‘Right.’ I rolled my chair back a few inches and crossed my legs, but made no further comment. I wanted to see what Jarazelsky would volunteer.
‘Anyway,’ he said after a moment, ‘I knew Davy was goin’ to his old lady’s house. He told me he was gonna stay there while he looked for a job.’
‘Do you know where he planned on looking for this job? Did he contact anyone before he left Attica, maybe some of his old buddies at the Eight-Three?’
Jarazelsky shrugged. ‘I can’t say for certain. He could’ve.’
I opened a notebook and wrote my own name three times, then looked back up. Between the bulging eyes and the jug ears, Jarazelsky’s face had a bat-like quality, especially when he tilted his head down. Although his appearance also had a menacing aspect, I sensed the wariness of a small mammal caught in a trap. Whenever he shifted his weight, the chains that bound his wrists and ankles rattled softly.
‘Tell me what David Lodge was like,’ I said. ‘What did he do with his time? Did he have any hobbies? Like to write letters? Play basketball? What’d he talk about when you were alone?’
‘He lifted weights,’ Jarazelsky said after a moment.
‘That’s it?’
‘What can I say? Davy was pretty quiet. And he was never my cellie. We mostly got together in the yard. But you could take this to the bank: Davy was nervous about his release. The guy he clipped, Clarence Spott? Well, Spott’s brother, DuWayne, took over the crew after his brother’s passing. I was still at the Precinct when this happened, so I know what I’m sayin’. DuWayne put the word out that he wasn’t gonna sit for his brother gettin’ murdered by no honkey pig.’
This time, Jarazelsky’s eyes gave him away. He was searching my face, gauging my reaction. Having confirmed (without prompting) the second element of the widow’s statement, he wanted to know if I was buying his story.
‘Are you telling me that Lodge was directly threatened by DuWayne Spott?’
‘Like I said, Davy was real quiet. It wasn’t always like that. Back at the Eight-Three, when he was still drinkin’, he was pretty much out of control.’
Jarazelsky hadn’t answered the question, but I let it go. I wasn’t all that interested in his tale because it didn’t address the point Adele had raised in Sarney’s office. How would DuWayne Spott know that David Lodge was going to his wife’s house upon release?
But I still had a choice to make. I could leave Jarazelsky’s story unchallenged or I could send a message.
‘Do you have a release date, Pete?’
Jarazelsky tried for a smile, but didn’t quite make it. ‘Six months.’
‘You get out in six months?’
‘Yeah.’ He tried to bring his hand to his face, but the cuffs held him back. ‘Ya know,’ he told me, ‘Davy was over at Cayuga for a couple of years.’
‘And then got transferred to Attica?’
‘Right.’
‘How’d that happen?’
Again, Jarazelsky lowered his voice and leaned across the table. ‘Davy told me that he ran into a problem with another con at Cayuga. He didn’t name no names or nothin’, so don’t get ya hopes up, but he did say the beef came from outside the joint. Like, he was bein’ set up.’
‘So, what did he do about it?’
‘He did what he had to do.’
For me, it was attack or retreat time. There was nothing to be gained by prolonging the interview, not unless I wanted to shake him up by pointing out that a black gangster from Brooklyn was highly unlikely to hire a white supremacist from Syracuse to pull off a hit.
Instead, I backed off. First, there was that fan thing I’d mentioned to my partner. As far as I could tell, it was still on high, still spewing excrement. And then there was the distinct possibility that Jarazelsky could be turned. In just six months, he was scheduled to leave Attica, to go from a place where his life was always in danger to a place of moment-to-moment safety. If I was somehow able to put his release date in jeopardy, he’d most likely roll over. He was, after all, a snitch by nature.
But I had no way to threaten Pete Jarazelsky, not then, and I wrapped up the interview a few minutes later. Jarazelsky continued to watch me, as he’d been watching me all along, with the look of a man immersed in a poker game. Would I call his bluff? Would I concede the pot? There was a lot at stake here for Pete Jarazelsky and he would have been wise to keep his anxiety to himself.
I fished a business card out of my wallet and laid it on the table. Jarazelsky wasn’t a large man and the jumpsuit made him appear even smaller. ‘Any time you wanna call me, Pete,’ I told him, ‘I’m open for business. And I appreciate your talkin’ to me when you didn’t have to. I owe you one.’
Dr Vencel Nagy’s interview room was neat as a pin. The tiled floor gleamed, the small wooden table and the chairs to either side had been polished to a frenzy; a bank of vertical filing cabinets against the far wall might have been resting on a showroom floor. The individual responsible stepped to one side when I entered the room, in deference to the uniformed guard escorting me. A small black man, he clutched a spray can of furniture polish and a soiled gray cloth to the breast of his orange jumpsuit as if fearing a robbery. But my escort never even glanced at the prisoner as he led me through a door to our right and into Nagy’s windowless office.
The contrast between Nagy’s office and his immaculate interview room could not have been greater. Not only did mismatched bookcases, crammed to capacity, stand against every wall, but the spaces between the bookcases were filled with dusty books stacked on top of each other. Towers of books sprouted from a threadbare Persian rug, as they did from Nagy’s desk where he’d created a wall of books. If I sat down, I’d no longer be able to see him, which might have been all to the good. Dr Vencel Nagy’s hands were jumping from his mouth to his ears to the fringe of snow-white hair along his scalp like cockroaches in search of a crevice. When he finally jammed them beneath his armpits, I was distinctly relieved.
‘Please, sit down,’ Nagy said after I introduced myself. In his sixties, his powder-white skin was criss-crossed by hundreds of fine wrinkles.
‘Do you think I might remove some of these books first?’ I shifted one of the stacks to the floor before he could answer, then stepped around another pile and dropped into a metal chair. I could see Nagy from this position, although it was like peering through a window.
‘So, tell me what you are traveling all this way to find?’ Nagy had a pronounced eastern-European accent. His vowels were thick, his consonants hard. His tone was that of a man used to having his questions answered.
‘To find out who killed David Lodge,’ I replied without hesitation.
Nagy turned to his left, his gaze drifting to the ceiling, and laughed, a heh-heh-heh devoid of amusement. ‘With this I cannot help you,’ he eventually admitted. ‘David wasn’t the sort of convict who made enemies. He was very quiet, very self-contained.’ Suddenly, Nagy’s hands were on the move again, bouncing over his chest and shoulders before settling at his waist. ‘You don’t know how much I miss David. This idiot they have sent me? You’ve seen him?’
‘I have,’ I admitted.
‘David, for me, wrote up the charts, kept the files, answered the phones. This lunatic, he’s all day with the vacuum cleaner and the rags and the bucket. From a medication chart, he knows nothing. From filing, he can’t tell A from Z.’ Nagy paused long enough to slide his hands beneath his thighs. ‘So, other than identify Lodge’s killers, how can I help you?’
‘How close were you to Lodge? Was he open with you?’
‘We spoke together often. David was very smart, but somewhat obsessed.’
‘Obsessed with what?’
‘With his innocence.’
Bang, a wild card, face up on the table. I saw it hit the top of Nagy’s desk, watched it quiver for a moment before settling down. ‘Were you Lodge’s therapist?’ I asked.