The door opened, and Barstad said, “I’ve had them turn off the audio but I have to keep the video on. It’s policy. Just signal at the camera when you’re through.”
Broker shook Barstad’s hand again and went in.
41
Keith smelled like spoiled meat washed in disinfectant. He sat in a blocky ModuForm armchair. The large dense blob of furniture was molded from a pebbly rubberized substance that looked, in color and texture, as if Barney the dinosaur had been run through an auto compactor and turned into a seat. The chair, designed for prisons, weighed two hundred pounds.
He wore loose blue denim jail utilities and blue slippers.
His shirtsleeves were rolled up, showing biceps. Frankenstein stitches in his left arm twisted like centipedes sleeping in the packed muscle. Yellow disinfectant discolored the seamed forearm. He’d lost fingernails on three fingers on his right hand to frostbite, and they were scabbed over, blackened.
His left hand was clamped in a fist in his lap. His hair was short, sidewalled and bristly. No sunglasses allowed here.
His yellow eyes were hard, clear and shiny as frozen ball bearings. In them, Broker felt the icy embrace of the Devil’s Kettle, and, possibly, the fixed stare of mental disorder.
Despite his present circumstances, Keith held his powerful body with the erect bearing of a mad warrior monk.
On the top of his left hand, a patch of infected skin puffed up a blue tattoo of a three-barred Russian cross.
Crude, self-inflicted; probably with the straight end of a safety pin and ink from a felt tip.
Self-laceration.
What happens to a perfectionist who loses his rule book.
He opened his curled left hand. And Broker saw that he wore Caren’s wedding ring on the little finger. What was left of the little finger. The first joint had been amputated, and the stub closed with stitches. The skin under the gold wedding band was swollen, marbled with purple bruising.
He wore his own ring on the next finger. His fingers twitched, and the gold bands jingled.
Keith stood up. Instinctively, they circled each other in a sort of preliminary dance. They did not shake hands. The room was wedge shaped, with three holding cells built into one wall. The cells were empty, and the doors were open.
A guard podium was on the other wall. The camera peered, bracketed in the corner.
Broker evoked it all with the sound of his name: “Keith.”
Keith laughed soundlessly. His eyes roved the walls. “This place is really something. Last night I smelled cigarette smoke. It’s been bothering me all day. How the hell did someone sneak a cigarette in here. You quit, didn’t you?”
“About six months ago.”
“What made you do it?”
Broker looked straight in the icy eyes. “Well, the baby.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe I only imagined I smelled smoke. My taste is all screwed up since…” He held up his hands. His eyes continued to travel the walls. “You know, I never even smoked a joint in my life. You did, though. You had to, working undercover.”
“Yeah, Keith.”
Keith shook his head. “You think they’ll legalize drugs?”
It was an absurd conversation, but Broker was carried along. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Me either. It’s job security. Like the buffalo. They support a way of life-cops I mean, and corrections, the people who work in and build places like this.”
“What the hell happened, Keith?” The hang-fire question cooked off.
Keith avoided eye contact. “What happened,” he savored the words. “Who is owed an explanation.” Again, the soundless laugh. The dead eyes crawled over the monotonous brick pattern. “Maybe I’m the one that’s owed an explanation.” He raised the damaged hand and felt along the stone wall. “These walls won’t last, not like, say, an Inca wall. I saw this thing on
He let the thought get away, pressed his forehead against the bricks. “Maybe I got tired of fat cop faces. You ever notice how many fat cops there are.” His disfigured left hand explored the unyielding brick. “Maybe that’s what happened.”
“Why’d you put me on your list?” Broker asked.
“Why’d you ask to be invited?” Keith shot back. A muscle in his left cheek jumped under the skin. His fingers jerked, clinking the wedding rings together in a nervous tic.
“Thought you could tell me what happened out at the Devil’s Kettle.”
“What happened is I never intended for her to get hurt.
She just had to stick her nose in.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Keith spat on the floor. “Uh-uh. C’mon.” He jerked his head at the camera. “The FBI is listening to everything we say.”
Broker held up the picture Garrison had given him. Keith shook his head. “You? Carrying water for the feds? I smell that fucking Garrison.”
“He took me to Wisconsin yesterday. We stood over your mother’s grave and he told me what a bad mother- fucker you are,” said Broker.
Keith grinned, took the photo, ripped it in half and let the pieces fall to the floor. “Did you check out the Russian cross, with the three bars?” He raised and twisted his left hand, turning the palm in so the tattoo confronted Broker. Stepped closer. “See the little one on the bottom that’s crooked?” His fingers squirmed. Nerves. Gold circles clicking.
“Keith? You want to talk or play games?”
“I am talking. The reason it’s crooked goes back to a dispute in the early church, in the second century. This faction insisted that the cross should remind people that Christ really was human and he really suffered.” The rings clinked. “That little bar represents the footrest, where the condemned braced their weight. See? Crucifixion was all about muscles giving out, the chest cramping the lungs. Slow asphyxiation. The pain gets more and more excruciating. They writhe and twist the footrest…”
Keith smirked. “I learned that on the History Channel.”
“Was it like that when Alex Gorski got it?” Broker asked in a low voice.
“Excuse me, did I hear right?” Keith cupped his hand to his ear. “Got it? The death of? The problem with ‘the death of?’ is-we’re fresh out of bodies.”
Keith sneered and rubbed his chin with his gruesome black fingertips. “Give me a break, you were never a detective. Go back to the fucking woods. Pretend life is a show on public television. Get used to it. Old cop dilemma-you know who did it, but you just can’t prove it.”
He was changing, like a diver going deeper. His face altered, distorted by the pressure. The lips pulled tighter, creating a ruthless mask wiped clean of illusions. He was getting ready. He would go to federal prison where strangers would try to kill him, on principle, because he was a cop. Broker started to turn away from the willful madness, the jingle of the rings. To the camera.
Keith raised his left hand, blue infected tattoo, nightmare stitches, stumpy little finger and ring finger beating out the demented rift.
Broker tensed at the contemptuous tone of command.
