Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“Any distinctive marks on Vasquez’s body I should know about, in case he should turn up dead?”

“If I remember right, he had his serial number tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand,” Dan said, making a fist with his own right hand and holding it to Marty’s face as if to demonstrate.

“He should also be minus one freshly pulled tooth,” I added. “Dan will help you with the rest.”

“Serial numbers,” Schillinger mumbled as he wrote in his little notebook. “Pulled tooth.”

I took a couple of steps to the front of the cramped cell, held on to the bars, the same way Vasquez must have held them ten thousand times before in his eight years as an inmate. I had to wonder what he thought about, how he felt, how he must have run the scenario for springing these walls over and over again until he was too exhausted to think anymore. I imagined him collapsing onto the bunk and maybe falling into a deep sleep. But then all he’d have to wake up to was this cold gray room and these steel bars.

Vasquez was doing life.

But he also knew that since the death penalty had been reinstated by the governor, it was only a matter of time until he was executed by a three-stage, mechanically operated lethal injection. He had murdered a cop after all. And everybody knows New York cops take care of their own.

I felt Marty’s hand on my shoulder.

“Ask you something, Keeper?”

“I got a choice, Marty?” Shrugging his meaty hand away.

He pulled down on the belt of his trench coat to better accommodate his gut.

“Why’d you let a yo-yo like Vasquez outside the prison?”

I felt like the concrete had been pulled out from under me. Nerves maybe. A man had escaped from my prison. I was responsible. Schillinger was reminding me of that. I’d signed the fieldtrip release. I might have had the word “liable” tattooed to my forehead. Just a big letter L branded right between the eyes.

I took my hands away from the bars.

“Listen, Marty,” I said, not looking at him, but at Dan, “you know as well as I do that an inmate has his rights, which include proper dental care. I can’t just take away a prisoner’s rights even if he did shoot a cop in the back of the head execution style. Even if that cop had a young wife who was pregnant with their first child. Even if that wife can’t afford her own dentist now.”

Marty’s cheeks turned red. I wasn’t sure if the sob story had gotten to him or if his pressure was simply up.

“I’m just asking,” he said.

“My hands are tied, Marty,” I added. “And you know it.” Which wasn’t exactly the truth. We both knew that if I had thought real hard about it, I could have said no to Vasquez’s dental visits. I might have taken a few lumps from some civil-libertarian lawyer, but there were worse things in life. Now, if I was considered negligent by the commission up in Albany, I could easily face criminal charges, possibly jail time. It was too late to reverse the past. Now I had to figure out a way to clear myself as quickly and as cleanly as possible. Once I did that, I would get my head back together, get back to the business of running a tight prison.

I took one last look around before I left the cell. It was then, when I looked at the floor, that I found it. Just a crumpled-up envelope. Garbage really. Something that might go unnoticed to Schillinger, but not to me. You see, Vasquez’s cell was immaculate. Too immaculate, too clean to be believable to anyone except an outsider like Schillinger. I took another step inside, picked up the crumpled number-ten-size business envelope. At the same time, Schillinger had his back to me as he studied the Virgin Mary, picking her up and putting her down again. Dan stood beside him, supervising.

I gripped the envelope and walked out.

Outside, on the catwalk, I flattened out the envelope as best I could. It was addressed in a kind of hasty handwriting to Eduard Vasquez care of Green Haven Maximum Security Prison, Stormville, New York. It had come from Cassandra Wolf, a name I recognized as belonging to Vasquez’s long-time girlfriend. The return address indicated Olancha, a California town I did not recognize.

I stuffed the envelope into my pants pocket and waved Dan over. A CO was posted at the end of the gallery. He held a baton in his right hand and was slapping it against the palm of his left.

“Watch the iron house till I get back,” I said.

“Pelton,” he said, tugging on those thin-waisted pants, looking down on me, but not by much. “What about Wash Pelton?”

“Pelton called once already. He calls again take it, but stall him. Tell him we’re doing everything we can to assist the Stormville PD and the state police to see that Vasquez is stopped in his tracks. Make sure he gets all the paper work he needs. Pictures, prints, statements, next of kin, phone numbers, whatever Val can get off the microfilm and the computers.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Then ask him who we contact at the Bureau. He’ll love that.”

“What about the guards?”

“What guards?”

“The guards he’s been on us to can?”

“You have no knowledge about guards,” I insisted. “That’s the keeper’s territory, so just play dumb.”

“Oh yeah,” Dan said, smiling now. “And how am I supposed to do that, boss?”

“Just put yourself in my shoes, little brother, and think real hard.”

I WAS DRIVING THOUGH Newburgh, past the four and five-story professional buildings in search of a place with the number 684 posted somewhere outside, along with the name A. J. Royale, dentist. I patted out a Pall Mall, lit it with the silver-plated Zippo engraved with my initials-J.H.M., Jack Harrison Marconi. The lighter had been a gift from Fran for my forty-third birthday, not two weeks before the collision that took her life. A year had gone by and I’d spent the better part of those twelve months trying to get used to the idea of living alone so that every time the image of Fran’s face popped into my head, I wasn’t rendered as useless as a sack of rags and bones.

This is what I thought: I had made a big mistake handing over those photographs to Marty Schillinger. It was, of course, the right thing to do. SOP. But it’s the way Marty took them from Dan and me. So quick and so willing to stuff them inside that trench coat of his. Like he knew what was inside the manila envelope without even looking.

There was something else going on inside my brain, too. I couldn’t shake the image of that heart-shaped tattoo. No faces or full bodies. Just limbs and white flesh, with a heart-shaped tattoo being the only real mark of distinction.

I was still thinking about the tattoo when I located A. J. Royale’s two-story brick-and-glass building at 684 North Main Street in Newburgh. Inside the navy-blue-carpeted waiting room, “The Girl from Ipanema” dribbled from Muzak speakers. Behind the reception counter, a woman passed the time by painting her nails. When she looked up, I saw that her eyes were encircled with a heavy application of black eyeliner, as if she were hiding a set of equally black shiners.

I gave her the best smile I could summon under the circumstances. “I’d like a word with the dentist,” I said.

She looked back down at the fingers on her left hand. Her fingernails were long and sharp, like stilettos, and painted a glossy black like the finish on a cop cruiser. “The dentist is with a patient,” she said, swiping at a finger-nail with her emery board.

I reached into my back pocket, pulled out my wallet, and flashed her the badge issued when I took over as war-den of Green Haven. She’d probably seen enough TV to know a cop has got to flash a badge-any badge -before someone will believe him. She dropped the emery board onto the open appointment ledger. “Is there some kind of problem, Officer?”