In with the Devil Page 20

  As soon as Keene entered Hall’s cell, he could see that Larry sensed something. There was none of the chumminess or cordial “Hi, James.” Instead he stayed in his chair and watched Jimmy quietly, almost reflectively.

  “Yeah, Larry,” Keene said. “Looks like I’ll be going home pretty soon, now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that a few things are working out pretty good for me.”

  Hall’s face froze with fear—perhaps at losing his friend, but Jimmy didn’t want him to think he was really his friend. “You know, Larry, those things that you did were some rotten shit, man. I don’t see how you can live with yourself doing that.”

  Hall slid his chair back on the tennis balls halves, his eyes wider than ever. “Beaumont sent you, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know the guy,” Keene lied. “I just know how fucked up you are.”

  But Hall knew the truth now and he kept repeating, “Beaumont sent you. It was Beaumont, Beaumont . . .”

  “He was practically hyperventilating,” Keene remembers. “Like he was having a panic attack.” Keene backed out of Hall’s cell and stepped into his own just as the doors were locked down. “And I figured we were both trapped for the night.”

  But Keene had forgotten one thing: Hall was not like the other inmates on the floor. He was let out at three in the morning for his maintenance job. Instead of remembering Larry’s schedule, Jimmy fell into a deep, blissful sleep, daring to dream about freedom for the first time in months.

  Keene slept as well that night as any he spent in prison. The next morning, he woke to the sound of keys rattling in his door. As he turned to the light, suddenly guard after guard piled into his cell. A short, squat woman in a white smock and pants suit hovered over his bed. She pointed a finger at him and shouted, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  Jimmy was still wrapped in his blanket. “What do you mean?” He spun around and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m James Keene and if you look at my medical file—”

  “But I want to know who you really are,” she said, cutting him off. “Why are you hassling my patient with all these questions about his cases and trying to get into his life?”

  Her patient? Keene peered through the phalanx of guards in his cell, and he could see Hall watching from the corridor with a guard on either side, as though they were shielding him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Keene said. “You need to talk to my doctor.”

  But she kept barking at him. “Who sent you here? The government? The FBI? That prosecutor? Do they have you working undercover?”

  Two guards grabbed Keene by each arm and dragged him out of bed. “You’re going down into the hole until you decide to tell us the truth,” she said. He was only in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, but they didn’t even give him a chance to dress. They put on cuffs and shackles and pushed him outside in his bare feet. Still groggy from sleep, Jimmy stumbled forward as if he were in a dream. How could this be happening? As they shoved him down the hall, he looked back over his shoulder and saw the doctor and Hall walk off together in the opposite direction.

  Keene was back in the hole again. He told himself it was just a misunderstanding. As soon as the FBI followed up on his message, they would come to set him free. But the day wore on and no one appeared as Jimmy shivered, barefoot with just his boxers and T-shirt.

  Keene’s only communication with the rest of the world came through the two slots in his steel door: the eye-level wicket, which the guard could slide open and shut, and a lower slot opening at knee level, just high enough for rubberized food trays or for the guard to reach through to secure cuffs. After he had been in the hole for a day, Jimmy tried reaching out to the guard on duty. When he heard him pass by, he kicked on the door and the upper wicket slid open. Keene put his face by the slot. “Officer, listen, I need to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you about nothing,” the guard shot back. “Just do your time and shut up.”

  For Jimmy, the Special Housing Unit cell in the “Medical Center” was no different from solitary in any other prison he had been in. “It’s just a damp, dark, nasty little hole,” Keene says, “like all the other holes, but in Springfield they start you off with absolutely nothing. Maybe a few sheets of toilet paper and that’s all.” It took another day before he got clothes, and a few more after that before he got a blanket. “And they really hold out on the pillow.

  “Even though they tell you they don’t have enough stuff to go around, it’s really an honor system that they have in that prison to make you behave,” Keene explains. “But if you’ve got prisoners who are crazy to begin with, it only makes them crazier. All day and all night you hear unbelievable bitching and moaning: ‘Let me out of this fucking place’ or ‘Give me a new pillow, I want a different pillow.’ Over and over until you practically go crazy yourself.”

  After a few days went by and no one had tried to contact him, Jimmy couldn’t keep silent any longer. “I felt very hyper because I knew I had a very limited time if Hall still sent the map and the falcons to his brother in the mail, so I had to explain what was happening as clearly as possible.” When the day guard came by to deliver the tray, Keene was waiting by the opening. “Officer, now listen to me,” Jimmy said when he bent down. “Just listen to me, okay? Don’t think I’m trying to come up with some crazy, nutcase story. Just listen to me! I’m not just a regular prisoner. I’m working undercover with the FBI, and I’m down here on a case for them to investigate a serial killer. You need to go and talk to—”

  But the guard cut him off. “Don’t you ever say something as whacked-out as that again!” he hissed, then slammed the flap shut.

  “Just listen to me,” Keene screamed, “listen to me!” He kicked the door with his feet and pounded it with his fists, but then, he says, “It started to scare me that I was raising so much hell. I said to myself, ‘If you act crazy, they’re going to treat you like you’re crazy.’ ” When Keene watched for the guard later as he passed his door, the guard intentionally turned away from him.

  Keene says, “I realized what that guard saw when he looked through my slot. My hair was sticking all over my head and my eyes were bugging out. I must have looked the part of a crazy guy.” Now the words of Big Jim kept echoing through his brain: “Lost in the system. Lost in the system.” Did anyone even know where he was? By the time his father and his lawyer found out, would it be too late to help him?

  All he could do was sit for hours on the metal bed or in a corner and replay his last conversation with Larry. It probably scared Hall enough to contact his shrink when they let him out for his early shift. He may have gone straight to the wood shop to destroy the map, too. For all Keene knew, after Hall’s doctor threw Jimmy in the hole, she called the chief psychiatrist with some story about Keene threatening Larry.

  “I started to think about every worst-case scenario imaginable,” Keene recalls. “Like, since I’ve blown this investigation, the Feds are now going to treat me like a mental case and keep me locked down here forever.” That was the nightmare he’d contemplated when the marshals first brought him to Springfield and what Big Jim had warned him about over and over. He says, “I almost expected it to happen.”

  As the days passed into weeks in Springfield’s solitary, Keene could not help but obsess about other times in his life when he’d tried to do the right thing and it backfired. All the money he’d sunk into Big Jim’s businesses never did either of them any good. Then there was his daring rescue of Nick Richards from Hector’s mountaintop lair only to have Richards snitch on him a few years later. If only he had listened to Hector’s admonition about knowing who his true friends were. “I’m telling myself, ‘This is what happens when you work with the Feds. They feel I’ve blown this case, but I can’t even contact anybody to tell them what I do know, anyway. Now they’re going to think I’m a mental case, and they’re just going to leave me locked down he
re forever.’

  “At this point, I had a full beard and mustache going, and I hadn’t seen daylight or had a shower for days. The fear that my dad put in my head about getting lost in the system was pumping through me. I couldn’t think about anything else. I could barely sleep for more than a few hours at a time. I was so mad, I was going mad, too.”

  But no matter how justifiable his anger, Keene still had to calm down and act as normal as possible. He only had to look through the upper wicket at the cell across the hall to see what could happen if he didn’t keep himself under control. The inmate there was a Mexican, who seemed harmless enough at first. “His name was Julio or something like it,” Keene says, “and he would sing the same song over and over. I didn’t understand the words, but I can still hear that melody to this day. He kept singing it louder and louder until the guard would come around. He’d smack the door with his stick and go, ‘Keep it down in there.’ And then Julio would say, ‘Fuck you, man. I’m sitting here forty fucking years for selling marijuana.’ As soon as the guard left, he would just break into a frenzy—kicking and hitting on his door. When he got exhausted doing that, he’d start singing his song again.

  “And I thought to myself, ‘He does have a point. If he really was just a dealer and not killing anybody, he certainly didn’t belong in a place like this for forty years.’ But as far as the guards were concerned, he was crazy, and they came around with a nurse to give him pills until he yelled, ‘You guys ain’t making me take that shit no more.’ And the next thing you know, they busted in on him with a whole crew of the prison SWAT team—guards who wear helmets and pads. I could hear him screaming and thrashing around and the guards telling the nurse to inject him some more. Then someone yelled, ‘Get the gurney,’ and a little later they rolled him out into the hall strapped down to a cart which is shaped like a T on top for his arms and like a V on the bottom for his legs. He was still thrashing around, and the nurse had to inject him again, and he just went, ‘Ughhh,’ and conked out. For the next few days they left him out there where we all could see him as an example to us. He would piss on himself and defecate on himself and they took their time before they cleaned him up. It smelled horrible. But it sure did stop him from singing.”

  Keene decided he needed a new strategy and he would try it out with the night guard. “I knew I just couldn’t unload everything on him at once,” he says. “Instead I wanted him to see I was a normal person. When he took my tray away, I thanked him and we chatted about the weather.”

  Keene then waited until the early-morning hours when he knew the guard wouldn’t be too busy and asked him to stop by for a minute. This time he delivered a capsule version of his situation in as calm a voice as he could muster. “I could see him giving me one of those wary looks like I might turn out to be another nutcase,” Jimmy says, “so I told him, ‘Look at my jacket and you’ll see my doctor is the chief psychiatrist. Could you just let him know that I want to see him?’ ”

  The guard gave Keene a noncommittal nod, but at 7:00 a.m. when his shift changed, he came back and rapped on Jimmy’s door. “Hey, listen, I went down to talk to the doc,” he said, “but he’s on vacation. As soon as he gets back, I’ll go talk to him. I’ll tell him your story and we’ll see what he says.”

  It was another week, but it felt like a month to Keene. “It’s the uncertainty that makes you crazy,” he says. “That’s worse than any physical torture they could have given me. I had been in the hole before, but I knew why and when I was getting out. This was totally different. It was so unfair and so unjustified, it made me incredibly angry. All I could think about was how good I had it back in Milan and how my father knew best when he warned me not to go to Springfield. All these negative voices go around and around in your head when you have no one else to talk to. It doesn’t take long before you really do become a whack job.”

  Finally the guard came back one morning to tell him, “I think the doctor is giving you a visit later today.”

  Only moments later, Keene heard a rap at his door, and when he looked through the eye slot, he saw the chief psychiatrist on the other side with an office chair. He sat down, lifted the lower flap, and put his face as close to the opening as he could. “Jim,” he whispered, “what’s going on? These guards are all telling me how angry you are and that you were kicking on the door. They also said you told them you work for the FBI. You’re not supposed to say that.”

  “And you’re not supposed to go on vacation,” Keene shot back. “Look what that lady did to me.”

  Jimmy now had a full beard and had not had a shower in the two weeks he had been in solitary. From the look in the doctor’s eyes, he could see how wild he must have appeared. “I don’t think any of us thought you’d move so fast,” he explained. “They wanted this to be a slow-developing thing.”

  “Yeah, and Hall’s psychiatrist attacks me while you’re gone. You were supposed to protect me,” Keene hissed. “You never told me you were going on vacation. But the least you can do is get me out of here.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” the doctor said as he fumbled through Keene’s file jacket. “It looks like this other doctor has you on an evaluation hold right now. And I’d have to cut through some red tape to get you out with that hanging over your head. Maybe I’ll need the contacts at the FBI to help.”

  “I don’t care what you do, Doc,” Keene shouted. “You just get that FBI lady here—”

  “Just settle down,” the doctor shushed.

  But Jimmy yelled louder until his voice echoed through the hall. “And you get her today or I’ll let everybody know you’re working with the FBI, too.”

  “That’s enough. I’ll get her here. I’ll get her here. Just don’t worry.”

  But later that day when Keene heard a rap on his door, he looked through the wicket and saw three guards. They rushed in, as if he had just been in a fight, and put him in cuffs and shackles. “Hey, hey,” he shouted. “What’s going on now?”

  They shoved him through the door and dragged him down the hall. Only when he lifted his head and looked all the way down the long, long corridor did he see a blond woman surrounded by four men in dark suits. It was Janice Butkus.

  “The guards didn’t know what was going on either,” Keene remembers. “They walked me down the corridor—totally handcuffed and shackled—and the first words out of her mouth were ‘Jim, I am so sorry. I am so sorry.’ I said, ‘This is ridiculous. I thought you guys would get me out of here right away if something happened, but I’ve been rotting in this hellhole for weeks.’ Then she looked at the guards and said, ‘Please, get all of that stuff off of him.’ And they did. They took everything off of me right on the spot. My hands, my feet, everything, and I was free.”

  Then, walking shoulder to shoulder with the FBI agents and the guards, Keene walked through the tunnels and corridors to the administrative building. On the way, they walked past clusters of startled prisoners, including identity thief Malcolm Shade, who watched the procession with his mouth hanging open—once again dumbfounded by Keene’s mysterious change in fortunes. “I didn’t have to say anything,” Jimmy remembers. “They knew something big was going on because the suits wouldn’t come in there unless something big was going on.”

  A few inmates started to follow the procession. “One of them was a little, scraggly guy I used to hang out with named John,” Keene says. “He started yelling, ‘Jim, Jim, what’s going on, man? What’s going on?’ The guards had started pushing him away. I looked at him, and I said, ‘Don’t worry, John. I’m going home, man.’ And he yelled back, ‘Then can you help me? I want to get out of here, too, man.’ ”

  The guards led them directly to the intake center—the same area where Jimmy first entered the Medical Center. “They had to give me back the clothes that I wore when I arrived,” Keene explains, “and the guards who were watching this whole deal were as confused as the inmates. There was one guy in particular, a real fucking asshole, who made life difficult on m
e the whole time I was inside that prison, and you could have knocked him over with a feather. He looked at me and said, ‘What’s going on, James? Are you going home?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, dude, and guess what? You’re stuck here for the rest of your life.’ ”

  A van waited for them outside, and although the airstrip was eight miles away, Jimmy remembers it as being as close as the prison’s backyard. When Keene asked Butkus about the falcons and the map, she deflected the question. “No one knew that you were in so deep with him,” she explained. “When we stopped hearing from you, it was hard to take your call seriously.” Keene had never confided in her that he was even talking to Hall, let alone that he was in his cell nightly.

  The van drove him right to a sleek private jet waiting on the airstrip. When he got inside, a turkey dinner was waiting. It was nothing fancy, but it was far and away the best food he had eaten since the marshals took him to dinner near the Ford County jail six months earlier. “I literally ate like a wild animal,” Keene remembers, “stuffing my face with food and scratching at my beard. But I was still livid and I kept yelling at Janice, ‘This is really bullshit what you did to me.’ And she kept apologizing and saying it was the doctor’s fault for not keeping in touch with her and that her phone system had lost my voice mail. But I just kept raving with the turkey falling out of my mouth—kind of like a maniac myself.”

  Still, for all the shortcomings of the Feds, some of Jimmy’s rage was also directed at himself. He had jumped the gun with Hall, and now he had no idea if he was really going home, as he’d bragged back at the Medical Center. “Without Tricia Reitler’s body I did not complete my mission, and I didn’t know what Beaumont was going to do about that.”