by Seth Morgan
Ginger Ears stepped to the rail. The decrescendo wail was swallowed in slashing branches as Archie Sing crashed down the wooded hill.
“I didnt mean to drop the little zipperhead,” Detective Sergeant Villareal of Narcotics said. He held up the empty jacket, adding as if it were Archie’s fault: “He slipped.”
“Who’s Joe?”
“His fuckin brother.” Snorting disgustedly, Villareal tossed the jacket flapping into the night. “Musta called him by instinct. His big brother saved his yellow ass every other time he was …”
“What? At loose ends?” chuckled the other. He drew back from the rail. “A pudpuller at the movies that night said one of them called the other Joe …”
“Whoever worked the switch made a point of dropping Joe Sing’s name. But Joe Sing aint got the ice. He’s alibied for the time the theater was hit, just like that one.”
“So we find him next.”
“After Joe Sing hears about this? Shit. He’ll be harder to find than a virgin in Nevada.” Villareal pulled a radio from a deep pocket on the pantleg of his camouflage trousers and telescoped its antenna. “Unit 64 to Control. This is Tango Charlie Niner. Present location Powell and Union. Just spotted a header off Coit Tower. Am proceeding Code Eleven to secure tower. Over.”
“Ten Four, Tango Charlie Niner. Meat wagon rollin. Over.”
“You better book,” Villareal said, pocketing the radio. “Downstairs door opens from the inside. Tell Mr. Moses I’m sorry I dropped the zipperhead.”
“He’ll understand. You’re only human …” Quick Cicero turned on his heel and stabbed the elevator button. Awaiting its arrival, he started giggling.
“What’s the joke?” Villareal asked nervously. “Jesus, you sound like that idiot Frank Stutz.”
The elevator sighed open and Quick Cicero stepped within and turned around, still giggling. His gloved hand stopped the doors just long enough to say, “Catchcha later, butterfingers.”
SHE SELLS SEASHELLS
Kitty sat legs folded beneath her, elbow propped on the back of the loveseat in the baywindow. Her chin in her hands felt cool, her hands warm; she reached out and touched the window pane sparkly with dust: cold. “Shitfire,” she sighed.
It was the kind of apartment—condo, excuse tragic me, Dan—that let you know you were alone in it. The sleek gray furniture yawned emptier, the shadows stretched colder, the chrome tubing everywhere shone ghostly as coffin rails, the digital clock in the foyer italicized the silence with hollow measured tocks like a designer time bomb.
“Shitfire,” she muttered again, regretting that she’d agreed to stay With Dan for the baby’s term. It made practical sense; he had the money for the doctors and all. He’d given up trying to marry her, said there were no strings attached. And she wanted to believe him the way she’d believe in Santa Claus, for the kid’s sake. But shitfire, she ragged herself, you’ve heard enough men protest no strings to know that’s when the web is woven thickest. If only she could get her hands on enough of those sourpussed dead presidents to cut and run.
The phone on the end table bleeped and blinked. Kitty chewed her lip staring at it. She knew it was Dan, he was down in L.A. opening a new store and was calling trying to talk her into taking a vacation. Belize, Capri, Rio, Ceylon, a Nile cruise—the exotic brochures littered the smokedglass coffee table. Dan couldn’t understand her reluctance to leave San Francisco. He couldn’t guess at her need to cleave to the memories of the man whose image largened daily in her belly.
On and on bleeped the phone, panicking Kitty with its manic insistence. Impulsively she decided then and there to leave Dan immediately. She’d hock the jewelry he gave her down on Sixth Street and hop a Greyhound on Seventh. Pawn shops and bus stations operate in the same neighborhoods for just such getaways.
She jumped up and ran to the bedroom and dumped her jewelry box in her purse. I dont like doin you like this Dannyboy but fuck it, a woman’s is a tragic tough lot. She rushed out of the condo and into a waiting elevator. I’m sorry, Danny. In that significant way you’re always talkin about, I’m shitfire sorry, but I got no choice. She pushed B for the underground garages and blew a curl off her forehead, thinking fuck it, aint no Christian way to go about these things so fuck it.
She was halfway across the garage, her heels stabbing the concrete fuckityfuckityfuckity, almost to the Rolls, when she halted. She couldn’t doublepark and abandon a hundredthousanddollar automobile in front of the bus station. Get a handle on yourself, girl. She started to turn back when something black flickered at the corner of her eye and she whirled.
There was the Corniche, mauve and stately gray. It was just her damn nerves. DanNerves, she tittered to herself, sold in the Designer Angst aisle.
Wait a sec! She heard a rasp of shoes from the Rolls’s blind side. She’d surprised a tragic car booster, that’s it. Probably someone of her bustout acquaintance.
Wraithlike, Lieutenant Tarzon rose from behind the Corniche.
“Good morning, Miss Litter.”
“What the fuck you doin snoopin around that car?”
“Bored. And when I get bored I get to wondering and wandering.”
“This is private property,” she said evenly. “There’s laws …”
“Guess what I found in this land yacht’s tire treads?” His gloved fingers unfolded, revealing a handful of pearlescent chips. “Seashells … And here …” His other black leather hand gently picked several pink petals from the windshield. He smiled taking the Hav-A-Tampa Jewel from his mouth and blew them swirling in a verdigris cloud of smoke across the gleaming hood, saying in the artificially drawn voice of a magician, “Cherry blossoms.”
“They’re from the parking lot of the Hai Ginza,” Kitty said. “It’s a zen cuisine dive on the peninsula Dan practically lives at.”
“You did see Joe that night. And he told you the hiding place. I could hold you for obstructing justice. I might even get the D.A. to go for an accessory charge.”
“You’re fuckin bananas.”
“Or maybe you’ve told Graves. Yes, he’d have the connections to down the diamond discreetly. You sold Joe out …”
“Diamond? What tragic diamond?”
It was as if he hadn’t heard. Starting around the car, a queer light fluttering from his eyes, he began singing—“She sells seashells by the sea shore … That gives me an idea. I could tell Joe you were doublecrossing him with Graves, then have him released. He’s killed twice, a third time would be …” Tarzon snapped his fingers. “… that easy.”
Kitty had backed up to the elevator. Blindly she reached behind, stabbing the buttons. She heard the doors opening and threw back her hand, cocking its finger pistol. “You’re a lot sicker than Belly Blast can cure with whips and antifreeze enemas.”
He was lunging for the elevator when the doors closed.
Back in the condo she rushed to the phone and punched out the L.A. number Dan had left beside it on a pad. Thank God he picked up. “Never mind which flight. Just meet the next three planes into Burbank …”
A ’65 Sting Ray was parked at a hydrant down the street. In it Quick Cicero was jotting notes in his leather pad. Tarzon emerged from the building first and drove off in his doubleparked unmarked. Quick was about to leave his car to bribe the doorman to tell him which apartment the cop visited when a girl ran out waving her arms for a cab. Quick’s flat eyes narrowed. This bimbo he knew. She worked the Strip. Some whore who knew Glorioski, that’s who Tarzon had questioned.
Quick followed the cab all the way to the airport, to one of the commuter lines. Shootin to Vegas to sling highstakes pussy, Quick entered in his pad. Tarzon was probably wasting his time with her anyway. Wasn’t no bimbo stole the Blue Jager Moon. But Quick would pay her a visit anyway when she got back. Just to make sure. He wondered if she’d hold the bow while he tied her ribbons. She couldn’t be gone long, h
e concluded pulling the Sting Ray out of the departure zone. Bitch didn’t take no luggage.
Breakfast was the convicts’ favorite meal. Fresh from dream furloughs, hearts renewed and hopes replenished, their voices clamored the Chowhall with a roar like many waters, brightened with clashing metal trays and utensils. Mist swirled off the steam tables, billowing orange and yellow in steep ramps of barred light through high windows. Joe shoveled grits onto his fork with a wedge of Wonder bread.
Across the fourman table, Earl was disputing the allegation of a rawboned Indian giant named Horsekiller. “No one ripped off yer fifi bag, Johnny. You just wore the sucker out and threw it away and dont remember. So turn that frown, yeah, upsidedown.”
But the crease in the jowls the color of baked clay only deepened, the scowl trained on Joe now, trampolining his gut. He set down his steaming cup of chicory to swear, “I dont even know what a fifi bag is, pal.”
“Errp errp …” spluttered Earl. “Fifi bag’s a phony snatch. They take orange juice cartons from the Commissary, yeah, cut em in half and stuff em with a baggie loaded with hand lotion. That’s your basic fifi bag. Every con has his own touch, yeah. Johnny”—pointing with his fork at the ponytailed hulk still staring at Joe—“stuffs his with dirty drawers for that backdoor aroma. Johnny likes …”
Horsekiller interrupted, “I like Boston Red Sox.” He snapped his red suspenders as evidence.
Joe grinned snapping the cap’s brim in turn. “Thanks. Only it’s this belonged to the Dodgers when they still played in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn? Where’s Brooklyn?” the Indian asked suspiciously.
In the midst of Joe’s geography lesson, Horsekiller stood abruptly and left the table.
“Dont mind Johnny,” Earl assured Joe. “He’s cellshocked. Done so much time he can only concentrate long enough to tie his shoe … or kill. But he’s harmless, yeah, less you call him Chief.”
Joe made a mental note to guard against that gaffe.
Earl said he had a favor to ask and he bet Joe knew what; and Joe said he hadn’t consulted his Magic 8 Ball but would take a stab anyway—“You want to borrow more cigarets.”
Earl bobbed his head for unseen apples, grinning as if Joe had just solved the riddle of life and death.
“You already too far in the hole, F Stop. Ever since you learned I’ve been getting over at Hobby, you’ve been putting the arm on me. Besides,” Joe concluded, “I heed motion lotion myself to bribe a oneman cell.”
“Trouble with a cell,” Earl pointed out, “is you never know if you shittin in the bedroom or sleepin in the shitter.”
“I’ll take that confusion over the madness in the dorm.”
Earl ducked his face to glower at Joe from beneath scraggly gray brows. Behind him convicts in the food line jerked by like tinstamped shooting gallery targets. “Malec and Irons wouldnt be dealing with you if it werent for that cap on your head, no. And you owe that cap to me.”
Joe narrowed his eyes. Rudy Malec was Captain of the Coldwater A.B. tip, and Gerald Irons its Sergeant at Arms. Joe’s first day at Hobby, the pair joined him in a sophisticated and lucrative smuggling scheme involving bogus jewelry supply houses, double invoices, and falsebottomed delivery crates. Nearly two pounds of drugs were being funneled through this pipeline into the penitentiary each week. Joe enjoyed imagining his savvy demeanor earned his enlistment, that Whisper’s cap was only a strong reference. Discovering now that the cap was his sole qualification would have pained him more were it not for the greater wound inflicted by Earl’s exploitation of that truth to extort him. He was about to scratch an itch to slap Earl’s face with the cap when a fluty voice piped suddenly over his shoulder: “Hey, got a square?”
Joe spun on his stool to face mischievous eyes level with his own, Spencer in a wheelchair. Laughing, Joe shook out a Camel, which Spencer seized in a twisted coathanger fixed to his arm stump, a replica of the prosthesis he had used to smoke AMA on Sick Bay. A cough wracked the quad, a sound like an engine trying repeatedly to start and failing. Lighting Spencer’s cigaret, Joe asked casually after his health.
“Sucks,” pronounced a daunting blue cumulus. “They cant wait for me to shuffle off so they can cut me open and see if there isn’t a publishable paper they can write on my condition. If the postmortem yields no enlightenment, they’ll hide my death in the AIDS stats. I’ll catch the plague sooner or later anyway. I get weekly transfusions and all the plasma’s drawn from CDC population.” He shrugged armless shoulders at Joe’s look of alarm. “You gotta go sooner or later.”
Something happened inside Joe like falling down stairs, something that dampened the Chowhall’s din to a roaring silence out of which echoed Rooski’s words: “We all gotta go sometime.” Christ, Joe remonstrated to a god who went unacknowledged until a scapegoat was needed— Is heaven so desolate, so lonely that you must martyr all its hostages?
Spencer’s voice returned him from the void. “Joe, meet Roy.” Between the wheelchair’s arms stood a gaunt convict, his eyes in their deep sockets rolled up, his stubbled skull tipped back, swaying to silent music. He extended his hand to Joe in slightly the wrong direction. “He’s blind,” Spencer explained needlessly. “I’m his eyes and he’s my limbs. We go everywhere together. Siamese twins, only by choice.”
Joe pumped the bony hand, mumbling something about any friend of Spencer’s.
“Medication call in ten minutes,” rumbled Roy.
“Sounds like he’s your conscience, too,” Joe said.
“Dont be fooled,” piped a fresh blue cloud, “he’s only looking out for numero uno. When I croak he goes back to licking stamps for the chaplain.”
The swaying head stilled.
“By the way,” Spencer smiled, “I hear you’re hustling down at Hobby hard as a onearmed bookie on Derby Day. Watch out.”
“What are they gonna do?” Joe spread his palms. “Put me in jail?”
“Worse. Z Block … Home, James.” Roy spun the wheelchair and the bizarre convict symbiosis trundled off between the thronged tables.
“That’s a helluva pair to draw to,” Earl submitted.
A Chowhall guard stopped at their table and ordered them to hook it up, the bell for the second shift was about to ring. Earl jabbed his thumbs at his crotch. “Hook this up, Gomez.” The guard glowered and slouched off.
Watching Earl slurp down his pineapple ring, Joe saw he was avoiding his eye and knew the old coot regretted his manner of requesting a loan. They stood together and wended their way to the bus station by the Chowhall doors. There they scraped and stacked their trays and dropped their forks and spoons in the suds bucket beside the cage where a guard slept with a shotgun across his knees.
It was morning rush hour on the Mainline. Up and down the corridor bowled convict voices loud as thunder trapped in a narrow canyon. Clerks with reading glasses and pens in their pockets, toolbelted telephone technicians, hardhatted roofing crews; cooks in white, nurses in green, plumbers in grimy overalls—the fortress citystate of Coldwater was going to work.
“I’m sorry how I put the arm on you, amigo,” Earl said as they stood aside for a team of electricians wheeling copper spools on a handtruck. “I just cant seem to help myself, no.”
Joe dipped his shoulder, reentering traffic. “Dont worry about it, F Stop. I suppose a cell can wait. I’ll have your smokes at the head of the dormitory block at lunch call … By the way, what’s Z Block?”
“Psych unit. Only you dont need to be crazy to end up there, no. Hit a guard or fuck with his action, you get gaffled up to Z Block. They straitjacket your ass with Prolixin and lock you in an iron box.”
“How long?” Through the Mainline’s eastern windows Joe watched the sun spear up behind the Sierras, bloodying ribbed clouds.
“Just as long as you survive. Aint no gettin off Z Block, no. It’s the terminal unit.”
DESP
ERATE MEASURES
Captain Reilly stood gazing out the Warden’s office windows overlooking the town of Coldwater, parasite of the beast on the hill. Where the sycamores shading town hall still held night in their branches and Toby Ellis tossed first editions from the tailgate of his daddy’s stationwagon onto lawns jeweled with dew; where Ernie took time out from hosing down the islands of his Texaco station to help a kid put air in his bike tire, and Art Phelan’s pickup was parking at the Morning Call Cafe. There the 6:10 Amtrak was just pulling into the station by the feed lots, its diesels chugging white puffs as perfect as those puffed by a toy locomotive Reilly bought his son years ago. Indeed, from the prison’s elevation, the town itself had the look of a collection of scale structures designed for a model train set. Reilly imagined he could reach out and lift each to read its price tag.
“Sorry I’m late, Mel!” cried Warden Gasse, slamming the door behind him. A small man, Gasse did everything in a big way. He crossed to his desk, gesturing to the wingchair facing it. “Cop a squat.”
Reilly sat and crossed his legs. For several minutes Gasse noisily shuffled and boxed papers, made faces at memos, wiped inmate janitor germs off his telephone receiver with a handkerchief. With his bald peaked head and complexion like cold oatmeal, he looked more like the manager of an allnight checkcashing center than a maximum security prison. Reilly emitted a sigh, signifying polite impatience.
Gasse leaned back in his chair, delicately holding a pencil between the thumb and forefinger of either hand. The rising light painted his bald head orange. “I received a phone call late last night, Mel. After the party broke up. It was my source from Department offices in Sacramento. More exactly, it was my friend on the Director’s staff.” Gasse paused to let his wellconnectedness sink in; Reilly made an appropriate little O with his mouth. “He informed me, Mel, that I’m about to lose my job.”
“What in hell? …”
“They feel Coldwater is experiencing a security crisis. As evidence they cite the fact that not one homicide occurring behind these walls in the last five years has resulted in a conviction. Coldwater is the only prison in the system without a delegate on Death Row.”