Released for the time being. Keep your cellphone with you at all times for you may be contacted by police. Do not REPEAT DO NOT leave the area. A bench warrant will be issued for your arrest in the event that you attempt to leave the area.
“It isn’t that I am innocent, Mother. I know that I am innocent! The shock of it is, people seem to believe that I might not be. A lot of people.”
It was a fact. A lot of people.
He would have to live with that fact, and what it meant of Mikal Zallman’s place in the world, for a long time.
Keep your hands in sight, sir.
That had been the beginning. His wounded brain fixed obsessively upon that moment, at Bear Mountain.
The state troopers. Staring at him. As if.
(Would they have pulled their revolvers and shot him down, if he’d made a sudden ambiguous gesture? It made him sick to think so. It should have made him grateful that it had not happened but in fact it made him sick.)
Yet the troopers had asked him politely enough if they could search his vehicle. He’d hesitated only a moment before consenting. Sure it annoyed him as a private citizen who’d broken no laws and as a (lapsed) member of the ACLU but why not, he knew there was nothing in the minivan to catch the troopers’ eyes. He didn’t even smoke marijuana any longer. He’d never carried a concealed weapon, never even owned a gun. So the troopers looked through the van, and found nothing. No idea what the hell they were looking for but he’d felt a gloating sort of relief that they hadn’t found it. Seeing the way they were staring at the covers of the paperback books in the back seat he’d tossed there weeks ago and had more or less forgotten.
Female nudes, and so what?
“Good thing it isn’t kiddie porn, officers, eh? That stuff is illegal.”
Even as a kid Zallman hadn’t been able to resist wisecracking at inopportune moments.
Now, he had a lawyer. “His” lawyer.
A criminal lawyer whose retainer was fifteen thousand dollars.
They are the enemy.
Neuberger meant the Skatskill detectives, and beyond them the prosecutorial staff of the district, whose surface civility Zallman had been misinterpreting as a tacit sympathy with him, his predicament. It was a fact they’d sweated him, and he’d gone along with it naively, frankly. Telling him he was not under arrest only just assisting in their investigation.
His body had known, though. Increasingly anxious, restless, needing to urinate every twenty minutes. He’d been flooded with adrenaline like a cornered animal.
His blood pressure had risen, he could feel pulses pounding in his ears. Damned stupid to request a polygraph at such a time but — he was an innocent man, wasn’t he?
Should have called a lawyer as soon as they’d begun asking him about the missing child. Once it became clear that this was a serious situation, not a mere misunderstanding or misidentification by an unnamed “eyewitness.” (One of Zallman’s own students? Deliberately lying to hurt him? For Christ’s sake why?) So at last he’d called an older cousin, a corporation attorney, to whom he had not spoken since his father’s funeral, and explained the situation to him, this ridiculous situation, this nightmare situation, but he had to take it seriously since obviously he was a suspect and so: would Joshua recommend a good criminal attorney who could get to Skatskill immediately, and intercede for him with the police?
His cousin had been so stunned by Zallman’s news he’d barely been able to speak. “Y-You? Mikal? You’re arrested—?”
“No. I am not arrested, Andrew.”
He believes I might be guilty. My own cousin believes I might be a sexual predator.
Still, within ninety minutes, after a flurry of increasingly desperate phone calls, Zallman had retained a Manhattan criminal lawyer named Neuberger who didn’t blithely assure him, as Zallman halfway expected he would, that there was nothing to worry about.
TARRYTOWN RESIDENT QUESTIONED IN ABDUCTION OF 11-YEAR-OLD
SEARCH FOR MARISSA CONTINUES SKATSKILL DAY INSTRUCTOR IN POLICE CUSTODY
6TH GRADER STILL MISSING SKATSKILL DAY INSTRUCTOR QUESTIONED BY POLICE TENTATIVE IDENTIFICATION OF MINIVAN BELIEVED USED IN ABDUCTION
MIKAL ZALLMAN, 31, COMPUTER CONSULTANT QUESTIONED BY POLICE IN CHILD ABDUCTION
ZALLMAN: “I AM INNOCENT” TARRYTOWN RESIDENT QUESTIONED BY POLICE IN CHILD ABDUCTION CASE
Luridly spread across the front pages of the newspapers were photographs of the missing girl, the missing girl’s mother, and “alleged suspect Mikal Zallman.”
It was a local TV news magazine. Neuberger had warned him not to watch TV, just as he should not REPEAT SHOULD NOT answer the telephone if he didn’t have caller I.D., and for sure he should not answer his door unless he knew exactly who was there. Still, Zallman was watching TV fortified by a half dozen double-strength Tylenols that left him just conscious enough to stare at the screen disbelieving what he saw and heard.
Skatskill Day students, their faces blurred to disguise their identities, voices eerily slurred, telling a sympathetic female broadcaster their opinions of Mikal Zallman.
Mr. Zallman, he’s cool. I liked him okay.
Mr. Zallman is kind of sarcastic I guess. He’s okay with the smart kids but the rest of us it’s like he’s trying real hard and wants us to know.
I was so surprised! Mr. Zallman never acted like that, you know — weird. Not in computer lab.
Mr. Zallman has, like, these laser eyes? I always knew he was scary.
Mr. Zallman looks at us sometimes! It makes you shiver.
Some kids are saying he had, like, a hairbrush? To brush the girls’ hair? I never saw it.
This hairbrush Mr. Zallman had, it was so weird! He never used it on me, guess I’m not pretty-pretty enough for him.
He’d help you in the lab after school if you asked. He was real nice to me. All this stuff about Marissa, I don’t know. It makes me want to cry.
And there was Dr. Adrienne Cory, principal of Skatskill Day, grimly explaining to a skeptical interviewer that Mikal Zallman whom she had hired two and a half years previously had excellent credentials, had come highly recommended, was a conscientious and reliable staff member of whom there had been no complaints.
No complaints! What of the students who’d just been on the program?
Dr. Cory said, twisting her mouth in a semblance of a placating smile, “Well. We never knew.”
And would Zallman continue to teach at Skatskill Day?
“Mr. Zallman has been suspended with pay for the time being.”
His first, furious thought was I will sue.
His second, more reasonable thought was I must plead my case.
He had friends at Skatskill Day, he believed. The young woman who thought herself less-than-happily married, and who’d several times invited Zallman to dinner; a male math teacher, whom he often met at the gym; the school psychologist, whose sense of humor dovetailed with his own; and Dr. Cory herself, who was quite an intelligent woman, and a kindly woman, who had always seemed to like Zallman.