I Detest All My Sins Read online

  Louise said, “Up yours, Eddie. In your dreams.” She reached under the bar for two whiskey glasses and poured the drinks. “Keep it handy?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said, “next one’s on Billy here. We got a little catchin’ up to do.”

  He swiveled around to face Bill and put his hand on Bill’s shoulder. Bill maintained the same mask he wore during his trial for rape. It had disguised the heartbreak of Pamela’s damning testimony against him, veiled the guilt for so many things, and now camouflaged bitter hatred and urgent anger toward this silly man who killed Mikey and who took away Bill’s only chance to assuage his conscience.

  “You know, Billy, we was afraid you was a rat. But I told the guys, the priest, he ain’t no rat. I mean, ain’t he a fucking priest? I figured if you had a pipeline to Jericho Lewis, you knew to play stuff close to the vest, right?”

  Bill lifted Eddie’s hand off his shoulder. He smiled and said, “well, I’m not a priest, but I made the prison my ministry. I counseled a lot of the guys and helped them with legal stuff.”

  “But a lot of us was afraid that while you was doing your counseling thing, you was also counseling Jericho Lewis about what we was up to.”

  “I didn’t care what anybody was up to. I never asked. My concern was souls.” He cocked his head. Eddie must have heard he was asking around about him and knew Eddie would have been doing asking of his own.

  “I already did, but wanted you to know what some guys thought,” Eddie said.

  “I was constantly petitioning Admin for better treatment of the men; better food, better equipment for the yard. I got some things done.”

  “So, Billy, you still in touch with Jericho Lewis? You know, write him letters and stuff, talk about art?”

  “Now why would you ask?”

  “Just curious. Wouldn’t blame ya if you did. As deputy wardens go, I guess he wasn’t that bad.”

  Bill was letting Eddie punch away, letting him believe he was in control, maybe get careless talking about the Mikey take-down.

  “Yeah, I was called into Lewis’s office a few times. A lot of guys were, but not enough to make him my pen pal,” Bill said.

  “Was you called in after Mikey Osborne got shivved?”

  “You mean did I rat you out? You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Now who even said I did it?”

  “Geez Eddie, I just assumed you did. Word was around that Mikey disrespected you,” Bill bluffed.

  “Whose word?”

  “We’re not in prison anymore. We don’t have the same rules out here. Out here, I’m assuming you are a rehabilitated individual and a good guy to have a beer with.”

  “You’re right, Billy. Hard to let go of old habits. Whats say you buy another round and we drink to the outside world and all the pussy we can eat.”

  They continued drinking. They talked about the joint, guys they knew, suspicions, resentments, alliances. They talked about the guards, which ones would play ball and bring stuff in for just a few bucks. “They don’t earn shit,” Eddie allowed, by now drunk. “We coulda had anything we wanted, steaks, drugs, pussy, right? As long you had the money. I bet you and Lewis talked about that stuff, huh? You and him had fancy educations, I bet you talked about art and stuff.”

  He wouldn’t let up. Why did he keep bringing up Jericho? “Nah, like I said, all we ever talked about was what he could do for us convicts. He liked to talk about the Catholic Church, too.

  Eddie’s eyebrow cocked. “Hey, no shit,” he said. “Like what? Whadaya call it, confession? Did he make a confession?” He laughed.

  Bill’s efforts at rapport weren’t breaching Eddie’s walls.

  “I told you, I was never a priest. No, just theological matters.” That stopped Eddie cold.

  “I gotta roll, Eddie. Let’s do it again sometime.”

  “Sure. I’ll see ya in here. I live close by. We can trade more stories.”

  Bill squared the tab and strolled out to the corner. Dammit, all he did was play defense. Why was Eddie interested in the church thing? And why did he keep mentioning art? The closest Eddie got to art was graffiti under the el. Did Eddie see him meet Jericho at the Art Museum?

  It would take a while for Eddie to come clean about Mikey, about why he did it and whether ServMark had anything to do with it. Bill would rather eat a plateful of maggots than pal around with Deadly Eddie. It would be simpler if there was nothing more to Mikey’s killing than some stupid prison disrespect thing. All Bill would have to do then is kill him. But if ServMark Hospitality had anything to do with Mikey getting waxed, well, that would complicate Bill’s plans.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have left Louise alone with that animal. But she could take care of herself and the place was half full. Still…

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jericho’s huge frame filled the entire doorway as he leaned into Bill’s guard shack on the Temple campus and spoke over the noise of traffic. The Deputy Warden was getting serious heat from his boss over the Mikey Osborne killing.

  “Mikey’s killing won’t be solved until some rat comes forward,” he told Bill.

  “Why are your people taking the problem out on you?”

  “I’m being set up to take the fall over the food contract with ServMark, that’s why. Warden White is saying I was the one who green-lighted their entry during the test phase.”

  “Bullshit. That kind of thing isn’t done on your level, is it?” Bill said.

  “Yeah, but they’ll have internal memos saying they relied on me and God knows what else. They’ll need a scapegoat.”

  “Then stay closer to home instead of taking this Temple job.”

  Jericho got permission to accept a position at Temple University conducting a criminology seminar on incarceration. He convinced Warden White that being nearer to his former police department colleagues as well as the city’s Graterford graduates and parole officers might unearth something, especially the connection, if any, between the Osborne killing and the food issue. Jericho needed Eddie to help sort out the food problem; Bill wanted him because of Mikey.

  “I met with Eddie,” Bill said. “Nothing.”

  “He killed Mikey, all right,” Jericho said. “We need to find out why.”

  Strange, it was the first time Jericho brought up motive. Prison killings happened for stupid reasons, like stolen sneakers or disrespecting a shot-caller. Unless it involved a gang, motive was seldom a big deal to prison officials.

  “He’s not admitting it,” Bill said, “at least not to me.”

  “Seduce him, tell him something like, ‘all the guys hated Mikey…’ that kind of thing. Convince him he did the world a favor. Build him up,” Jericho said.

  “He kept working your name into the conversation. I told him you and I didn’t have any relationship to speak of. I told him nobody knew who killed Mikey.”

  “Cons suspect everybody’s relationships. If they knew how to relate, they wouldn’t be convicts, present company excepted. The more tight-lipped Eddie is, the more he’s trying to hide.”

  Jericho’s interest in the Mikey case was widening like an earthquake fissure. “Let’s talk about it later,” Jericho said. “I’m meeting an old friend tonight at the Blue Horizon, a guy I worked with when I was a cop, Sam Lanza. He may have insights. Why don’t you join us?”

  “Sure,” Bill said. “But before you head for your class, what’s new on the Crystal front?”

  “Shit, Bill, she fucks me over by day then fucks me over by night.”

  Bill’s lifted eyebrows begged for explanation.

  Jericho looked at him, a sad, beseeching look in his eyes. “She wants four grand a month in alimony and another two in child support. Hey, I only make one-thirty.”

  “She works in the accounting department at ServMark, right? What does she make, about sixty? What’s your lawyer say?” Bill asked.

  “He says not to eat my liver out that Fernando taps her every night. He says Fernando is only a symptom.”

&
nbsp; “He’s right.”

  “Yeah, except that symptom is fucking my wife.”

  “She’s not your wife, not anymore, my friend. She left you. You’re hanging on, afraid you’ll fall through a trap door. Maybe it’s a chute to freedom.”

  “I know. I know. This ServMark thing doesn’t help,” Jericho said. “I can’t think about ServMark without remembering she works there, and I can’t think of her without thinking about that fucking Fernando. It’s a merry-go-round of misery.”

  “Yeah, something else. The ServMark thing may be bigger than you. You’re used to street felonies, not crooks who run institutions and own entire parts of state government. You’re Graterford, not high-rent like Lewisburg.”

  “Maybe, but when the shit rolls downhill into my prison, and winds up murdering a sweet kid like Mikey Osborne right under my nose, well…

  “…Well, let me work on Eddie. You won’t find out much at the prison. See you later at the Blue Horizon.”

  Bill headed on his rounds. His friend was being set up to take a fall on top of his domestic problems. Jericho and his soon-to-be ex wouldn’t let go of Bill’s brain.

  Who was he to counsel Jericho about women? Women had always been the joker that trumped Bill’s hand. Men and women, attracted to one another, needing one another: it should add up to happiness. Maybe that’s how it was in the Garden of Eden before the fall. Maybe that’s what the fall was about, men and women locked in loving attraction, but after it, like a mongoose and cobra. Maybe that was God’s last laugh before the eviction. Love, need. Need, love. One felt so good, the other ached so bad. Seminary never taught that.

  At one time his need for Pam Rogers jumbled his brain like a cement mixer. Sex seeped out of her every pore, and the most mundane thing, like dropping a pencil, aroused Bill’s imagination and speculation as to what it might mean. He had little idea of what enthralled him. He thought at first that he needed her warmth, but what he needed was her heat, and his vow of chastity, tenuous to begin with, evaporated like dry ice. Nor did he confuse it with love. It was something about her. She was practically another species.

  The first time he saw her unclothed he thought she belonged in a museum, like Nefertiti, and he thanked God for bringing her to him. Then, the first time they shared a needle after an hour of lovemaking, his identity became subsumed along with the residue of his faith. He did the drugs because she wanted it. The sex was a gift and kept him calm, until Pam’s friend Barbara Jenkins got jealous that Bill co-opted her friendship with Pamela, then ratted them out to Pam’s uncle, Congressman Benjamin Rogers. Bill and Pam were having a tryst at the Overbrook Inn when enough cops to raid the Cali Cartel burst in, leaving no time to flush the smack down the toilet. She was lying nude under him. He had been so hungry, so taken by her, that he hadn’t taken the time to peel out of his clothes.

  As he walked up Montgomery Avenue he prayed for another chance. He wasn’t sure if his prayers were heard anymore, or whether he was even deserving of hope.

  That night, as two welterweights battled at the Blue Horizon, their spattered blood and sweat sprayed the mezzanine seats overhanging the ring. The fighters’ thuds and fluids fueled howls of intensity from the crowd, while Bill, Jericho, and Jericho’s old friend, Detective Sam Lanza joined in the yelling, as if catharsis might emanate from the warriors below.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Eddie Matthews leaned against his faded blue ’78 Toyota Cressida. He fired up a cigarette, scrunched his thin lips into a perfect O and blew smoke rings toward the mid-September moon. A hazy slice of faded blue with enough darkness to not be seen, yet enough light to see Louise limp out of Dirty Frank’s after locking its doors for the night. When he had been at the bar talking with the priest, he picked up a vibe between Louise and the priest, or brother, or whatever the fuck he was. Eddie didn’t care what the priest had said about friendship with Jericho Lewis. Maybe him and Jericho were blowing each other. Theology…bullshit. Word was that Jericho covered for Bill just like Luca’s man covered Eddie after Eddie put Mikey down for the count.

  Eddie didn’t yet know the deal between the priest and the deputy warden. He needed it to determine Jericho’s comings and goings, get that big fucker before he screwed things up, that is, if he knew anything at all about the ServMark Hospitality deal and its connection to Mikey Osborne.

  But Eddie had the documents that Mikey once bragged were his armor and knew the whole story behind them. They were the docs that could bring the giant food company down along with the whole fucking Department of Corrections and anybody else connected to the scam.

  Mikey had stupidly squawked to Eddie about having the goods on the corporate crooks that supplied Pennsylvania prisons with maggoty and tasteless food. Not fit for a Russian gulag was how he put it. Mikey bragged about how his buddy, Shlomo Belkin, explained things for a lousy carton of cigarettes. Shlomo was in for securities fraud and murder-one for killing a partner on the cusp of ratting out Shlomo’s Ponzi scheme. He helped Mikey understand what rigged bids were, and if Mikey had evidence of them, treasure. The kid’s wife had the originals stashed safely away.

  Mikey had a big tattoo down his right arm that said DESIREE, his bride. He flashed her love letters around with the seemingly innocuous numbers on the backside. They were copies of papers he had lifted from ServMark when he worked for a janitorial company. He wasn’t sure what they were about at first, yet they looked important, so what the hell, he took them and threw them into his nightstand drawer and forgot about them. But when he got sent away he recalled they had something to do with the prison system, and suspected they weren’t kosher. Shlomo counseled Mikey that he could use them to finagle extra protection against prison thugs. And when Mikey boasted of them to Bill, whose access to the deputy warden was the best-kept secret since the Bay of Pigs invasion, it was sure to get to prison management.

  Once Deadly Eddie got paroled, a simple phonebook check located a Desiree Osborne near the warehouse district. For a second story man, popping a screen and a silently broken windowpane was as good as an unlocked door. He found the papers hidden inside the bag compartment of a vacuum cleaner. He took them back to Graterford and visited with Shlomo, who viewed one of the documents through the security glass. Shlomo confirmed Mikey’s boasts, and pitched a partnership deal with Eddie, but the all he got was fifty dollars deposited to his commissary account.

  What Eddie now had was the file of actual documents of the competitive bids Mikey had pilfered from the desk of the ServMark CFO. They were bids ServMark had no business having, but critical to rigging their own bid to provide services to the commonwealth’s entire prison system, seventy-five facilities, thousands of prisoners and employees requiring food, personnel, office equipment, uniforms and wherewithal required to run a state system. ServMark’s name was constantly splashed all over the press as an outstanding corporate citizen, offering a hundred-million-dollar loan to help the Eagles finance a new stadium, or saving the vaunted University of Pennsylvania’s Veterinary School from closing, or financing a new classroom building for Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Melon’s School of Agriculture.

  Mikey Osborne had never known how the ServMark CFO got copies of those bids. He hadn’t cared, but once Shlomo explained things, Mikey felt for sure they were his ticket to safety inside the prison walls. Instead, they were his ticket to an eighteen-hundred-degree oven.

  Eddie wondered if the priest was aware of what Mikey had. And what about Luca? Were the papers the reason Luca wanted Mikey dead, or was Luca after Jericho? Speaking of Jericho, maybe he was part of the scam, and his so-called enlightened incarceration theories a big act. Whoever the puppets were, Eddie pulled the strings now.

  He looked at his watch. It was time for the bar to close. He peered down to the streetlight’s glow on the corner and waited for the door to Dirty Frank’s to bang open. When it did, well, well, well, wasn’t it the bar-wench and the priest with his arm around her shoulder as they walked to her Mustang. Eddie jumped into his car
and waited for her to pull out. As she proceeded down the street, he eased out and stayed a half block behind. After a stop at KFC, Louise parked on Day Street in Fishtown, and both went into a house where Eddie was able to keep tabs from where he was parked. After an hour, the upstairs light went out. Bill Conlon was still in there.

  Eddie pulled away for the night. He knew where she lived. Too bad her favors were wasted on the priest. Maybe he could persuade her otherwise, get the priest out of the picture.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Daily News headline caused Bill to gasp: STATE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS UNDER SCRUTINY! There had been a lawsuit on behalf of the prisoners of Graterford, but it snowballed into prisoner suits from facilities across the state, each alleging counts of tainted and otherwise insufficiently nutritious food, failure to allow reasonable time to eat, failure to accommodate religious diets and other counts. All cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The article said that while such complaints usually got dismissed, numerous suits filed around the same time indicated coordination by a prisoner advocacy group. The Prison Wardens Association of Pennsylvania offered no response other than, “We are confident that our controls and audits of prison food and nutrition will reveal the priority we place on the health and well-being of people incarcerated in Department of Corrections facilities.”

  Spokespersons for the state’s black communities expressed outrage. Not only were blacks disproportionately sentenced for the same crimes as whites, they said, but weren’t even decently fed. All talk about reducing the Department of Corrections budget and saving money on the backs of black people must stop. Many black organizations as well as the American Civil Liberties Union intended to file amicus briefs.

  Bill could hardly wait to talk to Jericho. He left ten voicemails over three days. Warden Londell White was probably shitting his pants. Poobahs at ServMark must be digging out records and memos to see if their asses were covered. The development might blow the whole ServMark thing wide open. That was okay with Bill. The food thing was getting in his way. Yet, panthers hunted best at night, so the last thing he wanted was the light of discovery and scandal, at least not until he took care of business.