Small Vices

Chapter 44

I talked with Ellis Alves again, alone, in a small conference room on the thirty-second floor at Cone, Oakes and Baldwin. He was as hostile and interior as he had been the last time. I remembered what Hawk had said: You in for life, hope will kill you. There was nothing on the conference table except a water carafe and some paper cups stacked upside down. Ellis paid no attention to it. He stood motionless, silhouetted against the bright picture window with the early fall light filling the room.

“Where’s Hawk?” Alves said.

“Elsewhere,” I said. “I have some things to tell you.”

He didn’t say anything. He simply waited, standing on the other side of the small conference table, for what I might have to say. I imagined in prison you learn to wait.

“I know you didn’t kill Melissa Henderson,” I said.

Alves waited.

“I can’t prove it yet, but I will.”

Alves waited.

“You interested in what I know?” I said.

“No.”

“You’re going to get out,” I said.

Alves stood without speaking or moving.

“You got any questions?”

“No.”

“Okay, then that’s all I got to say.”

“Make you feel better?” Alves said.

“No. I just figured you ought to know you’re going to get out pretty soon, so you wouldn’t do something dumb in the interim.”

“Yeah,” Alves said.

“Don’t try to escape. Don’t get into a fight. Don’t break any rules. Nobody much wants you to get out, so don’t give them an excuse to keep you.”

Alves didn’t say anything. He was looking at me, but I felt no contact. It was like exchanging stares with a statue.

“You got anything else you want to say before I get the guards?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

I got up and started for the door.

Behind me, Alves said, “How long it going to take?”

“I don’t know, weeks probably, maybe days. I need to make somebody confess.”

“What happens they don’t?”

“I’ll force it,” I said.

“Been almost a year,” Alves said. “How come you still doing this?”

“I was hired to do this.”

“What happens to me, somethin’ happen to you?”

“Hawk will finish it,” I said.

We stood looking at each other for a minute.

“Couple niggers fighting the system,” Alves said.

“Couple niggers and the biggest law firm in Boston,” I said.

Alves walked stiffly over to the window and looked out at Boston Harbor.

“I ain’t counting on nothing,” Alves said.

“Best way to be,” I said.

Alves nodded once, his eyes flat and meaningless, his face empty.

“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

I knocked on the door and the guards opened it.

“All done,” I said.

They went past me into the conference room and I walked out to the corridor and punched the button on the elevator. It arrived in time, and I got in it with mail room clerks and young female secretaries and a couple of suits, and down we went.

I stopped in the lobby for a minute and watched the people hurrying freely about. They would have taken Ellis down in the service elevator and out the back. In an hour he’d be back in the joint, looking at life; his only chance to get out in the hands of a white guy he neither knew nor trusted... breeding/lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire... If you’re a lifer, hope will kill you... Was I mixing up my poets? At least no one was calling me the hyacinth girl.

I walked over to the parking garage where they’d found Tommy Miller’s body and got in my car and headed for New York.