Devil's Redhead

by David Corbett

  Not everyone on his review committee agreed. A penology wonk named Trimble, with designs on a state-level appointment, argued that the law’s the law, choices have consequences. He was a sharp-featured man with a boyish haircut and hard eyes, who had a strangely soulful manner of speech. He talked a lot about responsibility and used the phrases “send a message” and “the letter of the law” as part of a droning litany. “There is no demonstrable evidence,” Trimble claimed, “of true reform or even remorse on this inmate’s part.” He ticked off the violations, as he saw them—contact with a known felon; conspiring to conceal evidence in at least one homicide investigation; obstruction of justice; battery; harboring a fugitive; felony murder. “These are material crimes, and the list goes on and on,” he intoned, pushing hard for full revocation, a return to federal custody for five years with prosecution on additional charges. “Is this what we’ve come to, where we’ll even condone the systematic breaking of the law for a few good pictures? What’s next? Paying rapists for the rights to live coverage?”

  Abatangelo, allowed five minutes to speak on his own behalf, took only two. Dressed in his orange jumpsuit, the rim of his T-shirt peeking through the open collar and a patch bearing his inmate number stitched above his heart, he stood before the committee members without written notes or prepared remarks, hoping that, if he spoke directly and impromptu, the sincerity of his words would outweigh their disjointedness. When he was finished he sat back down, no questions ensued, and the committee took the matter under submission.

  They conferred for three weeks before issuing a decision. During that time, Trimble, the hard-liner, provided the text of his remarks to a right-leaning talk show host who recited selected segments in his broadcasts. “The Founding Fathers would spin in their graves,” the radio voice thundered, “if they saw the way deadbeats, pornographers, and, yes, criminals hide behind the First Amendment.” He called any comparison between what Abatangelo had done and the work of real photojournalists or, as some had suggested, combat photographers, “phony” and “insulting.”

  “There can be no neutrality in the war against crime,” he roared. “Not on our streets. Not in our neighborhoods. Not with our children at stake.”

  It created the desired effect, a backlash against the previous sympathy Abatangelo had enjoyed. Even with the momentum the radio show created, though, Trimble couldn’t muster the votes. In a split ruling, the committee decreed, “Daniel S. Abatangelo poses no discernible threat to the community at large. Charges of crimes committed, in particular the most serious allegation, felony murder regarding the death of Frank Maas, do not bear up under thorough scrutiny. What questionable acts said probationer performed in violation of his release conditions are arguably outweighed by the service he has provided to law enforcement and the general citizenry.”

  Release from custody was ordered; his probation, however, remained intact. Reading the report, and wincing at the rhetoric, Abatangelo wondered if that meant he was no longer Of Malignant Character.

  Three months to the day from the Sunday morning on which he surrendered, Abatangelo walked out of the San Bruno NIC. He passed through sign-out, headed out through the gate and down the walkway to the waiting car. It wasn’t a cabby in an aging Checker this time. It was Eddy Igo, driving the Dart.

  “All the cars at your disposal,” Abatangelo said, getting in, “mine’s the best you could do?”

  “Damn straight,” Eddy said. “The Mighty Dart. Dinosaur that refused to die, just like you and me.”

  They took Skyline Boulevard into the city. The road traveled a pine-thick ridge looking down at the vast ocean to the west, the bay and its far hills to the east. The sky was clear except for scrolls of faint white cloud. After taking in the vistas for a bit, Abatangelo leafed through the paper, which Eddy’d brought along. To mark the occasion of his release, the Sunday magazine had a profile of him that Waxman had written.

  “At the risk of making you impossible to live with,” Eddy said, “I insist you read the thing now. I wanna see the look on your face.”

  Abatangelo thumbed through the glossy pages. Some of the pictures already published were repeated here, plus a few that had slipped through the cracks. There were also some archive shots from the Oregon trial, in which he looked breezy, cocksure and young. The text recounted Abatangelo’s life and career, and was glowingly ham-handed, even by Waxman’s standards. Abatangelo got no further than the bottom of the first page before he put the thing down.

  “What a merry dose of horseshit,” he said.

  “Ah, the price of fame,” Eddy cracked. “Just damn hard, being the hero.”

  Abatangelo looked out the window. He’d spent much of his time during the last three months in protective custody. The isolation had taxed him, to where he still suffered sudden surges of almost hallucinatory moodiness, during which the voices in his head all seemed to be shouting at once. And what the voices sometimes—too often—cried out was this: Doesn’t have to be this way. The words came to him drained of all heart, shrouded in a pitiless futility. Same thing I said to Cesar, he thought, right before the gun went off. Same thing Joey “The Twitch” Costanza’s enforcers said to my father as they led him away. Ironic, that resonance. That’s not Gina boy. That’s Vince boy. Shel would detect in it inklings of Fate.

  “Heroism,” he said finally, “is a vastly misunderstood phenomenon.”

  Eddy glanced sidelong at him. “You doing okay?”

  Abatangelo smiled. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’m good. Thanks.”

  They entered the Sunset District from the south, heading for the campus of a small private college near Golden Gate Park. “Polly and Shel are waiting at the pool,” Eddy explained. “Pair of trunks in the back for you.”

  Abatangelo looked, reached across the seat and collected a minimal black Speedo from its box. “Whose idea was this?” he said, holding up the spandex suit. Unstretched, it was smaller than a hanky.

  “Three guesses,” Eddy said.

  “She must be feeling better.”

  Eddy chuckled, then puffed his cheeks and sighed. “There’s good days and bad days. The swimming’s getting her legs back together, but walking’s still a minor miracle at times. It’s an iffy process. Could take months. Longer.”

  Abatangelo glanced out the window as they passed a woman cyclist straining up the hill. “Longer as in …”

  “No saying,” Eddy admitted. “Just like there’s no saying if she’s headed for a stroke, or an aneurism, from the head-bashing she got. Limits of current medical science and all that.”

  The woman on the bicycle turned up through a brick gateway, vanishing. “Been worried about that, actually,” Abatangelo admitted. “Doctors mention any precautions, meds?”

  “No such luck. They say it’s a case of sit tight. Wait. See what happens.”

  How apt, Abatangelo thought. Just like prison. He sank a little further into his seat. Sensing the sudden funk, Eddy said, “You doing okay?”

  “You already asked me that.”

  “I’m asking again.”

  Abatangelo snorted. “Sure. Ducky. I’m the latest freed man.”

  Eddy nodded, puffed his cheeks again. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Any rate, on a different front, Shel finally stopped fighting the doctor over the pills he prescribed. Still going back and forth on dose.” He shrugged, to suggest cluelessness on all sides. “For the depression, I mean.”

  Abatangelo absently wiped his fingers across the dash, removing a ribbon of dust. The sickness unto death, he thought.

  They pulled into the campus, navigated a roundabout, and followed a tree-lined lane to the natatorium. Once, inside, Eddy pointed out the dressing room, explaining, “Miss Beaudry’s orders. You are to appear before her in your Speedo.”

  Abatangelo groaned, but headed through the door. Checking in with the white-clad monitor, he found a locker and proceeded to undress. The echoes from the showers, the locker stalls, the
musty chlorinated smell of the place, it all brought back memories from his days as a pool rat, and the remembrances conjured a wholeness he found inviting.

  He emerged from the dressing room with a towel wrapped around him. Reflections from the overhead lights flickered in white serpentine trails across the pool water and ricocheted along the domed roof, triggering another jolt of nostalgia. Eddy sat in the bleachers, hooting and clapping. Shel clung to the side near the five-foot mark, with Eddy’s wife, Polly, beside her. Both women wore black one-piece suits, like Channel swimmers.

  Shel turned toward him at the sound of Eddy’s applause and broke into a breathless smile. Abatangelo felt his heart kick, like he was on a date. She was wearing the amethyst.

  Her bruises had all but vanished. It made her seem younger, despite the fact her hair had dulled a little, traced with gray. She’d stopped using henna. There was something else, though, too—a lost, loopy cast in her eye. Antidepressants.

  Seeing the towel, she mocked up a grimace and quipped, “Chicken.”

  Abatangelo stepped to the edge of the pool. “I am not chicken. I’m modest.” She splashed him. He dodged, smiled, and nodded to Eddy’s wife. “How do you do.”

  “I’m Polly,” she replied, extending a wet hand.

  She was, he thought, the very picture of a Polly—short and strong without any shape that registered sex appeal in the conventional sense, except, as Eddy put it, “The hips will bear and the rest is there.” She offered a selfless smile in a face that was square and round at the same time, with cornsilk hair, a pert snub nose and freckles. The kind of woman, Abatangelo thought, that a lot of men just don’t get. To Eddy, though, she was the find of a lifetime.

  Shel said to Abatangelo, “Time to get wet, big fella.”

  Making a little bow, he let the towel drop. He still had his shape from prison lifting, which the Speedo showed off to grand effect, barely covering his basket.

  Wiggling her fingers, Shel said, “Yummers.”

  Polly climbed out of the pool, her head thrown back. “Your turn,” she said to Abatangelo, shaking her hands of water. “Make sure she kicks.”

  “Show Polly-Wogs how pretty you are in the water,” Shel hollered, clapping her hands. The sound echoed through the vast domed space, and surrendering to the mood of celebration, Abatangelo made a racing dive, skimming the surface with barely a splash. He took one fast lap, switching from Australian crawl to backstroke to butterfly as the mood dictated, then came up behind Shel and slipped his arms underneath her breasts. Her nipples hardened at the touch, sprouting under the slick black fabric.

  “Come on,” he said. “Kick.”

  He pulled her behind him as she made knifing thrusts with one leg then the other, the right clearly abler, stronger than the left. He wondered how long it would take, getting her to walk again. Wondered if she’d even survive that long. Stroke, he thought. Aneurism. To lose her now, after all they’d survived, wouldn’t that be a nice little valentine from the gods. Once he felt confident they were out of Ed’s and Polly’s earshot, he said softly, “Tell me the truth, how are you?”

  She stopped kicking and wiped a gluey strand of hair from her face. “I’m an old woman,” she whispered. “You’re still gonna love me, right?”

  He dunked her under the water, held her for a second, then let her up. She gasped, wiped the water from her face and sputtered, “Asshole.”

  “Tell me how you’re doing.”

  She gauged the space between them and the bleachers. “I don’t sleep much,” she admitted.

  “Scared?”

  “God yes.”

  He moved a little further into the center of the pool.

  “Not just me,” Shel said. “Eddy freaks every time a Mexican walks into his shop. Boy’s jumpy as a bug. It’s nuts, he knows it, but it’s got him beat.”

  “I think I know how he feels,” Abatangelo said.

  Despite his attempts to keep a low profile, word of Abatangelo’s presence at San Bruno had circled quickly inside. It was the kind of notoriety that would make him a prize to some lowlife mutt or desgraciado eager to make his name, which was why he’d elected for solitary.

  As for Shel, she’d been granted immunity through Cohn’s intercession in exchange for a series of interviews with the law. She still got calls at least once a week to come in, sit down with Detective So-and-So, he wanted to go over just one more aspect of this thing, tie up a little loose end. It was a good-news-bad-news sort of arrangement; she’d be safe but at the mercy of law enforcement for a good long while, and when she was no longer at their mercy she’d be cut free to fend for herself.

  “It’s not just the scared part, though,” Shel went on. “These pills, there’s times I feel like I’m watching myself watch myself watch something. And the thing I keep seeing is him. Cesar, I mean. I tricked him, gave him the idea it was him and me, baby, on the run.”

  “Shel—”

  “I had to, I know that, it was my only way out. If he didn’t exactly save my life, though, he did at least refuse to kill me. It’s the only reason I’m here. But then, like I said, I see him. Up against the wall, you holding him there, trying to get him to listen, to see, to stop, and that thing in his eyes when he figured it out and the hate and then the gun going off—”

  “I didn’t want,” Abatangelo began, stopping because he caught a whiff of self-pity in it. Changing tacks, he said, “Not much of a sleeper myself these past few weeks.”

  He lay awake most nights till dawn, trying to negotiate a truce with his foreboding. Felix Randall was back in Boron. He’d been able to keep his empire alive before from inside prison, but his organization lay in shambles now. Dayball, Tully, his other lieutenants were dead or in lockup. And in that void, the Mexicans accomplished their principal goal, tightening their grip on the Delta meth trade. Rumor suggested the stranglehold would be short-lived. It’d be only a matter of time, they said, before the locals reclaimed the territory, taking it back inch-by-inch as the homegrown masterminds learned the ephedrine cooking process and their labs cropped up everywhere again.

  Regardless, Rolando Moreira hadn’t stuck around to gloat, not with the press coverage Waxman had caused. He’d fled to Mexico, claiming family business interests beckoned and leaving behind a phalanx of lawyers and straw men to deny all. Victor Facio, never one to relish the public eye to begin with, vanished completely. Rumors placed him back in Mexico, now fully in the service of Marco Carasco, the Sinaloan trafficker behind Moreira’s operation. The El Parador Hotel, out in Montezuma Hills, sat empty, still cluttered with the debris from Larissa Moreira’s quince.

  “Sometimes,” Shel said, breaking the silence, “I wake up in the middle of the night with the taste of Cesar’s blood in my mouth. The way it tasted when I bit him.”

  He tightened his arms around her. “I get the same thing,” he admitted. “Except with me it’s the smell that hung in the air right after Frank triggered his bomb.”

  She rested her cheek against his arm. “Poor, sad, fucked-up Frank.”

  He flinched a little at her tone, and caught himself again wanting to say, I didn’t want …, or some such, but she beat him to it. “If I had a nickel for every good intention gone bad,” she said, “we’d be set for life. Good intentions gone bad and people I never meant to hurt.”

  He trolled her backward around the pool, glancing up at Ed and Polly on the bleachers. They sat close, sharing the Sunday funnies, him in his street clothes, her wrapped in a towel. Suddenly they laughed out loud, knocking against each other, rattling the comics between them. Shel glanced up then, too.

  “Polly’s been the queen’s kid sister,” she said. “Even helps me dress sometimes, when I’m just … such a klutz. I feel stupid. And Eddy, God. Eddy’s been stellar.”

  “It’s his nature,” Abatangelo said.

  “If anything happens to them,” she said, “I’ll never forgive myself.”

  Abatangelo kissed her hair. It smelled of chlorine and shampoo. �
�They’re not here,” he said, “because it’s easy. It’d be nice if we could wish the risks away, but we can’t.”

  “We could disappear.” The words came out rushed, hopeless. “Leave them out of it.”

  “You tried that once, remember? Where’d it get you?”

  “It’s not fair,” Shel said. “Not for them. I’m serious, Danny.”

  “Everybody’s serious,” he responded, “and everybody’s scared. Too bad that’s no excuse. If people care about you, return the favor. Love them back. Have the guts to be grateful, make it worth their while. Running’s chickenshit and there’s no guarantee it’ll protect anybody, anyway. I realize, like a lot of sound advice, that’s easy to say and hard to live by and doesn’t seem to solve much, but …”

  He tightened his grip around her and kept moving, kissing her hair again. Swirling the water with her feet, she watched the froth dissolve behind her and settled back against his arms, lulled by the rhythm of his breathing. In time, he lay his cheek against her hair and hummed a tune she couldn’t quite place at first. Gradually, it came to her—it was one of the songs he’d sung that night at his flat, when he dropped her into the tub of scalding water and nursed her. A comical song, except now she detected sadness in it. Not tragic or crazy-making or wrong. Gentle. True. Maybe it’s the way he’s humming it, she thought, or just your imagination, or these pills. Then again, maybe it was there all along, that sadness.

  Something broke inside her then, a tension wire in her heart, snapping. Her body started to shake with sobs and behind her Abatangelo slowed his pace through the water, whispering in her ear, “Talk to me.” She clutched his arm with one hand while the other signaled that she was good, fine, keep moving. He did so, enveloping her in his arms, and as he did the sorrow rising up inside revealed itself as something familiar, long lost. Like the called-out greeting from an old friend, a wise friend, one who’s been away, it seems, forever.