Archie Novotny lived in the older part of town, the smaller homes bunched together on streets bordered by cul-de-sacs. The realtors would say that the circular blocks of concrete at the end of each block promoted slower vehicles, safer for children to ride their bikes and play in their streets. The truth was, their purpose was to discourage drive-by shootings.

It was near six o’clock now, and I needed to get back to the office with Shauna’s car, so she could leave work, and so I could leave in my own car. The later in the day it got, the more Smith’s people might come to realize they’d been blown off. It was important that they think their surveillance was working just fine.

I rang the doorbell and stood, bouncing on my toes, on the front porch.

“Door’s open!” called a voice from inside.

It felt like old times, a different era, when people kept their doors unlocked and invited people in, sight unseen.

I opened the door and stood at the threshold on a dingy black-and-white tile floor. “Mr. Novotny, it’s Jason Kolarich.” I closed the door behind me. To my left was a winding staircase. Straight ahead were a hallway and a small room. To my right was a coat closet, open, with a full rack of coats and windbreakers, caps and mittens and scarves on a top shelf, boots and shoes on the floor.

“Call me Archie,” said the voice.

Okay, Archie, but I wasn’t going to head upstairs without an invitation.

I waited a good five minutes, enjoying the comparative warmth of the home. Finally, a man bounced down a few stairs into my view.

“Come on up, Jason.”

My first take on the guy, wearing a flannel and cords, was Paul Bunyan on Social Security. I made it up the stairs to the second level—the living room and kitchen, finished hardwood, green furniture, and small windows—and found Novotny in the corner of the room, unplugging a floor sander.

“Put in the hardwood last week,” he told me, brushing dust from his hands. “Got a little extra time on my hands these days.” Novotny was a union guy, a painter with the electric utility.

“Hard finding work?”

“Has been, lately. Yeah. Working at Home Depot in between jobs.” He nodded to the corner. “They let me steal the sander for the week.”

I took a seat across from him and adjusted my initial impression. He had an outdoorsman’s face, weathered and rugged, matching his large hands. I figured mid-fifties. He looked like a guy who used to be powerful and who had finally softened physically but not mentally. He looked me square in the eye, a hint of amusement in his expression.

“Can I do you for?” he asked. “A lawyer wants to talk to you, your mind runs wild.”

“Sure, sure.” I raised a hand. “Archie, I represent Sammy Cutler.”

He didn’t look surprised. “Sure, Sammy. Heard about what happened. He gonna be okay, you think?”

“I hope. I’m doing everything I can.”

He seemed to be sizing me up. “Including talking to me.”

I smiled at him.

“Why?” he asked. “You want me to tell the jury that Griffin Perlini was a sick, low-life piece of garbage? That he deserved what he got?”

Everything about him changed in an instant, the heat to his face, the clenched fists, the stiffening of his shoulders. My radar was inconclusive at this point. If a guy had molested my daughter, I don’t care how much time had passed, it would light a fire in me.

“Name the time and the place, if that’s what you want,” he said.

This felt promising. Something made me think I needed to prompt him.

“You testified at the parole hearing,” I said. I wasn’t sure about that but the Drurys had thought so, and it seemed a better idea to state it as a fact. A trick we learned as prosecutors, when interrogating witnesses.

“I sure as hell did. They gave him twenty-five and he shoulda served twenty-five.”

I’d need to get a transcript of that parole board hearing. Again, for now, I’d bluff.

“You spoke in very strong terms,” I said.

He played with that for a while, rubbing his hands together, clenching his jaw. “My daughter cried herself to sleep for years afterward. You know what that’s like? Jody couldn’t sleep in the dark. Ten years later, she was still having nightmares. You know what you do as a parent? Are you a parent?”

I choked on that one. I went with “No.”

“Well, you will be. Your job is to protect the innocence of your child for as long as you can. And this man—this monster—he stole her innocence at the age of seven. She never got a childhood.”

“I under—”

“My wife died, three years after this happened. Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

“Jody was having night terrors, she couldn’t make friends, she was always crying, and my wife died thinking that this was all Jody would become.”

I didn’t answer. I was trying to keep this on a clinical level. I was trying to see if this was my guy. I’d come to one conclusion already—I might be able to sell him as a suspect to the jury. But I hadn’t yet decided if I could take the route, adding insult to deep, deep injury.

Was this guy working with Smith?

“Hey,” he said.

I looked up at him.

“Why you asking about me testifying before the parole board?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Trying to get my arms around the entire landscape here.”

“That sounds like something a lawyer would say when he doesn’t want to answer the question. The landscape.” He leaned in toward me. “You investigating me?”

“Should I be?” I always loved that question. But it moved the conversation in a different direction. Now I was confronting him.

He squinted at me. He had a pretty good poker face. He didn’t reveal much of anything. I figured he was running through his options. He could tell me to take a leap and kick me out of his house, but he was smart enough to realize that such a response would only pique my interest. More likely, he would take the common route of anyone cornered—he’d try to talk his way out of it. That’s an option I always encouraged as a prosecutor and strongly discouraged as a defense lawyer. It’s the human impulse to defend yourself, but often you just dig a deeper hole.

All of this assumed that Archie Novotny had something to hide. But the longer he stared at me through those narrow slants, the more I thought I’d stumbled onto something.

“I was at a guitar lesson that night,” he said. “I’ve had guitar lessons every Thursday night for three years.” He nodded presumptively. “I was playing guitar.”

Interesting that he had an alibi at the ready. I wanted to explore this. And I wanted to seem nonchalant in doing so. But that effort typically backfires; in fact it has the opposite effect, trying too hard to seem unaffected, and then you’ve emphasized the importance of the question still further by trying to be underhanded about it. I wanted to know more about this alibi, and there was no way to ask about it in a casual manner.

I was instantly sorry that I hadn’t brought a “prover”—somebody who could verify the contents of this conversation in court. I couldn’t testify, obviously, as I was counsel, and it had been an oversight on my part not to bring Joel Lightner or anyone else along with me. I’d been so focused on sneaking out of my building without Smith’s guys seeing me that I hadn’t taken this elementary precaution. It was another reminder to me that I wasn’t bringing my “A” game to this case, that I probably wasn’t capable of doing so, that I quite possibly was in over my head as I tried to help my childhood friend escape a first-degree murder charge. The usual physical symptoms of minor panic showed themselves—my chest tightened, my throat constricted—but I had no way out at this point and there was simply nothing I could do but motor forward and play out this string. I took a deep breath and refocused.

“Who said Griffin Perlini was murdered on a Thursday, Archie?”