Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“Who are you?” he said.

He smiled or maybe it was just a way of positioning his lips. He wore bright blue polyester pants, white socks collapsed at the ankles, and black plastic loafers split at the seam.

I decided to say nothing. On the other hand, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the man, as if I no longer had the energy left to ignore him. He stared at me, too, his hands flat on top of the bench, his arms locked straight like pillars, to support a body that might otherwise collapse the second I breathed on him.

“You a pimp?” he said, his voice forced and raw.

I shook my head, laughed.

“Whas so funny?”

“No,” I said, looking down at the concrete slab, “not a pimp.”

“Dealer?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Burglar, hit man? What the hell are you, then?”

I said, “I’m the warden of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison.”

He scrunched his eyebrows.

“Man,” he said, “you sure look like shit.”

I broke out laughing. Nervous exhaustion, I think they call it.

The drunk laughed, too, a high-pitched, squeaky laugh-a laugh I felt in my temples and the backs of my eyes more than heard. A suspicious laugh, as if he were certain the goddamned wool was being pulled over his bloodshot eyes.

He said, “And I’m a fucking senator. Glad to meet you, Warden. I’m Senator Teddy Kennedy from Hyannisport.” He said Hyannisport like Hy-anus-port.

“I don’t expect you to believe me,” I said, letting out a breath of cigarette smoke.

The drunk lost his smile. He stared out beyond the vertical bars as if there were something to see besides a concrete floor and a cement-panel wall. He turned, looked at me with a perked-up, almost sober face.

“Then you must be nuts, I guess,” he said. “You must be crazy nuts. Or a pervert. Is that it?”

I answered him by directing my vision to the concrete floor.

“Tell you what, nutcase pervert,” he said. “I’m going back to sleep. Wake me when the President comes to bail me out. Or better yet, wake me when the Pope comes.”

With that he curled up his wilted body and lay back down on the bench.

“Warden, my ass,” he whispered, pressing his hands together, stuffing them back into his crotch.

AT TEN MINUTES AFTER nine in the morning, the judge set my bail at five thousand dollars, much to my lawyer’s irritation and mine. “Let’s face it, your honor,” Tony Angelino had said, smoothing his double-breasted blazer with his big, thick hands, “Mr. Marconi is a respected member of both the New York State Department of Corrections and society at large. I’m quite confident that he is not about to run away from us.”

Pelton stood up and directly requested that the district attorney set the bail at twenty-five thousand, minimum. But in the end, because of my reputation as a member of the corrections department, the judge set the bail much lower, despite a two-felony-count accusation plus resisting arrest. (The arresting officer who’d gotten it in the nose with my elbow stood close by with a piece of gauze taped across his swollen face.)

The middle-aged judge, Anthony Sclera-a man I had met on several occasions at the governor’s mansion-sat back in his black leather chair, stuck his hands out from under his wrinkled cloak, and crossed them again against his considerable chest. He was heavyset and out of breath and his white hair stuck up on one side like he’d been dragged out of bed for just this occasion, which may have been the case. He used his index finger to push the round wire-rimmed glasses back onto the summit of his hawk nose while he expressed his deepest regret on the matter of my arrest. He even went so far as to apologize for how and when I’d been taken into custody. It was his solid hope, he said, that the entire affair was nothing more than a mix-up. A simple case of miscommunication. At the conclusion of the morning hearing, the judge leaned up onto his oversized podium, made a frown, and shook his jowls. A court date was set for August ninth, and the gavel came down.

I was escorted out of the courtroom and brought back to the holding cell where I would stay until Val arrived to post my bail.

About an hour later, the attending guard came back to my cell. Sure enough, “a good-looking woman named Val,” was here to bail me out. I stood up, straightened out my pants, tucked in my shirt.

“When can I see her?” I said.

“Soon,” the thin black guard said. He waved his hand in the air as if to say, sit back down, relax, you re not going anywhere for a while. “She’s in the middle of processing all that paperwork. You know, SOP.”

I tried to work up a smile.

A frown was easier.

“You could have asked him how long the process usually takes,” the guard said, referring to my drunken cell-mate lying flat on his back on the wooden bench and snoring. “But then, he’s not much of a talker in the morning.”

“I bet he talks a blue streak during his first six or seven manhattans,” I said. “It’s probably the last two dozen that shut him up pretty good.”

The guard turned.

“I’ll be back for you in a few shakes, Warden.”

I could just picture the headlines now.

I SHOULD HAVE STAYED behind bars just a little longer.

I knew something wasn’t right the second Val pulled into the driveway of my Stormville home. Deep gouges had been dug into the lawn. Black tire tracks were burnt into the blacktop. The mailbox had been rear-ended and now leaned out toward the road.

Somebody must have peeled out in a hurry.

Tommy Walsh and his men hadn’t made that kind of impression on the property when they’d come for me the night before. They were calm, collected, businesslike. Somebody had been at the house between the time of my arrest and the time I’d returned-not the brainiest of deductions, but true just the same.

“Wait here,” I said. I opened the door, eased myself out of Val’s station wagon.

“I’m coming with you,” she insisted.

I leaned into the open passenger-side window.

“Stay here. Somebody might still be inside.”

I knew my.45 was still in the house, under the mattress in the bedroom.

Val cut the engine. She got out of the car.

“I’m not staying out here all by myself just because you want to play hero.”

She slammed the car door closed.

Together we stood at the front door. Small aircraft were taking off and landing at the Stormville airfield directly across the street. The day was hot and still and dry. I took the key ring from my pants pocket, found the house key. Val stood close behind. I could hear her long, deep, calming breaths. I went to fit the key into the lock. But the door swung open on its own.

I couldn’t understand it.

The wood jamb hadn’t been notched out, nor had the metal lock-set been ripped away from the frame with a heavy screwdriver or crowbar. The wooden door had not been kicked in with the heel of somebody’s jack boot. Somebody had used a key. Neat and simple. But then they’d left the door open on their way out. They’d torn ruts in the lawn; they’d run into the mailbox.

Sloppy. Or, if not sloppy, then downright intentional.

I pushed open the door. From the foyer I could see that the single-story home had been left in a shambles. The carpeting had been torn up and tossed in a heap into the living room. The coffee table had been turned on its side, the books pulled off the shelves, my entire CD and album collection thrown on the floor. Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” had been stepped on and crushed, and what really got to me was that when I took a few steps inside, I realized that they’d cut the skins on every one of my drum heads. No music fan, no matter how sick, would have resorted to that.