Dina Santorelli (16 page)

"Wow,
that was fast," Jamie said, picking Charlotte up.

"Does
she need a diaper?" Joey asked.

"I
thought she did, but no."

Leo
poked his head in. "Everything all right in here?" he asked.

"Yep,"
Joey said, proudly placing the bowl of grapes on the dining room table.

"Okay,
just checking." Leo winked at Jamie and turned on his heel, leaving the glass
door open.

Jamie
placed Charlotte on the floor, watching as she ambled over to the coffee table,
plucked one of the cut grapes out of the bowl, and shoved it into her mouth
with her dirty hands.

"
Ewww
,
gross." Jamie grabbed a paper towel from the kitchen and wet it under cold
water. When she returned, Joey was staring at the computer screen. Her panic
was instant.

"What's
the matter?" she said.

"I
don't know, something weird," Joey said. The glass doors opened and in walked
Leo, Tony, and Benny. "The computer screen froze."

Shit!
Jamie prayed she was able to log out
of Facebook successfully before the computer crashed.

"What
the fuck you doin', Joey?" Tony asked, taking one of the cut grapes and
plopping it into his mouth, much to Charlotte's dismay. She covered the bowl
with her hands.

"It
crashed," Joey said. "I think we're going to have to restart."

"You
better not have broken that thing, Tony," Benny said. "Bailino will fuckin'
freak."

"I
didn't break it," Tony said and then looked at Joey. "Did I?"

"I
don't think so." Within a few minutes, Joey had the machine up and running and
all new windows appeared, much to Jamie's relief.

"You'll
have to log yourself back into Facebook, Ton," Joey said.

"Shit,
I was playing Texas Hold 'em. I better not have fuckin' lost my chips."

"You
lost more than that a long time ago," Leo said, sitting on the couch and
cracking open a beer. He looked at Jamie and smiled. "So, Dimples, what should
we do now?"

The general visitors' room at
the Stanton correctional facility looked like a school lunchroom, with its long
bench tables; windows inlaid with wire mesh; dirty, cracked tiled floors; and
creaky fans lining the ceiling overhead, blowing back down little more than an
odor of sweat. Gino's memory of that room, the memory of his mother's, and
later his wife's, touch on his arm, of their earnest belief that Gino was, at
heart,
a good boy
, faded as he entered the death-row visitors room, a
cramped four-by-four space with nothing but a bench situated below a narrow safety-glass
window. With hands and feet shackled, Gino shuffled over and took his appointed
seat.

On
the other side of the glass, Don Bailino held up a piece of paper. On it was a
drawing, colored with crayons, of a stick-figured man and a stick-figured
little girl standing outside a house in a green field. In purple crayon,
scrawled at the top was, "Me and Pop-Pop."

"From
Gina," Bailino said with a smile. His voice was tinny coming from the small
speaker in the corner of the room.

Gino
nodded. He had never seen his great-granddaughter, who had been named for him.
And, very probably, never would.

"You
all right?" Bailino asked.

Gino
nodded again, his eyes on the drawing on Bailino's lap.

"All
is all right here too," Bailino said. It wasn't worth bothering Gino with the
details of the second abduction and the fact that three-and-a-half grown men
couldn't take care of one infant. He looked at the security camera overhead.

Gino
reached into his pocket to take out a cigarette he didn't have. He fumbled with
the flap of his shirt fabric as he too eyed the camera focused on him.

"Fuckin'
Potsie, what a goof," Gino said, the steely look returning to his eyes.

Bailino
nodded.

Years
ago, when he had first come to Stanton and was a relatively young man, Gino had
been told by the medical staff that he was entering early-stage dementia
because he was prone to sudden outbursts of gibberish. Although his brain scans
were clean, the episodes appeared to become more frequent over the years, and
soon Gino developed the reputation of a poor old man who was progressively
losing his marbles. The prison psychologist had other ideas, of course. Because
Gino's outbursts occurred particularly with visiting family and friends, she
wrote in his report:
"Gino is unable to deal with the horrific nature of his
crimes and face his loved ones. Therefore, his conscious self-subverts, or
hides, which most commonly manifests as disorganized speech or thinking with
significant social dysfunction."
The psychologist requested a meeting with
Bailino in 2004 to explain her diagnosis and ask that Bailino remain calm
during these periods of disorientation. Bailino said he would do all that he
could to make Gino comfortable.

Bailino
smiled at the memory, at the way the psychologist, a kid barely out of school,
spoke to him in that rehearsed maternal, calm voice that always got on his
nerves. He even let her put her hand on his as a show of sympathy. As he
watched her walk out the door in her tight navy-blue suit, he couldn't help but
smile. With all her years of training and those expensive little pieces of
paper hanging on her office wall, Ms. Psychologist failed to deduce that Gino
Cataldi's mind was far from disorganized. Rather, it was icy sharp, and his
ramblings a cover for a lifetime of covert operations taking place right under
the nose of New York's finest.

As a
young marine in World War II, Gino served in the Pacific Theater with a group
of young Navajo men who had been enlisted to help the United States strengthen military communications, since Japanese intelligence experts were
breaking every code that US forces devised. These young men, many of them boys
who had never been off their reservations before, would become known as the
Navajo Code Talkers and create the only unbroken code in modern military
history, saving thousands of lives and helping to end the Second World War. For
many years after the war, their code was considered a military secret too
important to divulge; however, it finally was declassified in 1968, about the
same time Gino had been pinched for his first homicide.

Using
the basic tenets of the Navajo code, Gino devised a way to communicate
clandestinely with family and colleagues, while living in the fishbowl that was
the New York State Department of Correctional Services. The secret language had
baffled law enforcement, who had begun to suspect that Gino was using code to
manage his illegal operations, particularly after several known enemies of his
had turned up in the Hudson in 1975, but they could never be sure. And because
Gino had gotten into the habit of talking nonsense in areas other than the
visitors' room—in his cell, in the weight room, in the yard—he managed to throw
police detectives off his scent.

As
with the Navajo code, Gino's language wasn't complicated at all, but actually
very simple: Gino used old neighborhood slang, or terms that were derivatives
of neighborhood slang, for related words. For example, the word for
killed
was
upstate
, or any variation of the word, such as
up
or
state
,
since the old gang, back in the Brooklyn days of Gino and Bailino's father,
referred to anything north of the New York City border as
The Kills
—Fishkill,
Peekskill, etc.
Cops
were
blue
, and
mothers
were
white
.
Ex-cons were
striped
. Words that didn't have an associated term, such as
people's names, were spelled out or abbreviated using slang words that
represented letters of the alphabet, excluding curse words, articles, and
pronouns. Therefore, if Gino said, "Fuckin' Potsie, what a goof," he was asking
about Phillip Grand—
Potsie
and
goof
represented the initials in
play,
P. G
. After many years, Gino and Bailino had developed a succinct
and thorough shorthand.

"And
the blue?" Gino asked.

Bailino
shook his head no.

Gino
nodded. "It's time."

Bailino
nodded.

There
was an awkward pause. Business was done. Under normal circumstances, these
kinds of visitations were full of emotional outbursts, the kissing lips of
family members or lovers separated by wire-mesh glass, but the two men simply
sat and stared. Gino glanced at the guard behind him and returned his gaze to
Bailino. "You're looking healthy today."

Bailino
lifted his shoulders in uncertainty. "Am I?" he asked, looking down at his
clothing and then at Gino's. At Stanton, death-row inmates were distinguished
from other inmates by their orange T-shirts; their pants were the same
blue-colored trousers.

"No,
it's in your face," Gino said. "Something's different."

Bailino
folded the drawing and put it in his pocket. "ToniAnne wants to come."

"No!"
Gino said. "I told you this last week."

"I
know, but she keeps asking. I told her that I would mention it again."

"I
can't... see her now, Donny," Gino said, his eyes focusing on a speck of dirt
on the corner of the glass window. He reached out and scraped it with his
fingernail. "How's Joey?"

"Good,
good. Picked him up in the City yesterday. Enjoying his spring break. You know
he got accepted to MIT?" Bailino said with pride.

"No
shit. Fucking $60,000 a year. And for what?"

"It's
a good school, Jeen. The kid's bright."

"So
are you, and you didn't go to some fancy-pants school. Kid should be going into
the military. Knock some sense into him."

Bailino
hesitated. This was a sore subject for him. Although he was the first to admit
that most college-educated adults were no smarter or more successful than
anyone else, especially nowadays when a witty Twitter profile could land
someone a book deal, he had pressured ToniAnne to have Joey apply to MIT and a
few Ivy-League schools. The kid had an IQ of 150 and needed to be around people
like himself, not the slobs he was hanging around with now.

"I
respectfully disagree," Bailino said with a laugh.

"We're
so polite today." Gino gave a slight chuckle himself. "Did you get the Earl?"

Bailino
shook his head. Gino had slipped back into code and was asking about the name
of the executioner. The state of New York used  private citizens as its
executioners, paying them a paltry $150 per execution, but their identities
remained anonymous. Last week, Don had tried to find out who the state was
using, but couldn't. He wasn't sure how much time it would buy them—if any—to
knock off the guy, or girl, the morning of the execution. Still, it had never
been tried and was an interesting alternate plan. He had to give Gino credit.

Gino
tilted his head so that his left ear nearly met his left shoulder, and Bailino
thought he could hear Gino's neck crack through the thick glass.

"Do
you have everything you need?" Bailino said.

"Yes,
everything I could ever want."

"Good.
Then I need something done for me."

"Really?
I'll have to check my calendar and get back to you."

"You
know what I mean," Bailino said. He held up three fingers.

"Yeah,
I know," Gino said, knowing Bailino was referring to the $3 million he was
promised for organizing this little scheme.

"And,
of course, there's the other thing."

Curiosity
getting the better of him, the prison guard stationed behind Gino leaned in,
waiting for the words, but they never came. They didn't have to. For Gino, the
message was loud and clear. Don Bailino wanted what he'd always wanted. Out.

Although it made sense that
he would be shaken up, given the events of the past twenty-four hours, Phillip
Grand felt the need to appear calm before the mansion's front security guard,
as if looking nervous would give away his meeting with Bailino.

"Hey,
Barry," he said as nonchalantly as he could, as the gates opened for his
limousine.

"You
okay, Governor?" Barry asked.

"Yes,
yes, fine, thank you." Phillip forced a smile, and as Henry pulled the car up
the driveway, the governor eyed his security guard, who was eating a large
sandwich inside the small gate booth, with suspicion. Arthur had been their day
security guard for Phillip's first term, but had expressed interest in moving
to the nightshift when the previous night guard decided to retire. Apparently,
Arthur's wife had had enough of domesticity and decided to go back to work
after their youngest went into full-day kindergarten, and Arthur felt strongly,
as Phillip did, that at least one parent should be home when the kids stepped
off the school bus. Phillip was happy to oblige the request, and Barry was
hired not long afterward to take Arthur's shift. In the short time Barry had
been with the Grands, he had been reprimanded twice for drinking on the job and
once for sleeping. Phillip had wanted to let him go three months ago, but
Katherine insisted he stay, not because she had any real affinity for him, but
because she was carefully watching the number of minorities they had on staff
in order to, as she said, "keep the NAACP and their ilk" off their backs. Barry
satisfied two minority categories: He was black and he was gay. Plus, he walked
with a slight limp that didn't affect his job performance, but was enough to
classify him as disabled in the eyes of the government. In terms of appeasing
the AFL-CIO, Barry was the holy grail.

Phillip's
cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. It was his mother.
Crap.

"Hi,
Mother."

"Phillip,
was I supposed to meet you at the diner today? Didn't you remember that I was
taking a trip with the girls this week to Buffalo to see Aunt June?"