I’d handled hundreds of drug cases as a prosecutor, big and small, and I knew all of this well. During my stint on felony review—assigned to a police station to interrogate suspects and approve charges—I’d seen guys arrested for possession with intent who looked more like the addicts who bought the stuff than the guys who sold it to them.
And I had to acknowledge, as I had last night with Shauna, that from being swamped by the Almundo trial, to being a new father, to falling into a funk after losing Talia and Emily, I hadn’t been keeping a watchful eye on my little brother. This could have been building up for the better part of a year, and the whole thing eluded me.
I went to the office at nine. I needed to make some calls to some old friends at the county attorney’s office, hoping to call in some favors for Pete, which would be a minor challenge on a Saturday. I also needed to do some Internet transactions to have money liquid in case I needed to bond him out. He’d get bond of some kind or another for a nonvio lent, though guns weren’t far from violence and the judges treated them seriously.
When I walked into my office, the front page of our city newspaper, the Watch, was sitting on my chair. GRAVE SITE FOUND ON SOUTH SIDE, said the headline, including an old photograph of Griffin Perlini and a sky-view photograph of the hill behind Hardigan Elementary School, complete with law enforcement swarming the area and a crane lifting dirt. “At least four” children found buried, said one smaller story. MOLESTER MURDERED LAST YEAR; VICTIM’S BROTHER ACCUSED, read another, with side-by-side photographs of Audrey and Sammy Cutler.
This, of course, was a residual benefit I’d always hoped for. I wanted to prove Perlini killed Audrey to help my case, but I also wanted Perlini’s name to become infamous in the minds of potential jurors. I wanted a county full of potential jurors who knew, full well, that Griffin Perlini was a child molester and a murderer.
I imagined the look on the face of Lester Mapp, the smug prosecutor, as he read this very public account of Griffin Perlini’s misdeeds. This was not a good development for him.
But it was hard to focus on Sammy’s case, concerned as I was for my brother. There was nothing I could do for Pete yet. I didn’t know anything about the case. Pete had told me that he was with two people when the police came down on them, and he thought one of them got away. The other guy wasn’t with Pete in the holding cell, which made me wonder.
And what had the cop, DePrizio, said? I’m on in four hours.
I went to bond court early to try to hook up with the prosecutors. The courtroom was fairly empty and the judge wasn’t present, so I cornered a young assistant county attorney named Warren and made my pitch for a low bond. He listened patiently to my spiel, which included a few dropped names, and told me he couldn’t go below a hundred. I wasn’t surprised. Too much rock, and guns, to boot. That meant I had to come up with ten thousand. I’d transferred enough money in my checking account to cover that and more.
By the time the judge was ready to assume the bench, the courtroom was full of family members hoping that their loved ones would get I-bonds—allowing them to leave of their own recognizance, meaning no cash down—or at least something low that they could afford. The judge assumed the bench without fanfare, without a call to order by the bailiff. The Honorable Alexander Lotus—Lex Lotus—was a former prosecutor who’d come to office in the last election. He was about my age but graying, a solemn man who looked displeased at his assignment to bond court.
He started with the outstanding warrants for people who had missed court appearances. With each of the roughly twenty men who came before him, he listened to both sides and casually said, usually without looking up from his papers, “Warrant to stand,” after which the people were scooped—taken back into custody.
I settled in when Judge Lotus then turned to the misdemeanors, because that meant Pete’s case—felony charges—would be last. That was the standard protocol for these judges, starting with the small stuff before handling the felonies.
Every person, upon arrest, is entitled to a Gerstein hearing, where the judge determines that probable cause exists to detain. In theory, this determination might consist of a searching review of the records, maybe even the calling of witnesses, but in bond court in a big city, the judge usually had the words “Probable cause to detain” out of his mouth before the defendant reached the bench.
After the Gerstein finding, the judge would turn to the question of bond, which could take a bit longer unless the prosecutor and defense attorney had agreed on the amount. The judge can choose an I-bond, which lets the defendant walk and only pay the bond if he fails to appear later, or a D-bond, which requires a deposit of ten percent of the money before release.
“Probable cause to detain, circumstances?” The judge would then listen to the attorneys discuss bond before announcing, “Ten-thousand-D, or “One-thousand-I,” never deviating much from formula. If any one case took more than five minutes, the judge wasn’t doing his job.
Prisoners were shuffled in through a side door and lined up in the area that, in other courtrooms, would be reserved for the jury. Sometimes there were benches or chairs, but not in this courtroom. Prisoners stood, manacled, looking through Plexiglas at the profile of the judge, hearing what went on in the courtroom through a speaker, until their case was called.
A fresh batch of prisoners shuffled in, and I saw Pete. My heart sank at the sight. He clearly hadn’t slept, which was a smart move, but I saw nothing to indicate he’d been treated roughly. His shirt and pants were badly wrinkled and his hair was oily and flat. His eyes searched the courtroom until they found mine, and I nodded to him. He blinked twice, then nodded back.
The words finally came from the clerk: “Kolarich, Peter.”
“Jason Kolarich for the defendant,” I said from the front row, before I’d even approached, hoping the name might register with the judge. Our time as prosecutors had overlapped, though we’d never met.
“Prob—” The judge’s eyes lifted off the papers before him. He straightened his posture. “Counsel,” he said to me. A lightbulb had gone on.
“Good afternoon, Your Honor.”
He nodded to me, then glanced in Pete’s direction. “This is a relation, I take it?”
“This is my brother, Your Honor.”
He took a deep breath. “Well, Mr. Kolarich, I think at this stage I would find probable cause to detain.”
“I understand that, Your Honor.” There was absolutely no possibility of my convincing him otherwise, so I showed him some courtesy back, hoping for another return from him for the bigger question.
“Circumstances, Mr. Warren,” the judge said quietly to the prosecutor.
“Officer complainant,” Warren answered, meaning that a cop—DePrizio—was an eyewitness to the crime, as opposed to a layperson. “One point seven kilos of uncut rock cocaine and over thirty handguns. The defendant has two priors for—”
“I see his history, Counsel,” the judge said, waving a hand. Another courtesy, sparing Pete from having his criminal history—two possession busts—being stated publicly.
“People request one-hundred-thousand-D, Judge.”
The judge ran a hand over his mouth. “Mr. Kolarich, sir?”
“Judge, I would request an I-bond. Judge, my brother isn’t going anywhere. He’s gainfully employed, and he’s not going to run from this. If he does, he should be more worried about me than you.”
The judge thought about it a moment, then said, “Three-hundred-thousand-I.”
I breathed out. He was releasing Pete on his own recognizance, making the usual judicial trade-off—stiffening the amount but not requiring anything up front. If Pete skipped a court appearance, he’d be on the hook for three hundred thousand dollars.