Peter Abrahams - Lights Out

Messer checked his watch. “They’ll be along. Just like vultures. Execution tonight, Miss de Vere. We’ll be going into a precautionary lockdown in forty-five minutes.”

“Who’s being executed?”

She’d surprised him again. “You haven’t heard of Mister Willie Boggs? I thought he was a national figure by now.”

“What did he do?”

“Found a way to wrap a lot of bleeding-heart lawyers around his little black finger.”

“I was referring to his crime,” Karen said, noticing the photographs of Messer posed with dead fish on the walls.

“Killed a liquor-store clerk in a robbery,” said Messer. “Or was with the guy that killed him. Or drove the getaway car. Can’t remember. It was a long time ago, Miss de Vere. Now how can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a former inmate of yours.”

“Name of?”

“Eddie Nye.”

Messer went still.

“What is it?” Karen said.

“Nothing.”

“You recognized the name.”

“Oh, sure,” said Messer. “I was thinking, is all.”

“Thinking what?”

“Thinking-that was quick.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ol’ Nails’s been gone hardly more’n a week and he’s screwed up already, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Not a record, fifteen minutes is the record, but quick just the same.” Messer glanced at the closed office door. “I take it you don’t know where he is.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You think we know where he is?”

“Any information might help.”

Messer nodded. “What’s he done?”

“Nothing that I’m aware of. Why do you call him Nails ?”

Messer smiled at some memory. “It’s a long story,” he said. “If he hasn’t done anything, why are you looking for him?”

“The investigation concerns his brother.”

“Didn’t know he had one.” Messer swiveled around to a computer, tapped at the keyboard. “He a jailbird too?” Words popped up on the screen. Messer scrolled through them. “Here we go. Nye, J. M. Residence: Galleon Beach Club, Saint Amour, the Bahamas. Fancy-dancy. One visit and one visit only, and that was fifteen years ago.” Messer looked up. “What’s he done?”

“He’s suspected of various securities infractions.”

“Can’t picture Nails involved in something like that.”

“Why not, Mr. Messer?” Karen said, realizing as she spoke that she was coming to Eddie’s defense in some way, and not stopping herself.

“Doctor, if it’s all the same to you,” said Messer. “I’ve got a doctorate in psychology.”

“Doctor,” said Karen, very distinctly, not mentioning her law degree from Harvard or her Ph.D. in economics from Penn.

“Thank you,” said Messer. “See, Nails is a criminal, all right, but not the white-collar type.” He glanced at the computer screen. “He got himself in here on a dope-smuggling conviction, five to fifteen, should have been out in three and a half, four, but then he killed three inmates and ended up pulling the full load. Not the white-collar type, if you see what I mean.”

“He killed three inmates?” She’d known about the dope conviction ninety minutes after Eddie had first knocked on Jack’s door.

“Not that we could ever prove in a court of law. No one’s going to talk for the record, right? Or he would’ve been here forever. But we didn’t need that shit to deny parole. Excuse my language.”

“Of course, doctor. Could you tell me more about these killings?”

“Like what?”

“The motives, for example.”

Messer turned to the screen, scrolled through. “The usual initiation thing, I guess you could say. Only he took revenge. Successfully, you might say. That hardly ever happens.”

“Initiation thing.”

“This isn’t summer camp, Miss de Vere. How specific do you want me to be?”

“They raped him, is that what you’re pussyfooting around?”

“One way of putting it,” said Messer. “You’ve got to look at it in context.”

“Context?”

“It wasn’t an attack on Joe or Joanne Normal. Ol’ Nails is a violent guy.”

“I’ve seen no sign of that.”

Messer leaned forward. “You’ve met him?”

“More than once.”

“In New York?”

“That’s right.”

There was a silence. “But you’ve got no idea where he is.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Karen said. “As I mentioned.”

“No idea at all.”

“That’s what I said.” Karen got the odd idea that Messer shared her interest in Eddie’s whereabouts.

Messer shot her a quick, angry glance from under his Santa Claus eyebrows. Then he heaved a deep sigh. “Sorry if I’m a little distracted today. These executions are a nuisance, if you want my frank opinion.”

“You’re against them?”

“Against capital punishment? Just the reverse. For all the usual reasons. Plus it just feels right, morally speaking.”

“To whom?”

He yawned, stretched. There were sweat stains under both arms of his short-sleeved white shirt. “I’m sure you didn’t come all this way for a philosophical discussion, Miss de Vere. Have you got any other questions relating to Mr. Nye?”

“I could use a list of all his visitors over the fifteen-year period, but if that’s too much trouble, the last two or three will do.”

Messer turned to the computer. After a moment or two he said, “You’ve already got it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There was just the one visit. His brother, two months after processing day.”

“That can’t be right.”

“It’s all in the computer,” said Messer. He checked his watch. “Now, if there’s nothing else…”

Karen rose, extended her hand. That took some effort. He shook it. “Good luck,” he said.

She was almost at the door when she had a final thought. She stopped, turned.

“Did Eddie know Willie Boggs?”

“All those longtimers know each other, more or less.”

“Did they spend time together?”

“The death-row boys don’t do much circulating. About the only place they might have run into each other was the library. That’s where Mister Willie Boggs went when he wanted to play lawyer.”

“And Eddie Nye spent time in the library.”

“Oh, yes, he was quite the reader.”

Karen drove away from the prison in her rental car. A crowd of people stood in a dusty field by the side of the road; a woman in black held up a sign: “Stop the Murder of Willie Boggs.” Karen pulled over and got out.

She walked through the crowd. She saw a priest, a nun, a Buddhist monk; a woman in business dress, a leathery man wearing nothing but cutoffs, a baby in a stroller; a cameraman, a soundman, a reporter fixing her lipstick. She didn’t see Eddie Nye.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t coming. She glanced in her bag, saw the red fragment of the Monarch . Maybe Eddie and Willie Boggs had had long discussions in the library. Maybe he would want to be here.

The sun was setting, but the air was still warm. In the middle distance, the prison rose like a castle in the kind of bloody fairy tales that have been dropped from the anthologies, its stone walls reddened by the last rays of the sun. A breeze stirred, raising dust off the field. When a vendor came by pushing a cart, Karen ordered a diet soda, just to wet her throat.

“I’ve got beer too,” said the vendor. “And wine coolers.”

“No, thanks.”

The leathery man bought a can of beer with change dug from the pockets of his cutoffs and sat down cross-legged to drink. Night fell. Lights shone on the walls of the prison, as though a son et lumiere show was in the offing. A few more people arrived, none of them Eddie. The reporter interviewed the nun and a man with a bottle sticking out of his pants, then went into the TV truck with her crew. Karen could see them passing around cartons of food.