Innocence

by David Hosp

  “And if he succeeds?”

  Jimmy thought about this, but only briefly. “He still should go. He’s old and sloppy.”

  Carlos laughed without humor. “Is age such a handicap, my young friend?”

  The others in the room laughed as well, but Jimmy pressed his point. “Not if age makes you stronger.” He looked carefully at Carlos. “Do you think age has brought wisdom to Detective Macintyre?”

  The laughter ceased. Everyone turned back to Carlos.

  “No,” the older man said. “Our friend is certainly not wise.”

  “I didn’t think so. And given his weakness, he’s no longer useful, either. We have others in better positions to help us. He is nothing more than a liability.”

  Carlos considered this. “Agreed,” he said at last. “After Saturday, we will make sure to eliminate that liability.” He turned and faced the window. “I also agree with your view as to the more immediate issue. We must have a contingency plan in place. I would like you to handle that.”

  “Of course, Padre. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Personally,” Carlos emphasized.

  Jimmy’s heart skipped a beat. It was another test, he knew, and there was no way to evade the challenge. “Personally,” Jimmy agreed. He hoped no one heard the tremble in his voice.

  Carlos walked over and placed a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “I am glad you are with us,” he said. “Otherwise I would wonder how you might judge my own age.” He looked at the younger man, his eyes narrowing as though they might peer through Jimmy’s eyes to read his thoughts. Jimmy kept his gaze even and unblinking, looking directly back into Carlos’s dark pupils.

  After a moment Carlos broke into a grin, and he gave a sharp laugh. “Indeed,” he said, turning to the others in the room. “I will be always sure to have my wisdom grow faster than my years with this one around. I would never want to be viewed as a liability myself.”

  Jimmy smiled back as the dark laughter filled the room. He was well aware, though, when it was best to keep his thoughts to himself.

  z

  The examining room was no cleaner than the waiting area. If anything, it was more depressing. There were no windows, and the examining table was a rickety piece that looked like it had seen its best days around the time Ted Williams was still playing for the Sox. There was a chair in the corner and a rolling doctor’s stool that floated on rusty springs in the center of the room, but neither Finn nor Kozlowski chose to sit. It seemed wiser to avoid contact with anything in the room. Through the thin walls, they could hear a deep chest cough that sounded like a child’s last dying gasps.

  Kozlowski’s head throbbed. The meeting with Maddy had gone no worse than he’d expected, but that hadn’t made it any easier. He’d warned Finn, but that fact, too, provided little consolation. He could tell that Finn wanted to talk, to thrash things out, but Kozlowski avoided any movement or speech that would indicate a willingness to engage. To some degree, that was just his way; he wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

  They waited silently in the examining room for ten minutes before the door opened and a young man in a white coat walked in. There was little question that he was Vincente Salazar’s brother. He was a little taller and thinner, but he carried himself with the same quiet confidence, and he had the same distinctive widow’s peak and dark skin coloring. He regarded both of them for a moment and then held his hand out to Finn. “Mr. Finn, I’m guessing,” he said.

  “Yes,” Finn replied, shaking his hand. “Dr. Salazar.”

  “My brother talked to me about you. Thank you for helping him.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t accomplished anything.”

  “You’ve given us hope. You’ve given him hope. That’s more than you may understand.” He looked at Kozlowski and held his hand out again. “And you must be the skeptical Mr. Kozlowski,” he said. “My brother described you as well.”

  Kozlowski remembered his demeanor with the man’s older brother and wondered whether he was supposed to feel guilty. “I may have given the wrong impression to your brother,” he conceded. “I’m suspicious of convicts by nature.” It was as far toward an apology as he was willing to go.

  “No explanation is necessary, Detective. It’s understandable. My brother said you were honest. It is a trait he admires greatly.”

  Kozlowski nodded. There was no question that there was something compelling about the brothers. They both looked you straight in the eyes, and there was a leadership quality that emanated from them. For the first time, Kozlowski found himself believing in Vincente Salazar’s innocence.

  “Interesting place you have here,” Finn said, interrupting Kozlowski’s thoughts.

  Miguel looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time. “It’s humble, I admit,” he said. “But you’d be surprised how many lives a place like this saves.”

  “Must be a significant difference from your usual practice,” Kozlowski said.

  “It is. It’s far more fulfilling.” He sat down on the rolling stool. “Tell me, Mr. Finn, what can I do for you?”

  Finn leaned against the wall. “We wanted to talk to you about your brother. Assuming he’s innocent—”

  “He is innocent.”

  “Right. Which means that someone must have set him up. I’ve asked your brother whether he was aware of anyone who would want to frame him, but he couldn’t think of anyone. We figured we should talk to you and see if you could suggest any possibilities. Sometimes it’s harder to answer questions about your own enemies honestly. I thought you might be able to give us a more unvarnished view.”

  Miguel twisted on the stool, thinking. “No one,” he said. “I can’t think of anyone who might have wanted to do anything to hurt my brother.”

  “No one?” Finn asked. “We all have enemies.”

  “We’re not all like my brother.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest anything bad about your brother, and I understand how you may feel,” Finn said. “He’s a very impressive guy in person. But no enemies?”

  Miguel shook his head. “You say he’s impressive as though you really know him. You don’t. You have met him, what, two or three times over the past week? This is after he spent fifteen years in hell? After he was forced to leave his home in El Salvador only to come here and have this happen to him? He has had everything taken from him, and still, all he thinks about is other people. He has never thought of himself. Believe me, Mr. Finn, ‘impressive’ doesn’t even begin to describe my brother.”

  Finn said, “Fair enough. You’re right, I don’t know your brother all that well. But I still have only a few days to come up with a reasonable theory to explain why all the evidence in this case points to the fact that your brother shot Madeline Steele. And that theory has to be good enough to sell to the judge, otherwise, regardless of what the DNA tests say, your brother will stay in jail for the rest of his life. So any help you can give me in developing that theory would be great.”

  Miguel looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Finn. I know you are only trying to help, and I shouldn’t get so emotional. The fact that, of all the people in the world to get caught up in something like this, it is my brother is enough to make me lose my grip on my temper.”

  “It’s understandable,” Finn said. “Anything you can tell us would be helpful.”

  Miguel took another moment to think. “I suppose there could have been people he tried to help who might have thought he didn’t do enough. It seems hard to believe, but it’s possible.”

  “People like who?”

  “Immigrants. Other illegals. Back then there were no free clinics in the area. Going to the hospital risked detection and possibly deportation. My brother was the only medical help many in the community could get. He charged people only what they could afford, which was often nothing or next to it, and he treated everyone who came to him. Some of them . . . there was nothing he could do. Even at Mass General, with the best facilities and technology in the worl
d, there are times when there is nothing doctors can do. My brother was without an office, without supplies, without any support whatsoever. It is safe to say that there were times when he could do nothing to help his patients. Perhaps some of them blamed him for not doing more.”

  Finn considered this. “He treated everyone who came to him, right?”

  Miguel nodded. “To the best of his ability, yes.”

  “Including those in VDS.” It was a statement, not a question, and Kozlowski paid close attention to Miguel’s reaction.

  Miguel hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

  “They’re clearly dangerous,” Finn pointed out. “If one of them got angry with your brother, they might very well seek revenge.”

  Miguel scoffed. “You’re right, Mr. Finn, they would. They would have had him killed. They wouldn’t take the time with the subtleties of framing Vincente. But yes, you are right, I’m sure he treated members of VDS if they needed medical attention. That is what doctors do.”

  “Was he a member of VDS?” Kozlowski asked.

  “No.” Miguel’s answer was emphatic, and Kozlowski could read nothing beyond indignation from his expression.

  Finn let the answer sit, and Kozlowski thought that Salazar might augment his answer. He didn’t.

  “Okay,” Finn said. He turned to Kozlowski. “Can you think of anything else that might be helpful?”

  Kozlowski shook his head.

  “Then I guess we’re done for now.”

  Miguel said, “I’ll walk you out.”

  They left the examining room and walked down the hall. Miguel opened the door to the waiting area. All eyes turned to look at the three of them, then quickly found the floor. Kozlowski got the distinct impression that he and Finn were not welcome in this place.

  “Está bien,” Miguel said to the patients waiting. More quietly to Finn and Kozlowski, he explained, “They think you are the police. Most of our patients, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, are illegal. If it wasn’t for this place, they would never seek medical treatment. There are just too many dangers for them, particularly now that the government is cracking down.”

  “How many patients come to this place a week?” Kozlowski asked.

  “Nearly a thousand,” Miguel replied.

  “That many?” Finn sounded shocked.

  “Yes. Without us . . .” Miguel’s voice trailed off. He picked his way through the crowded room, nodding and smiling reassuringly to those who dared to look toward them. “In a way, this place is a monument to my brother,” he said.

  “How so?” Finn asked.

  “I saw what happened to my sister-in-law. How she died. It could have been prevented, but they were too scared to go to a hospital. When she died, a part of my brother died, and if it wasn’t for her death, my family never would have come to the attention of the INS. None of this would have happened. When I started as an intern at Mass General years ago, I lobbied for the supplies and funding to set this clinic up. I didn’t want what happened to my brother to happen to anyone else.”

  They were at the door. “Your brother seems very proud of you,” Finn commented.

  “I wish he could see it. I wish he could be a part of it.” Miguel reached out to shake their hands. “Please let me know what else I can do,” he said. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do to help my brother.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Wednesday, December 19, 2007

  Joey Galloway ran his nightstick along the bars of each cell as he walked the forty-yard stretch. “Morning call, scumbags!” he yelled as he walked. “Stand at attention!”

  He loved the rat-a-tat the nightstick made. It echoed with power and control. The only sound that pleased him more was the dull thud it made on those occasions when it smashed the knuckles of any prisoner stupid enough to grasp the bars of his cell as he passed. Most of them were savvy enough to avoid being hit, but every once in a while he got a newbie—a fish—unfamiliar with his brutal streak. He made sure they spent the week eating one-handed.

  Galloway hated the convicts. Some of the other guards felt an odd kind of kinship with their charges, not unlike the Stockholm syndrome that sometimes develops between captors and their hostages. Galloway referred to those misguided coworkers as “the fairy patrol.” He would never fall into that trap; he took any opportunity that presented itself to torture those he’d been hired to watch over. It was the only way he knew to keep the separation between them clean.

  He threw his shoulders back as he came to the end of the line. “Block Three, open!” he called out.

  A buzzer sounded, and the steel doors rang out with a squeal as they slid open. “On the line, assholes!” he yelled.

  In unison, the orange-clad men stepped out of their holes, putting their toes on the painted line that ran down the cell block.

  “Okay, faggots! Chow time! You know the drill. Keep your shit wired tight and your hands to yourselves. Don’t piss me off, and I may let you live through this miserable fucking day!”

  He turned and walked through the large metal gate at the end of the corridor, listening to the footsteps of the prisoners in line behind him. He smiled inwardly. Another day, another chance to fuck someone up.

  z

  Henry Womak had been incarcerated for most of his life, and there was no question that he was doomed to spend the rest of his days behind bars. He’d grown up in Dorchester, the son of an angry, unemployed dockworker. “Fuckin’ niggers stole my job,” his father used to say between beers in the morning. “Fuckin’ niggers stole my life.”

  When busing came to his neighborhood in the late 1970s, Henry was seven. He was young enough that the first time he attacked a black boy with a baseball bat, he’d only been suspended. A six-month stint in a reformatory had followed the second attack two years later, and that was probably only because he’d shattered all of his second victim’s teeth against a brick wall. The boy had spent three weeks in the hospital. By the time Henry was eighteen, murder seemed more like career advancement than a crime, but it was the horrific nature of the murder that guaranteed him a lifelong stay in Billerica.

  He’d seen the man as he was walking along the docks in South Boston, at a moment when the storm was already gathering force in his troubled mind. The man was black and wore the faded, beaten jacket of a dockworker. He was just getting off work and heading to his truck for the drive home to his family. It was a nice truck: a Ford F-250. Not new, but not old, either.

  Whatever sanity that still struggled within Henry deserted him for good that evening. Fuckin’ nigger like that with a new truck while my father sits at home sucking on a bottle and coughing up a lung? Henry couldn’t live with it.

  The man never saw Henry coming. Not that he could have protected himself if he had. Henry was crazed and wouldn’t have been denied his revenge without a bullet in the head.

  The first time he’d swung the pipe as hard as he could. It slammed into the man’s stomach. The next three swings went to his head. There was some unintended mercy to that. The coroner said that the man had likely been unconscious when Henry stripped him of the short handheld grappling hook used by dockworkers and swung it at the man’s face. It caught him under the chin and drove itself though the flesh underneath the tongue, the point slipping out of his mouth and catching securely on the jaw.

  Henry claimed he didn’t remember attaching the handle of the hook to the chain that ran off the back of the man’s truck. Or starting the engine. Or driving the thirty yards it took for the man’s jawbone to come loose and separate from his face. It hadn’t mattered, though. Memory be damned, he wasn’t sorry, and he wouldn’t say so. Not even his family felt any sympathy when he went away for good. They were too tired and scared to feel much of anything for him anymore.

  And so it was with nothing but adrenaline-fueled anticipation that Henry approached Samuel Jefferson on Wednesday morning on the chow line. They were heading toward each other, and Henry slipped the shiv out of his pocket. It was made from a ste
el rod stolen from the metal shop, and had been shaped carefully into a six-inch knife. It was not nearly as effective for killing a man as a glass blade would be. Glass could be broken off into a man and left to continue wreaking havoc

  after an attacker fled. But steel would work well enough for today’s purposes. Jefferson had given it to him the night before. Along with fifty dollars.

  As they approached each other, Jefferson gave a nod.

  Henry raised the shiv and drove it into the large black man’s belly.

  z

  A soldier. That was how Samuel Jefferson regarded himself, and a soldier doesn’t question orders. It made sense. The brotherhood had agreed to the plan and he had been paid well to execute it. He was a huge man with a prodigious gut. A smaller man might be at real risk.

  He saw the blow coming and raised his arm instinctively to block it, relaxed as the redneck asshole’s hand passed through his halfhearted defense, and then felt the steel slip through the stretched skin of his belly, splitting him open.

  Jefferson roared in pain, thrashing out as he went down, cuffing Womak hard on the ear. It felt good, and he could see the pain etched on the other man’s face. Serves him right, Jefferson thought. Orders or not, he had to send a message to anyone in the prison who might sense weakness on Jefferson’s part. Weakness was the only real sin behind bars. Everything else could be forgiven, but weakness was a disease that killed, and anyone seen carrying it was quickly culled from the ranks.

  He even thought to get in another blow but saw the guards rushing in. He’d made his point. Better now to cover his wound and let the screws sort the shit out. This part of the job was done.

  z

  Joey Galloway was only a few paces behind Womak, watching him carefully. He saw the shiv come out as they approached Jefferson, and he quickened his pace. Not too much, just enough to control the situation before it got out of hand. He loved it when the cons went for

  each other, particularly when he was there to wade in and got the opportunity to take someone out as a result.

  Suddenly, Womak’s arm shot out and caught Jefferson in the gut. As the huge black man went down, he caught Womak’s head with a stunning blow that made Galloway smile. Got to hand it to the man, he was a bear.