by Lee Goodman
“Shut up,” Kendall yells. “Let’s go. We’re leaving.”
“Not so fast,” Chip says.
“No threat,” Kendall says to Chip. “Just bullshit. Street talk. If you had a transcript, no threat. My client and I apologize for any implication to the contrary. Now, unless you plan to arrest him, we’re leaving.”
“But I live here,” Scud says.
“Not today you don’t,” Kendall snaps. “Come on.”
Before Kendall can get Scud into the car, the door of the house opens, and Colin comes out with his mother. They stand in front of the door, the mother with arms crossed and back bent. Maybe she has some scoliosis, or it might just be her surrender to disillusionment. Cheeks, shoulders, eyes, jaw, all like pillowcases hanging limp on the line.
“Honey, did I tell you we were having company?” Scud says.
She ignores him and looks at Dorsey. “How long?”
“At least another hour, ma’am.”
“Stupid goddamn—” she says.
“We’ll be as unobtrusive as possible, ma’am.”
“Good joke.”
She eyes us all like she’ll lunge for the throat of the first one to make a move. Her eyes jump around and her nostrils widen above the quivering lip. No doubt she’s been sitting inside looking for the courage to come out here. Now that she’s here, the courage turns out to be hollow, and what fills the space is rage tugging at a fraying tether.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” Dorsey says with astonishing gentleness, and I realize he’s seen what I see—that if we’re not careful, we’ll have to take this woman out of here in restraints, and who knows what that could trigger from her, from Scud, and from Colin. She scans the group of us but won’t look at Scud, and the obvious conclusion is that he’s the one she actually loathes, not us.
“Mrs. Illman,” I say, following Dorsey’s lead, “I’m just about to send someone to Starbucks. What can we get you?”
“Nothing,” she says, as I knew she would, but it has the intended effect of knocking her off track.
“Or maybe something for Colin? A soda? A big cookie?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell you what,” I say, “we’ll just get a bunch of stuff, and if Colin wants a cookie or muffin, it’ll be here.” I watch Colin to see if any of this registers, but he’s not letting on.
“Double-shot vanilla latte for me,” Scud bellows, but we all ignore him except for Kendall, who looks ready to tackle him.
Dorsey has stepped away and is on the phone. He sees me watching and mouths, “Family services.”
Good idea: someone trained in this stuff to get Colin and Mrs. Illman away from the action and keep a lid on things. Scud’s wife probably isn’t a part of whatever he’s into. Not willingly, anyway—no brassy, wrong-side-of-the-tracks, don’t-fuck-with-me kind of girl. But she found the backbone to come get in our faces, not to protect Scud or align herself with him, rather, to align us with him as intruders, disrupters, violators. In a pathetic way, she is admirable. I wonder how it would affect her if the right woman were here with us, an officer or lawyer. Maybe she wouldn’t see herself as so apart from us. Not someone like Flora, whose own “issues” are a bottomless black lake under the most meager crust of ice, and probably not someone like Cassandra, whose sincere warmth would feel patronizing to the suspicious Mrs. Illman. No, the woman who comes to mind, the one most likely to hit the right note, is the gritty but sensitive Tina from my office. As a former elementary schoolteacher, she’d be a good one for Colin, too. But she’s not here.
“Come on,” Kendall says to Scud, “let’s get out of here. Bring your wife and son.” He puts a hand on Scud’s shoulder and tries to steer him back to the car, and I see Scud check his inclination to swing at the source of this unwelcome touch.
“Bullshit, there’s cookies coming. I’m staying,” Scud says. He takes Colin’s hand, and they walk away from us. Scud kneels down and talks to Colin quietly and brushes hair from his eyes.
Kendall catches my eye and shakes his head in exasperation. This is a smooth move on his part; it puts Scud in the light not of a monster but just an aggravating guy.
“Got your hands full,” I say to Kendall.
Chip, who has returned to studying the flower garden, turns and yells, “Who’s the gardener here?” Nobody answers, so he walks across the lawn to Mrs. Illman and says, “Nice garden.”
“They’re his,” she says.
“Nice garden,” Chip says to Scud, who is standing with Colin and holding his hand.
“Relaxes me after a long day at work,” Scud says.
“A day at work?” I hiss. I press to within inches of his vile smirk, and before I know what I’m doing, I have his shirt bunched in my two fists. “And what exactly do you do, Mr. Illman?” I say.
In an instant Dorsey and Chip have separated me from Scud.
“Assault,” Scud says.
There is a moment of stillness. Everybody looks at Kendall, who appears not to have noticed.
Upton tugs me toward the car. “Let’s get back.”
I laugh.
Scud laughs.
I let Upton pull me toward the street. Kendall Vance walks to the road with us. “Infuriating little weasel, isn’t he,” Kendall says.
“He’s a murderer.”
“It’s my impression, Nick, that you have no real evidence.”
“We’ll have it soon.”
“But what I want to talk to you about is Tamika Curtis.”
“Not now. Call me at work.”
“I do. You don’t call back.”
“This afternoon. I’ll be in.”
I get in the car with Upton and close the door.
We ride without speaking. The person I find myself thinking about, oddly, isn’t Kendall or Scud or Upton but Tina. Tina Trevor, who for some reason surfaced through the drama as the ideal person to get the volatile Mrs. Illman calmed down.
“Well, that was intense,” Upton says, breaking into my reverie.
“Upton,” I say loudly, “Upton, Uptown. So you have a reputation with the bad boys?”
He laughs and looks at me with a puzzled expression. “Go figure.”
CHAPTER 18
Friday afternoon: Tina and I are on our way to Ellisville Maximum. She has a deposition scheduled, and I’m riding along to have a chat with Fuseli the tattoo artist/informant/youth counselor. We’re in her Toyota Avalon with the stock report on the radio, and our briefcases on the backseat, which looks too clean. It has never seen a child or a dog or even two adults out on a double with Tina and whomever she hangs with.
I remember Cassandra’s hair, long and loose. And the funky way she dressed. Tina, by contrast, with her atrocious hairstyle, is wearing her standard gray lawyer uniform.
“Have you read Jane Austen?” I ask.
“Is that by one of the Brontës?”
“What about Lord of the Rings?”
“Saw the movies. I don’t read much fiction.”
We ride on in silence.
At the prison, I wait for Fuseli in a conference room of the administrative complex. He is brought to me in manacles, hands cuffed together and locked to a chain around his waist. His ankles are chained, too, with a few inches of slack for taking tiny steps. The guard parks him in front of me and looks up with questioning eyebrows. I nod. The guard unlocks his hands but leaves his ankles shackled.
“Thanks, Officer, we’ll be fine.” I skimmed Fuseli’s prison file before they brought him in. He’s not dangerous. The guard goes out but leaves the door ajar.
Fuseli’s name isn’t Fuseli. It’s Leroy Burton. He is a tall, dissipated white man of forty-seven, but if I were going by appearance, I’d put him past sixty. He is thin and creased, with wispy hair. He sits in one of the padded conference chairs and wiggles around. “Man, don’t that feel good,” he says in a raspy voice from down in his throat.
The guard comes in and says, “Mr. Norton wants me to ask what you’d like. Coffee,
fruit juice, soda?”
“Orange,” I say, and I look at Fuseli. It takes him a second, but he finally figures it out, and his eyes go wide in astonishment. “Sprite,” he says.
The guard comes back with Sprite and orange soda and two glasses with ice. I had meant orange juice, but I don’t say anything. Fuseli pours his soda and takes a sip. “Been a while,” he whispers.
“You don’t get Sprite?”
“We get Sprite. We don’t get waited on.”
“Enjoy,” I say, and I make a gesture of clinking glasses without really clinking. Fuseli’s motions are slow and deliberate, as though he’s drugged up, but his whole shtick is that he hates the junk and the gang culture that goes with it. No, Fuseli has two problems that have nothing to do with drugs—first and most obvious, his thirty years in prison with no chance of getting out. I’ve seen it before. In some guys, the bleakness of prison inhabits the mind like a tumor. It slows everything down.
His other problem is more literal. He has multiple sclerosis.
“So you’re the tat man of Ellisville Max?” I say.
He bobs his head.
I say, “I got a question about a tattoo we found on a dead guy. Nobody seems to know anything. I thought you might.”
“And you ain’t got people to drive out here for you? Or just fax a picture and have the warden ask me?” This is asked not unkindly, and it tells me things about him. He’s smart and curious. I wonder what he’d look like if he didn’t look so institutional.
“I have an interest,” I say.
“You got a photo?”
“Don’t need one.” I quickly draw the four-part square on a scrap and slide it to him. I don’t mention the ME’s observation that it was touched up.
“A window?” he says.
“Looks like it.”
“Why should it mean anything at all?”
“Maybe it doesn’t.”
“The dead guy, what’s the deal? What do you know?”
“No need to get into all that, Mr. Burton. I’m just curious about the tattoo.”
He shrugs.
I wait.
He waits.
I say, “Well, I won’t waste your time.” I pick up my briefcase.
“That’s a good one.” He laughs. “Not wasting my time. I like that one. You’re a funny man.”
“Mr. Burton, do you know anything about the design?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
I nod. The last thing I want is to get jacked around by an inmate making himself feel like a big dick by screwing with me. Just another Scud Illman. “Tina told me you were helpful,” I say. “She must have gotten you on a good day. I’ll tell her and Mr. Norton you’re not.”
“So send Tina in. I’ll talk to Tina.”
“But not me?”
“Suppose I know about this tat,” he says. “I tell you about it, and you go out of here, use my info, and what do I get? You ain’t telling me why the big deal: why a muckety-muck like you drives out here. You ain’t telling me who the stiff is or who killed him. Not even a good story. No usable info, no extra privileges. I don’t get fifteen minutes looking at Tina’s pretty face while she laughs and tells me about some case she’s working on, and I don’t even get another goddamn soda. You want to tattle to the warden, tattle away. Warden will ask me what gives, and I’ll tell him you don’t want to pay, and that’ll be that. But I can see you’re greener than eggs ’n’ ham, and you probably don’t mean no disrespect, so let’s you and me start again.”
All this was said in his whispery, nonthreatening voice, but I still considered just walking out. I might have if he hadn’t said the part about Tina. It was complicated. The part about listening to her laugh, that was key. He’d shown me a weakness: He’d confessed his sorrows.
“Mr. Burton,” I say . . .
“I prefer Fuseli.”
I nod. “Fuseli. A kid was selling dope to pay his college tuition. The Bureau determined that his source was a criminal group whose crimes stretch into many other antisocial practices.” I lay out a sketchy version of the landscape, leaving out my personal involvement. When I get to Seth Coen’s tattoo, I say, “The medical examiner noticed that it was recently altered. It was an amateurish job. We’re trying to fill in what we can. Can you help?”
“Why come out here yourself ? Why not send somebody?”
We stare at each other across a few feet of conference table. It’s a stuffy, windowless room but much nicer than anything Fuseli sees day to day—the Formica conference table has hardwood trim, the padded chairs swivel, and the walls are Sheetrock instead of cinder block.
“Guard,” I yell. The door swings open, and two of them come in, ready for action. I hold up a hand. “Could we get another couple of sodas here?” Then I turn back to Burton/Fuseli. “You’ve received my down payment. From here on, it’s value for value.”
He considers this. “Tell you what,” he says, “you write down six last names on that piece of paper. Five of ’em are guys you know of in prison. The sixth is the dead guy with the tat. Stick him in anywhere. First, last, middle. Don’t tell me.”
I do as he says, shielding the list with my hand until it’s done. Six names, the second is Coen. I slide it over to him. He glances at it. “Coen,” he says.
“Impressive. What’s the secret?”
He smiles, and immediately, I start to like him. It is an honest and open smile. “Pay up,” he says.
I think of arguing, but I don’t. I tell him about how Coen was found in a freezer all chopped up. That seems to satisfy him. He taps the drawing of the tattoo. “You think this is significant?”
“I don’t think anything.”
He nods. He turns the paper over to the clean side and draws a swastika right in the middle with heavy black lines, then he covers it with his palm and traces the outline of his whole hand and slides the drawing toward me. I let it sit on the table between us, reluctant to touch it. I feel something in the back of my throat. I can’t think of anything to say.
Fuseli speaks. “They used to have an Aryan problem down at Alder Creek. Vicious bastards. Not enough of them to rule the blacks, but every Jew-boy they get, they branded him. We had one in here once, a nice kid who’d finished his state time and come over here to do his federal. Drug shit. Ain’t it always. I worked on some designs with him, how to turn it into something else. Something nice. Finally, we just closed the sides and made a window. I guess that’s what the others did once they got away from the Aryans. Simple. Closed up the sides. How long was Coen outside?”
“A couple of years.”
“There you go. He got his release, and first thing he does is gets his tat altered. Maybe even does it hisself. I can tell you it was an amateur job, because if it was done right, you wouldn’t know it was changed.”
Fuseli reached over with the pen and quickly blacked in the four half-sides, turning the swastika into a window. But it was there, the evil disguised as something innocuous—or not just innocuous but spiritual. A window, timeless metaphor for insight and wisdom. It’s almost worse in hiding than in the open. Things come into my mind, awful things. Zander emerging from the dirt, Cassandra dead in her home, the hand in the freezer. And my son, Toby. When Toby was alive, there was a kindly and ancient family doctor in the town by the lake. Dr. Wallis. He talked of Toby’s illness as a hidden defect, a lurking evil. That’s what I see in the altered tattoo, a lurking evil. I’d rather just see the swastika.
“You Jewish?” Fuseli asks. “Looks like you got the wind knocked out.”
This embarrasses me. And it impresses me because his voice is earnest and sympathetic. Here he is doing life in prison, and yet he views my momentary show of emotion as an opportunity not to gain leverage or to smirk but to make a human connection—to participate for a second in normal human sadness as we experience it on the outside. I like this guy.
“Just thinking. What about you? You sound compassionate.”
“I heard of one guy ov
er there at Alder Creek,” he says. “I mean, I never seen him, but this is what I hear: They branded him just like your Mr. Coen. One day he takes a knife and peels the skin right off the back of his hand. You don’t need to be Jewish or free to feel for shit like that. It’s fucked up. Like this disease I got—”
“MS.”
“Done your homework, I see. Well, if I could take a knife and peel if off, I would. Yes, sir.”
“Are the Aryans still active over there?”
“You tell me. You’re outside, I’m stuck here. But I hear they got broke up. Prison moved a couple. Blacks killed one. Maybe you remember.”
We’re silent a few seconds, then I say, “You ever hear of a guy named Scud? Scud Illman?”
He shakes his head. “Connected to Coen?”
“Yeah. Small players in a big game. You know anybody inside pulling strings on the outside?”
“Everybody. What strings?”
“Anything. Drugs, mostly.”
“Young guys talk to me—guys having trouble adjusting. But see, I’m not in on anything. I sell my tats, I keep to myself.”
“But—”
“Ask Tipper, he knows everyone.”
“Who’s Tipper?”
“Bookie. He was a bookie on the outside, big-time. Bookie on the inside now, small-time. The prison don’t care, it’s just small change and cigs and favors. Gives us something to do. Makes the ball games on TV more interesting. But Tipper’s the one, ’cause everybody wants action, and he’s who’s got it. So he deals with everyone. Equal opportunity, you know? Maybe he don’t know all the secrets, but he sure as hell knows who knows.”
“Will he talk to me?”
“He’s coming up for parole.”
“Tipper. What’s his real name?”
Fuseli laughs. “Eggs ’n’ ham,” he says, “some things you got to find out yourself. Now pay up: How come you, the man, is driving out here yourself to ask me about a tat that probably don’t mean shit anyway?”
“Haven’t you figured it out?”
“You play ’em pretty close.”
We stare at each other. I notice his left hand shaking, which I suppose is from the MS. He sees me watching it. “Lucky I’m right-handed,” he says. “I can still do tattoos. For now, at least. That’s one thing I got.”