Presidents' Day

by Seth Margolis

  She just stared at him, arms folded across her chest.

  “It’s Julian, Sarah. I know it. He’s what connects all of this: Sandifer, the prostitute, Lightstone, now Moore.”

  She blinked as tears spilled from her eyes. Then she went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 24

  Chapter 18

  Mark Verbraski lived in a large, 1960s-era center hall colonial on the outskirts of Williston, New York, if a town of ten thousand residents could be said to have an outskirts. Zach parked in front and went slowly up the front walk, which was being reclaimed by crabgrass and weeds. He’d called ahead and been told by a groggy-sounding Verbraski that he was not interested in discussing the prison uprising, which had occurred when he was warden. Zach had decided to make the two-hour drive from Manhattan anyway. Now, looking up at the peeling paint, grimy windows, and sagging gutters on Verbraski’s home, he wondered if he’d made the right decision. On a street of nearly identical houses, all of them in good condition with well-tended lawns, Verbraski’s house looked almost sinister in its decrepitude. He rang the doorbell and a few moments later the front door opened.

  Verbraski was as unkempt as his house. He appeared to be about sixty, with a pale, unshaven face and blue eyes that seemed dimmed from overuse. Tall and thin, he had on a white T-shirt and baggy khaki pants, both in need of washing, or perhaps replacement.

  “What do you want?” His voice was gruff, with a liquid undertone, as if he were gargling.

  “I called you yesterday. Zach Springer?”

  “Not interested.” He started to shut the door. Zach placed a hand on the knob and pushed his way in.

  “It’s important.”

  “How many books about Williston does the world need? How many articles? We’ve had two documentary films already. You think we need another one?”

  “I’m not writing a book or making a film, I told you that yesterday.”

  Verbraski squinted, as if trying to recall a conversation held decades earlier. “Then what do you want?”

  “Can I come in?”

  Verbraski hesitated, then turned and headed into the house. Zach followed him through a dark hallway, past a living room empty of all furniture except a huge flat-screen TV on a pedestal and a leather armchair positioned directly in front of it, past a completely empty dining room, and into the kitchen. Verbraski sat on one side of a built-in breakfast nook. A half-full tumbler of clear liquid was waiting for him on the table.

  “My wife took everything that wasn’t nailed down.” He patted the table. “Thank God this was nailed down. I keep meaning to buy some new furniture,” Verbraski said, as if in response to a question. “But I can’t seem to find the time.” He took a long sip from the tumbler and sighed, sending a vodka-scented breeze across the table.

  Zach had read about the hearings online. Three weeks of testimony by inmates, guards, and Verbraski himself before a blue-ribbon panel appointed by the governor. In the final report, which ran over seven hundred pages, Verbraski had not been charged with complicity in the bloody outcome of the Williston prison uprising, but he had been held accountable for the inhumane conditions that led up to the riot. He was fired by Acorn, the company that had bought the prison from the government, and was denied his accumulated pension benefits.

  “The hearings must have been tough for you.”

  Verbraski’s rheumy eyes expressed how far short Zach’s assessment fell. “Yes, very tough indeed,” he said with a phonily prim voice. “You want something to drink?”

  Zach shook his head. Verbraski reached for a nearby bottle of Absolute and refilled his tumbler. His wife and pension and furniture were gone, but he wasn’t skimping on quality booze.

  “When you were warden at Williston, the prison was owned by Acorn Corporation, which was controlled by Julian Mellow.”

  “What exactly is it you want from me?”

  “I’m looking into the connection between Julian Mellow and an inmate from the time of the uprising, Billy Sandifer.”

  What little color there was in Verbraski’s cheeks drained away.

  “You know, I’ve had twenty or twenty-five people stop by to interview me about that time, and I’ve turned them all down. But none of them ever mentioned those two names in the same sentence.”

  “What’s the connection?”

  “Connection? One owned the prison. The other lived inside it.”

  “That’s it?” When Verbraski didn’t reply, Zach decided to try a different tack to keep him engaged. “The commission report stated that Acorn put pressure on you to cut back on things like sanitation and food service.”

  “I worked at Williston my entire career, worked my way up from night shift guard, did you know that? I was warden when the state decided to privatize the place.” The way Verbraski drew out the first syllable of privatize, it sounded both silly and sinister. “When you work for the government, you don’t exactly have a blank check. But I never knew cutbacks like the ones Acorn had me make. It started with small stuff, like less chicken in the Sunday stew, less cleaning fluid in the mop pails. Then it got more serious, like clean inmate uniforms every two weeks instead of twice a week, smaller food rations, longer shifts for the guards, which didn’t exactly make them more kindly toward the inmate population. You know, if we hadn’t had that prisoner uprising, I sometimes think the guards might have rioted.”

  Zach remembered running the numbers on Acorn, which had fallen far short of its promise following the buyout by Mellow Partners. His job had been to do the financial calculations and projections while Mellow communicated with the management teams of the companies he controlled, including Acorn. He hadn’t known that the numbers he had blithely calculated back then had resulted in conditions at Williston so dismal that riots had ensued. Then again, he hadn’t asked.

  “Weren’t there state inspectors?”

  “’Course there were. And they reported to officials over in Albany who liked their golf outings and Caribbean vacations, all courtesy of the Acorn Corporation. Hell, I went on a few of those outings myself. First class all the way.” He raised his glass to toast the memory.

  “Did Julian Mellow ever contact you personally about cutbacks?”

  “Does God speak directly to his flock?”

  “Some people think he does.”

  “Well, God never spoke to me, and neither did Julian Mellow. Some guy who reported to some guy who reported to some guy who reported to Mellow would call me and tell me we had to cut expenses another 5 percent. That’s how it worked.”

  “So you never met Mellow.”

  Verbraski hesitated before shaking his head.

  “You did meet him.”

  “Do I look like I hobnob with his sort? And why do you care, anyway?”

  Zach switched gears. “Tell me about Billy Sandifer.”

  “He was an inmate. Had a hard-on for free trade or something. Blew up a building in Boston.” His voice had tightened, and he began shifting his tumbler across the tabletop.

  “You seem uncomfortable talking about him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “What I know…” He raised the drink and, finding it empty, reached for the vodka bottle. But he changed his mind and put it down. “You want to hear what I know? Billy Sandifer is an animal.”

  “He protested for the rights of poor people in Third World countries, children working in sweatshops.”

  “He set a bomb off in a building and killed a man.”

  “No one was supposed to get hurt.”

  “That’s what he said. Sandifer was bad, just bad, one of the worst I ever met, and I worked in a prison most of my life. He didn’t believe in anything except making trouble. Blowing things up. Hurting people. Free trade? Ten years earlier it would’ve been Vietnam, or hell, civil rights. Any cause would do, so long as it gave him cover to cause mayhem.”

  Zach tried to square Verbraski’s description of
Sandifer with what he’d read about him: the high school dropout, globetrotting protester, articulate spokesman for a cause who wanted only to give the poorer countries a fair shake.

  “He negotiated between prison management and the inmates during the siege,” Zach said. “He got time off for what he did.”

  “Yeah, he really saved the day. Five inmates and three guards killed.”

  “That wasn’t Sandifer’s fault, he was seeking a peaceful resolution. The National Guard killed them.”

  “Funny that the five inmates who were shot just happened to be the ringleaders. There were fifty-three inmates and twelve hostages in the cafeteria, and the National Guard somehow managed to shoot the leaders. After that, the surviving inmates basically caved.”

  “Someone on the inside tipped off the National Guard?”

  Verbraski shook his head.

  “Then how—”

  “Sandifer.”

  “Let me get this straight—Sandifer told the National Guard who the leaders were, and where they’d be in the cafeteria once the siege started?”

  “That’s one theory. But you know, it went off too cleanly, you know what I mean? Even knowing the lay of the land, how do you pick off five men, dressed identically, in a room of fifty-three?”

  “What’s the other theory?” Verbraski just stared, waiting for him to figure it out.

  “Sandifer killed them?” After a beat Verbraski nodded very slowly.

  “None of the inmates knew, but some of the guards suspected. Nothing was ever proven. The National Guard had orders to fire at the ceiling unless they were directly attacked. The inmates had knives and a few rifles, taken from the hostages, that’s all. Somehow, five inmates were shot.”

  “And the three prison guards?”

  “Had their throats cut. Practically decapitated. Happened while the National Guard was storming the prison. Supposedly that’s why they fired, seeing the bodies like that. But we never found one inmate who saw anyone slit their throats. Nobody knows who did it.”

  “What’s your theory?”

  “Sandifer. He set the whole thing up. One of the ringleaders survived long enough to tell us that Sandifer got the inmates to kill my three men, to justify the open-fire order. But we never had proof beyond the words of a dying man.”

  “The other ringleaders?”

  “None of them survived. Ballistics showed that two were killed by the National Guard.”

  “The other two?”

  “Killed by rifles taken from the hostages.”

  “In other words, killed by their fellow inmates.”

  “By Sandifer, you mean.” When Zach started to say something, Verbraski held up a hand. “There’s no proof, okay? But the whole thing was too neat. No witnesses to say who killed the guards, other than the one inmate who talked in the ambulance and died before he got to the hospital.”

  “Sandifer had less than three years to go, and was up for parole in a year. Why would he risk that?”

  “A few murders for a year of freedom. People have done more for less.” But Verbraski sounded unconvinced.

  “There must have been some other incentive.” Verbraski reached for the bottle and this time he poured. “Who did Sandifer negotiate with?”

  “Couple of guys from the governor’s office, National Guard big shots.”

  “You?”

  He waited a beat, then: “Sure.”

  “Did someone tell him to kill the inmates?”

  “I didn’t. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have told him to kill my own men, slit their throats. We’re talking longtime employees, family men.” His voice faded to a whisper. “Friends.”

  “But someone did. And they offered him more than a few months’ jump on his parole.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was Julian Mellow involved in negotiations?”

  “God doesn’t negotiate. He sends his apostles.”

  “I worked for him at the time. Believe me, he was very close to the situation. It killed him to see one of his investments blowing up like that. And I don’t recall anyone being sent by him to negotiate.”

  Verbraski’s eyebrows arched. “You work for Mellow?”

  “Used to. Every day the siege at Williston continued, he was on the front page of the tabloids, the evil financier mistreating inmates to fatten the bottom line. It ate him up. He wanted the takeover ended at all costs.”

  “Obviously you were closer to the situation than I was,” Verbraski said with undisguised irony.

  “Why did Sandifer kill the prisoners and guards?”

  “To end the standoff. It worked.”

  “Who told Sandifer to do it?”

  “I got stuff to do.” Verbraski stood up and walked unsteadily across the kitchen. He stopped in the middle of the room and turned. “You’re asking questions about two of the most dangerous men I ever met, and I was a prison warden.”

  “Why is Julian Mellow dangerous?”

  “Because he hates to lose. He’ll do anything, and I mean fuck-all anything, to avoid it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He owned the company that owned the company that owned the prison I used to run.”

  “But you said you had no direct contact with him.”

  He headed for the back door. “Just leave it alone, whatever it is you’re looking for.” He walked outside, brushing the frame of the doorway on the way. Zach followed him. The backyard was, if anything, more disheveled than the front, the grass having gone to seed, twigs and leaves and bits of garbage littered about. Verbraski picked up a rake from the ground and began running it across a patch of crabgrass. He seemed neither capable of nor interested in the task.

  “I lost everything,” he said. “My wife, kids, every cent I had. I think of those guards sometimes, the ones with their throats cut, and I try to remind myself that compared to them I’m a lucky guy. But that only goes so far, you know?”

  Zach didn’t see the point in pressing Verbraski further.

  “Here’s my card, if there’s anything else you want to tell me.” He placed his old Mellow Partners card, with everything crossed out but his name and cell number, on a dilapidated lawn chair. As he circled the house he passed the garage, which was open. Inside was a gleaming silver Escalade. He stopped. The flat-panel TV in the living room must have cost at least a few thousand dollars. The vodka was forty bucks a bottle, not the brand you’d expect a penniless drunk to swill. And now the car, eighty grand at least.

  “Nice car,” Zach shouted from across the yard.

  After a long silence, Verbraski looked up at him through milky, bloodshot eyes. “You have no idea what you’re getting into,” he said. “You think you know, but you don’t.”

  He got up and tottered back into the house.

  Chapter 19

  Julian Mellow watched a recording of the previous day’s Republican debate, fast-forwarding through most of it. None of the four candidates had managed to make much of an impression, he thought. Certainly not Harry Lightstone. Everyone, even the two most conservative candidates, wanted to carve out the largest segment of the party, the centrist, moderate segment, and so refrained from saying anything that could be construed as controversial. The only time any of them sounded remotely passionate was when they talked about the incumbent president. Without a compelling agenda of their own, their best hope for energizing the electorate was to attack Paul Nessin. Gabe Rooney, a ten-term congressman from Missouri and the frontrunner by a large margin, managed to get particularly worked up over the president’s tax increases, designed to relieve the gargantuan federal debt inherited from his predecessor. “You can’t tax your way out of debt,” he said, reiterating the theme of his candidacy. “We have to grow ourselves out of debt.” In contrast, Lightstone seemed almost conciliatory, refusing to endorse a blanket repeal of Nessin’s tax increases, which was fine for the general election but a guaranteed ticket to oblivion in the Republican primaries. One exchange did, however, give Julian ho
pe.

  The moderator asked about foreign policy differences with the current administration, and the first three candidates to answer, including Rooney, replied with bland observations about the importance of European allies and the need to build consensus while not caving to foreign interests. The public showed little interest in foreign policy, other than its impact on homeland security, and candidates rarely mentioned the world beyond the nation’s borders. Then it was Lightstone’s turn.

  “This administration has a disgraceful track record of cozying up to foreign dictators in return for economic benefits. To my way of thinking, this is a devil’s bargain and cannot be tolerated.” Lightstone waited for applause from the audience, and when it wasn’t forthcoming he cleared his throat and plunged ahead. “In Kamalia, Laurent Boymond brutalizes his own people, imprisons thousands without trial, and yet the Nessin administration remains completely closemouthed. In fact, we continue to grant Kamalia trade benefits so that the flow of copper and cobalt to this country remains uninterrupted. That’s a devil’s bargain, to my way of thinking, and in a Lightstone administration it will not continue. The people of Kamalia deserve freedom and it is our obligation as the most powerful country on earth to nurture that freedom, not continue to do business with a corrupt, oppressive regime like that of Laurent Boymond.”

  The moderator signaled for the next candidate to begin. Governor Alex Fortune from New Mexico, whose sole advantage in the race was that his mother had been born in the Dominican Republic, thus making him a potential favorite among Hispanic voters, was caught staring at Lightstone with open-mouthed incredulity, as if his opponent had launched into a tirade against pet ownership or Fourth of July parades and not a rather tepid call for a new policy toward an obscure African dictatorship. He regrouped quickly and launched into a dissertation on the importance of improving relations with countries like Mexico and Venezuela, places at least some Americans could locate on a map.