Authors: Tom Connolly
Chapter 11
In the early autumn sun on a late September afternoon sitting on a grassy hill, the seven brothers and one girl, one Valerie McGuire, pondered their great questions from Mr. Conetta’s Great Questions class. In the girl’s case, she pondered the great question: “How much I love Eddie Wheelwright; let me count the ways.”
The two young lovers had met as new lifeguards at Tod’s Point Beach in Old Greenwich over the summer. And while Parker Barnes and Sebastian Ball also lifeguarded at the Point with Eddie and Valerie and both vied for the freckled faced Miss McGuire’s young heart, it was the ramrod straight Wheelwright whom she fell for. Or tripped for, for on the very first day of lifeguard drills, when Valerie stumbled over a rock on a two-mile timed run with nine lifeguards through the woods, only Wheelwright stopped to help her up. In that valiant moment, a small spark ignited between the two, and by the summer’s end, the spark grew into an inferno of youthful passion.
When Parker made no progress in his pursuit of Valerie, he simply conceded that Eddie had won the girl. Sebastian Ball was not as gracious. Even then, at seventeen going on eighteen, Sebastian competed with Eddie for girls. Over the prior winter, he had lost the hand of a debutante at Brunswick’s sister school, Greenwich Academy, to Wheelwright. Try as he did through the summer to budge Valerie from her loyalty to Wheelwright, she never wavered.
“It’s not you, Sebastian. You’re fine, you’re handsome, you’re a leader among your friends, you’ve got all the right things going for you, including that Mercedes,” she told Ball on a walk around the Point. Well, she told him with an outstretched arm and the palm of her right hand pressed against his chest as he tried kissing her. “But I really care about Eddie, so please, let’s be friends. I know how much you guys care about each other. Promise me, I won’t come between you.”
Ball kept the promise. He never made another pass at Eddie’s girl-friend, but he did find himself longing. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he had met to that point in his life with her athletically proportioned body, her long brown wavy hair always blowing in the afternoon breeze at the beach, and her tanned freckled skin. He felt he could do so much for a young woman who had no money, no strong economic future. But it was not to be. This time Eddie had won out.
So as the brothers pondered Conetta’s great questions the seven had grown to eight. Valerie had been accepted. It turned out to be the only way Eddie Wheelwright would stay focused, if Valerie was included; otherwise, when the boys got together as they did almost daily, if Valerie was not there, neither would Eddie. Or if Eddie was there and Valerie was not, he would be daydreaming about her. She was constant in his thoughts.
Winston Trout, the smartest, offered up his great question as they sat on the grass on the rolling hill of his father’s estate overlooking Long Island Sound: “How will I solve the energy crisis?” Given that his father owned Trout Solar, a start-up solar panel inventor and developer; it was a logical problem to set out solving.
The smallest boy in the group, Kish Moira, felt his future and one of the great questions for him lay in, “How to adequately feed the world?”
“Somehow we’re not breaking out of our known cosmos,” Gideon Bridge said.
“What do you mean, Gid?” an intrigued Valerie asked.
“Kish, your family comes from the most undernourished country on the planet. Winston, your dad is solving the energy crisis. We’re doing what we know—where’s the challenge?”
“Gid, the challenge is there. If you’ll notice, gas for your Audi has almost doubled in the last two years,” Winston Trout shot back with a smile.
“Guys,” Valerie began, “does your teacher mean what your parents want you to do or what you want to do?” The girl didn’t have money but she did have brains.
Sebastian Ball laughed, “Is there a difference?” Not to Ball who was already committed to his father’s vast and rich hedge fund. At eighteen Ball worked two afternoons a week at Ball Enterprises.
“Sure, there’s a difference,” Wheelwright added.
“And?” Ball challenged.
“We need to decide what we need to do to make a difference.”
“What the Peace Corps. You and Val?” Ball laughed at the thought Eddie and Valerie had proposed earlier.
“Yes,” the female part of the Wheelwright/McGuire brain said. “How can we share democracy with countries where freedom is rare?”
“Come on, Val.” Where are you gonna find that? Russia? You and Wheelwright trotting off to Kiev to unleash the Communist downtrodden.”
There, he had done it again: Sebastian Ball in all his omniscience, challenging, rejecting and ultimately putting down in irony the ideas of his friends. The brothers and Valerie loved him, for he was superior to them in his world view and in his sense of power. But there were those times when he headed to deep space on a lone ship.
“Nice, real nice, asshole,” Gideon Bridge, who took nothing from Ball, enjoined. “For Christ’s sake, Sebastian, grow up. For one of us, you’re the least of us,” the conscience and debater of the group reacted angrily. “You really gotta stop this, ‘I’m the lord of the Riff’ bullshit, Ball.”
A chastened eighteen-year-old Sebastian Ball saw the fire in Bridges eyes. Gideon was the one member of the group whose command of the English language and balls to stand up to him kept Ball in his place. Not above them but one of them.
“How about you, Gid?” Tray Johnson, the Admiral’s son asked.
“My great question? I don’t know, Tray,” a calmed Bridge replied. “I think it’s going to be, “How can we help the poor?” I mean we have so much, yet we see so little of what so many cope with. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” Parker added. “Mine is similar. How do we not hurt others?” I don’t know the answer, but I’m framing my question around that thought. Tray, you?”
“My father always likes to talk about peace. Being the warrior he seems to go to opposites. He always quotes Curtis LeMay, the general who ran the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command where they have all the B52 bombers. LeMay was the guy who fire bombed Tokyo in World War II, but when it came time for a motto for his Air Command he chose, ‘Peace is our Profession.’ So something like that, how do we keep peace in the world?”
“Valerie offered up ours, but I also have a second idea floating around, “How do we remain lifelong friends?”
And in that long day out on the grass at the end of summer, the seven boys and one girl pondered Mr. Conetta’s challenge and for some, put in place a framework that would guide their lives.
Chapter 12
The first thing you notice about the Auburn maximum security prison is the walls. Huge imposing walls. Walls that run for blocks. And as these walls change directions, there are guardhouses sitting atop them, large guardhouses, more like apartments, surrounded by glass.
Robert Chambers, the preppy murderer, served his time there. William Kemmler, the first person executed in the electric chair, got the juice there. Joey Gallo, the mobster who made a mess of Umberto’s clam house in Little Italy when they rubbed him out, spent happier days at Auburn. And while the State Asylum for Insane Criminals was part of the Auburn System, Robert Buffum, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Abraham Lincoln himself, committed suicide there by slashing his throat in his cell. Some unfortunate things happened to Mr. Buffum after his meeting with the president: he became an uncontrollable alcoholic, suffered psychological damage resulting from his time as a prisoner of war in the hands of Confederates, and he spent three years in a mental hospital. After that hospital stay, he began to drink again, got into an argument with a man who denigrated President Lincoln and shot and killed the man. He was indicted for murder and sent to the Asylum as an insane criminal.
Interestingly, not two miles from the prison is the historic home of William Seward, former US Senator and Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, who was brutally stabbed in his Washington home on April 14, 1865, the same night President Lincoln was murdered at the Ford Theater. Seward’s attacker, Lewis Powell, was a co-conspirator of John Wilkes Booth. Seward recovered from his injuries and later retired to his home in Auburn where he died on October 10, 1872.
It had started to snow in the morning when he left Stamford on the Greyhound bus to New York. Billy Stevens was to take a bus from New York’s Port Authority to visit his cousin, Curtis “CJ” Strong, who had been imprisoned in Auburn for four of his twenty-five years to life sentence. While CJ’s and Billy’s mothers were sisters and the boys were best friends growing up, Billy had not come to visit CJ in the time he had been at Auburn.
The bus to the prison was free for family members and brought the visitor right to the front gate of the prison. By 11 a.m. the snow had started to accumulate, and some of the people who had been waiting for the bus to Auburn decided to leave after it was delayed one hour. Stevens thought about turning back; after all, he was not looking forward to seeing his friend and telling him what really happened on the night the Guatemalan drug dealer was murdered. It also meant he would not get back to Stamford until after midnight.
Stevens would take the bus. He needed to unburden himself.
The ride was mostly on major highways and took a little over four hours. Stevens and the other passengers visiting the prison went through multiple layers of security including partial body searches.
As they entered the large waiting room, Billy saw Curtis at the far end of the room standing in a gray prison uniform with a smile on his face. His tension melted away. Strong was older and bigger, in fact, stronger looking.
“Billy,” Curtis said, smiling as he hugged his cousin. “Thanks for coming to see me.”
“I’m sorry, CJ; I should have come sooner,” Billy said.
“Damn right, you should have. Sit down.” Curtis said as they each took chairs on opposite sides of the metal table.
“How are they treating you here?” Billy asked, forgetting whatever it was he intended to say.
“They’re treating me fine.” Curtis said, again with a big smile. “And what about you, what have you been up to.”
“Trying to stay out of here,” he said, then regretted it at once, “I mean…”
Curtis stopped him. “That’s OK, it’s funny.”
“I’ve had a few jobs, nothing important. Still hang out with some of the same guys on the Westside. You remember Cecil Lane?”
Curtis nodded, “How is Cece; what is he up to? I figured I’d be bunking with him up here sometime.”
“He’s as crazy as ever, still shooting hoops down at the park in the summer. No one can beat him. He should be pro.”
“How’s your mother and father?” Curtis asked.
“They’re fine. Both said to say hi. Mom said to give you a kiss for her, but we’ll let that go.” They both laughed.
“Your mom came up with my mom three months ago. I told her to tell you I was going to break out of this place and come and get you if you didn’t come and see me.” Curtis laughed.
“Man, you must be the happiest guy in here. What the hell are they feeding you?” Billy said, smiling back at the cousin who had been so loyal to him.
“What are you going to do? Complain to city hall? Who’d listen to me?” Curtis said, a statement he’d made to many visitors over the years to help him over the awkwardness of the initial discussion.
“So you forgive me for not coming,” Billy Stevens pleaded.
“I do; you don’t need to talk about it,” Curtis said.
“But I do. It’s what kept me away; it’s what brought me here now,” he said.
“I said we don’t need to talk about it,” Curtis said more firmly.
“I need to talk about it,” Stevens said, his voice rising; he was on the verge of tears. “All this time you have been in here blaming me for it.”
“No one is blaming you, Billy, least of all me. I chose to do this.” Curtis said.
“Rather than tell on me?” Stevens said, imploringly to his cousin.
“Yes, rather than tell on you.” Curtis said, not smugly, but close to it.
“Well, here’s the shock: I didn’t do it,” Billy said to CJ.
“So nothing has changed in four and a half years. What’s new?” Curtis said.
“Well, Cuz, how bout if I tell you who did do it?” Billy said smartly, getting a rise now out of CJ.
“How bout if I smack the shit out of you right here. What the fuck are you talking about,” Strong said a little more loudly.
A guard was standing with his back against the wall about twenty feet away. He was a bit overweight but big enough to handle visiting day commotions; he leaned forward and quietly said, “Hold it down a bit fellas, will ya?”
CJ raised his hand in acknowledgement.
“Answer me,” CJ said with renewed focus.
“That night there was someone else with me. We were buying drugs. My boy was a little high and got agitated when the Guatemalan dealer wanted to see his money,” Stevens said to his cousin.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” CJ demanded, but in a lower, but fiercer tone. “Who the fuck was it?”
Billy Stevens looked to his left and to his right and leaned forward, and in a whisper said, “You may not want to hear it. I came here to make you understand that it wasn’t me who did the knifing.”