Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  Klesko smiled indulgently. “Let’s begin.”

  “Do you want me to answer questions or just talk?”

  “Give me an account of what happened in your own words. I might interrupt from time to time. I’ll almost certainly need you to clarify some points at the end.”

  “Too bad you didn’t bring popcorn,” she said.

  * * *

  At approximately 7:45 that morning, Sergeant Richie had been called to the laundry room in B-Block by the guard on duty. The trustees assigned to the detail were reporting that several of the new industrial washers refused to start.

  A quick inspection revealed that the units had been sabotaged—the control panels had been jimmied—and since the machines had been working the day before, and the door to the room had been locked overnight, the vandal or vandals must have worked the last shift.

  Richie sent the morning crew back to their pods, since there was no way they could have vandalized the machines. The lone exception was Billy Cronk, who had put in extra hours the prior evening and was therefore a suspect. She then summoned the two trustees who had worked the night shift with him. Both Darius Chapman and Trevor Dow were considered dangerous men. Dow especially had a reputation for brutally sodomizing his unlucky cellmates, although no one had dared go on the record against him.

  How they’d become trustees, Richie had no idea, but she claimed to have been unafraid of them. Plus, she had the most fearsome officer in the prison as her wingman. This was the previously unidentified guard killed in the encounter. His name was Kent Mears, and he had weighed three hundred pounds.

  Billy had mentioned the brute to me during one of our recent visits. CO Mears sounded like one of those sadists who sometimes bluff their way through written tests, oral interviews, and personality assessments and secure their dream jobs as professional punishers. He had risen through the ranks to command the Supermax’s “extraction team”: the armored squad that invaded the cells of disorderly inmates to beat them to a pulp and haul them off to bleed, naked, in a restraint chair.

  With Mears for a bodyguard, it was no wonder Richie had considered herself safe. Despite knowing about the spotty surveillance in the laundry room—that she might be invisible to the guard in central control—the possibility of being ambushed never crossed her mind.

  She’d been grilling Trevor Dow when she heard Billy Cronk cry out, “Hey! What are you doing?”

  The shouted question caused Mears to turn his back on Darius Chapman, who used the distraction to jab a concealed shiv into the guard’s carotid artery. Richie never even saw the improvised weapon. All she saw was cartoonishly red blood jetting through the fingers of her bodyguard. Mears banged off a steel dryer as he toppled to the floor. Dying, he kicked the machine so hard with his duty boots they made black dents.

  The next thing Richie knew, Trevor Dow was whipping his hand toward her throat. This time she saw a flash of metal. She raised a hand but felt the razor edge slice through skin and tendons all the way to the metacarpals. But her reflexes at least deflected the shank. The blade missed the arteries and veins in her neck but slashed deeply down the length of her face.

  Dow came at her again, this time grabbing her bleeding hand, but she got her uninjured arm between them, taking cuts to her wrist and hand.

  Her next memory was of Dow raising the shank for a backslash across her windpipe, when his eyes seemed to pop from their sockets. He began to jerk as if an electrical charge were flowing through him, short-circuiting his nervous system. Then suddenly he was toppling over: a dead tree in a gale.

  Behind him stood Billy Cronk, panting, blood-spattered, the shiv clenched in his huge hand. He must have wrestled it away from Chapman, she concluded. On the floor behind Billy, Darius hissed obscenities as he clutched his stomach.

  Richie braced herself against the laundry table, but she felt her legs give way as the shock wore off.

  Billy Cronk caught her in his arms. Gently he laid her down on an unbloodied section of concrete.

  “You’re OK, Sarge,” she remembered him saying, his glacier-blue eyes close to hers.

  No one ever called her Sarge.

  Then armored men were dragging Billy away. They hammered him with plexiglass shields, beat his arms and legs with batons. One of the guards sprayed an entire can of mace into those same icy eyes she had stared into, spellbound.

  The correctional nurse from the infirmary appeared and began pressing what looked like a maxi pad to Richie’s face. She felt hands all over her while the RN shouted for the clueless officers to maintain pressure.

  Meanwhile, out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Cronk refused to submit. She saw him on his hands and knees while the blows fell hard upon his back and shoulders.

  7

  Klesko produced two plastic bags from a leather duffel at his feet. The first contained a strange rust-red object that seemed mostly made of plastic with a point at one end. I’d heard stories about the inventiveness of inmates, but fashioning a lethal weapon from picnic cutlery and a sharpened wood screw took a special kind of ingenuity.

  “Does this look familiar, Sergeant Richie?” Klesko asked.

  “That’s the shiv Chapman used to kill Officer Mears, I’m guessing.”

  “The same weapon Billy Cronk used to stab Darius Chapman and kill Trevor Dow?”

  “It’s got to be, right?”

  “What about this item?”

  The second plastic bag contained a T-shaped hunk of stainless steel. The crossbar had been honed to a cutting edge while the short descender was wrapped in box tape to provide a crude grip.

  “Did that come from a clipboard?” I asked.

  Indeed it had, said Klesko. It was the metal section that normally springs shut against the backing.

  “These are nothing special,” he said, leaning over to me, the smell of peppermint on his breath. “Sometime at the crime lab I’ll show you some of the shivs and shanks confiscated over the years.”

  “Are we finished?” Richie said from her bed.

  Klesko glanced at his notebook. “I’d like to go back to something you mentioned earlier. You said that Officer Mears lost focus when Billy Cronk said, ‘Hey! What are you doing?’”

  “Yeah, so?”

  I felt my heartbeat begin to accelerate. Steve is wondering whether it was Billy’s role to provide a distraction.

  “How would you describe Cronk’s tone?” he asked.

  “His tone?”

  “Did he sound confused, surprised, rehearsed?”

  Finally Richie got the gist. “You’re wondering if he was in on it? Have you met Cronk, Detective?”

  “Not yet.”

  Smiling seemed to cause her pain. “The man isn’t smart enough to be part of a conspiracy. What’s that line from Winnie-the-Pooh? Billy Cronk is a bear of very little brain.”

  All his life people had misjudged my friend’s intelligence, me included upon our first meeting. While Billy was far from brilliant, he was no moron. Like his wife, he had suffered the stigma of having been born poor to undereducated parents and had been dismissed ever since based on his accent and limited vocabulary.

  “How is Killer Cronk doing, anyway?” Richie asked. “I heard Chapman stabbed him before Billy wrestled the shiv away.”

  “He’s still in surgery to repair the tears to his intestines. One of the knife thrusts passed between the bowels but nicked the outer wall of his colon. The doctors are concerned about sepsis if there was leakage into the body cavity.”

  “Leakage!” She made a sour face. “I mean, that sounds like a horrible way to die. Can one of you get me a drink from that sippy cup?”

  Klesko held the straw to her lips. When she was done slurping, she shimmied herself upright.

  “Are we done?”

  “Almost. Do you have any idea why Chapman and Dow tried to kill you?”

  She laughed until she began to grimace from the pain it must have caused her damaged body. “Do I have an idea? Yeah, I have plenty o
f ideas, starting with the fact that they hated my guts.”

  “What was the nature of their grievance?”

  She smirked at Klesko’s turn of phrase. “Those two had grievances coming out their sphincters.”

  “Can you be specific, Sergeant?”

  “When I first started at the prison, I got catcalls. You expect that as a female CO. But if you rap a few knuckles, mace a few tear ducts, it mostly stops. But Chapman and Trevor never bent the knee. I gave them some time to rethink their attitudes in the Supermax.”

  Klesko loosened the knot of his tie. “Can you point to any specific occurrence—say in the past few weeks—that might explain the timing of the attack?”

  “Why does it have to be something recent?” she said sharply. “For all you know they’ve been working on their master plan for months. What’s that Klingon proverb? ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’”

  “Isn’t that a line from The Godfather?” asked Klesko.

  “The wops stole it from the Klingons. Excuse me if anyone here is Italian.”

  There seemed nothing left to say after that.

  Outside, in the hallway, I found myself studying the ceiling tiles as if I were a certified ceiling-tile inspector.

  “What’s on your mind, Mike?” asked Klesko.

  “Did you notice she never commented on being slashed across the face?”

  “No.”

  “I know plastic surgery can fix scars. But what kind of woman—what kind of person—doesn’t give a shit about being disfigured? Either she’s good at hiding her feelings, or she’s one of the most cold-blooded people I’ve ever met.”

  * * *

  The hospital staff were trying to return to normal operations, but the media had caught wind of the story, and journalists were now attempting to talk their way inside the building. Through the nearest window, I saw three news vans with satellite antennas lined up in a pretty little row.

  With Klesko’s help, I secured permission from the officer in charge to hang out in the waiting room until Aimee and the kids arrived. The deputies blocking the entrance were instructed to let the hero’s family inside.

  “I’d like to be in the room when he wakes up,” I told Klesko.

  “That, I am afraid, is a bridge too far.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to get his statement before he talks with anyone else, which means we have to wait for the anesthesia to wear off. Given your relationship, I can’t have you in the room for that conversation.”

  “You’re still worried that Billy might have played a part in the attack?”

  “I can’t dismiss the possibility outright.”

  “Even though Dawn Richie said he was too dumb to conspire in anything?”

  “I think it’s safe to assume that the dead prisoners hated your friend. There’s also the matter of potential lawsuits. If Mears’s family—or, hell, Dow’s or Chapman’s—decides to sue the state, how is it going to look if you were in the room for the interview, potentially coaching him.”

  “Understood.”

  After Klesko had moved off to confer with his colleagues, I noticed a familiar pale person in a midnight-blue uniform at the soda machine. Aside from the COs assigned to Billy, most of the other guards had returned to the prison. Those who remained I took to be friends of Dawn Richie’s. Maybe, like me, they were waiting for a chance to visit with their injured comrade.

  But something about the way Pegg was standing was odd; slightly hunched, muscular arms hanging at his sides, he gazed with fascination at the shelves of Coke and Sprite. It wasn’t the posture of a man struggling to make a decision. It was the posture of a man frozen in place by a magic spell.

  “Pegg.”

  He didn’t react until I tried again, my voice louder.

  “Oh, hey, Warden Bowditch.”

  His eyes, I had noticed, tended to be on the pink side. But his sclera were fully bloodshot now.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Me? Yeah, I’m chill. You can call me Tyler by the way.”

  “Hell of a thing this morning. Were you there when it happened?”

  “No, but I saw the laundry room after. That was some bad shit that went down. Mears getting stuck in the throat. Dude fell hard, too. We all thought he was bulletproof, you know? Like, no way could any con take down Mountain Man Mears.”

  Despite Pegg’s jive-talking, there was no missing how shaken up he was.

  “How long have you been working at the prison?”

  “Four months.” He offered a shaky smile. “The cons call me a newjack.”

  “So this was probably the worst thing you’ve seen?”

  “The worst? More like the latest.”

  “We don’t know each other, but if I were in your shoes, I’m sure I’d be reconsidering my career choice after something like this morning.”

  He turned his gaze to his boots. “Nah, I’m chill.”

  “Let me ask you something then. Had you heard anything about prisoners conspiring against Sergeant Richie?”

  He shook his head vigorously from side to side: a no. But he didn’t say the word, I noticed.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “It sounds to me like she’s made a lot of enemies since coming over from Machiasport.”

  His cheeks darkened, the color close to wine. “I already said I didn’t hear nothing.”

  “So you have no idea why Chapman and Dow ambushed her in the laundry room?”

  “Fuck no.”

  “Really?”

  “Those guys were fucking animals. They didn’t have to have a reason.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you, Tyler.”

  In a split second the anger was gone, replaced by manifest fear. “Is Richie saying something? What is she saying?”

  I held up a hand. “The sergeant didn’t even mention your name. But I’m getting the feeling that you know something—or maybe suspect something—and it’s causing you stress.”

  Now the anger flared back up, but it was a poor cover for the terror inside him. “A CO was killed and I had to mop up his blood. So, yeah, I am feeling a little stressed out.”

  “I know what it’s like to lose colleagues in the line of duty. Some of them were friends. I found it helpful to talk it out afterward.”

  “You don’t know me, man. You don’t know the first damned thing.”

  8

  While I was waiting for Billy to emerge from his cocoon of anesthesia, yet another detective pulled me aside. He needed a statement on the role I’d played in disarming Darius Chapman. My interviewer didn’t approve of the word execution to describe what Novak Rancic had done, but it scarcely mattered: a dozen other eyewitnesses, including the nurse who had been taken hostage, would claim it had been a righteous kill.

  The hospital having returned to normal, I drifted down to the cafeteria at the opposite end of the building. I ordered a couple of eggs and two grilled English muffins and was shoveling in my second breakfast while I checked the messages on my phone.

  Word had gotten out among the Maine law-enforcement community, and the majority of my texts and emails were of the “What the hell happened?” variety. I answered my friends with candor, my supervisors with circumspection, and ignored the rest. The busybodies could get their gossip elsewhere.

  Dani Tate had left a four-word voice message: “I’m on my way.”

  It occurred to me that I didn’t know how to feel about that statement. She would have finished her shift and would be driving without sleep under the assumption that I needed moral support—or perhaps she was merely eager for an excuse to come visit.

  Through the cafeteria window I watched a mixed flock of cedar and Bohemian waxwings alight in a crab apple. It took the birds mere minutes to pick the tree clean, and just like that, they disappeared into the air. I felt a wave of calmness pass through me: the first in days, it seemed.

  “Warden Bowditch?”

  I turned
to see a man in a pin-striped suit tailored for a power lifter. He had dark curls, but his goatee was touched with frost. The graying beard gave me trouble because I knew I recognized him—by his physique, by his dapper dress, by his unusually long eyelashes—but couldn’t remember where we’d met. Then came the spark. He was Angelo Donato, yet another official from the Maine State Prison. He looked to have aged a decade in the four years since I’d last seen him.

  The two of us had locked horns when I’d visited the prison to ask about a mutual friend, Jimmy Gammon—who’d served alongside Donato as an MP in Afghanistan—and who had later committed suicide.

  I gripped his outstretched hand and felt the calluses on his palm where he gripped the barbell. “Sergeant Donato.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me. But I’m a deputy warden now.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Not until then did I notice a uniformed CO standing a short distance from us. He was whip thin with a trimmed mustache that made him look like a British subaltern and stood as if called to attention by a commanding officer. There could be no question that the military-looking man was Donato’s minion.

  “I wondered if you had time to answer a few questions.” Donato sat down across the table without waiting for my permission. He moved aside a vase of dried flowers to have an unobstructed view of me.

  “Do you want a Gatorade or a vitamin water, sir?” asked the mustached guard, whose uniform sleeve bore sergeant stripes.

  “I’m fine, Hoyt. But maybe you could give the warden investigator and me a few minutes?”

  “Ten-four.”

  After the guard had marched off, I said, “You’ve done a better job of keeping up with my career than I have with yours. So I take it these questions are sensitive as well as important or you wouldn’t have wanted to ask them in private.”

  He had a disarming smile. “You always were a smart guy, Bowditch.”