The Wrong Man by John Katzenbach

longer, and he knew her hearing was getting pretty shaky. He glanced down the hallway for a moment. None of the other tenants seemed to be stirring. He could never understand why no one else complained about the cats, and he hated them for it. There was an old couple, from Costa Rica, who spoke poor English. A Puerto Rican man who, O’Connell guessed, supplemented his machinist’s job with an occasional B and E occupied one of the other apartments. Upstairs were a pair of graduate students, who occasionally filled the hallway with the pungent smell of marijuana, and a gray-haired, sallow-faced salesman who preferred to spend his extra hours weepy and immersed in a bottle. Other than complaining about the cats to the superintendent—an older man with fingernails encrusted with years of dirt, who spoke in an accent that was indecipherable, and who clearly hated to be bothered with repairs—O’Connell had little to do with any of them. He wondered if any of the other tenants even knew his name. It was all just a quiet, dingy, unimpressive, cold place, either an end for some or a transition for others, and it had an impermanence that he liked. He looked down, as he opened his door, and wondered whether the old woman actually kept track of her cats. He doubted that she had an accurate count.
    Or that she would miss one.
    He rapidly bent down and seized the black-and-white roughly around the midsection. The cat squealed once, clawing at him in surprise.
    He looked down at the sudden red scratch on the back of his hand. The thin line of blood was going to make what he had in mind much easier.
             
    Ashley Freeman lay back in her bed.
    “I am in trouble,” she whispered out loud.
    She remained that way, barely moving until the sunlight moved steadily through her window, past the frilly, opaque shades that gave the room a little-girl feel. She watched as a shaft of daylight moved slowly along the wall across from her bed. Some of her own works were hung there, some charcoal drawings done in a life-figure class, one of a man’s torso that she liked, another of a woman’s back that curved sensuously across the white page. There was also a self-portrait that she’d done, which was unusual in that she had only drawn half of her face in detail and left the remainder in obscurity, as if it were shadowed.
    “This can’t be happening,” she said, again out loud, but this time a little louder.
    Of course, she noted inwardly, she didn’t know what this was. Not yet.

    I called her later that day. I didn’t bother with pleasantries or small talk, but just launched into my first question: “Exactly where did Michael O’Connell’s obsession come from?”
    She sighed. “That’s something you need to discover for yourself. But don’t you remember the electricity of being young and coming unexpectedly across that singular moment of passion? The one-night stand, the chance encounter. Have you gotten so old that you can’t remember when things were all possibility?”
    “All right. Yes,” I said, perhaps a little too hastily.
    “There was only one problem. All those moments are more or less benign, or, at the very most, simply embarrassing. Red-faced mistakes, or moments you keep to yourself and never mention to another soul. But that wasn’t the case this time. Ashley, in a moment of weakness, slipped once, and then, abruptly, found herself enmeshed in a briar patch. Except a briar patch isn’t necessarily lethal, and Michael O’Connell was.”
    I paused, then said, “I found Will Goodwin. Except his name wasn’t Goodwin.”
    She hesitated, a small catch in the words that slowly came over the phone line. “Good. You probably learned something important. At the very least, your understanding of Michael O’Connell’s, ah, potential should have grown through your meeting. But that’s not where it all began, and it’s probably not where it all ends, either. I don’t know. That’s for you to figure