The overnight stack sat on the front counter of the defender's office under a stapler, so the heating wouldn't blow it onto the floor when it came on. Omar Haddad took the top folder because it was on top. At seven on a Sunday morning that was the whole of his method. He had slept four hours in his shirt, and his head could hold one clear thought at a time, the way a man carries a full glass of water down a hall.
The cover sheet said open murder. Under it, in a detective's square capitals, someone had written "Victim: brother." The narrative ran a page and a half. Officers arrived at 11:46pm and found the defendant on the front porch in his socks, holding a wet dish towel, and the victim on the kitchen floor with a single wound below the left collarbone. The defendant repeated his statement to the first officer and asked if he could put his shoes on.
He read the time on the incident report twice. Saturday, 9 January, 11:40pm. At 11:40 on Saturday he had been at a bar on Michigan Avenue, explaining to a bartender why the Lions would break his heart again, and ordering the drink that proved it. He did the arithmetic without wanting to. While he was waiting for his change, a man in Dearborn had been standing in his mother's kitchen with a knife from the drawer by the sink.
There was a disc in the folder and a yellow note from the duty supervisor: "911 audio. Listen before arraignment. Trust me." Omar carried both to his office, which had a window onto an air shaft and a spider plant Tess kept alive out of spite. He put on his headphones and turned the volume down to where a hangover could stand it.
The dispatcher picked up on the second ring.
"Dearborn 911, what's the address of your emergency?"
"Calhoun Street." A house number followed, said slowly, for someone writing it down. "I need an ambulance for my brother. He's on the kitchen floor. I stabbed him."
Omar waited for the voice to break. It didn't. The young man on the tape sounded like someone ordering a pizza for a neighbour.
"Sir, is he breathing?"
"A little. There's a lot of blood. I put a towel on it."
"Is the person who did this still in the house?"
"I'm the person. I did it." A tap was running somewhere behind him. "It told me to."
"Who told you, sir?"
The tap ran. Omar heard him breathe out through his nose, the sound of a man deciding an explanation wasn't worth the trouble.
"I'll wait on the porch," Danny Saleh said. "The door's open."
Omar played it again. Then he played the last ten seconds a third time, listening under the tap for a second voice, a television, anyone. There was a refrigerator. There was the tap. There was a twenty-six-year-old telling a stranger, in the tone of somebody reporting a gas smell, that something had told him to kill his brother.
Competency, he wrote on the folder, and under it, plea. You could have this pleaded out by March, and nobody would blame you. It was a sensible thought. He underlined plea and went to find coffee before he found his client.
The Sunday arraignments at the 19th District Court in Dearborn ran in a courtroom on the second floor that smelled of floor polish and wet coats. Twenty defendants sat in two rows behind a glass partition, in orange, each with a deputy's idea of a haircut. Omar found his man at the end of the second row.
Danny Saleh was smaller than his voice. He was thin in the shoulders, with a short beard somebody had kept neat until yesterday and the careful posture of a boy who had been told to sit up straight and had never stopped. His hands rested in his lap, cuffed at the wrist. There was a line of dark brown under the nail of his right thumb.
Omar leaned to the gap in the glass and gave him the speech he gave everybody. The judge will read the charge. She'll ask if you understand. You say yes. You say nothing else, not to her, not to the deputies, not to the man next to you, and especially not on the jail phone, which is recorded and which prosecutors listen to on their lunch break for fun.
"Yes," Danny said. "Thank you."
He said it the way you thank a man who has held a door.
They were called fourteenth. The magistrate was a woman in a cardigan who had seen everything twice and wanted her lunch. Across the aisle, at the prosecution table, Rebecca Kline stood with one hand flat on a legal pad. Omar knew her from three trials and one long night in a hallway outside a jury room. She was very good, and on a Sunday she looked it with less effort than he did.
"Daoud Saleh," the magistrate read. "You're charged with open murder in the death of Sami Saleh. Do you understand the charge?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Omar had started to breathe out when Danny turned toward the microphone again.
"I want to say something for the record."
"He doesn't," Omar said. "Your Honor, my client will stand on his right to remain silent."
"It told me to," Danny said. He looked at the magistrate with polite attention, as if helping her fill in a form. "I'd like that written down."
The courtroom did what courtrooms do with a sentence like that. A deputy shifted his weight. Somebody in the gallery laughed once and stopped. The magistrate wrote, without looking up, because everything was written down whether you liked it or not.
Kline didn't laugh. The corner of her mouth went up and stayed there for about a second, the face of a woman who had been handed her closing argument by the defendant. Then she was all business.
"The People ask that the defendant be held without bond, Your Honor. It's open murder. He's told us twice now."
"The People can count," Omar said. "We'd ask for a forensic referral at the earliest opportunity."
"Ask the circuit judge," the magistrate said. "Bond is denied. Probable cause conference on the twenty-first, preliminary examination on the twenty-eighth. Next."
Twice on the record, Omar thought, walking back to the partition. Unprompted, calm, the same four words both times. You could build a defence on less. He took the thought the way he had taken the file, because it was on top.
The holding cell behind the courtroom was a concrete box with a steel bench bolted along one wall and a drain in the middle of the floor. Somebody had scratched a cross into the paint by the door and somebody else had scratched it out. A deputy let Omar in, locked the door behind him and stood outside with his back to the window, which was the closest anyone in the building came to manners.
Danny sat at the end of the bench with his cuffed hands between his knees. Omar stayed on his feet. He went through it in order, because order was what he had to give. The jail on Clinton Street this afternoon. The twenty-first. The twenty-eighth. The phone. The cellmate who would want to be his friend and then want to be a witness. Danny nodded at each item as if he were being given directions to a house.
"Questions?"
"Is my mother all right?"
"I haven't met your mother. I'll go and see her this week."
"She'll make you tea," Danny said. "Drink it. She takes it personally."
Omar wrote that down, partly to have something to do with his hands. The pen was dry for the first two letters.
"In there you said it told you to. On the call, too. I need to know what you mean by it. Not now. Not here. But you'll tell me, and nobody else."
Danny looked at him for the first time without the politeness. His eyes were brown and steady and did not seem to need to blink. Then they went down to the folder in Omar's hand, to the label on its edge where the office printed the attorney's name.
"Haddad," he read. "Are you Muslim?"
The drain in the floor ticked. Somewhere above them a radiator knocked twice. Omar thought of six good answers, every one of them a lawyer's.
"I was raised," he said.
Danny nodded like a man hearing the answer he had already written down. He sat back against the painted wall.
"Then you know it's real."