Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

I folded up the wallet, stuffed it back into my pocket.

“It depends,” I said, trying to appear deliberately evasive. At the same time, I wasn’t sure what made me feel more nauseous, the noise of the dentist’s drill or “The Girl from Ipanema.”

The receptionist stood up from her seat, pulled down on her miniskirt, and disappeared into a back room. The noise of the drill stopped and suddenly I could hear her talking with someone. But I couldn’t make out their words. Then the dentist came out of the room. Dressed in green surgical scrubs, he peeled off flesh-colored Latex gloves and extended his right hand toward my own.

The hand felt bony and cold.

I don’t know why the man should have annoyed me so much right off the bat. It wasn’t like I had a right not to like him, or not to give him the slightest of chances. But there was something about him, his mannerisms, his skinny, almost frail body, that seemed to set me off. I mean, he was taller than my five-foot-eight, but I must have had twenty pounds on him in the arms and chest alone. And that handshake…Like a dead fish.

“Angel tells me you’re a policeman,” said the dentist, getting right to the point, which was fine by me.

“A warden actually,” I said. “Green Haven in Stormville. I’m here to verify an appointment one of my inmates had today.”

“Is that all you wanted to know?” the dentist said, raising his eyebrows. “You could have checked with my receptionist for that.”

Stone-faced, Angel went right on sharpening her nails.

“I thought it would be better to hear it from you in person.”

“The Girl from Ipanema” finally died and a Manilow song replaced it. Angel ran the emery board over her fingernails in time with the music. Long live rock ‘n’ roll.

“We took care of an inmate today.”

“What was his name?”

“Angel,” the dentist said, “do we have a name for the man who had the molar extraction this morning? We’d been performing a series of root canal procedures for quite a while now on that same tooth. But in the end, I couldn’t save it.”

“Sounds traumatic,” I said.

Angel slapped the emery board down. Using a glossy black fingernail as a pointer, she ran down the registry page from top to bottom and back up again. Until she came to a name and an appointment she recognized.

“Vasquez,” she said, rolling the Z off her tongue. “Eduard Vasquez.”

“Not an easy extraction,” the dentist interjected. “Do you know what goes into an extraction, Mr. Marconi?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Lots of Novocaine and a pair of vise grips.”

The laugh that followed was more fake than Angel’s fingernails, but just as sharp. “It’s a little more complicated than that I’m afraid. A dentist certainly could not be expected to handle a job of that magnitude inside a prison like Green Haven, not with those horrible medical facilities.”

Almost unconsciously, I pulled a cigarette from the pack in my breast pocket.

“Please,” said A. J. Royale. “This is a dentist’s office.”

“The good dentist doesn’t believe in the kind of smoking that makes your lungs fry,” Angel offered, glancing up from her self-manicure.

“That’ll be enough from you,” said the dentist, now nervously scratching at the red skin on his stick-like fingers. “My niece can be a little abrasive at times,” he went on. “Tell me, Mr. Marconi, do you have any family?”

I shook my head because, regrettably, Fran and I had never had the time for children.

“Look,” I said, “was there anything that seemed out of place when Vasquez was here?”

Royale leaned against the reception counter and stuck out his bottom lip as if imitating a pouting child. “Not that I could see. I get prisoners in here all the time from Green Haven and Sing Sing. After a while, they all start looking the same.”

“Brown and browner, right?”

“You may say that.”

“What about the guards?” I said, trying to keep things moving while I still had enough daylight left in the after-noon.

“Just a couple of National Geographic readers,” Shrugging narrow shoulders. “The usual.”

“No one seemed exceptionally nervous? Exceptionally jumpy?”

He looked to the floor.

“Not at all.”

“You’re sure?”

“The good dentist doesn’t bother looking at a man’s eyes,” Angel broke in. She was on a roll and I wanted out of there. A Muzak version of “Send in the Clowns” replaced Manilow. “You’ve been a big help,” I lied, and started for the door.

“Might I inquire as to what precisely Mr. Vasquez was imprisoned for?” Royale asked.

I stopped, looked over my shoulder.

“He pumped a few bullets into a cop’s head. A rookie, just twenty-five years old, married barely a year to a girl pregnant with their first kid.”

“My God,” the dentist exhaled. “What a world we live in.”

“My God,” Angel said. “What a world you live in.”

Send in the clowns, I sang to myself. Don’t bother, they’re here.

I CROSSED THE HUDSON River via the Newburgh Beacon Bridge along Route 84 on my way back toward Green Haven. I drove the Toyota 4-Runner fast, not worrying about speed, worrying instead about the little bit of natural sunlight I had left. I was trying to figure out why Vasquez would have kept a dentist appointment if he was planning an escape.

I put myself in Vasquez’s shoes.

If I had planned on escaping, would I have kept a dentist appointment, allowed him to extract my molar? Why not just run? Why go through all that blood, all that pain, for nothing? Maybe the answer didn’t lie with Vasquez so much as it lay with A. J. Royale, dentist to the inmates.

Once over the bridge I drove past Lime Kiln Road, keeping my eye out for a grassy field that might match Logan’s description. But looking for a grassy field among acres of grassy fields was an exercise in futility. I looked for burned rubber on the road, for tire tracks dug into the soft shoulder. I looked for spots of blood or vomit or torn clothing or clumps of hair. But I knew it was next to impossible to spot something so small from the driver’s seat of the 4-Runner.

With the setting sun, I didn’t have the time to get out and comb the area as thoroughly as I wanted. What I did manage was to drive over the same section of bad road five, maybe six times. But the more I drove the more I found a whole lot of nothing.

With dusk coming on fast, I knew I had no choice but to head back to Lime Kiln Road and the gravel pit that it led to. Where Corrections Officers Logan and Mastriano claimed they had gotten the holy hell beaten out of them.

THE TOYOTA MOVED LIKE a bullet shot out of the twilight. I pictured a faceless woman with a heart-shaped tattoo on her bare neck, and I wondered what kind of woman could do such a thing to her body. I had no idea why I should feel that way. As a corrections official, I saw tattoos of every color and shape every day of my working life. You’d think that after all that time I would have gotten used to them. Inmates with tattoos of naked women on their over-pumped biceps or the name of a long lost girlfriend inscribed in the center of a blood-red heart. Some inmates simply had their prison ID tattooed to their knuckles like Vasquez had. For a couple of packs of smokes, an inmate could have his favorite football team or the name of a child he’d never seen or just about any design he desired tattooed on his body. All it took was a sewing needle and some blue ink from a split-open ballpoint pen and, voilà, instant tattoo. I’ll never forget the time an inmate was brought to my attention over a stunt he’d pulled on an unsuspecting prisoner who had hired him to tattoo his mother’s name on his back. Instead of the name, the inmate had carved out the words Kill Me in dark blue letters. Kill Me was not an invitation you wanted to extend inside the iron house.