Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“Okay, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “Can I ask what that was all about?”

I shifted my gaze from Fleischer’s wall of fame to Fleischer in the flesh.

“You tell me,” I said. “Monday afternoon, Mastriano was stable. Not a mark on him. Today he’s battling for his life.”

“I told you we had to perform some tests to determine the extent of his internal injuries.”

“I felt his head myself,” I said. “There were no lumps the size of a tennis ball or a baseball or a basketball, for that matter. No blood, no nothing. What’d you do, Fleischer, hit him over the head yourself when no one was looking?”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Fleischer said, clicking the push button on his pen, squinting his eyes while he glared out a window that overlooked Newburgh General’s parking lot.

“What is it then?” I said, pulling a cigarette from my chest pocket and lighting it before Fleischer had a chance to protest. “Mastriano paying you under the table to make his case look worse than it is? Or is someone else your sugar daddy?”

Fleischer turned back to me. “First of all, this is a doctor’s office and I would appreciate it if you refrained from smoking. It’s illegal.”

I blew out a long, exaggerated stream of cigarette smoke. Then I flicked the loose ash onto the carpeting.

“Second of all,” he went on, “Officer Mastriano appeared to be stable Monday afternoon. The injury I referred to yesterday morning on the news, to the back of his skull, was an internal injury we did not pick up until we did the MRI on Monday evening. The bleeding was internal and gradual, not external and out of control.”

“Who mentioned yesterday’s news?” I said.

Fleischer turned visibly red, like maybe he was giving away too much.

“Listen, Mr. Marconi,” he said, “he’s leaking CSF. We had to pump him full of steroids to shrink the brain swelling and to stem the flow of blood and fluid. Perhaps I should have clarified that earlier.”

I smoked for a second or two.

Then I said, “Yeah, perhaps you should have clarified that earlier.”

Fleischer clicked his pen a few more times. He sat up straight in his chair, gave me a tight-lipped, wide-eyed look that made him seem a lot older than I’d thought he was only forty-eight hours ago. “I know how upsetting it must be for you to have lost a prisoner-”

“Inmate,” I interrupted.

“Excuse me?”

“Inmates haven’t been called prisoners since the days of the Sing Sing lock-step,” I lied.

But Fleischer bought it anyway. His cheeks were redder than the red seal on his Harvard Medical School diploma. “Okay,” he said, “I know how upsetting it must be for you to have lost an inmate. Especially a man who shot an officer of the law. I know about fraternity and all that.” He waved his right hand over his shoulder, referring to the numerous fraternal and academic institutions on his wall, as if I couldn’t see them. “And I also know you must be upset for having to take the blame for the escape. But that comatose man upstairs was hit with something right here and hit with something hard.” He made a fist with his free hand and struck the back of his head like he meant it. “He was hit hard, even if I wasn’t able to pick up on the actual extent of his injury right away. That’s what modern medicine is all about. That’s why we developed medical imaging in the first place.”

Satisfied with his speech, Fleischer sat back, resumed clicking his pen and gazing out the window.

“Look, Doctor Fleischer,” I said, tone calmer, “all I’m saying is, as a prison worker, I’ve seen every kind of head injury there is to see, from stabbings to blows. Every single one was followed by some kind of bleeding or swelling or both, so don’t tell me there might be nothing unusual about Officer Mastriano’s condition.”

Fleischer actually smiled. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

“I see,” I said. The good doctor had me stumped, or so it appeared. So I decided to make like Barry Sanders and change direction midstride. “What about all those people upstairs? Tell me they’re all family.”

“Now that the media has latched on to this,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the parking lot, “there’s little I can do.”

Now he was definitely lying, but I wasn’t swallowing it and Fleischer knew it. On the other hand there was no real point in going toe-to-toe with him anymore. This was his home turf, his ballpark, and I didn’t have a warrant and all he had to do was call security and then I ran the risk of another arrest.

“Well then,” I said, “I apologize if I caused you any inconvenience.”

I went for the door.

I heard the sound of Fleischer getting up behind me. “Water under the proverbial bridge,” he said, reaching for the door and opening it for me.

Proverbial, I thought. What a smart man.

“You really should consider putting an end to those things,” he said, nodding at my lit cigarette, “before they put an end to you.”

“Is this Harvard Medical School talking?”

“Just a concerned doctor of medicine,” he smiled. “You must be aware of the risks.”

“When you’re as desperate as I am to find answers to difficult questions,” I said, holding the cigarette up to both our faces, “a few risks here and there are worth it.”

“And just what is it you’re trying to find out, Mr. Marconi?”

I glanced over Fleischer’s shoulder, honed in on the Harvard diploma above his desk. “Veritas” I said, “and a whole lot more.”

I DID EIGHTY ALL the way from Newburgh to Albany and made it in just under two hours. I went directly to the Albany Police Department on South Pearl Street where I had no trouble walking into Mike Norman’s hole-in-the-wall office.

“What the hell,” I said, instead of hello.

Norman got up from his desk, pulled me into the office, and slammed the door closed.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You know the trouble you’ve gotten me into already, Keeper?”

The wall-mounted clock above his desk read 3:35 in the P.M.

“What went wrong, Mike?”

Looking more tired and pallid than usual, he walked back to his desk. His jet-black hair was sticking straight up, like last night had been spent in the office sleeping it off on the couch. And my guess was that it had been. What should have been a finely pressed button-down shirt was wrinkled and stained, and the knot on his brown necktie was pulled down around his chest. Mike ran his hands through his hair as if it made any difference at all and he sat down, hard. Opening a bottom drawer, he pulled out the bottle of ginger brandy, filled his I LOVE MY JOB! mug, laid out a second mug beside that one, and filled it, too.

I drank the brandy in one swallow and slammed the mug back down on the desk.

“Look, Keeper,” Norman said, “I don’t mean to go ballistic, but if Pelton’s busted you, that makes me an accessory. No matter who’s in the wrong, that makes me liable for manipulating the evidence, too.”

“You knew the risks.”

“I never imagined anything like this.”

“Pelton’s going to pin Vasquez’s escape on me,” I said. “Why is that?”

Norman poured another shot and drank it down. He squinted his eyes and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You think I ratted,” he said, his voice strained and constricted from having swallowed the booze.

I looked him square, in both eyes.

“I think you tipped him off. I mean, for Christ’s sakes, the man was holding the bag of evidence in his hands.”

“For Christ’s sakes, Keeper,” Norman said, “I had nothing to do with it. You hear me? Nothing.”