Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“Don’t tell anyone where it came from.”

I winked at the little boy. His fine, sandy-brown hair was buzz-cut short. When he gave me a smile, I could see that one of his top teeth was missing.

“Have a nice day,” I said, and then I turned and walked across the overgrown lawn toward my Toyota. But before I got in, the woman called out to me from her front door.

“Keeper,” she said. “You’re Keeper Marconi.”

I turned.

“I never believed you killed that prisoner,” she said. “Not for a second.”

I smiled at her and her son. Then I turned and walked away, without saying another word. The hero that I was.

CASSANDRA STOOD ON A pier made of heavy timbers covered with two or three coatings of asphalt. She wore a Levi’s jacket on this cool morning and the same pair of black jeans she’d worn at the cabin in Ironville. I approached her from behind. She turned quickly and smiled.

“You’re late,” she said. The wind off the river blew the hair away from her face so that the heart-shaped tattoo was exposed in the early morning sunlight.

“I had things to take care of first,” I said. In the distance, an oil tanker moved upriver slowly, almost motionlessly, heading for the petroleum processing plant that took up a good-sized chunk of riverfront property immediately south of the port.

I reached into the right-hand pocket of my leather bomber jacket and pulled out the small videocassette.

“You do the honors,” I said.

“No, you do it,” Cassandra said, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. I felt inside the cassette and pulled out the black videotape. I pulled until most of the celluloid littered the pier. Then I kicked the whole thing into the river. Together, Cassandra and I watched the tape slap against the surface of the river and float away toward oblivion while the gray-and-black tanker inched silently forward.

Now it was time for something else.

I reached into my jacket and pulled out the.32 Cassandra had used to kill Vasquez.

Her face turned noticeably pale as I held out the piece.

“You must have seen me,” she said. “You must have seen me climb the hill behind the cabin. You saw me and you said nothing.”

“What I didn’t see or hear was you firing the two rounds on my.45 when I went to sleep that night at the cabin. My guess is that you went outside and far enough down the road so that the explosions wouldn’t wake me. You leaving the cabin like that gave the overcoat man the chance to sneak in and hide himself in the bathroom. When you were finished, you snuck back into the bedroom and returned the weapon to the table next to the bed, where I was still out cold.”

“I’m not a killer,” Cassandra said. “Pelton and Schillinger and Eddy were killers. I knew all about them breaking into your home. Look, I panicked. Blowing off the two rounds seemed like the thing to do at the time, the thing that would save my life if we got arrested. I thought if they implicated you, they’d let me go.”

“It never dawned on you that if Vasquez was shot with a.32, it wouldn’t matter how many.45 slugs were missing from my gun.” I looked down at the tanker-made waves that crashed against the cement pier. “None of it matters now,” I said, taking her hand and giving her the pistol. “I understand why you did it. When I saw that film of you with Pelton and Schillinger, I knew how difficult it must have been for you to be involved with Vasquez for so long.”

Her hand trembled as she tried to grip the.32. I felt the warm sun on my face and the cool breeze that tempered the warmth. The tanker was enormous and very close now.

“What do you want me to do?” she said.

“It depends on what you want to do,” I said.

We stood there not saying anything for a time that seemed forever. When Cassandra turned and tossed the pistol into the river, I felt like I had been swimming underwater for far too long and had only made it to the surface in the nick of time.

“I have something else for you,” I said. I handed her the other items Tony had given me.

“What’s all this?” she said.

“Passport,” I said, “credit cards, driver’s license. A few other assorted necessities for starting over. You already have enough cash.”

“I don’t get it,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“You’ll find out,” I said, “as soon as you make it over to where that tanker is about to dock. There’s a man there that you have to see. His name is Captain Ralph and he’s sailing this afternoon for Brazil. You’re going to be on that ship.”

“But what about my testimony?” she said. “I’m supposed-”

“Don’t worry about that. You get involved in a court of law, somehow they’re going to find out who shot Vasquez, and that’ll be the end of you.”

Cassandra looked down at the passport, opened it, and read the name stenciled under the photo.

“Martha Stewart,” she said like a question. “Do I look like a Martha Stewart to you?”

“That’s Tony’s Guinea Pigs for you,” I said, noticing the tears forming in Cassandra’s eyes.

She took a deep breath and smiled. “I never could have imagined things turning out like this.”

“For both of you,” I said, placing my open hand gently on her belly.

She looked up fast.

“You know about my angel, too?”

“I hope it’s a girl,” I said, “and I hope she’s as beautiful as you.”

Cassandra laughed, but at the same time, a tear ran down her cheek, and it kept going until it reached her heart-shaped tattoo.

“I guess it would be wrong for me not to thank you,” she said.

“Just promise me you’ll be on that boat. That’ll be thanks enough.”

She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.

“I guess I have no other choice,” she said. And then she kissed me gently and started walking toward the dock. She was on her way to Brazil.

A few minutes later I was still standing at the empty pier, with the river water moving flat and slow and the wind cool and picking up as the bright morning wore on. I knew I could have asked Cassandra whose baby she carried. Deep down, maybe it was a bit corny of me, but I knew I could have asked her and that she would have told me if the father was Vasquez or Pelton or Schillinger or the overcoat man, for that matter. But then, knowing for sure that it was one of these men would not have been a good thing. And besides, letting it go presented a second possibility. Just suppose the baby’s father was not one of the above? Just suppose the baby’s father was a nice, hard working young man whom Cassandra had not mentioned in the interest of protecting his identity? It wasn’t likely, but just the same it was the scenario I preferred to believe.

MIKE NORMAN’S BODY WAS finally taken out of cold storage and buried at the Albany Rural Cemetery around noon on a warm bright day in early June. He received full pomp-and-circumstance, including three dress-uniformed cops who fired twenty-one rounds into the sky from black, police-issue M-16s.

I stood away from the fanfare, far away from the crowd that had gathered by his grave, even farther from the podium where Mayor Jennings delivered a eulogy that included a plea for reform in the corrections department in light of recent calamities. He called for more prisons, more officers, more programs for violent offenders, better medical conditions, fewer field trips. Because, after all, Attica survivor Mike Norman would have wanted it that way.

While the mayor spoke, I crossed the flat green landscape until I found a rectangular plot that, at five feet by ten feet, measured little less than a prison cell. It was a grave I did not visit often, but I knew it as a silent peaceful place, especially at midday with the sun yellow and red over the hills to the east. The cemetery had been laid out on a hillside a century and a half ago and on a clear day you could see through the tall maples and oaks to the Hudson River below; you could see the morning sun reflected off its glassy surface. Overhead, tall pine trees shaded the plots. When their pine needles shed, even the footsteps of the visitors were muffled, so that the place reverberated in silence.