“And did you find anything?”
“Yes,” she says. “Ms. Himmel used her Visa card that evening to buy a small pizza and chef’s salad from Mario’s. We obtained from Mario’s a copy of the delivery receipt.”
“Is this the receipt?” Katie O’Connor shows the witness a yellow receipt from Mario’s Pizzeria, for a charge of $19.62, plus tip, with Alexa’s signature on it.
“That’s the receipt,” says the detective. O’Connor admits the receipt into evidence without objection.
“Does the receipt have a date and time indicated, Detective?”
“Yes, it does,” says Hilton. “A small pizza and salad from Mario’s Pizzeria were delivered to Ms. Himmel at 7:02 that evening.”
I have to stifle a smirk. I look down and control my expression.
“What other information did you pursue, Detective?”
“We looked at her cable television bill for the month of July,” says Hilton.
“Is People’s Twenty-five a true and accurate copy of that bill?”
“Yes, it is.”
O’Connor admits that bill into evidence, too.
“As you can see,” says the detective, “on the evening of her death, Tuesday, July thirtieth, Ms. Himmel ordered the movie Doctor Zhivago on pay-per-view television at 7:07 P.M.”
Just after the pizza arrived. A pizza and a movie-a three-hour classic at that, a film that would run past ten o’clock that evening. Not the behavior of someone living at my house. But more important, much more to the point, not the behavior of someone who was planning on dropping by my house, either. It’s the behavior of someone who was kicking up her feet and settling in for a quiet night at home.
Or someone who very much wanted it to appear that way.
Oh, Alexa. How did I underestimate thee? Let me count the ways.
FIVE MONTHS BEFORE TRIAL
July
75
Jason
Tuesday, July 23
I drop Alexa off downtown and then head to work. I have a nine-thirty in federal court, a status on a weapons case, which is bad news for my client because a federal gun charge will get you triple what it would on the state side. Trial is scheduled for six weeks from now, if it goes. The government wants my guy to flip on people up the chain, and so far my client has refused. I come from a neighborhood where you don’t narc on your buddies, so I understand my client’s reluctance, but my loyalty is to him, not his pals, and he could shave five years off his sentence if he starts talking.
I get back to my office after ten and push around some paper, a few files I’ve kept, the ones I haven’t referred out to other lawyers. I realize that it’s not an optimal strategy for a lawyer, who makes his living representing people for a fee, to push away all his clients. It’s not exactly a recipe for long-term success. But long-term success is not on my agenda right now.
The case files holding no interest for me, I return to the notes I’ve scribbled about my time interrogating suspects as a prosecutor, trying to relax my mind and come up with some breakthrough. It has to be somebody I put away, and it has to be someone who just got out of prison. This guy has way too much of a hard-on for me to have kept his powder dry for years. This is a guy who stewed in prison, every sit-up in his cell at night, every repetition of the bench press in the prison yard, every moldy piece of bologna he ate, every night staring at a cement ceiling, every morning in the shower, looking over his shoulder, blaming me for all of his troubles, plotting out what he’d do to me when he got released.
He’d want to get started on that plan right away. This is not a guy who’s enjoyed years of freedom since. This is a guy who got out of prison and got right to work.
I drop my head, feeling helpless. My stomach is revolting against me and my body temperature is fluctuating wildly from sweat to chills and back. I don’t want to take a pill. I didn’t take one for several hours on the night we tried to trap “James” at Linda Sparks’s house, the adrenaline rush distracting me, and my mind was sharper than it has been for months. In fact, it was the night I realized that “James” had been mimicking back to me one of my favorite lines during interrogations, the you’re nobody to me comment.
So, no pills. No pills because they cloud my mind, and I need my brain to function right now, I have to think, I need to process information, I need to think out of the box, one of the things the corporate robots say, there has to be something, some way, but I’m so damn tired, my vision losing focus, maybe if I just sleep for a few minutes, a quick catnap. .
“Who are you, James?” I mumble, and he’s in my office, James in my office, James telling me he didn’t kill anybody, James asking me how to frame somebody, James in my office when I leave to take a pill in the bathroom, James taking my Bic pen, James dumping out my trash for Kleenex or an empty bottle of water, anything with saliva or mucus for DNA, maybe fingerprints, What evidence do I have against you? he asks me, taunting me over the phone, Just some souvenirs I collected from you, just some souvenirs like a chewed-up pen, maybe some Kleenex from the trash, a water bottle, just some souvenirs, because That’s How You Frame Somebody by Jason Kolarich, Chapter One, first you pick a time when I have no alibi, Chapter Two, next you pick victims connected to me, Chapter Three, then you take things from my office that implicate me, souvenirs, and you leave them at the crime scene, James in my office, taking souvenirs-
My head pops up off the desk, my eyes taking a moment to return to focus, my brain reorienting.
Chapter Four, you plant incriminating evidence at the patsy’s house.
Or, failing that, the patsy’s office.
I jump out of my chair. Did I say that to him? Did I give him that advice? I don’t know. The fog is too thick. But it’s what I’d do if I really wanted to lock somebody down; I’d leave some morsels at the crime scene, nothing obvious but enough for an inquiry, and then, for the cherry on top, I’d put something really incriminating at the patsy’s house or office.
As far as I know, he’s never been inside my house. But he’s been here in my office.
There’s something here, I realize. Right here, in this office. He planted something here, something subtle, something hidden, something the police will specifically search for. It would need to look hidden. It can’t be dangling from the ceiling or plastered on the wall like a trophy. It has to look like I didn’t want anyone to find it. But it’s here.
Why didn’t you think of this before? You know why. It’s those little white round bundles of joy that turn your brain to mush. How much more proof do you need?
I go to the corner of my office and dig my fingers against the cheap carpeting, feeling for a hole, a place where he could have stuck something. I cover the entire perimeter of the room, pulling back case files, the refrigerator, the couch. Nothing. Nothing I can find, anyway. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.
The couch. I search under it and run my hands under cushions, feel under the bottom. Nothing.
The fridge. That would be fiendishly clever of him, brilliant in its simplicity. But nothing there. No lock of hair tucked into the small freezer section, no bloody knife taped to the bottom.
I go through my desk drawers, removing everything, searching through my coffee cup full of pencils and pens, everything I can think of. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Bigger than a bread basket? Probably not. A woman’s fingernail? Her blood?
I turn my attention to the case files strewn around my office. Sure, maybe. He could have dropped something inside them, into one of the accordion files or one of the manila folders shoved within them. It could be anything. It could be anywhere.