The Bubble Gum Thief (21 page)

March 23—Washington, DC

The crowd for Michael Brodsky’s funeral overflowed from the All Souls Church onto Harvard Street, where a long line of mourners waited to pay their respects. Inside, Marjorie Brodsky, a thin and stylish woman, sat by the closed casket, her right leg crossed firmly over her left, her clasped hands resting on them. She wore no veil to hide her tears—they flowed freely and quietly while a succession of friends and colleagues paid tribute to her son. There were no prayers or homilies—just stories and anecdotes. Fellow professors talked, with only slight exaggeration, about his love for teaching and his prodigious intellect. Lydia Brodsky, Michael’s younger sister, placed a sheet of paper on an overhead projector; an untitled watercolor by the artist at age four filled the screen in front of the congregation. Diego Rodriguez talked about Michael’s final days, noting that he was happy, and that he was in love. He didn’t mention Dagny by name. Few in the church would have known who she was. Those who did probably didn’t think much of her, because she wasn’t there.

March 23—Coleman, Florida

Dagny’s phone had finally stopped vibrating. The service must have started. She kept her eyes focused on Highway 301. Her cell had been ringing with regularity since Mike’s murder, and Dagny had ignored all calls except those related to the case. Julia’s name had flashed up so often that it threatened to burn into the screen. Maybe Julia wouldn’t understand, but Dagny couldn’t talk to her right now. She couldn’t talk to anyone.

Except Victor, it seemed.

Victor held an Egg McMuffin in one hand and a road map in the other. “Should be up on the right,” he said, dripping egg juice on his tie. “Dammit. Third one.”

“What?”

“Third tie I’ve ruined this way.”

“With an Egg McMuffin?”

“Yep.”

Coleman Federal Correctional Complex looked a little like an industrial park—bland, expansive block buildings, all gated and fenced. A clear glass sign hung from the brick entrance, with white block letters and directional arrows. Minimum security
to the left. High-security USP 2 to the right. Straight ahead for low security, medium security, high-security USP 1, and central administration.

“Actually, one was a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese.”

Dagny flashed her creds to the guard in the booth at the front of the medium-security lot. They parked their rented Buick in the small parking area and walked through the red stone arched doorway into the prison. An old, thin man sat at the front counter and opened the glass window to greet them. The nameplate on the counter read “Maurice Jones.”

“Can I help you?”

“We’re from Quantico.” Dagny flashed her creds, and Maurice nodded and looked over at Victor, who was fumbling through his pockets.

“I swear I have them,” Victor said.

Maurice shook his head and looked back at Dagny. “He your partner?”

“The community college has an externship. He gets two credits.”

“And what do you get?” Maurice asked.

“Mostly annoyed.”

The old man laughed. “How can I help you?”

“We’re here to see a prisoner. Reginald Berry.”

“Reginald Berry,” he mumbled, starting to type the name into his computer. Then he stopped typing and laughed. “Oh,
Reginald Berry
. I’m sorry ma’am, but you’re at the wrong facility. You need to go down the road a bit.”

“What do you mean?”

“As of a couple of years ago, Reginald Berry is Regina Berry. She’s at the women’s satellite camp.”

“You mean he—”

“She.”

“Really?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I didn’t know that a sex change would get you transferred to the women’s prison.”

“I don’t believe there’s an actual policy on this kind of thing. Most prisoners can’t afford the surgery, and the government won’t pay for it. So it hardly comes up.”

“How’d he get the transfer if there’s no policy on it?”

“How does anyone get anything in prison? He filed a lawsuit.”

“Pro se?”

“No, he had a lawyer.”

“How’d he get a lawyer?”

Maurice shrugged. “Berry’s got to have a little money—he paid for his surgery.”

“The lawyer must have been pretty good to get the transfer.”

“Maybe, but then again, he drew one of them liberal judges.”

“Hey, do you think our guy dressed as a woman during the bank robbery as some kind of nod to Berry and the sex change?” Victor asked, groping around the backseat of the car.

“Maybe.” She’d actually been thinking the same thing herself.

“Found them,” Victor exclaimed triumphantly, creds in hand.

As they pulled into the parking lot and the women’s prison came into view, Berry’s surgery started to make sense. The men’s prison was a medium-security facility, but the women’s was a minimum-security camp. Thus the women’s warden didn’t lead them to a sterile concrete room with a table and chairs, but rather to an outdoor picnic table in a grassy clearing next to a large oak tree. A gentle breeze rustled through its new leaves. “Ah, spring,” Victor said.

A guard escorted a small and slight African-American woman to their table. She looked a little like a woman, anyway. In a dark bar, perhaps even an attractive one. But her hands, her throat, her brow—all retained a masculine quality.

“You the feds?” Regina asked in a husky rasp.

“I’m Special Agent Dagny Gray, and this is my associate, Special Agent Victor Walton,” Dagny replied. “We’d like to talk to you about a bank robbery.”

“I ain’t done nothin’—I’ve been in prison.”

“I mean the one that got you here,” Dagny explained.

“What’s to tell, really? And why should I?”

“You’ll be coming up for parole sometime.”

“Shit, there ain’t hardly any parole anymore. Maybe you drop a year or two from twenty-five, but that’s all.”

Victor jumped in. “That year or two will seem important when it comes.”

“Alrighty,” Regina relented, throwing her hands up and pretending that Victor had convinced her. “I’ll tell y’all about the bank robbery, but I don’t know what it’s gonna do for you. It’s ancient history.”

“Please tell us about it,” Dagny said.

“I was working construction, doing houses and stuff. It was hard work, and we was working with illegals, long days in the hot sun. Plus lots of overtime, and they was stiffin’ us. So one day I’m complaining out there to a guy I worked with a lot—Ed Cooper was his name, or so he say. Big white guy. And he’s telling me how he has a plan so he don’t have to keep doing shit jobs like this. Gets me all interested—real mysterious like—telling me just that he got a plan. This shit goes on for days, maybe weeks, just telling me he got a plan, but not telling me what it was. Finally, I tell ’im I think the whole plan thing is bullshit and he ain’t got no plan, and so he tells me he’s got one, really, but he ain’t gonna tell me unless he can trust me. ‘Can I trust you?’ ‘Sure you can.’ So he tells me he wants to rob a bank—he’s got the whole thing planned, ’cause he has a cousin who runs security at the bank, and the cousin can be the inside man. His cuz would let him know when the staff was down. You follow?”

“Yes. Please go on,” Dagny replied.

“He tells me that on Thursdays they have their biggest load. That they normally got only about twenty grand on hand, but on Thursdays they got five hundred, ’cause that’s the change-out day. Says he wants me for the car, but only if he can trust me. I tell him he can trust me, but I don’t know about robbin’ no bank; I ain’t never done nothin’ like that. But times was tough, and he says he my angel, come to save me.

“The day we do it, I pick him up in my new Chrysler—it was a year old and the only nice thing I ever bought me, took a lot of house work to get it. I’d stolen a plate and swapped it out, in case there was gonna be a chase. Then Ed Cooper comes up to the car with a cast on his leg, tells me he broke it falling off a roof. Tells me the whole gig’s off, unless we switch roles, ’cause he can’t run but he can still drive. ‘Shit, I ain’t gonna do that.’ And he says he figured so, but he’s gonna have the cast for two months and he can’t wait that long since he can’t even do construction with the cast. Says he’ll find someone else to do the stickup work. I say, ‘Wait, man, we had an agreement.’ He says, ‘If we a team, then you do the job.’ I say no way. He says he’ll go fifty-fifty with me, and he and his cuz will split his half. That was persuasive.

“I give him my keys and he drives me to the bank. I sit there, just thinking, how am I gonna do this, and maybe it’s wrong, ’cause I know it’s wrong. But he explained that the bank was insured, and no one would lose anything, and they be happy to give it to me, ’cause it wouldn’t trouble them none. Then he hands me a bag, and I open it and see a gun, and he says, ‘You’re not even gonna have to fire it. You just need it for show.’ So I take the gun from the bag and hide it under my jacket, and I just tell myself that two hundred and fifty and I’m set, man. I can buy a new TV and move to a new place. He give me one of them hats you pull down over your head with the eyes cut out and says, ‘Don’t put this on until you’re at the counter and the gun’s out.’ So I take the mask and put it in my pocket, and I get out of the car
and start up toward the bank. Real slow like. And I’m shaking, and wanted to say fuck it, but it was too late, ’cause then I was in the bank and there was like, no one there. No customers and only couple of tellers. So I walk up to the counter and I tell the lady I need the money, but I mumble it like, ’cause I can’t even believe I’m saying it. And she’s like, ‘What?’ And so I pull out the gun, you know, for clarification. And I put on the mask. And I tell her to put the money in a bag and give it to me. I didn’t even have the bag—man, this shit was not thought through—but she had a bag, so she starts putting money in. It don’t look like half a mil, so I tell her I know there’s more. But she says, no, that’s all, and that there’s more in the vault but she don’t have access to it. So I grab the bag and run out the door, but my car ain’t there. And then it’s clear—my friend, my angel—he never had an inside man, no cousin. He ain’t even wanted to rob the bank. He just wanted my car. So I run back into the bank and tell the lady, ‘I need your car,’ and I wave my gun at her, and she digs in her purse and tries to find her keys. But she can’t find them, and she’s crying, and I hear sirens, and I say, ‘Shit, woman, did you call the police?’ And she just nods. I fall to the floor, man, ’cause I know there’s nothin’ I can do. Lady finally finds her damn keys and tosses ’em to me, but by then the police are through the door, guns raised. And it’s over.”

“Did they catch Cooper?” Dagny asked.

“They didn’t even believe he existed. I said, ‘Then how the hell I get to the bank?’ but they wouldn’t listen.”

“I read that you kept muttering, ‘The sins of the angels remain with them in heaven.’”

“Y’all make me sound like a crazy mofo, but yeah, I said what I said, and I still hope it’s true.”

“When did you say it?”

“When I dropped to the floor, realizin’ just how I’d been played.”

“What did you mean by it?”

“I meant just what I said. Damn angels may ride up to heaven, but they gonna have to live with what they did.” Regina looked over to Victor. “Fool, don’t you say nothin’? You let this lady run you?”

“You’re a lady, too,” Victor replied.

“Damn straight I am. Beats the hell out of where I was.”

“So you had the sex change just for the transfer?” Victor asked. “Was it really that bad?”

“You ain’t got no idea what it’s like. Five forty in the morning, and I’m awake ’cause some jackass is screaming on the block above. I’m laying on the top bunk, and I know it gonna be six soon, so why bother falling back asleep. Teddy Jack is on the bunk below, and he’s jackin’ it like he does every morning. At six the lights come on and the gates go unlocked. I jump down from the bed and take a dump, after Teddy. Get dressed. Check to see who’s going to the showers. If it looks clear, I might go in. If I get a bad look, figure I can wait ’til later, or even a couple of days if need be. But have to be back at the cell door for the eight o’clock count. Wait for that count to clear. Sometimes it takes fifteen minutes, but sometimes it takes an hour, just standing there. Skip the cafeteria, ’cause bad stuff goes down there in the morning, and just eat the stuff in the box I got at the commissary. Then down to the factory, working the presses, squeeze ’em down seven hundred times until it’s close to noon, so I run back to my cell for the noon count. Maybe decide to get a hot lunch in cafeteria after count, so I check it out, see who’s there, and if it looks okay, then I get in line for the mac and cheese, and grab me some Kool-Aid. Nobody too happy to have me sit down with ’em, so I eat standing up, real fast, just shovel it in, ’cause the line’s long and I need to get back to the factory anyway, keep them presses going. Got one bite of cookie still in my hand, as I’m walking out the door, when guard busts me, calls me a thief, threatens to put me in the hole. Can’t take food out the room. They want to sell that stuff in the commissary. Takes my last bite of cookie and tosses it away. Man the presses until the four o’clock count. After
count, go outside, get some sun before it goes down. Ain’t part of no gang, so I’m just chillin’ with Rex and Reed. They’ve got nothin’ going on, just like me. Then Birdy and the Loo come up to Rex and say he forgot the yeast. Rex works the cafeteria, so Birdy and Loo need his help to make wine. Rex just got out of the hole for stealing yeast, and he ain’t happy to do it again. Birdy flashes a knife and says there are worse things than the hole. Rex promises he’ll get the yeast at dinner tonight. Me, I’m just glad I work the presses. Seventy cents an hour and low stress. Skip the cafeteria and chow down a can of tuna and some crackers for dinner. Eat that most nights. Maybe check out the TV lounge, but sports is on, and that ain’t good. Always gonna be a fight, ’specially if it be something like New York or Philly, but even if not, people got too much money on the game. Thousands of dollars. Too much temper in one room, so I head back to my cell and write another letter to Momma. Tell her I’m sorry again. Maybe this time she’ll read it and cry, maybe even decide to come visit her son. Ain’t had no visitors, not once. ’Cept you and Red, and the lawyer. But maybe Momma will come. Watch a guy polish the floors each night before bed. The whole prison stinks of men, but that floor shines like a beaut. Just keeps shining away, even when it ain’t scuffed, when it’s clean as day. See, in prison, it don’t matter what something needs—every floor gets cleaned whether dirty or not—ain’t nobody care, ’cause a floor’s a floor and they’re all the same to the man cleaning ’em. And the machine he uses, it hums, but real soft. Sounds nice. Gets me ready to sleep. Ten o’clock, lights out. Day is done.”