The looming walls of Auburn were topped with razor wire and watched over by men with rifles in guard towers. But there was only a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence between the inmates at Roxbury and freedom. There were no guard towers or men with guns in plain sight of the inmates. The guards patrolled in cars around the perimeter, but most of the security work was done by cameras.
The grounds of the prison farm were immaculately kept and appeared to have been professionally landscaped with bushes and trees. Beyond the campus, there were rows and rows of crop fields-barren now, but plowed and furrowed for the spring planting.
Hell, if they had a pool and a bar, I could almost live here, Marlene thought after a cursory check of her identification at the front gate. She pulled up to the building with the pretty painted sign that read Administration.
Again she had to invoke her husband's name to get the superintendent, an officious little mouse of a man named Andrew Vundershitz-an unfortunate but appropriate name-to cooperate. Vundershitz had a guard escort her to a waiting room with overstuffed chairs and a well-stocked magazine rack. The guard disappeared and a couple of minutes later reappeared with Enrique Villalobos, who was even uglier in person than the mugshot she'd seen.
The prisoner was wearing jeans and a clean blue prison shirt, but it was the only thing clean about him. His yellow, jaundiced eyes held hers for only a moment before drifting down to her breasts. The purple scars of a childhood bout with measles looked hideous against his ocher-colored skin. There was something about the way he combed his greasy black hair back from his pointed face and his rodentlike teeth that made her think of a large rat she'd seen once in the alley next to the loft building on Crosby.
The creature had seen her too-it was broad daylight-and rather than scurry away, stood on its hind legs and hissed at her. Marlene was no coward but there was something about the hissing rat that unnerved her and she'd turned and ran.
"You want me to stay in the room, ma'am?" the guard asked. He looked like a big, strong farm kid, probably from one of the neighboring farms, who was supplementing his income with a job at the local prison. He evidently thought it was a good idea if he remained.
"No, that's okay, officer," Marlene said. "I'll be fine."
"Yes, Officer Richardson," Villalobos sneered. "She'll be just fine. I'll treat her real good."
Officer Richardson pointed a thick finger at Villalobos. "You behave or if this lady complains, you and I will have a little discussion out by the toolshed."
Villalobos feigned a hurt look. "I wouldn't hurt a fly, Officer Richardson. You got no call to talk to me like that." Then he turned and leered at Marlene. "Obviously, this fine-looking bitch has heard that Enrique Villalobos is a stud and wants to find out for herself."
Marlene felt grateful that she was no longer carrying a gun. Otherwise, she thought, I might be tempted to wait for Officer Richardson to disappear, then put a hot one in this piece of shit's brain.
When she first agreed to take the case, Marlene had looked at Villalobos's PSI, the presentence investigation report done on every prisoner to give the judge some guidance on the appropriate place and severity of incarceration. The psychiatrists who'd examined Villalobos had recommended maximum security because of the likelihood that he would reoffend if he escaped. The psychologist had noted that Villalobos both hated and worshipped his mother, with a strong possibility, though it had been denied by both, that the mother had had sexual relations with her son from an early age. "It is felt by this board," the examining physicians wrote, "that the crime perpetrated on his victims was a way of acting out repressed anger at his mother. Yet, publicly at least, he professes a great love for her."
When Richardson left, closing the door behind him, Marlene smiled at Villalobos. "Mr. Villalobos, I'd like to talk to you about a friend of yours."
"Oh, yeah?" he said, placing his hand on his crotch. "I got lots of friends. Like the women I fucked. They always want more from their 'friend,' Enrique."
"Yes, I'm sure," she said sarcastically, but it didn't affect his smile or what he was doing with his hand. "But I'm here to talk about another man…Igor Kaminsky."
Villalobos's smile disappeared and his hand returned to the arm of his chair. "I don't know no fuckin' Kaminsky."
"No? The DOC's records say he was your cellmate at Auburn in February. About the time you 'confessed' to the rape of Liz Tyler."
"I remember sweet Liz, all right," Villalobos said, regaining his composure. "I always remember them tight asses I fuck. Um, um, it's so g-o-o-o-d."
Marlene again wished she was packing heat, or at least a Taser, but forced herself to continue. "Well, I just thought you might be interested to know that Mr. Kaminsky has been in contact with the Brooklyn DA's office."
Villalobos scowled. "Oh, yeah, now I remember that lying sack of shit. I think I fucked him, too, in my cell. That's what I do to liars and bitches."
"That's what you did until you had a 'positive prison experience' and found Jesus, right?"
The smile returned to the convict's face. "Thas right, bitch. Me and God is tight like this," he said, crossing his fingers.
"Yeah, Enrique, I'm sure God has something special planned for such a good friend…someplace cold and dark and alone except for the voice shrieking in your head," she snarled.
The sudden turn in her demeanor shocked him at first. But he recovered and hissed, "Fuck you, bitch…when I get out of here-and you better believe I will-I'm going to come visit you and do what I did to sweet Lizzie."
Marlene fought to keep that other side of her-the one she'd been trying to conquer-from jumping up and ripping Villalobos's heart out through his throat. She only partly succeeded as she leaned forward. "Listen, you fuck. When I leave here, you ask some of your piece-of-shit friends, if you have any, if they know Marlene Ciampi. Ask them, ass wipe, if they think that there's maybe something not quite right about her, in fact, maybe something's quite wrong. I know a lot of really bad people in the world, and some of them owe me favors. And maybe before you can get out, I send a few of them to visit your mother-I believe she's still living over off West Fourth in Brooklyn-and I have them do to her what you did to Liz Tyler."
Marlene's threat to have the man's mother raped-one she would not have wished on any woman no matter what the provocation-had the desired effect on Villalobos. "You go near my momma, and I'll kill you," he hissed again only louder. "I will hunt you down and rape you, and slit you open like a chicken."
"I'll bet she screams like crazy when they do to her what you did to Liz," Marlene said. "I bet she cries and begs for her son Enrique to save her…but he won't be able to because he's locked up here."
"Fucking whore," Villalobos screamed and lurched out of his chair at her.
Out in the hall, Officer Richardson heard the scream and rushed for the door. But before he could get it open to rescue the pretty woman inside, something had happened to the prisoner, whom he found lying on the ground gasping for air and clutching his sides.
"What happened to him?" Richardson said with an amused look.
"I think he hurt himself stumbling against the chair," Marlene said. "But you might want to get him to the infirmary." She tapped Villalobos in the side with the toe of her boot, which caused him to scream in pain. "I do believe he broke his ribs in the fall."
"Yeah," Richardson smiled. "Good thing I saw the whole thing or he might have tried to accuse you of beating the tar out of him."
Marlene grinned back at him. "Oh, my, yes, good thing. I wouldn't want something like that to hurt my reputation."
20
No sooner did Marlene walk in the loft door from her tour of New York's penal colonies than she began to tell Butch, who stood in the dimly lit kitchen, about her encounters with Svetlov and Villalobos. "That greasy piece of crap, Villalobos, is your prototypical prison braggart. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that he said something to Kaminsky that he regretted later and told Sykes, who tried to have him killed by Lynd."