The Wrong Man (15 page)

“There you go.”

Shauna piped in. “So we join with the prosecution in arguing that Tom won’t talk about the case. We renew our motion that Tom isn’t fit to stand trial, and now we have Wendy Kotowski corroborating our position.”

“We do.” I threw the football too high in the air and almost didn’t reach it coming back down. “This will play right into Nash’s wheelhouse. He loves to see lawyers tie themselves in knots with their own words.”

“And this does what?” Shauna asked. “It just buys us time, right?”

“Right. It buys us time so my brilliant team of lawyers and investigators can discover hidden jewels of information that will reveal the innocence of our client.”

Shauna took a seat and looked at me crosswise. “So that’s why you wanted to keep the insanity notice on the books. Even though you didn’t like it. You didn’t plan on using it. You just wanted to bait the prosecution.”

I waved her off. “Hey, before we break our arms congratulating ourselves, we have one very big variable,” I said. “That obstacle goes by the name of Bertrand Nash.”

Tori stopped by the law office around eight-thirty with some work product for me. I’d deputized her, put her to work on summarizing some of the background evidence into abstracts that I could quickly reference if necessary. She’d wanted to help, and I’d warned her that it was grunt work, the lowest of the low—background summaries of Tom Stoller and the others with whom he’d served in Iraq. I’d probably never use them, but I’d rather have the information and not need it than need it and not have it.

Shauna had taken some work home with her, which was too bad, because I wanted her to meet Tori.

Tori looked glum. Not an uncommon reaction of a woman in my presence, and Tori wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine on a good day.

“This is really sad,” she said. “He had schizophrenia hidden inside him and the post-traumatic stress unleashed it?”

“Yeah, it’s a bitch of a thing, no question.”

“But you’re not going to say that at his trial? That he had a flashback or whatever?”

I shook my head. “I think I have a stronger case on reasonable doubt.”

“That’s too bad,” she said.

I didn’t follow.

“I mean, it’s a compelling story,” she said. “If I were on the jury and heard about war and that tragic thing that happened in Iraq with that little girl, and now he has post-traumatic stress, and on top of that, a mental illness, I’d feel sorry for him. I wouldn’t want to convict him.”

That was a savvy observation, I thought, for a math major. She was right on the money.

“I’m going to try to get that information in front of the jury, anyway,” I said.

“Oh, good. You really should.” Tori strolled the conference room, looking at the exhibits. She stopped on the blow-ups of the crime scene, the dead stare of the victim, the pool of blood, but then quickly turned away.

“You get used to that,” I said.

She looked at me. “To what?”

“The violence. The blood and gore. You have a problem with that, don’t you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Your reaction, the other day. When I told you I was defending someone accused of killing a woman in Franzen Park. You looked like you were about to vomit.”

She stared at me. I had a hunch that she didn’t like being analyzed. I didn’t, either. I was beginning to think we were made for each other.

“Well, I don’t like violence against innocent people,” she said. “I don’t like it when people are minding their own business, trying to make a living and support their family and all the right things, and then someone comes along and senselessly kills them. That turns my stomach, yes. And I wouldn’t
want
to get used to it.”

Fair enough. A good reason to stick to mathematics. Plus, she would make a room full of male high school algebra students very, very happy. She removed her long white coat to reveal a black turtleneck and jeans. She looked better every time I saw her.

“But if you’re a criminal or something,” she continued. “If you’re doing something bad. If you’re a drug dealer or whatever and someone kills you—honestly, I don’t have much sympathy for that. If you’re in that game, you live with the risks.”

“You play in mud, you get muddy,” I said.

“Exactly.” Tentatively, she looked back at the crime scene blow-ups. “So which one was she?”

“She—you mean the victim? Kathy Rubinkowski?”

“Yes. Which one was she? Was she an innocent victim? Or was she muddy?”

Interesting. Very interesting. It was really helpful to inject some fresh blood into this process, a layperson unschooled in the law but with brains and common sense, plus a nice ass.

It hadn’t occurred to me to think of Kathy Rubinkowski as anything but a victim. If Tom shot her as part of a PTSD episode, the answer was easy, she was a random, innocent victim. But even if it were a Mob hit, I’d been working on the assumption that she had stumbled on something at work, that kind of thing, and she was murdered before she could expose it.

But Tori, unpolluted and viewing this from a fresh perspective, had made a good point. Why was Kathy necessarily an innocent player? She could have been involved in something shady herself. I made a note to mention something to Joel Lightner. He was probably pursuing that angle, anyway, but it never hurt to make the comment.

“Maybe while you’re majoring in math, you could minor in pre-law,” I said.

“Not for me.” She walked across the room to where I was sitting. My heart did a two-step. The faint scent of flowers followed with her. I knew—meaning my brain fully comprehended—that nothing was about to happen. She wasn’t going to sit on my lap or disrobe or any of the images that swam through my head. But I found her approach provocative no less.

It was a humbling feeling. I still didn’t really know how to do this. Even before I met my wife, I was never good at the initiation stage of a relationship. Since her death, I’ve never felt like I had my legs under me when it came to navigating this kind of thing.

“But I do want to help,” she said. “I don’t have any legal training, but I can do summaries or abstracts or whatever. I’d really like to help this poor guy.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Are you sure this isn’t your detached way of trying to spend more time with me?”

She watched me for a moment, then allowed for a small smile. “Always that cocky exterior,” she said, shaking her head.

Yeah, okay, but I was breaking through with her, even just a little.

“You can help,” I said. “Let’s start by figuring out if Kathy Rubinkowski was clean or muddy.”

The clock was ticking—booming, actually—on the Stoller trial, but despite my attempts to clear my schedule as much as possible, I still had some other matters that required my attention. This morning, I had to cover a prelim on a residential burglary, a high school senior who broke into a neighbor’s basement to steal part of his gun collection. The kid was eighteen, so there was no question on the adult transfer, but he’d been released to his parents on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond.

The preliminary hearing, where the government establishes probable cause to charge the defendant with a crime, took less than an hour. It was always the same, a one-sided affair where the prosecution gets to ignore virtually every rule of evidence, and the judge is directed by law to find probable cause as long as the prosecutor doesn’t fall to his knees, burst into tears, and admit that the defendant is innocent.

My client’s parents wore crestfallen expressions, an upgrade from their initial reactions of utter shock. Shock because they couldn’t believe their boy would break into someone’s house, and shock because of the swiftness and perceived mercilessness of a criminal justice system that doesn’t make an exception for their precious child.

Three weeks in, they’d now resigned themselves to the circumstances, but they were no less perplexed and clearly heartbroken. They peppered
me with questions, prodded me for assurances, and left the courtroom clutching their son.

When it was over, I went up to the sixth floor and asked the man at the reception desk for Wendy Kotowski. After making me wait for ten minutes, Wendy appeared down the hallway, waved me back, and started toward her office. Not exactly a first-class escort, but we had history, and informality between us was customary. In the end, we were good friends and held each other in high regard.

“Kolarich, you’re a piece of shit, you know that?” she said as I entered her office.

Okay, maybe not
high
regard.

Wendy had enough seniority in the office to have walls and a door but no window. With her time in and her talent, she should be even higher up on the chain by now. But with the economy like it was, there wasn’t much movement out of the county attorney’s office these days, so the ones who’d been around longest were sticking around.

I liked her. She shot straight and kept everything in perspective. She was fair to the defense beyond what was minimally required, at least in my opinion, but when she got into a courtroom she was fierce.

“How are the twins?” I asked, nodding to the photos on her desk. Two boys, they’d be twelve or thirteen by now, if my memory was right.

“Good, they’re good,” she said, and sighed. “They just got their drivers’ licenses, so I’d advise against driving in the city until they’re off to college.”

Okay, I was off a few years.

“Why am I a piece of shit?” I asked. “Your voice mail wasn’t specific. There could be any number of reasons.”

Wendy looked around her office for something. From the stacks of paper covering her floor, it was no simple task.

“I understand you had a nice visit with the Rubinkowskis,” she said.

“It was very nice, thanks for asking.”

She dropped her head and leveled a gaze on me. “Are you trying to get between me and the family?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“No, of course not. ‘Can you think of why anyone might have wanted to hurt your daughter?’ What the hell was that about?”

I played innocent. “Hey, you’re moving to bar my insanity defense, kid. I need a plan B.”

“Yeah, and a plan C, too, apparently. ‘Did you give Wendy any documents?’ You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“What am I doing?” A nonanswer. Wendy watched me for a long time.

“I know you, Kolarich. When you filed your appearance in this case, I told Connor—”

“How is Connor?”

“Good. Getting divorced, but good.” She nodded. “I told him, here comes a fucking headache around the corner. I knew you’d start pulling shit here.”

She looked tired in the eyes. Her unmanageably curly hair had a dark tint to it, bloodred, which told me that gray must be creeping in and she was going with a bottle. Bad choice, in my opinion. Maybe she was dating again. She’d divorced when the twins were fairly young, and during the years we were in the office together, she’d basically surrendered any thought of romance, focusing on keeping those boys on the straight and narrow and putting criminals in prison. Different time, different situation, I might have even gone for her myself.

“There’s a case you may have heard of called
Brady versus Maryland
,” I said.

“Bullshit. Bullshit, and you know it,” she said. “That document isn’t remotely exculpatory. It doesn’t have anything to do with this case. Especially an insanity case.”

But back when Tom Stoller had been indicted, the assistant public defender, Bryan Childress, had pleaded both not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. It was a formality, the dual plea, but technically my defense extended beyond insanity to a straight NG.

Even so, she was right—that document that Mr. Rubinkowski had given me wasn’t telling me much of anything, at least not on the surface. There was no particular reason why Wendy would think this would be favorable to me. When I was a prosecutor, I always erred on the side of disclosure. I gave the defense pretty much anything and everything. It was one part strategy and one part ethics: If I gave them everything, they could never tag me with a
Brady
violation, and it also allowed me to
inundate the defense with unnecessary material so that anything particularly good for the defense would not stick out.

Wendy waited me out. When I didn’t speak, she finally said, “So?”

She wanted to know if I was going to try to fuck her on this.

“So what?” I asked.

“Are you gonna try to fuck me on this?”

“The thought never crossed my mind.” I kept a poker face, then laughed. “Wendy, I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I sincerely believe that at the time, you thought this document was not exculpatory. You had no idea how explosively relevant that document would turn out to be.”

She rolled her eyes. “Explosively relevant,” she repeated back.

“A bombshell. A game-changer.”

“Sure.” She framed her hands. “Just when you think Tom Stoller shot Kathy Rubinkowski, you learn that—horrors—she was a paralegal who helped prepare responses to discovery requests!”

I smiled again. I didn’t smile much, but I did around her. I missed my fellow prosecutors. I missed this office. “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “In fact, the more I think about it, that document holds no relevance whatsoever. I wouldn’t even give it another thought if I were you. Really.”

Back to playing poker with her. She knew the dance. I think she found it amusing. I used to be able to punch her buttons. I once had her in stitches in a courtroom, still laughing hard as her case was called, and she narrowly avoided a contempt citation.

“You have a copy of that document, then?” I asked.

She nodded. “Ray faxed me a copy back when he received it.”

“Good enough. And I trust there are no other documents you’ve brazenly withheld?”

“Not that I can think of at the moment.” Wendy watched me for a time, then her smirk slowly disappeared. “You’re not going to ask for an extension based on this—this innocuous piece of written discovery?”

“No,” I said.

Her posture softened. She looked up at me again. “So—how are you doing these days? You got your feet back under you?”

“Sometimes I pinch myself,” I said.