Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3)

by Gary Earl Ross

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “Good. Then you’ll understand when I tell you Hellman was the submissive half of the team. Something psychiatrists for both sides agreed on.”

  “Shrinks? So he’s crazy after all?”

  “It’s more complicated. Hellman and his cousin were born a few months apart and grew up like brothers. He idolized Tull. After a life of petty crime, he moved into the big leagues when Tull decided to kill his parole officer and needed his cousin’s help. Hellman did whatever Tull wanted. From his history, both shrinks also concluded Tull was probably a psychopath.”

  “What’s all that got to do with me?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Hellman’s a violent and dangerous man but he’s not a dominant type, not a leader.” I kept to myself that I was sure I had half the answer to my next question. “How’d he get you to make a run at me?”

  “Money,” Joey said, with a trace of hesitation.

  “He doesn’t have any. Far as I know he’s been broke his whole life.”

  “He told me he had some stashed away in Pennsylvania, money nobody knew about.” A few seconds passed. “Thirty thousand, from a robbery. Fifteen would be mine if I took you out. But first I had to make sure you knew he was behind the pain you were gonna feel.”

  Phoenix had been right about the set-up, but realizing I was not a bargain basement target after all did nothing for my self-esteem. “So instead of shooting me, you announced yourself. Having two guys was supposed to give you better odds before you pulled the gun.”

  “Yeah.”

  I was tempted to ask how that had worked out for him, but something else had nagged at me since that day on Franklin. “How long were you following me?”

  “About two weeks. Not every day but a few times a week. I waited down the street from your office one day. Bag Man said you were a big black guy with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses. When you stepped out, I was sure it was you, so I followed you on foot to the grocery store and the coffee shop.”

  The Lexington Co-op and Spot Coffee, both on Elmwood near my office. I could have seen him at either location. In the Elmwood Village, full of students, hipsters, young professionals, and old hippies, a red and black tattoo would not have seemed out of place.

  “Sometimes I followed you in my truck. Twice when you went out with your lady friend.” He half smiled. “Both times you parked at her place all night.”

  My temples began to throb again. I had wondered if he’d seen enough to realize the nature of our relationship, which was why I had asked Phoenix to stay away today. My plan was to tell him she was my lawyer, nothing more. But if he had sat on her place through the night, he knew the truth. Now maybe Hellman knew as well.

  “I got lucky the second Sunday,” Joey continued. “I saw the two of you drive away in the morning but I lost you so I went back to a spot outside her building. When you came back and parked, I got out of the truck. I followed you to the theater and asked what time the show was over so I could pick up a friend. Then I texted my guys to say we were on. While you were in the restaurant, they came. We waited in my truck for you to come out.”

  “Tell Mr. Rimes how you were supposed to get paid,” Tripp said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “First, does Jasper Hellman know about my…lady friend?”

  “No. Least not from me.”

  I placed both my hands flat on the table. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I took a deep breath and stared into Joey’s eyes, hard. I wanted him to see the killer inside. As pissed as I was Phoenix might be a target, it didn’t take much acting. “That’s the whole truth? In all these weeks you haven’t somehow sent a message to Hellman?”

  “If he lies, his deal goes away,” Tripp said.

  “No,” Joey said. “You look like you want to reach across this table and snap my neck. I do believe you could. I don’t believe either one of these men could stop you.” He gulped. “But I’m not lying, sir.”

  “Because if anything happens to her…”

  Tripp placed a hand on my forearm and leaned on his other elbow toward Joey. “If anything happens to Ms. Trinidad, you will be charged as an accessory, sentenced to life, and transferred to Attica or a place like it, where most of the inmates are Black and Latino. By the time you get there, they will know you’re responsible for the murder or attempted murder of a Puerto Rican soul sister.” Tripp withdrew his hand. “Do you understand me, Mr. Snell?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  Tripp looked at me just as I finished rolling my eyes. Puerto Rican soul sister?

  “Mr. Rimes, doesn’t Ms. Trinidad have clients who ended up at Attica and other prisons in the state system?”

  I nodded. “They all love her. Too bad she wasn’t your lawyer, Joey. Could have got you a better deal.”

  Protecting the plea at all costs, Aronson ignored my eye roll and now said nothing about my threatening his client or insulting his competence.

  “Has Hellman made his thirty thousand dollar pitch to anyone else?” I asked.

  “Fifteen thousand,” Joey said. “Lots of guys heard him. I don’t know if anybody took him serious, but I was the first to get out.”

  “I need the names of any men you think heard him,” Tripp said. Then he turned back to me. “We’ll investigate further to see who’s in Hellman’s circle, who else got out or will soon get out.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt also to see if anyone has white power or Aryan nation connections.”

  “Right.” Tripp angled his head at Joey. “Tell us how you were to get your money.”

  Joey shifted again, avoiding my eyes. “When he saw on the TV news that you were dead, he’d send me a phone number to call. We know they read our letters, in and out, so we had a code worked out. I would call the number and his wife would send me a special bank check for fifteen thousand, which I was gonna put right in my mother’s account. The rest of the money was for his wife and daughter.”

  Though I stifled my chuckle, a good measure of the tension building inside me dissipated. “A special bank check? Any check that size automatically gets a review back to the source. You think money to an ex-con from a convicted killer’s wife right after the arresting officer is murdered won’t make somebody’s spider-sense tingle?”

  Joey said nothing but his Adam’s apple bobbled as he considered what he’d heard.

  “We checked,” Tripp said. “No unsolved robberies anywhere in Pennsylvania when he was there that would give him that much money to hide. He never sold drugs or guns...”

  “Bag Man set you up,” I said. “He sent you to do his wet work and didn’t care if you got caught. It was a mistake to believe him.”

  “I know that now.”

  “Do you also know he’s never been married?”

  “What?”

  “His lawyer pulled every trick in the defense playbook,” I said. “Laid out every detail of his miserable life. A childhood marked by poverty and deprivation. Two crazy sisters with four boys and one girl between them, all crammed in a narrow trailer. Bed bugs, lice, disease, poor nutrition. Add to that failing in school until he was old enough to drop out, an inability to form attachments to women, and unresolved homosexual feelings for his smarter cousin. All the boys are dead now, except Hellman, and so are both mothers. The sister his cousins raped repeatedly as he watched and did nothing? She’s the real survivor of that horror show. She ran away the first chance she got and changed her name. She’s a respected professional now, happily married with children and living nowhere near Pennsylvania.”

  “We questioned her,” Tripp said. “She knows nothing about a hidden thirty grand. If it exists, it didn’t come from her. She said also if she knew where it was and he’d touched it, she would burn every bill.”

  “You know what else the psychiatrists revealed at trial?” I said.

  Scowling, Joey waited a beat before responding. “You like making me look stupid, don’t you? Both of you.” He sta
rted to push himself to his feet, but Aronson put a hand on his arm.

  “A trial will be worse for you, Mr. Snell. I advise you to let them finish.”

  Joey dropped back into his chair.

  “I’m not enjoying any of this,” I said. “Jasper Hellman was the follower but like his cousin, he has no conscience and is capable of anything. You need to understand how he used you so you’ll give Mr. Caster any help he needs. All right?”

  “Yeah.” Joey looked down at his cuffed hands for a moment. “But I gotta say I wish I never laid eyes on you.”

  “One last thing and you’ll never see me again.”

  Joey rubbed the back of his neck. “Then get it over with.”

  “The mothers never got the kids vaccinated,” I said. “Some religious thing. Measles and chickenpox went through the family when the kids were young. But mumps waited till Hellman and Tull were teenagers. Hellman’s case was the most severe. Bag Man’s bag got so inflamed it left him unable to father children. Which means there’s no daughter who could have paid you either.”

  Joey was quiet a long time. Then he looked up, eyes glistening but not filling enough to send tears down his cheeks. “Same as always,” he said. “When you got nothing else to fuck, fuck Joey.”

  11

  In my career I had been to my share of lockups—army stockades, jails and holding centers, medium and maximum security prisons, even Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But nowhere had felt quite like Attica Correctional Facility, the supermax nearly forty miles from Buffalo. Everything about it was gray—the thirty-foot wall surrounding the sprawling grounds, the guard towers that seemed to belong to another age, the overcast sky, the grass which had yet to find its rich summer green. Even the air smelled gray. As I sat in my car packing into the biometric safe my watch, gun, baton, tactical pen, wallet, iPhone, and anything else I could not take through visitor processing, I thought about all I had read in preparation for my visit.

  With the inmate uprising in 1971, Attica joined the top tier of American maximum-security prisons that marched into legend through news, song, film, and television: Alcatraz, San Quentin, Folsom, Leavenworth. Alcatraz had its Birdman and a host of movies with Burt Lancaster, Clint Eastwood, and Sean Connery. San Quentin had mass murderers Juan Corona and Charles Manson, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan, a Bogart movie, and concerts by B.B. King and Johnny Cash. Folsom had a couple of Johnny Cash concerts too, as well as his best-selling album At Folsom Prison and a role in the Cash biopic, Walk the Line. Leavenworth had held Boston mobster Whitey Bulger early in his career, James Earl Ray a dozen years before he shot Martin Luther King, and self-taught ornithologist Robert Stroud for thirty years before a transfer made the Birdman of Leavenworth the Birdman of Alcatraz.

  Because of the uprising, however, Attica was different. It had held fabled bank robber Willy Sutton before 1971 and Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz, John Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman, and Long Island Railroad shooter Colin Ferguson well afterward. But with reports of racism, inhumane conditions, and forty-three dead after the New York State Police regained control by force, the prison became the focus of corrections reform and racial and social justice advocacy. After five decades of books, films, documentaries, TV specials, songs, investigations, lawsuits, and still unreleased reports, Attica, as chanted by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, was still a one-word political firestorm.

  Even though it was a weekday, the lines were long—Black and Latino visitors with a handful of whites, a sprinkling of men but mainly wives and girlfriends, some with children in tow, and mothers waiting to see their sons. I knew processing would take a long time. In addition to my driver’s license, I had my PI license and my old CID investigator card in the hope that somewhere along the way I would get a professional courtesy. It still took an hour, the only courtesy a reminder my CID card was expired and invalid for visits. Metal detector, light pat-downs, information forms completed with a stubby rubber pen, and having my photo taken for the visitor data system. But most of it was waiting my turn and passing one CCTV camera after another as prison personnel checked documents, searched diaper bags, and scanned people with a wand. I listened to the buzz of conversations around me, some in Spanish, most in English: “Girl, be glad it ain’t Saturday or Sunday or we might not never get there ‘fore cut-off.” “No, baby, Daddy can’t come home with us this time but he will be so happy to see you!” “Felt like the damn bus driver tried to hit every pothole he saw.” “What you mean this shirt too tight? I ain’t got nothing else to wear!”

  It was noon when I reached the general population visitation room and took a seat. As I waited for the man I had come to see, I took stock of where I was. Some women embraced and kissed men in prison greens or visiting day street clothes before they sat across from them. They would repeat the clipped show of affection when it was time to leave. There were soft toys and coloring books for the children. Disney characters and pictures of flowers and landscapes were painted on cinder block walls where men posed with their families or partners for Instax pictures visitors could buy. A Latino couple in their early twenties stood in front of Donald Duck, the man in his jumpsuit and the woman in a pink sweater and jeans. With an arm around each other, they smiled broadly. But her head rested against his shoulder at exactly the right angle for the overhead lights to find the moisture in her eyes.

  I looked away and let out a long breath. Whatever the man had done to end up here, the woman was suffering as well. As were all the visitors, except me. However tough I was, or thought I was, I was Bobby’s kid. His capacity for empathy had shaped mine. I saw the pain behind the smiles and hugs in the room. I pictured these women and children aboard the busses in the parking lot, traveling back to New York City or Albany or some other corner of the Empire State, staring at the five Instax photos they had been allowed to buy. If I had been an attorney or here to take a deposition, I could have avoided the wave of emotion by using one of the small lawyer rooms off to the side. But feeling was the price of living.

  At half-past noon Jasper Hellman appeared in the doorway.

  My mind spun back to the day my partner Jimmy Doran pulled our cruiser into a Buffalo State parking lot and we saw Hellman kneeling beside a woman on her back. For all we knew when we opened our doors, the middle-aged man in a dirty tan Carhart jacket and red cap was helping someone who had fallen. We had no idea Marv Tull—in a checked jacket and heavy jeans and standing with his back to us—had just shot Solange Aucoin with a silenced automatic or that Hellman was fumbling for the car keys under her body. When Tull looked over his shoulder, he flashed us a friendly smile meant to be disarming. Even though our hands were on our service pistols, we were still processing the tableau when he whirled and fired twice. The explosion of the driver side window was louder than the snap of the suppressor. Jimmy went down as Tull turned to me. His gun snapped as I cleared my holster. The bullet went into a light pole behind me. I squeezed off two center mass shots and a third when he wouldn’t fall. As Tull dropped, Hellman was on one knee and rising. He put an unsilenced bullet in my door panel. I caught him in the gut, two of my four shots punching through him into Solange Aucoin’s Hyundai.

  Seconds I couldn’t count. A hesitation too costly to forget. Never again.

  Now, in loose-fitting greens, Hellman shuffled in and started toward my table. He looked thinner than when I shot him. As he drew near, his smile revealed bad teeth and a sublime satisfaction he had rattled me into a visit. He was close to fifty now, sallow-skinned and wearing horn rims. His hairline had receded, leaving graying brown strands stuck to his forehead as if with sweat. He chuckled when he reached me.

  “I don’t get many visitors so I knew this had to be somebody real special. I’m so glad it’s you.” His voice had a peculiar raspy quality that swung back and forth between a high and low pitch as if he were comedian Gilbert Gottfried moonlighting as a Muppet in his spare time. “So, how you doin’, my nigga?”

  The nearest corrections officer—
young, thickset, dark-skinned—said nothing, but like most Black men he had a low threshold for the word nigger. He glanced at Hellman as he scanned the room.

  “Just fine, Bag Man,” I said. “How’s it hanging?”

  Hellman’s smile disappeared and his volume dropped. “Same place it always hangs, you black sumbitch.” He sat across from me, glasses looking as if he hadn’t cleaned them in three days, a stark contrast to his close shave. “Some suit came here to interview me about a kid who did time in my block. Seems like the kid got beat down trying to start a fight with some jerkoff on the street. Told the DA he did it for me.” He half-smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know nothing about it. Can’t even remember meeting the kid when he was here.”

  “Kids do dumb things,” I said. “Especially when they’re promised big money.”

  “Maybe but I wouldn’t know anything about it.”

  “A wise thing to say. Still, a man’s got to be smart to get another man to risk his life doing what he can’t get to do himself.” I tapped my temple. “Pretty smart.”

  Hellman nodded and grinned. “I guess so.”

  I spoke softly. “A scared kid with daddy issues and maybe a history of sexual abuse meets an older guy who offers to look out for him in prison. They’re both lonely and form a friendship, a trust. Maybe something deeper because this man can offer the kid a different… perspective.” I paused and watched Hellman’s lips press into a thin, bloodless line. “Then the man promises the kid big money to do him a favor when he gets out—a move Marv would have appreciated, getting the kid to go after somebody on the outside. The kid fails, but the man’s dying to tell somebody what he did. Marv’s dead so that somebody is me. Tell me.”

  “What you talkin’ ‘bout, nigga?” He laughed, enjoying both his own stab at a Black dialect and the freedom to hurl a slur when I couldn’t throw a punch.

  Smoothing his mustache, the CO stepped over and bent close enough for us to hear him. “Inmate Hellman, twice I’ve heard you raise your voice and say the N-word.” His tone was even but his authority was underscored by the finger he pointed at Hellman. “It is an insult to your visitor, to me, and a poor example for children who may overhear you. If you use that word again, I will terminate this visit and return you to your cell.”