The Wrong Man

35

“The trial begins on December first,” I said to Joel Lightner. “That’s eleven days from now. Anyone mention that to you yet?”

“Did anyone mention to you that the FBI has tried to come up with the identity of Gin Rummy for the last three years and drawn a blank?”

We were walking down Gehringer Street. It was Saturday, early evening, and the Franzen Park neighborhood was alive. The taverns and restaurants we passed were full. The sidewalks were crowded with people. Everyone was having a good time. Everyone but me.

To everyone else, Saturday meant the weekend, time with family, drinking and socializing and relaxing. To me, it meant people were harder to find, government offices and professional workplaces were closed. And after the weekend, it would be a short week for Thanksgiving. People would be halfway out the door by noon on Wednesday. And then forget it, there’s no chance of finding anybody until the following Monday.

And the Monday after Thanksgiving was November 29-two days before we started selecting a jury.

Joel Lightner had spent the last week trying to nail down the Gin Rummy question. He’d tapped all his connections at the local, state, and federal levels and come up empty.

“Just the last three years?” Tori asked. Yes, I’d brought her along. She’d visited the other crime scene with us, why not this one, too? Besides, she’d shown a real interest in this case and her non-lawyer, lay perspective had proven helpful on more than one occasion thus far.

Clearly, then, I had several reasons for bringing her along. It wasn’t like I was trying to impress her or win her over. Good. Glad that was settled.

“The name Gin Rummy first came over a wiretap about four years ago,” said Joel. “Second-rate sources. Not Paulie Capparelli or anybody at the top. So the FBI, they jot the name down, but they don’t think much of it. Right? I mean, these guys, they all have about five nicknames, anyway.”

“Okay,” said Tori, though she probably had no idea.

“But then there’s a prison tap. Rico Capparelli, the top guy, who’s inside for life now, he mentions the name. So now the FBI is paying attention. As best they can tell, Gin Rummy has about ten hits to his name over the last couple of years. Remember Anthony Moretti?”

I did, in passing, at least. The Moretti family, which had connections out east in New Jersey, was the principal rival of the Capparellis. About a year ago, Anthony Moretti, the capo, was shot in his bed. Two bodyguards in the apartment were found dead, too.

“That was Gin Rummy?” I asked.

“That’s what everyone thinks.”

Tori looked at me. “So you’re messing with a pretty big guy.”

“I like to keep things interesting. But I have to find this guy first.”

We crossed Mulligan at the crosswalk and passed a shoe store that Talia used to love.

“I love this store,” Tori said. It stood to reason, fashionista that she was. I can’t believe the word “fashionista” was even in my vocabulary. The boys back home would be ashamed. Maybe I was getting soft.

We got halfway down the block on the west side of the street and stopped. Lightner fished out copies of the photographs from a manila envelope.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a tree that had been planted in the middle of the sidewalk. I didn’t understand why the city bothered. Regardless, this time of year, the branches were naked, leaving it looking more like a gigantic, ugly weed.

“The shell casing was found in the dirt at the base of the tree,” said Joel. He took a couple of steps to his left, which put him almost up against a tall privacy fence that served an apartment building. Behind that five-foot privacy fence was a condo building where a witness, Sheldon Pierson, was prepared to testify that he was outside, untangling Christmas decorations, during the interval of time in which the medical examiner estimated the murder occurred, but unfortunately he didn’t hear a thing or obviously see anything.

On the opposite side of the street were walk-up three-flats and some single-families. Some were renovated in the last decade and some looked like they’d barely survived an aerial bombing. A neighborhood in progress, halted by the economic downturn.

Joel extended his right arm and made a gun with his hand. “So he shot her from here. The casing probably landed straight in the dirt.”

Using one of the evidence photos as a guide, I walked over to the curb and found the spot where Kathy Rubinkowski had fallen dead. There was a diagonal crack in the curb that I could use as a reference point from the photographs. Plus I pretty much knew it, anyway, as this wasn’t my first trip to the crime scene. It’s absolutely vital that you visit the crime scene. It’s almost as important that you visit it a second time, and a third. You have to see things up close. You have to play out the scene. Otherwise, you could miss something that could make or break the case.

“Last time I walked it, it was ten feet,” I said, measuring the distance from Joel Lightner to me.

“That’s highly accurate shooting,” Joel said, not for the first time.

“He shot her right between the eyes?” Tori asked. “So she was looking right at him?”

I looked at Tori. “What’s your point?”

She was her typically put-together self in the long white coat with black knee-high boots. “If someone pointed a gun at me, I’d run. Or duck.”

“That’s what you think,” said Joel. “But in fact, humans center their eyes on danger. There are studies on this. People want to predict the danger, so they focus on whatever is the source of danger. If Kathy saw the gun, odds are that she’d fix her eyes directly on it, and she’d turn so she was seeing it head-on.”

Tori listened, then shook her head. “I’d duck. I wouldn’t stare at the gun.”

“That would be your secondary response,” said Joel. “Your initial response would be to focus on the weapon. Remember, this probably happened in the space of a second or two. Maybe given more time, maybe the outcome would have been different.”

“This is all very fascinating, folks,” I said. “When this over, let’s write an article together. But for now, how about we figure out how to acquit our client of murder?”

Peter Gennaro Ramini watched Jason Kolarich and the others as they reenacted the shooting of Kathy Rubinkowski. He’d had little trouble following them, using the cover of the festive crowd on a Saturday night. He didn’t need to get too close at this point. He knew what they were doing. So he stood at the intersection of Gehringer and Mulligan, half a city block away, leaning against the door of a bank, his hands stuffed in his pockets as always-his signature, at this point.

Kolarich and company seemed to have the details of the shooting basically right, the distance and the angle, the position of the victim’s body. The latter detail would have been easy to gather from the photographs. The accuracy of their distance measurement surprised him initially. Once you got past a space of four feet or so, it was difficult to pin down the distance of a gunshot with any particularity.

But then he remembered the spent shell casing. That must have been how they measured it. There had been no need to be concerned about the shell casing, from his perspective, because it didn’t matter if the casing traced back to the murder weapon; the murder weapon was going to be found, anyway. Besides, if the shell casing wasn’t left behind, it would look like a professional job. It wouldn’t look like an amateur robbery-turned-homicide, which is how he’d wanted it to appear.

But the flip side of that was now obvious to him: It gave a distance. And that distance was meaningful, a pretty long distance for a Glock to be fired with such precision. It gave Kolarich an argument he wouldn’t otherwise have-that the shooting was carried out by someone of superior skill. A pro. A hired gun.

He watched them until he knew all he needed to know. And then he went home.

Tomorrow, there would be a conversation.