It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  There had been no other cars in the parking lot that time. Now that it was visitors’ day, there were many, and Pat noted uneasily that they were mostly cheap American sedans. Frank probably did stand out a little inside. A prison population, even here, was not going to be confined to accountants and bankers and disbarred lawyers, with a couple of doctors convicted of Medicare fraud thrown in for diversity. That would have been boring, anyway.

  Pat took Ruby’s hand as they walked up the bright white steps, and she was pleased when Ruby, instead of pulling away, squeezed her fingers so hard they hurt. Pat tried to remember a period of her life when she’d been as close-mouthed as her daughter had become lately, but she couldn’t. Even when Pat’s father had run off with the woman from the Chamber of Commerce, a subject that was actively discouraged in conversation, the family had found plenty of other things to talk about, maybe even more than usual. A rush of words was a good way to wash an event clean.

  The guard who let them into the tiny glass foyer looked normal, too muscly maybe, but not at all sadistic. Pat was admittedly a bit nervous. Frank had told her to bring a hundred dollars in small bills for the vending machines, so she’d brought an assortment in a transparent cosmetic case, the only type of purse allowed in the visiting room. But the idea of gourmand Frank eating food from a vending machine was too ridiculous. (Jelly Bellys? Tootsie Rolls? A minuscule bag of oversalted, underflavored potato chips? Never.) So Pat had also put five hundreds in her bra, because you never knew what nefarious plots were afoot in prison and she thought that the mention of a hundred dollars might be code for “Bring me some real money.”

  The guard showed no inclination to search her. His lip did curl up at the corner when he talked, but you couldn’t really call it a sneer. Fortunately Pat had never been a person who embarrassed easily. “Great. Perfect,” she said several times in her sweeping soprano.

  The people in the visitors’ room looked normal, like any crowd at a bus station. Well, not quite normal. In every group was a man wearing khaki pants and a gray sweatshirt. Also, the proportions of the room were odd. Usually a room this size would have higher ceilings. Frank looked squashed when he appeared suddenly in the doorway, dressed like all the other inmates. The weight he’d gained before going to prison had disappeared. He was as skinny as he’d been in his twenties. In his forties he had earned a certain gravitas—not the killjoy sort, but the sort that comes naturally with age and comfortable living and unquestioned authority. That was gone now. His new leanness made him look older and frailer, and his eyes seemed to have sunk back a little in his head. As he moved toward his family, his cheap tennis shoes splayed out awkwardly. They might have been designed for something straighter and narrower than human feet.

  As Pat embraced him, her face flushed, her pulse raced. The combination of strangeness and familiarity left her breathless. He didn’t even look like himself. Yet she knew him through and through. She could reach in and touch his heart. It would be even easier now that he was smaller. Was that an age spot on his hand? Incredible.

  As Frank tried to hug Ruby, who remained stiff and stricken, Pat looked over her shoulder to flash the guard at the desk a big smile. “What’s he like?” she asked Frank in a low voice.

  Frank shrugged. “He’s okay,” he said.

  “You hear all these things about prison guards.”

  “Really, he’s okay,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down.”

  “Happy Thanksgiving!” she said, perched on the molded plastic chair. She told Frank he was looking good, a little white lie. Because he had been defined by his decisive and sometimes overbearing energy, it was difficult to see him so restrained, so skinny, so watchful.

  “So how’s Winky?” he asked. Ruby had been given Winky as a puppy years before.

  “Good,” she said briefly.

  Pat decided not to mention that Ruby’s social studies teacher had called yesterday to find out why she was missing so much school.

  “It’s not bad here,” said Frank. Then he attempted more jauntiness, maybe even irony: “Yesterday we had apples.”

  “How nice!” cried Pat. “I love apples! You know that the Forbidden Fruit was a fig, not an apple!”

  “Sometimes I wish you were in here with me,” said Frank.

  “That’s so sweet,” said Pat.

  “I don’t know why you shouldn’t be,” said Frank, still smiling. “You’re the one who’s still reaping the rewards of my evil behavior.”

  “Oh, wow,” said Pat, too startled to know what to say.

  “Daddy—” said Ruby intensely.

  “What, honey?”

  When Ruby did not seem able to elaborate, Pat jumped in to say, looking down at the bright linen-white tiles, “I have never seen a floor glow the way this one does.”

  “An inmate buffs it every day,” said Frank.

  “Oh,” said Pat.

  It was better to ignore his flash of maliciousness about her incarceration. He had never before been anything worse than callous. Or obtuse. Oh, well, it was no wonder, considering all he’d been through. She smiled even harder. She wanted to reassure him with her own greater calm, the way she would one of the dogs. She knew she could pat him without being bitten. His weapons could not be fully unsheathed here, maybe they’d even shrunk with the weight he’d lost. Yet fear lurked behind this calm of hers, making it brittle. She was afraid for both of them—for Ruby, too—afraid that he might now possess a despair so great Pat would be incapable of divining the magic words to dispel it and he would say or do something that might never be undone.

  Then he said, “It’s wonderful to see you both,” and of course he meant it—truly—anyone could see that. What could she have been thinking? But the visit was going to go on for hours, and she was exhausted already.

  “Did you remember the cash?” he asked.

  Pat lifted the see-through cosmetic case with its furled bills.

  “Let’s eat,” he said with an uncharacteristically greedy gleam in his eye. Okay, he’d been greedy in the past. That, after all, was partly why he was in prison. He had never been greedy over petty matters, though. No matter how aggressive a driver Frank was, he wouldn’t fight over a parking space. He would dismiss anyone who did, saying, “I guess he’s too weak to walk a step or two.”

  But there was undisguised longing in his voice when he said, “We’ll start with chicken wings.” Evidently his request for cash for the vending machines had been completely straightforward.

  Still, Pat had never heard of getting chicken wings in a vending machine. Self-consciously she looked around the room. A number of people did seem to be eating with great relish.

  “Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this,” said Frank. “You know some inmates never have visitors, so they never get to eat anything but prison food.”

  “Chicken wings,” repeated Pat. “Do you want to be the one to get them?”

  “I can’t,” said Frank, sitting on his hands. “It’s against the rules.”

  So Pat gathered herself up and obediently strode off to one of the tall gray machines. There were the wings, in little plastic bags, slot after slot after slot of them, along with pizza and cheeseburgers and “beef steak,” all for six dollars a piece. With the help of a chatty Ecuadorean woman in a white drawstring blouse, she microwaved one of the packages while looking over her shoulder at her family and once even archly waving. Ruby and Frank were not speaking to each other.

  “Don’t you want any?” asked Frank when she returned with only the one serving.

  “Maybe later,” she said.

  He wasn’t paying attention. He fell upon the chicken wings with little scrabbly motions of lips and fingers, which got shiny with grease; his age spot danced. Pat felt Ruby trying to catch her eye, but Pat couldn’t let her do it; she was afraid of what might be written plainly across their faces.

  “When Alice Paul was in prison, she organized a hunger strike,” said Ruby.

  Frank broke off sucking long
enough to say, “Who?” His eyes flicked between his wife and his daughter, his face fell, and he abruptly dropped what was left of the wings into the packaging on his lap.

  There was an embarrassed silence.

  Then Pat said, “I wouldn’t be any good at a hunger strike. And don’t those wings look tasty! I think I’ll have some, after all.”

  They were awful, of course, stringy and off in the way that chicken heated in a microwave always is, but there did not seem to be as much meat as sauce, which had a certain tang to it. Plus, of course, Pat hadn’t eaten since breakfast. So she really wasn’t insincere when she said, “My, yes, Ruby, you should try some,” although she knew she may have sounded so, because of the way her voice swooped and soared.

  Considering Frank had asked Pat to bring a hundred dollars, he must have expected her to buy a lot of these tiny meals, at least a dozen. That would be four apiece. But he continued to ignore the chicken wings in his lap.

  “You have to have a real Thanksgiving dinner,” he said, as if to obliterate the wings’ existence.

  “That sounds good,” said Pat. “But we’re happy to be here with you.”

  “Stop near Camelback on your way home.”

  “That’s an idea,” she said.

  “The inn there isn’t bad,” he said peevishly, as if his taste had been questioned. “They had rather good rémoulade if I remember. No! Don’t go there. Drive down to Lancaster. There’s a fabulous five-star restaurant among the Amish there. Remember? Go out and get your cellphone and see if you can still get reservations. I wish I could speak to them. I’m sure I could get you a table.”

  “I think I’ll just get some more of these delicious wings,” Pat chirped. Clearly she was going to have to do a very good job of pretending to like them, if she wanted Frank to pick up his again.

  “Give me a moment, and I’ll remember the name,” he said.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any, Ruby?”

  “Daddy—” she said, sounding strangled.

  At the vending machine Pat wondered if she really had to get another package of those awful wings or if she could switch to another, no less unappetizing-looking food, like the “beef steak.” Better to stick with the wings, she figured.

  And it worked. Oh, he knew she was putting on a show, but so what? Shows work because performers and audience members all want them to. The audience cries out to be tricked. As Pat delved into her next package of wings with dogged cheerfulness, Frank finally went back to the last of his own and asked for pizza. Ruby frowned and again said, “Daddy—”

  “Yes?” said Frank.

  Whatever she’d been about to say she changed to “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff,” but neither Pat nor Frank paid much attention. The show had prevailed, so Ruby’s words, however cutting, must have been indicative of her own misery rather than any acknowledged truth.

  When Pat returned with the pizza, she said, “I caught a glimpse of Oliver the other day. Why, exactly, didn’t you promote him?”

  Frank’s agitation returned. “Is he still angry at me? After I kept him out of that mess? My problem was, I wasn’t a big enough criminal.”

  Pat could not see the logic behind the conjoining of those two ideas—the protection of Oliver with the insignificance of the crimes. Probably Frank thought his behavior was “wrong” in the way he’d know it was “wrong” to ski a trail that had been posted. It’s the sort of thing you regret only if it fails. You can get down a dangerous trail—and then scoff at why it had been closed at all. You can continue to inflate your earnings—and then scoff at the rules that try to put a brake on a market that goes up as surely as a flood tide. You don’t necessarily lose your way and put would-be rescuers in the hospital. You don’t necessarily get caught and end up impoverishing your secretary.

  “I ran into Ellen, too,” said Pat.

  “You know that she cried when I called her,” said Frank.

  Pat did not point out the many times Frank had already mentioned this. Instead she said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to help her out in some way?” There was no point in telling him that she’d already sent a check; it would only upset him.

  “Oh, yes,” said Frank. “That’s a great idea. Do something for Ellen. It wasn’t her fault.”

  “Whose fault was it?” asked Ruby in a small voice.

  “I don’t know who was worse, Riley or Neil,” said Frank. “In the two years before LinkAge went bankrupt, Riley Gibbs made seventy-eight million dollars. Neil Culp made thirty-nine million. And that isn’t counting their unsecured loans. The shareholders lost a hundred and forty billion dollars. It was all rigged.”

  “One hundred and forty billion,” Pat repeated slowly.

  “I was a moron,” said Frank. “They used me just the way they used everybody. The first quarter that LinkAge’s numbers were bad, word came down from Gibbs: The Swat Team was to fly coach and stay in budget motels. Then he turned around and bought himself a horse farm in Hunterdon County. I thought Neil was so great, but he would do anything for Gibbs because whatever Gibbs got, Neil got half. I’m surprised he didn’t get a half a horse farm.”

  “Why aren’t they in jail?” asked Ruby.

  “Too rich, I guess,” said Frank. “Maybe if I’d worked harder and made more money, I’d have gotten off, too.”

  “Why didn’t you do something about it before you got put in jail?” Ruby persisted.

  “Maybe the government didn’t have enough evidence,” said Pat quickly. “It isn’t always possible to change everything that’s wrong.”

  “I don’t see why,” said Ruby, her eyes narrow and her lips tight.

  “What shall we have next?” said Pat. “A cheeseburger?”

  “Pizza for me,” said Frank.

  Pat came back with just the pizza, saying, “I changed my mind at the last minute.”

  Later, on their way out, as they stepped gingerly down the concrete steps into the wide-open world, Pat noticed tears streaming down Ruby’s face. She tried to put an arm around her shoulders. But Ruby shrugged her off, saying, “Why were you such a pig in there? Maybe if you could stop stuffing your face for two minutes in a row, people like Neil Culp wouldn’t get away with everything.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  Pat had been rereading Lemuel Samuel’s books for a while. She was surprised at how crude they seemed now; like early Technicolor, their effects were lurid and clumsy and heavy-handed. Bud Caddy actually cuts off a guy’s foot in The Fleabag Massacre and leaves it lying in the road. But the roughness was the point. Mallow was the smoothest and most sentimental of the books, also the most lucrative. Pat had saved it for last, hoping to find clues about who she was. Instead she found the same joy present in all the books. You might mistake it for anger or righteousness or knight errantry. Bud Caddy often seemed to. But at the core of his every thought and action was a very American and very physical joy—in excess, in ferocity, in endurance. Halfway through Mallow, Pat decided she needed a drink. It was better that than look for a fight, which she would not have known how to do for fun, anyway.

  Because she had thrown away all the half-full wine bottles, she decided to pick up a nice burgundy at the liquor store. She slipped on a pair of skintight black pants and a pair of sunglasses so narrow that they would have let in tons of light, had there been any on this gray day. Reconnoitering the stairway wasn’t too hard, because there was a window at each landing, but she could hardly see as she picked her way across the shadowy kitchen.

  “So what’s with the shades?”

  “My goodness!” cried Pat, her voice soaring.

  At first she thought Ruby was referring to the shades on the kitchen windows, which had been drawn for some no doubt nefarious reason. She was sitting in the dark, possibly on some kind of drug that made the pupil take over the iris and thus be more sensitive to light. Hadn’t there been a drug like that? Pat couldn’t remember. If not, science and technology had probably come up with it in the last coupl
e of decades.

  “Pretty groovy slash embarrassing,” said Ruby. This was the usual puzzle. She was already making fun of Pat in the choice of the word groovy, so how was embarrassing a twist? Ruby’s disposition had not been improved by her father’s absence.

  “Yes,” agreed Pat absently. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “It was a half day. Testing slash torturing.”

  Pat wondered if this could possibly be true. “I’m sure you did very well,” she said.

  LaConte Liquors was not on the main commercial street of Hart Ridge, but in a less frequented shopping arcade nearby. On one side was an unpopular deli; on the other, a dry cleaners that still had aging sixties-style cardboard advertising in the window. In the window of LaConte Liquors, Christmas lights illuminated a little glowing Santa with an inflatable bottle of gin in his sleigh. Pat paused in front of it, ambushed by memories of happier times.

  When she was growing up, the LaConte brothers were everywhere. LaConte & Company was the largest real estate office in town. The LaConte Funeral Home was prosperous, too, even though it didn’t dominate its market in quite the same way. LaConte Liquors was the poor relation, covering the shabbiest section of the town’s first tier. But Frank was friends with the son, Bobby, in high school, and when Bobby eventually took over the family business, Frank started buying all his liquor there. It was a store that Pat liked to shop in, too, because it sold grittier, more atmospheric stuff like forty-ouncers you wouldn’t see in shops that specialized in fine wines. Not that Bobby passed up luxury items. He was the one who’d ordered Frank the cartons of reds and the carton of single malts. She took a deep breath and pushed open the door.