Ebersole hummed his way through a minute, playing at having to think hard about the invitation, masking his delight over this unexpected excuse to avoid, even if for only a couple of hours, the torture of staring at a blank, snow white computer screen, unable to untangle ideas he once translated so effortlessly into a tale well told.
"It doesn't pay much,” the commander said, misinterpreting his silence. “An honorarium certainly nowhere close to what your time must be worth, sir."
"Hmmmmm ... Send it to your memorial foundation, Commander Foley. I'm honored to accept and to serve,” Ebersole said. Accept and to serve. Wordplay on law enforcement's motto. A positive omen the fires of creativity still burned inside him, yes?
Yes!
No McDonald's for Gus Ebersole, not yet, anyway.
* * * *
Ebersole reached Men's Central Jail during morning visiting hours and angled his SUV into the reserved space waiting for him a half block away in the public parking lot on Bauchet Street, a mangy stretch of street within sight of the 101 and 110 freeways, full of stiff-backed law enforcement personnel and a United Nations of civilians who'd come to share time with inmates at Central or its neighbor across the way, the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, a complex built and christened before its name took on a significance far more tragic than any story any prisoner could tell.
He was no stranger to his surroundings, but it had been six or eight years since his last visit to Central, a research tour that formed the basis for his series of “High Security” stories. Twin Towers was no country club, but it was Central, the largest jail in the free world, where they housed the high-risk population.
Commander Foley was waiting at the check-in desk, looking nothing like he'd sounded on the phone, in a uniform that might have fit him twenty pounds ago, his ear-to-ear smile half lost under a thick salt-and-pepper mustache that fit above his mouth like a limp hot dog.
He shook Ebersole's hand like he was pumping for water and led him off and briefed him on the writing class members during the ten minutes it took to reach the meeting room, a space about ten by twelve feet, the walls bare except for a green chalkboard mounted behind a scarred teacher's desk fronting a semicircle of cheap student tablet chair-desks.
Applause greeted their arrival, led by an inmate in the white top and blue bottom uniform combination that identified him as a trustee. He'd been using the teacher's desk as his own. He was in his mid-to-late sixties, maybe five five or six feet in height and a hundred twenty pounds on a rail-thin frame, his angelic face home to a halo of hair, as bedsheet white as his complexion, hanging in a knotted braid past his shoulder blades.
He matched Foley's description of Chester “Smiley” Burdette. A career criminal halfway through a ten-year sentence for first-degree armed robbery, and one of dozens of prisoners transferred to Central when the county ended its contract with the state.
"Smiley's also a fan of yours and the one who's been fronting the program since he got here,” Foley had said. “He's first-rate when it comes to keeping the others in line, if anyone gets out of line for any reason."
"Like what kind of reason?"
"You never know until it happens,” Foley said.
"If you're trying to scare me, Commander, it's working."
"Just making conversation, Mr. Ebersole. We haven't lost an author yet.” He showed off his smile again. “Of course, there's always a first time,” he said, turning his smile into a burst of laughter and giving Ebersole's shoulder a series of reassuring pats.
Ebersole was not reassured.
He thought about canceling out then and there, fleeing Central Jail, but that would have meant returning home to a blank computer screen.
* * * *
Ebersole wrote his name on the board in large block letters and launched into a lengthy introduction, sparing his audience no adjective or noun that enhanced his reputation and standing in the literary fraternity; much of what he said was true.
Then it was their turn.
Smiley Burdette went first, playing his own history like stand-up comedy, drawing his biggest laughs describing the armed robbery that got him back behind bars. “Was meant to be burglary, which is my specialty,” he said. “Climbed into the Bar None through a window off the alley, not thinking to check first if the joint was still open for business. It was, so that made my burglary a robbery and how I found myself staring down the barrel of the barkeep's twin-gauge. My priors turned my sentence into five years times two, so here I am, my swan song to a home away from home."
He took a bow and spread his arms grandly to the applause he'd generated from seven of the eight other inmates.
"Plain stupid, you ask me,” said the lone dissenter, earning a unanimous chorus of hisses as he dismissed Burdette with a throwaway gesture.
Burdette said, “I didn't ask, but you definitely are, Cooke. Nothing's more stupid than a dirty cop who gets caught stepping over the line. You bend over a lot in the shower or why else do they let you out of segregation and into the general pop for our class?"
Al Cooke pushed up from his seat, unfolding a six-foot frame and a weightlifter's ripple of muscles inside the orange uniform that identified a connection to law enforcement. He reared back, fists clenched, cold-cocking Burdette with his pit bull eyes, and stepped toward him.
Burdette rose to the challenge and egged Cooke forward with his hands.
* * * *
Two of the inmates leaped to their feet and blocked Cooke's way, while another latched onto Burdette's arm and urged him to shut up and settle down, insisting, “Smiley, a DRB or the hole's nothing you need right now."
The air remained heavy with acrimony. Burdette and Cooke grunted between labored breaths, neither man showing any inclination to step away from a fight and be seen as a loser.
Ebersole wiped at the fright sweat blanketing his forehead and upper lip and reached over to press the call button installed on the underside of the desk. It would bring guards running, the commander had told him.
Burdette recognized the move and shook his head at Ebersole.
Pumped a laugh to the ceiling and sank into his chair.
Said, “Only playacting, Mr. Ebersole, maybe give you something to write about in one of your Bogey Brothers stories. Our way of showing our thanks for your being here today, ain't that so, Cookie?"
Cooke hesitated before answering. “Why not?” he said, and waved off the inmates who had blocked his access to Burdette. “What's to know about me, I'll make it short and sweet. I'm a bad cop who got caught, honored the Blue Wall and refused to turn state's, got sentenced to the max, and is now sitting out an appeal hearing among this bunch of losers.” A cacophony of nasty sounds erupted. Cooke answered them with a wagging upright middle finger. “I've been writing a book I'm calling Cop-Out."
"Cop-In more like it,” somebody said, winning applause.
Cooke ignored the interruption. “So I went and scored this program hoping to maybe pick up a handy hint or three along the way from a writer like you,” he said, and sat down.
Ebersole thanked him and pointed to an inmate who'd seemed more interested in playing with his fingernails than being in the class. Early-to-mid forties, Coke-bottle glasses on an otherwise ordinary face.
He didn't bother standing but remained focused on his nails. “Name's Bob Rauschenberg, no relation to the painter of the same name,” he said, like he was sharing a state secret. “Been writing all my life. Checks mainly. What helped get me here. What I call creative enterprise, others call forgery.” He blew on his nails, brushed them on his uniform, and signaled he was through.
"Who'd like to speak next?” Ebersole said, any fears for his personal safety erased by the realization these inmates were a garden of story ideas ripe for picking.
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 cliché-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, jefé."
* * * *
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—
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