A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [62]
“Delores! I’m sorry. I can’t talk anymore. I’m really in a rush here.”
He arrived at the district courthouse fifteen minutes early. His trial had been held around the corner in superior court. But they looked the same, smelled of the same old wood and papery dust. He felt big again, bigger than anyone else, as he came down the corridor. He started into the crowded elevator, then changed his mind with all the irritated faces staring back. He hurried up the stairs to the parole office on the second floor, where eleven men sat in the waiting room. He settled into a corner seat. The men were all younger. He was the only one wearing a suit and tie. An hour later, Mr. Mazzorio called him into the office.
“So, how’re things going?” Mazzorio wore a red golf shirt. He was fumbling through stacks of files on the floor by his desk.
“Very well, thank you.” Gordon folded his arms. Afraid that might seem threatening or arrogant, he clasped his hands in his lap.
“Any problems?” Mazzorio’s voice rose from the far side of the desk.
“No. None that I can think of.” Other than Neil, but if he said his boss was acting strange, Mazzorio might think he had done something to cause it. Which maybe he had. He was beginning to wonder.
“Jesus Christ,” Mazzorio muttered. “I can’t find anything in this mess. Here we go!” He popped up with a file. “Okay,” he murmured, flipping pages. “Okay. Okay. Let’s see now.” He ran his finger down one page, continued on the next. “Okay. All right, so we got no sex crimes, no rape, molestation, nothing with kids, right? Just the one homicide, which was, what—here we go—twenty-five years ago, so you don’t have to register as an SO.”
“No.” An SO was a sex offender. They’d covered all this in the first visit.
He looked at Gordon. “So you know the drill, then? All you gotta do is keep it clean, live straight, show up here on time, and you’re home free.” He scribbled on a smudged form, then pushed it across the desk. Gordon signed, handed it back. Mazzorio said he would be notified by mail when his next appointment would be.
“So will that be it?”
“Far as I’m concerned. Unless you got a problem.” Mazzorio peered over his glasses, looking at him for the first time.
“No, no problem. I just wanted to make sure, that’s all.” A missed appointment, an unreturned document, an anonymous complaint, the merest hint of suspicion, anything might send him back.
As he came up Essex Street, a gust blew from a narrow alley, and his stomach turned with the stone-deep stench of urine and the memories it brought back of Fortley. He hurried on ahead, past a pizza shop that had once been Coco’s Photography Studio. He’d had his senior yearbook picture taken there. His mother hated the picture. She insisted he have it retaken. By the time she got done convincing him how thick-faced the picture made him look, how dull-eyed and lethargic, he wasn’t about to let a camera betray him again. Rather than argue, he said he would, but never did. It became the wire services’ official schoolboy-killer shot.
“Oh no!” his mother had cried, showing him the paper the first time it was used. “It makes you look so cold and mean. Like you actually could have done it.”
“Well, I did,” he said, and she slapped him, then burst into tears.
“What’re you trying to do, destroy me? Is that what you’re trying to do?” she sobbed.
Farther up the hill, St. Theresa’s white steeple pierced the treetops. His family had attended Mass there in the small wooden church. Next door was the parish grammar school, a one-story building of brick and glass blocks that with its gated school yard had been his first prison. The buzz of an electric bell cut through the stillness, and there he was again, stepping into formation, shuffling from the safety of his cell into clamor and constant watchfulness. Lines of children streamed through