The Last Alibi

68

Jason

Wednesday, July 17

We sit around Linda’s kitchen table for a while, frustrated and spent, having just witnessed over a week’s worth of preparation and stress, danger, and risk end without anything to show for it. The pizza’s not half bad, the two bites I took before my stomach said stop, pepperoni and garlic. Doesn’t go so well with the bottle of Scotch that is passed around freely, but no one’s complaining.

“Not even a partial?” Linda asks me. “Not even a single letter or number?”

I shake my head. “Didn’t see the license plate at all.”

“He’s smart,” says the guy named Halston, a big Irish redhead. “He played us well.”

“Screw him being smart,” Joel says. “We were dumb. He tricked us with a prank we used to pull when we were kids.”

Maybe so, but Joel’s being too hard on himself. Everyone was so hyped up, and it was believable, a good ruse for a killer. Everyone answers the door for the pizza man, even if only to say, Sorry, wrong house.

“We should have played it out,” Joel says. “Answered the door, seen what he did. We had Linda covered six ways to Sunday. We should have given him a chance to make his move.”

Linda takes the Scotch and pours a few fingers into a glass. “We won’t get another chance like this,” she says.

Silence. Each of us believes what Linda just said. This was our chance, right here.

“On the bright side,” says Halston, “the pizza guy has a great story now.”

That gets a hard laugh, a release of nerves and tension. It feels good to laugh. I can’t remember the last time I laughed.

“The guy shows up to deliver a pie and suddenly he’s got guns in his face and he’s on his knees, begging for his life.” Lightner can hardly contain himself. “He must have been like, ‘What the fuck is happening?’” He buckles over in laughter.

“The poor guy wet his pants,” Linda gets out, wiping her eyes. “All he gets out of this is soiled underwear and a fifty-dollar tip. Is that how much you tipped him?” she asks Joel.

“I didn’t tip him,” he says. “I told you to tip him.”

“I thought you said you tipped him.”

“No, I said, ‘Tip him.’”

“So nobody tipped him?” I laugh. “We just sent him on his way? Did we at least pay for the pizza?”

Another round of laughter. Everyone at the table needs it. We let it linger, savor it, because the alternative is a lot more grim. Eventually it dies down, and we’re back to moody and bitter.

“A silver or white Accord,” Lightner says, shaking his head. “We’ll just run that through the DMV and we can narrow our list of suspects down to about two million people.”

“It’s something,” I say.

“It’s nothing. This guy’s a ghost. He’s nobody.”

I’m nobody.

I stir at the memory, just like that, like the snap of a finger, bursting from the fog of a conversation some six weeks ago. Something “James” said to me when he came to my office. A moment of self-pity, something like, I don’t matter to people, and then: I’m nobody to them. An odd thing to say, I recall thinking.

“I guess we go back to looking at old case files,” Joel says. “Anybody you prosecuted.”

I’m nobody to them.

And then, yes, I remember, clarity for once, finally, dark clouds parting ever so slightly and allowing in the sun: what he said to me when he left. He approached me, shook my hand good-bye, and said something odd again.

I hope I’m not nobody to you, Jason.

The last words he ever said to me, face-to-face.

I pop out of my chair.

I hope I’m not nobody to you, Jason.

You’re nobody to me.

“What?” Lightner asks me.

“We’ve been looking in the wrong place,” I say. “He’s not someone I prosecuted.”

“No? Then who is he?”

“He’s someone I interrogated.”

“Interr-You mean while you were on Felony Review?”

“Exactly.” I start pacing. Every assistant county attorney does a stint on Felony Review, where you’re assigned to a police station to approve warrant applications and arrests and, at least back when I was there, to interrogate suspects. It was a wild ride, those eleven months, working three days on, three days off, if you were lucky, working day and night with the detectives and patrolmen, hearing their stories, high-fiving them when there was a solve, making friendships, feeling like part of their team. “It was a line I used during interviews to intimidate suspects. I pulled it out when I needed it. ‘You’re nothing to me.’ ‘You’re nobody to me.’ Y’know, breaking them down.”

“Right? But. .”

I shake out of my funk. “This guy, ‘James’ or whatever, when he came to my office, he repeated that phrase back to me. He said, ‘I hope I’m not nobody to you.’ It’s probably something I once said to him.” I blow out air. “He’s someone I interrogated.”

Lightner nods. “And you wouldn’t be an attorney of record for something like that, right?”

“Right,” I say. “I didn’t prosecute this guy. I never filed an appearance because I never stood in a courtroom opposite him. I just handled him at the police station and then dished him off to people more senior than me.” I pin my hair back off my forehead, a show of exasperation handed down from my mother. “How did I not think of this before?”

“Because it wouldn’t occur to you,” Joel says. “Because it’s like a revolving door on Felony Review, suspects coming in and out and then you wash your hands of it. You probably spent no more than an hour with most of these guys, give or take. One hour, out of a one- or two-year process for them. You forget about them and you assume they forget about you.”

He’s being charitable, cutting me some slack. He’s not wrong, either, but still this should have occurred to me sooner. These suspects really were blips on the screen to me, and I to them, but that doesn’t mean that something didn’t stick in one of their craws.

“You must have gotten a confession,” Linda says. “If you stand out to this guy that much, it means you made him talk.”

I wag my finger at Linda. “You’re right. And then, it’s not necessarily a one- or two-year process. If I got a confession that stuck, his lawyer would probably tell him to take a plea. A confession could close down that case right away.”

“And then he’d have one and only one prosecutor to thank for his time in prison,” says Joel. “That prosecutor might stick out to him.”

“I’ll bet you used deception,” Linda says. “That always pisses them off, like they forget about all the shit they really, truly did and focus on how unfair it was that you tricked them into admitting it.”

She’s right. That’s exactly how it works. And I was the master. I’ll bet I somehow twisted him up and got him to cop to something he hadn’t planned on admitting. There’s more than one way to do that, and I mastered them all.

“So we forget about Gang Crimes and felony courtrooms, even the misdemeanors, and we focus on Felony Review,” I say. “That’s the good news. Wanna hear the bad news?”

Lightner already knows the bad news, I think. He gives a solemn nod.

“I don’t remember any of those interviews,” I say. “I mean, bits and pieces, some memorable moments, but names? No names. That was, what, eight years ago? And we were seventy-two on, seventy-two off back then.”

“I remember that,” Joel says. “The prosecutors looked like hell by the third day. We’d let them shower in our bathroom and sleep on a roll-down mattress in one of the interview rooms. I don’t know why they had you stay on for seventy-two hours straight.”

“You were lucky if it was seventy-two,” I remind him. “If we caught a case that was ongoing, we stayed on it. I was once on for six days straight on a kidnapping.”

Lightner sighs. “The point being, it’s all a blur to you.”

“Pretty much, yeah. And that’s just the bad news. Here’s the worse news,” I say. “Records. You think it’s hard to track down cases where I filed an appearance and prosecuted someone? Try finding Felony Review records. Forget computers. Back then? We’d be lucky if my name was scribbled at the top of a sworn statement, which would be clipped to a pressboard and thrown into some box. Who knows if those paper records even exist anymore? For closed cases? The appeals exhausted? I’m not sure they exist at all.”

That takes the air out of the room. Everyone looks fried. I’m sure I do, too.

“Still, it’s a start,” Joel says. “We started with the most logical step, remember? We looked at violent ex-cons who were released in the last year. We thought we struck out because you didn’t prosecute any of them. But now we can look at them again, right? Maybe you got a confession from one of them.”

He’s right. We have a fresh start. We’re in the game, at least.

“This guy has definitely pissed me off,” Joel says. “I’m not letting this go. I’m seeing it through.”

“Me, too,” says Linda.

The others join in, too.

“We’re going to catch this prick,” Linda says. “Nobody sends pizza to my house I didn’t ask for.”