The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  I gripped the envelope and walked out.

  Outside, on the catwalk, I flattened out the envelope as best I could. It was addressed in a kind of hasty handwriting to Eduard Vasquez care of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison, Stormville, New York. It had come from Cassandra Wolf, a name I recognized as belonging to Vasquez’s long-time girlfriend. The return address indicated Olancha, a California town I did not recognize.

  I stuffed the envelope into my pants pocket and waved Dan over. A CO was posted at the end of the gallery. He held a baton in his right hand and was slapping it against the palm of his left.

  “Watch the iron house till I get back,” I said.

  “Pelton,” he said, tugging on those thin-waisted pants, looking down on me, but not by much. “What about Wash Pelton?”

  “Pelton called once already. He calls again take it, but stall him. Tell him we’re doing everything we can to assist the Stormville PD and the state police to see that Vasquez is stopped in his tracks. Make sure he gets all the paper work he needs. Pictures, prints, statements, next of kin, phone numbers, whatever Val can get off the microfilm and the computers.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “Then ask him who we contact at the Bureau. He’ll love that.”

  “What about the guards?”

  “What guards?”

  “The guards he’s been on us to can?”

  “You have no knowledge about guards,” I insisted. “That’s the keeper’s territory, so just play dumb.”

  “Oh yeah,” Dan said, smiling now. “And how am I supposed to do that, boss?”

  “Just put yourself in my shoes, little brother, and think real hard.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I WAS DRIVING THOUGH Newburgh, past the four and five-story professional buildings in search of a place with the number 684 posted somewhere outside, along with the name A. J. Royale, dentist. I patted out a Pall Mall, lit it with the silver-plated Zippo engraved with my initials-J.H.M., Jack Harrison Marconi. The lighter had been a gift from Fran for my forty-third birthday, not two weeks before the collision that took her life. A year had gone by and I’d spent the better part of those twelve months trying to get used to the idea of living alone so that every time the image of Fran’s face popped into my head, I wasn’t rendered as useless as a sack of rags and bones.

  This is what I thought: I had made a big mistake handing over those photographs to Marty Schillinger. It was, of course, the right thing to do. SOP. But it’s the way Marty took them from Dan and me. So quick and so willing to stuff them inside that trench coat of his. Like he knew what was inside the manila envelope without even looking.

  There was something else going on inside my brain, too. I couldn’t shake the image of that heart-shaped tattoo. No faces or full bodies. Just limbs and white flesh, with a heart-shaped tattoo being the only real mark of distinction.

  I was still thinking about the tattoo when I located A. J. Royale’s two-story brick-and-glass building at 684 North Main Street in Newburgh. Inside the navy-blue-carpeted waiting room, “The Girl from Ipanema” dribbled from Muzak speakers. Behind the reception counter, a woman passed the time by painting her nails. When she looked up, I saw that her eyes were encircled with a heavy application of black eyeliner, as if she were hiding a set of equally black shiners.

  I gave her the best smile I could summon under the circumstances. “I’d like a word with the dentist,” I said.

  She looked back down at the fingers on her left hand. Her fingernails were long and sharp, like stilettos, and painted a glossy black like the finish on a cop cruiser. “The dentist is with a patient,” she said, swiping at a finger-nail with her emery board.

  I reached into my back pocket, pulled out my wallet, and flashed her the badge issued when I took over as war-den of Green Haven. She’d probably seen enough TV to know a cop has got to flash a badge-any badge -before someone will believe him. She dropped the emery board onto the open appointment ledger. “Is there some kind of problem, Officer?”

  I folded up the wallet, stuffed it back into my pocket.

  “It depends,” I said, trying to appear deliberately evasive. At the same time, I wasn’t sure what made me feel more nauseous, the noise of the dentist’s drill or “The Girl from Ipanema.”

  The receptionist stood up from her seat, pulled down on her miniskirt, and disappeared into a back room. The noise of the drill stopped and suddenly I could hear her talking with someone. But I couldn’t make out their words. Then the dentist came out of the room. Dressed in green surgical scrubs, he peeled off flesh-colored Latex gloves and extended his right hand toward my own.

  The hand felt bony and cold.

  I don’t know why the man should have annoyed me so much right off the bat. It wasn’t like I had a right not to like him, or not to give him the slightest of chances. But there was something about him, his mannerisms, his skinny, almost frail body, that seemed to set me off. I mean, he was taller than my five-foot-eight, but I must have had twenty pounds on him in the arms and chest alone. And that handshake…Like a dead fish.

  “Angel tells me you’re a policeman,” said the dentist, getting right to the point, which was fine by me.

  “A warden actually,” I said. “Green Haven in Stormville. I’m here to verify an appointment one of my inmates had today.”

  “Is that all you wanted to know?” the dentist said, raising his eyebrows. “You could have checked with my receptionist for that.”

  Stone-faced, Angel went right on sharpening her nails.

  “I thought it would be better to hear it from you in person.”

  “The Girl from Ipanema” finally died and a Manilow song replaced it. Angel ran the emery board over her fingernails in time with the music. Long live rock ‘n’ roll.

  “We took care of an inmate today.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Angel,” the dentist said, “do we have a name for the man who had the molar extraction this morning? We’d been performing a series of root canal procedures for quite a while now on that same tooth. But in the end, I couldn’t save it.”

  “Sounds traumatic,” I said.

  Angel slapped the emery board down. Using a glossy black fingernail as a pointer, she ran down the registry page from top to bottom and back up again. Until she came to a name and an appointment she recognized.

  “Vasquez,” she said, rolling the Z off her tongue. “Eduard Vasquez.”

  “Not an easy extraction,” the dentist interjected. “Do you know what goes into an extraction, Mr. Marconi?”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Lots of Novocaine and a pair of vise grips.”

  The laugh that followed was more fake than Angel’s fingernails, but just as sharp. “It’s a little more complicated than that I’m afraid. A dentist certainly could not be expected to handle a job of that magnitude inside a prison like Green Haven, not with those horrible medical facilities.”

  Almost unconsciously, I pulled a cigarette from the pack in my breast pocket.

  “Please,” said A. J. Royale. “This is a dentist’s office.”

  “The good dentist doesn’t believe in the kind of smoking that makes your lungs fry,” Angel offered, glancing up from her self-manicure.

  “That’ll be enough from you,” said the dentist, now nervously scratching at the red skin on his stick-like fingers. “My niece can be a little abrasive at times,” he went on. “Tell me, Mr. Marconi, do you have any family?”

  I shook my head because, regrettably, Fran and I had never had the time for children.

  “Look,” I said, “was there anything that seemed out of place when Vasquez was here?”

  Royale leaned against the reception counter and stuck out his bottom lip as if imitating a pouting child. “Not that I could see. I get prisoners in here all the time from Green Haven and Sing Sing. After a while, they all start looking the same.”

  “Brown and browner, right?”

  “You may say that.”
r />   “What about the guards?” I said, trying to keep things moving while I still had enough daylight left in the after-noon.

  “Just a couple of National Geographic readers,” Shrugging narrow shoulders. “The usual.”

  “No one seemed exceptionally nervous? Exceptionally jumpy?”

  He looked to the floor.

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “The good dentist doesn’t bother looking at a man’s eyes,” Angel broke in. She was on a roll and I wanted out of there. A Muzak version of “Send in the Clowns” replaced Manilow. “You’ve been a big help,” I lied, and started for the door.

  “Might I inquire as to what precisely Mr. Vasquez was imprisoned for?” Royale asked.

  I stopped, looked over my shoulder.

  “He pumped a few bullets into a cop’s head. A rookie, just twenty-five years old, married barely a year to a girl pregnant with their first kid.”

  “My God,” the dentist exhaled. “What a world we live in.”

  “My God,” Angel said. “What a world you live in.”

  Send in the clowns, I sang to myself. Don’t bother, they’re here.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I CROSSED THE HUDSON River via the Newburgh Beacon Bridge along Route 84 on my way back toward Green Haven. I drove the Toyota 4-Runner fast, not worrying about speed, worrying instead about the little bit of natural sunlight I had left. I was trying to figure out why Vasquez would have kept a dentist appointment if he was planning an escape.

  I put myself in Vasquez’s shoes.

  If I had planned on escaping, would I have kept a dentist appointment, allowed him to extract my molar? Why not just run? Why go through all that blood, all that pain, for nothing? Maybe the answer didn’t lie with Vasquez so much as it lay with A. J. Royale, dentist to the inmates.

  Once over the bridge I drove past Lime Kiln Road, keeping my eye out for a grassy field that might match Logan’s description. But looking for a grassy field among acres of grassy fields was an exercise in futility. I looked for burned rubber on the road, for tire tracks dug into the soft shoulder. I looked for spots of blood or vomit or torn clothing or clumps of hair. But I knew it was next to impossible to spot something so small from the driver’s seat of the 4-Runner.

  With the setting sun, I didn’t have the time to get out and comb the area as thoroughly as I wanted. What I did manage was to drive over the same section of bad road five, maybe six times. But the more I drove the more I found a whole lot of nothing.

  With dusk coming on fast, I knew I had no choice but to head back to Lime Kiln Road and the gravel pit that it led to. Where Corrections Officers Logan and Mastriano claimed they had gotten the holy hell beaten out of them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE TOYOTA MOVED LIKE a bullet shot out of the twilight. I pictured a faceless woman with a heart-shaped tattoo on her bare neck, and I wondered what kind of woman could do such a thing to her body. I had no idea why I should feel that way. As a corrections official, I saw tattoos of every color and shape every day of my working life. You’d think that after all that time I would have gotten used to them. Inmates with tattoos of naked women on their over-pumped biceps or the name of a long lost girlfriend inscribed in the center of a blood-red heart. Some inmates simply had their prison ID tattooed to their knuckles like Vasquez had. For a couple of packs of smokes, an inmate could have his favorite football team or the name of a child he’d never seen or just about any design he desired tattooed on his body. All it took was a sewing needle and some blue ink from a split-open ballpoint pen and, voilà, instant tattoo. I’ll never forget the time an inmate was brought to my attention over a stunt he’d pulled on an unsuspecting prisoner who had hired him to tattoo his mother’s name on his back. Instead of the name, the inmate had carved out the words Kill Me in dark blue letters. Kill Me was not an invitation you wanted to extend inside the iron house.

  When I came to the end of a two-track, I found a couple of kids riding their bikes up and down the banks of the closest gravel pit. The pit was a small, man-made canyon with high, steep walls and a pool of cloudy rainwater that had collected like a small lake in the center. The kids pushed their bikes up the banks of the pit on foot. Once they got to the top, they mounted the bikes, gunned them down the pit wall, feet off the pedals, hands off the brakes, finishing up with a crash through the brown water.

  Here’s what I decided to do: I got out of the Toyota and walked around a bit until I found fresh tire tracks in the loose, sandy gravel. Beside the tire tracks, I found some footprints that obviously hadn’t come from the two kids. The prints were flat and rectangular-shaped. Maybe size eleven or larger.

  I moved closer to the pit.

  Just over the edge of the pit wall were some bullets and an empty.38 caliber black-plated service revolver. It was partially buried, but the bullets were scattered about, plainly visible even in the fading light. What I could not understand as I took out my hankie and wrapped it around my right hand before lifting the pistol from the dirt, was why Vasquez’s men would go to the trouble of disarming Logan and Mastriano and unloading the weapon only to toss it a few feet away where anyone with half a brain could find it. Why not just take the weapon with them, add it to their own private armory?

  I tucked the recovered pistol into the back of my pants, wrapped the bullets into the hankie, stuffed it into my pocket. Then I called out to the boys. “You seen anybody here today? Maybe a couple of cops in a station wagon?”

  The boys looked at each other and then looked back at me like I was crazy. They stared at me, but said nothing.

  Not a word. Tough little guys. I knew the type. They sloshed out of the water and started pushing their bikes back up the pit wall.

  “Simple question,” I said. “Anybody come driving in here in the past few hours?”

  The two boys went on gazing at me with wide eyes and corner-of-the-mouth smiles, as if I were doing handstands in the dirt. The first kid, who wore a red baseball jacket, mounted his bike. The second, smaller kid, who wore aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses too large for his head, did the same.

  “Hey mister,” Baseball Jacket said. “I got two words for you.”

  Aviator sunglasses started to laugh like he knew what was coming and I didn’t.

  “Screw and you.” Then the boys took off, side by side, down the gravel pit wall and into the water.

  Maybe one day I’d see them in my prison. Then I’d have two words for them. Too and bad.

  I headed back toward the Toyota. It was time to take care of the inevitable.

  I dialed Channel 13 news on my cellular and asked for Chris Collins, the news director and anchorwoman of the small Stormville station. As the keeper I was expected to play my official public relations role, speaking out on the unfortunate escape of convicted cop-killer Eduard Vasquez. But chances were she knew all about the escape, since news of the event must have gone out over the police scanners. And if she knew about it, she must have already formed an opinion.

  Anyway, I told Chris Collins most of what I knew. Just the apparent facts. No opinions, conjectures, or even the simplest of thoughts. From Logan’s statement I knew that Vasquez had left his cell at nine in the morning, made it to his eleven o’clock appointment in Newburgh for a tooth extraction. From there he had left the dentist escorted by Officers Logan and Mastriano at about eleven forty-five. Sometime around noon, prisoner Vasquez was overtaken by what appeared to be a heart attack. Not long after, he was rescued by three men in black ski masks driving a black van. As the story goes, Officers Logan and Mastriano took a beating, with Mastriano taking the brunt of the punishment. With the two guards knocked unconscious and, somehow, stuffed into the front seat of the wagon, Vasquez’s men drove them out to the gravel pit and dumped them. Sometime around one-thirty, Logan managed to pull Mastriano from the car. He then dragged him out to the road. Around two o’clock, he hailed down a car and brought Mastriano to the hospital in Newburgh. Logan called
the prison. He was picked up from the hospital and brought directly to my office at my request. Then I sent him home.

  “But all I really know,” I told Chris Collins, as the sun went down on the gravel pit, “is that Vasquez flew the coop. End of story.”

  She wanted an interview ASAP. Chris Collins was a tenacious reporter. Visions of Emmy awards in her big black eyes.

  “Not convenient,” I said.

  “Just take five minutes of your time, Keeper,” Collins insisted.

  “No. Can. Do.”

  “But this is big news-”

  I took the cellular away from my face.

  “You’re giving out, Chris,” I said, pretending to lose the signal.

  I hit the end button and dialed my office. Val picked up.

  “Hello, doll.”

  “Pelton called,” she said. “He really wants to talk.”

  “You find Vasquez’s file?”

  “I checked the log. No one signed it out.”

  “Forget it. If it’s lost, it’s lost. If somebody took it, it’s been shredded.”

  “I managed to make copies from the old microfilm. How updated the information is though, is anybody’s guess. ‘Cause I got squat off the computer.”

  “You and Dan manage to get copies out to Pelton?”

  “Yes.”

  “He try to pump Dan for more information?”

  “He wants to know what went wrong.”

  “How do I know what went wrong?”

  “I’m only telling you what he said, boss.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “You were supposed to drop the ax on two more men last Friday. Here it’s Monday, and he still hasn’t heard anything from you.”