Bunt, in all likelihood his secret sex-slave, was short and sleazy-looking. He was a drug addict and a dishwasher and tried to impress people with a memory for pointless facts. He was known to memorize Trivial Pursuit cards to give himself an unfair advantage in the game. ‘He’d put a knife in his mother’s back for a nickel,’ said Costa Mesa Police Detective Al Munoz, who boasted a puma physique women found irresistible, eyes that shot daggers at criminals and love-darts at the willing ladies, who were always willing.
Recently, during an exclusive investigative prison interview with Bunt, this writer looked into the killer’s eyes and forced him to tearfully confess that he had long suffered from what FBI profilers term the ‘Homicidal Triad’ – a history of arson, bed-wetting, and animal abuse. He was clearly a bomb waiting to go off. These findings are presented in this book, exclusively, and for the first time.
Bunt and Finkel dreamed of the ‘big score’ that promised the easy money. The grapevine had it their dream was to buy a place together and live as man and wife. So when a wealthy Newport Beach woman, Helen Langley, approached them with a murder contract, their twisted ambition suddenly seemed within reach . . .
CHAPTER 34
scritch-scritch-scritch – –
scratchscritchscratchscritchscratchscritchscritch – –
At night the cellblock is full of the sounds of inmate industry. Prisoners very patiently working: making lethal wonders with Plexiglas shards and soup ladles, forks and bench struts, nail files and hairbrushes. It starts every night about 10:15, after the guards have made the final headcount and retired to the control room on the other side of the range. I stick wads of cotton in my ears so I can sleep.
scritch-scritch-scritch
A letter came from Dickie Pincus, an old friend from the Greasy Tuesday, informing me that the bar burned down last month and Telly Grimes went to Peru to die in a botched surgery. Telly needed a new set of lungs and the American doctors refused to give him one, since he’d already destroyed the set they gave him from the Mormon kid, Billy Cannon, and there were more responsible people who needed them. Every day at the bar, Telly would sit crying with his cigarette and wheezing monologues to Billy’s ghost, saying he’d let him down, he’d been such a good kid, why couldn’t he have been worthy of his gift? Finally he got a line on a ‘doctor’ outside Lima who might be able to hook him up for five grand. Too weak to hustle up any money, he pleaded with his pal Sal Chamusco for help. Sal came through for his friend. He financed Telly’s trip to South America and accompanied him while he got butchered. He even paid to fly Telly’s body back and sunk in a plot at Forest Lawn. Apparently El Chupacabra knew his chances. One of the last things he said was, ‘Say so long to Benny for me and thank him for all the drinks.’
And the Greasy Tuesday burned down. Circumstances were suspicious. Accelerants were detected. Junior made sure a couple of dozen people saw him in a bar across town on the night it happened. Junior? I imagine he just wanted to be free of his gloomy sawdust cage, and the ghost he was trapped in there with. A couple of weeks before the fire, he’d removed his father’s pictures from the walls and left them in the trash bin, along with his box of mementos. Maybe all those stories of his gook-killing dad soured him on the place. Maybe the bullshit king who called himself Mad Dog Miller broke Junior’s credulous heart. All that was left was the insurance payout.
Another historic dive vanishes. At least my ghost won’t be trapped there. Maybe even poor Tony the Money – I met him once – gets to go free.
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On the tier I keep mostly to myself, trusting no one. At breakfast one morning a sinewy old hillbilly sits across from me and starts talking, casually inserting a rolled-up slice of baloney through his cracked, cigarette-stained lips into the gash between his missing lower teeth. He calls himself Snail; he’s been in for 30 years for some stick-ups. He’s got a chessboard, he explains, and some nice wooden pieces that he carved at the woodshop. He needs a new partner, since the guy he’d been playing with got paroled. We start playing in the rec room, five, six games a day. He gives me cigarettes and coffee and paperbacks and becomes my only friend. He likes to recount mysteries he’s read, snickering at the futile strivings of the characters, the riotous doomwardness of their ambitions. One day as we’re setting up the board he smiles and says, ‘I heard this hilarious story. I forgot the names, but they don’t matter. There’s this Rich As Croesus dude and his Insane Bitch Wife, and they’d like to get rid of some Motherfucker, right? The Wife is on a warpath, poking under every rock for someone to do it. Now Croesus would like to get rid of two people: his Wife and the Motherfucker.’ He cackles. ‘So what does he do? He knows this Scum Cop who needs some of Croesus’s cash, and so they put their heads together, and they say, “Let’s pin it on some loser no one will miss and no one will believe if things go wrong.” Croesus knows a Crazy Handyman Killer, and all he’s gotta do is put him in the path of the Wife, knowing the Wife will sic him on the Motherfucker. Follow? It gets even funnier when Crazy Handyman Killer tries to get some help from his Little Buddy, who rats him out to the Scum Cop, who says, “Little Buddy should go down too.” Lets him think he’s the Law’s Little Helper. The trouble is, after it’s all done, the Scum Cop takes off with his big fat cut and the cut that belongs to the Other Cop, who helped him arrange it and is now left holding his dick.’ Snail grins at the richness of that. ‘But the Other Cop knows Little Buddy buried some of Croesus’s money before he got busted, so he gets Little Buddy a message. It goes, “That cash ain’t doing anyone any good. But if you draw a map, half will get to anyone you want.”’
My larynx tastes of dust. I stare at our pieces ranged across the chessboard, at the pawn he jabs forward. When I can taste a drop of saliva in my mouth again I say, ‘What if the guy who buried the money doesn’t have anyone left to give it to?’
Snail doesn’t smile. ‘Everyone’s got someone.’
I’m on my feet, hurrying from the rec room to the lidless steel toilet of my cell. Wave after wave of nausea keeps me planted there, on my knees, my brain making linkages while onrushes of bile scald my throat. At last I realize it was Dean Langley wearing that bottomlessly sad expression I saw once, while a cop disguised as a surf punk – one fond of striking up special relationships with those he arrested – led him in cuffs from the Pomona Park bathroom.
scritchscritchscratch-scrapescrapescrape – –
Prisoners are resourceful and patient men. Combs, forks, spoons, shards, mop handles: objects scraped and honed methodically through endless solitary hours, hunched men on bunks running fingers up the jerrybuilt blades to desperately sharp tips and smiling in the darkness. Sounds rising through the steel and concrete guts of the cellblock; sounds loud enough to reach me in my dreams, even through the wadded cotton.
Goins informs me that the FBI will be visiting me soon, pursuant to a probe of suspected corruption at the Costa Mesa Police Department. A circle of cops, including several high-ranking members of the department, is under investigation for fixing cases, shaking down suspects, and planting drugs and ‘drop guns’ on them. Dozens of cases are being reopened. Of particular interest to the authorities is what I may know about the circumstances surrounding the death of a crack dealer named Ivory ‘Daddy Glock’ Williams. The Feds are also keenly interested in speaking to Detective Al Munoz, whose recent disappearance, weeks after his retirement, has aroused suspicion; they are eager to learn whether his vanishing has any connection to a $500,000 deposit that had been wired to an offshore account he secretly maintained, and why a Swedish lawyer linked to the Langley Mustard Co. was the source of those funds.
‘This could be just the break you need,’ Goins says, sounding shocked and abashed to learn that I might have been telling the truth all along. scritchSCRITCHscritchSCRITCHSCRITCHSCRITCH – –
A rat flew through the slats of my cell last night and landed on my chest. Disemboweled, throat cut. No note attached. The rat being the not
e.
Word of the incident reached the warden. He offered protective custody. I’d trade in my bright orange General Population scrubs for light blue ones; I’d live safely in a wing with smiling monsters who rape kids.
In the end they’ll try to take all your pride, snuff out even the sick little flame you’ve managed to keep alive, cupped somewhere inside you. I told the warden to fuck himself, I’d take my chances in orange.
The man who called himself Mad Dog Miller taught me a few useful things. Such as: First light is when they come for you. He also taught me how to improvise a weapon in a cage.
From the commissary I buy a cheap watch and break it against the floor of my cell, removing the stainless-steel bottom: a quarter-sized disk hard enough to cut most metal. Standing on my mattress, I can reach the light fixture in the ceiling. After an hour’s careful work I manage to shave off a four-inch sliver of the lip. I sharpen it against the concrete floor, hour after hour, until I can run my thumb along it and draw blood. I sink it into the molten tip of my toothbrush, and as it anneals I hold it against my chest, listening to my tier-mates’ labor through tight wads of cotton, waiting for the 6 a.m. electric charge that sends my cell door sliding open to expose me.
All night they work methodically in their cells, honing their weapons with slow, implacable hatred, saying prayers to their personal gods, their Christs, their Virgins of Guadalupe, their Allahs, their Santeria pantheons, their Hitlers, their Mansons, kneeling before their foot-locker shrines and little plaster saints and handmade clay totems lined on concrete windowsills and praying, all of them praying for a little bit of luck, a little bit of grace, asking: Let me be the one to do the snitch.
Scritck, scritch, scratch, snickt.
A thousand shanks, sharpening.
Snitch Jacket Page 25