Брайан Гарфилд - Suspended Sentences

That had been a year ago, at the prison in Atlanta. She’d only visited him once more after that, to tell him about the funeral and ask him when he expected to be released on parole. She’d left quickly, unable to face his indifference to Mom’s death.

Now he was getting out, just as he’d planned, and she had to keep her part of the bargain. But it would be all right. After Monday he’d be far away in some distant part of the world and she’d never have to see, or even think about, her brother again.

Thurston found a parking space just off McDonough Boulevard and walked to the entrance gate. The long gray building had a forbidding institutional massiveness. Only a discreet plaque identified it: Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. The “Big A.”

Thurston was expected. His credentials got him in. A guard escorted him to a small outer office where he waited a few minutes with a magazine before he was admitted to the Deputy Warden’s sanctum.

The Deputy Warden was a large man with a bushy sand-colored mustache and a beer gut and the plaid-shirt look of Good Ole Boy who spent his free days hunting with coon hounds and swapping lies in roadhouse taverns.

“Well, now, Mr. Thurston, they didn’t tell me exactly what you want down here but we be happy to oblige you if we can. Now you represent the insurance company, that right?” He pronounced “right” as if it were “rat” and put heavy emphasis on the first syllable of “insurance.”

Thurston said, “I work for a private-investigation company. But we’re under contract to the insurance people, yes. Indirectly I work for the insurance company. We’re still hoping to recover the bonds that Marks stole.”

“I can see where they might be just a little bit interested in something like that. They had to pay off the claim in full, I expect?”

“In full,” Thurston agreed drily. “We didn’t recover any of it.”

“But I thought Marks confessed?”

“He did.”

The Deputy Warden glanced through a stapled sheaf of papers — possibly the file on Edward “Ned” Marks. “They were bearer bonds, I see. No registered owners, no signatures. Even if you get ’em back, how’re you fixin’ to identify them?”

“They’ve got serial numbers.”

“Well,” the Deputy Warden said, “he’s behaved himself here, kept mostly out of trouble, served easy time. Stays out of most folks’ way. I haven’t had much contact with him. No occasion to. The ones I see are mostly the troublemakers. So there’s not a whole lot I can tell you about him.”

The Deputy Warden cocked his head over on one side. “You know, that’s a pretty fair rate of pay — seven hundred thousand dollars for twenty-eight months easy time. Works out to about twenty-five thousand a month, doesn’t it. Good pay, yessirreebob. If he gets to keep it.” The eyes narrowed into a shrewd smile. “You’re fixin’ to see he doesn’t get to keep it.”

Thurston said, “Well, I’m fixing to try. He’s due for release tomorrow morning. I’d appreciate it if you’d point him out to me but not let him see me. I’ve seen his photographs But they’re a few years old and I’d rather have him identified for me in the flesh, just so there’s no possibility of a mistake.”

“And then you aim to shadow him when he leaves here, that it?”

“Every step of the way.”

Thurston sat in the car in a No Parking zone — “Violators will be towed away” — with art angle of view on the Big A. It looked rather like the Reichstag from this angle — the old one, he thought; the one Hitler had burned down in ’33. Thurston took an interest in history, particularly the kind that was told photographically. He had a growing collection of rare old plates — even a few Matthew Brady originals. It was the sort of thing you did when you lived alone, and Thurston preferred to live alone.

He wasn’t antisocial. But he’d learned there wasn’t anybody whose face he wanted to look at every night and every morning — or at least he’d thought so until recently.

There was one daughter, now thirteen, the souvenir of his youthful romantic illusion, but she was confined to a home for the severely retarded. She didn’t recognize him on his infrequent visits, so he didn’t feel he had any real ties. He read books, collected his photographic history, played poker quite often, enjoyed his own simple cooking, worked out three times a week in a health club, dated several women most of whom were divorcees; but lately he’d been seeing more of one woman than of the others.

He enjoyed most of all his work. Thurston had been a licensed investigator ever since he’d been discharged from the Military Police in 1968.

He had specialized in insurance cases for seven years now; he had a record of recoveries that no other agent in the company could match, and he took pride in it.

The Ned Marks case had been a special challenge from the beginning. It had come across his desk a year ago; another agent had handled it originally but he’d retired and now it was Thurston’s. The self-confident brashness of the Marks theft had intrigued him from the start, mainly because it appeared that Marks had expected to be caught.

Marks had been neither surprised nor chagrined when they’d arrested him two days after the bearer bonds had disappeared from the vault of the Sherman Oaks bank where he’d worked for eight months as a junior mortgage officer.

Thurston had inherited a thorough dossier on Marks and he’d committed the salient references to memory. It was a personal history of dreary familiarity to Thurston, who had read a thousand such dossiers and long since lost his capacity for surprise.

Marks was thirty-seven. He’d served in Vietnam, but in a clerical capacity in Saigon — not out in the boonies. There was only one prior arrest on the rap sheet. At the age of eighteen he’d stolen the landlord’s typewriter and sold it for $25, which he then lost in a schoolyard crap game. His mother had bought another typewriter for the landlord and the case had been dropped.

After his army service and two years of G.I. Bill attendance at a junior college in Santa Ana, Marks had gone to work for a former Vietnam buddy in a shady scheme to sell cut-rate (and worthless) vitamin pills to minor drugstore chains. When the venture went bankrupt under the threat of F.D.A. scrutiny, Marks had drifted into other jobs, mostly in the sort of selling operations that were next door to frauds but just within the law — mail-order junk, real-estate scams, pest exterminating. According to the dossier, one employer had fired him because she suspected him of having embezzled $3000, but nothing was proved and no charges had been brought against him.

Thurston had dealt with Marks’s kind before: the cruel solipsists, the me-first sharpies with clever brains and the moral convictions of hungry pariah dogs.

Among the confidential reports in the dossier was an interview with a casual chum of Marks’s who’d worked as a bartender in Van Nuys. “He said he’d just got himself a job in some bank over there someplace around Ventura Boulevard. He said it didn’t pay much. So I ask him why he took the job, and he gives me that funny smile, like, you know the way he smiles like he knows something nobody else knows, and he gives me, you know, that old Willie Sutton line about I go to banks because that’s where the money is. You know.”

So he might had had it in mind to rip off the bank even before he applied for the job there. In any case he’d had eight months to study the operations — the bank’s arrangements for the handling of negotiables. On the morning of the theft Marks had gone into the vault to get a deck of traveler’s checks, and according to his confession he’d simply slipped the sheaf of bearer bonds under his shirt and walked out with them.