Unless, between now and the trial, I could figure out who killed Audrey Cutler.
I SAT ON MY BED, watching the clock approach midnight, pondering everything, using my abilities at cross- examination to punch holes in my plan. There were plenty of flaws, but I was satisfied that I was doing all I could do. The best thing I had going for me was the element of surprise. They didn’t know me. They thought they did. It would have to be enough.
Just after midnight-thirteen hours before my hearing on the DNA testing before the judge-I turned off the bedroom light, leaving my entire town house in darkness.
46
JUST PAST THREE in the morning, two men-two of Smith’s men-approached the town house from the rear. The front made no sense; it was too well-lit and on a fairly busy street. The rear, on the other hand, worked well for their purposes. The town house was backed up to an alley, a locked gate separating the alley from a small garden area consisting of a circular patio with the ubiquitous barbecue grill, table, and chairs.
The gate lock had to be picked, but that was not an overly difficult chore. Once past the lock, the two men slowly moved through the garden area toward the town house. One of the men, the bigger of the two, looked through the back-door window into the kitchen, searching for the house alarm. The alarm had a green light on it, meaning it was disarmed.
“It’s not armed,” he said to his partner. He readied his tension wrench and hooking pick to get through the back-door lock. “We spend all that time getting the combo to the alarm from his idiot brother and Kolarich doesn’t even set the damn thing.”
“Someone should tell these yuppies there’s crime in this city,” said the other, quietly.
“I’ll make a note of it,” I said, swinging my baseball bat at the bigger guy first, just as he’d turned, connecting square across the nose. The second guy was reaching for his weapon. I kicked out at his knee, the heel of my foot hitting the side of his kneecap, causing a painful buckling of his leg before he fell. Once he was on the ground, I used the butt of the baseball bat, two sharp blows into his face, knocking his head against the stone patio. The bigger guy hadn’t had time to recover-he was stunned, crumpled awkwardly on the two concrete stairs leading up to the back door, blood gushing from his nose. “Where’s my brother?” I asked him.
“Fuck… you,” he said through his hands.
I swung the bat with all my might, with all the rage that had festered, into his kneecap, then into his chest. I didn’t want to kill these guys, nor did I want retrograde amnesia. They needed to get word to Smith, with the one phone call they’d be allowed.
“Tell me where he is or I crush your skull.”
At that moment, a light went on in the town house next door. We were making enough noise to wake the neighbors. It didn’t look like I was going to get the answers I needed. I’d miscalculated, yet again. I should have let them come into my house and jumped them there, instead of huddling in the corner of my back patio awaiting them. My thought had been that I was safer outside, where I could run, I could yell for help, if these guys got the better of me. But if I’d chosen inside to make my move, I probably could have spent more time with them. I could have extracted the information I needed. Another mistake.
Figuring that my neighbors would be doing so shortly, I pulled out my cell phone and called 911, giving the dispatcher my address and telling them about two men trying to break into my house. Then I put the phone back in my pocket and surveyed my attackers.
They were suffering badly. The bigger guy’s nose was shattered and bleeding uncontrollably and the blow to his chest had left him struggling for air. The second guy was stunned from the blows to his face followed by the immediate contact with the patio, forming a one-two punch that left him unable to discern up from down, dark from light, such that he didn’t even seem to notice that his knee was dislocated.
I went back to the first guy. “Try again, Igor,” I said, poising the bat over my shoulder. “One last chance. Where’s my brother?”
“Your brother’s… gonna fucking die.” He managed something in the realm of a chuckle. I hit him across the chest with everything I had. He didn’t take it well.
“You, Einstein.” I stood over the second guy, who was barely conscious. “Where’s my brother?”
I’d hoped that his dazed state might serve as truth serum, but he was unable to respond. I tried a couple more times with the bigger guy, alternating my watch from one to the other-they were armed, after all, and I had to be sure they wouldn’t reach for their weapons. I decided not to disarm them because I wanted the cops to find them that way.
The bad thing about living in a nice neighborhood-normally a good thing-is that the cops come quickly. It was less than ten minutes later that two uniforms approached from the alley, coming through the same gate that Smith’s buddies had entered.
A flashlight shone on my face. I was holding up my driver’s license. “I’m the owner of the house,” I said. “I called you. My name is Jason Kolarich. These guys are armed,” I added, “but at the moment, not dangerous.”
The cops, guns drawn, were not in the mood for levity, but it didn’t take them long to get matters settled. My mentioning that I used to be an ACA, worked felony review out of Area Four, handled Judge Weiss’s courtroom, all that good stuff, helped them considerably. I was, after all, the owner of the house, and the two guys lying wounded and weary, with guns stuffed in their pants, looked like they’d come off the set of
I’d figured that Smith’s final play before tomorrow’s court hearing would be to mess me up, or maybe even detain me briefly-anything to keep me from attending that hearing. It’s what I would have done, if I were them. But then, if I were them, I might have considered the possibility that my adversary might anticipate that very move, and might be lying in wait in the corner of his back patio with a baseball bat.
The goons were arrested on attempted aggravated burglary and suspicion of unlawful weapons charges. They were taken to the station house for processing and detention. I sat at the desk of a lieutenant and gave my statement. He gave me the names of my attackers and mentioned that each of them had encountered more than one brush with the law in the past, which suggested that their bond might be set pretty high when their arraignment came.
“These guys had handcuffs and rope,” the lieutenant told me. “Didn’t look like they were looking for a smash- and-grab. It looked more like a kidnapping, in fact.”
I expressed my utter shock at the possibility. “Why me?” I asked.
“I was going to ask you that.”
“Never heard of these guys, Lieutenant. Nino Ramsey and John Tunicci? I don’t have a clue.”
“You said you’re a criminal defense lawyer. You ever represent any organized crime?”
“No.”
“Okay. Okay.” The cop thought about that. “These guys, they’re nothing but a couple of thugs. Enforcer types. They freelance from time to time, but they usually run with the Capparelli family.”
He was talking about old-school mafia, Rico Capparelli’s crew. Rico, last I recalled, was serving out the rest of his life in a maximum-security federal pen. It stood out, more than anything, for the prosecutorial joke. The old man went down for federal racketeering charges-Rico was pinched on RICO.
Was I up against organized crime? It could mean so many different things nowadays, that phrase. As much as the feds had curtailed their influence, they hadn’t so much cured the world of crime as simply forced these scumbags to scatter into subgroups-less “organized,” maybe, but still criminals. It didn’t narrow my focus much at all.
But at least I had two of these guys out of the picture for a short time. I was confident now that I was up against a small band of people working for Smith-four people, to be exact. Two of them, presumably, had been baby-sitting Pete while the other two came for me. Now, for a time, at least, they had lost half their
