by Cleo Coyle
The morning rush came and went, the mail arrived, and I pulled espressos, mixed lattes and cappuccinos by rote. By eleven, Detective Quinn was too busy to return my calls—presumably because he was diligently tracking down the elusive fashion designer Fen. Matteo was off and running on his coffee kiosk planning. And Rena’s killer was still on the loose. Then, as I was preparing for the early lunch rush, a bicycle messenger arrived with a hand-delivered package.
“Are you Clare Cosi?”
I nodded and he offered me a clipboard. “Sign here…and print your full name here.”
I scribbled my name, then wrote it out in block letters. The man handed me a manila envelope; the return address read “Tanner and Associates, Attorneys-at-law.” The address was on Madison Avenue. Noting the delivery, Esther Best appeared at my shoulder.
“What is it? Good news I hope.”
“Something from Tucker’s lawyer, I think.”
I ripped into the envelope and found a letter and another envelope inside—this one from the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, the New York City Department of Corrections.
“Be advised that this authorized pass allows Ms. Clare Cosi and Mrs. Blanche Dreyfus Allegro Dubois to visit prisoner #3244798909, Mr. Tucker Burton of—”
I ceased reading because Esther Best was whooping and woofing (a hip-hop generation thing) and drawing the attention of several patrons. “When are you going?” she cried.
“As soon as I can,” I said, closing my eyes in grateful relief.
I quickly climbed the back steps and entered my small, second floor office to call Madame. I had been trying without success to arrange a visit with Tucker since his arrest, never imagining how difficult it could be to visit someone once he was incarcerated in what amounted to America’s only penal colony. Unless you’re a relative, it’s nearly impossible to visit a prisoner on Rikers Island, and even then you can only see the inmate if they’ve put your name on an official list kept at the prison. For everyone else, save legal council or members of law enforcement, a request for a visit must be sent to the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, who receives between 1,500 and 2,000 such requests every month. Typically it takes weeks to receive a reply, usually in the negative.
I’d mentioned the problem to Matteo, who passed the information on to Breanne. Somehow Ms. Summour’s lawyer had managed to cut through the mountain of bureaucratic red tape and the authorization magically had appeared. Though I was no fan of Breanne Summour, at the moment, I was truly grateful for the pass, and I knew Madame would feel the same.
I dialed her number and Madame answered on the second ring. “It’s the maid’s day off, my dear,” she explained. I told her the wonderful news and Madame was as ecstatic as I was.
“I’ll be over in an hour,” I told her.
Fifty-two minutes later, I flagged a cab on Hudson, climbed in, and told the driver my destinations. “First I need to pick up someone on Fifth near Washington Square Park. Then we’ll be going on to Rikers.”
The driver did a double take, his dreadlocks flying as he turned his head. “Rikers? Mon, you mean the prison?” he said in a lilting Caribbean accent. He shook his head, his dreads taking flight again. “Lady, I don’t even know how to get there. It’s in Queens, no?”
“Yes, it’s on the north shore of Queens—in the middle of the East River.”
“Well, lady, this cab, she don’t float. So I’m gonna have to call my dispatcher.” While the driver headed over to Washington Square, I pulled out my cell and rang Madame.
“Apparently, cabbies don’t know how to get to Rikers Island,” I explained.
“Never mind, dear. I’ll call my own car service. I’m sure Mr. Raj can help us out.”
I informed the cab driver I’d be getting out at Washington Square, and to forget the trip to Rikers. He seemed relieved. On Fifth, I found Madame waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of her building. She was wrapped in an elegant belted, pecan brown coat with faux fur trim on the cuffs, lapels, and turned up collar.
“Mr. Raj insisted on driving us himself. He’s made the trip before.”
My eyebrows went up. “Did he tell you why?”
She waved her hand. “I did not ask and he did not offer.”
A few minutes later, a black late-model Lincoln town car with bright white Taxi and Limousine Commission plates pulled up to the sidewalk. A diminutive middle-aged man with cocoa-brown skin and a thick iron-gray moustache stepped out and opened the door for us.
“Bonjour, Mr. Raj,” said Madame sweetly.
“Bonjour, Madame,” he replied to my French-born ex-mother-in-law. Smiling behind his moustache, he wore a well-tailored suit and a deep blue turban.
The ride out of Manhattan was fairly uneventful. We headed uptown and through the Queens Midtown Tunnel, then onto the Grand Central Parkway. As we approached LaGuardia Airport, however, the driver swerved onto a rarely used ramp marked Nineteenth Avenue. The ramp led to a narrow two-lane bridge, the only route to Rikers Island without a boat.
The bridge, largely unknown to most New Yorkers, stretched more than a mile across the East River. As we drove across the fast-moving water, a deafening roar sounded around us and the silver wings and fuselage of a United Airlines plane appeared over our heads. It rapidly descended, flying so low its roaring engines rattled our car windows and I could almost make out passengers in their upright and locked positions. For a moment, my heart stopped—I was certain I was witnessing a passenger airplane crash. Then I noticed the pier on our right displaying a huge sign directing pilots to LaGuardia’s runway 13-31. Seconds later, the jet smoothly touched down.
I sighed and sat back. Outside the car’s tinted windows, the sunlight played on the rippling waters of the East River. The route over the bridge was a lonely one, patrolled by officers in cars and on foot. Along the way, posted signs warned passengers that firearms, cameras, and photographic devices, tape recorders, beepers and cell phones, and a host of other items were not permitted inside the prison and would be confiscated; that proper identification would be required; and that all visitors were subject to a physical search before entering the sprawling island compound.
During the drive from Manhattan to Queens, I read to Madame from some papers the lawyer had provided, learning the information myself as I read. Apparently the island was named after the Rikers family, who’d sold the giant piece of rock rising from the East River to New York City in the 1880s. The city initially used the land as a dump. Over the next forty-plus years, the size of the land mass quadrupled, a result of the thousands of tons of refuse deposited there. By 1935, the dump was closed and the garbage barges halted as the first jail opened. The Rikers Island Correctional Facility is now one of the largest prisons in the world, comprised of ten jails spread across an area half the size of Central Park. There are nine jails for men and one for women, and the entire place has a daytime population of close to twenty-thousand people including prisoners, employees, and visitors.
Two-thirds of the inmates were in the same boat as Tucker—detainees who were legally innocent and waiting for their cases to crawl through the criminal justice system, stuck there because they could not produce bail, or bail was denied them by a judge because of various circumstances. The other third of the inmates on Rikers had been convicted and sentenced already and were waiting for an empty bed in an upstate prison. A smattering—all with sentences under twelve months—actually served out their entire incarceration on the island.
With its own schools, clinics, chapels, grocery stores, barbershops, a bakery, a bus depot, even a ball park and running track, Rikers essentially has become a small town.
After driving through the security gates, we were stopped by a pair of armed guards who recorded our names and asked us the nature of our business. I showed them the official letter from the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, and we were directed to the Control Building. On the way, the town car nosed its way through a quiet and seemingly deserted two-lane street that was l
ined by ultra-modern modular buildings erected between aging jails of brick and mortar built half a century ago. Everywhere I looked, fences loomed, twelve-foot-high steel mesh walls tipped by razor-wire.
At the Control Building we were compelled to pass through metal detectors, then I slid the official pass from the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections under a thick, bulletproof Plexiglas window to a bored-looking desk sergeant. He checked our identification—my New York State driver’s license, Madame’s United States passport—and we were handed off to two female prison guards. They took us to another area, scanned us again, this time with metal-detecting rods and a relatively new machine called an Ionscan, which was capable, we were told, of detecting drug residue in much the same way an airport scanner can detect the residue of explosive materials. One of the chat-tier female guards told us the year before over three hundred visitors were arrested on Rikers for attempting to smuggle contraband in to prisoners—drugs, weapons, bullets, etc.
Finally, we were frisked. The women worked silently and efficiently without meeting our eyes. We were asked to empty our pockets and purses, and our cell phones were confiscated, to be returned at the end of our visit. A few minutes later, another armed guard presented us with plastic identification cards.
“Don’t lose these,” he warned. “You will be subject to arrest if you do not display these badges at all times.”
I didn’t doubt it.
Our pass from the Deputy Commissioner must have put us on some kind of VIP track, because we were immediately taken outside by a young Hispanic guard and escorted across the street and down the block to a modern modular building.
I expected the kind of thing you see in the movies—a long table with chairs, bulletproof glass separating you from the prisoner on the other side, a telephone on the table, through which you talk to your loved one. Instead we were placed inside a small windowless room—a cell, really—with a heavy steel door, fluorescent lights, and insulated brick walls thickly slathered with institutional green paint. Madame and I sat on green plastic chairs until the door opened a few minutes later.
We looked up as Tucker entered, a burly uniformed guard twice his size leading the lanky young playwright and actor by his thin arm. I rose to give my friend a hug, but the look of pain and embarrassment on Tucker’s face gave me pause.
“Lift up your arms,” rumbled the guard.
Only then did I notice Tuck’s hands were folded behind his back—and handcuffed. The guard drew a key from his belt, removed the cuffs. Then he acknowledged our presence for the first time.
“Thirty minutes,” he said. “If you need me sooner, bang on the door.”
The guard turned on his heels and left. The door slammed with a loud clang. Tucker, pale and thinner than I’d ever seen him, rubbed his wrists where the cuffs had chaffed them. His beautiful mop of floppy brown hair was gone—replaced by a crewcut. He looked like a shorn sheep, but despite his obvious torment, Tucker stared at us through grateful eyes.
“God…Clare, Madame…thank you…for…” His voice broke as he sat in the green plastic chair beside me, and I took him in my arms. He sobbed, his shoulders heaving.
“I’ll get you out of here, Tucker. I swear…”
Tucker wiped his cheeks with his hands, nodded, but his face was a mask of doubt and confusion. “How did this happen?” he moaned.
Madame leaned forward, “Are you getting good legal council?”
“The lawyer…Mr. Tanner…he’s doing his best. Says that since the second poisoning wasn’t fatal, he can probably get the charges reduced to reckless endangerment. Mr. Tanner interviewed Jeff Lugar—”
I sat up. “What?”
Jeff Lugar was the second victim—the tan, buffed boy-toy who’d been Ricky’s date and finished off the poisoned latte. I’d been desperate for news about his condition. But after the initial stories reporting the poisoning, the ongoing details of the case had disappeared from the news cycle. In a city as big and rich in crazy front page headlines as New York, even a fatal poisoning at a chic event could become old news in forty-eight hours. The last report on Lugar’s condition listed him as “critical” and I had assumed he was in a coma or otherwise unable to give a statement. Obviously, I was wrong.
“Tucker, are you saying your lawyer talked to him?” I asked.
“Yes…or someone from Mr. Tanner’s office did, anyway.”
“What did he say?”
Tucker shrugged. “Not much. All I know is that from Lugar’s version of the events, Mr. Tanner says he can prove Jeff was not the intended victim and that his poisoning was just an unfortunate consequence of the crime…”.
I sat in silence, mulling over the possibility of getting to Lugar myself.
“How are you otherwise?” Madame asked in the meantime, patting Tucker’s hand.
“I think they may move me soon,” he said with a barely suppressed shudder. “Mr. Tanner is trying to get a psychiatric evaluation for me, which means I would be moved to a medical facility like Bellevue, but the judge is resisting…”.
His voice trailed off and he stared at the wall. Of course I understood Tucker’s concern. Out of solitary confinement, or “suicide watch,” he would be placed with the general population, mixing with hardened criminals—some already convicted of heinous crimes. A sheep to snarling wolves.
“It won’t come to that,” I said firmly. “We’ll have you out of here in no time.”
“But if we don’t manage that trick, I have a few suggestions for surviving this place unscathed,” said Madame. “I’ve learned these tricks from my own experiences.”
Both Tucker and I stared at her in amazement. “Are you telling us you’ve been in jail?” asked Tucker.
Madame nodded. “I was imprisoned within this very compound, many years ago,” she declared.
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s not important,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Ancient history…”
We both urged Madame to give us details, but she simply refused to elaborate, and her stern expression told us to drop the subject. Of course, we did—one does not “press” Madame.
Eventually, Tucker changed the subject, asking about the coffeehouse, about Esther and Moira. Finally, Madame faced Tucker, took his right hand in hers and looked into his eyes. “I know imprisonment feels like the end of your life, but don’t you ever give up hope. Don’t look anyone in the eye or they’ll take it as a challenge. But don’t look away, either, or they will think you are weak.”
Tucker nodded with each suggestion.
“Keep to yourself, but do not spurn friendship if it is offered. Deal carefully with the guards. If you get too close to them, the inmates will think you’re a stool pigeon.”
In all the years I’d known Madame, I’d never once heard the words “stool pigeon” (one of my dear old dad’s typical terms) come out of her mouth. And as shocked as I was to hear prison advice issued from a woman in floor-length Fen outerwear, I had to admit her suggestions seemed sound.
“Don’t be anyone’s fool, Tucker,” she continued. “But do not assume everyone around you is a criminal or out to harm you simply because they are locked up in here. Most of these inmates are in the same situation you find yourself—blameless, but too impoverished to get bail. They await justice with the hope the system will eventually exonerate them.”
Misty eyed, Tucker opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by the heavy door swinging open.
“Time’s up,” said the guard.
We offered Tucker a final hug, and watched unhappily as the guard cuffed him and led him away. The woman who brought us to this windowless room appeared in the door a moment later, then guided us back to the Control Building where we checked out and were given back our cell phones and other personals.
Outside, Madame waved to Mr. Raj, who was parked in the visitor’s area. As the Lincoln pulled up to us, Madame sighed deeply. “Oh, Clare, I feel so badly for the boy. I do wish there was something more we could
do.”
“There is,” I replied.
TWENTY
MADAME and I were both so intimidated by the quiet, ordered oppressiveness of Rikers Island that I don’t think we dared breathe normally until we’d crossed the bridge back over the East River and merged with the normal flow of traffic on the Grand Central Parkway.
For once, I felt happy to be stuck in the noisy chaos of pre-rush hour and I gazed out the window, watching an airplane wing its way over Rikers before making a banking approach to one of LaGuardia’s runways. I wondered how it would feel to be trapped inside that prison and hear—hour after hour, day in and day out—the whine of airplanes filled with happy, free people going about their lives just over your head.
“Where would you like to go, Mrs. Dubois?” asked Mr. Raj.
Madame offered him a blank stare. “Very good question.”
I cursed. “I’m so stupid. I should have asked Tucker where Jeff Lugar is being treated. That’s the kind of information that’s difficult to pry out of hospital administrators.”
Madame leaned forward. “Just make it Manhattan, for now,” she told Mr. Raj, who nodded and continued heading for the Queensboro Bridge.
“Have you a clue where he is, Clare?” Madame asked.
“I believe at least one ambulance came from St. Vincent’s,” I said.
Madame nodded. “That’s a start, my dear.” She fumbled in her tiny purse until she located her cell. “Now relax while I make a few inquiries.”
Madame dialed her cell, then spoke. “Dr. McTavish, please. It’s Mrs. Dubois calling.”
The good doctor immediately took the call. No surprise, since Madame had been seeing the man off and on for quite some time now. Well over seventy, Dr. McTavish bore a passing resemblance to Sean Connery. Like the actor who played 007, the esteemed oncologist from St. Vincent’s cut an imposing figure even at his advanced age. Unlike Mr. Connery, however, Dr. McTavish had retained most of his iron gray hair.