Suddenly Allie turned up the volume on her tape deck, and as the E Street Band boomed behind the Boss, she clicked off the mobile phone without a further word. Typical Allie. No frills. Waitin’ on a Sunny Day.
“What’s that going to cost?” Teresa said.
“Something,” I said. With Allie, it was never tit for tat. If it became necessary, she would make Albert Curwent available to J.J. If not, there would be something else. Allie’s upward mobility was predicated on the flexibility of her allegiances. Calling me was just another deposit to the capital she hoarded away in her survivalist savings account.
Ten minutes later, I told the operator I would accept the charges from Mr. Tugboat. Teresa was listening on the extension. Tugboat got to the point immediately.
“You know Princess, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “I know Princess up in, you know, and I know the other one, the fat one.” The idea was to keep the conversation going, even though I did not know what he was talking about. Professional criminals suspect that every stranger and most friends are wearing a wire, that every room is bugged, and all telephones are tapped. Names and places are rarely mentioned, and never with any specificity. This guy and that guy, your guy and his guy, their guy and the other one. Where? There. You’re kidding me. No, there. What’s-his-name goes there, right? That’s the place. No shit, I don’t know that. Now you fucking do. Well, I thought he went to the other place. No, this place. Down in . . . Yeah. So that’s where. Right. Right.
Entire arias of miscellaneous felonies and mayhem between every silence.
“Your guy,” Tugboat said.
“The fat one?”
“No, the one on the TV.”
“Oh, that one.”
“He worked for Wonderman.”
“I don’t know Wonderman.”
“The whatchamacallit. The tongue-tied guy, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, that guy.”
“Wonderman.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“In Oklahoma.”
“That makes sense.”
“That Wonder, he was something.”
“I heard that.” I was beginning to see an outline of where this might be heading. Duane Lajoie had done time in Oklahoma. Thirteen months in McAlester for stealing an eighteen-wheeler and turning it over on a van full of German tourists from Düsseldorf. “So Princess worked in Oklahoma.”
“Let’s just say your guy worked for that guy.”
“Okay. In Oklahoma.”
“Getting his shit pushed.”
“Wonderman?”
“No, man. Wonder wasn’t getting his shit pushed. Wonder was pushing shit. Big-time.”
Tugboat said that dinner was nearly over. He said he worried about his back. He suggested a face-to-face. He thought tomorrow would be an excellent time for a face-to-face. Or else he’d have to make other arrangements.
Tugboat said he was not comfortable at Sunflower.
“Max,” Teresa said. She was flipping through a transcript. “The first time we met Duane. He said something. I’m trying to find it.” She ran her finger down a page, then the next, then the one after, and the ten after that. “Here. Got it.” She read it as if she were a court reporter reading playback testimony to a jury.
TK: Duane, we were talking about you and Bryant, how you met.
DL: He cold-cocked someone with a pool cue. I mean, that’s what kind of violent person he is, a stranger, someone he didn’t even know. It’s like what he did to Wonder.
MC: Who’s Wonder?
DL: It’s fucking nobody. Some guy. Another guy.
“He got pissed off,” I said. I remember we had not pursued it. It seemed just another violent encounter in the kind of existence where periods of nonviolence were at best interludes.
“There’s something else,” Teresa said. “Something that’s been floating around in my head. Something I haven’t been able to put my finger on. Something Jack said the night we were together. The night he died. Something about Edgar Parlance. And making a movie about him.” She pulled it up from the fog of memory. “He said there was no one to root for. He said you can’t root for a dead man. He said . . .” She paused. “He said, ‘What’s his backstory?’ ” We looked at each other for a moment.
“I think we’re about to find that out, Teresa.”
CHAPTER TWO
TUESDAY
I left for Sunflower before dawn. If my absence came up, Teresa would say that I was doing defense business at her request.
She saw me off, bundled in her jogging sweats, stamping her sneakered feet against the dark morning chill. She seemed to be holding something back, then told me as I was getting into the car that J.J. had called from Cap City just after midnight. It’s Jamie, he said when she picked up the telephone. She would not tell me what else they had talked about. Things, she said. Just things. I had never thought of J.J. as Jamie before. The childhood name gave him a vulnerability I had not thought he possessed.
I wondered if he knew about Tugboat.
I wondered if she had told him about Tugboat.
I wondered if they were already keeping secrets from each other.
“I am a double-up, triple-up snitch,” Tugboat said. We were talking through the glass partition in the visitors’ room. I had signed in as counsel to Albert Curwent. There was a camera scanning the visitors’ room, sending its images back to a guard station. The camera was attached to a TV monitor on which I could see the back of my head and Albert Curwent’s face. At that moment, he and I were the only two people in the visitors’ room. Like all seasoned cons, Albert Curwent shielded his mouth with his hand so that his lips could not be read. “Some guys, they done so much stuff their brains are like scrambled eggs, they can’t remember who they ratted out. Not me. I remember every one. When I did it. Where I did it. What happened to the guy I ratted. You know why I move around so much? I keep moving, I keep alive. Staying alive is important to me. Then I get sent here two weeks ago. Already I see three guys in the yard I ratted, and I hear another one’s due in next week from Eastham ad seg. This is not a safe environment for me. The day I get off the bus, I’m not even processed yet, some guys are doing a snitch in a day-room. Twenty-eight stab wounds. You got to admire the professionalism. A shank spatters blood, so they bring along a change of clothes. That shows planning. So now I watch out for guys carrying laundry. I been thinking Alaska. What do you think of Alaska?”
“It’s cold.”
“Of course it’s fucking cold. But I never ratted out an Eskimo I know of. That’s what makes it appealing to me. I see pictures of Spring Creek. It’s got a fucking totem pole outside. Like you see in the National Geographic.How tough can a joint be that’s got a totem pole by the front gate?”
“Hawaii’s warmer.”
“Are you crazy? You ever seen the size of those fucking Samoans they got out there, man?” Tugboat was huge. I wondered if he could turn around in his cell without brushing the wall. “They all got like eighteen letters in their names. Tuifatasopo, and names like that. The only thing I got going for me in a place like this is I’m fat. I know the moves. Fat Albert can take care of himself. For a while anyway. So I don’t want to go no place where I’m like a midget, and that’s what I am next to those Samoans, forget Hawaii, forget aloha.”
“Alaska,” I said. “It might be doable.” I was not sure how, but there was no reason to tell him that. He would know it anyway. He was a professional snitch, and he had learned to play his cards very close to the vest. Facing five LWOPPs, he knew that prison was the only home he would ever have. Snitching was just a way to improve his standard of living. As Albert Curwent’s lawyer, I could speak to the Department of Corrections about his snitch jacket. The correctional center at Spring Creek with the totem pole at the front gate was probably a reach, but at least it would be on the record that Albert Curwent’s attorney had said his client, with reason, felt himself at risk. If Albert Curwent came to an untimely end at the hand
of another inmate or inmates, the possibility of civil litigation would be implicit, if far-fetched.
“I thought it might be.” Albert Curwent was ready to put his cards on the table. “You used to put people like Princess away.”
I said I did.
“And now you defend her.”
There it was. “You knew her at McAlester.”
“She worked for us.”
“ ‘Us’ is you and Wonder?”
“Me and Wonderman.”
“Wonder have a first name?”
“Earnest. Like in ‘He’s an earnest individual.’ Not the other way.”
“Earnest Wonder.”
“We called him Wonderman.”
“So you said. He have another name?”
“Christ, man, everyone’s got another name.”
“You’ve been Leo Lutz.”
“Hey, you’re not bad.”
“Wally Korn, Korn with a k.”
“That goes way back. Haven’t used that one since Saginaw. Or maybe it was PNM in Santa Fe.” He paused. “Chick Bailey.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“Of course you don’t know that one. I just made it up. I’m very good at names. I’m known for it. Guys are getting out, they already got a score set up, I sell them a name. Give me two butts and I come up with Jack Beale. Harry Schott. Easy names. Randy Ford. Easy to get ID. Lost my license, some bastard lifted my wallet on the number nineteen bus, you know, going to Overland and Main. What’s your name? Lew Smith. Lewis J. Smith? Or Lewis M. Smith? No. Lew. Just Lew. My old man was half Chinese, he didn’t like middle initials, that’s a thing with Chinese people. They got this thing about middle initials. Lew. It’s a big Chink name. There’s seventeen people behind you in line, they’re getting pissed off, it’s time for lunch, you walk out of the DMV with a temporary that says you’re Lew Smith, 1291 Overland. The thing with most of these dumb bastards, they’re not smart enough to make it up as they go along. It’s like fucking Ping-Pong. They see me, I tell them what to do, they write it down with their pencil, they try to memorize it, these guys can’t remember the last time they took a leak, and they say to me, Is it the number eighteen bus or the number nineteen, as if it fucking matters. They already got a score set up, they’re going to knock over a jewelry store, and they don’t know how to get a fucking driver’s license.”
It occurred to me that if the pseudonymous Lew Smith ever did knock over that jewelry store, Albert Curwent would have someone else to rat out. No wonder he felt as if his situation demanded constant movement. “So what was another name Wonderman used?”
As if I did not already know.
“Hey, man, the guy Princess did.”
Earnest Wonder. Edgar Parlance.
Max, who actually knew Edgar Parlance?
Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree.
Best Santa we ever had.
Gar.
“So you and Wonder were in business together.”
Albert Curwent stared at me through the glass. I wondered as I had all the way to Sunflower why he had called me instead of J.J. Prosecutors can offer snitches more in the way of promised favors than can defense attorneys. But that was a question I would hold off asking until our business together was finished.
“I was his associate,” Albert Curwent said carefully. “Associate” was not a con word. It was as if he were already testifying under oath, stressing his importance while claiming to be only a junior partner. “Wonderman was a natural-born business leader. I get to McAlester, he hasn’t been there all that long, he’s already running the yard and gen pop. Him and me, we hit it off. I have a low tolerance for shit and so does the Wonder. I’m like his bodyguard. That’s how smart he was. He believes in harmony between the races, he says, but he don’t want no black guy covering his back. We are all bros. He cuts me in. We’d get these little matchboxes full of weed, sell them for fifteen dollars each. He’d give me two, keep five, the rest goes to the screws. The joint is what you call a cash-on-demand economy, you can get anything you want, even early release, but you got to pay for it.”
“He was running the punks too.”
“Him and the hacks. Wonder always said the warden took his cut, and the chaplain. It was just like a big-time whorehouse, like in one of them places in Nevada, Mustang Ranch, like. The hacks free up this old trailer and bring in some videos, buttfucking and shit, and it was like Saturday night at the movies, people were lining up outside, and the girls were there, Wonderman’s got them all dressed up pretty, they’re wearing blusher and mascara and bandannas and bikini underwear, parading around like they do at Mustang, and there’s a screw with a counter by the door, so Wonderman doesn’t short him, he’s too smart to do that, this is a good deal and he doesn’t want to lose it. I get to name all the girls. Nancy Sue and Ava Gardner and Caroline Cooz. And this one big black girl, she used to play arena football or some shit, she must be six-six, six-seven, queer as a pink hairnet, and I call her Queen Kong, and she is the star of the string. Queen Kong could do thirty johns a day, no sweat, she loved it, around the world in ten minutes. She didn’t need no candle like the other girls, that bitch was always ready.”
Tell me why you stole that candle from his room.
I had suspected its provenance.
It was not the sort of thing easily discussed with a relative stranger.
What was it Stanley had said? When he spotted the candle I had lifted from Edgar Parlance’s room over Claude Applewhite’s garage? Someone was naughty, was someone?
I took the twisted candle from my bag and put it on the counter on my side of the glass partition. “Like this?”
“Is that his?”
“It was in the place where he resided.”
Albert Curwent nodded thoughtfully. “He kept some in his cell.” After a moment, he said, “You knew what it was, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Tell me about Princess.”
“Wonder thought she’d be an addition. A real moneymaker. Small, you know. Red hair. Niggers would love her.”
“What did Duane think of that idea?”
“Let’s call her Princess, okay?”
“Right. My mistake. What did Princess think of that idea?”
“Not much.”
I could not imagine that being turned out by Earnest Wonder would have much appeal. “Was she a punk?”
“No more than anyone.”
An answer with layers of meaning.
“And Wonder says to me, ‘Tug,’ he always calls me Tug, he says, ‘Tug, I want you to do something grievous to that girl.’ ”
The absolute monarchism of the prison yard. King Wonder the First. “What exactly constitutes ‘grievous’?” I said.
Tugboat laughed, a frightening, unpleasant sound. “Wonder ran the sports book. Softball games, basketball games, boxing matches. That shit. The hacks are taking their piece, they let him keep a bat, they look the other way. I was like what you call the batboy. It was one of those aluminum jobs they use now. Wonder used it for protection.”
“Or to do something grievous?”
“It’s very good for doing something grievous.”
I could imagine the extent of the grievousness. “In the . . .” I wondered if I could say anal sodomy with a foreign object: to wit, an aluminum softball bat. Not likely in this venue. Just avoid it. “It must have been very convincing.”
Albert Curwent seemed to enjoy my squeamishness. “Very. We took turns, Wonderman and me. Made her chew on a towel so she wouldn’t make no noise. She changed her mind.” An aluminum softball bat up your ass might have that desired result, I thought. “She was cute. I named her Princess. She was a good earner. Regular johns. Wonder liked to watch her. She wasn’t a natural like Kong. But Wonder made her keep the candle in so she was always ready.”
So Duane Lajoie had a motive.
Princess was cute. Princess was a good earner.
“Albert, one thing,” I said as I prepared to leave Sunflo
wer. “Why’d you come to me and not to Mr. McClure? That’s the usual drill.”
“I did. Friday. He wasn’t around. I got this bitch who worked for him. She blew me off. She said the case was airtight. She said I was just trying to ease my situation. The dumb cooz. What’s she think a snitch does? You were my shot.”
I wondered if Patsy Feiffer had ever been called a cooz. J.J. would have heard Albert Curwent out. But then J.J. wasn’t around.
Earnest Wonder had pleaded guilty to selling narcotics in Ada, Oklahoma. Charges of assault with intent to kill were dismissed when the victim of the assault declined to testify against him. The sheriff’s department in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, faxed to my office in Capital City the arrest report on Wonder, Earnest, Case Number 3345. The state’s attorney faxed a copy of the plea-bargain agreement signed by Wonder, Earnest, Case Number 3345. Wonder, Earnest, Case Number 3345, was represented by Jane Leo, now deceased, of the Pontotoc County Public Defender’s Office. Wonder, Earnest, Case Number 3345, was sentenced to two years at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma. The Oklahoma DOC faxed photographs to my Cap City office of Wonder, Earnest, Prisoner Number 83992-1, full face, left profile, right profile. The sentence of Wonder, Earnest, Prisoner Number 83992-1, was commuted to early release after fifteen months and seven days.
Duane Lajoie, Prisoner Number 84411-1, arrived at OSP McAlester three months before Earnest Wonder’s early release.
CHAPTER THREE
WEDNESDAY
Bottom line. Teresa and I now perhaps had the extenuating evidence needed to keep Duane Lajoie out of the electric chair in the penalty phase of the trial after he was convicted. That Duane Lajoie would be convicted was as near a certainty as the gods allowed. I wondered if the P carved into Edgar Parlance’s chest with the Tennessee Toothpick was meant to signify Princess. Certainly not Parlance. The man Duane Lajoie and Bryant Gover had run into on County Road 21 was known to Duane Lajoie only as Earnest Wonder. Edgar Parlance was someone else. The kind of black man better white people could identify with. Good-hearted. Independent. Not weighted down by the faults of the society that so many black folks (a construction of the better white people) blamed for their straitened circumstances.
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