I stepped inside.
The CO closed the gate behind me and moved back to his post at the edge of the guard shack where the electronic panels powering the cell doors were located.
For now, I took a seat on Garvin’s stainless-steel bunk while he used the rim of the stainless-steel toilet as a chair. He was dressed only in gray inmate pants, his torso exposed. His chest was mapped with scars and pockmarks, trophies earned from attacks by rival gang members. On his left forearm was a tattoo of a rose. A very beautiful tattoo of a red rose. He had a thin, coarse face, like a man who had spent too much time in the sun before coming to the iron house. Tattooed to his cheek, below his left eye, were four tiny blue teardrops. His hair was bleach-blond, neatly cropped, slicked back against his head.
I gave Garvin a Pall Mall, lit it for him. He blew the smoke out slowly through his nostrils. In the meantime, I could hear shouts and jeers coming from the caged animals near Garvin’s cell. “I want my lawyer. Rehabilitation, shit. I want my lawyer…” They went on and on, not making sense, but making a plea nonetheless, because that’s all they had left to do. But like living beside a railroad track, after a while you just don’t hear the trains anymore.
“He had like this scheme going,” whispered Garvin a minute or two after I asked him his thoughts on the escaped Vasquez. “Years ago, Eddy knew he had to buy into the program. It was his way up the chain of command, so to speak. Wasn’t long before he was pushing like one thousand, two thousand pounds inside and outside the joint.” Garvin looked up at me. His smile was oddly attractive, oddly confident. “Over-the-counter trading he called it,” he said, exposing a gold tooth, a shining gem amongst a mouthful of rotting molars, incisors, and cuspids.
“What about the escape?” I said, laying my hands out flat on the cold steel bed.
Garvin faced the sky, blew perfect smoke rings that dissipated against the concrete-paneled ceiling. “Orders would come in from the inmates and visitors. Manhattan street prices prevailed, no more, no less, far as we could tell. Keep market value consistent. That was the motto, like that was the fucking rule. Orders left the prison with the visitors, along with logistical information…You know, like where and when the drop would take place. Same thing would happen if the drop was going to be on the inside. Course, that was much trickier. Shit came in and out with the visitor, hidden inside a deflated balloon stuffed up his ass. Or, more likely, stuff came through in bulk, through the service entrance, with the deliveries and the laundry.”
“So tell me something I don’t already know, Giles,” I said, holding out the pack of cigarettes for him again. “I mean, why does a guy like Vasquez even sell shit when he doesn’t have a prayer of seeing the outside?”
Without hesitating he took another cigarette from the pack and lit it off the one just smoked.
“Okay,” he said, “all right. Like Vasquez was selling so he’d have a nest egg for him and his girlfriend, what’s her name?”
“You tell me.”
He smiled a mouth full of black-and-brown teeth, the one capped in gold out of place and sparkling in the raw white light that came from the overhead ceiling fixture.
“I don’t have no names,” he said. “But I do know this about Vasquez. He was selling shit so he and his girl could have something to live on down in Mexico when he finally got his chance to split. But like, he couldn’t split right away. Like he was waiting for the perfect security personnel, the right guards, you dig it? Eddy, he’s a motherfucker for sure, but he’s one smart motherfucker. He knew he had only one chance, one shot. He had to get hold of some guards who didn’t have no problem taking a bribe.”
I put my hand in my pocket, fingered the envelope with Cassandra Wolf’s address on it.
“You want to give me the names of the guards who were working with Vasquez?”
“Yeah,” he said, leaning back against the concrete wall, laying his tattooed forearm across his lap. “Like I really, really do, Mister Warden sir.”
He looked into my eyes and he smiled that killer smile. I wondered if it was the same smile he’d used when he lured those kids into his van. I guess this was the part of the one-on-one where I was supposed to feel a slight chill shoot up from the base of my spine. I wasn’t sure if my lack of feeling was more an indication of Garvin’s lack of effect on me or my own desensitization. On the other hand, there was something very practical and useful going on here and I didn’t want to blow it by getting on Garvin’s bad side, although I’m not so sure he had a good side at all. Fact is, it wasn’t often that an inmate would just open up about a fellow inmate unless some serious shit was going down between them.
“So why are you telling me all this, Giles?”
Garvin’s already-hard face went noticeably taut His skin turned fire-engine red. He used his lit cigarette as a pointer when he extended his fist to my face.
“Should I say, Mister Warden sir, that Eduard Vasquez, motherfucker that he is, is on my shit list? Should I say that Vasquez, when I get to him, is like one dead motherfucker? Would that be incriminating myself, Mister Warden, sir? Because if it is, I’m long past sympathy for the devil.”
I opened up to the voices of the other caged men. “Hey Warden Marconi, I know you’re in there…“ I heard the voices until I would not allow myself to listen to them anymore.
In the meantime, Garvin settled down a little.
“But I don’t give away information without a price,” he said, blowing another stream of smoke into the sweat-soaked air.
“Listen, Giles,” I said, wondering just what Vasquez had done to double-cross him, “I can’t do a thing about your sentence. Those kids you murdered are too much. But I can make it easier for you in here.”
He glared at me with translucent blue eyes hidden inside chiseled cavities. The four baby-blue teardrops tattooed to his face were bitter reminders of the four children he had murdered and mutilated.
“But first,” I said, “give me names.”
The killer looked to one side of his cell, then to the other as if expecting to see something besides concrete, steel and slime.
“Okay, Mister Warden, sir,” he said, leaning up and resting his elbows on his knees. “But you gotta promise me one thing.”
Me, nodding.
“That when it comes time, you speak up for me.”
Garvin had no chance for parole. If the jury hadn’t wrestled with the sanity question, they would have sent him straight to death row. I had no idea what Vasquez could have done to betray him.
“No deals. Any deal gets made, I make it.”
Garvin spread his thin legs wide, grabbed his balls.
“Blow me,” he said.
“You know the score, Garvin. Word gets out I gave you a deal, my name don’t mean diddly in the iron house.”
Garvin dropped the spent cigarette through his spread legs so that it landed in the toilet. I heard the quick hiss of the doused flame. He leaned back against the concrete wall. When I offered him a third cigarette, he refused, choosing instead to cross his arms against his chest as though in protest.
“Names,” I pressed.
He hesitated for a second or two.
“Fuck you,” he said. “Like you don’t want to help me, then fuck you.”
“No deals.”
“You just want those names so you can save your ass. You ain’t got no interest in helping me. I read the papers too, Warden. Like, you been slipping since your wife got killed. Like, maybe your mind just ain’t on your job no more.”
“Yeah,” I said, standing up from the stainless-steel bed, nodding for the guard to release the cell door, “I’m a million miles away.”
“No deals,” Garvin said, “then I got nothing to say.”
The cell door opened, electronically this time-an iron cell within an iron cage.
“Go ahead,” spat Garvin, laughing now, showing me his gold tooth, “waste your time, man. Like ‘California Dreamin.’ Just like that stupid-ass song. You be real safe, you be
real warm if you was in L.A.”
I turned to leave.
“Don’t you see, Warden, California was never real. Like California was just a big beautiful dream. You are the warden, aren’t you? Like, you can do anything.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m the big boss, Giles.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was trying to tell me, if he was trying to tell me anything at all. It was rants like this that had spared him from lethal injection when judge and jury handed down their sentence. Nutty rants and raves that made little or no sense.
But then, Garvin had been on the money about one thing.
Since Fran died, I’d been a million miles away. If my mind had been on my job, then maybe-just maybe-I would not have let Vasquez go like that. Civil liberties or no civil liberties.
I tossed the pack of cigarettes onto Garvin’s bunk and got the hell out.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT WAS QUARTER PAST five on a Tuesday afternoon. I took a fresh pack of smokes from the carton stored in the right-hand drawer of my desk. Val Antonelli and Dan Sloat had left for the day, an unavoidable situation that always made me feel a little empty inside. I checked my voice mail. Only one person had left a message. What I mean is, at least six other calls had been placed but the caller or callers had hung up without saying a word about who they were, what they wanted, or why they had to talk to me.
In the prison business, hang-ups were never a good sign.
Pelton, I thought. Pelton or the press.
Probably both.
I popped a cigarette from the new pack, lit it, and leaned back in my swivel chair. Then I reached over and hit the playback button.
Keeper, Schillinger at Stormville PD letting you know we got dead ends all around. Nothing in Vasquez’s cell. Nothing from the roadblocks. Nothing from the California people in Olancha. Just dead ends. We’ve contacted the FBI, and as I speak, border patrol is doing what they can for us in case Vasquez is headed south, but who knows. That’s it, that’s the score. Just dead ends, you know. Call me back with anything you find out. Oh yeah, one more thing. I need to tell you that tomorrow we should sit down and talk about what went wrong on your end. You have a good night now.
Detective Martin Schillinger hung up having delivered his little threat. Tomorrow he wanted to talk. Over my dead body, I thought. Or maybe that’s what someone had in mind. I found it surprising that he never once mentioned the photos Dan and I had handed over to him inside Vasquez’s empty cell. He must have examined them. To me, a photo of some woman with a heart-shaped tattoo on her neck was a clue that deserved follow-up. But then, he was the detective and I was the concerned warden.
I played Schillinger’s message back again. When it finished, the receiver hung up and a dial tone took over. Then nothing. I played the message back one last time. It didn’t change, so I erased it.
I looked at my watch. Five-eighteen on a hot, still afternoon in May.
Happy hour. What was there to feel happy about?
I poured myself a drink anyway, and decided to put a couple down for all the wrong reasons.
If I called Schillinger I would probably catch him in his office. But what would I have to tell him about the escape? He’d want the truth and I had no idea about the truth. I thought about Logan’s statement, about the three armed assailants who had beaten him and Mastriano. I thought about the little bump above Logan’s left eye and then suddenly I pictured the wide white medical bandage that he had wrapped around his head, specifically for a television audience. I pictured Mastriano lying in a hospital bed, his mother sitting by his side, her hands clasped around his. I pictured Giles Garvin blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling of his cell.
I took another sip of the whiskey. While the drink was going down smooth and warm against my pipes, it dawned on me. Giles Garvin. That stuff he’d been rambling on about, just before I’d left his cell. California dreamin’. I thought about Schillinger’s message, how they had contacted the people in Olancha, California. I thought about the envelope I found in Vasquez’s cell yesterday afternoon. I pulled it out of my pocket and studied it in the white light that came from my desk lamp. There wasn’t much to look at, just a typical envelope addressed to Vasquez with a return address from Cassandra Wolf in Olancha. But then I looked at the postmark. The circular mark inlaid over a rectangle was barely legible. But when I put it under the light, I could just about make out the letters. The mark was dated 1 May 1997, but it hadn’t come from Olancha, California, at all. The goddamned letter had been postdated at an office in Athens, New York. No wonder Vasquez had eluded the road blocks. No wonder Schillinger and his men had nothing to go on. Vasquez must have somehow made the eighty-mile trek north to meet Cassandra Wolf in Athens.
I sat back in my swivel chair, smoked the cigarette, drank the whiskey.
The importance of what I’d done-withholding police evidence and hampering a state investigation-kicked in, turned my stomach inside out. Maybe Garvin was right. Maybe I was trying to get at the truth just to save my behind for not being more careful when it came to transporting inmates outside the prison. At best, I could just keep avoiding Schillinger the way I’d been avoiding Pelton for the last twenty-four hours. Avoid him and hope he focused his attention on other things, like where to begin looking for Vasquez. But then, I wanted to be the first one to find Vasquez, have him give me the true gen on what was happening to me and to Green Haven.
I poured myself another whiskey. Like bad medicine, I downed it in one swallow. I poured another and drank that down, just as fast. I felt the liquor warm my insides, like an embrace from a beautiful woman, and just as tender. I poured one last shot, took the phone off the hook, closed my eyes, and embraced the woman.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I LEFT THE OFFICE at 6:55 and arrived home fifteen minutes later. I was groggy from the whiskey, but not so dazed that I couldn’t catch the rest of the seven o’clock news. The CBS news anchor spoke from his New York studio to a reporter inside the hospital room of Green Haven CO Bernard Mastriano. Mastriano had attracted national attention. The reporter stood exactly where Chris Collins had stood earlier, at the foot of Mastriano’s bed so that you could see him and his mother by his side.
“Has there been any word on the possible location of Eduard Vasquez?” the anchor asked the reporter.
“No such luck. All we can tell at this point is that roadblock and surveillance efforts have proven unsuccessful. In fact, there’s speculation that Vasquez may have already escaped New York state altogether. Perhaps by now, more than twenty-four hours after the initial breakout, Vasquez has even made it out of the country.”
Athens, I thought. He went to Athens, New York, to hook up with his girl.
“Has any reason been given for why such a dangerous criminal as Eduard Vasquez would have been allowed to visit a dentist on the outside?”
“That answer can only come from the warden of Green Haven Prison, Mr. Jack ‘Keeper’ Marconi, and he’s been unavailable for comment thus far.”
“Let me get this straight,” the anchor went on, pretending to put his field reporter on the spot. “The warden of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison is not guarding his inmates?”
“That seems to be the case.”
There was a slight pause in the report, as if to allow that little exchange to sink in below the belt of every American tuned in to the broadcast. Then the anchor continued with his questions.
“Any word on the present condition of the corrections officer who was struck down?”
“Only that he’s unconscious and still in intensive care and will be for some days.”
With that, the anchor turned in his swivel chair and faced the camera. “That was William Anderson reporting live from the Newburgh General Hospital room of Corrections Officer Bernard Mastriano, the young man whose life hangs in the balance after suffering a severe beating on Monday afternoon when Eduard Vasquez, a convicted cop-killer, escaped from Green Haven Maximum Security Prison
in Stormville, New York.”
I got up from the bed, turned off the television. A swift kick in the cojones would have been an improvement over the way I felt. I took the envelope out of my pocket and stared at the Athens postmark. I knew I had to go to Athens now. I had no choice. My reputation had just been slandered on national television. Someone was covering up something and gradually making me the scapegoat.
I had to find Vasquez, bring him back.
I took the phone in my bedroom off the hook. Then I went into the living room and spun Bucky Pizzarelli and Zoot Sims again, since it was still on the turntable from the night before. I went back into the bedroom and undressed.
I hadn’t had any dinner yet. But I poured one final drink. I considered having a few more drinks, maybe even getting drunk. But I couldn’t allow that to happen. I couldn’t relinquish control when it was still so early in the game. I had to stay cool and sober, because this was no game; it was my life. I put the glass down, turned out the light, slipped into bed, and closed my eyes.
It was only seven-thirty in the evening.
I tried to clear my mind, but it was impossible. In the end I went to sleep to the vision of a heart-shaped tattoo.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I HAD NO WAY of telling how long I’d been asleep when the front door opened wide and the living room lights came on. I’d been dreaming of Fran again; feeling her beside me, touching me, her lips pressed against mine, my hands against the small of her back, our naked bodies together in bed. Then the dream shifted suddenly so that Fran and I were prisoners sharing a cell. Logan and Mastriano were breaking in during the middle of the night to shake us down. I could smell the trash when it goes ripe in the prison galley. I could feel the way the hot night made the sweat ooze from my back and from the concrete ceiling overhead. I could see the tight faces of the two guards as they came through the open cell gate, arms outstretched, going for our necks. I could feel Fran in my arms, smell her sweet familiar smell, feel her hair on my lips. Then my eyes focused and I realized I wasn’t inside a jail cell at all. Fran was no longer there and I saw the figure of a man standing in my bedroom doorway.
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