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“You want me to call your wife, or can you handle that yourself?” he asked.
“You know, there is something you could do for me. I’d really appreciate a pack of gum from the machine out in the hall. That would really be nice,” I replied.
I sat for twenty minutes, listening to all the sounds that are common to any jailhouse environment: steel doors clanging, toilets flushing, trusties dragging wash buckets down the corridor, Mariel felons yelling at one another in Spanish, a blaring television set tuned to a stock car race, a three-hundred-pound biker, wrapped in chains and stink, his hair like a lion’s mane, deciding to make his captors earn their money when they tried to shove him inside a cell. I took off my ruined shirt and rolled it into a ball for a pillow and lay down on the wooden bench and placed my arm over my eyes. Then I heard footsteps in the corridor again and, vain fool that all drunks are, thought it was the sheriff, my friend, returning to set things straight.
But the sheriff did not return, nor did anyone take me out of the holding cell or indicate when I might be arraigned.
The unpleasantness of jailhouse life has less to do with confusion and the cacophony of noise that fills the inside of your head twenty-four hours a day than it does with your disconnection from the outside world and the fact that for you time stops when the cell door slams behind you.
You make no decisions for yourself. You are strip-searched by a bored turnkey who fits on polyethylene gloves before he pries your buttocks apart, then fingerprinted, photographed, given a cleansing cream and a dirty rag to remove the ink from your hands, spoken to in a toneless voice by people who never address you as an individual or look into your face, as though eye contact would grant you a level of personal identity that you do not deserve.
Then you sit. Or lie on the floor. Or try to find anyplace in a crowded cell away from the open toilet that eventually you will use in full view of everyone in the cell and anyone passing in the corridor. But most of the time you simply wait. No sexual encounters in the shower, no racial beefs with blacks or the Mariels from Castro’s prisons whose space is rented for them by the G, no meetings with Damon Runyon street characters or O. Henry safecrackers. Most of the miscreants are hapless and stupid. Out-of-control hardcases are sedated, forced to shower, powdered with disinfectant, and transferred to hospitals. The screws are usually duffers worried about their prostates.
You wait in a vacuum, maybe in a large, colorless room, one more face among the faceless and uneducated and inept and self-pitying, convinced you are not like the others, that it is only bad luck that has put you here. After a while you wonder what it is you are waiting for, then realize you’re thinking about your next meal, a chance to use the toilet or to stand a few moments at a window that looks out upon a tree. One morning you ask somebody which day of the week it is.
The life that used to be yours comes to you only in glimpses, perhaps through a letter, a visitor who sees you out of obligation, or financial notices of foreclosure and repossession. The noise, the ennui, the lack of uncomfortable comparisons inside the jail now become a means of forgetting the sense of loss that eats daily at your heart.
If there was ever a viable benchmark to indicate a person’s life is unraveling around him, I know of none better than the day a person discovers himself inside the gray-bar hotel chain.
I called Bootsie, but no one was at home. When Alafair’s recorded message ended and the machine beeped, I started to speak, then realized the inadequacy as well as harmful potential of the message I would have to leave. I replaced the receiver in the cradle and called Clete’s apartment, but there was no answer. A half hour went by and I asked the turnkey for another visit to the phone. “Maybe you won’t need it. You got a visitor,” he said. Then he shouted at the other cells, “Female on the gate!”
“Female?” I said.
Barbara Shanahan walked down the corridor in a pink suit and white blouse and heels, her perfume as strange and incongruous inside the jail as a flower inside a machine shop. She stood at the cell door, a tinge of pity in her eyes that made me look away.
“Clete told the locals he saw the fight. He got them to go back to Styles’s club and search the area where Styles was sitting. They found a switchblade knife under a table,” she said.
“Switchblade knife, you say?” I said.
“Right.” Her gaze wandered over my face. “Clete says he saw Styles pull it on you. But the arrest report makes no mention of a knife. I wonder why that is.”
“I’m a little unsure of what happened, actually.”
“I’m not going anywhere near this, but I made a couple of calls. A bonds
man will be over here shortly. So will your lawyer.”
“My lawyer? I don’t have a lawyer.”
“You do now. He’s a prick, but he’s the best at what he does.”
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“You’re a good cop and don’t deserve this bullshit. Most people think you’re nuts. The sheriff has washed his hands of you. You’re totally self-destructive. I wish you’d killed Jimmy Dean Styles. Take your choice.”
“Who’s the lawyer?”
She winked at me. “Put a piece of ice on that eye, handsome,” she said.
She walked back down the corridor, her scent lingering in the air, smiling slightly at the remarks made to her through the bars of the adjoining cells.
Ten minutes later Perry LaSalle came down the corridor with the turnkey.
“You know a song by Lazy Lester titled ‘Don’t Ever Write Your Name on the Jailhouse Wall’? Man, I love that song. By the way, Jimmy Dean Styles swallowed his bridge and had to have his stomach pumped. How’s it hangin’, Dave?” he said.
Cops call it a “drop” or sometimes a “throw-down.” It can be a tear-gas pen, a toy pistol, or perhaps the real article, the serial numbers burned off with acid or on an emery wheel. Or it can be a switchblade knife.
When a shooting goes bad and the suspect is on the ground with his dead hand open and a set of car keys falls from his palm rather than the pocket-size automatic you thought you saw, either you can tell the truth at an Internal Affairs inquiry and be hung out to dry on a meat hook, perhaps even do serious time in a mainline joint with the same people you put there, or you can untape the drop from your ankle, wipe it with a handkerchief, throw it on the corpse, and ask God to look in the other direction.
