Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (6 page)

The Marriott’s elevators, visible through the glass facade, looked like space capsules as they moved up and down, carrying early risers to breakfast. I was hungry, too, but I wouldn’t be dining at the Marriott Marquis. I found a small deli and had the counterman grill me a bacon and egg sandwich, added a cup of coffee and a cheese danish, then made my way uptown to the fountain outside the Time-Life building on Sixth Avenue.

Watching the women hurry into their offices was like watching a movie. It’d been ten years since I’d seen women moving freely through the world. I undressed them with my eyes as they hurried past, noted the curve of breast, buttock, and hip, yet my feelings weren’t particularly sexual. It was too exotic for a physical reaction. Besides, I had no illusions about my own situation. From their point of view, I was just another homeless asshole. Another potential menace to be evaluated and avoided.

And, of course, I had Calvin to consider. I wasn’t about to become his slave. I’ve played any number of roles in my life, but slave wasn’t one of them. Still, it was obvious that although I could evaluate Calvin the way office workers evaluated me, I couldn’t avoid him. I couldn’t just walk away and take my chances on the streets. Simon Cooper had threatened to violate me if I changed my residence without his permission, and I had no doubt that he’d do it.

I suppose I could have called Simon at home, but even if he gave me permission to leave the Foundation, where would I go? I had to have an address or Simon would violate me to protect his own butt. There was no way he could justify letting a documented sociopath like Peter Frangello sleep in the street. He might let me move to another shelter, but the shelter trail from the Foundation went straight downhill. The next stop would be a massive city shelter with as much violence as a prison, but without the supervision.

The simple truth was that I’d have to deal with Calvin. I was locked in to the Foundation and there was no way to go around him. The question I kept asking myself was why Calvin couldn’t see who I was. If a panhandler in the bus terminal could look into my eyes and turn away, why did Calvin take me for a punk? A prisoner’s cell is his only real possession. To step into another man’s cell without permission is the ultimate disrespect. Calvin had set himself down on my bed as if he owned it.

There were only two possibilities and they were obvious enough. The first was that Calvin was a stupid punk who thought he could do whatever he wanted to a collection of helpless, homeless men. But Calvin, himself, was living in a shelter, so how bad could he be? Maybe he and his Sing-Sing muscle had been assigned to the Foundation by P.O.’s of their own, but really dangerous ex-cons don’t go to shelters. If they don’t have families, they go back into the shooting galleries and the crack dens and worry about their P.O.’s later.

The other possibility was that Calvin had some hidden resource that I didn’t know about. He was probably connected to one of the dealers outside the Foundation. Maybe his connection would supply him with muscle if he got into a beef. And maybe his connection wouldn’t. There weren’t more than forty beds in the entire Foundation. How much action could that represent to the millionaires who control the street corners in Hell’s Kitchen, especially if Calvin’s beef had nothing to do with drugs or territory?

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 Sing-Sing. 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, Sing-Sing,” 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, Sing-Sing. 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, Sing-Sing?” 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, Sing-Sing. 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.”

I
LEFT THE SHELTER
as soon as Sing-Sing 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 Sing-Sing. Sing-Sing 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 parents, 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.”