Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  “It’s him,” Larry confirmed in an excited whisper. “It’s Frank Flagg.”

  Garrett rushed to the window and grabbed the bottle of rotten milk. With a hearty wet snort, he opened the bottle and drooled into the mixture.

  A stench filled the cell. Peter grimaced.

  Garrett pressed his palm over the bottle. “A good bacteria cocktail starts with whole milk,” he informed Peter matter-of-factly. “That’s the food—that’s what bacteria eat. You add two teaspoons of blood as fertilizer and then seed it with the snot of a man with the flu.”

  “Rat shit works, too,” Larry offered.

  Peter tensed and looked around the cell, peering into the corners.

  Larry laughed. “I think the new guy is afraid of rats,” he said. “I guess we cancel our summer barbecue.”

  Garrett shook the mixture. He said to Peter, “Nice hot weather like this, mmmm, they grow good in five days.”

  Peter nodded.

  “Spitting in here really had nothing to do with the recipe—that part’s personal,” Garrett confessed.

  Larry climbed off the floor, saying to Peter, “It’s your first meal with us—always ask for extra salt.”

  Peter sighed. He spoke his first words since being transferred from the medium-security prison half a mile away. “Is the food that bad in this building?”

  “Who knows,” Garrett said. “I only eat the crackers.” He stepped beside the door and waited with his hand over the bottle.

  The door trap creaked open.

  “Chow time,” said Flagg.

  Franklin Flagg was about forty-five, heavy-browed and snaggletoothed. He wore a sand-colored jumpsuit from the minimum-security building down the road, and served meals in High Security on work detail. He pushed a covered aluminum tray to Larry through the opening in the door.

  “I want extra salt,” Larry said.

  “I know, I know. It’s on there.”

  “The new guy wants extra salt, too.”

  “Fine.” He pushed a second tray through. Larry set them on the bottom bunk and turned back to take the third.

  Once the food was inside, Garrett leaned to the opening. He said, “The cops gave us a shakedown last week.”

  Flagg said nothing for a moment, and then: “Oh yeah?”

  “Somebody told them I had a contraband: they ripped the cell apart.”

  “Huh.”

  “I barely had time to flush three grams of snizzle down the shitter. Do you know how hard it is to get that real Colombian shit into this building?”

  “I don’t need trouble,” Flagg said. “I’ve done my time, every minute of it. I did six years in this building, and then worked my way down to minimum security by avoiding problems. In twenty-four days, I get paroled out of the system. I don’t want to start nothing with you.”

  “I know somebody has been watching me,” Garrett said. “You spying on me, Flagg? Is that how you won parole? Because I saw you in the rec yard. I saw you in the law library. I saw you looking at me at Bible study. And I’m seeing you right now.”

  “Look, Garrett, I got a lot of jobs around—”

  Garrett jammed the bottle into the opening and squeezed.

  Flagged shrieked, gagged, turned to run, skidded, slipped, crashed to the floor. “Help me!” he cried.

  Garrett doused him with the putrid stream and then shoved the empty container into the hall. “Next time,” he growled through the slot, “I stuff your heart in the bottle.”

  He yanked the trap shut, turned away from the door, looked to heaven, and shouted over Flagg’s muffled cries, “ ‘And the captain of the guard took Jeremiah, and said unto him, the Lord thy God hath pronounced this evil upon this place!’ ”

  “Amen!” said Larry.

  Then Garrett asked cheerily, “So what’s for chow?”

  “Are you kidding?” Peter asked. He held his nose. “I can’t eat after that.”

  Larry uncovered the meals. “Uh, you can thank us later,” he told Peter. The meat loaf was a steaming gray lump. The waxed beans might have actually been made from wax. Each tray also had one large wheat cracker, a battered apple, and a carton of milk. “You’ll find that the meat loaf tastes like Jimmy Hoffa,” Larry warned.

  Garrett passed his nose over the food and sampled the aroma. “Mmmm,” he said, mockingly. He bit into a wheat cracker and then collected three paper packs of salt from each tray.

  “At least we got extra salt with the new guy here,” Larry said.

  Garrett opened the salt packs three at a time and dumped them into an empty milk carton.

  “Don’t you guys eat?” Peter asked.

  “Not lately,” Garrett said. He reached into his jumpsuit, briefly pulled out his cock, and squirted bright yellow piss into the carton.

  “What the hell is that for?” Peter stammered.

  Garrett adjusted his jumpsuit and then went to the window and stirred the mixture with an old toothbrush. “The salt is a corrosive,” he explained. “And the piss is acidic.”

  He dipped the brush in the mixture and then carefully painted the metal frame around the window.

  “How long you been doing this?” Peter asked.

  “Two years.”

  The three men were silent as Garrett slathered the frame with piss brine. “How much longer?” Larry asked finally.

  Garrett put the carton aside and retrieved the shank from his sock. He probed the frame with the sharp tip. “Hard to say,” he concluded with a shrug. “There’s some softening. I’d say a couple weeks, three at the most.”

  “Uhhhhh!” Larry moaned. “Three more weeks on this fuckin’ diet.”

  eighteen

  “I’m glad you came back.”

  “I’m sorry about the way I left last time,” Billy whispered.

  “Think nothing of it,” the priest said.

  “I didn’t wait for my penance.”

  “I’ll sentence you to ten thousand Hail Marys if that would ease your conscience,” said Father Capricchio. He chuckled.

  Billy blew out a long breath. The silk screen bulged against it. “There’s balance in the universe, isn’t there?” Billy asked. “Hypothetically.”

  Father Capricchio’s eyebrows climbed his head. Billy was here for business. He took a tug off his diet Moxie and considered the question. He began, “I guess that depends—”

  “Because God puts things into balance,” said Billy, interrupting. “There’s the right amount of mass and energy in space, the right mixture of air and land on earth. When there is crime— let’s call it sin—”

  “Let’s.”

  “—isn’t there an equal amount of justice somewhere to counteract it?”

  “God plays fair, if that’s what you mean.” Father Capricchio said. Billy had lost him.

  “No, what I mean is—what if an innocent person is about to be harmed, while a guilty person goes free? Wouldn’t God approve if somebody, um, righted the scales?”

  Father Capricchio felt a chill, like a cool, damp wind. He squirmed in his chair, then said gravely, “You speak in terms of man’s law, not God’s. Our laws are fallible—for example, sometimes we let the guilty go free because we’re not sure they’re guilty.”

  “Reasonable doubt.”

  “There is no doubt in God’s law—whatever errors we make with human justice, God will correct on His timetable.”

  “I’m sitting on a jury,” Billy said.

  Father Capricchio tried to lighten the mood. “You mean a sharp guy like you can’t get out of jury duty?”

  “It’s a murder trial.”

  The cold wind blew again down the priest’s back. He said, “We are not speaking in hypotheticals, are we?”

  “Most people think it’s an open-and-shut case—that the defendant is guilty. But I don’t think so.”

  “You must follow the evidence, and your own conscience, of course.”

  Father Capricchio thought back to the morning newspaper. He had seen something about a murder tri
al. In Rhode Island, maybe?”

  “I looked into his eyes, Father,” Billy said. “And I didn’t see it—whatever it takes to be a killer wasn’t there. This kid has been in trouble, shot lots of dope into his own veins. He’s a tough guy on the outside, but inside he’s scared.”

  Father Capricchio had no intention of talking Billy out of his hunch. He believed God planted hunches to tell people what they could not know by mortal means. Father Capricchio had a hunch that Billy’s trial had pushed him closer to committing murder.

  “He’s innocent,” Billy said.

  Father Capricchio sipped Moxie, thinking of what to say. Finally, he raised the courage to ask, “Do you believe that if you free this defendant, it will be okay to kill the man you hate?”

  “We’ve already agreed that there’s a balance in the universe.”

  Father Capricchio rubbed the back of his neck. The skin was damp with sweat. He probed: “You said last time that this man killed your wife. How can this be? Why isn’t he in jail?”

  Billy was quiet a moment. “It’s complicated.”

  “Oh, bullshit it is,” the priest scolded harshly. “If you’re unwilling to trust the sanctity of the confessional, and the vows I took to perform this sacrament, and my love of Christ, which brought me to the Church in the first place … uh, uh …” Father Capricchio wasn’t sure where he was going with his outburst. Was he threatening to throw Billy out?

  “The guy used to be a cop,” Billy explained calmly. “He took up with my wife after she threw me out.”

  “Oh,” Father Capricchio said. His tirade had worked—no one could have been more surprised than he. He heard pills shaking in a bottle. “Is that medicine you’re taking?”

  “They ain’t Tic Tacs.”

  “Why did she throw you out?”

  “After I gambled away my stuff, I started losing her stuff, too. She told me I was sick and tried to get me some help. I convinced her that therapy was working. We even had a little boy. Then I lost the house and the game was up. She took my boy and the cat I gave her, and started over without me. The divorce was easy—we had no assets left to split.”

  “I hear a lot of regret in your voice.”

  “It was all temporary—I had figured—until I could win a few bets, get out from under the mountain.”

  “By gambling more?”

  “Father, once you owe these people, winning is the only way out,” he said. “But in the meantime, Angie—that’s my wife—shacked up with this cop up on the East Side, in Providence. I didn’t even know she’d been seeing anyone.” He sighed. “I was still working as a reporter, though by then I was just mailing it in, mining the same old sources every day for a new fact to be mounted atop fifteen inches of background, to make a story. It’s hard to get away with that for long. Somebody I worked with posted a sign in the bathroom near my desk: ‘Reporters must wash hands after pulling articles from ass.’ ”

  “How cruel,” Father Capricchio said.

  “I was juggling three bookies and a thin-skinned loan shark who thinks I miss payments to humiliate him—I don’t pretend to understand that. On top of those debts, I was bouncing a dozen credit-card companies, using one card to pay off another.”

  “Ugh,” Father Capricchio said, slugging soda. “I’d rather owe the loan shark.”

  “And then my old man got sick—can barely butter his own bagel—and moved in with me.”

  Father Capricchio chuckled gently, not making fun, just sympathizing. “We all have our crosses to carry,” he said, “but it sounds like you had enough to tow.”

  “Mmmmm,” Billy said, sounding detached. “And then Angie was dead.”

  He fell silent.

  Father Capricchio held his breath and waited, waited. Pressure built in his chest. He passed thirty seconds without air, forty, forty-five.

  “They had been at dinner,” Billy continued. “Angie and the cop.”

  The priest closed his eyes and silently eased out the breath he had been holding. He inhaled deeply and smelled his sweat.

  “Some Mexican restaurant, a bring-your-own-bottle place—I won’t eat there,” Billy said. He sounded annoyed. “This cop was known to like the sauce. Three years ago, he nearly got fired after the Massachusetts staties bagged him for DUI on the turnpike.”

  “Dee you eye?”

  “Stands for driving under the influence,” Billy said. “Don’t you ever leave that little booth?”

  “In body only.”

  “I don’t know what kind of wine they had, but a waitress remembered a bottle of Captain Morgan, and their register receipt said they bought ten Cokes. How well does rum and cola go with taco salad?”

  “They had an accident, didn’t they?”

  “Not an accident,” Billy said sharply. “A crash. There’s a difference.”

  Father Capricchio tugged off his white collar. It was getting warm in his confessional. He wet his lips with diet Moxie and then echoed, “They crashed.”

  “The car swerved off a back road, traveled sixty-six feet into the woods, and rammed a white oak that had stood on that spot for ninety-four years,” Billy said. “After I cut the goddamn thing down, I counted the rings.”

  Tears filled the priest’s eyes.

  “Angie was dead at the scene,” Billy said.

  “God bless her,” Father Capricchio whispered under his breath.

  “And the cop—that drunken son of a bitch—he lived. He got mangled, but he lived. His cop buddies who arrived at the scene to assist the local PD whitewashed the crime. They sat on the accident report for a week, protecting him. When they finally released it to the public, it said he had fallen asleep at the wheel. They never drew blood at the hospital to test his blood-alcohol level, so there was no way to convict him for motor vehicle homicide—there’s no fuckin’ proof.”

  No proof? “Then how do you know,” Father Capricchio asked, “that this wasn’t an accident?”

  Billy cleared his throat. He leaned closer to the screen. “I got bumped from my reporting job pretty soon after,” he whispered. “I couldn’t look at a police report anymore without seeing conspiracies and lies—poorly written ones, too.”

  Father Capricchio heard the pill bottle shaking again. More pills? He wanted to speak up, but he slapped himself lightly over the back of the hand.

  Don’t be his mother.

  “I was a shitty reporter at the end, but I had been good in my day,” Billy said. “I still had sources, people who owed me. I learned off the record that the original accident report—the one filed the night of the crash—had been intercepted and rewritten. They sanitized the paperwork. All copies of the original were obliterated—on paper and in the department computer. When I heard this, I tipped off a reporter buddy of mine. He investigated—the way I used to do it. He got the department to admit that the report had been rewritten, though they claimed it was only because the original had been misfiled and lost.”

  “You don’t believe them?”

  “Christ! Would you?”

  Father Capricchio frowned heavily. He was not supposed to lie—period. But certainly he must not in the confessional. He tipped back the soda can and drained it. He said, “I suppose I wouldn’t believe them.”

  “So instead of jail for killing my wife,” Billy said, “he got a disability pension.”

  nineteen

  The moment Alec Black left the smoke-free mall for the parking garage, he satisfied a craving with an organic American Spirit cigarette. The smoke smelled like dry leaves in a campfire. He tried to think about the movie he had just seen—how he would have shot it better—but the plot was so dumb, the acting so flat, the happy ending so horribly Hollywood. His thoughts drifted back to the trial. He was a juror, the target audience of the production. What if the trial were a movie? What director would have cast a bug-eyed freakazoid like Peter Shadd in the role of defendant?

  Only a genius, of course.

  A Kubrik or a Kazan. Or Fritz Lang—Alec planned to be
the next Fritz Lang.

  He let the butt dangle between his lips, put his thumbs together, and made a window with his hands. If the trial were a movie, how would Lang have filmed the testimony from Larry Home? He panned his hands across empty parking spaces. Fritz would have shot it in black and white, naturally, starting with a close-up of the cell door—shot in silence for thirty seconds—before slowing pulling back to reveal the three convicts.

  Alec puffed his butt and looked around. At midnight, the garage was empty. He had exited the mall on the wrong floor. His car was one level higher.

  He took a long drag and headed for the stairs.

  “Lose your car, too?” someone asked.

  Alec jerked his head around. A man fell into step with him toward the stairwell. He was dressed in black jeans, a black turtleneck, black sports coat, and tight black leather driving gloves—just as Alec was dressed, except for the gloves.

  “You scared the shit outta me,” Alec said. He chuckled and patted his hand over his heart. “Didn’t hear you behind me.”

  “Daydreaming?” the man asked. He smiled.

  “Thinking about a movie.”

  “I saw you in the theater. I saw the same film. Not much to think about, was it?”

  Alec dragged on his cigarette. He didn’t remember the man from the theater. “It was a dumbed-down adaptation of a pretty good book,” he said. “The relationship between the senator’s wife and the mandolin player wasn’t sexual in the book. It was emotional. His free sprit was supposed to teach her about the limitations of being a political wife, despite the money and the fame. The movie squeezed out the subtlety from their kiss on the roof, and then the director had to paper over the lack of character development by introducing the bodyguard as a heavy. There was no heavy in the book. It’s too bad. But that picture will probably make a hundred million dollars.”

  “Wouldn’t the studios make as much with a good story?”