CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
AT 12:50 ON WEDNESDAY afternoon, I reached under the mattress in the master bedroom of my state-appointed home on the grounds of Green Haven Prison. As luck or providence would have it, the pistol was still there. Even though the mattress had been left askew and the underside searched, it hadn’t been searched thoroughly. Maybe Pelton’s men assumed no one would hide anything as obvious as a hand cannon under the mattress. On the other hand, maybe they hadn’t searched under the mattress at all.
I gripped the.45 and depressed the latch with my thumb so that the magazine slipped out into my left hand. Still fully loaded, I slammed the magazine home and cocked a round into the chamber. Then I gave the pistol a quick polish by using the end of the bed sheet as a buffer. When the gunmetal was shiny, I laid the.45 flat on the bed and changed into a pair of jeans and brown cowboy boots. I slipped into a blue-jean work shirt and a charcoal blazer. Checking the safety on the.45 I shoved it, barrel first, inside my belt. Then I turned and looked at myself in the mirror above the dresser. First I looked at myself head on, at the shadowy face, the overgrown goatee, the dark hair now highlighted with shades of gray at the temples. I turned one way and then the other. With my blazer buttoned, the.45 was well hidden.
At the dresser I opened my briefcase, pulled out the number-ten-size envelope, and stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans. I took my keys off the dresser and held them in my hand while I returned to the living room, pulled the curtain back just a touch, and took a quick look outside the window. I saw Chris Collins waiting for me in the center of my front lawn, her cameraman right beside her, his camera hoisted up on his right shoulder.
By now, three or four other news teams had gathered as well.
Tenacious bunch.
I would have to make a mad dash for the Toyota if I was going to get out unscathed.
I decided to use the sliding door in back, off the kitchen.
I made my way around the back of the house, past the woodpile, then the garage, until I came to the driveway in front. No one had spotted me yet, but I knew the shit would hit the fan once I attempted to unlock the Toyota. I knew I should have invested in one of those electronic locking and unlocking devices long ago.
My head was buzzing. I felt as if the whole world were about to slip out from under my feet. Then I thought, screw it, this is my house, my driveway, my ride. If I want to walk out to my truck, I have the right to do it without being harassed by the press. I took a step out from behind the wall.
“There he is,” someone said.
The bunch of them turned and looked at me.
I made a dash for the Toyota.
I didn’t have the key in the lock when Chris Collins, along with the other reporters, came running after me. “Mr. Marconi,” Collins shouted, attempting to shove a microphone in my face. “What can you tell us about the escape of cop-killer Eduard Vasquez?”
“Not now, Chris,” I said, avoiding the microphone and her eyes, attempting to jam the key into the lock.
“Mr. Marconi,” another voice screamed, “what about your arrest?”
“Keeper Marconi,” came a third voice, “how much money did you get for assisting with Vasquez’s escape?”
Oh how quickly they turn on you.
I opened the door and got in. I pressed my foot on the gas and fired the six-cylinder up. Then I threw it into reverse and resisted the temptation to run as many reporters down as I could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE VIGIL STRETCHED ALL the way from Bernard Mastriano’s fourth-floor room in Newburgh General, out into the hall, down the full length of the corridor, and into the waiting room where a half-dozen cameramen and photographers from newspapers and television stations were exploiting “Day number three for Bernard Mastriano, the corrections officer from Green Haven Prison mercilessly struck down while in the line of duty.”
Somebody had paid somebody an awful lot of money to allow all those media people to be there without reprisals from the hospital staff. The place was so congested that there was barely enough room for the nurses and physicians’ assistants to get through with their clipboards and their IV units on wheels.
I pressed myself through the crowd and was nearly knocked over when I read the words, WHO SHALL PROTECT OUR CHILDREN IF WE CANNOT PROTECT OURSELVES? stenciled in black letters on the large cardboard banners. I squeezed past the children carrying smaller banners that read WHO WILL PROTECT ME? in the same lettering. Under the words were drawn perfectly shaped faces with perfectly shaped teardrops coming from perfectly shaped eyes. The entire scene was surrealistic at best, as though some Hollywood director had taken over the hospital and set the scene for a movie shoot.
I squeezed past the reporters and the cameraman getting shots of the children as they stood together, packed into a far corner of the hospital wing, their faces blank, wide-eyed, and confused. I thought, who in their right minds would come up with banners like these? Who the hell would come up with slogans identifying the corrections department as the protector of all civilization? Certainly not the children. Certainly not the average citizen.
No doubt about it, somebody had definitely given somebody one hell of a payday to go to all this trouble.
Moving closer to Mastriano’s room I could see the bright portable lamps used by the cameramen. The white lights illuminated the CO, made him look like an angel. He was still on his back, but a full bandage had been applied to his head, hiding his black hair completely. An IV was attached to his right arm, just below the elbow. A plastic-and-metal chair had been placed at the head of the bed. I assumed the chair was for his mother. But now it was vacant.
Behind me stood a group of older women, two of whom were dressed in blue habits. All four of them looked at me as soon as I came into the room, but no one seemed to recognize me. They simply went on with their praying- chanting really-rosaries in hand, beads pressed tightly between thumb and forefinger, bodies straight and stiff, faces to the floor, like imitations of the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary I remembered from Vasquez’s cell.
Mastriano lay on the bed facing the white ceiling-eyes closed, thick arms straight and pressed against his sides, shoulders stiff, face cleanly shaven as if his mother had just run a razor over those chubby baby cheeks. And maybe she had. A tightly tucked, baby blue blanket covered his entire torso.
I sat down in the empty chair, brought my lips to his ear. I wanted to shout out his name. I wanted to see him jump. But I acted calm and cool while the nuns went on praying and the sweat oozed out from the pores in my forehead.
“Mastriano,” I whispered. “Can you hear me, Mastriano?”
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…
“I found your service revolver, Mastriano. Can you hear me, Officer Mastriano?”
I searched for a response, a twitch of a finger, a blinking of an eye, a slight trembling of the bed. I got nothing.
“I would have told you Monday, but things have gotten complicated now. Things have changed now that you’ve got your friends all around you.”
…Blessed art thou amongst women…
“I’ve got the piece, the ammo, and the key to your cuffs.”
…and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…
“I found all that stuff, Mastriano, and when it all comes back from the lab I’m gonna prove the only prints on it are yours and Logan’s. Do I make myself clear, Mastriano?”
…Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners…
“You know what I’m gonna do after that, Officer Mastriano?”
…now, and at the hour of our death…
“I’m gonna fire your ass. I’m gonna have you brought up on charges for conspiracy in the aiding and abetting of an escaped convict. Are you getting all this, Mastriano? I don’t think you’re getting all this, Mastriano. You’ve got to pay attention.”
… Amen.
Mastriano lay perfectly still. Too still. I mean, he never even flinched. Maybe he was out cold. O
ne thing was for sure, if he’d been awake, he’d have known by now that I’d already been arrested for harboring his pistol and ammo. If he’d been awake, he’d have known I was bluffing.
I had to consider this: Maybe he was injured, after all.
But there was something else to consider. Maybe his unconsciousness was chemically enhanced and not simply faked. What I mean is, if Dr. Fleischer could get away with slapping a bandage on his head, poking an IV into his arm, and allowing all these people and their cameras to invade hospital corridors where the truly sick were trying to get well and the truly terminal were trying to die in peace, then he would have no trouble putting Mastriano to sleep. In the end, it all depended on one thing and one thing only.
Money.
Just how much was Fleischer getting and who the hell was greasing him?
I turned and looked out the open door. A flash went off, stung my eyes, blinded me for split second. A tall man stood behind the photographer. He supported a video camera on his right shoulder. The cameraman must have been filming me the entire time I’d been speaking to Mastriano. The media people weren’t leaving anything to chance. And I suppose it was pretty reckless of me to be seen inside Mastriano’s room like that, after what had gone down in Albany that very morning.
I sat back, blinked, tried to regain my eyesight.
There was some kind of commotion going on outside in the corridor.
Behind me, the nuns went on praying, unaffected.
Our Father who art in heaven…
When I looked up, the false image of a black flashbulb had nearly faded from my line of vision and I was able to make out the face of a plump gray-haired woman dressed in black. Mastriano’s mother. On one side of her stood Dr. Arnold Fleischer. On the other stood Chris Collins from the Newscenter 13. Collins, in all her tenacity, must have followed me from Stormville, across Route 84, over the Newburgh Beacon Bridge, all the way to Newburgh General. And I hadn’t noticed even for a second in my rearview mirror. She looked at me with that chiseled face and those deep black eyes. She wore a blue skirt with a matching blazer and a white oxford shirt buttoned all the way to the top, a silver brooch pinned where the knot of a tie might have been. She held a microphone to Mrs. Mastriano’s face-a face that became distorted with rage when she recognized me.
“You,” the little woman shouted in a trembling, accented voice. “You…you sent my boy out with that criminal, that cop-killer.”
She pointed an index finger, thick as a sausage, at my face.
…Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done…
She clenched her hand into a fist and lunged at me. But Collins dropped her mike to the floor and grabbed hold of the woman’s right arm while Dr. Fleischer grabbed hold of the other.
“Mr. Marconi,” Fleischer said, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises.”
Collins wasted no time going to work on me, waving her hand at the cameraman who was still shooting the scene from outside the door, then using the same hand to pull down on her skirt and straighten her hair. The bright white light shined in my eyes again. Collins turned to face the camera. “We have Keeper Marconi, warden of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison in nearby Stormville, with us today. As warden, Mr. Marconi is the man directly responsible for sending Corrections Officer Bernard Mastriano outside the prison walls with Eduard Vasquez, who, until Monday afternoon of this week, had been serving a life sentence for the notorious 1988 slaying of a rookie policeman.”
Collins turned to me. At the same time, she pulled Mastriano’s mother away from Fleischer and into the picture with me. Behind us, serving as a backdrop, was Mastriano, laid out on the hospital bed. Before I knew what was happening, Collins was subjecting me to the third degree. “Mr. Marconi, can you tell our viewers why you chose Bernard Mastriano for this particular, potentially life-threatening job?”
Mrs. Mastriano broke into tears at the sound of her son’s name.
…and forgive us our trespasses…
Caught off guard, I looked into the camera and said, “That’s strictly police business now. I’m here simply to check on the condition of my officer.”
“We don’t want you here,” the old woman screamed. Fleischer took hold of her once more, pulled her out of the way of the camera.
“Can you tell us, Mr. Marconi,” Collins went on, “what Mr. Mastriano’s injury reveals about the nature of prison policy in general and about the disintegrating nature of the corrections system in this country?”
I looked straight into those black eyes. “Lady,” I said, “you have no idea.” And then I walked away. But before I left the room, I approached Fleischer, who stood in a far corner between Mrs. Mastriano and the group of four nuns.
I pointed my index finger at his face. “I don’t know what you’re pulling here,” I said, “and I don’t know who’s paying you off. But in the end I’ll have your medical diploma tacked to the wall of a prison cell.” Then I made a mistake by poking his chest with my finger, forcing Fleischer to stumble back a little. “I think maybe F- or G-Block for you, pal.”
…but deliver us from evil…
“Listen, buddy!” Fleischer screamed, releasing Mrs. Mastriano’s forearm. “I’m a Harvard-educated doctor of medicine. You were the one arrested, Mr. Marconi. Not me.”
I turned back to him quick.
“Then let’s get away from this circus, Harvard boy, and talk about it like real men.”
The white camera lights grew even hotter against the back of my neck. You could probably smell the testosterone in the room. For a second or two, I had forgotten about the cameras. Mrs. Mastriano crossed the room, sat down on the chair beside her son. Tears dripped from her chin. Chris Collins stared wide-eyed at the entire scene; her cameraman was almost all the way into the room now, bulky camera mounted on his right shoulder. I knew that if I stayed any longer, I would do something I’d regret.
“Okay,” Fleischer said. “You want to talk, Marconi, let’s talk.”
He went out the door and disappeared into the crowd.
…For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, now and forever…
“Amen,” I said, glancing back at the two nuns. And then I followed Fleischer out of the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IT WAS AS QUIET as a morgue inside Dr. Arnold Fleischer’s first-floor office in Newburgh General. I stood alone in a square-shaped room decorated the way you might expect from a physician who relied on boasting about his Harvard Medical School education to elevate his character. Numerous diplomas were tacked to the walls along with more than a dozen citations, plaques, and other advertisements for himself, most of them for delivering papers on the benefits of one medical drug or another, the spelling and pronunciation of which were beyond my energy and will at that point.
I was busy going over how unimpressed I was with Fleischer’s credentials when he stormed in, slammed the door behind him, and sat down hard behind his desk. He scanned the desktop, opened the drawer, pulled out a pen, and sat back in the swivel chair, clearly relieved that he had something to fiddle with while we had our little discussion.
“Okay, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “Can I ask what that was all about?”
I shifted my gaze from Fleischer’s wall of fame to Fleischer in the flesh.
“You tell me,” I said. “Monday afternoon, Mastriano was stable. Not a mark on him. Today he’s battling for his life.”
“I told you we had to perform some tests to determine the extent of his internal injuries.”
“I felt his head myself,” I said. “There were no lumps the size of a tennis ball or a baseball or a basketball, for that matter. No blood, no nothing. What’d you do, Fleischer, hit him over the head yourself when no one was looking?”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Fleischer said, clicking the push button on his pen, squinting his eyes while he glared out a window that overlooked Newburgh General’s parking lot.
“What is it then?” I said, pulling a ci
garette from my chest pocket and lighting it before Fleischer had a chance to protest. “Mastriano paying you under the table to make his case look worse than it is? Or is someone else your sugar daddy?”
Fleischer turned back to me. “First of all, this is a doctor’s office and I would appreciate it if you refrained from smoking. It’s illegal.”
I blew out a long, exaggerated stream of cigarette smoke. Then I flicked the loose ash onto the carpeting.
“Second of all,” he went on, “Officer Mastriano appeared to be stable Monday afternoon. The injury I referred to yesterday morning on the news, to the back of his skull, was an internal injury we did not pick up until we did the MRI on Monday evening. The bleeding was internal and gradual, not external and out of control.”
“Who mentioned yesterday’s news?” I said.
Fleischer turned visibly red, like maybe he was giving away too much.
“Listen, Mr. Marconi,” he said, “he’s leaking CSF. We had to pump him full of steroids to shrink the brain swelling and to stem the flow of blood and fluid. Perhaps I should have clarified that earlier.”
I smoked for a second or two.
Then I said, “Yeah, perhaps you should have clarified that earlier.”
Fleischer clicked his pen a few more times. He sat up straight in his chair, gave me a tight-lipped, wide-eyed look that made him seem a lot older than I’d thought he was only forty-eight hours ago. “I know how upsetting it must be for you to have lost a prisoner-”
“Inmate,” I interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“Inmates haven’t been called prisoners since the days of the Sing Sing lock-step,” I lied.
But Fleischer bought it anyway. His cheeks were redder than the red seal on his Harvard Medical School diploma. “Okay,” he said, “I know how upsetting it must be for you to have lost an inmate. Especially a man who shot an officer of the law. I know about fraternity and all that.” He waved his right hand over his shoulder, referring to the numerous fraternal and academic institutions on his wall, as if I couldn’t see them. “And I also know you must be upset for having to take the blame for the escape. But that comatose man upstairs was hit with something right here and hit with something hard.” He made a fist with his free hand and struck the back of his head like he meant it. “He was hit hard, even if I wasn’t able to pick up on the actual extent of his injury right away. That’s what modern medicine is all about. That’s why we developed medical imaging in the first place.”
The Innocent Page 11
