He nodded. “My car.”

He was right. Before I ask questions of a client, I like to give him the lay of the land, so he’s clear on what the prosecution knows and what they don’t know. It’s always nice to demonstrate the wiggle room before giving the client the chance to wiggle.

I started with the obvious. “The convenience store down the street—its security camera is posted in the back corner of the store and points toward the register. It also happens to catch a little bit outside the store. Your car is parked right outside the store, just enough so the camera can catch the back end of your car—and the license plate. The vid is clear on it being your license plate, so we’re stuck with that, right?”

He nodded.

“It doesn’t capture who got into the car because that part of the car is out of the camera’s range. So it’s your car, Sammy, but they can’t say who drove it there or who drove it away.”

“Well, yeah, but . . .”

I was giving him the wiggle room here, but he seemed content to sit still.

“It was me,” said Sammy.

I deflated. “Then we have some ’splainin’ to do. That’s a pretty big coincidence.”

“Not really.”

“Why not really?”

“They got that one store video? From that night? That’s it?”

“Correct.” I didn’t get where this was going. “Just the one.”

Sammy stubbed out his cigarette and blew out the remnants of smoke. He didn’t look well. The sleep deprivation didn’t help, but it was more than that. He had a heavy drinker’s complexion, a smoker’s wrinkles, a natural frown. He’d lived hard.

“About a week before he died,” said Sammy, “I saw him. I saw the fuckin’ guy.”

“You saw Perlini—”

“I was in the grocery store where he worked, at the checkout, and some manager or something starts calling out for ‘Griffin.’ I tell ya, Koke, I heard that name and I—I just froze. We were kids and all, but man, I knew it was him, soon as I laid eyes on him. Soon as I fuckin’ laid eyes on him.” He lit up another cigarette silently before continuing. “So I waited ’til his shift ended and I followed the guy. I followed him to those apartments. I knew where he lived. And I tell ya, I thought about it every night. Every night for a week, I drove over by his place and I thought about Audrey, and what he did to her, and I wondered if I had the stones to do it—to kill that scumbag.”

Sammy’s story would not be found in the Guinness Book of World Records under “all-time greatest alibis.” I was there, contemplating murdering Perlini, when someone else did it. And it was a hell of a coincidence. The week Sammy sees Griffin Perlini in a grocery store and begins to stalk him is the same week that Perlini takes a bullet between the eyes?

“So that night,” I said, “you drove over there and thought about killing him?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get out of your car?”

He shook his head, no.

“If you did, Sammy—if you liked to walk while you think, instead of sitting in the car—it might explain why those eyewitnesses saw you. Like, you were standing somewhere around the building, you heard a gunshot, you started running, and that’s when that nice elderly couple saw you. We’d have some kind of explanation—not the greatest one, but—”

“No, not the greatest one. I’d have to explain why I was hanging out, doing my thinking, right by his damn building. No, I was in the car the whole time. Camera can’t say different.”

Sammy had had a long time to think about this. This was his story and, apparently, he was sticking with it.

“Huge coincidence,” I said.

He shrugged. “Life is full of ’em, right?”

Wrong. But we didn’t have much to play with here. They had his damn car on video, parking at 8:34 P.M. and leaving at 9:08 P.M.—which happened to be the precise window of time in which Griffin Perlini was murdered.

My good friend Smith had suggested that we tag-team on an explanation for Sammy that night. I thought Sammy might be willing to go along with something, if we could drum something up, but how do you explain why you drove across town, parked there for only half an hour—the precise half hour in which the murder happened—and left?

But I let it go for now. If Smith and I could come up with a better alibi—and dollars to doughnuts said Smith was working on it—I could always try it out on Sammy.

As I was heading back to my car, my cell phone rang. The caller ID was blocked.

“Mr. Kolarich, it’s Jim Stewart.”

“Thanks for getting back,” I said. His parents must have been awfully big fans of the actor, because, I mean, come on, you give a kid a name like that, he’s gotta deal with the comments his entire life, the crappy impressions—Ah, ah, say, now, ah, ah—and Christmastime must have been hell with that damn movie playing every other minute.

“Your message mentioned Lightner? You work with Joel?”

“Yeah, he gave me your name. Said you were stand-up.”

He laughed. “He probably said I was a good-for-nothin’ drunk.”

“That came up, too.”

“Right, right. Anyway,” he said, “sounds like we should meet?”

I looked up and down the street for my tail, which at the moment I couldn’t see.

“You got some time for me this afternoon?” I asked.

“ HONEY, I’M HOME!” I call out, something out of a ’50s sitcom, a standing joke with my wife. It’s a not-so-hectic week for me at the office. They don’t come often so I try to make them count.

“Daddy!” Emily hears the door. She comes bounding down the stairs as I open my arms.

“Hey, princess!” I say, in that soothing voice I reserve for my daughter. We go through the usual routine, kisses, tickling, gleeful squealing. As Emily and I climb the stairs, I hold Emily upside down to her non protesting protest.

I find Talia in the bedroom, just having walked out of the master bath, wiping at her eyes. She smiles at me but there’s something besides innocuous happiness to her look.

“Hey, babe.” I set down Emily and fix on my wife. There is something equivocal in her expression, not necessarily good or bad, but important. My eyes find their way to the bed, to an open box, a thin strip of paper next to it, a set of folded instructions.

“Oh.” My eyes shoot back to meet hers. We’ve talked about it in a serious but casual way, serious in that she knew I meant it, casual in that we hadn’t been formally trying.

“Is it—are you—?” I move around the bed and take her hands in mine. “We’re gonna have a—?”

My forehead touches hers, an instant connection of body heat. She can no longer restrain her emotions. “This is what you want, right?” she whispers.

I wrap my arms around her. “Of course this is what I want, babe. Of course it is.” I turn to Emily, who seems to understand that she is being left out of a secret. “C’mere, sweetheart,” I say. I crouch down and lift my daughter into the air. “How’d you like a baby brother or sister, Em?”

I LEFT THE cemetery a little after one, a surge of bitterness gripping me, the mixing of anger with the ubiquitous anguish. I resented Talia. I wanted to close the book on what happened. I wanted to pretend that I’d never met her, we’d never had Emily. But the book, I knew, would never close. I’d just flip back to the beginning, or the middle, when I reached the end.

I wanted to understand it. I really did. I wanted to believe that there was a God, and He had a plan, and this was all a good thing in some way, but there was no way that a beautiful young woman and our precious, innocent child dying violent deaths could possibly be for the greater good.

The sky was debating another rainfall, and the temperatures had fallen. Midwestern October always does this, flip-flopping between extended summer and early winter, occasionally giving us the autumn we desperately prefer.