Murder at the Foul Line

by Otto Penzler

  Freddie may feel better, but he looks terrible. He’s gasping for breath and he’s bright red from his forehead to his throat. When I let go of him, he falls back onto the pillow and brings his hand to his chest. Freddie’s twenty-two years old, a computer nerd who created a virus that shut down six of the biggest Web sites on the Net.

  “How long have you been Campbell’s snitch?”

  “Since I got here. He grabbed me the first week and took me to his office. You know about the office?”

  I shake my head. Campbell is a middle-aged muscle brain who’s been walking a tier for three decades. A veteran of the worst prisons New York State has to offer, he generally manages to restrain himself at Menands. Still, his personal violence surrounds him, a sour stink detectable by an experienced con at a distance of a hundred yards.

  “That’s what Campbell calls it: my office. It’s behind the main furnace, a coal room. You know, from the time when they heated with coal. It’s not used for anything now, and when you’re inside, the furnace is so loud nobody can hear you even if there’s someone around. Which most of the time there isn’t.” He pauses long enough to wipe his nose, then jumps back in. “Campbell told me things…. things he’d do to me if I didn’t… I was scared, Bubba. I was never in trouble before I came here. For all I knew, Campbell could do anything he wanted to and get away with it. I didn’t know where to turn.”

  Now that I see a way to get my coke back and exact a little revenge for Spooky at the same time, I can’t even fake being mad. I stretch, yawn, take a breath. “I’m gonna need you, Freddie, so I want you to stay alive for a few days. Don’t be alone, no matter what. Stay in a group and Campbell won’t be able to get to you. Remember, it’s only for a couple of days.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “I’ll talk to the trusty on the floor, see that he watches your back.” I get up, take a step, then turn back to Freddie. I’m smiling now, a genuine smile. “Was I right?” I ask.

  “Right?”

  “Do you feel better? Now that it’s out in the open.”

  “Yeah,” he tells me, “I do.”

  Coach Poole makes an announcement after Wednesday’s practice. The league’s championship game will be made up on the following night with no civilians present. This is good news for me because there won’t be a practice on game day and I’ll have enough time to get to the coal room unseen. Unlike Attica with its many checkpoints, Menands runs mostly on the honor system. The fence and the razor wire surrounding the prison are there to reassure the community, not to prevent an escape. The population is controlled by a very simple and very potent threat: you fuck up, you get sent to some horrible place where your survival (not to mention your sexuality) is anything but assured. Most prisoners at Menands aren’t willing to risk their privileged status.

  Later that night, Tiny and Road press me, but I don’t reveal much. I tell them to be patient and to stay clear of Freddie Morrow. I tell them I hope to recover the product soon and that I don’t need their help. They don’t care for the underlying message, but they seem to accept it. Nevertheless, within a few days, should I fail to deliver, I know they’ll begin to suspect a double cross.

  I wake up on Thursday, take a shower, then skip breakfast and head for the locker room. Freddie’s already there, hanging our pressed uniforms in our metal lockers. Once upon a time, the lockers were a uniform gray, the color of pewter, but they’ve tarnished over the years and now have a mottled overgrown look, as if the victim of some exotic fungus.

  “You ready, Freddie?” I ask. “You ready to go to work?”

  “Bubba, I…”

  “Don’t start that Bubba shit again. I have something I need you to do.”

  “What is it?”

  “This afternoon, two o’clock, Campbell is gonna be workin’ in the library. I want you to go there, talk to him, tell him that I know you snitched us out.”

  “He’ll kill me.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you’re gonna be in the library. You even enough, you get eighty-sixed.”

  “Then he’ll get me later.”

  “He’s already gonna get you later.” I put a foot up on the bench that runs in front of the lockers. “It’s your chance, Freddie. Your chance to be a man for the first time in your miserable life, your chance to stand on your own two feet.” I hold up a finger. “Plus, you can help yourself at the same time. Because I’m telling you, when Campbell hears what you have to say, he’s gonna be a lot more worried about me than you.”

  Freddie thinks it over for a moment, the possibility of deflecting Campbell’s wrath onto me obviously appealing. If he gains an ally in the process, so much the better. “Whatta ya want me to say?”

  “Tell Campbell that I put the pieces together on my own. I know he killed Spooky and snatched my product because he was the only one who had the opportunity. I know you snitched because… well, I know you snitched because you’re you. Likewise, because you’re you, when I threatened to shank your ass, you confessed. Those stitches in your ear and that bandage oughta be proof enough that I meant business.”

  “And that’s it? Just that I admitted talking to him?”

  “Yeah, you opened up because you were in fear of your life and now you’re trying to make it good by telling him the truth.” I put my arm around his shoulder, let my voice drop. “Campbell’s gonna ask you a lot of questions. He’s gonna want to know everything you said to me and everything I said to you. It’s only natural, right?”

  Freddie nods. “Right.”

  “So you tell him everything you told me about his threats and where he took you before he delivered them. The only thing you don’t tell him, Freddie, is that I asked you to come forward. That’s the one teeny-tiny thing you keep to yourself.” I give his shoulder a squeeze. “That’s gonna be our little secret.”

  I go from Freddie to Warden Brook’s office. He tells me that he’s spoken to the two refs, and I guarantee him a win. We’re one-point underdogs by now.

  “You’re not worried about losing Spooky?”

  “You remember when you brought me here, Warden? You remember I promised you a championship? Well, tonight I’m gonna keep that promise.”

  I know the warden bets on every game, always on the Tigers, even when I tell him the team’s so worn-out we’d get our asses kicked by the Menands High School Barracudas. He’s a fan is what he is, a former athlete who lives through his favorite team, which is us.

  “So make room in the trophy case,” I declare, “because we’re bringin’ the cup home.”

  My next stop is in the computer room, where I find my teacher, Cliff Entwhistle, hard at work. Cliff is a big-time gambler, but unlike Warden Brook, he’s willing to wager against the Tigers. Though I only bet with the team (and once threatened to crush the fingers of a skinny point guard I thought was shaving points), I don’t bet every game.

  “What’s the word?” I ask him. “Out on the yard?”

  “Without Spooky, Menands doesn’t have a chance.”

  “Good, because I want to get a bet down.” I retrieve a pair of C-notes from their resting place in the crotch of my underwear and hand them over. If the coke deal had gone down as planned, it’d be a lot more, but I’m doing the best I can. “I guarantee a win here,” I tell him. “You can take it to the bank.”

  Cliff nods. “Thanks, Bubba.”

  “Don’t thank me. There’s something I need you to do. Like, right now.”

  An hour later I make my way down a long flight of stairs to the furnace room. Two stories high and at least a hundred feet long, the room houses a state-of-the-art, fully automated boiler the size and shape of a diesel locomotive. It being May and warm, the unit is only producing hot water. Still, the steady hiss of the flame is loud enough for my purposes. I work my way along the north wall, the route taken by Campbell when he recruited Freddie, avoiding a pair of cameras mounted on the ceiling. The cameras use heat-sensitive film and are in place to detect fires.

  The coal ro
om, Campbell’s office, is not as Freddie described it. I expect a large empty space, but the room is cluttered with discarded desks. There are desks upside down, on their sides, on three legs, desks piled one on top of the other. Desk drawers, heaped in a corner, rise halfway to the ceiling.

  It’s now one o’clock. Freddie’s scheduled to make his confession at two. That leaves me an hour to find my product. Assuming it’s here at all, that Campbell doesn’t have another hideaway, that he didn’t take his prize home with him, maybe peddle the weight to a street dealer.

  I begin to search, at first systematically, then more and more frantically as time passes. A pair of overhead lights don’t respond to a switch next to the door, and the only illumination splashes in through the open doorway. The desks are extremely dusty. The dust coats my throat and mouth as I work. When I run my fingers over my brush cut, it feels like I’m dragging them through mud.

  Somewhere around one forty-five, I force myself to slow down. I tell myself I have one of those unforeseen problems that crop up from time to time, no matter how carefully I try to plan my activities. I tell myself they happen to everybody. It’s not God getting me, like I sometimes thought before I learned to control my anger.

  I set out to draw ten deep breaths, each one slower and deeper than the last, just the way I’ve been trained. I don’t get past the fifth before I realize there’s another way, and if I’d only taken a moment to think before I started ripping desks apart, I could have saved myself a lot of work.

  I’m standing just to the left of the door, looking for a good place to hide, when Campbell walks into the room. He is not alone. A dealer named Redmond Mitchell is with him. At the tail end of a ten-to-life bit, Red is also a veteran of New York’s maximum security institutions. His stay at Menands is theoretically the final step in his rehabilitation.

  Coming from the intensely bright furnace room, neither Red nor Campbell sees me until I step in front of them.

  “What’s up, guys? You lookin’ for me?”

  Campbell is maybe five-ten. A layer of fat covers a much thicker layer of muscle on his heavy boned frame. At one time, I suppose, he was quite the brawler, an upstate redneck who would have been a convict if he hadn’t become a screw But now he’s nearing fifty, a hard drinker who maintains his self-image by terrorizing inmates, like Freddie Morrow, who are in no position to fight back.

  Red is another matter. He’s younger, in much better condition, a man who maintained his personal dignity over many years in many prisons. I see Campbell glance at him, smiling, convinced that Red is an ally in this war. He’s wrong.

  “Red,” I explain, “what I gotta do here is convince this dumb-as-shit screw to show me where he’s hidden my cocaine. Most likely, it’d be better if you weren’t here to see it.”

  I know that Red’s not afraid of me. I also know that he’s got a release date for the end of the summer and the last thing he reeds is a serious beef. “No harm, no foul,” he says. “I’m not out no money and I ain’t got a dog in this fight.” He backs through the door, then asks, “You gonna win tonight, Bubba?”

  “I guarantee it.”

  “Thass good, man. ’Cause I took the points big-time.”

  Red steps into the furnace room and his footsteps are instantly masked by the hiss of the boiler. He might be lingering a few feet from the open doorway, or he might be on the moon. Campbell stares up at me and I stare down at him. I wonder if he’s looked through my file, tried to get an idea of who he was up against. But, no, careful is not his style. Freddie told him about the coke and he wanted it and that was all she wrote. When he found Spooky in the locker room, he could have backed off, or busted Spooky and taken the credit. But he was already counting the money, already holding it in his sweaty palm.

  “Where’s my product, Percy?”

  The shiny white surface of his bald scalp slowly reddens. Most likely, in his entire career, no con ever spoke to him this way. But then, in times past, he always had plenty of backup. Now he’s on his own. He can’t call for help, even if he could make himself heard over the din of the furnace, without everything coming out. Spooky, Freddie, the cocaine, everything. Officer Percy Campbell is helpless.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Yablonsky.”

  “You can do better than that.” I watch his hand inch toward his back pocket. It’s pathetic, really. “You wanna go that route, Percy, it’s all right, but I don’t see how it’s gonna do you any good.” I step forward until we’re less than an arm’s length apart.

  Credit where credit is due, Campbell’s right hand dives into his pocket and he snarls, “See you in hell, ya Jew bastard.”

  Despite the epithet and the made-for-TV dialogue, death is not on today’s agenda. First because I’m not a killer, and second because Officer Campbell’s body would draw far too much attention. Most likely, he’s already a suspect in Spooky’s murder.

  I grab his wrist, pin his hand in his pocket, then put all 270 pounds into a looping right that makes a sound like a bat slammed into a watermelon as it crashes into his chest. His eyes roll up, his legs wobble, then fail him altogether. He drops to the floor and stops breathing.

  For a minute, I think I’m gonna have to give him CPR, maybe catch some fatal screw disease, but then his eyes snap into focus as he rises to a sitting position, draws a painfully ragged breath, and begins to gasp.

  I squat down, remove the knife from his pocket and a can of pepper spray from a holder on his belt. I toss them into the furnace room where they can be easily recovered.

  “Time for a reality check, Percy. First, you’re completely on your own here. You couldn’t call for help even if there was someone to hear you. Not without risking a murder charge. Second, you’re a middle-aged, out-of-shape, alcoholic sadist who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, while I’m a hardened, merciless criminal who wants his cookies back.”

  I grab him by the collar, yank him to his feet, deposit him on one of the few upright desks. Campbell probably goes about 220, but I handle him easily enough. Last time I was in the weight room, I benched 350 for the first time.

  “Where’s my coke., Percy?”

  There’s no more fight in Campbell’s eyes. There’s hate in abundance, and fear, but no fight. He points up, to a ventilator shaft in the wall. “Behind the grille.”

  A moment later I’m holding the package in my hand. It’s a joyous moment, even triumphant, but it’s not enough.

  “Now you gotta pay for Spooky,” I tell him.

  “What?” He seems honestly confused, as though I’d brought up the name of a mutual acquaintance he can’t quite recall.

  “Spooky was my teammate and my friend. You killed him and now I’m gonna punish you, and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it. You’ve already been checked out on the computer, by the way. You’re on sick leave.”

  I push him backward off the desk and onto the floor. I expect a struggle, but Campbell’s eyes reveal only a rapidly enveloping panic. He slides away as I approach, until he comes up against an overturned desk. “Please, please,” he moans. “Please don’t.” I wonder how many times he’s heard those words from the mouth of a Freddie Morrow. I wonder how many times he’s shown mercy in the course of his long shitkicker career.

  A long wet stain runs along the inside of Campbell’s thigh, from his crotch to his shins. As I kneel beside him, he rolls onto his side and curls into a fetal position. “Please, please, please.”

  In the locker room, before the game, I tape my knees using a pair of Ace bandages that haven’t been washed since the season began. The bandages are still damp from yesterday’s practice and they feel slighty gritty against my skin. They stink, too, stink something nasty. The bandages are part of a ritual that started five years ago when my legs began to give out. As I wind them around my knees, I put on my game face. No mercy is what I tell myself. Take the moron’s game, take his heart, crush his soul.

  I flex the knuckles of my right hand.
Though I kept well away from Campbell’s head and face, both hands are a little sore.

  “Bubba?”

  “Yeah, Road?” I’ve already spoken to Road, Tiny, and Hafez Islam about the officials calling the game close. I left out Bibi Guernavaca because he’s a Pentecostal and begins every encounter with the words Cristo salva.

  “You found our product, bro. You the best, you the baddest. You saved our asses. I love you, man.”

  A poignant moment, by prison standards. I rise, thump Road’s chest. “Forget that bullshit,” I tell him. “You wanna show your gratitude, hit the jump shot when I pass out of the double team.”

  I let the moron win the opening tip. A few seconds later, when the ball comes to him maybe fifteen feet out, I let him drive by me. The packed stands, ablaze with energy a moment before, grow silent. I hustle up the court and plant myself just outside the paint and Tiny gets the ball to me before the double team closes down. I fake left, then spin to the baseline, where the moron checks me with his hip, as he did twenty times in the first game. From fifteen feet away, the senior official, a screw called Dashing Dan Thomas, blows the whistle as I toss the ball in the direction of the basket.

  I make both free throws and the crowd wakes up. Red Mitchell, sitting four rows back at midcourt, grins and shakes his head. The moron sets up fifteen feet from the basket, well outside his range. I know he’ll go right and that he’ll bump me with his shoulder on his way across the court. I know because he bumped me in the first game and got away with it. This time, however, Dashing Dan…

  The moron goes ballistic, launching a string of epithets at Dashing Dan, who, very predictably, tees the moron up. Satisfied I watch Tiny make the free throw while the moron’s coach drags him over to the bench.

  By the end of the first quarter, we’re up 25–9. The fans, even those who bet against us, are on their feet with every play. I’ve scored thirteen points, most of them against the moron’s sub, who’s slow and short, but at least knows when to keep his mouth shut.