Murder at the Foul Line (43 page)

The bright side here is that I don’t have to lay a finger on little Freddie. All I have to do is stare at him.

“You snitched us out, Freddie. You ratted on us. I just wanna hear it from your lips.”

“Bubba, I…”

“We’re not gonna kill you, Freddie. We’re not even gonna hurt you any more than you’ve already been hurt. That’s because you’re
gonna help us get our product back.” I pull him toward me, until we’re nose-to-nose. “Take the first step,” I tell him, my
voice steady, my tone encouraging. “The first step is always the hardest. You take the first step, the rest is easy.”

“Bubba…”

“No, don’t start with
Bubba
. You’ve done that three times and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Start with somebody else’s name, like the name of the screw
you told about the coke.” I give his hand a playful squeeze. “You confess, maybe we can dream up a way to protect you.”

I can hear the little switches in Freddie’s mind as they click into position. With Spooky dead, he’s now the weak link on
two chains.

“You know what I think, Freddie? I think it was pure accident. I mean, we didn’t run the scam until near the end of the fourth
quarter and the screw had to be in and out before the end of the game. Most likely, when he snuck into the locker room, he
figured Spooky was already back on the court. ‘Turn around,’ is what I would’ve said in his place. ‘Face the wall. I’m gonna
search you.’ Then out comes the knife and it’s judgment day for Spooky Jones.”

“Bubba…”

“Start with the name, Freddie. You’re gonna feel so much better when you tell me the name.”

“Percy Campbell,” he finally blurts.

Freddie may feel better, but he looks terrible. He’s gasping for breath and he’s bright red from his forehead to his throat.
When I let go of him, he falls back onto the pillow and brings his hand to his chest. Freddie’s twenty-two years old, a computer
nerd who created a virus that shut down six of the biggest Web sites on the Net.

“How long have you been Campbell’s snitch?”

“Since I got here. He grabbed me the first week and took me to his office. You know about the office?”

I shake my head. Campbell is a middle-aged muscle brain who’s been walking a tier for three decades. A veteran of the worst
prisons New York State has to offer, he generally manages to restrain himself at Menands. Still, his personal violence surrounds
him, a sour stink detectable by an experienced con at a distance of a hundred yards.

“That’s what Campbell calls it: my office. It’s behind the main furnace, a coal room. You know, from the time when they heated
with coal. It’s not used for anything now, and when you’re inside, the furnace is so loud nobody can hear you even if there’s
someone around. Which most of the time there isn’t.” He pauses long enough to wipe his nose, then jumps back in. “Campbell
told me things…. things he’d do to me if I didn’t… I was scared, Bubba. I was never in trouble before I came here. For all
I knew, Campbell could do anything he wanted to and get away with it. I didn’t know where to turn.”

Now that I see a way to get my coke back and exact a little revenge for Spooky at the same time, I can’t even fake being mad.
I stretch, yawn, take a breath. “I’m gonna need you, Freddie, so I want you to stay alive for a few days. Don’t be alone,
no matter what. Stay in a group and Campbell won’t be able to get to you. Remember, it’s only for a couple of days.”

“What about tonight?”

“I’ll talk to the trusty on the floor, see that he watches your back.” I get up, take a step, then turn back to Freddie. I’m
smiling now, a genuine smile. “Was I right?” I ask.

“Right?”

“Do you feel better? Now that it’s out in the open.”

“Yeah,” he tells me, “I do.”

Coach Poole makes an announcement after Wednesday’s practice. The league’s championship game will be made up on the following
night with no civilians present. This is good news for me because there won’t be a practice on game day and I’ll have enough
time to get to the coal room unseen. Unlike Attica with its many checkpoints, Menands runs mostly on the honor system. The
fence and the razor wire surrounding the prison are there to reassure the community, not to prevent an escape. The population
is controlled by a very simple and very potent threat: you fuck up, you get sent to some horrible place where your survival
(not to mention your sexuality) is anything but assured. Most prisoners at Menands aren’t willing to risk their privileged
status.

Later that night, Tiny and Road press me, but I don’t reveal much. I tell them to be patient and to stay clear of Freddie
Morrow. I tell them I hope to recover the product soon and that I don’t need their help. They don’t care for the underlying
message, but they seem to accept it. Nevertheless, within a few days, should I fail to deliver, I know they’ll begin to suspect
a double cross.

I wake up on Thursday, take a shower, then skip breakfast and head for the locker room. Freddie’s already there, hanging our
pressed uniforms in our metal lockers. Once upon a time, the lockers were a uniform gray, the color of pewter, but they’ve
tarnished over the years and now have a mottled overgrown look, as if the victim of some exotic fungus.

“You ready, Freddie?” I ask. “You ready to go to work?”

“Bubba, I…”

“Don’t start that
Bubba
shit again. I have something I need you to do.”

“What is it?”

“This afternoon, two o’clock, Campbell is gonna be workin’ in the library. I want you to go there, talk to him, tell him that
I know you snitched us out.”

“He’ll kill me.”

“For Christ’s sake, you’re gonna be in the library. You even enough, you get eighty-sixed.”

“Then he’ll get me later.”

“He’s
already
gonna get you later.” I put a foot up on the bench that runs in front of the lockers. “It’s your chance, Freddie. Your chance
to be a man for the first time in your miserable life, your chance to stand on your own two feet.” I hold up a finger. “Plus,
you can help yourself at the same time. Because I’m telling you, when Campbell hears what you have to say, he’s gonna be a
lot more worried about me than you.”

Freddie thinks it over for a moment, the possibility of deflecting Campbell’s wrath onto me obviously appealing. If he gains
an ally in the process, so much the better. “Whatta ya want me to say?”

“Tell Campbell that I put the pieces together on my own. I know he killed Spooky and snatched my product because he was the
only one who had the opportunity. I know you snitched because… well, I know you snitched because you’re you. Likewise, because
you’re you, when I threatened to shank your ass, you confessed. Those stitches in your ear and that bandage oughta be proof
enough that I meant business.”

“And that’s it? Just that I admitted talking to him?”

“Yeah, you opened up because you were in fear of your life
and now you’re trying to make it good by telling him the truth.” I put my arm around his shoulder, let my voice drop. “Campbell’s
gonna ask you a lot of questions. He’s gonna want to know everything you said to me and everything I said to you. It’s only
natural, right?”

Freddie nods. “Right.”

“So you tell him everything you told me about his threats and where he took you before he delivered them. The only thing you
don’t tell him, Freddie, is that I asked you to come forward. That’s the one teeny-tiny thing you keep to yourself.” I give
his shoulder a squeeze. “That’s gonna be our little secret.”

I go from Freddie to Warden Brook’s office. He tells me that he’s spoken to the two refs, and I guarantee him a win. We’re
one-point underdogs by now.

“You’re not worried about losing Spooky?”

“You remember when you brought me here, Warden? You remember I promised you a championship? Well, tonight I’m gonna keep that
promise.”

I know the warden bets on every game, always on the Tigers, even when I tell him the team’s so worn-out we’d get our asses
kicked by the Menands High School Barracudas. He’s a fan is what he is, a former athlete who lives through his favorite team,
which is us.

“So make room in the trophy case,” I declare, “because we’re bringin’ the cup home.”

My next stop is in the computer room, where I find my teacher, Cliff Entwhistle, hard at work. Cliff is a big-time gambler,
but unlike Warden Brook, he’s willing to wager against the
Tigers. Though I only bet with the team (and once threatened to crush the fingers of a skinny point guard I thought was shaving
points), I don’t bet every game.

“What’s the word?” I ask him. “Out on the yard?”

“Without Spooky, Menands doesn’t have a chance.”

“Good, because I want to get a bet down.” I retrieve a pair of C-notes from their resting place in the crotch of my underwear
and hand them over. If the coke deal had gone down as planned, it’d be a lot more, but I’m doing the best I can. “I guarantee
a win here,” I tell him. “You can take it to the bank.”

Cliff nods. “Thanks, Bubba.”

“Don’t thank me. There’s something I need you to do. Like, right now.”

An hour later I make my way down a long flight of stairs to the furnace room. Two stories high and at least a hundred feet
long, the room houses a state-of-the-art, fully automated boiler the size and shape of a diesel locomotive. It being May and
warm, the unit is only producing hot water. Still, the steady hiss of the flame is loud enough for my purposes. I work my
way along the north wall, the route taken by Campbell when he recruited Freddie, avoiding a pair of cameras mounted on the
ceiling. The cameras use heat-sensitive film and are in place to detect fires.

The coal room, Campbell’s office, is not as Freddie described it. I expect a large empty space, but the room is cluttered
with discarded desks. There are desks upside down, on their sides, on three legs, desks piled one on top of the other. Desk
drawers, heaped in a corner, rise halfway to the ceiling.

It’s now one o’clock. Freddie’s scheduled to make his confession at two. That leaves me an hour to find my product. Assuming
it’s here at all, that Campbell doesn’t have another
hideaway, that he didn’t take his prize home with him, maybe peddle the weight to a street dealer.

I begin to search, at first systematically, then more and more frantically as time passes. A pair of overhead lights don’t
respond to a switch next to the door, and the only illumination splashes in through the open doorway. The desks are extremely
dusty. The dust coats my throat and mouth as I work. When I run my fingers over my brush cut, it feels like I’m dragging them
through mud.

Somewhere around one forty-five, I force myself to slow down. I tell myself I have one of those unforeseen problems that crop
up from time to time, no matter how carefully I try to plan my activities. I tell myself they happen to everybody. It’s not
God getting me, like I sometimes thought before I learned to control my anger.

I set out to draw ten deep breaths, each one slower and deeper than the last, just the way I’ve been trained. I don’t get
past the fifth before I realize there’s another way, and if I’d only taken a moment to think before I started ripping desks
apart, I could have saved myself a lot of work.

I’m standing just to the left of the door, looking for a good place to hide, when Campbell walks into the room. He is not
alone. A dealer named Redmond Mitchell is with him. At the tail end of a ten-to-life bit, Red is also a veteran of New York’s
maximum security institutions. His stay at Menands is theoretically the final step in his rehabilitation.

Coming from the intensely bright furnace room, neither Red nor Campbell sees me until I step in front of them.

“What’s up, guys? You lookin’ for me?”

Campbell is maybe five-ten. A layer of fat covers a much thicker layer of muscle on his heavy boned frame. At one time,
I suppose, he was quite the brawler, an upstate redneck who would have been a convict if he hadn’t become a screw But now
he’s nearing fifty, a hard drinker who maintains his self-image by terrorizing inmates, like Freddie Morrow, who are in no
position to fight back.