Identity- Lost Read online

  Why did I mention that to her? I should have lied.

  He asked himself if he could keep the news from her about these two thugs, his intimate knowledge of their past criminal life back in Chicago, and what they really meant to him. More importantly, he worried how he would keep his family safe when these two murderers got word back to Monroe “Pick” Clarke in Chicago that they found the kid who squealed on them over thirty years earlier.

  As he neared his exit, Stan felt the world closing in around him, squeezing him hard. He found it difficult to breathe. News would be out soon, too, he worried, from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, reporting the arrest of two more border smugglers and with it the release of their names. When Thomas took center stage at his news conferences, he always made sure to have Stan Kobe next to him at the podium, signaling to the media that “Arizona’s Most Ruthless Prosecutor” was on the case.

  Stan knew he had to delay that press conference, as well as any word about it in the Arizona Republic as long as he possibly could, since the case no doubt would make headlines not only in his hometown of Phoenix, but in Chicago newspapers, too.

  When Stan arrived at the corner of his block, he could see Maxine standing on the large, flagstone patio that bordered the circular driveway in front of their home. As he pulled his car up next to hers, she waved at him.

  “Hi, honey,” she said as he got out of the car.

  “Hi, baby.” He pecked her on the cheek. “Been a long time since you called me home in the middle of the afternoon,” he said as he pulled away, winking at her.

  “I swear, the older you get, the hornier you get.”

  As they entered the front door of their home, he closed the door behind them. As soon as he got in the foyer, he came to an abrupt halt.

  “Hey, Stan.”

  “Brian! What are you doin’ here?” Surprised to see his buddy standing there, Stan turned to Maxine. “Max?”

  She looked back at her husband, but didn’t answer.

  He questioned her again, “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Brian and I wanted to talk to you. Together.”

  “Is that right?” He paused a second, then turned away from her and looked Brian straight in the eye. Seeing him standing in the foyer of his home had rekindled his anger about the call Brian had made earlier in the day to Tom Terry. “‘Bout what?”

  “About this,” she said, stepping in between them. Maxine reached behind the chair in the foyer and pulled out the Louisville Slugger. She held it up in front of her husband’s face.

  Stan stared at the bat, unable to take his eyes off it. After a prolonged pause, he shook his head and looked at her. “You wanted to talk to me about his dad’s bat? That’s why you called me home? I said I was sorry to him about that comment I made.” Stan snuck a quick look at Brian but then turned his attention back to his wife. “I told you I was sorry. What is this really all about?” He furrowed his perspiring brow and pointed at the Louisville. “Please don’t tell me this is what you called me home for?”

  “You know what it’s about, Stan,” Brian replied. “Or should I call you James?”

  Stan looked at him, bewildered, and then turned back to his wife, shrugging. “Do you know what he’s talking about? ‘Cause I don’t.”

  “You don’t?” Brian asked. “Well then, why don’t we try a different subject? Let’s talk about Manny Fleischman.”

  “What about Mister Fleischman?” Stan replied.

  “Tell us how you know him?”

  “You know how I know him. I knew him when I was a kid. I worked in the same grocery store with him.” He shook his head. “But I’ve told you all that already.”

  “What grocery store would that be?” Brian continued.

  “Hey, what is this?” Stan brushed past the both of them and walked into the kitchen. “What’s going on? What’s this all about?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Answer him, honey,” Maxine said, following him. “Just tell us the truth.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Stan shouted. He shrugged off his suit coat and tossed it on the back of one of the kitchen table chairs. When he turned around, Maxine and Brian were right behind him.

  “You can’t sweep this under the carpet, Stan,” she challenged. Stan knew, had they been alone, a full-blown argument would have followed since that was how he always chose to deal with her badgering. It was either a fight or give answers to her prodding questions.

  “Just answer Brian. What grocery store did you work at with Mister Fleischman?”

  “Hyde Park Foods,” he scoffed, turning his back on both of them again.

  “Hyde Park?” Brian said. “Why, that’s in Chicago, if I’m not mistaken. I thought you told me you were from Gary, Indiana.”

  Stan paused a beat and then walked toward the kitchen sink, not looking at them as he did. “I am from Gary … that is … we lived in Chicago, too … I mean … “

  Maxine eased to Stan’s side as he stared out the window above the kitchen sink and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Stanford. I love you. We love you. Brian and I want to help. But we can’t help you if you don’t tell us the truth. We want the truth.”

  Stan felt trapped. He turned and walked to the table, pulle-dout a chair, sat on it, and started to crack his knuckles.

  “I’m your wife. I deserve the truth.”

  “You don’t understand,” he mumbled. “You just don’t know who you’re dealing with. No one can know.”

  “Know what, pardner?” Brian asked.

  “Know about me. Who I am. I can’t tell you.” Stan looked up to meet his friend’s stern glare. “I can’t.”

  “We already know, James,” Brian said.

  “There you go with that James thing again.”

  “Stan, I’ve told Max everything. We’ve sent the twins to California in an unmarked car. They’ll be safe there with Maxine’s mother.”

  Stan bolted up from the chair. “You did what? What do you mean? Why did you—? You had no right—I need them near me. I can’t protect them if—”

  Stan rubbed his temples with his trembling hands. His wife came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder, urging him back into the chair. He obliged her. Then she stroked the top of his slightly balding head.

  “It’s all right, honey. It’s okay. Brian and I are here for you.”

  He raised his head and looked back at her with dark eyes.

  “You just don’t know. No one can or will ever know.”

  CHAPTER 30

  The kitchen at the Kobe house would have been completely silent if not for the ticking of a clock on the wall. Sweating more profusely now, Stan stared blankly across the room’s big, round table. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his brow.

  Brian stood where he’d been since he first entered the kitchen. He had the Louisville in his grip now, tapping the bat in the palm of his hand. Maxine sat down at the table next to her husband. No one spoke. She reached for Stan and embraced him.

  Her hug gave him needed comfort, much the same way his momma had done those many nights he’d awake, sometimes screaming, from his provocative, recurring nightmare. As a child, he’d describe the details of his dream to his momma and she would console him, lulling him back to sleep with her tender words. He had buried the raw feelings the dream unflinchingly reproduced and pushed them into a deep part of his soul, wanting to forget all of his pain, anger, and frustration and, most of all, grief.

  “There’s no way I could ever explain to you,” Stan said, breaking the silence, “or to make you understand.” He took a deep breath and looked at his wife. The safety of his children and Maxine’s love—and trust—had become, besides his job, the only thing that mattered to him in his life. Somehow, Stan Kobe had overcome all the challenges, creating a life where he could make his own decisions; far different from the life James Overstreet had as a child, hiding under the wary shield of witness protection. Stan Kobe had risen to a position of prominence and become a
top prosecutor, a man feared by every felon and defense lawyer who faced him. Stanford James Kobe was a survivor and he did not want the refuge, the haven, he struggled to achieve in Arizona to come crumbling down in front of him. Not now. Not after all he had done. Not after overcoming the identity he had lost.

  Stan felt trapped—the same way he felt the day he rode in the back of the tan, Ford Econoline van when an imposter Cook County Sheriff’s Deputy drove him and his family away after the not guilty verdict in the murder trial of Manny Fleischman. He recalled the way his mother had cried as she held him close to her chest, protecting her “sweet baby boy,” the way she had always referred to him. He didn’t know then what she must have known in her heart as she wailed inconsolably in the back of the van: that the family’s life would never be the same again; would never be a life where they could make choices freely and without fear.

  He knew that feeling now, though. He felt the same gnawing her gut must have felt; the pain she had held within her from the day the family arrived in Arizona, only to leave her the day she died in a nursing home from—as he always believed—a broken heart. His brothers and sisters must have felt the same way, too, since they had all long before stopped talking to the brother who went to the police and ruined their lives. No longer in touch, Stan didn’t even know where they lived. Nor did he know the whereabouts of his father, a man who had walked out on his family not long after being set up in Fountain Hills with their new identity.

  As his mind returned to the challenge that faced him this late afternoon inside the kitchen of his north Scottsdale home, Maxine and Brian offered him little choice but to answer these accusations. The tables turned on him now, Stan felt like he was the criminal under interrogation. Yet, still, he fought. He would do the thing he knew best. Lie. He took another deep breath and said, “I have no idea what you two are talking about.” Then he snapped his head around and looked squarely at Brian. “And it pisses me off you getting my wife all worried here. You have no right to butt your nose into our personal business. Why did you do this?”

  Brian didn’t respond. Stan knew Brian’s experience as a cop exposed him daily to criminals who tirelessly denied accusations made against them in their desperate attempt to avoid facing the truth. Many denied it even more fiercely when the evidence was clearly stacked against them.

  “I did it to help you, Stan, that’s why. I’m your friend. But maybe you’ve forgotten that.”

  “A friend wouldn’t call another friend’s boss. Go behind his back. You had no right to call my office and speak with Tom Terry.”

  “Didn’t I?” Brian barked back at him. “I’m an officer of the law. There’s no way those two guys over at 4th Avenue Jail should be extradited back to Illinois like you want to do. You know that. You’re wrong and I had to put a stop to it. I didn’t risk my life, wearing a wire, to capture those two pieces of shit, just to have you run and turn tail.”

  Stan leapt at Brian, tackling him around the waist and wrestling him to the ground. The jolt dislodged the bat from Brian’s grip and the ash wood clattered as it hit the room’s Saltillo tile floor.

  “Stop it, you two! Stop!” Maxine screamed, pouncing upon them both, attempting to pull them apart. “Stan! Stop! Please! Stop it!”

  She pounded on his back, but the men continued to wrestle until Maxine shouted, “I’m calling the police!” She got up and rushed across the room, picking up the phone on the wall.

  Stan immediately jerked himself away from Brian and stood up. “No, Max. Don’t do that. That’s a very bad idea.”

  “I mean it, Stanford. Stop this fighting or I’m dialing.” She hovered her index finger over the keypad.

  “Please, Max. Don’t.” Stan held his hands up in the air as if under arrest. “I’ll stop. Honest.”

  Brian pulled himself up off the floor and stood silently, looking as if he were waiting for Stan to say something to him. When Stan didn’t speak, Brian broke the tension. “I’m sorry, Stan. I was only trying to help, trying to do what was right.”

  Stan dropped his head, eyes going down to the silent, discarded bat. “Hang up the phone, Max. I won’t cause any more trouble. Promise.”

  Maxine hung up the receiver and pulled a chair out from the kitchen table. “Sit down, honey. Please. Just sit down and cool off.”

  Stan went to the table. Brian picked up a chair Stan had pushed to the floor and sat down next to him.

  Avoiding their gazes, Stan asked sullenly, “How’d you two figure it out?”

  “It was Brian. He did it. He dug until he found the answer.”

  Stan looked up and inched a smile at the meticulous cop.

  “Even though I was three sheets to the wind that day at my house, your reaction when you saw that bat just wasn’t like you,” Brian said. “And then when you lost it at the 4th Avenue Jail seeing Turner and DeSadier, well, those two led me to my dad’s old precinct. The Chicago PD sent me everything they still had on the Fleischman case.”

  “Stan, I’m so sorry what happened,” Maxine said. He felt the tight clench of her hand around his as she pulled a chair out and sat down on the other side of him. “I can’t even imagine what it must have been like. You were just a little boy. I mean, all of them getting away with murder. And then what happened to you and your family. It’s just awful.”

  Her arms pulled him closer. His heart melted as he thought of his own mother the day she hugged him in the back of the van, protecting him from the bullets and the shattering glass all around them, smothering him in her embrace. He had never wanted his wife to mother him, but couldn’t deny that Maxine’s love and comfort right now made him want to crawl inside her, to retreat into the protection of her maternal womb.

  “It was terrible,” Stan sighed, hanging his head, choking back tears. “But not nearly as bad as having to keep the secret from you. I’ve mistreated you because of my fears all these years, not knowing how to or what to share with you. Wanting to tell you but also wanting to protect you from all the pain—from all my pain.”

  “It’s okay, honey,” she whispered into his ear, cradling him.

  The warmth of her breath against his skin eased him. “Now that it’s finally out in the open, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my chest.” Stan cried openly. Thirty years of living another person’s life had taken its toll on him, making him regret so many of his actions and behaviors, especially with his wife, children, and friends. He was filled with mixed emotions. Sad for all the things he had done but joyful that it was finally out in the open, able to be talked about freely, and with no fear.

  He had lost so much. His psyche had been damaged so badly. He had never fully mourned everything he had lost in the blink of an eye the day Monroe Clarke took Manny Fleischman’s life. Now, he had to work on repairing the damage he had done to his relationship with his wife and best friend.

  “How did you piece it all together?” he asked them, looking up, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “All I had to go on was what my contact at Chicago PD told me and the newspaper clippings,” Brian said. “What I can’t figure out is exactly what went wrong at the trial?”

  Stan pulled away from Maxine and got up so he could pace the floor and think. “I came forward. Told the police what I saw. I met with the state’s attorney. I told every one of them I had witnessed Manny Fleischman’s attack, but they really didn’t listen to me. I was just a little black kid. Just some little nigger. ‘What the fuck does this shithead know?’ That’s what they thought.”

  Stan increased the speed of his pacing, his voice growing louder. “They didn’t listen to me when I told them Pick and his gang ran toward the Oakwood Boulevard overpass at Thirty-Ninth Street. They just figured I must have had it wrong, ‘cause Mister Fleischman’s body was found next to the Forty-Third Street footbridge.

  “Our side made the wrong assumptions. They didn’t even walk the crime scene with me before the trial. It wasn’t until we were three days into testimony that our t
eam realized they misinterpreted my version of what really went down versus the version they presented in court. The gang’s defense lawyer tore us a new ass. It wasn’t until I entered law school that I fully understood all the holes in the prosecution of our case.”

  “That’s unbelievable,” Brian said. “I also read they didn’t provide counsel to this Pick kid when he asked for a lawyer. What could they have been thinking?”

  Stan stopped and looked straight at Brian. “I guess that’s a question only your father can answer.”

  Brian’s eyes widened. “How long have you known I was Stick Hanley’s kid?”

  “I’ve known since the day we executed Tisdale down in Florence, back in 1992, when we first worked together,” Stan said. “When you mentioned your dad had been a detective, a lightbulb went on in my head. I had my office run your background. When they came back with the results, I couldn’t believe you were who you were. What were the chances of that happening, I asked myself, a million to one? Who would have believed I’d end up working with the kid of the cop who ran the Fleischman investigation?” Stan paused. He walked over and stood in front of Brian, placing his hand on the cop’s shoulder. “And then become his best friend.”

  Brian smiled back at his buddy.

  “Your dad was a good cop, Brian, and he was good to me. There were so many times I wanted to tell you.” Stan paused once more, recalling the times the two had worked together side by side, catching and prosecuting bad guys and sending them to jail, then having a beer together in celebration. “You know, you not only look at lot like your dad but you act a lot like him. He protected me and watched out for my family, too. “

  Brian shot up from the table. “Oh my God!” he cried. “It all makes sense now.”

  “What?” Maxine asked.

  “Dad moved us out here so he could be by you!” Brian said as he pointed at Stan.