Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

This was no dream.

Zoot Sims and Bucky Pizzarelli had stopped jamming.

My palms and forehead were covered in a layer of sweat.

Too late to reach for the.45 I kept stored under the mattress. Even under the circumstances, I made a mental note to store the weapon in a more accessible place. But then it dawned on me: If this man was a burglar, he hadn’t been very stealthy about breaking and entering. He wasn’t stealing anything.

“Excuse me, sir,” the man said. “You up?”

A polite housebreaker.

I propped myself up on one elbow and squinted. Behind the man, I could see two more men. One tall. One short. They were moving around inside the living room of my state-appointed home examining the framed photographs of my wife on the walls and on the tables. They were picking up the picture frames, studying the different portraits, placing them back down again exactly where they had found them.

“Come on in,” I said. “Who knocks anymore?”

No smiles came from the big man in the doorway. Not even a crack in his stone face.

“Mr. Marconi?” the man inquired, his low baritone voice now sounding somehow familiar.

I nodded.

“You’re wanted in Albany, sir, immediately.”

“If not sooner, right?” Definitely a voice I recognized even if I couldn’t see the face all that clearly in the darkness of the bedroom. I sat all the way up in bed. “Who wants to see me?” I said. But I already knew the answer to that question. I knew that the men had come in through the front door without breaking in, simply because they’d had a key. No need to jimmy the lock or break a window or slide down the chimney for that matter. No need to call the police, because they were the police. They had a key to the place. In fact they probably had keys to all the identical, half a dozen or so, single-story, state-owned homes on this quiet rural road in Stormville.

So that was it, then; that’s where I had heard that voice before. The voice of the man standing in my bedroom doorway belonged to a member of Pelton’s private staff. If he was the kid I remembered, his name was Tommy Walsh. Not a bad kid really. Just a young man robbed from my own staff of COs by Pelton himself when he had come down for one of his surprise inspections a year ago last April. What Tommy lacked in brains he made up for in muscles and loyalty.

“Commissioner Pelton wants to see you now, Mr. Marconi.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Tommy,” I said. “The state of New York includes a telephone in your boss’s budget. Tell him I said to use it.”

“He’s your boss, too, Mr. Marconi,” Tommy tried to remind me. “And my orders are to bring you back with me tonight. So if you don’t mind.”

I glanced at the digital display clock beside the queen-size bed. Two-thirty in the A.M., Wednesday. Tommy took a couple of steps into the bedroom so that now I could make out more of his clean-shaven face in the light that leaked in from the living room. He wore dark slacks, black turtleneck, black blazer, black mailman shoes. His black hair was crew-cut short and he had pork chop sideburns, like Elvis. He was only an inch or two taller than me, but his shoulders were wide enough to fill the doorjamb.

I wiped my hands on my T-shirt. Then I reached over and flicked on the table lamp.

Tommy took a small scrap of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, read it, and put it back.

“Mr. Pelton wants to ask you a few questions about the escape of Eduard Vasquez before he faces the news media at a noontime press conference.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Why don’t you and your boys get back in your car and tell Pelton I’ll see him first thing in the morning.” I turned out the light, slipped back into bed. “And don’t forget to hit the light in the living room on the way out.” I stretched my legs so that my bare feet slipped out from underneath the covers at the foot of the bed.

First came the footsteps-heavy, power-lifter footsteps. Then the light went back on. Even with my eyes closed, the bright white light burned my eyes through the skin of my eyelids.

“I’m real sorry about this, Mr. Marconi,” Tommy said in a deep, whisper voice, “but Mr. Pelton wants to speak with you now. So if you’ll get dressed and come with me…”

I leaned up on one elbow, took a good look into the living room. I could see the two men who had accompanied Tommy Walsh. Nameless men who stood shoulder to shoulder in the hall just outside the bedroom door. They weren’t leaving without me.

I turned over and let out a sigh. “No choice, huh, big fella?”

“No choice, sir.”

I slipped out of bed, stood up, felt my lightheadedness give way to imbalance as I reached out for the end table. “Now I’m going to get dressed,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

Tommy glanced at the open window in the wall opposite the open door. Then he glanced back at me.

“Look-it,” I said, just to be more difficult. “Could you please turn around.”

Tommy stood there, his eyes moving from the open window to me and back to the window again, like I was guilty of something and about to use the window as a means for a quick getaway. But Tommy was a good kid really, and he had been a good guard before Pelton had taken him away from me. He was doing what he did best: following orders.

“Afraid I might run off, Tommy?”

No response other than that stone face staring at me between glances at the open window.

“Lucky we’re just a bunch of dicks here,” I said, dropping my drawers, “or I’d really feel stupid.”

I SAT BACK IN an expensive leather chair, not four feet away from Washington Pelton, Commissioner of Corrections for the state of New York, and one-time friend to both Mike Norman and myself. It was our first meeting since last Christmas at the governor’s wassail party. He hadn’t said a word to me since Tommy Walsh had escorted me in some twenty minutes earlier. Instead, he had buried himself in paperwork that, for some reason, had to be expeditiously processed at four-thirty in the morning.

Pelton wore a neatly pressed, black pinstripe suit. A far cry from the stiff, navy-blue uniforms the two of us, along with Mike Norman, had worn when we’d started out at Attica all those years ago. The white shirt beneath his suit was finely pressed. Gold cuff links secured the sleeves at the wrists. The tie was silk. Sitting there, I tried to decide if Pelton was dressed for the new day or had never gone to bed the night before.

Regardless of his sleeping habits, I could see through Pelton’s act.

He would not look up at me until good and ready. I could have ranted and raved. I was pissed off enough to grab him by the collar, pin him down on the floor. Maybe that’s what he wanted. Maybe this was a test to see how far he could push me before I did something stupid like backhand him across the kisser. In the end it would not only have cost me my job and my reputation, it would have put me in jail. I was no longer bargaining from a position of power. Pelton was the commissioner and I answered directly to the commissioner.

For now, I had to be content with looking over his shoulders and studying the many custom-framed photos that decorated the walnut paneling behind his desk. Photos of the commissioner embraced in handshake with the governor; another of him seated at a round table with Ronald Reagan; another with his arm wrapped around George Bush Jr’s shoulders, broad smiles on their faces. Proud Republicans, the entire bunch.

I sat back and took in the floor-to-ceiling, French windows that overlooked the darkened Albany skyline and the Hudson River in the near distance. Outside I could see the occasional flicker of red neon that came from an electric billboard planted on the flat rooftop of a nearby office building.