Broken English

by P. L. Gaus

  “I need to speak with the warden today.”

  A short man in all-black military attire came through the door behind Branden. Miss Falviano shifted her eyes toward him so that Branden would notice. The man in black walked past her desk without speaking, rapped twice on the warden’s door, and disappeared into the office beyond.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding as if she meant it. “Perhaps you’d be better off talking to Lieutenant Brown, anyway.” As she said it, she made two little jabs with her pencil toward the door that the man in the black uniform had just entered.

  Branden got her meaning, said, “I’ll wait,” and took a seat on one of two sofas behind a long coffee table near the front door. When Brown walked out of the warden’s office, Branden followed him into the hall outside Miss Falviano’s third-floor office.

  “Pardon me,” Branden said, and strolled up to Brown in front of the elevator.

  He looked Branden over, stepped onto the elevator when the doors opened, and said, “Yes?” as he pushed the button to close the doors.

  Branden followed him onto the elevator as the doors were closing and said, “My name is Mike Branden.”

  The lieutenant pushed impatiently on the round button marked “One” and the elevator began its descent.

  “What can I do for you?” Brown asked. He hadn’t really looked Branden in the eyes. Everywhere else, but not in the eyes. It was an impatient way of saying “I don’t have time.”

  “I need to see the warden. Thought maybe you could help.”

  With bored resignation, Brown said, “Who’s it for?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “What case?” They stepped out of the elevator at the first floor, and Branden followed Brown out, under the canopy covering the front entrance to the prison offices. At the end of the canopy, as Brown started out into a steady drizzle toward the parking lot, Branden stopped where he was and planted his feet at the edge of the sidewalk.

  Brown took several more paces and glanced back as if expecting to see just another inmate’s apologist on his heels. He turned around entirely when he realized Branden was no longer there, and then came back slowly in the rain to the professor on the curb. As he walked back, Branden stood his ground and sized him up.

  He was perhaps five foot-seven. His black hair was done in a military crewcut. He wore a pair of dark sunglasses in spite of the blanket of gray skies and the patter of rain on the concrete. The black trousers and shirt he wore sported several utility pockets on the thigh and the sleeves. Some closed with Velcro and others with zippers. His duty belt was made of black woven leather. There was a bulge on the outside of his right ankle where he carried a small revolver. His build was tight and powerful, and his gait was smooth. He seemed to Branden to be at once acutely aware of everything around him and unconcerned about any of it. He stopped on the pavement in front of Branden, took off his sunglasses, and said, “Is this about a parole?”

  “No,” Branden said, and waited.

  “The parole board meets tomorrow,” Brown said, by way of explanation. “I assumed you’d have some business with the warden on that.”

  Branden let a moment pass and then said, “We’ve got a little problem with one of your ex-cons back in Ohio, and I thought I had arranged a meeting with Warden Franks to talk about that.”

  “You’ve got to get past Falviano to do that.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Brown. Steve Brown.” The lieutenant held out his hand. “I’m in charge of security matters for the warden.”

  Branden relaxed inwardly and shook his hand. Brown stepped up onto the curb, and suggested a dry place to talk, inside the glass and red steel doors to the prison offices.

  “Anita’s a buffer for the warden,” Brown offered apologetically.

  “Lieutenant, a sheriff’s deputy in our little town did just about everything a person could do to arrange a meeting for me with Warden Franks.”

  “And now she’s not letting you through.”

  Branden said, “You could say that, yes,” and then “I am Professor Michael Branden. I’m here to try to figure out some things about a case we’ve got back home, and I think your warden has already spoken to a young reporter about this matter earlier.”

  “We get a lot of reporters through here,” Brown answered.

  “From Ohio?” Branden challenged.

  Brown now seemed interested. “Not normally, but a kid did come here about two weeks ago.”

  “I know,” Branden said. “He’s dead.”

  Brown’s eyes betrayed a surge of worry. “Jesse Sands?”

  “That’s the problem we’ve got.”

  “His last name was Brom-something?”

  “Bromfield.”

  “Right. Bromfield. He’s dead?” Before Branden could answer, Brown started for the elevator.

  Branden followed and said, “Eric Bromfield was shot in the head on the day he returned from talking with Warden Franks.”

  Brown groaned audibly. He pushed the elevator button impatiently and rode up in silent thought, with Branden, to the warden’s floor. In Anita Falviano’s outer office, Branden hung his jacket on a coat tree inside the door. He straightened his collar and followed Brown into the warden’s office. As he passed Anita Falviano’s desk, he leaned a bit her way and whispered, “Thanks.”

  Warden Frank’s office was appointed with heavy wood and thick, dark carpet. Three walls held books in walnut cases fronted with glass doors. The windows on the fourth wall were draped with heavy velvet. The corners of the room were nearly lost in shadow. A single green desk lamp was lit on the warden’s black lacquer desk. Brown crossed the lavish carpet to the warden’s desk and said, “Al, the Jesse Sands thing in Ohio has gone sour on us.”

  Warden Franks tossed a report onto the polished surface of his desk and leaned back to listen in his high-backed chair. It was upholstered in red leather, tacked with ornate brass studs. He muttered something and closed his eyes wearily.

  Brown introduced Branden. Branden reconstructed the story of Eric Bromfield’s murder. The warden seemed annoyed, but Brown still seemed surprised. When Branden mentioned David Hawkins, the warden only shrugged. Branden considered that strange and then realized that, between Bromfield and Robertson, Franks would have been told the whole story of Hawkins and Bromfield. Would have been told all about Jesse Sands. It was Brown, Branden realized, who was hearing most of this for the first time. Like Robertson, Bromfield had talked only with the warden. Impressive, Branden mused, that Bromfield had managed to talk his way past Anita Falviano.

  When he explained Bruce Robertson’s theory of Hawkins’s revenge, Branden thought he noticed Brown catching the warden’s gaze with a reproachful look. When he mentioned Jesse Sands and Nabal Greyson, the warden finally stirred in his leather chair.

  Warden Franks rose and took a position near one of the long velvet drapes. He pulled the heavy cloth back a few inches and watched the gray drizzle as he thought. Brown waited silently near the desk, straight and curiously rigid. Branden lowered himself into a plush chair in front of the warden’s desk. The quiet in the darkened room was almost tangible. The chill, gray light of the rainy day did not penetrate the heavy curtains. Neither would the light of a sunny day. The street noises of Trenton would never reach into the warden’s darkened office. Branden watched the warden at the window. Brown did too. Minutes passed.

  “I don’t think we’re going to be able to help you, Professor,” Franks said at the window and turned to face Branden. Brown rustled nervously in place beside Branden and seemed to be considering an interruption. It never came, and Brown settled back into his rigid posture.

  “I wouldn’t expect that you could,” Branden said, “other than to help me understand what it is that Bromfield meant when he phoned his editor in Millersburg. He said he had something that changed his story entirely, and that they should hold the Sands/Hawkins story until he got back.”

  Brown stirred as if t
o answer, but Franks cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Professor,” the warden said, “I don’t know what that would be.”

  Branden said, “Warden, there’s a friend of mine back in Millersburg who’s got it all on the line for a fellow who looks, for all the world, as if he’s preparing to make the mistake of a lifetime by killing Jesse Sands. I’ve got another friend, the sheriff, who’ll not give a whit for his own life, if that’s what it will take to put Sands on trial safely. We’ve already got a reporter who’s dead, and the convict you released from prison has killed a young woman in her home.” Impulsively, Branden added, “I’m sure you can see the downside of this, if it develops that you could have helped, and didn’t.”

  The remark landed hard on the warden. Brown abandoned his post in front of the warden’s desk and crossed the room to the windows. He drew the warden aside, and with his back turned to the professor, whispered with the warden for several minutes. Then the warden turned back to the window, and Brown turned to Branden. He said, “Professor, Bromfield talked to Billy Hershon when he was here. Hershon was the cellmate of Jesse Sands for the last eight years.”

  Branden asked, “There’s a connection to Millersburg?”

  “No, there isn’t,” Brown said. “There’s no connection. But Bromfield did talk to Hershon and you might learn something there.” Brown turned back to the warden to see if there would be anything more to add, and plainly there was not.

  Then Brown ushered Branden out into Anita Falviano’s office and asked him to wait while he spoke with Warden Franks. When he emerged twenty minutes later, Brown was red in the face and angry.

  “Hershon is the only way to go,” he said, “and if you’ve got the time, we can do it now.”

  Branden gathered his jacket and stood by the door. Brown said, “Right, OK,” lifted the receiver from Falviano’s desk phone, and punched out four digits. He spoke several crisp sentences to the guards on duty at the prison and escorted Branden out of the offices and through red iron doors into the old fortress prison.

  24

  Monday, June 16 6:00 A.M.

  TWO plumbers in coveralls walked into the sandstone courthouse in Millersburg that Monday morning with Bruce Robertson. By 6:45 A.M., the four urinals in the third-floor men’s room were lying on the floor, their service pipes capped off at the wall. Next came two of the three toilets in the stalls, plus the privacy dividers. As the plumbers wheeled the porcelain fixtures to a janitor’s closet down the hall, Amish carpenters arrived in a long passenger van driven by one of Robertson’s deputies.

  Saturday, all of the supplies had been delivered according to Robertson’s orders. Two-by-fours, two-by-eights, brick, mortar, nails, wheelbarrows, sheets of bulletproof glass, and two reinforced steel doors. Everything was now stacked in the hall outside the men’s room, adjacent to the courtroom of Judge Harrold S. Singleton.

  The carpenters came into the courthouse up the steep east steps, carrying their wooden tool trays, saws, levels, and squares. They were dressed nearly alike. Work boots, plain denim trousers, denim vests or light denim jackets, long-sleeved shirts that varied in color, but were all uniformly plain. They wore light yellow straw hats, and their hair stuck out, round and puffy underneath. Some smoked. All left their lunch pails in the van.

  On the third floor, the Amish crew looked over the men’s room, and milled about in the hall, as one older fellow, Grossvater to nearly all the men, checked in the adjoining courtroom. He and Robertson spoke for a moment, and then the short, elderly Dutchman drew out a tape measure, walked off a length along a courtroom wall, and went out into the hall where the men lingered. He spoke for several minutes in Low German and slang, and soon the men began to busy themselves with their tools. They moved slowly, but purposefully. There was very little explanation for what anyone should do. They worked as a silent team that seemed to have done this sort of job a thousand times before. The labor was not rushed, nor were the minutes wasted.

  A sledge was thrown against the wall in the men’s room, and a rough doorway into the adjoining courtroom was knocked out. Ripping bars were taken to the trim work, and eventually the four walls in the men’s room had been stripped back to the studs. One young fellow hammered together a couple of saw-horses, and two-by-eights were laid on top for a worktable. There was a great deal of measuring, writing, and cutting. There was occasional laughter, and sometimes good-natured teasing. By noon, the room was stripped bare, and the new doorway, from the old men’s room into the courtroom, had been framed and squared. Then the heavy steel door was hinged and hung.

  The Amish men ate their lunches on the east steps of the courthouse. Locals who passed by gave them little notice. Some tourists lingered and snapped photos. The occasional buggy was brought in and hitched at the rail near the sheriff’s van.

  During the break, Robertson walked over from the jail, studied the progress on the third floor, and came out onto the east steps. The men sprawled casually on the stone steps, and some lay flat on their backs in the grass below. The one who first noticed Robertson said something in German slang, and the Grossvater pulled himself up from his lunch and climbed the steps to talk with the sheriff.

  After lunch, the two youngest boys hauled water in buckets from the second floor and mixed mortar with shovels in a wheelbarrow, while two others laid brick. Two men stacked brick for the masons, and two others worked in the courtroom to install a bulletproof panel in front of the steel door. By three o’clock, Robertson’s brick room was finished, and deputies carried in a simple bed frame and mattress. When it was ready, they collected the sheriff from his office, and he looked the brick room over, while the Amish men watched.

  Robertson started in the courtroom. There was a tall shield of bulletproof glass with a table and four chairs set behind the glass. Behind the chairs, on the south wall at the side of the courtroom, there was a black steel door. Robertson opened the door and stepped through, into the old men’s room. All but one toilet had been removed, as well as all but one sink. The walls were entirely of new red brick, and even the one outside window had been bricked over. One of the four brick walls had a small window of bulletproof glass, and, behind a steel door in that wall, there was an anteroom where a deputy could watch a prisoner through the glass. The other door in the anteroom opened into the hallway on the third floor of the courthouse. The ceiling in the brick room was covered over with Plexiglas to put the electric fixtures out of reach to a prisoner. Robertson sat on the bed and weighed his procedures one last time.

  He had ordered the bulletproof glass a week ago, after they had first learned about David Hawkins. The idea of the brick room had come to him in a single flash. The details had formed in his mind on a sleepless night. Now he sat where Sands would sit, and thought it over from every angle he could see. Sands would be brought over at night. He’d already approved the overtime and told the deputies. In the days to come, Sands would live in the sheriff’s brick box for as long as his trial lasted. The heavy curtains on the courtroom windows would forestall a sniper’s run at Sands during a trial, but there was now also the bulletproof partition as an extra security measure. The steel doors were more than adequate. The anteroom would allow them to watch Sands around the clock. The hot water had been turned off in the sink, and the bricks covered everything else that Sands might think to use as a weapon. When he was satisfied, Robertson walked out, settled up with the Amish boss, and strolled back to his office in the jail.

  Sands was scheduled to go over Thursday night. Robertson rocked back in his chair and smoked. Sands would actually go over Monday night, tonight, and only Robertson knew it. Then Sands would sit out his trial in a brick cocoon, because, Robertson told himself with satisfaction, no U.S. Army Special Forces clown was going to get to Sands before his trial. Not on Robertson’s watch. Not in Robertson’s town. When the time came, he’d throw the switch on Sands himself. But until then, anyone who wanted Sands dead was going to have to blow the courthouse completely apart in order to do it.
/>
  25

  Monday, June 16 4:20 P.M.

  EVERYTHING about Billy Hershon spoke of malicious hostility. His voice, his words, his tone. His walk, his rock-and-sway, street-gang swagger. His eyes. He stood on the prisoner’s side of the glass partition and seemed both scornful and amused. Branden was seated on the outside. Lieutenant Brown stood behind him. Branden lifted the receiver and held it to his ear. He leaned back casually, propped an elbow on the armrest of the chair, and gave a long, unconcerned sigh, all the while holding Hershon’s gaze.

  Hershon yanked the receiver off the wall on his side of the glass and spoke disrespectfully. “The Man, there, says you’ve got something for me on Jesse.”

  “I’ve got a lot for you on Jesse Sands,” Branden replied with a disinterested nonchalance. Brown stood back and observed the exchange. “Hold back as much as you can,” he had told the professor. “Trade every fact for another one like it. Never tell everything and surely nothing that isn’t returned in kind. And never allow yourself to appear concerned.” So far, Branden had performed well.

  “Where is he?” Hershon asked.

  “In Ohio. Tell me about him.”

  “Where in Ohio?” His eyes were dead with spite.

  “Tell me about him.”

  Hershon rattled off Sands’s prison number and said, “Maxed out,” followed by an intense, “WHERE IN OHIO?”

  “Millersburg. Tell me why . . .”

  “How do you know him?” Hershon took a seat.

  “I’ve spoken to him once.”

  “He’s back in?” Disappointment appeared on Hershon’s face for the briefest of moments.

  “County jail. Now tell me why you’re not surprised.”

  “Because he was gonna push.” His expression changed from disappointment to satisfied anticipation.