The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  I got up off the bed, turned off the TV, and picked up the receiver. I said Val instead of hello.

  “Some crazy shit, huh boss?”

  “I saw the report. Logan knows full well he’s forbidden to make any comments to the press.”

  “Haven’t had your coffee yet, have you, boss?”

  “Now I know Logan has got to be lying.”

  “There’s a real problem here, isn’t there?”

  “If I don’t start getting answers before fingers start pointing in all directions, it could mean any one of our asses in a sling.”

  “When will you be in?”

  “Later. I’ve got somebody to see up in Albany first”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Norman,” I said. There was a sigh.

  “Keeper,” Val said, “tell Mike I was asking for him.” Val Antonelli and Mike Norman had been something of an item not too long ago, until Mike’s moods and his drinking habits became a bit too much. Even though she found it impossible to be his girl, I couldn’t help but think that Val had a real soft spot for him. The strange thing, though, was that whenever she mentioned his name, I got sort of jealous. I knew it was silly, juvenile even. But I really couldn’t help the way I felt.

  “Sure thing, Val,” I said, my free hand held out in front of my face, fingers crossed. “I’ll remember to give Mike your best.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LT. MIKE NORMAN SAT in his office sipping from a coffee mug with the words I LOVE MY JOB! stenciled around the rim in bold black letters. When he took a drink from the mug, you could see the word NOT! imprinted on the bottom in the same lettering.

  I hadn’t seen him in a few months, but he looked more haggard than usual.

  Norman’s face was gaunt, like his skin was too tight for his cheekbones. His eyes were heavy and bloodshot, and what should have been a five o’clock shadow looked more like the emergence of a full-grown beard. A wrinkled and tattered blue blazer hung on a metal coat rack attached to the back of the office door. Mike had his shirt sleeves rolled up, and a brown necktie hung down low on his open-collared shirt. A leather shoulder holster wrapped around his thin shoulders like a harness, his 9-millimeter Glock stuffed under his left arm, grip forward, easy access.

  All the New York State cops were using porcelain Glocks now. Just one way to keep up with the underworld competition. A Glock had no safety other than a trigger you depressed twice just to get off the initial round. From there you kept the finger pressure on until the magazine was empty. But once you chambered a round, you practically had to take the pistol apart in order to de-chamber it without firing. I think it’s fair to say that a Glock is a weapon for a man or woman who shoots for keeps. I’d fired one a couple of times, but never requisitioned one because, to be perfectly frank, they scared the hell out of me. Imagine a guy who’s at best a fair-to-middling shot packing a piece without a safety?

  Mike and I shook hands and sat down-Mike at his desk, feet up on top, me on the couch by the door.

  “How’s Val?” he asked. “She still with you?”

  So much for keeping her out of this.

  “So far,” I said.

  “You’re having a bad week,” Mike said, taking a hit off his I LOVE MY JOB! mug, “and it isn’t even Tuesday afternoon yet. That’s not like the keeper I remember. How’d you manage it?”

  “You’re the detective,” I said, glad that he dropped the Val issue right away. “You tell me.”

  “Vasquez flew the coop, huh, just like that?”

  “Bolted,” I said.

  Mike gave me one of those squinty-eyed, tight-lipped grins cops seem to perfect by their twenty-fifth year on the job. He opened up his bottom drawer, took out a bottle of ginger brandy, added a shot to his coffee, then gave me a wide-eyed look that said, Join me.

  I nodded, not out of thirst, but out of consideration. Mike put out another mug, poured a shot.

  I sat my briefcase on my lap, opened it, and slipped out a large freezer bag containing Logan’s.38 along with the live rounds and the key to the cuffs. I dropped the lot onto Norman’s desk. Then I set the briefcase back down on the floor and stood up.

  “What’s all this?” Mike said, leaning forward, elbows on the desk top.

  “I prove the only prints on this stuff are Robert Logan’s and Bernie Mastriano’s, I prove the story of three shotgun-packing assailants assisting with Vasquez’s escape is a lie. A cover-up for something else.”

  “You got a hunch?”

  “More like a theory,” I said, staring up at a calendar that occupied an otherwise bare wall to the right-hand side of Norman’s desk. “I smell the proverbial rats and they take the form of Logan and Mastriano.”

  “I saw the morning news,” Norman said. “That scene with Mastriano’s mother almost had me bawling.”

  I nodded and looked at the perfect X’s Mike had slashed through each of the square calendar days as they’d passed, one after the other. Only five days X’d out so far in May. By the end of the afternoon, there’d be a sixth.

  “You think they made up that story about being attacked?”

  “I had Logan in my office only a few hours after the escape. Not a single mark on the guy. I saw Mastriano in the hospital a few hours later and, again, the same story. Not a mark on his baby face.”

  “Prints or no prints,” Norman said, “you’re not gonna prove a goddamned thing.”

  “But it’ll be a start.”

  “So who’s running the show down there, anyway?”

  “A guy from Stormville PD by the name of Schillinger.”

  “Don’t know him,” Norman said. He drank and frowned, either at me or at the cheap brandy in his old coffee. He broke the seal on the freezer bag. Then he pulled out his handkerchief and shrouded the fingers and palm of his right hand before he gripped the pistol. He closed his left eye and sighted in on the short, four-inch barrel. “Don’t see many of these anymore. A genuine relic.”

  “You can help?” I asked. “Off the record?” I pulled out a Pall Mall, lit it with the Zippo. Then I took a sip of the booze and wished I hadn’t. Cheap ginger brandy, sold by the gallon for a drinker like Norman who didn’t care how bad his medicine tasted.

  Mike straightened up, opened his top drawer, and placed the pistol, bullets, and key ring inside. He closed it, locked it.

  “I can help,” he said. “But I get caught, we both go up shit’s creek. Obstructing justice, manipulation of evidence just for starters. Some serious charges going to point you in the face like this Glock hiding inside my armpit.” He downed his coffee and brandy so that the word NOT! stared me in the face again. This time Mike filled his mug with brandy only.

  “I’ve considered obstruction already,” I said. “It’s a chance I’ve got to take before Logan and Mastriano go too far with the press.”

  “Logan’s not supposed to be opening up his mouth, huh?”

  “Department rules. Unwritten, but rules nonetheless.”

  Mike smiled.

  “It’ll cost you, Keeper. I mean, I’m closing in on retirement, and you know I’ve still got to maintain my desirable attributes as a detective.”

  I blew out some smoke slowly.

  “Name your price,” I said.

  Mike leaned back, crossed his hands in his lap, looked up at the ceiling.

  “Don’t rush me,” he said. “Delicate operation like this takes some thinking over.”

  I sat down on the armrest of the couch, half sitting, half standing.

  “Any ideas, copper?”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ve got it.”

  “Uh-oh. Last time I saw that look on your face, I had to buy doughnuts every day for the month of July. Summer of 73, I believe it was. We were at the training academy with Wash Pelton. Cost me fifty bucks in lard and caffeine.”

  “This evidence could save your ass, Keeper,” he pointed out.

  “Worth more than mere doughnuts, wouldn’t you say?” The smile on his face grew wider.
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  “Definitely more than doughnut-serious,” I agreed.

  “Okay,” Norman said, “I’ve got it. I agree to pull this favor, lunch is on you once a week for the entire summer.”

  “Burger King, Wendy’s, Jack-in-the-Box, McDonald’s, Big Kahuna Burger?”

  “None of that crap, Marconi.”

  I looked at the ceiling. The darkness of Norman’s office made the roof nearly invisible, like a black sky on an overcast night.

  “No choice?”

  “No choice, pal.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Name your venue.”

  Norman thought hard for a second or two. He took another drink from his mug.

  “Jack’s Oyster House, every Friday, twelve noon. Meet me in the bar for drinks. You buy, of course.”

  Jack’s Oyster House was one of the oldest and most expensive eateries on State Street in downtown Albany. Owned by the same Jewish family for nearly four generations, Jack’s was strictly a New York-style, businessman’s restaurant where men dressed in tuxedos and long white aprons served you Beefeater martinis and bloody porterhouse steaks.

  “I can’t talk you down?” I posed.

  “Them’s the terms, pal.”

  “Anyone finds out about this, could get us both in big trouble.”

  “Not me, pal,” he said, raising his hands. “You came in here, threatened me with my life. I felt intimidated, had nightmares, began drinking heavily…“ His voice took on a mock quiver.

  “You wouldn’t rat on an old buddy, would you, Mike?”

  “You ever hear Mike Norman call himself a hero, Keeper? You and Pelton are the ones who made it to the big time. Me, I passed out at Attica. Commission’s never let me live that one down. Nervous breakdown they called it. Catatonic state. Shit, I was a kid, nineteen years old. Those rebel inmates were going to kill us. Changing departments hasn’t helped. Now twenty-five lost years spent in law enforcement and I still can’t make it past lieutenant. They gave me this office-this miserable closet in the corner. But you know what? I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  He took another deep swig from the mug.

  “For a cop,” I said, “you’ve got a shaky moral foundation and a bad attitude.”

  Norman nodded thoughtfully, as if that was the point. And I guess it was.

  “Questionable at best,” he said. Then, taking another pull on his brandy. “Tell you what, you get caught and you get busted, I promise to visit you in the can every Friday, twelve noon, with file sandwiches.”

  “File sandwiches?”

  “Yours comes with a file stuffed between the ham and cheese.” Planting another smile on that tired, gaunt face.

  “Now I see why we’ve been pals all these years,” I said.

  “Hey,” Mike said, blowing his nose with the same hankie he’d used on Logan’s.38, “what are friends for?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME to remember everything that happened during those four hopeless days at Attica. Much of it is distorted, the memories jumbled and mixed together. What I do remember has, over the years, taken on all the sharpness and vividness of the present. What I mean is, there are certain events that repeatedly occur in my mind, as if they have nothing to do with the past at all, as though they are always happening over and over again in the present. Whether or not the events actually happened that way doesn’t matter anymore. Because when it comes to memories, what counts is not accuracy, but the feelings they call up.

  I can still see Mike Norman sitting with his back against the stone wall, knees pressed up against his chest. Pelton sits beside me, Indian-style. We say nothing, do nothing. We just stare at Mike, who hasn’t been sick to his stomach for an hour now, or what seems an hour, anyway. It’s hard to tell. The sun is going down over the yard. Bonfires lighting up the night make the yard seem oddly festive, like a carnival of death.

  Some of the inmates have been busy hammering together a large platform out of the loose boards and plywood pulled from the physical plant. From here the platform looks like a staging area of some kind. Maybe a gallows. Some of the inmates come into the yard with Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, little bags of potato chips, and other junk looted from the commissary. They offer us nothing to eat, and I know better than to ask. Occasionally a black-and-white chopper makes a flyby, shining bright white spotlights against the gravel floor of the open yard. When it passes, the inmates throw rocks and shout obscenities, as if words alone will bring the chopper down.

  What’s the point of choppers, I think.

  What can they possibly do for us from the air?

  Mike hugs his legs and stares straight ahead, but I’m not sure he’s seeing anything at all. Wash asks me what we should do about him. Nothing we can do, I say, but wait. But then I see a CO running like a bat out of hell from a gang of six rebel inmates. He is barefoot, dressed only in his uniform trousers. He tries to evade the rebels by attempting to climb from the first-story gallery up to the second-story along the steel bars that run vertically against the face of D-Block. I can see his bare chest and face pressed up against the bars from where I sit. The gang of six inmates comes after him from behind. They claw at him while he panics and holds to those iron bars for his life. But there are too many inmates. They are enraged, crazy. They climb up after the CO, pull him down off the wall. The last I hear of him, he is kicking and screaming and gagging. “They’re cutting my throat!” he screams. “Cutting! My! Throat!” I close my eyes, try to think of Fran. But it’s no use. The bloody gurgling sound is so loud it echoes throughout the yard, reverberates against the insides of my skull, kills the image of Fran.

  Then there is nothing.

  I go dizzy, like the entire prison has been pulled out from under me. Pelton buries his face in his hands and cries. But it’s Mike who takes it the hardest. He passes out, just like that. A little smile forms at the corners of his mouth, a slight, wry, angelic smile. Peaceful. Like he’s dreaming a sweet dream.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  GILES GARVIN OCCUPIED A single ten-by-twelve cell within a row of five so-called special cells. The cells are situated on a fourth-floor wing of the administration building and accessed primarily by a freight elevator with a closed-circuit camera unit installed in the ceiling. Anyone transported up or down the elevator to and from the special cells is video-taped. For code reasons, there is a fire escape located at the opposite end of this wing that contains a Plexiglas-walled guard shack, video surveillance monitors, padlocked closets with restraining equipment, and tranquilizers. For security reasons, the fire escape is barred off and bolted closed. There is an additional wall of iron bars outside the usual set of bars that enclose the cells. It’s because of this second set of vertical iron bars that inmates and guards alike take a certain pride in calling this special place “the cage.”

  The cage houses inmates who pose a greater-than-average threat to the general population. Inmates who get a special kick out of stabbing a fellow inmate directly in the face, for instance. The mutilation that results is the brand or tattoo handed down by a man of power, a man to be respected.

  The cage not only protects the general population from its more lethal killers. It also serves the opposite function. It protects marked men who wouldn’t last a single day in general population from being offed with a shiv to the liver.

  Inside the cage these men could be kept under twenty-four-hour supervision-no outside contact, no chow in the mess hall, no television privileges, no visitors, few phone calls, no windows or fresh air. The only exercise is one hour per day of supervised recreation in a fifty-by-fifty gravel-covered yard normally set aside for condemned prisoners. Other than that, the immediate landscape of the caged prisoner is concrete walls and floors; iron bars; stainless-steel toilets, sinks, bunks and Plexiglas shields.

  This was the price of protection.

  Garvin’s cell was covered with just such a Plexiglas shield. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Latino-and-black mix from the streets of New York City who, be
fore being shipped to Green Haven, used to wait outside grade schools, lure kids into his van, take them for a ride into the country, and touch them a little before he wrapped their heads in bed sheets and plastic shopping bags. He’d then dismember their bodies, and scatter their body parts throughout Dutchess County. Maybe a head in a streambed, an arm in a wooded area south of Catskill, a full torso propped upright against a cemetery gravestone with the feet, hands, and head cut off. His most famous case involved a six-year-old beauty-pageant winner whom he gagged and bound and tossed into a dumpster alive, which he then doused with gas and set on fire. The fire inside the dumpster burned with such intensity that all that was found of the little girl some four hours later after Garvin had phoned in the whereabouts of his latest victim, were a couple of bone fragments and some teeth. Some days later, after arresting Garvin on a petty shoplifting charge, forensic scientists were able to extract enough DNA from the six-year old’s teeth to match it with skin and blood removed from under his filthy fingernails. The tiny bit of DNA evidence was all it took to put the mark on the monster and, in turn, send him away for the rest of his life. The only thing keeping him from lethal injection was the possibility of insanity.

  Since Garvin couldn’t strangle, burn, or dismember kids anymore, he had become one hell of a good drug salesman, which seemed oddly out of character for him, since drug dealing, at base, was a hustler’s business, not a cold-blooded killer’s. For his own protection, he spent a lot of time in the cage. New York State wasn’t about to make the same mistake the state of Wisconsin had made with Jeffrey Dahmer.

  On this Tuesday, he slithered out from the dark regions of his cramped cell and pressed his body up against the vertical bars when I was let into the cage by the presiding CO. He gave me a teeth-biting sneer that wasn’t much of a welcome wagon as the CO took his time manually releasing the locking device on the cell. He stood there with his short, well-groomed hair and his wiry, vascular, copper-colored body.