Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (21 page)

I forced myself to eat it, then went off to McDonald’s office and worked out for more than two hours. At ten-thirty I picked up the phone and dialed the number Condon had given me. He picked up on the third ring.

“Yeah?”

“Condon?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Pete Frangello.”

“Well, well. Right on time. You must be gettin’ the message.”

“I got the name of the bank.”

“Give it to me.”

“The Grant City Savings Bank. On Hylan Boulevard.”

“That’s it?”

“Right, that’s it. The Grant City.”

“That ain’t what I mean, Frangello.”

I was starting to enjoy myself. In my line of work, you don’t find many opportunities to bust a cop’s balls.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“There seem to be a few small gaps here.” He got right into the spirit of the exchange. Maybe he was bored. Or maybe the name of the bank was enough to take the edge off his temper. “Like who’s the guy ya gonna snatch? Like what’s the date when the heist is goin’ down? Like what’re the names of the rest of the perps? Little gaps, like I said.”

“I don’t have that yet.”

“You tellin’ me ya spent the whole day with Eddie Conte and all you got for me is the name of the fuckin’ bank?”

“We spent the day in Staten Island, checkin’ the location. The thing is, Condon, I’m still playin’ it tough. I’m comin’ on skeptical. You wanna hear what Eddie’s plan for
me
is?”

“You bullshitting me here, Frangello?” Veteran cops are much sharper than criminals like to believe. When they put up that cop radar, they can pick up a scam from a thousand yards out.

“What do you want me to do, Condon? You want me to take a lie detector test?”

“Maybe.”

“Then set it up, because I don’t have another way to prove myself.”

“You have another way, Frangello.”

“Like what?”

“Like wear a wire.”

“That’s fucking suicide. I’d rather go back to jail. Eddie’s more paranoid than you. And that’s saying something, because you’re
completely
paranoid.”

I heard him sigh into the phone, trying to decide what to do next. He didn’t trust me, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it at the moment. Later, maybe, he’d put me to the test, but for now he’d have to settle for taking notes.

“Where’s Conte livin’? What’s his address?”

“I’m not gonna tell you that. Not yet.”

“You better stop fuckin’ with me. I’m gettin’ sick of it.”

“If I tell you the address, you’re gonna set up surveillance, right?”

“How’s that
your
problem?”

“If Eddie spots you tomorrow, who’s he gonna blame? One day
I
arrive and the next
day you
arrive. Who they gonna find in a Jersey swamp? I’m tryin’ to survive here. Now let me tell ya what I’m supposed to do. It’s got a nice murder in it, so you oughta be happy. I’m the one who stays with the family while Eddie does the job. After the heist, I get a call, then eliminate the witnesses. Bing, bing, bing. Execution style.”

“Conte wants to kill them all? The kids? The women? Everybody?” He seemed impressed, almost respectful.

“But it’s not gonna come to that, right? Because, unless I missed something, you and the cavalry are gonna show up before the shit goes down.” I didn’t wait for a response. “Eddie also swears the bank is getting a shipment of cash from the Federal Reserve the day before the job goes down. He won’t tell me how he knows, but he says the bank needs the cash to make up payrolls.”

The conversation rolled on with Condon firing questions and me dodging as best I could. I don’t know if he was satisfied, but by the time I hung up the phone, I knew he’d wait a few more days before he had his partner work me over.

I went up to my room and showered. For once, my roommates were nowhere to be found. I fell asleep thinking of Ginny, but I dreamed of the jewelry store and the fat proprietor and blood everywhere. As usual, the dream repeated like a stuck record. And, as usual, I woke early, more tired than when I’d gone to sleep. I tried to will myself awake, but I kept drifting back to the day of my release from Cortlandt. My dreams were closer to reality than my fantasies on that day. Death Before Dishonor? Shit Happens? I felt like I was on a mountain, holding a stop sign up to an onrushing avalanche. I could hear the gods laughing.

I jumped into the shower again, washing the sweat away before shutting off the hot water. In the box, in Cortlandt, the showers are timed to give two minutes of hot water. I don’t know who dreamed up this particular punishment, but the C.O.’s added their own wrinkle. They started the timer as soon as they opened your cell. The showers were set up on the eastern side of the building, so if your cell was on the west side, you had to run past the other cells, soap yourself, and rinse off before the hot water shut down. Most of the time you didn’t make it.

After dressing, I went downstairs. I would have liked to hike around the city, but it was raining pretty hard, so I settled for a conversation with Sing-Sing. We swapped stories about life in the Institution for an hour or so, then the pay phone in the hallway behind us started ringing. It was barely seven o’clock.

“Yeah!” Sing-Sing rubbed his hands together. “I been waitin’ on this call. This here is a
money
call.”

He answered the phone, muttered a few words, then turned to me in surprise. “It’s for you,” he said.

“Shit.” I went to the phone and announced myself, expecting Eddie or Condon. When I heard Ginny’s voice I nearly dropped the phone.

“Pete. Is that you? It’s Ginny.”

“How’d you find me?” I had to say something and that was the first thing that came into my head.

“I got your number from Simon.”

I should have known. The last time I was on the street, Ginny and Simon Cooper had been co-conspirators in my rehabilitation.

“Ginny, I don’t know what to say. It’s been a long time.” My voice was soft and gentle, though I didn’t want it to be. Behind me, I heard Sing-Sing snort a line of coke. It was a fitting counterpoint to the conversation.

“I want to see you, Pete. I really need to see you. To explain.”

“Explain what? You don’t have anything to explain.” Was she actually blaming herself? It didn’t seem possible. Then again, the simple fact that she’d loved me didn’t seem possible, either.

Her voice dropped a notch, became huskier, as it always had when she was being serious. Or when she was turned on. “I know it’s been a long time, Pete, and I don’t have any right to ask you, but if you can just give me a few minutes, I’d like to explain what happened.”

“You think I don’t know what they did to you?” Why was I putting her off when I would have given my right arm to be with her? Images rushed into my head. I remembered waking up with her warm body curled into me, soaping her back in the shower, her childish excitement when she won a two-dollar bet at the racetrack.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have called, but it’s been haunting me for ten years. That I was part of it.”

“No, it’s all right. You want me to come out there now?”

“Can you?”

“This is America, Ginny. Land of the free and home of the brave. Even ex-cons on parole are allowed to go to Queens.”

She managed a small laugh. “I have to be at work by ten.”

“It’s only seven. I could be out there in forty-five minutes.”

“How can you do that so fast? Do you have a car?”

“I’ll take a cab.”

It was the first lie.

I
STOPPED LONG ENOUGH
to buy a bundle of heroin from a dealer standing in a doorway out of the rain, then drove against the rush hour traffic to Cherry Avenue in Flushing. I was hoping I could handle Ginny, reassure her with a few well-chosen words, then get her out of my life. The last thing I needed was another complication or a replay of yesterday’s panic, but when she opened the door and looked into my eyes, my heart dropped and I felt like a ten-year-old boy waiting for a nonexistent mother to rescue him from the orphanage. All through our time together, she’d symbolized the normal life that, consciously or unconsciously, beckoned like a rainbow. I’d never really believed that I could have it (or her), but I never dropped the fantasy, either.

Ginny was wearing a dark blue sweatshirt over faded jeans. Her hair, still wet from the shower, was wrapped in a white towel. Ten years ago, Ginny could have been described as beautiful. Maybe her delicate features and bright blond hair weren’t cover girl material, but she’d turned heads wherever we went.

She looked tired now, her gray eyes were duller, her mouth somehow smaller and sad. But her body was just as I’d remembered it from the time when she’d worked out five days a week at a local health club. Her hips pushed against the fabric of her jeans, insistent and demanding.

“Thanks for coming,” she said, stepping aside to let me pass. When we’d first met, Ginny had been writing copy for an ad agency in Manhattan. She’d been sharp and ambitious. That job, according to her testimony, had evaporated after her arrest. “Do you want some coffee?”

“Yeah, I do.”

We sat at the kitchen table, coffee mugs and buttered corn muffins before us. I didn’t know what she wanted to hear, so I kept my big mouth shut and let her do the talking.

“I should have hated you,” she began, “but I didn’t. It wasn’t actually a decision I made—to hate you or not. I just couldn’t stand the idea of you going to jail again. The cops said, ‘All you have to do is tell us where you got the ring and agree to testify and we’ll let you go. We don’t want to arrest you. We know you didn’t have anything to do with it.’

“I said, ‘If you know I’m not guilty of anything, how can you arrest me at all?’

“‘You were in possession of stolen property, miss, and that’s a crime.’

“‘I don’t mean technically. I mean morally. If you know I’m not guilty, how can you put me in jail?’”

“I bet they turned mean when you said that.” I finally interrupted her. “When they realized you weren’t gonna give me up voluntarily.”

“Yes, that’s the way it happened. They booked me. Took photographs and fingerprints, then forced me to strip for a search.”

“Did the detectives stay in the room while you were being searched?”

She looked down at the table. “Yes. They made … they made comments. Then they put me in a cell in the basement. There was another woman with me. She had a knife and she was as strong as a man. She made me do things to her. I couldn’t get away.”

“Don’t tell me. For god’s sake.”

“Are you all right? Are you angry?” Puzzled, she reached out to touch the back of my hand.

“I have enough nightmares already. I don’t need any more.”

Ginny looked at me carefully, then went on with it. “She said I was her property and she was going to rent me out to the other dykes. She said she’d kill me if I didn’t obey her and I believed it. The guards came by every couple of hours. They saw what was going on. They wanted it to happen, because they knew I couldn’t take it. And they were right, Pete. I wasn’t used to that life. I couldn’t take it.”

I think she wanted to cry, but she didn’t. She leaned back and took a deep breath, trapped by her memories in spite of the years. It must have been like having an arm or a leg amputated. Every time you look in the mirror, you’re reminded of the simple fact that your leg will never grow back, that you’ll never be the same. I’d taken similar blows many times in my life and I’d responded with anger and rage. I’d sworn never to submit, and that decision was enough to hold me up. Ginny had absorbed the pain and it still gnawed at her mind like a psychic tapeworm. I reached out and took her hand, holding it gently until she calmed down.

“The thing is,” I said, “that you’re right when you say that you should hate me. It would make the whole thing easier for you.”

She pulled away, raising her eyes to meet mine. “How did you stand it? All those years in jail. The cops, the guards, the prisoners. How?”

“I started young.”

“Don’t be a wise guy, Pete. I need to know.”

“When you’re in the Institution and you know you’re going to stay there, your first obligation is to simply survive. There’re lots of suicides in the Institution, especially in the kiddie jails, but if you’re not going that route, you do what you have to do. Say you’re trapped in a cell with a bull dyke. The dyke is much stronger than you and she’s got a knife. You can’t fight back, so what you do is submit until you get your chance. Until she goes to sleep, for instance. Then you try to kill her. If you succeed, or if you hurt her bad enough, word gets out and the next dyke leaves you alone. The C.O.’s are a different problem. All you can do is hate them, so that’s what you do. You bury every human emotion and learn to live for drugs or prison hooch or a contraband roast beef sandwich. Most of all, you live for the day you get out. If you start down that road early enough, you come to believe that there’s nothing else out there. That every citizen is just like you, wanting the same things, but afraid to take them.”

“I wish I could hate,” she said, “but I can’t. It’s been ten years and I still can’t shake it off. A piece of me is missing and it won’t grow back and I don’t have anything to put in its place.”

“You’re a victim, Ginny. Can’t you understand that? A crime has been committed against you. By me, by the cops, by the Institution. You should talk to someone. You have to get help.”

She stood up, took the percolator off the stove, and filled both mugs. “In the beginning, I used to go see Simon. He told me the same things you’re saying now. I wanted to write you, to explain why I testified, but he told me not to do it. He said the reason you were so attractive was because of your intelligence. You can see the trap and you can talk about it, but you can’t change. He said your line of bullshit is so perfect, you should have been a con artist instead of a … a thief.”

Good old Simon. I’d spent ten years in Cortlandt without a visitor, without a letter. I felt the anger rising. It was all so fucking predictable.

“What do you want me to do, Ginny? I can’t forgive you because I never blamed you in the first place.”

“Last night, after I saw you, I realized something that I should have known a long time ago. I can never go back to the life of a good citizen. The smug security, the idiotic belief that the police and the system are out there to protect
me
—that’s gone forever. Maybe I won’t rob somebody’s home or mug somebody on the street, but I’m just as much of an outlaw as you are. What I have to do is learn to accept it. And the loneliness that goes with it.” She paused for a moment, sipping at her coffee. “What are you going to do, Pete? Are you going to … you know, go straight?”