by Robert White
“I mean her, damn you. What about her?”
“She’s working for a motel chain on Jefferson-on-the-Lake. Cleaning staff. Gets a free room, minimum wage. Hasn’t she been to see you?”
I hadn’t seen her since my sentencing to Lake County Correctional. She held a scarf in her hands the same way. I had forgotten how shapely her hands were . . .
“I haven’t seen her since my sentencing.”
“Never wrote, huh?”
“Why?”
“Lindell knows a lot about you. Knows all about your rather exotic sex life. My God, Haftmann, don’t you worry about STDS? How many—you’re like a dog in heat.”
This last uttered with a nose-wrinkling of distaste. “Anyway, he rented an entire private investigation firm in Toledo. Their only assignment is you, find out all they can.”
“Is that legal?”
“It’s legal and he’s got the cash.”
“Booth, you didn’t look into his face. He’ll go after her. He won’t care if you are watching her. It’ll just make it more of a challenge for him.”
He gave me one of his patented stares and then swiped at his immaculate hair. “Well, we agree on that much. The Basic Sciences people concur. He likes a challenge.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
One of the guards entered to usher out a couple cons who had come in to see their families after I arrived. They gave me black looks as they passed. FBI clout.
“We fixed Boston as much as possible. The assault with intent and the gun charge is all they want. You’ve pled that down as far as the state’s attorney’s office will allow.”
“How much time?”
“What’s Ohio give these days? “
“Ten days good time for a month served. Three days every month on top of that.”
“Not bad, considering.”
“Not bad? Axe murderers don’t do seven years. Can’t you do something?”
“The only reason I didn’t leave you twisting in the wind is that I did some very good creative writing on my field reports for Washington. They seem to be buying it. At least, I’m still in charge of the operation.”
“If it weren’t for me—”
Pouting, his face screwed up in a snit. “The Phineas Priesthood was your work.”
“So help me. Just once more.”
“You don’t listen. I’ll bet you’ve been told that more than any human being I know. But if you’re worried he can get to you in here—”
“I can take care of myself in here.”
“No, it isn’t that. He’s spending a lot of money to see to it that you’re well taken care of.”
“You mean in here? In this second-rate slammer? There are nothing but check bouncers and hit-and-run drunks. Hell, I did a skip trace on a couple of these guys.”
“One of the guards told us. It’s Boston he’s looking out for. Had your cell picked out at West Boylston before the ink was dry on the extradition papers. He wants to be sure you come to no harm. It’s an easier place to do a stretch than Cedar Junction.”
“How can he do that? The prison board for the entire state makes that decision.”
“He bought them.”
“Booth, nobody buys a whole prison board—”
“Prison boards are sinecures. Political appointments. If you know the right people—”
“What is it that you’re not telling me?”
“He’s well-connected, untouchable. I’m going to send some information. You’d better look at it because I have to tell you that I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
“You’re still not telling me everything.”
Booth looked to me at that moment old and tired, as if he were burdened by secret sins. “I’ve even felt the pressure. I didn’t think anyone could reach this high for something this ugly. Things keep deflecting the investigation. I’ve had three agents working on him transferred out.”
“Having a crisis of faith, are we? In homicide we used to call you guys Fan Belt Inspectors.”
“Don’t joke about the bureau to me. I’ve given my life to it since I came out of law school.”
“Watch her, Booth. She doesn’t believe me. You know?”
“I know it,” he said and he raised a hand to signal time up.
I wasn’t sure he believed me either.
Prison is like college. They both prescribe your behavior. They allow you to read books. They both give you time alone to think and time to discuss issues with peers. The difference is that prison is about the past, whereas college is about the future. An existentialist might see no crucial difference. I might have been content to spend months doing what I did with time on the outside—play mah jongg and solitaire, lift weights, and eat starchy foods—except that the future was somewhere beyond these walls. I had one course of study: Richard G. H. Lindell. Class enrollment: one. My degree program was Pass/Fail.
I had written Micah one letter but received no answer. I began writing Ingrid long, detailed letters asking her to write me, trying not to alarm her, but her letters to me were all short notes in grammatically skewed English, written long after her work was done, at (I imagined) a small utility table in the efficiency apartment. She never mentioned speaking to Lindell that day. I never brought it up in my own letters. I saw her in a room with no view, drafty in winter, airless and cheerless in summer; mouse turds in the closets. No matter what touches of home she tried to bring into it, it would never be a place where you could leave a mark or feel good about yourself. Please come see me, I wrote at the end of every letter.
She did. The day of my parole hearing. I did not expect her to, but she testified for me, and impressed the panel with a mother’s grief and sorrow. My crimes, she said, were all a result of my trying to help her find her missing daughter. It must have wrung blood from her heart to have to tell her sorrow to strangers, but she did. Somehow, by the end of my session, I was painted as something less than the wild-eyed ex-cop trespassing, resisting arrest, and fracturing the bones of the law’s sworn minions than as a blundering cretin donning a suit of armor too heavy for him to wear, too moth-eaten and rusty for use. I felt the invisible hand of Booth in the room.
Gift horses and looking into mouths, they say. Dante buried that guy deep in the Inferno, the one who lied to the Trojans about that big fucking horse in front of the gates. Me, I would have listened to the hollowed belly for the clanging sound of iron.
Whatever it was, it worked. The letter of conditions was spelled out with bullets and a numerical list. One of life’s little absurdities intruded into my reflections: the only condition that mattered to me was getting permission to leave Ohio for Boston, but I would be leaving the state in the company of federal marshals who would be escorting me in cuffs looped to my belt to answer for crimes against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Where could she hide? Where would she be safe? Every time I put my mind to it after lockdown and the lights went out, I could see no solution. His leering face blended with all the faces of the dead I had seen until I had one twisted.
The day the marshals came for me was like every other day of confinement except that my cellmate told me I was laughing in my sleep instead of grinding my molars. An ex-con and outlaw biker named Fat Danny, in for stealing and chopping Harleys.
“What’s so funny, man? Share the joy.”
I told him I had a crazy dream of being back in homicide police. Before the crack-up when everything—job, marriage, life—went to hell. In the dream I was standing in the muster room when the day-watch commander came out and handed me a note. It said my old partner Jack was found dead in his apartment. “Ate his gun,” the note said. Below that line: “We all gotta die.” In the crazy logic of dreams, I go to see the shrink to have the note explained, although it wasn’t a mystery to me. The shrink is the same guy I was forced to meet with after my first shooting. He was an exotic little man with from some Southeast Asian island chain, now a Cleveland psychiatrist with an office in the Te
rminal Tower with the incredible name Matrooshian. The plaque on his door spells it all out in humorless gothic letters: Terd Porn Matrooshian. That was his real name, by the way. The shrink hands me another note. I open it and read it. YOU HAVE BEEN SENTENCED TO DIE, it says.
When I look up to ask what’s going on, I see the shrink pivot in a balletic way, windmill his arm like in fast-pitch softball, and while I’m standing there with my gob hanging open, he plunges a shiv right under my ribs. “Oh, it hurts,” is all I can say.
I gave a condensed version of this dream to my cellie. The low-riding slob laughed at the punchline.
The airplane flight to Boston was uneventful; a little chop had me reaching for the vomit bag a couple times. The late March sky above the cloud cover was clear and the sun burned above the scud. Logan was shrouded in a mist as swarms of waterspouts with upended funnels moved off the Atlantic; the air full of icy mist and stank of diesel fuel. The airport crowded with people snapping black umbrellas. Depressing. The marshals were in their thirties, neither spoke much nor asked me any questions, and I couldn’t remember which name went with which man. I was just a job, but they knew why I had done time in Ohio, and they were not friendly.
Inside my new prison, I was strip-searched—all orifices checked for contraband and weapons, my hair professionally tousled, and my clothes replaced by white prison duds with blue piping and the name of the prison in block letters on the back. My loafers replaced with an ugly pair of black 12EE’s. Block D, Tier 4, Cell 8B, said the next guard in line who read from a clipboard.
My cellmate was a small man named Donald, a homosexual who painted his fingernails and tweezed his eyebrows. “Defalcation,” he told me; then he looked up at me to explain what the word meant. “Stealing company funds. Three years.” He also told me that he belonged to a lifer named Frank in cellblock E.
“They’ve separated us right now,” he said, “and I do worry about Frank a little.”
Apparently Frank could look out for himself. “Oh not that anybody would be stupid enough to mess with him, you see,” he said without looking at me. “Even these dumbass niggers have enough sense to leave him alone. The same goes for me. Nobody touches me, so you’re safe—as long as we’re friendly and get along,” he simpered. “It’s just that he’s such a stud he might go sticking that beautiful cock into one of those black butthole surfers while he’s in that cell. The slim disease, you know? We fight all the time because I’m such a jealous little bitch.” Then he gave me what I supposed was his coquettish grin: “Shall I call you Thomas or Tom?”
“Call me anything you like but don’t call me late for supper,” I said, recalling the ancient quip of sailors from my days on the Great Lakes. When I turned around, he was fashioning another loony grin.
“How about if I call you ‘Sugar Britches?’”
Lindell, I assumed. Using his power and his money and connections everywhere to have a little joke to help me idle away the boredom of my captivity.
I dug into the prison library system for information on Richard G. P. Lindell. Naturally, in liberal Massachusetts, there was a sophisticated version of the “college for cons” programs of every state. Some of these shitbirds were knocking down more federal money to go to college than taxpayers. Go figure. Some do-gooder left the state’s prison system money to purchase computers and provide a network with access to the Tufts library in downtown Boston for the advanced students. They classed me as an advanced student because I could read and write beyond a sixth-grade level.
The socialite stuff I expected. Photos of Lindell winking behind glasses of champagne held aloft celebrating this or that event or commemorative occasion. He or one of his clan seemed to be in attendance at every gala event in Boston over the last decade. Sometimes the events were strictly familial; having started in banking, they considered philanthropy “their real raison d’etre,” which I took to mean using charity as a cover to fuck people over in the business world. His mug was all over the society pages. He had been affianced twice in the last five years. No follow up on either marriage. His family traced its lineage back to Adams—the Adamses of Massachusetts. He was destined for a career in medicine from birth; apparently, that’s where the initials came in: Galen for the second-century physician of Asia Minor and Paracelsus for the sixteenth-century Swiss philosopher and physician. But Booth was right about his brilliance. The more I read, the more I doubted my own senses. He looked ten years younger than he was. I replayed the film of my beating him; his face lit by something beyond the power of drugs, its animation was grotesque, babbling through broken teeth. His incredible intellectual gifts were nurtured like a hothouse flower in all the right private schools, from Harvard magna cum laude straight through the College of Medicine, until his appointment at UCLA as one of the youngest research professors of medicine in the school’s history. Wit and charm in abundance, never a blemish along the way, nothing to mar his progress. No one suspected what he was.
I googled his name to see what it had. His academic career testified to another age than our own with all its narrow specialization; it was a Renaissance portrait in miniature: articles on science, the humanities, sociology, psychology, and law. I did not think a man my own age could have been made to be so unlike me. He defied the axiom that there are only six degrees of separation between the highest and lowest of humankind.
At about the time one career stopped, his other began. I wrote down the names of his books and put in a chit for inter-library loans.
I read passage after passage from Lindell’s books that hinted of apocalypse. Nothing so dramatic that anyone alerted to his intellectual proximity to white supremacist thinking would have been alarmed about, but as text followed text, he began to abandon his early interest in behavior modification through drugs. The earlier books on psychotropic drugs stank of the lamp; after 1997 he abandoned clinical research for the most part. He was interested in whole societies, their rise and fall.
I found a passage from his book on race mixing to be most revealing because he abandoned the tight-assed, pedestrian prose of a scholar and begins to digress lyrically from his thesis. The issue of race-mixing itself is one he approaches and avoids elsewhere; this time he drives toward it before pulling back into arcane matters of ethics or philosophy. At this time, according to the dust jacket blurb, he had been affiliated with the San Diego police department as a criminologist working on developing a deterrent policy to combat gangs. Most of it is cool, analytical, and—to this private eye—yawningly pedestrian stuff dummied down for the layperson until it comes to page 256. Then the little burst of radiance from an inner light infuses it and tantalizes the reader with what it could really mean. It ends as abruptly as it begins and merges back into the smooth wake of a discourse on the demographics of East Los Angeles and southeastern San Diego. I underlined portions, which I copied into my notepad:
He went on to speak of the abandonment of civilization, “as a result of the decay and pollution, abetted by the largesse of certain factions within America who control the information gathering from shore to shore.” He concluded in solemn tones that:
AMERICA IS LOSING ITSELF, IS APPROACHING THAT CRITICAL MASS WHERE ENOUGH PEOPLE ARE PRIMARILY VILLAINS SO THAT ALL PEOPLE LIVE IN FEAR AND COME TO HATE, THUS INVITING SELF-RIGHTEOUS VIOLENCE. I KNOW I HAVE RUN ON HERE, BUT I AM SO TROUBLED BY OUR CHANGES, ESPECIALLY AFTER HAVING SPENT FOUR YEARS IN VIOLENT COMMUNITIES TRYING TO DESIGN MORE EFFECTIVE POLICING. THUS I TREMBLE FOR THIS ONCE SO IDEAL LAND. WE ARE LOSING OURSELVES TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF OUR MISSPENT IDEALS OF RACIAL EQUALITY. WE ARE TOO PLURALISTICALLY FACTIONALIZED, THE CHANGES ARE AT SPEEDS TO WHICH WE CANNOT ADJUST, BECOME ECONOMICALLY MORE RIGIDLY STRATIFIED THUS REALISTICALLY LOSING EQUITY, AND OF COURSE SUFFERING THE CROWDING OF BEHAVIORAL SINK AS WESTERN IDEALS, RACIAL HOMOGENEITY—ALL, ALL, I SAY—MUST PERISH IN THE MUD. PERHAPS THE ANSWER IS FOUND IN THE ANCIENT WISDOM OF A SECULAR PRIESTHOOD WHOSE GOAL IS TO PRESERVE US FROM OUR MOST BRUTAL INSTINCTS AND THE PREDATORY URGES OF THE UNFIT
, SUBHUMANS EAGER TO DEFILE WITH THEIR FILTH THE UNPOLLUTED MAJORITY.
Mud races. Was this the turgid ideological manifesto of the Priesthood of Phineas or one intellectual’s lament, another variation on that chord first struck in Dallas in 1963? Now that I had time to reflect, I remembered how the city had been in mourning for a murdered President’s wife.
My ex-wife was right about me and the moral order of the universe: I wanted to save one person from catastrophe and I had failed.
I hoped the astronomers and physicists were right and that there was a parallel universe out there where you got to make all different decisions.
I closed my eyes and slept twelve to fifteen hours a day, every day, for the next three weeks. Det. Cooney came to see me in late April; he was en route to Suffolk Superior Court to testify in the Best Friends drug-murders. He told me he passed his sergeant exams and was now working directly under one of two lieutenants at the One-Five.
“Congratulations,” I said, into the phone when his words about the promotion finally registered and I realized he was waiting for a response.
“Skip it,” he said. “You got trouble, Haftmann.”
His voice was muffled, as was mine, I supposed, and the plexiglass was filthy with scratches. Any smooth surface was fair game for gang graffiti.
“What kind of trouble could I be in, Sgt. Cooney?”
I felt wearied. The sleep was saving me, I suppose, from boredom during the past three days of lockdown—or from too much thinking, but I couldn’t clear the fog out of my head and concentrate for more than ten minutes at a time.
“Nathaniel, the guy who worked you over, the bouncer? He’s turning state’s evidence, so we’ve got him in protective custody over in Walpole. One of his crimeys told him something is going down in here really soon. Lotta bread changing hands, according to the grapevine.”