Book of Nathan (5 page)

“You must really be fishin’ on the bottom, Esquire.”

That pushed me to ask a question I wasn’t really sure I
wanted answered. “What’s Mr. Krup in for?”

“Bestiality. Beuford never met a sheep he didn’t want to get
to know real
well.”

“Damn!” I whispered.

“No!” Yigal’s shifting became more animated. “Sheep are not
part of the complaint. Nothing to do with sheep.”

The guard rubbed his chin. “That’s right. It wasn’t no
sheep. It was a mule.”

Yigal turned to the Gateway contingent as if we were a jury.
“Beuford Krup’s innocent. Can’t be done. With a mule, I mean. Not without being
kicked.”

I had heard enough. “Look, it doesn’t matter what Beuford
did or didn’t do as long as he can get us all inside.”

“Oh, he can,” Yigal assured us. “I have rights as counsel.”

The guard looked confused. “All right. But the lady stays
outside.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Rule seven.”

I turned back to the sign.

7. Proper attire is
required at all times. Shoes and shirts must be worn; suggestive clothing:
see-through fabrics, halter or tube-type tops, short shorts and miniskirts will
not be allowed.

Twyla’s shelf bra pushed her breasts up and practically out
of her blouse. Getting past the proper attire
roadblock
looked like an impossibility until Rosenblatt tossed us a life preserver.

“I have a trench coat,” the lawyer revealed. “In my car.”

The guard started to resist, but Yigal had already
hopscotched his way out the door. A minute later, he was back with a
raincoat.
 

“This will work,” he said.
 

“This is
so
nice
of you, Mr. Rosen Bag,” Twyla crooned.
 

“Rosenblatt,” the lawyer said. “But you can call me Yigal.”

Twyla appeared genuinely moved. “Well, I
love
that name. Yigal. What does it mean?”

Rosenblatt didn’t show much facial skin but the little I
could make out began to turn red. “He will redeem
.
In Hebrew, it means he will redeem.”

Twyla pulled the lawyer’s coat over her hardworking blouse
and skirt. “How cute! Do you have a nickname?”

“Oh, no. Just Yigal Rosenblatt. That’s my name.”

“Well, I’m going to call you Yiggy,” Twyla said with a nod
that vibrated her chest. “If that’s okay with you.”

Yigal’s flesh went from pink to a brilliant shade of
fuchsia. “Well, it’s unorthodox. But if you want. Just don’t call me that in
court.”

Chapter 3

“Pick
up the phone,” a guard instructed after I had parked myself in front of a
fourteen-inch TV monitor. I lifted the handset to the right of the television
screen and played twenty questions with an unpleasant woman on the other end of
the line. “Who was I here to see?” “What was my name?” “What was my connection
to the inmate?” And so on.

Once the quiz was over, the TV screen went blank. The delay
gave me time to do a more careful survey of the visitor center’s high-tech
setup. A miniature camera mounted above the monitor in front of me, along with
the phone I was still holding, allowed inmates to be seen and heard but only
through the wonders of teleconferencing. Any kind of physical intimacy was
impossible.

The Orange County Jail Video Visitation Center was crowded
with small groups of distressed adults and a few even more anxious-looking
children all staring at screens and passing around telephone receivers. The
TV-phone setups were lined up in a row with only a small panel separating one
station from another.
 

While Maurice Tyson and I sat waiting for Zeus to pop up on
our monitor, Twyla and Doc Waters were one screen away pretending to live by
the jailhouse rules. Their TV came to life first, and I leaned around the
narrow vertical panel to catch a glimpse of Beuford Krup, who looked like a
piece of gristle covered with gray hair.

Twyla grabbed the phone. “Hello, Mr. Cup,” she purred and
opened her trench coat.

“Krup,” was all Beuford said but his expression left no
doubt he was already under Twyla’s spell.

“How very nice to meet you, Mr. Krap,” said Twyla.

Krup had the glassy-eyed stare of a man who might be
rethinking whether the back end of a mule wasn’t the only place to find
pleasure.

I was ready to give Twyla advice about what not to say to
Beuford when my own TV monitor sprang to life.
  

Miklos
Petris Zeusenoerdorf, aka Zeus, was born in Copsa Mica, a Romanian town with
the reputation as the worst place to live in all of Europe. When the Communists
were running the country, the Transylvania air was filled with contaminants
from lead-smelting factories and other hazardous pollution-producing plants.
Poisonous soot coated everything living and inanimate throughout the town,
which became known as the “Black Village
.”

In Copsa Mica, two out of three kids ended up mentally
retarded. With food, water, and air loaded with zinc, lead, and cadmium
residue, Zeusenoerdorf never had a chance.
 

Zeus’s mother, Anes-Marie, had just one stroke of good luck
in forty grueling years of life. She had a cousin in New Jersey who was
sleeping with a bureaucrat high up in the Manhattan District Office of U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services. That relationship was good enough to
spawn a visa for Anes-Marie who moved from a two-room hovel in Romania to a
two-room hovel in Jersey City. There, her good fortune took a U-turn. She was
diagnosed with colon cancer and did her dying in and out of Newark’s University
Hospital. Although it was a painful end to a miserable existence, she managed
to clear a high hurdle before she took her last breath. Her one and only son
was made a full citizen of the U.S. of A.

Zeus became the property of New Jersey’s Division of Youth
and Family Services. He was shuffled from one residential youth center to
another until age eighteen, when he was spun out of the system. After that, it
was life on the streets interrupted by a five-year prison stint.
Zeusenoerdorf’s case file and rap sheet painted him as a lost cause.
  

“Wha’s happenin’, bro?” Maurice Tyson greeted the image on
the TV screen.
  

I couldn’t hear Zeus’s response since Maurice owned the
phone. Not that it mattered. As Tyson and Zeus went through some preliminaries,
Yigal Rosenblatt was fumbling with a legal pad and pen and trying to flip on a
pocket-sized tape recorder. The scene so captivated Maurice that he put the
conversation with Zeus on hold.

“Forget
the
lawyer!” I yelled at Maurice. Easier said than done. “Pay attention to Zeus!
Tell me what he’s saying! Everything. Word for word. Understood?”

“Yeah, okay,” I had my doubts Maurice grasped the gravity of
his assignment. His translation could either put Zeus back on the street or
send him to death row.

Maurice leaned toward the small tube-like camera mounted by
the TV screen. “So what’d you do, man?”

Zeus’s mouth began moving.
 

After listening for about a minute, Maurice turned to Yigal
and me. “This is what he says. He was sleepin’ under a pass over—”

“Overpass, is what he means,” Yigal interjected. “Not a
Passover. I’m sure of it.” Rosenblatt did a Lord of the Dance quickstep that I
took to be his way of showing disdain for anyone who confused a sacred Jewish
observance with a transportation artery.

Maurice shot a look of annoyance at the lawyer. “I’m just
tellin’ you what he’s tellin’ me.”

“Keep going, Maurice,” I said.

Over the next five minutes, Tyson translated Zeus’s account
of what occurred the night Benjamin Kurios was killed. Around three a.m., Zeus
saw a blue sedan following a white van. Both vehicles were traveling fast. When
they reached the underpass, the blue car clipped the back end of the van and
sent it into a steel stanchion. The crash crushed the midsection of the van
with such force its twin rear doors flew open. According to Zeus, Kurios was
catapulted out of the van and ended up on the pavement. About the same time the
evangelist hit the ground, the blue car did a one-eighty spin and ran into a
buttress on the opposite side of the road.

Zeus stopped as if that were the end of the story. I told
Maurice to keep the prisoner talking.

“Whoever was drivin’ the van—he had a gun,” Tyson
translated.

“A gun?”

Maurice confirmed what Zeus had said with a nod. I looked at
Yigal who seemed more surprised than me by the news.

“Then what?” I asked.

Tyson fed us the next chapter. The van driver was short and
stocky. Holding a pistol, he jumped out of the damaged vehicle and rushed
toward the not-so-banged-up sedan. He never got past the front fender. The
driver of the blue car was a lot faster and tougher than the man waving his
gun. The car driver wrestled the van operator to the pavement and the pistol
was kicked to one side.
 

“That’s when Zeus come down from underneath the pass over
where he was campin’ out for the night,” Maurice explained.

“Did he recognize either driver?”

“No.”

“If we showed Zeus pictures of the two men—could he identify
them?”

Maurice relayed my question and came back with the answer I
expected. “He don’t think so. The one thing he might remember is the necklace.”

Necklace? What necklace?”

“The blue car driver. He was wearin’ a chain that had this
thing on it.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Zeus says it was a circle made out of silver. Had a cross
in the middle of it.”

“All right. Keep digging, Maurice. Ask Zeus what happened
next.”

The two drivers were still battling it out when Zeus walked
into the van’s high beams. His sudden appearance startled the two men, and the
fight was over. The man driving the blue car broke free but not before the van
driver retrieved his pistol and pulled off two shots.

“Was the other man hit?” I asked.

“Might a been,” Maurice interpreted. “Not sure.”

“Keep going.”

According to Zeus, the driver of the blue car took off in
his sedan. Apparently the run-in with a steel column hadn’t done any serious
damage to the car. The van man was in less of a hurry to leave. He picked up
his pistol and walked to the rear of his vehicle. As he leaned over the
motionless Benjamin Kurios, Zeus drew closer. Too close. The driver pointed the
weapon at Zeus’s midsection and pulled the trigger. Nothing but a few clicks.
When the man realized the pistol was useless, he dashed for his van and managed
to disentangle it from the bridge abutment. The vehicle limped away leaving
Zeus and what was left of Kurios in its wake.

I had a million questions and only a few minutes left on the
Visitation Center’s clock.

“What about the wooden cross?” I asked—the alleged weapon
used to beat Benjamin Kurios to death. “It was covered with blood.”

“Belonged to Zeus,” Maurice communicated the obvious. “He
made it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Everyone
knew about the cross. The media had
played it up six ways to Sunday.
Cleric
Murdered With Handmade Cross.
 

“Zeus says the cops took it,” said Tyson.

Of course they took it. It was a prosecutor’s dream.
 

Maurice continued his translation. “What happened was that
Zeus leaned over the preacher and the cross got some blood on it.”

This was a monumental deviation from statements made by the
two college students who stumbled onto the scene while Zeus was still perched
over Kurios. The witnesses admitted they didn’t actually see Zeus hammering
Kurios with the cross, but it was obvious what had happened—wasn’t it?