Guilty Minds

49

For years, Victor Heller had been imprisoned in a Gothic redbrick medium-security prison called the Altamont Correctional Facility, formerly the Altamont Lunatic Asylum, in upstate New York. It wasn’t convenient to get to — you had to fly to Albany and then rent a car and drive to the outskirts of a town called Guilderland. But that wasn’t why I didn’t visit him. Every time I saw him it felt like I gave up another piece of my soul. He was not a good man. I learned from him how to tell when someone was lying because he lied like he breathed.

I got a flight out of Reagan National Airport and got to Altamont around noon. He was waiting for me behind the long counter in the visitors’ room.

He was wearing the prison uniform of dark green shirt and slacks. His hair had gone white, and he had a big white Old Testament beard.

He didn’t look well. His head lolled to one side. I was surprised at how much his health had apparently deteriorated in the thirteen months since I’d last seen him.

When I’d called his lawyer to arrange the visit, he told me that Victor was agitating for a compassionate release on the grounds that he had senile dementia. That was news to me. The few times I’d seen him he was as sharp as ever. “Well, you’ll see,” the lawyer said. “He’s not the man he was.”

I sat down at my side of the counter. My father was mumbling something about ice cream and something about shoes. I looked at him. His face above his beard was raw-looking, with flakes of skin coming off. He had a bad case of psoriasis, like a molting snake.

“Hello, Dad,” I said.

He was looking off somewhere in the distance and kept mumbling. More about ice cream and what sounded like “laundry.”

“Dad?” A little louder this time.

So much for asking for his help with the law firm Norcross and McKenna.

“Robert told me that you’re applying for a compassionate release. Who has to approve it?”

He turned sharply and looked at me. “Bernie?”

Bernie was the name of his college roommate, with whom he’d had a falling out before I was born. I’d heard the name, and never in a positive way. Maybe I looked a little like Bernie.

“You’ve got fourteen years left in here,” I said. “That’s a long time. That’s, what, fourteen times three hundred and sixty-five days, which is... like four thousand — forty-five hundred days.”

Victor, still looking off in the distance, rolled his eyes, and snapped, “Five thousand, one hundred, and ten.”

Even at the dinner table of my childhood, Dad, with his slide-rule precision, could never stand to let arithmetic mistakes like this pass. I guffawed in victory.

He leaned forward, glanced uneasily at the guard who’d brought him out, standing about twenty feet away, and whispered, “What the hell do you want this time?”

“What can you tell me about Norcross and McKenna?”

“They won’t represent you. You’re not rich enough.”

“What’d they do for you? Some securities-fraud allegation, right?”

“Is that what I told you?” He smiled wanly. “I needed to find a way to funnel money to a couple of politicians without having my name attached. They took care of it. Whatever black magic they used, I was able to make a couple of, uh, gifts, off the books.”

“They’re known mostly for handling dark money, right?”

“They do whatever their clients need. They assure you that your confidential files are protected. Most firms stow old files off-site at a storage facility, an Iron Mountain. But not these folks. Everything stays on-site, under their watchful eyes. They’re very proud of their triple-locked strong room.”

I knew then what my next step had to be.

“They don’t still represent you, do they?”

“No. But if I called them up and said I needed help, they’d fall all over themselves to welcome me back.”

“Huh.” I thought a minute. Norcross and McKenna wouldn’t believe me if I pretended to be there on behalf of my father. They’d see through it too quickly.

“Why are you so interested in Norcross and McKenna?”

“I’m working on a case involving Jeremiah Claflin and a gossip website called Slander Sheet.”

He smiled his crocodile smile. “That’s you?”

“You know what I’m talking about?”

“The sainted Supreme Court justice and the chippie?”

“You get the Internet in here, I guess.”

He lowered his voice. “Amazing how far a pack of cigarettes goes.”

“I want to know who owns Slander Sheet.”

“Why?”

How much to tell him? That was always the dilemma. I didn’t trust him, didn’t trust his discretion, and I had no idea what his network was like anymore. How he got word to people on the outside. I never knew what his real, secret agenda was. The more I talked to him, the more corroded I felt.

“Someone had it in for the judge,” I said.

He ran his hand over his eyes. “No doubt.” He blinked rapidly, flecked away a few flakes of dead skin. “A man like Claflin is going to have some formidable enemies.” He raised an index finger, and now he really did look like an Old Testament prophet gone mad. “But it’s always your friends who do you in.”

He should know. Several colleagues of his whom he called friends had cooperated with the prosecutors and provided the evidence that got him locked up for so many years.

As always, my father was talking about his favorite subject: himself.