Keith Ablow - Compulsion

"I'd rather grab a beer," he said. He winked.

A lot of people would have taken that bit of honesty as a good enough reason to keep their money, but I knew what it was like to need a beer. "Here you go." I handed him two dollars.

"I gave you a five," he said. "Where's my five?"

I smiled. "Now, you're pushing it. Good luck." I walked by him.

I hadn't gotten ten yards down the sidewalk when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around and saw the same man walking toward me at a good clip, his eyes more focused than before, one of his hands down by his side, clutching something that glittered in the light drifting down from the street lamps. I thought of running, but he had closed to within five feet of me.

He smiled, his mouth full of perfect-looking, glistening white teeth, a mouth that seemed to prove he had been laying in wait for me, pretending to be homeless. He raised his arm above his head.

I reared back, cocked my fists karate-style, and waited for him to come a foot or two closer. If all he had was a knife, I'd have him on the ground before he could use it.

He stopped, dropped his arm. "I'm sorry," he said. "I scared you." He slowly held up a silver crucifix. "I forgot," he said. "Thank you. And God bless you." He smiled that toothy grin again, then pointed at his mouth with the crucifix. "Tufts Dental. Free clinic," he said, as if reading my mind. "Got 'em today." Then he turned around and started walking away in the direction of Charles Street, probably to get that beer he wanted, celebrate his new teeth, who knows?

I took a deep breath, talked my heart down to a regular rhythm, and headed for the jail. Maybe a call to Laura Mossberg, I thought to myself, wouldn't be such a bad idea, after all.

Within a couple blocks of the building, I saw television crews starting to swarm into position. I quickened my pace. I didn't want to talk about Billy's case until I had come up with just the right message to counter the story Bishop, O'Donnell, and Harrigan were spinning.

North Anderson had done his job paving the way for my visit with Billy, so I got my visitor's badge at the front desk without any trouble. I signed in, walked through the metal detector, then passed through three separate iron doors, each of which opened as the one behind it slammed closed.

Despite all the times I have visited prisons, I have never lost the feeling of melancholy that coming and going from such places provokes in me. I feel as if I am drowning in questions. By what twists of fate are these people locked up? Who still remembers them as little boys, full of innocence and wonder? And this, getting to the heart of the matter: By what good fortune do I walk the streets a free man? Because I do not feel the great distance between myself and these rapists and murderers and thieves that I presume most others do. I feel separated from them by something wafer-thin and translucent. I think they sense it, too. I carry the scent of their pack. But for the occasional kind words from my unpredictably violent father, but for a teacher in sixth grade who took a liking to me and told me I would amount to something, but for who knows what other myriad, minuscule details of my life story, I can easily imagine that I would be an inmate, too. And I feel this especially when leaving a prison's barbed-wire walls, returning my visitor's badge and retrieving my medical license. I half-expect a dubious stare from an omniscient front desk clerk, a finger raised, Just one moment, then an alarm sounding, a rush of booted feet coming my way, my sentence shouted at me as I am carried off to a cell, the din all but obscuring my plea: "Guilty. Guilty as charged. Guilty as hell."

I took a long, wide corridor toward the interview rooms. The fluorescent lights made my skin look cadaverous. The floor, a high-gloss, gray linoleum, translated every one of my steps into an ominous echo bouncing off bright white, cinder-block walls.

A guard met me at the end of the corridor and brought me to Billy Bishop, already seated at a small table, inside a six-by-eight-foot room with a glass door. He was wearing the standard-issue orange jumpsuit, with a black number stenciled across his chest. He stood up. He looked every bit as wiry as he had at Payne Whitney, but all the brashness had drained out of his posture. "I wish you had lent me that money," he said, forcing a grin. "I could have been long gone."

The guard and I exchanged reassuring glances, and he left. I stood just outside the room. "I'm glad you're all right," I said.

Billy made a display of looking around him. "I wouldn't say this is all right," he said.

I nodded toward the table. "Let's talk," I said.

He sat down. I took the seat opposite him. I noticed that the fingers of his hands were laced together so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.

"Strange place," he said, his voice suddenly a sixteen-year-old's, full of worry.

"It is." I paused. "Tell me how you're doing."

"How am I doing? I'm done," he said, his eyes showing none of their old fire. "Win won."

"Not yet," I said. "We're still working."

He closed his eyes and nodded. "They have me in protective custody, because I'm accused of hurting… killing a baby. I guess that ranks me with the guys who like sex with kids. If they could get at me, they'd-" He stopped and looked straight into my eyes.

Being imprisoned is more stressful than many men can stand. But being imprisoned as a pariah, a target, makes everything else look tame. "I want to ask you straight out," I said. "Did you have anything to do with what happened to Brooke or Tess?"

He kept looking right at me, never blinking, and shook his head.

"You didn't," I said. I wanted him to speak the words.

"I felt bad for the twins," he said. "They were born at the wrong time, into the wrong family. Like me, losing my parents. I didn't have any desire to hurt them."

I nodded. "I'm going to help find an attorney to represent you," I said. "In the meantime, you've got to try to keep your mind busy while you're in here. And you've got to try to stay hopeful."

"That's a long yard," he said. "Game's about played, don't you think?"

"It's not over. I promise you."

Billy's eyes filled up. He looked away while he struggled to hold back his tears. Then he took a deep breath and looked back at me. "I've got one idea," he said. "It's my last shot, or I wouldn't even mention it."

"What's that?"

"If Garret saw something the night Brooke was murdered, something about Darwin, would his word mean anything in court? Would a jury ever believe what he had to say?"

I thought about all the circumstantial evidence linking Darwin Bishop to the crime. An eyewitness, especially Bishop's son, might well be enough to make jurors believe Billy had been wrongly accused. "I think his testimony could change everything," I said.

"You should ask him, then," Billy said.

"I did," I said.

"That was before they caught me. Ask him again."

"Why don't you tell me?" I said. "What will Garret say that he saw? He must have told you."

Billy shook his head. "That's not up to me to talk about."

I wasn't sure why Billy would maintain a code of silence around something that might get him off charges of attempted murder and murder. "Why not? Why can't you talk about it?"

"Because I figure there's a good chance the jury won't budge, even with Garret's testimony, and then I'll get put away for life, and he'll be all alone with the devil. Just Garret and Darwin. If it were me, I don't think I'd take that risk. I mean, we're not that close. I'm not his real brother. And I've done some rotten things since I moved in with him. The stealing and all that. He would have been better off without me there."

My heart went out to Billy at that moment. He had lost his family in Russia and hadn't ever really been a full member of the Bishop family. Julia hadn't really favored his adoption, after all. Maybe that was part of the reason he'd started getting into trouble in the first place. "I'll ask Garret to think about it," I said. "You should ask him, too. Because it really could turn the key and get you out of here."