The Fall-Down Artist (29 page)

Dorsey took her empty cup to the sink, rinsed it, and stacked it in the rack. There was a half window above the sink, and Dorsey looked out on the fields that had once been the Kellers', down payments on Gretchen's future. So it all goes back to a storefront in Johnstown, he thought, where you had to put the heat on the chain's weakest link. Then three silent hours through the snow. She gets a night's rest and an early start for Lancaster. And you miss her call because you're at the police station.

The realization struck him as he moved away from the sink. Frozen on the kitchen tile, Dorsey pulled it all into one piece. Jesus Christ. Sunday morning, early on. Before the papers or even the radio had the story. And after a few miles east on the turnpike, the car radio gets only the farm report and prayer meetings. Good God, she doesn't know.

“Look, something happened Saturday night.” He slipped back into his chair and toyed with a spoon. “It might not help you see things my way, but—whatever. You think nothing could be worse than what you saw, but believe me, everything is relative. And there's always another notch to take things up to.” Dorsey told her about the assault, Russie's death, and the funeral.

“That's where it stands.” Dorsey took her hand, softly squeezing it. “The job I did on Claudia Maynard was pretty low, but it's not the worst. Death is the worst—unless Father
Jancek has enough pull in the hereafter to fix me up for eternal damnation. Don't put me in his league.”

Dorsey watched her go to the sink and wipe her face. “I didn't know,” she said, her back to Dorsey as she gazed out the window. “He was your friend. I'm sorry. He got the car that morning, the day they were watching the house. Kind of an odd guy, but even still.”

“Odd?” Dorsey said. “He was damned strange. But he was my friend. And I was the target, the one they came for.”

Gretchen turned to him. “So you'll see this thing through; I suppose you have to now. We'll talk when it's over. I can't promise anything, except that we'll talk.”

Dorsey left
the Buick in a parking lot near the perimeter of the prison compound, located in a windy hollow between two mountains. Looking for the visitor's check-in, he crossed through an area that might be taken for a mobile-home court, filled with Airstreams and Avions. But Dorsey knew it for what it was: housing for the trusties who worked the prison farm. He recalled a time several years earlier when he had interviewed an inmate who had begun pulling in compensation checks just before sentencing. The inmate claimed to be in constant excruciating back pain. After the interview, using binoculars from a perch atop one of the guard towers, Dorsey watched for two hours as the inmate bounced along on a tractor, jumping on and off during breaks, plowing a field.

At the visitor's check-in, still outside the high red-brick walls, Dorsey found that Preach was as good as his word: Dorsey's name had recently been placed on inmate Demory's list of approved visitors. Dorsey was given a brief lecture on prison regulations and the penalties for smuggling things inside. After he browsed for a few minutes in a gift shop that carried inmate art work, mostly depressingly dark sketches of prison scenes, Dorsey's name was called and he was escorted to the main gate.

Next to the barred gate was a walk-through entrance, the final security checkpoint. A gray-uniformed corrections officer
handed Dorsey a plastic tray, instructing him to empty his pockets into the tray, along with his belt. The officer then motioned to a second officer seated in a glass observation booth overlooking the gate. Holding his pants up by the belt loops, Dorsey passed through the metal detectors and entered the maximum security area of Huntingdon SCI.

Dorsey retrieved his belongings and walked through a small garden, brown with winter, following a sign for the visiting center. In a long one-story wing, he found a lounge equipped with easy chairs and vending machines where inmates, dressed in uniforms of varying colors depending on their housing and work assignments, mixed with visitors. At the far end were three doors; Dorsey made his way through groups of families and girlfriends to the door marked
ATTORNEY
'
S CONFERENCE
and slipped inside, locking the door behind him. The room was ten by twelve, divided by a waist-high counter across its middle. From the countertop to the ceiling was wire-reinforced glass, with a metal speaking portal at the height of a sitting man. A chair sat at the portal; a companion chair was beyond the glass.

Dorsey sat at the divider, took a pen and steno pad from his coat pocket, and placed them on the counter. As he watched the door at the opposite end of the room, his thoughts trailed back to Gretchen and that farmhouse, now three hours away. She'd be back, he was sure . . . almost sure. She'll be back and you'll make it work, he promised himself, or nothing's ever going to go right again.

With a metallic clang, the steel security door's deadbolt was released. Dorsey nervously ran his hands down his sides, checking his appearance, as if he were the subject of the interview. A short, heavily gutted guard swung open the door and motioned an even shorter black man into the room. Unlike the officer, the black man was very thin and looked to Dorsey as though he was only beginning his recovery from a serious illness. The skin of his face was tight to the bone, and his eyes were more brown than white. The sleeves of his orange coveralls were rolled to the elbows and ballooned out from there. His hair was trimmed close
to the scalp with a razor part on the left, and when he came opposite Dorsey at the glass he fished two packs of cigarettes from his pockets. Dorsey checked the two vertical scars on his chin and figured them for a cell game that got out of hand.

“Word is you've got the room for as long as you want.” The guard turned to Demory as he began to close the door. “Art, bang on the door when you're through. Or if you need more smokes. Just keep at it, I'll hear ya eventually. Okay?”

Demory watched the door shut then dropped into the chair. “You Dorsey? The guy Lou Preach sent?”

“That's me,” Dorsey said. “You believe me, don't you? How many visitors you get up here in the mountains? I could show you some ID, perhaps a major credit card?”

Demory snorted out a laugh. “Fuck, no. This is good. Preach said you'd be good for a talk. But you're who you're supposed to be?”

“Yes, I am. I is me.” Dorsey flipped open the steno pad.

“This is gonna be okay,” Demory said. “You gotta realize. My day is full of hangin' out with cons or bullshittin' to guards, assholes like the one that brought me here. On a good day I get to pull the psychiatrist's leg.” Demory lit a cigarette. “I shouldn't call the guy who brought me here an asshole. He ain't bad. But here you are, my fuckin' diversion for today.”

The ground rules were set, as far as Dorsey could tell. No hard-ass bullshit, no threats, valid or otherwise. You've seen him before. He wants to talk, to impress on you that he is no ordinary jailbird. Lead him a little and sit back for the ride. And, of course, make sure he's not a fraud, a put-up job by Lou Preach.

“I read up on you on the way here,” Dorsey said, tapping at the glass. “Your home turf, I'm familiar with it.”

“Fuck you know about Aliquippa?” Demory laughed and took a deep pull on his smoke. He flicked the ash to the floor. “What you know, maybe, is the Serbian Club, some Italians, and the mill. You don't know shit.”

“Somebody say something about Aliquippa?” Dorsey registered confusion. “Plan Eleven, that's the place I had in mind.”

Demory grinned and wagged a finger at Dorsey. “You know the Plan? Damn straight. The Plan, that's where I spent what I like to think of as my formative years.”

“And learned your profession?”

“That's right.” Demory shook a cigarette free from one of the packs on the counter. He lit the fresh smoke from the butt of the one he was finishing. “Doors, locks, windows, iron bars. Ain't nothin' could keep me outa your house. If you had something I wanted, you could bet your sweet ass I'd take it away from you.”

“Don't know about that,” Dorsey said. “No matter how good you are, even the best get caught. They caught you and put your skinny black ass in Beaver jail. With our mutual friend Tony Ruggerio.”

“Antonio motherfuckin' Ruggerio.” Demory drew it out through his teeth. “That fat-ass. Me and Tony was tight. He's a hard fuckin' guy, gets on your shit, but we was tight. I was in Beaver County twice. Second time, I made trusty. We was tight.”

“Good man,” Dorsey said. “Not many like him.”

“Shit, ain't nobody like him.” Demory hit off his smoke. “Up at the Wall there ain't nobody like him. Hard place, know what I mean? Fuckin' hard.”

It was starting to move for Dorsey. Give it a little push, he thought. The inmate is ready to talk. Dorsey watched him take yet another cigarette and light it off the butt. Good Christ, Dorsey thought, his lungs must resemble the walls of a coal mine.

Dorsey didn't have to push. The jailbird was moving under his own power.

“The Wall,” he said. “Can't help but pick up a few things in a place like that. I learned plenty.”

“Heard a guy call it a finishing school once.” Dorsey chuckled. “What courses did you take? Must've done pretty well. You stayed clean a long time.”

The compliment drew a nod from Demory. “Picked up general stuff, first year or so. Stuff everybody learns. Like how to lie so well you believe it yourself. So you could fool anybody.”

“What you might call the core courses?” So this is what it boils down to, Dorsey thought. You're sitting in this room with a guy who likes to think of himself as the master of deception, and you've got to hang on his every word. The crapshoot of a lifetime. “Then what?” he asked.

Demory pulled at his cigarette and coughed back the smoke. He spit on the floor and shrugged his shoulders, collecting himself. “Preach was right. He said you'd be worth talkin' to.” Demory stared back at his cigarette. “It was this white guy I knew at the Wall. It pissed off the brothers, me hangin' with him, but it was worth it. The guy really knew some shit. Called him the Professor; me and three other guys called him that. The Professor stayed in his cell most all day except for chow. He was older, fifty or sixty; he was afraid some guys would fuck with him. But it was okay because me and these other guys would spend our time in there with him, on the floor by his bunk, squattin', kind of. Just hung with him till whenever.”

“Sounds like story time at the children's library,” Dorsey said.

“Weren't no fuckin' kids in that cell,” Demory said. “And the Professor, he knew a game that beat shit outa creepin' around somebody's house in the dark. This guy pulled in more on one job than I ever did in a month of doin' houses. The Professor was a fall-down artist. He was behind the Wall for likin' little girls too much, but he made his livin' on beatin' insurance companies. And he taught it all to me.”

Verification, Dorsey realized, was in his own backyard. This is your turf; he can't bullshit you. It's why Preach put us together. He knows you and he knows this jailbird, and he knows one can't fool the other. “Tell me about it,” Dorsey said.

“For a while,” Demory said, flicking ashes to the floor,
“I did most of my work in department stores. On escalators. Had this shoe with a ragged toe. I'd head down the escalator when it was crowded. At the bottom, I'd fall down and start screamin'. I mean really bawlin'. And then I fell flat on my face. Nobody could see what was happening, but even still, with all the screamin' and the nasty end of my shoe, they thought they was witnesses. After the first-aid room I went to the risk manager's office, a guy who knew a nuisance claim when he saw one and wanted out. So I'd sign a release for a check and head down the street to the next target.”

“Slick, very slick.” Dorsey stretched and linked his hands at the back of his neck. “What else?”

“Icy sidewalks in winter, maybe a fall down a flight of steps. Some of that, anyway. And auto accidents: whiplash. Used rental cars, always used rentals. The rental agency pushes through the settlement. That way, nobody gets the idea their cars are a piece of shit. You better believe that takes a certain touch, hitting a bus or a car just so, especially if you want it to look like the other guy's fault. Make the other guy look like an asshole. Which he fuckin' is.”