Keeplock: A Novel of Crime Page 5

  The cabs swarmed over Sixth Avenue, timing the lights as they made their way uptown. The buses plodded along, leaving small black clouds behind them when they pulled away from the curb. The fountain spit columns of water into the air. The sound of the water falling back onto the reflecting pool reminded me of the shower in my dream.

  My problem, I realized, was not whether Calvin was a punk or well connected. There was only one way to deal with Calvin, no matter what he was. My problem was that I didn’t want to go back to prison. I wanted to do the right thing, but the right thing wasn’t there to do. I was locked in, without any real choices, and the knowledge brought my anger to the surface. There was, of course, only one possible outlet for that anger.

  I got up and began to walk. I went straight uptown into Central Park, then wandered aimlessly along the pathways until I found myself at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street, next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fifth Avenue, with Central Park on one side and massive stone apartment buildings on the other, is the richest street in Manhattan. There had been times in my life when I’d walked down Fifth Avenue, daydreaming myself into the life enjoyed by the people stepping past fawning doormen. Now I ignored them altogether. It wasn’t my world and it never would be.

  I wandered east to Third Avenue, then turned downtown until I located a Woolworth’s. It was a little after eight and the store didn’t open until nine. I ordered breakfast in a small coffee shop, but I couldn’t eat. My whole being was focused on Calvin and what I was going to do to him. At nine, when the manager unlocked the door, I wandered through the aisles of the five-and-dime until I found what I wanted, a denim tote bag with a drawstring top. The girl behind the register took my money without comment, then returned to her chewing gum.

  I walked across the street to a D’Agostino supermarket and bought four large cans of stewed tomatoes. I put the cans in the bottom of the tote bag, then picked up a couple of newspapers on the corner, carefully stuffing them into the bag until the cans were trapped at the bottom. Finally, I hailed a cab and told the driver to drop me at 39th and Tenth, a block from The Ludlum Foundation.

  The adrenaline pumping through my veins kept telling me to hurry, but I deliberately slowed down, saving it for Calvin. The weapon I’d constructed was perfectly legal, at least until I used it. Up at Cortlandt, the administration gives prisoners a small canvas bag to carry commissary back and forth from the cells to the courts. A few cans of tomatoes transforms a swag bag into a weapon. It’s not much use against a shank because it takes too much time to put the bag in motion, but a shank isn’t always available to newly arrived convicts, while the potential for violence exists from day one.

  I found Calvin on the third floor. He was in the shower, all alone. The symmetry was delicious. I stepped into the mist and swung the bag in a vicious arc, taking him in the lower ribs. He never saw it coming, and by the time he looked up from the floor, he was in too much pain to do anything but moan. Not everyone can beat a helpless man into the hospital. It takes special skills, the kind you develop in the course of an Institutional life.

  I worked on Calvin until my shoulders ached, until he begged for mercy, until he stopped begging. Then I went looking for SingSing. I found him in the dining room, sitting at a small table by himself. He tried to muster up his bad-ass prison stare, but the sight of me, dripping wet, raised just enough doubt to show in his eyes.

  “Your boss needs you upstairs, SingSing,” I hissed. “When you get up there, you take a good look at him, because that’s gonna be you if you disrespect me again. Ever again. I don’t want no part of whatever bullshit scam you’re running, but I will kill you. I’ll walk away from your corpse like you were a cockroach under my shoe.”

  He started to get up, but I grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the table, leaning forward until our faces were inches apart. “You hear what I’m tellin’ you, asshole?” I gave him a chance to answer, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he tried to yank his wrist away, but he didn’t come close to succeeding. “You think I spent ten years in Cortlandt just to run away from a piece of shit like you? You’re in over your head, SingSing. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  When I said the word Cortlandt, a glimmer of understanding finally showed in his eyes. Cortlandt is the ultimate threat wielded by administrations in the various minimum-and medium-security institutions. You fuck up one too many times and you get an administrative transfer to a prison where you can be controlled. Cortlandt is the end of the line.

  “You hear me, SingSing?” I repeated.

  “I hear you,” he said finally. “How come you didn’t say nothin’ ’bout Cortlandt last night?”

  “That’s not the way it works, SingSing. People who talk their way out of trouble are soft, and soft don’t take you out of the shit. Calvin disrespected me and he paid the price. From where I’m sitting, the only thing you owe me is respect.”

  “What about Calvin?”

  “Go upstairs and find out for yourself.”

  SEVEN

  I LEFT THE SHELTER as soon as SingSing was out of sight, walking south a few blocks before giving the canned tomatoes to a knot of homeless men gathered around a fifty-five gallon drum filled with burning planks. The tote went into the sewer and the newspapers into a corner trash can. There was no sense in returning to the Foundation before the excitement died down, so I hiked over to Macy’s and bought myself a pair of jeans, a knit shirt, and three pair of underpants. The prices amazed me. When I went inside, you could still buy a pair of jeans for under twenty dollars. The first pair I picked off the shelf in Macy’s had a French name on the back pocket and a sixty-dollar price tag. Even the Wranglers I eventually bought cost me twenty-eight bucks. By the time I added the knit shirt and the underwear, my bankroll was reduced to thirty dollars and forty-seven cents. But at least I’d have something to put on while I washed my state clothes in the sink.

  I walked down to Washington Square and passed the afternoon with the folk musicians and singers. The chess hustlers still gathered in the southwestern corner of the park, just as they had ten years before, and the drug dealers still whispered “coke and smoke” as I strolled past. It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, without a hint of the summer heat to follow. I felt my freedom for the first time. In a few days, I’d have a job. A shitty job, true, but still a job and a steady income that might, one day in the future, buy me a room of my own in a building run by an ordinary thieving landlord instead of a grant-hungry director with an MSW.

  I headed back uptown at five o’clock. I was hungry and I wanted to get to the Foundation in time for a meal. Calvin would be gone and I wouldn’t have any trouble with SingSing. SingSing would be too busy finding a substitute dishwasher to bother with me. Of course, there was the always the possibility that some of Calvin’s buddies would be waiting, but I simply wasn’t afraid.

  Still, I wasn’t surprised to find Arthur McDonald waiting in the foyer, a worried look on his face. I wasn’t surprised when he asked me to join him in his office, either. By this time, everyone in the Foundation must have known who and what had happened to Calvin. That was the whole point of the exercise. What shocked me were the detectives lounging in McDonald’s office. One of them was short and fat. His face was all jowls and cheeks, his eyes little dots. The other cop was taller and muscular. His cheeks were dotted with acne scars and he wore a gray sport jacket over a tightly buttoned charcoal vest. He would be the bad cop.

  They rose as I entered the room, evaluating my potential for violence, bracing me with hard cop stares. Then they handcuffed me, read me my rights, and told McDonald to take a walk.

  “You got anything to say?”

  I’d first begun to hate after I was attacked in the group home when I was nine. Before that, I’d had a full quota of anger and resentment, but I was (I think I was, anyway) still reachable. After Jack Parker and Ramsey, my anger hardened until hatred became the focus of what little self-esteem I possessed. I began by hating my adopted parents, then my real p
arents, then the group home and the people who ran it, then cops and politicians, then ordinary citizens. I was an outlaw in the literal sense of being outside the law and I was proud of it. Watch out, world, Pete Frangello’s gonna get even.

  “Fuck you.”

  As soon as Simon found out that I’d been arrested, he’d violate me, which meant I wouldn’t be eligible for bail or a hearing before the parole board until the assault charge was resolved. I was amazed that Calvin had given my name to the cops, and I couldn’t imagine him testifying in court, but even if I beat the new charge, the board could decide to send me back to prison. There are no standards of proof at parole board hearings, no rules of evidence, and while you can bring a lawyer to the hearing, the board may resent his presence enough to remand you for that reason alone.

  The tall cop reached over and slapped me in the face. It was his way of opening a conversation. The fat one grabbed his hand before he could do it again. I’d been right about the good cop-bad cop routine, but that was small consolation to my face.

  “Take it easy, Rico,” the fat one growled. “You wanna go before the review board?” Rico backed off and his partner returned to me. “I’m Detective Condon and this is Detective Rico. We’re arresting you for Assault in the First Degree.”

  “Yeah,” Rico said, coming back at me. “One fuckin’ day out of the joint and he commits an assault. Somebody oughta give this asshole an IQ test. Find out if he’s a fuckin’ nigger.”

  “Okay, so you made a mistake,” Condon said, ignoring his partner. “Shit happens, right? You wanna talk about it?”

  “Fuck you.”

  This time Rico hit me hard enough to knock me out of the chair. I ate the pain, ate it and turned it into hatred. What Doesn’t Kill Me, Makes Me Stronger. Handcuffed and as helpless as a nine-year-old trapped in a shower, I fought back with the only weapon I possessed. Later, when I was dragged over to a holding pen at Central Booking, the other side, the depression and the failure, would overwhelm me.

  Condon continued to play his part in the charade. He got up and pushed his partner out of the room. Rico cursed me as he fell back. “Piece of shit. Piece of shit.” There was a window in the office door and I watched Rico’s lips move after Condon shut the door.

  “My partner’s a head case,” Condon announced, helping me to my feet. “The Department shoulda given him a desk job ten years ago.” He righted my chair, sat me in it, then plunked his fat ass into the chair next to mine. “Tough break, Pete. I mean about only being out one day and gettin’ into shit like this. I know you had to do what you did, ’cause I know Calvin. Calvin’s been workin’ with us for a long time.”

  “Calvin’s a snitch?” I was so surprised that I spoke without thinking. The rule of thumb for experienced criminals like myself is never give the cops a statement. The detectives try to make you believe that you can talk your way out of jail, but it never happens like that. What happens is your lawyer reads your statement and advises you to plead guilty.

  “‘Confidential informant’ is the way we like to put it.”

  He gave me a chance to respond, but I pulled back into myself again. This conversation should have been happening back at the precinct. What did they want from me? There was no good reason to speculate, because they’d tell me when they were ready.

  “Jeez, I gotta pee bad.” He shook his head in disgust, setting his jowls in motion. His cheeks were red and lined with small blue veins. “I eat too much, smoke too much, drink too much. My whole fuckin’ body’s fallin’ apart and I’m only forty-three. You believe that?”

  He waddled out of the office and Rico, as expected, came back inside. With my hands cuffed behind my back, I had to lean forward in the chair, making my face an easy target. Rico put his skinny ass where his partner’s fat ass had been and shook his head. His face was all angles. Sharp nose and cheekbones, thin slash for a mouth, pointy jaw and glittering black eyes. He looked like a terminal speed freak. Even his ears had little points on top.

  “How does it feel, asshole?” he asked. “One day on the outside. One fuckin’ day. You probly didn’t even get laid. Or maybe you didn’t wanna get laid. Maybe you got laid so many times in the joint you don’t even remember what a pussy tastes like.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in my face—a Grade A asshole with a badge and a gun—then reached over and casually slapped me. “I don’t like that look on your face. That look is sayin’, ‘Fuck you.’ I don’t like that.” He slapped me again. “Ya know what else I don’t like? Calvin was settin’ up half the goddamn street dealers in Hell’s Kitchen and now he’s in the fuckin’ hospital. I’m losin’ twenty collars because a piece of shit like you can’t control himself for one fuckin’ day. I oughta throw you out the window.”

  Condon rushed back into the room, right on cue. “Hey, hey, hey, hey. I told you to stay outta here.” He grabbed Rico and dragged him away from me, pushing him out the door. “Damn psycho. I musta asked for a new partner twenty times. Might as well have spit in the wind for all the good it did me. But about Calvin …”

  “Who’s Calvin?” I asked.

  “You sayin’ you don’t know who Calvin is? How come you asked me if he was a snitch if you don’t know who he is?”

  “Who’s Calvin?” I repeated.

  “Calvin’s the guy you had words with when you first came into the shelter.” Condon was patient, like any other smart detective. Patient and persistent. First he would convince me that I was buried, then hit me with what he really wanted. “I mean we got the story from McDonald. Calvin was working the security desk when you arrived and he disrespected you. Plus, your two roommates told us that Calvin came up to your room last night and had a talk with you. I hope you’re not gonna deny that?”

  “If you’re talkin’ about the black dude, he never told me his name. He ran me down a list of the shelter rules and left. You don’t believe me, ask the guy who came in with him.”

  Condon’s disappointed look told me that SingSing wasn’t cooperating. “You shouldn’t have done what you did to Calvin. It hurt us.”

  “What’d I do to Calvin?”

  He glanced at the door and Rico came back into the room. It was time for the bad cop again. Rico yanked me out of the chair and drew back his fist.

  “You’re wasting your time,” I said, my face and voice as calm as I could make them. “In Cortlandt they beat you with ax handles. There’s nothing you can do with your fists that’ll scare me. And if you wanna pull out your gun and shoot, go ahead. At this point I really don’t give a shit.”

  Rico hit me in the chest to show me how tough he was, then dropped me back into the chair. The two cops looked at each other for a moment. Finally Condon shook his head and turned back to me. “Look, Pete, the point is that you’re in a lot of trouble. You found Calvin in the shower and you beat him into the hospital. We got witnesses who say you were soaking wet when you walked back through the shelter. Maybe you were smart enough to get rid of the weapon, and maybe it’s true that Calvin’s got a sheet so long that a jury would give you a medal for putting him in the hospital. But even if you beat the charge, you’re gonna go back up to Cortlandt and finish your time. We already spoke to your P.O. He says he went to a lot of trouble to find you a job and get you into this shelter. He says he’s not gonna protect you under any circumstances. We persuaded him not to violate you for the time being, but if you don’t cooperate with us a little bit …”

  “Forget that shit,” Rico snapped. “Whatta you askin’ this piece of shit to cooperate for?”

  “Take it easy, Rico. You’re gonna get your pressure up.”

  “Fuck my pressure.” He put his face a few inches from mine. I could taste his breath. “You understand payback, asshole? You took somethin’ from me and if you don’t pay it back, I’m gonna put your ass in the joint for the next five years. Even a criminal asshole like you could figure out what I’m sayin’. You owe me and you gotta fork up the ante, one way or the other.”

  “I’ll te
ll ya what, Rico,” I said, forcing a smile, “you bring Calvin in here and I’ll pray over his broken body.”

  Rico flew into a rage, a genuine rage this time. He knocked me out of the chair and began to kick me in the back. I tried to curl into a ball, knowing full well that I’d be pissing blood in the morning, but McDonald’s desk was in the way. I was pinned against it and Rico was taking his time, carefully avoiding my head and face. He didn’t stop until I cried out.

  “Cuff his ankles.” It was Condon’s voice. He waited until I was shackled before he spoke again. “You’re a tough guy, Frangello. I admit it, okay? Tough guy. So what I’m gonna do is lay it out and give you some time to think about it. When you were up in Cortlandt, you were part of Eddie Conte’s crew. Don’t bother to deny it. I been on the phone with a deputy warden named Jack Camille all afternoon. Camille don’t like you, Frangello. He says he can’t wait to see you again. He also says you were assigned to Eddie Conte’s court up on the hill. Matter of fact, you were assigned to that court for more than five years. A little birdie told us that Conte’s plannin’ somethin’ big, a little birdie Eddie tried to recruit. The birdie don’t know what Conte’s big score is, but Conte was talkin’ seven figures. Me and Rico, we’re businessmen, we’re willin’ to trade twenty street dealers for one big collar. You don’t wanna trade, you go back to Jack Camille. It’s up to you.”

  They left without another word. I struggled to my feet and managed to hobble over to a couch by the wall. I’d done a lot of shitty things in my life, but I’d never been a rat. Rats sit at the very bottom of the prison hierarchy, below the shorteyes and the rapos. That is, the known rats are at the bottom. Half the prisoners, if the truth be told, have given up a name or a date at one time or another. But this was different. Rico and Condon wanted me to set up Eddie Conte.