Free No Show of Remorse by David J. Walker

down, what purpose would be served? Would it bring “closure” to a bunch of innocent family members who thought they wanted the truth, but who’d only be hurt if they ever heard it? Would it achieve “justice”?
    If it was justice I was after, maybe I should see what I could do to keep a hundred million children from going hungry that night while I fumbled around in my refrigerator for another Sam Adams and threw out that half-eaten pizza just because it had a little fuzzy stuff growing on it. “Justice” seemed to be mainly what people wanted it to be, to serve their purposes.
    I probably wasn’t going to eat that moldy pizza. I probably wasn’t going to send a check to Ethiopia—or Englewood, either, for that matter. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell myself that flushing Jimmy Coletta down the toilet would bring anyone “closure,” or have a whole lot to do with “justice.”
    *   *   *
    T RAFFIC WAS JAMMED up downtown. I parked illegally and ran inside and called Barney Green from the lobby of his building. I waited five minutes, then went up to his office and picked up a padded envelope he’d left for me at the reception desk. The envelope had my name on it and was stamped: Attorney-Client-Privileged Material. I left without seeing Barney or speaking with him or with anyone else.
    Five years earlier I’d delivered that envelope to Barney. Inside the envelope was an audiocassette tape, a recording of a conversation I’d had with my client Marlon Shades and his mother. I hadn’t told Barney that, but he’d known it was something big time and agreed to keep it safe and out of sight. That had been the day before I was to surrender Marlon, to be questioned as a witness in the cop killing. Marlon was to keep his mouth shut and rely on the fifth amendment. He got scared, though, and skipped. I was taken into custody instead.
    Marlon and his mother hadn’t known I was recording our conversation. Did that make it illegal? Maybe yes and maybe no. The state eavesdropping statute, and how it was to be interpreted, was pretty unclear at that time. But I’d thought when I did it that, legal or not, the heat was on higher in that case than in anything else I’d ever been involved with, and I’d wanted to hold as many cards as possible.
    *   *   *
    E ITHER EXPRESSWAY TRAFFIC MOVED more quickly than usual through the rain, or else I wasn’t paying much attention. Before I knew it I was far north of downtown, near the junction where the Kennedy angles off to the left toward O’Hare and the Edens goes straight north. I stayed to the right, got off at the next exit, and drove to the parking lot of a picnic grove that was part of the Cook County Forest Preserve District.
    It was a pretty dismal scene, just three other cars widely spaced along the row of parking slots. I took the end spot, as far from the others as possible, and made it four. Four men sitting alone in four cars and staring out at the rain, maybe some of them listening to the radio. I was probably the only one, though, with a cassette in his tape deck with information that could ruin a whole bunch of people’s lives.

CHAPTER
    13
    I PUNCHED Play and heard my own voice, first with the date and time, then stating I was going out to get Marlon and his mother. Then silence, then the sounds of getting them into my office. I fast-forwarded through the beginning of the interview, to listen again to the part I still knew almost verbatim:
    Marlon, how Mr. Foley here s’posed to help you, you won’t tell him where you was?
    I can’t, Mama. I be sittin’ up in the shithouse fifty years or somethin’… they don’t kill me first. I can’t tell him that part.
    Dammit, boy, you like to drive me—
    Sally Rose, please. Let me talk to him, all right?… LENGTHY SILENCE … Marlon, I believe you when you say