by Ed Gorman
He listened to their histories with a growing intensity, anxious for the session to end so he could tell Commander Foley he wanted to return, not just once, but as often as the inmates would have him.
Five of the inmates were genuinely interested in writing. They were the ones who asked the questions. The others were using the program to kill time or as an alternative to sweating in the kitchen or laundry or off sewing prison gear. They were the ones who seemed to sleep with their eyes open, whose breath stank of pruno, the illegal alcoholic drink made in their cells from fermented food.
Ebersole was supposed to report the fakers and the flakes — that’s how the system worked — but a short story Ricardo Ramirez read during his second visit was all the convincing he needed to ignore the mandate. Ricardo, who hid a high IQ under a body load of gang tats, had written in near-flawless prose about an execution-style killing on an afternoon when black clouds hung over the exercise yard — blood and guts spilled by a kid doing drug time, who ratted out a gang member for snatching his fish kit and won a snitch’s reward, a shiv fashioned from a toothbrush handle drilled into his carotid artery after it ripped open his belly.
The verisimilitude of the story made Ebersole wonder if it was fact wrapped in fiction, and if Ricardo perhaps was the convict who had wielded the homemade weapon, but those were not questions he asked. That would have been inviting Ricardo to snitch on himself, a thought that amused Ebersole as much as he was excited by his plan to rewrite the story in his vaunted style and submit it to Crime & Punishment Magazine.
Nothing he’d mention to Ricardo, of course.
That would be like Gus Ebersole snitching on himself. Hah, hah.
Instead, Ebersole gently poked away at his story structure, his overuse of street vernacular, and his cliche-riddled plot reminiscent of one of those old Warner Bros, movies starring Cagney, Bogart, and Pat O’Brien as either the softhearted warden or the kindhearted priest.
Ricardo appeared to take the criticism well, the suggestion of a grin dancing at a corner of his mouth. “I thought I was doing what you told us the last time, to write what you know,” he said.
“You know about a killing like that?”
Holy crap!
The question had just slipped out.
The room suddenly turned into a monastery for monks committed to an oath of silence as all eyes switched from Ebersole to Ricardo, who briefly played into the oath before saying, “Only what I know from the old movies, jefe.”
When the session ended after two hours and the inmates were lining up single file for the march back to their cells, Ricardo tossed his manuscript, handwritten in a bold, elegant cursive script, the kind they teach in elementary school, into the waste basket.
Ebersole waited for the room to empty and retrieved it.
Two days later, on Thursday, Ebersole had finished packing reference materials for his next session at Central Jail and was halfway to his SUV when the call came from Commander Foley’s office, a gum-chewing deputy relieved to have caught him in time to advise that all the programs were cancelled for the duration.
“Had ourselves a murder up on the exercise roof, so we’re in lockdown mode,” he said. Ebersole pressed for details. “Ugly screw-up,” the deputy said. “A K-10 Red, sexually violent predator fresh in from the state, who should have been in isolation because of his ‘keep away’ status. Word got out who he was, and that’s all she wrote. Somebody waltzed over, sliced his throat, and just as quick disappeared back into the pack. Me, I’d have gone for the K-10’s balls first, then his throat.”
“Any suspects?”
“We’re down to sixty-eight hundred inmates, sir. Central’s capacity.”
Ebersole returned to his class on Tuesday of the following week. By then the killing had been reduced to a cursory mention on the evening news and two tight paragraphs on a back page of the Times’ “California” section, more attention than it was getting at Central, where violence was as common as a yawn.
He had struggled at the computer the last five days, failing time and again to better the bones of Ricardo’s story. Nothing worked, except for improving the title, from “A Cutthroat Death” to “A Snitch in Time.” He’d had better luck keeping the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog.
Last night, during another siege of sleepless tossing, he realized why.
He was wrong about the quality of Ricardo’s story.
It was no damn good, not worthy of Gus Ebersole’s time or effort.
He rolled out of bed, padded across to the den, fixed himself a tall vodka over ice at the bar, and raised his glass to the notion that something better would come along.
It was waiting for him when he strolled into the classroom, a story without a byline, written on fourteen sheets of blue-lined yellow pages from a legal-size pad, hand-printed in precise, microscopic capital letters.
He read the first two pages of “Unnecessary Lives” to himself and didn’t dare continue. What followed an electrifying opening sentence turned him breathless, as if he were running the last mile of the L.A. marathon on guts alone.
“Whose is this?” Ebersole said, flashing the pages once he was sure of his voice. “Who wrote this?”
Heads swiveled, eyes questioned eyes, some shrugs, but no one took credit.
Ebersole, satisfied he’d done his due diligence, stashed the manuscript in his attaché case, twirled the combination lock, and launched into a discourse on the top ten clichés of crime fiction writing to be avoided.
Rauschenberg called out “Here, here!” to all but the one item on the list that decried the use of bizarre names for characters, suggesting, “They couldn’t get any more bizarre than what passes for names for real nowadays. If you don’t believe me, ask my daughter, Snowflake, when she comes to visit. Her mother’s decision, seeing as how she was born during a snowstorm back home in West Virginia and her daddy was a flake.”
“Is a flake,” Cooke said, his only contribution of the morning.
Smiley Burdette said, “Takes one to know one, Cookie.”
Cooke shut his eyes, swallowed a breath, and said, “You’d know that better’n me, old man.”
“About a lot of things,” Smiley said, his expression emulating his nickname.
“Here’s the next cliché,” Ebersole said, reasserting himself before Cooke and Burdette could take their feuding to the next level.
George Murdock, a craggy-faced airline pilot in his thirties sitting out a start date on his trial for the murder of his ex-wife and her lover, had been a silent presence during the first two meetings, taking notes but not participating in the discussions. He shook his head when Ebersole decried villains that routinely walk around in unnecessary disguises, like characters in a comic book. Murdock tore a sheaf of the yellow legal-size sheets in half.
That left Ray Lemmon the only inmate with something to read, of itself a surprise. Until now, the sad-eyed inmate with movie star looks, nearing release on a sentence for driving under the influence, had been one of the silent minority, hardly a shadow on the classroom wall.
“It came to me like in a dream after the last meeting,” he said, and began reading:
There’s no trick to being dead, once you get the hang of it.
Dead is a lot like living, only different.
Four pages later, as much as he’d written, everyone wanted more about a murder victim and his guardian angel, a boy with a penchant for stray dogs, who are assigned to commute from Heaven to solve crimes that appear unsolvable.
Smiley was amused. “Obviously the LAPD is their beat, wouldn’t you say so, Cookie?”
Cooke half rose from his seat, then thought better of it. He called to Ebersole, “Any way you can get this fudge monkey to shut his flap trap before I do some permanent damage?”
“You hear?” Ricardo said. “Instead of the other way around, the cop needs somebody to protect and serve him.”
Catcalls surrounded Cooke and Smiley, championing one or the other in equal
measure and no sense of quieting down despite Ebersole’s pleas for order. He pressed the call button to summon the guards and sat patiently while they cleared the room, in truth, anxious to be on his way home to an early start on reading the mystery manuscript. If it ended as well as it started, it would be pouring out of his computer and on its way to Crime & Punishment Magazine before nightfall.
The normal nesting time for a story submission at C&P was two or three months, maybe a month for the regular contributors who could be counted on for two or three stories a year, the way Ebersole once had been, before the magazine’s editor, Syd Moretti, began inundating him with rejection notes that grew progressively disheartening, from your basic “Not for us this time around” to a heart-sinking, “Where is your talent vacationing, Gus? Did it get there on a one-way ticket?”
He heard from Moretti in less than a week and not in writing, on the phone, Moretti’s Midwest roots betrayed by a flat, homespun Iowa twang that embraced a pronounced stammer whenever he got excited, like now.
He said, “Saw your byline and almost didn’t bother with a read, Gus, but I did, thank the Lord for giant favors. You are back bigger and better than ever, my friend. ‘Unnecessary Lives’ is a most necessary buy for us. What else do you have that could be a fit?”
Ebersole thought about it. “I just finished one I call ‘A Snitch in Time.’”
“Love it already.”
“It’s not as complex as ‘Unnecessary Lives,’ but — ”
“No buts,’ Gus. Upload it to me now.” An hour later, Moretti was on the phone again, saying, “You’re now officially batting a thousand, my friend. Both contracts will be in the mail first thing in the a.m.”
Ebersole celebrated over a vodka and was halfway through a second when he fixated on Ricardo Ramirez. He thought about the sexual predator whose throat was cut and his lingering suspicion that Ricardo was responsible. His hand trembled at the thought of Ricardo’s reaction when he discovered “A Snitch in Time” was, word-for-word, his story “A Cutthroat Death.” He chugalugged what remained of his drink and pondered his options over swipes straight from the bottle.
The next three sessions at Central went badly, Ebersole losing his train of thought every time he caught Ricardo looking at him with more than casual interest, which was every time he caught Ricardo staring at him, like Ricardo already knew about Crime & Punishment and was already planning how to extract punishment on him for his crime, the theft of Ricardo’s story, and —
Smiley Burdette recognized his mind was warped by his imagination and called him on it, hanging back during the pee-and-puff break, saying, “Who are you, kid?”
“Meaning what, Smiley? I don’t understand.”
“Meaning yourself you ain’t been for a while,” he said. “Getting worser and worser, and I’m not the only one noticing. I got a shoulder for you to lean on, you feel like spilling your woes to old Uncle Smiley, and if there’s anything I can do to help you …?” He plugged the offer with a question mark, took a step away from the desk to give Ebersole thinking room.
Ebersole popped a breath mint and weighed the offer, what was left of his jagged, picked-upon fingernails typing out a nervous tune on the desk’s surface.
Despite his age and diminutive size, Smiley was one feisty individual, not intimidated by the bigger, stronger, bullying likes of a Cooke. Confronting Ricardo on his behalf, if it became necessary, was not outside the realm of possibility.
Would it make a difference with Ricardo? It was worth a try, he supposed.
He confessed to Smiley and asked, “You think I might be overreacting?”
Smiley didn’t have to think about it “No,” he said “Stealing’s the misdemeanor here. Taking and selling the story as your own after you filleted his ego by putting the story down, that’s a felony where Ramirez comes from.” He ran a finger across his throat.
“Maybe I should just quit, get the hell out of here before the issue comes out and — ”
“And hide where? He has people on the outside who know how to find people. Street justice ain’t pretty, but it is permanent.”
“What do I do, Smiley?”
“Cancel out the sale. Get the story back. Give the magazine something else. You have a new Bogey Brothers? I told you how much I like them Bogey Brothers stories.”
“That wouldn’t work,” Ebersole said, leaving it at that. No desire to explain his terminal writer’s block. If he could write a Bogey Brothers, anything at all, he wouldn’t be in this mess
Smiley pushed out a noisy sigh, shook his head, and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Okay, in here these things have a way of taking care of themselves sometimes, but meantime, I’m on it.”
“‘On it.’ What’s that mean, Smiley7” The inmates were filing back into the room.
Smiley said, “Ask me that when we meet again on Tuesday.” He zipped his lips and retreated to his seat.
Ebersole survived the weekend on volcanic nerves and vodka, most of the time stretched out on the sofa in the den, watching old movies on the wall-mounted TV. Monday was no better, Tuesday morning worse. He cursed a mammoth migraine impervious to poppers and prayer on the bumper-to-bumper rush hour drive to Central he measured in inches.
Anxiety was an even worse enemy by the time he reached the reception desk, where the overweight deputy who regularly escorted him to the classroom, Don, waited with his usual cheery smile and chatterbox gossip.
Don said, “I suppose you already heard how the lockdown was only lifted last night or else you’d still be home right now and I’d be talking to myself.”
“First I’m hearing.”
“Didn’t raise much of a fuss on the news this time around. Another killing in the exercise yard, another throat cut with a toothbrush shiv. Nobody saw anything, of course. Some wise asses suggested we make sure to check everyone with dirty teeth.” He laughed. Ebersole didn’t. “Commander Foley said to tell you there might be a swell Inspector Phogg story here, seeing as how you knew the victim, him being in your class and fancying himself a writer.”
“Who?” Ebersole said, feigning shock while he fought back a grin as his mind conjured an image of Ricardo Ramirez stretched out on the yard’s concrete surface, his head resting at an impossible angle on a pillow of his blood. Now he understood what Smiley had meant. He owed him a big payback.
“Nice old bird too. Burdette. Smiley Burdette.”
“What? What about Smiley?”
“The vic I was telling you about,” Don said. “Him. Smiley Burdette.”
They had reached the classroom.
Ebersole pushed a hand against the corridor wall for support and battled to keep his legs from collapsing under him while he imagined what must have happened on the yard.
Playing intermediary, Smiley approached Ricardo and explained about the story sale to C&P. Instead of placating Ricardo, he only made him angrier. In the absence of Ebersole, Ricardo took out his fury on Smiley, the toothbrush his weapon of choice, like before
Ebersole was now more certain than ever it was Ricardo who murdered the sexual predator. And who next?
Him. Gus Ebersole would be his next victim, for insulting him in class about his story — then stealing it.
He wanted to run, flee, quit this place, the class, as far away as possible from Ricardo.
Ebersole remembered what Smiley told him about Ricardo having people who know how to find people. Street justice ain’t pretty, but it is permanent, he’d said.
The deputy pushed open the classroom door for him.
Ebersole made the sign of the cross, then a second time. He took a tentative step inside. Quit. Wheeled around. Said, “I need to speak to the watch commander. Now!”
“You’re saying Ricardo Ramirez did it?”
“Murdered Smiley, yes,” Ebersole said.
The watch commander moved his tac boots off the desk, sat upright, and studied Ebersole over his coffee mug. “And you know this how?”
Ebersole had an a
nswer ready “Smiley told me so,” he said. “He and Ramirez had been having bad words between them — over what, he didn’t say — but he said Ramirez threatened to get him, told him to watch his back.”
The commander tweaked his bulbous nose and thick brush mustache and nodded like he was weighing Ebersole’s response. After a few moments, he said, “You suppose, instead of his back, Smiley should have been guarding his neck?” He angled his face at Don and winked.
Ebersole bit down hard on his back teeth to suppress his anger. “Commander, you’re treating this as a joke? Smiley Burdette is the second inmate killed like that, his throat slashed out on your exercise yard.”
“And you’re saying Ramirez was also responsible for that death?”
“Draw your own conclusion.”
“Tell you what, Mr. Ebersole. I’ll pass word up and see what comes down, but I think there’s something you should know.” He bit off a hunk of the jelly doughnut camped on a pile of blue-jacketed file folders and washed it down with a slug of coffee. Rolled his tongue around his lips “What happens when we’re on inmate overload, a couple hundred receive early release, a “Get Out of Jail” card. Ramirez was one of the lucky ones sent home the day before Smiley was killed.” The watch commander smiled benevolently. He finished the rest of his jelly doughnut and hand-toweled off his mouth, used a glance to send a message to Don, who caught it immediately.
“Mr. Ebersole, you got a class waiting for you,” Don said.
Ebersole wanted to quit the program. There and then. Run and hide. Where? Definitely not home, where Ricardo could be waiting for him. Maybe he’d get into the car and drive —
He put the brakes to his panic.
Supposing Smiley never had a chance to talk to Ricardo?
That being the case, Ricardo wouldn’t know to come after him until the story appeared in print. If Smiley did talk to Ricardo, there still was time to eliminate the problem with a call to the magazine.