The Disposable Man (17 page)

“What’s there been so far?”

“The press has been leaning on him, questioning the integrity of the office. A couple of the low-rent lawyers around town went on record this morning about the same thing. You haven’t even been arraigned yet, and I’m off to Siberia. I didn’t think Derby would be such a politician.”

I remained silent, thinking of her change of tone from twenty-four hours earlier. The pendulum would swing back into balance, as always, but that realization did little to lessen the sting of what I was hearing.

“You should’ve seen the new guy. Wolf? You haven’t even met him. One week in juvie, and now he’s handling some of my cases. Preppie bastard—couldn’t keep the smirk off his face.”

She pressed her hand against her cheek and closed her eyes. I could hear the stifled tears in her voice. “I know you’re the victim here, Joe. I know all you’ve worked for is being threatened, and that I should be supportive and loving and all that shit. But to me, it’s like it’s all happening again—some big goddamn elephant coming out of the sky and landing on me like I was a bug, squashing you, me, everything we’ve got. It’s just too close for comfort. Not enough time’s gone by.”

She turned to face me, and in the dim light I could see the wetness on her cheeks. “It’s all coming back. The fears, the anger, the jitters. A photographer caught me in the street when I was leaving the courthouse this afternoon. I wasn’t expecting it. He jumped out, holding that damn camera, and it all came back—that sense of not being in control, of being a victim.”

She wiped away her tears, her eyes blazing. “It made me angry at you, Joe. Angry that you’re a victim, angry that you’ve made me one again, angry that you somehow pulled me into this world of dopers and child abusers and careless, stupid people who kill because they don’t have the brains to do otherwise. I used to sell houses to rich people, for God’s sake. The hypocrite ex-hippie who kidded herself by joining all the right tree-hugger boards. It was working so well I could’ve faked it forever.”

She pounded the bed several times with her fist, punctuating the next sentence one word at a time. “I’m tired of being raped.”

She rolled over, turning her back to me. I sat motionless for a long time, sorting through what she’d said, pretending to be calm when all my insides were in turmoil. My trust in the pendulum had been reduced by the simple fact that, sooner or later, people ended up saying things they couldn’t take back.

I knew what she was going through. The rape was fresh enough in both our memories. All her friends had been amazed at her ability to turn a catastrophe into a watershed, to use a trauma that destroyed many as a stimulus to return to law school, take the bar, and become a prosecutor. As friends, they’d taken comfort—even satisfaction—from her strength, using it for their own convenience to leave an unpleasant episode in their wakes. But I still shared her bed, and woke up to her nightmares, and lived in a house with as many locks and lights as a prison. I saw the subtle changes in how she walked down a street, how she stood in a crowded room, how she greeted previously unknown men with an inner wariness.

I knew the recovery for which she’d been justly applauded was still a fragile work in progress. What was destroying me now was that, while I’d been of help to her in the first event, I’d now become the cause of the worst setback I’d seen her suffer.

I stayed all night in the rocker, watching Gail toss and turn in fitful sleep, hoping against all odds that the few chips I had left in the game would turn our future around.

DANNY FREER AND BILL NATHAN CAME FOR ME
the next day. With very short haircuts, broad shoulders, and stiff manners, they were models of the law enforcement stereotype—from the military-style mustache on Freer’s upper lip to the superfluous sunglasses Nathan removed as I let them in.

“You two dig a hole deep enough to bury me yet?” I asked with a smile, extending my hand in greeting.

But gallows humor was obviously not on the agenda. Danny—older, more experienced, and visibly embarrassed—cleared his throat. “Joseph Gunther, you’re under arrest for grand larceny and possession of stolen property. You’re going to have to come with us.” He began to recite the all-too-familiar Miranda warning.

I hesitated, watching his eyes, trying not to show the effect of his words. While I’d been braced for an encounter with these two, I’d always assumed I’d be dealt the same courtesies we usually offered our low-threat customers—either arranging a meeting at a lawyer’s office, or simply issuing a citation to appear in court.

I was baffled and irritated by what I saw as theatrical nonsense.

Freer concluded by asking me if I understood my rights. I ignored him. “Why all the razzle-dazzle, Dan? You don’t have a warrant, do you?”

Nathan, his frustration boiling over into a young man’s need for action, roughly spun me around. “Hands against the wall. Spread your feet.”

Danny growled, “Cut it out, Bill.”

A surge of noise outside made me look over my shoulder, out through the open door into the driveway. Climbing out of a series of cars and vans were reporters, cameramen, and technicians from several newspapers and radio and TV stations.

I dropped my hands from the wall, ignoring Nathan, and turned to face them both, all explanations suddenly clear. “Very impressive. Coffin’s dog-and-pony show. No wonder you look like you want to be somewhere else. Where’re we headed with this?”

“Woodstock,” Danny said gruffly, looking at the growing crowd by the door.

Skipping the body search, Nathan grabbed one of my hands, slapped his cuffs on the wrist, and reached for the other. “You carrying?”

I indicated with my head. “Holster—right hip. That’s it.” He finished with the handcuffs and then removed my pistol, slipping it into his jacket pocket. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

I tried to catch Freer’s eye. “Danny, you take me up there and call for bail, it’s not going to stick. The judge knows me. You’ll look like jerks.”

Freer pursed his lips silently. Nathan, his face flushed, grabbed my elbow and pushed me toward the door. “Well, I don’t know you from shit, and what I’ve been learning isn’t too impressive, so why don’t you just do the drill and shut up?”

I shook off his hand violently, hearing the first snap of a camera shutter from outside. Pure fury rose in my throat, choking my breathing. I stared at them both for a long couple of seconds, seriously considering making this a media event worthy of the name. The shame in Danny’s eyes won me over, however, along with the absolute knowledge that all three of us right now had been reduced to simple puppets.

We walked the small gauntlet of bright lights, questions, and proffered microphones to the unmarked car they’d parked facing the street and then slowly drove away, swathed at last in cold silence.

· · ·

They drove me straight to the state correctional facility in Woodstock, over an hour’s drive north of Brattleboro. Normally, such a trip was only made after an arrest warrant had been served and a judge had dictated such conditions of release as would make a stay in jail unavoidable. In this situation, neither had occurred. As if dealing with some proven, stone-cold killer, Coffin had ordered Nathan and Freer to simply pick me up and deliver me for booking—an expeditious way of getting a menace off the streets. Except, as I’d told Danny, I was hardly that. Unless Coffin had something special up his sleeve, no judge in his right mind would jail me.

And from Freer’s and Nathan’s demeanor, I didn’t think Coffin had any hidden aces. We were being made victims of a supercharged ego, inflated to the point of folly by ambition and publicity. It seemed both Gail and Kathy Bartlett had been accurate in their appraisals of the man.

The irony was—assuming I was right about how this trip turned out—Coffin had just allowed himself to become as manipulated as I had been.

Unfortunately, his fate would be short-term ridicule and his reaction long-term hell for me. It was therefore with no satisfaction that I sat in the backseat watching the countryside slip by.

With nothing tangible to either prove my innocence or explain Boris’s death, I took advantage of the ride to ponder the few options I had left. Whoever was pulling the strings, for whatever end result, was counting on the legal system to be his dogged co-conspirator—the system I’d been brought up in, which was directing the other two men in this car, and which their boss was pushing to absurd extremes. Right now, all of us within it were being expected to serve the Rule of Law.

Except that I was beginning to consider the alternative.

If the puppeteer I was imagining truly existed, and was acting as I surmised, then the one thing he wouldn’t know how to control would be a renegade puppet, acting on his own. Of course, that wasn’t an insight I could act upon.

Yet.

· · ·

Woodstock Correctional Facility had taken on the aura of a populist penal colony. Not only is it located on the main street entering what is possibly Vermont’s most upscale village, thanks largely to some early Rockefeller largesse, but it butts right up to the sidewalk, around the corner from one gas station and opposite another, its unprotected front door within reach of any pedestrian. Turning Route 4’s sharp corner onto Pleasant Street, motorists are given an open view right into the jail’s exercise yard, predictably ringed by high fences and razor wire. It is a jarring sight, stimulating many a double take, and for me representing a typical example of the state’s make-do pragmatism.

This, of course, was before I was supposed to be one of its guests. Now, as our car pulled into the unguarded parking lot next to the building—and despite my own hopes about the futility of this trip—I also remembered Woodstock’s reputation for being cramped, overcrowded, and in need of repairs. Not that creature comforts were my primary concern. I was thinking of how someone of my profession might fare in such an environment, and a small knot of fear began forming in my stomach.

Freer and Nathan extracted me from the car and took turns securing their weapons in the trunk. Another of Woodstock’s lesser-known sins is that it occasionally loses the keys to the officers’ gun box, so the chastened have learned to trade being temporarily unarmed for being able to leave the place without delay after delivering their charges.

I was then led up the driveway, around the corner to the sidewalk, and up the few steps to the front door, my manacled wrists—as I felt it—like visual magnets to every passerby within sight. The odd absence of any press—given the publicity of our departure—didn’t strike me until later. At the door, Nathan pushed an intercom button, announced our arrival to a disembodied voice, and swung the door back in response to an electric buzz.

We found ourselves in a gray cement-block cubicle, facing a second door, heavier, with a small armored window at head height. The ignored gun box hung on the wall next to us. To the round, pale face of the supervisor floating in the window, both my escorts opened their jackets to reveal empty holsters. The face nodded, there was a dull clank, and the steel door opened before us.

We stepped into another, slightly larger room, with a tiny cell in one corner, an equally small strip-search bathroom opposite, one scarred and battered metal desk supporting a computer, and a booking stand equipped for “mugs and prints.” It was lit brightly enough to make us all squint upon entering. I saw, behind a curved bank of thick, tinted windows, the dim shape of the elevated control room operator, lording over a tilted panel of switches, intercoms, and TV monitors. Along one of the long walls, a second row of windows looked onto the prison cafeteria, where a few inmates could be seen listlessly wandering back and forth, barely glancing my way.

The heavy door slammed shut behind me, making me swallow hard, exposed in the harsh light.

Nathan handed the supervisor the booking affidavit, which he in turn carried over to the desk to be entered into the computer. Danny Freer turned to face me, his expression the only halfway sympathetic thing in the room.

He removed my handcuffs and indicated a metal straight-back chair. “Sit down, Joe. This’ll take a few minutes.”

He then picked up a clipboard and began asking me questions—age, height, weight, social security number, all the rest. As I responded to each, I saw through the corner of my eye the cafeteria windows slowly filling with gloating faces. Natural curiosity about incoming “fresh meat” had obviously been replaced by a widespread appetite for unprotected police officer. Word of my arrival had gotten out. Without comment, Danny moved to stand between me and the window, at which I heard a muffled outcry of protest. Someone began thumping on the thick glass.

“Okay,” Freer said, his voice impassive. “Empty your pockets.”

I did so slowly, allowing him to catalogue each item before he dropped it into a bag. Guards were now shouting at the inmates to back off from the window. My throat dry, fear overriding reason, I began to have doubts that Fred Coffin had stumbled in bringing me here—that maybe he was about to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

Danny, his routine finally finished, gave me a receipt and nodded to Bill Nathan, who picked up the phone on the desk and dialed the Windham District Court. I now cast a glance toward the windows and saw a crowd of men standing several feet away, their eyes upon me. Several of them grinned and made suggestive gestures.

Nathan lowered the phone and addressed his partner with disgust. “The clerk won’t play. She’s gone to find a judge.”

We sat in silence for several minutes before Nathan began talking again, too quietly for me to hear. Finally, after the line had gone dead, he said, “Fuck you, too,” and hung up with a bang.

He looked at Danny in disgust. “We gotta cut him loose—flash-cite him for arraignment on Monday. No bail, no conditions, no nothin’.”

Danny shrugged. “You surprised?”

He handed me the bag he was still holding so I could refill my pockets, and returned the clipboard to the supervisor. “Let’s get out of here.”

Nathan’s face was closed down tight, his eyes narrow with anger. “I wanna mug and print him first, just for our records.”