Tim Green - False Convictions

They passed the old corner bar and its plastic sign, hung crooked above the door and advertising Pepsi and a new name. They crested the hill and the walls and watchtowers of the prison appeared. A tide of human shadows ebbed and flowed in the early morning light, guards changing shift.

“Jake,” Casey finally said.

“It went well.”

“He overheard you talking at your offices,” Casey said, puffing from the effort to speak and run. “Who’s Massimo?”

Graham grabbed her arm and stopped. He gave her a look of shock, finding her eyes with his. In the early light their dark brown looked almost black and beetlelike.

“You’re spying on me?” he said.

Casey set her jaw and shook free from his grip. “I don’t want to dance around with you or anyone. Jake heard you talking about taking care of someone-a her-like you should have before and ending some charade. What charade? Me? The Project?”

“No good deed goes unpunished, right?” Graham said, looking slightly hurt. “All I did was offer to give you a million dollars a year for your clinic to get some help with another good cause.”

“So I work for you and that means I don’t get to think or ask questions?” Casey asked, the words sounding weak and confused.

Graham inhaled and pushed the air out through tight lips. “Do you know how unprofessional this is of Jake Carlson? Does he? You don’t sneak around a man’s office listening to phone conversations when he’s welcomed you and agreed to do an interview.”

“You think I give a shit about Jake Carlson’s manners?” Casey asked.

“Don’t you think, as a lawyer,” Graham said, “that listening through a keyhole or behind a wall or whatever he was doing, you could mix things up?”

“Of course,” Casey said, still keeping her chin high.

“So, he heard me talking with Massimo?” Graham asked.

“Apparently.”

“A ship,” Graham said, nodding.

“What ship?”

“That’s the her I should have taken care of,” Graham said, splaying his fingers and holding up his hands. “Do you see how ridiculous this is, now?”

“I don’t see anything,” Casey said, her voice wavering.

Graham grimaced and shook his head, then turned and began walking away, down the hill. “The Charade is a ship anchored in Lake Erie.”

Casey followed him. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s full of machines from an assembly plant that got shut down in Michigan,” Graham said. “I told the city they can either give me the tax breaks I want and pay for the environmental cleanup of this old mill or the equipment and all the jobs that go with it can keep going to China, where the government has a new facility waiting if I want it. I’ve left the damn thing there for almost a year, thinking they’d be hungry for the deal. It’s a publicity stunt to get the politicians off their asses, but I still don’t have a deal. I should have shipped her off to Shanghai a long time ago, but I thought I’d try to save some American jobs.”

Casey walked with him and asked, “What about this Massimo?”

“Massimo D’Costa runs an environmental cleanup company,” Graham said. “He’s supposed to be making this whole deal happen and if it does, he’s got about ten million in cleanup work. He’s supposed to be using his contacts to make the whole thing happen. You see, now?”

“And you had to meet them yesterday?” Casey asked, her face flushed now from more than just the run.

“That was one of several meetings I had,” Graham said. “Evidently, the only one Carlson could hear about through the door, or however he heard. Maybe he’s tapping my phones. I don’t know.”

Graham stopped again and touched her arm. “Was that-he didn’t follow me to the warehouse, did he?”

Casey felt her throat tighten.

Graham snorted in disgust, shaking his head.

Casey pressed her lips together and kept up with him, dodging the shift change and hustling between cars queued up to get out of the guards’ parking lot. They crossed the bridge over the Owasco River, then the railroad tracks before passing Curly’s Restaurant.

As they turned left onto the sidewalk that ran along Route 20 toward their hotel, Casey said, “I am so sorry. Do you know how stupid I feel?”

Graham reached down and gave her hand a small squeeze. “Forget it. He’s charmed a lot of other people, too. I’m sorry I haven’t been as involved as I’d hoped.”

“I don’t know how much you’ve gotten from Ralph,” she said eagerly. “But I think by the end of the day I’ll have a swab sample from the hospital here in town that will give us the DNA we need to set Dwayne Hubbard free.”

Graham took her hand again and stopped, looking intently at her. “He did tell me, and how good would that be?”

“I still feel stupid.” Casey said, letting her hand linger before removing it from his. “Can we just put that behind us?”

Graham smiled warmly, reached out with his other hand, and touched her shoulder. “For you? It’s already done.”

JAKE AWOKE WITH a groan, not knowing where in the world he was. His mouth felt like dry dirt and the back of his collar was sticky and damp. The pain in his head brought back the scene in the drainpipe, and he touched the oozing wound, removing a red-stained finger as he sat up and fumbled with the bottle of Advil lying on the floor of his rented Cadillac. After gulping down four tablets with the help of a warm bottle of water, Jake studied the narrow and crooked city home from across the weedy park and its rusty chain-link fence.

The house belonged to a twenty-seven-year-old punk named Anthony Fabrizio, who owned a marijuana possession charge at eighteen and a third-degree assault at the age of twenty-three. Fabrizio earned a modest income at a security company, too modest to afford the G55 he kept parked in the detached garage behind the crooked house. Jake knew all this after a late-night phone call to Don Wall. He had berated his friend for not coming up with the information on Massimo.

“I already got a job, you know,” Wall had said hotly. “And enough bosses for a dozen agents.”

Jake knew he hit a nerve, though, and because he came up with nothing on Massimo, Wall had agreed to run a quick check on Fabrizio before going back to bed.

The G55 hadn’t shown up until just before three in the morning, when the enormous Fabrizio stopped in the street and got out to piss on his neighbor’s trash before pulling behind the house. Even though Jake detected a wobble in Fabrizio’s gait and suspected it would be some time before the young man got up for work, he hadn’t taken any chances, and so he spent his night in the Cadillac’s backseat.

The car now smelled of Burger King. Jake looked around him, then slipped the bag of trash out onto the curb before climbing over the seat to take up his position behind the wheel. He checked himself in the rearview mirror and realized he’d need to change into one of the other shirts from the Marshall’s bag in the passenger seat before he returned to the BK around the corner for a quick coffee and the bathroom. He winced as he pulled the shirt over his head but a silver flash caught his attention.

With only his head and one arm in the shirt, he fired up the Cadillac and took off after the G55, impressed with Anthony Fabrizio’s work ethic. Fabrizio didn’t appear to be in a big hurry, though, and he proved it by stopping at a Spot Coffee on his way through the city, giving Jake a chance to finish dressing. Coffee in hand, Fabrizio continued to an exclusive city street out near Amherst where the homes sat well off the road, each boasting several acres and trees as thick as tractor tires. Jake kept going past the yellow Spanish-style hacienda with its red clay tile roof and gaping wrought-iron gates, making note of the street numbers for the next several houses so he could know the address Fabrizio had gone into.