Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“I had no intentions of going into the hit-man business,” Wash said, shifting his grip on the heavy pistol.

“Choosing the less violent alternative, you gave Schillinger one last payoff to be distributed to Mike Norman in exchange for the bag of evidence. On Tuesday afternoon Marty returned with the evidence you would use against me on Wednesday morning, but what you didn’t know at the time was that he’d kept the payoff for himself, probably telling Norman that it would be delivered within a couple of days. But when Thursday came around, all Lieutenant Mike Norman got was a visit from Marty Schillinger and Tommy Walsh.”

Pelton was staring at Schillinger now. Schillinger was looking at Tommy dead on the floor. As for the video, it was finished and all you could see on the screen was snow.

“How is it you’re privy to all this information, anyway?” Pelted inquired. “I mean, you’re no detective, Keeper. You’re a stupid warden.”

“I paid a second visit to Mike only a few hours after my arrest on Wednesday. He told me flat out that Marty had come in and taken the evidence away from him, no explanations, no nothing. And I believed him.”

Pelton moved closer to Schillinger, put the barrel of the chrome-plated.38 up against his temple.

“So how you and Tommy do it, Marty?” I pressed. “Get Mike good and stinking drunk behind closed doors? Then string him up with his own belt once he passed out, make it look like the suicide he was sure to pull off ever since his nervous breakdown at Attica? With him dead, there was no chance for him to open his mouth about what was going down in the New York State Department of Corrections. Because Mike had been doing little jobs for you guys through the years, hadn’t he? But he could only be trusted just so far since he was a drunk and he wasn’t renowned for being too stable. In fact, Mike might have been gone from the department a long time ago had he not been considered a tragic hero-a survivor of those four bloody days in September 1971. You remember those four days, don’t you, Wash?”

I might have looked into Wash’s eyes, but instead I got a good look at Schillinger. The sweat poured off his brow, into his eyes, down his puffy red cheeks, and onto his Burberry trench coat. I could tell that he wanted nothing more but to wrap his hands around my throat and squeeze till Kingdom Come. But he could do nothing about it. There was nowhere to run and hide. He just had to stand there and take it. That was his only option.

“And you were next on Schillinger’s and Tommy Welch’s list, Commissioner Pelton,” I said. “But Marty here didn’t want to do it so soon after he’d pumped Vasquez.”

“You’re full of shit, Keeper,” Schillinger mumbled.

“You were going to wait until the cops picked up me and Cassandra and slapped us with first-degree murder. And you knew I’d go to Athens, Marty, because you’d planted that envelope on the floor of Vasquez’s cell on Monday afternoon. You knew I’d find it and if I didn’t find it, you would have picked it up yourself and pointed it out to me. You knew I’d be curious enough to go to Athens. You’d shoot Vasquez, and when witnesses would testify to seeing my 4-Runner there, I’d naturally take the blame. But somebody had beaten you to the punch. When you went to kill Vasquez, he was already dead. Still, no matter who killed Vasquez, the result was the same. The case against me and Cassandra would be open and closed. All that would be left would be to make sure Pelton had an accident. But you had time for that.”

There was a thick silence for a slow second or two, with only a clear blue screen on the television and a high-pitched whistling that indicated the porn video was about to run out of tape, and I found myself praying to Christ that the camera was still rolling under the floorboards and that Cassandra was all right. But just then, as I pictured the blood from Tommy Walsh’s head dripping through the cracks in the wood panel into the potato cellar, Schillinger suddenly looked at me and screamed, “I’m not taking a dive!” And just like that he took hold of Pelton’s revolver. “It’s him!” Schillinger shouted while he and Pelton struggled for control of the pistol. “It had to be him. We left the room together. Pelton must have gone back to Vasquez’s room, shot the fucker dead.”

Schillinger screamed and clawed at the pistol but Wash had the advantage with his chubby index finger already wrapped around the hair trigger; it went off and Marty dropped like a stone. He went down right beside Tommy’s body, his blood and his soul draining out of his face like water from a faucet.

For a second or two, Pelton and I just stared down at the two dead bodies. Then he raised his head to me.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said in a strained, out-of-breath voice. “I didn’t kill Vasquez. I needed him alive because I wanted my money back. This son of a bitch must have killed him, no matter what he said, he had to have done it. Or you, Keeper, but somehow I don’t think you’re capable. No, Schillinger must have killed Vasquez. Just like he killed Mike and would have killed me. The son of a bitch.” He extended his right arm, held out the pistol, and emptied another round into Schillinger’s body at the exact moment that he said, “bitch.” Schillinger’s dead body jumped when the bullet hit it.

I stood there watching the bleeding body as if I wasn’t in the room at all, like my body was still there but I was somewhere far away, like in a dream. I knew that it didn’t make even an ounce of difference who’d drawn whom into the smuggling and murder business, or who abused whose power or who double-crossed the other or if I had created an accurate scenario of what went down during the last five days or not. In the end what difference did any of my assumptions make? This wasn’t a case of whodunit. It was a case of don’t-blame-me. What I mean is, it didn’t really matter who took the blame for killing Vasquez, as long as it wasn’t Cassandra and as long as it wasn’t me.

“SEEMS TO ME WE’VE been here before, Wash,” I said, taking a step forward, closer to where he stood. At the same time, I recalled that September afternoon when the rebel inmate held the barrel of the black-plated.38 service revolver inside Wash’s mouth and pressed a shiv against his neck, making the jagged scar that still existed today.

“You turned out to be some kind of hero,” Wash said. “This time I have the power to save your life or take it away.”

“What made you do it?” I said, now standing as still and as nonthreatening as possible. “Why go to all the trouble of arranging a drug deal that was destined to fail? After all we believed in?”

“What we believed in once upon a time, my friend,” he said, “is pure fantasy now. What we believed in was destroyed when Attica went down. They took away our power, handed it over on a platter laced with gold to the inmates. It was either us or the gorillas. Or there was a third option.”

“We could just join the gorillas,” I said.

“Precisely,” Wash said.

“But what do you really know about us or them? How much time have you spent inside a prison lately, other than to make a surprise inspection and take away my officers?”

“I was there, Keeper,” Wash said, shaking the barrel of the chrome-plated.38 in my face. “I was there a long time before I entered the political arena. I felt the pressure, maybe more than most, because of what happened to me at Attica.”

I knew what he was referring to and I knew it involved the four men who’d held him down on the concrete floor of Times Square.

“I felt the pressure too,” I said, “and I never gave in to the gorillas. Not once.”