“I have to. I’m sorry.”
She rubs her face. “Is it your knee?”
“No, nothing like that.” I sit on the bed next to her. “Let’s do something tomorrow. Okay?”
She pauses. I don’t know if she’s considering it or if she’s still half asleep.
“Call me tomorrow,” she says.
I press my lips to her forehead. “See you tomorrow,” I say. I throw on my clothes and head for the door. I go to the corner and try to hail a cab on Wadsworth, but there’s nothing here this time of night-I’m in a suburb, not the city-so I walk down a few more blocks to what passes for a downtown, a couple of banks and restaurants and a children’s store, and give it another few minutes. Finally, I call information on my phone, and after a couple of tries locate a company that will send a cab my way. I stand on the sidewalk, hopping on the balls of my feet, my thoughts careening wildly to dark subjects. A homeless man has taken up residence within the cocoon of a travel agency doorstep, a dingy SpongeBob SquarePants blanket over him, a skanky black beard obscuring his face. I can’t tell if he’s asleep or watching me, motionless.
A police squad car rolls down the street. I consider skulking into shadows, but they’ve already seen me. I’m committing no crime, but I can’t shake a feeling of something like guilt-but not guilt, not exactly, just a sense that I am wrong, that I am. . not right. “Waiting for a cab,” I tell them when they slow the patrol car and roll down the window before moving on, after a curt appraisal.
Guilty, but not guilty. Wrong, not right.
I am wrong. I am not right. I am falling.
The cab arrives. I show the driver a hundred-dollar bill and tell him it’s his if we get home in twenty minutes. If there’s no traffic, the highway makes that a possibility. My knees bob up and down inside the sticky taxi, the cheap torn seating and the inane interviews from some entertainment show on the small video screen.
James Drinker is gutting women like fish and hiding behind me, the guy who isn’t supposed to say anything, isn’t allowed to say anything, would be punished for saying anything at all to anybody at all. I put my head between my knees and grit my teeth. My tongue is like a piece of damp fur, my breath putrid, my forehead slimy with sweat.
I throw the driver the money and push myself out of the cab. I run up to my door, get in, give the door a push before I bound up the stairs two at a time, all the way to the third story, and rush to the bathroom. I open the cabinet under the sink and find the box for the allergy medicine, a white box with an orange stripe.
I pull out the silver-foiled sheet and pop one of the pills out, chew it up, and fall to my haunches. I wipe sweat from my eyes and fall back against the wall, finally finding a gentle, warm place on my bathroom floor.
Relax, I tell myself. Everything’s fine. Just because Drinker is a weirdo doesn’t mean he’s a killer. You don’t have to do anything, and you can’t, anyway. And this other thing you’re dealing with-it’s going to be fine. You need to do something, but you will, you always have; you overcame Talia’s and Emily’s deaths, you overcame poverty and a fucked-up childhood, you can do anything you want, anything at all.
It’ll be fine, I promise myself as warmth spreads through me. It’s all going to be fine.
PEOPLE VS. JASON KOLARICH
TRIAL, DAY 1
Monday, December 9
18
Shauna
Roger Ogren completes his opening statement at two-thirty. His presentation is what Jason predicted it would be: efficient, to the point, not flashy or hyperbolic. He is, according to Jason, a lifer at the office, a guy who interned during law school, started in traffic court when he got his law degree, and has spent nearly a quarter-century handling major felonies. I’ve struggled to guess what the upshot will be on drawing a veteran prosecutor. Has he fallen into bad habits that I can manipulate? Will he be wise to any tactical maneuvers we dream up? The best I can get from Jason, other than thoroughly unhelpful comments like “Roger is Roger,” is that Ogren puts on a straightforward case free of theatrics and imagination but may have the occasional blind spot for a creative defense attorney. (Now if I only knew a creative defense attorney-at least one who isn’t my client.)
Age has robbed Ogren of most of his hair and left it heavily grayed; cancer took away a good thirty pounds. Tall and thin and weathered, experienced and street-smart, careful and humorless-this is my adversary. I try to make it a habit to get along with opposing counsel, but then again, nearly every case I’ve ever tried was in the civil courts, where the dispute is over money, and where few of the attorneys have any illusions about their clients and sometimes are willing to share as much in off-the-record, colorful commentary. Prosecutors, however, are different. Their client is the state, the people, and many of them bring a holier-than-thou approach to their jobs. Defendants are the bad guys, criminals who must be incarcerated, and thus their attorneys, who search for dust to kick up or technicalities on which to seize, are likewise unsavory.
Judge Judith Bialek-“Judge Judy” behind her back-is a former prosecutor and a trial court judge going on eighteen years now. The bad news is she’s inclined toward the prosecution, the good news that Jason always did well in her courtroom when he was prosecuting felonies. I’ve noted a crimp in her expression from time to time when she’s looked over at Jason sitting in a chair that she probably never expected him to occupy.
“Ms. Tasker,” she booms to me, looking over her glasses, “does the defense still wish to reserve its opening statement?”
It’s been a debate between Jason and me all along. I want to deliver the opening statement now, to tell the jury, right now, right this second, before any impressions can cement in their minds, that Jason didn’t kill anybody. I’m a believer that many jurors make up their minds after opening statements, and if I hold back now, Roger Ogren gets out his first impression without me giving mine. Strike that-the defense is giving a first impression, but not a favorable one: We have something up our sleeve, something perhaps too clever by half, not a straightforward, just-the-facts presentation like our adversary. Roger Ogren has the facts, the defense has snake oil.
“We will reserve, yes, Judge,” I say, standing at my seat.
Jason, who wanted us to hold back our defense, won our internal debate. He might be right. On these matters, he usually is. But the truth, which I prefer not to confront, is that I went along with his idea because I was afraid of overruling him and then being wrong. That is something they don’t talk about in law school and something that attorneys in civil litigation rarely experience-the all-consuming fear that your mistake will land a client in prison.
The truth is that I’m absolutely terrified of making one of those mistakes.
19
Jason
“It was the right decision,” I say to Shauna after Judge Bialek calls a recess following Roger Ogren’s opening statement. Over the last two weeks, she has argued fiercely for delivering the defense’s opening statement at the start of the case, as is tradition-so much so that she actually wrote and presented her opening statement to me two nights ago in an effort to change my mind. It was a great opening, well couched and expertly delivered, but she was never going to change my mind about this. There’s no way we’re telling the jury what happened yet. I know this more than Shauna does.
Because I know things my lawyer doesn’t.
Shauna looks at me, poker-faced. The jury hasn’t filtered out yet, and she doesn’t want to betray any reactions, any emotions, in front of them. Plus there is the gallery behind us, a plentiful group of reporters and onlookers, all of whom would be more than happy to send tweets or post online stories about a perceived “disharmony among the defense team” or “surprised reactions” from a lawyer or from me. I’ve been surprised at the media’s interest in this case, which owes primarily to the fact that many people believe that I was the private attorney who played a central role in the scandal that embroiled our last governor, Carlton Snow. I was, and I did. But I’ve never acknowledged it publicly. Shauna wanted me to do so now in a blatant attempt to influence the jury pool, to trumpet the work that I did for the federal government, to display me to the public as a whistle-blower on corruption, a do-gooder who helped stop bad people from doing bad things. From whistle-blower to accused murderer was how one of the local papers blazed it in a feature story, even without my saying anything.