Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

Detective Martin Schillinger hung up having delivered his little threat. Tomorrow he wanted to talk. Over my dead body, I thought. Or maybe that’s what someone had in mind. I found it surprising that he never once mentioned the photos Dan and I had handed over to him inside Vasquez’s empty cell. He must have examined them. To me, a photo of some woman with a heart-shaped tattoo on her neck was a clue that deserved follow-up. But then, he was the detective and I was the concerned warden.

I played Schillinger’s message back again. When it finished, the receiver hung up and a dial tone took over. Then nothing. I played the message back one last time. It didn’t change, so I erased it.

I looked at my watch. Five-eighteen on a hot, still afternoon in May.

Happy hour. What was there to feel happy about?

I poured myself a drink anyway, and decided to put a couple down for all the wrong reasons.

If I called Schillinger I would probably catch him in his office. But what would I have to tell him about the escape? He’d want the truth and I had no idea about the truth. I thought about Logan’s statement, about the three armed assailants who had beaten him and Mastriano. I thought about the little bump above Logan’s left eye and then suddenly I pictured the wide white medical bandage that he had wrapped around his head, specifically for a television audience. I pictured Mastriano lying in a hospital bed, his mother sitting by his side, her hands clasped around his. I pictured Giles Garvin blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling of his cell.

I took another sip of the whiskey. While the drink was going down smooth and warm against my pipes, it dawned on me. Giles Garvin. That stuff he’d been rambling on about, just before I’d left his cell. California dreamin’. I thought about Schillinger’s message, how they had contacted the people in Olancha, California. I thought about the envelope I found in Vasquez’s cell yesterday afternoon. I pulled it out of my pocket and studied it in the white light that came from my desk lamp. There wasn’t much to look at, just a typical envelope addressed to Vasquez with a return address from Cassandra Wolf in Olancha. But then I looked at the postmark. The circular mark inlaid over a rectangle was barely legible. But when I put it under the light, I could just about make out the letters. The mark was dated 1 May 1997, but it hadn’t come from Olancha, California, at all. The goddamned letter had been postdated at an office in Athens, New York. No wonder Vasquez had eluded the road blocks. No wonder Schillinger and his men had nothing to go on. Vasquez must have somehow made the eighty-mile trek north to meet Cassandra Wolf in Athens.

I sat back in my swivel chair, smoked the cigarette, drank the whiskey.

The importance of what I’d done-withholding police evidence and hampering a state investigation-kicked in, turned my stomach inside out. Maybe Garvin was right. Maybe I was trying to get at the truth just to save my behind for not being more careful when it came to transporting inmates outside the prison. At best, I could just keep avoiding Schillinger the way I’d been avoiding Pelton for the last twenty-four hours. Avoid him and hope he focused his attention on other things, like where to begin looking for Vasquez. But then, I wanted to be the first one to find Vasquez, have him give me the true gen on what was happening to me and to Green Haven.

I poured myself another whiskey. Like bad medicine, I downed it in one swallow. I poured another and drank that down, just as fast. I felt the liquor warm my insides, like an embrace from a beautiful woman, and just as tender. I poured one last shot, took the phone off the hook, closed my eyes, and embraced the woman.

I LEFT THE OFFICE at 6:55 and arrived home fifteen minutes later. I was groggy from the whiskey, but not so dazed that I couldn’t catch the rest of the seven o’clock news. The CBS news anchor spoke from his New York studio to a reporter inside the hospital room of Green Haven CO Bernard Mastriano. Mastriano had attracted national attention. The reporter stood exactly where Chris Collins had stood earlier, at the foot of Mastriano’s bed so that you could see him and his mother by his side.

“Has there been any word on the possible location of Eduard Vasquez?” the anchor asked the reporter.

“No such luck. All we can tell at this point is that roadblock and surveillance efforts have proven unsuccessful. In fact, there’s speculation that Vasquez may have already escaped New York state altogether. Perhaps by now, more than twenty-four hours after the initial breakout, Vasquez has even made it out of the country.”

Athens, I thought. He went to Athens, New York, to hook up with his girl.

“Has any reason been given for why such a dangerous criminal as Eduard Vasquez would have been allowed to visit a dentist on the outside?”

“That answer can only come from the warden of Green Haven Prison, Mr. Jack ‘Keeper’ Marconi, and he’s been unavailable for comment thus far.”

“Let me get this straight,” the anchor went on, pretending to put his field reporter on the spot. “The warden of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison is not guarding his inmates?”

“That seems to be the case.”

There was a slight pause in the report, as if to allow that little exchange to sink in below the belt of every American tuned in to the broadcast. Then the anchor continued with his questions.

“Any word on the present condition of the corrections officer who was struck down?”

“Only that he’s unconscious and still in intensive care and will be for some days.”

With that, the anchor turned in his swivel chair and faced the camera. “That was William Anderson reporting live from the Newburgh General Hospital room of Corrections Officer Bernard Mastriano, the young man whose life hangs in the balance after suffering a severe beating on Monday afternoon when Eduard Vasquez, a convicted cop-killer, escaped from Green Haven Maximum Security Prison in Stormville, New York.”

I got up from the bed, turned off the television. A swift kick in the cojones would have been an improvement over the way I felt. I took the envelope out of my pocket and stared at the Athens postmark. I knew I had to go to Athens now. I had no choice. My reputation had just been slandered on national television. Someone was covering up something and gradually making me the scapegoat.

I had to find Vasquez, bring him back.

I took the phone in my bedroom off the hook. Then I went into the living room and spun Bucky Pizzarelli and Zoot Sims again, since it was still on the turntable from the night before. I went back into the bedroom and undressed.

I hadn’t had any dinner yet. But I poured one final drink. I considered having a few more drinks, maybe even getting drunk. But I couldn’t allow that to happen. I couldn’t relinquish control when it was still so early in the game. I had to stay cool and sober, because this was no game; it was my life. I put the glass down, turned out the light, slipped into bed, and closed my eyes.

It was only seven-thirty in the evening.

I tried to clear my mind, but it was impossible. In the end I went to sleep to the vision of a heart-shaped tattoo.

I HAD NO WAY of telling how long I’d been asleep when the front door opened wide and the living room lights came on. I’d been dreaming of Fran again; feeling her beside me, touching me, her lips pressed against mine, my hands against the small of her back, our naked bodies together in bed. Then the dream shifted suddenly so that Fran and I were prisoners sharing a cell. Logan and Mastriano were breaking in during the middle of the night to shake us down. I could smell the trash when it goes ripe in the prison galley. I could feel the way the hot night made the sweat ooze from my back and from the concrete ceiling overhead. I could see the tight faces of the two guards as they came through the open cell gate, arms outstretched, going for our necks. I could feel Fran in my arms, smell her sweet familiar smell, feel her hair on my lips. Then my eyes focused and I realized I wasn’t inside a jail cell at all. Fran was no longer there and I saw the figure of a man standing in my bedroom doorway.