A Walk on the Wild Side (42 page)

Dundee claimed to have spent every weekend for thirteen years in the same cell. His wife had a brother on the force, and to keep Dundee from blowing his check on whiskey, brother picked him up on the job when the Saturday noon whistle blew and booked him for vag. Then he turned Dundee’s check over to sister – ‘to protect you from yourself.’ Monday morning brother handed Dundee his lunch bucket and let him out in time to get back on the job without getting docked.

‘One thing I’ve always insisted on,’ Dundee boasted wildly, ‘I never come along till I’ve finished my Saturday lunch.’

Dundee’s cell mate had also been strangely victimized. His name was Wren and he liked to buy Fords on Sunday, particularly in small towns. He’d pay a thousand dollars or so for one, by check, and show the dealer his bank balance for that amount. Then he’d drive it to the used-car agency across the street and sell it for six hundred. When the Ford dealer would have him picked up, to be held till the banks opened on Monday morning, Wren claimed he had always been sporting enough to warn the man, ‘You’re making a big mistake, friend.’

Morning would prove the check perfectly good, and Wren would sue for fifty thousand dollars for false arrest. The most he’d ever actually collected was thirty thousand.

‘I must have made a million,’ he computed. But a sinister change had come over Ford dealers on Sunday; particularly in small towns. They had begun to trust him. He had had to act increasingly furtive and fly-by-night. He had even gone to the length of pasting a stage moustache onto his upper lip that looked ready to fall off any moment; and still they wouldn’t arrest him. Wren had run into a solid wall of human faith. And every time he ran into it it cost him four hundred dollars. Finally he had such a vicious run of not getting arrested that he would have gone broke altogether but for a tiny drill, a length of wire and some colored crayon. Parish police had picked him up in a roadhouse for tampering with slot machines.

‘I drill an eighth-inch hole in the side of the machine – it’s only aluminum casting. When the three payoff bars come up I stop the works with the wire and she pays off. Then I plug the hole with crayon of matching color – usually blue, red or silver. When the chumps fill up the jackpot I come back again. Sometimes I got a buddy to cover for me while I drill, we concentrate on fraternal organizations. What can they do about it? Slot machines aint legal either.’

It was true that the authorities were uneasy about their right to hold him. Yet it seemed that somebody ought to.

Cell doors to Tank Ten were left unlocked. Only the big door to the block, operated by air brake, barred the prisoners from the outside world. This permitted the area between the jail’s wall and the cells to be used for prisoner recreation. And since this was left to the prisoners’ own devising, all it came to in the morning was someone reporting casualties in the Animal Kingdom, or a spitting contest in the afternoon. But even the spitting contests lost interest, as the tobacco-chewers always won.

The men changed cells at will. When Wren wearied of Dundee’s grievance against his brother-in-law he moved, simply for change of grievance, into the cell of a barnyard cretin called Feathers.

Feathers had been snatched redhanded in the act of chicken-spanking.

‘I never heard tell of no such crime as that,’ Dove declined to accept chicken-spanking as a crime, ‘it must have been he tried to steal that hen.’

‘Feathers wasn’t trying to steal nobody’s hen,’ Make-Believe Murphy protested. ‘All Feathers done was set that leghorn on his lap and pat its bottom. Understand, I’m not saying the man was in his rights. After all, the bird hadn’t done nothing to be spanked for.’

‘I
like
chickies,’ Feathers clucked from his cell.

‘I’ll represent him even if I don’t care for the case,’ Murphy assured Dove. He seemed to have appointed himself a sort of Kangaroo Public Defender. Who was defending Murphy Dove didn’t ask.

Gonzales vs. Gonzales
was more to Murphy’s taste than
Feathers vs. Louisiana
. Gonzales, a laborer six days a week, was resting on the seventh when Mrs G. suggested idly that they go on a second honeymoon. This had upset Vicente, as they had never had a first. He had gone through the house methodically with a Number Five shovel, smashing holy images, pictures, glassware, chairs, pottery and a Victor gramophone and every time he’d brought the shovel down had cried out, ‘Call
this
a honeymoon!’

He had been prying the bathtub off the floor by its stubborn enamel claws when he’d heard Consuela run into the bedroom, snatch something and run out of the house again. He’d apprehended her trying to save their wedding photograph and pointed to the stove. She had always been an obedient wife, and she did what he ordered now: she threw the picture in.

Then they had stood, holding hands by side, until the flames had caught.

‘Mister Gonzales,’ Consuela told him then, ‘that just did it.’ And had phoned the police, had him booked and now promised, every time she came visiting loaded with dainties, that she was going to get him ninety days for malicious mischief if it was the very last thing she did.

‘Why you do that, Vicente?’ Dove inquired with some concern.

‘When I feel like going, I go,’ Vicente explained to his own satisfaction if nobody else’s.

‘You were in your rights,’ Murphy told him confidently, ‘you were remodeling your home. No court in the country can convict you.’

‘I’m just sorry he seen fit to remodel that photograph,’ Dove felt, ‘if you ask me that was pure meanness.’

‘I’m glad you brought that angle up,’ Murphy said, ‘I got that one whipped too. It was my client’s intent to burn only
his
half of the picture.’

‘It didn’t do her half much good,’ Dove felt obliged to point out.

‘I see,’ Murphy regarded him coldly, ‘you’re the type would actually deprive a man of his freedom for the sake of an old photograph. What kind of man are you anyhow?’

‘I’ll tell you
just
what kind,’ Dove informed him, ‘I’m the kind that’d injunct that Mexican’s shovel, if I were his wife, before I let him in my house again.
That’s
what kind.’

‘Shovel no matter,’ Gonzales promised everyone cheerfully, ‘when I feel like going, I go.’

‘A little on the headstrong side,’ Make-Believe Murphy had to concede, squatting beside Dove. He was a lanky stray from nowhere who’d been lost in the shuffle along the way. A year or two older than Dove. Older prisoners tolerated his make-believe practice, knowing that was as close to practising law as Murphy was going to get.

‘Great Hand of God,’ he marveled now, ‘for what it cost this country to keep us criminals in here, we could send a navy to Mexico.’

‘What for?’ Dove wondered. ‘We don’t have no war with Mexico.’

‘Well, by God,’ the boy resolved. ‘By God, if we don’t we’ll send down ’n get us one.’

The only true criminal in the whole tankful of fools, the only one who had soldiered honestly against law and order, was an old-timer named Cross-Country Kline, with a battered and seamed old round brown ball of a face that looked as if it had been lined into the grandstand and lined right back. They were having a hard time getting Country out.

‘Blow wise to this, friend,’ he advised Dove, ‘it’s always easier to convict a man of something he didn’t do than it is to prove that what he actually was doing was a crime. That’s why the nabbers are so much tougher on the man without a record than they are on the finished criminal product. They’ve got the finished product solved, they can nab him any time, so they can afford to be friendly. It’s the bird who pops up on some corner they never seen him around there before, he claims he never been arrested, he got no needle marks, he don’t act like a thief and they can’t find a set of prints on him that worries them. They figure he must be some too-wise ghee. They got to find a crime to fit him. And if he’s innocent that takes persuasion.

‘Do you know that half the men serving time are serving it for somebody else? Shaking somebody else’s jolt for copping somebody else’s plea, playing culprit for a lesser crime than the one they actually done?

‘What a young fellow like you got to think about, if you’re going into crime serious, is what any young business man got to consider before he invests in anything – How can he wire himself so that, if he takes a fall, he falls the least distance instead of the longest? He got to wire himself to the courts, the state’s attorney’s office, the police department. He can’t trust just any old lawyer, you don’t learn the law by going to law school. He got to have someone who can operate behind the bench as well as in front of it, behind the public prosecutor as well as in front of him. Then if he takes a fall he got a choice – Should it be one-to-life for armed robbery or one-to-three for simple robbery?

‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man’s jolt. And never you cop another man’s plea. I’ve tried ’em all and I know. They don’t work.

‘Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don’t have to do it by the yard. By the inch it’s a cinch. And money can’t buy everything. For example: poverty.

‘Take my own experience with money, for example. I was suppose to be a writer on the coast but all I ever wrote was phone numbers. I’d slip into a party like I was invited, spot some fluff who looked like she’d left her jewel case home, talk her out of her address and phone it to a couple fellas who were just setting around some hotel room talking religion. When she got home the jewel case would be empty. How should I know they were that kind fellas?

‘We made so much I didn’t have time to spend it. Still I felt them fellas were giving me a shellacking. I got out and went on my own. I lined up a most trim little number – you understand I passed for sharp myself them years. Husband had gold. Had her own car. One day she give me the key to it on a ring with her other keys, to drive around while she shopped. I wheeled eighty an hour out to her place, cleaned out every bit of her jewelry and the husband’s too, and was waiting for her when she got through shopping.

‘I was scoring like that every week, stuffing a suitcase for a trip to Chicago. There was a fence I trusted there. What tripped me was I figured it was my turn to give a party.

‘The country had just gone dry. I was living in Catalina and went across to L.A., bought a second-hand suitcase and stuffed it with Canadian rye. I got off the boat with it and carried it up hill to my cottage. I had to go past the nab station. I knew all the nabs. I set the suitcase down and cut up jackpots with them a spell. One of them asked, “What’s in the keister, Kline?”

‘“Just what you’re thinkin’ is in it, MacElheny my boy,” I told him, “booze.” We all had a laugh. I laughed too.

‘I just got into the cottage when somebody knocked. Four nabs I’d never seen in my life before. “What’s in the keister, Kline?” Only this one meant it.

‘“Liquor,” I told him right out, “Want a shot?”

‘“We’ll have to take you to the station, we have a tip you’re bootlegging.”

‘I went along. What else? Some clown of a justice of the peace clapped a hundred-fifty-dollar fine on me. I didn’t have that much on me, so they kept me in the clink. I played cards with the jailer and went to bed. I was still laughing but not so loud.

‘About three in the morning a deputy sheriff came in and shook me awake, took me into the jail office and pointed.

‘It was all spread out on a table. $120,000 in hot ice. They must have tore that cottage apart to find it.

‘My head was spinning like a top the rest of that night, trying to figure how to get rid of the stuff. I’d never been fingered for burglary, if they didn’t have the ice I was clean. In the morning the chief turned me over to a deputy, to take me on the boat to L.A.

‘The deputy was skirt-crazy. As soon as the band started playing he made it to the dance floor, lugging the jewelry in a cardboard shoebox under his arm. Once he threw it to the drummer to keep while he dragged a broad around the floor.

‘I wasn’t handcuffed. Where could I go? Nowhere but overboard and I can’t swim enough to bother. So I sat around gnawing my fingernails twenty-eight miles worth, waiting for a break. When we were almost in it came.

‘The deputy got the shoebox back, and we went up on deck to watch the boat make the pier. I said I was getting seasick and made for the rail. We were in the channel, almost to Wilmington Harbor. The deputy came along with me – to hold my head I guess – and when we reached the rail I started one from the ankle and he took it big.

‘He hit the deck on the back of his neck and I grabbed the shoebox and heaved it. It plopped into the propellor wash and burst like a bomb. It rained jewelry all over the muck in the channel.

‘The nab went for his gun and I held out my hands so he wouldn’t dare mow me down in front of all the passengers. He put the gun back and begun bawling, handcuffing me to the rail and crying like a baby, both at once, simply slobbering all over me. Then he ran for his box, still sobbing. He could have saved his sobs. They kept a gang of divers prowling that channel bottom ten days without bringing up a single piece. By the time we made the pier there were four cars from the bureau of identification. That nab stopped me three times on the way and
begged
me – begged like a kid for candy – to get out and run for it. “Give me a chance,” was how he put it, “You owe me that much.” I sat awful still.

‘The B. of I. give me the business. For seventy-two hours they kept me in the blue room and the things a bunch of tough coppers can think to do to a guy who won’t talk makes me shaky when I remember it yet. I could tell you things that’d make Uncle Sam’s whiskers turn black.

‘They jumped on my feet. They slapped my ears till I couldn’t hear. They put the glare in my eyes and held the lids open till I thought I was going blind and all the time somebody I couldn’t see kept hollering right into my ear at the top of his lungs. I got a pivot tooth now in place of one some ham-handed law cracked out, but I aced it out. Years later in stir I used to wake up thinking they were starting on me again, but I aced it. I aced it till one of my fluffs heard a radio broadcast ’n sent me a lawyer. That was when my real troubles begun.