“Sorry to wake you so early, lieutenant,” he said into the phone, and went on to tell the lieutenant the final chapter of the Greene/Willis story. When he hung up the phone, he said, “Lieutenant’s buying us breakfast.”
Ray arrived at seven o’clock, and Frieda held the office keys aloft, jingling them joyfully. “He’s gone,” she said. “It’s in the log, and I’m going to hit the sack.” She grabbed her backpack and departed.
In the parking lot Hendricks reminded her, “Breakfast at Lenny’s.”
“Oh yeah.” Frieda scrubbed her hand over her face to force her eyes and brain to keep working. “Not long, though. I have to be back here at three.”
Lieutenant Austin was waiting outside the restaurant when Frieda and Hendricks pulled up. “The warden will be joining us,” he said. “Go on in.”
“Good thing that reporter didn’t answer his phone,” Hendricks said as they slid into a booth. “I was going to invite him to breakfast, being as our unhealthy situation has done exploded.”
When their breakfast arrived, Frieda said to the warden, “Sir, I just worked a double and have to be back at three for another double, so pardon me for being blunt but I need to know why we’ve had to suffer Greene’s threats for the last two months?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Ferguson,” the warden said. “I learned about the situation only this morning when Lieutenant Austin called me. He told me it was Captain Lundquist’s order to keep Greene in Unit Five. When I questioned Mr. Lundquist, he explained that Greene is a boxer. Lundquist is sponsoring him in a tournament coming up. He didn’t want to take a chance that Greene might be shipped out of here.”
The captain! Frieda closed her eyes, but tears squeezed past her lashes. She was so tired. “Greene is a boxer?” she whispered, her voice quivering. “With fists considered by law to be deadly weapons. Poor Willis.”
She wondered why Greene hadn’t bragged about being a boxer. She wondered how he could be a successful boxer anyway when he was such a loose cannon.
“Willis, yes,” the warden said. “I need to stop at the hospital and check his condition. I was thinking how fortunate we are that you, Ms. Ferguson, and the other sergeants haven’t been hurt. Greene should never have been in minimum security. I’ve offered Mr. Lundquist an opportunity to resign.”
“Thank you, sir,” Frieda said and got to her feet. “Please excuse me now, I really do have to sleep. See you at three, lieutenant, at eleven, Don.”
She picked up her bag and hurried out to her car.
Dead Men Tell No Tales
by Lawrence Doorley
It was a raw, rainy night, Monday, April 15, 1991, about eight forty-five p.m. Mike Wilson, the literary agent from New York, was less than a block from where he had parked the rented car when disaster struck. A furtive figure under the flickering streetlight, he was carrying two corrugated manuscript boxes and an umbrella.
He was almost across the little stone pedestrian bridge when he slipped on some wet leaves. He slid against the stone parapet on his right, banged his elbow, howled with pain, dropped the umbrella and the manuscript box under his left arm, and grabbed his right elbow.
That dislodged the box under his right arm. It landed atop the parapet, teetered tantalizingly, and fell into the rain-swollen creek.
“Oh my God,” Mike squealed as he steadied himself, looked over the balustrade. He was in time to see the box hit a jagged rock and split open, the contents pulled under by the swiftly flowing stream.
He couldn’t move. He could barely breathe. A manuscript worth at least six million dollars — the original, the hard copies, the computer disk, everything — was already a sodden mess on its way to the Gulf of Mexico through a network of creeks and rivers.
A bolt of lightning rent the sky, thunder crashed, a sheet of rain hit him. He picked up the umbrella and the other box and ran for the car. He had a terrible time getting the key in the door lock.
Finally inside, the door closed, he switched on the dashboard light and made a silent prayer.
“Please, Lord, please, please,” he begged, “let this be the Ebb and Flow box.”
He should have known better; the Lord frowns on thievery.
“I knew it, I knew it,” he wailed, “God help me. I’m done, finished, on my way to jail. And what about her? Oh my God, this is a catastrophe.”
It was pretty bad.
Two weeks before the manuscript went over the bridge, Cathy and Linda, two hairstylists at Lillian’s New York Style Hair Salon, finished the four dollar and twenty-five cent special at the fast food restaurant. After which they solemnly shook hands and pledged to do what they had been talking of doing for weeks: contact the supermarket tabloid.
“I still think they’ll pay at least fifty thousand,” said Cathy. “This is the kind of sensational story they love.”
“Wow,” exclaimed Linda. “Think what I can do with my share. Now, you’re not going to back out are you? You’re really going to phone tomorrow?”
“I said I was, didn’t I? You tell Lil I’ll be in around ten thirty. Tell her the high school principal called me again about Wendy. That kid, someday I’ll choke her. Now, let’s go over it again.”
They went over it again.
That same night, on the Upper West Side of New York, a tall, distinguished-looking man finished his evening’s allotment, his second beer, and got up to leave.
“Goodnight, Danny,” he said to the bartender.
“Goodnight, Mr. Reardon, have a pleasant evening,” Danny said.
Mr. Reardon was Thomas W. Reardon, a sixty-five-year-old widower, head of The Media’s Conscience, a very worthy, very underfunded foundation devoted to battling untruths, half-truths, and outright slander and libel in all forms of the media. Mr. Reardon was being overwhelmed by what Freud gloomily labeled “the vile realities of life.”
His dear wife of forty years had died the year before; it still hurt. And unless a philanthropist appeared with several million dollars in the next few months, the foundation would be bankrupt. That would be a disaster, for without her father’s monthly check, his daughter and her two small children in Ohio would be homeless, her rotten husband having absconded to Brazil with his employer’s young wife and most of the firm’s capital.
Walking to his lonely apartment on a lovely spring evening throbbing with rebirth, Reardon began to sob. Life had become almost unbearable.
Thereby — from all the above — hangs a tale, a tale inspired by the adage Dead men tell no tales. Other adages — axioms, wise sayings — appear in this story. They include Charity begins at home and Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
And as Bobbie Burns has told us,
The best laid schemes o’ mice
and men
Gang aft a-gley.
And how often have we heard that The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on? Which is a shameful way to describe tall, sweet, skinny, slouchy, mousy-haired Martha Ainsley.
Best laid schemes constantly come a cropper, go awry, foul up. That’s what happened when two decent people — Martha Ainsley and Mike Wilson — were confronted with their vile realities.
Mike Wilson was no saint, but he had never broken any laws. In April 1991, he had only one vile reality. But it was a vile one, a forty-five hundred dollar alimony due on the first Monday of every month.
Martha Ainsley was a faultless person. Shy, meek, irreproachable, she was the most unlikely person ever to become a participant in a shaky scheme which, if it failed, could result in imprisonment. For a straitlaced goody two-shoes to abandon the straight and narrow for the slippery slope, there had to be an enormous vile reality.