The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  “I got out of the car and screamed, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But Eduard never answered. He just pulled the trigger again.”

  Cassandra fixed her eyes on the fire now. Finally, she was opening up to me. At the same time, I knew she was trying to come to grips with a past gone horribly wrong.

  “I started to run,” she said. “I ran as far as I could for as long as I could. And then I ran some more. The next morning I found myself outside the doors of Penn Station. I wanted to go straight to the police but I was afraid of what they’d do to me. So I went into Penn, went downstairs and called 911 from a pay phone, told them I knew who killed the police officer. I gave them Eddy’s address and by the time I got up the nerve to go back there, Eddy was under arrest. That black woman with the big eyes, she had given the police a description of Eddy, too. A description that must have matched mine.

  “But here’s the strange thing. During the time Eddy was being questioned, he never let on that I was with him. Even though witnesses were sure there was a girl with him at the time. But then, he’s always held that over my head, along with the fact that I called the police. I mean, it’s one thing that I told him I turned him in. It’s another he didn’t kill me right away. It’s why I stayed with him, even after he went to jail. It’s why I did everything.”

  “Because if you left him,” I said, “he’d have had you killed.”

  “I was a part of his brood, his property.”

  “Branded property.”

  Cassandra took a deep hit off the bottle.

  “But with Eddy Vasquez,” she said, now looking into my eyes, “you always knew where you stood. You were either his friend or his enemy; you were either alive or dead.”

  Three o’clock was approaching, fast.

  If time is relative, then the speed of time had doubled since Cassandra and I had made it to the cabin just a few hours before. But for now there was little to do but look at the fire and drink the wine left behind by the summer people and hope that Eddy Vasquez’s girlfriend could feed me all the information I needed to know. I also had to be sure I could trust her and that she wouldn’t go running off on me somehow. On the other hand, it would not be a bright idea to tie her up again if I was to consider her my ally. These were the things that were going through my head that night.

  But in my thoughts I pictured that rookie cop on his knees on the damp concrete of a New York back alley. I imagined the feel of the barrel pressed up against his head and I wondered if he’d known for certain that his time was up. I wondered if he’d known what had hit him when the first shot exploded. I wondered if he’d heard the sound of the exploding round before the bullet had penetrated his skull.

  I knew that only a cold-blooded killer was capable of that kind of execution. An animal who flew off the handle when provoked. As the keeper of the iron house, cold-blooded killers were my business, my trade.

  Cassandra put her hand on my leg and leaned in close.

  “I heard about your wife,” she said. “You must think about her a lot.”

  She kept her hand on my leg.

  “I’m having a little trouble shaking her,” I confessed.

  “Oh,” she whispered, squeezing my leg a little. “I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  She tried to work up a smile.

  “Looks like you haven’t gotten far beyond the guilt and remorse stage.”

  “Hark, the correspondent student, slash, exotic dancer speaks.”

  There was a thick silence that seemed to cover everything in the room like glue.

  “Keeper, hear me out,” she said, removing her hand from my leg, her voice trembling. “I speak from my own experience.”

  When she started to cry again, I felt the sudden urge to hold her tightly against my chest. I wanted her to hold me, too. But I didn’t know her and she certainly didn’t know me. Not that knowing one another was a prerequisite for commiserating together, each of us over our separate losses. But then, I also knew that getting so close to her at a time when she was so vulnerable would be a grave mistake. For me and for her.

  She wiped her eyes and forced a smile.

  “I’m not just sad,” she said, “and I’m not just wiped out with a token dose of the guilts.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I’m happy, too,” she went on, letting go with a strange-sounding laugh drowned in tears and sniffles.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I’m all mixed up,” she said. “Right now, I’m sad and I’m guilty and I’m scared and most of all I’m happy because that son of a bitch is dead, and I feel like I don’t deserve a second chance at living my life without Eddy over my head.”

  Then Cassandra did something extraordinary. She took off her boots and socks and sat up straight. She took another long drink of wine, and she stood up and began doing a dance, moving her narrow hips from side to side, gyrating with her stomach and midsection. She closed her eyes and let her hair fall to one shoulder so that I could see the heart-shaped tattoo pulsing with the muscles in her neck. She held her arms out away from her breasts and twisted her hands and fingers in and out and all around, her every limb and digit separated from her body but somehow in sync and all the time whispering a song I’d never heard before but beautiful and seductive. With the firelight surrounding her, she was like an angel or an apparition.

  For a moment she seemed suspended, her bare feet hardly touching the plank floor. But then she was suddenly in my arms, her face only inches from mine, and I could feel her heart beating, and I could smell her sweet breath, and I was taken in by her teardrop eyes, and I wanted to touch her. Time had just stopped and all that she’d confessed about living with a cold-blooded cop-killer had never happened and I badly wanted to kiss her and feel her mouth with my mouth, but I knew it was not me who wanted to kiss her, but someone inside of me whom I could not trust to take control.

  I pushed her away.

  “No,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “as in no you can’t? Or no you won’t?”

  “Both.”

  “Your wife is dead and gone, Keeper.”

  I stood and pulled Cassandra up by her arms. I put my face in hers and shook her, hard.

  “Now look,” I said, “since your boyfriend took off from my prison my life has gone to hell and it’s taken a Herculean performance to keep some semblance of it together.”

  Cassandra was wide-eyed now and silent, regardless of the tears that streaked down her face.

  “So you listen to me, little sister. What I don’t need now is some half-baked psychoanalysis or exotic dances or temptations of any kind. Do you hear me? What I need is answers, you got that?”

  I let her go.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, brushing back my hair with both hands in an attempt to regain control. “Maybe I don’t know what I need.”

  Cassandra stepped back, wiped her eyes.

  “What you need,” she said, now picking up her socks and boots from off the floor, “is a really long steel shank.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “To kill the bug that is lodged inside your ass.”

  What was supposed to be a safe house suddenly didn’t seem so safe anymore. I had to get the hell out, even for a few minutes. I went outside and lit up a cigarette. As I smoked I looked up at the stars and breathed in the cool mountain air and tried my best to regain some semblance of my ever-diminishing composure. The stars were so bright up north, unencumbered by the lights of the city. Layers and layers of them. I thought about Fran and I thought about the rookie cop lying dead in a back alley and I thought about the overcoat man rotting in the woods and I thought about going to prison and I thought about Attica and I thought about the way Cassandra had just danced for me and I thought about so many things I didn’t know what the hell to think next.

  None of this stuff matched the warden’s job description.

  Then she came out, took the cigarette out of my hand, and took a dee
p drag. She raised her head just a little when she exhaled, allowing her hair to fall back against her shoulders. In the light of the moon, she was truly beautiful. There was no other way to put it. But I couldn’t allow myself to be taken in by the beauty. I had to concentrate on the problem at hand. Hell, the problems.

  “Hey,” Cassandra said, her arms crossed at her chest for warmth, “I’ve got an idea.”

  “I’m all ears,” I said, as antisocial as possible.

  “Let’s start over.” Handing back the cigarette. “Like we never even met until this very moment.”

  The two of us had our eyes locked on the moon and stars. But then we both turned to each other at the same time.

  “What the hell,” I said, cigarette tucked in the corner of my mouth, right hand extended for her to shake. “Keeper Marconi, Green Haven Prison.”

  “Cassandra Wolf,” she said, taking my hand, curtsying slightly. “Eddy s Blue Bayou.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Cassandra.”

  “Same here, Keeper.”

  I stamped out the butt with the sole of my boot, blew out the last breath of smoke.

  “So Cassandra Wolf of Eddy’s Blue Bayou, what would you like to talk about?”

  “What if I were to tell you I was in possession of information that could change your life?”

  “What’ll it cost me?”

  “How’s about a drink?” she said, a smile now planted on her face.

  “You read my mind,” I smiled. “How’s a Beaujolais circa 1995 sound to you?”

  “A very happy year as I recall.” She started for the cabin door.

  “Funny you should say that,” I said. “That was the last year I remember being happy.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  “IT WAS SUPPOSED TO be a simple operation,” Cassandra said, as we stared into the dying firelight, an empty bottle of Beaujolais on the wood-plank floor between us beside the full bottle I had just uncorked. “Eddy would handle the trade and the customers, while Washington Pelton handled the upfront money and the security. To make the whole thing work, Eddy had to latch onto some guards he could trust. Guards who had no problem taking a bribe.”

  It was going on three-thirty in the A.M. Neither of us had slept, except sporadically. And although Cassandra had finally started on the information I needed to know, I got the sense that she was choosing her words carefully, stopping midsentence to take little breaths or to release a sigh that I assumed contained as much guilt as it did sadness.

  “Let me think,” I said, as sarcastically as possible, “guards from Green Haven Prison who have no moral quandaries about taking a bribe. Must have taken Vasquez forever to find two men to fit those qualifications.”

  “Of course, he immediately found two men willing to sell out,” Cassandra confirmed, taking a swallow of wine.

  “Money talks in the iron house.”

  “Loud and clear,” she agreed. “They came up with a system of outside visits, all of them under the pretense of visiting a dentist. Pelton had to get them on the outside, free, at least for a while. You see, Mister Marconi – “

  “Keeper, remember?”

  “Okay then, Keeper,” Cassandra said, catching her breath. “When it comes to making some serious cash, those iron bars and concrete walls can be a real problem.”

  I nodded.

  “There’s this dentist,” she added. “Has a weird name. A. J. Royale.”

  “We’ve met,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

  “A real ladylike kind of guy. He agreed to work with Eduard and Pelton for a price. He got paid a flat fee per visit and in turn did some kind of dentistry work on Eddy’s teeth, just to make the whole thing look good. Afterward, he’d cosign the release form in exchange for a pile of cash, I don’t know how much. Since Eddy had to be on the outside at least six or seven times in order to make the plan effective, A. J. Royale agreed to do a root canal on a perfectly good tooth. A molar that eventually had to be pulled because the tooth went bad. For six months Eddy saw the dentist once every three weeks. You should know about that, Keeper. You signed the releases for his outside visits.”

  “I recall them,” I said. “All six or seven.”

  “Don’t you see?” Cassandra said. “You were the main man, Keeper. The whole operation would have been dead in the water without you.”

  “Glad to be of service,” I said under my breath, but the humor was nowhere to be found.

  “Pelton and Eddy figured that in three months they could clear six hundred grand, cash. They would split four hundred, fifty-fifty. The remainder would be divvied up between whoever helped out indirectly.”

  “Even a serial killer like Giles Garvin?”

  “That’s correct. And it worked out all right, for a while anyway. Until Eddy and those guards, Logan and Mastriano, started taking stupid chances.”

  “How stupid?” I said, pouring some of the wine into my coffee mug, taking a drink.

  “After visiting the dentist, they’d change into civilian clothes right there inside the prison station wagon, and they’d find a nice cozy bar and they’d set up shop for a while. Eddy would meet me in some hotel room we’d prearrange and we’d have sex for an hour. Or at least, he’d try, but it was all pretty useless. I just didn’t want him anymore. Not like that.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “Afterward, Logan and Mastriano would rendezvous at the hotel room and they’d change back into their corrections officer grays, Eddy into his yellow jumpsuit. They’d head back to the prison but not before I produced a list of buyers and the up-front money that came from Pelton.”

  “You did his dirty work.”

  “Pelton wouldn’t meet with Eddy directly,” she said. “Claimed it was too risky.”

  “Then who would supply you?”

  “The lists came directly from Pelton’s second-in-command, Jake Warren. He’d meet us at the prearranged spot, which was usually the hotel. He’d toss us the list and we’d toss him Pelton’s cut of the money. Then, on their way back to Green Haven, Logan and Mastriano would pull into the Stormville airstrip where Marty Schillinger would be waiting for them. He’d oversee the retrieval of the drop and the payoff for the dealer. After that they’d bring the stuff in through the service entrance around back and begin dispersing the rest of the payoffs and the buys.”

  My God, I thought. The operation had been going on at the airstrip directly across the street from my house in Stormville, and I’d never known the difference. I thought about all the nights I’d sat outside slow-drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes while the planes came in and took off again.

  “Tell me more about Garvin,” I pushed. “He seemed pretty agitated when I tried getting some information off of him on Tuesday.”

  Cassandra ran her hands through her soft brown hair and touched her heart-shaped tattoo with two fingers.

  “Giles Garvin,” she said, “that horrible man.” Hesitating for a minute, as though choking on her own words. “I’m sorry, but it’s hard for me to believe I was involved with a creep like that.”

  I drank some more wine while I waited for her to compose herself.

  “Giles Garvin, Martin Schillinger, Tommy Walsh,” she said along with a deep breath, “all of them assisted Eddy in handling the inside trades to prisoners and guards. But mostly, his customers were visitors coming into the prison to see their quote, loved ones, end quote.” Cassandra made quotation symbols with her fingers. Then she said, “Schillinger and Walsh would get their payoffs directly from Pelton, but Garvin was supposed to get his payoff from Eddy since they were both on the inside. You have to understand, I never once met Garvin, but I knew who he was and what he had done to those poor kids.”

  “So why’s he so bent out of shape now?”

  Cassandra’s face lit up.

  “Jeez, don’t you get it, Keeper?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “Listen, when Eddy took off on Monday, he left with Garvin’s share fo
r three months’ work. Ninety thousand dollars. Cash Eddy had already shipped to Olancha, California, where I keep a trailer just outside Death Valley. He stuffed the cash into three plastic baby dolls and packaged them inside a cardboard box. I shipped them out by way of the Athens post office.”

  I pictured the envelope I’d found in Vasquez’s cell with the Olancha address and the Athens postmark. Then I pictured Schillinger traipsing around Vasquez’s cell in his Burberry trench coat like he had no idea in the world who the cop-killer was or how he could have escaped from Green Haven. I pictured Tommy Walsh standing in the door frame of my Stormville home and I knew he would have been capable of tearing me in two if Pelton gave the order because sometimes loyalty and devotion to duty have nothing to do with right and wrong.

  “I was all set for leaving the country once Eddy managed the escape. If he could manage the escape, which turned out to be a piece of cake.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “There never were any masked bandits to steal Vasquez away from Bob Logan or Bernie Mastriano.”

  “On Tuesday Eddy and I heard Logan’s story on television. He was nearly in tears he laughed so hard. Especially the part about those two taking a terrible beating. Don’t you see, Keeper? Once Bob Logan and Bernie Mastriano discovered Eddy and me missing from the hotel rendezvous in Newburgh, they must have panicked and beat each other up just to make it look like they were attacked by a bunch of ‘shotgun-carrying assailants.’ “

  “Okay,” I said, tossing another log onto the fire. “So you were free. What next?”

  “We had our cut of the money to live on, plus Garvin’s. More than enough to start over in Mexico or South America. But then Eddy got greedy. Once he was out, he turned the tables on Pelton. Told him that if he didn’t get more money, he’d expose the entire operation. He threatened to send an anonymous letter to The New York Times. He would accuse the entire department, including Pelton’s main man, senatorial hopeful John ‘Jake’ Warren. The accusation itself, Eddy figured, would be enough to make Pelton jumpy. So instead of heading directly to the California desert, which had been the original plan, we holed up in Athens.