Black Water Transit

by Carsten Stroud

  He had written her a few times during the early months of his war and heard very little back from her, unless the Corps had screwed up his pay deposits. The first year in-country, after he’d been working as a crew chief on an extraction Huey—where he first met Creek—he’d caught a shrapnel fragment in his right knee and they sent him back to Pensacola for a rest and refit.

  Janice rode him hard and put him away wet for six days straight, and each time they made love he lost a few more points off his IQ. By the time he left for Vietnam again, he was lucky to be able to tie his boots and respond to simple hand signals in exchange for a cube of sugar. Maybe that was why he never noticed that a lot of the REMFs—the rear-echelon motherfuckers—around Pensacola had practically no IQs at all, but seemed real happy in spite of it. It took him months to figure out that Janice was what you’d call these days fidelity-challenged. Their next meeting was a long while later; he’d been three years in-country, mainly flying Huey gunships out of Soc Trang with Creek Johnson, and Otts, and Gorman, and Jack Vermillion was not the same nice kid he’d been in 1966.

  By the time they eventually split up, after a few more years of cheap red wine and heart-to-heart combat, Janice, until then childless, had presented him with a baby boy—Christ, but he had been a lovely one too, with huge brown eyes and a scent like dry hay and his breath on the back of Jack’s hand warm and feathery—and Janice, hand on the place where a normal woman would have kept her soul, assured him that the child was truly his, swear to God.

  Now and then it occurred to Jack that if he’d just killed her right at the start, he’d be out of prison by now. Well, he hadn’t, and the kid was his punishment. Whoever his daddy was, and maybe it was Jack, there was no doubt at all who his mother was.

  They named him Danny, and yes he was a beautiful-looking child, but Christ, he seemed to be a bad-hearted little thing right out of the chute, and Jack’s biggest fear in the later years was that Danny—not Streak, that was Creek Johnson’s name for the boy—was only really happy when something small and furry was coughing up blood in a corner.

  But the boy was his responsibility and Jack loved him as hard as he could. He was all the boy had, since Janice had finally bailed out on both of them when Danny was seven.

  For some reason, maybe his Catholicism, Jack had never legally divorced Janice, so for years she had cruised into and out of their lives like a bad-luck comet, staying a few days, leaving radio static and bad weather in her wake, taking a purseful of cash and whatever else she could lever out of Jack, using Danny as the crowbar. Jack felt that Janice was the kind of mother who could damage the best of kids, and he had tried to be patient with Danny.

  Jack had given fatherhood everything he had. Danny got the best schools Jack could afford, a different one almost every year, lots of athletics, work on the docks right alongside his daddy. He made sure that Danny stayed clear of the sons of his old friends, most of whom were already in crime and studying for their button-man finals. It was Jack’s intention that Danny would become a full partner in Black Water Transit Systems as soon as he got himself straight.

  Jack pumped so much positive affirmation and self-esteem into the kid, it was a wonder he hadn’t exploded like an overheated spud. But Danny had a magnetic attraction for personal disasters, and in the latter years of their association his disaster du jour was drugs. Situations like this are what they call around the precinct “red-lined and ticking,” and to nobody’s surprise but Jack’s, it all blew up one day when Jack found Danny in the Black Water Transit warehouse down in Red Hook, sitting next to a set of propane tanks, holding a Marine Corps Zippo lighter that Jack had thought he’d lost years ago.

  Danny had it lit and was holding a spoon over it. He had a length of rubber tubing around his right elbow. When Jack walked in on him, first he saw the needle, then he saw a look in his son’s eyes—those soft brown eyes that had once been so strong a pull on Jack that he stayed in a bad marriage just to be around them—well, that broke his heart. It took a couple of the dockworkers to drag Jack off his son, and the kid had spent two days in a Brooklyn hospital recuperating.

  When Jack had gone to visit him the bed was empty. Danny was gone. So was the Day-Glo orange Camaro that Jack had leased for him. The next afternoon he got a call from a Key Bank branch in Passaic, a man he knew slightly, asking him about a check that had been presented for cash, made out to a Danny Vermillion, had Jack’s signature on it. The manager recognized the name from other business with Jack and felt that the signature seemed shaky. Jack asked him how much.

  Twenty-four thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven.

  And sixty cents.

  One thousand for every year of Danny’s life. He had probably thrown in the seven hundred and change to make the check look more plausible. Was Danny Vermillion there in the manager’s office? He was. Did Jack want to talk to him? Yeah, he did.

  But Danny refused. Jack could hear his voice over the phone, a slate whine like somebody taking the rust off steel. The manager came back, asked Jack, what about the check?

  It’s good, he said. Give him the money.

  Next time he heard from Danny it was indirectly, a call that was being made for him by a vice squad detective in Los Angeles, wanted to know if he’d take a call from a Danny Vermillion.

  Jack accepted the call, listened to a series of bullshit excuse scenarios that were so poorly constructed they were an insult to criminal assholes everywhere, and then refused to send the bail, thinking a beef for cocaine possession would teach Danny a life lesson. And it did. It taught him to be more ambitious.

  The next call was a year later, two weeks ago last Friday, from the prison clinic in Lompoc Correctional. The call came in after eleven at night. Jack had been sitting in the dark in the living room of his house in Rensselaer, listening to a Chopin nocturne and working through a bottle of Beringer’s gamay. Two weeks later he could still play it back in his head word for word.

  “Mr. Vermillion?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you accept a collect call from a Daniello Vermillion in Lompoc, California?”

  Jack had thought about it for a while. The nocturne floated through the darkened room and the gamay was in his bloodstream and he decided he was up to taking the call.

  “Yes.”

  “Dad … it’s Danny. Dad, don’t hang up! Please!”

  At first Jack didn’t believe it really was Danny. He had never heard that quaver in his throat, never heard the panic.

  “I won’t.”

  “Please don’t! Dad, I gotta get out of here. There’s a guy here, he’s … he’s trying to … I can’t shake him. The guards won’t help. I can’t get him off me. I’m in isolation for another three weeks, but after that—”

  “Why are you in isolation?”

  “I cut myself. Cut my throat. Deep. I used a piece of sheet metal from the shop floor. I had to do something. I’m back in general population by the middle of July. There’s no way I can take this guy. He’s a freak with La Eme. They run the yard. Dad, you have to do something. I can’t be a punk. I can’t let that happen. I’d be better dead. I’ll kill myself before I go back to gen pop. I swear, Dad. Please help me.”

  “Danny … I’ll try. What can I do? I’ll call the warden.”

  “That’ll just make me a snitch. Don’t call him. I can go to detox down in Fresno. I already asked my worker. They can do it, but they gotta have a recommendation for a transfer to medium security. My worker’s a lady named Lucy Carillo-Vega. She’s got it all set up. If you can get somebody in the Bureau of Prisons in DC to call her—”

  “How can I make that happen, Danny? I don’t know—”

  “Fuck, Dad. You’re a huge corporation. You gotta know somebody in Albany. Dad, I know I don’t deserve any help. I know I’ve been … I know what I am. But I can change. Man, I can change. I had no fucking clue, but now, Dad, this place … Dad, please try!”

  “Danny, I—”

  “Dad. I gotta go. Dad
… I love you. I gotta go!”

  “Don’t hang up.”

  “I gotta. Somebody’s waiting. I can’t hog the line. They shank you for that. I gotta go now. Do something fast, Dad. Please!”

  Then he was gone.

  Dad. Please help me.

  But there was nothing Jack could do. Danny was in Lompoc for trafficking and weapons possession and attempted armed robbery. He would be in Lompoc for—at the least—ten more years.

  Jack tried all the levers. Nothing worked. A state attorney in Albany explained it over a whisky sour. Jack had nothing to trade. Deals were always possible. If Jack wanted a medium-security bunk for the kid, maybe get him into a detox program, maybe some professional counseling, that could perhaps be done. But the feds would want something in return.

  Like what?

  The lawyer shrugged, tried to look casual, and said golly, he had no idea. Gee, wait a minute … what if? Maybe a lead on a big bust, something that would make the local U.S. attorney happy? That would be good, right? Something that came equipped with major headlines. Something conspiratorial and sexy.

  Got anything like that? Jack?

  Disarming smile, a sip of his whisky sour, and then he looked quickly away. Jack stared at the side of the man’s head in silence and tried to keep his temper under control. The guy knew damn well that Jack had lines into the Italian community, that he knew people who were pulling the usual crimes, but he also knew that there was no proof whatever that Jack was a connected guy. No proof, because he wasn’t. Not now. Not then. Not ever.

  But around Albany the courthouse sharks were dead-bang certain there was no way a man like Jack Vermillion—a gutter wop from Astoria—could make Black Water Transit such a success without some kind of Mafia backing. How about the way those Teamsters backed off him last year? That had to be Jack’s old school buddy, Frank Torinetti, now suspected of being a major figure in the local families. So naturally Jack was a source to be worked. And that wasn’t going to happen, not even for Danny. Which meant that, other than being a rat to guys he grew up with, it was pretty clear that Jack Vermillion had nothing to offer the state or the feds by way of ransom for his kid, who, for some reason that Jack could not quite define, even to himself, was still his son, and whom Jack still wanted to protect, if there was any way on earth he could, because you don’t throw away family, even if they deserve it, and you don’t set a limit on forgiveness, because if you do, the time will come when you’ll need it for yourself and it won’t be there, because it comes from God, who remembers these sins like a Sicilian remembers an insult.

  Danny had called two weeks ago. Jack had contacted his caseworker, Lucy Carillo-Vega, and she had confirmed that Danny was going back into general population next week. Was there anything Jack could do? If he was going to do something, it had to happen soon, she said. Jack had no answer. And then a total stranger named Earl Pike showed up at the Frontenac Hotel, and everything changed.

  CENTRAL BOOKING

  LOWER MANHATTAN

  2150 HOURS

  Euphonia Shabazz was actually the Honorable Euphonia Shabazz, known to the cops and the lawyers around Centre Street as the Eight Ball because she was round and shiny and black and had only three answers to any legal question—yes, no, and reply hazy, ask again later. Judge Shabazz was catching that very same evening when Eddie Rubinek filed an urgent request for dismissal of charges against Tony LoGascio on the grounds that the information provided by his client while in the back of the Sex Crimes DT car was wrongfully obtained under circumstances that constituted a clear violation of New York State’s absolute right to counsel.

  Ah yes, said Judge Shabazz, opening a yellow eye. She knew of this ruling. The absolute-right-to-counsel provision, known as ARC, states that a suspect may not be questioned until he waives his Miranda rights in the physical presence of an attorney.

  Furthermore—Eddie Rubinek was a guy who liked to use that word—furthermore, if the suspect is in actual custody, under the control of a police officer and not free to leave of his own volition, then ARC applies for all matters and there may be no questioning about anything at all. As a result, information arising from the arrest and interrogation of his client, up to and including information leading to the arrests of the Scarpa brothers, was irrelevant and inadmissible since the information had come during an improper interrogation. Thus to use the information would, in the classic phrase, shock the conscience of the court.

  Like there is such a thing. People have things stuck to the bottom of their shoes that have more conscience than a court of law. The law is a machine for processing and canning garbage meat.

  Anyway, the assistant district attorney—Veronica Stein herself—comes right back with an impassioned assertion that, according to the records and the testimony of the arresting officers—Casey Spandau and Levon Jamal—LoGascio had not been formally arrested, had in fact volunteered relevant information about the Coryell kidnapping, and since he had not been charged with any involvement with the Coryell abduction at the time, he had no Miranda rights to waive.

  This drew a squawk from Eddie Rubinek, who rose to proclaim that there was an accusatory instrument in effect at the time, a charge under Section 130, sodomy with a minor, a class E felony, so the defendant’s absolute right to counsel had therefore been violated, and it followed that anything said even under a perception of a Miranda waiver in connection with any other matter did not alter the fact of the ARC violation, so whatever followed, however disconnected from the original charge, was tainted and was therefore absolutely inadmissible on technical grounds.

  Nonsense, said the ADA. And even if there had been a violation of LoGascio’s Miranda rights, those rights are not considered a constitutional guarantee, are in fact merely a prophylactic device to guard against self-incriminatory statements made involuntarily, and, for that matter, under Harris v. New York, the Supreme Court had ruled that even intentional violations of Miranda that resulted in inculpatory statements did not render those statements inadmissible.

  Fah! observed Mr. Rubinek.

  At this point Judge Shabazz leaned forward in her creaking leather chair and spread her hands across the jumble of candy wrappers and legal papers on her desk.

  “I’ve heard enough. I intend to review the Harris decision and consider the relevant case law. I will render my decision in this matter in a few … in good time.” She stopped Rubinek in mid-aria by raising her left hand and showing him a pink palm with stubby fingers spread wide.

  “You can wait, Mr. Rubinek. I’ll give you my decision in good time. Into the hall with you both.”

  In other words, reply hazy, ask again later. That’s why they called her the Eight Ball.

  Twenty-six minutes later, after a séance with a Moon Doggie and a Monster Big Gulp down in the cafeteria, Judge Euphonia Shabazz returned to her chambers, called in the combatants, and ruled that the LoGascio information, whatever it might have been, was inadmissible and that anything flowing from that information had therefore been obtained in a clear and egregious—that word was definitely making a comeback—violation of the suspect’s ARC rights—including the inculpatory evidence obtained at the Scarpas’ apartment, the underwear, the forensics—and was, under various loopholes in the Bonehead Justice Machine, totally inadmissible and tainted. As a direct result of this decision, Tony LoGascio and the Scarpa brothers hopped out of the holding cells on Centre Street before nine o’clock that very evening. They scrambled into a gypsy cab, and it was several months before they managed to attract the attention of the NYPD in any memorable way. Mind you, when they did, it was terminal. Now. Observe the following incident.

  About an hour later, as he was walking home from the D train exit on Ninth Street, public defender Eddie Rubinek had his lights professionally punched out by an unknown but highly motivated assailant. The only description he was able to give the investigating officers from the Sixth Precinct, and this while sitting on the back steps of an EMS ambulance, talking through a purp
le face twice normal size and lips that looked like raw Polish sausages, was that she was female and black and built like an artillery shell.

  “What millimeter?” asked a cop from the Sixth, a recon vet with four ugly years in Vietnam stuck deep into his ribs, who had early on in this case decided that whatever the victim had to say, he was certainly no judge of anything military and had probably spent the entire Vietnam War up in Toronto smoking ganja and spray-painting stupid Marxist slogans on the sides of public buildings.

  “What do you mean?” says Rubinek, looking more than usually snitty. Blood was running from his nose down into his goatee and one of his eyes was puffed and half closed and the eyeball was bright red. He looked like the hand puppet from hell.

  The cop sighed and repeated the question.

  “You said she looked like a shell. I asked you what size.”

  Rubinek wiped some blood off his teeth with a swab of cotton and spat blood onto the sidewalk. Some of it hit the cop’s boot. Eddie Rubinek was a guy who never knew when to quit. He’s still at it, by the way; if you see him around Centre Street, ask him how’s his nose. He never gets it. He never will.

  Anyway, shortly after the report came in from the Sixth, the CO of the Two Five called the Sex Crimes section and told Casey Spandau to get her butt into his office right now. He then asked her where she had been and if she had anything to say about the incident.

  Casey Spandau just sat in the wooden rail-back chair he kept in his office exactly for this purpose and she gives him back that Chinese stare and asks if she could have a member of the NYPD’s black police officers association, the Guardians, as a witness to the meeting. The CO looked at her in silence for almost a full minute.

  Then he asked her once again, straight out, had she in any way contributed to the thumping-out of Eddie Rubinek? She never broke her stare and never said a word. He fought back a red cloud around the edge of his vision and swallowed hard twice, told himself again that she was worth the effort.