The Giveaway (6 page)

If you’re sent to prison, it’s important to understand that the people you’re doing time with are not, by definition, trustworthy. One of the first rules of incarceration is simple: Don’t owe anybody anything. As soon as someone has you, they have you forever. This means inside and outside. You might not know it when it’s happening, but eventually the scales will tip.

“Was Nick Balsalmo part of a prison ministry program?” I asked.

“Uh, no,” he said.

“Does Nick Balsalmo work for the police department?” I asked.

“Uh, no,” he said again. He was beginning to get the path of this line of questioning.

“Does he work in hazardous waste disposal?”

“No.”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m going to guess Nick Balsalmo is a drug dealer. Would that be an accurate description?”

“More like a courier. He doesn’t sell on the streets. I couldn’t trust a guy who sold drugs to kids or something.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Who could?”

The sarcasm was lost on Bruce.

“Right, right, my feeling exactly. But he works with bigger businesses, I guess you could say.”

“A middleman,” Sam offered.

“Exactly, exactly,” Bruce said. “A middleman.”

“So it might stand to reason that Mr. Balsalmo would be in the business of selling your stolen drugs to people who suddenly found themselves, say, low on product? Would that sound plausible?” I said.

“Uh, yes,” Bruce said. And there it was. Dawning.

“When did you speak with him last?”

“Three, four days ago. He called to thank me. Said he was having good luck moving the stuff, wanted to know if I wanted, you know, a cut. I said no, of course.”

“Of course,” Sam said.

“Of course,” I said. I gave him a big smile and then said, “You might want to give him a call. See if he’s still alive.”

The color left Bruce’s face then. He’d known this was serious before, certainly, but for some reason he hadn’t seen all of the consequences of his actions. I tossed him my cell phone and he dialed Nick’s number on speaker. After a few rings, an automated voice announced that the voice mail was full.

“What kind of drug dealer doesn’t check his messages?” I said.

“Maybe he’s out of town?” Bruce said.

“That’s why people have voice mail, Bruce, so they can get their calls anywhere. Especially drug dealers. Do you know where he lives?”

“He lives with a Cuban girl out in Little Havana. I went over there for dinner once. Nice place.” There was a matter-of-factness to Bruce that sometimes felt very odd: He was essentially a very simple guy. For a person who did twelve years, he didn’t seem to be all that jaded, or damaged, which meant that for some reason he hadn’t had a terrible experience in jail. Or not as terrible as others.

“What did you owe Nick for, exactly?”

Bruce got a pensive look on his face and started rubbing at his wrist again. When he finally spoke, it was just above a whisper. “He did my finger.”

“Could you speak up, Bruce?” Sam said. “I can’t quite hear you. Ten percent hearing loss in my right ear from the Falklands.”

Bruce didn’t know quite what to make of Sam, so for a moment he glared at him in a rather benign way, as if to say, You could say please
.
It didn’t last. “He did my finger, okay? Spent two months in the hole for it. When he got out, there was this
meshugass
with my mother’s illness, and so I couldn’t pay him what I owed him initially, but he was cool, really. The dinner and all that. Ever had Cuban pork chops? Authentic Cuban pork chops?”

“Once,” I said.

“Where?”

“In Santiago de Cuba,” I said.

“But I thought that . . .” He stopped for a minute, thought about where he was going, opted to change lanes. “Anyway, he was perfectly sweet about everything, but it was clear he wanted what was his.”

“Let me get this right,” Sam said. “Guy takes off
your
finger and
you
have to pay
him
? That’s inflation for you. Mikey, you hear that?”

“I hear that,” I said.

“It doesn’t make sense on the outside, I know,” Bruce said. “But it’s a different set of rules in prison.”

“How much did you owe him?” I asked.

“Fifty grand,” he said.

“How much do you think he could get for the drugs you gave him?”

“Enough that he felt comfortable offering me a cut,” Bruce said.

“Real gentleman,” Sam said.

The problem here was that even if Bruce wanted to give the Ghouls back their drugs—presuming Nick hadn’t already tried to sell them their own stuff—a good sum of it was already gone. And I didn’t feel comfortable giving anyone back a bunch of drugs—there’s no way into that situation that is safe and I didn’t particularly want to kill anyone that week. Or be killed, for that matter.

“Nick, he’s a good guy,” Bruce said. “He just has a bad job. But who doesn’t?”

Bruce made a convincing argument, but it might just have been his delivery. Having a sixty- five-year-old man give you a slice of prison wisdom does have a certain charm. He wanted to explain more, but before he could, Fiona came to the sliding glass window and cracked it open.

“Zadie would like something to eat,” she said to Bruce, who jumped from his seat like he’d been shocked and went directly into caregiver mode, rushing off to the other side of the great room and into the kitchen to fix his mother a sandwich.

Sam and I both watched him for a bit, how meticulous he was in putting together a plate for her, how he put the sandwich in one corner, a bit of Jell-O in another, how he washed by hand a few leaves of lettuce and then shook pepper onto them, followed by a dash of oil and vinegar. He then poured his mother an entire glass of ginger ale, no ice.

“We have to help him,” I said quietly.

Sam nodded once.

Bruce walked past us to the patio without saying a word.

“A complication,” Sam said, still watching Bruce. “Before I got here I ran the information on the house he hit. It was burned down last night.”

“Not a surprise,” I said.

“With the occupants inside of it,” Sam said.

“How many?”

“Two. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they found this Balsalmo in a ditch in the back if he’s as savvy as our friend Bruce is.”

Page ten of the Ghouls’ constitution said, “You dishonor the Ghouls. The price is determined by your dishonor.”

I guess they meant it.

 

Trying to figure out how to return stolen property is like trying to un-swallow: There’s no actual opposite action that will return the property (or the food you’ve eaten) in its original form. There will always be an elemental difference. Steal from someone and even if they get their stuff back in whole cloth, they’re still going to feel that sense of violation. Steal from a criminal organization and whether or not they feel violated, they’re going to want revenge.

In Bruce Grossman’s case, he didn’t actually want to return everything he’d stolen. He wanted to keep the money and give back the drugs and the paperwork and the box of patches that he’d also lifted and just call it even, which wasn’t going to work. There’s no even when three hundred thousand bucks is left out of the equation. And stealing a gang’s patches is maybe worst of all. It’s silly, but these grown men live and die for a stitch of cloth.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Sam said. We were back at my loft. I was eating blueberry yogurt. Fiona was doing this thing where she sits quietly flipping through a fashion magazine but is really listening to everything and waiting to make proclamations that will solve all the problems we’ve encountered. Sam was doing what Sam does: drinking my beer and asking questions. “If you’re a criminal mastermind, like Bruce thinks he is, why would you be so stupid?”

“He’s not a criminal mastermind,” I said, “so that solves that.”

“He’s closer to a criminal mastermind than either of you are,” Fiona said. She didn’t even bother to look up from her magazine.

“Because we’re not criminals,” I said.

“Have you ever tried to break into a safe-deposit box?” she asked.

Sam and I looked at each other. She had a point. Kind of.

“I’ve cracked into a few secure locations,” Sam said. “And Mikey here could have Fort Knox renamed Fort Westen in no time. Right, Mikey?”

“Uh, right,” I said.

Fiona was heading somewhere. This was just the opening salvo. She raised her eyebrows, but kept her eyes on the magazine, turning pages casually. “I should have been a model,” she said to no one in particular. “Seems like I’d get to sit around on bearskin rugs in Uggs and a bikini, not a care in the world.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?” I said.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” Fiona said.

“I think it’s cute when you guys repeat each other’s sentences,” Sam said.

“Do you know who Bruce Grossman is, Michael?” Fiona said. “I mean, do you really know?”

“I know he’s a person with a problem,” I said. “I know he’s a friend of Barry’s. I know he’s been a fool since he got out of prison. I know his mother is going to die soon. Isn’t that enough?”

Fiona shook her head slowly, like she couldn’t believe how utterly daft I was. “Right, right,” she said. She still hadn’t bothered to put down the magazine or look at either me or Sam. “What I’m saying is that the man is near a legend, Michael. I heard of what he was doing in Ireland. He broke into every bank imaginable. And so smart about it, too. Safe-deposit boxes are bank robber nirvana, Michael.”

“And?”

“And maybe he’d be good to keep around,” Fiona said. She looked up finally, smiling, flirting, batting eyelashes, doing that thing she does with the tip of her tongue along the inside of her bottom lip.

“No,” I said.

“No, what?”

I could see the wheels turning in her mind.

“No, he will not rob banks with you. No, you will not sell his services to other people who rob banks. No, you will not put him in a box and ship him to a small town in Iceland where there are very old banks. No, no and no.”

There’s not much about Fiona that remains a mystery to me, apart from her total nihilism. But it’s unusually cute, so there’s that.

“I’m just saying that in the position you’re in,” she said, “where revenue streams seem inconsistent, it might be wise to look at all avenues, Michael. It’s not every day someone from history shows up.”

“Duly noted,” I said, “and still, no.”

I went back to eating my yogurt and thinking about how to un-swallow Bruce’s problems. Fiona went back to reading her magazine, presumably thinking about the fashion shoots she’d missed in Bora Bora all these years. But Sam wasn’t doing anything. That was troubling, particularly since he’d finished his beer and hadn’t gone foraging in my fridge for another.

“Is he really from history?” Sam asked.

“The Safe-Deposit Bandit,” Fiona said. “There are probably textbooks about him.”

“As a kid, I always thought it was ‘safety’ deposit box,” Sam said.

“That’s because your American education never put the proper emphasis on enunciation. Both of you sound like you learned to speak with dirt in your mouth.”

Sam gave me a look that said, basically, What the hell?

“Something else troubling you, Fiona?”

“If you must know,” she said, “I’d like it if you found a way to describe me that didn’t make me sound like the help.”

“That’s my cue,” Sam said and headed for the door.

“Wait,” I said. “We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do with Bruce.”

“I can’t stand to hear you two fight,” Sam said, already halfway out the door of my loft. “It just breaks my heart.”

“Sam,” I said.

All that was left was his waving arm. “Call me later,” he shouted. “We’ll do some covert stuff together and it will be a great time.”

And then he was gone completely, leaving me alone with Fiona, who, in the last year or so, had become an inconsistent emotional concern. One minute she loved me, the next minute she hated me, a minute after that she was kissing me, two minutes later she was punching me in the head, five minutes later we were in bed . . . and always, always, there was some guilt on both ends.

And now this.

“If we’re going to talk about this,” I said, “you’re going to need to put that magazine down.”

“If I do that,” she said, perfectly calm, “I might be inclined to use it as a weapon.”

“Fine,” I said. I sat down on my bed, across from the chair she was sitting in. “Let’s hear it.”

“Well,” she said, “do you consider me your friend or your associate?”

“Yes, technically, I believe both are accurate descriptions.”

Fiona hurled the magazine at me, but fortunately she hadn’t slipped a sharp piece of broken glass into the pages beforehand, which is a nice trick if you want to really hurt someone. So the magazine just fluttered to the ground.

“Wrong answer,” she said.

“Fi, look, I’m not comfortable categorizing who we are to complete strangers, particularly not people like Bruce Grossman. He’s not exactly a confidential source.”

“I’m not speaking of him solely,” she said. “It would just be nice if, every now and then, I knew where I stood before I was offended by your boorish behavior.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking, I have no idea where we stand, moment to moment
.
“How would you like me to describe you?”

Fiona stood up then, went into my kitchen, poured water into a teapot and began preparing a cup of tea. It was as if I wasn’t even in the room. I watched her for a few moments, the simple, fluid motions of her actions, the lack of wasted space she conveyed. After about five minutes, the water came to a boil and she fixed her tea. She sat back down in her chair and played absently with the steeping teabag. “Any ideas come to you yet, Michael?” she asked.