Illustration by Paul Campbell © 2007
Guilty
Ricky Ginsburg – © 2006 - 07
I had not had the opportunity to converse with the gnarled old man who smiled at me through tobacco-stained lips prior to the execution. Other than a few brief words of thanks to the warden and a brief comment for some stale-breathed journalist, I hadn't spoken to anyone else at the prison. After 17 years, the one person I wanted to talk to again was already strapped to a table, waiting to die.
Vincent Bartholomew Jackson slit my brother's throat as he sat on a secluded concrete bench in New York 's Central Park. Alex, my brother, had been sharing a bottle of bottom shelf vodka and swapping lies with his pal Vince just as they had done for years. They met on an irregular schedule, an oddity in a city where everyone else lived by an appointment book and a calendar, but always at the same graffiti-covered bench on the southernmost edge of the park. It was a prime location for a pair of tourist-watchers as it gave them a clear picture of the Plaza Hotel and its wealthy patrons. However, with an overgrowth of scraggly shrubs tangled with the dipping limbs of tall trees, only those on a passing gravel walkway could see them. They took over the outdoor pew several times a month to play chess and frighten the wayward bird-watchers; always armed with an ample supply of affordable booze paid for with monthly blood bank donations. The liquor helped pass the time and ease the rigors of their self-imposed retirement from society.
Alex and Vince were not a pair of homeless bums beseeching passersby for loose coin, but you wouldn't know it to look at them. Neither had seen the need for, nor purchased fresh clothes in a decade. The torn jeans and missing button flannel shirts they sported, even in the heat of a Manhattan summer, and their unruly mop heads, gray though still tinged with original color, would lead one to believe the 60's had dropped these two out of the race long before Nixon came to rule. They still needed more than a dozen years before either could have collected a Social Security check, but neither of them had ever registered; they found food stamps to be a sufficient income in a city where handouts for the indigent were the norm. Alex resided in a grim fourth floor walkup in the east village with all-night dopers and Holland Tunnel hookers; Vince spent his nights alone in an abandoned houseboat floating on the Hudson several blocks further south at Battery Park.
My brother and I lived in different worlds; success had blessed only one of us. The loss of our parents in a Midwest hotel fire while we were in high school had orphaned us to different foster homes. In the years that passed, he dropped out; I fell into line. I lost track of him when the government took me on a fourteen month hiatus to Vietnam and didn't try to reestablish contact until shortly after I had found my niche in the contracting trades. I tried several times to get him to take any one of the odd jobs I could find through my construction business, but Alex lived by a tight schedule - too tight for work. For several years, I bought him a subscription to the Daily News so he could study the ‘help wanted' section; he never read anything but the comics.
His death, while tragic for me, was not an unexpected event. My friends who knew about him had warned me about the shortened lifespan of those who lived on the bricks and panhandled their way through the side streets of life. The late night phone call, the trip to the morgue in the rain, and the subsequent lonely funeral, at my expense, were pages of someone else's life I knew I would have to read someday. I didn't dwell on them, but when they were finally printed, I wasn't ready to acknowledge them.
According to the police report and agreed to by a jury of his peers, Vince, in an alcoholic haze had cut Alex across the throat and most of his left ear with an oriental knife bearing the initials ‘VBJ'. He then stabbed him seven times in the chest just to make sure Alex was dead. No one witnessed the crime, at least no one the police could find after the most diligent of searches, and no fingerprints were found on the knife, which remained standing in my brother's chest. Vince claimed he was home fast asleep, but couldn't produce a friend or lover to corroborate his story. His court-appointed, underpaid lawyer from Legal Aid was no match for the seasoned prosecutor. The jury took less than an hour to find him guilty of the murder. The judge needed less than ten minutes to sentence him to death.
***
The tired old man and I sat side-by-side on the only bus from Sing Sing back to the train station but said little during the ride. He wore a tattered gray fedora laced with the malodorous scents of mothballs and antiseptic, noticeable even over the heavy diesel fumes of a bus deep in need of repair. He mentioned something about the train and I replied “car.” It was not a time for pleasantries or deep philosophical commentary. I spent most of the trip staring at my reflection in the window and thinking about Alex. I forgave myself for not changing his life years ago, but I never stopped thinking about the friend who killed him.
None of it made sense; Vince was rarely sober but he had no good reason to kill anyone, especially his best friend. Where did he get the knife, a weapon the prosecutor admitted was far more costly than a year's worth of food stamps? What really happened on that bench, I wondered? Was it an argument over an errant chess move, amplified by the liquor and burnt into his sweaty neck by the midday sun? What makes a man kill his best friend? I had killed in Vietnam, but never anyone I knew. They were a faceless enemy who died at a distance, not someone I spent hours with discussing politics with on a New York City park bench.
With Vince on his way to hell, I was pleased, relieved, and my thirst for revenge had been satiated. There had been moments during the three day trial I would have grabbed Exhibit A and shoved it into his chest to save the state the time and money, but my wife held me back. Nightmares came and went for years after the trial. They all ended with a bloody, jewel-encrusted knife in my hand looking down into Vince's vacant, gray eyes.
It was only a twenty-minute ride from the prison, but unfortunately, the last train to the city departed several minutes before our bus arrived. It appeared the old man was stranded.
“Where do you need to go? I can drive you or at least get you close,” I offered.
He looked at me in hopeful surprise. “Fourteenth Street, just in from Eighth Avenue would be perfect if you don't mind.”
“Not a problem,” I sighed. “It's a long ride back from here and a passenger is better company than the radio.”
I unlocked my door, slid into the driver's seat, and reached across to let him in. Through the tinted window a street light glinted off his ornate belt buckle - a coiled, gold serpent with a curved dagger in its ivory teeth and several five-pointed stars fashioned from crushed, blue sapphires on its skin. The belt buckle disappeared in the shadows as he gingerly lowered himself into the car. I hadn't noticed the scarring on his face and hands in the dim light of the bus, but they aged his skin with crevasses of history carved helter-skelter between the raised veins and shrunken muscles. With his hat now removed, his bald pate momentarily reflected the dome light; the glare extinguished as he pulled the door shut; his scars disappeared into the darkness as well.
“My name's Trask; George Trask.” I extended my hand to the old man.
“Glad to meet you in the flesh. I've read about you in the papers. Sorry about your brother. My name is Vallerio but everyone calls me Val.”
I started the car, but let it sit idling for a moment while I gathered my thoughts. “Thanks, but he's been dead a long time and all I've waited for is vengeance. Does it make me sound sick or twisted? Seventeen years of waiting for someone to die? Planning your life so you know you'll be free on the day someone is going to be put to death, is that a lifestyle?”
“It was a long time to wait but we can all rest easier now,” he mumbled. “I'm glad you could give me a ride home. I'd hate to sleep in the train station all night.”
I paid the toll and hopped on the Interstate. The golden glow of the toll plaza faded quickly in the rearview mirror as I nudged the car over the posted speed limit. It had been many years since I gave much thought to my brother. After he was murdered, I had spent long days in the courthouse and the jail at Rikers. Other than his lawyer, I was Vince's only visitor. I pleaded with him to confess to me, at least to apologize for what he had done. I told him I could forgive him, even if he could never accept the sour hand fate might have dealt him. He stared back at me with a bobble-headed doll's eyes and never said a word. His silence hardened my gut and washed my forgiveness away along with the last of my tears. They refused to let me see him after the transfer to Sing Sing and his incarceration on death row.
I burned every dime store photo of him and Alex I found when I cleaned out the east village apartment.
At Alex's funeral, my wife held my hand and begged me to let my anger follow the coffin into the grave. Five years of agonizing, sleepless nights and several alcohol-fueled battles passed between us until she shook my hand goodbye. It would take another two years to get my anger under control, toss the last bottle of gin in the trash, and stop thinking about my dead brother. Only in the past few months, as the last of the mandated appeals was turned down by the superior court and the execution date set, did I once again see his placid face in my dreams.
“So, how did you get on the guest list for this event,” I queried. “I know you're no family of mine. Press?”
He shook his head and looked pensively out the window. “I'm an old friend of the warden who just wanted to make sure this guy was going to get his ride to hell. The right amount of money in the right hands will open just about any door,” he admitted, “Mind if I smoke?”
He lit a Marlboro without waiting for an answer and dropped the window to let the smoke drift out of the car. His wrinkled hands shook for a moment until the nicotine kicked in; fingers tainted with brown stains acknowledged a long-standing friendship with tobacco. I was surprised with the rasp in his throat and the shriveled, jaundiced skin that he had lived this long. The brown aviator's jacket wrapped loosely around his upper body saw battles won and lost long before either of us would have been called to duty; I wondered who had worn it first. Shadows of insignia were all that remained on the cracked leather shoulders. He coughed several times and stretched his neck to reveal a threadbare collar, but he wore new, black, patent leather shoes and a red plaid bow tie for today's excursion.
“How do you feel after seeing your brother's killer die? Are you relieved?” He shifted his body around to look at my face. There was a moment of hesitation and slight choke in his voice when he asked, “Is there any forgiveness in your heart after all these years?”
“Happy, I guess. Relieved, sure, I'm glad it's all finally come to a conclusion. Pissed it took 17 years to happen, that's for certain. Alex didn't have 17 years to die. Vince made it happen all too quickly. I'm glad I've gotten my revenge and I'll certainly sleep better tonight. But there will always be questions in my mind that will never be answered. This chapter of my life is finally over and I'm going to try and get on with the rest of it. Who knows, if all goes well I may even get back together with my wife. And you; what makes it special for you?”
The old man took a long drag on the cigarette and stared out the window for a few minutes. I didn't think he was going to answer the question but he slowly turned to face me and said, “Vincent didn't kill your brother. I did.”
The words were gunshots to my gut as I stood on the brake pedal. The rear end of the car spun around wildly as we slid off the pavement and onto the gravel shoulder. I threw it in park and killed the engine.
“What the hell did you just say? Are you nuts? Who the hell are you?”
“I'm the ‘VBJ' who killed your brother. Vallerio Bischwan Jamir – VBJ. It was my knife they found in Alex' chest. Vincent just had the bad luck to share my initials and be your brother's friend.”
“You're full of shit! Why do this now? Why tell me this? Don't you think I'm going to take you to the next Trooper station and turn you in? Is this some sick joke?” I screamed at him. I wished I owned a gun or carried a knife in the car.
“You can turn me in, but it's too late. I've only got a few more months to live now that my money's run out. I'm dying of AIDS thanks to your brother. Vincent was just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time who bought me almost enough time for a cure. But my money's gone and I can no longer afford the treatments to keep my body from crumbling.”
“You killed my brother? How do you know he had AIDS, not even the police were told.”
“Your brother got AIDS from one of his junkie friends. You knew he was shooting up right?”
I nodded slowly and started thinking about how I was going to kill this bastard.
“He was a regular at the 9th Street blood clinic, every five weeks another pint, another thirty-five dollars. I was hit by a bus on Park Avenue and got a transfusion of blood in the emergency room. Several months later I started feeling sick and went for some blood work. That's when I found out I had been infected. It took me over a year and several thousand dollars in the right hands to track the blood back to the clinic and then to your brother. Your brother killed me almost twenty years ago.”
I glared at the old man and realized the seventeen years I'd been waiting for revenge were wasted on the wrong man. “How the hell do you know it was my brother's blood? No one kept records of the bums who donated blood back then.” I spit the words at him as I unclipped my seatbelt.
“They did where the donor was AB negative, like your brother's blood. They paid them extra to have a name and address on file if a rare blood type was needed.”
My first punch shifted most of his nose to the right side of his face, crackling and squishing as it went. Vallerio blocked the second shot with his elbow and managed to release the seatbelt with his other hand. I lunged for his throat but grasped only air, as he fell out the passenger door and onto the gravel. He sat there holding his face, while a steady stream of rare blood soaked into his collar. I opened my door and was getting out, when a delivery truck roared past, tossing airborne gravel and debris across my shoulders. The stinging in my neck was only a momentary distraction as I sprinted around the front of the car to the passenger side. Vallerio was still on the ground and had nothing left to deflect my kick to his chest. He fell backward and lay in the shadow of my car sucking in the little amount of air his crushed ribs would allow.
“Seventeen years I waited to see a man die. I lost my wife, my brother, and a chunk of my life that I'll never get back. And you tell me that I've waited for the wrong man? You killed my brother because someone gave you his tainted blood? You let an innocent man die tonight so that you wouldn't die in jail? I'll kill you myself!”
The sound of his kneecap breaking into bone chips as I stomped on it disappeared under the noise of his scream and the rumble of several large flatbed trucks racing down the interstate. I grabbed him by the leather collar of the flight jacket and threw him against the trunk of the car. His voice was a mixture of spit blood and whispers. “You can take me to the police if you want but I'll be dead long before they get a chance to put me in a prison cell. I've spent all I own on treatments to keep me alive just to make sure Vincent never got a chance to convince anyone he was innocent. You're brother died a free man and so will I.”
“No, I'm not going to take you to jail,” I hissed at him, “I came for revenge tonight and you've just doubled my need.” I locked my arm around his neck and threw him out onto the highway. An eighteen-wheeler rolled at least half of those wheels over his body and didn't even slow down. His crushed body tumbled several times after the last wheel bounced over his head and never moved again. I slammed the passenger door closed and went around to the driver's side as a cool breeze tossed my collar up and carried the last of my anger off into the darkness.
Something tasted sweet in my mouth, I wondered if it was revenge.
