Godchild (6 page)

Chapter 8

The windowless cell measures about five feet by five feet. Almost a perfect square, with a tile floor and drain in the center.

There is a steel-framed bunk that supports a thin mattress pushed up against the concrete wall to her right. When she looks out the vertical iron bars that make up the door to the cell, she can see a gray concrete wall.

The cell is lit with only one exposed overhead lightbulb.

All around her come the moans and groans of the inmates. Sleeping the restless sleep of the drugged.

She zips up the front of her jumper, as if this makes her more secure, and moves toward the front of the cell.

“Hello,” she whispers out across the iron bars. “Is anyone out there who can hear me?” A deep, stale breath. In and out. “Hello…anybody?”

After a short time she hears a mans voice. “Hello,” comes the whisper.

She feels herself smiling, the muscles in her face tightening up, a shot of warmth and security shooting up her spine. “My name is Renata,” she says. “Where am I?”

“Beautiful Monterrey Prison,” he says in a heavy, throaty voice like the voice of an old man, although Renata has no way of knowing for sure.

She wishes she had her reporter’s notebooks, a pad of paper, a scrap, anything to write on. And something to write with. But she has nothing. They stripped her of everything when they dragged her in with that blindfold on.

‘‘Where in the prison?” she asks.

“Basement isolation” the man says. “Consider yourself lucky. Upstairs you have to share a box with ten or twelve people. Don’t take this the wrong way, but a woman like you…well, you wouldn’t last long.”

She wants to tell him he has no idea who he’s dealing with. But she lets it go.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Roberto”

“Why are you here, Roberto?”

“They say I murdered my wife’s lover.”

“Is it true?” she asks. If only she had a pen and paper.

“This man I speak of, he used to come across the border from Texas on Thursday afternoons. When I was at work.”

“Is that a yes or is that a no?”

“It was wrong for him to come across the border and do what he did to my wife.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“What are you in for, Renata?” he asks. “If you don’t mind?”

“I write books,” she said.

He laughs.

“What’s so funny?”

“Good material here,” he says.

She smiles, although he cannot see her smiling.

Just then there is the sound of a lock being unlocked and a metal door swinging open as hard leather soles shuffle on concrete. There is the sound of chains and keys rattling and shaking.

They are coming for her. She has no way of knowing for certain, but then, she can feel it like a lump in her chest.

“Miss,” the invisible man says, his voice now urgent. “Here they come. Do not talk. Just do what they tell you.

She feels her heart beating suddenly as she slides back against the far wall, knees tucked up into her chest. She sees them then. Three men. Two soldiers. Perhaps the same two who brought her in here from the desert. Standing in between the men is the mustached man also from the desert. He is still dressed in his black suit. The soldier to his left is holding a plastic tray containing a plate of food and water. The soldier to his right holds an identical tray that supports something else entirely. A syringe and a vial containing a clear liquid.

The mustached man calls out for the guard to open the door. “Numero dos!” he shouts.

An electronic buzzer sounds and the gate slides open.

The mustached man steps in. The soldiers follow.

“Are you hungry, Ms. Barnes?”

She stares at him, stone-faced.

“I must apologize for the way you’ve been treated.”

“Don’t bother” she says, feeling her teeth begin to chatter.

He crouches, meets her eye to eye, his face so close to hers she can smell his Bay Rum aftershave.

“If it is any consolation,” he says, “I spared your life out there in the desert. Running drugs, as you know, is a serious crime in this part of the world.”

“Is it?” she asks, as if she doesn’t know.

“I’d like to go on sparing your life,” he says, “so long as you cooperate with me.”

She breathes in and out. Twice.

“What is it you’d like for me to do?”

He reaches out with his right hand, gently fingers the zipper on her leather jumper.

“Answer some simple questions.”

She slaps his hand away. “Touch me again,” she says, “and I’ll find a way to kill you.”

He stands.

His face is serious, with heavy, black-and-blue bags under each eye, creases in the tan skin that covers his cheeks and forehead.

“Take away the food,” he says to the soldier on his left, who immediately walks out with the tray. Then, to the second soldier, on his right: “Shoot her up. It’ll help clear her mind”

The soldier to his right takes the syringe and vial in one hand and, with the other, sets the tray down on the floor.

“Don’t you touch me with that thing,” she screams, shuffling back quick into the corner.

The mustached man approaches her, grabs her by the feet. “Your resistance is nothing to us,” he says. “As is your life.”

The second soldier is sticking the needle into the vial, pulling back on the syringe, sucking the liquid up.

“Get away from me!” she screams, trying to kick. But he’s got her tight by the legs.

“Just stick it through her clothing” he orders the soldier.

The soldier holds the syringe up at chest height. He depresses it just enough to allow a bit of the clear liquid to spray out. He comes for her.

“No, goddammit, no!” she screams again.

“Just do what they tell you to do!” shouts an invisible Roberto
.

Chapter 9

You want to know what sleep was like for me? Let’s just say I hadn’t slept well in years. Not for lack of trying. Drink, pills, television, staring at the ceiling—nothing helped. Nothing could stop the memories that sped through the screen of my imagination like a videotape gone wacky.

This had always been the trick:

Attempting to sleep with my eyes wide open. If such a thing were possible, with my Colt laid out flat on my bare chest and the radiant heat making boiling and pinging sounds that reverberated against the paper-thin walls of the motel. I fixed my eyes on a popcorned ceiling that exploded in so much red neon with every flash of the Coco’s Motor Inn. Soon enough, the events were on their way back to haunt me in their perfectly calculated nap-time brilliance.

Me, at the wheel of the Ford Bronco, inching my way out into a four-way intersection. Fran, seated in the passenger side. She screams. I hit the brake in the middle of the intersection, like my life depends upon it. And it does. Only a split second later the Buick runs the red light, rams us, dead-on. Suicide seat. Fran slams forward, her head through the windshield, the sharp edge of the glass taking her head clean off at the base, her body falling back into the bucket seat as though nothing at all has happened. As though it was all a mistake. This is what immediately registers: the battered black Buick backing up fast, the tires burning rubber against the asphalt. Then the car quickly shifts into forward, swerving around the wrecked Bronco, shooting on past, but not before I get a good look at the driver. A bald man with a hoop earring and black John Lennon sunglasses. He looks at me before he takes off
.

Forever.

But then he is back. Just like that. Driving through the gates of the Albany Rural Cemetery.

The battered black Buick come back to life.

Or maybe that too, is just another dream.

I woke up like I always did: in a pool of sweat, the .45 having slid off my chest onto the bed. Outside the motel room came the stop-and-go sounds of the jets taking off and landing at the Albany International Airport and the perpetual murmur of commuter traffic growing heavier and heavier. Men and women rushing home to their private suburban hells.

I lay there on my back staring at the flashing red neon letters. Suddenly my thoughts shifted to Val. I saw her almond-shaped brown eyes and her chiseled cheekbones and her smooth, shoulder-length, sandy-brown hair. I remembered her warm smile and her low, smooth voice. I wanted to call her. But then I rolled over onto my side and I saw the folded restraining order sitting out on the bedside table and I knew it would be wrong to even try. I had to consider the consequences. Consider the fact that not only was I breaking the law but that I was breaking her heart, and mine, in more ways than one. I knew the best thing was to let it all go. For her, for me. Forget there had ever been a wedding, or an engagement, or even a proposal.

Forget there had ever been any such thing as Keeper and Val.  As the sun set on Albany, I folded back the metal clasp on the manila envelope that Barnes had handed me that afternoon at Tony’s office. I flipped it upside down and spilled the entire contents out onto the bed.

There was a paperback copy of Renata’s novel,
Godchild
along with what looked to be a press kit that had been prepared by her New York publisher. There were also three or four newspaper clippings that Richard must have added to the mix. The press kit had been held together with a heavy black clip. It consisted of a press release announcing publication of the novel, a short Q-and-A piece, and a brief article about the book. There were also three eight-by-ten color glossies. It was these images of Renata that caught my full attention.

Her hair was vivid auburn and cropped short, with little strands hanging over her forehead. Her eyes were deep blue and her nose was small but as pronounced as her lips, which, when they came together, made the shape of a heart.

I can’t say how long I actually sat there and stared at Renata’s image. Let’s just say I looked at it until, at very least, I might be able to spot her on a busy street corner.

Or should I say a cell block in Monterrey, Mexico?

I laid the three photos out, side by side, and picked up the first of the written pieces. There was a fairly involved bio that told me she had been born upstate in Cairo, New York, a small town located just outside Catskill. There she had been reared and raised in the public school system. She went on to Vassar to major in journalism before blowing another two years on a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing at Vermont College. From there she did a stint as a reporter at
The Times-Union
in Albany and then on to a freelance career with
Time, New York Newsday
, and some other papers.

It was during this time that Renata began to publish some of her first fiction in a whole bunch of journals I’d never heard of before, nor ever would again. Soon came the marriage to Richard, a short-lived career in public relations and script writing for Barnes’s own Reel Productions. Then, curiously enough, back on the road as a freelancer, this time to some pretty far-off locales like Florence, Moscow, Beijing, and even Benin, West Africa.

She covered the Gulf War for
Mademoiselle
, reporting on
Women in the Front Lines
, which resulted in her nomination for the “prestigious” Polk Award for “accuracy and clarity in reporting while willingly placing her life at risk.” She’d later suffer a case of the bends while writing about vampire bats in the underground caves of Sri Lanka for
National Geographic
, come close to arrest in Kosovo during the Balkan wars, and nearly have her brains blown out by an irate mobster while preparing a feature on the emerging black market in Russia.

She stayed at home long enough to bear and, for a time, raise her little boy Charlie, until the child’s untimely death in 1995. After which she took off again, this time for the south of France where she wrote
Godchild
, her only novel to date.

I took a few more seconds to look through what remained of the publicity material, all of it either regarding
Godchild
or the actual writing of the story, all of it stressing the “fiction” as opposed to the “memoir.” Deciding to cut to the chase, I picked up the novel itself and glanced at the jacket copy.

Godchild
is a psychological tour-de-force that exposes the madness behind a mother’s recounting of her child’s drowning…
.

I stopped right there.

Not exactly light reading. No wonder Barnes looked as though he was about to cry when he handed me the copy. I knew that if the emotions he had for his son bore even a fleeting resemblance to the ones I still carried for Fran, then there would be no getting over his kid’s death. It just wasn’t possible. And then his wife has to go and write
Godchild
. A constant three-hundred-page reminder of the sadness.

I picked up the newspaper clipping. It came from the spring of l995.

BARNES CHILD DROWNED IN BATHTUB!

I read the article. In the end it offered not much more information than the headline itself. Only that the kid had been discovered by his mother after she left the room for
two minutes, no more.
  And in that time — that space of one hundred twenty seconds — Charlie must have hit his head on the ceramic tub and drowned.

As of that writing, Renata had not been charged with negligence or murder. There was another short piece taken from two days later with the heading. AUTHOR BARNES DENIES KILLING CHILD. Under that clip was another, and it was this one that nearly made my heart stop.

It was an item taken from May 5, 1995, the day of Charlie Barnes’s funeral, almost an entire year to the day before Fran would be murdered. But it was not the article that got to me, or the description of the service and the moving eulogy given by Bishop Hubbard himself. It was the U.P. photo that went with it. The one conspicuously placed under the headline, BARNES CHILD BURIED! PARENTS IN MOURNING!

It was a black-and-white photo I had probably seen before in passing maybe back in 1995 while I was still warden at Green Haven Prison. A photo that showed a man who would mean absolutely nothing to me, until a year later when he would mean everything. Just a simple, grainy black-and-white shot of a defeated Richard clutched tightly to Renata’s arm —more for his own support than hers—as they descended the stairs outside St. Mary’s Cathedral, dressed all in black. But it wasn’t them I was concerned with. What concerned me now was the man who stood only a couple of people back. The man walking out with the crowd of mourners toward what must have been a long line of waiting limousines. A burly man with an earring in his left earlobe and a thin mustache that barely covered his lip and a shiny, shaved head.

The Bald Man.

Up close and personal.