The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  “But it all went bad because something happened that none of them had counted on. Pelton retaliated. He made you take the fall for Eddy’s escape. He set you up, Keeper, as a scapegoat for the entire deal. He made you take the fall not only for Eddy’s escape but for Logan and Mastriano’s misfortune in the field. He managed to get to you just as Eddy was getting to him. And, after all, you’d signed those releases. It was something no one had counted on and it made Eddy’s plan completely worthless so long as the cops bought into it. You’d been a tough man to get around during the first couple of years of your appointment, Keeper. You were shaking down cells, drug-testing inmates and guards. Eddy was even aware of the wiretaps you’d planted on a few of the guard and inmate informers. But then something happened to you, some kind of shock. Your wife died and you backed off. You kind of retreated into yourself. Maybe you didn’t realize it at the time, but you must have been clinically depressed. One thing was for sure, things got easier for Eddy then. That’s when he said yes to Pelton’s plan-only a few weeks or so after your wife was killed.”

  Cassandra said nothing for some time. As for me, I thought about melting into the woodwork. Since that was impossible, I went to the window, pulled back the shade, and looked out onto the blackness of the early morning. I took a breath and glanced at my watch again. Four in the morning. In just two hours’ time, it would be daylight. “I found photographs of you and another man inside Vasquez’s cell,” I said, finally.

  Cassandra swallowed a breath and chased it with some wine, as if the breath were that bitter.

  “Pelton began to demand a different kind of payoff,” she exhaled. “That is, once Eddy was safely behind bars after each of his field trips outside the prison gates. At first I kept the news from Eddy. But then I told him because I didn’t know what to do anymore. I didn’t know how to make Pelton stop. But do you know what Eddy told me? He told me he expected me to do exactly what Pelton wanted. When it came to Wash Pelton, he said, neither of us was bargaining from a position of power.”

  She took another deep swallow of the wine.

  “But there was a way to get back at Pelton without him knowing,” she said. “Eddy came up with the idea of making the still photos, since I couldn’t exactly send a video to him inside the prison.”

  “VCRs are hard to come by inside the iron house,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Cassandra said. “We could somehow use the stills against him. That is, if we could get them into the right hands, at the right time. In order to make it work, I had to steal a video while I was with Pelton. Then I’d have the stills made and I would ship them to Green Haven. Eddy would take care of things from there.”

  “Tell me,” I said, feeling sudden warmth from the thousand-watt bulb that ignited inside my brain, “is Schillinger on the video, too?”

  Cassandra looked at the floor surrounded by the half-light from the dying fire.

  “Yes,” she said, “that creep, Schillinger, too.”

  Why couldn’t I have seen through the forest earlier? I pictured the three stills I’d found in Vasquez’s cell. The unidentified man with the scar on his neck just above the breastbone. It was Pelton all along. The scar left over from the blade the rebel inmate had pressed up against his throat during the Attica riot. I thought I’d found the photos by accident. Now I knew they had been planted by Vasquez for someone to find, for someone to use against Pelton. That someone had to be me all along. He must have known I’d shake down his cell once he escaped. And then I went and handed them over to Marty Schillinger, who couldn’t grab them out of my hands fast enough.

  “You could have done better with the stills,” I said, stepping away from the window, back toward the fireplace.

  “You can hardly make out Pelton. And you didn’t get Schillinger at all.”

  “The video is that bad,” she said. “It was the best I could do. I mean, it’s not easy trying to convince a video mechanic that the skin flick you’d like to have transferred to stills is purely for your own enjoyment. And think of it this way. Pelton’s been in the news a lot lately. Can you imagine the attention I would have gotten if I’d left it up to a total stranger to develop a clear photograph of Pelton in bed with two other people-one of them another man, the other the girlfriend of a convicted cop-killer? Jesus, Keeper, I had to be a little smarter than that. I had to take another route.”

  I knelt down next to Cassandra.

  “So now what?” she said.

  “We’re going to get that video back,” I said. “And the money.”

  “It’s in Olancha, like I told you. It’s all inside the same big box.”

  “I have friends who can take care of getting it back,” I said. “In the meantime, you have to stick with me. You and that video are my way out of this mess. I’ll see to it that you get some sort of immunity by testifying against Pelton and the rest of them, even if they do try and charge you as an accessory in Eddy’s escape once we’re cleared of his murder. I’ll see to it that you get the money you need and a one-way ticket to Mexico.”

  “No way in hell,” Cassandra said, slapping the wine bottle down on the plank floor and knocking over one of the empties. “I’m not about to testify for anybody or anything.” She started to lift herself up from the floor, but I reached out, grabbed hold of her arm, and pulled her back down.

  “You’re hurting me,” she said, gripping her forearm where I had taken hold of it.

  “You are going to testify because I’m going to make it all right for you,” I said. “Don’t you understand? We prove you were a victim of circumstances, the courts go easy on you.”

  Cassandra relaxed her grip and looked down at her lap.

  “I’ve done questionable things,” she said, under her breath.

  “You’ve also done nothing they can keep you in jail for. So long as you agree to cooperate.”

  She raised her head.

  “Well then, what if I don’t want to go to Mexico, after all?”

  “Even if you’re off the hook, you’ll always be looking over your shoulder. Pelton’s a powerful man. Who knows what kind of connections he’s got. That dead man outside in the overcoat is proof. The way I see it, you’ve got no choice. But before we do anything, I’ve got to get Mike Norman, Wash Pelton, and Marty Schillinger in one place at one time.”

  “When do you plan on pulling this off?”

  “I’ll start on it tomorrow morning after I meet up with a friend. With a little luck we could be out of this in a couple of days.”

  “And what happens to me if your plan doesn’t work?”

  “We could always stay here,” I said.

  “For how long?”

  “Until the wine and the Dinty Moore run out.”

  ***

  As the night wore on I could not keep myself from remembering.

  On a Monday morning a year before Fran was killed, I sat at the kitchen table of the Albany home I saw only on weekends. The sun poured in through the wide kitchen window beside the table, and gazing outside I could see the green grass and newly budding trees at the perimeter of the yard and a black-and-white cat I had never seen before walking aimlessly across the lawn. My morning newspaper was laid out flat beside my coffee cup. The headline read, “Warden Tightens Belt on Prison Security!” There was a photo of me sitting at my desk on the phone inside my office on the second floor of Green Haven Prison.

  On this Monday morning, Fran sat across from me nibbling on a piece of toast coated with a thin layer of strawberry jam.

  “You’re still making friends, I see.” She wore only a terrycloth robe because she wasn’t expected at school for another hour and a half.

  “Don’t kid yourself, Fran,” I said, folding the paper in half and placing it back down on the table next to my third cup of coffee since five that morning. “The inmates would rather have it that way, believe it or not.”

  Fran had her long hair pulled back in a ponytail. When she smiled, small dimples formed in the lower corners of her pr
ominent cheeks. She placed a small piece of toast in her mouth and squinted her eyes as if to say, How?

  I leaned back in my chair and, looking outside, watched the black-and-white cat move stealthily over the lawn, nose to the grass, sniffing out the grubs. “It’s all very simple when you think about,” I said. “If I’m not in charge of the prison, then the gorillas are in charge.”

  “And what are the gorillas like, Keeper?”

  “Nice fellas,” I said, as the cat jerked a grub out of the lawn with its claws, “who like to rape and kill for fun.”

  ***

  Cassandra got up from the floor and went into the bedroom. She returned carrying two woolen blankets and a pillow. She spread out the first blanket on the floor in front of the fire and placed the pillow on the far end. Then she lay down on the makeshift bed and covered herself with the other blanket. She reached out for my hand.

  “I know it’s corny,” she said. “But will you stay here with me, at least until I fall asleep?”

  I nodded and smiled. Rather, I attempted a smile.

  But as Cassandra slowly drifted off to sleep, I felt myself sinking into a gorge of self-pity. I had been duped by the men I had worked with and trusted. By Wash Pelton and Marty Schillinger and Mike Norman, even though a part of me could not help but believe that Mike did what he did, not out of spite, but out of pure desperation.

  When I was a boy, my father once told me that there are three points of realization that occur in a young man’s life. The first is the knowledge that his parents will die one day. The second is that he, too, will die. The third-and this is the most important-is the knowledge that he must create a life worth living.

  But I think there is a fourth point of realization that my father left out. What he didn’t tell me is that a man is on his own in this life. No matter whom he trusts or whom he loves or whom he calls his friend and confidant, he is on his own. And the sooner he realizes it, the better.

  I tuned my thoughts to the events of the past five days.

  First, there was the bogus story of Logan and Mastriano’s escape. Truth is they must have panicked when Vasquez took off while they waited for him at some bar in Newburgh. The entire story about three shotgun-packing assailants in a black van was nothing more than a fabrication-a fiction designed to fool me and, at the same time, arouse public sentiment. If what Cassandra told me was true (and as a warden who has spent his career trying to sift through inmates’ lies in order to get at the truth, deep down inside I felt she was on the level), then I had no further reason to believe that the statement Robert Logan had issued in my office on Monday afternoon contained even a semblance of truth. If I had to come up with a motive for Logan’s lie, it would have been this: Logan and Mastriano must have put the pressure on Pelton because they weren’t about to take the blame for Vasquez’s sudden escape. They had been involved in the drug racket from the beginning. They knew too much. On the other hand, they were the most obvious patsies available to Pelton. Pelton, sensing the two guards meant business, must have paid off Dr. Fleischer to fabricate the serious blow to Mastriano’s head. Now I was certain that Mastriano’s coma had been faked and that Fleischer was pumping him daily with something to keep him out of it. In fact, I had the distinct feeling that Pelton was going around paying off everybody and his brother in order to keep his scam under wraps.

  Then there were Cassandra’s porn stills that were now in Schillinger’s possession. Would he have used the illicit photographs against Pelton? First he would have had to get the original film and destroy it, along with any copies that might have been made. If Lt. Martin Schillinger was really on the video, like Cassandra said, then she and Vasquez had made a mistake by not making stills of him-no matter the quality of the film, no matter who might have found out about it later. It was a missed opportunity no matter how you looked at it. There was, however, one proverbial ace-in-the-hole. And it was this: If Schillinger and Pelton cared even the least little bit about their reputations, their careers, and their lives, they would want that video back-stills or no stills.

  All I had to do was to get at that film. The film would allow me at least a little power to bargain with. But before anything else, I had to trust in Cassandra, believe that she was telling me the truth. But then, how does a man go about trusting a woman who had been an integral part of a convicted cop-killer’s pornography ring? How do you learn to trust a woman who saves your life by axing a man in the head when all she had to do was knock him cold? How did I know I wasn’t being duped all over again?

  I had to go with instinct. And now, watching her sleep on the floor of the cabin my grandfather built with his own two hands, bathed in the golden firelight that came from the fieldstone fireplace, I wanted to believe that she was telling the truth.

  Now I pictured Mike Norman. I saw his thin red face in the flames of the fire. He must have known about Pelton’s drug operation even if his knowledge was based on rumor, because he had used the evidence I’d picked up at the Lime Kiln gravel pit directly against me. My guess was that he’d seen an opportunity to make a quick buck and had taken it to Pelton without thinking about what could happen to me, not to mention himself. Pelton would pay Norman anything he asked if he believed it would present the perfect opportunity for me to be convicted in his place. Was it true that innocent men went to prison and stayed there for the rest of their lives? It was true, absolutely true. And I had never considered the reality of it as much as I did right then. Because an innocent man going to prison is what really was at stake. This wasn’t about corruption and conspiracy in the prison system or about exposing the people who perpetrated it. What was at stake was my life. Of all people, a warden, indicted for crimes he did not commit. A warden sentenced to life would be sentenced to death. Once incarcerated in an iron house, I was a dead man; no two or three ways about it. That’s what this was about. These were the stakes. Because in prison there was no such thing as a guardian angel.

  I sat on the floor of the fifty-year-old cabin, but for some reason, I did not feel the floor beneath me. Beside me, Cassandra slept soundly. The tattoo on her neck rose and fell with the rhythm of her silent breathing. I had to trust her, whether I liked it or not. At least, I had to believe I could trust her. Together we were on the run. Like me, she had been accused of the murder of Eduard Vasquez. I had to believe she was innocent, because what would she have gained by killing him?

  To be honest, she had a lot to gain.

  She had three hundred thousand dollars cash to gain and a videotape she could use to blackmail Pelton for even more money. Still, I had to go with instinct, and my instinct told me she was innocent. After all, if she had killed Vasquez and managed to elude the police, why would she have come this far with me?

  I believed this: that Cassandra Wolf had not shot Vasquez. The trigger man had to have been Pelton or Schillinger, or both. Or more likely, it had been Tommy Walsh acting on Pelton’s orders, or maybe even the overcoat man.

  Cassandra slept soundly, breathing steadily, like a baby. She was no baby, though. She was a grown woman on the run. And I needed her more than anything else in the world. I would guard her with my life. Maybe protection was her reason for staying with me. But then, maybe protection had nothing to do with it at all.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  THE NEXT MORNING I parked the Pontiac in an observation area overlooking the Champlain valley to the south. Getting out of the car, I cut through the second-growth woods at a jog until I sighted the blinking red stop light that hung over the place where Exit 28 met the Champlain road. From within a small patch of pines and birch trees located beside a garage used to house snowplows and dump trucks for the Champlain Valley Department of Transportation, I waited for Val’s Town & Country station wagon to pull up.

  At exactly one minute before nine A.M., the car rolled to a stop off the exit. I watched Val look one way along the Champlain road, then the other. Until she hooked a right, keeping her speed as slow as possible. The closer she came to th
e garage, the easier it was to see her lovely sandy-brown hair and her deep, almond-shaped eyes, and the more I felt my lungs deflate, my heart swell. She drove slowly, twisting and turning her head, surveying the open road, until she finally decided to pull the wagon over to the shoulder, not ten feet away from the asphalt drive that led up to the metal doors of the DOT garage.

  I walked out of the woods and made my way downhill to the car. I opened the passenger-side door of the wagon, slipped inside, and smelled the good, sweet smell of Val. I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her and hold her, swallow her. But I knew there was no time for that.

  “Drive,” was all I said.

  I told Val to make a right-hand turn into the observation area.

  “I have everything,” she said.

  “I knew you would,” I said.

  The observation area had been built along a natural clearing in the mountainside. The clearing looked out onto a view of the southern portion of the Champlain valley, where it abutted the northern portion of Lake George. The observation area itself was nothing more than a concrete sidewalk and a short, knee-high wall made from fieldstones topped with polished slate.

  I got out of the car and unlocked the trunk to the Pontiac.

  Val opened the hatch of the wagon.

  Without a word, we made the exchange of clothes, food, and weapons. Val tried not to show that she was nervous. She kept a straight, tight face the whole time, never once smiling or, for that matter, submitting to a frown. Her face was flat and expressionless, her motions direct and to the point. When the exchange was over, the two of us got into the car.

  She wore dark slacks, a white, button-down shirt, and a blazer. Her shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and a gold crucifix hung from a gold chain against the smooth bronze-colored skin of her chest. But now I could tell by the sudden downtrodden expression on her face that something wasn’t right. Something besides the obvious. She wouldn’t look at me directly. When I tried to catch her glance, she looked away and pinched the underside of her chin like she somehow forgot it was attached to her face.