Laguna Heat

by T. Jefferson Parker

  There was a difference. But with a pen from Helene’s nightstand, he drew—with shaking hand—a beard onto Mercante’s face in the newspaper, and the difference all but disappeared.

  It was impossible: he knew that. But the harder he tried to listen to the voice of his own reason, the louder the roar inside him grew. He looked out at the rioting ocean, waiting for his ears to explode.

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-TWO

  He was playing the dark notes now: he could feel them in his nerve-heavy legs, hear them in his voice as he bought a ticket at the AirCal counter.

  A few minutes later, the 12:40 flight from Orange County to Sacramento groaned into the sky. Shephard leaned back and watched the buildings tilt away below, shrinking as the landing gear thumped into place.

  What if Hannover knew he was looking for a dead man? Or Wade? Or Tina Trautwein, who believed in getting deeper than the headline? He waited with a cigarette in his mouth and a lighter in his sweaty hand, hoping the No Smoking light would hurry the hell up and go out.

  When the jet leveled off, Shephard smoked and tried to take stock. He had two victims, three if he wanted to count Colleen—and he did. He had a motive. He had a suspect who’d been dead for half a decade. Shephard tried to imagine the lines he’d use at Folsom Prison, but they just didn’t play. Johnny Cash’s blues kept moaning into his mind instead. On the other hand, he thought, then listed the things that still seemed to make sense to him. Cal. The Jota. Ten stitches, holding nicely, Jane …

  For the moment, a few other things would have to hold, too. He had left Helene’s apartment, locked the door, and told Mink she’d killed herself. The Newport Beach police would be calling on him, soon.

  At the Sacramento airport he rented a car, making Folsom just after three in the afternoon. The town was quaint and somewhat sorrowful. He looked out at the old houses, Victorian and a little self-conscious, he thought. The prison was away from the city, a steadfast brick building with ivy-covered walls and an appearance of absolute lifelessness. The desk guard, one of those minor officials who take pleasure in bearing bad news, offered a crisp litany. “Can’t see the warden ’cause he’s home, and can’t see the assistant ’cause he’s busy. Can’t get into records without permission from one or the other. Sorry, detective.”

  Shephard dredged up the name from memory. “Assistant Warden TeWinkle is a friend. Call him for me, would you, buddy?”

  “Told you he’s busy.…”

  “Don’t know he’s busy until you try, now do you? He’s expecting me.”

  The guard poked the telephone buttons with martial address, waited, explained the situation. Then the hold button: “Never heard of you, Shephard. Maybe you ought to make an appointment and—”

  “I got people back in my hometown dying by fire, mister. You heard of that? I’m a cop and I need some help, so tell TeWinkle this is the biggest emergency he’s had all night.”

  The guard eyed him, sighing. This time his tone was a little more encouraging. He explained again, nodded, hung up. “Be right with you.”

  “Thanks, chum. You’ve done a fine thing, really.”

  Assistant Warden Dave TeWinkle was right with Shephard a half hour later. He was a thin, wiry man in his late fifties, Shephard guessed, with taut orange hair and the bright nose of a drinker. He led Shephard upstairs to his office, which was paneled in redwood and oppressively hot. “Mercante? Sure. Won’t ever forget that sonofabitch. Killed in the riot of 1980, along with fifteen other inmates. Could have saved yourself a trip and used the phone, detective.”

  Shephard gathered what assurance he could muster. “What I want, Dave … what I need is to talk to someone who was there. At the riot. Someone who knew Mercante.”

  “Well, I was there. Me and a riot gun, holding down what was left of the east wing for twenty-four hours. Watched most of it burn.” TeWinkle jerked his thumb toward a photograph framed on the wall. Behind the dense smoke in the picture’s foreground, Shephard could see the forms of men scurrying through the cellblock surrounded by flames, like bodies lost in hell.

  “What happened to Mercante?”

  TeWinkle chortled, as if he were being pestered by a four-year-old. “He died. I wasn’t that close. I didn’t blast him with the twelve gauge, though I wouldn’t have minded too much. What do you mean, what happened?”

  “How did he die? Fire? Shot? How?”

  TeWinkle leaned back, put his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. “Guess I don’t remember exactly how it went down for old Azul.”

  “Can you get the account? The record? His file?”

  “Get anything I goddamned want,” TeWinkle said with a dry smile. “Stay put.”

  He was back in five minutes with a thin manila folder that bore a red sticker saying INACTIVE on it. He laid it on the desk in front of him, hunched over, and brought a pair of reading glasses from his pocket.

  “Bad time,” he said. “Late summer and quiet. That’s how you know something’s up in the joint. You come to work and the men are fighting and swearing and generally making a scene, you know things are okay. You come in and it’s nothing going on, look out. I was in charge of guards back then. Supervisor. Spent a lot of time in the north tower, just watching.” TeWinkle flipped a sheet and nodded.

  “Started about this time of night,” he said. “Fight in the mess hall got out of hand, and when the guard came to break it up they were ready for him. Half a dozen of them was the story. Beat the hell out of him and dragged him off to the east block and put him on the phone to the warden. They had a whole list of crap they wanted. Longer time in the yard, better extermination, I remember. The summer was a hot one and the place was full of fleas and roaches. Full of inmates, too. Much too crowded. Warden said he’d see what he could do if they’d let Connell go, but they killed him instead, then started setting fire to things. Mattresses, blankets, their own stuff mostly. Everybody runnin’ wild. Couldn’t hardly tell who was who, so much fire and smoke. Got into the rec room and set that on fire too.

  “The prisoners held the blocks for four days. Guards shot three of them dead. Couple more died in the fire. One or two got killed by their own kind … here, that was Mercante. Says right here: ‘Killed by unknown assailants during prison disturbance of August, 1980. A piece of sharpened bed frame was driven into his chest.’ Someone shanked him. Couldn’t have happened to a better guy. Open and shut, Shephard. That do ya?”

  He handed the folder across the table. Shephard studied the profile and face shots, a fresh set taken every few years. In the last pictures, taken in May of the year Mercante died, he wore a full beard and mustache.

  “Strange fellow, that Azul,” TeWinkle said. “Little guy, but everybody scared of him. Even the gangs left him alone. Got sent up for murder, life, I think. Now I’m a skosh hazy on this—you can check it there if you want—but I think he killed a guy while he was inside. Long before I came here, late fifties maybe. A fight down in the showers, and when it was over, Mercante had busted the fella’s head open on the tiles. So they tacked on another life sentence for that. Hell, he’d a been out a long time ago if he’d stayed low. Life is more like twenty if you do it straight up and keep clean.”

  Good memory, Shephard thought, reading a paragraph from the third sheet in Mercante’s file. The man was jumped in the shower—three on one—and he lived to be sentenced for it. Azul’s first five years had been hard time: three fights, two vacations in the cooler, moved to the trouble block, then back out with the regular population until he tried to use the bathroom. But after 1962, Shephard saw a change in the man’s lifestyle.

  “Understudy to the prison priest?”

  “The worst of them always end up on God’s side,” TeWinkle said as he fiddled with a pipe. “No wonder He’s losing. Look at Manson out at Vacaville. Everybody’s saved. Know why? Because it makes them feel good.”

  Shephard looked back at the file. Mercante, the acolyte, had outdistanced three prison priests in his t
welve-year career. He witnessed daily to the prisoners, made some converts, upped the church attendance. He still had time for a job in the Folsom records room, $1.25 an hour, a trusty.

  And he painted. The transcript mentioned a “successful” business he ran, charging inmates to have their portraits done. His work was featured twelve years running at the annual prison arts and crafts show. The guards commissioned him in 1972 to do a likeness of a retiring warden. He gave classes. And if his file was accurate, Azul Mercante changed. A 1953 entry described him as “deceitful, extremely violent, untrustworthy and not improving.” Ten years later he was “patient, agreeable, and apparently without violent tendencies.” By early 1973, his goodwill was no longer a hot topic among prison observers, and Mercante was “quite simply a model prisoner in all respects. It is regrettable that the inmate’s past record prevents his consideration for parole.”

  “Detective?” Shephard looked up to find TeWinkle studying him from behind a thin cirrus of smoke. “Mind me asking just what the hell you’re looking for?”

  Shephard tossed the INACTIVE file onto the desk. “Someone who was there. When he died. Right in the middle of it.”

  “If I knew what you were—”

  “If I knew, I’d ask, Dave. Someone inside at the riot. Someone who might have picked up the gossip afterwards. A man who’s been inside a while. It’s important. Can you get me inside, alone, with someone like that?”

  “Shephard, you expect the damndest things. Yeah, I can get you into a visitor’s room. If you want somebody who’s been here and knows the place, I got that too. Ed Matusic, but we call him Shake. Writes all the time.”

  “Not the visitor’s room. I need to see him on his own ground, where he’s comfortable.”

  “It isn’t comfortable anywhere in this place.”

  Shephard set his Python on TeWinkle’s desk and stood up.

  The sounds of West Block echoed around him as he stepped through the last set of sliding steel doors, flanked by two solemn guards. Music blurted from several of the cells, cacophonic and competitive. Two men screamed at each other—one dressed like a woman—from inside the cubicle to his left. From down the block, something raked against the bars in a clanging, methodical riff. Someone was singing and strumming a guitar, and a harmonica whined accompaniment from across the walkway. A Dylan song; Shephard recognized it. He could see faces coming into the dull light as he walked by, hands wrapping around bars. Somebody yelled, “Hey, sweet thing, come here to daddy.” The guard on his right nodded to the stairs at the end of the hall. “Matusic, two hundred B, as in boy. Upstairs.”

  Shake got off his bed and came to the bars as they approached. Shephard studied his small eyes, set like jewels in the meaty face. He was a big man, but plump, and his expression hinted at a boy picked on for his softness. But when he smiled, Shephard saw the brutish guile of a man who’d learned how to get even. There was something damaged in it.

  “Got a visitor, Shake. Mr. Shephard. Behave yourself, and show him this is a joint with class.” The guard opened the door. “I’ll be top of the stairs. Call when you’re done.”

  Shephard stepped in, glanced at the open notebook on the bed, and the pen beside it. “A writer. Shake for Shakespeare?” The door slammed closed behind him. He’d forgotten to ask what Matusic was in for.

  “And ’cause I shake when I move.”

  They shook hands. “Tom Shephard. What are you in for?”

  “Mostly rape. You’re a cop.”

  “Laguna Beach.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a long way.”

  “You can sit on the bed or the chair.” Shephard took the chair, and Shake fluffed his pillow before sitting back on his bed. He balanced the notebook on his belly. “I don’t want out. So if you’re here to make a deal, forget that kind of stuff. I’m home. Everything in the world I got right here.”

  “Not a thing you want? Nothing?”

  Matusic pondered the question, doodling in his notebook. Shephard looked around the cell: two stacks of books in a corner, piled almost head-high; more books under the bed; a sink and toilet; one wall covered by a huge photograph of mountains with flowers in bloom; the other by large sheets of graph paper clotted with tiny, dark handwriting.

  “Always use a little money,” Shake said finally. “I collect it. What you want’s the question, isn’t it?”

  Shephard studied the man’s face for some avenue of appeal. “Where do you keep your stuff? Your writing?”

  “Under the bed. This is my hundred and forty-third book, when I’m done with it. Collect them, too, like the money.” He tapped the notebook with the pen, and something seemed to catch his eye. He wrote slowly, his face tensing with concentration. When he was finished, he looked back to Shephard, relaxed and grinning as if he’d been caught torturing a cat. Shephard felt the hairs bristling up his neck. He put a twenty on Shake’s bed.

  “I need to know some things about the riot in ’eighty, Shake. Nothing you tell me is going to come back on you, on anyone. It’s a … personal thing for me.”

  Matusic’s little eyes seemed to light up. He crumpled the bill toward him and grinned. “Bad riot. Four days of confusion and pain. Sixteen men and one guard died. Brought in the National Guard, finally.” He leaned forward, catching the notebook as it slid away. “Fire everywhere and everything busted up. Guards thought we caused it, but it was the fleas caused it. That, and too many of us in the blocks.” He spread out the twenty, pressing it against his knee.

  “Do you remember it well?”

  “I wrote nine books about it.”

  “I want to know what happened to Azul Mercante.”

  “He died. How about some more money?”

  Shephard put another twenty on the bed and Shake pounced. It was time now: if Matusic had what he needed, this is where it would be. “How? And don’t tell me he got shanked, Matusic. I’m not here to buy shit.”

  Shake blushed, tried to straighten himself into composure, looked at Shephard with a worried grin. He’s afraid, Shephard thought. Here’s my way in. But don’t turn your back on him, not for a second. Matusic lowered his voice, speaking confidentially: “The real story is he burned to death,” he said. “That stuff about the shank was never true. This is what really happened.…”

  Shephard stared at him as Shake told the story, about the mattresses piled up in the black man’s cell and the way they caught fire with the paint thinner from the supply room, and the cell door slamming shut at the last minute with Azul inside and no one could get him out, so he burned up right there, I remember it, East Block number fifty-one Z.

  “I heard he might have died from the guards, too,” Shephard said quietly. “Shot him, Shake, is one way I heard it.” He put down another twenty and Matusic collected it with a grin.

  “That’s possible, too,” he said. “The way it happened was this.”

  Shephard stared at him again as he told the story about Mercante shot by a tower guard when he tried to make it from the rec room across the exercise yard with some more towels to burn.…

  He studied Matusic’s carnivorous smile, which grew bigger and more eager to please. The big man folded his newfound wealth, then unfolded the bills and straightened them against his leg. He laughed, unsurely.

  When Shephard stood up, he watched Shake bring up his legs and wrap his hands around them, leaning his face onto his knees, still laughing quietly. Shephard looked outside to the guard, who was kibitzing with a prisoner near the stairway. The music was still loud. “You know what happened to Azul, don’t you?” No change from Matusic, just little eyes laughing from atop his wide knees. The twenties were still in his hand. Go for broke, he thought. He brought the last of his money out, a twenty and a bunch of ones, but it looked good. He waved it.

  Matusic’s big head shook sideways. “I told you,” he said quietly.

  “You told me,” Shephard whined back. Fast as he could move now: the money back into his pocket with one han
d, ripping away the pillow with the other, then a grab at Matusic’s throat, jamming his head into the corner of the mattress while he hopped on top and braced his knees on the big man’s belly. Shake moaned, swatted up with his empty paw, and—Jesus Christ, Shephard thought—worked his money hand between the bed and the wall where he wouldn’t lose his paycheck. Knees on the flabby arms now, and both hands secure around his neck. The longshot: “Mercante didn’t die in that riot, Shake, we all know that. Your problem now is to tell me what happened before you choke to death. How you going to manage that, buddy?”

  Matusic pushed out a strangled whine; his legs pounded the bed behind Shephard, and his good hand waved harmlessly from the outside of Shephard’s knee. “I can’t … I can’t …”

  “Can’t breathe? That’s a problem, Shake.” He loosened his hands a little. “We were talking about Azul, remember? How it went down in ’eighty. You still there?” Cinching his hold again, hoping the guard wouldn’t wander back.

  “I can’t tell you, I swore.”

  “Unswear, Shake. I’m either going to strangle you or take my money back, or both.”

  Incredibly, Shephard thought, Shake used what strength he had left to jam his money down farther toward the floor. Behind him, the sounds of a radio shrieked, and there was laughing too, excited and cruel. Showtime, Shephard thought. He let up a little. “Matusic, if you’ve got any brains in your head, listen up. You’re going fast, another few minutes of this and you’re history. Mercante. What happened? Tell now, you can keep your money and twenty more. That’s a lot of money, Shake.” The poor man really was gasping, he thought. He loosened his grip a little more. “You’re not quite sure on that, are you? Shake? You there? Come clean, goddamnit, I’m getting tired of choking you.”

  One last try. He readjusted himself over Matusic’s arms, then closed his grip with a slow, patient strength. He could hear the laughter from behind him, quiet enough not to draw the guards. Shake was gurgling something. “… I … rrr … rokay … rokay.” Shephard let up. “I’ll tell you … no more.…” Shake’s chest was working deeply.