The Innocent

Statement given by Robert Logan, the senior corrections officer in charge of the transportation of convicted cop-killer Eduard Vasquez at the time of his escape:

You wanna know about Vasquez, well I’ll tell you about Vasquez. He looked like death twisted inside out. That dentist did a real job on him, or so I thought at the time. What I didn’t know was that Vasquez was one hell of a faker, one hell of an actor. You should have seen him sitting in the backseat of that station wagon all bound up in shackles and cuffs-skin white, lips swelled, gauze stuffed inside his cheeks. Blood and spit were running down his chin. His eyes were glazed and puffed up. That toothache must have been a real headache now that A. J. Royale, the butcher of Newburgh, had gotten to him. No way could Vasquez escape. But then how could I make any sense out of the feeling I’d had since we’d started out? The feeling that told me he was going to make the break?

But here’s how it really happened:

My partner, Bernie Mastriano, he drove the station wagon while I adjusted the rearview mirror to just the right angle so I could get a better look at Vasquez in the backseat without turning every ten seconds. He was sucking air like there’s no tomorrow. His feet and hands were bound up and he was locked up in that cage and you could see the pain all over his face. He just put his head back on the seat, opened his mouth wide, let his tongue hang out like a sick puppy. He didn’t seem so tough then. Seemed kind of stupid and pathetic, not at all like the crazy psycho who pumped three caps into the back of that rookie cop’s head back in ‘88. Vasquez kept suckin’ up that air like it somehow relieved the pain from the hole Royale left in his mouth. Then out of nowhere he doubled over, threw his head between his legs, started heaving blood all over the floor.

Mastriano screamed, “I think he’s having a freakin’ heart attack.”

I told him to shut up, stop the car.

“Heart! Attack!” he screamed.

“Damn it, Bernie,” I said, “pull the car over before somebody gets hurt.” Sometimes you gotta pound things into Mastriano’s head. He pulled the wagon onto the shoulder of Route 84, killed the engine. Then he pulled Vasquez out of the car and laid him out on the field next to the road.

I was right behind him.

When I got down on my knees to see if Vasquez had swallowed his tongue, the black van pulled up behind the station wagon. The back doors of the van swung open. There they were. Three of the hugest dudes you ever saw in black ski masks, packing sawed-off shotguns.

Mastriano went for his sidearm. But he took a shot in the head with the butt end of a shotgun, hit the ground cold. I got up and went after the son-of-a-bitch. I guess I didn’t see it coming either. I went down, right next to Vasquez. They kicked me in the face, in the forehead. See that purple-and-black welt above my eye?

One of those masked bastards knelt down, reached into my pockets, felt around for the keys to Vasquez’s handcuffs and ankle shackles. But here’s what really got to me: When Vasquez was free, he jumped up. When those shackles were off, he spun around to his knees, got up, spit out that bloody gauze, let out a laugh. “Hey boss,” he said, you fell for the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker. Just like that, boss.”

I rolled over onto my side in the high grass, jammed my knees into my chest. I couldn’t work up the air to talk. But my ears were still good.

“Lock ‘em up,” Vasquez said.

They cuffed Mastriano and me together with my own handcuffs, shoved us into the front seat of the wagon. Vasquez ordered one of his men to take the wheel. But before we pulled away, he leaned his head inside the open window.

“No hard feelings, boss. Hope this don’t screw up the promotion.”

The last thing I remembered before waking up at the gravel pit was Mastriano’s piece coming down hard on my head.

CHAPTER ONE

1997 WAS THE YEAR Green Haven Prison went insane. The winter hadn’t produced a single snowstorm that lasted for more than an hour before turning to rain and slush, and what should have been covered with a velvety-smooth blanket of white went on being gray and lifeless and pitiful, as if God Himself saw to it that the twenty-five hundred inmates and corrections officers living and working inside nine concrete cell blocks never once forgot where they were and why they were put there in the first place.

But for a man living and working inside an iron house, you didn’t take snow for granted. A fresh dose of snow always broke the endless monotony, pumping good vibrations throughout the facility so that even the hardest inmates showed wide ear-to-ear smiles on their scarred faces. And happy faces meant that, for maybe a day or so, you wouldn’t have a prisoner shivved square in the chest with a homemade blade or a psyche case tossing a handful of human waste at an unsuspecting officer or an HIV-positive lifer spitting a mouthful of blood at his cheating honey or a nineteen year old scared-out-of-his-wits man/boy wrapping a sheet around his neck and tying it to the overhead light fixture. What you might get instead was two thousand men joining in song, the gentle hum radiating against the concrete walls like music by moonlight while flakes of white snow drifted slowly down to earth.

What we got that winter instead of snow was rain and slush and bone-hard, damp cold. From New Year’s to Easter alone, we had six shivvings that resulted in four deaths and two badly rearranged faces. We had seventeen beatings that resulted in one death, and one inmate who (mysteriously) fell from the third-floor gallery in F-Block and who would now do life inside an infirmary, taking his meals through a feeding tube.

That winter we had two ODs, one death by hanging, an inmate who somehow got his wife pregnant during visiting hours, and another who acquired a good old-fashioned dose of the clap. To make a dismal matter even worse, we also had a group of twelve corrections officers who attracted national attention with their own arrests after a bachelor party turned ugly. The short of it was that my COs thought it would be funny to pelt unsuspecting passersby with raw eggs from the open windows of the school bus they’d rented for the occasion. One elderly citizen, who stood outside his car on a side street in Newburgh and protested, was given a special dose of humiliation. (As of this writing, his suit against Green Haven Prison and the State of New York is pending.)

But these were not the most serious things that happened during that winter.

We also had an increase in the inner-prison drug and contraband trade, in the form of pot, crack, heroin, liquid hormones, and assorted pharmaceuticals. I was personally forced to retire a record number of COs, not because I wanted them gone (I didn’t have enough support staff to run the prison as it was), but because the Commissioner of Corrections for the State of New York had sent down his official mandate. And what’s more, the winter of 1997 was the first I had spent without my wife, Fran, in more than twenty-five years-although by then nothing more could be done for her.

To add insult to an otherwise uncauterized injury, we had been cheated of our spring. Even the anticipation of spring rains and fresh muddy yards and good sleeping weather (there is no climate control inside a concrete prison cell) had been taken from the men who occupied the walls of Green Haven Prison. The heat of summer took over early with all the force of martial law, and what was supposed to be a “green haven” turned into a broiler oven. What little green vegetation there was within the concrete and razor-wire barriers turned brown and died. Even the baseball diamond cracked and heaved, like the blood that thickens and cakes on the upper lip after it oozes from the nostrils of a man’s nose when his body writhes and convulses during an execution by lethal injection. (For anyone believing lethal injection is the humanitarian way out, think again. I’ve witnessed three, and during all three, the men convulsed, choked, snapped their own ribs, and bled from the nose and mouth.)

In May of the year 1997, my prison smelled only of low morale, treason, and pity. And it tasted of sweat, concrete, and human decay. And my God, it was hot. But as for me, Jack Marconi, the keeper…the warden…the superintendent in charge of all things living and dying inside the iron house?

I did the only thing I could do under circumstances best left in God’s hands.

I blamed the weather.

CHAPTER TWO

GREEN HAVEN REACHED THE boiling point on a sweltering afternoon in May with the escape of convicted cop-killer Eduard Vasquez. Since I couldn’t very well blame the weather on a notorious killer who had practically been handed the keys to the front door, I found myself sitting on the edge of the desk in my office on the second floor of our administration building, holding my head in my hands. I had managed to take control of the situation as best I could so that it had been only twenty minutes since I’d ordered a general lockdown of the nine blocks. Now, instead of holding my head in my hands, I had to take the steps necessary to get my head together.

I’d just seen Robert Logan, one of the two COs held at gunpoint when Vasquez had escaped from their custody four hours before. Dan Sloat, my First Deputy Superintendent for Security and my second in command, was on his way downstairs to meet up with a detective from the Stormville PD. Stormville, along with the New York State police, were making preparations to head up the pursuit for Vasquez, at least to the outer fringes of their jurisdiction.

In the meantime, I had more pressing matters to attend to.

I turned to my secretary, Val Antonelli. “Whadaya mean the file’s missing?”

“I mean Vasquez’s file is gone, missing, outta here,” she said.

“Jeeze. Stormville’s gonna want information. Photos, rap sheets, next of kin. All of it.”

“Maybe Vasquez signed it out before he left this morning.”

“I don’t need jokes, Val,” I snapped. “I need that file!”

“Raising your voice does not change the fact that it’s hot in here or that the bacon cheeseburger I had for lunch is coming up on me or that Vasquez’s file is missing.”

Val sat in my swivel-back chair in the middle of the room with her legs crossed tight at the knees, making last-minute corrections to her freehand transcription of Robert Logan’s statement. “I’ll see if a folder was signed out this morning,” she offered. “For all I know it’s in the filing bin downstairs.”

“Try to get it before you leave tonight,” I said. Then working up a smile. “I’m asking, not telling.”

“We’ve got copies on microfilm anyway, boss,” she said. “So it really doesn’t matter if the file’s missing or not.”

I took a hot, sour breath and stared up at the cracks in the plaster ceiling of my fifty-five-year-old office-a square-shaped room inside a maximum security prison that had housed German POWs during World War II. Now it housed close to twenty-five hundred permanent inmates and transients on their way upstate to Attica or further downstate to Sing Sing.

Most of my prisoners were black and Latino. Kids mostly, with rap sheets so long they’d wear you out just getting past the list of youthful offences. Murderers and gangland killers and torture experts and organized professional killers. Some men with nothing on the outside but poverty and death, but some with beautiful cars and houses and beautiful women in furs who came to visit every day and bank accounts that would make the governor look like a pauper. Evil, mean-spirited killers, but likable killers, too. Tough killers and not-so-tough killers and killers who gave up being men altogether to take hormone injections, as if spending the rest of their God-given days inside five air-plane-hangar-size buildings were enough to eradicate the man, give birth to something distorted and freakish.

Inside the sweat-covered concrete walls and razor-wire fences you’d find weight lifters, junkies, drunks, health-food addicts, junk-food junkies, thin men, fat men, small and tall men, Muslims, Catholics, Five-Percenters, Buddhists, Jews, serial killers, man-eaters, kidnappers and child snatchers. You’d find bankers, accountants, lawyers, professors, teachers, architects, welfare cases, preachers, pimps, and you’d find high school graduates and college graduates and illiterate men who’d skipped school altogether and inmates so out of it they couldn’t tell you what month it was. Not far down the gallery from them you’d find the queers and steers and crybabies with long French braids, false eyelashes, thick red lips, and tattoos of broken hearts on their freshly shaved butt cheeks. Men with names like Black Jack, Lizard Leonard, and Ricky Too-Sweet. Butchers with baby-blue teardrops tattooed on the soft skin below their left eyeballs (one for each of their victims); men who’d arrived in the 1940s with all the piss and spunk of youth and who now, in their old age, would never consider leaving the comforting walls behind. There were cons and jokesters and pranksters and victims of circumstance, and men who did nothing wrong at all except hire the wrong lawyer, and kids who suffered so much for their mistakes that at night you could hear the echoes of their sobs as they called out for their mamas and you’d gladly wrench your broken heart out of your chest if only it would get them a fair shake in life.

But by 1997 a new breed of inmate had infected Green Haven Prison, a new generation of criminal born of the sewers of New York and raised in the streets. Teenage men who never really had a mother or a father or a home or the chance for an education. Men, not boys, who seemed almost happy to go to prison because, for the first time in their lives, they felt safe and protected by the thirty-foot-high concrete walls. Men who enjoyed the prison life for the free sex, booze, food, drugs, and medical attention. Tough young men who freaked at the sight of a dentist’s drill because they’d never seen one before. Young men whose life expectancy shot up dramatically from twenty-one to the ripe old age of forty because they now had iron bars and concrete walls to separate them from the killers they’d dissed along the way.

I was their warden.

I was their keeper, their mother and their father.

Which is why, for me, the matter of Eduard Vasquez’s escape was such a serious offense. I had signed the release form allowing him to visit a dentist on the outside. As the keeper of Green Haven, I was directly responsible. It was my decision and my decision only. What I mean is, I could have said no. But then, I couldn’t just deny a prisoner his right to proper dental care if that’s what he wanted. That was the rule in New York State. As the keeper, my job was not rehabilitation. My job was to see that society was protected from its prisoners. But get this: It was also my job to see that a man who’d shot a New York City cop at point-blank range maintained a pearly-white smile.

I was well aware that Vasquez knew his rights. All the sharp inmates did. Fact is, they knew their rights better than did the men and women who incarcerated them. It was simply a matter of the prisoners knowing more about their civil liberties than did the guards who locked them down every night. At Green Haven Prison in the spring of 1997 ignorance ruled, and ignorance was never bliss.

And when it came to making an executive decision based on an inmate’s civil liberties, there was never any right or wrong. There was only wrong and more wrong. But then, Vasquez had been a good prisoner. That is, he didn’t go around stabbing or raping anybody. And I’d had no reason to believe he would escape. Anyway, I didn’t make the rules in the first place, I only competed with them.

The hot sun poured into my office through the old double-hung windows. Even though Wash Pelton, the Commissioner of Corrections, had declared it a general cost-saving rule to leave the air conditioners dormant until June, I turned mine on and breathed in the cool, stale air.

I turned back to Val, watched her push up the sleeves of her cream-colored cashmere V-neck sweater.

“Okay, give it to me straight. You think Logan’s statement is legit?”

Val straightened her legs and spread her arms to catch the cool breeze from the air conditioner. She stood up from the leather chair and stretched her short solid body by reaching for the stars. A habit of hers I never got tired of admiring. “In my opinion,” she said, “Logan is one lying son of a bitch…if you’ll excuse my French.”

I slid off the desk, stuffed my hands into my pockets. “My thoughts exactly,” I said. I was relying on my gut. I’d never had an escape before. I’d never had any choice but to accept the word of my officers as gospel, no matter what I suspected otherwise. Besides the missing file, I thought, the only thing to go on was Logan’s unmarked face.

“You notice any marks on Logan’s mug?”

“For a man who got smacked over the head with a gun,” Val said, stuffing her notepad under her left arm, “he seemed in pretty good shape.”

“Perfect shape. Other than that small bruise on his forehead.”

We said nothing for a second or two while the cold air filled the room like the invisible vapors in a gas chamber.

The phone rang.

Val took it at my desk. “Superintendent’s office,” she said, looking directly at me with the wide eyes that told me someone I didn’t want to talk to was on the line. “Pelton,” she said cupping her hand over the mouthpiece.

“Crap,” I whispered. “He wanted two more men cut from the staff by Friday. Two more men when I don’t have enough officers now.” I removed my charcoal suit jacket from off the hanger in the closet, held it by the lapel.

“What do I tell him?”

“Tell him I’m not here. Something is definitely not right. I’ve got a missing prisoner, a missing file, and a possibly phony statement. I might even have a quack for a dentist. What I definitely have is a real problem when Pelton gets word I signed the release for Vasquez to walk.”

“What’ll I tell Pelton about the escape?” Val begged, her palm pressed flat over the mouthpiece. “He’s gonna want something. An explanation at least.”

I slipped on my jacket, pulling the cuffs to make the shirtsleeves taut. I looked into the small mirror on the back of the closet door, ran my hands through my black hair, pressed my fingers down over my mustache and goatee. “Tell him I had a dentist’s appointment,” I said, looking into my own brown eyes but quickly looking away. “Then try to find Vasquez’s file, even if you have to get it off the microfilm.”

“I can’t tell him you went to the dentist.”

“Why not? I have teeth.”

“He’ll know it’s a lie. You know I hate it when I have to lie for you.”

“Okay, then tell him the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That I don’t want to talk with him right now because I don’t feel like firing anyone.”

Val pressed her lips together, stared me down. She knew she had to lie for me whether she liked it or not. She took a quick breath, composed herself, and took her hand off the mouthpiece. She brought the phone to her face, spoke slowly, barely moving her thick, red lips. “Mr. Marconi just left for the dentist, Mr. Pelton. Is there a message?”

As I opened the door to the office, she stuck her tongue out at me.

“You mad at me?” I whispered.

She raised her middle finger high, as if the tongue hadn’t been enough.

CHAPTER THREE

LIKE ALL MAXIMUM SECURITY penitentiaries in New York State, the bowels of Green Haven are gray, dark, and completely devoid of life. The narrow tunnels and corridors that connect the nine cell blocks are lit only with caged light bulbs mounted high on the concrete walls. The concrete-paneled ceiling is flat and featureless, like a bunker. Looking around, you have the distinct, claustrophobic sensation of moving toward a dungeon or torture chamber rather than the “Home-Sweet-Home” of a few thousand inmates. Other than the thick, bright-yellow line that runs along the center of the concrete floor, all is gray, cold, and lifeless.

Here’s what I used to think, but never spoke up about: gray is not the color of rehabilitation; gray is the color of incarceration, pure and simple. Incarceration was my job, and Green Haven provided the perfect working environment.

Then there was the odor, the worm smell that coated the interiors like a vapor so thick you tasted it on your lips and tongue as much as you inhaled it, and when you first came to the prison you might have gagged on the foul air. It was an odor that began in the cells, from toilets that could not flush and from the waste-throwers who refused to flush the toilets that could. The smells came from the mess-hall galleys where nutritious meals of yellow potato salad, rice pilaf, beans, chicken patties, and Kool-Aid for twenty-five hundred inmates were being prepped for supper and served on Styrofoam trays with plastic spoons. The smells came from inmates who showered only twice a week, even after spending entire afternoons at the weight-lifting platforms or the basketball courts.

Coming to the end of the first corridor into A-Block, I walked past the square window embedded inside the steel door that accessed A-Yard. The window was thick and reinforced with heavy gauge chicken wire. There was a crack in the upper right-hand corner of the glass where an inmate had punched it. Outside, the weight-lifting platforms were now empty. So were the basketball and handball courts, while the COs took the late afternoon head count. Even with the bright sun shining down on the flat, hard-packed earth, all was colorless, lifeless.

All was burning hot.

Once past A-Block, I crossed through another tunnel that brought me to F- and G-Blocks. The guards at the gate, dressed in their prison grays, perked up when they saw me. The gatekeeper signed me in, asked me what I knew about Vasquez’s escape. “It’s why I’m Johnny-on-the-spot,” I told him. The short, bald-headed man turned away expressionless, like he should have known better than to pry at a time like this. And he should have. I wasn’t one to hold back information from my men, but he knew that nobody’s job in this prison was secure anymore, and I think he sensed the tension in my voice.

I climbed the wrought-iron stairway to F- and G-Blocks, the blocks designated “New York City” by inmates and guards alike, with F-Block being the East Side and G-Block the West Side. All around came the sounds of two hundred fifty locked-down prisoners talking, shouting, laughing. “Yo, Warden, I want my lawyer, Warden! Yo, Warden.” These were the voices I heard, voices that rose above the sounds of metal gates crashing into more metal gates, guards screaming out orders, bullhorns blasting over a nonstop rumbling that seemed to emanate from some deformed beast that lived far underneath the thick floor, like a stillbirth suddenly come alive.

Sound shocking?

Listen: Prison is not rehabilitation. Prison is incarceration. We admit that now.

I approached Dan Sloat inside Vasquez’s now empty cell. “You talked to Stormville PD yourself, little brother?”

During my three-year tenure as warden, I’d gotten used to calling Dan little brother because of our age difference, he being five years younger. Also, he was thinner, happier, better dressed-all those things I might have been if I had tried hard enough, or if I were still young enough to care.

Dan tugged on the loose-fitting waist of his brown slacks and ran a hand through thick, dirty-blond hair. “Marty Schillinger should be here anytime,” he said.

Martin Schillinger was a cop I’d gotten to know as well as any man can know an undercover cop. A big, slow-moving, middle-aged man, he rarely tackled much of anything in the small town of Stormville. An escape was a big deal for him and his department.

Vasquez’s cell was immaculate.

The bedsheet and blanket were army-barracks tight. Posters of Latino women were Scotch-taped to the walls. One of the posters depicted a woman dressed only in a skimpy G-string and black cowboy boots. She sported a ten-gallon Stetson and straddled the back of a live tiger instead of a horse. Her naked breasts were plump and taut and slick-looking. The index finger of her right hand touched the tip of her tongue. With the other hand she held a chunk of the tiger’s fleshy back like a rein.

In one corner of the ten-by-twelve-foot cell, opposite the exposed toilet and sink, Vasquez had set up a small shrine with a wooden crucifix and a little plastic statue of the Virgin Mary. A white plastic rosary was wrapped around the Virgin’s shoulders. The objects had been laid out on a fragile white doily that looked out of place in the cell. Behind the Virgin, leaning against the wall, was a reproduction of a painting that showed the agonized face of Christ, His forehead covered with a crown of thorns. Blood trickled down onto His mouth. His eyes were raised to the heavens. His suffering seemed to complement the cell. As for me, I hadn’t been to my Catholic church since Fran had been killed in a hit-and-run accident almost one year ago to the day.

I hadn’t prayed either.

Dan looked at me. “What now?”

“Take the bed apart.”

A shoe box had been laid out on one side of the small table holding the religious shrine. I opened it and found a shoeshine rag, a bottle of shoe leather cleaner, and some black shoe polish. Contraband technically. But stuff I normally ignored unless the prisoner was difficult to deal with. But even a cop-killer like Vasquez could be a peach of an inmate, so long as he had an agenda. And apparently he had.

I opened the can of polish, brought it to my nose, sniffed the oddly pleasant odor of ink and alcohol that immediately reminded me of my father shining his black Florsheims on Sunday mornings before mass. Nothing funny about it. Just shoe polish. I closed the lid on the little tin can, dropped it back into the box, picked up the plastic statue of the Virgin Mary and shook it.

The Virgin Mary was clean.

I picked up the photograph of Jesus, studied it, back and front. I shook it once and then laid it back down on the table.

Jesus was clean, too.

I turned and watched Dan strip down the bunk.

He found nothing when he pulled the sheet off the mattress. He found nothing when he pulled the pillowcase away from the pillow. But when he pulled the mattress off the metal springboard, a manila envelope slid out.

“Red flag,” I said.

Dan picked up the envelope. He bent back the clasps, opened it, and slid out four eight-by-ten photographs. “Not bad,” he smirked. He handed the envelope to me and sat down on the edge of the stainless-steel toilet like it was a chair.

I looked at the first photo. Blurry but clear enough. A picture of a naked woman’s backside. She knelt on the floor, her face buried between a set of pale legs that belonged to a man sitting on the edge of a bed. Her head was turned to the left just slightly, but enough for me to make out a heart-shaped tattoo on her neck, below the left earlobe. Another photo showed the same tattooed woman riding the man in bed. I still couldn’t see any faces, but I could make out a kind of jagged scar on the man’s neck between his chest and Adam’s apple. It looked almost like a birthmark or a burn. The last picture showed the woman lying on her back, legs spread. This time the man’s face was buried in her crotch.

Three very bad shots.

One scar.

One heart-shaped tattoo.

If I had to guess, the pictures were stills from a porn flick. No explanations, no faces, no names. Just a heart-shaped tattoo. Maybe just a meaningless pleasure tool for Vasquez. Maybe not.

I slid the photos back into the envelope, handed the package to Dan. “Hold on to these until I figure out what to do with them.”

Dan got up from the toilet, the envelope in hand. Just then, Detective Martin Schillinger of the Stormville PD showed up outside the bars of the cell, escorted by one of my COs.

“Big Marty,” I said.

“Keeper, Dan,’ he said, pulling out a small notepad from the right-hand pocket of his Burberry trench coat. “Anything good?”

Schillinger wore a trench coat because he thought it enhanced his image as a crime stopper.

“Some choice photos,” I said, nodding at the envelope in Dan’s hand. “Kinky stuff. Other than that, nothing.”

Dan handed the manila envelope to Marty. He took a look inside. “I’ll take these with me,” he said. He seemed to brighten up all of a sudden. “Mind if I take a second look around, Keeper, case there’s something you missed?”

I looked at Dan’s narrow, clean-shaven face. He made a rolling motion with his brown eyes. “By all means, Detective,” I said. “Dan’ll set you up with anything you need-a copy of Vasquez’s file once we come up with it, photo IDs, the whole kit and caboodle.”

“Any distinctive marks on Vasquez’s body I should know about, in case he should turn up dead?”

“If I remember right, he had his serial number tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand,” Dan said, making a fist with his own right hand and holding it to Marty’s face as if to demonstrate.

“He should also be minus one freshly pulled tooth,” I added. “Dan will help you with the rest.”

“Serial numbers,” Schillinger mumbled as he wrote in his little notebook. “Pulled tooth.”

I took a couple of steps to the front of the cramped cell, held on to the bars, the same way Vasquez must have held them ten thousand times before in his eight years as an inmate. I had to wonder what he thought about, how he felt, how he must have run the scenario for springing these walls over and over again until he was too exhausted to think anymore. I imagined him collapsing onto the bunk and maybe falling into a deep sleep. But then all he’d have to wake up to was this cold gray room and these steel bars.

Vasquez was doing life.

But he also knew that since the death penalty had been reinstated by the governor, it was only a matter of time until he was executed by a three-stage, mechanically operated lethal injection. He had murdered a cop after all. And everybody knows New York cops take care of their own.

I felt Marty’s hand on my shoulder.

“Ask you something, Keeper?”

“I got a choice, Marty?” Shrugging his meaty hand away.

He pulled down on the belt of his trench coat to better accommodate his gut.

“Why’d you let a yo-yo like Vasquez outside the prison?”

I felt like the concrete had been pulled out from under me. Nerves maybe. A man had escaped from my prison. I was responsible. Schillinger was reminding me of that. I’d signed the fieldtrip release. I might have had the word “liable” tattooed to my forehead. Just a big letter L branded right between the eyes.

I took my hands away from the bars.

“Listen, Marty,” I said, not looking at him, but at Dan, “you know as well as I do that an inmate has his rights, which include proper dental care. I can’t just take away a prisoner’s rights even if he did shoot a cop in the back of the head execution style. Even if that cop had a young wife who was pregnant with their first child. Even if that wife can’t afford her own dentist now.”

Marty’s cheeks turned red. I wasn’t sure if the sob story had gotten to him or if his pressure was simply up.

“I’m just asking,” he said.

“My hands are tied, Marty,” I added. “And you know it.” Which wasn’t exactly the truth. We both knew that if I had thought real hard about it, I could have said no to Vasquez’s dental visits. I might have taken a few lumps from some civil-libertarian lawyer, but there were worse things in life. Now, if I was considered negligent by the commission up in Albany, I could easily face criminal charges, possibly jail time. It was too late to reverse the past. Now I had to figure out a way to clear myself as quickly and as cleanly as possible. Once I did that, I would get my head back together, get back to the business of running a tight prison.

I took one last look around before I left the cell. It was then, when I looked at the floor, that I found it. Just a crumpled-up envelope. Garbage really. Something that might go unnoticed to Schillinger, but not to me. You see, Vasquez’s cell was immaculate. Too immaculate, too clean to be believable to anyone except an outsider like Schillinger. I took another step inside, picked up the crumpled number-ten-size business envelope. At the same time, Schillinger had his back to me as he studied the Virgin Mary, picking her up and putting her down again. Dan stood beside him, supervising.

I gripped the envelope and walked out.

Outside, on the catwalk, I flattened out the envelope as best I could. It was addressed in a kind of hasty handwriting to Eduard Vasquez care of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison, Stormville, New York. It had come from Cassandra Wolf, a name I recognized as belonging to Vasquez’s long-time girlfriend. The return address indicated Olancha, a California town I did not recognize.

I stuffed the envelope into my pants pocket and waved Dan over. A CO was posted at the end of the gallery. He held a baton in his right hand and was slapping it against the palm of his left.

“Watch the iron house till I get back,” I said.

“Pelton,” he said, tugging on those thin-waisted pants, looking down on me, but not by much. “What about Wash Pelton?”

“Pelton called once already. He calls again take it, but stall him. Tell him we’re doing everything we can to assist the Stormville PD and the state police to see that Vasquez is stopped in his tracks. Make sure he gets all the paper work he needs. Pictures, prints, statements, next of kin, phone numbers, whatever Val can get off the microfilm and the computers.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Then ask him who we contact at the Bureau. He’ll love that.”

“What about the guards?”

“What guards?”

“The guards he’s been on us to can?”

“You have no knowledge about guards,” I insisted. “That’s the keeper’s territory, so just play dumb.”

“Oh yeah,” Dan said, smiling now. “And how am I supposed to do that, boss?”

“Just put yourself in my shoes, little brother, and think real hard.”

CHAPTER FOUR

I WAS DRIVING THOUGH Newburgh, past the four and five-story professional buildings in search of a place with the number 684 posted somewhere outside, along with the name A. J. Royale, dentist. I patted out a Pall Mall, lit it with the silver-plated Zippo engraved with my initials-J.H.M., Jack Harrison Marconi. The lighter had been a gift from Fran for my forty-third birthday, not two weeks before the collision that took her life. A year had gone by and I’d spent the better part of those twelve months trying to get used to the idea of living alone so that every time the image of Fran’s face popped into my head, I wasn’t rendered as useless as a sack of rags and bones.

This is what I thought: I had made a big mistake handing over those photographs to Marty Schillinger. It was, of course, the right thing to do. SOP. But it’s the way Marty took them from Dan and me. So quick and so willing to stuff them inside that trench coat of his. Like he knew what was inside the manila envelope without even looking.

There was something else going on inside my brain, too. I couldn’t shake the image of that heart-shaped tattoo. No faces or full bodies. Just limbs and white flesh, with a heart-shaped tattoo being the only real mark of distinction.

I was still thinking about the tattoo when I located A. J. Royale’s two-story brick-and-glass building at 684 North Main Street in Newburgh. Inside the navy-blue-carpeted waiting room, “The Girl from Ipanema” dribbled from Muzak speakers. Behind the reception counter, a woman passed the time by painting her nails. When she looked up, I saw that her eyes were encircled with a heavy application of black eyeliner, as if she were hiding a set of equally black shiners.

I gave her the best smile I could summon under the circumstances. “I’d like a word with the dentist,” I said.

She looked back down at the fingers on her left hand. Her fingernails were long and sharp, like stilettos, and painted a glossy black like the finish on a cop cruiser. “The dentist is with a patient,” she said, swiping at a finger-nail with her emery board.

I reached into my back pocket, pulled out my wallet, and flashed her the badge issued when I took over as war-den of Green Haven. She’d probably seen enough TV to know a cop has got to flash a badge-any badge -before someone will believe him. She dropped the emery board onto the open appointment ledger. “Is there some kind of problem, Officer?”

I folded up the wallet, stuffed it back into my pocket.

“It depends,” I said, trying to appear deliberately evasive. At the same time, I wasn’t sure what made me feel more nauseous, the noise of the dentist’s drill or “The Girl from Ipanema.”

The receptionist stood up from her seat, pulled down on her miniskirt, and disappeared into a back room. The noise of the drill stopped and suddenly I could hear her talking with someone. But I couldn’t make out their words. Then the dentist came out of the room. Dressed in green surgical scrubs, he peeled off flesh-colored Latex gloves and extended his right hand toward my own.

The hand felt bony and cold.

I don’t know why the man should have annoyed me so much right off the bat. It wasn’t like I had a right not to like him, or not to give him the slightest of chances. But there was something about him, his mannerisms, his skinny, almost frail body, that seemed to set me off. I mean, he was taller than my five-foot-eight, but I must have had twenty pounds on him in the arms and chest alone. And that handshake…Like a dead fish.

“Angel tells me you’re a policeman,” said the dentist, getting right to the point, which was fine by me.

“A warden actually,” I said. “Green Haven in Stormville. I’m here to verify an appointment one of my inmates had today.”

“Is that all you wanted to know?” the dentist said, raising his eyebrows. “You could have checked with my receptionist for that.”

Stone-faced, Angel went right on sharpening her nails.

“I thought it would be better to hear it from you in person.”

“The Girl from Ipanema” finally died and a Manilow song replaced it. Angel ran the emery board over her fingernails in time with the music. Long live rock ‘n’ roll.

“We took care of an inmate today.”

“What was his name?”

“Angel,” the dentist said, “do we have a name for the man who had the molar extraction this morning? We’d been performing a series of root canal procedures for quite a while now on that same tooth. But in the end, I couldn’t save it.”

“Sounds traumatic,” I said.

Angel slapped the emery board down. Using a glossy black fingernail as a pointer, she ran down the registry page from top to bottom and back up again. Until she came to a name and an appointment she recognized.

“Vasquez,” she said, rolling the Z off her tongue. “Eduard Vasquez.”

“Not an easy extraction,” the dentist interjected. “Do you know what goes into an extraction, Mr. Marconi?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Lots of Novocaine and a pair of vise grips.”

The laugh that followed was more fake than Angel’s fingernails, but just as sharp. “It’s a little more complicated than that I’m afraid. A dentist certainly could not be expected to handle a job of that magnitude inside a prison like Green Haven, not with those horrible medical facilities.”

Almost unconsciously, I pulled a cigarette from the pack in my breast pocket.

“Please,” said A. J. Royale. “This is a dentist’s office.”

“The good dentist doesn’t believe in the kind of smoking that makes your lungs fry,” Angel offered, glancing up from her self-manicure.

“That’ll be enough from you,” said the dentist, now nervously scratching at the red skin on his stick-like fingers. “My niece can be a little abrasive at times,” he went on. “Tell me, Mr. Marconi, do you have any family?”

I shook my head because, regrettably, Fran and I had never had the time for children.

“Look,” I said, “was there anything that seemed out of place when Vasquez was here?”

Royale leaned against the reception counter and stuck out his bottom lip as if imitating a pouting child. “Not that I could see. I get prisoners in here all the time from Green Haven and Sing Sing. After a while, they all start looking the same.”

“Brown and browner, right?”

“You may say that.”

“What about the guards?” I said, trying to keep things moving while I still had enough daylight left in the after-noon.

“Just a couple of National Geographic readers,” Shrugging narrow shoulders. “The usual.”

“No one seemed exceptionally nervous? Exceptionally jumpy?”

He looked to the floor.

“Not at all.”

“You’re sure?”

“The good dentist doesn’t bother looking at a man’s eyes,” Angel broke in. She was on a roll and I wanted out of there. A Muzak version of “Send in the Clowns” replaced Manilow. “You’ve been a big help,” I lied, and started for the door.

“Might I inquire as to what precisely Mr. Vasquez was imprisoned for?” Royale asked.

I stopped, looked over my shoulder.

“He pumped a few bullets into a cop’s head. A rookie, just twenty-five years old, married barely a year to a girl pregnant with their first kid.”

“My God,” the dentist exhaled. “What a world we live in.”

“My God,” Angel said. “What a world you live in.”

Send in the clowns, I sang to myself. Don’t bother, they’re here.

CHAPTER FIVE

I CROSSED THE HUDSON River via the Newburgh Beacon Bridge along Route 84 on my way back toward Green Haven. I drove the Toyota 4-Runner fast, not worrying about speed, worrying instead about the little bit of natural sunlight I had left. I was trying to figure out why Vasquez would have kept a dentist appointment if he was planning an escape.

I put myself in Vasquez’s shoes.

If I had planned on escaping, would I have kept a dentist appointment, allowed him to extract my molar? Why not just run? Why go through all that blood, all that pain, for nothing? Maybe the answer didn’t lie with Vasquez so much as it lay with A. J. Royale, dentist to the inmates.

Once over the bridge I drove past Lime Kiln Road, keeping my eye out for a grassy field that might match Logan’s description. But looking for a grassy field among acres of grassy fields was an exercise in futility. I looked for burned rubber on the road, for tire tracks dug into the soft shoulder. I looked for spots of blood or vomit or torn clothing or clumps of hair. But I knew it was next to impossible to spot something so small from the driver’s seat of the 4-Runner.

With the setting sun, I didn’t have the time to get out and comb the area as thoroughly as I wanted. What I did manage was to drive over the same section of bad road five, maybe six times. But the more I drove the more I found a whole lot of nothing.

With dusk coming on fast, I knew I had no choice but to head back to Lime Kiln Road and the gravel pit that it led to. Where Corrections Officers Logan and Mastriano claimed they had gotten the holy hell beaten out of them.

CHAPTER SIX

THE TOYOTA MOVED LIKE a bullet shot out of the twilight. I pictured a faceless woman with a heart-shaped tattoo on her bare neck, and I wondered what kind of woman could do such a thing to her body. I had no idea why I should feel that way. As a corrections official, I saw tattoos of every color and shape every day of my working life. You’d think that after all that time I would have gotten used to them. Inmates with tattoos of naked women on their over-pumped biceps or the name of a long lost girlfriend inscribed in the center of a blood-red heart. Some inmates simply had their prison ID tattooed to their knuckles like Vasquez had. For a couple of packs of smokes, an inmate could have his favorite football team or the name of a child he’d never seen or just about any design he desired tattooed on his body. All it took was a sewing needle and some blue ink from a split-open ballpoint pen and, voilà, instant tattoo. I’ll never forget the time an inmate was brought to my attention over a stunt he’d pulled on an unsuspecting prisoner who had hired him to tattoo his mother’s name on his back. Instead of the name, the inmate had carved out the words Kill Me in dark blue letters. Kill Me was not an invitation you wanted to extend inside the iron house.

When I came to the end of a two-track, I found a couple of kids riding their bikes up and down the banks of the closest gravel pit. The pit was a small, man-made canyon with high, steep walls and a pool of cloudy rainwater that had collected like a small lake in the center. The kids pushed their bikes up the banks of the pit on foot. Once they got to the top, they mounted the bikes, gunned them down the pit wall, feet off the pedals, hands off the brakes, finishing up with a crash through the brown water.

Here’s what I decided to do: I got out of the Toyota and walked around a bit until I found fresh tire tracks in the loose, sandy gravel. Beside the tire tracks, I found some footprints that obviously hadn’t come from the two kids. The prints were flat and rectangular-shaped. Maybe size eleven or larger.

I moved closer to the pit.

Just over the edge of the pit wall were some bullets and an empty.38 caliber black-plated service revolver. It was partially buried, but the bullets were scattered about, plainly visible even in the fading light. What I could not understand as I took out my hankie and wrapped it around my right hand before lifting the pistol from the dirt, was why Vasquez’s men would go to the trouble of disarming Logan and Mastriano and unloading the weapon only to toss it a few feet away where anyone with half a brain could find it. Why not just take the weapon with them, add it to their own private armory?

I tucked the recovered pistol into the back of my pants, wrapped the bullets into the hankie, stuffed it into my pocket. Then I called out to the boys. “You seen anybody here today? Maybe a couple of cops in a station wagon?”

The boys looked at each other and then looked back at me like I was crazy. They stared at me, but said nothing.

Not a word. Tough little guys. I knew the type. They sloshed out of the water and started pushing their bikes back up the pit wall.

“Simple question,” I said. “Anybody come driving in here in the past few hours?”

The two boys went on gazing at me with wide eyes and corner-of-the-mouth smiles, as if I were doing handstands in the dirt. The first kid, who wore a red baseball jacket, mounted his bike. The second, smaller kid, who wore aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses too large for his head, did the same.

“Hey mister,” Baseball Jacket said. “I got two words for you.”

Aviator sunglasses started to laugh like he knew what was coming and I didn’t.

“Screw and you.” Then the boys took off, side by side, down the gravel pit wall and into the water.

Maybe one day I’d see them in my prison. Then I’d have two words for them. Too and bad.

I headed back toward the Toyota. It was time to take care of the inevitable.

I dialed Channel 13 news on my cellular and asked for Chris Collins, the news director and anchorwoman of the small Stormville station. As the keeper I was expected to play my official public relations role, speaking out on the unfortunate escape of convicted cop-killer Eduard Vasquez. But chances were she knew all about the escape, since news of the event must have gone out over the police scanners. And if she knew about it, she must have already formed an opinion.

Anyway, I told Chris Collins most of what I knew. Just the apparent facts. No opinions, conjectures, or even the simplest of thoughts. From Logan’s statement I knew that Vasquez had left his cell at nine in the morning, made it to his eleven o’clock appointment in Newburgh for a tooth extraction. From there he had left the dentist escorted by Officers Logan and Mastriano at about eleven forty-five. Sometime around noon, prisoner Vasquez was overtaken by what appeared to be a heart attack. Not long after, he was rescued by three men in black ski masks driving a black van. As the story goes, Officers Logan and Mastriano took a beating, with Mastriano taking the brunt of the punishment. With the two guards knocked unconscious and, somehow, stuffed into the front seat of the wagon, Vasquez’s men drove them out to the gravel pit and dumped them. Sometime around one-thirty, Logan managed to pull Mastriano from the car. He then dragged him out to the road. Around two o’clock, he hailed down a car and brought Mastriano to the hospital in Newburgh. Logan called the prison. He was picked up from the hospital and brought directly to my office at my request. Then I sent him home.

“But all I really know,” I told Chris Collins, as the sun went down on the gravel pit, “is that Vasquez flew the coop. End of story.”

She wanted an interview ASAP. Chris Collins was a tenacious reporter. Visions of Emmy awards in her big black eyes.

“Not convenient,” I said.

“Just take five minutes of your time, Keeper,” Collins insisted.

“No. Can. Do.”

“But this is big news-”

I took the cellular away from my face.

“You’re giving out, Chris,” I said, pretending to lose the signal.

I hit the end button and dialed my office. Val picked up.

“Hello, doll.”

“Pelton called,” she said. “He really wants to talk.”

“You find Vasquez’s file?”

“I checked the log. No one signed it out.”

“Forget it. If it’s lost, it’s lost. If somebody took it, it’s been shredded.”

“I managed to make copies from the old microfilm. How updated the information is though, is anybody’s guess. ‘Cause I got squat off the computer.”

“You and Dan manage to get copies out to Pelton?”

“Yes.”

“He try to pump Dan for more information?”

“He wants to know what went wrong.”

“How do I know what went wrong?”

“I’m only telling you what he said, boss.”

“What else did he say?”

“You were supposed to drop the ax on two more men last Friday. Here it’s Monday, and he still hasn’t heard anything from you.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That you wouldn’t be coming back after the dentist,…said you’d be in too much pain to talk or work.”

“Listen,” I said, pulling out the crumpled envelope I’d found in Vasquez’s cell earlier that afternoon. “I want you to write down a California address for me and then look it up in the atlas on the shelf behind my desk.” I read off the address to her. “Then I want you to fax to the sheriff in Olancha, California, the same package Dan faxed to Pelton. Tell them to fax the same material to their contact with the FBI.”

I could tell Val was writing down my orders.

“Anything else?”

“Just remember that I still love you, Val Antonelli.” I smiled even though I was alone.

“Glad to see you’re loosening up, boss,” she said.

“Glad to know you care,” I said. “And don’t call me boss.”

I hung up.

I put the cell back into the glove compartment. But before I turned over the ignition, I decided to get back out of the truck, take one last look at the gravel pit. The wind had picked up now with the coming of night. A dry, hot, wind that swirled the sand around and blew it against my face. I looked at the ground, kicked up some of the loose dirt. It was then that I saw something reflecting in the orange half-light of the setting sun. Some kind of flattened metal about the size of my little finger, with a key ring attached to it. I bent over and slid a small twig carefully through the key ring so that I wouldn’t get my prints on it. I could see right away that it was the key to a set of handcuffs. Logan’s or Mastriano’s cuffs, no doubt. I stored the key in my pants pocket along with the six live rounds and the envelope addressed by Cassandra Wolf, Vasquez’s girlfriend. Once I got back to the office, I’d put everything under lock and key, then decide what to do with it.

But first I walked back over to the edge of the pit.

This time the boys sat on their bikes in the center of the giant crater, with the dark, murky water coming up past their ankles. I guess they kind of enjoyed the muddy water. I guess it had a way of holding their interest or cooling them down or both. As I pulled a cigarette from my pocket and fired it up, the kid with the aviator sunglasses flipped me the bird. Just a middle finger raised high from a tough little guy. The second time someone had flipped me off in as many hours.

The kid in the red baseball jacket laughed.

I hoped they’d both catch pneumonia. Double pneumonia.

But then I saw Fran’s face. Fran, the elementary school teacher. I saw her scolding me for my despicable attitude toward a couple of harmless adolescents.

Harmless, my ass.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BACK IN SEPTEMBER OF 1971, during the third day of the Attica riots, a corrections officer by the name of Mike Norman decided to drop out of the madness. No more shivs made from prison-issue razor blades pressed into toothbrushes, no more poles sharpened into spears, no more trenches dug out of D-Yard, no more COs with their throats slit. No more tear gas, handcuffs, blindfolds, and burning buildings. No more bonfires, no more helicopters, no more rain, no more suicide.

I was eighteen years old and engaged to be married.

That night, in the middle of D-Yard, Mike Norman curled up his lanky body like an embryo and went to sleep on the ground where twelve of us had been ordered by the rebel inmates to drop. Half a dozen inmates pointed homemade shivs and spears at the backs of our heads. When a young black man with sunglasses and a black do-rag wrapped around his bald head tried to wake Norman, Norman wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t sick. But then he didn’t even appear alive except for the soft breathing. He was just sleeping peacefully, with a slight smile planted on his face, even with that rebel inmate screaming in his ear, “Wake up, motherfucker. Wake up or I’ll cut your throat you don’t wake up.”

He didn’t move when the inmate tried to slap that little smile off his baby face, or when the inmate picked up his feet and dragged his skin and bones along the gravel floor of D-Yard. He slept through the state troopers’ failed ambush, when they hit and killed two of their own COs. He slept for two full days during the Attica riots of September 1971- the week the nation’s entire penal system nearly caught fire.

Me and Washington Pelton, a fellow CO, humped Mike Norman around by his hands and feet, keeping him out of harm’s way as best we could. The rebel inmates made jokes about the sleeping beauty, taunting us with sinister kisses in the air. I could understand wanting to drop out. We all wanted to drop out. Still, I could not understand how he had managed to sleep through those final impossible hours.

He was asleep on the last day of our incarceration when a rebel inmate cut Wash Pelton’s throat with a razor blade. The jagged scar would stay with Pelton for years, like a tattoo gone bad. And he continued to sleep when the state troopers rushed the thirty-foot stone walls and stormed D-Yard, and when I tackled a rebel inmate from behind and plunged a shiv into his neck.

We lost twelve men during that riot. No one went unscathed, except for sleeping beauty-my buddy. Inmates and officers died all around him. To this day I can’t be sure if he faked that sleep, or if his nerves had given out and truly left him catatonic. But here’s the weird thing: Whatever he did, it worked. By dropping out of life, Mike Norman managed to stay alive.

I couldn’t decide if Corrections Officer Bernard Mastriano had a different thing going or not.

What was certain was that he had a room in Newburgh General with a color TV mounted high on the wall. When I walked in he was laid out flat on the bed, a clear tube up his nose, an IV stuck into the underside of his right arm. He was alone, knocked out cold. The hospital bed beside his was empty. The fact that I was in the room had nothing to do with visiting hours, which during mealtime were suspended for anyone not belonging to the immediate family. According to the elderly woman with an Italian accent who worked the reception desk, normal visiting hours didn’t resume until seven at night. But I flashed her my badge and that’s all it took for me to be admitted to the ICU ward.

Before I tried to wake Mastriano, I took a good look at his face and recalled what Logan had said about him being struck in the head with the butt end of a shotgun. From where I stood, the black-haired, fat-faced man didn’t have a scratch on him. He looked in better shape than Logan had.

I grabbed his arm just above the needle that supplied his intravenous. I shook it.

Mastriano mumbled a couple of words, opened his eyes, and closed them again. His face was tan and fleshy, the corners of his mouth turned up like he couldn’t hold himself back anymore, like he was about to break out into a fit of laughter.

I shook him again, but there was still no response other than some incoherent mumbling. I bent at the knees, put my mouth up to his ear. “Mastriano,” I whispered. “Can you hear me?”

No visible sign that he could.

But at the chance he might be faking it, I went on with what I had to say. “I want to hear about what happened out there today. I want to hear your story. Understand, Mastriano?”

I glanced over my shoulder at the open door. Nurses walked back and forth from room to room, clipboards and plastic water bottles in hand. It was then that I began running my fingers along Mastriano’s right temple, feeling for any evidence of a bump or abrasion. I ran my fingertips all through his thick, black hair, felt the cold, bumpy scalp. I would have run my hand through a second time too, had the doctor not walked in.

“Excuse me,” he said. “But is there some kind of problem?”

He was a short, curly-haired, young man. A kid really. He wore a tweed suit jacket, khakis, and running shoes. He had a laminated identification card with his photograph and a name I could not make out pinned to his jacket. He carried a clipboard in his right hand and wore a stethoscope around his neck. What he did not wear, however, was the usual knee-length, hospital-white lab jacket.

I took my hands away from Mastriano’s scalp and smiled. “Maybe you can help me,” I said. “What’s this man’s diagnosis?”

The doctor reached for the pen in the breast pocket of his blazer. “You related to the patient, sir?”

I pulled out my wallet. But this time, I did not flash my badge. Instead, I showed the good doctor my valid prison ID. “Keeper Marconi of Green Haven Maximum Security,” I revealed. “This man works for me.”

This time the doctor took a breath. “When the patient was brought in, he was already unconscious. The officer who came in with him said he was knocked out cold with the stock end of a shotgun.”

“Be honest, Doc,” I said. “Did this man take a blow to the skull with a blunt object?”

The doctor let out a breath. “No,” he said. “No sign of it that I could see, anyway. What he does have is a couple of bruises to the head, but nothing that would have been caused by the back end of a rifle. At least, I don’t think so at this point.”

“You’re certain of this?”

“Pupils aren’t uneven. No other lateralizing signs like paralysis, decreased reflexes, descerbrate posturing. In terms of the Glasgow coma scale, I’d say he’s a two, maybe a three.”

“Glasgow?” I asked.

“The medical standard by which we measure the seriousness of a head injury. The higher the score, the worse off you are. In theory, at least.”

“What do you think, in theory?”

“His relaxed state could be due to Descorticate Syndrome, which could mean injury to the cortical level of the brain.”

“But so far, he shows no real sign of taking that kind of hit, does he?”

“Could be a blood clot, could be a basilar skull fracture, who knows.”

“For now you keep him in ICU?”

“We’ve pumped him up with some Manitol and steroids in case of brain swelling.”

“His breathing seems okay.”

“Don’t see a ventilator, do you?”

Feisty little guy, I thought. This doctor is a feisty little guy.

Together we looked at Mastriano for a second or two, like he was about to bound up, say Gotcha. He was as still and as stiff as-you guessed it-a statue. The IV dripped slowly and steadily, in sync with the rising and falling of his chest.

“But he still shows no real sign of a concussion,” I said, shaking my head.

“Just the sleeping,” the doctor said, “which, in itself, could be serious.”

We said nothing for a few more seconds, just continued staring at the motionless body. Then I said, “Doctor, can I see you out in the hall?”

“He can’t hear us,” he said, nodding toward Mastriano.

“Indulge me.” Turning for the open door.

Outside we leaned our shoulders up against the white plaster wall. The nurses and interns marched passed us, not giving us a second look.

“Doctor, is there any chance Mister Mastriano could be faking sleep? I mean, maybe he popped some sleeping pills or something.”

The doc let loose with a high-pitched nasal laugh that I assumed was intended to convey my apparent silliness.

“Listen up,” I added, “a cop killer escaped from my prison today and I want to get to the bottom of it.”

“I suppose,” he said, getting a grip on himself. “But it’s awfully tough to do for hours on end. And he’s been in ICU for some time now.”

“But it is possible?”

“Given the right conditions, I guess all things are possible. But then, it’s not unusual for a man to go into a catatonic state if properly frightened or startled. And from what I understand, that officer has been through a lot. We’ve drawn some blood. It’s being analyzed as we speak. If there are drugs involved, it’ll show up.”

“What happens next?”

“Tests, tests, and more tests.” Smiling. “That’s what we like to do here.”

“Tests for what?”

“CSF leak, concussion, epilepsy, a few other assorted maladies. We have a neurologist coming in to check out his brain, put him into an imaging machine, really get into it. We even have to test his vision.”

“Do me another favor, will you?”

He nodded and rolled his eyes in a way that told me he was sick of answering my questions.

“Make sure,” I said, loud enough for Mastriano to hear me, if he could hear me, “that I’m notified right away if the officer wakes up.”

“He’ll be with us for quite a while,” the doctor informed.

I took out my wallet, slipped out a business card, and handed it to him. Then I leaned into his ear. “Doctor,” I whispered, “let’s hope your patient makes one hell of a miraculous recovery.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

MAYBE IT HAD SOMETHING to do with having Wash Pelton on the brain. Maybe it had something to do with seeing Bernie Mastriano laid up in bed, knocked out cold without the slightest hint of injury. Maybe it had something to do with Vasquez taking off without a trace. Maybe it was all of the above. But as I walked across the massive block-shaped parking lot outside the electronic sliding-glass doors of Newburgh General, the events of the past came back to haunt me in all their timeless brilliance and horror.

Listen. In the world of the Attica survivor, memory never occurs in the past tense.

One second it’s May 1997 and the next it’s September 1971 all over again.

In my memory I am able to see Mike Norman rolled over onto all fours on the muddy floor of D-Yard, heaving his guts. My blindfold has finally been pulled away and I can see that there is nothing left in Mike’s system to throw up onto the mud and gravel. He slumps over onto his left side, his shackled legs and hands tucked up into his chest. In the yard, with the fires going and the rebel inmates chanting for blood and revenge, we are the innocent angels of the prison system. Mike’s face is soaked with sweat and dirt. The three of us-Norman, Pelton, and I-have got to stick together if only to keep each other sane. But I know Norman is fighting a losing battle. His nerves are giving out. And there are rumors about one CO who got locked in a bathroom on the main floor of the administration building while a rebel tossed in kerosene and a lit match. Another man was castrated with a shiv and crucified to the wall in G-Block. I myself have seen COs kicked to within inches of their lives. Before my blindfold was removed, I could only listen to their screams, their moans, the gurgling, and then the silence.

When an inmate walks by with a wood shank as long as a spear, I try to persuade him to remove my cuffs and shackles. My buddy is hurt, I tell him. I’ve got a right to help my buddy. Pelton tries to stand. He holds his long arms out as if the inmate will unlock the cuffs right then and there. Instead, the inmate uses the dull end of the shank like a nightstick, plows it into Wash’s gut. Wash collapses, curls into himself on the ground. I see the inmate’s leg lift behind me and I feel the steel in his toe as his boot comes down against my head.

CHAPTER NINE

ON THE DRIVE BACK to Green Haven, with John Coltrane playing softly on the radio, my own eyes caught my attention in the rearview mirror. The skin around my brown eyes was heavy and wrinkled. Dark bags were already beginning to form. Goatee thick and speckled with gray, widow’s peak receding above my forehead. I needed a shave. The knot of my tie had been pushed to one side of my collar. The tension was shooting through the center of my solar plexus and down the backs of my arms, tightening my triceps. Chest, arms, stomach were tight and sore, yet I hadn’t pumped iron in five full days.

It’s amazing, really, how stress affects people.

By the time I got back to the office, Val had left. My entire staff had gone home to their wives, their kids and their hot suppers. They sipped cocktails, shoes off, feet up on the coffee table, and got a charge out of the daily news read for them off the teleprompter. At least that’s the way it had been for me not too long ago. I no longer had any of those things or the woman who had given them to me, but I still had my Jamesons. And as I poured a second shot, I pushed away the paperwork that had piled up after I’d left the office that afternoon.

I felt empty inside, my stomach as vacant as Vasquez’s cell.

I sat back, put my feet up on the desk, and gazed into the darkness of my second-floor office-a darkness broken only by the white light from the desk lamp and the scattered spotlights moving across the prison grounds like hungry sharks lurking through deep, blue waters.

I took another drink of whiskey and fingered the notes filled with Val’s handwriting. Messages from the commissioner. I had no interest in talking with him right now. As I said, I had to avoid him not only because of the escape, but because of the two additional names he wanted slashed from an already diminished list of officers. I could have given him Robert Logan and Bernard Mastriano, but I still couldn’t be sure that they weren’t telling the truth about Vasquez’s escape.

The white spotlight swept across my floor.

The wall-mounted clock face showed the big hand on the twelve, little hand on the seven.

I knew Pelton would still be in his office. He would be in his office until midnight, maybe later. Maybe he’d sleep on the couch, send out for a fresh suit of clothing. Pelton had a wife, Rhonda, a small blond-haired bull terrier of a woman who acted as public relations officer for the commission-a position Wash had virtually invented for her. She was notorious for her flirting and her drinking. Pelton was notorious for the way he sometimes slapped her sober. But then, like in any bureaucracy, there were a lot of rumors in the corrections department.

I wasn’t entirely against Pelton. We’d been good friends early in our careers. Both of us had started out as COs at Attica only weeks before the riot that had nearly taken our lives. Not long after, both Wash and I, along with Mike Norman, had been reassigned by the commission to set up a training program for rookie cops and security guards, not only to better prepare them in the event of another Attica riot, but also to help prevent another riot.

In those days, Wash, Mike, and I were no strangers to the bars that lined Broadway in downtown Albany. Justins, the Lark, Jack’s Oyster House. Five solid blocks of bars, glaring neon, and the rich fish smell that used to come off the Hudson River in the days before the state cleaned it up. But those were the days before Wash quit the department to get a bachelor’s degree and then a law degree and before Rhonda came into his life. When Wash married Rhonda and Albany politics, whatever friendship we had took a backseat.

Now that Fran was gone, Pelton and I once again had more than a few things in common. Like me, he had no children to go home to. No dog, no dinner, no slippers waiting by the door. He was married, but Rhonda didn’t seem the type to greet him with open arms and a peck on the cheek. Like me he had his work and his booze, but that’s where the similarities ended.

Whiskey and loneliness didn’t make us allies.

I recalled the wassail party the Commission had sponsored at the governor’s mansion on Eagle Street just five months before. It was the first time I’d gone out on my own to a social function since Fran’s death. Now I was caught in a room full of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances with Nat King Cole singing from the grave and colored lights hanging off the walls and wrapped around a gigantic Christmas tree that took up the entire center of the grand living room. Rhonda, as usual, had drunk herself blind, and somehow the booze had caused her to take a liking to me. Or maybe the recent death of my wife had made me more attractive or pitiable; I’m not sure which.

Anyway, I felt this need to get away from it all so I stepped out onto the patio to have a smoke.

Rhonda followed me.

She asked me for a light. But as soon as I lit her smoke, she grabbed onto my arm, pulling me into her with that deceptive bullterrier strength. She let the lit cigarette fall to the stone patio, puckered up, and laid one on me, just like that, in the middle of the governor’s porch. I didn’t want to kiss her. But she’d taken me by surprise. I quickly pushed her away.

But by that time we’d been spotted and the damage done.

Not only had Wash seen us, but so had the governor and his first lady. In fact, the entire party had stopped and stared at us through the open, floor-to-ceiling patio doors.

In the months that followed, Wash never once mentioned the incident to me. We dealt with each other on a professional level. He called me for names to scratch from my roster, and I, with all the fight somehow gone out of me since Fran’s death, capitulated. I didn’t think much about Rhonda after that or about the incident at the governor’s mansion. But I knew, deep down, that it must have been eating away at him. And who could blame him?

I decided to wait until morning to place a call. Anything said between us tonight could only lead to a dead end. I lit another cigarette and watched the smoke boil in the white light from the desk lamp until it disappeared in the darkness. I glanced at the framed picture of Fran that I kept on the right side of my desk-the black-and-white photo taken shortly after her graduation from Albany High, the one with her hair pulled back taut and straight, her costume diamond stud earrings shining in the bright light of the flash, her eyes wide and brown, her mouth curved up at the corners in a subtle smile.

“Okay, Fran,” I said. “Here’s the rundown. We’ve got a missing file and an officer who claims he got the holy hell beaten out of him. But he doesn’t show any signs of being beaten. We’ve got another guard who’s checked into a hospital after taking a clip to the head with the butt end of a rifle. But the guy appears to be unharmed. He’s alive and well, but then, he’s out cold like Sleeping Beauty. I checked in with A. J. Royale down in Newburgh and found out that Vasquez did, in fact, make his dentist appointment. I know he had a series of root canal procedures performed to a bad molar and that, in the end, the good dentist had no choice but to pull it. And last, I’ve got a weapon, a pile of rounds, and the key to Logan’s cuffs. I’ve got an envelope with Cassandra Wolfs address and a package of stills that Marty Schillinger confiscated. I’ve even got a woman with a heart-shaped tattoo on her neck. That, my love, is where the facts stop and the speculation begins.”

I downed my whiskey and poured another shot. I wrapped my hankie around the.38 service revolver, gripped it, and aimed it at the white spotlight as it floated across my window, left to right. I laid the pistol back down and stood each of the six copper-jacketed bullets upright on the desk. I felt the key to the handcuffs. I touched everything with the hankie as though, in the touching, I’d get answers.

Tomorrow I would contact Mike Norman at the Albany Police Department’s downtown division on South Pearl Street. I’d see what he could do about dusting the stuff for prints. In the meantime, I’d consider why Logan would have lied in his statement and why he’d be stupid enough to leave evidence lying around the gravel pit, unless, of course, he wanted it found. I knew someone must have been paid off for something, but who, how much, and why?

I needed connections.

Maybe Cassandra Wolf would provide them.

But from the look of things she was in California. And if I had to guess, Vasquez was with her.

I stamped out my cigarette. In the distance I could hear the electronic buzzers sounding off in F- and G-Blocks. I heard the slam of iron gates. Lockdown. Time for evening head count.

“Are there any good officers left in this prison?” I said out loud, my voice strange and tired.

I looked at Fran’s photo one last time and brought my fingers to her lips. I downed the rest of my drink and locked the envelope with Cassandra Wolf’s address, the.38, the live rounds, and the rest of the evidence inside my briefcase. I stood up with the now weighted-down case in hand and turned out the desk lamp.

By law I should have gone straight to the Stormville police. I should have gotten on the horn with Marty Schillinger and told him what I’d found. But I had a feeling that I’d already made a mistake giving him the stills from Vasquez’s cell. Who knew what would happen to those materials now that I’d handed them over to Marty? Who knew what would happen to the evidence from the gravel pit once it was out of my hands for good? It was my ass that was at stake for Vasquez’s escape. I remembered having signed six or seven identical releases in the past few months. I could not deny a prisoner his right to receive proper medical care. It was a case of an inmate’s civil rights-rights established in the bloody aftermath of Attica. I’d had a responsibility then, and I had a responsibility now.

I knew I had to take control of the situation-bring the material to Mike Norman in Albany, have him dust for prints off the record. It was illegal and I knew it. But I wasn’t concerned with breaking the law, so long as it meant I could get to the truth quickly, avoid a lengthy investigation, prosecute those involved, save my job, save my ass.

CHAPTER TEN

I COULDN’T DECIDE IF I wanted to hear Sinatra or Billie Holiday. I chose neither. Instead I reached up to the highest shelf beside the fireplace in my living room, behind my four-piece, blue-sparkle finish, vintage Rogers drum kit. I pulled out an old album I hadn’t spun in ten years: Zoot Sims and Bucky Pizzarelli. I slipped the record out of its sleeve, held the disc up to my face and breathed in the smell of old vinyl, puckered my lips and blew off the excess dust. Then I slipped the relic of an LP onto the turntable and engaged the stylus.

A while back I had refurbished my stereo system with an eight-disc CD player and replaced most of my collection, and it’s a big one, with high-tech, more expensive evolutionary clones. But now it felt somehow soothing to hear the scratchiness that always precedes the music on a vinyl disc.

The sound brought me back, made me think of Fran and her funny, giggly laugh. I could almost see her lying on the couch, stocking feet up on the coffee table, head tilted back just so, eyes closed, a glass of red wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, smoke rings floating all the way to the ceiling. But then my memory shifted in directions I did not want it to go and I recalled the black sedan that had come out of nowhere, blown the traffic light, plowed into the passenger-side door of my Ford Bronco…

Almost one year ago to the day.

I sat down at the drums and took the brushes in my hands. I thought about Vasquez as the first song came on and I placed my brushes to the snare to mimic the licks of the great Max Roach. I also pictured the heart-shaped tattoo. I thought about the way Schillinger had taken those photos from me inside Vasquez’s empty cell. Maybe I was putting too much into it, but I felt that, for some reason, Vasquez had left them for me to find. Let’s face it, he knew it was SOP to shake down a cell after an escape, and we’re talking about a very neat man here, a man who was not the type to overlook details.

I finished out the piece with a quick triplet and a cymbal crash and returned the brushes to the snare.

I didn’t have the heart for drumming tonight. The keeper of time was too concerned with the keeper of the maximum security joint.

I took a glance at my watch and thought about asking Val over for some reheated leftovers. But it was nine already and I knew it was too late to call. But then, I knew she’d be up. Like me, Val was no longer married, although she did have a twelve-year-old boy from her only marriage to keep her company. I even went to the wall phone in the kitchen and picked up the handset. But at the last second, just as I turned it over in my palm, just as I was about to punch in the numbers, I pictured her sitting on the couch beside her son-stocking feet up on the table, a bowl of popcorn between them-and I hung up.

I found the leftover spaghetti in a Tupperware bowl behind a twelve-pack of Budweiser long neck bottles in the refrigerator. I pulled down a frying pan from the rack, set it on the burner, turned the dial to medium, and tossed in a tablespoon of butter. When the butter had melted and the hissing sound was louder than the smooth licks of Bucky Pizzarelli’s jazz guitar, I added the spaghetti and fried it until it was finished. I ate while spinning the Zoot Sims album a second time. When I was through, I put the dishes into the sink and turned out all the lights. I let the record spin once more. Now that Fran was gone, music kept me company in the darkness.

I put my head on the pillow, closed my eyes.

I thought about Pelton and his phone messages.

Sooner or later, I’d have to give him an explanation for Vasquez’s escape. Sooner or later I’d have to give him two more names to scratch from the guard roster. I pictured Pelton’s puffy red face. I pictured his small, bloodshot eyes-eyes that seemed to have died during all the years that had passed since we’d been friends. I pictured his wife, Rhonda, laying one on me on the patio of the governor’s home. My mind raced. I pictured those two kids riding their bikes up and down that steep pit wall, their cherubic faces lighting up when they told me to screw. I felt the dentist’s gentle grip when we shook hands. I thought about a woman on her knees. A woman with a small, heart-shaped tattoo on her neck giving head to a man with no face. I thought about Logan and his lies, or what appeared to be lies, anyway. I saw Mastriano laid out in a hospital bed, maybe faking sleep, a smile plastered on his face. I couldn’t help but make a connection between Logan, Mastriano, and Eduard Vasquez, a connection that went beyond corrections officers and their prisoner.

I rolled over onto my side of the bed, put my face in the pillow, tried to forget about the whole thing. I tried to clear my mind and I tried not to think about a homemade shiv pressed up against Wash Pelton’s neck back in September 1971 during the Attica riots. I tried not to think about that Buick running the stop sign a year ago. Eventually, I would fall asleep to the angelic sounds of a jazz guitar and a soprano saxophone singing in my ears, like music by moonlight.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

TUESDAY MORNING I WAS up before my six-thirty alarm. I tuned in to Good Morning America on the small color set as I sat on the edge of the bed and slipped into my running shorts and shoes. While I stretched, the local news came on for their small segment.

The headline came at me like a bullet.

“Eduard Vasquez, the convicted murderer of an area police officer, escaped from Green Haven Maximum Security Penitentiary yesterday afternoon,” announced the anchorwoman, “after a vanload of shotgun-toting assailants took him away from the officers in charge of transporting him from the prison to the office of A.J. Royale, a Newburgh dentist who often works on inmates. We spoke with Robert Logan, the senior officer involved in the incident.”

Logan had his navy-blue Corrections baseball cap pulled far back on his round head. Someone had added gauze and medical tape to the small bruise above his right eye, making it look a lot worse than it had yesterday afternoon when he had given me his statement. Now he was all frowns as he balanced himself with a cane. The bastard was faking it, making it look like he had withstood one hell of a beating in the name of God, country, and duty.

“Those men came up on us with shotguns,” he said, his voice trembling, a glassy, wild look in his eyes. “They pressed the barrels against our heads, made us get down on our knees, threatened to shoot us if we didn’t do exactly what they said.”

He really poured it on.

“Then they beat us. My partner, Bernie Mastriano, got knocked out cold. We were gagged and locked up together with my own cuffs. They stuffed us into the station wagon and hauled us out to the gravel pit. They assaulted us, tortured us, did unspeakable things.” Logan looked shamefully to the floor, as though for effect. It was hard to tell whether his tears were genuine or fake. But to me, the report was like a cup of black coffee and just as bitter. I thought, here’s Logan’s and Mastriano’s chance to gain public sentiment before anyone has the true gen about the escape. Here’s their shot to get people on their side, to make themselves look like helpless victims.

The report shifted from Green Haven to Newburgh General. There, lying in his bed, just as still and silent as when I’d seen him yesterday afternoon, was Officer Bernard Mastriano. Now he had a white bandage wrapped around his head and an IV needled into his arm. A heart monitor was clearly visible in the background. If you listened closely, you could hear the steady beats of his heart over the small speaker of my old portable TV.

Many people surrounded Mastriano.

Family and friends. Standing room only. The crowd of people overflowed out into the hall; people were holding lit candles in their hands. A priest wearing a black habit with a purple cassock draped over his shoulders like a scarf stood just a few feet away from the hospital bed. Anchorwoman Chris Collins stood before the camera. Collins was a good looking woman with dark, nearly black eyes and black hair cut just to her shoulders. This morning she wore a tight, fire engine red mini-dress and matching blazer.

“We’re here in the room of Officer Bernard Mastriano,” said Collins directly into the TV camera, “one of the men in charge of Eduard Vasquez when he escaped from Green Haven Prison yesterday afternoon while on a routine trip to a dentist in Newburgh. From what we can make out so far, Mastriano was beaten severely about the head with the back end of a shotgun, until rendered unconscious. Now we’re going to speak with Dr. Arnold Fleischer, the physician attending Mastriano, to hear the diagnosis.”

For a second or two, confusion overtook the report so that Chris Collins was forced to back off and away from the camera. From out of the crowd emerged the doctor I’d spoken with on Monday. I noticed that the little guy hadn’t changed his clothes in all that time. The cameraman gave him a full body shot, then panned in. He wore that same tweed jacket, same white button-down shirt, same running shoes. His thick, curly black hair was mussed up. He wore a stethoscope around his neck. More for show, I thought, than need.

Chris Collins stuffed a microphone in his face. “Can you tell us, Dr. Fleischer, just what you know up to this point about Mr. Mastriano’s condition?”

Fleischer bowed his head toward the mike. He came close to pressing his lips against it. “Mr. Mastriano was brought to us yesterday afternoon,” he said pensively. “He bled badly from a wound in the back of the head, near the Circle of Willis.” Fleischer turned his head and pointed out the area on his own body to demonstrate for the viewers. “It then took me several hours to stem the bleeding and suture the lemon-sized wound. Mister Mastriano has never regained consciousness.”

“What, then, is his diagnosis, Doctor?” probed the reporter.

“It’s difficult for me to speculate. But if he pulls through, there’s a good chance that there will have been significant damage to the nervous system.”

“Can you speculate as to the extent, Doctor?”

“We’ll just have to wait…and pray.” Fleischer bowed his head, eyes focused on the floor.

Meanwhile the reporter turned back to the camera as the little doctor faded back into the crowd. “A decorated officer of the law, a dedicated son, struck down while in the line of duty. Just what questions does this unfortunate incident raise about the nature of crime and punishment in our community? How safe are our prisons? Just who is responsible for this lapse of security? Should Eduard Vasquez have been allowed outside prison grounds? Is it a habit that wardens allow cop-killers to just roam the city streets when they should be locked away safely behind bars? And if the warden allows a notorious killer like Vasquez out, shouldn’t he be certain that his corrections officers are prepared to handle a disaster such as the one that occurred yesterday afternoon, with weapons and a more concentrated support unit?”

The camera faded away from the reporter and zoomed in to Mastriano’s room where a short, rather plump woman with jet-black hair and equally black clothing was seated at the bedside, Mastriano’s lifeless hand in hers. Mastriano’s mother, no doubt. In a word, she looked destroyed. You could see the tears streaming down her face. Either she was putting on an act as good as her son’s or she was as fooled as the rest of the people surrounding him.

“This is Chris Collins reporting live from Newburgh General for Newscenter 13. Now back to our live broadcast of Good Morning America.”

I don’t think five seconds had elapsed before the phone rang.

I got up off the bed, turned off the TV, and picked up the receiver. I said Val instead of hello.

“Some crazy shit, huh boss?”

“I saw the report. Logan knows full well he’s forbidden to make any comments to the press.”

“Haven’t had your coffee yet, have you, boss?”

“Now I know Logan has got to be lying.”

“There’s a real problem here, isn’t there?”

“If I don’t start getting answers before fingers start pointing in all directions, it could mean any one of our asses in a sling.”

“When will you be in?”

“Later. I’ve got somebody to see up in Albany first”

“Anyone I know?”

“Norman,” I said. There was a sigh.

“Keeper,” Val said, “tell Mike I was asking for him.” Val Antonelli and Mike Norman had been something of an item not too long ago, until Mike’s moods and his drinking habits became a bit too much. Even though she found it impossible to be his girl, I couldn’t help but think that Val had a real soft spot for him. The strange thing, though, was that whenever she mentioned his name, I got sort of jealous. I knew it was silly, juvenile even. But I really couldn’t help the way I felt.

“Sure thing, Val,” I said, my free hand held out in front of my face, fingers crossed. “I’ll remember to give Mike your best.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

LT. MIKE NORMAN SAT in his office sipping from a coffee mug with the words I LOVE MY JOB! stenciled around the rim in bold black letters. When he took a drink from the mug, you could see the word NOT! imprinted on the bottom in the same lettering.

I hadn’t seen him in a few months, but he looked more haggard than usual.

Norman’s face was gaunt, like his skin was too tight for his cheekbones. His eyes were heavy and bloodshot, and what should have been a five o’clock shadow looked more like the emergence of a full-grown beard. A wrinkled and tattered blue blazer hung on a metal coat rack attached to the back of the office door. Mike had his shirt sleeves rolled up, and a brown necktie hung down low on his open-collared shirt. A leather shoulder holster wrapped around his thin shoulders like a harness, his 9-millimeter Glock stuffed under his left arm, grip forward, easy access.

All the New York State cops were using porcelain Glocks now. Just one way to keep up with the underworld competition. A Glock had no safety other than a trigger you depressed twice just to get off the initial round. From there you kept the finger pressure on until the magazine was empty. But once you chambered a round, you practically had to take the pistol apart in order to de-chamber it without firing. I think it’s fair to say that a Glock is a weapon for a man or woman who shoots for keeps. I’d fired one a couple of times, but never requisitioned one because, to be perfectly frank, they scared the hell out of me. Imagine a guy who’s at best a fair-to-middling shot packing a piece without a safety?

Mike and I shook hands and sat down-Mike at his desk, feet up on top, me on the couch by the door.

“How’s Val?” he asked. “She still with you?”

So much for keeping her out of this.

“So far,” I said.

“You’re having a bad week,” Mike said, taking a hit off his I LOVE MY JOB! mug, “and it isn’t even Tuesday afternoon yet. That’s not like the keeper I remember. How’d you manage it?”

“You’re the detective,” I said, glad that he dropped the Val issue right away. “You tell me.”

“Vasquez flew the coop, huh, just like that?”

“Bolted,” I said.

Mike gave me one of those squinty-eyed, tight-lipped grins cops seem to perfect by their twenty-fifth year on the job. He opened up his bottom drawer, took out a bottle of ginger brandy, added a shot to his coffee, then gave me a wide-eyed look that said, Join me.

I nodded, not out of thirst, but out of consideration. Mike put out another mug, poured a shot.

I sat my briefcase on my lap, opened it, and slipped out a large freezer bag containing Logan’s.38 along with the live rounds and the key to the cuffs. I dropped the lot onto Norman’s desk. Then I set the briefcase back down on the floor and stood up.

“What’s all this?” Mike said, leaning forward, elbows on the desk top.

“I prove the only prints on this stuff are Robert Logan’s and Bernie Mastriano’s, I prove the story of three shotgun-packing assailants assisting with Vasquez’s escape is a lie. A cover-up for something else.”

“You got a hunch?”

“More like a theory,” I said, staring up at a calendar that occupied an otherwise bare wall to the right-hand side of Norman’s desk. “I smell the proverbial rats and they take the form of Logan and Mastriano.”

“I saw the morning news,” Norman said. “That scene with Mastriano’s mother almost had me bawling.”

I nodded and looked at the perfect X’s Mike had slashed through each of the square calendar days as they’d passed, one after the other. Only five days X’d out so far in May. By the end of the afternoon, there’d be a sixth.

“You think they made up that story about being attacked?”

“I had Logan in my office only a few hours after the escape. Not a single mark on the guy. I saw Mastriano in the hospital a few hours later and, again, the same story. Not a mark on his baby face.”

“Prints or no prints,” Norman said, “you’re not gonna prove a goddamned thing.”

“But it’ll be a start.”

“So who’s running the show down there, anyway?”

“A guy from Stormville PD by the name of Schillinger.”

“Don’t know him,” Norman said. He drank and frowned, either at me or at the cheap brandy in his old coffee. He broke the seal on the freezer bag. Then he pulled out his handkerchief and shrouded the fingers and palm of his right hand before he gripped the pistol. He closed his left eye and sighted in on the short, four-inch barrel. “Don’t see many of these anymore. A genuine relic.”

“You can help?” I asked. “Off the record?” I pulled out a Pall Mall, lit it with the Zippo. Then I took a sip of the booze and wished I hadn’t. Cheap ginger brandy, sold by the gallon for a drinker like Norman who didn’t care how bad his medicine tasted.

Mike straightened up, opened his top drawer, and placed the pistol, bullets, and key ring inside. He closed it, locked it.

“I can help,” he said. “But I get caught, we both go up shit’s creek. Obstructing justice, manipulation of evidence just for starters. Some serious charges going to point you in the face like this Glock hiding inside my armpit.” He downed his coffee and brandy so that the word NOT! stared me in the face again. This time Mike filled his mug with brandy only.

“I’ve considered obstruction already,” I said. “It’s a chance I’ve got to take before Logan and Mastriano go too far with the press.”

“Logan’s not supposed to be opening up his mouth, huh?”

“Department rules. Unwritten, but rules nonetheless.”

Mike smiled.

“It’ll cost you, Keeper. I mean, I’m closing in on retirement, and you know I’ve still got to maintain my desirable attributes as a detective.”

I blew out some smoke slowly.

“Name your price,” I said.

Mike leaned back, crossed his hands in his lap, looked up at the ceiling.

“Don’t rush me,” he said. “Delicate operation like this takes some thinking over.”

I sat down on the armrest of the couch, half sitting, half standing.

“Any ideas, copper?”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ve got it.”

“Uh-oh. Last time I saw that look on your face, I had to buy doughnuts every day for the month of July. Summer of 73, I believe it was. We were at the training academy with Wash Pelton. Cost me fifty bucks in lard and caffeine.”

“This evidence could save your ass, Keeper,” he pointed out.

“Worth more than mere doughnuts, wouldn’t you say?” The smile on his face grew wider.

“Definitely more than doughnut-serious,” I agreed.

“Okay,” Norman said, “I’ve got it. I agree to pull this favor, lunch is on you once a week for the entire summer.”

“Burger King, Wendy’s, Jack-in-the-Box, McDonald’s, Big Kahuna Burger?”

“None of that crap, Marconi.”

I looked at the ceiling. The darkness of Norman’s office made the roof nearly invisible, like a black sky on an overcast night.

“No choice?”

“No choice, pal.”

“Okay,” I said. “Name your venue.”

Norman thought hard for a second or two. He took another drink from his mug.

“Jack’s Oyster House, every Friday, twelve noon. Meet me in the bar for drinks. You buy, of course.”

Jack’s Oyster House was one of the oldest and most expensive eateries on State Street in downtown Albany. Owned by the same Jewish family for nearly four generations, Jack’s was strictly a New York-style, businessman’s restaurant where men dressed in tuxedos and long white aprons served you Beefeater martinis and bloody porterhouse steaks.

“I can’t talk you down?” I posed.

“Them’s the terms, pal.”

“Anyone finds out about this, could get us both in big trouble.”

“Not me, pal,” he said, raising his hands. “You came in here, threatened me with my life. I felt intimidated, had nightmares, began drinking heavily…“ His voice took on a mock quiver.

“You wouldn’t rat on an old buddy, would you, Mike?”

“You ever hear Mike Norman call himself a hero, Keeper? You and Pelton are the ones who made it to the big time. Me, I passed out at Attica. Commission’s never let me live that one down. Nervous breakdown they called it. Catatonic state. Shit, I was a kid, nineteen years old. Those rebel inmates were going to kill us. Changing departments hasn’t helped. Now twenty-five lost years spent in law enforcement and I still can’t make it past lieutenant. They gave me this office-this miserable closet in the corner. But you know what? I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

He took another deep swig from the mug.

“For a cop,” I said, “you’ve got a shaky moral foundation and a bad attitude.”

Norman nodded thoughtfully, as if that was the point. And I guess it was.

“Questionable at best,” he said. Then, taking another pull on his brandy. “Tell you what, you get caught and you get busted, I promise to visit you in the can every Friday, twelve noon, with file sandwiches.”

“File sandwiches?”

“Yours comes with a file stuffed between the ham and cheese.” Planting another smile on that tired, gaunt face.

“Now I see why we’ve been pals all these years,” I said.

“Hey,” Mike said, blowing his nose with the same hankie he’d used on Logan’s.38, “what are friends for?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME to remember everything that happened during those four hopeless days at Attica. Much of it is distorted, the memories jumbled and mixed together. What I do remember has, over the years, taken on all the sharpness and vividness of the present. What I mean is, there are certain events that repeatedly occur in my mind, as if they have nothing to do with the past at all, as though they are always happening over and over again in the present. Whether or not the events actually happened that way doesn’t matter anymore. Because when it comes to memories, what counts is not accuracy, but the feelings they call up.

I can still see Mike Norman sitting with his back against the stone wall, knees pressed up against his chest. Pelton sits beside me, Indian-style. We say nothing, do nothing. We just stare at Mike, who hasn’t been sick to his stomach for an hour now, or what seems an hour, anyway. It’s hard to tell. The sun is going down over the yard. Bonfires lighting up the night make the yard seem oddly festive, like a carnival of death.

Some of the inmates have been busy hammering together a large platform out of the loose boards and plywood pulled from the physical plant. From here the platform looks like a staging area of some kind. Maybe a gallows. Some of the inmates come into the yard with Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, little bags of potato chips, and other junk looted from the commissary. They offer us nothing to eat, and I know better than to ask. Occasionally a black-and-white chopper makes a flyby, shining bright white spotlights against the gravel floor of the open yard. When it passes, the inmates throw rocks and shout obscenities, as if words alone will bring the chopper down.

What’s the point of choppers, I think.

What can they possibly do for us from the air?

Mike hugs his legs and stares straight ahead, but I’m not sure he’s seeing anything at all. Wash asks me what we should do about him. Nothing we can do, I say, but wait. But then I see a CO running like a bat out of hell from a gang of six rebel inmates. He is barefoot, dressed only in his uniform trousers. He tries to evade the rebels by attempting to climb from the first-story gallery up to the second-story along the steel bars that run vertically against the face of D-Block. I can see his bare chest and face pressed up against the bars from where I sit. The gang of six inmates comes after him from behind. They claw at him while he panics and holds to those iron bars for his life. But there are too many inmates. They are enraged, crazy. They climb up after the CO, pull him down off the wall. The last I hear of him, he is kicking and screaming and gagging. “They’re cutting my throat!” he screams. “Cutting! My! Throat!” I close my eyes, try to think of Fran. But it’s no use. The bloody gurgling sound is so loud it echoes throughout the yard, reverberates against the insides of my skull, kills the image of Fran.

Then there is nothing.

I go dizzy, like the entire prison has been pulled out from under me. Pelton buries his face in his hands and cries. But it’s Mike who takes it the hardest. He passes out, just like that. A little smile forms at the corners of his mouth, a slight, wry, angelic smile. Peaceful. Like he’s dreaming a sweet dream.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

GILES GARVIN OCCUPIED A single ten-by-twelve cell within a row of five so-called special cells. The cells are situated on a fourth-floor wing of the administration building and accessed primarily by a freight elevator with a closed-circuit camera unit installed in the ceiling. Anyone transported up or down the elevator to and from the special cells is video-taped. For code reasons, there is a fire escape located at the opposite end of this wing that contains a Plexiglas-walled guard shack, video surveillance monitors, padlocked closets with restraining equipment, and tranquilizers. For security reasons, the fire escape is barred off and bolted closed. There is an additional wall of iron bars outside the usual set of bars that enclose the cells. It’s because of this second set of vertical iron bars that inmates and guards alike take a certain pride in calling this special place “the cage.”

The cage houses inmates who pose a greater-than-average threat to the general population. Inmates who get a special kick out of stabbing a fellow inmate directly in the face, for instance. The mutilation that results is the brand or tattoo handed down by a man of power, a man to be respected.

The cage not only protects the general population from its more lethal killers. It also serves the opposite function. It protects marked men who wouldn’t last a single day in general population from being offed with a shiv to the liver.

Inside the cage these men could be kept under twenty-four-hour supervision-no outside contact, no chow in the mess hall, no television privileges, no visitors, few phone calls, no windows or fresh air. The only exercise is one hour per day of supervised recreation in a fifty-by-fifty gravel-covered yard normally set aside for condemned prisoners. Other than that, the immediate landscape of the caged prisoner is concrete walls and floors; iron bars; stainless-steel toilets, sinks, bunks and Plexiglas shields.

This was the price of protection.

Garvin’s cell was covered with just such a Plexiglas shield. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Latino-and-black mix from the streets of New York City who, before being shipped to Green Haven, used to wait outside grade schools, lure kids into his van, take them for a ride into the country, and touch them a little before he wrapped their heads in bed sheets and plastic shopping bags. He’d then dismember their bodies, and scatter their body parts throughout Dutchess County. Maybe a head in a streambed, an arm in a wooded area south of Catskill, a full torso propped upright against a cemetery gravestone with the feet, hands, and head cut off. His most famous case involved a six-year-old beauty-pageant winner whom he gagged and bound and tossed into a dumpster alive, which he then doused with gas and set on fire. The fire inside the dumpster burned with such intensity that all that was found of the little girl some four hours later after Garvin had phoned in the whereabouts of his latest victim, were a couple of bone fragments and some teeth. Some days later, after arresting Garvin on a petty shoplifting charge, forensic scientists were able to extract enough DNA from the six-year old’s teeth to match it with skin and blood removed from under his filthy fingernails. The tiny bit of DNA evidence was all it took to put the mark on the monster and, in turn, send him away for the rest of his life. The only thing keeping him from lethal injection was the possibility of insanity.

Since Garvin couldn’t strangle, burn, or dismember kids anymore, he had become one hell of a good drug salesman, which seemed oddly out of character for him, since drug dealing, at base, was a hustler’s business, not a cold-blooded killer’s. For his own protection, he spent a lot of time in the cage. New York State wasn’t about to make the same mistake the state of Wisconsin had made with Jeffrey Dahmer.

On this Tuesday, he slithered out from the dark regions of his cramped cell and pressed his body up against the vertical bars when I was let into the cage by the presiding CO. He gave me a teeth-biting sneer that wasn’t much of a welcome wagon as the CO took his time manually releasing the locking device on the cell. He stood there with his short, well-groomed hair and his wiry, vascular, copper-colored body.

I stepped inside.

The CO closed the gate behind me and moved back to his post at the edge of the guard shack where the electronic panels powering the cell doors were located.

For now, I took a seat on Garvin’s stainless-steel bunk while he used the rim of the stainless-steel toilet as a chair. He was dressed only in gray inmate pants, his torso exposed. His chest was mapped with scars and pockmarks, trophies earned from attacks by rival gang members. On his left forearm was a tattoo of a rose. A very beautiful tattoo of a red rose. He had a thin, coarse face, like a man who had spent too much time in the sun before coming to the iron house. Tattooed to his cheek, below his left eye, were four tiny blue teardrops. His hair was bleach-blond, neatly cropped, slicked back against his head.

I gave Garvin a Pall Mall, lit it for him. He blew the smoke out slowly through his nostrils. In the meantime, I could hear shouts and jeers coming from the caged animals near Garvin’s cell. “I want my lawyer. Rehabilitation, shit. I want my lawyer…” They went on and on, not making sense, but making a plea nonetheless, because that’s all they had left to do. But like living beside a railroad track, after a while you just don’t hear the trains anymore.

“He had like this scheme going,” whispered Garvin a minute or two after I asked him his thoughts on the escaped Vasquez. “Years ago, Eddy knew he had to buy into the program. It was his way up the chain of command, so to speak. Wasn’t long before he was pushing like one thousand, two thousand pounds inside and outside the joint.” Garvin looked up at me. His smile was oddly attractive, oddly confident. “Over-the-counter trading he called it,” he said, exposing a gold tooth, a shining gem amongst a mouthful of rotting molars, incisors, and cuspids.

“What about the escape?” I said, laying my hands out flat on the cold steel bed.

Garvin faced the sky, blew perfect smoke rings that dissipated against the concrete-paneled ceiling. “Orders would come in from the inmates and visitors. Manhattan street prices prevailed, no more, no less, far as we could tell. Keep market value consistent. That was the motto, like that was the fucking rule. Orders left the prison with the visitors, along with logistical information…You know, like where and when the drop would take place. Same thing would happen if the drop was going to be on the inside. Course, that was much trickier. Shit came in and out with the visitor, hidden inside a deflated balloon stuffed up his ass. Or, more likely, stuff came through in bulk, through the service entrance, with the deliveries and the laundry.”

“So tell me something I don’t already know, Giles,” I said, holding out the pack of cigarettes for him again. “I mean, why does a guy like Vasquez even sell shit when he doesn’t have a prayer of seeing the outside?”

Without hesitating he took another cigarette from the pack and lit it off the one just smoked.

“Okay,” he said, “all right. Like Vasquez was selling so he’d have a nest egg for him and his girlfriend, what’s her name?”

“You tell me.”

He smiled a mouth full of black-and-brown teeth, the one capped in gold out of place and sparkling in the raw white light that came from the overhead ceiling fixture.

“I don’t have no names,” he said. “But I do know this about Vasquez. He was selling shit so he and his girl could have something to live on down in Mexico when he finally got his chance to split. But like, he couldn’t split right away. Like he was waiting for the perfect security personnel, the right guards, you dig it? Eddy, he’s a motherfucker for sure, but he’s one smart motherfucker. He knew he had only one chance, one shot. He had to get hold of some guards who didn’t have no problem taking a bribe.”

I put my hand in my pocket, fingered the envelope with Cassandra Wolf’s address on it.

“You want to give me the names of the guards who were working with Vasquez?”

“Yeah,” he said, leaning back against the concrete wall, laying his tattooed forearm across his lap. “Like I really, really do, Mister Warden sir.”

He looked into my eyes and he smiled that killer smile. I wondered if it was the same smile he’d used when he lured those kids into his van. I guess this was the part of the one-on-one where I was supposed to feel a slight chill shoot up from the base of my spine. I wasn’t sure if my lack of feeling was more an indication of Garvin’s lack of effect on me or my own desensitization. On the other hand, there was something very practical and useful going on here and I didn’t want to blow it by getting on Garvin’s bad side, although I’m not so sure he had a good side at all. Fact is, it wasn’t often that an inmate would just open up about a fellow inmate unless some serious shit was going down between them.

“So why are you telling me all this, Giles?”

Garvin’s already-hard face went noticeably taut His skin turned fire-engine red. He used his lit cigarette as a pointer when he extended his fist to my face.

“Should I say, Mister Warden sir, that Eduard Vasquez, motherfucker that he is, is on my shit list? Should I say that Vasquez, when I get to him, is like one dead motherfucker? Would that be incriminating myself, Mister Warden, sir? Because if it is, I’m long past sympathy for the devil.”

I opened up to the voices of the other caged men. “Hey Warden Marconi, I know you’re in there…“ I heard the voices until I would not allow myself to listen to them anymore.

In the meantime, Garvin settled down a little.

“But I don’t give away information without a price,” he said, blowing another stream of smoke into the sweat-soaked air.

“Listen, Giles,” I said, wondering just what Vasquez had done to double-cross him, “I can’t do a thing about your sentence. Those kids you murdered are too much. But I can make it easier for you in here.”

He glared at me with translucent blue eyes hidden inside chiseled cavities. The four baby-blue teardrops tattooed to his face were bitter reminders of the four children he had murdered and mutilated.

“But first,” I said, “give me names.”

The killer looked to one side of his cell, then to the other as if expecting to see something besides concrete, steel and slime.

“Okay, Mister Warden, sir,” he said, leaning up and resting his elbows on his knees. “But you gotta promise me one thing.”

Me, nodding.

“That when it comes time, you speak up for me.”

Garvin had no chance for parole. If the jury hadn’t wrestled with the sanity question, they would have sent him straight to death row. I had no idea what Vasquez could have done to betray him.

“No deals. Any deal gets made, I make it.”

Garvin spread his thin legs wide, grabbed his balls.

“Blow me,” he said.

“You know the score, Garvin. Word gets out I gave you a deal, my name don’t mean diddly in the iron house.”

Garvin dropped the spent cigarette through his spread legs so that it landed in the toilet. I heard the quick hiss of the doused flame. He leaned back against the concrete wall. When I offered him a third cigarette, he refused, choosing instead to cross his arms against his chest as though in protest.

“Names,” I pressed.

He hesitated for a second or two.

“Fuck you,” he said. “Like you don’t want to help me, then fuck you.”

“No deals.”

“You just want those names so you can save your ass. You ain’t got no interest in helping me. I read the papers too, Warden. Like, you been slipping since your wife got killed. Like, maybe your mind just ain’t on your job no more.”

“Yeah,” I said, standing up from the stainless-steel bed, nodding for the guard to release the cell door, “I’m a million miles away.”

“No deals,” Garvin said, “then I got nothing to say.”

The cell door opened, electronically this time-an iron cell within an iron cage.

“Go ahead,” spat Garvin, laughing now, showing me his gold tooth, “waste your time, man. Like ‘California Dreamin.’ Just like that stupid-ass song. You be real safe, you be real warm if you was in L.A.”

I turned to leave.

“Don’t you see, Warden, California was never real. Like California was just a big beautiful dream. You are the warden, aren’t you? Like, you can do anything.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m the big boss, Giles.”

I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was trying to tell me, if he was trying to tell me anything at all. It was rants like this that had spared him from lethal injection when judge and jury handed down their sentence. Nutty rants and raves that made little or no sense.

But then, Garvin had been on the money about one thing.

Since Fran died, I’d been a million miles away. If my mind had been on my job, then maybe-just maybe-I would not have let Vasquez go like that. Civil liberties or no civil liberties.

I tossed the pack of cigarettes onto Garvin’s bunk and got the hell out.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

IT WAS QUARTER PAST five on a Tuesday afternoon. I took a fresh pack of smokes from the carton stored in the right-hand drawer of my desk. Val Antonelli and Dan Sloat had left for the day, an unavoidable situation that always made me feel a little empty inside. I checked my voice mail. Only one person had left a message. What I mean is, at least six other calls had been placed but the caller or callers had hung up without saying a word about who they were, what they wanted, or why they had to talk to me.

In the prison business, hang-ups were never a good sign.

Pelton, I thought. Pelton or the press.

Probably both.

I popped a cigarette from the new pack, lit it, and leaned back in my swivel chair. Then I reached over and hit the playback button.

Keeper, Schillinger at Stormville PD letting you know we got dead ends all around. Nothing in Vasquez’s cell. Nothing from the roadblocks. Nothing from the California people in Olancha. Just dead ends. We’ve contacted the FBI, and as I speak, border patrol is doing what they can for us in case Vasquez is headed south, but who knows. That’s it, that’s the score. Just dead ends, you know. Call me back with anything you find out. Oh yeah, one more thing. I need to tell you that tomorrow we should sit down and talk about what went wrong on your end. You have a good night now.

Detective Martin Schillinger hung up having delivered his little threat. Tomorrow he wanted to talk. Over my dead body, I thought. Or maybe that’s what someone had in mind. I found it surprising that he never once mentioned the photos Dan and I had handed over to him inside Vasquez’s empty cell. He must have examined them. To me, a photo of some woman with a heart-shaped tattoo on her neck was a clue that deserved follow-up. But then, he was the detective and I was the concerned warden.

I played Schillinger’s message back again. When it finished, the receiver hung up and a dial tone took over. Then nothing. I played the message back one last time. It didn’t change, so I erased it.

I looked at my watch. Five-eighteen on a hot, still afternoon in May.

Happy hour. What was there to feel happy about?

I poured myself a drink anyway, and decided to put a couple down for all the wrong reasons.

If I called Schillinger I would probably catch him in his office. But what would I have to tell him about the escape? He’d want the truth and I had no idea about the truth. I thought about Logan’s statement, about the three armed assailants who had beaten him and Mastriano. I thought about the little bump above Logan’s left eye and then suddenly I pictured the wide white medical bandage that he had wrapped around his head, specifically for a television audience. I pictured Mastriano lying in a hospital bed, his mother sitting by his side, her hands clasped around his. I pictured Giles Garvin blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling of his cell.

I took another sip of the whiskey. While the drink was going down smooth and warm against my pipes, it dawned on me. Giles Garvin. That stuff he’d been rambling on about, just before I’d left his cell. California dreamin’. I thought about Schillinger’s message, how they had contacted the people in Olancha, California. I thought about the envelope I found in Vasquez’s cell yesterday afternoon. I pulled it out of my pocket and studied it in the white light that came from my desk lamp. There wasn’t much to look at, just a typical envelope addressed to Vasquez with a return address from Cassandra Wolf in Olancha. But then I looked at the postmark. The circular mark inlaid over a rectangle was barely legible. But when I put it under the light, I could just about make out the letters. The mark was dated 1 May 1997, but it hadn’t come from Olancha, California, at all. The goddamned letter had been postdated at an office in Athens, New York. No wonder Vasquez had eluded the road blocks. No wonder Schillinger and his men had nothing to go on. Vasquez must have somehow made the eighty-mile trek north to meet Cassandra Wolf in Athens.

I sat back in my swivel chair, smoked the cigarette, drank the whiskey.

The importance of what I’d done-withholding police evidence and hampering a state investigation-kicked in, turned my stomach inside out. Maybe Garvin was right. Maybe I was trying to get at the truth just to save my behind for not being more careful when it came to transporting inmates outside the prison. At best, I could just keep avoiding Schillinger the way I’d been avoiding Pelton for the last twenty-four hours. Avoid him and hope he focused his attention on other things, like where to begin looking for Vasquez. But then, I wanted to be the first one to find Vasquez, have him give me the true gen on what was happening to me and to Green Haven.

I poured myself another whiskey. Like bad medicine, I downed it in one swallow. I poured another and drank that down, just as fast. I felt the liquor warm my insides, like an embrace from a beautiful woman, and just as tender. I poured one last shot, took the phone off the hook, closed my eyes, and embraced the woman.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I LEFT THE OFFICE at 6:55 and arrived home fifteen minutes later. I was groggy from the whiskey, but not so dazed that I couldn’t catch the rest of the seven o’clock news. The CBS news anchor spoke from his New York studio to a reporter inside the hospital room of Green Haven CO Bernard Mastriano. Mastriano had attracted national attention. The reporter stood exactly where Chris Collins had stood earlier, at the foot of Mastriano’s bed so that you could see him and his mother by his side.

“Has there been any word on the possible location of Eduard Vasquez?” the anchor asked the reporter.

“No such luck. All we can tell at this point is that roadblock and surveillance efforts have proven unsuccessful. In fact, there’s speculation that Vasquez may have already escaped New York state altogether. Perhaps by now, more than twenty-four hours after the initial breakout, Vasquez has even made it out of the country.”

Athens, I thought. He went to Athens, New York, to hook up with his girl.

“Has any reason been given for why such a dangerous criminal as Eduard Vasquez would have been allowed to visit a dentist on the outside?”

“That answer can only come from the warden of Green Haven Prison, Mr. Jack ‘Keeper’ Marconi, and he’s been unavailable for comment thus far.”

“Let me get this straight,” the anchor went on, pretending to put his field reporter on the spot. “The warden of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison is not guarding his inmates?”

“That seems to be the case.”

There was a slight pause in the report, as if to allow that little exchange to sink in below the belt of every American tuned in to the broadcast. Then the anchor continued with his questions.

“Any word on the present condition of the corrections officer who was struck down?”

“Only that he’s unconscious and still in intensive care and will be for some days.”

With that, the anchor turned in his swivel chair and faced the camera. “That was William Anderson reporting live from the Newburgh General Hospital room of Corrections Officer Bernard Mastriano, the young man whose life hangs in the balance after suffering a severe beating on Monday afternoon when Eduard Vasquez, a convicted cop-killer, escaped from Green Haven Maximum Security Prison in Stormville, New York.”

I got up from the bed, turned off the television. A swift kick in the cojones would have been an improvement over the way I felt. I took the envelope out of my pocket and stared at the Athens postmark. I knew I had to go to Athens now. I had no choice. My reputation had just been slandered on national television. Someone was covering up something and gradually making me the scapegoat.

I had to find Vasquez, bring him back.

I took the phone in my bedroom off the hook. Then I went into the living room and spun Bucky Pizzarelli and Zoot Sims again, since it was still on the turntable from the night before. I went back into the bedroom and undressed.

I hadn’t had any dinner yet. But I poured one final drink. I considered having a few more drinks, maybe even getting drunk. But I couldn’t allow that to happen. I couldn’t relinquish control when it was still so early in the game. I had to stay cool and sober, because this was no game; it was my life. I put the glass down, turned out the light, slipped into bed, and closed my eyes.

It was only seven-thirty in the evening.

I tried to clear my mind, but it was impossible. In the end I went to sleep to the vision of a heart-shaped tattoo.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I HAD NO WAY of telling how long I’d been asleep when the front door opened wide and the living room lights came on. I’d been dreaming of Fran again; feeling her beside me, touching me, her lips pressed against mine, my hands against the small of her back, our naked bodies together in bed. Then the dream shifted suddenly so that Fran and I were prisoners sharing a cell. Logan and Mastriano were breaking in during the middle of the night to shake us down. I could smell the trash when it goes ripe in the prison galley. I could feel the way the hot night made the sweat ooze from my back and from the concrete ceiling overhead. I could see the tight faces of the two guards as they came through the open cell gate, arms outstretched, going for our necks. I could feel Fran in my arms, smell her sweet familiar smell, feel her hair on my lips. Then my eyes focused and I realized I wasn’t inside a jail cell at all. Fran was no longer there and I saw the figure of a man standing in my bedroom doorway.

This was no dream.

Zoot Sims and Bucky Pizzarelli had stopped jamming.

My palms and forehead were covered in a layer of sweat.

Too late to reach for the.45 I kept stored under the mattress. Even under the circumstances, I made a mental note to store the weapon in a more accessible place. But then it dawned on me: If this man was a burglar, he hadn’t been very stealthy about breaking and entering. He wasn’t stealing anything.

“Excuse me, sir,” the man said. “You up?”

A polite housebreaker.

I propped myself up on one elbow and squinted. Behind the man, I could see two more men. One tall. One short. They were moving around inside the living room of my state-appointed home examining the framed photographs of my wife on the walls and on the tables. They were picking up the picture frames, studying the different portraits, placing them back down again exactly where they had found them.

“Come on in,” I said. “Who knocks anymore?”

No smiles came from the big man in the doorway. Not even a crack in his stone face.

“Mr. Marconi?” the man inquired, his low baritone voice now sounding somehow familiar.

I nodded.

“You’re wanted in Albany, sir, immediately.”

“If not sooner, right?” Definitely a voice I recognized even if I couldn’t see the face all that clearly in the darkness of the bedroom. I sat all the way up in bed. “Who wants to see me?” I said. But I already knew the answer to that question. I knew that the men had come in through the front door without breaking in, simply because they’d had a key. No need to jimmy the lock or break a window or slide down the chimney for that matter. No need to call the police, because they were the police. They had a key to the place. In fact they probably had keys to all the identical, half a dozen or so, single-story, state-owned homes on this quiet rural road in Stormville.

So that was it, then; that’s where I had heard that voice before. The voice of the man standing in my bedroom doorway belonged to a member of Pelton’s private staff. If he was the kid I remembered, his name was Tommy Walsh. Not a bad kid really. Just a young man robbed from my own staff of COs by Pelton himself when he had come down for one of his surprise inspections a year ago last April. What Tommy lacked in brains he made up for in muscles and loyalty.

“Commissioner Pelton wants to see you now, Mr. Marconi.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Tommy,” I said. “The state of New York includes a telephone in your boss’s budget. Tell him I said to use it.”

“He’s your boss, too, Mr. Marconi,” Tommy tried to remind me. “And my orders are to bring you back with me tonight. So if you don’t mind.”

I glanced at the digital display clock beside the queen-size bed. Two-thirty in the A.M., Wednesday. Tommy took a couple of steps into the bedroom so that now I could make out more of his clean-shaven face in the light that leaked in from the living room. He wore dark slacks, black turtleneck, black blazer, black mailman shoes. His black hair was crew-cut short and he had pork chop sideburns, like Elvis. He was only an inch or two taller than me, but his shoulders were wide enough to fill the doorjamb.

I wiped my hands on my T-shirt. Then I reached over and flicked on the table lamp.

Tommy took a small scrap of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, read it, and put it back.

“Mr. Pelton wants to ask you a few questions about the escape of Eduard Vasquez before he faces the news media at a noontime press conference.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Why don’t you and your boys get back in your car and tell Pelton I’ll see him first thing in the morning.” I turned out the light, slipped back into bed. “And don’t forget to hit the light in the living room on the way out.” I stretched my legs so that my bare feet slipped out from underneath the covers at the foot of the bed.

First came the footsteps-heavy, power-lifter footsteps. Then the light went back on. Even with my eyes closed, the bright white light burned my eyes through the skin of my eyelids.

“I’m real sorry about this, Mr. Marconi,” Tommy said in a deep, whisper voice, “but Mr. Pelton wants to speak with you now. So if you’ll get dressed and come with me…”

I leaned up on one elbow, took a good look into the living room. I could see the two men who had accompanied Tommy Walsh. Nameless men who stood shoulder to shoulder in the hall just outside the bedroom door. They weren’t leaving without me.

I turned over and let out a sigh. “No choice, huh, big fella?”

“No choice, sir.”

I slipped out of bed, stood up, felt my lightheadedness give way to imbalance as I reached out for the end table. “Now I’m going to get dressed,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

Tommy glanced at the open window in the wall opposite the open door. Then he glanced back at me.

“Look-it,” I said, just to be more difficult. “Could you please turn around.”

Tommy stood there, his eyes moving from the open window to me and back to the window again, like I was guilty of something and about to use the window as a means for a quick getaway. But Tommy was a good kid really, and he had been a good guard before Pelton had taken him away from me. He was doing what he did best: following orders.

“Afraid I might run off, Tommy?”

No response other than that stone face staring at me between glances at the open window.

“Lucky we’re just a bunch of dicks here,” I said, dropping my drawers, “or I’d really feel stupid.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I SAT BACK IN an expensive leather chair, not four feet away from Washington Pelton, Commissioner of Corrections for the state of New York, and one-time friend to both Mike Norman and myself. It was our first meeting since last Christmas at the governor’s wassail party. He hadn’t said a word to me since Tommy Walsh had escorted me in some twenty minutes earlier. Instead, he had buried himself in paperwork that, for some reason, had to be expeditiously processed at four-thirty in the morning.

Pelton wore a neatly pressed, black pinstripe suit. A far cry from the stiff, navy-blue uniforms the two of us, along with Mike Norman, had worn when we’d started out at Attica all those years ago. The white shirt beneath his suit was finely pressed. Gold cuff links secured the sleeves at the wrists. The tie was silk. Sitting there, I tried to decide if Pelton was dressed for the new day or had never gone to bed the night before.

Regardless of his sleeping habits, I could see through Pelton’s act.

He would not look up at me until good and ready. I could have ranted and raved. I was pissed off enough to grab him by the collar, pin him down on the floor. Maybe that’s what he wanted. Maybe this was a test to see how far he could push me before I did something stupid like backhand him across the kisser. In the end it would not only have cost me my job and my reputation, it would have put me in jail. I was no longer bargaining from a position of power. Pelton was the commissioner and I answered directly to the commissioner.

For now, I had to be content with looking over his shoulders and studying the many custom-framed photos that decorated the walnut paneling behind his desk. Photos of the commissioner embraced in handshake with the governor; another of him seated at a round table with Ronald Reagan; another with his arm wrapped around George Bush Jr’s shoulders, broad smiles on their faces. Proud Republicans, the entire bunch.

I sat back and took in the floor-to-ceiling, French windows that overlooked the darkened Albany skyline and the Hudson River in the near distance. Outside I could see the occasional flicker of red neon that came from an electric billboard planted on the flat rooftop of a nearby office building.

Pelton’s office was dimly lit from the green-shaded banker’s lamp positioned in the center of his mahogany desk. But here’s the strange part. When he finally looked up at me, his eyes went wide, as though my less than sudden appearance had taken him completely by surprise. He added further to the act by dropping his pen and sitting back in his chair, locking both hands like a headrest behind his gray-haired head. He looked out the window into the early morning darkness.

“Did you get any coffee, Keeper?” His voice was so soft and understated, I barely caught his words. He focused his glance beyond me and directed Tommy to get me that cup of coffee.

“How’ve you been making out these past few months?” he asked. “Since Fran passed away, I mean.”

I nodded, as though saying, Fine, the world is my freakin’ oyster. But I didn’t like Pelton calling me Keeper any more than I liked entering into any courteous small talk with him, especially about Fran. If it had been twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have minded. Twenty years ago, I might have welcomed the small talk. But that was then and since then, we had both changed and gone our separate ways, formed our own alliances and surrendered to our own ambitions. So now I minded.

“They never did find the man who killed her, did they?” Pelton pressed.

“You know full well they never found him,” I said.

Tommy came back into the room and placed a china saucer and cup on the far end of Pelton’s desk. No Styrofoam cups in this right-wing office. Before the big man backed off, he placed a finely polished silver spoon on the saucer.

“How’s Rhonda?” I said, not able to resist the temptation. “Word’s out she’s on the wagon.”

Pelton pretended to think about it for a second or two. Then he let out a fake laugh.

“Keeper,” he said, “now you know full well she isn’t.”

“So you drag me here at four-thirty in the morning to discuss our separate domestic and family affairs.”

“No, Keeper,” Pelton said, shaking his cranium from shoulder to shoulder. “This has nothing whatsoever to do with your immediate family. This is all about your extended prison family. So perhaps I should get right to the point and dispense with any further niceties.”

“Please do. I’d like to get a shave before work.”

Pelton’s face went noticeably taut.

“Tommy,” he said, waving his right arm in the air like a pointer, “send in Mr. Warren, would you, please?”

I heard the door to the office open and then a man walked in and stood between me and Pelton’s desk. It was John “Jake” Warren.

“Keeper, Jake,” Pelton said. “I’m sure you two know one another.”

I didn’t get up, nor did I bother with a handshake. Warren had worked for the commission for almost as long as I had. Now he was Pelton’s second in command, the man directly responsible for security in and out of state prisons. Ironically he made more money than Pelton, the commissioner’s salary not having been raised in more than a decade. But then, Warren didn’t need the money, his family owning and operating a good-size machine works in a small Mohawk River town just north of the Albany city limits. Recently Warren had announced his candidacy for state senate on the Republican ticket. An escape, no matter who was responsible, could only hurt his chances for election, since it clearly represented a breakdown in the system that he oversaw. Warren took a seat behind Pelton’s desk. Clearly he hadn’t been asked to be here in the interest of discussing politics.

“Keeper,” Wash Pelton said, “why don’t you tell Jake and I just what plans you’ve established for getting this man Vasquez back.”

I took a quick glance around the room, because it suddenly dawned on me that Pelton could be taping this conversation. In that case, I had to answer carefully.

“Taking it by the book,” I said. “All the procedural stuff. General lockdown, no authorized field trips of any kind, tightened security, better food.”

“But you’re not answering my question,” Pelton went on. “Haven’t you taken any action to get Mr. Vasquez back?”

“I’m not sure I understand?”

“In other words, Keeper,” Pelton said, once again looking out his window, “your position in this matter is purely passive.”

“What can I possibly do? There’s an investigation team on it now. Schillinger from Stormville PD is handling it. FBI’s been alerted.”

“Yes,” Pelton said, “I know.”

The room fell quiet for a moment.

And then Pelton said, “Keeper, do you recall Deputy Commissioner Warren having called you about the possibility that Eduard Vasquez might escape?”

“No,” I said, my eyes on Warren, getting a good look at his dark blue Brooks Brothers single-breasted suit. “All I’ve been getting from the commission are calls for names to scratch from my guard roster.”

Warren pushed his horn-rimmed glasses farther up on the crown of his nose. Then he crossed his legs.

“Are you sure?” Pelton pushed. I noticed that his voice was getting deeper, more inquisitive, slower than normal- trying his best to convince me of something that hadn’t happened at all.

“Yes,” I said, sitting up straight in my chair, gripping the armrests with my fists. “No one ever called me about Vasquez. Only about names.”

Outside the window, the full moon was plainly visible over the west bank of the Hudson River as it reflected off its surface. In just a little while, it would be the sun’s turn to reflect as it rose over the Berkshire Mountains to the east.

“Well,” Pelton said, touching his thin lips with the back of his pen, “you’d better get your story straight.”

I looked into his eyes. “Whadaya mean get my story straight?”

“Mr. Warren seems to recall having contacted you.”

The light of the full moon cast a pale luminescence over everything in the large room, including Pelton’s red face. Somewhere, a church bell sounded, one lonely chime after the other, and stopped after only five chimes.

“No,” I insisted, “I don’t recall getting a call from Mr. Warren. I don’t think I could forget a thing like that.” I tried to make eye contact with Warren. But he sat behind Pelton’s chair, legs crossed, eyes gazing down at the floor. Pelton got up and went to the window.

“I know Warren spoke with you,” he said.

“Listen, Wash,” I said, blood boiling inside my head, “I don’t care if you are my superior, but I’ve just been kidnapped from my home.”

“Kidnapped,” he smirked. “We’re being dramatic.”

“Yes, bloody-well kidnapped and brought here to answer questions about an escape I had no way of anticipating. Now you want me to agree to phone calls that never occurred. What the hell’s going on?” Now Pelton was looking out the window into the full moon.

“Temper, Keeper,” he said. “I thought we were all on the same team here.”

“Okay, Wash,” I said, my voice lowered a decibel or two, “I’ll tell you what. When I get back to work in a little while I can ask Val about any phone calls that might have been placed. She keeps excellent records. She’ll know if Warren called.”

The room fell quiet for a minute.

And then Wash said, “Keeper, I’m sure by now you have a pretty good idea about what’s going on here.”

I nodded. “You want me to take the blame for the Vasquez escape.”

“I didn’t say that exactly.”

“You want me to take the blame so that you can save your precious posteriors…so that you can stay up here in this white tower and so Warren here can get his state senate seat. Am I right?”

“I like my job,” Pelton said, “if that’s what you mean. Jake here, he has his aspirations also.”

“This conversation’s over!” Standing. “I’m not about to take the blame for anybody else’s screwups.” I went for the door. But Tommy Walsh, loyal as ever, blocked the entire frame.

Pelton shouted: “Superintendent Marconi!”

I turned.

“Sit down,” he said. “Please. You don’t have to take the blame for this.” He took a deep breath.

“Excuse me?”

“All you have to do is admit that Jake called you, warned you, and you simply forgot.” The moonlight was disappearing now as the orange haze of morning began to overtake the night. “I’ll fix it so that it was all a mistake. All you have to do is admit it. And then I’ll take care of your little reward.” He hesitated a bit between “little” and “reward.”

The orange morning light began to sneak its way in through the office windows, drowning everything in its rays, including Pelton’s face.

“You’re not saying anything, Marconi!” Pelton shouted. “This is your life we’re talking about here. I’m trying to save it, just like you saved mine at Attica. Don’t let pride fuck it up. A lot of money for a lot of people could be at stake.”

The morning light became almost too bright to look at.

“Do you know I could have you fired for this escape and brought up on charges for negligence? I mean, for Christ’s sake, Keeper, you executed the releases that allowed a convicted cop-killer to just walk outside the gates of Green Haven.”

The pressure in my head was suddenly replaced with a sickening, sinking feeling, like my organs were about to slide out from underneath my skin, spill all over the floor.

“Admit it, Keeper, you just haven’t been the same since Fran passed on.” Pelton was smiling now. “I mean, you haven’t really been paying attention, have you?”

I took couple of steps closer to him. “You’ll get nothing from me, Wash. Because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You didn’t do anything right either!” Pelton shouted. He ran his hands through his thinning gray hair, took a deep breath. He looked at me. I glared back at him until our eyes locked. His eyes were stone cold and wet, his lips taut and angry. So this is what it all came down to, I thought. This is what it was all about. Somebody’s dirty money.

“Okay then,” he said. “That’s the way you wanna play the game.” He walked around to the opposite side of his desk, picked up the phone, pounded a button or two on the phone unit. He kept his eyes locked on me the entire time, as though I might just disappear into the woodwork. Warren, on the other hand, stayed seated, staring at the floor. A liar caught perpetrating his own lie in the name of might and right. I heard an electronic buzzing coming from outside the room. When it stopped, Pelton whispered something into the phone. I heard the sound of footsteps in the hall outside the door. There must have been two or three people, at least, making their way down the corridor toward Pelton’s office. Their leather soles slapped against the terrazzo floor of the state building. They were running, not walking. Their quick steps matched the rapid beating of my heart. My stomach collapsed, my chest tightened. I could feel them coming for me as Pelton slammed the phone down. The wood-and-glass door opened and two uniformed police officers came into the room along with Detective Martin Schillinger.

Pelton pointed to me, his arm outstretched across his mahogany desk. Warren leaned over, buried his face in his hands. Behind him was the photograph of Ronald Reagan. Behind him were the photographs of George Bush. All those politicians posing for the camera, glowing faces perpetually locked in those twenty-five-cent smiles.

Schillinger looked at me with emotionless eyes and a plump white face. As usual, he was wearing that Burberry trench coat. He said: “Mr. Jack ‘Keeper’ Marconi, you are under arrest for obstructing justice and tampering with police evidence.”

I turned toward Pelton. He lifted a large plastic baggie from inside his desk. It contained Logan’s pistol, the rounds of ammo, and the key to his handcuffs. I knew then that it must have been Mike Norman who’d given the thing away right after I’d left his office. He must have called Pelton, told him that I’d been there, and asked him to process the evidence for prints illegally.

I stared at Schillinger.

He stood there with a shit-eating grin planted on his face. I wasn’t about to stand around and allow him to arrest me. I wasn’t about to stand around and beg for my freedom either. I did what I should have done the minute I’d been escorted into Pelton’s office earlier. I went for the door. But one of the cops grabbed my collar from behind. I swung back with my left elbow and clipped his nose. The nose exploded like a water balloon. He went down. A second man grabbed my arm and pushed me backward. A third man knocked my legs out from under me, at the knees. I hit the floor hard. The cop I’d clipped in the nose grabbed a fistful of hair and pounded my forehead against the terrazzo while the other cops held me down. I met the floor with my face two separate times. Once would have been enough. Once would have done the trick. I saw the room go dim and wavy before I felt the pain and tight swelling of the egg-shaped lump that had already begun to form on my forehead.

They picked me up off the floor, one man under each arm.

I surveyed the room, tried to get my bearings. I stared at Pelton, Warren, and Schillinger through a haze of bright stars and wavy light.

“You may read Mr. Marconi his rights, Detective Schillinger,” Pelton said. “And don’t forget to add resisting arrest.”

Schillinger reached inside his trench coat and pulled out a leather wallet. He lifted a small plastic card from the billfold and started reading from it.

“You have the right to remain silent…“ Reading me the Miranda rights just added to the annoyance. What I mean is, I knew them by heart. As another cop drew my arms behind my back and closed the handcuffs so tight around my wrists that I could feel the skin tear, I saw my old buddy Wash standing inside that ray of pale, white sunlight.

“I’m sorry, Keeper. Really, I’m sorry. But you leave me with no other choice.” He wasn’t smiling, but then, he wasn’t crying either. Jake Warren remained buried in his hands. Hear no evil, see no evil. He never said one word the entire time. He just took a deep relieved breath as Schillinger and his men began dragging me out of the room. Like his future would be somehow certain, somehow secure, so long as I was out of the picture and behind bars.