Indefensible (12 page)

I remember Cassandra's hair, long and loose. And the funky way she dressed. Tina, by contrast, with her atrocious hairstyle, is wearing her standard gray lawyer uniform.

“Have you read Jane Austen?” I ask.

“Is that by one of the Brontës?”

“What about
Lord of the Rings
?”

“Saw the movies. I don't read much fiction.”

We ride on in silence.

At the prison, I wait for Fuseli in a conference room of the administrative complex. He is brought to me in manacles, hands cuffed together and locked to a chain around his waist. His ankles are chained, too, with a few inches of slack for taking tiny steps. The guard parks him in front of me and looks up with questioning eyebrows. I nod. The guard unlocks his hands but leaves his ankles shackled.

“Thanks, Officer, we'll be fine.” I skimmed Fuseli's prison file before they brought him in. He's not dangerous. The guard goes out but leaves the door ajar.

Fuseli's name isn't Fuseli. It's Leroy Burton. He is a tall, dissipated white man of forty-seven, but if I were going by appearance, I'd put him past sixty. He is thin and creased, with wispy hair. He sits in one
of the padded conference chairs and wiggles around. “Man, don't that feel good,” he says in a raspy voice from down in his throat.

The guard comes in and says, “Mr. Norton wants me to ask what you'd like. Coffee, fruit juice, soda?”

“Orange,” I say, and I look at Fuseli. It takes him a second, but he finally figures it out, and his eyes go wide in astonishment. “Sprite,” he says.

The guard comes back with Sprite and orange soda and two glasses with ice. I had meant orange juice, but I don't say anything. Fuseli pours his soda and takes a sip. “Been a while,” he whispers.

“You don't get Sprite?”

“We get Sprite. We don't get waited on.”

“Enjoy,” I say, and I make a gesture of clinking glasses without really clinking. Fuseli's motions are slow and deliberate, as though he's drugged up, but his whole shtick is that he hates the junk and the gang culture that goes with it. No, Fuseli has two problems that have nothing to do with drugs—first and most obvious, his thirty years in prison with no chance of getting out. I've seen it before. In some guys, the bleakness of prison inhabits the mind like a tumor. It slows everything down.

His other problem is more literal. He has multiple sclerosis.

“So you're the tat man of Ellisville Max?” I say.

He bobs his head.

I say, “I got a question about a tattoo we found on a dead guy. Nobody seems to know anything. I thought you might.”

“And you ain't got people to drive out here for you? Or just fax a picture and have the warden ask me?” This is asked not unkindly, and it tells me things about him. He's smart and curious. I wonder what he'd look like if he didn't look so institutional.

“I have an interest,” I say.

“You got a photo?”

“Don't need one.” I quickly draw the four-part square on a scrap and slide it to him. I don't mention the ME's observation that it was touched up.

“A window?” he says.

“Looks like it.”

“Why should it mean anything at all?”

“Maybe it doesn't.”

“The dead guy, what's the deal? What do you know?”

“No need to get into all that, Mr. Burton. I'm just curious about the tattoo.”

He shrugs.

I wait.

He waits.

I say, “Well, I won't waste your time.” I pick up my briefcase.

“That's a good one.” He laughs. “Not wasting my time. I like that one. You're a funny man.”

“Mr. Burton, do you know anything about the design?”

“I haven't decided yet.”

I nod. The last thing I want is to get jacked around by an inmate making himself feel like a big dick by screwing with me. Just another Scud Illman. “Tina told me you were helpful,” I say. “She must have gotten you on a good day. I'll tell her and Mr. Norton you're not.”

“So send Tina in. I'll talk to Tina.”

“But not me?”

“Suppose I know about this tat,” he says. “I tell you about it, and you go out of here, use my info, and what do I get? You ain't telling me why the big deal: why a muckety-muck like you drives out here. You ain't telling me who the stiff is or who killed him. Not even a good story. No usable info, no extra privileges. I don't get fifteen minutes looking at Tina's pretty face while she laughs and tells me about some case she's working on, and I don't even get another goddamn soda. You want to tattle to the warden, tattle away. Warden will ask me what gives, and I'll tell him you don't want to pay, and that'll be that. But I can see you're greener than eggs 'n' ham, and you probably don't mean no disrespect, so let's you and me start again.”

All this was said in his whispery, nonthreatening voice, but I still considered just walking out. I might have if he hadn't said the
part about Tina. It was complicated. The part about listening to her laugh, that was key. He'd shown me a weakness: He'd confessed his sorrows.

“Mr. Burton,” I say . . .

“I prefer Fuseli.”

I nod. “Fuseli. A kid was selling dope to pay his college tuition. The Bureau determined that his source was a criminal group whose crimes stretch into many other antisocial practices.” I lay out a sketchy version of the landscape, leaving out my personal involvement. When I get to Seth Coen's tattoo, I say, “The medical examiner noticed that it was recently altered. It was an amateurish job. We're trying to fill in what we can. Can you help?”

“Why come out here yourself ? Why not send somebody?”

We stare at each other across a few feet of conference table. It's a stuffy, windowless room but much nicer than anything Fuseli sees day to day—the Formica conference table has hardwood trim, the padded chairs swivel, and the walls are Sheetrock instead of cinder block.

“Guard,” I yell. The door swings open, and two of them come in, ready for action. I hold up a hand. “Could we get another couple of sodas here?” Then I turn back to Burton/Fuseli. “You've received my down payment. From here on, it's value for value.”

He considers this. “Tell you what,” he says, “you write down six last names on that piece of paper. Five of 'em are guys you know of in prison. The sixth is the dead guy with the tat. Stick him in anywhere. First, last, middle. Don't tell me.”

I do as he says, shielding the list with my hand until it's done. Six names, the second is Coen. I slide it over to him. He glances at it. “Coen,” he says.

“Impressive. What's the secret?”

He smiles, and immediately, I start to like him. It is an honest and open smile. “Pay up,” he says.

I think of arguing, but I don't. I tell him about how Coen was found in a freezer all chopped up. That seems to satisfy him. He taps the drawing of the tattoo. “You think this is significant?”

“I don't think anything.”

He nods. He turns the paper over to the clean side and draws a swastika right in the middle with heavy black lines, then he covers it with his palm and traces the outline of his whole hand and slides the drawing toward me. I let it sit on the table between us, reluctant to touch it. I feel something in the back of my throat. I can't think of anything to say.

Fuseli speaks. “They used to have an Aryan problem down at Alder Creek. Vicious bastards. Not enough of them to rule the blacks, but every Jew-boy they get, they branded him. We had one in here once, a nice kid who'd finished his state time and come over here to do his federal. Drug shit. Ain't it always. I worked on some designs with him, how to turn it into something else. Something nice. Finally, we just closed the sides and made a window. I guess that's what the others did once they got away from the Aryans. Simple. Closed up the sides. How long was Coen outside?”

“A couple of years.”

“There you go. He got his release, and first thing he does is gets his tat altered. Maybe even does it hisself. I can tell you it was an amateur job, because if it was done right, you wouldn't know it was changed.”

Fuseli reached over with the pen and quickly blacked in the four half-sides, turning the swastika into a window. But it was there, the evil disguised as something innocuous—or not just innocuous but spiritual. A window, timeless metaphor for insight and wisdom. It's almost worse in hiding than in the open. Things come into my mind, awful things. Zander emerging from the dirt, Cassandra dead in her home, the hand in the freezer. And my son, Toby. When Toby was alive, there was a kindly and ancient family doctor in the town by the lake. Dr. Wallis. He talked of  Toby's illness as a hidden defect, a lurking evil. That's what I see in the altered tattoo, a lurking evil. I'd rather just see the swastika.

“You Jewish?” Fuseli asks. “Looks like you got the wind knocked out.”

This embarrasses me. And it impresses me because his voice is
earnest and sympathetic. Here he is doing life in prison, and yet he views my momentary show of emotion as an opportunity not to gain leverage or to smirk but to make a human connection—to participate for a second in normal human sadness as we experience it on the outside. I like this guy.

“Just thinking. What about you? You sound compassionate.”

“I heard of one guy over there at Alder Creek,” he says. “I mean, I never seen him, but this is what I hear: They branded him just like your Mr. Coen. One day he takes a knife and peels the skin right off the back of his hand. You don't need to be Jewish or free to feel for shit like that. It's fucked up. Like this disease I got—”

“MS.”

“Done your homework, I see. Well, if I could take a knife and peel if off, I would. Yes, sir.”

“Are the Aryans still active over there?”

“You tell me. You're outside, I'm stuck here. But I hear they got broke up. Prison moved a couple. Blacks killed one. Maybe you remember.”

We're silent a few seconds, then I say, “You ever hear of a guy named Scud? Scud Illman?”

He shakes his head. “Connected to Coen?”

“Yeah. Small players in a big game. You know anybody inside pulling strings on the outside?”

“Everybody. What strings?”

“Anything. Drugs, mostly.”

“Young guys talk to me—guys having trouble adjusting. But see, I'm not in on anything. I sell my tats, I keep to myself.”

“But—”

“Ask Tipper, he knows everyone.”

“Who's Tipper?”

“Bookie. He was a bookie on the outside, big-time. Bookie on the inside now, small-time. The prison don't care, it's just small change and cigs and favors. Gives us something to do. Makes the ball games on TV more interesting. But Tipper's the one, 'cause everybody wants action, and he's who's got it. So he deals with everyone.
Equal opportunity, you know? Maybe he don't know
all
the secrets, but he sure as hell knows who knows.”

“Will he talk to me?”

“He's coming up for parole.”

“Tipper. What's his real name?”

Fuseli laughs. “Eggs 'n' ham,” he says, “some things you got to find out yourself. Now pay up: How come you, the man, is driving out here yourself to ask me about a tat that probably don't mean shit anyway?”

“Haven't you figured it out?”

“You play 'em pretty close.”

We stare at each other. I notice his left hand shaking, which I suppose is from the MS. He sees me watching it. “Lucky I'm right-handed,” he says. “I can still do tattoos. For now, at least. That's one thing I got.”

“Here's your answer, Mr. Burton: Coen and his associate Scud Illman may have killed someone I know. Two someones. It has become personal.”

“ 'Zat all you're saying?”

“For now.”

“You still owe,” he says without anger.

“I'll come back. I'll tell you more when I can,” I say. “Promise.”

He nods, and we sit silently. His tremor seems to come and go. I notice one of his eyes doesn't always follow the other.

“How come they call you Fuseli?”

Slowly, he pulls up his shirt and reveals an elaborate tattoo across his chest. It's a copy of a painting I recognize: A woman lies stretched on a bed, head dangling backward in death or deathly sleep. Sitting on her chest, as if he owns her, is a demon. In the foreground are prison bars. “
Nightmare
by Fuseli,” he says. “I saw it in a book in the library. Copied it.”

“The bars are your addition?”

He nods.

It's an impressive bit of body art, especially seeing as he had to do it on himself in a mirror. It tells me more about him, too, because it
is an image of horror and sorrow, not of anger: a quietly existential statement about life in prison.

“Talented guy. Smart, too,” I say. “How'd you get involved in a double murder?”

He's studying his chest and seems unperturbed by the question. “Never killed anyone,” he whispers.

And strangely—because here I am in this world of murderers and thieves and rapists and con men and liars—strangely I believe him.

I wait.

“Read my file,” he says.

T
ina has a trial tomorrow. I see tension in her face, teeth clenched, eyebrows in a scowl. The car stereo plays harpsichord music as we drive past silver maples whose leaves are already tinged with red. There are just a few settlements between Ellisville and the city, places where dilapidated homes have gathered around a stop sign and a bar. It's all low-value land, too marshy to farm and too far from the city to have residential value.

When we near the outer suburbs, Tina exits where I show her, and we make our way along back roads. I guide her to Flora's two-story shingled Cape. It's a wooded lot on a small pond. There's no lawn, just a carpet of pine needles.