I Detest All My Sins Read online

  When he finally met with Jericho it was a kick in the groin: Jericho had been suspended by Warden White pending the outcome of the investigation by the Inspector General for the DOC.

  “Warden White accused me of green-lighting ServMark during its test period,” Jericho said. I had to remind him that it was his call to let ServMark in, that he had said Harrisburg wanted it that way.”

  “I can’t believe they would try that,” Bill said. “Did you okay letting them in?”

  “But here’s the bad part. White pulled out a memo from three years ago that said food services would be under my umbrella. That goddam memo was two years before I ever got word that Harrisburg wanted ServMark in. So yeah, I rubber-stamped it.”

  “It’s a set-up,” Bill said.

  “I should have known. You’d think I’d been around long enough to cover my ass,”

  Jericho said, “but I didn’t. Now look at me.”

  “There must be an official process, and documentation, right?” asked Bill.

  “Of course, but the internal stuff isn’t about covering our asses in court or in the press, it’s all about who is going to take the fall.”

  “You were being a good soldier,” Bill said.

  “That’s no consolation. I had noticed how shitty the food had become even before you told me about Mikey’s allegation. Remember when the stew was filled with dead roaches and almost caused a riot? And when fifty-six people came down with e-coli from the clam chowder and the audit committee said it was poor food-handling? I had the staff re-take food safety courses, but I knew better. I knew somebody was trying to cover something up. My reports must have gone to memo heaven.”

  Something was missing from Jericho’s story, but Bill let it ride. Jericho’s confidence was in the basement. His job was at stake on top of everything else. A criminal allegation against him wasn’t out of the question.

  Bill said, “Yeah, then we thought Mikey Osborne knew something…

  “…and I couldn’t lay my hands on the contract or specs and memos were missing from my file. White told me he’d report it directly to Harrisburg. I never heard more about it. I should have never let it drop. The whole deal stank.”

  Bill shook his head in sympathy.

  “I wonder if I need to give in to Crystal’s divorce demands to get her to help us.”

  “What can she do?” Bill asked.

  “I don’t know. She works at that place. Maybe she has access to information of some kind,” Jericho said.

  “Her lawyer may get in the way. You have to open direct communications with her. Maybe by only talking about the kids, what a terrific mother she is. And don’t go off about Fernando! Can you do that? What about financially? Can you hold out?”

  “I got enough to pay the mortgage for a couple of years. But it was for retirement. And I don’t want to lose my pension.”

  “We’ll work through this,” Bill said, “and with you on leave from your job, we still need to be careful. You know your people are digging for more reasons to get you. We don’t want to give them more reason to cast you in a bad light by fraternizing with ex-cons.”

  “You mean worse light.”

  “Without our talks at Graterford, I might have killed myself, especially at first,” Bill said.

  “Life is not for amateurs, is it?”

  Maybe it was Bill’s sympathetic ear, but Jericho began to sound stronger, as if he had needed a crisis to rise to. “Let’s climb one mountain at a time,” he said. “Up front is Mikey Osborne. I have the freedom now to contact this outfit behind the lawsuits, see what they have. Whatever it is, it may circle back to Mikey.”

  Jericho did it again, focused on Mikey Osborne, as if Mikey engineered a huge conglomerate’s rigged bid scam all by himself. Bill let it go. After all, Mikey’s death in the yard did happen under Jericho’s watch, and might be the reason Warden White was trying to make Jericho the fall-guy. Jericho had his hands full.

  “Then there’s still Deadly Eddie Matthews,” Bill said.

  “Don’t remind me.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “You’re goin’ about this all wrong,” Luca told Eddie, sitting upstairs at Jim’s Steaks on South Street. “And wipe your chin, you got grease all over yourself.”

  Eddie wiped his chin and took a gulp of Coke to help swallow the last bite of cheesesteak and Luca’s abuse. “You want me to take them both out? It’ll cost more,” he said.

  “Both? You ain’t been so Deadly Eddie with just the big guy, and you want me to contract you for both?”

  “What do you want? I can’t just go to his house and plant a pill in his dome, can I?”

  “It would be nice.”

  “I have to get him where I can, and I gotta be able to get away. If he happens to be with the priest, so be it. I’ll take ’em both out and won’t charge extra. How’s that? But I ain’t goin’ back to prison again.”

  “Jericho Lewis has been suspended from his job, so he ought to be easier to get to.”

  “I might use the priest and his girlfriend to get to him.”

  “I don’t give a shit if you sneak a laxative into his Cheerios and cap him on the toilet.”

  “Trust me, I will.”

  “I’ll trust you when you give me Jericho’s dick on a skewer, meantime you’re nothing but agita, Deadly Eddie.” He said the name with a sneer, wiped his hands with a napkin, and got up and left.

  Eddie stayed and watched the revelers parade up and down South Street. The ServMark rigged bid scheme had gangster all over it. Eddie would wait until Jericho was out of the way and litigation dust settled before springing his surprise. It would take down all the State Correctional civil servants, ServMark, and probably Luca and his minions. Eddie wasn’t exactly sure how, but the dominoes would fall.

  Yep, a lot could happen, and look at all the good he’d do. Get even for all the sickening food and slop and other abuse he and his fellow cons put up with over the years, for one. He hadn’t felt this righteous since he buried the ax in his old man’s head. All he needed now was for Jericho Lewis and that fucking priest not to steal his thunder. But Jericho had no proof. Eddie had the proof, and he’d sell to the highest bidder. Killing Mikey Osborne was the smartest thing Eddie ever did.

  Driving around the Temple campus and Radiant Hope looking for the priest got old, and Roller Bitch at Dirty Frank’s wasn’t much help, although Eddie could have just knocked on her door on Day Street and found the priest there. The problem with that tack was that Eddie once overheard Roller Bitch tell Thunder Woman at Dirty Frank’s that the best way for a woman to deal with harassment by an ex con was his parole officer, not cops. There was little to lose with another check at Radiant Hope.

  “Bill Conlon moved his stuff out about ten days ago,” Albert said. “Didn’t leave a forwarding address near as I could tell.”

  “Could you double check with that woman who runs the place, what’s her name?”

  “Henrietta?”

  “Yeah, Henrietta. Is she in now?”

  “Nope. Left early. She’s been seeing that guy from Graterford, the really big guy, I forget his name.”

  “Does he take little steps when he walks, I mean for such a big guy?”

  “Yeah. You know him?” Albert asked.

  “Ever seen him pick her up?”

  “Yep.”

  “What kind of car does he drive?” Eddie asked.

  “A gray Expedition, probably the only thing he fits in.”

  “What days does he come by?”

  “That’s easy, Eddie. Every week-end. He picks Henrietta up Fridays, about 3:00 p.m.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Louise’s unclothed body took Bill’s breath away. Her taut waist, solid butt and quads reflected a body honed by years of athletics, yet her movements liquid as a cat’s.

  “What is it, Bill? Is it me?”

  “Oh, no! I want you so badly I ache. I don’t know, maybe this whole Jericho thing is on my mind.”

 
Before being sent up, he had never had a problem with Pamela. Maybe the drugs helped, or maybe his rampaging libido, by then unfettered by religious constriction, screamed for expression. But with Louise, it was often a struggle and the more he tried the more of a struggle it became. Could it be the liquor? It affected the body differently than drugs. Maybe his stretch had something to do with it. It would pass.

  As they lay side by side holding hands in the dark, Louise finally said, “So this boy who got killed in prison…

  “…he was only twenty-four,” Bill said.

  “This Mikey…”

  “Mikey Osborne.”

  “Was he like your brother?”

  “He was nothing like Dennis. Dennis was talented, ambitious, wanted to study engineering at the Naval Academy, wanted to fly jet planes. Mikey Osborne was a vulnerable street kid who wanted to be a tough guy, but unlike real tough guys felt a lot of fear. Pain too. It got him into trouble. I helped him close that gap, between who he wanted to be and who he was.”

  “Why did he get killed?”

  Bill hesitated. He didn’t want the why to matter. He wanted a clear path to Mikey’s killer, unsullied by whys, ifs, maybes, and but-fors. When Dennis had died those questions had collided like a rack of billiard balls busted in a high-stakes game, but faded as he befriended and protected Mikey. When Mikey got killed, thoughts of vengeance became the antidote that quelled the noise in Bill’s head. And it was what Dennis would want.

  “Who knows in prison? Guys go off for no reason.”

  “I thought he had something to do with that food thing.”

  “He told Jericho he knew something about it, said he’d be more specific if he could get a hearing. He was looking for a deal.”

  “I can’t believe that creep Deadly Eddie did it and comes into my bar.”

  “There’s no proof he did it. Mikey was surrounded by a bunch of guys making a ruckus. That’s how they do it behind the walls. But he did it okay.”

  “Promise me you’ll stay away from him.”

  “I will,” Bill lied.

  She was more right than she knew. Bill’s impotence was not without foundation. Mikey Osborne was no Dennis Conlon, though they both died young and at the same age. Bill’s friendship with Mikey and helping him with his problems brought the same warm feeling as when Bill and Dennis were boys and Dennis crawled into his big brother’s bed and kissed him on the cheek and thanked him for talking their parents into letting him have flying lessons, even though Dennis was only twelve. That Bill got so much joy from doing it helped reveal his vocation to be a priest, and not long after, he joined the Jesuit monastery. But there were gaps in his commitment. He was unable to admit to his struggle with the Spiritual Exercises or see that struggle itself was holy. The sin of pride caused him to deviate from the lives of Augustine and Ignatius Loyola who went from the ways of the flesh to holiness, whereas Bill tacked in the opposite direction.

  It first emerged at nine when he would skip Sunday Mass with his fourth-grade class and instead hung out at Silverman’s Drugstore where he drooled over True Detective Magazine covers of busty women with inviting cleavage and skirts slit to mid-thigh. He didn’t know what the attraction was, only that the mysterious pull was magnetic and felt so good. His fellow seminarians had told him it would go away. “It’s like quitting cigarettes,” they said. “After a year you won’t even notice.” But Bill did notice, and unlike his brothers in Jesus, he was not able to divest millennia of evolution, and by the time Pam Rogers came into his life, it had become an obsession that no amount of prayer could overcome. He wasn’t after sexual thrills, though that was a part of it. It was more what sex accomplished. It satisfied a yearning for intimate love and union with a woman, a completion of the self that connection to God didn’t fulfill.

  “So, Easy Louisey, has Bill Conlon been around lately, you know, the priest?” Eddie asked.

  “I don’t talk about who comes in or not, you know that Eddie.”

  “Well, gimme a pencil and piece of paper. I’ll write him a note. You can deliver a note, can’t you?”

  “If I remember.”

  Eddie’s note was simple: “We have a friend in common. He comes aroun’ the halfway house. Meet me here next wensdy at 10 at nite and talk about it. Eddie.” He folded it into a square and gave it to Louise. “Put this in your bra, honey. Don’t forget. It’s important.”

  Louise jammed it through a spindle that collected delivery invoices next to the register. “I’ll try and remember,” she said, “but if I forget, you’re on your own.”

  Eddie smiled confidently. The priest would have the note by that night, and Eddie would soon have Jericho’s oversized head in a hatbox.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It took Jericho a week but he reported back to Bill that he smooth-talked Crystal and it seemed to be working.

  “How about her money demands?” Bill asked.

  “I told her not to worry about my suspension, and I would do whatever to take care of her and the kids. We didn’t talk specifics, but I think it calmed her. And I didn’t say anything about Fernando.”

  “Did you mention that she could help on the other thing?”

  “I hinted, but I didn’t press. Not yet. Didn’t want to hit her with too much at once.”

  “Wise,” Bill said, though he felt anxious for his friend. Surely, Jericho knew that he might face criminal culpability. Making him scapegoat would squeegee away hanky-panky or negligence by the DOC. Jericho’s balls were in a vise and the sooner he got Crystal snooping around ServMark, the better.

  But then Jericho dropped a bomb.

  “I’ve been seeing Henrietta from Radiant Hope.”

  Bill’s strategies quickly unraveled.

  “For how long? During your marriage? Why did you wait until now to tell me?”

  He had suppressed doubts about Jericho’s stories of his role in selecting ServMark. He accepted that Jericho was being set up, yet now he wondered what else Jericho failed to share.

  Once more, Bill decided to sit on it, and again gave the benefit of doubt to his friend. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe his ability to trust was too eroded to withstand the winds of ambiguity and uncertainty. Maybe Jericho needed Henrietta’s companionship. After all, who better than Bill understood need?

  “I never realized that you and Henrietta had a thing going on,” Bill said.

  “It’s hard to explain. I never cheated on Crystal. But I could always talk shop with Henrietta. She understood incarceration and prisoners and the bureaucratic bullshit. She bent rules for me, like when she placed you in her facility just because I asked. Yeah, we had drinks together a few times, and you can’t deny, she’s pretty hot.”

  “But you brought more of yourself to Henrietta than you did to Crystal. Then you wonder how Fernando happened.”

  “Wrong. Crystal didn’t care about me, or my work, or what I put into it, or what it took out of me.”

  “Are you happy now?”

  “For my love life? Yeah. And Crystal signaled she’d be patient, maybe even help. It bodes well for a divorce settlement I could live with, once I get this suspension lifted.”

  So the outcome appeared to be good. No need to slice and dice Jericho’s marital integrity, especially since the once-sharp edges of Bill’s own integrity had been sanded by fleshly needs.

  “Did Crystal hint that she could find anything out?” Bill asked.

  “Maybe, as long as it didn’t jeopardize her job. She’s not a risk-taker.”

  “Yeah, and you’ll be asking her to feed information to a whistle-blower.”

  “They’re a huge conglomerate. The correctional-institution piece must be small potatoes. I just don’t want to resign and give up my pension. And I like corrections work. Besides, this ServMark thing is just wrong. And don’t forget Mikey.”

  Eddie was at the noisy bar with his back to the door, schmoozing a large-framed fawning girl wearing red shorts over white tights and a blue bustier with little red stars
beneath white THUNDER WOMAN lettering across the chest. Her nails were painted blue with white glitter. She was sipping a foamy chartreuse drink through a little straw, its stab at daintiness incongruous for a girl with such big shoulders, neck, and hands.

  “Am I interrupting something?” Bill asked as he slid out a stool next to Eddie.

  “Oh, no,” Thunder Woman said, “Eddie here was just explaining his tattoos. I love body art.”

  “I love your costume,” Bill said. “The nail polish to match the bustier is a nice touch. Where did you get the name?”

  “Thunder Woman? I come on strong. Besides, my name is Thor, Melissa Thor. And this?” she said gesturing to her costume, “Yeah, it makes me feel empowered, you know?”

  “Then I can call you Mel?”

  “No, you can call me Thunder Woman.”

  “Then Thunder Woman it is,” Bill said.

  “So this here one,” Eddie said, pointing to a cobweb tattoo on his neck, “means a long stretch, like I was in such a long time a cobweb grew.”

  “Oh, wow,” Thunder Woman said. “And what are those little teardrops by the corner of your eye?”

  “Those there?” he said, pointing to them. “Well, those are special.” He turned to Bill. “Should I say?” Bill nodded, sure, she’ll wet her pants.

  “Well, these here teardrops mean I killed someone, but believe you me, it was self-defense. Look, I need to talk with my friend here. Can you excuse us? But don’t go nowheres, I want your number.”

  She reached into her shoulder bag with Thunder Woman stitched onto it and pulled out a pen and paper, scrawled something, and gave it to Eddie. Eddie kissed it, gave her a chuck under her square, cleft chin, and said, “I’ll be callin’ ya.”

  “I hope so, Eddie. You tell such great stories.” She gave Bill a cursory wave and joined a friend sitting at a table.