Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

"Okay, I guess," said Felix. "My head hurts. What the fuck happened?"

"You were knocked out, a concussion. Also you were stabbed, but the blade twisted against a rib and did not penetrate far. Would you like some pills for the pain?"

"Fuck yes."

The pills were produced, two tabs of Percocet. After swallowing them, Felix asked, "So I'm okay? No permanent damage, huh?"

"Not to your body. Your legal situation is not so good, I am afraid."

"My legal…?"

"Yes. The guard Daniels is dead. They are saying you killed him."

"The fuck they are! That's bullshit! Who's saying I killed him, the niggers?"

"No, you were seen by several guards, apparently. Daniels was killed by a blow to the side of the neck, a blow from a naked hand. There are not many men who could deliver such a blow."

Without thinking, Felix looked at his hands. A heavy rind of callous ran along the edge of each. The knuckles barely rose above the thick hornlike skin that encased them. Felix had been a karate black belt before coming to the prison, and he had been scrupulous about practicing during his time here. That was his other main thing- his body and its effectiveness as a weapon. Had he killed Daniels? He wasn't sure, although some details were returning now, as the drug relaxed him. The iron bar had been torn from his hands, and then he'd felt the jab of the knife. There were angry black faces all around him and he'd kicked and struck out at them. Someone had tried to grab him from behind and he'd whirled and chopped at a neck. Then nothing. That could have been Daniels. By then everything was a blur, the red haze of rage, sweat in his eyes. They couldn't hold him responsible for that. It was Marvelle who'd started the whole thing anyway.

"It was Marvelle started the fucking thing. Whyn't they fuck with him for a change?"

The Arab ignored this. "I think you are in a lot of trouble, Felix, you know? A great deal of big trouble. Killing a guard is murder in the first degree. They have the death penalty now. I think they intend to pin you for this murder."

"Let them fucking try," said Felix, "I didn't kill anyone. Not on purpose anyway."

Later that same day, however, two state police detectives arrived at Felix's bedside, to interview him and to confront him with the evidence against him. The whole thing had been captured by the video cameras perpetually trained on the yard, they said, and it was perfectly clear who had killed the guard. They desired a confession, which Felix did not give them. It was an essential part of his psychology never to confess to anything, not for strategic reasons, but because, in his own mind, he was incapable of wrongdoing of any kind. That any act of his was justified, correct, blameless was, in a sense, the core of his being. Felix Tighe was a psychopath.

He asked for a lawyer then, which meant that they had to stop questioning him. It did not mean, however, that they had to stop talking to him, and one of the state detectives did that, describing in some detail what would happen to him after he was convicted of first-degree murder. New York had never executed anyone under the new statute, but it was the detective's belief that the state was merely waiting for someone just like Felix: white, a convicted murderer of a woman and a child, who had killed an officer in the line of duty. "A poster boy for capital punishment" was the phrase he used more than once.

The next day, a lawyer appeared, a court-appointed local, bored and irritably earning his twenty-five dollars per, who explained to Felix the legal doctrine of intent. It did not matter, he said, that Felix had not arisen that Monday morning planning to murder Officer Phillip K. Daniels. He had directed a blow against the victim's neck, knowing his own power and skill, knowing that it was potentially deadly. It was precisely the same as shooting a cop in the commission of a crime. "I didn't mean it" was not exculpatory under law. The lawyer advised Felix to take the plea, and he'd try to work out something that did not involve lethal injection. Felix refused. The lawyer explained what a refusal meant: that he would be tried locally, in Cuyahoga County, before a jury composed of people having zero sympathy for New York City bad boys, who all knew someone who knew someone who worked as a corrections officer at the prison. Felix then cursed out the lawyer so violently that the man got up and left.

After that Felix napped, untroubled by the future. Like many of his fellow psychopaths, he had the imagination and foresight of a newt. It was the Arab who brought him to his senses. He was sympathetic, to start with, and Felix was a great consumer of sympathy. In the long quiet night hours of the infirmary, the Arab sat in a chair by Felix's bedside, listening to the sad story of how Felix had been shafted, screwed, betrayed by everyone with whom he had come in contact (especially women), how all his plans had been undone by bad luck, how his reasonable efforts to seek justice had been misconstrued, how he had been so many times unjustly accused of crimes, as now. To all this, the Arab listened calmly, silent except for little clucks of concern. This made Felix happy, not because he thought he was becoming friends with the man- friendship was a category void of meaning for Felix- but because the jerk seemed to be swallowing the story whole, which meant he could be manipulated to Felix's advantage. Which he already was: he was a willing source of drugs, and a faker of medical reports, so that Felix got to hang out in bed all day instead of having to hump laundry baskets or slave away in the roasting stamping shop, making license plates. The infirmary was air-conditioned.

On one of these pleasant nights, Felix was expatiating on one of his favorite themes, how the niggers got all the breaks, because the hebes wanted it that way, so that real Americans got kept down. Felix did not actually believe all this. Sympathizing with the downtrodden, even the class of which he was a member, was quite alien to him. All of it was in service of manipulation- he figured the Arab would have a thing about Jews. And indeed, the man spoke for the first time after Felix said this, but not about the Jews.

"They are going to execute you, you know," said the Arab. "It is inevitable. And that will be the end of your sad story. A pity, really. You are clearly a man capable of larger things."

Felix stared at him.

The Arab's eyes were sad as he resumed. "Yes, you see I have many contacts in the administration. And outside. It is amazing how much information one can buy if one has an endless supply of painkillers and soporifics and diet pills. Everyone is looking for the drugs smuggled into the prison; it never occurs to anyone that drugs can be smuggled out, as well. In any case, my informants tell me that the indictment is already prepared. It will be for first-degree murder, and the state has absolutely no incentive to ask for anything other than death."

The word brought Felix back from a reverie in which he blackmailed the Arab into letting him into the drug supply business in the prison, running it, in fact. He'd be the fucking king of the yard if he could get his hands on…

"Death?"

"Yes. Inevitable. The trial will be a slam dunk. That is correct, yes, a slam dunk? As I say, a pity. Unless you were able to escape."

"What're you talking about?"

"It could be arranged. I could arrange it, in fact."

"How?"

An elegant shrug. "You could go into a decline. Dr. McMartin is not punctilious and we have an unusual number of patients because of the riot. Your wound becomes infected. I start an IV, for antibiotics. Unfortunately it is of no use. You slip into a coma. You die. You have no close relations, do you?"

"No," said Felix, and had the strange, if fleeting, notion that the Arab already knew this fact. "What do you mean, I die?"