Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  Whit eased the Ford he was driving along at a leisurely speed. On the western outskirts of the city, he parked and inspected his acquisition. In the glove compartment he found a credit card, and it was then he learned whose car he had borrowed. He grinned. And then the violence boiled up out of him.

  He put the car through the gears, viciously. He rammed it through traffic, slammed it around corners, tires screaming. “All right, you grim reaper bastard,” he thought, broadsiding crazily into another corner, “here’s your chance!”

  He pulled into a gas station when he reached Montrose, above Glen-dale. “Five of your ethyl,” he told the attendant.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Whit got out. He watched the hand of the gas meter race around, listened to the bell ding five times. He had the oil checked and the windshield cleaned. He checked the tires himself. Then he handed the attendant the credit card, signed the slip with the postmaster’s name, adding a “Jr.,” and pocketed his copy.

  He drove off.

  He was a factor again.

  Moose lived in a district of Los Angeles, bordered on one side by the Los Angeles River and on the opposite side by a busy truck highway.

  Moose was an incorrigible romantic, and to that extent a character. He was forever falling in love with some cute young thing, tarts and chippies and good-bad girls by no means excluded. Indeed, the quantitative aspects of l’amour seemed wholly to have won him over, leaving no room for any qualitative considerations. Possessed of a nature as fickle as it was amorous, each week he discarded an old flame for a new and gaudier one. This catch-as-catch-can brand of romance kept Moose broke—for he was a notoriously free spender—and made him an opportunist always in search of a fast buck.

  Whit braked the Ford to a stop in front of the small frame house where Moose lived. A horn blast brought Moose to the door and a shout brought him lumbering out to the car. His walk was deceptive. Actually he was agile as a cat.

  Greetings exchanged, Moose asked, “Where’d ya get this crate, clout it?”

  “ ‘Borrowed’ is a nicer word,” Whit said.

  “Sure,” Moose agreed amiably, “but they both add up to the same thing. Besides, I thought you’d got religion and turned square.”

  Whit didn’t crack wise. He said simply, without glibness, “I guess I’ve backslid.”

  “I don’t get it,” Moose said, perplexed. Moose wasn’t a thinker, yet he had a homely way of getting incisively to the heart of a problem. “I don’t get it at all. When you were little you were raising more hell than six other guys could. Just like that"—Moose snapped his fingers—"you changed from a mama’s boy into a wild man. And when the bulls nailed Tim, damned if you didn’t ride the beef for all of us. Then you get out of that place up north and you act like you got a halo around your head. Now here you are with a hot heap. So what happens next?”

  “We engage in a little free enterprise,” Whit said.

  “Meaning we take somebody’s dough?” Moose asked.

  Whit nodded. “That’s about it.”

  “Well, pal, that’s O.K. with me, but are you sure that’s what you want? I mean you got brains enough to amount to something. I got an idea for some screwy reason I don’t understand you keep trying to throw your life away by getting into jams and I don’t think that’s really what you want to do. Me, I keep it simple. All I try to do is get along, have a little fun and, one way or another, keep a few nickels in my jeans. I don’t try to find any hidden meanings in what happens or try to figure out what makes the world go round. But you’re different. You act like a guy that’s looking for something characters like me don’t even know exists. And if it’s like that, pal, you better be sure you’re looking in the right place.”

  Whit’s laugh was spontaneous. “Moose,” he said, “whether you know it or not, the philosophers and psychologists could take some lessons from you.”

  Moose’s brow furrowed with concentration. He looked at his big hands. Ordinarily he didn’t put his nose into anyone else’s business or subject their motives to a nice analysis. It made him uneasy to do so. But Whit was his friend. “Don’t get me wrong, pal. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. And I know I won’t get hurt by going in with you. At least not through any fault of yours. But that’s the trouble. What’Il probably happen is that I’ll do all right for myself and you’ll wind up in a jackpot.”

  Whit said, and meant it, “I’m willing to take my chances. Now let me tell you what I got in mind.”

  “Fire away, pal,” Moose invited. “I’m all ears.”

  The next afternoon, with Moose in the front seat beside him, Whit guided the postmaster’s Ford along a narrow, winding drive that meandered among the Hollywood Hills.

  “That’s the place,” Whit said, pointing out an impressive structure of decidedly haughty architecture. High green hedges walled it off from neighboring homes.

  “Classy looking joint, all right,” Moose commented.

  Whit nodded his agreement. He eased the Ford in toward the curb. “I’m parking a couple of doors down to reduce the chance of the car being seen. Now, have you got everything straight?”

  “Sure,” Moose said, full of brash confidence.

  “O.K., then let’s go. But remember, let me do the talking. From what I hear, getting into this place won’t be easy.”

  The walk was flower-bordered and arced at a fish pond where marble cranes squirted water at each other, and fat goldfish swam aimlessly. With Moose beside him, Whit punched the door button. They heard the muted notes of a chimes. A coffee-complexioned young woman in a trim maid’s uniform opened the door.

  Whit looked at her and then dropped his eyes and squirmed, simulating a keen embarrassment. He stammered, “I was wondering—I, I mean—well, my friend and I, we . . .”

  The maid couldn’t resist a knowing grin. She invited them in. Inside, in a sumptuously decorated parlor, they were met by a woman, perhaps forty, of the type the French would call très chic. This woman made no effort to conceal her amusement at the sight of the fuzzy-cheeked Whit then eyeing her boldly.

  “You’re a little young to be coming here, aren’t you, junior,” she asked in a voice that purred.

  Whit had dropped all pretense of being the gauche young innocent. “Ah, madam,” he replied, “surely you realize how impetuous even tender youth can be.”

  “Give the word, Stella,” said an oily masculine voice, “and I’ll toss this smart-cracking punk out on his ear.”

  Whit turned to its source. Lolling in an easy chair in a corner of the room was a tall, slim, exquisite dandy who bore the conspicuous stamp of the pimp.

  “Well, listen to this lap dog, will you,” Whit said, not bothering to make his words exclamatory.

  The dandy muttered an oath and started to push himself up from the chair when the woman called Stella spoke sharply.

  “It’s all right, Frank. Sit still.” Then she asked Whit, “Did you have any particular girl in mind?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Whit told her, “I’ve got all your girls in mind.”

  Stella became excusably suspicious. “Just exactly what do you mean by that?” she demanded.

  “This,” Whit said. He drew a snub-nosed gun from a pocket of his sport jacket and held it casually in his right hand. At the same time Moose produced a larger-calibered, long-barreled revolver, a horse pistol. Whit had Moose stay with Stella, the maid and the pimp while he rounded up the girls.

  He found four of them chatting in a sun porch at the rear of the house. These he turned over to the custody of Moose before vaulting up the stairs. He walked in, unannounced, on a fifth abed with a customer in a bedroom on the second floor. This one was an outraged spitfire with a small, feline face and the pungent vocabulary of a mule-skinner. While throwing her ample self into a near-diaphanous housecoat, she discoursed on the subject of “half-pint, two-bit hoodlums with guns who come busting into a working girl’s boudoir.”

  Whit apologized for the intrusion, and tri
ed with indifferent success to be grave while doing so.

  Meanwhile, the customer, a bald, paunchy individual, resignedly put on his clothes. His moon face, at first disorganized by this sudden and untoward turn of events, gradually assumed an expression of acute disenchantment.

  At the point of his snub-nosed gun, Whit induced Moonface and Spitfire to descend the stairs and join the others.

  One of the girls was cooing suggestively at Moose who, forever susceptible to feminine blandishment, appeared on the verge of forgetting the original and exclusive purpose of their invasion.

  “All right, you big ox, get your mind back on your business,” Whit said, and Moose grinned sheepishly.

  At Whit’s urging, Stella reluctantly opened a hidden wall safe. He stuffed its cash contents into a jacket pocket, ignoring all else in the safe except the inevitable little black book which he palmed gingerly. “Well, well,” he said, looking knowingly at the madam of the place.

  “My book,” Stella said. Her statement implied a question.

  “Sure,” Whit said. “Your book.” He tossed it to her. “No good to me unless I wanted to make trouble. And neither one of us wants trouble, do we, Stella?”

  Stella quickly agreed they did not.

  “All right,” he said. “Then you don’t squawk to anybody about getting hijacked. You just write it off as an occupational hazard. And in return, I forget all about your place here. I don’t make any anonymous calls, say, to a certain crusading newspaper that’s hot to expose houses like yours. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Stella said, adding, “You know, junior, for a sprout you seem damn clever. But watch out you don’t outsmart yourself.”

  Whit grinned. “I’ll try real hard, Stella,” he said. “I’ll try real hard just for your sake.”

  Then he sent Moose upstairs to make a fast search of the girls’ rooms. “No jewelry,” he emphasized. “Nothing but cash.”

  Moose was gone several minutes. He returned with a fistful of bills clutched in one hand and his large gun still held in the other one. Spying the money, Spitfire squalled bitter protest, screaming she had worked hard for that dough.

  “Don’t take it so rough, baby,” Moose said placatingly, his big homely face splashed with humor. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  Spitfire sputtered something fierce. Then she subsided, rendered speechless by the immensity of her own righteous indignation.

  Apparently of the opinion it was high time his authoritative male voice be heard, the dandy declared, “I guess you know you won’t get away with this.”

  “No kidding,” Whit said. He walked over to confront the dandy. He stripped off the dandy’s fancy wristwatch and ground it under his heel. He jerked a diamond ring from one of the dandy’s fingers and had Moose go flush it down a toilet. All the time he held his gun aimed at the dandy’s midsection, and his eyes dared the dandy to resist. He frisked the dandy, memorizing the name and address on a driver’s license found in the latter’s wallet. A man of discretion, the dandy suffered these numerous indignities in silence, including the removal of several bills from his wallet.

  “Maybe next time,” Whit said, “you’ll have sense enough to keep your fat pimp mouth shut. If you don’t, you’re apt to have your tiny pimp brains blown out.”

  The dandy had no comment.

  “How about the old gink here,” Moose asked, “do we shake him down too?”

  Whit shook his head. “No, we leave him strictly alone and we apologize for interrupting his party. Now put that cannon away and let’s get out of here.”

  They strode quickly to the Ford, got in and drove off. Moose counted and divided the loot. After relaxing expansively in the seat, he gazed fondly at the roll of bills he held in a big hand. “Nothing to it,” he said. Then he looked at Whit and saw more than a skinny adolescent with a rather large head and an odd way of grinning.

  In less than a week following their initial foray into the Hollywood Hills, employing the same modus operandi, they robbed eight more bordellos. Moose was jubilant with his sudden riches. “Man, we’re really riding a gravy train,” he exalted. “I take it away from one tomato and then turn right around and blow it on another. Broads’re gonna be the death of me yet.”

  Whit had to grin. He said, “You know, Moose, there’s a lot more truth than poetry in what you just said.”

  Moose sobered. “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  “Well, mainly because I got wind the P.I.’s and some other people are all riled up over what we’ve been doing. I got reason to believe there’ll be a hot reception party waiting for us at the next place we walk into.”

  Moose got the point. “Meaning, then, we stop walking into those kind of places?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Moose reacted to the news philosophically. “Well, I guess nobody should expect a good thing to last forever,” he said with a shrug. “Got anything else in mind?”

  “Not anything that’ll pay off in the kind of coin you’re looking for. Just three or four miscellaneous projects. Besides, I think we better split up for a while, hot as we are. If I’m not nailed in the meantime I’ll be back to see you in three or four weeks, maybe sooner.”

  Moose didn’t ask any questions. “Okay, pal, take it easy.”

  “Sure, Moose,” Whit said. “And you do the same.”

  The private detective agency was located in the heart of Los Angeles, on the fifth floor of a building that had seen better times. Whit walked in and confronted a mousey-looking receptionist.

  “Yes?” she said. “What is it you want? If you’re selling subscriptions we don’t want any.”

  “Quit trying to scare off a cash customer before he gets a chance to talk with your boss,” Whit said.

  The private dick was a seedy-appearing, middle-aged guy with alert eyes. “You want to see me about something?” he asked.

  Whit said he did, privately.

  “Come into my office then.”

  Whit got right down to business. He told the private dick all he knew about where, when and how his mother had been found.

  “You want to find the girl—I mean that woman?”

  “No, I want to find out who her parents were.”

  “That’d be a tough job. It might cost a lot of money and even then I couldn’t guarantee results.”

  “Never mind the build-up,” Whit said. “Just tell me how much money is a lot of money.”

  “Well, fifteen bucks a day, expenses, and train or plane fare both ways.”

  Whit produced a thick roll of bills. The money was. every last dollar he had netted from the houses. He gave the roll a little toss into the air, caught it, surveyed it critically, looked at the private dick, whose eyes had opened wider and grown considerably more interested with the appearance of the roll, and then Whit threw the roll.

  “Catch,” he said, and the private dick caught, with both hands. “There’s enough money to pay your expenses and keep you looking for a helluva lot of days. But I’m not going to ask for a refund, not even if you have the answer for me tomorrow. All I want is results.”

  “Sure,” the private dick said, “all you want is results, and that’s what you’ll get.”

  “Now you could go south with my money,” Whit observed, “because I don’t intend to try to check on you, and I’m not even asking for a receipt. And if you did go south, I wouldn’t yell copper. I wouldn’t say a word to anybody. But . . .”

  The private dick interrupted with protestations of his honesty. “I guarantee value received,” he said, with just the right amount of injured professional pride.

  “Sure, sure,” Whit said. “I know. But I still think I should make it plain that I wouldn’t be happy if you got scientific with me, figuring maybe you were just dealing with a dumb kid.”

  Whit heard elaborate assurances there was no chance this would happen.

  “All right,” Whit said. “Now that we understand each other let’s

  work
out the details. You take the money and you go look for the answer. While you’re looking, you make reports of everybody you talk to and everything you do. I want a complete record. When you find the answer, you come back here. You put all the reports in a file and seal them up. One of these days I walk in and get them. Then I walk out and we both forget we ever saw each other.”

  The private dick nodded and said, “That sounds like a most satisfactory arrangement.” He buzzed for the mousey-looking receptionist who doubled as his secretary. “I want you to take down every word this young man has to say.”

  Whit repeated what he had told the private dick about how, when and where his mother had been abandoned. Leaving, he gently reminded the dick, “Remember, we got a gentleman’s agreement.”

  Whit spent the night at his mother’s bedside, slowly rocking back and forth in a rocking chair. This was an old habit they had, softly talking the night away, for sleep was a luxury the pain-ridden Hallie seldom enjoyed without the aid of drugs and she far preferred the company of her son to a drugged sleep. They talked happily of everything bright and warm under the sun—of writers and artists and poets and books and paintings and poetry and happenings both new and old and other people and other times—and yet they did not once mention their dark and unhappy personal world, nor did Whit tell his mother of his visit to the private detective agency. And she, of course, knew nothing of his money-gathering activities, or of the fact that he had taken the postmaster’s car.

  Their night was calm and peaceful; the dark and disruptive violence touching their lives was remote.

  During the ensuing two weeks Whit kept the Ford on the road almost day and night. Later, checking back on him, the police learned he had used the credit card to put as much as twenty gallons of gas in the car daily.