The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  Pelton pointed to me, his arm outstretched across his mahogany desk. Warren leaned over, buried his face in his hands. Behind him was the photograph of Ronald Reagan. Behind him were the photographs of George Bush. All those politicians posing for the camera, glowing faces perpetually locked in those twenty-five-cent smiles.

  Schillinger looked at me with emotionless eyes and a plump white face. As usual, he was wearing that Burberry trench coat. He said: “Mr. Jack ‘Keeper’ Marconi, you are under arrest for obstructing justice and tampering with police evidence.”

  I turned toward Pelton. He lifted a large plastic baggie from inside his desk. It contained Logan’s pistol, the rounds of ammo, and the key to his handcuffs. I knew then that it must have been Mike Norman who’d given the thing away right after I’d left his office. He must have called Pelton, told him that I’d been there, and asked him to process the evidence for prints illegally.

  I stared at Schillinger.

  He stood there with a shit-eating grin planted on his face. I wasn’t about to stand around and allow him to arrest me. I wasn’t about to stand around and beg for my freedom either. I did what I should have done the minute I’d been escorted into Pelton’s office earlier. I went for the door. But one of the cops grabbed my collar from behind. I swung back with my left elbow and clipped his nose. The nose exploded like a water balloon. He went down. A second man grabbed my arm and pushed me backward. A third man knocked my legs out from under me, at the knees. I hit the floor hard. The cop I’d clipped in the nose grabbed a fistful of hair and pounded my forehead against the terrazzo while the other cops held me down. I met the floor with my face two separate times. Once would have been enough. Once would have done the trick. I saw the room go dim and wavy before I felt the pain and tight swelling of the egg-shaped lump that had already begun to form on my forehead.

  They picked me up off the floor, one man under each arm.

  I surveyed the room, tried to get my bearings. I stared at Pelton, Warren, and Schillinger through a haze of bright stars and wavy light.

  “You may read Mr. Marconi his rights, Detective Schillinger,” Pelton said. “And don’t forget to add resisting arrest.”

  Schillinger reached inside his trench coat and pulled out a leather wallet. He lifted a small plastic card from the billfold and started reading from it.

  “You have the right to remain silent…“ Reading me the Miranda rights just added to the annoyance. What I mean is, I knew them by heart. As another cop drew my arms behind my back and closed the handcuffs so tight around my wrists that I could feel the skin tear, I saw my old buddy Wash standing inside that ray of pale, white sunlight.

  “I’m sorry, Keeper. Really, I’m sorry. But you leave me with no other choice.” He wasn’t smiling, but then, he wasn’t crying either. Jake Warren remained buried in his hands. Hear no evil, see no evil. He never said one word the entire time. He just took a deep relieved breath as Schillinger and his men began dragging me out of the room. Like his future would be somehow certain, somehow secure, so long as I was out of the picture and behind bars.

  BOOK TWO. ALBANY AND STORMVILLE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HERE’S HOW I SEE it now after twenty-six years: In my mind, the Attica riot was something very much like a short war. During the heat of battle there is no such thing as innocent or guilty, no such thing as right or wrong, no such thing as heaven or hell.

  It is all hell.

  And when, in the middle of all the madness, the rebel inmates surround the prison chaplain as if they suddenly feel the need to pray, I know for certain that the devil is truly showing his face at Attica State Prison. Instead of reciting “Our Father’s and “Hail Mary’s,” the rebels order the chaplain to strip down to his skivvies, socks, and white V-neck T-shirt. They force the meek, round-shouldered, Roman Catholic priest onto his knees, hands behind his back. One inmate cuffs his wrists while another inmate bends down and plants a kiss smack-dab on his quivering lips.

  The priest has a thin, almost gaunt face. His skin is white, but caked with mud and spit. His lips are blue. Horn-rimmed glasses lie crooked on the crown of his nose, his chin is pressed down against his chest. He is crying, not out of shame, but because a rebel inmate has dressed himself in the priest’s habit. The inmate is doing an Indian war dance around the half-naked priest, spitting on him, mocking him.

  “Though I travel through the valley of death,” mumbles the priest between tearful gasps, “I shall fear no evil.”

  The rebel inmate carries a steel pipe in his hand like a war club. He chants woo-woo-woo and dances that Indian dance all around the crying, praying chaplain. The rest of the inmates break out in laughter.

  “Fear this!” they scream. “Save yourself, Mister Righteous Man!” they shout.

  The rebel inmate dances and chants. He brings one foot up slowly and lets it down, then brings the opposite foot up and lets it down. His movements are slow, deliberate, and smooth.

  He stops dancing suddenly. Just like that.

  He coughs up a rubbery hawker from deep inside his nasal passages. He rolls the hawker around his mouth for a while until I want to gag on just the thought of it. Then he positions his mouth over the priest’s head and lets loose with the wad of yellow-green spit. When the mission is accomplished, the inmate stands up straight, takes a step or two back, and brings that metal pipe down hard on the priest’s head. It’s then that the priest stops crying, stops praying. He takes on a wide-eyed look of surprise, as if something inside his body and soul has just snapped. And it has, along with his entire cranial cap.

  The priest smiles a peaceful smile. He releases a slight breath. A puddle of blood oozes up from the opening in his skull like oil from a well, and for a split second even the rebel inmates are perfectly silent, as though a church service is about to be performed in their honor. A moment or two later, the priest lets loose with a gentle sigh and falls flat on his face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IN THE DREAM MIKE Norman sits behind his desk in a darkened office with only a red-and-white neon light flickering outside the Venetian blinds. He is pouring brandy into his I LOVE MY JOB! coffee mug. I see the word NOT! on the bottom of the mug when he lifts it high and drinks, allowing the booze to spill over the rim and run down the sides of his narrow face onto his white button-down, soaking it like a layer of sweat.

  Laid out on Mike’s desk is a plastic baggie, the word EVIDENCE printed in white letters against a background of baby blue just below the seal. The baggie is filled with Logan’s.38, six loose rounds, and the key to his cuffs. Suddenly Norman has the phone to his ear. His hands tremble. “I’ve got what you need, Wash,” he says. “But it’s gonna cost you.”

  Mike sits back in his chair, reaches down between his legs, grabs a brown paper shopping bag. He puts the bag on his lap. His eyes grow wide and wet. Tears start pouring down his face, off his chin.

  “I’m sorry, Keeper,” he says, reaching into the paper bag with his right hand, pulling out Fran’s head.

  Now it’s me who’s crying, only there are no more tears…

  The dream shifts to my second-floor office in Green Haven.

  Val sits in my chair, her stocking feet up on the desk. She smiles, holds her open arms out for me. Then she is gone and now it’s Robert Logan who sits behind my desk, laughing. On one side of me stands Schillinger, his big hands planted firmly in the loose pockets of his Burberry trench coat. On the other side stands A. J. Roy ale, the butcher of Newburgh. He wears a white surgical mask over his mouth. He holds out a fisted hand. The hand is covered with a rubber glove. He opens his fingers slowly to reveal an extracted molar, the long roots stained with blood…

  And then they are all gone, just like that.

  Now I stand only a few feet away from the banks of a gravel pit. Positioned on the very edge of the pit is a woman I do not recognize. The woman is naked with dark teardrop eyes, shoulder-length hair, and chiseled cheekbones. My insides feel like melting. I want her, bad. I
try to reach out for her, but I can’t quite touch her. It’s then that the gravel pit fills with water. The pit seems to become as wide and as deep as an ocean. The woman looks at me with an expressionless face. She smiles, whispers “Keeper. “

  Using her left hand, she gently brushes back her brown hair to expose a heart-shaped tattoo. She turns and dives into the water, begins swimming away. I jump in after her, but instead of floating, I feel tentacles that rise up from the bottom of the pit, wrap themselves around my legs, and pull me down, deeper and deeper, until the surface is beyond reach and all my air is gone…

  ***

  The cement-walled holding cell measured twelve feet by ten feet. I’d walked it out at least thirty times since I’d woken up after having been tossed in it early that morning. Side wall to side wall, and back wall to bars. In the center of the battleship-gray concrete floor were two benches positioned side to side, their full length facing the front of the cage. The bench tops were made of heavy oak worn down smooth from age and use. Tubular steel supports served as legs. The steel supports had been bolted into the concrete floor with heavy-duty lugs.

  I wasn’t alone.

  The man in the holding cell was still asleep when the guard slipped me inside and unlocked my cuffs. He was an older man, somewhere between sixty and seventy. He lay on his side on one of the benches, his knees tucked up into his chest. His cupped hands were stuffed into his crotch. He had a wrinkled, chalky-white face and looked like the living dead. He snored, and when he exhaled, his breaths rattled against the concrete walls. Once, he mumbled something I could not understand, and it wasn’t until I came close to him that I could smell the whiskey on his breath.

  Because of the hour of my arrest, SOP dictated that I’d have to stay in the holding cell until my arraignment, which was scheduled for nine that morning. In the meantime I sat on the cell floor with my back pressed up against the wall and listened to the echo of the old man’s rattling breaths. I waited for my lawyer, Tony Angelino, to show up, along with Val, who would bail me out if the judge demanded it. I lit the first one of the morning and fingered the welt on my forehead and the scratches on my wrists.

  Eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning.

  I’d been up for nearly six hours, despite the hour nap I’d caught when they first tossed me in here after tagging, printing, and photographing me.

  I listened to the workings of the jail as if they were familiar, and they were. The closing and opening of iron gates; the slap of footsteps on the concrete; the sound of muffled, nearly indiscernible voices coming from loudspeakers that echoed in the concrete corridors; the smell of urine and sweat; other invisible prisoners locked in steel cells, shouting to one another, their voices mixing together like blood and poison.

  Guard: You there, stand up against them bars.

  Prisoner: Eat me, screw.

  Guard: I hear you, boy.

  I should have been at home in an iron house, with the disgruntled sounds and the greasy, worm smells. Prison was my home away from home. I’d spent more time surrounded by cement, steel, and razor wire than I’d spent with my wife.

  Listen, the outside of a prison cell was familiar ground.

  Inside was not.

  The drunk tossed and turned on the narrow bench. How he managed to make complete turns on a bench that could not have been more than twelve inches wide was a testimony to either his sense of balance or his experience.

  When he woke up suddenly, he opened his eyes wide and took a deep breath. He sat up straight, removed his hands from out of his crotch, brought them up to his face. He rubbed his eyes, ran his hands over his cheeks, and massaged his entire face as if jump-starting the circulation in his congested veins and capillaries. He hacked, coughed up some loose phlegm, and spit it out onto the concrete floor. It was then, just after he spit that wad, that he realized he wasn’t alone.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  He smiled or maybe it was just a way of positioning his lips. He wore bright blue polyester pants, white socks collapsed at the ankles, and black plastic loafers split at the seam.

  I decided to say nothing. On the other hand, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the man, as if I no longer had the energy left to ignore him. He stared at me, too, his hands flat on top of the bench, his arms locked straight like pillars, to support a body that might otherwise collapse the second I breathed on him.

  “You a pimp?” he said, his voice forced and raw.

  I shook my head, laughed.

  “Whas so funny?”

  “No,” I said, looking down at the concrete slab, “not a pimp.”

  “Dealer?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Burglar, hit man? What the hell are you, then?”

  I said, “I’m the warden of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison.”

  He scrunched his eyebrows.

  “Man,” he said, “you sure look like shit.”

  I broke out laughing. Nervous exhaustion, I think they call it.

  The drunk laughed, too, a high-pitched, squeaky laugh-a laugh I felt in my temples and the backs of my eyes more than heard. A suspicious laugh, as if he were certain the goddamned wool was being pulled over his bloodshot eyes.

  He said, “And I’m a fucking senator. Glad to meet you, Warden. I’m Senator Teddy Kennedy from Hyannisport.” He said Hyannisport like Hy-anus-port.

  “I don’t expect you to believe me,” I said, letting out a breath of cigarette smoke.

  The drunk lost his smile. He stared out beyond the vertical bars as if there were something to see besides a concrete floor and a cement-panel wall. He turned, looked at me with a perked-up, almost sober face.

  “Then you must be nuts, I guess,” he said. “You must be crazy nuts. Or a pervert. Is that it?”

  I answered him by directing my vision to the concrete floor.

  “Tell you what, nutcase pervert,” he said. “I’m going back to sleep. Wake me when the President comes to bail me out. Or better yet, wake me when the Pope comes.”

  With that he curled up his wilted body and lay back down on the bench.

  “Warden, my ass,” he whispered, pressing his hands together, stuffing them back into his crotch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AT TEN MINUTES AFTER nine in the morning, the judge set my bail at five thousand dollars, much to my lawyer’s irritation and mine. “Let’s face it, your honor,” Tony Angelino had said, smoothing his double-breasted blazer with his big, thick hands, “Mr. Marconi is a respected member of both the New York State Department of Corrections and society at large. I’m quite confident that he is not about to run away from us.”

  Pelton stood up and directly requested that the district attorney set the bail at twenty-five thousand, minimum. But in the end, because of my reputation as a member of the corrections department, the judge set the bail much lower, despite a two-felony-count accusation plus resisting arrest. (The arresting officer who’d gotten it in the nose with my elbow stood close by with a piece of gauze taped across his swollen face.)

  The middle-aged judge, Anthony Sclera-a man I had met on several occasions at the governor’s mansion-sat back in his black leather chair, stuck his hands out from under his wrinkled cloak, and crossed them again against his considerable chest. He was heavyset and out of breath and his white hair stuck up on one side like he’d been dragged out of bed for just this occasion, which may have been the case. He used his index finger to push the round wire-rimmed glasses back onto the summit of his hawk nose while he expressed his deepest regret on the matter of my arrest. He even went so far as to apologize for how and when I’d been taken into custody. It was his solid hope, he said, that the entire affair was nothing more than a mix-up. A simple case of miscommunication. At the conclusion of the morning hearing, the judge leaned up onto his oversized podium, made a frown, and shook his jowls. A court date was set for August ninth, and the gavel came down.

  I was escorted out of the courtroom and brought back to the holding cell where I wo
uld stay until Val arrived to post my bail.

  About an hour later, the attending guard came back to my cell. Sure enough, “a good-looking woman named Val,” was here to bail me out. I stood up, straightened out my pants, tucked in my shirt.

  “When can I see her?” I said.

  “Soon,” the thin black guard said. He waved his hand in the air as if to say, sit back down, relax, you re not going anywhere for a while. “She’s in the middle of processing all that paperwork. You know, SOP.”

  I tried to work up a smile.

  A frown was easier.

  “You could have asked him how long the process usually takes,” the guard said, referring to my drunken cell-mate lying flat on his back on the wooden bench and snoring. “But then, he’s not much of a talker in the morning.”

  “I bet he talks a blue streak during his first six or seven manhattans,” I said. “It’s probably the last two dozen that shut him up pretty good.”

  The guard turned.

  “I’ll be back for you in a few shakes, Warden.”

  I could just picture the headlines now.