Page 184 of Two Marlboros

“We’re here to ask you some questions about the robbery last July the 30th. Can you help us?”

The guy on the other side of the glass raised his eyebrows for a moment, almost doubtful, but at least he disproved my assumption that he was completely dead inside. There was still a flicker of life somewhere down there, buried under a pile of white dust.

Every now and then he would look down or look up into the light, only to squint right back up. There was no defiance in his eyes, but he really seemed to be disconnected from the world from time to time.

“Well, let’s begin,” I pressed him. “What is your relationship with Harvey Walker?”

He scrunched his nose and pulled up, then sighed. “We met a few months ago. He’s a friend, nothing more.”

“Can you be more specific about when you met?”

His gaze was lost on the wall of the room. Once again, he seemed disconnected, his lips again parted in an unnaturalexpression, in a uniform a little too wide for him. On his neck was a series of abrasions; I wondered if they were the result of some close encounter with other inmates.

“Before the summer. This year, anyway, during a vacation in Vermont, in Stowe.”

“The same circumstance in which Michael Cossner met him. Quite a coincidence.”

Ryan shrugged. “That’s exactly what it sounds like: a coincidence. At least as far as I’m concerned.”

He briefly explained about the vacation, how Harvey had approached him, and how he had caught a glimpse of Michael as well.

“Harvey is a guy who inspires trust if you see him,” he continued. “He doesn’t look like it, but he’s educated and well-spoken. He’s not from the slums, though he wants to give that impression - perhaps because the air of sophistication gets in the way of his business.”

“Was it Harvey who gave you the drugs?”

Ryan shrugged again. “Of course it was Harvey. He has a business, you know. At first it started out as a very quiet thing, a few joints now and then. But that wasn’t enough for us anymore. It just wasn’t enough anymore. So, he came out one day with coke, some guy on the 11th Street had sold it to him. I didn’t want to try it, but Harvey told me I would forget everything. So, we sniffed it up,” and he rubbed his nose again, “good stuff.”

He began to make one foot dance, in a nervous tic. His gaze was again lost on the wall to his right, which had only a few cracks in the plaster of interest.

“And then what?”

“And then you want the money. You want the stuff. And you really do anything.”

“Like a post office robbery?”

Ryan shifted his torso toward us abruptly, as if he wanted to impose his opinion with his presence.

“I didn’t want to, alright? But I had to pay for some doses. And I had to buy more.”

“What about Michael Cossner?”

Ryan chuckled, but his smile quickly faded. He shook his head, denying perhaps some thought in his mind.

“He was smarter than all of us. He stopped earlier, but he still had debts. It’s just that he didn’t want to go screwing old men and robbing.”

He added a few more details about Michael, and his testimony matched what Michael himself had told us some time earlier. The threatening phone calls, the car, the sense of unease: it all matched.

“So, it was an act of intimidation against him, as well as an economically motivated robbery, right?”

“He hadn’t paid for the stuff! They were all pissed off in there.”

“Why did you sell him the cocaine before he paid?”

Ryan sighed. “You know when you go to the supermarket, and they have deals? They do it to attract you, right? It’s an extra customer. The same was true for us. One more in the business, one more to sell out and one more to bring in money.”

He told us in broad strokes about other members of the group, some of whom died of overdoses. I remembered a couple of heroin-related deaths at the famous McDonald’s on the 34th Street that had occurred no more than three months earlier. We had found them with their eyes averted and a syringe stuck in their arm. Ryan did not seem impressed by that eventuality. He considered himself above death, but at times even above life; he spoke of his days in a detached manner, as if they had no connection to one another, guided only by a single thought: cocaine. Those who died of overdoses wereimmediately replaced by a thousand more Michael Cossners, and there were those who resisted and those who ran away. Theft and prostitution were not even in the news anymore.

But as I imagined him starring in those scenes - with the syringe, on the sidewalk - I couldn’t help but have another pounding thought in my head.

---