Godchild (19 page)

PART FOUR

NO ANSWERS YET IN SUSPECTED DEATH OF FORMER WARDEN

ALBANY (AP)-DNA tests failed to reveal the true identity of the body recently recovered inside the charred wreckage of a 1996 Toyota 4-Runner belonging to former Green Haven warden turned private detective Jack “Keeper” Marconi.

Marconi is best remembered as having been falsely brought up on charges in 1997 in the shooting death of Eduard Vasquez, the convicted New York City cop-killer who escaped Green Haven Prison. But it wasn’t until going on the run to produce the proof necessary to acquit himself and convict the true murderer —former DOCS Commissioner Washington Pelton —that Marconi was able to vindicate himself.

Marconi has not returned to public service since but has chosen instead to operate as a private consultant. Pelton had been serving a life sentence at Clinton Correctional Facility for the murder of Vasquez when he died of stomach cancer in August of last year.

Marconi, who for two years waged a campaign to locate the man accused of killing his former wife, Frances, in a 1996 hit-and-run, never showed up for his wedding last Saturday to Albany native Valerie An-tonelli. After having been spotted at Bill’s Bar and Grill on Watervliet Avenue, he disappeared. His badly burned 4-Runner was recovered from the Hudson River a day later, riddled with .9-millimeter bullet holes. The body discovered inside the wreckage had been burned beyond recognition, prompting a series of DNA tests that, thus far, have proven inconclusive.

Chapter 50

We were going on our third day at the Days Inn.

It was only a matter of time until Tony and his Guinea Pigs found us. Not that he had even the slightest clue as to how and where to find us. But of course, I’d never known Tony not to find a simple way around that kind of problem. He might check the address I used when I filled out the form for the rent-a-car. He might check out the address to the credit card. But the address would have led him to my apartment in Stormville, ninety miles south of the Albany city limits.

Two things were certain: He knew I was somewhere in Albany and he knew I had Renata with me. How long we’d keep out of sight was his guess. Whether or not he had personally acknowledged to Barnes that we were back and that we were hiding out was anybody’s guess. It was possible he had kept the whole thing to himself.

For now, while I lay back on the bed watching the early evening edition of CNN, Renata continued to work at the hotel desk, just as she had for the past three days. She worked incessantly, never coming up for air, on occasion breaking into tears or slamming her fist on the table, throwing herself on the bed, stuffing her face into the pillow.

She seemed mesmerized by her work. Transfixed on one hand, agonized on the other, as though recounting the experience of losing her child was not enough. She had to actually relive it in her mind, put herself through all the pain and suffering in order to get it right. Why was she putting herself through the misery? Had she decided to finish the manuscript just because I’d asked her to? Why hadn’t she just split? In my mind, I knew she was finishing the job she had started simply because it had to be done. What’s more, I knew that deep down she feared for her life. She already knew her husband was capable of murder. But in the end, so what if the manuscript could not be used as admissible evidence against her husband? As long as it got written, it could be used as an accusation. Anyone with a law-and-order background could tell you that when it came to murder, the accusation counted almost as much as the burden of proof.

Until the guilty were proven innocent.

Renata hardly ate or drank. She had been taking time out only to shower (which she did as often as four times a day). She hardly slept, catching only the occasional power nap for an hour or so at a time. She rarely spoke. The life she lived inside the motel room with me didn’t seem to matter. It was the life she was living inside her mind that mattered—the past she shared with her two-year-old son and the father who allegedly killed him.

Late in the morning of the third day, I picked up a sheet of the carefully stacked paper and began to read:

When Richard came home from the office that night, his mood was black. He asked for Charlie. I told him that I was getting Charlie ready for his bath and reminded him that it was bath night. Instead of dinner, Richard fixed himself a drink. When that drink was gone, he fixed another, using less soda. Then he fixed another and yet another until he wasn’t using any soda at all, rather, just straight whiskey from the bottle…
.

That’s as far as I got before she ripped the page from my hand, looked at me with eyes that weren’t eyes at all but mirrors that reflected her pain and hatred. Not for me, but for what she was writing. I realized then that the actual process of writing for Renata wasn’t pleasurable. It was a drive, a force, a possession even. It was weird, but just watching her write gave me the creeps, like watching an addict shoot up. I couldn’t imagine how anyone in their right mind would want to write for a living. But then, maybe the answer was inherent in the question. Whatever the case, I never dared to read another page. I never even took a chance while she was taking one of her many showers. I knew better than to betray the trust of the dead.

Now I was leaning back on the bed, an open bottle of spring water by my side, .45 resting on my lap, locked and loaded. I was watching TV to the now-familiar clatter of typing. CNN Headline News was running a story about fifteen school kids shot and killed in a peaceful Indiana cow town. Another story on mass graves uncovered in Mexico.

I drank some water.

CNN broke for a commercial. When the live local spot aired for an Albany car dealership in which a young woman was being interviewed by a salesman about her great new Chevy, I thought I could be hallucinating. That maybe in all my exhaustion I was dreaming or seeing things. It wasn’t the commercial itself that bothered me, so much as the man who stood only a few feet away from the woman playing the part of the satisfied customer.

While Renata typed away, I got up off the bed, bottle of water in hand. I crouched before the TV, looked directly into it. There was no doubt in my mind. The man behind the woman was the Bald Man. The same round John Lennon sunglasses, the same shaved head, pencil-thin mustache, tiny silver hoop in his left earlobe. He stood not more than three or four feet behind the woman while she spoke into the microphone.

I never noticed when the water bottle slipped out of my hand and fell to the carpeted floor.

Renata never noticed it either.

I went back to the bed and picked up the telephone.

Maybe the spot wasn’t truly live after all. Maybe it had been made to simply look live in the cold darkness of a typical March night.

There was only one way to tell.

I flipped on the lamp, looked up the number for the local cable television station in the yellow pages. I dialed the number and got the woman who worked the night shift. I inquired about the commercial spot. How could I find out if it was live or Memorex?

“Hold on,” she said, fuzzy Muzak now pouring into my head.

A minute later she came back on the line.

“Live,” she said. “They have three top-of-the-hour spots left, including eleven o’clock.”

“Can you tell me who’s producing the commercial?”

She let out a breath, slightly exasperated. I could hear the sound of pages flipping. “Reel Production,” she said.

“Bingo,” I said.

“Excuse me?” the woman said.

I hung up the phone.

First I grabbed my leather. Then I checked the .45, made sure I had the three extra clips stuffed inside the interior pocket. I holstered the weapon once more. Afterward I bent down and spoke softly to Renata.

“I have to go out,” I said. “For a little while.”

She kept right on typing, pulling out the pages as she completed them, piling them in a neat stack, facedown so I couldn’t read them.

“I’m going to lock the door from the outside,” I said. “Don’t open it for anyone. Do you understand me, Renata?”

She nodded to her typewriter.

But she understood. I knew I could trust her not to leave. But just to be safe, I disconnected the telephone. It felt like the right thing to do under the circumstances.

I locked the door behind me when I left the room.

I was off to check out some new Chevys.

Chapter 51

Capital City Auto Center wasn’t one of those run-of-the-mill used-car lots with dozens of colorful flags hanging from light poles and bright spots illuminating a lot full of freshly detailed used cars and trucks that didn’t work for spit underneath the paint.

Instead, it looked more like a mall for cars. A modern-day marketing marvel. Complete with electronically controlled gas pumps, brushless car wash, five-star restaurant and bar (
Drag Racers
), specialty shops, and thousands of cars.

Used and new.

Tonight, the lot was lit up not with the usual strategically positioned halogens, but with spotlighting for two or three shoulder-mounted TV cameras. Parked in the lot, beside the huge metal-and-glass building that housed the showroom, was a large van with a satellite dish mounted to the roof. Printed on the side of the van were the words
Reel Productions
.

A man approached me just as I stepped out of the Explorer at the edge of a sea of brand-new Chevy cars, trucks, and vans. A tall, thin man with the face of a rat, who wore a tan polyester suit, loafers covered with black rubbers, and a hooded Kmart parka for an overcoat.

“I’m Bob,” he said, bare hand extended, smile plastered from ear to ear on his gaunt rat face. “How can I help you?”

I looked over his shoulder at the mobile camera crew filming the same brown-haired girl I’d just seen on television at the Days Inn, standing between the camera and a brand-new baby blue SUV. Although I was out of earshot, I could plainly see her jumping for joy over what a hell of a buy the SUV was. But when the director—a man in a red down vest with black headphones wrapped around his neck—crisscrossed his hands overhead as if to say, “Cut,” I could tell they were running through a rehearsal.

So far, no sign of the Bald Man.

“New wheels?” Rat Face asked, as if to snare my complete and undivided attention from the television crew.

“The SUV over there,” I said, pointing directly over the hoods of the cars at the film crew. “The baby blue one.”

“We’re running a live promo,” Rat Face said, using his left arm as a pointer. “So it’s going to be a bit tough to take a good look at that particular automobile.” He started walking toward the opposite side of the lot. “But if you’ll come with me, I’ll gladly walk you through a variety of SUVs we have in stock.”

I started toward the film crew, taking the most direct path I could manage between the cars and trucks.

“Sir, I’ll have to ask you to come this way.”

I ignored him, kept on walking.

Now the director was wearing the headphones over his ears. He held a clipboard in his right hand. “Ten seconds,” I heard him say as he stared at his watch, right hand raised high overhead, the bright stand-mounted spotlights aimed at the face of the brown-haired girl.

“Five seconds,” the director said, beginning the backward count. When he got to number one, he formed a pistol with his right hand, pointed it at the girl, brought down his thumb.

That’s when he came out of the showroom and stepped into view.

The Bald Man.
My
Bald Man. Dressed in black jeans and combat boots, a black turtleneck to match.

“Welcome back to Capital City Auto Center,” the girl said, in a happy singsong voice.

I made my way up to the edge of the cars and stopped.

Rat Face Bob was on my tail. He grabbed at my leather jacket. “Sir,” he whispered in my ear. “I’m going to have to insist—”

“Bob,” I said, turning toward him. “Shut the hell up.”

The Bald Man turned toward me, caught my glare.

He did a double take.

He breathed white vapor out his mouth.

He took a couple of steps toward me. He must have stepped within range of the camera lens, because the director started waving his right arm violently, mouthing, “Get out of the way, get out of the way…” over and over again.

My heart was beating in my throat.

Brown-haired girl kept on talking into the mike anyway, her face angled at the camera but her eyes most definitely shifting to me. Because suddenly I was the center of attention.

Until finally the Bald Man turned, bolted.

I took off after him, knocking one of the bright mobile television lamps to the pavement, the huge bulb exploding like a grenade when it hit the frozen blacktop, forcing the director and the brown-haired girl to hit the pavement. Both of us sprinted, dodging around the parked cars and trucks. Until I hopped up on the hood of a green Chevy Malibu, then onto the hood of the cherry red Malibu beside it and the tan Dodge Dakota beside that.

I sucked the cold wind and I ran as fast as my legs would take me and I narrowed the space between us to three cars.

Maybe two.

One more and I could have cut him off before he got to the end of the lot.

I would have made it too, if it hadn’t been for the white-hot explosion against the back of my head…the cold darkness that followed.

Chapter 52

The first thing I saw when I came to was the blurry outline of two people standing at the foot of a bed. After a few seconds of blinking and breathing, I was able to get a better fix on them.

Tony Angelino and Detective Mike Ryan.

Four walls surrounded me.

Capital City Auto Center had disappeared.

So had the Bald Man.

My head hurt. A lot.

At least my leg didn’t hurt anymore. If it did, it hadn’t registered yet.

“Look who’s awake,” Tony said, as if I were a toddler waking up from a mid-afternoon nap.

He had on his dark blue, double-breasted suit underneath a charcoal overcoat, a matching navy blue fedora resting back on his head. In the corner of his mouth, a toothpick bobbed up and down when he moved his lips.

“Two hours,” Ryan said, not to me, but to Tony. “Not bad.” He crossed his arms at his chest, a gold Claddagh ring visible on the third finger of his left hand. He was still wearing his leather blazer, even indoors, his thin black tie pulled down a few inches on his chest.

When I tried to lift my head, it felt like it had been run over by a squad car. I decided not to lift it again.

 “You got one hell of a lump,” Tony said. “You’ve been unconscious for a couple of hours.”

“Baseball bat,” Ryan said. “Some guy named Bob. Salesman at Capital City.”

I breathed a little.

“They also took care of that little flesh wound in the back of your left thigh,” Tony said. “They had to reopen it.”

“As a lawman you should know better than to attempt aggravated assault in front of so many witnesses,” Ryan said. “And you should also know better than to fake your own death.” He tossed a folded newspaper onto the bed. “I can get you two-to-five for that little charade. Or maybe a nice little stay in the nuthouse. I’m not even gonna ask where you appropriated the cadaver.”

I looked at Tony.

He was looking at the floor. Apparently Ryan hadn’t guessed his role in the staging of my sudden and unfortunate passing. I suppose it all made a hell of a lot of sense.

No doubt about it, I had to suck this one up.

A nurse walked in. She slipped a battery-operated thermometer under my tongue.

I looked at Tony and Ryan while the plastic thermometer did its job. They both gave the nurse a couple of up and down looks.

When the thermometer beeped, she pulled it back out, stared at the readout, and set it beside the sink in the little alcove near the bathroom. “Good,” she said.

“Are you going to be giving him a sponge bath?” Tony said. “We can step outside if you like. Or perhaps it would be better if we just averted our eyes?”

Ryan couldn’t keep from laughing. He brought his fisted right hand up to his mouth to hide his smile.

The nurse ignored Tony. She went out into the hall,  and came back with a little paper cup, which she handed to me. Inside the cup were two bright red, sugar-coated caplets. Tylenol, I assumed. It hurt to look at them. I swallowed them while she filled up a plastic jug with water from the sink and then set it on a portable stand beside the bed. She began filling a cup with the water. But I grabbed the pitcher right out of her hand, taking a long, deep drink. When I had my fill I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and set the pitcher back down again on the portable stand.

“Oh my,” she said. “Aren’t we thirsty.”

“Lady,” I growled. “You have no idea.”

She turned to Tony and Ryan. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I suggest you make your conversation a quick one. Mr. Marconi has suffered a mild concussion and he needs his rest.”

When the nurse was gone, Tony pulled a hip flask from his right-hand overcoat pocket. He unscrewed the little sterling silver cap, took a deep drink. Then he handed the flask to Ryan. Ryan drank and passed the flask to me.

I decided to pass.

Tony took the flask back, shoved it into the side pocket of his overcoat.

In my head I pictured Renata. I prayed to Christ she was still safe and sound inside the motel room. I looked at Tony. “The Bald Man,” I said. “I saw him.”

Tony ran the index finger on his right hand across his throat like a knife, stopping me in mid-sentence. “Mike has something to tell you, paisan.”

“Reel Productions wants to press assault charges,” Ryan said.

I pictured Barnes’s face. The prominent cheeks, the slicked-back hair, the wireless glasses.

“You tried to assault one of their employees,” Ryan went on. “Barnes is convinced you’re a madman, that you were trying to kill that man.” The cop poked at his nostrils with the forefinger and thumb on his right hand.

I managed to prop myself up on my left elbow. “You stupid cop,” I said. “It’s him. The Bald Man. The man who killed my wife.”

“Keeper,” Tony said. “That man’s name is Leonard Kauffman. He’s forty-six years old and he’s been a production manager at Reel Productions for more than five years now. He’s married with a wife and kids; lives in the burbs. Church on Sundays; pickup basketball games on Monday nights at the high school; PTA meetings once a month. He’s the guy you saw in the newspaper clipping.”

“It’s him, Tony,” I insisted. “I know it.”

“You don’t know it,” Tony said. “Yeah, he’s bald; yeah, he’s got an earring. So do a hundred thousand other guys going through a midlife crisis.”

In my mind, the Bald Man staring at me from the driver’s seat of his battered Buick on the warm spring morning. Before he turned around, peeled away from the scene of the crime.

“It all makes sense,” I said. “You said yourself the Buick’s been spotted around town. The Bald Man suddenly shows his face. He works for Barnes. Barnes tried to have me killed.”

Ryan looked cross-eyed at Tony. “What in the world is he talking about?”

“Must be the head injury,” Tony said.

I sat up straight. “You listen to me,” I said. “That bald man killed my wife. He drives a black Buick.” I looked into Tony’s eyes. “He recognized me, Tony. Don’t you get it? That’s why he ran away. He recognized me when I showed up at the lot.”

“Maybe you should calm down, Keeper,” Tony said. “You’ve had a tough — ”

“It doesn’t change what I saw!” I shouted. But what I really wanted to shout out was how Barnes had hired me to find his wife, how he most likely had attempted to have the both of us killed. And now that he knows I’m in town hiding his wife, he wants to have me busted. But I couldn’t say a word about it. Not a single word. All in the interest of preserving the Tony Angelino Experience.

“You know what I’m getting at, Ryan,” I insisted. “Because you were there. You took my testimony. Your man took a description of the car.”

Ryan crossed his arms at his chest. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the floor. His expression was the same one I recognized from the cemetery a few days before when I first spotted the black Buick. It was a tight-lipped smile. More like a smirk I would have gladly knocked off his face, if I’d had the energy and if it wouldn’t get me busted.

“Obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Ryan said, with a shake of his head. “That’s all this is. Severe O.C.D. It causes people to be unable to distinguish between actually witnessed events and things they just imagined. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. I once worked on a case about a guy who got fired from his job because he was always late for work. At this specific spot near his home, he imagined himself running over a little kid. I mean, the crazy bastard would drive around the block something like twenty-five times to make sure he hadn’t made roadkill out of some innocent kid who existed only in his mind. Eventually he killed himself. And that’s what worries me more than anything. The mock staging of your death this time can simply be the prelude to something slightly more real and certainly more permanent next time.”

“You’ve been under a lot of strain, Keeper,” Tony said, eyes wide, taking a step forward, once again holding out his hip flask for me. “You need some rest.”

I knocked the flask away, onto the floor.

“Barnes is behind all this,” I said, lying back on the bed again, my head on the pillow, a distinct dizziness settling in. “Just like he’s behind the attempted murder of his own wife. Barnes is behind everything. He owns Reel Productions. This isn’t rocket science, and you can’t go around protecting him just because he’s your client.”

“What attempted murder?” Ryan said. “What the hell is he talking about?”

“He’s delirious,” Tony said, looking at me with wide, shut-the-hell-up eyes.

Then the bed-spins started kicking in.

“Look, it’s not that we don’t believe you,” Tony explained, bending over, picking up his flask from off the terrazzo floor. “It’s just that there’s no evidence to suggest the man working for Barnes is the same man who killed Fran.”

“You can find him in the employ of Richard Barnes,” I said.

But it was no use. If Tony, my advocate, didn’t believe me, then you could bet Ryan wouldn’t believe me either. So what was the point? And besides, the room had begun to spin like crazy, my head getting suddenly heavy. The red pills, I thought. The red pills weren’t Tylenol after all. The red pills must have been sedatives.

Ryan took another step forward, closer to the bed. “All we know about Barnes’s wife is that she is officially reported missing. Richard seems to believe you know of her whereabouts. Now, why in the world would he make such an accusation, Mr. Marconi?” He slid his thumbs inside his black belt. “We have witnesses at the airport and at the Hertz rent-a-car who claim they saw two people matching your descriptions only three days ago. We have what looks like your signature on the credit slip.”

“Now, just a moment, Detective Ryan,” Tony said. “There’s no reason in the world to believe my client has any knowledge whatsoever as to the location of Mr. Barnes’s wife.”

There, I thought. Finally Tony said something I wanted him to say. No, that’s not right either. For a change, he said what I needed him to say. Maybe he was covering for me after all. He knew goddamned well I was hiding Renata. And yet there was still the possibility that he was going to bat for me. Maybe in the end he was playing Ryan like a well tuned fiddle, sometimes stroking him lightly, other times playing him hard as hell.

Despite my trouble focusing, I kept my eyes on Tony, as though he were running a shell game. And in a way, he was.

“I’ve personally managed to persuade Barnes to hold off his dogs on the assault charge for now, Keeper,” Tony went on, his voice sounding as though he were talking through a cardboard tube. “But I won’t be able to keep him at bay for long. There are time limits to these things.” He turned to Ryan. “But as far as your accusations on the location of Renata Barnes, Mike, I find them outrageous and unfounded.”

“We’ll see,” Ryan said, in that same through-the-tube voice. “Until Barnes presses charges, you’re off the hook, Keeper. For now I’ve asked Tony to stay on your ass. Until whatever is going on with you calms down a little.”

“Perfect,” I mumbled, but I couldn’t be sure if I was dreaming the words or not.

Ryan started for the door. But then he stopped.

“Oh,” he said, “and there’ll be one more thing.”

I stared up at the ceiling. I felt like I was falling. But not afraid to fall.

“I’ll need your weapon and your license.”

The wall-mounted lights behind the bed reflected off the smooth white surface of the ceiling like two shiny circles. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tony walk over to the closet near the door to the room. He reached inside, grabbed my shoulder holster and the .45 it held from the hook. Then he approached the bed and the nightstand beside it. He opened the drawer, pulled out my wallet, slid out the laminated pistol permit, and shut the drawer. “Why don’t I hold on to this stuff until this blows over,” he said to Ryan. “There’s no reason to make this official until we have to
make
it official, capisce?”

Ryan thought about it for minute. “Okay,” he said. “But if anyone asks, it’s your ass I’m gonna point my finger at, Angelino.”

“Fair enough,” Tony said, giving me a wink.

I was too tired to wink back. But not too tired to see Tony go through the pockets of my leather jacket, taking my car keys, stuffing them into his pocket along with a book of matches that had the
Airport Days Inn
printed on it. He made eye contact with me, coughed into his hand, and gave me a telltale wink. I became convinced then that he was playing along, going as far as he could to keep Ryan amused and satisfied. I was also convinced he had to play the game as delicately as possible in order to save his own ass and, in the long run, mine.

He turned to the young cop. “Look, Mike,” he said. “This is just a temporary setback for Keeper. You have to understand all he’s been through. For instance, did you know he wasn’t even eighteen years of age when he survived the Attica uprising…” He went on and on, just like that, explaining and detailing the more violent portions of my life—from the four-day-and-night Attica Prison siege in 1971, to Fran’s hit-and-run, to my trouble with former Commissioner for Corrections Wash Pelton only a few years ago. He started in on it all as though it would explain why I’d officially gone off the deep end. But as Tony’s voice thinned out and trailed off into silence and the circles on the ceiling joined together, I fell off the edge of the world.