The Hidden Man

solemnity in his expression. The teenager, hardened, solving problems with his fists. Differing portraits as time moved forward, I realized now more than I had as a child.

I didn’t notice him until he approached the door with the security escort. We made eye contact, an awkward moment, as we appraised each other with the mild surprise that accompanies any encounter following decades of separation, no matter how you try to make adjustments for maturity, for hard breaks along the way. I’d done that time-adjusted analysis and come up short, way off. He wasn’t what I expected. He looked, in fact, much more like the clients I’d been defending for the last six weeks.

Sammy was thick in the torso with meaty arms, a blotchy complexion, oily hair pulled back in a ponytail. His nose was crooked, with dried, crusty skin around his nostrils. His eyes were the only sign of life, large blue eyes that searched me with the hope I’ve seen many times from clients.

So many things came back so quickly, but seeing him in manacles brought back the most logical, the most obvious vision. Age sixteen, Sammy in handcuffs, his head down inside the police interview room.

Better me than you, he’d said to me then.

“You don’t need to do that,” I told the prison guard, who had seated Sammy in the chair and was locking his handcuffs to a metal clip on the table. The guard locked him down anyway, before leaving attorney and client to their own devices.

Sammy smiled nervously, almost apologetically. From his perspective, this had to be incredibly difficult, a reunion while in a prison jumpsuit. With some effort, given the manacles connecting his hands, he fished out cigarettes and lit up.

We were eleven when we first did that, stole a smoke from his mother and ran to the park, vainly attempting to light the damn thing by striking a match on a rock, then coughing as the smoke burned our throats and chests. Sammy never really stopped after that time, and neither did I until the day Coach Fox realized that I had some speed and could catch a football.

“Jason,” he said.

Even that simple greeting felt wrong, painful. I don’t recall Sammy ever addressing me by my first name. It was never Jason. It was Koke, short for Koka-Kolarich, a play off my last name.

“Some place for a reunion, huh?” he added.

Right, and one of those awkward ones where nobody wants to talk about their past. Most reunions would start with a rundown on immediate family. There wouldn’t be much of that here. For starters, his sister, Audrey, was abducted when Sammy was seven.

His father, Frank Cutler, a plumber who drank more often than he worked, left only a few weeks later. Way I heard it, Sammy’s mother had allowed no shortage of blame for Audrey’s abduction to fall on Frank, who had been out on a bender that evening.

Sammy’s mother, Mary, died about nine years later from kidney failure, some rare genetic thing, leaving him with no immediate family. By then, Sammy was already serving time in a juvenile detention facility. When he got out, he had no mother, father, or sister.

I knew, only from reading the file Smith had given me, that Sammy later did two stints in the penitentiary, one for possession with intent, the other for aggravated battery. The truth was, I’d barely spoken to Sammy after that day the cops had taken him away.

Better me than you, he’d said to me then. Better me than you.

“So you’re like a big-time lawyer, huh?” He said it like he approved. That was how I remembered Sammy. He was rough around the edges, but he never intended anyone harm. “Saw you on TV a while back about some big case.”

That was back at my old firm. I’d second-chaired the defense of a state senator on federal corruption charges. It was a fourteen-week trial, in which the feds had prosecuted a sitting state senator, Hector Almundo, on eleven counts, running the gamut from taking bribes to extortion. The trial began exactly two weeks after Talia gave birth to Emily.

“That seemed like a pretty big deal,” Sammy said.

It was, especially for me. I had joined Shaker, Riley and Flemming only about a year earlier, after being a county prosecutor. The pay jump was tremendous, and Paul Riley’s law firm was the place to be. When Paul tapped me to assist on the Almundo defense, and then we somehow managed to pull out a not- guilty, I was established. I was in. I was set, at the finest litigation shop in the city.

My family was a different story. Talia had had a rough pregnancy, especially near the end, and then delivered Emily as we were on the cusp of trial. Talia wasn’t deaf to my need to establish myself in my career, but still, it was hard to sell the trial to a first-time mother trying to care for a newborn by herself day and night.

Therein was the irony. It was after I was left with an empty house, and basically fell apart, that I left the law firm that had cost me such precious time with my wife and daughter.

“I mean, there we was, watching the news, and I see you on there, and I told everyone, I knew that guy, we were-we used to be-”

Sammy didn’t complete the sentence. We both sensed the awkwardness. Used to be. Used to spend every waking moment together. Used to be so close that we called each other brother.

“So-how’s Pete?” he asked, changing the subject.

My brother Pete, five years my junior, lives in the city like me. He’s hit a bump or two along the way, struggled with drugs a little, but he’s a good egg, and I think he’s on a straight course right now. Then again, I’m not exactly one to judge.

“You know my mom passed,” I said.

“Yeah, heard that. Heard that.” He gestured at me without looking in my direction. “Jack’s still”-he gestured with his head-“y’know-”

“Inside, yeah.” He was talking about my father. Sammy and I referred to Jack by his first name behind his back, a minor rebellion. My father’s fourth strike came about three years ago. He should probably be good for parole within the next few years, but I haven’t done the math and don’t plan to do so.

“You married?” he asked me. He smiled. “Bet you got a hot wife, right?”

“Had one,” I said. It wasn’t fun to acknowledge it, but in an odd way it felt good to pass on some misfortune of my own to the man who had spent much of his adult life in prison, and who could well be on the way to many more years at the same address. Maybe it leveled the field ever so slightly.

Sammy stubbed out his cigarette and grew quiet. I thought to ask him why he took so long to contact me-he’d been arrested almost a year ago and he waited until a month out from trial to get in touch with me. But it wasn’t hard to imagine his reluctance. Sammy was always fiercely proud, and it was probably killing him to come to me for help.

“This is the guy who killed Audrey,” Sammy said. “You know that, right?”

“I know, Sam.”

“This asshole deserved to die. Right?”

“Right,” I agreed. It felt like he was looking for justification, which meant that he was acknowledging that he had killed Griffin Perlini. But I didn’t push the subject. Defense attorneys never do. And I was his attorney first, friend second-if I’d be his attorney at all.

“So,” Sammy said, “can you help me?”

It was a question I literally couldn’t answer, which, I suppose, was an answer in itself. I’d been back on my feet for six weeks, and I’d gotten some good results for some clients, but this was a first-degree homicide with all kinds of complications and little time to prepare. The cases I’d handled were mostly bench trials with only a witness or two, and the truth was, I was mostly winging it, hoping to take advantage of less experienced prosecutors and looking for a lucky break here or there with a missing witness or lost documents. I could do that. That was easy. This case would require dedication, consistency, and full work days, and the price of fucking it up would be my old friend Sammy Cutler spending his life in jail.

So of course I said, “Sure, Sammy,” and shook his hand.