Absolute Certainty

by Rose Connors

  The locals might have been better served by changing the name of their town. To this day, everyone I know still refers to the prison as Walpole.

  Walpole was built in 1955 and opened less than a year later. Its original perimeter is still in place, a concrete wall with eight observation towers. The wall is twenty feet high, with four strands of electri fied barbed wire stretched taut across the top. A few years ago, a new unit was added to the prison, and a ninth tower was added to the wall. Each tower is manned twenty-four hours a day by multiple guards with automatic weapons. The exact number is deliberately unspecified.

  Harry came here yesterday and met with Rodriguez about his sentence, his pending appeal, and the new assault charges I filed against him. Rodriguez gave Harry a single piece of information, something he’d never told Harry before. It’s something I should hear, Harry told me, something I should hear from Rodriguez firsthand. Harry says it’s important, and that’s good enough for me.

  It took over an hour to drive here from Harry’s office in Barnstable. The Kydd is covering for me at the office. I warned him that Geraldine will be furious with both of us when she finds out where I’ve gone. He agreed to cover for me anyway.

  Harry rolls down the driver’s side window of his beat-up old Jeep Wrangler and hands both his license and mine to the guard at the gate. The guard studies them carefully, comparing Harry with his license photo, then comparing me with mine.

  “She’s much better looking in person,” Harry tells him.

  The guard doesn’t even let on he heard, but I turn bright red anyway, and Harry smiles at me. The uniform walks around the Wrangler looking in the windows. He takes notes on a clipboard, then stands behind the Jeep copying its plate number. Finally, he checks our names against the list of appointments approved by the superintendent.

  “It’s good to have friends in high places,” Harry says.

  The guard frowns, but just barely. He keeps our licenses and waves us through the gate. A second guard directs us to a predetermined parking spot. He takes Harry’s keys, tags them, and slides a corresponding tag under the driver’s side windshield wiper. He drops Harry’s keys into a cloth sack hanging from his belt, and points us toward a concrete walkway that leads to the front entrance.

  The uniform at the gate must have notified the front desk of our arrival; the huge steel doors open as we approach them. A half dozen security cameras are rolling. Once inside, we are directed to put all of our possessions into a numbered plastic bin with a padlock. We are to take nothing past the front desk, we are told, but the clothes on our backs.

  Harry raises his eyebrows and lets out a low whistle when I drop the Lady Smith into the plastic bin along with my cell phone. “Sweet Jesus, she’s packing heat,” he says.

  A brusque, burly guard asks if I am wearing a wig. If so, he says, he will need to inspect it. Harry tugs on my hair to demonstrate its authenticity. The burly guard is not amused.

  “What about you, sir, are you wearing a toupee?”

  Harry is delighted by the question. He grins broadly and tugs at his own thick tangle as he responds. “No, sir. This is the real McCoy.”

  The burly guard remains visibly unimpressed. He directs us through the metal detector, and walks a short distance from us to converse with a guard who looks like a younger version of himself.

  While we wait, I take in the details of the cavernous lobby. Three separate visitors’ dress codes are posted. They cover an entire wall. The first code is just for men and lists dozens of restrictions. No denim. No black, navy blue, or gray sweatshirts. No blue chambray shirts. The code for women is even longer. No leotards. No gym shorts. No nylons. The third code applies to everyone. Just one pair of earrings. Just one religious medal. Underpants required.

  The younger guard tells us to follow him. He leads us down a narrow hallway, past a series of numbered doors. When we reach the last one, number twelve, he selects a key from the ring on his belt loop and opens it. He steps back to allow us to enter, and follows us inside.

  Every inmate at Walpole is classified as a serious flight risk and a grave physical threat to himself, the other inmates, and the prison staff. Every inmate here is confined to his cell at all times, except when he is removed for reasons preapproved by the prison hierarchy. On those occasions, the prisoner leaves his cell under armed escort and in restraints. That is how Manuel Rodriguez arrives in the cubicle adjacent to the small space where Harry and I are waiting.

  The space is too tiny to be called a room. The ceiling is low— Harry has only about an inch of headroom—and there are no furnishings, not even a chair. Three of the four walls are made of whitewashed cement block. The fourth is two-thirds cement block, the top third bulletproof glass. Microphones and speakers on each side of the glass allow communication between one side of the wall and the other.

  Harry looks first at the two guards with Rodriguez, then at the guard who stands behind us. “Gentlemen, you’ll excuse us? This conference is protected by the attorney-client privilege. Your superintendent has approved it.”

  One of the guards with Rodriguez looks confused. He probably has seen both Harry and me on the television news. He knows I don’t represent Rodriguez. But Harry holds up the written authorization, signed by the superintendent, and the guard’s questioning look disappears. All three guards exit, in blind submission to the institutional chain of command. They take up posts outside the doors.

  Harry doesn’t waste a second. “Manny, this is important. This might help you. You need to tell Attorney Nickerson what you told me yesterday. All of it.”

  Rodriguez turns slowly toward me, his upper lip curled, daggers emanating from his eyes. Then he turns, just as slowly, back to Harry. “What’s she gonna do, let me go home?”

  Harry presses his fists against the glass. “Look, we went through this yesterday. This is your only shot at setting things straight. Maybe it’s a lousy shot. But it’s the only one you’ve got left, pal. Take it now or leave it for good.”

  Rodriguez is unmoved. “So what do you want me to tell her?”

  Harry is losing patience. He enunciates each word carefully. “Tell her where you were and what you did Memorial Day a year ago, during the predawn hours. And tell her all of it.”

  Rodriguez looks back at me. “I was in Orleans,” he says.

  Minutes pass. Rodriguez says nothing more. I can’t believe Harry brought me here for this. “You expect me to believe him?” I ask Harry. “You expect me to think that two different witnesses lied about seeing him at Chatham Light, and he’s all of a sudden telling the truth?”

  Harry doesn’t look at me. His eyes are boring into Rodriguez. “Goddammit, tell her.”

  “I was in Orleans first, then I went to Chatham.”

  “So what?” I ask him.

  Harry pounds on the glass. “Tell her what you did in Orleans, and tell her now.”

  Rodriguez puts his face close to the glass and stares at me. Only when my eyes are glued to his does he speak again. “I killed a guy.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but I know it wasn’t this.

  Rodriguez is laughing at me now, enjoying his control over the situation. “I killed the guy at the Orleans Pit Stop. He wouldn’t open the cash box, and he set off some goddamned alarm, man, so I shot him.” He pauses to make sure I am still looking into his eyes; he’s directing this show. “Right in the head.”

  My blood runs cold and Rodriguez laughs again. “I couldn’t get the damn thing open, man, and the cops were coming, so I split. The sirens came from the north, so I went south, man, out of Orleans, through East Harwich and into Chatham. I stopped at the lighthouse and went down to the beach to throw my piece in the ocean.”

  I don’t know why he’s telling me this. But he keeps talking. “That guy—the one you’re all worked up about—he was already dead, man. He was sprawled on the beach when I got there.” Again, Rodriguez peers deep into my eyes. “But he wasn’t cold yet.”

  This fac
t apparently strikes Rodriguez as funny; he laughs yet again. “I checked him for money, and I took what I found. I took his watch, too. I was countin’ on some cash from the Pit Stop, man. I had some people I needed to pay.”

  None of this makes sense. I can’t think clearly. I turn to Harry, but he’s still staring holes through Rodriguez. I look back at Rodriguez too, and he is waiting for me. He narrows his eyes and hisses, “So I know what you did with the shirt, lady.”

  “The shirt?”

  His entire upper lip curls back. He’s missing three teeth, and the ones he has left are yellow and brown. He looks like a rabid animal.

  “Yeah, the shirt. I wasn’t wearing no goddamned flannel shirt. I didn’t even keep my tee shirt on for long. I was sweatin’ like a pig, man. That flannel shirt was in my trunk for months. If that guy’s blood was on it, lady, you put it there.”

  My head is spinning. Rodriguez is still talking. Now that he’s started, he can’t seem to stop.

  “So you think you put some totally innocent slob in the slammer. You get off on that, I guess. You think you’re real smart. But you ain’t very smart after all. You thought you framed an innocent guy, but it turns out you just framed me. And I did kill a guy, just not the guy you said.”

  Rodriguez moves back from the glass and spits on the floor. His shackles allow only a baby step, and he almost topples backward, but it doesn’t faze him.

  “It don’t make no difference to me, man. But it might make a difference to that good-lookin’ lady with the red hair. I got kids too, ya know. I got feelings. I feel sorry for that lady. Whoever killed her kid ain’t in the slammer. He’s out there lookin’ around.”

  Harry bangs on the door and all three guards reappear instantly. “We’re finished here,” Harry tells them.

  Rodriguez disagrees. “Hey, man, I ain’t finished. I never said I was finished.”

  “You’re finished,” Harry tells him.

  The guards move Rodriguez out the door like a piece of furniture.

  “Hey, Madigan, thanks for nothin’. The only thing you ever done for me was knock me out. Thanks a lot, man.”

  The heavy metal door slams shut.

  “Harry,” I start. But he stops me.

  “Let’s talk outside,” he says, nodding toward our escort.

  “But Harry…”

  “I know,” he says.

  I can’t stop myself. “Harry, that’s the Buckley case. Jim Buckley was the clerk who got shot in Orleans that night. He didn’t die. He survived.”

  “I know, Marty. We’re going to see him next.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Jim Buckley retired from the Commonwealth Electric Company after thirty-five years of service. Three months later, he went looking for a job. His wife insisted, he later told the Orleans detectives. He was driving her crazy.

  Jim found a job at the Orleans Pit Stop, an old-fashioned, full-service general store. He worked from six in the evening until two in the morning, five days a week, until Memorial Day a year ago. On that day, just before closing time, a man who had entered the store like an ordinary customer suddenly brandished a firearm and demanded the contents of the cash register. Jim Buckley tripped the alarm and tried to escape through a side door. The gunman fired a single shot into the back of his head.

  Paramedics rushed Jim Buckley to Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. Once stabilized, he was airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and taken straight into surgery. Six hours later, surgeons reattached the back of his skull and closed the surgical field, the bul let still lodged in its original resting place. It was too close to the brain stem, they said, to be removed.

  Geraldine lives in Orleans. She takes every unsolved violent crime in her hometown as a personal affront. Jim Buckley’s case is no exception. She has been hounding the Orleans Police Department since the day it happened, to no avail. They’ve had no leads. No prints were left at the scene. No gun was ever found.

  It was months before Jim Buckley was able to communicate with the Orleans investigators. He described his assailant as either a light-skinned black man or a dark-skinned Latino; average height, average weight. Wearing faded dungarees and a plain white tee shirt. No distinguishing characteristics, so far as Jim could recall.

  It’s two o’clock by the time Harry and I approach the Sagamore Bridge, heading back to Cape Cod. It will take another forty minutes to reach Jim Buckley’s house in Orleans. It’s clear that I won’t make it into the office at all today. I called the Kydd to tell him so as soon as we left Walpole. He’s got me covered, he said.

  Harry hasn’t said much since we left the prison. Like me, he is probably trying to sort out the ramifications of this new piece of information. I shift in my seat and face his rugged profile as he drives across the bridge. “You know, Harry, Rodriguez could be duping us both. The Buckley attack got plenty of press coverage. Rodriguez might be well aware of the fact that Buckley survived that shooting. If he knows that, he’s got good reason to want to trade the attack on Michael Scott for the attack on Buckley. At least he’d have the possibility of parole on the horizon.”

  “I’ve thought of that, Marty. Rodriguez is no dope, that’s for sure. He’s capable of putting on a convincing act. If Buckley can’t identify him, we’ll have to assume that’s a real possibility.”

  Silence settles on us again. We are entering Orleans when I verbal ize the question that I think has been plaguing both of us. “What if Buckley does identify Rodriguez? What then, Harry?”

  Harry sighs and turns down a side street into a tree-lined residential area. “Then we have to face some ugly facts, Marty.”

  I shift in my seat again and stare out the window. I’ve about had my fill of ugly facts for now. But Harry keeps talking. “Fact number one, Rodriguez is in jail for the wrong crime, serving the wrong sentence. Fact number two, whoever killed the Scott kid was still on the streets when Eldridge was murdered. Fact number three, he’s still out there.”

  Harry stops the Jeep in the middle of the road and stares at me. I know what he’s going to say next. “Fact number four is the worst one of all, Marty. If Rodriguez didn’t kill the Scott kid, then somebody went to great lengths to make it look like he did.”

  I am having trouble absorbing this. My mind is racing to find an alternate explanation. “What if Rodriguez did both? What if he shot Jim Buckley and then killed Michael Scott?”

  My question sounds ridiculous even to me.

  Harry pulls into the driveway next to a well-maintained shingled ranch with a freshly cut lawn. “Think about it, Marty. Rodriguez shoots Buckley, then drives to Lighthouse Beach to get rid of the weapon. He sees the Scott kid and decides to do him too. And he uses a knife? He’s got a gun in his hands and he uses a knife instead?”

  Harry is right, of course, but I’m not ready to say so. We get out of the car in silence.

  Jim Buckley is waving to us from his back porch. He shakes our hands as if we are old friends, and leads us into a small, tidy kitchen where his wife is waiting, a grandmotherly lady wearing a pink apron. The Buckleys are the picture of working-class, retired America. Framed photographs of their adult children and grandchildren are on every available shelf. We sit down at a mottled red kitchen table with stainless steel legs, and Mrs. Buckley brings iced tea.

  Harry gets straight to the point. “Mr. Buckley, thanks for meeting with us on such short notice. This will only take a few minutes, I promise.”

  Jim Buckley waves his hands in the air as if he’s got all the time in the world. Harry unzips a leather case he brought from the Jeep and takes out a single poster board. On it are twelve mug shots.

  There are strict rules governing the procedures to be used when a crime victim—or any witness, for that matter—is asked to identify an attacker from an array of photographs. If the rules are not followed, the identification will not be admitted at trial. Worse yet, if the court finds that the photographic display was too suggestive, the witness’s testimony may be deemed tainte
d, and excluded altogether.

  Harry’s photographic display passes all of the tests. There are a dozen photographs of men in their mid-to-late twenties. Four are light-skinned black men. Four are dark-skinned Latinos. Four are Hispanic. Only one is Rodriguez.

  Jim Buckley breaks down as soon as Harry lays the board on the red kitchen table. “You’ve got him. By God, you’ve got him.”

  He points straight to Rodriguez and takes off his glasses as he looks from Harry to me, shaking his head. He wipes tears from his eyes. “After all this time. By God, you’ve finally got him.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Thursday, June 10

  “You went to Walpole? With Madigan? I’m surprised they let you in. I’m even more surprised they let him out. Is there something wrong with you, Martha?”

  As usual, Rob and I are seated at his desk and Geraldine is towering over us, pacing and chain-smoking. I had wanted to speak with Rob alone about the Rodriguez confession and the Buckley identification, but that proved impossible. Geraldine knew something was up as soon as she looked at me this morning. I am lousy with secrets.

  “Geraldine, Harry came to me saying he had just been given important information for the first time. I was the prosecutor on the case. I had a duty to go hear it for myself.”

  “A duty? To Rodriguez? You think you had a duty to listen to Rodriguez cop to a lesser offense now that he’s convicted of murder one? You think there’s a single inmate at Walpole who wouldn’t like to cop to a lesser offense? Do you have a duty to listen to all of them?”

  I’m actually a couple of inches taller than Geraldine, but it never feels that way. I am tired of her looking down at me, so I get to my feet before I answer. “My duty is to the integrity of the system.”

  Geraldine tosses her head back and blows smoke at the ceiling. She gives me a sidelong glance, a look that says even I can’t be naive enough to mean what I just said.