“Okay. This is weird.” Trillo held up a photocopied check from Archie Novotny, dated September 28, in the amount of fifty dollars. “He paid for two lessons on the twenty-eighth.”

Which would have included the twenty-first. But my eyes fixed on the memo line of that check, in which the handwritten words “I insist!” were written.

I felt my knees go weak, the adrenaline flow with a vengeance. I thought I understood this, but I wanted to get Trillo on the same page with me. “ ‘I insist,’ ” I said.

“Huh. ‘I insist.’ Yeah.”

“What does that mean? What was he insisting on?”

Trillo thought about it. I decided to help him along.

“So he didn’t write you a check on the twenty-first, and then he wrote you a check for the following week with the words ‘I insist!’ on it.”

“ ‘I insist.’ ‘I—.’ Oh.” Nick Trillo looked up at me, shaking the paper. “I remember this. Yeah. Yeah.” He got up from the floor and pointed at me. “He missed a lesson. He missed a lesson and I told him he didn’t have to pay for it, but he insisted, ’cause he hadn’t called ahead to cancel it. He said, fair was fair.”

I tried to remain calm, though I wanted to wrap my arms around his bony frame. “He missed the lesson on the twenty-first but insisted on paying for it.”

“Yeah.” Trillo nodded with excitement. “Yeah. Must have been the twenty-first. He’d paid for every other one. Yeah, I remember, I told him not to worry but he said, well—”

“He insisted.”

“Right. He insisted.” Trillo looked at the paper and chuckled. “I feel like a detective or something. You want copies of this stuff?”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” I answered. And if it was, I would personally take them to a Kinko’s and make copies myself.

Trillo left for a few moments, returning with fresh copies of each of Archie Novotny’s checks for September—twenty-five dollars for September 7, twenty-five dollars for September 14, and fifty dollars for September 28.

“Good thing we checked,” he said.

Indeed it was—good for me, at least. Not so good for Archie Novotny. Mr. Novotny, it seemed clear, missed his guitar lesson on the night that Griffin Perlini was murdered. Then, if he was even thinking this diabolically, he tried to cover his tracks by paying for it anyway.

“Hey, if it’s not a problem,” I said, “I’ll come back tomorrow with an affidavit—a legal document describing what we discussed. That okay with you?”

“Yeah, that’s great.” He was still excited about our little adventure in puzzle-solving. Sooner or later, he’d become less excited when he realized that I was not serving Archie Novotny’s interests. But the truth was the truth, and I’d lock him down with the affidavit, in any event.

I left the Music Emporium with some steam in my stride. I had Archie Novotny. I had motive, opportunity, and an attempt to manufacture an alibi. I tried to imagine the look on the face of Lester Mapp, the prosecutor, when he saw this.

“Sammy,” I said to no one, “we might just win this case.”

41

YOU KILLED ME, JASON.

I awoke with a start, my eyes stinging from the sweat, the echo of Talia’s voice lingering between my ears. The dream was always a little different, but always she was dead, visiting me, a vision within a dream, appearing out of nowhere but somehow I knew she was coming, and I knew she was right.

I tossed the pillow, soaked in sweat, to the foot of the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

“Happy birthday,” I said. Talia was born on October 13, 1972, in a small town outside New York City, where her father was opening a Kmart. It had been his job, moving across the country as new stores opened. Talia lived in ten cities growing up, attended three different high schools, a nomadic life that taught her an adaptive personality but left her longing for permanency as an adult. She’d made me promise, before Emily was born, that we’d stay in one place, that Emily would stay in one school system.

I thought of her parents, Nelson and Ginny, what today would mean for them. I considered calling them, but we hadn’t spoken since the funeral. They hadn’t placed blame per se, but they’d noted to me, coolly enough, You were supposed to go with them. I’d already beaten them to the punch.

That’s what you do—you play it out, isolating any single moment that could have altered the chain of events, turning every one of those moments into blame. I should have told Talia, all along, that I was still on trial, that it was unrealistic to expect that I could break away for the weekend at her parents’ place. I should have told her about Ernesto Ramirez, the ex-Latin Lord who could blow open the case against Senator Almundo.

She’d have left earlier in the day. She’d have left during daylight, making that turn along the road before it was dark. Had I not strung her along into the early evening, she’d have left that morning. Talia and Emily would still be alive.

I got out of bed and went to the bathroom, vomiting until there was nothing but dry retching. I got a glass of water downstairs and sat in the family room, dark and chilly, as the morning sun filtered through the blinds.

Time passed. I didn’t spend it in the way one might expect—lighting a candle, looking over photos. In fact, I spent several hours on the couch drifting in and out of sleep filled with vivid dreams of Talia: The first time we slept together in college, cautious and awkward; an ice-cream cone she threw in my face along the lake one summer afternoon; smiling through tears as she told me she was pregnant; the delivery room, Talia’s remarkable cool during eleven hours of labor; my dumbfounded fascination as the nurse put the scissors in my hand to cut the umbilical cord. Each time I popped awake, fresh sweat covering my forehead and my heart racing.

As I stumbled to the bathroom, I passed a clock that told me it was just past two in the afternoon, which reminded me that I had work to do today, that today could not be all about mourning. My cell phone rang and I scrambled around the living room to find it. It was under the couch, though I couldn’t recall how that happened.

“Hello?” I managed, my voice sounding like a poor facsimile of my normal speech.

“Hey.” It was Pete. “Wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“Not the best day.”

“No, I know. You wanna—you wanna grab dinner or something? Probably a good day that you could use some company.”

True, but I couldn’t run the risk of being seen with my brother. He had to stay secluded or Smith could sink his teeth into him.

“The day will come and go,” Pete said. “Tomorrow will be better, Jase.” I took a shower in scalding water and threw on a sweater and jeans. Neither Sammy nor Pete could afford the luxury of my wallowing in self-pity. Sammy’s trial started in sixteen days, and while I had a few pieces of a defense, I hadn’t yet decided how to make them fit together.

ACCORDING TO THE FILE Smith had delivered to my house, Ken Sanders had a pretty long sheet of violence and drugs. He’d been in and out of the joint and now worked as a dishwasher at a Greek diner on the west side.

I ordered some coffee at the counter and waited for him to come out. I’d seen a glimpse of him back in the kitchen—what looked like him, at least, compared to a mug shot—and I felt like I knew this guy already. I’d prosecuted this guy, a hundred times over, a guy on a treadmill of crime, having not much of a chance at anything promising once out of prison, so he returns to what he knows best: to criminal activity out of necessity, to drugs out of despair. One of the downsides of prosecution is you get so overwhelmed by these individual tragedies that you wall it off, you focus on the crime and not on the person, leaving you wondering how much sense any of this makes, whether you’re making any meaningful difference at all.