“But, Your Honor, Mr. Guaraldi has lived in this community for over thirty years, he has no police record, he’s never even-”
“I’ve made my ruling.”
“Are you sure Your Honor isn’t giving in to the power of the press?”
“That will cost you five hundred dollars. Hope it was worth it. Good day.”
A forensics team was brought in to excavate around Guaraldi’s house. They dug extensive burrows and tunnels in and around the house. Nothing was found. A backhoe was brought in to excavate the entire property. The same process was carried out at the day care center. Nothing was ever found. Bob Fox was outraged. He set an inhuman pace for his prosecutors. He stormed through offices, demanding results. And Leo didn’t blame Fox for demanding results; he knew it was due in large part to the almost daily attacks made on him by the media. In fact, the media were starting to focus some of their attention on Leo, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Two days after the excavation at Guaraldi’s home was abandoned, one of Leo’s clerks had buzzed his office and told him he had a call on line two.
“Who is it?” he asked the clerk.
“Anne Hunter.”
“Christ. Tell her I’m out of town.”
“She says to tell you that she knows you’re here and this is going to be your only opportunity to confirm or deny.”
“Confirm or deny what?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“Christ,” he grumbled and punched line two. He had met Anne Hunter shortly after he became a prosecutor. He’d been working on a case involving a minor figure of the community who was suspected in a nonfatal hit-and-run. After court one day, Anne had approached him for comments on the case. He had known that sooner or later he would work on a case that generated some public interest, but he wasn’t prepared for the rush he got the first time a reporter actually asked him questions. He felt like a celebrity after the fact. It was ludicrous to feel that way, he knew, but, nonetheless, he got off on it in a big way. It fed his ego. And Anne Hunter had clued in to that right away. She called on him almost daily to get his comments on current cases, cases that he knew were not particularly newsworthy. But it was no big leap for him to talk himself into believing that they were important cases. After all, why would a real reporter want his views on them if they weren’t important? But Anne knew what she was doing. They had ultimately ended up seeing each other socially, but once the initial excitement of seeing his name in the paper had worn off, Leo began to dislike her. It had been a bit like going out with a psychiatrist. The conversation always seemed to have a subtext. There was always the feeling that every offhand remark was being neatly filed away and marked for later use. That she was grooming him for her future benefit. And that instinct had been right. Even after the relationship cooled (it had consisted of four sexual encounters and little else), he always called Anne first when he had a story he wanted leaked to the press. And now that he was the ADA on a murder case that had captured the nation’s attention, Anne Hunter had the ultimate in. She was reaping the benefits of all the hard work she had put into stroking his ego. Only lately, Anne didn’t seem too terribly interested in keeping Leo’s ego stroked. Her articles were becoming more and more critical of his performance on the case. Whereas she had once singled out Bob Fox as her whipping boy, she was now targeting Leo. Singling out mistakes he had made. Her last article had used the motif that time was getting short for the children of the city and what were our city’s leaders doing about it? The piece had ended with the ominous rejoinder that unless they did something soon, for Bob Fox and Leo Hewitt, as for the children, time was getting short.
“Anne. I’d love to help you with your story, but I’m kinda busy right now. We’ve got a murder case we’re working on. You might have read about it.”
“I hear Guaraldi’s gonna walk.”
“You heard wrong.”
“I hear you’ve got nothing on him. I hear it’s gonna be James Nice all over again. You’ve got what? Two issues of Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage?”
“We’ve got plenty on Guaraldi.”
“We’ve got plenty on Guaraldi.”
“That’s not what I hear. Come on, Leo, it’s only me. Level. Wouldn’t you rather I broke the story? I’ll do it gently. Like always.”
“‘Time is getting short for Leo Hewitt.’ That gently?”
“My sources are very reliable.”
“I’m your only source. Look, Anne, it was a nice try. And on the chance that you’re not making this up just to trick me into commenting on it, did it ever occur to you that Monty Lee might be generating this rumor to make his client look better? Take it from me, Frank Guaraldi is not going to walk.”
“Well I’m running the piece whether you confirm or deny.”
“Anne, I just denied it.”
“And if it turns out to be true, you’ll look-”
“Good-bye, Anne,” he said, and hung up on her. She was right about one thing, though. Well, actually, she was right about two things. It was looking more and more like Guaraldi might walk. And, worst of all, time was getting short.
Eventually, even the prosecutors began to lose faith in the case, as did Leo. A roundtable discussion was called by the entire prosecution team, after-hours and without Bob Fox’s knowledge. The prosecutors demanded that Leo go to Bob with the suggestion that the charges against Guaraldi be dropped. There was simply no hard evidence against the man. Leo agreed, but first he met with Paula, alone. He had to make one last effort at getting something going before he asked Bob to drop the case and essentially throw away his career. He decided to start at the beginning with the Conners woman and her statements.
“Look, one of the big reasons we kept after Guaraldi was because of the Conners woman. I want to go see her before I ask Bob to drop the charges, which he will never do anyway.”
“Do you want me to come?” Paula asked.
“No, I want you to dig up her original call to the tip line. I wanna hear the tape.”
Carolyn Conners lived in College Park in an upscale home directly across from the Guaraldi residence. From her front porch, Leo could see the mass of yellow police tape and open craters and what was left of the Guaraldis’ once-beautiful home. If we did this to an innocent man, he thought, who was going to take responsibility? Who was going to make it right? He rang the bell. When no one answered, he rang again. A lace curtain hanging in a window off to the side of the house inched open. Leo saw an eye peering out from behind the curtain. The curtain dropped closed, and seconds later a woman opened the front door. She was wearing a hat crudely fashioned from aluminum foil on her head.
“Ms. Conners?”
“Who wants to know?”
Then the smell of her body odor hit him. Rank and foul, the smell of a body months unwashed. He took a step back.
“My name is Leo Hewitt. I’m with the district attorney’s office. I’m the assistant DA. I wanted to ask you about what you saw.”
“I see a lot. Are you a Democrat?
“Uh, no, I’m not.” Behind the woman, Leo could see masses of cats. Hordes of them crawling over tables and chairs. He saw what could only be feces smeared on the walls. And the smell of the shit and the cats wafted out to him.
“Well, that’s good at least, ’cause they been sending agents out here to spy on me. They been sending out transmissions. They put a transmitter in my head, but I block it with the hat.”
“Really,” Leo said, and began to wish for a cigar.
The prosecution team sat around the conference table. The silence was uncomfortable, and no one would look Leo in the eye.
“You mean to tell me that no one ever just sat down and talked to this woman?”
Paula looked up. “We had her initial statement. The affidavit. We didn’t need anything else. She must have seemed lucid at the-”