The Corruptions

by Vincent Zandri

  The first thought that entered my brain: What exactly are you hiding, Mr. Clark?

  He brushed back his thick-for-a-middle-aged-guy gray-blond hair, and fixed his blue striped rep tie so that the knot was positioned perfectly below his ample chin. I pegged his suit as a light cotton wool blend Brookes Brothers. Perfect for the summer. I couldn’t make out his shoes behind the desk, but I half expected him to be wearing Gucci loaders, no socks. Like he might be hitting the beach after work instead of swatting black flies off the back of his neck outside the front door of his state-appointed Department of Corrections housing. Fancy duds for a man who brought in maybe eighty K per year, plus bennies. Who knew, maybe he’d married into some real dough.

  “Terrible habit,” he said, planting a polite smile on his face. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  His voice came over smooth, but again, nervous. I noticed a hint of blue-blood Long Island in it. Oyster Bay maybe. Or Montauk. So what was he doing all the way out here in Little Siberia? Maybe he should have been sitting inside the corner office in a prestigious New York law firm. I almost posed the question, but then seeing how his right hand was trembling just enough for me to take notice, I decided against it.

  “Smoking,” I said. “Ten years quit. You never stop missing it. Totally sucks.”

  “I’m doomed,” he said. Then, “But enough about my bad habits. Can I offer you a chair, Mr. Marconi, Sheriff Hylton, and what is it, Blood?”

  Blood nodded.

  “Standing is fine with me,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. He stood only inches from where Rodney stood, as if daring the big muscle-head to shove him.

  Bridgette took one of the two chairs while I took the one beside hers. I crossed my legs and finger-tapped the wood arm rests. Sitting up Catholic girl-straight, Bridgette locked her hands together at the fingers.

  “We’re not here to interrogate you, Peter,” she said, breaking the ice. “Mr. Marconi has been hired to look into Sweet’s and Moss’s whereabouts, and that’s all.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his neck. Pulling out his desk chair, he took a seat. He seemed relieved at Bridgette’s comment.

  “Internal Affairs down in Albany is giving me a hell of a time as you can imagine,” he said, locking eyes with mine from across the length of his desk. “I understand you were once a prison supervisor, Mr. Marconi. Tell me, did anyone ever breakout under your watch?”

  I nodded. “Cop killer escaped when I was overseeing Green Haven. I went after him myself. Nearly got killed in the process. The things we do to keep the iron house in order.”

  His face turned pale and for a moment, I thought he might cry. “I never saw it coming. I swear, I never could have imagined them getting away like they did. Cutting through the pipe, crawling through…through…that horrible excrement.”

  “The cocksuckers had inside help, Mr. Clark,” Rodney barked.

  “Language, please,” Clark said. “A lady is present.” He shot Bridgette a quick, apologetic smile. “But then, I suppose you’re right, Rodney. They did have inside help. However, the buck stops with me. I encouraged a lackadaisical environment. Too forgiving to my fellow man. Too easy going. Just like our President Barack Obama or Pope Francis, God bless his soul. I believed rehabilitation needed a kind hand towards some very misunderstood human beings.”

  “But you’re not the Pope, Mr. Clark,” I said. “You’re a warden and they’re cold blooded murderers.”

  He nodded, defeated.

  “If you don’t mind my shifting gears,” I said. “You have any clue where they might have gone? If they had more help on the inside and out other than Joyce Mathews and what’s his name? Mean Gene Bender.”

  He folded his hands atop the desk. “Not that I know of.”

  “Sweet and Moss confide in any other inmates about where they might hold up once they got out?”

  He shook his head. “Again, no idea, and I’ve already told all this to state police.”

  “D’Amico.”

  “Yes, rather unpleasant man of diminutive stature.”

  “I feel your pain,” I said. “We had coffee with him just this morning…sort of.”

  I smiled. Bridgette laughed a little under her breath. Blood stood guard.

  “I wish I could be of more assistance with information on where the two might have run off too,” Clark went on. “But I just don’t know. Or else we would have found them by now.”

  “Lots of woods between here and everywhere,” I said. “I know D’Amico thinks they could already be on their way to Mexico, and that the Feds are about to trample on his investigation. But I’m not so sure. That would be too easy. I think they’re still here somewhere and I think there’s a big part of D’Amico that believes it too.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Somewhere near Dannemora. You mind we take a look at their cell, see exactly where and what they broke out of?”

  He picked up his pack of smokes, shook it so that a cigarette magically rose to the top. He popped the smoke between his lips with all the grace of a professional smoker, lit it with a silver plated Zippo not unlike the one I still owned.

  “Oh, pardon me,” he caught himself. “You mind? Force of habit, I suppose.”

  “You have an extra?” Bridgette said.

  “Indeed,” he said, shoving the pack towards us. I took hold of it, pulled one out, placed it between my lips. “You mind,” I said holding out my hand. He placed the lighter in my palm. Flicking open the top, I lit the butt without inhaling all the way into my lungs, handed it to Bridgette. Then I set the lighter back down on the desk.

  “How do you do that?” Clark said. “Don’t you worry about going back? To the addiction?”

  “Not at all. I vowed to quit. I’m keeping my vow.”

  “Such strength,” he said. “Such determination. I wish I could be more like you.”

  He held up the cigarette in the hand that trembled. He noticed me noticing it, and he took hold of his wrist with the opposite hand.

  “So whaddaya say, Mr. Clark,” I said. “You gonna let us see the cell?”

  He exhaled blue smoke, and stood. “It’s been scoured by the state and local police. But if you must.”

  “Oh, we must.”

  He shot Rodney a glance. “Would you be so kind, Rodney?”

  “I got a choice?”

  Clark smiled, held out his hand. I stood up, took it in mine. The trembling hand felt small, sweaty. Frail almost. The warden might have dressed for success, but there was something very unhealthy about him. His skin showed signs of yellowing, almost like the skin on a meth addict. I’d seen it plenty of times before. A liver working overtime.

  Bridgette stood up, nodded at the warden.

  “Thanks for your time, Pete,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He frowned. “I suppose you will. You and IA.”

  That’s when I heard it. Something that at first I confused for birds. Inland seagulls maybe. The kind that spend their lives flying over trash heaps. A distant and distinct, high-pitched wail. Maybe not like a bird, but more like a cat. A cat in pain, its desperate wails coming up through the old heating grates in the floor.

  “You hear that?” I said to Bridgette.

  “Hear what?” she said.

  For a brief beat, the office fell silent.

  “That,” I said.

  “Sounds like a cry of some kind,” Blood said. As usual, his senses were more finely tuned than my own. “A woman maybe.”

  Clark laughed nervously. “I assure you, Mr. Blood, Mr. Marconi, there are no women presently incarcerated at the Clinton County Correctional Facility, nor have there ever been. Only hard-boiled individuals. Killers, rapists, drug dealers, confidence men, all of them.”

  “Sure,” I said, “whatever you say, Clark. We won’t waste anymore of your precious time.”

  He smoked, stealing such an intense drag on the cigarette, half of it turned to gray ash.

  “You’d bet
ter keep that habit in check,” I added. “It’ll come back to haunt you.”

  He looked into my eyes. The look told me cigarettes were the least of his problems.

  “If you don’t have your health,” he said. “You have nothing.” But he didn’t believe the cliché. Not for a second.

  The four of us escaped the warden’s office, no closer to finding the two cons than when we first entered.

  First thing I noticed when I re-entered the reception room were the two FBI agents seated on the couch. Mancuso and Doyle. I could make out both their sets of eyes now that they weren’t wearing sunglasses. Their eyes were brown.

  “We meet again,” I said, for lack of something wittier.

  Mancuso stood. “We’re close to confirming that Sweet and Moss crossed over into Canada. When it happens, you and your friend there are done. Understand?”

  “What do you think, Blood?” I said. “That sounds like a stand-down threat to me.”

  “I don’t think Agent Mancuso a very friendly guy,” he said. “And we’re private eyes. We don’t stand down for nobody. Agent Mancuso would know that if he watched the Rockford Files.”

  “Saturday nights in the 1970’s,” I said. “Rockford took the nine o’clock spot in between Mary Tyler Moore and Carole Burnette.”

  “Let’s just go,” Bridgette said.

  “Yeah, let’s just leave the suits alone,” Rodney said. At least he didn’t call them cocksuckers.

  I held out my hand for Mancuso. Acting on instinct, he went to shake it. But I pulled it away at the last second.

  “Gotcha,” I said, heading out the door.

  We waited for Blood out in the corridor while he made a solid plan with Betty for drinks later that night after work. That is, if we weren’t already in the woods. In the meantime, Rodney took the time to radio the honor block, warn them of our imminent arrival.

  “You’re not going to find anything,” he said when he was through. “Just a hole in the wall and hole in the sewer main which, if they don’t patch up soon, is gonna cause a fucking riot over the stink.”

  Blood came back out. He was smiling. A rare occurrence for him.

  “I’d ask you if you need any Cialis, Blood,” I said, “but that would be like asking the Eskimo’s if they need extra ice.”

  “Pardon my hold up,” Blood said. “I’m well aware we still got lots of work to do.”

  “We don’t mind waiting around for you, Blood,” Rodney said. “In fact, it’s our privilege to wait around for you.”

  Blood looked into Rodney’s eyes, unblinking. As if suddenly slapped across the face, the beefy CO turned and started down the corridor.

  While we walked, Bridgette leaned into me.

  “He’s right, you know,” she said.

  “Who’s right, sheriff?”

  “Rodney. There won’t be much to see inside the cell. I went through it myself days ago. And forgive me for saying so, because I’m the last person to tell anyone their job, but wouldn’t it just be better to head out into the woods and start looking for those two jamokes that way?”

  “Like I said, Bridgette, lots of territory to cover out there. Forest that’s already being covered by D’Amico’s staties. We go out there ill informed, we’re no better than they are. Moss and Sweet no doubt hear them coming minutes before they arrive and they just find another place to hide. It’s like when you try and exterminate cockroaches. They just shift to another place in the apartment. But if I can find out where their safe house is or, at the very least, a solid trail that they’re following, I can catch them before they anticipate me.”

  “I see your logic,” she said, setting her hand on my shoulder.

  “I can be very logical when I want to be.”

  She giggled and ran her hand down my arm. Before removing it, she gently touched the back of my hand. It sent a shock up and down my spine. A very welcome touch. Maybe Blood had made a date for the night, but I was beginning to wonder if we should plan a double date.

  Unlike the other prison blocks, the honor block didn’t smell of body odor and, to put it plainly, shit. The smell was more like an Italian restaurant with fresh garlic roasting on a frying pan inside one or more of the cells occupied by incarcerated wise guys. Maybe members of the Gambino family who’d been shipped to Little Siberia straight from Rikers where they’d do a third of a fifteen to twenty stretch before their private lawyers would strike up a probation deal the DA—and his or her loved ones—simply could not refuse.

  The four of us climbed the stairs to the second tier of cells and walked the catwalk until we came to a cell that had been vacated by two men assigned to it. Reginald Moss and Derrick Sweet. There wasn’t any plastic yellow Do Not Enter--Crime Scene ribbon covering the old-fashioned metal-barred cell door, but a hastily fashioned cardboard sign had been Scotch-taped to it, the words Absolutele No Entry penned on it in dark black Sharpie.

  Blood stared at the sign.

  “You bear responsibility for the homemade sign?” he said over his shoulder to Rodney.

  “So what if I do?” Rodney said.

  “You spelled one of the words wrong.”

  Rodney’s roid-damaged face turned fifty shades of red.

  I felt a start in my heart.

  “You bustin’ my balls again, right?” Rodney said. “You think I’m a dumb ass cause I’m working in a pen ’stead of on the outside, maybe for the cops.”

  Blood cocked his head, his eyes fixed on the cardboard sign. Clearly Rodney had self esteem issues.

  “I just pointin’ out an observation, the reality of which, is a misspelled word. Accuracy means everything when it comes to law enforcement. Ain’t that right, sheriff?”

  Bridgette bit down on her bottom lip.

  “Absolutely, Blood,” she said. “Absolutely, with a Y, that is.”

  Rodney examined the cardboard sign more intently, actually positioning his eyes closer to the words.

  “Absolutely…with a Y,” he repeated. He stepped back. “Okay, so I fucked up. Big deal. Big fuckin’ deal. Now I’m the stupid cocksucker.” He drew the mic clipped to his shirt to his mouth. “Open up two-two-two,” he growled.

  A loud buzz shot through the cavernous concrete block building, and the barred door opened and slammed against the frame in an explosion of metal and against metal.

  Rodney stepped aside.

  “Make it quick, people,” he said.

  The three of us stepped into the cramped cell. It measured the typical six by eight feet with the metal-framed bunk beds taking up most of the wall to the right. The wall paint was hospital white that had turned gray-brown over the years and an industrial overhead lamp that spilled white light all over the concrete floor. We made our way to the back of the cell since that was where all action went down.

  I faced a panel that had been painted to mimic the concrete block walls exactly. I lifted it away, exposing a hole in the wall that could easily facilitate a man. A good-sized man like Reginald Moss. Ducking my head, I made my way through the opening into a massive yet narrow pipe chase area that was dimly illuminated with red lights inside protective wall-mounted cages. Immediately I was struck by the foul odor of sewage and methane gas.

  I didn’t chalk up the proliferation of stink due to an old plumbing system probably originally meant to accommodate half the people housed inside this block, but instead because of the gaping hole that had been sawed out of the main line. A square hole in the half-inch thick pipe that measured a couple feet by a couple feet. Something that, like the hole in the concrete block wall, would have taken some time and commitment to create with rudimentary tools, such as old-fashioned hacksaws, chisels, and hammers. Tools the two cons purportedly utilized even if they were also rumored to have used power tools. Also some noise, leading me to believe that more than just one corrections officer was aware of Moss’s and Sweet’s intentions.

  I stepped back into the cell so that the others could get a look-see.

  The first to go was Brid
gette, her nose clothespinned between her index finger and thumb.

  “Don’t light a match,” I said, “or the entire place will blow.”

  When she came back in, Blood took his turn. In the meantime, I did some searching around the cell. Lowering myself onto all fours, I looked under the bunk beds, and in all four corners of the narrow space. I peered under the thin mattresses and pillows, pressed down on both to see if any contraband might be hidden inside them.

  “Told you the joint was clean,” Bridgette said, brushing back her hair, pulling it tight into a ponytail which she held in place by a rubber band.

  “Trust me on this one, Bridgette,” I said, “a prison cell is never clean. Take it from a former warden, there’s always something left behind, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. Something that just might give us a clue to where they landed after jumping ship.”

  “Keeper,” Blood said from where he was stood on the catwalk inside the pipe chase. “Need you to look at something.”

  My eyes lit up. At least I felt them light up.

  “A clue after all?” the sheriff posed.

  “Observe,” I said.

  Ducking, I went back through the rabbit hole.

  Blood faced the hole. But when he raised his right arm, pointed at the fake wall panel that leaned against the bunk bed beyond the hole, I realized he was focusing on something else.

  “You see the effect the red lights in the pipe chase have on that panel?” he posed.

  I looked at the wash of red light on the board. He was right, something showed through the layer of gray-white paint Moss had applied to the board to make it resemble stacked concrete blocks. Repositioning myself so that one foot was planted inside the cell and the other out on the catwalk, I leaned down and stared closely at the board.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “Why?” Bridgette said.