Devil's Food

by Anthony Bruno

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Might help your attitude, too. Give it a try. You’ll be surprised.”

  Marvelli maneuvered the biker to the rear of the office where they disappeared down a narrow hallway. Loretta stared blankly at their departing backs, eyes wide, not blinking. Then out of the blue her heart started to do a merengue in her chest as she flashed back on big Joe with that chair up over his head. It all came back in a rush, and she had to grip the straps of the handbag slung over her shoulder with both hands to control the trembling. The old fear came crashing down over her—the panic, the terror, the anger and humiliation of being trapped and helpless. She had been looking at Joe, but in her mind it wasn’t Joe.

  It was Brenda.

  2

  Loretta stared at the desk chair that Joe had tried to bash over Marvelli’s head. She was lost in thought, thinking about Brenda.

  Brenda Hemingway. Inmate #445619. Twenty-five to life for murdering a rival drug dealer in Jersey City. A male drug dealer. By her own hand. With a razor.

  Loretta gritted her teeth and tried to take slow, deep breaths, but the more she tried to change the channel in her mind, the better the reception came in on the Brenda Channel. No matter what she did, no matter how hard she tried, Loretta knew she would never ever forget that face. The broad nose, the malevolent little eyes, the fluttering pink tongue. One hundred and eighty pounds of seething malice just waiting for someone to take it out on. Brenda knew she’d never get out of prison alive, so she didn’t care what she did. She had nothing to lose. Unfortunately, the good Lord above had decided to put them together for a while to give Loretta the opportunity to hear Brenda Hemingway’s complete philosophy of life in prison—at length.

  Twenty-seven hours. Twenty-seven hours in hell. Trapped in the prison laundry, alone with Brenda, while the rest of the place rioted. Assistant Warden Loretta Kovacs had been left in charge of the Pinebrook Women’s Correctional Facility that night. Wet-behind-the-ears Loretta Kovacs who figured she could cut the troublemakers off at the pass by going straight to the leader of the uprising and listening to her complaints while at the same time making it clear that nothing would be negotiated until the two guards they’d taken hostage were released. She’d been prepared to stare Brenda Hemingway down like a bad dog in order to make her obey. But it didn’t work out that way because Brenda was no dog. She was a human being full of hate and resentment with absolutely nothing to fear. But stupid Assistant Warden Kovacs had been too cocksure of herself to see that.

  The rioters held onto the two guards, and Loretta ended up going one-on-one with Brenda. Twenty-seven hours, naked and trussed up with electrical cord like a calf waiting to become veal. Brenda waving her homemade shiv, a sharpened spoon, using it to poke and prod and terrorize Loretta, using it like a divine da Vinci finger to point out all Loretta’s faults: her love handles, her double chin, her jiggly butt, her cottage-cheese thighs, and worst of all, her stupid, arrogant assumptions about prisoners. Twenty-seven hours of Brenda’s voice, her cackle, her relentless monologue. Brenda yanking off Loretta’s clothes and trying them on, Loretta’s blouse on her head like a headdress, her big feet in Loretta’s loafers, crushing the backs as she circled the sacrificial calf, prancing like an Ikette, showing the assistant warden that she could have power, too, that she could be the person and Loretta could be the animal.

  “Things change, baby,” Brenda yelled as she hauled Loretta up by the hair and forced her into the mouth of that giant industrial clothes dryer. “Nobody ever clued you in to that one, did they, honey? Well, I’m telling you now, so pay attention, girl. Even the queen bee can get stung. That’s right. Things do change.”

  The dryer door slammed shut with a pinging bang. Fear and panic choked Loretta like a plastic bag thrown over her head. Suddenly the motor rumbled and groaned, and she started to tumble, gears grinding and stripping with her weight. The burner fired—she could hear the blast beneath her—and the metal started to heat up. She tumbled faster, knocking her head, her knees, her elbows. She could smell the heat rising. On the other side of the round glass window Brenda’s cackling face spun round and round. Loretta felt sick to her stomach but was afraid to throw up inside the dryer. The perforated metal walls started to burn her skin. She screamed, but only Brenda could hear her. She screamed again, pleading—

  “Something wrong over there?”

  “Huh?!” Loretta’s chest was heaving as she realized she wasn’t in that clothes dryer. She looked all around for the source of the voice, her gaze bouncing around the room like a haywire searchlight. Then her eye found the cinnamon buns on the typing table, and she stared hard at them, finally believing that she was here, now, not back there then, and that Brenda was locked up, in another prison, in another state, far away.

  “I said, is there something wrong, young lady? You look like you got the heebie-jeebies over there.”

  A stout, dark-skinned black man with a pointy goatee was standing in the hallway that Marvelli and Joe the biker had just gone down. He was wearing a pink short-sleeved shirt and a red-and-black-striped tie. A white knit skullcap covered the crown of his round head. Down by his side he was holding a silver flute.

  “You Kovacs?” he asked.

  Loretta composed herself before she nodded. “Yes. Loretta Kovacs.”

  “Well, I’m your brand-new pain-in-the-ass.” The man opened his mouth wide and laughed out loud. “Come on in and let’s be friendly for a while before I get mean again.” He turned around and slipped into the hallway, the sound of furious flute music echoing in his wake. It was progressive jazz, the kind with no melody that always gave Loretta a headache. Except this was unlike anything she’d ever heard before. It sounded like a combination of humming and flute playing. Actually, it sounded like the man was trying to eat the instrument, and the instrument was fighting for its life.

  Loretta released her white-knuckle grip on the handbag straps and walked across the room toward the hallway. Squeezing the bottom of her leather bag, she felt her gun and sighed with disgust. Why the hell did she freeze when Joe had that chair up over his head she wondered. What good were all those hours she’d spent on the firing range She was a pretty good shot now, but so what She was still scared shitless. She’d thought she’d gotten over being afraid, but deep down she knew she wasn’t even close.

  The mantra started up in her head again: I’m fat; I’m single; my career is in the toilet. . . and Vm still afraid.

  Loretta let out a long, sad sigh. Brenda Hemingway had messed up her life in so many ways. Loretta had become so angry and ashamed after that incident, she couldn’t stand herself. She and her live-in boyfriend, Gary, eventually split up, she gained more weight, and now it was almost three years since she’d been with a man. Fat, lonely, and horny—the Triple Crown of single womanhood. Is this what they mean by “having it all”?

  “What in the hell are you doing out there, woman?” the man with the flute called out.

  Loretta snapped out of it. “I’m coming.” She headed into that back hallway and peered into the first office she found.

  “Come in, come in. Sit down.” Loretta’s new boss spoke with the flute up to his mouth. Apparently he wasn’t finished assaulting the instrument. His head suddenly jerked back as he made the flute squeal for mercy. His shiny forehead was a Venetian blind of horizontal lines from his arched brows all the way up into his disappearing hairline.

  Loretta sat down in the chair opposite his desk and made herself comfortable. It looked like this flute attack was going to take a while. Now she wished she had taken a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun.

  The man’s office wasn’t small, but the stacks of case files all over the floor cut down significantly on the walking space. His file cabinets and desk held still more piles of files. The walls were covered floor-to-ceiling with posters of jazz musicians, all saxophonists as far as she could tell. She even recognized a few: John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman. The largest poster was on the
back wall overlooking the desk. It was a life-size picture of a black man playing two saxophones at the same time, his inflated cheeks raising the sunglasses off his face. Loretta stared up at it, doubting that anyone could play anything worth listening to with that much in his mouth.

  When the man saw what she was looking at, he stopped torturing his flute and grinned at her. “Rahsaan Roland Kirk.”

  Loretta was confused. She started digging in her bag for her reassignment letter. “I thought I was supposed to report to—”

  “Not me,” the man said. “Him.” He jerked his thumb at the poster. “Rahsaan Roland Kirk. A true genius and, like all the true geniuses, severely underappreciated. Rahsaan knew what it was all about.” The man rolled his eyes toward Loretta and frowned. “I take it you’ve never heard of him.”

  Loretta shrugged. “Sorry.”

  The man tsk-tsked like a cricket. “Like I said. Severely underappreciated.”

  Afraid that she’d already offended him, Loretta kept her mouth shut.

  “Julius Monroe,” he suddenly said.

  “You?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Me. In the flesh.” He crinkled his eyes and laughed out loud.

  She was beginning to feel like Alice with the hookah-smoking caterpillar. She extended her hand to him. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Monroe.”

  He reached across the desk and shook her hand. “Call me Julius. Call me Monroe. Call me Misterioso. Just don’t call me Mister. We don’t stand on a whole lot of ceremony down here, Ms. Loretta Kovacs. This is the Jump Squad, after all. You do know about the Jump Squad, don’t you?” He dropped his chin and stared up at her from under his brows, waiting for a reply.

  “Call me Loretta,” she said and left it at that. It was her new policy not to stick her foot in her mouth. Even though the Jump Squad’s reputation was common knowledge to everyone in Corrections, she wasn’t going to let on that she knew it was the pits. As part of her new policy, she was going to play the game and stay out of trouble for a change.

  Julius Monroe laid the flute down on top of his desk and nodded gravely, stroking his goatee. “Breath control is very, very important to a musician, Ms. Loretta Kovacs.” He pointed up at Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing his two saxes. “Please don’t make me waste my precious breath with a lot of hellos and how-are-yous because you and I both know that you won’t be sticking around here very long.”

  The blood rose to her scalp. “What makes you say that?”

  “This is the Jump Squad, my dear. Deep Space Nine, the end of the line. The people upstairs throw all the problem children down to Uncle Julius, so nobody really wants to be here. In the Department of Corrections, this is the ‘plank’—as in ‘walk the’? The last step before the deep blue sea of good-bye. So unless you really and truly want to be here, which I seriously doubt, I suggest you do us both a favor and leave now.”

  “I asked to be transferred here.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they tell me.” Monroe opened up the top folder on his lowest stack. “I give you 5 out of a possible 10 for that move. Clever, but it’s been done before. Ask for the dungeon before they send you there. Makes you seem like a guest. Problem is, the Jump Squad was in your cards, Ruby, My Dear. Three more months and they would’ve sent you down here anyway. N-forced.”

  She knew he was right, but she didn’t want him to think he was getting a Corrections reject, the typical parole-officer burnout who can’t keep it together and ends up taking it out on his cases. “Granted, I’ve had a few problems, but I’d like you to know that—”

  “You’re not gonna stay here, my dear. Trust me. People like you come in and out of here all the time. It never works.”

  “No. It’s not like that with me. Let me explain—”

  “Breath control,” he interrupted, putting an index finger to his lips. “Save your breath. I know your history, Ms. Loretta Kovacs.” He tapped on the file. “It’s all right here.”

  “But—”

  “Breath control, woman. Let me wail for a while, then you tell me if I got it right. Once upon a time, way back when, you started strong—M.S.W. from Columbia University, good field placements, excellent letters of recommendation from your profs. After you graduated, you set your sights on Corrections, figuring you could do some real social work in the prisons. Besides, for a woman it was the right place at the right time. ‘Who could ask for anything more?’ they must’ve said upstairs when your curriculum vitae arrived on their desks. You hit the charts steaming, my dear. Hot. With a bullet. Couple of years in the system and you made it all the way to assistant warden. And you were just barely thirty. Then that riot thing happened at Pinebrook and the incident with that inmate. Bad scene. She messed up your mind. The hill started going the other way after that—down, down, down. Assistant warden to staff counselor to regular old PO and now here. Way down. It’s a cryin’ shame, but that’s how it goes sometimes. No matter how you bend the notes, some songs are just natural blues.”

  “That’s not the whole story. What actually happened was—”

  “No, darlin’, you don’t have to explain it to me. I got the picture.” A sad smile peeked out from under the ends of his mustache. “You’re a problem child because you got that big bad terminal disease that a lot of us have. You’ve got standards, principles, a conscience, call it what you will, but you’ve got it and you’ve got it bad. You know right from wrong, and you’ve got the guts to say so. But that’s what happens to the people afflicted with this pitiful disease when they start to understand how the system really works. It’s a very bad condition to have if you wanna work for the state, my dear, but you’ve got it, and believe me, there ain’t no gettin’ rid of it. That’s why you’re here. That’s why yours truly is here. And that’s why I don’t want you here.”

  “But—”

  Monroe held up his palm like a traffic cop. “Don’t interrupt. It’s still my solo. You see, Ms. Loretta Kovacs, I understand your story very well because I made it to assistant warden once myself. Unfortunately, my problem was I got this strange idea somewhere along that line that prisons are for rehabilitation. Then one night a guard got killed in a fight with a con, and somehow it was all my fault. I was too liberal, too lenient; I treated the men too good—that’s why this one crazy son of a bitch lost it for half a minute and ended up icing a guard. Makes perfect sense, right? Right. That’s when my hill started going the other way. Oh, I bounced through a few different jobs in the system, but then I landed here, no-man’s-land. They hoped I’d just quit and go away, but I hung on by my toenails and stuck it out. Now I’m the king of no-man’s-land, bandito numero uno.” He looked off into the distance, shook his head, and let out a bitter chuckle. “Life can be weird when you’re paying attention.”

  Loretta couldn’t agree more. That was pretty much her own story in a nutshell.

  “So, Ms. Loretta Kovacs, as you can see, I know your story, and if you want it to have a happy ending, I suggest you delete the Jump Squad episode, walk out that door, and start working on the happily-ever-after part.”

  But that wasn’t the way Loretta had scripted it. She crossed her arms and shook her head. “You can’t talk me out of working here, Julius. I want this job. I’ve got a plan for getting to the happily-ever-after part, and it starts right here, with the Jump Squad.”

  “You better check your health insurance, woman. Make sure you’re covered for long-term psychiatric care.”

  “Look,” she said. “First of all, I need the money, and frankly, I’m too much of a bitch to start doing social work with old farts or whiny kids or homeless people or anybody else, for that matter. But more than that, I do not want to give the bastards upstairs the satisfaction of knowing that I quit.”

  “So what are you saying here?”

  “I’m saying I want the job.”

  “Can’t have it.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause I say so.”

  “You can’t do that. I was transferred. I’ll call Personnel.�
�

  “Woman, you don’t want this job.”

  “I’m telling you. I want it.”

  Monroe looked at her from under his brows. “Last woman we had here lasted three days.”

  Loretta shrugged. “That was her. I’m me.”

  “We don’t bring in female jumpers all that often, Ms. Loretta K. It’s 98 percent men, bad mothers, worst of the worst. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand.”

  “And you still want this job?”

  “Yes.”

  He brought the flute to his mouth and started humming his disapproval into the mouthpiece, his eyebrows snaking up and down. Jitters squeezed through Loretta’s stomach like cookie dough through a clenched fist. Julius Monroe did not understand. She really needed this job. If she had to go out and start pounding the pavement, she may as well throw her master plan out the window. She had to have this job.

  Julius grumbled through the flute and looked her hard in the eye. “Tell you what,” he finally said, putting down the instrument. “Since you’re so dead set on working here, I’ll give you a shot. Can’t say Uncle Julius ain’t fair with people.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, don’t thank me yet. I’m giving you one chance. I’ll give you a case. You bring the jumper back to me in one week, and the job is yours. But no jumper, no job. You got it?”

  “I got it.” She nodded, poker-faced, but her stomach was in agony.

  “Okay, then.” Julius picked the top file off his second-shortest stack and examined it. He closed it and took the next one. He rejected that one and picked up a third. He tugged on his goatee as he pondered the top sheet. Loretta tried to read it upside down, but it was too far away for her to see.

  “Here,” he finally said. “A female jumper. Bring her back and the job’s yours.” He tossed the file across the desk.

  Loretta opened it and started reading. The jumper’s name was Martha Lee Spooner. White female, age thirty-one. Born in Slab Fork, West Virginia. Dropped out of high school. Last address: Margate, New Jersey. Served two and a third for laundering drug money for a biker gang. Unusually sophisticated methods considering the company she kept. She cleaned the money by purchasing residential real estate with the dirty cash, then reselling the properties after a year or so. Martha Lee had a whole Rolodex full of crooked lawyers who played along with her. There was one, though, who crossed her, and he was found in a Dumpster behind his office with a fractured skull and a ruptured spleen. Somehow, Martha Lee beat that charge. But, careful as she was, one of her biker pals got in a jam and gave her up to the cops to save his own butt. She was eventually convicted on a lesser charge but apparently kept her nose clean in prison because she was let out on parole her second time up before the board. Stayed a good girl for almost a whole year after her release, but then stopped reporting to her PO last winter. That was ten months ago. Present whereabouts were unknown.