My Ex's Father Is the Mafia King I Am Court-Ordered to Evaluate, and I Am the Reason He Is in the Cell novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Bars
Fay is led into a detention center interview room to evaluate a prisoner and finds Kostas Drakos, her ex's father, who asked for her; he pins her against the bars without touching her, and she signs the intake form anyway.
The guard unlocked the door of the third-floor interview room.
The file in my hand said only a single initial and a surname.
I had not read past it.
The man behind the steel table wore a county orange jumpsuit, and his hands lay flat on the metal.
He was the father of the man I had left eleven months ago.
He was in this building because of me.
He did not smile.
"Dr. Hennessy," he said, in a low steady voice. "I asked for you."
The guard stepped out, and the door shut behind him with a flat clang.
I stood there with my coat still on.
The room held one table, two chairs and a barred window set into the wall between us and the corridor.
Through the bars I could see the guard's shoulder, turned away, and a clock nine minutes slow.
"I have a conflict," I said.
My voice came out thinner than I wanted.
"I was engaged to your son. I'll tell the court this morning, and they'll send someone else."
"Yes," he said. "I know you were."
He said it the way you read a name off a list.
I turned for the door and reached for the bars to wave the guard back.
I heard the chair scrape.
He crossed the room in two steps.
I had evaluated forty-one defendants for this court.
Not one of them had ever moved that quietly.
He put one hand against the bars on my left and one on my right.
The left hand was scarred across every knuckle.
He did not touch me.
His chest stopped an inch from my coat, and I felt the heat of him through the wool.
I stood with my back to the iron and my pen in my fist.
"Sit down, Fay," he said.
He did not raise his voice.
"You are the only person who put me in this room, and the only one I will tell what I did."
Up close he was older than the newspaper photographs.
His hair was iron gray at the temples.
The skin under his eyes was gray from eleven months under a light that never went off.
His eyes were very dark and entirely steady.
He smelled of jail soap, and under it of something warmer that I remembered.
His son used to smell a little of it, on the days he had been to visit him.
I had lived with that son for two years.
I had sat at this man's table on Eastern Avenue and watched him cut bread for half a neighborhood.
He never once lifted his eyes from the knife.
I had never been alone with him.
"Step back, Mr. Drakos," I said.
It was the first time I had said his name aloud in that room.
My voice shook once, and I made it stop.
"Or I will end the session and put it in my report."
He looked at me for the length of one slow breath.
Then he took his hands off the bars.
He went back to the table and sat down.
He laid his hands flat again, the left one slightly curled.
I could breathe, and I hated how loud it was.
Out in the corridor, a door buzzed.
I could walk out now.
Every rule I worked under told me to walk out.
An evaluator with a tie to the defendant is not an evaluator, and I knew exactly what my supervisor would say.
Then I thought of the closet in the Federal Hill apartment.
I thought of a navy work jacket with a stain on the right cuff.
I thought of the prosecutor's face when I set it on her desk, and how sure I had been.
For eleven months I had told myself I had done a hard, right thing.
For eleven months I had not been able to open a newspaper.
And this man had not asked for a bail hearing or a deal in all that time.
He had not even asked for a visit from his own lawyer.
He had asked the court for me.
I pulled out the chair across from him and sat.
My knees were not steady, so I put my hands under the table where he could not see.
I took the pen from my coat and wrote the date at the top of a clean page.
Under it I wrote: Competency evaluation, session 1.
"You said you'd tell me what you did," I said.
"I said I would tell you," he said.
"Then tell me why you asked for me."
"Sign your name first," he said.
He nodded at the intake form on the steel between us.
It carried the court's seal at the top and a blank line at the bottom.
Once I signed it, I was bound to this man by the court and by my license.
I would sit across from him once a week until the judge said otherwise.
I knew that.
I also knew that nobody else on earth was going to tell me why his son's jacket sat in a prosecutor's evidence bag.
Not while the father sat in a cell.
I took the pen and signed.
Fay Hennessy, Ph.D.
He watched my hand until the pen came off the paper.
"Thank you, Doctor," he said.
It was very gentle.
I understood that the gentleness was the most dangerous thing in the room.
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