Godchild (4 page)

“At least talk to Barnes,” Tony suggested. “Then make your own decision.”

“And Val,” I said, facing him again. “Can you arrange for me to see her?”

Tony suddenly lost the color in his face, like the blood had simply drained out of it. And it had. “There’s something else I have to go over with you,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

I pulled the number-ten envelope out of my pocket. “It has something to do with what’s inside here, doesn’t it?”

He pointed toward the door, car keys dangling from his fingertips.

“Let’s go for a ride,” he said.

Chapter 4

She knows she’s on an elevator. Because she can feel herself falling. Slowly. The hot, airless box shuddering. Invisible wheels and gears grinding, cables stretching, straining. Like at any moment the cable is going to snap and send the car plummeting to the concrete bottom.

She is blind.

The black hood they pulled over her head in the desert prevents her from seeing anything. Her present world is black. The soldiers have been leading her around, one on each arm. They act as her eyes. She can feel the stifling heat of the elevator car, can feel her wet breath soaking the cloth where her lips press against the fabric. She tries to keep her cool, tries to keep her head. Because if she gets out of this mess alive, she might just write about it. What a story it could make. A firsthand account. Busted in the Mexican desert and alive to write about it.

When the elevator stops suddenly, she feels her knees buckle. She feels the compression of her stomach wall. She is forced to swallow. The world inside her hood is still black, still stiflingly hot.

When the metal doors slide open, she feels the rush of cool, damp air. There is the steady buzz of mechanical equipment coming from somewhere off in the distance. She knows she must be at the bottom. The basement. But then, the machinery cannot drown out the distant voices. Hundreds of them. Shouting, laughing, crying.

The soldiers yank on her arms, pull her out of the compartment into a concrete corridor she has no way of seeing. They lead her closer to the voices. The closer she comes, the louder the voices get.

And while she walks blindly, the mornings events come hack to her. From the very moment the mission went all to hell:

The bright halogen headlamps that burned bright on the cab roofs of the big trucks; the wail of the sirens; the voice of the soldier who stood foursquare on the exterior flatbed, screaming “Alto, alto, alto,” through a bullhorn over and over again while the military trucks proceeded to form a tight circle around the Land Rover and her motorcycle.

The dealers had turned their backs on her to get a good look at the dozens of soldiers who now blocked any path of possible escape. But the tall dealer was not intimidated in the least, as he positioned his shotgun at the hip, began blasting a hole in the line. That is, until a burst of automatic fire tore him in two at the waist.

The second, shorter dealer was not so gutsy. He dropped his weapon to the ground, raised his hands in surrender. She raised her hands too, although she was not carrying a weapon.

A moment later, a soldier broke away from the line and approached the two (she was not at all certain if they were soldiers or police, because they were dressed in green fatigues and combat boots. They carried automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. But, then, the word POLICE had been stenciled onto the white side panels of the four-wheel-drive trucks in big bold, black letters).

What happened next happened fast. The soldiers poured all over the Land Rover and motorcycle like ants on sugar. They aimed their rifles at her and the short man, forced them to lay down flat on their stomachs, hands locked behind their heads. It was while she was on the ground, all those black shiny jackboots shooting past her line of sight, that she first noticed the short man’s sobs. He whispered to her through the tears, “They will kill us all. You and me. We are all dead.”

She laid there on the ground, the cool sand touching her lips. What happened to the tough guy, she thought. Where’s the hard son of a bitch who ran his filthy fingers down my chest?

It would please her to see him die. Even if she had to die along with him.

That is the last thing she remembered before being picked up off the ground, carted over to one of the flatbed trucks, thrown down on her back—on a mattress, of all things, as if they had been planning this all along. Two soldiers aimed their M-16s at her while another man ordered her to unzip her jumper. “Do it now,” he said, in English. On her back, she swallowed something hard, began to unzip the jumper, slowly. All the time she was watching the eyes of her captors, watching their Adam’s apples bob up and down with every inch of bare skin revealed. But then, just as she was about to remove the jumper, another man appeared from out of the twilight.

He was not a soldier. At least, he was not dressed like one. He was wearing a suit. A black suit in the desert, with alligator shoes. He was a dark-haired, mustached man with a tiny diamond earring in his left earlobe. He carried a black pistol. A six-shot .45 maybe, or a .9 millimeter. Whatever it was, he pressed the barrel of the pistol up against the temple of the soldier to her immediate left.

“That’s enough,” the suit said in broken English. “We’re taking them to the pit.”

Several bumpy miles later, she found herself standing on the very edge of a wide-open pit. A mass grave really, dug out of the desert. Maybe twenty feet wide by thirty feet long. There must have been a hundred bodies stacked inside, like cord wood. Bloated bodies covered with some kind of white, sulfurous powder. The smell was revolting. Rotting meat and skin.

She stood there, shivering in the early morning coolness, but it was not the air that made her tremble. She was reminded of the old films she once saw of the Holocaust. Black-uniformed Nazis surrounding entire groups of Jews who had been stripped naked to the waist. Women, children, and men shot pointblank in the back of the head, their bodies slumping lifelessly, one by one, into the grave.

And then it happened. Two soldiers dragged the short dealer to the very edge of the pit, he kicking, screaming, clawing the entire way. He didn’t want to die. Not now. Not like this. Then a third soldier coming up on him, pressing the barrel of an M-16 up against the back of his skull, triggering off a round that sent his forehead into the grave just a couple of seconds before the rest of his body followed.

She stood at the edge of the pit, watching the short man’s body rolling end over end, like a rag doll falling down the stairs, until it joined the others. So this is what it’s like to die, she thought. This is what it’s like to just disappear off the face of the devil’s earth.

She waited for her turn. But then she discovered that they had something else in mind for her. The suit approached her once again. He was carrying something in his right hand. A piece of black cloth. When he opened up the black cloth, she could see that it was really a hood. When he pulled the hood over her head, everything went black. He dragged her across the sandy floor, until he told her to stop. She heard the sound of a truck door opening. “Watch your step,” she heard the man say as he helped her up into the seat.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” came an accented voice from out of the near distance.

 “She rides with me” said the suit as he got into the driver’s side seat.

“And why is that?”

“Because you and your men are pigs,” he said, slamming the truck door closed.

Now, as the two soldiers tug on her arms, signaling for her to stop, she is startled by a sudden electronic buzz and an equally loud clatter of metal slamming against metal. Like gates being electronically opened.

She feels a hand shove against her back, pushing her inside. Then abruptly, the hood is pulled off. Her eyes burn and she is forced to cover them with the flats of her palms. She goes to her knees on the concrete floor as the soldiers leave and the prison gate slams closed
.

Chapter 5

The first time I saw Tony Angelino—the
lawyer
— in action, he was being dragged to county jail for contempt of court. I’d been going on my seventh hour perched up in the marble balcony of the State Supreme Court in Albany when the presiding judge referred to Angelino’s murdered client, Corrections Officer Donna Payton, as a promiscuous femme fatale: “A woman who had no business being a prison guard regardless of New York’s acceptance of what common sense tells us should be a male-dominated field.”

Whatever the hell that meant.

But the assessment had caused Tony to shoot up from his chair, raise his left hand, point it directly at the shackled prisoner seated at the defendant’s table. “Your honor, this piece of scum deserves the death penalty,” he shouted. “And since we can’t get him that, he deserves castration.”

That’s when Tony pulled a stiletto out of his jacket pocket, triggered open the six-inch blade, causing the black inmate to duck down under the long wooden table and to start screaming for someone to get that “madman” away from him.

The bald-headed Judge Howe called out for the police, just as Tony buried the knife a good two inches into the table. Tony then referred to the judge as a “No-good, head-up-your-ass, woman-hating son of a bitch,” for which the entire courtroom, including the twelve-member jury (two-thirds of them women), exploded in applause.

In my humble estimation it took only twenty seconds flat for the armed security to pounce on Angelino, cuff him, and drag him out of court to an awaiting mob van for an all-expenses-paid visit to the Albany County lockup.

It had been one hell of an introduction.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Actually, it all goes back to one Friday night in September of 1984 when I was still the Acting Deputy Superintendent for Security at Coxsackie Correctional Facility in Greene County, during which one of my corrections officers—a very attractive young woman by the name of Donna Payton—was raped and killed while working the four-to-midnight action shift. Around six that evening, not long after chow, a disturbance had been reported coming from the vicinity of the prison chapel. Against the better judgment of her shift commander, Donna volunteered to check it out.

But what should have turned into a routine check turned into something else entirely. Lenny Jones, the Schenectady-born-and-raised serial killer whom I’d placed in charge of chapel maintenance at the direct request of the prison padre (thinking perhaps that he and Jesus could somehow rehabilitate the cold-blooded killer), lay in wait for Payton.

The night when she entered the chapel, nightstick in hand, Lenny closed the wood door behind her and barricaded it with a church pew. He cornered her, beat and raped her with her own baton. Because the religious worship areas were all located on the opposite end of the prison, her screams and cries for help could not be heard. Not  that  old   Lenny  ever  attempted  to   muffle  them.

Screams and cries made up just a part of his MO, made up just a small portion of what got him off on the killing experience. That and literally biting off her nipples while she lay on the altar beneath a wooden statue of the crucified Christ, bleeding hopelessly, inside and out.

So it was during that Murder One trial that I was finally able to get a glimpse of what would one day come to be known as the, and I quote, “Tony Angelino Experience.”

Through all of the morning and most of the afternoon I watched Tony in action from up in the marble balcony of the State Supreme Court. I watched him meticulously lay out the facts of the Lenny Jones/Donna Payton case for the jury, not just with the spoken word but with the use of story-boards tacked to four separate bulletin boards. To add some real emotional weight to the case, he then proceeded to pass around graphic photos of the dead corrections officer, causing one jury member (a twenty-something white man) to become physically sick. And at another point in the trial, when his oration in defense of Payton’s heroics (heroics that “defied all boundaries of gender”) caused another jury member (an elderly black woman dressed entirely in white) to burst out in tears, I became convinced that Tony had the talent to fool Jesus Christ Himself.

What he did not have, I would later discover, was the talent to change the mind of a bigoted and biased old judge who took perverse pleasure in handing out thirty-day jail sentences for contempt of court to lawyers who would never see things his way. Regardless of who was in the right, who was raped, who was murdered by a convict already serving out a life sentence for Murder One.

As for the upshot of the trial?

Tony did do his thirty days in the county lockup as decreed, while the jury handed Jones yet another life sentence in Coxsackie Prison’s general populace. The new sentence didn’t deter him from killing two more young inmates, both transvestites hooked on smuggled hormones and synthetic heroin.

But as you might have already guessed, no amount of bigoted old judges or bleeding-heart prison padres or repealed death-penalty laws or even Jesus Christ Himself could save Jones from dying—dare I say it—by the sword. For on the late afternoon of December 24, 1989, almost five years to the day after the brutal murder of Donna Payton, Lenny found himself cornered inside that same prison chapel by a couple of inmates who harbored no grudge against him in particular.

In the end, the strangulation and mutilation of Lenny Jones had been nothing personal. Call it another day’s work for the two killers, both of whom were already serving out life sentences. In other words, they had nothing to lose on an outside they’d never see again. But then, they had everything to gain inside a concrete and razor-wire world that placed a certain value on men who had the balls to take out an infamous serial killer.

But here’s the real sweet spot of the story:

It couldn’t have been more than an hour after Lenny Jones’s murder that Fran and I were attending a party at Tony’s condo. Naturally I assumed the purpose of the party was to celebrate the final Christmas of the 1980s, but later on I learned through a very trustworthy source that the party had been intended to celebrate the “very sudden and very unfortunate death” of Jones.

And just to prove it, he began passing out little mass cards with a portrait of the Virgin Mary on the front and a Hail Mary printed on the back along with the name Leonard L. Jones and his—get this—birth and death dates printed below that. The cards were beautiful, with little gold lacing embroidered around the edges and embossed printing. A timely and expensive job, at least according to Fran. A job that would take a week or more to produce.

So when Fran asked about how in the world Tony would know that Mr. Jones was going to die that very afternoon, my confidential source simply raised his hands in the air, stuck out his bottom lip, and went back to the bar to freshen his drink. And when Fran turned to me, looked me in the eye, and said, “Oh my sweet Jesus, he had him killed,” I quickly pulled the drink out of her hand and dragged her onto the dance floor under a piece of mistletoe that hung on a string from the cathedral ceiling. I kissed her until embarrassment alone caused her to forget—at least for the time being— about the death of Lenny Jones and the legal counsel who arranged it.

Now, ten years later, you could say that Tony had calmed down a lot. But as a lawyer he was still arranging deaths. In this case, the death of me and Val.

We were sitting inside his Porsche Carrera, parked on the Port of Albany. To our right, the rusted hull of a massive cargo ship was being loaded with wood pallets that contained four fifty-gallon drums apiece. The stenciling on the black drums spelled out MOLASSES in bold white letters.

Not ten feet from the car, a telephone pole was embedded in the macadam-covered dock. The pole was leaning drastically to the right, as though all it would take was a stiff gust of wind to send it into the river. Stapled to the pole was an artist’s rendering of the Bald Man, and the ten-thousand-dollar reward leading to any verifiable information as to his whereabouts. It was still there after two years, a faded reminder of my failure.

Tony asked for the envelope he had given me earlier.

From the passenger seat I watched the powerful movements of the enormous booms and cranes that lifted the pallets off the dock. The booms swung like giant arms, hauling the cargo up to the ship’s deck, then loading it down inside a hull I had no way of seeing from where I was sitting.

“The envelope, please,” he said.

Without looking at him I reached inside my blazer, slid the envelope out from the interior pocket. Not ten feet before us, the Hudson ran fast and wide and very dark. Seagulls flew circular patterns around the cargo ship. You could feel the Carrera bucking in the wind. The gusts caused the pallets of molasses to sway like pendulums as they rose up off the docks.

Tony snatched the envelope out of my hands. “I’ll do it for you,” he said.

He tipped back the brim of his navy blue fedora and slipped his thumb inside the flap, ran it down the length of the envelope, tearing it neatly open.

“I’ll get straight to the point,” he said, holding the contents of the envelope in his hand. “Last night Val obtained a court order preventing you from having any contact with her whatsoever. With her and her son, Ben. This is your copy of the order.”

“Are you issuing me an affidavit, counselor?” I said, staring at a family of black ducks floating on the surface of the water, bobbing up and down in the wake.

“Yes,” he said, softly.

I took the document in my hand, unfolded it, stared down at it. The very top of the paper had been dated for the day before and stamped with the number 813.12 in the left-hand corner. In the top center appeared the words
Family Restraining Order and Injunction
. A few spaces below that could be found
Definitions
.

I read the first paragraph.

In this section of the document, domestic mistreatment means any of the following engaged by an adult family member or adult household member against another adult family member or adult household member against his or her former spouse or, as in the case of cohabitation, common-law spouse, or by an adult against an adult with whom the person has a child in common, biological or guardian. Intentional and/or possible infliction of physical pain, physical injury or illness…

I was tired of reading. The words meant nothing to me anyway. I folded the document up, stuffed it back inside the envelope, and back inside my jacket pocket.

“They just don’t pass out restraining orders at will.”

“You’re no stranger to the process,” Tony said. “Restraining actions can be easily filed even without the help of an attorney. County clerks have the forms on hand. From there you hand in the completed form along with a certified check for one hundred eighty bucks. Within a few hours, you’re in business.”

I focused on the Bald Man’s face, flopping in the breeze coming off the river—the smooth egg head, the wide eyes, the thin mustache, the hoop earring in his left ear-lobe.

“How’d she get the state to act on it so quick?”

“Val has as many contacts in the legal field as anyone else who’s spent their entire adult life in law enforcement,” Tony explained. “After she got wind of your performance last night at Bill’s Grill, she thought it prudent to pull a few strings. In the protective interest of her and her son. As you know, her first husband was abusive — ”

“I know what the hell he was,” I said.

Tony looked directly out the concave windshield of the Porsche, toward the river. He inhaled gently and then released it. “I know you’re not dangerous,” he said. “I’m sure deep down, Val knows you’re not dangerous. It still does not change the fact that you walked out on her or that you shot up a local bar with your own personal hand cannon.”

“The Buick, Tony,” I said. “The fucking Buick showed up again.” I looked down at my lap. “I want to go back to the cemetery, Tone. Take another look.”

“You do that, paisan, and you will never forgive yourself.”

“What if I find something?”

“What if you don’t?”

He was right. The thought of not finding something frightened me way more than finding something that would finally lead me to the Bald Man. I looked one last time at the artist’s rendering. I actually made eye contact with the poster. One day I would find him. Sooner or later. I wanted it to be sooner.

“Oh for Christ’s sakes, Keeper,” he said. “You can’t carry Fran’s cross forever.”

I turned to him. “Go to hell,” I said.

“But here’s the reality of it,” Tony said. “If you try anything, anything at all, if you even breathe in her direction, she’ll call the police and they’ll bust you, and by then there’ll be nothing more I can do for you.”

“Cut the bullshit, Tony,” I said. “What’s this court order stuff really all about?”

He turned slowly, back to facing the river. He pulled the brim of his fedora down low on his forehead. “Revenge,” he said. “Simple revenge. For walking out.”

“Just like that,” I said. “No second chance?”

Tony raised his hands in the air, dropped them in his lap.

“You left her standing at the altar,” he said. “Now tell me, how would
you
feel?”

The river.

Black and deep.

I felt like jumping in.

Drowning. For a little while at least. If it were possible.

“No comment,” I said finally.

“No further questions, Your Honor.” he said.