“What did he look like?” Carella asked.
“Santo? Good-looking kid, even lighter skinned than his brother, black hair, sort of amber-colored eyes.”
“How tall?” Carella asked, writing.
“Five nine, five ten, around there.”
“Can you make a guess at his weight?”
“Sort of skinny kid. Well, not skinny. Slender, I guess you’d call it. Muscular, you know, but slender. Sinewy, I guess you’d say. Yeah.”
“How old was he then, do you know?”
“Seventeen. He was just a kid.”
“That would make him twenty-four now,” Carella said.
“If he’s alive,” Barragan said.
Even driving as hard as he could through the torrential rain, Meyer did not get to Rawley, upstate, until a little after 6:00 P.M. He had phoned ahead first to verify that a man named Frederick Bones was indeed a prisoner at Castleview there, and then had phoned Sarah to tell her he wouldn’t be home for dinner. Sarah sighed. Sarah was used to him not being home for dinner.
Castleview State Penitentiary was situated on a point of land jutting out into the River Harb, a natural peninsula dominated by the gray stone walls that crowded the land to its banks on all three sides. A concrete foundation some thirty feet high slanted into the water itself, creating the image of a fairy-tale castle surrounded by a moat. There were eight guard towers on the walls — one at each corner of the prison’s narrow end, two spaced along each of the walls angling back toward the main gate, and another at each corner of the wall fronting the approach drive. The massive main gate was constructed of solid steel four inches thick. Meyer rang the bell alongside it, and a panel in the gate opened.
“Detective Meyer, 87th Precinct,” he said to the face behind the bars. “I called earlier. I’ve got an appointment to talk with one of your inmates.”
“Let’s see your I.D.,” the guard said.
Meyer showed him his shield and his Lucite-encased I.D. card. The panel slammed shut. There was the sound of a bar being thrown back, and then the sound of heavy tumblers falling. The gate opened. Meyer found himself in a small entrance courtyard, walls on either side of him, a steel-barred inner gate directly ahead of him. The guard told him he’d picked a bad time for a visit; the men were at dinner. Which is where I should be, Meyer thought, but did not say. He asked instead if he could look at Bones’s records while he waited for the dinner hour to end. The guard nodded curtly, picked up a phone hanging on the wall just inside the entrance door, spoke briefly to someone on the other end, and then went back to reading his girlie magazine. In several moments, a second guard approached the barred inner gate, unlocked it, slid it open, and asked, “You the detective wants to see somebody’s record?”
“That’s me,” Meyer said.
“You picked a hell of a time to come up here,” the second guard said. “We had a prisoner got stabbed in the yard yesterday.”
“Sorry,” Meyer said.
“No sorrier’n he is,” the guard said. “Well, come on.”
He let Meyer into the yard, and then locked the gate behind him. The prison walls loomed enormous around them as they walked through the rain to a building on their left. In the guard towers, Meyer could see the muzzles of machine guns pointing down at the yard. He had lots of friend here, Meyer did — or rather business associates, so to speak. All part of the game, he thought. The good guys and the bad guys. Sometimes, he wondered which were which. Take a cop like Andy Parker...
“In here,” the guard said. “Records is down the hall. Who you interested in?”
“Man named Freddie Bones.”
“Don’t know him,” the guard said, and shook his head. “Is that his straight handle?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t know him. Just down the hall there,” he said, pointing. “Dinner’s over at seven. You want to talk to this guy, you’ll have to do it then. They get pissed off if they miss their television shows.”
“Who do I see after I’m through here?” Meyer asked.
“Assistant Warden’s office is around the corner from Records. I don’t know who’s got the duty right now, just talk to whoever’s in there.”
“Thanks,” Meyer said.
“Got him with an ice pick,” the guard said. “Fourteen holes in his chest. Nice, huh?” he said, and left Meyer in the corridor.
The clerk in Records was reluctant to open the prison files without a written order authorizing him to do so. Meyer explained that he was investigating a homicide, and that it might be helpful for him to know something of Bones’s background before actually talking to the man. The clerk still seemed unconvinced. He made a brief phone call to someone, and then hung up and said, “It’s okay, I guess.” He found Bones’s folder in a battered file drawer that had seen far better days, and made Meyer comfortable at a small desk in one corner of the office. The folder was as brief as the clerk’s phone call had been. This was Bones’s first offense. He had been convicted for “the unlawful sale of one ounce or more of any narcotic” (the narcotic having been heroin in his case), an A-1 felony, which — under the terms of the state’s stringent hard-drug laws — could have grossed him from fifteen years to life in prison. Plea bargaining, which was permitted only within the A-felony class, had netted him ten. He could be paroled in three and a half, but that would be a lifetime parole; spit on the sidewalk or pass a traffic light, and he’d be right back behind bars again.
Meyer finished his homework and looked at his watch. It was a quarter past six. He carried the folder back to where the clerk was busily typing something no doubt important. The clerk did not look up. Meyer stood by his desk, the folder in his hand. The clerk kept typing. Meyer cleared his throat.
“You finished?” the clerk said.
“Yes, thank you,” Meyer said. “Any place I can get a sandwich and something to drink?”
“You mean inside the walls?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a swing room across the yard. Show the tin and they’ll let you in.”
“Thanks,” Meyer said.
He left Records, stopped in at the Assistant Warden’s office to tell him he was here and ready to talk to Bones, and made arrangements for him to be brought into the Visitors’ Room at seven sharp. The guards’ swing room across the yard was equipped with machines serving up sandwiches and soft drinks. Meyer bought himself an orange crush and a ham on rye. He wondered what his father would have said about the ham. The guards were talking about nothing but the inmate who’d had his chest ventilated the day before. Meyer guessed things were tough all over, inside or out.
At five minutes to seven, he went over to the Visitors’ Room, and was admitted by a guard, who asked him to take a seat on one side of the long table that ran the length of the room. At seven on the dot, a tall, extremely handsome black man in prison threads came into the room and took a seat opposite Meyer at the long table. They were separated by a sheet of clear plastic three inches thick; Meyer had heard someplace that the plastic was the same sort used in the gun turrets of bombers during World War II. There were telephones before both men on their separate sides of the table. Each carrel was separated from the one on either side of it by soundproof dividers that granted at least a modicum of privacy to visitors and inmates. A sign on the wall advised that visiting hours ended at 5:00 P.M. and asked that visits be limited to fifteen minutes. The room was empty now, save for Meyer and the man who sat opposite him. Meyer picked up his telephone.