The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  Satisfied with his speech, Fleischer sat back, resumed clicking his pen and gazing out the window.

  “Look, Doctor Fleischer,” I said, tone calmer, “all I’m saying is, as a prison worker, I’ve seen every kind of head injury there is to see, from stabbings to blows. Every single one was followed by some kind of bleeding or swelling or both, so don’t tell me there might be nothing unusual about Officer Mastriano’s condition.”

  Fleischer actually smiled. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “I see,” I said. The good doctor had me stumped, or so it appeared. So I decided to make like Barry Sanders and change direction midstride. “What about all those people upstairs? Tell me they’re all family.”

  “Now that the media has latched on to this,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the parking lot, “there’s little I can do.”

  Now he was definitely lying, but I wasn’t swallowing it and Fleischer knew it. On the other hand there was no real point in going toe-to-toe with him anymore. This was his home turf, his ballpark, and I didn’t have a warrant and all he had to do was call security and then I ran the risk of another arrest.

  “Well then,” I said, “I apologize if I caused you any inconvenience.”

  I went for the door.

  I heard the sound of Fleischer getting up behind me. “Water under the proverbial bridge,” he said, reaching for the door and opening it for me.

  Proverbial, I thought. What a smart man.

  “You really should consider putting an end to those things,” he said, nodding at my lit cigarette, “before they put an end to you.”

  “Is this Harvard Medical School talking?”

  “Just a concerned doctor of medicine,” he smiled. “You must be aware of the risks.”

  “When you’re as desperate as I am to find answers to difficult questions,” I said, holding the cigarette up to both our faces, “a few risks here and there are worth it.”

  “And just what is it you’re trying to find out, Mr. Marconi?”

  I glanced over Fleischer’s shoulder, honed in on the Harvard diploma above his desk. “Veritas” I said, “and a whole lot more.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I DID EIGHTY ALL the way from Newburgh to Albany and made it in just under two hours. I went directly to the Albany Police Department on South Pearl Street where I had no trouble walking into Mike Norman’s hole-in-the-wall office.

  “What the hell,” I said, instead of hello.

  Norman got up from his desk, pulled me into the office, and slammed the door closed.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You know the trouble you’ve gotten me into already, Keeper?”

  The wall-mounted clock above his desk read 3:35 in the P.M.

  “What went wrong, Mike?”

  Looking more tired and pallid than usual, he walked back to his desk. His jet-black hair was sticking straight up, like last night had been spent in the office sleeping it off on the couch. And my guess was that it had been. What should have been a finely pressed button-down shirt was wrinkled and stained, and the knot on his brown necktie was pulled down around his chest. Mike ran his hands through his hair as if it made any difference at all and he sat down, hard. Opening a bottom drawer, he pulled out the bottle of ginger brandy, filled his I LOVE MY JOB! mug, laid out a second mug beside that one, and filled it, too.

  I drank the brandy in one swallow and slammed the mug back down on the desk.

  “Look, Keeper,” Norman said, “I don’t mean to go ballistic, but if Pelton’s busted you, that makes me an accessory. No matter who’s in the wrong, that makes me liable for manipulating the evidence, too.”

  “You knew the risks.”

  “I never imagined anything like this.”

  “Pelton’s going to pin Vasquez’s escape on me,” I said. “Why is that?”

  Norman poured another shot and drank it down. He squinted his eyes and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “You think I ratted,” he said, his voice strained and constricted from having swallowed the booze.

  I looked him square, in both eyes.

  “I think you tipped him off. I mean, for Christ’s sakes, the man was holding the bag of evidence in his hands.”

  “For Christ’s sakes, Keeper,” Norman said, “I had nothing to do with it. You hear me? Nothing.”

  “I’m supposed to take your word for it?”

  “What can I say? You either believe me or you don’t or you shoot me in the belly right here or you fucking leave my office.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Norman poured another shot. He took a swallow from the cup, set it down on the desk, not hard.

  “My hands are tied,” he whispered.

  “Who set the knots?”

  “I’m not exactly at liberty to say.” He took another drink.

  I reached across his desk, grabbed the brandy bottle, poured myself a second shot. I drank it down, felt the cool heat of the liquid coat the inside of my gut.

  “What more can I do for you, Keeper?”

  I set the mug back down on the desk. I wanted nothing more to do with it.

  “You can help me get out of this mess and then you can help me bring Pelton down.”

  Norman took hold of his mug, sat back in his swivel chair. The light coming from the desk lamp in his otherwise black office made his face glow like a ghost’s. At the same time, something inside told me that Norman was truly on his way to becoming a ghost.

  “Try again, Keeper.”

  “At least fill me in on what happened yesterday afternoon.”

  I sat down, crossed my legs, and waited for Norman to talk.

  He took a deep breath and looked into his mug.

  “This plainclothes cop came by only a few hours after you left to go back to Stormville. What the hell was his name?” He opened his desk drawer, scanned the contents, and pulled out a business card. “Schillinger,” he said. “Detective Martin Schillinger, Stormville PD. Big, beefy goofball of a guy in a trench coat; same guy you told me about yesterday.”

  “My arresting officer,” I said.

  “Well, he wasn’t alone. He had an entourage with him. No one I recognized. He said he had reason to believe I was harboring evidence of some kind that was crucial to the recapture of Eduard Vasquez.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “What do you think I told him? I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. That I had only just heard about the Vasquez escape. How could evidence have possibly made it up to my office that fast or at all for that matter? Then he asked me to follow him downstairs to the crime lab.” He took another drink, emptying out his mug so that the word NOT! was clearly visible on the bottom.

  “You followed.”

  “You’re damn right I followed. Listen, Keeper, you’ve been in Corrections most of your life, so I’ll spare you the gory details, but are you aware of new SOPs on printing analysis?”

  I shook my head no, even though I was somewhat cognizant that fingerprint technicians were becoming real scientists with ultraviolet light-enhancement processing and microscopic imaging. That sort of thing. But as far as any actual procedures went, I didn’t know much. It just wasn’t part of the warden’s job description.

  “When the stuff you gave me was sent down to the lab, it would normally have been tagged and bagged and logged in on the computer with both the state and the FBI as admissible evidence. Only this time I worked off the record. No tagging, no bagging of any kind. Just analysis.”

  “No registering with the proper authorities,” I said. “No way for Stormville PD to know about the stuff unless there was a leak.”

  “I promised you I’d do this under the table,” Norman said, pouring one more drink, “and that’s what I set out to do. Now here’s the kicker. Somehow this clown…”

  “Schillinger.”

  “Somehow Schillinger knew what to look for and where to find it in the lab.”

  “Inf
ormant,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “Squeaky technician.”

  “No way,” Norman said.

  I released a cloud of blue smoke that boiled in the light from the desk lamp and then disappeared into the darkness.

  “Could have been anybody in the lab,” I said, getting up from the couch. “Let’s go pay a visit.”

  Mike stood up fast.

  “Keeper sit down!” he barked. “You go traipsing through there, you get the whole place in an uproar.”

  I sat back down. So did Mike. In the end, I suppose he was right. I had to be careful about shooting my mouth off or making any false accusations. Maybe on one hand I had trouble believing he was giving me the truth. On the other hand, I had no real reason not to believe him.

  “Those folks downstairs,” Mike said, “they’re scientists, techies. They got no reason in the world to turn informants. They’re like machines, extensions of their scopes and lasers.”

  “Money,” I pointed out. “Money talks.”

  “What?”

  “How much one of those crime techies make a year?”

  “Probably thirty. No more than thirty, anyway.”

  “How can you be sure a lab techie didn’t phone a friend of his downstate when you asked him to do the Vasquez stuff off the record?”

  “I know these people pretty well, Keeper. They’re on the up-and-up.”

  “And we’re not?” I said.

  “You’re not,” Mike said.

  An uncomfortable silence followed that I nearly filled by calling my old buddy Lieutenant Mike Norman a jerk.

  “What about you,” I said. “How deep you in now?”

  “Keeper,” he exhaled, holding his mug with two hands, “I’m playing dumb the whole way. Don’t ask me how that stuff got in the lab. It could’ve happened a hundred different ways. For all I know, the stuff spontaneously appeared out of the blue. Maybe aliens dropped it.”

  “Aliens,” I said, stamping my cigarette out in the metal ashtray next to the base of the desk lamp. “Sure.”

  Norman got up, which told me there wasn’t anything left to talk about.

  A thin waft of smoke rose up from the ashtray, clouded his sunken face.

  “Now get out of here and don’t come back for three years, Keeper. I’m sorry, man, but a pension’s a pension, and you’re a hot ticket these days.”

  I stood up and took a look at the calendar tacked to the wall behind him. The entire first week of May was close to being x-ed out. Soon he’d be working on the second week.

  I went for the door.

  “Keeper, wait,” Mike called out.

  I turned.

  “Sorry it went bad.”

  “Lots of people sorry these days, Mike. Me included.”

  He put his hands on his hips. His.9 millimeter Glock was stuffed up under his left armpit. His armpits were soaked with sweat and his white shirt stuck to the sides of his ribs.

  “Maybe I should have gone right to the Stormville cops,” I said, “instead of taking matters into my own hands. It’s just that I knew Robert Logan’s statement was a phony.”

  “Tell you what, Keeper,” Mike offered, going for the door. “When this thing blows over, we’ll go to lunch. We’ll do something better than Jack’s, something a little more personal. We’ll do Italian in your honor. How about Mama Citones on Quail Street?”

  “William Kennedy’s hangout,” I said. “Pulitzer Prize-winning pasta.”

  Mike tried to work up a smile.

  “I’ll be counting the days until this thing is finished and you’re off the hook.”

  “Hey,” I said, taking one last glance at the x-ed-off calendar behind his desk, “I like my job, too.”

  I forced a smile, but I wouldn’t call it a happy smile. Because I knew then, for certain, that my old Attica buddy Mike Norman was a liar.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BUT THEN, NORMAN HADN’T always been a liar. Once upon a time, he was a happy-go-lucky young kid trying to make a name for himself in the Department of Corrections. We all were like that-Norman, Pelton, and me. Cocky, young, crazy. Lucky, for God’s sakes. And get this: We’d set out to make a difference in the lives of those prisoners. Until September of 1971, that is, when the prisoners made all the difference in our lives.

  And there’s no denying that Mike Norman was affected the most.

  Even now I can see him lying on his side, knees tucked into his chest, arms wrapped tight around his shins, fingers locked in place at the knuckles. I can see his black hair sticking up straight on the left side of his head. His face is thin and filthy with saliva and dirt. A patch of dry blood stains the small space between his upper lip and nostrils. Eyes wide, he gazes straight ahead into an imaginary distance. He doesn’t seem to see the iridescent glow of the tower beacons or the small gathering of inmates who are shooting up with drugs lifted from the psycho ward. He doesn’t seem to see the rebel inmates granting interviews to special reporters allowed inside the yard, any more than he sees the famous William Kunstler, long-haired lawyer for the people, seated at a long folding table conducting negotiations with the Panther leaders. He doesn’t see the sharpshooters poised on the stone wall or the helicopters making their perpetual flybys. He doesn’t feel the power of the propeller-driven wind when they buzz the yard. He doesn’t see the puddles of blood or my bare feet. Mike sees only what he sees. And I cannot imagine what that is. And I’m not sure I want to know.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I MET MY LAWYER, Tony Angelino, at the Miss Albany Diner on Broadway beside the old RCA building, the six-story, concrete monstrosity that was topped off with a fifty-foot-high, plaster, Nipper the dog. Nipper sat doggy style on the flat roof, his tail end pointing to the banks of the Hudson River like an insult. Nipper was a magnificent leftover from the old days when the RCA company had run and operated the building-back when Albany had been a budding metropolis for gangsters like Legs Diamond and political gods like Erastus Corning; before the city had paved over the trolley tracks and integrated the districts that had originally been divided between the Irish and the Italians and the Polish and the Canadian French, and you knew where you stood just by sniffing the particular aroma of whatever dishes were being cooked for the evening meal. My own grandparents had come from the Ancona region of Italy directly to Albany after a brief stay on Ellis Island where my two-year-old father was nearly shipped home, having contracted a severe case of influenza during the long journey. In Albany my grandfather went to work for a local grocer, then for an automotive parts distributor; then he began a construction company, and, yes, his father’s brother was responsible for having invented a wireless communications system that the world would one day embrace as radio, although this afforded no special privileges to my father and his family once they arrived in the States. During the Depression, he also moonlighted for some of the more ambitious and money-hungry local politicians, driving trucks full of “near-beer” from Albany to Hartford and back again in the middle of the night under blackout conditions. In those days, there was a lot of money to be made working for the local politicians.

  Sometimes it was the only money.

  Years later, the corruption in Albany had supposedly been squelched by honest taxpayer coalitions. On the other hand, what had once seemed like a budding metropolis now seemed devoid of life itself-a small city filled to the brim with state workers making lower-than-middle-class wages, perpetually trapped in an overcast atmosphere best described as prison-gray.

  On the other hand, if you wanted to find it, you didn’t have to look too hard around Albany to uncover corruption both on the street and on the political level. Just last year the city treasurer, Ernest McDaniels, had been busted for taking a kickback from a contractor who wanted the contract for the new train station that would occupy four square blocks of razed downtown property. Now both men were doing time at Auburn. In the end, I suppose, the difference between the politicians of the past and those of the present is that now you can’t flaun
t the fact that you’re on the take.

  Tony Angelino was a staff lawyer for Council 84 on Colvin Avenue in the west end of the city. Council 84 was the New York union that represented law enforcement officials throughout New York State, including New York City. He had already started on a plate of eggs over easy and buttered toast when I came through the narrow door of the old Miss Albany Diner.

  “Breakfast at four-thirty?” I asked, taking a seat on the empty stool directly beside the short, square-shouldered lawyer.

  “If you remember correctly, paisan,” Tony said with a deep, careful voice, “my breakfast was interrupted this morning by a plea for help from a certain guinea warden I know.” He wiped the edges of his mouth with his napkin and took a quick glance at the lap of his pinstriped suit to make sure he hadn’t spilled any egg yolk during the exchange of conversation. “Hey, Cliff,” he said across the counter to a short, balding man with a white apron wrapped around his thick torso, “coffee for my paisan.”

  I watched Cliff retrieve a white ceramic mug from the stainless-steel shelf above the grill.

  “How you holding up?” Angelino said, placing a good-sized portion of egg onto a triangular piece of toast and then stuffing it into his mouth.

  “Not bad for a guy who’s been kidnapped from his own bed, held at gunpoint by the police, busted across the forehead, accused of harboring evidence and obstructing justice.” Taking in a breath. “Not bad when you consider I’ve been tossed into jail, printed, photographed, and booked. Not at all bad now that my reputation has been slandered in the newspapers and on national television. Not bad when you consider my house has been ransacked and the jerks who did it have a fetish for slicing giant X’s through photographs of my dead wife.”