The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  I felt the gentle heat from a fire now reduced to glowing embers.

  “You never told me,” I said, “who pulled the trigger on Vasquez.”

  She leaned up on her right elbow, tilted her head slightly so that it nearly rested on her shoulder. Her smooth, long hair gravitated toward the floor. Other than her breathing and the steady hiss of the fading embers, there were no other sounds inside the cabin.

  “Who pulled the trigger, Cassandra?” I pictured the black-plated.32 she’d tossed into the briars and pine scrubs. I could smell the freshly fired gunpowder. I pictured the way she’d wrapped the Ace bandage around her waist so as to conceal what was growing inside her.

  She sat up straight but stared at the floor. Until I grabbed her shoulders.

  “I want to know,” I said in a forced whisper. “No matter how much it hurts.”

  I was so close to telling her what I’d seen only minutes ago on the granite clearing of Old Iron Top that I could almost taste it. But that would have been the wrong thing to do. That would have put her on the defensive and that’s not what I wanted at all. I wasn’t after the truth about who’d pulled the trigger on Vasquez, so much as I was after the truth about Cassandra. I had to be sure I could trust her. Because if she could lie about the murder and if she could conceal her pregnancy, then she could easily lie about the victim-of-circumstances role she’d played in Pelton’s drug operation.

  “Keeper stop it,” she begged.

  I let go of her shoulders. She took a deep breath and then another.

  “Like I told you,” she said, in a long drawn-out voice. “Yesterday afternoon, Martin Schillinger and Pelton came to see us in our room at the Stevens House.”

  “Pelton and Schillinger together,” I said. “You’re sure about that?”

  “I worked with them for a long time. I made that horrible movie with them. I know what they look and sound like.”

  I nodded.

  “They pounded their fists against the door, threatened to knock it in if we didn’t open it right away. Eddy took the.32 from the desk drawer and stuffed it in my hand, he pushed me into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. And all the time I’m hearing the sound of fists and feet kicking down the door. And just like that, they were in.”

  “You couldn’t see them,” I said. “But you could hear them.”

  “I heard them fighting, struggling. Then I heard the shots.”

  “How many shots?”

  “Two,” she said, with a shaky voice that verged on tears.

  I stood up and, using the pointy tip of my cowboy boot, stamped out a lit ember that had popped out of the open fireplace.

  “Two shots,” Cassandra repeated. “Back-to-back.”

  I wondered how many chambers had been fired from the.32. Two, maybe three. I couldn’t be sure. There was no sure way to tell.

  “Did you hear what Pelton and Schillinger said before they shot Vasquez?”

  “Pelton called Eddy a ‘back-stabbing bastard.’ He called him some other things, too, but that’s what I remember most. They fought and some glass broke and then they must have had Eddy down on his stomach because Pelton said, ‘Let me see his face.’ And the room went silent for a minute and I wanted to unlock the door and run out of the bathroom and blow them all to hell.”

  “But the.32 had no bullets.”

  “I didn’t know that then,” she said. “I thought I’d lose it right there. I was afraid. You know, fear-a normal human response to danger.”

  “Trust me, I know what it is,” I said.

  “I called out for Eddy, but he wouldn’t answer. Then came the first shot and I thought I would fall dead on the floor like the bullet had hit me. I heard Schillinger. He said, ‘Shoot him again and then shoot the bitch in the closet.’ And then they shot Eddy a second time. But before they started after me I was already out the window, down the fire escape, and making a run for the river.”

  “So Pelton was the trigger man?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t see, remember?”

  “But whoever did it used two caps. You’re sure about that.”

  This time, Cassandra wouldn’t answer. My questioning was getting to her. I could see it in the wear and tear on her face. Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe she wasn’t. There was no way to be certain one way or the other. All I knew was that I had seen her up-close-and-personal, tossing that.32 into a patch of heavy vegetation on Old Iron Top where no one would ever find it. But then, maybe she had other reasons for tossing it away and maybe those reasons had nothing to do with the shooting death of Vasquez. In the end, what it came down to was whether or not I could trust Cassandra. I had been racking my brain over it for almost twenty-four hours. I had to choose, one way or the other. If I chose not to trust her then I had to make her a prisoner, lock her up in one of the rooms and tie her to the bed until I was ready to haul her in to the authorities on my own terms. On the other hand, if I chose to trust her, I had to make her an asset, an ally to the cause, which was nothing other than getting out of this mess as fast and as cleanly as possible. I had to choose; there were no two ways about it. The sooner I made the decision and the commitment, the better off I’d be. What little time I had-before the police or Pelton’s goons, or both, had me trapped-was precious.

  Choose, Keeper, whispered the voice inside my head. Choose now.

  I looked at Cassandra on the floor, her head hung in sadness.

  I chose to trust her.

  With that clearly in mind, I decided to pursue another avenue. Instead of focusing on the killer, I decided to focus on the weapon.

  “Cassandra,” I said, “were you able to see the pistol they used?”

  She was crying now. Long, drawn-out tears.

  “I told you before,” she said. “The bathroom door was closed.”

  That’s when it hit me.

  I pulled out the.45 and discharged the clip. I began to empty the rounds, one by one, into the palm of my hand. There should have been eight rounds in the magazine. But only six were ejected from the clip.

  It hit me a second time.

  When Pelton’s men raided and ransacked my Stormville home on Wednesday, as I was detained in the Albany County lockup, they must have found the.45 under the mattress and taken the two shells they would eventually need to kill Vasquez and pin the whole thing on me. Of course, I couldn’t be sure. But the alternative was to believe that Cassandra had killed Vasquez and was now lying about it along with everything else. But I had no way of knowing just what caliber round Vasquez had been shot with, and it was possible that my.45 had only had six rounds in the clip to begin with. So in the end, I had no real way of discerning the truth.

  Using my thumb, I pressed the shells back into the clip. Cassandra wiped the tears from her face and took some deep breaths, composure regained. I couldn’t get the image of that Ace bandage wrapped around her torso out of my mind. I wondered how many weeks or months along she was. She couldn’t have been that far into the pregnancy, because she was only just showing.

  “What do you plan on doing now, Keeper?” she inquired. “We can’t stay up here forever and I can’t take any more of your damned third degree. I saved your life, for God’s sakes. Remember that.”

  With the.45 in hand, I stood by the heavy wooden door that led to the carport, beside the corner where my grandfather stored his fly rods. I turned and looked at Cassandra.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, after all that, you’re not thinking of leaving me, are you, Keeper?”

  I slammed the clip back into the.45 and returned the weapon to my belt.

  “I need you,” I said. “And I think you need me. But there’s something we have to do first, and like I told you before, it involves getting Pelton and Schillinger in one place at one time. And that place has got to be here, in this cabin, because this is my turf and this is where I’ll have the most control.”

  I went into the kitchen and took a beer out of t
he refrigerator. I cracked the tab with my thumb and took a deep drink. Cassandra followed me. She suddenly seemed far from tears, curiosity and concern having replaced fear and loathing.

  “What about all the others?” she said. “What about the guy who turned you in? What about Mike Norman?”

  I drank the rest of the beer in one long swallow and fired up a cigarette.

  “Norman’s dead,” I said. “They found him late last night, hanging from a steam pipe in his office in Albany.”

  Cassandra went pale. She reached out to the kitchen table for balance.

  “It could have been suicide,” I added. “Or it could have been murder. But the result was the same.”

  I took another beer from the fridge and opened it. As opposed to the last one, this beer would get sipped.

  “They got to him, didn’t they?” Cassandra said. “The bastards got to him, too, just like they got to Eddy and almost got to us.”

  She stood up straight and breathed and took the beer out of my hand and drank deeply.

  “How can I help you?” she said, handing the beer back to me. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Please, just tell me.”

  My father used to tell me that when things got bad, all you had to do was sit down, regroup, think things out, and make a plan. Just the act of making the plan, he said, seemed to make you feel better, like you were in control again. And that’s what I was about to do. And I think the strategy was about to pay off because Cassandra seemed to perk up just a little bit.

  “Cassandra,” I said, “how good are you at working a video camera?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  THERE WAS A REMOVABLE panel in the wood floor of the great room between the fireplace and the door. While most of the cabin had been built on a concrete slab, my grandfather had dug out a small cellar to use as storage for onions and potatoes. Occasionally he used it for smoking trout or perch or venison strips. Just a room in the ground, maybe six feet deep by eight feet wide, accessible only by a removable panel and a stepladder. A great hiding spot for me when I was a kid.

  I turned on all the lamps in the great room, and I got on my knees and began feeling around for the edges of the removable panel. The edges had been smoothed out in the many years since the cellar had been used and had I not known it was there, I would never have known the difference. Dirt had filled the tiny groove between the square panel and the planks that surrounded it so that the surface of the cabin floor appeared perfectly homogeneous. But once I began my search, I found the edges right away.

  I went into the kitchen and took two steak knives out of the drawer. I got back on my knees and stuck each blade into opposite ends of the panel while Cassandra stood over me. I braced myself and lifted the panel off the floor.

  As I’d expected, the hole was dark, and a cool, moist air rose from it. I asked Cassandra to look under the sink for a flashlight. She found one and brought it to me. I hit the switch and shined the bright light into the hole. The place was covered with spider webs and, aside from the insects, seemed absolutely dead. Until I heard the distinct sound of something scurrying back and forth on the dry plank floor at the bottom of the hole. I must have disturbed some animal. From where I lay on the floor, I was amazed to see the shriveled remnants of petrified potatoes and onions left behind by my grandfather on the wooden shelves lining the walls of the cellar. Still, I wasn’t able to make out the far side of the crawl space -the portion covered by the cabin floor.

  “I’m going in,” I said.

  “Better you than me,” Cassandra said.

  With flashlight in hand, I eased myself down onto the stepladder, pressing my weight onto the top rung to make sure it was sturdy enough to support me. Shining the flashlight on the floor, I stepped into the hole. The change in air temperature was immediate. The hole was warm but clammy, and the air smelled funky. I swiped away at the spider webs and ducked under the floor structure and it was then that I discovered the source of the animal sounds. In the far corner of the otherwise empty space, a family of snakes had taken up residence. Garden snakes, the biggest I’d ever seen. The snakes were piled up into one corner like a stack of black-and-yellow garden hoses. Maybe four of them. I wasn’t the type to be spooked by the occasional spider or rat or multi-legged insect. But snakes were a different story. Just the sight of a snake, even on television, had a way of making me catatonic if only for a few seconds until I was able to pull myself together. So here’s what I did: I pulled out the.45, emptied the entire six rounds into them, watched their black-and-yellow flesh bounce and tremble from the blasts.

  The entire cellar lit up like the Fourth of July.

  “Keeper!” Cassandra screamed. “What’s happening?”

  I climbed up the ladder, the three dead snakes in hand.

  “Oh my God,” Cassandra chanted, backing away fast. “Oh dear sweet Jesus.”

  “Don’t worry. They’re dead and the hole is now clean.”

  “So why should I be worried?” she said, as I went for the door of the cabin, opening it and tossing the dead snakes out beyond the woodpile. “What’s that hole got to do with me?”

  “That cellar,” I said, closing the door behind me, “is going to be your post tomorrow night during the party.”

  “Party,” she said. “What party?”

  “The TV party we’re going to have with our good friends, Wash Pelton and Marty Schillinger.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  IT TOOK SOME DOING to convince Cassandra that the cellar would be clean and that no snakes could possibly get into it again. And she agreed that snake phobias-like all phobias-made little sense, considering that garden snakes, at least, were harmless. I told her that for a psych 101 correspondent student, she had certainly covered a lot of territory. Knowing the truth about fear, she said, didn’t make it any easier for her.

  “Me neither,” I said, although my sympathy did little to calm her nerves.

  We took the car into town and rented a VCR. Then we drove thirty miles to the closest Radio Shack in the little ski town of North Creek. As luck or providence would have it, I was able to charge a video camera along with a thin, flexible scope that could take pictures from any place and any position at any time of day. The snakelike lens cost about ten times what the camera cost, but would be worth its weight in diamonds if my plan succeeded.

  By the time we got back to the cabin it was late afternoon. I set the camera up on its tripod in the potato cellar and I attached the video probe. It took a bit more convincing, but eventually Cassandra climbed down with me.

  “All we have to do,” I said, forcing the black, super thin camera lens through a knothole in the floorboard beside the access panel, “is snake this baby through here.”

  “Bad choice of words,” Cassandra said, examining the controls on the video camera.

  In the meantime, I climbed out of the cellar and stood near the door to the cabin.

  “Can you see me?”

  “Right on,” Cassandra said. “You look about three feet taller and twenty pounds lighter.”

  I suggested that the vision must be a real improvement. Cassandra laughed and disagreed saying she preferred solid muscular men to skinny wimps.

  Next I repositioned the TV so that the screen faced the cellar and the camera lens.

  “How about the TV screen?” I inquired.

  “I’m getting the whole thing,” Cassandra said. “You and the TV.” She came back out of the cellar, brushed away some of the dust and dirt from her pants. “There’s just one thing that’s got me perplexed.”

  “What is it?” I said, moving away from the door and pulling back the shade on the picture window, making my usual check outside.

  “Why don’t you just make a copy of the video once you get ahold of it, and send it off to the governor or some bureaucrat like that. I mean, why go to all this trouble?”

  “We don’t have time for all that,” I said, letting the shade fall back. “Besides, it’s not the film I’m so conc
erned with. It’s Pelton’s and Schillinger’s reactions to the film that I’m more interested in.”

  She nodded.

  “I want to see their faces when I get them to admit that they pulled the trigger on Vasquez, and I want them to see my face when they admit that they set me up to take the fall, and I want to record the event on tape-not just for the governor, but for all the world to see.”

  Cassandra turned away and stood in front of the picture window that looked out onto the east-west road and the trout stream alongside it.

  “You may have a tough time getting them to do that,” she suggested.

  “Who knows,” I said, “I’ve been known to get lucky from time to time.”

  “Not lately.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING, I drove to the Ironville post office to retrieve the box that Tony’s Guinea Pigs had (God willing) found and overnighted from Olancha. The post office was a small brick building with a slate roof and old, French windows. The Formica counter held a cash register as well as a weight scale for packages. On both sides of the counter were walls of post office boxes. The boxes were the same old, wrought-iron compartments I recalled from my youth when I’d ridden shotgun beside my grandfather going to pick up his mail on Saturday mornings. On display in a glass booth below the counter were the featured stamps of the month, which, it turns out, were the faces of jazz legends the likes of Duke Ellington, Mel Torme, and even the chairman of the board himself, Sinatra. Maybe one day there’d be a stamp of the keeper and his famous drums.

  On the drive from the cabin to the post office I’d wondered how good an idea it had been to use my grandfather’s name on the package. Considering that things never changed this far north, there was the distinct possibility that the man or woman working behind the counter would have known my grandfather. Luckily, the kid behind the counter could not have been more than eighteen years old. He had long hair parted in the middle. The hair had been dyed yellow as opposed to natural blond. It probably hadn’t been washed in two, maybe three weeks, and it hung down in clumps, like starchy spaghetti. He wore a T-shirt, on the front of which was the visage of Kurt Cobain, the self-assassinated rock star who seemed to be the model for the kid’s obsession with the same straggly yellow hair, the same it-sucks-to-be-alive expression, and the same three-day-old growth. Below Kurt’s picture were the dates 1967-1994. It bothered me to know someone could be so young, so rich, and so resentful of the world. Maybe old Kurt’s death was really murder, a cover-up for something else? Maybe someone should have interrogated his wife?