Chapter 8 - The Cell at Bedford Hills
Two weeks later, the morning air over Westchester County was crisp, cold, and smelled of fallen oak leaves and wet granite.
The visitor’s conference room at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility was an unvarnished chamber of cinder blocks, industrial linoleum, and reinforced safety glass that separated the free world from the damned.
I sat on the civilian side of the partition, wearing an unbuttoned camel-wool coat over a dark cashmere sweater, my hands resting calmly on my leather handbag.
A heavy steel door unlocked with a concussive, mechanical CLANG on the prisoner's side.
Clara Vane was escorted into the room by two armed female corrections officers.
The transformation was absolute, devastating, and irreversible.
The four-thousand-dollar silver Versace gown, the diamond bracelets, and the sculpted French chignon were gone. She wore a coarse, faded green corrections jumpsuit that hung off her narrow shoulders like a dirty canvas sack. Her hair was unwashed, cropped short to her ears with blunt scissors; her face was completely devoid of makeup, pale, gaunt, and lined with deep, bitter creases of sleepless terror. Her wrists were shackled to an iron chain that was padlocked around her waist.
She sat down heavily on the bolted metal stool, her breath rattling in her throat, her bloodshot eyes staring at me through the reinforced glass with an expression of feral, helpless hatred.
She picked up the plastic telephone receiver with her shaking, handcuffed hands.
I picked up the receiver on my side.
"You came to gloat," Clara rasped, her voice thin, rough, and stripped of all its velvety charm. "You came to see the master criminal in her cage."
"No, Clara," I said, my voice smooth, calm, and completely devoid of malice. "I came to deliver a message from the United States Attorney."
Clara flinched, her grip tightening on the plastic receiver until the plastic creaked. "The plea agreement? Did they accept the fifteen-year offer?"
"There is no fifteen-year offer, Clara," I replied, leaning slightly closer to the glass.
"The grand jury in Chicago unsealed four additional indictments yesterday morning regarding the Robert Vance estate. The state of Florida has filed extradition warrants for the Arthur Sterling homicide in Palm Beach. And thirty minutes ago, your attorney, Gregory Vance, signed a comprehensive cooperation agreement with the Department of Justice."
The color drained from her face, leaving her skin the color of dirty chalk.
"Gregory...?" she whispered.
"He gave them the encrypted keys to the Zurich safe deposit boxes," I continued, every word falling with the clinical precision of an autopsy report. "He gave them the recorded telephone conversations where you and Harold discussed the digitalis concentration for my father’s cake. He sold you out to save himself from thirty years in federal isolation."
Clara’s lips began to tremble. Her hands shook so violently that the telephone receiver knocked against the glass partition with a sharp, hollow click.
"Evelyn... please," she wept, her voice dropping into that ragged, pathetic whimper of a cornered predator that had finally run out of ground. "Talk to your father. Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him I really did care for him... in the beginning! I was desperate! The debts in Chicago... Harold threatened to report me to the feds if I didn't cooperate! You can't let them send me to Florida! The death penalty is active in Florida!"
I looked at the woman who had stood beside my father with a silver spoon, waiting for his heart to burst so she could buy yachts in Monaco.
"You should have thought about the death penalty before you extracted the digitalis from Harold’s greenhouse, Clara," I said softly.
I reached into my handbag, pulled out an unsealed legal document, and pressed it flat against the safety glass so she could read the bold black type:
CERTIFICATE OF COMPLETE ESCHEATMENT AND ASSET SEIZURE.
"Every single dollar you stole from Robert Vance has been recovered by his surviving grandchildren," I told her, my voice carrying the unshakeable weight of an iron decree.
"The eight million dollars from Chicago is gone. The two million from Florida is gone. The Swiss accounts have been liquidated. You don't have an inheritance, Clara. You don't have a defense fund. You have an assigned public defender who has eighty-four other felony cases on his desk."
I set the document back in my bag, adjusted the collar of my wool coat, and prepared to stand up.
"Evelyn! Don't leave me here!" Clara screamed through the receiver, her hands beating against the reinforced glass, her transport chains rattling violently against the steel table. "EVELYN! PLEASE! I'M A HUMAN BEING! LOOK AT ME!"
I stopped.
I looked into her wild, dilated pupils one last time.
"I am looking at you, Clara," I whispered into the receiver.
"And for the first time in your life... the world is seeing you exactly as you are."
May you like
I hung up the plastic telephone, set it on the cradle, turned on my heel, and walked through the heavy steel exit doors into the bright, blinding autumn sunlight.
Behind me, the locks clicked shut, sealing the darkness away forever.
