Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

There was more.

All the paintings and photographs were either hanging crooked or no longer hanging at all. There was an old photograph of my grandfather and me: him sitting on the edge of a neatly stacked pile of cordwood just outside the cabin he’d built in the Adirondacks, with me, no more than five years old, sitting on his knee. He was smiling that wry smile of his, his red-and-black mackinaw over his stocky shoulders. The photo had been thrown on the floor, the frame cracked, the glass shattered.

There was the gold-framed mirror Fran’s mother had given us as a wedding gift twenty-five years before. It lay on the floor in pieces. Someone had deliberately crushed it. I stepped on the broken glass, felt it crunch under my leather soles. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned fast, grabbed the hand.

“Jesus,” I spat, “I could have taken your arm off.”

Val took a deep breath. I let go of her. The two of us leaned against the plaster wall in the foyer.

“My mistake,” she said.

“Nobody’s here,” I said.

She walked into the living room, stepping carefully to avoid the broken bits of glass.

“What the hell happened?”

“Someone left me a message,” I said. “And I think I know who.”

Val took a few more steps in and scanned the room.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said, lifting the remnants of a picture frame off the floor. Pieces of broken glass fell from the frame and shattered. She held a portrait of Fran and me in her hands. I recognized it as the one taken at a studio just after our engagement in 1971. Me with jet-black hair cut close to the scalp, no mustache or goatee, and Fran with long black hair parted down the center, making her look like an angel. Now there was an X slashed through her face.

I took the photo out of Val’s hands and tossed it into the pile of torn-up carpeting, books, and albums.

“Mother of God,” I said, taking a deep breath.

“I don’t want to look anymore,” Val said. She went into the kitchen, started rummaging through the cabinets, through the pots and pans. When I heard the water running, I knew she was making a pot of coffee. Leave it to Val, I thought, to bring calm and civility to an otherwise chaotic and senseless situation.

I went ahead and checked the rest of the bedrooms. Everything seemed okay. Nothing missing. Even my briefcase, which contained a copy of Vasquez’s file and the number-ten-size envelope I’d found in his cell, hadn’t been disturbed. I returned to the kitchen, took a beer from the fridge, and brought it out to the porch. Later I would clean up the mess. As for calling the cops, I knew there wasn’t much I could do but file a report. Besides, I was the one under arrest. And how did I know it wasn’t the cops who had trashed the joint in the first place? How did I know it wasn’t Tommy Walsh along with a couple of Pelton’s finest?

They’d used a key for God’s sake.

I lit a cigarette and for the moment just stood there on the porch watching the small planes take off from the airstrip. I looked at the torn-up lawn and the leaning mailbox. I looked at the driveway covered now with streaks of black rubber. I couldn’t help but remember the image of my wife being zipped up in a black plastic body bag and stuffed into the back of a Chevy Suburban with black-tinted windows. The bastards who’d X’d her face would pay for that little stunt. Screw with me but don’t screw with my wife, dead or alive.

Val joined me on the porch. In her left hand she held an ice pack fashioned from a white-and-blue-checked dish towel filled with ice cubes. In her right, a cup of coffee. She handed me the ice pack.

“You want me to help tidy things up for you in there?”

Using two hands, she balanced the overfull coffee cup against her lips and took a sip, careful not to burn her mouth.

“I’ll manage,” I said, holding the ice pack in my hands.

“I’d like to help if I could.”

“I know where everything goes,” I said, setting the ice pack down on the porch floor next to my chair.

“That’s a nasty bump,” Val observed.

“Too late for ice,” I said, taking a hit off the cigarette and following up with a swig of the cold beer. But she was right. I could still feel the tightness of the swelling above my eye. The egg-sized welt throbbed. I suppose it couldn’t have been any less conspicuous than a tattoo.

Across the street, a Cessna with white wings and a red-and-white fuselage was coming in for a landing. The small craft descended painfully slowly, never straight, always fighting the wild up-and-down currents of air as its black tires came closer and closer to the hot, sun-baked pavement. It landed finally, the wheel that faced me touching the airstrip first, then the weight of the plane coming down hard on the opposite wheel.

“How does a man like you get himself arrested?” Val posed.

I drank my beer and smoked my smoke and told her about the gravel pit off Lime Kiln Road, and about the evidence I’d found there. Then I told her about my visit with her old boyfriend Lt. Mike Norman at the Albany Police Department and also about my visit with Pelton, including the illegal part where he’d wanted me to take the blame for Vasquez’s escape in exchange for a reward.

“And you think Mike ratted on you?”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“You know as well as I,” Val said, still holding her coffee cup with two hands, “that Mike Norman is not that kind of man.”

I pictured the kind, caring man Val probably wanted to remember from those few months they’d spent together as a couple. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but imagine his pale face, his trembling hands, the coffee mug he used for a shot glass. I thought about his ongoing love affair with the brandy bottle and I knew that this was the real reason Val and Mike had never worked out. She could never be content taking second place to a man’s drinking problem, and who could blame her. But then I saw Mike Norman picking up his phone once I was out of his office and I saw him dialing Pelton’s private line and I heard him saying, “Wash, old buddy, I’ve got something you might be interested in, but it’s gonna cost you, old buddy. It’s gonna cost you good.”

I might have explained all this to Val, but considering how she’d once felt about Mike, regardless of his drinking, I felt it only right to let it go. Besides, at this point, the only thing I could be certain about was the bump on my forehead.

Val looked out beyond the porch and took a swallow from her coffee cup.

“There’s something else I’ve got to do,” I said, careful to drop the subject of Mike Norman.

Val turned back to me.

“I’m going to locate Vasquez, talk to him face-to-face.”

“Jesus, Keeper. First of all, nobody knows where Vasquez is, and second, even if you could find him, what in the world makes you think he’ll talk with you?”

I flicked my spent cigarette butt over the rail of the porch.

“We have a common enemy now,” I said. “Common legal circumstances, too.”

“Except you’re white and a respected member of the law enforcement fraternity, and he’s Latino and a convicted cop-killer on the loose.”

“Correction,” I said, “I’m Italian, which makes me no whiter than Vasquez, and what’s more, I’ve just been busted for obstruction of justice and manipulation of evidence. My home’s been ransacked by someone who has a key to the front door, and I refused to take a bribe from the Commissioner of Corrections, who, as we speak, is probably sealing my fate. So, under the circumstances, Val, I don’t think I have much choice but to find Vasquez.”

“All this still doesn’t solve the problem of where to find him.”

“I think I know where to start looking.” I was thinking of Athens.