The Death Box(85)

“Wrong,” I told Ms Zefferelli. “You have my heart forever.”

I turned to an expectant Gershwin. “The tag came from a crane assembly delivered to one Avram Kazankis in 1978.”

“Georgie’s daddy,” Gershwin said. We punched knuckles.

“According to Kazankis, his father had a bad leg. What you want to bet Georgie was in charge of clearing the leased land?”

“Finding a big hole in the ground,” Gershwin said, finger-drumming a riff on his desktop. “He knew.”

I heard Roy’s voice booming down the hall. It was time to see how much clout my new boss had. And how much autonomy I had.

I stuck my head in his office. “I need a chopper, Roy. Do-able?”

He frowned. But his only question was, “How many you seating?”

“Zigs and me.”

“A little one, then. They’re easier. Every time I need one of the big chops, the damn Governor’s got his ass in it. No one’s gonna shoot at you with missiles, are they?”

“Hope not.”

He picked up his phone and spoke for a few seconds before zinging the phone back to the cradle. “One’s being gassed up. The heliport’s on the roof.”

Within minutes we were strapped in with mic-equipped helmets around our cabezas, Miami turning to a distant skyline as the land became gridded subdivisions set into green land broken by brown stretches of farm field. I was amazed open land existed in Florida, thinking the last piece of arable Floridian earth was in a museum somewhere.

After a bit the low sprawl of the Okeechobee prison appeared, a grid of gray boxes at first, then we saw the rec area and ball field and towers and high-wire fences topped with wire that could filet meat. The warden knew George Kazankis well enough to use the man’s first name, Kazankis visiting twice a year on average, his rehabilitation programs seemingly beneficial. I was curious at how Kazankis made his picks.

“I never figured out George’s reasoning for his selections,” Warden Pruit Sloan said. Sloan was a big, brown-suited guy in his sixties, square as a refrigerator, with longish gray hair and eyebrows that looked like tufts of dirty cotton over mobile brown eyes. “George has a high success rate, so I never argued. But his candidates were all over the board.”

“How so, sir?”

“Mainly it was guys working hard on rehabilitation. But now and then George would sponsor a candidate I never figured would get straight.”

“They stood out?”

“Some of them were freaking scary. Hardcores. But they were at the end of their stretch and George figured he could save them.”

“You know Paul Carosso?”

A nod. “Don’t know why Carosso appealed to George. Carosso was a loner with all the personality of a clam. Did max time because he wouldn’t inform on a guy already doing life. Not real bright.”

“But loyal,” I noted. “Not a bad trait in an employee.”

The Parole Board had faxed a list of cons selected for Kazankis’s program over the years. I passed it to Sloan. “We’re kind of in a hurry, Warden. Could you check the bad boys on this list? Just pencil-mark the ones you never figured for salvation.”

He scrutinized the list. Gershwin had told me Sloan had been with the prison for twenty years. I figured he knew most of Kazankis’s cons from day one.

“You want their records?” Sloan said, picking up a pencil. “I can have copies made pronto.”

We went buzzing back to Miami with dense clouds in the western sky, but a strong wind seemed to be pushing them quickly over the horizon. Gershwin and I passed the time reading Sloan’s paperwork on the men Kazankis had sponsored.

“He spends a lot of time with the prison personnel and the cons,” Gershwin said. “Gets a lot of background, sees a lot of records, hears a load of scuttlebutt. Then picks the cream of the crop, so to speak.”

“I bet most want to go straight, Zigs, how Kazankis keeps up the illusion. But every now and then I figure he finds a prize. A guy with a trade he needs. Like a knife psycho.”

“Here’s Carosso’s pages,” Gershwin said. “Everything down to cellmates: Two years with Frank Turner, four and a half with Ambrose White, two months with a guy named Orlando Orzibel. Then Carosso’s out and under the Bible-thumping tutelage of Kazankis.”

“Any cellies match with Kazankis hires?”

Gershwin cross-checked as I studied the landscape. Miami lay twenty miles or so distant, looking like a prosperous Oz on the shores of an emerald sea.

“Got a match,” Gershwin said, checking against parole records, picking up where the prison records left off. “The Orlando Orzibel guy. He was also a sponsored release by Kazankis.”