This is where I can help small-town police departments. Because I’m a former employee, I know whom to call and what kind of specific help to ask for. I can usually speed things up. Then, when the FBI returns its assessment of the material, I can show the local police how to implement it into their investigation.
Which is just what I was trying to do as I sat there — to think of the three suspects in light of Peary’s eight-page profile.
The trouble was, the three men could all fit the profile — until I knew more about them and their patterns, anyway.
And that was going to take a lot more work.
3
The prison grapevine can get a story around in less than an hour. By then virtually everybody in the place will know the same tale.
Well, this one day, there’s a very special tale going around and its consequences can be seen in the cafeteria where this rabbity little guy with thick glasses sits eating his soup — alone.
Usually you see the little guy with his buddies but not today because he ain’t got no buddies no more.
He learned less than two hours ago that he has the first confirmed case of HIV in the prison.
And nobody wants to be around him.
AIDS is just now starting to fill the TV screens and the front pages of newspapers and there’s a lot of hysteria. Gays getting beaten up everywhere. An AIDS hospice getting burned down in the middle of the night. Some little kid barred from school because a veritable lynch mob of parents come screaming to the school board.
Everybody in the prison industry knows that when AIDS starts to really hit the prison, there is going to be hell to pay.
Anal intercourse being the most efficient method of transmitting the disease — well, in a prison full of horny men reluctantly willing to screw each other even though they’d much rather screw women...
Well, it’s going to be terrible.
This is the background as he lies awake on the upper bunk one night and listens to the guy below him weep.
Tries to pretend he doesn’t hear.
Tries to pretend he doesn’t know what’s really going on.
But he does know.
This sorta pretty kid got passed around among all the important cons and now—
Well, you can bet there are a lot of important cons lying awake tonight, too, wondering if they’re soon going to get the word from the infirmary that...
“You awake?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry for crying,” the kid says.
“It’s all right.”
“It’s just I’m scared.”
“I know.”
“You ball anybody since you been in here?”
“Huh-uh. I don’t like men. I like women.”
“You’re probably all right, then.”
“Unless I pick it up some other way,” he says. He’s a real hypochondriac. He wishes he had a different guy living on the bunk below.
“Don’t you watch TV?”
“Yeah.”
“Well they explain that. You can’t get it from drinking out of the same glass or just touching somebody or anything like that.”
“That’s what they say, anyway.”
“You don’t believe them?”
“Huh-uh.”
“How come?”
“They’re just trying to keep everybody calm. They don’t want people rioting in the streets and stuff like that.”
“You ever seen anybody with it in the later stages?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty terrible.”
“Yeah.”
“I hope I die before I get that bad off,” the kid says. “Except I’m scared to die.”
Neither speaks for a long time.
Just listen to the prison night.
“How about you?” the kid says.
“How about me what?”
“You afraid to die?”
“Sure. Especially from some faggot disease.”
“I guess I don’t like that.”
“Don’t like what?”
“Being called a faggot.”
“Oh.”
“We’re human beings, too, you know.”
“Just give it a rest, kid, all right?”
“I resent it, man. I mean if you really want to know. I don’t call you names, why should you call me names?”
“You don’t call me names because I’m not a faggot.”
“That’s it, you sonofabitch.”
And the kid jumps off his bed and puts his fists up like he’s in some kind of bad-ass fight with an invisible opponent and then he starts coming closer and closer to the top bunk and—
He lashes his foot out and kicks the kid real hard in the mouth. The kid starts wailing and weeping right away.
All the cons who’ve been listening in are laughing their asses off.
Some fairy boy with AIDS, this is exactly what he’s got coming.
The kid cries himself out, just the way little babies do, and then finally crawls back up on his bunk and goes to sleep.
Sixteen months later, the kid is down to eighty-one pounds and can’t hold any kind of food they try to feed him in the infirmary.
He’s losing a pound a day.
The story is all over the prison.
God, eighty-one pounds.
Sure glad I never screwed him.
Benny screwed him. Benny won’t admit it. But Benny screwed him.
During the time it takes the kid to die, eight more HIV-positive cases are reported in the prison.
His hypochondria is getting real bad.
Even though he’s extremely careful never to touch anybody in any way, he’s terrified that he’s going to get it anyway.
He’s convinced that the government is lying. He’s convinced that he’s never going to leave this prison alive.
No two-thousand-dollar-per-month retainer is going to help him now.
For the first time, he starts daydreaming about escaping from here.
4
St. Mark’s Hospital was a four-story red-brick structure with no flourishes or pretensions whatsoever. It had windows, doors, ledges and corners and that was it. Presumably it also had indoor plumbing.
I found the back door, then the back stairs and proceeded to go up. Earlier I’d talked to the hospital operator, pretending I was calling long distance about my brother Karl, and she told me he was in Room 408, intensive care.
I moved as quickly and quietly as possible up the echoing concrete stairwell. At the fourth floor, I opened the heavy green fire door and peeked down the hall, expecting to see the flash of white uniforms and hear the squeak of rubber soles.