CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I SHOULD HAVE STAYED behind bars just a little longer.
I knew something wasn’t right the second Val pulled into the driveway of my Stormville home. Deep gouges had been dug into the lawn. Black tire tracks were burnt into the blacktop. The mailbox had been rear-ended and now leaned out toward the road.
Somebody must have peeled out in a hurry.
Tommy Walsh and his men hadn’t made that kind of impression on the property when they’d come for me the night before. They were calm, collected, businesslike. Somebody had been at the house between the time of my arrest and the time I’d returned-not the brainiest of deductions, but true just the same.
“Wait here,” I said. I opened the door, eased myself out of Val’s station wagon.
“I’m coming with you,” she insisted.
I leaned into the open passenger-side window.
“Stay here. Somebody might still be inside.”
I knew my.45 was still in the house, under the mattress in the bedroom.
Val cut the engine. She got out of the car.
“I’m not staying out here all by myself just because you want to play hero.”
She slammed the car door closed.
Together we stood at the front door. Small aircraft were taking off and landing at the Stormville airfield directly across the street. The day was hot and still and dry. I took the key ring from my pants pocket, found the house key. Val stood close behind. I could hear her long, deep, calming breaths. I went to fit the key into the lock. But the door swung open on its own.
I couldn’t understand it.
The wood jamb hadn’t been notched out, nor had the metal lock-set been ripped away from the frame with a heavy screwdriver or crowbar. The wooden door had not been kicked in with the heel of somebody’s jack boot. Somebody had used a key. Neat and simple. But then they’d left the door open on their way out. They’d torn ruts in the lawn; they’d run into the mailbox.
Sloppy. Or, if not sloppy, then downright intentional.
I pushed open the door. From the foyer I could see that the single-story home had been left in a shambles. The carpeting had been torn up and tossed in a heap into the living room. The coffee table had been turned on its side, the books pulled off the shelves, my entire CD and album collection thrown on the floor. Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” had been stepped on and crushed, and what really got to me was that when I took a few steps inside, I realized that they’d cut the skins on every one of my drum heads. No music fan, no matter how sick, would have resorted to that.
There was more.
All the paintings and photographs were either hanging crooked or no longer hanging at all. There was an old photograph of my grandfather and me: him sitting on the edge of a neatly stacked pile of cordwood just outside the cabin he’d built in the Adirondacks, with me, no more than five years old, sitting on his knee. He was smiling that wry smile of his, his red-and-black mackinaw over his stocky shoulders. The photo had been thrown on the floor, the frame cracked, the glass shattered.
There was the gold-framed mirror Fran’s mother had given us as a wedding gift twenty-five years before. It lay on the floor in pieces. Someone had deliberately crushed it. I stepped on the broken glass, felt it crunch under my leather soles. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned fast, grabbed the hand.
“Jesus,” I spat, “I could have taken your arm off.”
Val took a deep breath. I let go of her. The two of us leaned against the plaster wall in the foyer.
“My mistake,” she said.
“Nobody’s here,” I said.
She walked into the living room, stepping carefully to avoid the broken bits of glass.
“What the hell happened?”
“Someone left me a message,” I said. “And I think I know who.”
Val took a few more steps in and scanned the room.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said, lifting the remnants of a picture frame off the floor. Pieces of broken glass fell from the frame and shattered. She held a portrait of Fran and me in her hands. I recognized it as the one taken at a studio just after our engagement in 1971. Me with jet-black hair cut close to the scalp, no mustache or goatee, and Fran with long black hair parted down the center, making her look like an angel. Now there was an X slashed through her face.
I took the photo out of Val’s hands and tossed it into the pile of torn-up carpeting, books, and albums.
“Mother of God,” I said, taking a deep breath.
“I don’t want to look anymore,” Val said. She went into the kitchen, started rummaging through the cabinets, through the pots and pans. When I heard the water running, I knew she was making a pot of coffee. Leave it to Val, I thought, to bring calm and civility to an otherwise chaotic and senseless situation.
I went ahead and checked the rest of the bedrooms. Everything seemed okay. Nothing missing. Even my briefcase, which contained a copy of Vasquez’s file and the number-ten-size envelope I’d found in his cell, hadn’t been disturbed. I returned to the kitchen, took a beer from the fridge, and brought it out to the porch. Later I would clean up the mess. As for calling the cops, I knew there wasn’t much I could do but file a report. Besides, I was the one under arrest. And how did I know it wasn’t the cops who had trashed the joint in the first place? How did I know it wasn’t Tommy Walsh along with a couple of Pelton’s finest?
They’d used a key for God’s sake.
I lit a cigarette and for the moment just stood there on the porch watching the small planes take off from the airstrip. I looked at the torn-up lawn and the leaning mailbox. I looked at the driveway covered now with streaks of black rubber. I couldn’t help but remember the image of my wife being zipped up in a black plastic body bag and stuffed into the back of a Chevy Suburban with black-tinted windows. The bastards who’d X’d her face would pay for that little stunt. Screw with me but don’t screw with my wife, dead or alive.
Val joined me on the porch. In her left hand she held an ice pack fashioned from a white-and-blue-checked dish towel filled with ice cubes. In her right, a cup of coffee. She handed me the ice pack.
“You want me to help tidy things up for you in there?”
Using two hands, she balanced the overfull coffee cup against her lips and took a sip, careful not to burn her mouth.
“I’ll manage,” I said, holding the ice pack in my hands.
“I’d like to help if I could.”
“I know where everything goes,” I said, setting the ice pack down on the porch floor next to my chair.
“That’s a nasty bump,” Val observed.
“Too late for ice,” I said, taking a hit off the cigarette and following up with a swig of the cold beer. But she was right. I could still feel the tightness of the swelling above my eye. The egg-sized welt throbbed. I suppose it couldn’t have been any less conspicuous than a tattoo.
Across the street, a Cessna with white wings and a red-and-white fuselage was coming in for a landing. The small craft descended painfully slowly, never straight, always fighting the wild up-and-down currents of air as its black tires came closer and closer to the hot, sun-baked pavement. It landed finally, the wheel that faced me touching the airstrip first, then the weight of the plane coming down hard on the opposite wheel.
“How does a man like you get himself arrested?” Val posed.
I drank my beer and smoked my smoke and told her about the gravel pit off Lime Kiln Road, and about the evidence I’d found there. Then I told her about my visit with her old boyfriend Lt. Mike Norman at the Albany Police Department and also about my visit with Pelton, including the illegal part where he’d wanted me to take the blame for Vasquez’s escape in exchange for a reward.
“And you think Mike ratted on you?”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“You know as well as I,” Val said, still holding her coffee cup with two hands, “that Mike Norman is not that kind of man.”
I pictured the
kind, caring man Val probably wanted to remember from those few months they’d spent together as a couple. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but imagine his pale face, his trembling hands, the coffee mug he used for a shot glass. I thought about his ongoing love affair with the brandy bottle and I knew that this was the real reason Val and Mike had never worked out. She could never be content taking second place to a man’s drinking problem, and who could blame her. But then I saw Mike Norman picking up his phone once I was out of his office and I saw him dialing Pelton’s private line and I heard him saying, “Wash, old buddy, I’ve got something you might be interested in, but it’s gonna cost you, old buddy. It’s gonna cost you good.”
I might have explained all this to Val, but considering how she’d once felt about Mike, regardless of his drinking, I felt it only right to let it go. Besides, at this point, the only thing I could be certain about was the bump on my forehead.
Val looked out beyond the porch and took a swallow from her coffee cup.
“There’s something else I’ve got to do,” I said, careful to drop the subject of Mike Norman.
Val turned back to me.
“I’m going to locate Vasquez, talk to him face-to-face.”
“Jesus, Keeper. First of all, nobody knows where Vasquez is, and second, even if you could find him, what in the world makes you think he’ll talk with you?”
I flicked my spent cigarette butt over the rail of the porch.
“We have a common enemy now,” I said. “Common legal circumstances, too.”
“Except you’re white and a respected member of the law enforcement fraternity, and he’s Latino and a convicted cop-killer on the loose.”
“Correction,” I said, “I’m Italian, which makes me no whiter than Vasquez, and what’s more, I’ve just been busted for obstruction of justice and manipulation of evidence. My home’s been ransacked by someone who has a key to the front door, and I refused to take a bribe from the Commissioner of Corrections, who, as we speak, is probably sealing my fate. So, under the circumstances, Val, I don’t think I have much choice but to find Vasquez.”
“All this still doesn’t solve the problem of where to find him.”
“I think I know where to start looking.” I was thinking of Athens.
Val stepped up to the porch rail and took a deep breath. But then she set her coffee cup down on the rail and, for a time, stayed perfectly still. Some of the coffee spilled when she went down the porch steps. She came back up with the morning paper in her hand and a sour look on her face.
“Read it and weep, boss,” Val said.
The headline consisted of only two words, but I had to read it several times before I could absorb it completely. MARCONI BUSTED!
Not far under the headline was an old photograph of me, taken at least a decade before for my current ID, from when I had been appointed first lieutenant for Coxsackie Correctional Facility in 1987. The black-and-white photo would have been available in the commissioner’s records. In the photo, I’m stone-faced, almost thuggish-looking. The photo looked more like a mug shot than anything else, with my eyes nearly closed and a smile hidden behind a Pancho Villa mustache.
Below the photo was another headline of almost equal proportions.
DAY NUMBER THREE FOR MASTRIANO!
Another photo showed the corrections officer lying in a Newburgh General Hospital bed, his mother by his side, along with Dr. Fleischer, the fierce little man peering directly into the camera. The photo credit belonged to the Associated Press.
“This thing made the morning papers,” I said. “Which means Pelton must have leaked the story to the press before he called me into his office.”
“They had every intention of arresting you,” Val deduced. “The whole thing was a setup from the start.”
“I’m the patsy,” I said, feeling very dizzy.
Just then a station wagon pulled up outside the driveway. A white van with a satellite dish on top pulled in behind that. Channel-13-Newscenter was printed on the sides of both the car and the van. The two vehicles couldn’t have been there for more than ten seconds when a Ford Bronco from a different television station arrived from the opposite direction.
I stood up just as the reporters and cameramen began scrambling out of their cars and trucks.
“Guess it’s about time we made a quick exit.”
“Congratulations,” Val said, “you’re gonna be famous.”
“Yah, for all the wrong reasons.”
We escaped back into the house.
I locked the deadbolt behind me and turned to Val.
“Listen,” I said, “there’s no telling where this thing is going and who could be implicated along the way.”
Val pressed her lips together. Her eyes were deep and wet.
“What are you trying to say, Keeper?”
“What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.” I put my left hand on her arm and gripped the newspaper with my other.
“You can trust me,” she said. “I work for you before I work for anybody else.”
I kissed her forehead and pressed her against me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“As far as I’m concerned, those bastards toss you to the dogs, they toss me to the dogs, too.”
Outside the picture window in the living room, I could see a reporter standing on the front lawn, his hand at his forehead like a visor, trying to get a look inside the house.
“They already have, Val,” I said. “They already have.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I SUPPOSE PEOPLE SHOW grief in different ways. I didn’t openly weep after Fran died. I didn’t cry at her funeral. From a distance, I could see other wives whispering to their husbands, and I knew what they were saying. Shouldn’t he be more upset? Shouldn’t he be crying?
But Fran’s death tore me up all the same.
Repairing those rips and tears over the last twelve months had not been easy. Now, any little thing could set me off, plunge me into the dungeon of despair. A half hour after Val left through a haze of reporters on her way to the office in Green Haven, I went into the living room to pick up the mess. I would have managed it, too, if I hadn’t picked up the portrait of Fran and me, the one with the X slashed through her face.
I stared at the photo for a good long while, longer than I should have. Then I gently put it on the fireplace mantel. I went to the bar and poured myself a tall Scotch. It had turned into a Scotch kind of afternoon. I lit a cigarette. My hands shook. Standing there alone in the living room with the reporters walking around aimlessly on my lawn, I knew I should have stashed the photo away, saved it for something. For evidence maybe. But I couldn’t help myself.
I took the photo off the mantel and lit the white corner with the Zippo. It caught fire instantly and I tossed it into the open fireplace and sat there smoking while the photograph shrunk and curled up into itself. I watched my body and the body of my wife disappear in a blaze of orange-and-red-colored flame, and I grieved all over again.
I took a pull on the Scotch and took another look outside the living room window. People were carrying all kinds of communications equipment, voice recorders, and cameras. They paced the front lawn waiting for something to happen.
I felt like the groundhog.
Maybe if I waited long enough, they would try to burn me out.
In the kitchen, I dialed my office and got Val.
“How you holding up?” she said.
“I feel like O.J. Except I didn’t do it.”
“More like John Gotti,” Val said. “Get your ethnicity right. You want to check in with Dan?”
“Why not?”
There was a pause and then the confused noises of the phone being transferred from one person to another.
“What the hell’s going on, Keeper?” Dan said. “Pelton called, said by court order you can’t step foot inside Green Haven. Said if you did to have you arrested again.”
There was
that familiar organ-slide feeling in my gut. I made a conscious decision not to explain anything to Dan quite yet. Besides, what could I possibly tell him that he didn’t already know?
“Pelton make you acting warden?”
“Just this morning.”
“Good,” I said, as if that had been the plan all along. “Now I want you to do us all a favor.”
“Anything.”
“From here on out, you’ve got to avoid Pelton like the plague.”
“Won’t be easy, Keeper,” Dan said. “I mean, under the circumstances, he wants constant reports. Especially with Vasquez gone and general lockdown still in effect.”
“Just ignore his calls as best you can, or if he decides to make a surprise visit, take the back door. Just don’t let him get to you.”
“Anything else?”
“Sit tight, don’t say a word about anything to anybody, especially Pelton and Marty Schillinger. Val will fill you in on everything. In the meantime, I’ve got a little catch-up ball to play.”
After I hung up the phone I went around the entire house and closed all the curtains. The press had gathered enough nerve to move from the lawn to the front porch. They rang the bell a few times, but they knew I wasn’t about to open the door. They knew I was still inside the house, but I’d do my best to remain invisible until it came time to get by them.
Now I knew why they called them the press.
I returned to the living room, took hold of the heavy metal poker that leaned against the brick fireplace, and used the blunt end to crush the burned photo of Fran and me into so much soot and ash. It was then I noticed that the photo hadn’t burned completely. A semblance of the image remained. I bent down, sifted through the black ash, and picked out the remains.
Fran’s face was still there.
I put the cigarette between my lips, reached into my pocket for the Zippo. I started the lighter and brought the flame to the stamp-size portion of intact photograph.
Maybe my imagination was taking over but, like the image of her body, the image of Fran’s face took some time to disappear. No matter how I put the flame to it. I wasn’t the type to heed signs from above, but it seemed like a gesture from divine providence itself.
The Innocent Page 10