Time to Kill (8 page)

‘Uh huh.'

‘The same problem about answering a simple question that you had driving into the airport,' reminded Mason. ‘I want to hear from you loud and clear that you understand what I'm telling you. So let me hear it, Gerry. You understand everything I've said, don't you?'

‘Yes, I've understood,' mumbled the man.

‘And you're going to tell Howitt, make sure he understands?'

‘Yes, I'm going to tell him.'

‘That's good. It's important that we all completely understand each other.'

Mason waited until lock-up and the gradual although minimal quietening along the landing before telling Chambers, ‘You haven't got anything to worry about after I get out.'

‘You sure?'

‘Positive.'

‘How've you fixed it?'

‘It's fixed.'

‘I'm grateful.'

‘You haven't told me what hotel you've chosen for us to meet at, when you get out,' prompted Mason.

‘The New York Sheraton, on Seventh and 56th. Conventions all the time.'

‘The 28th.'

‘I'll be there, waiting.'

So will I, thought Mason. Everything was going like well-oiled clockwork.

Six

J
ack Mason didn't resort to any histrionics like stopping outside White Deer to gaze up in relief at the heavens or turn back with an obscene gesture, as he'd seen and heard of other long timers doing at their moment of release. Neither was the reservation anything to do with his first experience of relative freedom for the parole hearing, although it had put the disposal of the antiquated broad-lapelled and flaptrouser cuffed suit at the top of his immediate agenda. In the lost environment of penitentiary incarceration such predictable demonstrations were the closely watched and intently discussed stuff of prison folklore and Mason had years ago determined against performing for anyone's satisfaction or benefit other than his own. He didn't have difficulty either, in preventing any surprise at seeing Glynis Needham waiting at the wheel of a macho, broad-wheeled Cherokee 4x4, appropriately dressed in jeans, check work shirt and work boots.

At the car door he said, ‘I've got a travel voucher.'

‘I've got wheels,' said the parole officer.

‘It's a long drive to DC.'

‘We've got all day and I like long drives.'

‘You take this care about every parolee?' asked Mason, getting into the vehicle.

‘No.'

‘Why me?' asked Mason, although he believed he already knew.

‘Because I felt like it. And we got things to talk about.'

To have been waiting outside this early she would have had to have driven over the previous evening and stayed somewhere, Mason calculated. ‘I'm glad you did.' He wondered how long it would take for her to make her pitch? But it really was a long drive. She didn't have to hurry.

‘So how's it feel to be out?' Glynis Needham asked, firing the engine.

‘Good.' Which role would she play, bull or bitch? He could allow himself to think about pussy now, after subjugating what had once been a preoccupation. Her shirt was too loose to decide what sort of tits she had, even though they would be off limits to him.

‘You going to miss your friend?'

‘My friend?'

‘Chambers.'

Did she believe like everyone else that he was gay, as she very obviously was, and that because of it there would be some bizarre empathy between them? ‘Sounds like you're taking a special interest.'

‘I always take a special interest. That's my job.'

‘I'm grateful for how you're doing it so far.'

‘What about Chambers?'

‘Everyone got that wrong.' He didn't want her to have any curious recall if she heard later of Chambers' death. Why the hell had she raised it now!

‘Sure,' she dismissed, just as confusingly. ‘I've got you a room in a hostel.'

With sheets smelling of piss, farts and jerked-off semen, he guessed. ‘I'm not staying in any hostel. If you've read my file properly you know I've got money. I was thinking of something by myself at a Guest Quarters. There's one I remember by the Watergate.'

‘I don't like – or want – hostility.'

‘Neither do I,' said Mason. He wasn't worried the stupid bitch didn't like being confronted. She had to agree to his staying somewhere other than in the accommodation she had selected.

‘Then let's not have any.'

She'd be the bull with the strap-on dick, Mason decided. ‘If you've read all my reports you know I'm not hostile and you would have known of my inheritance, while I was inside. I've got more than enough jail money until I see my lawyer and pick up the bank things he's been holding for me.'

‘I do know about the inheritance,' said the woman. ‘And I'll do everything I can to help you settle down.'

‘Thank you. You're heading for the interstate, right?'

She chanced a sideways glance. ‘Why?'

‘You mind stopping at a mall, first? I want to get out of this fancy dress.'

She sniggered. ‘Good idea. Difficult to believe that suit was once snappy, isn't it?'

‘Maybe catch a coffee and a bagel, too?' Knowing she'd expect the remark he added, ‘First food I can choose myself, now that I'm out.'

‘Why not?'

The interstate was being signposted before they came to a shopping complex. It was far bigger than Mason could remember from 1985, the year he'd been arrested and held, pre-trial. He disguised any outward bewilderment at the bustle and the size, isolating almost forgotten store names. Mason was oddly glad, although he didn't know why, when the woman got out of the car to walk with him into J C Penny. He bought everything new, even underwear and loafers, bemused that the fitness regime had taken an inch off his old waist size and added two across his chest and shoulders. He bought an additional pair of jeans, three extra check sport shirts and a loose, Italian-labelled windbreak. Glynis Needham chose a soft leather grip to carry his purchases in. She also brought a large plastic shopping sack to the changing room for him to bag up all the discarded clothes, which he dumped into a waste bin directly outside the store, on their way to the nearby McDonald's. Mason, who in the penitentiary had rigidly controlled his diet as he'd controlled everything else, had a sausage and egg McMuffin breakfast, with extra hash browns and drank three cups of coffee and insisted on paying for Glynis's maple syrup waffles and coffee, as well as his own meal.

‘Feel like you've never been away?' said Glynis Needham.

‘Feels like I shouldn't have eaten so much.'

‘You're doing good. Damned good.'

‘Good?'

‘I know you're nervous, getting out. But no one would know, certainly not now you're dressed properly.'

‘If there's still a Guest Quarters near the Watergate, we could make a reservation from here.'

‘You want me to do it for you, on my cell phone?'

Mason felt a blip of irritation, at being beholden, but said, ‘If you wouldn't mind.'

‘It's my job to fit you back into society,' she said, with almost mocking formality.

‘You're helping a lot, this early,' said Mason, his irritation lessening at the awareness that it was he who was patronizing her rather than how she thought it to be. He watched and listened attentively, determined not to make mistakes when he got his own cell phone.

Glynis Needham made her pitch within minutes of their getting on to the interstate, tapping her fingers against the wheel to accompany the softly playing country and western for which Mason thought they were both dressed.

She said, ‘I think there might have been a misunderstanding.'

‘Misunderstanding?' queried Mason, genuinely confused.

‘When we met at the penitentiary after that mix-up in Washington. I didn't mean it to sound like a threat when I said a compensation claim might affect your release.'

‘Then it was my misunderstanding,' said Mason, in seeming apology. It was close to being amusing.

‘You serious about going ahead with it?'

Mason set out automatically to use the word ‘fuck', which she'd probably expect after his being institutionalized for so long in an environment in which the obscenity featured so much, but instead, maintaining the reformed persona, he said, ‘Howitt tried to screw me over.'

She gave another sideways look at the restraint. ‘But didn't manage it.'

‘It could have cost me another five years.'

‘But it didn't.'

‘He still tried.'

‘You properly thought about what it would mean? Headlines again, your being recognized wherever you go. You really want all that notoriety repeated?'

‘I want Howitt properly punished for what he tried to do, like I was properly punished and served my time, for what I did.' It was difficult not to laugh aloud.

‘I'm on the inside here, remember. I know what's already been sworn by the airport police and the FBI,' said the woman. ‘Howitt will be found guilty at least of gross negligence, which will mean his being stripped of his rank and seniority.'

‘He deserves to be dismissed.'

‘That won't happen.'

‘It will if there's a full hearing and I get compensation.'

‘You really think it's worth it, put against the anonymity you'll lose? It's you and your resettlement I'm thinking about.'

Bullshit, thought Mason. She was thinking of a nice quiet, secret internal tribunal with no embarrassment to the prison service, which was what Hubert Harrison had been thinking of during their final release interview at which the warden had even used some of the same words and argument as Glynis Needham was now employing. ‘I gotta go with my attorney's advice.'

‘No, you don't,' insisted the woman. ‘You've got to
listen
to his advice and make a decision based upon it – upon what's best for you. And I think you should balance that decision by what I've warned you you'll lose.'

‘I don't know,' said Mason, choosing the moment to introduce his supposed uncertainty. ‘I got to think about it, like I've got to think about a lot of other things like relocating to California … California and sunshine.'

‘That's exactly what you've got to do,' urged the woman. ‘Think long and hard about what there is to lose against what there is to gain.'

It came as a sudden, physical chill, so that Mason shivered and was surprised to find that he had his arms around himself, hugging himself, and that there was a churning sensation, physical again, deep in his stomach. He unwrapped his arms, embarrassed although he was alone in the Guest Quarters apartment but kept his hands together, driving back into himself the control that he'd always been so confident of having. Gradually the shivering stopped and the inner turmoil went. There was sound: outside traffic noise and the inevitable scream of an emergency siren; but to Mason it appeared to be – it
was –
total silence. He hadn't known such silence for years, he realized: fifteen years, longer if he included his remand custody. Or aloneness. Always the rustling, crying, shifting movement of the claustrophobic human anthill that was unrelenting, uninterrupted imprisonment.

With that awareness came another, what Glynis Needham had called his doing good. She'd called it nervousness, too, and now all alone in what he judged to be utter silence Mason accepted that she was right. From the moment of his stepping out through the penitentiary gates that morning he'd been hanging on, refusing the nervous uncertainty, refusing to admit it until now. But now, finally and unembarrassed, he did. It was more than simple nervousness. He was actually, shiveringly, frightened: frightened at the unexpected and unknown. Of how to go out and use a cell phone without making a mistake, drive a car, make a telephone reservation at a restaurant or for a show, of how to find his way around and how to talk to people without making it sound like a challenge, as it had been instinctive to confront everyone he'd been surrounded by for so long. Abruptly, angrily, Mason halted the drift. None of it was unknown. It was unaccustomed. He'd adopted another life, another way of existence. And survived by doing so: surmounted everything instead of being crushed by it. Now he had to adapt again. Become accustomed to living and behaving as he had once but hadn't needed to for too long. He had to do better than that – far better. In the penitentiary he had been the person everyone knew and was physically aware of, the hard man everyone made way for, was wary or downright frightened of. He didn't want to be – couldn't risk being – recognized like that any more. He had to become Mr Invisible, the crowd man no one saw or remembered; the crowd man two people in particular would never see, until he wanted them to see him: Mr and Mrs Daniel Slater, of 2832 Hill Avenue SE, Frederick, Maryland.

It had been a switchback time. Ann's fear had appeared gradually to subside as the days passed after Slater received Peebles' letter but noticeably mounted in the final two weeks leading up to when they understood Mason would be released. She snapped back irritably at the slightest provocation – at no provocation at all – and sought arguments in everything. It became routine for her to check every security lock and bolt and alarm after Slater nightly setting them and at the beginning of those final two weeks insisted that Slater have installed permanently operating camera monitors not only at the house but at her gallery, so that any visitor could be seen and identified before being allowed in. At the gallery Ann also demanded CCTV recording cameras. She refused to remain in the house alone but came with them on the nights Slater took David for basketball practice, ensuring they were locked into the car inside the garage before operating the automatic door opening. Their worst argument followed Slater telling Ann that David had asked if she was ill: ‘Sure I'm sick. Sick with worry!' Although only slightly less serious was the row when Slater suggested they really did ask their doctor for tranquilisers.
‘Here's our problem, doctor. My ex-husband, who spied within the CIA for Moscow, has just been released from jail and I'm frightened he'll try to find my current husband, who was the KGB agent who ran him before defecting. You got a pill that'll help me with that crock of shit?'