Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“So tell me something I don’t already know, Giles,” I said, holding out the pack of cigarettes for him again. “I mean, why does a guy like Vasquez even sell shit when he doesn’t have a prayer of seeing the outside?”

Without hesitating he took another cigarette from the pack and lit it off the one just smoked.

“Okay,” he said, “all right. Like Vasquez was selling so he’d have a nest egg for him and his girlfriend, what’s her name?”

“You tell me.”

He smiled a mouth full of black-and-brown teeth, the one capped in gold out of place and sparkling in the raw white light that came from the overhead ceiling fixture.

“I don’t have no names,” he said. “But I do know this about Vasquez. He was selling shit so he and his girl could have something to live on down in Mexico when he finally got his chance to split. But like, he couldn’t split right away. Like he was waiting for the perfect security personnel, the right guards, you dig it? Eddy, he’s a motherfucker for sure, but he’s one smart motherfucker. He knew he had only one chance, one shot. He had to get hold of some guards who didn’t have no problem taking a bribe.”

I put my hand in my pocket, fingered the envelope with Cassandra Wolf’s address on it.

“You want to give me the names of the guards who were working with Vasquez?”

“Yeah,” he said, leaning back against the concrete wall, laying his tattooed forearm across his lap. “Like I really, really do, Mister Warden sir.”

He looked into my eyes and he smiled that killer smile. I wondered if it was the same smile he’d used when he lured those kids into his van. I guess this was the part of the one-on-one where I was supposed to feel a slight chill shoot up from the base of my spine. I wasn’t sure if my lack of feeling was more an indication of Garvin’s lack of effect on me or my own desensitization. On the other hand, there was something very practical and useful going on here and I didn’t want to blow it by getting on Garvin’s bad side, although I’m not so sure he had a good side at all. Fact is, it wasn’t often that an inmate would just open up about a fellow inmate unless some serious shit was going down between them.

“So why are you telling me all this, Giles?”

Garvin’s already-hard face went noticeably taut His skin turned fire-engine red. He used his lit cigarette as a pointer when he extended his fist to my face.

“Should I say, Mister Warden sir, that Eduard Vasquez, motherfucker that he is, is on my shit list? Should I say that Vasquez, when I get to him, is like one dead motherfucker? Would that be incriminating myself, Mister Warden, sir? Because if it is, I’m long past sympathy for the devil.”

I opened up to the voices of the other caged men. “Hey Warden Marconi, I know you’re in there…“ I heard the voices until I would not allow myself to listen to them anymore.

In the meantime, Garvin settled down a little.

“But I don’t give away information without a price,” he said, blowing another stream of smoke into the sweat-soaked air.

“Listen, Giles,” I said, wondering just what Vasquez had done to double-cross him, “I can’t do a thing about your sentence. Those kids you murdered are too much. But I can make it easier for you in here.”

He glared at me with translucent blue eyes hidden inside chiseled cavities. The four baby-blue teardrops tattooed to his face were bitter reminders of the four children he had murdered and mutilated.

“But first,” I said, “give me names.”

The killer looked to one side of his cell, then to the other as if expecting to see something besides concrete, steel and slime.

“Okay, Mister Warden, sir,” he said, leaning up and resting his elbows on his knees. “But you gotta promise me one thing.”

Me, nodding.

“That when it comes time, you speak up for me.”

Garvin had no chance for parole. If the jury hadn’t wrestled with the sanity question, they would have sent him straight to death row. I had no idea what Vasquez could have done to betray him.

“No deals. Any deal gets made, I make it.”

Garvin spread his thin legs wide, grabbed his balls.

“Blow me,” he said.

“You know the score, Garvin. Word gets out I gave you a deal, my name don’t mean diddly in the iron house.”

Garvin dropped the spent cigarette through his spread legs so that it landed in the toilet. I heard the quick hiss of the doused flame. He leaned back against the concrete wall. When I offered him a third cigarette, he refused, choosing instead to cross his arms against his chest as though in protest.

“Names,” I pressed.

He hesitated for a second or two.

“Fuck you,” he said. “Like you don’t want to help me, then fuck you.”

“No deals.”

“You just want those names so you can save your ass. You ain’t got no interest in helping me. I read the papers too, Warden. Like, you been slipping since your wife got killed. Like, maybe your mind just ain’t on your job no more.”

“Yeah,” I said, standing up from the stainless-steel bed, nodding for the guard to release the cell door, “I’m a million miles away.”

“No deals,” Garvin said, “then I got nothing to say.”

The cell door opened, electronically this time-an iron cell within an iron cage.

“Go ahead,” spat Garvin, laughing now, showing me his gold tooth, “waste your time, man. Like ‘California Dreamin.’ Just like that stupid-ass song. You be real safe, you be real warm if you was in L.A.”

I turned to leave.

“Don’t you see, Warden, California was never real. Like California was just a big beautiful dream. You are the warden, aren’t you? Like, you can do anything.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m the big boss, Giles.”

I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was trying to tell me, if he was trying to tell me anything at all. It was rants like this that had spared him from lethal injection when judge and jury handed down their sentence. Nutty rants and raves that made little or no sense.

But then, Garvin had been on the money about one thing.

Since Fran died, I’d been a million miles away. If my mind had been on my job, then maybe-just maybe-I would not have let Vasquez go like that. Civil liberties or no civil liberties.

I tossed the pack of cigarettes onto Garvin’s bunk and got the hell out.

IT WAS QUARTER PAST five on a Tuesday afternoon. I took a fresh pack of smokes from the carton stored in the right-hand drawer of my desk. Val Antonelli and Dan Sloat had left for the day, an unavoidable situation that always made me feel a little empty inside. I checked my voice mail. Only one person had left a message. What I mean is, at least six other calls had been placed but the caller or callers had hung up without saying a word about who they were, what they wanted, or why they had to talk to me.

In the prison business, hang-ups were never a good sign.

Pelton, I thought. Pelton or the press.

Probably both.

I popped a cigarette from the new pack, lit it, and leaned back in my swivel chair. Then I reached over and hit the playback button.

Keeper, Schillinger at Stormville PD letting you know we got dead ends all around. Nothing in Vasquez’s cell. Nothing from the roadblocks. Nothing from the California people in Olancha. Just dead ends. We’ve contacted the FBI, and as I speak, border patrol is doing what they can for us in case Vasquez is headed south, but who knows. That’s it, that’s the score. Just dead ends, you know. Call me back with anything you find out. Oh yeah, one more thing. I need to tell you that tomorrow we should sit down and talk about what went wrong on your end. You have a good night now.