by Robert White
The prison grapevine reached me easily in the infirmary where I went for tetanus shots and twenty-seven stitches to close the wound in my hand. My whole hand was infected, and while I recuperated, I learned that Frank was organizing the lifers for a second shot at me. One of the hospital trusties had an Aryan Brotherhood connection close to the lifers, and he told me that his source said that Donald was supposed to let the real killers inside our cell—the entire block of cells was to be racked open at once—where I was to be beaten unconscious and taken down to the shower room. The job was to be done with a sharpened piece of wire. My eye first. Then I was to be revived and certain other things were to be done throughout the rest of the night. But Donald wanted to impress his lover and muffed it. I was to leave prison on the day of my release all right—except it would be the back way with a tag on my toe.
Instead, three days after my date of release, I was escorted down the corridor to administration to sign forms for my clothes and valuables, including the last of my money. They informed me that my Plymouth was in a South Boston impound lot. At five minutes after eleven o’clock in the morning of an August day, I found myself a free man on a street corner in Boston waiting for a bus.
I took a bus downtown to get a room. I wanted to shave and bathe away the prison stink and refine the details of my plan to get Lindell. I realized with a sharp pang of clarity I had finally become a free man, totally free in my head. Nothing mattered, nothing meant anything now. No rules.
Haftmann has no more rules.
I was going into battle without fear because they can’t hurt you if you’re already dead. My laughter caused the bus driver to stare at me in the rearview mirror. I knew what he was thinking: another nutjob on a ride to no place special.
Chapter 12
The front desk man at the Ritz-Carlton eyeballed me with as much disdain as one can put into a look without being called outside to a duel. Maybe the paper sack with the articles I took out of prison, stuff I couldn’t cram into my pockets, or the two-day beard stubble put him off.
His eyes bulged and he looked pale when I said I was paying cash, but took my $192.96. That left me with less than three hundred and no great confidence that this was going to go as planned.
I asked for a room high up and that drew another pained look of surprise. For the first time since that day, I noticed the vast mural behind him while he punched up numbers on his computer; it covered the entire curved wall. I had seen the Diego Rivera murals in the Detroit Art Institute once while tailing a man on a case. I liked their vivid colors and energy. This one was a little too neoclassical for my taste— youths in toga-clad dalliance prancing about a garden. A fat-faced cherub voyeuristically hovered above one further along in courtship than the other pairs. Swingers’ websites facilitate such wango tango now; even college kids create them in their dorms to facilitate stress relief caused by exams.
My staring must have provoked the clerk’s comment because, without looking up, he said, “Rococo, eighteenth-century.”
Surprised that he spoke, I asked him what he had just said. He ignored me and handed me the room card. “You do know how this works?”
At that point, I realized I was back in the real world again, with liveried monkeys like him all about me. I said, “Yes, I think so,” and went into a crotch-grabbing, stumblebum routine I hadn’t done since my street days with Jack.
As I made for the elevator, I watched his faced twist with concern as if he had just let a wolf into his fine establishment. I straightened up immediately and gave him a thumbs-up sign. I had business to attend to, not much time or money for play.
After the bath, I called the One-Five and asked for Detective Sgt. Cooney. They transferred me around a bit, and said he was unavailable—I heard a voice shouting his name around the room—would I like to speak to another detective in Crimes Against Persons? Somebody else came on the line and said he wasn’t there, could he take a message?
“Tell him Lindell called and would like to see him at his earliest convenience,” I replied. I gave my hotel and room number.
Cooney’s eyes bulged like the Ritz-Carlton desk man’s.
He started to talk out there in the hallway, and I said for him to save it.
“Are you out of you fucking mind?”
“My ex-wife’s a lawyer,” I said. “If she were here, she’d advise me not to answer that question on advice of counsel.”
Inside, he asked me, “How did you know?”
“That you’re on his payroll? It figured,” I said. “He knows everything, everybody’s movements, the progress of the investigation, my plans and thoughts while I was inside, everybody’s whereabouts all the time. Somebody had to tell him. It had to be an inside source. You were the only one who could have done it. You were in the right position every step of the way.”
He was more relaxed now, as if a weight had been dropped from his shoulders. I knew what he was thinking before he said it.
“Knowing ain’t proving, Haftmann. You should know that.”
He crossed his legs and took out a pack of Marlboros.
“You were the liaison between those shitbags and Lindell,” I said, “You were his eyes.”
He stood up and began moving about the room, opening closet doors and looking under the bed. “Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, you’re right. Where does it get you?”
“It got me this far.”
“Oh?” He came up to me, patted me lightly on the chest and reached around to the small of my back. “Wired?”
“No,” I said.
“I don’t believe you. I think you got too many goofy ideas from jail. Maybe you took it up the ass too many times from your fudgepacker cellie, huh?”
Looking at the gauze wrapping of my hand. “He really fucked you up. Those homos like to bite, ever notice? Messiest homicides are blowboys falling out. They do like their knives.”
Cooney was smaller by twenty-five pounds and three inches. But he was younger, and I wasn’t so sure he was all swagger. I was in the worst shape of my life. I had aged years for months.
“How much did you make from Lindell?” I asked him.
He gave me another light frisk down my legs, and said, “Strip. I wanna see down there. Dickie check.”
“I’m not wired.”
“Do it, asshole. Just like we do the gangbangers.”
He reached inside my briefs and gave me a feel. “Lucky for you, Haftmann. If you’d been lying to me now—”
“How much for selling out, Cooney?”
“None of your business, shitass. I will tell you this much. There’s never going to be a case on Lindell. The chain of evidence is all screwed up. Seems he bought the evidence room boys too. Hair and fiber stuff got lost, boo-hoo.”
I threw a punch that caught him flush on the chin, and he staggered backwards and fell on the bed. I had my knee on his chest before he could move and my bad hand gripped tightly on his scrotum sac. He knew it too and lay very still.
“Now, you listen good, fucker, or I’ll pop your testicles,” I growled above him. “I don’t give a fuck about you or any other grifter at the precinct. You tell Lindell I’ve got all the evidence I need back in Ohio. Just give him the message.”
I eased off on the pressure so that he could talk. “C-crazy sonofabitch . . . my nuts.”
“You going to do what I say?”
“You coulda told him that yourself on the fucking phone,” he groaned.
“He’ll believe it from you. I’ve got the evidence in Ohio.”
“You know what he can do to you?”
I said, “You knew about this Phineas Priesthood all along, didn’t you?”
As I withdrew my hand, he struggled, grimacing, to a sitting position. Without looking at me, he said, “You dumb shit. Fuck you, him, and the Phineas Priesthood.”
“Lawrence Gallatine, Cooney. Tell me how he comes into this?”
“Lindell’s got a hundred Gallatines all over the country. He finds these peo
ple. I don’t know how. He throws money at them and they all come running to serve him.”
“That’s how he got you,” I said.
“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, motherfucker.”
He tried to spit on me, but I sapped him before he finished another sentence. I used a melon-sized, silver-plated decorative apple from the bookshelf above the bed. Maybe it was Rococo too. I wanted to hit him to get the rage out of my system for being so goddamned blind. I might have saved one from the maw of that psychopath.
I took the page out of my notepad that I had copied from a prison bible, folded it in half, and secured it with a rubber band to Cooney’s index finger. He twitched and his eyelids fluttered a moment before he fell back into unconsciousness. I slipped his Sig Sauer out of his shoulder holster and found an ankle gun and tucked them into my pants.
I left Boston on a Trailways bus that afternoon. I had just enough cash to get me back home. As I settled into my seat, I heard a black male’s voice saying, “Better cease that shit, woman,” and heard the smack of a hand on flesh.
Nothing ever changes, I thought. I felt the sleep coming on, kicking in again—my protective coloring against the world: Look, everybody, this one-eyed, ineffectual cretin is asleep even when he’s awake. Nothing to fear when Haftmann’s on the job . . .
Chapter 13
The ride home was a miserable twenty-two hour affair with stops every fifty miles except for the Dewey Thruway. I made it most of the way home from the Ashtabula depot by hitching a ride on the back of a pickup truck filled with concrete blocks and stacked lumber. I walked the remaining two miles to my house and discovered that I had never locked it the last time I walked out the door. It seemed like years ago.
I showered and slept another eighteen hours straight. As Mike Tyson said famously after his demise from boxing: “I guess I’m going to fade into Bolivian.” No dreams, no grotesquerie or mocking faces from a misspent life. Just a prevision of my afterlife: nothingness.
When I awoke, I took the quarter-mile walk to the Strip and found my office closed with that chalky soap smeared across the windows. The phone and the office furniture was gone, but my file cabinets were still in place. My key didn’t fit the new lock. Someone had stolen or removed the sign with my name on it.
I walked to Tico’s and found him washing glasses behind the bar. He brought me a chilled glass of tomato juice and the local news since I’d been away. Business was good. The bikers were expected to ride through over the Labor Day holidays. Gossip about a rumble between the Santa Monica Pagans and the Cleveland chapter of the Hell’s Angels over a patch with CALIFORNIA on it—a big no-no among these cretins, a dissing of Angels everywhere. The tattoo parlor busted by the state cops for fronting drugs. The usual trivia of resort-town low life in high summer. Millimaki closed the case on O’Reilly: autoerotic asphyxiation.
Tico asked me what I was going to do now that I was no longer a private eye? “Opera,” I said.
“Tomás, why’nt you settle down for a bit? Take things easy. You don’ look so good, man, and you been hit on the head more times than a foosball.”
“Football. I’m fine.”
“You remember that migrant worker from that one summer? Came in here babbling about Jesus. Hay-suss told him to kill his bebé?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Yeah, well. You got the same look. You better go real slow for a few weeks.”
That night I had a fever dream. I left my penicillin pills in the drawer of the Ritz-Carlton back in Boston and my hand reinfected; it was swollen and painful. That was all I needed: the MRSA virus to eat away my flesh. After some hesitation about falling off the wagon, I had drunk some Jack Daniels for the pain and consoled myself for the latest failure. What right, I thought, did this cesspit of a society have to hold me to any standards?
I went out less often, stopped shaving. My bad eye was red and my good eye bloodshot. I looked like a walking vampire. I thought about calling someone but there was no one to speak to. I did call Doc Harris and asked him how he could have signed off on O’Reilly’s death certificate like some first-year med student. I accused him of taking money and he killed the connection.
I fell asleep on my faded red velour couch and watched the dust motes bounce and float around my head in the middle of a steaming afternoon. I had not worn a shirt in two days because the air was so heavy with humidity that you could wring the sweat out of your clothes by standing still. I drank some more. During my lucid hours I tried to think of my plan to get Lindell, but I wearied of following one harebrained scheme after another down some cul-de-sac.
Gallatine was the key but how to get to him?
I was running out of cash even on my liquid diet. One check left from the last bank credit card that still did business with me. Worse, I was running out of time before Lindell called my bluff.
Jesus, Hay-suss. Everything’s fucked up beyond all belief.
Hydra, the Serpent constellation, was declining in the West; its three-starred tail upright. Just another indecipherable omen. Time to go. I loaded up the backseat of Tico’s son’s car, which I had pried loose from Tico on the strength of a vow on my mother’s grave to bring it back in the same condition it was given. I wondered, briefly, where my mother’s grave could be. It occurred to me that I always imagined her dead, although it was conceivable she was still alive somewhere; whether she was happy in the life she chose after abandoning a child to her own mother or declining into old age, senility, and a lonely death, I did not know. I never tried to find her.
The night sky alternated moonglow with pitch blackness as a cold front crossed Lake Erie that ended a ten-day drought in a torrential downpour that afternoon. Crowds of tourists fled the low-hanging scud that precipitated another bout of rain. I sat under the awning in Freddie’s Grill eating hot dogs and drinking coffee. My hand was giving me such pain that I couldn’t sleep. I could barely make a fist. All day I lay around fearful of a blood infection. I turned on the television hoping to hear the world was ending; instead some vapid tabloid show with an anorectic blonde was talking earnestly about why Charlie Sheen’s “Torpedo of Truth Tour” ended prematurely.
When I could stand my own company no more, I made my decision. I got in my car and drove. I cut off I45 and made the last mile down Route 307 as slow as possible. I saw no cars since leaving the Lake where the last of the biker bars would be pouring their clientele out the doors. The grungiest of them all, the Far Side, came to mind; that’s where the Jack-in-the-Box serial killer had found his last job as a bouncer right in the midst of all the state’s criminal investigators and FBI men on his trail—hiding in plain sight.
I could use some of that luck, I thought.
About a hundred yards east of the house, I pulled over. There was a flattened area of cattails on what used to be marsh. I took a chance that the downpour hadn’t affected the baked earth too much and pulled the car into the middle. The cattails rattled like sticks on a tin roof. I slewed it around as the dampened earth gave under the tires, but it looked solid enough. I grabbed the equipment from the backseat. The moonlight came back just enough to help my bearings.
I circled the house and worked my way to the back where some trees stood. I picked my spot and dropped onto the ground; the air smelled of rotten cabbage. I trained my Zeiss glasses on an upstairs light. The rest of the house was in darkness except for a light over the kitchen window.
At dawn Gallatine appeared in the living room window. No wife or kids anywhere. I retraced my steps back to the car and drove home.
The next night I followed the same pattern except that I arrived around nine o’clock. I kept my vigil until dawn when Gallatine appeared in the same window. I stank of mosquito repellant and body odor. No wife or kids about the house. On my first night I had stumbled through beaten-down grass where someone had made a path for off-road three-wheelers. I tried to find this again, but it was a darker night, and I was shredding my clothes in briars; figuring that I was opposite
the house I took a chance and made my way close to the road’s edge. I saw no cars in the driveway and wondered if Gallatine’s wife had left him.
My fifth night of surveillance paid off. I was raw from mosquito bites, and chiggers had penetrated my thick socks and eaten red speckled rings around my ankles. My resolve was failing badly, so I brought a pint of bourbon to keep me warm and provide whatever liquid courage I needed to get through another night. Cooney’s gun was jammed uncomfortably behind me. The hours passed and the night sounds grew louder with insect trilling. Swallows overhead were replaced by bats feeding on bugs. The small animal noises kept me awake as before but this time it rained about three o’clock in the morning. The booze I had rationed to pass time was gone, and the bottle lay at my elbow, empty and accusing. The noise of grackles awoke me this time, and it was well past the false dawn I had used to cover my escape. I was worrying about how to make my exit when I heard the scrunching of gravel in front of the house.
Somebody coming. . .
I heard a door slam but could see no activity in any of the windows. A figure loomed at the kitchen momentarily, Gallatine, and then he was gone. The sun put a glare on the windows that made it increasingly difficult to see, so I moved to a better position behind a clump of Rose of Sharon bushes.
Two men, then a third, passed in front of the window. Two of the men were similar in size, so I couldn’t tell if there were three men in the house or two. I decided to get closer.
The back of the garage offered the best security but it was too far from the windows to see or hear anything. I broke at a run for the kitchen window; flat against the house, I’d be open to exposure, but someone would have to walk out of the house to see me. I worked my way west of the house with the trees as cover and crossed the open expanse between the farthest gate of the pool. Made it. My back to the wall of the den, I sidled along the surface of the house, ducking under windows or belly-crawling past the patio doors. I made it to the kitchen area, and as I approached I heard two voices speaking loudly.