“Why you wanna know anyway? Anton an’ Yollo is dead and all the businesses they had is ovah.”
“That was a fresh body in the tomb,” I said. “It couldn’t have been there more than a few days or so. Somebody who knew the dead cops’ business used it to bury that woman.”
“Maybe I’ll remember more later,” Burns speculated. “You know, after I shoot up and then sleep, sometimes in my dreams I put things together that were far apart before.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. If you remember something Hester has my number.”
“Maybe we could make some kinda deal?”
“Maybe…if you remember something I need.”
We stood there a moment or two in silence.
“You gonna get Manny outta that prison?” Burns asked.
“One way or another.” I didn’t know what the words meant—not yet.
The junkie took it as his cue to leave.
I stood there on the corner. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. The impact of the mass-murder gravesite manifested as a shudder in my chest and forearms.
30.
I know I slept because all night long I heard that unnamed prisoner threaten to rape and murder my wife and child. I felt the dank coldness and the crawling, hairy legs of insects over my skin. Men cried out in pain and madness, and there was the continual sound of tramping feet: men pacing in cells only two and a half steps in length.
None of this could have been real because, even though I was in an underground cell, I was not anywhere near the sounds of suffering. There were no rats keening for love or blood, or footsteps destined for nowhere.
I would have done better staying awake and planning my next move.
I woke up exhausted, with no appetite and little hope. But I knew what I had to do next. I knew where to go and how to get there.
My first destination was Ray Ray Wanamaker and Company on the south side of Central Park at 11:45 a.m.
Ray Ray’s brother, Brill Wanamaker, was a bus driver for the city of New York. He worked hard and had many commendations from the city, his union, and private commuter organizations that judge public transportation and those who deliver it.
Brill was a bastion of good, but his brother, Ray Ray, was just bad. His first stint in prison was for drug dealing. His second conviction was for attempted murder, and his final period of incarceration was for stealing an ambulance; no one, not even Ray Ray, it seemed, could figure out why he stole that emergency vehicle. When he was in for the third time, Brill decided to save him. He bought a fleet of five defunct buses and worked diligently rebuilding them while Ray Ray languished in Attica.
Upon the career criminal’s release, his brother presented him with a ready-made business that would ferry family and loved ones directly to the prisons where their blood, kinfolk, and friends were interned.
Love is a powerful tool. I believe that Ray Ray rehabilitated not because he had a good-paying business but because of the idea that his brother worked all those years just for him.
Ray Ray got a license to drive a bus, hired a staff of mainly ex-cons, and worked seven days a week transporting spouses, family members, and other lovers to see their unlucky kinsmen for a minimal price.
I took off my fake facial hair, donned a yellow hoodie, and made my way to the makeshift bus stop that the NYPD had been ordered to let operate so as not to incur political rancor from proponents for prisoner rights.
Most of Ray Ray’s clients, to most prisons, were women and children, mothers and now and then a brother or father. But Bedford Hills Correctional Facility was the only maximum-security female prison in the New York penal system. So there were a good number of husbands and boyfriends sprinkled in among mothers, grandmothers, grown daughters, and children. When I climbed up into the entry well of the old-time bus I had my $17.50 in hand, ready to pay and ride in relative anonymity.
“Joe?” the driver said.
“Lenny.”
“You got somebody at Bedford?”
“Private now. There’s someone I need to talk to.”
“You lucky Ray Ray don’t drive this run,” Lenny the Lookout said. He was a skinny white guy with dirty blond hair and skin something like an albino crocodile hide.
“Why’s that?”
“ ’Cause you busted his ass more than any other cop. He told me that you could never get on this bus.”
“And?”
“I won’t tell if you won’t. That’ll be seventeen-fifty.”
“You goin’ ta see ya wife?” a plump black woman with a beautiful face asked me. She had the window seat and I the aisle.
“A friend of a friend. He can’t be seen up there and so I deliver the message.”
“Conjugal visit?”
“I don’t think my friend would appreciate that.”
“He don’t have to know,” the brown-faced Aphrodite explained. “I mean if her man can’t come up and give her what she needs he should be happy he got a friend that’a do that for him.”
“If he could be happy about that, then he wouldn’t be in so much trouble that he can’t be seen.”
“He don’t have to know,” she said again.
“Leonard Pillar,” I said, extending a hand.
“Zenobia Price,” she replied, accepting the proffered hand. “I been up to see my sister’s husband in Ossining five times. She in jail for the same robbery up here.”
“What would you do if your man came up to service your sister?”
She thought a moment and then grinned. The gap-toothed smile reminded me that the letter from Minnesota had re-sexualized me.
“I’d cut off his dick, take Athena’s kids, and move to Lake Tahoe—the Nevada side, where I could deal cards for a livin’.”
Before we got off the bus Zenobia gave me her phone number and I gave her one that might seem like it was connected to me.
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility was a group of old brick buildings separated from the world by high wire fences and enough razor wire to protect Fort Knox.
I let Zenobia enter before me because I didn’t want her to hear my real name. I lied about who I was going to see and my name because I wanted to linger someplace with Zenobia Price. I wanted to smell her sweat, but I knew that I had to hold back some or soon I’d be in some deconsecrated crypt, stacked with strangers and eaten by rats.
“Name?” the front-gate lookout asked. Even though she was sitting, I could see that she was tall; her skin, white like aged ivory. The sentry did not smile within the confines of the prison, but she didn’t seem dour.
“Joe Oliver.”
“Inmate you’re coming to see including her number and the number we gave allowing your visit.”
“Lauren Bachnell.”
The officer, who had not been looking at me, raised her head.
“There is no inmate here with that name.”
“Not an inmate,” I said. “The assistant warden.”
“And who are you?”
“I already told you that.”
The sentry was confused. The words I gave her didn’t have a corollary in her rule book.
“Step to the side,” she said to me. “Mary! This man needs assistance,” she called to another woman sitting behind a metal desk maybe fifteen feet away.
Mary had broad shoulders, and when she stood up I had the feeling of being faced by a man. She was very upset to have to deal with hoi polloi like me. I imagined she was once the custodian on duty for visitation and now she had risen to a more supervisorial rank.
“Yes?” she said to me. Rather than calling her a black woman, I would have used the descriptor caramel-buttercream. Together her fists would have been the size of my head, and I had no doubt she was close to using those hams on my jaw.
“My name is Joe Oliver and I’m here to see Lauren Bachnell.”
“Assistant Warden Bachnell has a secretary and a phone.”
“And yet here I stand, talking to you.”
“I can’t help you.”
“I’ll tell Lauren that when I call from the phone booth outside.”
Mary didn’t like me. Most people don’t. I push them and then make them do things that insult their sense of independence. Since my own stint in prison I especially enjoyed making prison guards into pretzels.
“What’s your name again?” the woman named after our savior’s mother asked.