Dave Zeltserman: Killer

“What if I gave them Salvatore Lombard?”

That gets my lawyer’s attention. It would have to, me offering up Boston’s top crime boss. Up until that moment he’d only been going through the motions, halfheartedly suggesting that he might be able to cut me a deal for thirty years, but using a tone which indicated he didn’t really believe that. I can’t blame him. I’ve already seen the same videotapes and wire tap transcripts that he has. The state has me dead to rights for a long laundry list of crimes including extortion, a shitload of Mann Act violations and attempted murder. My busting up an undercover cop’s skull with a crowbar was only icing on the cake as far as they were concerned.

“You’re sure about this?” he asks.

I nod. This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision on my part. It was something I’d been mulling over for weeks, ever since I realized someone in Lombard’s organization must’ve given up the operation. This was the reason I fired the lawyer Lombard had cherry-picked for me, and had my wife, Jenny, find me a virgin one, someone not connected. I’m forty-eight, and maybe betraying Lombard means I’m never going to see forty-nine, but I’ll be fucked if I’m going to be buried in a prison cell for the next thirty years.

“And you can tie him to all this?”

“Yeah.”

“That might change things,” he admits. “Let me see what I can do.”

His face is flushed now. He stands up abruptly and knocks on the small square Plexiglas window embedded in the locked door, and two guards come into the room to escort me to my cell. Less than an hour later I’m brought back to the same room. My lawyer’s waiting for me, his face still flushed, maybe even a bit shiny at this point. I take the chair opposite him, and we both wait patiently until the guards leave the room and close the door behind them.

“If you can really deliver Salvatore Lombard-”

“I can.”

“Then I can get you fourteen years,” he says. “This is a gift given what they have on you.”

“I need better than that.”

He stares at me, his eyes widening as if I’m crazy. “Leonard, let me try to impress on you how generous their offer is. I know the DA must be salivating over the prospect of nailing Lombard, but fourteen years is the best he can give you without inciting a riot within the police department after what you did to that officer, not to mention those other people. I wouldn’t have a prayer of doing better than that if this went to trial-”

“I can do the fourteen years. That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what?”

I shift in my seat, my gaze wandering past him. “If I give up Lombard he’ll tie me to other felonies. I need immunity from those. Fourteen years is all I do regardless of what else I confess to.”

“What else did you do?”

I shake my head. “When we have a deal in place I’ll give the rest to the DA.”

My lawyer gives me a funny look, but he gets up again and signals through the Plexiglas window. The guards let him out, but this time they don’t bother taking me back to my cell. I sit alone for no more than fifteen minutes before my lawyer is let back in. His eyes are hard on mine as he nods.

“As long as there’s no crimes involving children, no child porn, and no sex crimes, the DA’s willing to give you a free pass on everything else if what you give them can be verified and is enough for a conviction.”

“We’ve got a deal then,” I tell him.

My lawyer and I meet with the DA. After I’m given the paperwork for the deal my lawyer has worked out, I give the DA what he needs. It takes them three weeks to check it out, but once they have Lombard charged, we all meet again so I can outline the rest of my crimes, the ones I’m going to be given immunity for. It takes a while. There are so many of them. When I go over the twenty-eight murders that I did for Salvatore Lombard, the DA’s face turns ashen. Involuntarily, my lawyer’s lips twist into a sick smile, almost as if I’m pulling something over on him too.

I breathe easier after that. Ever since I fired Lombard’s chosen lawyer, I was expecting Lombard to either find a way to kill me or to leak my involvement with those killings to make sure I couldn’t cut any deal. I guess he couldn’t figure out a way of doing either of them without screwing himself. Anyway, a hell of a weight off my chest…

present

Someone was moaning within the cell block. The noise was muffled; whoever it was must’ve had his face buried in the mattress. I sat and listened, trying to figure out which cell it was coming from and whether the moaning was the result of an inmate humping his mattress or sobbing into it. Not that I cared, but I’d been up several hours now and welcomed the distraction. The hours when I waited for the lights to be turned on were the hardest. Early on at Cedar Junction, when Jenny was putting the maximum she could into my prison commissary account, I had been able to buy myself a reading light and those hours weren’t so bad. Once she came down with cancer, that changed, and it wasn’t long before the only money coming in was from my work detail, which paid all of eight cents an hour. As much as I hated doing it I sold my reading light when my last bulb blew. I couldn’t afford more bulbs; the little money I got was needed to buy necessities like soap and toilet paper. After that I was no longer able to escape from those quiet early hours alone with myself by reading.

If I were back in Cedar Junction, other inmates right now would be giving this guy hell and letting him know in explicit detail what would be happening to his rectum the next day if he didn’t shut the fuck up. Not here, though. Most of the inmates knew they were lucky to be held at a medium security prison. They knew there were far worse places they could be sent, places like Cedar Junction. And that they’d end up in one of those shitholes if they acted up.

There were no windows in the cell block, but still, there was never a true darkness here; only a murky grayness. The same had been true at Cedar Junction. At night both prisons kept a bank of fluorescent lights flickering on beyond the hallway. It was probably a prison regulation, at least in Massachusetts.

My internal clock told me it was five-thirty. At six o’clock every morning the lights are turned on and a horn is blasted solidly for a full minute to rudely awaken any of the lucky ones who had managed to sleep through the night. After the lights and the horn would come the showers, mess hall and then work details. Not for me, though, not with today being my last day in prison. A fourteen-year stretch done and finished with, and I’d be fucked if I was going to give anyone one last chance to ice me. Later that morning I had one last appointment with my “society reintegration” case worker, then I was done. Until then, I wasn’t going to leave my cell for any other reason. Not that I believed anyone here had the intestinal fortitude to take me out, nor would it make any sense at this point for Lombard’s boys to let it happen, but still, I’d feel like an idiot if I gave someone an opening at this late date.

The moaning had stopped. I had to turn my thoughts to something other than the stillness and quiet suffocating me, and I started thinking of Lombard’s boys, of how surprised they had to be that I was going to be leaving here alive. I wondered briefly what odds were given on the street that I’d ever walk out of prison. Probably at least ten to one, and even then it would’ve been a sucker’s bet. Not that Lombard’s boys didn’t make an effort. I knew they’d put a price on my head; at times I’d spot the ones who were gearing themselves up to make a go for it. But then I’d catch their eye, and I’d see their toughness fading fast, and I’d know they didn’t have what it took to go through with it. The one time any of them tried it, there were three of them and they had set it up so that we’d be alone. When they made their move I moved faster and the one closest to me was on his knees vomiting blood, the other two quickly looking like scared school-children and scrambling to get away from me. After that, all the others that Lombard’s boys tried to employ would make the same mistake of first trying to give me the hard stare in the eye, and then they’d be worthless.