The Unquiet-CP-6 (24 page)

‘chair.’”

That I knew about. The “chair” was a restraining device used on those who managed to push the guards too far. Four or five guards wearing full body armor and carrying shields and Mace would storm a prisoner’s cell to perform the “extraction.” He would be Maced, pushed to the floor or onto his bed, then handcuffed. The cuffs would then be connected to leg irons and his clothes cut from his body, and then the prisoner would be carried, naked and screaming, to an observation room and there bound to a chair with straps where he would be left for hours in the cold. Incredibly, the prison authorities argued that the chair wasn’t used for punishment but only as a means of controlling inmates who were a threat to themselves or others. The Portland Phoenix had obtained a tape of an extraction, as all such operations were recorded by the prison, ostensibly to prove that the prisoners were not being mistreated. According to those who had seen it, it was hard to imagine how extractions and the chair qualified as anything other than state-sanctioned violence bordering on torture.

“They did it to me once,” said Bill, “after I coldcocked the cop. Never again. I kept my head down after that. That was no way to treat a man. They did it to Merrick, too, more than once, but they couldn’t break Frank. It was always the same reason, though. It never varied.”

“What do you mean?”

“Merrick was always being punished for the same thing. There was a kid in there, name of Kellog, Andy Kellog. He was crazy, but it wasn’t his fault. Everybody knew it. He’d been fucked with as a child, and he never recovered. Spoke about birds all the time. Men like birds.”

I interrupted Bill.

“Wait a minute, this kid Kellog had been abused?”

“That’s right.”

“Sexually abused?”

“Uh-huh. I guess the men who did it wore masks or something. I recalled Kellog from his time in Thomaston. Some of the others in the Max did too, but nobody ever seemed to know for sure what had happened to him. All we knew was that he’d been taken by the ‘men like birds,’ and not once either. A couple of times, and that was after others had been at him already. What was left when they were done with him wasn’t worth a nickel curse. Kid was medicated to hell and back. Only man who seemed to get through to him was Merrick, and I got to tell you, that was a surprise to me. Merrick wasn’t no social worker. He was hard. But this kid, man, Merrick tried to look out for him. It wasn’t no faggot thing either. First man who said that to Merrick was also the last. Merrick near took his head off, tried to force it through the bars of his cell. Nearly succeeded, too, until the cops came and broke it up. Then Kellog got transferred to the Max for throwing shit at guards, and Merrick, he found a way to go there too.”

“Merrick deliberately got himself transferred to the Supermax?”

“Yep, that’s what they say. Until Kellog went, Merrick had minded his own business, kept his head down, apart from those occasions when someone stepped out of line and threatened the kid or, if he was really dumb, tried to move up the order by knocking heads with Merrick. But after Kellog was transferred, Merrick did everything he could to rile the cops until they had no choice but to send him to Warren. Wasn’t much that he could do for the kid there, but he didn’t give up. He talked to the cops, tried to get them to send a mental health worker to check up on Kellog, even managed to talk the kid down once or twice when it seemed like he was going to get himself sent to the chair again. Guards took him out of his cell on occasion just so he could reason with the kid, but it didn’t always work. I tell you, Kellog lived in that chair. Maybe he still does, for all I know.”

“Kellog is still in there?”

“I don’t think he’s ever gonna get out, not alive. I think the kid wants to die. It’s a miracle he isn’t dead already.”

“What about Merrick? Did you talk to him? Did he tell you anything about himself?”

“Nah, he was a loner. Only man he had time for was Kellog. I got to talk to him some, when our paths crossed on the way to the infirmary or to and from the kennel, but over the years we talked about as much as you and I have done tonight. I knew about his daughter, though. I think that was why he was looking out for Kellog.”

The final period started. I could see Bill’s attention immediately begin to transfer itself to the ice.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What did Merrick’s daughter have to do with Kellog?”

Reluctantly, Bill turned away from the action for the last time.

“Well, his daughter had gone missing,” he said. “He didn’t have much to remember her by. A couple of photographs, a drawing or two that the girl sent to him in jail before she disappeared. It was the drawings that attracted him to Kellog because Kellog and Merrick’s daughter, they’d drawn the same thing. They’d both drawn men with the heads of birds.”

Three

I myself am Hell,

nobody’s here—

—ROBERT LOWELL, “SKUNK HOUR”

Chapter XV

I t didn’t take long to find out the name of the lawyer who had represented Andy Kellog during his most recent brushes with the law. Her name was Aimee Price, and she had an office in South Freeport, about three miles away from the tourist-trap bustle of Freeport itself. The contrast between the towns of Freeport and South Freeport was striking. While Freeport had largely given up the ghost to the joys of outlet shopping, its side streets now converted to extended parking lots, South Freeport, which extended from Porter Landing to Winslow Park, had preserved most of its old nineteenth-century homes, built when the shipyards on the Harraseeket were booming. Price worked out of a small complex that had been created from a pair of carefully restored ship captains’ houses on Park Street, part of an area two blocks square that constituted the town center, situated just above the Freeport Town Landing. She shared the space with an accountant, a debt-restructuring service, and an acupuncturist.

Although it was Saturday, Price had told me that she would be working on case files until about one. I picked up some fresh muffins at the Carharts’ Village Store and strolled over to her office shortly before noon. I entered the reception area, and the young woman behind the desk pointed me in the direction of a hallway to my left, after calling ahead to inform Price’s secretary that I had arrived. Her secretary was male, and in his early twenties. He wore suspenders and a red bow tie. In someone else his age, it might have come across as trying too hard to appear eccentric, but there was something about the crumpled cotton of his shirt and the ink stains on his tan pants that suggested his eccentricity was pretty genuine.

Price herself was in her forties, with red curly hair cut short in a style that might have suited a woman twenty years older. She wore a navy suit, the jacket of which was slung across her chair, and had the tired look of someone who was fighting too many losing battles with the system. Her office was decorated with pictures of horses, and while there were various files on the floor, the windowsill, and on her desk, it was still a lot more welcoming than the offices of Eldritch and Associates, mainly because the people here seemed to have figured out how to use computers and dispose of some of their old paper.

Instead of sitting at her desk, Price cleared some space on a couch and invited me to sit there, while she took an upright chair alongside it. There was a small table between us, and the secretary, whose name was Ernest, set down some cups and a coffeepot, and took one of the muffins for his trouble. The seating arrangement left me sitting slightly lower, and slightly less comfortably, than Price. It was, I knew, quite deliberate. It seemed like Aimee Price had learned the hard way always to assume the worst, and to take every advantage available in anticipation of the battles to come. She wore a large diamond engagement ring. It sparkled in the winter sunlight as if there were bright living things moving within the stones.

“Nice rock,” I said.

She smiled. “Are you an appraiser as well as a detective?”

“I’m multitalented. In case the whole detecting thing doesn’t work out, I’ll have something to fall back on.”

“You seem to be doing okay at it,” she said. “You make the papers a lot.” She reconsidered what she had just said. “No, I guess that’s not true. It’s just that when you do make the papers, it kind of stands out. I bet you have all your press framed too.”

“I’ve built a shrine to myself.”

“Well, good luck attracting fellow worshipers. You wanted to talk to me about Andy Kellog?”

It was straight down to business.

“I’d like to see him,” I said.

“He’s in the Max. It’s off-limits to everyone.”

“Except you.”

“I’m his lawyer and even I have to jump through hoops to get near him in there. What’s your interest in Andy?”

“Daniel Clay.”

Price’s face grew stony. “What about him?”

“His daughter hired me. She’s been having some trouble with an individual who’s anxious to trace her father. It seems this individual was an acquaintance of Andy Kellog’s in jail.”

“Merrick,” said Price. “It’s Frank Merrick, isn’t it?”

“You know about him?”

“I couldn’t help but be aware of him. He and Andy were close.”

I waited. Price leaned back in her chair.

“Where to begin?” she said. “I took on Andy Kellog pro bono. I don’t know how much of his circumstances you’re familiar with, but I’ll give you a short summary. Abandoned as a baby, taken in by his mother’s sister, brutalized by her and her husband, then passed around to some of the husband’s buddies for the purposes of sexual abuse. He started running away at the age of eight, and was practically wild by twelve. Medicated from the age of nine; severe learning difficulties; never made it past third grade. Eventually, he ended up in a halfway house for severely disturbed children, run on a wing and a prayer with minimal state funding, and that’s when he was referred to Daniel Clay. It was part of a pilot program. Dr. Clay specialized in traumatized children, particularly those who had been victims of physical or sexual abuse. A number of children were selected for the program, and Andy was one of them.”

“Who decided which kids were admitted?”

“A panel of mental health workers, social workers, and Clay himself. Apparently, there was some improvement in Andy’s condition right from the start. The sessions with Dr. Clay seemed to be working for him. He grew more communicative, less aggressive. It was decided that he might benefit from interaction with a family outside of the environment of the state home, so he began to spend a couple of days each week with a family in Bingham. They ran a lodge for outdoor pursuits: you know, hunting, hiking, rafting, that kind of thing. Eventually, Andy was allowed to live with them, with the mental health workers and child protection people keeping in regular touch on him. Well, that was the idea, but they were always overstretched, so as long as he wasn’t getting into any trouble, they left well enough alone and moved on to other cases. He was allowed a certain degree of freedom, but mostly he preferred to stay close to the family and the lodge. This was during the summer season. Then things got busier, there wasn’t always time to watch Andy twenty-four/seven, and—”

She stopped.

“Do you have children, Mr. Parker?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t. I thought I might have wanted them once, but I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Maybe it’s for the best, when you see the things that people are capable of doing to them.” She wet her lips, as though her system was trying to silence her by drying out her mouth. “Andy was abducted from near the lodge. He went missing for a couple of hours one afternoon, and when he returned he was very quiet. Nobody paid too much heed. You know, Andy still wasn’t like the other kids. He had his moods, and the folks who were looking after him had learned to let them blow over. They figured that it didn’t hurt to allow him explore the woods by himself. They were good people. I think they just let their guard down where Andy was concerned.

“Anyhow, it wasn’t until the third or fourth time it happened that notice was taken. Someone, I think it was the mother, went to see how Andy was, and he just attacked her. He went wild, clawing at her hair, her face. Eventually, they had to sit on him and pin him down until the police came. He wouldn’t go back to Clay, and the child-care workers could only get him to talk about fragments of what had occurred. He was returned to the institution, and he stayed there until he was seventeen. After that, he hit the streets and was lost. He couldn’t afford the medication that he needed, so he fell into dealing, robbery, violence. He’s doing fifteen years, but he doesn’t belong in the Max. I’ve been trying to get him admitted to Riverview Psychiatric. That’s where he should really be. I’ve had no luck so far. The state has decided that he’s a criminal, and the state is never wrong.”

“Why didn’t he tell anyone about the abuse?”

Price nibbled at her muffin. I noticed that her hands moved when she was thinking, her fingers always beating out some pattern on the edge of her chair, testing her fingernails or, as in this case, pulling apart the muffin before her. It seemed to be part of her thought processes.

“It’s complicated,” she said. “In part, it was probably a product of the earlier abuse, where the adults responsible for him were not only aware of what was happening but actively colluded in it. Andy had little or no trust in authority figures, and the foster couple in Bingham had only just begun to break down his barriers when the new abuse occurred. But from what he told me later, the men who abused him threatened to hurt the couple’s eight-year-old daughter if he said anything about what was happening to him. Her name was Michelle, and Andy had grown very fond of her. He was protective of her, in his way. That was why he went back.”

“Went back?”

“The men told Andy where he should wait for them each Tuesday. Sometimes they came, sometimes they didn’t, but Andy was always there in case they did. He didn’t want anything to happen to Michelle. There was a clearing about half a mile from the house with a creek nearby, and a trail led down to it from the road, wide enough to take a single vehicle. Andy would sit there, and one of them would come for him. He was told always to sit facing the creek, and never to turn around when he heard someone arriving. He would be blindfolded, walked to the car, and driven away.”