The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  “Superintendent’s office,” Val said.

  “You alone?”

  “Where are you, Keeper?” Her voice suddenly muffled, but urgent all the same.

  “Pay phone.”

  “Vasquez is dead.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I saw the special report on television. You were running away.”

  I let out a breath.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “Of course,” Val said. Voice funny, distant.

  “Listen carefully. I’m running out of change and time. You have to call me back.”

  I read off the payphone number.

  Val hung up without saying goodbye. I wasn’t entirely convinced she’d call me back, but it was a chance I had to take.

  I took a quick look at the Pontiac while I waited (and prayed) for the pay phone to ring. Of all times to lose my cell phone. Cassandra sat in the passenger seat, gripping the two-and-a-half pound, unloaded.45 in her right hand, holding it steady on the pastor. She made a fist with her free hand and rested it in her lap. Her face lacked even a semblance of expression-mouth closed, teardrop eyes staring through the windshield, heart-shaped tattoo looking out of place but somehow natural on the smooth skin of her neck.

  The phone rang.

  I felt a wave of relief when I pulled the receiver and put it to my ear.

  “Tell me what you know?”

  “FBI came snooping around this morning,” Val said. “There was a bag of something. Dope, heroin, something; I don’t know what. A bag of cash, too, inside your desk drawer under lock and key.”

  I felt like my legs had been chopped out from under me.

  “They found two bags, Keeper. How am I supposed to feel about that?”

  “Plants,” I said, taking a deep breath, trying like hell to regain my equilibrium. “Don’t you see, Val? Setup.”

  “Of course,” she said, in that strange, unfeeling, monotone voice.

  “Come on, Val. You have to believe me.”

  The silence that followed verged on unbearable. I gazed into the Pontiac at the ever-still pastor and the ever-still Cassandra Wolf with.45 in hand.

  “I told you before, Keeper,” Val said finally, in a whisper voice. “I work for you first.”

  There, I thought. She said it. She said exactly what I’d wanted her to say. But it was the way she said it. A funny, unsure, trembling voice.

  “You have to do me a favor,” I pressed. “I’m heading north to my cabin in the Adirondacks. I want you to meet me at Exit 28 of the Northway tomorrow morning at nine. Pull off the exit and wait. You won’t see me, but I’ll see you.”

  “You have a cabin in the Adirondacks?”

  “My grandfather’s before he died. Then my father’s until he died. He left the place to me. I haven’t been there since I was a kid, but I don’t know where else to go.”

  “Sure,” Val said, as if she didn’t quite believe my cabin story either.

  “Now,” I said, “you’re going to need a pencil and some paper.”

  I waited until Val was ready.

  “Go,” she said.

  “I want you to bring me a first-aid kit and some food. Enough stuff to last two people a couple of days. Also, two shotguns.”

  “And where am I supposed to find-”

  “Just call Tony Angelino at Council 84. He’ll help you.”

  Val wrote down the instructions.

  “Two twelve-gauge shotguns,” I added. “Remington 1187s if he can get them. Four boxes of shells, plus a box of.45 caliber rounds. I need a pair of black jeans, black combat boots, black turtleneck, black watch cap. You know the sizes.”

  “Guns,” Val whispered. “Guns and combat boots.”

  “Here’s where I really need your expertise,” I said. “I need an identical set of clothing for a woman.”

  “Cassandra Wolf sort of woman?” Val said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That sort of woman.”

  “What’s her size?”

  I took another quick look inside the Pontiac.

  “She’s a little taller than you I guess, maybe a hundred seven, a hundred ten pounds, average hips, better than average chest, I suppose.”

  “Sounds like a four,” Val said. “Lucky you.”

  “Also,” I said, “I need some cash.”

  “Anything else, Keeper?”

  “Anything you can think of that I might have missed.”

  “Who’s gonna pay for all this?”

  “Just tell Tony to put it on my tab.”

  “He’s gonna love that, Keeper. A union lawyer financing a fugitive.”

  I could feel the uneasy silence oozing through the line.

  “You have to be guilty to be a fugitive, Val.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I saw you running away on TV. Away from the police, I mean. And there was the stuff in your drawer.”

  “I didn’t do it, Val. Neither did Cassandra Wolf.”

  “It’s just the way it looked.”

  “Remember,” I said, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  I pictured Val’s soft face, her brown eyes, and well-sculpted black eyebrows. I pictured the way she reached for the ceiling when she stood up from the swivel chair inside my office at Green Haven. Scared and anxious, that’s all she was. So was I.

  “Keeper,” she said, releasing a quick resolved breath. “I’m with you all the way.”

  “You do this for me,” I said, “you become an accessory after the fact.”

  “Listen, Keeper, I’m thirty-six years old. My husband took off on me six years ago. Other than Mike Norman, I haven’t had a steady relationship in almost as many years. I have to do something for me. Take a stand. Maybe this is my stand.”

  “I won’t let you down, Val. I swear it.”

  I gazed once more inside the Pontiac. Neither the white-faced pastor nor Cassandra stirred. Just a blank look on her face, and a.45 in her hand.

  “Remember, Val,” I said. “Exit 28 of the Northway. Nine o’clock sharp.”

  “I’m already on it”

  “You’re my angel, Val.”

  “You bet your sweet ass I am,” she said.

  BOOK FOUR. IRONVILLE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  1971 IS THE YEAR Attica State Prison goes insane.

  Here’s how:

  I sit cross-legged and barefoot in a mud puddle in D-Yard. Mike Norman sits directly across from me mumbling something that makes no sense. His eyes are dark and glassy, his face sunken and pale. His yellow jumpsuit is soaked through to the bone. He is covered in mud. So is Wash Pelton. He sits beside me, so close I can feel his trembling shoulder rubbing up against my own. His knees are tucked up into his chest, arms wrapped around his shins. He’s crying again. I feel my own eyes welling up. Everything around me-the stone wall, the soupy earth, the overcast sky-is gray-brown. A high-pitched whistle goes off inside my head. When I hear the screams of the CO who is being castrated with a double-edge razor, I have to hold back the tears and the shakes. My body goes numb as the officer is pushed to his knees. His pants are pushed down and his skinny legs are exposed, the white skin streaked with veins of mud. Two rebel inmates hold him by the arms and by the hair on his head. They press his knees into the mud. He screams in agony as the razor cuts through the pale flesh and opens up the purple artery, the blood spurting five feet into a rainy sky. The scream is the kind of primal scream you feel more than hear. It is a scream that goes beyond anything human. I try to turn my mind off to the blood, rain, mud, and death. I try to turn my mind off completely. But I know this corrections officer and because I know him I feel he is a part of me. He is fifty-four years old and the grandfather of a new baby boy.

  John Pendergast has been emasculated with a razor blade.

  He lies bleeding to death in the middle of D-Yard.

  I am eighteen years old. My name means nothing to the rebel inmates. My death would mean everything.

  “Our Father,�
� we begin to pray together on the muddy floor, “who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…“

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK I got back into the white Pontiac and drove out of the supermarket parking lot. I knew I had to do something about the pastor. If I were a real killer, this would have been the part of the mystery where I’d have to bump him off, execution style. Just one shot from the.45 to the back of the head would do the trick. Then I’d lose his body in a patch of heavy woods somewhere off the highway, well above the Albany city limits. North, above Lake George.

  The pastor knew too much. He could finger Cassandra and me in a lineup. At the very least, I’d have to take him with me, lock him up in the potato cellar underneath my grandfather’s cabin. He knows too much, I’d keep telling myself. It’s either him or me.

  But I wasn’t a killer and it made me sick to my stomach to be thinking like one. Maybe I was beginning to unravel from the inside out. Maybe I was beginning to disintegrate. Maybe, with my back up against the wall, I was becoming one of them.

  There was an orange-red sky on the horizon, and a steady north wind bucked against the Pontiac, making it veer to the right. I pulled off the highway onto the ramp for Pottersville, not far from the Pottersville Inn-a century-old, three-story, wood-framed building that took up one full square block in the small upstate town.

  As I came to the end of the exit and made a left turn onto the road to the inn, I was suddenly stricken with vivid memories of my grandfather. It was thirty-five years ago and we were on our way from Albany to his cabin. But first he turned off the highway for a “cold one,” and led me into the inn. Driving now through Pottersville I could still see the long mahogany bar and the wide, gilt-framed mirrors behind the shelves of bottled liquor; I could see the giant moose head mounted above the ladies’ room and the fire going in the woodstove; I could smell the burning hardwood and stale beer and the distinct, steamy fish smell from my grandfather’s oversized mackinaw as the snow melted off it. Then I remembered my grandfather’s callused hand wrapped around my smaller hand, and I smelled the sweet smell of Scotch-sour on his breath, and I recalled the weird feeling in my stomach when I realized, even at eight or nine years old, that this short man, with black-and-gray stubble on his face and a halo of light brown hair around his head, was my father’s father and how different the two men looked and how differently they acted-one slow and methodical and tender, and the other (my father) fast and direct and always occupied.

  I pulled the Grand Prix over to the soft shoulder.

  Cassandra turned to me.

  “Why are we stopping?” she said.

  “This is where the pastor gets out,” I said.

  She opened her eyes, wide. Her first real emotional response since we’d borrowed the pastor’s car.

  “But he can recognize us now,” she said. “We can’t just let him go.”

  “I’m not a kidnapper.”

  “Short-term memory can be a real bitch,” she said. “Trust me. I used to study stuff about the brain, how it works.”

  “What college?” I said.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “The University of Bad Breaks,” she joked.

  “I see.”

  “I used to take correspondence courses, before Eddy hired me on.”

  “So you think we ought to keep the pastor with us.”

  “All I’m saying is he can spot us now.”

  “We’re innocent, remember?”

  “Innocence never kept anyone from jail. You of all people should know that.”

  “That’s a chance we’ll have to take.”

  Cassandra retreated back into herself again, as if I had scolded her. But then, she didn’t seem quite like the kind of person who could be easily scolded by anyone, least of all me. She gazed down at the rubber foot mats on the Grand Prix and tried to tune me out, just like that.

  “Listen,” I said. “By the time he finds his way back to Albany, we’ll be long gone.”

  But she said nothing, as if I couldn’t possibly convince her that letting the pastor go was the right thing to do. I reached around the bucket seat anyway and pulled the gag out of his mouth. I undid the belt tied around his wrists, tossed it onto his lap.

  “End of the road, Father,” I said. “You’re free to go.”

  He wiped away the white patches of dried saliva that had collected on his lips, and he coughed.

  “You mean you’re not going to kill me?” he said in a strained voice.

  Cassandra laughed suddenly and glanced over her left shoulder.

  “Would you like us to kill you, Father?”

  “You two are wanted murderers.”

  “I think the padre here wants to be a martyr,” Cassandra giggled.

  “That’s enough,” I said.

  But Cassandra turned away and shook her head and laughed a little bit more. When she moved her head quickly, her shoulder-length hair bobbed, exposing the red, heart-shaped tattoo on her neck.

  “Despite public opinion, Father,” I said, “the lady and I are not Bonnie and Clyde.”

  I got out of the car and pushed the driver’s seat in toward the steering column so that he would have an easier time getting out. At the same time a car passed and then another. As far as I could see, neither driver seemed to suspect that anything was wrong.

  “You have any money, Father?”

  The red-faced, gray-haired pastor gave me a look like the skin was melting off my face. He patted his pants pocket with open hands.

  “I wasn’t planning on needing any,” he said, clearly fearing a mugging.

  I pulled the roll of bills out of my pocket, peeled off two tens.

  “Here,” I said. “Now I’m going to ask you, as a Christian and a man of God, not to call the police for at least one hour. That’s all I’m asking. And I’m asking you in the name of the Father.”

  The pastor stood there, mouth open, little tufts of gray hair blowing in the wind that trailed each passing car and truck.

  He said, “One hour.”

  His stringy hair stuck up on one side and the bald spot in the middle of his round head made him look like a friar more than the pastor for the Church of the Nazarene. His collarless shirt now hung out of his pants. He had two tens folded up in his fisted hand.

  “You did not harm me,” he said, looking down at his hand. “You are letting me go free. You’ve given me money. Maybe you are innocent, maybe you are not. But I will give you the hour you ask for.”

  He took a deep breath and raised his face to mine.

  “Then I’m going to call the proper authorities and tell them what I know.”

  “I’m sorry, Father,” I said.

  He started to walk away. But before he got far, he stopped and turned back to me.

  “What about the car?” he said. “The car belongs to the parish.”

  “I’ll take good care of it,” I said, trying to work up a semblance of a smile. “I’ll return it when I no longer need it.”

  The pastor looked down at the ground, most likely convinced he would never see the car again. He was certainly justified in thinking that way. But then, for a second or two, both of us were drawn to Cassandra. She sat motionless in the Grand Prix, her eyes peeled on the Pottersville Inn just ahead. She seemed transfixed by the old building. But then, I had the feeling that she saw something completely different.

  “She going to be okay?” the pastor said.

  “Her boyfriend was just blown away by the very same people that want to see me go down,” I said.

  “I’ll say a prayer for both of you,” he said.

  “Do it now,” I said, getting back inside the car. “Do it often.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  WE GOT TO THE cabin at a little past seven-thirty.

  The five-room cabin had been built by my grandfather in 1947, just a couple of years after he’d come back from the war in Europe, where, during the Battle of the Bulge, he’d taken rounds in the leg and the shoulde
r from a Tiger-tank-mounted machine gun. He’d set the cabin into the base of what some locals referred to as a very small mountain called Old Iron Top because of the way the metal aggregates in the bald, granite hilltop glistened in the sun when it shined down directly at noontime.

  The cabin had been constructed of timbers felled from the forest that surrounded it. The roof was framed in the shape of an A and shingled with wood shakes that had been replaced only twice that I knew of since the old man had died from stomach cancer back in ‘81. The cabin had been set so far into the base of Old Iron Top that you could access the roof from the back without using a step ladder. Coming up the paved drive I was besieged with childhood memories of warm summer nights, and of sneaking out the bedroom window and shimmying up onto the roof, and of how in the morning my grandfather would swear he’d heard animals running around overhead during the night.

  When I tried to wake Cassandra, she wouldn’t budge. Maybe it had been days since she’d slept so soundly. Or maybe Vasquez’s death had some kind of tranquilizing effect on her. Some sort of shock to the system. Whatever the case, she slept like the dead, and I was thankful for it.

  Like we had done to the pastor only a short while before, I took off my belt, wrapped it carefully around the wrist of her right arm, and at the same time slipped it through an opening in the passenger-side door handle. I secured the belt as best I could without jarring her and started my walk up the drive with the silence of the black forest all around me and my.45 in hand-a round chambered, safety off. I made it to the stack of piled firewood stored under a carport connected to the west side of the cabin, and moved on slowly until I reached the side door. In the light from the headlights, I could make out the little black mailbox bolted to the wall beside the door frame. The golden eagle that had once been attached to the black box was gone now, leaving only an outline.

  I stepped up onto the first of the three wooden risers and slipped my hand into the small space between the mailbox and the exterior cabin wall. The key was there hanging by a nail, just like I hoped it would be. It had been my grandfather’s idea to hide the key in that space. Now it was left there by the caretakers so renters could access the place in the summer and early fall months.