The Last Alibi

47

Jason

Tuesday, July 2

I pick up Alexa on my way home. She has two suitcases and a bag with her, plus her stenography equipment. When we get to my house, she unpacks everything, hanging dresses and blouses and pants in the second bedroom’s empty closet, lining the floor with shoes of all kinds. She puts lingerie and underwear in two of the drawers in the bedroom dresser. She puts makeup and toiletries in the master bathroom.

She’s moving in with me. Neither of us has said so out loud, and even if we did, we’d recognize it more as an act of necessity than a progressive step in our relationship-I’ve begun joking that I should introduce Alexa not as my girlfriend but as my “alibi”-but none of that changes the fact that she’s moving in with me.

“You doing okay?” she asks as she rearranges some things in one of the dresser drawers while I sit on the bed. “How do you feel physically?”

“I’m fine,” I say. Which is true, unless you count the dull pain over my eyes, or the incessant itching on my hands and forearms. Or the fact that I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in three months. Or my stomach, which is about as volatile as democracy in Egypt.

A clearheaded man might think that his body is telling him something. But clarity of thought is not something with which I have a lot of experience lately. I’m trying. Lord knows, I’m trying, because I need to get ahead of my murderous client, and I’m miles behind. I feel like I’m running in place. I feel like I woke up in a strange place, unsure of how I got there and not sure how to find my way back.

“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” Alexa asks me.

“Shit, I’m always thinking about him.” I’ve been checking the Herald online on an hourly basis, looking for any updates on the investigation or any word of another murder committed by the North Side Slasher.

“Did you get your list of old cases to Joel?”

“Yeah. This morning. For what it’s worth.”

“It’s not worth much?”

“I can’t possibly go back and retrieve all the cases I worked on. We don’t have a system like the PACER system in federal court, where cases can be sorted by attorneys’ names. We don’t have that.” I fall back on the bed. “Do you have any idea how many cases I handled? From cattle-call courtrooms when I started, to juvenile and abuse-and-neglect cases that are now sealed? Arraignments and bond hearings I handled before turning the cases over to older prosecutors for trial? The major crimes I prosecuted, yeah, I can remember a decent number of them. But the rest? There’s no record. And they all blur together for me. And here’s the best part: He might not be any of those guys. He might be a friend of a guy I prosecuted, or a brother. I’d-I’d have better odds trying to guess the winning lottery ticket tonight.”

“Oh, it can’t be that dire.” She closes up a drawer and looks over at me. “Since he’s such a violent person, it was probably a big-deal crime you caught him doing. Probably not a traffic violation, for example. Right?”

She’s right, of course. And luckily for me, the really violent cases are the ones I remember best. “But most of the time I spent prosecuting violent crimes was in the gangs unit,” I say. “And this guy who came to visit me didn’t look like a member of the Tenth Street Crew or the Insane African Warlords or the Columbus Street Cannibals.”

“Okay, well, still. Anything you can do to narrow it down. And you said it’s likely to be someone who was recently released from prison?”

“That’s where Joel’s starting, with violent ex-cons released in the last year,” I say. “It’s the obvious place to start. But. .”

“But what?”

“But this guy is intelligent. He’d know that. Somehow, I don’t think it applies to him.”

Alexa finishes up, claps her hands, and sits next to me on the bed. “Be optimistic,” she says. “You’re doing everything you can.”

“It’s worth a shot,” I agree. “I’ll give Joel a week or two and see what comes of it.”

She looks at me, confused. “What does that mean, you’ll give him a week or two? What happens in a week or two if he can’t find anybody?”

“I turn myself in,” I say.

Her hand, caressing my leg, suddenly stops. She grips my calf. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m totally serious. I’ll go to the police and tell them everything. Maybe he’s bluffing about how he’s framed me with physical evidence. And if he’s not, if he really did plant chewed-up pens and whatever else at the crime scenes, then maybe I can still convince them I’m a patsy.”

“Maybe you can’t. Then you go to prison for something he did.”

I shrug. “I’m not going to let him kill anybody else. I’m not.”

She wags her finger at me, but decides not to argue the point. We still have a couple of weeks to battle out that issue. And as long as Alexa stays by my side night after night and provides me a rock-solid alibi, so our theory goes, “James” will not kill anybody else.

So our theory goes.

“Okay, then, how about that present you promised me after I unpacked?”

“I probably built it up too much,” I say. “It’s not that exciting.”

“Whatever. What is it?”

I fish it out of my pocket. It can’t be that much of a surprise.

It’s a house key. A key that opens all three doors of my house-front, back, and side/garage.

She smiles at me, touches her nose to mine. “Wow, my very own shiny silver house key.”

“It set me back four bucks,” I say. “So if you don’t like it, let me know and we’ll exchange it for a nicer key.”

She kisses me and runs her fingers through my hair. She’s always touching me, my hair, my neck, my arms.

“You sure know how to charm a girl,” she says, pulling me on top of her.