Monday 3rd, 9.00 a.m.
The ferry ploughed its way through the gray water towards Rikers Island, a stretch of land shaped like a teardrop that lay in the middle of the East River, halfway between Queens and the Bronx. Ida sat near the boat’s prow, reading the case jacket, looking up occasionally at the shoreline in the distance, pale and misty in the morning light, rising out of the water indistinctly. Around them the river was a floating traffic jam – ferries, freighters, carfloats, barges, even fishing boats – their green and red lights glittering like jewels in the otherwise gloomy landscape, funnels emitting sooty black smoke which was lifted by the wind into the gunmetal sky.
Michael leaned on the railing next to her, staring instead across the boat at the other passengers sitting on the benches that lined the deck – wives and children of inmates paying visits, lawyers, prison workers. All of them were wrapped up in heavy winter coats to shield them against the bitter winds that swept across the river. Many of the wives seemed to know each other and sat in groups chatting. Their children sullenly watched the boats, or raced around the slippery deck chasing seagulls, shrieking as much as the birds they were pursuing.
As the ferry approached the island, Ida closed the case jacket and inspected their destination, watched as its features became steadily more distinct – treeless scrubland, a rocky shoreline, low, red-brick buildings, all of them surrounded by razor-wire and security walls. The island had a strange, lumpy quality to it, grassy mounds rose up out of the scrub, whole sections were at an angle to the water.
When they reached the island, the ferry bumped against the jetty, was tied up, and they all descended. They made their way over a rickety wooden walkway above the marshy ground. At the end of the walkway were a pair of metal gates set in a long, brick wall, behind which was the sprawling complex of Victorian buildings that made up the prison. The visitors formed a line at the gates and as they waited for the guards to open them up, Ida surveyed the landscape they had just crossed. Frost lay all across the marsh, making the foliage and black earth sparkle like some Arctic tundra, as if the boat had come ashore in Iceland or Greenland, rather than New York.
Then she spotted something odd in the distance; smoke rising up from the black soil, and here and there, in amongst the reeds, the frost seemed to be glowing, and deep underneath it, orange lights bloomed and faded, like jellyfish coming to surface and diving once more. Ida was reminded of the eerie blue lights of the will-o’-the-wisps that darted across the swamps back home in Louisiana.
‘This whole island used to be a dump,’ said Michael, following her gaze. ‘The garbage is still there under the ground and it catches fire sometimes, comes up through the soil. It’s on account of all this being built on garbage mounds that the buildings are crumbling.’
He nodded to the building in front of them; the imposing facade was riven with cracks that darted down the mortar between its bricks. A whole wing seemed to have settled below the rest of the building, subsiding into the marsh. This was the cause of the island’s slanting, uneven quality that Ida had noticed on their approach. She thought of the city using the place to discard its unwanted refuse, then its unwanted humans, and the place seemed even more mournful.
The guards opened the gates. The line moved forward and they were instructed to head inside. They stepped through into a muddy courtyard, entered a barn-like reception hall that was subdivided by ropes and poles. They were directed to a desk where their IDs were checked and noted down, then they were told to wait once more.
‘How long’s visiting time?’ Ida asked Michael.
‘Half an hour,’ he replied.
‘Barely enough time to get started.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the point.’
After fifteen minutes, guards entered and shouted out names, and they were led in groups through a door into a hall filled with rows of numbered tables. Behind each one sat a prisoner in chains. The hall was gloomy and windowless apart from a row of thin skylights high up in the ceiling which were covered in a thick layer of grime that made the anemic morning light even more so.
Michael and Ida were led to table eighteen, where Thomas James Talbot waited.
Ida struggled not to show her shock. She hadn’t seen him since before the war and he had changed dramatically. He was chubbier than she remembered, though he still had his father’s physique in there somewhere. His hair was going gray and receding. Even more alarmingly, he had a great bruise on his left cheek, lumpy and topped with a scab. But beyond even that, it was his eyes that startled her. They had lost their shine, their joy, there was something haunted to them, traumatized. The same deterioration she’d seen on Michael was apparent on his son, but writ greater, stronger, more heart-wrenching.
They sat and he gave them both a cheerless smile.
‘Ida. It’s good to see you,’ he said.
‘It’s good to see you too.’
‘Pop,’ said Tom, turning to look at Michael.
Michael nodded and Ida picked up on some frostiness between them.
‘What happened to your face?’ Michael asked.
‘Fight in the food hall,’ said Tom. ‘I wasn’t involved, but I caught a stray elbow. It’s nothing.’
Michael eyed him like he wasn’t entirely convinced. And neither was Ida.
She glanced at the other prisoners sitting at the tables around them. Most of them looked accustomed to this world. Hard-edged men, bruisers, thugs, killers. And there was Tom, bookish, mild-mannered, caring and gentle, trapped in the same jail as them. If it came to a fight, to an assault, to an attack, the boy was as good as dead. How easy it would be for the cops to arrange a jailhouse hit to keep him quiet. She wondered if Michael had told Tom exactly how much danger he was in.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Tom said to Ida. ‘I need all the help I can get. I didn’t do this, Ida. I swear to God. I’m a doctor. All I’ve done my whole life is try and help people.’
‘I know, Tom,’ she said. ‘We’re gonna find out the truth and we’re gonna get you out of here.’
At this he smiled and his downtrodden expression brightened ever so slightly.
‘Visiting time’s only half an hour,’ she said. ‘So we need to be quick. I’m going to ask you a lot of questions. A lot of questions that you’ve probably already answered a hundred times over, but I need to hear them from you. I had a look at the case details on the ferry over, and there’s a lot of inconsistencies, Tom. A lot of things in your account that don’t make sense. I’m going to ask you about those and you have to be honest. OK?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ he said. ‘Whatever it takes. Like I said, I didn’t do this.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s start at the very beginning – why were you living there, Tom? The Palmer Hotel? Why a dive like that?’
At this he paused, the question touching a nerve. ‘Rent was cheap,’ he said. ‘I was down on my luck.’
Ida picked up straight away that he was hiding something.
‘You weren’t working?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘I quit the hospital a few months earlier.’
‘Why?’
Again he paused, pained by the question. He shot a look at his father, then shrugged. ‘I was getting sick of it,’ he said.
Another lie. Ida looked at Michael, could see the pain on his face. He knew Tom was lying too. If the boy stuck with this story, he didn’t stand a chance.
‘How long had you been living at the hotel?’ Ida asked.
‘A few weeks.’
‘And in your statement you said in all those weeks you never saw Bucek, the white victim, even once. Not till the night of the murders.’
‘That’s the truth. I would’ve remembered seeing a white boy in there.’
‘See, that’s the first inconsistency. He was signed into the guest register six weeks before the murders.’
‘I swear I never saw that kid in my life. That room they say he was staying in was closed up the whole time I was there. He didn’t live there. I never saw him, and the Powell brothers never did neither. They would have told me about it if they had.’
‘You knew the Powell brothers?’
‘A little. I got friendly with them after I’d moved in. We’d share a drink in our rooms some nights. I wasn’t part of the Temple they belonged to. The newspapers said I was, but they got that wrong.’
‘The Temple of Tranquility?’
‘Yeah. They take in dope addicts, try to wean them off it, preach all this Black Star Line stuff at them, you know, Marcus Garvey, back-to-Africa. They tried to get me to go down there a few times, but it wasn’t my thing. All that hokey voodoo stuff they found in our rooms? I never saw it before in my life. Not in my room, not in their room.’
‘So if you didn’t go to the Temple of Tranquility and you didn’t go to your job, what did you do all day?’
‘What did you do all day? With your time? How did you spend it?’
Tom shifted in his seat. ‘Walk,’ he said, sheepishly.
‘All day?’
‘Sometimes. I’d walk all the way down to Battery Park and back again. Catch the train out to Brooklyn or Queens and walk back.’
‘Why?’
‘So maybe when I got home I was so tired I’d pass straight out. Some days I’d drink.’
He looked embarrassed. Ida felt a pang of sympathy and she knew from her own bitter experience what he was trying to hide, and that this story about walking the streets was the truth.
‘Some days when it was raining I’d go to the library,’ he said. ‘There’s a soup kitchen in the neighborhood for veterans, I used to help out there sometimes, too.’
‘Is that what you did the day of the murders?’ she asked. ‘Go walking?’
He nodded. ‘I woke up, washed, left the hotel. Caught the subway down to Coney Island, walked up the coast to Sunset Park. Bought a sandwich. Caught a bus to Brooklyn Heights. Walked the rest of the way home. I got back about nine.’
‘And when you got home,’ said Ida, recalling what she’d read in Tom’s police statement, ‘you went to sleep and woke up to the sound of screams?’
‘Yeah,’ said Tom. ‘I went downstairs and saw the Powells were dead, went into the reception area. I saw the money and the dope in Bucek’s room, stepped inside to take it, and that’s when the police arrived.’
Ida stared at him. ‘Tom, I’m gonna level with you,’ she said. ‘This doesn’t look good.’
‘You don’t think I know that?’
‘This whole account doesn’t make sense. No one’s going to buy it. You need to tell us a plausible story.’
‘I’m telling the truth.’
‘You’re saying four people were butchered in the same building as you and you slept through it. All those people died and they only screamed once? It doesn’t add up. Plus, you walked into Bucek’s room because you saw his stash and money there?’
‘I was broke.’
‘Tom, if you want a jury to believe it was someone else who killed those people you’re going to have to explain why the killer left Bucek’s money and drugs out in the open, where you could see them from the corridor.’
Tom looked at her flatly, with an inscrutable gesture that reminded her of his father.
‘And your fingerprint on Powell’s watch,’ Michael added quietly. ‘How are you going to explain that?’
‘I don’t know how any print got there,’ said Tom. As soon as he said it, he lowered his head, and Ida wondered if he was crying. She shared a look with Michael. Tom raised his head, and she saw his eyes were dry, stony.
‘I want you to tell me in detail what happened that night,’ Ida said.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I got home about nine and I went and took a shower. I was sweaty from the walk. I came back to my room, poured myself a few drinks and passed out. I had the radio on. I woke up at some point, heard something, screaming maybe. Heard a car outside. It was hard to tell ’cos the radio was on, and ’cos of the nightcaps I’d had, and how damn tired I was. I went back to sleep. Few minutes later I heard another scream. I woke up. I didn’t know what to do. I waited. Didn’t hear nothing else. Then I went down to see what was going on. Saw Lucius’s body on the second-floor corridor, Alfonso’s in their room. Suddenly I was back in the field hospital in Saipan. My head was spinning, I wasn’t thinking straight. I snapped out of it eventually, realized I’d better go check on Miss Hollis. Walked into reception, saw her all cut up, blood everywhere.
‘Then I saw the light on in the back room, at the end of the corridor, the door was open. That door had never been open in all the weeks I’d lived there. I walked over, looked in. I saw Bucek’s body, saw how cut up he was, and the first thing I thought was what the hell’s a white boy doing here? Then I saw the money and the dope. I should have got out of there and called the cops. But I didn’t. I went in to take the money ’cos I sure could have used it. Next thing I know there’s police rushing into the room.’
Tom looked at her, and across to Michael. Then something seemed to break in Tom, some wall whose debris tumbled out of him in a long, pained sigh.
‘That’s the God’s honest truth,’ he said. ‘I never killed any of those poor people. And whoever it was that did it, sometimes I wish they’d killed me too, so I wouldn’t have to be sitting here in this hellhole facing the electric chair.’
He paused, his lip trembling, tears forming in his eyes. Ida could see he was telling the truth. As surely as he was lying about what he was doing in the hotel and why he’d quit his job at the hospital, she knew he was being honest when he protested his innocence. When he spoke again it was in a shaky voice, filled to the brim with emotion.
‘I don’t know what happened that night,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how that stuff got in our rooms. I don’t know why I didn’t wake up earlier. I’d been drinking, maybe that’s why. I had the radio on. My room’s five flights up from Bucek’s. Three flights up from the Powell brothers’. Here’s what I do know. Someone dumped all that voodoo stuff in our rooms. Someone put my fingerprint on Powell’s watch. Someone tipped off the cops ’cos they turned up there faster than any cop’s ever responded to anything in the whole history of Harlem. And none of us had ever seen Bucek before his body turned up in that room that night.’
He lowered his head and sobbed.
Michael reached out a hand and clasped Tom’s across the table. Ida looked around the room, at the other inmates, bruisers, thugs, killers. She thought again how easy it would be for the cops to arrange a jailhouse hit to keep him quiet. How if it came to an attack, he was as good as dead.