“Yep.”
“How’s everything in the high-rent district?”
“Fantastic.”
“January is ice-fishing time in Maine, ain’t it?”
“Yep.”
“I see by this calendar that it’s almost here.
A few weeks.”
“That’s right, man. Hardly enough time to get packed.”
“A right, man.”
Brewer dozed in the heat. There was a faint occasional breeze flowing through the cell block and if he sat on his bed near the cell door, it flowed over his damp skin. The next few days would be the longest in his entire life. His biggest fear was a reaction by the judge who had sentenced him. If that judge heard about his release, he might raise hell with the parole board members and force them to change their ruling. Five days to sweat out.
He heard a bump. Then a struggle. Then a drumming sound.
“Guard! Guard! Hey, man!” Rine started the clamor and soon every voice in the cell block was shouting. The noise smothered the soft drumming sound.
Guards came running at last but they were too late. When they opened his cell and cut him down, Jason Poole was dead from strangulation. He’d hanged himself with a length of plastic clothesline.
Poole had done a neat job of it. He’d carefully bundled up his clothing, destroyed all his personal papers, and on the back of each of his paintings he’d taped a piece of paper with the name of the recipient. Brewer received Poole’s favorite, a sun-filled portrait of Chili on a perfect point in an alder thicket. The woodcock was almost invisible in the shade.
“It’s probably the best thing he ever did,” the guard told him. “And that’s saying a lot.”
Prison was a ritual—reenacted daily, year in, year out. Prisoners came and went; generations came and went; and yet the ritual endured.
Cell doors were opened invariably at the same time each morning and closed at the same time each night. Breakfast time was fixed; lunch time never varied; supper was always supper; the mail was received, the showers were taken, the movies shown—every minute of the day was scheduled, organized, routinized. Ritualized. It was more than doing it by the numbers. It was ceremonial. Traditional. Expected. Reassuring.
And so it was with the discharge. The inmates who worked in the tailor shop prepared the civilian clothing of the dischargee the night before, itemized, invoiced, recorded. Ritualized.
The heat remained. There was no rain. Everything dried up. And the autumn foliage came early. The night before his discharge date, Brewer lay awake the entire night, a mass of contradictory emotions.
Sleep was a restless affair at best in prison. All night Brewer heard men yawning and pacing in their cells, heard them shout at the heavy snorer, heard the toilets flushing, smelled the drifting cigarette smoke, heard the slow pace of the guards.
He feared the last-minute hitch: the protest from the judge, the second thoughts by the parole board, the warden’s objection, the chance impediment, random, unexpected. He had to hang by his thumbs until noon.
All night the prison saying haunted him: “You’re not out until you’re out.” Meantime—sweat.
He must have eaten breakfast. He knew that he had been braced against the wall several times by small knots of men with furious faces. “Don’t fuck up, Brewer, or it’s your ass. You come back here on a parole violation and your life ain’t worth two farts on an old penny. Hear?” He was numb most of the morning with a roaring in the ears and a somnambulistic pace.
At nine the paper-signing began. And the settling of accounts. The directions on signing in with the halfway house in New York City—once a month. He smiled. By telephone, if necessary. A thimblerigged parole. He was being turned loose—flung from the prison. And into the arms of an unknown, for an unknown reason.
He would accept it—freedom—under any terms. Just get out. He would take his chances on the street. He would beat the odds.
By eleven he was convinced the fix was in. The parole board would sit at one, and he was to be dressed and ready to receive the last words. Kiss the ring in the throne room.
They gave him early lunch at eleven but he didn’t remember seeing it or eating it. A guard touched his arm and he followed the man.
It was a reverse of his arrival: He picked up his dunnage from his cell and horsed it on his shoulder in a mattress cover, following the guard, through one door—slam!—with shouts of farewell and curses in his ear, through another door—slam!—and another and another in succession, up and down corridors and steel catwalks, then down a long flight to the main door, then crossing the yard to the receiving and discharge rooms.
They took his dunnage and they counted it and examined it and gave him a receipt for it. He was stripped naked again, surrendering everything down to his socks and shorts.
Then he was led to the tailoring room and given street clothes. As he took each item, the guard sang out the name, and another inmate checked it off on the tally sheet.
“One pair shorts, size thirty-two. One pair socks, size fourteen. One T-shirt, size large. One dress shirt, fifteen and a half, thirty-four. One pair of street slacks, waist thirty-two. One street jacket, size forty-two. One pair of shoes, size twelve. One belt. One necktie. Sign here, please.” To the end it was a world of numbers and numbering.
These weren’t the clothes he’d worn in. Those had gone long ago on someone else’s back. And what he now received had prison written all over it. Gray stretch polyester pants, washable brown jacket with badly cut lapels, prison shoes, black, and a worn string of a tie for a shirt that was pilled around the collar. It badly needed ironing.
It is said that you can tell how many friends you make in prison by the clothing the prison tailors give you. And what Brewer got was a token of the friendless man.
“Hey, asshole.” One of the tailors put a hand on Brewer’s chest. “Story is you bought your way out of here. You got Poole’s slot. And that sucks, man.”
At one o’clock he was led to the counter in the same room he’d entered six months before in a sleeting rain. As he was signing the last papers, he heard the catcalls and whistles and looked up. He saw the three cars of the parole board arriving, framed perfectly in the open doorway—first the red Mercury, then the white Saab, and last—not the blue Cadillac, but a new green Mercedes-Benz. And that’s what had drawn the whistles.
Brewer bowed his head and laughed softly. His life was worth at least one German automobile to somebody. Or at least his death was.
He signed his name with a flourish on the last piece of paper.
4
Brewer walked through the gateway and out of prison.
About twenty yards ahead, in a No Parking zone, was a powder-blue Mercedes convertible. At first he didn’t recognize the woman who stepped out of the car. It had been six months.
Later he thought it was the way she held her head that he remembered. Or the legs: All through his trial the jury had stared at her legs.
“Hello,” she said.
He nodded at her.
“How are you?” she asked.
He studied her cautiously. She looked younger. He wondered what he looked like.
She tried again: “Handsome painting. Did you do it?”
“How’d you know I was getting out?”
“The court. Have you forgotten? I’m still listed as your attorney. If you’d called me, I would have helped you fill out the forms.”
He nodded and stared boldly at her, at her tailored suit, her hair, her legs. It was shocking—going from that walled-in locker room, that bricked-up madness with its violence and street ways to this soft and civilized, money-pampered loveliness.
He stepped past her to the trunk of the car and waited for her to unlock it.
He remembered the quarrels they’d had.
She had told him he could not defend an innocent plea. No one cared whether he was innocent. It was a different game. What he had to do was use the few moves that were open to him to negotiate a le
sser sentence. He must spend as few days as possible in prison.
He insisted. She entered a plea of innocent, defended it resolutely, and gave the prosecution a good fight. But it was hopeless. A jury of his peers didn’t believe a word he said. They found him guilty. And the judge gave him the maximum sentence with the stern recommendation that he never be paroled.
And not once did she say “I told you so.”
When he first met her he thought she was Irish—she had the marvelous coloring of women in the West of Ireland he had seen so often when he fished for salmon there. A gift from the rain, they would say.
Not Irish, she told him later. Vermont stock, originally English. Cornish, in fact. From Land’s End.
He looked again at all those other features he had seen day after day all through the trial. The thick black hair, all soft waves and loose curls. And under black brows, blue eyes set in whites as unblemished as a baby’s. Eyes with a direct, open look that held the complete attention of the jury.
She had rarely smiled during his trial—he had given her little to smile at. And when she did, it was mirth mixed with a dash of cynicism at each corner of the mouth. The wary smile of a lawyer who had been lied to by many clients. In sunshine, beside her automobile now, she smiled—warmly.
Lastly, on her finger, the ring he had stared at every time she’d made a lawyerly note on her courtroom pad. Mrs. Madeline Hale.
He looked at the bus ticket he was dumbly holding in his hand and flung it in the air. They drove off in silence.
In spite of the panting summer heat and the grave stillness of the air, autumn was arriving. Under a cerulean blue sky, fall colors swept from horizon to horizon—umbers and tans, yellows and reds, magentas and golds, on the trees and on the ground and falling through the sunlit air. Sweet gum was the first to go—a waxy deep maroon color—along with the mitten-shaped red sassafras. Jason Poole had told him that.
The extraordinary beauty of the countryside filled him with rage. That patient acquiescence. He was not ready for acquiescence.
He looked at her, and her femininity was almost overwhelming. Those prison officials were insane to have let him ride off in a car with an attractive woman after six months behind those walls.
He wasn’t prepared for this tide of rage that was welling up in him. He wanted to kill someone. Anyone.
“I reserved a room for you,” she said.
“Don’t talk.”
They rode back to the city through the beauty of late summer under that limitless sky in silence.
She dropped him off at the Hotel Ashbourne—“A Residential Hotel with Amenities.” On Second Avenue in the Twenties.
“I reserved a room for the next two weeks,” she said. “Cooking facilities included. I got your trunks and suitcases from storage and put them in the room. Here.” She handed him his checkbook. “If you’ll stop around the office, I’ll give you all your other papers. And the power of attorney.”
He thrust the painting at her. Chili on a perfect point. Tap tap tap went Jason Poole’s heels on the wall. As he watched, she put it back into the trunk of her car and drove off.
Brewer stood on the street corner in the wilting heat, observing her Mercedes blend in with the auto traffic. It was a Mercedes that had gotten him out of prison. Then he looked at his “Residential Hotel with Amenities” and drew back. He was not quite ready for that. He turned and walked away.
Free. He walked unimpeded. He felt naked and exposed under the dangerous sky, without those protective prison walls and the guards.
His anger had a new companion. Fear. He felt as though he’d been ejected from a womb. Reluctantly born. And helpless in a hostile world.
He paused in a doorway and looked around him. Where was the attack going to come from? A sniper from a rooftop? A passing car? What baffled Brewer most was—why would anyone pay off a parole board with a new Mercedes plus two other unspecified gifts to get him out of prison? It had to be to kill him. But he wasn’t worth killing.
He knew no state secrets; he wasn’t a potential blackmailer; he knew of no one who wanted revenge on him. He shook his head at the puzzle. He could die from an assassin’s bullet without ever knowing why.
On Third Avenue, he found the Tipperary Pub. It was dark and cool inside, and the cold glass of beer tasted like benediction. His sense of freedom—the enormous range of options after the optionless world of prison—was intoxicating. A leaping joy mixed with a lurking rage: Brewer didn’t know whether to hug the world or go on a rampage.
Or to go into hiding. He carefully avoided sitting with his back to the door.
Brewer knew what he should do next: find Marvel. Marvel had been his backup in Central Park during the arms sale. Handy Andy Marvel, the no-show. His testimony could have kept Brewer out of prison. What had happened to Marvel? Had he set Brewer up?
The fastest way to find Andy Marvel was to find his brother Freddy. Brewer finished his beer and went back into the city’s heat. In the hotel he opened his trunks from storage, changed into his own clothes, threw his prison outfit down the garbage shaft, and went uptown to Murray’s.
There was always a hush at Murray’s—an air of tension and concentration. This was no neighborhood billiard parlor. This was Murray’s. Pumping balls with a cue stick was a serious activity—on twenty pool tables, all in championship condition. At this hour of the day many of them were covered in dark green rubberized cloth. Draped corpses in a morgue.
Voices barely murmured. Eyes scowled. And the only sounds were the clicking of the balls and the whack and bump in the pockets, and the occasional thumping of a cue handle on the linoleum floor to call for a new rack-up.
Along the back wall were four huge cathedral windows curtained in thick green baize to block the sun. At Murray’s, it was always three o’clock in the morning.
Many great confrontations had occurred there; the walls were covered with photographs to commemorate them. Near the entrance was a huge glass case exhibiting silver cups and plaques.
Brewer hired a table with a clear view of the entrance and began pumping balls while watching the stairway entrance.
After a while a few familiar faces appeared. Regulars. They hardly glanced at him but they’d seen him. Brewer finished off a rack of balls, then turned and made a deliberate survey of the faces. That was the first time he saw the man in the black suit, sitting in the disused shoeshine chair, looking out of place.
He sat there stiffly, exuding a severe and disapproving air. In his lap lay clasped hands that had never held a pool cue. The black suit was nondescript, the white shirt noncommittal, the blue polka-dot tie an afterthought. He had the lean and authoritative air of an undertaker’s man come for the body.
Brewer decided to try the Off-Track Betting center.
There was a listlessness in the sweltering streets, the exhausted air of a city too long under siege, waiting for rescue. A bus with broken air conditioning rolled by, shooting a cloud of dirty exhaust; bare arms projected from the open windows; sweat-wet faces looked out at Brewer with gaping mouths. All the buildings seemed to sway in the rising heat waves.
Marvel’s brother Freddy loved the ponies and his favorite Off-Track Betting center was down at 34th and Lexington. Men stood in the small room, leaning on elbows on green wall-counters, reading the charts: PREVIOUS DAY’S RESULTS, TUESDAY, ROOSEVELT, MONTICELLO. The signs over the betting windows said SELLING or CASHING, SELLING. The men all held betting slips about the size of an open book of matches which they marked with great thought, furtively. Over their heads were television screens posting the races, the horses, and the odds.
One of the horses in the third at Belmont was named Marvel.
“A cold front,” said one man. “Tomorrow, they say.”
“Twelve days in a row over a hundred degrees.”
“I told you. It’s the greenhouse effect.”
The place was all windows; he would be visible in there from a block away. So Brewer took up a position in a c
offee shop across the street. He sat on a stool near the back where he couldn’t be seen too easily, and from there watched the OTB doorway.
And that’s when he saw the man in the black suit again, strolling past the OTB office. With black hair and olive skin, he could have been any Mediterranean type—Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arab. Perhaps Turkish. In a few steps he was gone around the corner.
Brewer quit at five. Marvel’s brother Freddy was probably holed up until dark. So Brewer went back to his hotel.
He was out on the street again at nine that night, ate dinner somewhere—he couldn’t have told you where an hour later—and clambered up the steel-edged stairs to Murray’s. Each stair riser had an enameled sign, many of them badly chipped, advertising defunct cigarettes and hair oils. The Burma Shave sign warned: HE MARRIED GRACE WITH A SCRATCHY FACE. HE ONLY HAD ONE DAY OF GRACE.
The night pace at Murray’s was brisker. The tension greater. Most of the tables were in use. And some serious games had drawn small bands of spectators. Brewer positioned himself at the rear in the midst of a crowd and watched the front door. And in walked the man in the black suit.
He walked from table to table, observing the games, looking at the faces, then moving on. At one point Brewer glanced up and found the man staring back at him. The eyes were humorless and unwavering. Then the man turned away.
After an hour and a half, Brewer quit. When he left, he crossed the street and stood in a doorway to see if the man in the black suit came out. He did and hailed a cab without a glance at Brewer.
It happened so fast Brewer almost missed it. It was after nine the next night in Murray’s as he sat with a group of spectators, watching a game. He kept his eyes on the stairway. Abruptly, through the railing, Freddy Marvel’s head came just level with the floor and paused. He could have passed for his older brother’s twin. Freddy’s eyes studied the crowd. Then the old man at the counter said something to him. Freddy’s head ducked. When Brewer got to the street, Freddy was gone.
So. The kid brother had been tipped. And now he would avoid his familiar haunts. But Freddy Marvel was the only way to Andy Marvel. Brewer had to find another way to tag him.
Foxcatcher Page 9
