The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  “Come on,” he whispered. “The next one.”

  I put my hand on the hot water faucet and hesitated.

  “Now,” he insisted. “Do it.”

  The hot water steamed up onto my bare chest and face. I could feel the sting of it as it splattered into the white porcelain sink. I began to turn the knob. But instead of turning it counterclockwise, I slowly turned it clockwise, opening up the valve, the hot water pouring out faster and heavier and hotter.

  “No,” he said, still using that evenly toned whisper, but somehow more urgent now. “The other way. Left is Lucy. Right is tight.”

  And that was when he fell for it. He reached out to the faucet with his free hand. But I grabbed his wrist and held his hand down under the scalding water and went for the knife. The overcoat man screamed and yanked back hard. He stumbled backward a few steps and I brought my fingers to my throat to see if he’d cut me. When he raised the knife to drive it into my chest, I looked closely at the blade to see if it was streaked with red. But before I had a chance to see, his body crumpled and collapsed.

  Without thinking, I went down for the knife.

  Standing over me was Cassandra.

  She had buried the kindling-wood hatchet smack into the back of his head. He never knew what hit him.

  I dropped the knife to the floor and got back up on my feet. For a second or two, Cassandra and I stood there stunned, looking at one another with blank faces, breathing hard but steady.

  Then I went down on my knees again.

  “Grab a towel,” I said.

  She did it.

  I held the towel in one hand and jerked the hatchet out of the skull with the other. Blood came gushing out along with the blade. I pressed the towel up against the wound and got a good look at his face. His eyelids were blinking and his mouth was opening and closing, but no sound was coming out and I was fairly certain that his life had left his body before his nervous system had had a chance to register it.

  I laid him down on the floor, the weight of his head pressed against the now blood-soaked towel.

  “Oh God,” Cassandra said, bringing her hands to her face, turning her head. “Oh my sweet Lord.”

  I had no way of telling if her reaction was the result of what she had done or of recognizing whom she had done it to, or both.

  I felt the jugular for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  I brought my ear to his mouth, listened for breathing.

  Nothing.

  I shook him hard.

  “Who sent you?!” I shouted. But it was all useless.

  All I could get out of him was a death rattle and even that stopped after a few seconds. He was gone and I knew it.

  I pressed his head back down onto the towel and looked up at Cassandra.

  “You recognize him?” I said.

  She had her back to me.

  “I’m talking to you!” I snapped.

  “No,” she said.

  “You’re lying,” I said, bounding up.

  She said nothing. I grabbed her shoulders, turned her around. She was crying.

  “Who the hell was he?” I said. “You saw his face and you recognized him. Who was he?”

  “I don’t know!” she screamed. “I’m telling the God’s honest truth. Please…” Her voice just trailed off.

  I let go of her, took a deep breath, and glanced back down at the dead man. The bath towel was saturated now and there was a small puddle of blood on the floor behind his head.

  “How am I supposed to know if you’re telling the truth?”

  Cassandra gritted her teeth, gazed at me wide-eyed.

  “Because I just saved your ass,” she said, with a voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up stiffer than the overcoat man’s dead body. Tearing the plastic shower curtain off the metal rings, she draped it over the body.

  “There,” she said, walking out. “I did my part. Now you clean up the rest.”

  I took a deep breath and proceeded to do exactly that.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  IT DIDN’T SURPRISE ME one bit that I found nothing on the man after going through his pockets. No wallet, no ID, no photos, no badge (thank God), not even a stick of gum. He was a thorough professional, probably a freelancer. And I was quite sure he had been sent either by Pelton or Schillinger or both. It only made sense for them to place a tail on me seeing that I posed such a threat. What did surprise me was how the hell he located us all the way up here. He must have tailed us the whole way.

  Under the cover of night, I dragged his body out to the woods behind the cabin and buried him in a shallow grave marked with a stone cairn and piles of oak leaves and pine needles for camouflage. It wasn’t much but at least his body would be hidden until I devised some kind of plan for disposing of it before the stink of decomposition took over. I’m not sure exactly why I did it, but before I covered him in dirt I put the knife back in his hand.

  It took about an hour to clean up the mess in the bathroom and to burn the blood-soaked towels in the fire. By the time I got settled, it was going on two o’clock in the morning.

  Cassandra was a tough one.

  She never lifted a finger to help with the mess. She sat by the fire taking deep, calming breaths, her shoulders shaking, trying to bring herself to grips with the fact that she had just buried a hatchet in somebody’s skull. Like Eddy Vasquez’s sudden death, this was something she had to swallow. But in another sense, it was something I had to swallow too. Cassandra had saved my life and I knew I should be grateful. And I was. Not for my life necessarily, but for providing me with at least one very good reason to place my trust in her.

  I sat down beside her. She seemed somewhat calm now, although I had no way of knowing for certain just how she really felt.

  “Thanks,” I said, staring not at her, but into the fire.

  “For what?” she said.

  “For preventing that paid assassin from planting that knife in my solar plexus.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That.”

  I looked at her, saw her make a slight, corner-of-the-mouth smile, then break down in tears once more.

  “You did what you had to do,” I said.

  “No,” she said in a soft, whisper voice. “That’s not it at all.”

  “What then?” I was trying my best to stay calm and patient, despite the fact that I needed answers and needed them quickly.

  “I’m not sure that I loved Eddy at all after he shot that cop,” she said. “It’s just that I felt this need to be there for him once he’d been put in prison. Like my being there somehow gave him a good side or somehow destroyed the bad. And now that he’s dead, I can’t help but feel like I somehow let him down.”

  She hesitated for a few seconds. Her entire body was trembling, and for good reason.

  “But there’s something else, too,” she said. “I can’t help but feel relieved.”

  I felt the heat from the fire on my face, but in my brain I pictured the overcoat man coming up on me from behind, knife in hand.

  “How can I help?” I said. But what I really wanted to say was this: Just what the hell do you know and how do I know you’re going to tell me the whole truth and nothing but the whole truth, regardless of the way you just saved my life?…

  Of course, I’d have to be gentler than that.

  “You don’t know what I’m going through,” she said, louder this time, more forceful.

  I looked at her eyes, wide and brown, filled with fire both real and reflected.

  “I almost feel good, like this weight has been lifted from my shoulders because I know I won’t have to be there for him anymore, won’t have to play his or anyone else’s games. Like I can live a life of my own now that Eddy has lost his.”

  I put my hand on her knee. She made no attempt to move it.

  “Don’t confuse relief with guilt,” I said. “From the moment he killed that cop, his going down was only a matter of time.�
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  I wasn’t sure if I should have said it like that, but I said it anyway, because it was the truth and I wanted to get beyond this whole thing as soon as possible. But the facts were plain enough: Eduard Vasquez shot a cop. A cop with a pregnant wife. He had to pay, one way or the other.

  Cassandra put her head down again, chin against chest. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands. But then, suddenly, she snapped her head up so that her heavy eyes and long black eyelashes once again reflected the radiance of the fire.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I’m not going to mourn for a man I did not love.”

  “Good,” I said, lifting my hand from her knee to her shoulder. “Then let’s get to work.”

  I checked the time. Two-fifteen in the A.M.

  Before I knew it, daylight would be breaking over the valley and Val would be waiting for me at our rendezvous off Exit 28 of the Northway. That is, if the bastards didn’t get to us first. What I mean is, if the overcoat man had been sent by Pelton or Schillinger and he didn’t return or contact them at some designated hour, somebody was going to become a little suspicious.

  I got up, tossed two more chunks of wood into the fire. Sparks shot up and a couple of air pockets burst like intermittent blasts from a light-caliber revolver. It was hard to believe in a way. A fire during the month of May, during an unusually warm spring. But that was the difference between the north country and the suburbs that surrounded Albany only a hundred fifty miles or so to the south. As I sat back down again, I knew that even during the summer months it was not unusual to get a frost up here.

  “Now look, Cassandra,” I said, in as steady a voice as I could summon given our situation. “I want to ask you some questions and I want you to tell me the truth.” I tried looking her in the eye, but she looked away as if the effort were just too painful. “We have to be honest with each other, help one another out as much as possible, hold nothing back. Or else we both risk going away for a very long time. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She stared at the fire like it was her lifeline, like we had all the time in the world. I took her by the shoulders, shook them just enough to get her full and undivided attention. “Do we understand one another?” I repeated.

  She said nothing. Instead she nodded her head yes.

  “Good,” I said, standing and pulling the.45 out from under my belt, checking the safety and the round I had chambered earlier. “First question. How’d you get mixed up with a crook like Vasquez?”

  “So you want to know about Cassandra’s fucked-up past, is that it?”

  “It might help if we start from the beginning,” I said, pacing now from one end of the great room to the other. “It’ll definitely be a start if I get to know you a little better.”

  Cassandra laughed, but I wasn’t sure why.

  As for me, I pulled back the shade on the picture window just enough to get a look outside, slightly anxious that the overcoat man might not have been alone when he tailed us here.

  Cassandra cleared her throat as if about to make a speech. Then she breathed and started in.

  “In ‘87,” she said. “I was working as a waitress in one of those cheap Mexican buffet joints down by NYU. I was barely getting by, so I decided to answer a classified to become an exotic dancer. You know, a stripper. No prior experience required, the ad said.”

  “On the pole training.”

  “At the same time,” Cassandra said, “I was taking some home-study courses from a cable television correspondence school.”

  “In what?” I said, peeking out the window once more, but seeing only the flat, black darkness.

  “I already told you in the car,” she said.

  “The brain.”

  “Psychology, to be exact,” she said.

  “So you were an intellectually motivated student, slash, exotic dancer, is that it?”

  “A very broke dancer, slash, correspondence student,” Cassandra said. “I had bills to pay, and dancing more than paid for them. I even had my own apartment on the West Side. Try supporting that on waitressing money.”

  “Dancing was cost-effective,” I said.

  “I guess that was the sensible side of it all,” she said. “But then there was the other side.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I used what I was doing at work to come up with a topic for a term paper. ‘Striptease,’ I called it, ‘For Fun or Money?’ “

  “What’d you get?” I said, now leaning against the windowsill.

  “For what?”

  “For a grade?”

  “For a grade?” she said. “They didn’t even bother to grade it. The teacher wrote a little note saying that my topic had little to do with the intention of his course and that it might help if I turned myself in to the pornographic hot line or the rape crisis center or some shit like that.”

  I wasn’t sure why, but part of me wanted to laugh.

  “I guess they weren’t used to term papers written by strippers,” Cassandra admitted.

  “Which was it for you, then?”

  “Which was what?”

  “Dancing,” I said, picking up a scrap of kindling from the floor and tossing it into the red-yellow flames. “Fun or money?”

  “I’m not sure. But like I told you, it was a way to make the green. It wasn’t like I hated it either, you know.”

  I sat down next to her again, sat the.45 in my lap, barrel pointed to the fireplace, and gently brushed away the hair on her shoulder exposing the heart-shaped tattoo.

  “What about Vasquez?” I said. “What about this tattoo?”

  “He saw me dancing one night and offered me a job in Tribeca that paid almost twice the cash, and suddenly I’ve got this career.”

  “But what about the tattoo?”

  “All his dancers had their mark. Their brand you might say.”

  “And yours came in the shape of a heart.”

  “You catch on quick, Mr. Marconi,” Cassandra said. “Do I call you Mr. Marconi or is it Warden Marconi or General Marconi?”

  “Keeper,” I said, in the interest of killing off any formality. Besides, she knew by now what people called me. “What I don’t understand, though, is how a smart kid like you could be coaxed into being branded by Vasquez?”

  “Lots of recreational drugs went with the job,” she explained, “which, by the way, kind of added to my term paper.”

  “Research is research,” I said.

  “I ended up doing a couple of films for him. Nothing heavy. Strictly cheesecake. But by then the drugs were becoming an everyday event and I was snorting a lot of junk and making more money in a single week than my father made in three months when I was growing up. All of this went into the paper. That and a lot of graphic description.” She smiled. “In terms of language, I left nothing to the imagination.”

  “I’m beginning to understand your teacher’s concern,” I said, getting up from the floor once more, replacing the pistol in my belt, and going for another bottle of wine. “Suddenly the researcher becomes the subject.”

  “I was making the green,” she said, “and getting off on the excitement. My father struggled for years selling wholesale toilet paper from the dining room table of our flat in Queens and then died a lonely, broke old man. I wasn’t going to let something like that happen to me.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “My mother?” she said, grabbing the fresh bottle of wine from my hand. “My mother died not long after my tenth birthday. And as for my father? They should have buried him alongside her.”

  “After a while,” Cassandra went on, “I had no idea what I felt or what I was doing. It was like suddenly the mythical Cassandra-the babe who’s supposed to be able to tell the future-can’t make any sense out of her past or present. It wasn’t like I was worried about having a future. It was like I didn’t want a future at all.”

  “Drugs, pornography, correspondence school,” I commented. “It all adds up.”


  “I fell into this trance,” she said, taking another sip of wine from the bottle and passing it back to me. “Did you know there’s been studies done as to why women turn to hooking or stripping or both?”

  “Women who normally wouldn’t turn to that sort of thing,” I said.

  “Some shrinks think that these women work from some kind of…how do they put it…some kind of pathological base, but not identical pathological bases, if you get my drift.”

  “Pathological, as in crazy?”

  “Do I look crazy to you?”

  “I hardly even know you. But here I am needing you.” The memory of her burying that hatchet flashed through my mind.

  “Believe me,” she said, “the word pathological can even mean that some women are born into this kind of thing. Doesn’t matter if they’re rich or dirt-poor like I was, they’re attracted to the allure of it all, attracted to the trance. They don’t give a rat’s ass about doing anything else.”

  “In other words,” I supposed, “it’s not just a way of making a quick buck, after all.”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Cassandra said, “but some prostitutes don’t need the money at all.”

  “So much for mythology. But what about you? What snapped you out of the trance?”

  She took a breath and another swallow of wine.

  “One night, as Eddy and I were coming back from the club in his Mercedes, he ran a stop light. A cop tailed us and made us pull over, close to the sidewalk. When the cop came up to the car, Eddy opened the door and slammed it into him. It caught the cop by surprise and he fell back hard. I screamed at Eddy to stop it, but he just backhanded me, told me to shut up.

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d seen him mad before, but not like this. He just went berserk, like the cop triggered something inside his brain. He shot out of the car and kicked the cop in the head and dragged him into an alley on the opposite end of the sidewalk. It was late night and dark, and you know how it is in the city when it’s hot and people just hang out at all hours of the night. Some people had gathered, a few black kids and a black woman I remembered whose eyes were as big as pools, even through the tinted windows of Eddy’s Mercedes. It took only a second or two, but then I saw the flash and heard the pistol go off.