Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“When do you plan on pulling this off?”

“I’ll start on it tomorrow morning after I meet up with a friend. With a little luck we could be out of this in a couple of days.”

“And what happens to me if your plan doesn’t work?”

“We could always stay here,” I said.

“For how long?”

“Until the wine and the Dinty Moore run out.”

As the night wore on I could not keep myself from remembering.

On a Monday morning a year before Fran was killed, I sat at the kitchen table of the Albany home I saw only on weekends. The sun poured in through the wide kitchen window beside the table, and gazing outside I could see the green grass and newly budding trees at the perimeter of the yard and a black-and-white cat I had never seen before walking aimlessly across the lawn. My morning newspaper was laid out flat beside my coffee cup. The headline read, “Warden Tightens Belt on Prison Security!” There was a photo of me sitting at my desk on the phone inside my office on the second floor of Green Haven Prison.

On this Monday morning, Fran sat across from me nibbling on a piece of toast coated with a thin layer of strawberry jam.

“You’re still making friends, I see.” She wore only a terrycloth robe because she wasn’t expected at school for another hour and a half.

“Don’t kid yourself, Fran,” I said, folding the paper in half and placing it back down on the table next to my third cup of coffee since five that morning. “The inmates would rather have it that way, believe it or not.”

Fran had her long hair pulled back in a ponytail. When she smiled, small dimples formed in the lower corners of her prominent cheeks. She placed a small piece of toast in her mouth and squinted her eyes as if to say, How?

I leaned back in my chair and, looking outside, watched the black-and-white cat move stealthily over the lawn, nose to the grass, sniffing out the grubs. “It’s all very simple when you think about,” I said. “If I’m not in charge of the prison, then the gorillas are in charge.”

“And what are the gorillas like, Keeper?”

“Nice fellas,” I said, as the cat jerked a grub out of the lawn with its claws, “who like to rape and kill for fun.”

Cassandra got up from the floor and went into the bedroom. She returned carrying two woolen blankets and a pillow. She spread out the first blanket on the floor in front of the fire and placed the pillow on the far end. Then she lay down on the makeshift bed and covered herself with the other blanket. She reached out for my hand.

“I know it’s corny,” she said. “But will you stay here with me, at least until I fall asleep?”

I nodded and smiled. Rather, I attempted a smile.

But as Cassandra slowly drifted off to sleep, I felt myself sinking into a gorge of self-pity. I had been duped by the men I had worked with and trusted. By Wash Pelton and Marty Schillinger and Mike Norman, even though a part of me could not help but believe that Mike did what he did, not out of spite, but out of pure desperation.

When I was a boy, my father once told me that there are three points of realization that occur in a young man’s life. The first is the knowledge that his parents will die one day. The second is that he, too, will die. The third-and this is the most important-is the knowledge that he must create a life worth living.

But I think there is a fourth point of realization that my father left out. What he didn’t tell me is that a man is on his own in this life. No matter whom he trusts or whom he loves or whom he calls his friend and confidant, he is on his own. And the sooner he realizes it, the better.

I tuned my thoughts to the events of the past five days.

First, there was the bogus story of Logan and Mastriano’s escape. Truth is they must have panicked when Vasquez took off while they waited for him at some bar in Newburgh. The entire story about three shotgun-packing assailants in a black van was nothing more than a fabrication-a fiction designed to fool me and, at the same time, arouse public sentiment. If what Cassandra told me was true (and as a warden who has spent his career trying to sift through inmates’ lies in order to get at the truth, deep down inside I felt she was on the level), then I had no further reason to believe that the statement Robert Logan had issued in my office on Monday afternoon contained even a semblance of truth. If I had to come up with a motive for Logan’s lie, it would have been this: Logan and Mastriano must have put the pressure on Pelton because they weren’t about to take the blame for Vasquez’s sudden escape. They had been involved in the drug racket from the beginning. They knew too much. On the other hand, they were the most obvious patsies available to Pelton. Pelton, sensing the two guards meant business, must have paid off Dr. Fleischer to fabricate the serious blow to Mastriano’s head. Now I was certain that Mastriano’s coma had been faked and that Fleischer was pumping him daily with something to keep him out of it. In fact, I had the distinct feeling that Pelton was going around paying off everybody and his brother in order to keep his scam under wraps.

Then there were Cassandra’s porn stills that were now in Schillinger’s possession. Would he have used the illicit photographs against Pelton? First he would have had to get the original film and destroy it, along with any copies that might have been made. If Lt. Martin Schillinger was really on the video, like Cassandra said, then she and Vasquez had made a mistake by not making stills of him-no matter the quality of the film, no matter who might have found out about it later. It was a missed opportunity no matter how you looked at it. There was, however, one proverbial ace-in-the-hole. And it was this: If Schillinger and Pelton cared even the least little bit about their reputations, their careers, and their lives, they would want that video back-stills or no stills.

All I had to do was to get at that film. The film would allow me at least a little power to bargain with. But before anything else, I had to trust in Cassandra, believe that she was telling me the truth. But then, how does a man go about trusting a woman who had been an integral part of a convicted cop-killer’s pornography ring? How do you learn to trust a woman who saves your life by axing a man in the head when all she had to do was knock him cold? How did I know I wasn’t being duped all over again?

I had to go with instinct. And now, watching her sleep on the floor of the cabin my grandfather built with his own two hands, bathed in the golden firelight that came from the fieldstone fireplace, I wanted to believe that she was telling the truth.

Now I pictured Mike Norman. I saw his thin red face in the flames of the fire. He must have known about Pelton’s drug operation even if his knowledge was based on rumor, because he had used the evidence I’d picked up at the Lime Kiln gravel pit directly against me. My guess was that he’d seen an opportunity to make a quick buck and had taken it to Pelton without thinking about what could happen to me, not to mention himself. Pelton would pay Norman anything he asked if he believed it would present the perfect opportunity for me to be convicted in his place. Was it true that innocent men went to prison and stayed there for the rest of their lives? It was true, absolutely true. And I had never considered the reality of it as much as I did right then. Because an innocent man going to prison is what really was at stake. This wasn’t about corruption and conspiracy in the prison system or about exposing the people who perpetrated it. What was at stake was my life. Of all people, a warden, indicted for crimes he did not commit. A warden sentenced to life would be sentenced to death. Once incarcerated in an iron house, I was a dead man; no two or three ways about it. That’s what this was about. These were the stakes. Because in prison there was no such thing as a guardian angel.