by Seth Morgan
“The ACLU roped in the NAACP and local black civic organizations. All of these parties had already informed the Mayor and D.A. that they were withdrawing their support in the upcoming election unless the witchhunt against your boss was called off. Faria was about to give in, his case against you was faltering anyway … when these … horrible new allegations were made.”
Quick started a series of stage yawns.
Bell’s glistening face contorted like an Ashanti war mask gulping steam. “Five days before the election! What timing! All the leverage I’d worked so hard to build blasted to thin air … Overnight the Mayor and D.A. of San Francisco were household names across America. The case became instant grist for newspaper editorials, the sensation of morning talk shows … Stop that!”
Quick performed one last elaborate yawn like a silent Indian war whoop before returning his attention to the ceiling tiles, counting cracks, break this mother’s back …
“No way could Mancuso and Faria lose the election, with or without the support of the groups I just mentioned. Not that they were making a peep any longer. Murder, Mr. Cicero, doesnt qualify as victimless crime.”
Quick turned slitted eyes on him and drew back his lip. “Yours would be, Yonner. You need killing, you earned it. If I clipped you, you’d be your own victim, no one else’s. And you’d be canceled. So your murder would be the perfect victimless crime. Not that it’s worth the effort.” It took a moment for Quick to recover from this feat of logic, then another to find the lost thread. “Mr. Moses says if he falls, you fall.”
“Oh?” An addled grin creased Bell’s jowls. “But I dont see what I can do to help now. The election’s in the archives. The D.A. and Faria are snugly back in office due to the outstanding publicity you guys gave them. Such good publicity that they cant back off your case, as they normally would with another four years sewed up. They’ve got to keep after you now. Nailing you’s more important to the electorate than cutting taxes … What’s the Grand Jury going to hear? What are the police going to discover? …” The war mask turned witchdoctor. “How could you make those movies?”
“Who said we did but a burntout whore? But never mind that. We got that covered. Her word’s gotta be backed up with evidence and they aint gonna find any …” Absently Quick began tweaking his nipples. It was hardly the titillating spectacle offered by Bambi, and the judge shut his eyes in disgust. “But we’ve already been convicted in Superior Court on the pimping and pandering and grand theft. Naturally, we’re gonna appeal. We got a clerk in the Appellate Division who can have our case assigned to whichever judge we name … So what you gotta do, Yonner, is tell us which judge you got the most influence with. We wont settle for anything less than reversal.”
Judge Bell’s steamironed lungs wrung out, “So … that’s why you didnt go for an easy mistrial …”
“You got it, Yonner.” Quick Cicero stood and rewrapped his towel—breathing easy, the little bastard. “You got five days to get us a name.” Quick Cicero turned to leave.
“The Moon,” gasped Bell. “When do I get it back?”
“You gotta talk to Mr. Moses about the ice, Yonner. Which reminds me. The boss says no more spy stuff with the phones. When Mr. Moses calls you, you call back on his personal line. You remember—the one you used to order girls like pizza pies?”
THEM JONESES
Joe leaned on the counter at the Law Library, awaiting a clerk who was assisting an aged pachook word a writ of a certiori. He glanced again at the ducat he found on his bunk the previous evening. It was the first such summons he’d ever received from a convict, and its presumption annoyed him. It was signed CRABBLE, GENERAL COUNSEL. Joe had heard of this character. The highest paid jailhouse lawyer at Coldwater, he first gained acclaim by winning his own release from the Hole on a writ of habeas corpus presented to the court on toilet paper.
The clerk sauntered down the counter and Joe asked just where this legal luminary might be found.
“Down at the Mailroom.”
“Point him out to me when he comes back,” Joe said.
The Law Library was in the corner of the regular Library. Joe sat at a long table beneath tall iron windows and leafed through a National Geographic. Rain streamed down the pitted glass, making a cozy shushing sound, flooding the Library with a wavery gray light. “Yard down,” faintly fizzled the Mainline P.A. Like fog, rain obscured the guntowers’ lines of fire. Too bad, he thought idly. It was the kind of raw autumnal rain he remembered from his youth, its stinging pelt against his face, its smell of faroff snow and dank dark dying things becoming earth again. He would have liked to have gone for a walk in it.
The Library itself awakened another of the childhood remembrances that lately were evoked by the slightest stimuli, as if imprisonment was purifying the pool of his perceptions. The smells of old pulp and print, the soothing sense of refuge, the dense hush numinous with knowledge … When he and his mother went to town and she got to slinging down shots at the Red Dog or passing quarts of beer in the park, Joe would slip away to the public library; there to wander the looming aisles, slack lips shaping the titles like exotic ports of call, finger running down the bindings like a stick down a picket fence …
Joe started at a tap on his shoulder. It was a trim, middleaged black with a neat mustache and nervous smile. “Scuze me, man,” he murmured. “But I gots two packs of cigarets if you could help me make a letter to my bride. See, I cant write.”
Joe nodded. The black sat beside him. He passed Joe a sheet of lined paper, a pencil stub, and two packs of Camels, the most popular brand in the pen, the ones used for currency.
“Dont need the squares,” Joe said, pushing them back and taking up the pencil stub. “Shoot.”
Dear, Joe started writing—“Is that an E or a U in Irlene?” The hammer shrugged. “I,” Joe decided a little loudly, drawing a savage slantendicular from another convict at the table writing a letter, his tongue stuck out sideways.
Dear Irlene, How are you? I’m fine. Did Mama get you that job at the Rib Hut? Look out after Mama. Irlene baby, I sure do miss you. I hear they have—“No, no,” Joe laughed. “It’s conjugal, not conjure visits.” That’s you and me alone in a trailer for a weekend. I know you got no car. Maybe ask Hank next door. I swear I’ll make up for this. Seems I hardly knew you. We were married only a month …
The hammer’s voice trailed off. Joe was anxious to be done with the letter, it only summoned thoughts of Kitty, but when he turned he saw Irlene’s husband was bent over the table, head cradled on his crossed arms, shoulders trembling with silent grief. Then, suddenly, he jumped to his feet and bolted out of the Library.
Joe stared after him in bewilderment.
A skinny convict with bushy white hair and a banana nose approached the table. “That’s one letter that would never be delivered,” he clued Joe in. “Alonzo there caught Irlene gambling with their food stamps and cut her head off with a roofing hatchet.”
Joe tore the letter slowly in pieces.
“Every day he comes to the Library and tries to write her.”
“Why didnt you tell me before I started,” Joe groused.
“Because I just got here. The other law clerk said you were looking for me …”
“You’re Crabble? Well …” Joe stood and snapped the ducat from his shirt pocket. “What the hell’s this? I got no law business.”
Crabble led him back to the Law Library, chuckling.
“I routinely review the jackets of cons who can afford my services,” he explained. “You’d be surprised at the number with unexplored legal options who dont know it. I pay particularly close attention to T Wingers. Look at it as professional solicitation.”
“I look at it as pure pesteration.”
Crabble hoisted conspiratorial brows. “Wanna go free?”
Joe cocked his head, slanting Crabble a suspicious eye.
“I see from your jacket, Speaker, that you’re a candidate for a coffee break parole.”
“A what?”
“A Special Circumstances release. They call them coffee break paroles because that’s about how long they take.” Crabble produced a business card from under the counter and slid it across. Joe picked it up. MARVIN MAAS, ATTORNEY AT LAW. Joe recognized the office address as being on the same street as the Department of Corrections complex.
Crabble leaned across the counter. “You’ve heard of Maas. Sometimes they call him No Maas, as in no mas time.
“I’ve heard him called Maas Dinero.”
The convict counsel chortled. “Oh, he costs, but he delivers. He and the Director are tennis partners. Hell, they probably switch wives. For two large you hit the gate.”
“But I dont even have a parole hearing scheduled.”
“Dont matter. A Special Circumstances release doesnt require a hearing. It’s all very informal and discretionary. Maas just has to make a case that your rehabilitation would be best continued in the community. All the members care about is whether they’ll get any backlash. You know, like they couldnt cut Charlie Manson loose. In your case I dont think there’d be a public hue and cry … Once you get Maas the dough, he’ll walk you in three, four months. Just keep your jacket clean.”
Joe pocketed the card. “Before I thank you, what’s the freight?”
“Pro bono, baby.”
Crabble watched Joe leave the Library, then picked up the institutional phone. The convict he dialed was doing time, a Murder Two for tying his coke connection by the heels to the bumper of his Audi 5000 and dragging him cowboystyle through the streets until they needed dental records to ID the remains.
“Donnie? … The D.A. wont make a peep if we enter a motion for retrial on a reduced charge of Involuntary Manslaughter … Diminished capacity, what else? … What changed their mind? You remember that homicide loot in the crinkly black suit? … Yeah? Well, I just did him a favor …”
Joe went straight to his Maintenance Yard office and typed a letter to Maas. He also typed a withdrawal slip authorizing Accounting to forward the attorney five hundred dollars from his inmate trust account. Enough, he guessed, to bring the parole specialist to Coldwater for an initial interview.
It wasn’t until after he slipped Maas’s letter into the Legal Mailbox on the Mainline outside Custody that he remembered the promise he’d made to Spencer only three nights ago. The quad was playing checkers in the Chowhall at Evening Activity call, pushing the pieces with a pencil wired to an elastic headband, the same clumsy rig used to scrawl the Clorox kite.
“No more convict plasma,” Joe pledged. “We’re goin to cop blood that’s already been tested. Plus we’re gonna send for a free specialist so you’re not at the mercy of these sorryass state sawbones.”
Spencer chuckled, wistfully it seemed. He jerked the coathanger prosthesis in Joe’s direction, as if to shake, a ghost reflex of the departed arm; then laughed at both his physical and emotional helplessness.
How could Joe pay both for Spencer’s medical needs and his own freedom? To which was he more obligated?
He made Yard alone to think it through, crossing the baseball diamond to the weight pile beneath a fall sky scattershot with clouds. He benchpressed until stars burst in his eyes and his jugular bulged. Aerated blood brimmed his brainpan, surcharging thought with optimism. I can do both, he felt certain. Save Spencer and liberate myself. I’ve got a few hundred left from my Hobby scams; I’ll spend that on Spencer, then scare up some fresh hustles, not such a tall proposition in the Maintenance Yard. Exploding breath copperish with blood, Joe had himself convinced that he had everything under control—when two shapes joined their shadows across his heaving chest.
“Whaddaya know? F Stop’s bankroller.” To his right Joe recognized Big Casino’s basso profundo and glimpsed the brass belt buckle faced downward by his belly.
“Read his titty tattoo,” sniggered Little Casino on the left. “Born to Lose. No wonder he covers the old man’s action.”
Before Joe could speak, each sleeved a twentykilo plate on the opposite ends of his bar. He locked his elbows to hold the extra eightyeight pounds aloft, creaking his wrists.
“I … aint bankin F Stop no more,” he managed to grunt.
Big Casino flashed a gold tooth snarling, “That aint what he tells us … punk.”
Little Casino pitched in, “He says you’ll collect all his markers including the vig … Big, I think we should show this pootbutt what weighty matter this is.”
Two more iron plates slid onto the bar. Sputtering for breath, Joe fought to keep his quivering arms straight but they crumpled slowly, then collapsed, and nearly four hundred pounds lay crushing his chest.
Big Casino asked, “Is this little interview impressing you?”
All breath was squeezed from Joe and he could only nod. He was afraid his eyeballs were going to pop out of their sockets like corks.
“Good,” he chortled. “F Stop’s down four yards. I want it in green money at the head of S Wing at chow call tonight.”
Joe’s world was going black; strange music filled his ears.
“Be there,” Little Casino advised, “or we’re gonna turn you out for stick pussy.”
“Maybe we oughta take this load off him,” Big Casino suggested. “After all, he aint heavy, he’s our brother.”
“You’re funny, Big. I’m talkin Vegas funny. You could open for Tom Jones, I bet.”
Only the old cons celled there and the others called V Wing the Hole in the Wall. Where Tommy Dorsey took turns with the Texas Playboys scoring sepiatinted dreams of interstate flight in flathead Fords in the days when acquittal could still be won holding court in the streets and a new identity was as simple as one more madeup name. The outlaw then was still the Promethean darling of the republic, hero of pulp rags and Saturday serials, not yet a victim himself of fivecent words that didn’t shoot back.
Earl wasn’t home. His cell smelled grayly of dirty socks and sour sheets and liniment, old man smells. Joe called to Bony Moroney in the opposite cell. Bony was the institutional Lightbulb Man, a convict remarkable for his height and long white beard. Twenty years Bony had patrolled the Mainline and cellblocks of Coldwater, replacing dead lights with a sixfoot bulbgripper that likened him to an Old Testament prophet.
“He’s in the shower,” reported Bony. “And the whole wing would take it as a favor if you didnt roust him out. F Stop only takes a notion to wash about once a month … if we’re lucky.”
Joe waited in Earl’s cell. The walls were plastered with yellowed magazine pictures of oldtime baseball players in baggy uniforms, wearing gloves that looked like raw livers. Mixed in were snapshots with scalloped edges of a younger Earl; standing with his foot propped on the running board of a ’39 Plymouth, sitting on a New Orleans fretwork balcony with his arm around a pretty girl, barechested in striped convict pants against a sunsplashed wall topped with broken bottles. Leaning close, Joe made out a gecko lizard sunning itself on the wall and decided it had to be the Louisiana state pen at Angola. Earl had told him once about having to kill that seaman on Decatur Street. The judge sentenced him to ride the lightning and Earl’s wife (could it be the girl on the balcony?) had him declared legally dead before his execution even so she could marry a country doctor; then the judge called drunk as they were strapping him in that homely throne of oak and iron, commuted his sentence to Life Without; but he escaped and ran for ten years—or so he said—three of them hiding in the Air Force, where he lost parts of his fingers to frostbite on a highaltitude recon flight over North Korea. Over his cell sink were Scotchtaped several photos from this period. One tickled Joe’s memory, perhaps he’d seen someone else in the same pose—tipped back in a chair from a nightclub table dense with bottles and glasses, cap on the back of his head, cigaret dangling from his lip …
&nbs
p; “Be it ever so humble … Where yat, Joe?”
Earl stood in the cell gate with a towel wrapped around his waist. The brow above the blue eye was snaked up in a question mark.
“I just paid off your gambling debts.”
Earl opened his mouth and closed it. “You dint have to, no.”
“What are you talkin about? You set me up, motherfucker! They almost killed me.” Joe related the events on the weight pile. “But what really cooks my cojones is that they did it just for fun. They knew all they had to do was ask, I couldnt refuse. They’re McGee’s boys. They grease him big time and he protects their action. That’s how their runners move so freely after Lights, taking guard action even. That’s also why any other convict takin bets gets shook down three times a day until they find an excuse to throw him in the Hole … Christ! You were my friend, Earl. You owed me better.”
“I’m sorry.” Earl pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes tight. “I dint mean to get you hurt, no.”
“It’s Spencer you hurt, you sick old sack of shit. I told you I was savin to get him clean blood and real doctors. I explained I was finished picking up your markers. And you went and fronted me right off, gambled away Spencer’s last hope.”
Earl sat on his bunk and stared at the floor. He barely flinched when Joe hurled his portable television to the floor. It exploded with a hollow pop like a giant lightbulb, spraying glass around the cell. Mumbling deep in his throat, Earl busied himself bunching his blanket in his gnarled fist.
Joe shouted, “You go down to W Wing and tell him he’ll have to take his chances with the plague because some pitcher’s slider aint sinkin … or is it a quarterback now who throws more interceptions than touchdowns?”
The opaque gray eye beseeched Joe. “I couldnt help myself, no. It’s this jones. I can tell you everything about gamblin cept how not to place that first sucker bet. Just the same as I can tell you everything about jail cept how to stay out and most all there is about livin cept how not to die …”