Nothing Lost (25 page)

“You like the sty?” Alice Todt said.

Teresa seemed trapped. “It looks real.”

“I fired Marty this morning,” Alice Todt said. She had an effortless ability to change gears. “I mean, my lawyer in New York did. Jocko's dad is going to handle my money from now on. He's so smart. He says I need to diversify more. Lessen my liability. Get higher yields. Have my money working for me. Go offshore. He wants to leverage some shit, whatever the fuck leverage is, but he's so rich it has to be okay, cut down the tax burden. He says maybe I should buy a plane, the fucking deductions I could get, you know lease it out to people when I'm not using it. Jocko says he wants to learn how to fly—”

“I'm sure you and Marty can work it out,” Teresa said.

“She wants to fly out here,” Alice Todt said. “I mean, she's your friend, and all. I don't know why the fuck I should talk to her.”

“We're due back in court in twenty-five minutes,” I told Teresa. “We should get something to eat.”

“Try the catering truck,” Alice Todt said. “I hired Auntie Pasto's.”

Teresa leaned back against the headrest as we drove to the DeLuxor. Her eyes were closed. “I want this trial to be over, Max,” she said after a moment. “I've always loved the courtroom. I love the competition. I even love a pain in the ass like Tracy. I love getting around the petty tyranny. I love trusting my instincts. It's like playing chess with someone's life. Some pawn who otherwise isn't worth an instant”—she snapped her fingers—“of your time. I even love knowing I'm going to lose, because I'll go down knowing I did my best. I love the whole thing. And here it is the first morning, and I want it finished.”

She was trusting those instincts. She was not an alarmist. She only knew there was a storm ahead. She did not know where it was coming from, but she knew it was coming, she smelled it the way sailors smell foul weather two days off, and she knew that hatches would be battened down, people would drown, that survival itself was at risk.

When we walked into our office at the motel, Mrs. Idella Primrose, the local woman we had engaged as our secretary, said there had been a collect call forwarded from my Cap City number from a man who identified himself only as Tugboat. Mrs. Primrose had a worn pinched face, and she did not meet our eyes. I asked if Tugboat had said anything else. Things I wouldn't even tell my late husband, Mrs. Primrose said. Tugboat had left a callback number, but said he could not be reached and would try to call again at dinnertime.

“You know anyone named Tugboat?” Teresa asked.

“No,” I said. “But you can bet I'm going to accept the charges if he calls again. Chances are a solid citizen named Tugboat has a sheet, done some time, and knows something he thinks I might want to know, if the proper arrangements can be made. The area code he called from is in Sunflower County. I think I know what that means.”

I picked up the telephone and dialed the number Tugboat had left. “You have reached the Sunflower Facility of the South Midland Department of Corrections,” the voice on the automated answering machine said. “For general information, press one—”

“The Sunflower supermax,” I said to Teresa. “It's only been opened four months. Top of the line. State of the art. Privately operated under a concession from the DOC. Making it a profit center. It's the envy of the upper Midwest. Twenty-four-hundred beds, five hundred screws with automatic weapons and open fields of fire. No windows in the cells, just slits that let in a little light. Plus death-wire electrified fences, one touch turns you into toast. It's going to warehouse all the hard cases in four states. Kansas, Nebraska, North Midland, they'll all pay Sunflower to take their worst guys off their hands.”

Teresa picked at the greens Mrs. Primrose had ordered from a nearby mini-mart.

“If he calls back, he'll call at five. That's when they have dinner. He probably won't go to dinner—”

Teresa seemed to perk up. “Because the pay phones in every prison I've ever seen are out in the open and he won't want anyone to hear what he has to say.”

“Right.”

“There's probably a tap on the line,” Teresa said.

“Count on it,” I said.

“And people called Tugboat tend to know things like that.”

“In my experience, yes.”

“Can we find out more about him?”

I took a deep breath. There was one way to find out quickly, but I knew Teresa would not like it. “I'll ask Allie Vasquez. She's got sources all over the system. Give her twenty minutes, she'll know how many teeth he has left in his head.”

Teresa considered the proposal. “Max, I'm not sure that's a good idea,” she said finally. “She works for”—she searched for the right words—“for the other side.”

“Teresa,” I said. “We don't have a case. We need all the help we can get. You don't get it free.”

She did not reply. It wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no either.

The option of checking with Duane Lajoie was one we did not consider.

In the afternoon session, there was a detailed analysis of the blood evidence by medical technicians from the state Bureau of Investigation. Some of the jurors were having difficulty staying awake. One started to take notes and was immediately told by Judge Tracy that she did not permit jurors to take notes, and ordered a bailiff to confiscate the notebook. It was the function of jurors to listen to the evidence and weigh it carefully, she said, and if during their deliberations they needed parts of the record to be read back to them, she would so order. A juror writing, she continued, was a juror not paying attention. She was like a pedantic kindergarten teacher, I thought. I watched the courtroom clock ticking toward the end of the day and wondered what Tugboat would have to offer. I was not wearing a watch and had told Teresa not to wear hers in the courtroom. It was just another of Ellen Tracy's idiosyncrasies: The sight of an attorney peeking at a watch guaranteed that she would ask the offender if he or she had another engagement.

Judge Tracy called it a day at four-twenty.

Again J.J. and Teresa ignored each other.

I stopped Allie as she left the courtroom and quietly asked if she could get a heads-up on a con named Tugboat at Sunflower. No other information available.

“Do I get to ask why?” she said.

“No.”

“I can't do it, Max.”

“Okay. No harm in asking.”

“None.”

We told Idella Primrose to take the rest of the afternoon off.

At five-oh-five, the phone rang.

“Max, I'm going to tell you this just once,” Allie Vasquez said. She was on her car phone. In the background I could hear Springsteen. “His name is Albert Curwent, aka Leo Lutz, aka Tyrone Powers—like the actor, but add an
s
—aka Wally Korn—Korn with a
k
—aka Tugboat, aka Fat Albert. Nobody calls him Fat Albert to his face. He's sensitive about his weight. He likes to hear the sound of bones breaking. The pelvis is his specialty. A stone criminal. He's been inside somewhere seventeen of the last twenty-one years. You name the joint, he's passed through. Sunflower's just the latest stop. He's looking at five LWOPPs to be served consecutively. He contracted to torch a house in KC and there were five people in it. The guy's girlfriend, the girlfriend's mother, and three kids. The starship
Enterprise
will be back before he gets out.”

Suddenly Allie turned up the volume on her tape deck, and as the E Street Band boomed behind the Boss, she clicked off the mobile phone without a further word. Typical Allie. No frills. Waitin' on a Sunny Day.

“What's that going to cost?” Teresa said.

“Something,” I said. With Allie, it was never tit for tat. If it became necessary, she would make Albert Curwent available to J.J. If not, there would be something else. Allie's upward mobility was predicated on the flexibility of her allegiances. Calling me was just another deposit to the capital she hoarded away in her survivalist savings account.

Ten minutes later, I told the operator I would accept the charges from Mr. Tugboat. Teresa was listening on the extension. Tugboat got to the point immediately.

“You know Princess, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “I know Princess up in, you know, and I know the other one, the fat one.” The idea was to keep the conversation going, even though I did not know what he was talking about. Professional criminals suspect that every stranger and most friends are wearing a wire, that every room is bugged, and all telephones are tapped. Names and places are rarely mentioned, and never with any specificity. This guy and that guy, your guy and his guy, their guy and the other one. Where? There. You're kidding me. No, there. What's-his-name goes there, right? That's the place. No shit, I don't know that. Now you fucking do. Well, I thought he went to the other place. No, this place. Down in . . . Yeah. So that's where. Right. Right.

Entire arias of miscellaneous felonies and mayhem between every silence.

“Your guy,” Tugboat said.

“The fat one?”

“No, the one on the TV.”

“Oh, that one.”

“He worked for Wonderman.”

“I don't know Wonderman.”

“The whatchamacallit. The tongue-tied guy, you know what I mean?”

“Oh, that guy.”

“Wonderman.”

“I didn't know that.”

“In Oklahoma.”

“That makes sense.”

“That Wonder, he was something.”

“I heard that.” I was beginning to see an outline of where this might be heading. Duane Lajoie had done time in Oklahoma. Thirteen months in McAlester for stealing an eighteen-wheeler and turning it over on a van full of German tourists from Düsseldorf. “So Princess worked in Oklahoma.”

“Let's just say your guy worked for that guy.”

“Okay. In Oklahoma.”

“Getting his shit pushed.”

“Wonderman?”

“No, man. Wonder wasn't getting his shit pushed. Wonder was pushing shit. Big-time.”

Tugboat said that dinner was nearly over. He said he worried about his back. He suggested a face-to-face. He thought tomorrow would be an excellent time for a face-to-face. Or else he'd have to make other arrangements.

Tugboat said he was not comfortable at Sunflower.

“Max,” Teresa said. She was flipping through a transcript. “The first time we met Duane. He said something. I'm trying to find it.” She ran her finger down a page, then the next, then the one after, and the ten after that. “Here. Got it.” She read it as if she were a court reporter reading playback testimony to a jury.

TK: Duane, we were talking about you and Bryant, how you met.

DL: He cold-cocked someone with a pool cue. I mean, that's what kind of violent person he is, a stranger, someone he didn't even know. It's like what he did to Wonder.

MC: Who's Wonder?

DL: It's fucking nobody. Some guy. Another guy.

“He got pissed off,” I said. I remember we had not pursued it. It seemed just another violent encounter in the kind of existence where periods of nonviolence were at best interludes.

“There's something else,” Teresa said. “Something that's been floating around in my head. Something I haven't been able to put my finger on. Something Jack said the night we were together. The night he died. Something about Edgar Parlance. And making a movie about him.” She pulled it up from the fog of memory. “He said there was no one to root for. He said you can't root for a dead man. He said . . .” She paused. “He said, ‘What's his backstory?' ” We looked at each other for a moment.

“I think we're about to find that out, Teresa.”

CHAPTER TWO

TUESDAY

I left for Sunflower before dawn. If my absence came up, Teresa would say that I was doing defense business at her request.

She saw me off, bundled in her jogging sweats, stamping her sneakered feet against the dark morning chill. She seemed to be holding something back, then told me as I was getting into the car that J.J. had called from Cap City just after midnight. It's Jamie, he said when she picked up the telephone. She would not tell me what else they had talked about. Things, she said. Just things. I had never thought of J.J. as Jamie before. The childhood name gave him a vulnerability I had not thought he possessed.

I wondered if he knew about Tugboat.

I wondered if she had told him about Tugboat.

I wondered if they were already keeping secrets from each other.

“I am a double-up, triple-up snitch,” Tugboat said. We were talking through the glass partition in the visitors' room. I had signed in as counsel to Albert Curwent. There was a camera scanning the visitors' room, sending its images back to a guard station. The camera was attached to a TV monitor on which I could see the back of my head and Albert Curwent's face. At that moment, he and I were the only two people in the visitors' room. Like all seasoned cons, Albert Curwent shielded his mouth with his hand so that his lips could not be read. “Some guys, they done so much stuff their brains are like scrambled eggs, they can't remember who they ratted out. Not me. I remember every one. When I did it. Where I did it. What happened to the guy I ratted. You know why I move around so much? I keep moving, I keep alive. Staying alive is important to me. Then I get sent here two weeks ago. Already I see three guys in the yard I ratted, and I hear another one's due in next week from Eastham ad seg. This is not a safe environment for me. The day I get off the bus, I'm not even processed yet, some guys are doing a snitch in a day-room. Twenty-eight stab wounds. You got to admire the professionalism. A shank spatters blood, so they bring along a change of clothes. That shows planning. So now I watch out for guys carrying laundry. I been thinking Alaska. What do you think of Alaska?”

“It's cold.”

“Of course it's fucking cold. But I never ratted out an Eskimo I know of. That's what makes it appealing to me. I see pictures of Spring Creek. It's got a fucking totem pole outside. Like you see in the
National Geographic.
How tough can a joint be that's got a totem pole by the front gate?”

“Hawaii's warmer.”

“Are you crazy? You ever seen the size of those fucking Samoans they got out there, man?” Tugboat was huge. I wondered if he could turn around in his cell without brushing the wall. “They all got like eighteen letters in their names. Tuifatasopo, and names like that. The only thing I got going for me in a place like this is I'm fat. I know the moves. Fat Albert can take care of himself. For a while anyway. So I don't want to go no place where I'm like a midget, and that's what I am next to those Samoans, forget Hawaii, forget aloha.”

“Alaska,” I said. “It might be doable.” I was not sure how, but there was no reason to tell him that. He would know it anyway. He was a professional snitch, and he had learned to play his cards very close to the vest. Facing five LWOPPs, he knew that prison was the only home he would ever have. Snitching was just a way to improve his standard of living. As Albert Curwent's lawyer, I could speak to the Department of Corrections about his snitch jacket. The correctional center at Spring Creek with the totem pole at the front gate was probably a reach, but at least it would be on the record that Albert Curwent's attorney had said his client, with reason, felt himself at risk. If Albert Curwent came to an untimely end at the hand of another inmate or inmates, the possibility of civil litigation would be implicit, if far-fetched.

“I thought it might be.” Albert Curwent was ready to put his cards on the table. “You used to put people like Princess away.”

I said I did.

“And now you defend her.”

There it was. “You knew her at McAlester.”

“She worked for us.”

“ ‘Us' is you and Wonder?”

“Me and Wonderman.”

“Wonder have a first name?”

“Earnest. Like in ‘He's an earnest individual.' Not the other way.”

“Earnest Wonder.”

“We called him Wonderman.”

“So you said. He have another name?”

“Christ, man, everyone's got another name.”

“You've been Leo Lutz.”

“Hey, you're not bad.”

“Wally Korn, Korn with a
k.
”

“That goes way back. Haven't used that one since Saginaw. Or maybe it was PNM in Santa Fe.” He paused. “Chick Bailey.”

“I don't know that one.”

“Of course you don't know that one. I just made it up. I'm very good at names. I'm known for it. Guys are getting out, they already got a score set up, I sell them a name. Give me two butts and I come up with Jack Beale. Harry Schott. Easy names. Randy Ford. Easy to get ID. Lost my license, some bastard lifted my wallet on the number nineteen bus, you know, going to Overland and Main. What's your name? Lew Smith. Lewis J. Smith? Or Lewis M. Smith? No. Lew. Just Lew. My old man was half Chinese, he didn't like middle initials, that's a thing with Chinese people. They got this thing about middle initials. Lew. It's a big Chink name. There's seventeen people behind you in line, they're getting pissed off, it's time for lunch, you walk out of the DMV with a temporary that says you're Lew Smith, 1291 Overland. The thing with most of these dumb bastards, they're not smart enough to make it up as they go along. It's like fucking Ping-Pong. They see me, I tell them what to do, they write it down with their pencil, they try to memorize it, these guys can't remember the last time they took a leak, and they say to me, Is it the number eighteen bus or the number nineteen, as if it fucking matters. They already got a score set up, they're going to knock over a jewelry store, and they don't know how to get a fucking driver's license.”

It occurred to me that if the pseudonymous Lew Smith ever did knock over that jewelry store, Albert Curwent would have someone else to rat out. No wonder he felt as if his situation demanded constant movement. “So what was another name Wonderman used?”

As if I did not already know.

“Hey, man, the guy Princess did.”

Earnest Wonder. Edgar Parlance.

Max, who actually knew Edgar Parlance?

Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree.

Best Santa we ever had.

Gar.

“So you and Wonder were in business together.”

Albert Curwent stared at me through the glass. I wondered as I had all the way to Sunflower why he had called me instead of J.J. Prosecutors can offer snitches more in the way of promised favors than can defense attorneys. But that was a question I would hold off asking until our business together was finished.

“I was his associate,” Albert Curwent said carefully. “Associate” was not a con word. It was as if he were already testifying under oath, stressing his importance while claiming to be only a junior partner. “Wonderman was a natural-born business leader. I get to McAlester, he hasn't been there all that long, he's already running the yard and gen pop. Him and me, we hit it off. I have a low tolerance for shit and so does the Wonder. I'm like his bodyguard. That's how smart he was. He believes in harmony between the races, he says, but he don't want no black guy covering his back. We are all bros. He cuts me in. We'd get these little matchboxes full of weed, sell them for fifteen dollars each. He'd give me two, keep five, the rest goes to the screws. The joint is what you call a cash-on-demand economy, you can get anything you want, even early release, but you got to pay for it.”

“He was running the punks too.”

“Him and the hacks. Wonder always said the warden took his cut, and the chaplain. It was just like a big-time whorehouse, like in one of them places in Nevada, Mustang Ranch, like. The hacks free up this old trailer and bring in some videos, buttfucking and shit, and it was like Saturday night at the movies, people were lining up outside, and the girls were there, Wonderman's got them all dressed up pretty, they're wearing blusher and mascara and bandannas and bikini underwear, parading around like they do at Mustang, and there's a screw with a counter by the door, so Wonderman doesn't short him, he's too smart to do that, this is a good deal and he doesn't want to lose it. I get to name all the girls. Nancy Sue and Ava Gardner and Caroline Cooz. And this one big black girl, she used to play arena football or some shit, she must be six-six, six-seven, queer as a pink hairnet, and I call her Queen Kong, and she is the star of the string. Queen Kong could do thirty johns a day, no sweat, she loved it, around the world in ten minutes. She didn't need no candle like the other girls, that bitch was always ready.”

Tell me why you stole that candle from his room.

I had suspected its provenance.

It was not the sort of thing easily discussed with a relative stranger.

What was it Stanley had said? When he spotted the candle I had lifted from Edgar Parlance's room over Claude Applewhite's garage?
Someone was naughty, was someone?

I took the twisted candle from my bag and put it on the counter on my side of the glass partition. “Like this?”

“Is that his?”

“It was in the place where he resided.”

Albert Curwent nodded thoughtfully. “He kept some in his cell.” After a moment, he said, “You knew what it was, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Tell me about Princess.”

“Wonder thought she'd be an addition. A real moneymaker. Small, you know. Red hair. Niggers would love her.”

“What did Duane think of that idea?”

“Let's call her Princess, okay?”

“Right. My mistake. What did Princess think of that idea?”

“Not much.”

I could not imagine that being turned out by Earnest Wonder would have much appeal. “Was she a punk?”

“No more than anyone.”

An answer with layers of meaning.

“And Wonder says to me, ‘Tug,' he always calls me Tug, he says, ‘Tug, I want you to do something grievous to that girl.' ”

The absolute monarchism of the prison yard. King Wonder the First. “What exactly constitutes ‘grievous'?” I said.

Tugboat laughed, a frightening, unpleasant sound. “Wonder ran the sports book. Softball games, basketball games, boxing matches. That shit. The hacks are taking their piece, they let him keep a bat, they look the other way. I was like what you call the batboy. It was one of those aluminum jobs they use now. Wonder used it for protection.”

“Or to do something grievous?”

“It's very good for doing something grievous.”

I could imagine the extent of the grievousness. “In the . . .” I wondered if I could say anal sodomy with a foreign object: to wit, an aluminum softball bat. Not likely in this venue. Just avoid it. “It must have been very convincing.”

Albert Curwent seemed to enjoy my squeamishness. “Very. We took turns, Wonderman and me. Made her chew on a towel so she wouldn't make no noise. She changed her mind.” An aluminum softball bat up your ass might have that desired result, I thought. “She was cute. I named her Princess. She was a good earner. Regular johns. Wonder liked to watch her. She wasn't a natural like Kong. But Wonder made her keep the candle in so she was always ready.”

So Duane Lajoie had a motive.

Princess was cute. Princess was a good earner.

“Albert, one thing,” I said as I prepared to leave Sunflower. “Why'd you come to me and not to Mr. McClure? That's the usual drill.”

“I did. Friday. He wasn't around. I got this bitch who worked for him. She blew me off. She said the case was airtight. She said I was just trying to ease my situation. The dumb cooz. What's she think a snitch does? You were my shot.”

I wondered if Patsy Feiffer had ever been called a cooz. J.J. would have heard Albert Curwent out. But then J.J. wasn't around.

Earnest Wonder had pleaded guilty to selling narcotics in Ada, Oklahoma. Charges of assault with intent to kill were dismissed when the victim of the assault declined to testify against him. The sheriff's department in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, faxed to my office in Capital City the arrest report on Wonder, Earnest, Case Number 3345. The state's attorney faxed a copy of the plea-bargain agreement signed by Wonder, Earnest, Case Number 3345. Wonder, Earnest, Case Number 3345, was represented by Jane Leo, now deceased, of the Pontotoc County Public Defender's Office. Wonder, Earnest, Case Number 3345, was sentenced to two years at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma. The Oklahoma DOC faxed photographs to my Cap City office of Wonder, Earnest, Prisoner Number 83992-1, full face, left profile, right profile. The sentence of Wonder, Earnest, Prisoner Number 83992-1, was commuted to early release after fifteen months and seven days.

Duane Lajoie, Prisoner Number 84411-1, arrived at OSP McAlester three months before Earnest Wonder's early release.