The Innocent

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HERE’S HOW I SEE it now after twenty-six years: In my mind, the Attica riot was something very much like a short war. During the heat of battle there is no such thing as innocent or guilty, no such thing as right or wrong, no such thing as heaven or hell.

It is all hell.

And when, in the middle of all the madness, the rebel inmates surround the prison chaplain as if they suddenly feel the need to pray, I know for certain that the devil is truly showing his face at Attica State Prison. Instead of reciting “Our Father’s and “Hail Mary’s,” the rebels order the chaplain to strip down to his skivvies, socks, and white V-neck T-shirt. They force the meek, round-shouldered, Roman Catholic priest onto his knees, hands behind his back. One inmate cuffs his wrists while another inmate bends down and plants a kiss smack-dab on his quivering lips.

The priest has a thin, almost gaunt face. His skin is white, but caked with mud and spit. His lips are blue. Horn-rimmed glasses lie crooked on the crown of his nose, his chin is pressed down against his chest. He is crying, not out of shame, but because a rebel inmate has dressed himself in the priest’s habit. The inmate is doing an Indian war dance around the half-naked priest, spitting on him, mocking him.

“Though I travel through the valley of death,” mumbles the priest between tearful gasps, “I shall fear no evil.”

The rebel inmate carries a steel pipe in his hand like a war club. He chants woo-woo-woo and dances that Indian dance all around the crying, praying chaplain. The rest of the inmates break out in laughter.

“Fear this!” they scream. “Save yourself, Mister Righteous Man!” they shout.

The rebel inmate dances and chants. He brings one foot up slowly and lets it down, then brings the opposite foot up and lets it down. His movements are slow, deliberate, and smooth.

He stops dancing suddenly. Just like that.

He coughs up a rubbery hawker from deep inside his nasal passages. He rolls the hawker around his mouth for a while until I want to gag on just the thought of it. Then he positions his mouth over the priest’s head and lets loose with the wad of yellow-green spit. When the mission is accomplished, the inmate stands up straight, takes a step or two back, and brings that metal pipe down hard on the priest’s head. It’s then that the priest stops crying, stops praying. He takes on a wide-eyed look of surprise, as if something inside his body and soul has just snapped. And it has, along with his entire cranial cap.

The priest smiles a peaceful smile. He releases a slight breath. A puddle of blood oozes up from the opening in his skull like oil from a well, and for a split second even the rebel inmates are perfectly silent, as though a church service is about to be performed in their honor. A moment or two later, the priest lets loose with a gentle sigh and falls flat on his face.

CHAPTER TWENTY

IN THE DREAM MIKE Norman sits behind his desk in a darkened office with only a red-and-white neon light flickering outside the Venetian blinds. He is pouring brandy into his I LOVE MY JOB! coffee mug. I see the word NOT! on the bottom of the mug when he lifts it high and drinks, allowing the booze to spill over the rim and run down the sides of his narrow face onto his white button-down, soaking it like a layer of sweat.

Laid out on Mike’s desk is a plastic baggie, the word EVIDENCE printed in white letters against a background of baby blue just below the seal. The baggie is filled with Logan’s.38, six loose rounds, and the key to his cuffs. Suddenly Norman has the phone to his ear. His hands tremble. “I’ve got what you need, Wash,” he says. “But it’s gonna cost you.”

Mike sits back in his chair, reaches down between his legs, grabs a brown paper shopping bag. He puts the bag on his lap. His eyes grow wide and wet. Tears start pouring down his face, off his chin.

“I’m sorry, Keeper,” he says, reaching into the paper bag with his right hand, pulling out Fran’s head.

Now it’s me who’s crying, only there are no more tears…

The dream shifts to my second-floor office in Green Haven.

Val sits in my chair, her stocking feet up on the desk. She smiles, holds her open arms out for me. Then she is gone and now it’s Robert Logan who sits behind my desk, laughing. On one side of me stands Schillinger, his big hands planted firmly in the loose pockets of his Burberry trench coat. On the other side stands A. J. Roy ale, the butcher of Newburgh. He wears a white surgical mask over his mouth. He holds out a fisted hand. The hand is covered with a rubber glove. He opens his fingers slowly to reveal an extracted molar, the long roots stained with blood…

And then they are all gone, just like that.

Now I stand only a few feet away from the banks of a gravel pit. Positioned on the very edge of the pit is a woman I do not recognize. The woman is naked with dark teardrop eyes, shoulder-length hair, and chiseled cheekbones. My insides feel like melting. I want her, bad. I try to reach out for her, but I can’t quite touch her. It’s then that the gravel pit fills with water. The pit seems to become as wide and as deep as an ocean. The woman looks at me with an expressionless face. She smiles, whispers “Keeper. “

Using her left hand, she gently brushes back her brown hair to expose a heart-shaped tattoo. She turns and dives into the water, begins swimming away. I jump in after her, but instead of floating, I feel tentacles that rise up from the bottom of the pit, wrap themselves around my legs, and pull me down, deeper and deeper, until the surface is beyond reach and all my air is gone…

The cement-walled holding cell measured twelve feet by ten feet. I’d walked it out at least thirty times since I’d woken up after having been tossed in it early that morning. Side wall to side wall, and back wall to bars. In the center of the battleship-gray concrete floor were two benches positioned side to side, their full length facing the front of the cage. The bench tops were made of heavy oak worn down smooth from age and use. Tubular steel supports served as legs. The steel supports had been bolted into the concrete floor with heavy-duty lugs.

I wasn’t alone.

The man in the holding cell was still asleep when the guard slipped me inside and unlocked my cuffs. He was an older man, somewhere between sixty and seventy. He lay on his side on one of the benches, his knees tucked up into his chest. His cupped hands were stuffed into his crotch. He had a wrinkled, chalky-white face and looked like the living dead. He snored, and when he exhaled, his breaths rattled against the concrete walls. Once, he mumbled something I could not understand, and it wasn’t until I came close to him that I could smell the whiskey on his breath.

Because of the hour of my arrest, SOP dictated that I’d have to stay in the holding cell until my arraignment, which was scheduled for nine that morning. In the meantime I sat on the cell floor with my back pressed up against the wall and listened to the echo of the old man’s rattling breaths. I waited for my lawyer, Tony Angelino, to show up, along with Val, who would bail me out if the judge demanded it. I lit the first one of the morning and fingered the welt on my forehead and the scratches on my wrists.

Eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning.

I’d been up for nearly six hours, despite the hour nap I’d caught when they first tossed me in here after tagging, printing, and photographing me.

I listened to the workings of the jail as if they were familiar, and they were. The closing and opening of iron gates; the slap of footsteps on the concrete; the sound of muffled, nearly indiscernible voices coming from loudspeakers that echoed in the concrete corridors; the smell of urine and sweat; other invisible prisoners locked in steel cells, shouting to one another, their voices mixing together like blood and poison.

Guard: You there, stand up against them bars.

Prisoner: Eat me, screw.

Guard: I hear you, boy.

I should have been at home in an iron house, with the disgruntled sounds and the greasy, worm smells. Prison was my home away from home. I’d spent more time surrounded by cement, steel, and razor wire than I’d spent with my wife.

Listen, the outside of a prison cell was familiar ground.

Inside was not.

The drunk tossed and turned on the narrow bench. How he managed to make complete turns on a bench that could not have been more than twelve inches wide was a testimony to either his sense of balance or his experience.

When he woke up suddenly, he opened his eyes wide and took a deep breath. He sat up straight, removed his hands from out of his crotch, brought them up to his face. He rubbed his eyes, ran his hands over his cheeks, and massaged his entire face as if jump-starting the circulation in his congested veins and capillaries. He hacked, coughed up some loose phlegm, and spit it out onto the concrete floor. It was then, just after he spit that wad, that he realized he wasn’t alone.

“Who are you?” he said.

He smiled or maybe it was just a way of positioning his lips. He wore bright blue polyester pants, white socks collapsed at the ankles, and black plastic loafers split at the seam.

I decided to say nothing. On the other hand, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the man, as if I no longer had the energy left to ignore him. He stared at me, too, his hands flat on top of the bench, his arms locked straight like pillars, to support a body that might otherwise collapse the second I breathed on him.

“You a pimp?” he said, his voice forced and raw.

I shook my head, laughed.

“Whas so funny?”

“No,” I said, looking down at the concrete slab, “not a pimp.”

“Dealer?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Burglar, hit man? What the hell are you, then?”

I said, “I’m the warden of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison.”

He scrunched his eyebrows.

“Man,” he said, “you sure look like shit.”

I broke out laughing. Nervous exhaustion, I think they call it.

The drunk laughed, too, a high-pitched, squeaky laugh-a laugh I felt in my temples and the backs of my eyes more than heard. A suspicious laugh, as if he were certain the goddamned wool was being pulled over his bloodshot eyes.

He said, “And I’m a fucking senator. Glad to meet you, Warden. I’m Senator Teddy Kennedy from Hyannisport.” He said Hyannisport like Hy-anus-port.

“I don’t expect you to believe me,” I said, letting out a breath of cigarette smoke.

The drunk lost his smile. He stared out beyond the vertical bars as if there were something to see besides a concrete floor and a cement-panel wall. He turned, looked at me with a perked-up, almost sober face.

“Then you must be nuts, I guess,” he said. “You must be crazy nuts. Or a pervert. Is that it?”

I answered him by directing my vision to the concrete floor.

“Tell you what, nutcase pervert,” he said. “I’m going back to sleep. Wake me when the President comes to bail me out. Or better yet, wake me when the Pope comes.”

With that he curled up his wilted body and lay back down on the bench.

“Warden, my ass,” he whispered, pressing his hands together, stuffing them back into his crotch.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

AT TEN MINUTES AFTER nine in the morning, the judge set my bail at five thousand dollars, much to my lawyer’s irritation and mine. “Let’s face it, your honor,” Tony Angelino had said, smoothing his double-breasted blazer with his big, thick hands, “Mr. Marconi is a respected member of both the New York State Department of Corrections and society at large. I’m quite confident that he is not about to run away from us.”

Pelton stood up and directly requested that the district attorney set the bail at twenty-five thousand, minimum. But in the end, because of my reputation as a member of the corrections department, the judge set the bail much lower, despite a two-felony-count accusation plus resisting arrest. (The arresting officer who’d gotten it in the nose with my elbow stood close by with a piece of gauze taped across his swollen face.)

The middle-aged judge, Anthony Sclera-a man I had met on several occasions at the governor’s mansion-sat back in his black leather chair, stuck his hands out from under his wrinkled cloak, and crossed them again against his considerable chest. He was heavyset and out of breath and his white hair stuck up on one side like he’d been dragged out of bed for just this occasion, which may have been the case. He used his index finger to push the round wire-rimmed glasses back onto the summit of his hawk nose while he expressed his deepest regret on the matter of my arrest. He even went so far as to apologize for how and when I’d been taken into custody. It was his solid hope, he said, that the entire affair was nothing more than a mix-up. A simple case of miscommunication. At the conclusion of the morning hearing, the judge leaned up onto his oversized podium, made a frown, and shook his jowls. A court date was set for August ninth, and the gavel came down.

I was escorted out of the courtroom and brought back to the holding cell where I would stay until Val arrived to post my bail.

About an hour later, the attending guard came back to my cell. Sure enough, “a good-looking woman named Val,” was here to bail me out. I stood up, straightened out my pants, tucked in my shirt.

“When can I see her?” I said.

“Soon,” the thin black guard said. He waved his hand in the air as if to say, sit back down, relax, you re not going anywhere for a while. “She’s in the middle of processing all that paperwork. You know, SOP.”

I tried to work up a smile.

A frown was easier.

“You could have asked him how long the process usually takes,” the guard said, referring to my drunken cell-mate lying flat on his back on the wooden bench and snoring. “But then, he’s not much of a talker in the morning.”

“I bet he talks a blue streak during his first six or seven manhattans,” I said. “It’s probably the last two dozen that shut him up pretty good.”

The guard turned.

“I’ll be back for you in a few shakes, Warden.”

I could just picture the headlines now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I SHOULD HAVE STAYED behind bars just a little longer.

I knew something wasn’t right the second Val pulled into the driveway of my Stormville home. Deep gouges had been dug into the lawn. Black tire tracks were burnt into the blacktop. The mailbox had been rear-ended and now leaned out toward the road.

Somebody must have peeled out in a hurry.

Tommy Walsh and his men hadn’t made that kind of impression on the property when they’d come for me the night before. They were calm, collected, businesslike. Somebody had been at the house between the time of my arrest and the time I’d returned-not the brainiest of deductions, but true just the same.

“Wait here,” I said. I opened the door, eased myself out of Val’s station wagon.

“I’m coming with you,” she insisted.

I leaned into the open passenger-side window.

“Stay here. Somebody might still be inside.”

I knew my.45 was still in the house, under the mattress in the bedroom.

Val cut the engine. She got out of the car.

“I’m not staying out here all by myself just because you want to play hero.”

She slammed the car door closed.

Together we stood at the front door. Small aircraft were taking off and landing at the Stormville airfield directly across the street. The day was hot and still and dry. I took the key ring from my pants pocket, found the house key. Val stood close behind. I could hear her long, deep, calming breaths. I went to fit the key into the lock. But the door swung open on its own.

I couldn’t understand it.

The wood jamb hadn’t been notched out, nor had the metal lock-set been ripped away from the frame with a heavy screwdriver or crowbar. The wooden door had not been kicked in with the heel of somebody’s jack boot. Somebody had used a key. Neat and simple. But then they’d left the door open on their way out. They’d torn ruts in the lawn; they’d run into the mailbox.

Sloppy. Or, if not sloppy, then downright intentional.

I pushed open the door. From the foyer I could see that the single-story home had been left in a shambles. The carpeting had been torn up and tossed in a heap into the living room. The coffee table had been turned on its side, the books pulled off the shelves, my entire CD and album collection thrown on the floor. Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” had been stepped on and crushed, and what really got to me was that when I took a few steps inside, I realized that they’d cut the skins on every one of my drum heads. No music fan, no matter how sick, would have resorted to that.

There was more.

All the paintings and photographs were either hanging crooked or no longer hanging at all. There was an old photograph of my grandfather and me: him sitting on the edge of a neatly stacked pile of cordwood just outside the cabin he’d built in the Adirondacks, with me, no more than five years old, sitting on his knee. He was smiling that wry smile of his, his red-and-black mackinaw over his stocky shoulders. The photo had been thrown on the floor, the frame cracked, the glass shattered.

There was the gold-framed mirror Fran’s mother had given us as a wedding gift twenty-five years before. It lay on the floor in pieces. Someone had deliberately crushed it. I stepped on the broken glass, felt it crunch under my leather soles. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned fast, grabbed the hand.

“Jesus,” I spat, “I could have taken your arm off.”

Val took a deep breath. I let go of her. The two of us leaned against the plaster wall in the foyer.

“My mistake,” she said.

“Nobody’s here,” I said.

She walked into the living room, stepping carefully to avoid the broken bits of glass.

“What the hell happened?”

“Someone left me a message,” I said. “And I think I know who.”

Val took a few more steps in and scanned the room.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said, lifting the remnants of a picture frame off the floor. Pieces of broken glass fell from the frame and shattered. She held a portrait of Fran and me in her hands. I recognized it as the one taken at a studio just after our engagement in 1971. Me with jet-black hair cut close to the scalp, no mustache or goatee, and Fran with long black hair parted down the center, making her look like an angel. Now there was an X slashed through her face.

I took the photo out of Val’s hands and tossed it into the pile of torn-up carpeting, books, and albums.

“Mother of God,” I said, taking a deep breath.

“I don’t want to look anymore,” Val said. She went into the kitchen, started rummaging through the cabinets, through the pots and pans. When I heard the water running, I knew she was making a pot of coffee. Leave it to Val, I thought, to bring calm and civility to an otherwise chaotic and senseless situation.

I went ahead and checked the rest of the bedrooms. Everything seemed okay. Nothing missing. Even my briefcase, which contained a copy of Vasquez’s file and the number-ten-size envelope I’d found in his cell, hadn’t been disturbed. I returned to the kitchen, took a beer from the fridge, and brought it out to the porch. Later I would clean up the mess. As for calling the cops, I knew there wasn’t much I could do but file a report. Besides, I was the one under arrest. And how did I know it wasn’t the cops who had trashed the joint in the first place? How did I know it wasn’t Tommy Walsh along with a couple of Pelton’s finest?

They’d used a key for God’s sake.

I lit a cigarette and for the moment just stood there on the porch watching the small planes take off from the airstrip. I looked at the torn-up lawn and the leaning mailbox. I looked at the driveway covered now with streaks of black rubber. I couldn’t help but remember the image of my wife being zipped up in a black plastic body bag and stuffed into the back of a Chevy Suburban with black-tinted windows. The bastards who’d X’d her face would pay for that little stunt. Screw with me but don’t screw with my wife, dead or alive.

Val joined me on the porch. In her left hand she held an ice pack fashioned from a white-and-blue-checked dish towel filled with ice cubes. In her right, a cup of coffee. She handed me the ice pack.

“You want me to help tidy things up for you in there?”

Using two hands, she balanced the overfull coffee cup against her lips and took a sip, careful not to burn her mouth.

“I’ll manage,” I said, holding the ice pack in my hands.

“I’d like to help if I could.”

“I know where everything goes,” I said, setting the ice pack down on the porch floor next to my chair.

“That’s a nasty bump,” Val observed.

“Too late for ice,” I said, taking a hit off the cigarette and following up with a swig of the cold beer. But she was right. I could still feel the tightness of the swelling above my eye. The egg-sized welt throbbed. I suppose it couldn’t have been any less conspicuous than a tattoo.

Across the street, a Cessna with white wings and a red-and-white fuselage was coming in for a landing. The small craft descended painfully slowly, never straight, always fighting the wild up-and-down currents of air as its black tires came closer and closer to the hot, sun-baked pavement. It landed finally, the wheel that faced me touching the airstrip first, then the weight of the plane coming down hard on the opposite wheel.

“How does a man like you get himself arrested?” Val posed.

I drank my beer and smoked my smoke and told her about the gravel pit off Lime Kiln Road, and about the evidence I’d found there. Then I told her about my visit with her old boyfriend Lt. Mike Norman at the Albany Police Department and also about my visit with Pelton, including the illegal part where he’d wanted me to take the blame for Vasquez’s escape in exchange for a reward.

“And you think Mike ratted on you?”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“You know as well as I,” Val said, still holding her coffee cup with two hands, “that Mike Norman is not that kind of man.”

I pictured the kind, caring man Val probably wanted to remember from those few months they’d spent together as a couple. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but imagine his pale face, his trembling hands, the coffee mug he used for a shot glass. I thought about his ongoing love affair with the brandy bottle and I knew that this was the real reason Val and Mike had never worked out. She could never be content taking second place to a man’s drinking problem, and who could blame her. But then I saw Mike Norman picking up his phone once I was out of his office and I saw him dialing Pelton’s private line and I heard him saying, “Wash, old buddy, I’ve got something you might be interested in, but it’s gonna cost you, old buddy. It’s gonna cost you good.”

I might have explained all this to Val, but considering how she’d once felt about Mike, regardless of his drinking, I felt it only right to let it go. Besides, at this point, the only thing I could be certain about was the bump on my forehead.

Val looked out beyond the porch and took a swallow from her coffee cup.

“There’s something else I’ve got to do,” I said, careful to drop the subject of Mike Norman.

Val turned back to me.

“I’m going to locate Vasquez, talk to him face-to-face.”

“Jesus, Keeper. First of all, nobody knows where Vasquez is, and second, even if you could find him, what in the world makes you think he’ll talk with you?”

I flicked my spent cigarette butt over the rail of the porch.

“We have a common enemy now,” I said. “Common legal circumstances, too.”

“Except you’re white and a respected member of the law enforcement fraternity, and he’s Latino and a convicted cop-killer on the loose.”

“Correction,” I said, “I’m Italian, which makes me no whiter than Vasquez, and what’s more, I’ve just been busted for obstruction of justice and manipulation of evidence. My home’s been ransacked by someone who has a key to the front door, and I refused to take a bribe from the Commissioner of Corrections, who, as we speak, is probably sealing my fate. So, under the circumstances, Val, I don’t think I have much choice but to find Vasquez.”

“All this still doesn’t solve the problem of where to find him.”

“I think I know where to start looking.” I was thinking of Athens.

Val stepped up to the porch rail and took a deep breath. But then she set her coffee cup down on the rail and, for a time, stayed perfectly still. Some of the coffee spilled when she went down the porch steps. She came back up with the morning paper in her hand and a sour look on her face.

“Read it and weep, boss,” Val said.

The headline consisted of only two words, but I had to read it several times before I could absorb it completely. MARCONI BUSTED!

Not far under the headline was an old photograph of me, taken at least a decade before for my current ID, from when I had been appointed first lieutenant for Coxsackie Correctional Facility in 1987. The black-and-white photo would have been available in the commissioner’s records. In the photo, I’m stone-faced, almost thuggish-looking. The photo looked more like a mug shot than anything else, with my eyes nearly closed and a smile hidden behind a Pancho Villa mustache.

Below the photo was another headline of almost equal proportions.

DAY NUMBER THREE FOR MASTRIANO!

Another photo showed the corrections officer lying in a Newburgh General Hospital bed, his mother by his side, along with Dr. Fleischer, the fierce little man peering directly into the camera. The photo credit belonged to the Associated Press.

“This thing made the morning papers,” I said. “Which means Pelton must have leaked the story to the press before he called me into his office.”

“They had every intention of arresting you,” Val deduced. “The whole thing was a setup from the start.”

“I’m the patsy,” I said, feeling very dizzy.

Just then a station wagon pulled up outside the driveway. A white van with a satellite dish on top pulled in behind that. Channel-13-Newscenter was printed on the sides of both the car and the van. The two vehicles couldn’t have been there for more than ten seconds when a Ford Bronco from a different television station arrived from the opposite direction.

I stood up just as the reporters and cameramen began scrambling out of their cars and trucks.

“Guess it’s about time we made a quick exit.”

“Congratulations,” Val said, “you’re gonna be famous.”

“Yah, for all the wrong reasons.”

We escaped back into the house.

I locked the deadbolt behind me and turned to Val.

“Listen,” I said, “there’s no telling where this thing is going and who could be implicated along the way.”

Val pressed her lips together. Her eyes were deep and wet.

“What are you trying to say, Keeper?”

“What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.” I put my left hand on her arm and gripped the newspaper with my other.

“You can trust me,” she said. “I work for you before I work for anybody else.”

I kissed her forehead and pressed her against me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“As far as I’m concerned, those bastards toss you to the dogs, they toss me to the dogs, too.”

Outside the picture window in the living room, I could see a reporter standing on the front lawn, his hand at his forehead like a visor, trying to get a look inside the house.

“They already have, Val,” I said. “They already have.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I SUPPOSE PEOPLE SHOW grief in different ways. I didn’t openly weep after Fran died. I didn’t cry at her funeral. From a distance, I could see other wives whispering to their husbands, and I knew what they were saying. Shouldn’t he be more upset? Shouldn’t he be crying?

But Fran’s death tore me up all the same.

Repairing those rips and tears over the last twelve months had not been easy. Now, any little thing could set me off, plunge me into the dungeon of despair. A half hour after Val left through a haze of reporters on her way to the office in Green Haven, I went into the living room to pick up the mess. I would have managed it, too, if I hadn’t picked up the portrait of Fran and me, the one with the X slashed through her face.

I stared at the photo for a good long while, longer than I should have. Then I gently put it on the fireplace mantel. I went to the bar and poured myself a tall Scotch. It had turned into a Scotch kind of afternoon. I lit a cigarette. My hands shook. Standing there alone in the living room with the reporters walking around aimlessly on my lawn, I knew I should have stashed the photo away, saved it for something. For evidence maybe. But I couldn’t help myself.

I took the photo off the mantel and lit the white corner with the Zippo. It caught fire instantly and I tossed it into the open fireplace and sat there smoking while the photograph shrunk and curled up into itself. I watched my body and the body of my wife disappear in a blaze of orange-and-red-colored flame, and I grieved all over again.

I took a pull on the Scotch and took another look outside the living room window. People were carrying all kinds of communications equipment, voice recorders, and cameras. They paced the front lawn waiting for something to happen.

I felt like the groundhog.

Maybe if I waited long enough, they would try to burn me out.

In the kitchen, I dialed my office and got Val.

“How you holding up?” she said.

“I feel like O.J. Except I didn’t do it.”

“More like John Gotti,” Val said. “Get your ethnicity right. You want to check in with Dan?”

“Why not?”

There was a pause and then the confused noises of the phone being transferred from one person to another.

“What the hell’s going on, Keeper?” Dan said. “Pelton called, said by court order you can’t step foot inside Green Haven. Said if you did to have you arrested again.”

There was that familiar organ-slide feeling in my gut. I made a conscious decision not to explain anything to Dan quite yet. Besides, what could I possibly tell him that he didn’t already know?

“Pelton make you acting warden?”

“Just this morning.”

“Good,” I said, as if that had been the plan all along. “Now I want you to do us all a favor.”

“Anything.”

“From here on out, you’ve got to avoid Pelton like the plague.”

“Won’t be easy, Keeper,” Dan said. “I mean, under the circumstances, he wants constant reports. Especially with Vasquez gone and general lockdown still in effect.”

“Just ignore his calls as best you can, or if he decides to make a surprise visit, take the back door. Just don’t let him get to you.”

“Anything else?”

“Sit tight, don’t say a word about anything to anybody, especially Pelton and Marty Schillinger. Val will fill you in on everything. In the meantime, I’ve got a little catch-up ball to play.”

After I hung up the phone I went around the entire house and closed all the curtains. The press had gathered enough nerve to move from the lawn to the front porch. They rang the bell a few times, but they knew I wasn’t about to open the door. They knew I was still inside the house, but I’d do my best to remain invisible until it came time to get by them.

Now I knew why they called them the press.

I returned to the living room, took hold of the heavy metal poker that leaned against the brick fireplace, and used the blunt end to crush the burned photo of Fran and me into so much soot and ash. It was then I noticed that the photo hadn’t burned completely. A semblance of the image remained. I bent down, sifted through the black ash, and picked out the remains.

Fran’s face was still there.

I put the cigarette between my lips, reached into my pocket for the Zippo. I started the lighter and brought the flame to the stamp-size portion of intact photograph.

Maybe my imagination was taking over but, like the image of her body, the image of Fran’s face took some time to disappear. No matter how I put the flame to it. I wasn’t the type to heed signs from above, but it seemed like a gesture from divine providence itself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

AT 12:50 ON WEDNESDAY afternoon, I reached under the mattress in the master bedroom of my state-appointed home on the grounds of Green Haven Prison. As luck or providence would have it, the pistol was still there. Even though the mattress had been left askew and the underside searched, it hadn’t been searched thoroughly. Maybe Pelton’s men assumed no one would hide anything as obvious as a hand cannon under the mattress. On the other hand, maybe they hadn’t searched under the mattress at all.

I gripped the.45 and depressed the latch with my thumb so that the magazine slipped out into my left hand. Still fully loaded, I slammed the magazine home and cocked a round into the chamber. Then I gave the pistol a quick polish by using the end of the bed sheet as a buffer. When the gunmetal was shiny, I laid the.45 flat on the bed and changed into a pair of jeans and brown cowboy boots. I slipped into a blue-jean work shirt and a charcoal blazer. Checking the safety on the.45 I shoved it, barrel first, inside my belt. Then I turned and looked at myself in the mirror above the dresser. First I looked at myself head on, at the shadowy face, the overgrown goatee, the dark hair now highlighted with shades of gray at the temples. I turned one way and then the other. With my blazer buttoned, the.45 was well hidden.

At the dresser I opened my briefcase, pulled out the number-ten-size envelope, and stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans. I took my keys off the dresser and held them in my hand while I returned to the living room, pulled the curtain back just a touch, and took a quick look outside the window. I saw Chris Collins waiting for me in the center of my front lawn, her cameraman right beside her, his camera hoisted up on his right shoulder.

By now, three or four other news teams had gathered as well.

Tenacious bunch.

I would have to make a mad dash for the Toyota if I was going to get out unscathed.

I decided to use the sliding door in back, off the kitchen.

I made my way around the back of the house, past the woodpile, then the garage, until I came to the driveway in front. No one had spotted me yet, but I knew the shit would hit the fan once I attempted to unlock the Toyota. I knew I should have invested in one of those electronic locking and unlocking devices long ago.

My head was buzzing. I felt as if the whole world were about to slip out from under my feet. Then I thought, screw it, this is my house, my driveway, my ride. If I want to walk out to my truck, I have the right to do it without being harassed by the press. I took a step out from behind the wall.

“There he is,” someone said.

The bunch of them turned and looked at me.

I made a dash for the Toyota.

I didn’t have the key in the lock when Chris Collins, along with the other reporters, came running after me. “Mr. Marconi,” Collins shouted, attempting to shove a microphone in my face. “What can you tell us about the escape of cop-killer Eduard Vasquez?”

“Not now, Chris,” I said, avoiding the microphone and her eyes, attempting to jam the key into the lock.

“Mr. Marconi,” another voice screamed, “what about your arrest?”

“Keeper Marconi,” came a third voice, “how much money did you get for assisting with Vasquez’s escape?”

Oh how quickly they turn on you.

I opened the door and got in. I pressed my foot on the gas and fired the six-cylinder up. Then I threw it into reverse and resisted the temptation to run as many reporters down as I could.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE VIGIL STRETCHED ALL the way from Bernard Mastriano’s fourth-floor room in Newburgh General, out into the hall, down the full length of the corridor, and into the waiting room where a half-dozen cameramen and photographers from newspapers and television stations were exploiting “Day number three for Bernard Mastriano, the corrections officer from Green Haven Prison mercilessly struck down while in the line of duty.”

Somebody had paid somebody an awful lot of money to allow all those media people to be there without reprisals from the hospital staff. The place was so congested that there was barely enough room for the nurses and physicians’ assistants to get through with their clipboards and their IV units on wheels.

I pressed myself through the crowd and was nearly knocked over when I read the words, WHO SHALL PROTECT OUR CHILDREN IF WE CANNOT PROTECT OURSELVES? stenciled in black letters on the large cardboard banners. I squeezed past the children carrying smaller banners that read WHO WILL PROTECT ME? in the same lettering. Under the words were drawn perfectly shaped faces with perfectly shaped teardrops coming from perfectly shaped eyes. The entire scene was surrealistic at best, as though some Hollywood director had taken over the hospital and set the scene for a movie shoot.

I squeezed past the reporters and the cameraman getting shots of the children as they stood together, packed into a far corner of the hospital wing, their faces blank, wide-eyed, and confused. I thought, who in their right minds would come up with banners like these? Who the hell would come up with slogans identifying the corrections department as the protector of all civilization? Certainly not the children. Certainly not the average citizen.

No doubt about it, somebody had definitely given somebody one hell of a payday to go to all this trouble.

Moving closer to Mastriano’s room I could see the bright portable lamps used by the cameramen. The white lights illuminated the CO, made him look like an angel. He was still on his back, but a full bandage had been applied to his head, hiding his black hair completely. An IV was attached to his right arm, just below the elbow. A plastic-and-metal chair had been placed at the head of the bed. I assumed the chair was for his mother. But now it was vacant.

Behind me stood a group of older women, two of whom were dressed in blue habits. All four of them looked at me as soon as I came into the room, but no one seemed to recognize me. They simply went on with their praying- chanting really-rosaries in hand, beads pressed tightly between thumb and forefinger, bodies straight and stiff, faces to the floor, like imitations of the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary I remembered from Vasquez’s cell.

Mastriano lay on the bed facing the white ceiling-eyes closed, thick arms straight and pressed against his sides, shoulders stiff, face cleanly shaven as if his mother had just run a razor over those chubby baby cheeks. And maybe she had. A tightly tucked, baby blue blanket covered his entire torso.

I sat down in the empty chair, brought my lips to his ear. I wanted to shout out his name. I wanted to see him jump. But I acted calm and cool while the nuns went on praying and the sweat oozed out from the pores in my forehead.

“Mastriano,” I whispered. “Can you hear me, Mastriano?”

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…

“I found your service revolver, Mastriano. Can you hear me, Officer Mastriano?”

I searched for a response, a twitch of a finger, a blinking of an eye, a slight trembling of the bed. I got nothing.

“I would have told you Monday, but things have gotten complicated now. Things have changed now that you’ve got your friends all around you.”

…Blessed art thou amongst women…

“I’ve got the piece, the ammo, and the key to your cuffs.”

…and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…

“I found all that stuff, Mastriano, and when it all comes back from the lab I’m gonna prove the only prints on it are yours and Logan’s. Do I make myself clear, Mastriano?”

…Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners…

“You know what I’m gonna do after that, Officer Mastriano?”

…now, and at the hour of our death…

“I’m gonna fire your ass. I’m gonna have you brought up on charges for conspiracy in the aiding and abetting of an escaped convict. Are you getting all this, Mastriano? I don’t think you’re getting all this, Mastriano. You’ve got to pay attention.”

… Amen.

Mastriano lay perfectly still. Too still. I mean, he never even flinched. Maybe he was out cold. One thing was for sure, if he’d been awake, he’d have known by now that I’d already been arrested for harboring his pistol and ammo. If he’d been awake, he’d have known I was bluffing.

I had to consider this: Maybe he was injured, after all.

But there was something else to consider. Maybe his unconsciousness was chemically enhanced and not simply faked. What I mean is, if Dr. Fleischer could get away with slapping a bandage on his head, poking an IV into his arm, and allowing all these people and their cameras to invade hospital corridors where the truly sick were trying to get well and the truly terminal were trying to die in peace, then he would have no trouble putting Mastriano to sleep. In the end, it all depended on one thing and one thing only.

Money.

Just how much was Fleischer getting and who the hell was greasing him?

I turned and looked out the open door. A flash went off, stung my eyes, blinded me for split second. A tall man stood behind the photographer. He supported a video camera on his right shoulder. The cameraman must have been filming me the entire time I’d been speaking to Mastriano. The media people weren’t leaving anything to chance. And I suppose it was pretty reckless of me to be seen inside Mastriano’s room like that, after what had gone down in Albany that very morning.

I sat back, blinked, tried to regain my eyesight.

There was some kind of commotion going on outside in the corridor.

Behind me, the nuns went on praying, unaffected.

Our Father who art in heaven…

When I looked up, the false image of a black flashbulb had nearly faded from my line of vision and I was able to make out the face of a plump gray-haired woman dressed in black. Mastriano’s mother. On one side of her stood Dr. Arnold Fleischer. On the other stood Chris Collins from the Newscenter 13. Collins, in all her tenacity, must have followed me from Stormville, across Route 84, over the Newburgh Beacon Bridge, all the way to Newburgh General. And I hadn’t noticed even for a second in my rearview mirror. She looked at me with that chiseled face and those deep black eyes. She wore a blue skirt with a matching blazer and a white oxford shirt buttoned all the way to the top, a silver brooch pinned where the knot of a tie might have been. She held a microphone to Mrs. Mastriano’s face-a face that became distorted with rage when she recognized me.

“You,” the little woman shouted in a trembling, accented voice. “You…you sent my boy out with that criminal, that cop-killer.”

She pointed an index finger, thick as a sausage, at my face.

…Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done…

She clenched her hand into a fist and lunged at me. But Collins dropped her mike to the floor and grabbed hold of the woman’s right arm while Dr. Fleischer grabbed hold of the other.

“Mr. Marconi,” Fleischer said, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises.”

Collins wasted no time going to work on me, waving her hand at the cameraman who was still shooting the scene from outside the door, then using the same hand to pull down on her skirt and straighten her hair. The bright white light shined in my eyes again. Collins turned to face the camera. “We have Keeper Marconi, warden of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison in nearby Stormville, with us today. As warden, Mr. Marconi is the man directly responsible for sending Corrections Officer Bernard Mastriano outside the prison walls with Eduard Vasquez, who, until Monday afternoon of this week, had been serving a life sentence for the notorious 1988 slaying of a rookie policeman.”

Collins turned to me. At the same time, she pulled Mastriano’s mother away from Fleischer and into the picture with me. Behind us, serving as a backdrop, was Mastriano, laid out on the hospital bed. Before I knew what was happening, Collins was subjecting me to the third degree. “Mr. Marconi, can you tell our viewers why you chose Bernard Mastriano for this particular, potentially life-threatening job?”

Mrs. Mastriano broke into tears at the sound of her son’s name.

…and forgive us our trespasses…

Caught off guard, I looked into the camera and said, “That’s strictly police business now. I’m here simply to check on the condition of my officer.”

“We don’t want you here,” the old woman screamed. Fleischer took hold of her once more, pulled her out of the way of the camera.

“Can you tell us, Mr. Marconi,” Collins went on, “what Mr. Mastriano’s injury reveals about the nature of prison policy in general and about the disintegrating nature of the corrections system in this country?”

I looked straight into those black eyes. “Lady,” I said, “you have no idea.” And then I walked away. But before I left the room, I approached Fleischer, who stood in a far corner between Mrs. Mastriano and the group of four nuns.

I pointed my index finger at his face. “I don’t know what you’re pulling here,” I said, “and I don’t know who’s paying you off. But in the end I’ll have your medical diploma tacked to the wall of a prison cell.” Then I made a mistake by poking his chest with my finger, forcing Fleischer to stumble back a little. “I think maybe F- or G-Block for you, pal.”

…but deliver us from evil…

“Listen, buddy!” Fleischer screamed, releasing Mrs. Mastriano’s forearm. “I’m a Harvard-educated doctor of medicine. You were the one arrested, Mr. Marconi. Not me.”

I turned back to him quick.

“Then let’s get away from this circus, Harvard boy, and talk about it like real men.”

The white camera lights grew even hotter against the back of my neck. You could probably smell the testosterone in the room. For a second or two, I had forgotten about the cameras. Mrs. Mastriano crossed the room, sat down on the chair beside her son. Tears dripped from her chin. Chris Collins stared wide-eyed at the entire scene; her cameraman was almost all the way into the room now, bulky camera mounted on his right shoulder. I knew that if I stayed any longer, I would do something I’d regret.

“Okay,” Fleischer said. “You want to talk, Marconi, let’s talk.”

He went out the door and disappeared into the crowd.

…For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, now and forever…

“Amen,” I said, glancing back at the two nuns. And then I followed Fleischer out of the room.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

IT WAS AS QUIET as a morgue inside Dr. Arnold Fleischer’s first-floor office in Newburgh General. I stood alone in a square-shaped room decorated the way you might expect from a physician who relied on boasting about his Harvard Medical School education to elevate his character. Numerous diplomas were tacked to the walls along with more than a dozen citations, plaques, and other advertisements for himself, most of them for delivering papers on the benefits of one medical drug or another, the spelling and pronunciation of which were beyond my energy and will at that point.

I was busy going over how unimpressed I was with Fleischer’s credentials when he stormed in, slammed the door behind him, and sat down hard behind his desk. He scanned the desktop, opened the drawer, pulled out a pen, and sat back in the swivel chair, clearly relieved that he had something to fiddle with while we had our little discussion.

“Okay, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “Can I ask what that was all about?”

I shifted my gaze from Fleischer’s wall of fame to Fleischer in the flesh.

“You tell me,” I said. “Monday afternoon, Mastriano was stable. Not a mark on him. Today he’s battling for his life.”

“I told you we had to perform some tests to determine the extent of his internal injuries.”

“I felt his head myself,” I said. “There were no lumps the size of a tennis ball or a baseball or a basketball, for that matter. No blood, no nothing. What’d you do, Fleischer, hit him over the head yourself when no one was looking?”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Fleischer said, clicking the push button on his pen, squinting his eyes while he glared out a window that overlooked Newburgh General’s parking lot.

“What is it then?” I said, pulling a cigarette from my chest pocket and lighting it before Fleischer had a chance to protest. “Mastriano paying you under the table to make his case look worse than it is? Or is someone else your sugar daddy?”

Fleischer turned back to me. “First of all, this is a doctor’s office and I would appreciate it if you refrained from smoking. It’s illegal.”

I blew out a long, exaggerated stream of cigarette smoke. Then I flicked the loose ash onto the carpeting.

“Second of all,” he went on, “Officer Mastriano appeared to be stable Monday afternoon. The injury I referred to yesterday morning on the news, to the back of his skull, was an internal injury we did not pick up until we did the MRI on Monday evening. The bleeding was internal and gradual, not external and out of control.”

“Who mentioned yesterday’s news?” I said.

Fleischer turned visibly red, like maybe he was giving away too much.

“Listen, Mr. Marconi,” he said, “he’s leaking CSF. We had to pump him full of steroids to shrink the brain swelling and to stem the flow of blood and fluid. Perhaps I should have clarified that earlier.”

I smoked for a second or two.

Then I said, “Yeah, perhaps you should have clarified that earlier.”

Fleischer clicked his pen a few more times. He sat up straight in his chair, gave me a tight-lipped, wide-eyed look that made him seem a lot older than I’d thought he was only forty-eight hours ago. “I know how upsetting it must be for you to have lost a prisoner-”

“Inmate,” I interrupted.

“Excuse me?”

“Inmates haven’t been called prisoners since the days of the Sing Sing lock-step,” I lied.

But Fleischer bought it anyway. His cheeks were redder than the red seal on his Harvard Medical School diploma. “Okay,” he said, “I know how upsetting it must be for you to have lost an inmate. Especially a man who shot an officer of the law. I know about fraternity and all that.” He waved his right hand over his shoulder, referring to the numerous fraternal and academic institutions on his wall, as if I couldn’t see them. “And I also know you must be upset for having to take the blame for the escape. But that comatose man upstairs was hit with something right here and hit with something hard.” He made a fist with his free hand and struck the back of his head like he meant it. “He was hit hard, even if I wasn’t able to pick up on the actual extent of his injury right away. That’s what modern medicine is all about. That’s why we developed medical imaging in the first place.”

Satisfied with his speech, Fleischer sat back, resumed clicking his pen and gazing out the window.

“Look, Doctor Fleischer,” I said, tone calmer, “all I’m saying is, as a prison worker, I’ve seen every kind of head injury there is to see, from stabbings to blows. Every single one was followed by some kind of bleeding or swelling or both, so don’t tell me there might be nothing unusual about Officer Mastriano’s condition.”

Fleischer actually smiled. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

“I see,” I said. The good doctor had me stumped, or so it appeared. So I decided to make like Barry Sanders and change direction midstride. “What about all those people upstairs? Tell me they’re all family.”

“Now that the media has latched on to this,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the parking lot, “there’s little I can do.”

Now he was definitely lying, but I wasn’t swallowing it and Fleischer knew it. On the other hand there was no real point in going toe-to-toe with him anymore. This was his home turf, his ballpark, and I didn’t have a warrant and all he had to do was call security and then I ran the risk of another arrest.

“Well then,” I said, “I apologize if I caused you any inconvenience.”

I went for the door.

I heard the sound of Fleischer getting up behind me. “Water under the proverbial bridge,” he said, reaching for the door and opening it for me.

Proverbial, I thought. What a smart man.

“You really should consider putting an end to those things,” he said, nodding at my lit cigarette, “before they put an end to you.”

“Is this Harvard Medical School talking?”

“Just a concerned doctor of medicine,” he smiled. “You must be aware of the risks.”

“When you’re as desperate as I am to find answers to difficult questions,” I said, holding the cigarette up to both our faces, “a few risks here and there are worth it.”

“And just what is it you’re trying to find out, Mr. Marconi?”

I glanced over Fleischer’s shoulder, honed in on the Harvard diploma above his desk. “Veritas” I said, “and a whole lot more.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I DID EIGHTY ALL the way from Newburgh to Albany and made it in just under two hours. I went directly to the Albany Police Department on South Pearl Street where I had no trouble walking into Mike Norman’s hole-in-the-wall office.

“What the hell,” I said, instead of hello.

Norman got up from his desk, pulled me into the office, and slammed the door closed.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You know the trouble you’ve gotten me into already, Keeper?”

The wall-mounted clock above his desk read 3:35 in the P.M.

“What went wrong, Mike?”

Looking more tired and pallid than usual, he walked back to his desk. His jet-black hair was sticking straight up, like last night had been spent in the office sleeping it off on the couch. And my guess was that it had been. What should have been a finely pressed button-down shirt was wrinkled and stained, and the knot on his brown necktie was pulled down around his chest. Mike ran his hands through his hair as if it made any difference at all and he sat down, hard. Opening a bottom drawer, he pulled out the bottle of ginger brandy, filled his I LOVE MY JOB! mug, laid out a second mug beside that one, and filled it, too.

I drank the brandy in one swallow and slammed the mug back down on the desk.

“Look, Keeper,” Norman said, “I don’t mean to go ballistic, but if Pelton’s busted you, that makes me an accessory. No matter who’s in the wrong, that makes me liable for manipulating the evidence, too.”

“You knew the risks.”

“I never imagined anything like this.”

“Pelton’s going to pin Vasquez’s escape on me,” I said. “Why is that?”

Norman poured another shot and drank it down. He squinted his eyes and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You think I ratted,” he said, his voice strained and constricted from having swallowed the booze.

I looked him square, in both eyes.

“I think you tipped him off. I mean, for Christ’s sakes, the man was holding the bag of evidence in his hands.”

“For Christ’s sakes, Keeper,” Norman said, “I had nothing to do with it. You hear me? Nothing.”

“I’m supposed to take your word for it?”

“What can I say? You either believe me or you don’t or you shoot me in the belly right here or you fucking leave my office.”

“Sure,” I said.

Norman poured another shot. He took a swallow from the cup, set it down on the desk, not hard.

“My hands are tied,” he whispered.

“Who set the knots?”

“I’m not exactly at liberty to say.” He took another drink.

I reached across his desk, grabbed the brandy bottle, poured myself a second shot. I drank it down, felt the cool heat of the liquid coat the inside of my gut.

“What more can I do for you, Keeper?”

I set the mug back down on the desk. I wanted nothing more to do with it.

“You can help me get out of this mess and then you can help me bring Pelton down.”

Norman took hold of his mug, sat back in his swivel chair. The light coming from the desk lamp in his otherwise black office made his face glow like a ghost’s. At the same time, something inside told me that Norman was truly on his way to becoming a ghost.

“Try again, Keeper.”

“At least fill me in on what happened yesterday afternoon.”

I sat down, crossed my legs, and waited for Norman to talk.

He took a deep breath and looked into his mug.

“This plainclothes cop came by only a few hours after you left to go back to Stormville. What the hell was his name?” He opened his desk drawer, scanned the contents, and pulled out a business card. “Schillinger,” he said. “Detective Martin Schillinger, Stormville PD. Big, beefy goofball of a guy in a trench coat; same guy you told me about yesterday.”

“My arresting officer,” I said.

“Well, he wasn’t alone. He had an entourage with him. No one I recognized. He said he had reason to believe I was harboring evidence of some kind that was crucial to the recapture of Eduard Vasquez.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“What do you think I told him? I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. That I had only just heard about the Vasquez escape. How could evidence have possibly made it up to my office that fast or at all for that matter? Then he asked me to follow him downstairs to the crime lab.” He took another drink, emptying out his mug so that the word NOT! was clearly visible on the bottom.

“You followed.”

“You’re damn right I followed. Listen, Keeper, you’ve been in Corrections most of your life, so I’ll spare you the gory details, but are you aware of new SOPs on printing analysis?”

I shook my head no, even though I was somewhat cognizant that fingerprint technicians were becoming real scientists with ultraviolet light-enhancement processing and microscopic imaging. That sort of thing. But as far as any actual procedures went, I didn’t know much. It just wasn’t part of the warden’s job description.

“When the stuff you gave me was sent down to the lab, it would normally have been tagged and bagged and logged in on the computer with both the state and the FBI as admissible evidence. Only this time I worked off the record. No tagging, no bagging of any kind. Just analysis.”

“No registering with the proper authorities,” I said. “No way for Stormville PD to know about the stuff unless there was a leak.”

“I promised you I’d do this under the table,” Norman said, pouring one more drink, “and that’s what I set out to do. Now here’s the kicker. Somehow this clown…”

“Schillinger.”

“Somehow Schillinger knew what to look for and where to find it in the lab.”

“Informant,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “Squeaky technician.”

“No way,” Norman said.

I released a cloud of blue smoke that boiled in the light from the desk lamp and then disappeared into the darkness.

“Could have been anybody in the lab,” I said, getting up from the couch. “Let’s go pay a visit.”

Mike stood up fast.

“Keeper sit down!” he barked. “You go traipsing through there, you get the whole place in an uproar.”

I sat back down. So did Mike. In the end, I suppose he was right. I had to be careful about shooting my mouth off or making any false accusations. Maybe on one hand I had trouble believing he was giving me the truth. On the other hand, I had no real reason not to believe him.

“Those folks downstairs,” Mike said, “they’re scientists, techies. They got no reason in the world to turn informants. They’re like machines, extensions of their scopes and lasers.”

“Money,” I pointed out. “Money talks.”

“What?”

“How much one of those crime techies make a year?”

“Probably thirty. No more than thirty, anyway.”

“How can you be sure a lab techie didn’t phone a friend of his downstate when you asked him to do the Vasquez stuff off the record?”

“I know these people pretty well, Keeper. They’re on the up-and-up.”

“And we’re not?” I said.

“You’re not,” Mike said.

An uncomfortable silence followed that I nearly filled by calling my old buddy Lieutenant Mike Norman a jerk.

“What about you,” I said. “How deep you in now?”

“Keeper,” he exhaled, holding his mug with two hands, “I’m playing dumb the whole way. Don’t ask me how that stuff got in the lab. It could’ve happened a hundred different ways. For all I know, the stuff spontaneously appeared out of the blue. Maybe aliens dropped it.”

“Aliens,” I said, stamping my cigarette out in the metal ashtray next to the base of the desk lamp. “Sure.”

Norman got up, which told me there wasn’t anything left to talk about.

A thin waft of smoke rose up from the ashtray, clouded his sunken face.

“Now get out of here and don’t come back for three years, Keeper. I’m sorry, man, but a pension’s a pension, and you’re a hot ticket these days.”

I stood up and took a look at the calendar tacked to the wall behind him. The entire first week of May was close to being x-ed out. Soon he’d be working on the second week.

I went for the door.

“Keeper, wait,” Mike called out.

I turned.

“Sorry it went bad.”

“Lots of people sorry these days, Mike. Me included.”

He put his hands on his hips. His.9 millimeter Glock was stuffed up under his left armpit. His armpits were soaked with sweat and his white shirt stuck to the sides of his ribs.

“Maybe I should have gone right to the Stormville cops,” I said, “instead of taking matters into my own hands. It’s just that I knew Robert Logan’s statement was a phony.”

“Tell you what, Keeper,” Mike offered, going for the door. “When this thing blows over, we’ll go to lunch. We’ll do something better than Jack’s, something a little more personal. We’ll do Italian in your honor. How about Mama Citones on Quail Street?”

“William Kennedy’s hangout,” I said. “Pulitzer Prize-winning pasta.”

Mike tried to work up a smile.

“I’ll be counting the days until this thing is finished and you’re off the hook.”

“Hey,” I said, taking one last glance at the x-ed-off calendar behind his desk, “I like my job, too.”

I forced a smile, but I wouldn’t call it a happy smile. Because I knew then, for certain, that my old Attica buddy Mike Norman was a liar.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

BUT THEN, NORMAN HADN’T always been a liar. Once upon a time, he was a happy-go-lucky young kid trying to make a name for himself in the Department of Corrections. We all were like that-Norman, Pelton, and me. Cocky, young, crazy. Lucky, for God’s sakes. And get this: We’d set out to make a difference in the lives of those prisoners. Until September of 1971, that is, when the prisoners made all the difference in our lives.

And there’s no denying that Mike Norman was affected the most.

Even now I can see him lying on his side, knees tucked into his chest, arms wrapped tight around his shins, fingers locked in place at the knuckles. I can see his black hair sticking up straight on the left side of his head. His face is thin and filthy with saliva and dirt. A patch of dry blood stains the small space between his upper lip and nostrils. Eyes wide, he gazes straight ahead into an imaginary distance. He doesn’t seem to see the iridescent glow of the tower beacons or the small gathering of inmates who are shooting up with drugs lifted from the psycho ward. He doesn’t seem to see the rebel inmates granting interviews to special reporters allowed inside the yard, any more than he sees the famous William Kunstler, long-haired lawyer for the people, seated at a long folding table conducting negotiations with the Panther leaders. He doesn’t see the sharpshooters poised on the stone wall or the helicopters making their perpetual flybys. He doesn’t feel the power of the propeller-driven wind when they buzz the yard. He doesn’t see the puddles of blood or my bare feet. Mike sees only what he sees. And I cannot imagine what that is. And I’m not sure I want to know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I MET MY LAWYER, Tony Angelino, at the Miss Albany Diner on Broadway beside the old RCA building, the six-story, concrete monstrosity that was topped off with a fifty-foot-high, plaster, Nipper the dog. Nipper sat doggy style on the flat roof, his tail end pointing to the banks of the Hudson River like an insult. Nipper was a magnificent leftover from the old days when the RCA company had run and operated the building-back when Albany had been a budding metropolis for gangsters like Legs Diamond and political gods like Erastus Corning; before the city had paved over the trolley tracks and integrated the districts that had originally been divided between the Irish and the Italians and the Polish and the Canadian French, and you knew where you stood just by sniffing the particular aroma of whatever dishes were being cooked for the evening meal. My own grandparents had come from the Ancona region of Italy directly to Albany after a brief stay on Ellis Island where my two-year-old father was nearly shipped home, having contracted a severe case of influenza during the long journey. In Albany my grandfather went to work for a local grocer, then for an automotive parts distributor; then he began a construction company, and, yes, his father’s brother was responsible for having invented a wireless communications system that the world would one day embrace as radio, although this afforded no special privileges to my father and his family once they arrived in the States. During the Depression, he also moonlighted for some of the more ambitious and money-hungry local politicians, driving trucks full of “near-beer” from Albany to Hartford and back again in the middle of the night under blackout conditions. In those days, there was a lot of money to be made working for the local politicians.

Sometimes it was the only money.

Years later, the corruption in Albany had supposedly been squelched by honest taxpayer coalitions. On the other hand, what had once seemed like a budding metropolis now seemed devoid of life itself-a small city filled to the brim with state workers making lower-than-middle-class wages, perpetually trapped in an overcast atmosphere best described as prison-gray.

On the other hand, if you wanted to find it, you didn’t have to look too hard around Albany to uncover corruption both on the street and on the political level. Just last year the city treasurer, Ernest McDaniels, had been busted for taking a kickback from a contractor who wanted the contract for the new train station that would occupy four square blocks of razed downtown property. Now both men were doing time at Auburn. In the end, I suppose, the difference between the politicians of the past and those of the present is that now you can’t flaunt the fact that you’re on the take.

Tony Angelino was a staff lawyer for Council 84 on Colvin Avenue in the west end of the city. Council 84 was the New York union that represented law enforcement officials throughout New York State, including New York City. He had already started on a plate of eggs over easy and buttered toast when I came through the narrow door of the old Miss Albany Diner.

“Breakfast at four-thirty?” I asked, taking a seat on the empty stool directly beside the short, square-shouldered lawyer.

“If you remember correctly, paisan,” Tony said with a deep, careful voice, “my breakfast was interrupted this morning by a plea for help from a certain guinea warden I know.” He wiped the edges of his mouth with his napkin and took a quick glance at the lap of his pinstriped suit to make sure he hadn’t spilled any egg yolk during the exchange of conversation. “Hey, Cliff,” he said across the counter to a short, balding man with a white apron wrapped around his thick torso, “coffee for my paisan.”

I watched Cliff retrieve a white ceramic mug from the stainless-steel shelf above the grill.

“How you holding up?” Angelino said, placing a good-sized portion of egg onto a triangular piece of toast and then stuffing it into his mouth.

“Not bad for a guy who’s been kidnapped from his own bed, held at gunpoint by the police, busted across the forehead, accused of harboring evidence and obstructing justice.” Taking in a breath. “Not bad when you consider I’ve been tossed into jail, printed, photographed, and booked. Not at all bad now that my reputation has been slandered in the newspapers and on national television. Not bad when you consider my house has been ransacked and the jerks who did it have a fetish for slicing giant X’s through photographs of my dead wife.”

I let out a breath.

“Glad I asked,” Tony said.

I took a sip of the coffee and looked around the old diner that had been here since my father was a kid growing up less than a mile from here on Colonie Street, smack between the redbrick rectory of Sacred Heart Church and the western bank of the Hudson River. The counter was made of light oak that had been covered some years back with a white laminate top. The walls were covered with a stainless-steel paneling that hadn’t quite managed to live up to the title of stainless, displaying as it did the brown-green marks of spattered grease. The big, boxy gas-fired grill took up most of the wall space directly across from Tony, and the floor was covered with white-and-black asbestos tiles. The Miss Albany was an old diner that looked like it might have been a trailer at one time. But now the place was an Albany landmark, a steadfast survivor amongst the abandoned lumber yards and steel mills that, once upon a time, made Broadway and the banks of the Hudson River seem like a hopping, if not a somewhat seedy, destination.

Frank Sinatra crooned over the loudspeakers while I sipped my coffee.

“So you’ve decided to take my case,” I said.

Tony puckered his lips and blew on the surface of his coffee. “It’ll probably cost me my job,” he said. “A union lawyer representing an indicted lawman would be a definite problem.”

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

“I wouldn’t get up in the morning if I didn’t plan on doing anything I would regret later on.”

“We can sit here and philosophize all day, Tony. But you got to think about number one, no matter what. So I’ll understand if you want to say no.”

“Listen, Keeper, I’ve been thinking about going out on my own for a long time now.”

“I thought you liked the Council.”

“It’s not that. I’m forty-two. Maybe it’s that midlife thing and maybe it’s not. But I feel like I got to make a move. This might be as good a time as any.”

“Glad to be of assistance.”

“And besides,” Tony said, “I think Pelton is crooked and I think I might get as much enjoyment out of seeing him come down as you will.”

We said nothing for a second or two while Cliff cleaned the grill by scraping away at it with an inverted spatula.

“We used to be friends, you know, Pelton and me,” I said.

“So were Martin and Lewis.”

“And Lennon and McCartney.”

“All you need is love, right?”

“We’re a team then?”

“Yeah we’re a team,” he said, biting into another triangle of toast. “Paisans, like O.J. and Johnnie Cochran. Only don’t get in the habit of calling me at four in the morning to bail you out.”

I had another sip of coffee and took in the soothing voice of Old Blue Eyes. I didn’t know what it was about Sinatra that made me want to light up a cigarette and pour myself a tall whiskey.

Night and day, day and night…you are the one…

I tapped out the swing beat on the counter with a butter knife.

“Always the skins, man,” Tony said.

“They call me the keeper,” I sang.

The afternoon sunlight poured in through the wide diner windows behind me, and I could feel the radiant heat on my back. Outside the diner, the Broadway of the 1990s was now empty. But I tried to imagine a long time ago when it must have been filled with cars, trucks and women when they still painted their faces, instead of piercing their tongues and men when they still wore fedoras and oversized overcoats with shoulder pads, and smoked filterless Camels as they walked the sidewalks.

Angelino wiped up the egg yolk on his plate with the last of his toast.

“Let’s move to a booth,” he said, lifting his stocky body up from the stool, “get down to business, Keeper.”

We set our coffees back down and took seats across from each other in the empty booth behind us. Before anything else was said, Tony took out a small tape recorder not much larger than his palm. He pressed the PLAY and RECORD buttons on the little machine simultaneously.

“I’m gonna ask you a couple of basic questions,” he said, “just to get the blood moving, get a feel for what could be going on.”

I nodded. From here on in, Tony was running the show.

“Have there been any wrongdoings at Green Haven that you’ve been privy to in the three years since you were appointed superintendent?”

The question was more like an understatement. Angelino knew the answer almost as well as I did. My war against corruption on the inside had made headlines for more than two years. Up until the time Fran died, that is. After Fran lost her life, I seemed to lose my enthusiasm for fighting what was a losing battle anyway. Who was I to be fighting the drugs, booze, gambling, sex, the gifts for guards, the favors, and extortion? Or to be more accurate, who was I to be fighting it all alone?

Tony’s point, I knew, was this: did I make any enemies while acting as warden? The answer? Of course. Just ask Eduard Vasquez or Giles Garvin or any number of mob connections I had put a lid on -the likes of Edward Farrelli, Franky Evangelista, and Joseph “The Thumb” Ricardo.

“The problem,” I said, “is this: Along the way I set up a couple of guards with wiretaps.”

“Illegal move, number one,” Tony said, making a mark in a small, flip-top notebook he pulled out of his shirt pocket.

“It was the only way to snag guards and convicts who were working together to bring in contraband. I knew Vasquez had been running the show. He and, to an extent, Giles Garvin. And they knew that I knew. It’s just that I could never catch them in the act. Even with the taps.”

“They were probably on to the taps.”

“It wasn’t until yesterday when I talked with Garvin that I realized how much stuff was being passed through,” I said.

“Garvin opened up to you?”

“Guess he figured it was safe now that Vasquez was out. But I think there’s more to it than that.”

“How?”

“Garvin said something about Vasquez being on his shit list.”

Tony nodded, wrote something down in the notebook.

“What would you say if I said I thought Pelton could be taking off the top?”

“Possible,” I said. “Could explain why he kept me purposely understaffed. Could explain why none of the dope pushers were ever indicted.”

“Could explain a lot of things,” Tony proposed.

“It’s a long shot,” I said. “I mean, come on, the guy’s the commissioner for God’s sakes.”

“Sure, it’s gonna be tough to prove. But not impossible.”

I took a breath, tightened my lips.

“Could be just the thing to save my big fat butt.”

“Any of those tapped men come forward, Keeper, you’re done. Prisoner or no prisoner. Proof of Pelton’s involvement or no proof. You obstructed justice, even before you were busted for obstructing justice. What you got now looks bad, but what you’ll have if those stupidos come forward is a six-figure fine and five years’ lockup minimum. Can you imagine what they’d do to a former warden inside an iron house?”

I was silent for a minute while the tape recorder continued running and Tony sipped his coffee.

“Listen, Tony,” I said. “What if somehow I get to Vasquez, get him to admit he escaped, that Logan and Mastriano helped him, and that I had nothing to do with it?”

“Now you’re defying all logic.”

“Just consider it,” I insisted. “You know, for shits and giggles.”

Tony sat back in the booth, both hands still wrapped around the coffee mug.

“Well, seeing we’re only talking shits and giggles, I’d say you could prove you weren’t implicated. At the very least, you’d sway a jury that way.”

“More like, I’d blow the whole thing out of the water.”

“At the same time, paisan, you’d open up a whole new can of worms.”

“But it would make Pelton awfully nervous, that is, if he really did have any part in the drug trade.”

“And just how do you plan on getting an escaped convict to come forward?”

“Hey, if Vasquez won’t come to me…”

Tony sat up straight.

“You’re not thinking of doing something really stupid?” he said. “As your counsel, I should remind you that if you leave Stormville you jeopardize the terms of your bail. You’re under what amounts to house arrest. You’re taking a chance just by being here.”

I sipped my coffee.

“Vasquez’s girlfriend lives in a town in southern California called Olancha, right?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the crumpled envelope, pointing to the postmark with my index finger. “Well then, what do you make of this, Tony?”

Tony picked up the envelope and held it out at arm’s length. He squinted, adjusting his arm like a telescope, until he could read the postmark.

“Athens,” he said, hitting the STOP button on the tape machine and now holding the envelope only inches away from his face. “No wonder the FBI turned up nothing.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Vasquez could be right under our noses and no one knows about it except you and me.”

“Okay, say he is in Athens? Just what do you think you’re gonna get from Vasquez if you can find him? Just what do you think he’s gonna say? Take me, I’m yours?”

“It’s the only chance I’ve got, Tony. My only shot at redemption. Maybe I can convince him that Pelton is more of an enemy than I am.”

Tony leaned into the table.

“He sees you,” he said, “he’s gonna kill you, Keeper. Take it from me. You go down to Athens, you’re a dead man. Vasquez won’t consider you a friend, believe me.”

Cliff came over and topped off our coffees. Out of the corner of his mouth, he asked me if I wanted something to eat. I told him I didn’t. It didn’t seem to make a difference to him either way. He went back behind the counter to take care of a customer who had just walked in. The customer, who wore a long wool overcoat in the middle of a hot spring day, took a stool at the counter. A long wool overcoat and it must have been eighty-five degrees outside, and sunny.

“There’s something else I should tell you,” Tony added.

“What now?”

“Just this morning, Pelton nominated Mastriano and Logan for a citation and a promotion.”

I felt the blood fill my face.

“At the same time,” Tony went on, “Pelton wants to compensate them for their physical and emotional troubles. A bonus, if you will.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” I said.

Tony got up from the counter, shaved some bills off the thick stack he kept in the pocket of his pants.

“Give it to me straight, Tony. Just what the hell do you think is going on?”

Tony took a deep breath, adjusted the two buttons on his double-breasted blazer. He looked directly at me.

“In my opinion, paisan, Pelton’s gonna try and bring you down.”

“I’m aware of that already.”

“Yeah, but he’s gonna stop at nothing. He’s not interested in convincing the public that you let Vasquez go free out of simple negligence. He wants to convince Johnny Q. Public that you were paid to let him go. In other words, he’ll try to make it look like you were part of a much larger crime syndicate. Pelton could actually be putting you in his own shoes, making you take the rap for something gone way out of control for him. This could either be the fruition of a long-range plan or something he’s doing as a last-ditch effort. Who knows?”

“You mean to tell me I might have been stepping on Pelton’s toes the past three years and not even realized it?”

“If he’s involved in what I think he’s involved in, the last thing he needed was an overzealous warden stemming the flow of drugs and contraband into Green Haven.”

I made a fist, brought it down hard on the tabletop.

“Bastard’s turning the tables on me,” I spat. Coffee spilled over the rim and made a puddle on top of the Formica. Cliff made an about-face at his grill. So did the man seated at the counter. He was still wrapped in his overcoat, like it was cold and snowing outside instead of hot and sunny.

“It’s okay, Cliff,” Tony said. “My paisan’s a little upset.”

Cliff looked at me for a second or two with eyes that seemed more searing than his grill. His round face, on the other hand, was as cold and white as old bacon grease. He sported faded tattoos on both forearms-Navy tattoos-one an insignia, the other a hula-hula dancer with a grass skirt. He held a stainless-steel spatula in his right hand. After a second or two, he let out a short breath. Then he turned and flipped a couple of eggs, over easy.

“Listen,” Tony said. “That business this morning at your house? The ransacking? In my opinion, just a scare tactic. Probably from Pelton to make you know he can get at you whenever he wants. He knows you can’t get away with accusing him of doing such a thing because, after all, he is the commissioner. An accusation would be ludicrous, especially after your arrest.”

Tony got up, retrieved his brown Mike Hammer fedora from off a hat rack that was attached to the booth back. He placed the hat on his head carefully, so that it didn’t muss up even a single strand of his black hair. Then he pulled down the brim, shading his eyes. He took a toothpick out of the shot glass atop a small table by the door and placed a hand on the door knob. All I could see from where I sat were his head and shoulders on the other side of the booth back.

“Still not going to be easy to sleep knowing they’re out there,” I said, resting my hand on the.45 stuffed inside my belt, hidden by my blazer and the tabletop.

Tony took his hand off the doorknob and laid his heavy arms on top of the booth back. He set his chin on the backs of his hands and, at the same time, glanced over at the grill to see if Cliff was watching. When he saw that Cliff was distracted, he brought his right hand up and made a trigger-pulling motion with two fingers.

“Listen up,” he said. “I got a little story for you that might put you at ease.”

“A story,” I repeated. “Now?”

“Just relax and listen,” he said. “Once upon a time there were three little pigs who left their mama to go out into the world and build homes of their own. Now, the first little pig built a house of straw. One day the big bad wolf came by and blew it down. The pig ran like a bat out of hell across town to his brother’s house, which by the way, was made of wood. But the big bad wolf had been tailing his ass and when he caught up with the two pigs, he blew in that house also. The two pigs screamed ‘Mamma mia’ and managed to escape to their oldest brother’s place-a house built the right way. You know, the Italian way with bricks and mortar.”

“Heard this one before, Tone.”

“Let me finish, paisan,” Tony said with a calming wave of his hands. “Now, the two younger pigs were in a panic, screaming that the big bad wolf was after them and that he would be there any second to destroy the brick house and make roast pork with rosemary out of them. But the oldest pig was calm and cool. He told his bothers to settle down, relax. Even if it didn’t seem like it at the time, he had everything under control. Just to prove it, he picked up the phone, dialed a number, spoke with someone for a few seconds, and then hung up. A few minutes later, sure enough, the old wolf was at the front door shouting off like a drunk on a bender about huffing and puffing and caving in the entire joint. While the two younger pigs huddled in a corner trembling in fear, the oldest pig sat back and relaxed. But just then, there was the sound of a car racing up the road. The car skidded to a stop right outside the door. A bunch of rounds were fired – shotguns, grease guns, Uzis, you name it. Then the car sped away. ‘What was that?’ the youngest pig asked the oldest pig. ‘That, my little brother,’ he said, ‘was the Guinea Pigs.’”

Angelino laughed and pushed back his fedora just slightly, enough to expose some of his forehead.

I sat back.

“I’m not sure I get it,” I said.

“What I’m trying to tell you is not to panic. I’m prepared to help you fight Pelton no matter what it takes. Even if I have to call in a few of my underworld pals to lean on the big bad wolf a little. If you know what I mean.”

“Guinea Pigs,” I nodded. “Friends of yours.”

“I prefer to call them business associates,” he said, cocking his head. “And they’re available whenever or wherever I want them. Capisce?”

“Capisce,” I said.

Angelino laughed unlike any lawyer I had ever known. It was a tongue-in-cheek laugh that said, screw the law, what’s right is right. It felt good to know he was on my side, working for me. He gave me a wink and a smile, and pulled the brown fedora back down over his forehead. He twisted that toothpick around inside his mouth. But before he left, he took a good look at the guy in the wool overcoat who had both hands wrapped around the coffee cup like it was snowing outside. Tony turned back to me, made like a pistol with his forefinger and thumb, pointed it at his temple, and twirled it around a few times. Then he exited the Miss Albany Diner the by way of the front door.

CHAPTER THIRTY

INSIDE THE TOYOTA, BEFORE turning over the ignition, I took one final look at the color-Xeroxed file Val had lifted from the microfilm in the prison archives. Rap sheets, medical histories, two photos of Vasquez-one a snapshot of him seated in a cheap aluminum lawn chair, a shotgun laid out flat across his lap; another a blow-up from mug shots taken during his 1988 arrest in New York for shooting that rookie cop at point-blank range. There was a third photo, too, but not of Vasquez. A blurry, color shot of a woman who had to be his girlfriend, Cassandra Wolf. Her hair was brown and her face white, her eyes black and heavy. The color Xerox was a little distorted. But even with the distortion, I could make out a small red mark on her neck, down near her shoulder. Just a small mark, about the size of a thumb print. Maybe a birthmark, maybe a tattoo. It was hard to tell because the mark was cut off by the edge of the photo. But then it came to me. I thought about the heart-shaped tattoo from the photos now in Schillinger’s possession. Could Cassandra be the mystery girl in the orgy shots? Whatever the case, it wouldn’t take an Einstein to figure out that wherever I found Eduard Vasquez, I’d find Cassandra Wolf.

The thing to do, I thought, as I noticed the tall man in the long wool overcoat exiting the Miss Albany Diner, was to go to Athens, no matter what my lawyer advised, and find out for myself.