If I was right that Smith and company were covering up Audrey’s murder, and perhaps multiple child murders, the clock was ticking loudly for Pete and me. Once Sammy’s trial was over, and they had no use for me, they’d come after both of us to cover their tracks. I had seventeen days to solve this thing before there would be a contract out on both of our heads.
What else could I do? I had forced Smith into a corner now by asking the court for DNA testing. I was trying out a plan on Detective Denny DePrizio, though it probably wasn’t going to help Sammy. What else could I do?
Solve Sammy’s case, for starters. I had two leads on alternative suspects now. Smith had given me Ken Sanders, the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene. And I had to follow up on the alibi of another potential suspect, Archie Novotny, who claimed he was at a guitar lesson on the night Griffin Perlini was murdered.
THE MUSIC EMPORIUM, located on 39th and Greenway, was a relic in this day and age, full of rows of albums and CDs in an era where nobody had a turntable anymore and most young people were buying music online. It was a cramped, musty, dark place with music posters for wallpaper, where the only conditions of employment seemed to be wearing your hair past your shoulders and sporting hallucinogenic imagery on your T-shirt.
I actually appreciated the place. We’ve become too impersonal nowadays, buying and reading everything through a computer. I still liked to hold a newspaper in my hand. I still preferred flipping through CDs in a store. I did so while I waited, going through some old Smiths music. This place had a pretty good collection. I bought a used copy of Strangeways, Here We Come because I’d lost mine, and a CD single of “The Queen Is Dead,” which I still thought was their best song.
“Morrissey. Good taste.”
I turned around as the clerk was ringing up my purchase to find the guy who I assumed was Nick Trillo. Archie Novotny had given me his name; this was his guitar teacher who could vouch for him. I hadn’t formed a predictive image of the man in my mind, but in hindsight, he was about what I should have expected. He was skinny to a fault but with a minor paunch, a scatter-patch goatee, gray hair pulled back into a long ponytail.
“You, too,” I said, nodding to his T-shirt, which was the cover art for That What Is Not, by Public Image Ltd., the band Johnny Lydon formed after the Sex Pistols, though I liked PiL’s early stuff a lot better. “You know a better song than ‘Acid Drops’?”
“Nah.” His face lit up. “Nah, man, I don’t.” He hit my arm with the back of his hand. I had won him over. This ponytailed hippie and the yuppie in a serious coat and tie united in their appreciation of an early pioneer of punk rock.
“You needed me for something?”
“Yeah, yeah. Can we find a place to talk?”
“Sure, man, yeah. Here.” I followed him through the store to a door that had a piece of paper on it that read: HEY! IF YOU’RE NOT AN EMPLOYEE, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? TURN AROUND AND BUY SOMETHING. It made me like the place even more.
He led me to a room where, presumably, he taught guitar lessons. The walls were lined with some of the finest guitars ever made—a Les Paul, a Stratocaster, a Flying V. Otherwise, there was nothing more than two stools in the middle of the room and a lone guitar, standing upright in a pedestal, that apparently was the one Nick Trillo played when he taught lessons. I made a point of commenting on the classics on the walls to further soften any ice that might have formed. I was a lawyer, after all. People clutch up around me all the time.
“Did Archie tell you I’d be calling?” I asked.
“Yeah, he said something about some dates. He said to give you whatever you wanted.”
That was helpful. This guy Trillo didn’t need to know which side I was on—that is, that I was on the opposite side of Archie Novotny. Maybe he thought I was Archie’s lawyer. If so, I would choose my words carefully, walking a fine line to let him believe that without actually lying.
“September 21, 2006,” I said.
“Whoa.”
“A Thursday night,” I added. “Do you know if he took a lesson that night?”
“Well, yeah, Thursday night’s when he’s always had lessons. But that’s like, over a year ago, man. Far as I know, yeah, he did.”
I didn’t want to be the inquisitor. I had to play this gently. “My only fear here,” I said, “is that someone else might ask the same question, and they won’t take your word for it. They’ll want records. They’ll want proof.” I leaned into him. “I’ll tell you what my real concern is here, Nick.” This is where I hoped our bonding would pay off. “My real concern is that Archie and I give them the wrong answer. I just want the truth. If we say he was here and he wasn’t, then we’ll be in trouble. Or vice versa. If we say he wasn’t here and he was, then, y’know, it looks like we’re lying. I couldn’t care less what the answer is, but it has to be verifiable.”
Nick Trillo seemed troubled by all of this. “Is this, like, something really serious?”
I showed him my hand. “Not as long we tell the truth. We just have to make absolutely sure it’s the truth, either way. Archie figured you might have some records that could verify whether he was here or not.”
I wasn’t being entirely forthright with the gentleman, but in the end, I was just asking for the truth. That, as much as anything, would be what he’d remember. The minor details of what I was saying would get lost.
“Are you, like, one of these criminal lawyers?”
I shrugged. “I do a lot of things. Like divorces, for example.”
“Oh, okay.” He seemed relieved. “So this is like a divorce fight or something?”
I smiled at him. “I don’t think Archie would want me to answer that, Nick.”
Rather slippery of me, admittedly. The guitar instructor thought about it a moment and, my guess, decided that this was a divorce where Archie Novotny’s whereabouts on a particular night were in question. Probably an allegation of adultery. Maybe he hadn’t thought it through, but either way, he was making me for Archie’s advocate and he seemed to want to help.
“So,” I said, “do you guys have any records of attendance?”
He thought about it, blowing out a deep sigh. “Well, y’know, I’ll sometimes jot something down but—I mean, I wouldn’t keep it. No, it’s more like I just remember—well, I’ll tell you what. We could see how much he paid. Yeah, I could do that. Hang on.”
Nick Trillo left the room, leaving me with the guitars on the wall. I should have been a rock star. Other than the fact that I couldn’t play an instrument, couldn’t sing, wasn’t all that attractive, and lacked the gift of lyrical composition, I think I could have.
“Here, okay.” Trillo carried a hefty file box into the room and placed it on the floor, as there was no place else to put it. He sat on the floor and opened it up. “Month of September,” he said. I looked over his shoulder at the files, which were tabbed by months of the year for the year 2006. He grabbed the tab labeled “9/06” and pulled it back to reveal a few dozen sheets of paper. On each one was a photocopy of a check.
“Twenty-five bucks a lesson,” he said. “They usually pay that day.”
“By check?”
“Boss’s rule,” he said. “One of the instructors who used to be here, he wasn’t so honest with the cash thing. Boss says it’s gotta be a check or credit card.”
Good for me.
“September 7,” Trillo said, showing me a photocopy of a check written by Archie Novotny in the amount of twenty-five dollars.
He kept leafing through the pages. “Here. September 14.”
I didn’t care about September 7 or 14. I cared about September 21, 2006.
Trillo ran through the pages. I was playing defense, praying for the absence of a record. I held my breath as he kept leafing, by my estimate a little longer than he should have, proportionately. I watched the dates on the photocopied checks, felt my heart skip a beat as the dates passed September 21, but that assumed that the checks were in perfect chronological order.