Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

When I came to the edge of the woods, just a dozen or so yards from the cabin, I waited until I was certain that Cassandra was inside and had no plans for coming back out. I crouched and moved quickly to the Pontiac. I found the car keys in my pocket, opened the trunk, and peeled back a portion of the black carpeting. I slipped the.32 out of my pants and put it in the trunk, then I pressed the carpeting back in place and closed the trunk as quietly as I could. I turned, took a breath, and walked into the cabin like nothing had happened at all on the summit of Old Iron Top.

Cassandra was already asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace, on the same wool blanket she had slept on the night before. I knelt down, shook her shoulder. She stirred and looked up at me with glazed eyes. She gave me a dreamy smile, and for just a quick second, I had the distinct sensation that she was going to kiss me on the mouth.

“What took you so long?” she said, yawning and curling back into the blanket, hands pressed together as though praying, only using them for a pillow under her head.

I sat down on the floor and did my best to suppress the urgency building up inside my sternum. It was a sensation that screamed, Tell me everything you know; hold nothing back! But I knew I had to take it slowly, carefully, not give Cassandra any reason to back away.

I felt the gentle heat from a fire now reduced to glowing embers.

“You never told me,” I said, “who pulled the trigger on Vasquez.”

She leaned up on her right elbow, tilted her head slightly so that it nearly rested on her shoulder. Her smooth, long hair gravitated toward the floor. Other than her breathing and the steady hiss of the fading embers, there were no other sounds inside the cabin.

“Who pulled the trigger, Cassandra?” I pictured the black-plated.32 she’d tossed into the briars and pine scrubs. I could smell the freshly fired gunpowder. I pictured the way she’d wrapped the Ace bandage around her waist so as to conceal what was growing inside her.

She sat up straight but stared at the floor. Until I grabbed her shoulders.

“I want to know,” I said in a forced whisper. “No matter how much it hurts.”

I was so close to telling her what I’d seen only minutes ago on the granite clearing of Old Iron Top that I could almost taste it. But that would have been the wrong thing to do. That would have put her on the defensive and that’s not what I wanted at all. I wasn’t after the truth about who’d pulled the trigger on Vasquez, so much as I was after the truth about Cassandra. I had to be sure I could trust her. Because if she could lie about the murder and if she could conceal her pregnancy, then she could easily lie about the victim-of-circumstances role she’d played in Pelton’s drug operation.

“Keeper stop it,” she begged.

I let go of her shoulders. She took a deep breath and then another.

“Like I told you,” she said, in a long drawn-out voice. “Yesterday afternoon, Martin Schillinger and Pelton came to see us in our room at the Stevens House.”

“Pelton and Schillinger together,” I said. “You’re sure about that?”

“I worked with them for a long time. I made that horrible movie with them. I know what they look and sound like.”

I nodded.

“They pounded their fists against the door, threatened to knock it in if we didn’t open it right away. Eddy took the.32 from the desk drawer and stuffed it in my hand, he pushed me into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. And all the time I’m hearing the sound of fists and feet kicking down the door. And just like that, they were in.”

“You couldn’t see them,” I said. “But you could hear them.”

“I heard them fighting, struggling. Then I heard the shots.”

“How many shots?”

“Two,” she said, with a shaky voice that verged on tears.

I stood up and, using the pointy tip of my cowboy boot, stamped out a lit ember that had popped out of the open fireplace.

“Two shots,” Cassandra repeated. “Back-to-back.”

I wondered how many chambers had been fired from the.32. Two, maybe three. I couldn’t be sure. There was no sure way to tell.

“Did you hear what Pelton and Schillinger said before they shot Vasquez?”

“Pelton called Eddy a ‘back-stabbing bastard.’ He called him some other things, too, but that’s what I remember most. They fought and some glass broke and then they must have had Eddy down on his stomach because Pelton said, ‘Let me see his face.’ And the room went silent for a minute and I wanted to unlock the door and run out of the bathroom and blow them all to hell.”

“But the.32 had no bullets.”

“I didn’t know that then,” she said. “I thought I’d lose it right there. I was afraid. You know, fear-a normal human response to danger.”

“Trust me, I know what it is,” I said.

“I called out for Eddy, but he wouldn’t answer. Then came the first shot and I thought I would fall dead on the floor like the bullet had hit me. I heard Schillinger. He said, ‘Shoot him again and then shoot the bitch in the closet.’ And then they shot Eddy a second time. But before they started after me I was already out the window, down the fire escape, and making a run for the river.”

“So Pelton was the trigger man?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t see, remember?”

“But whoever did it used two caps. You’re sure about that.”

This time, Cassandra wouldn’t answer. My questioning was getting to her. I could see it in the wear and tear on her face. Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe she wasn’t. There was no way to be certain one way or the other. All I knew was that I had seen her up-close-and-personal, tossing that.32 into a patch of heavy vegetation on Old Iron Top where no one would ever find it. But then, maybe she had other reasons for tossing it away and maybe those reasons had nothing to do with the shooting death of Vasquez. In the end, what it came down to was whether or not I could trust Cassandra. I had been racking my brain over it for almost twenty-four hours. I had to choose, one way or the other. If I chose not to trust her then I had to make her a prisoner, lock her up in one of the rooms and tie her to the bed until I was ready to haul her in to the authorities on my own terms. On the other hand, if I chose to trust her, I had to make her an asset, an ally to the cause, which was nothing other than getting out of this mess as fast and as cleanly as possible. I had to choose; there were no two ways about it. The sooner I made the decision and the commitment, the better off I’d be. What little time I had-before the police or Pelton’s goons, or both, had me trapped-was precious.

Choose, Keeper, whispered the voice inside my head. Choose now.

I looked at Cassandra on the floor, her head hung in sadness.

I chose to trust her.

With that clearly in mind, I decided to pursue another avenue. Instead of focusing on the killer, I decided to focus on the weapon.

“Cassandra,” I said, “were you able to see the pistol they used?”

She was crying now. Long, drawn-out tears.

“I told you before,” she said. “The bathroom door was closed.”

That’s when it hit me.

I pulled out the.45 and discharged the clip. I began to empty the rounds, one by one, into the palm of my hand. There should have been eight rounds in the magazine. But only six were ejected from the clip.

It hit me a second time.

When Pelton’s men raided and ransacked my Stormville home on Wednesday, as I was detained in the Albany County lockup, they must have found the.45 under the mattress and taken the two shells they would eventually need to kill Vasquez and pin the whole thing on me. Of course, I couldn’t be sure. But the alternative was to believe that Cassandra had killed Vasquez and was now lying about it along with everything else. But I had no way of knowing just what caliber round Vasquez had been shot with, and it was possible that my.45 had only had six rounds in the clip to begin with. So in the end, I had no real way of discerning the truth.