Prudence Couldn't Swim (27 page)

M
y cellmate was an eighteen-year-old psycho who called himself Bullet. He never slept, just paced up and down telling stories about stealing cars and cooking methamphetamine. Bullet weighed about a hundred pounds. I tried talking to him, reminding him that he wasn't the sole inhabitant of that little concrete and steel box.

He kept speed rapping. After about four hours I concluded only one thing would shut him up—a good beating. I contemplated pulling him off his top bunk in the middle of the night and kicking his head a few times. With my luck I'd probably crack his skull and end up with a murder charge. Just as I started cramming toilet paper into my ears to block out his inane monolog, they called me for an attorney visit.

Tsiropoulos wasn't exactly shining. And he reeked of cheap wine. At least he bought me an Almond Joy and a soda from the visiting room vending machines but I wasn't sure he was ready for all the news I had to pour out.

I had to admit that it all sounded far-fetched, Prudence and Carter working together to squeeze money out of Jeffcoat and Newman. But there was another piece to the puzzle, Washkowski. He was no innocent lamb. Plus, if he was hooked on crank, he wouldn't survive much pressure.

Tsiropoulos just shook his head when I told him Carter's story. I reminded him that truth was always stranger than fiction.

“Especially when it comes from you and Red Eye,” he added. He said he'd try to talk to Jeffcoat's lawyer and see if the Margolis stuff would get us any leverage. I told him to wait until the envelope I'd mailed him arrived.

“Then you'll have some real ammunition,” I promised.

“Right now I'm just firing blanks and Carter'll probably get bail in the next twenty-four hours,” Tsiropoulos added. I freaked. Once he got out, Carter would cover his tracks and make sure I never set foot outside an electrified fence again.

The three of us had our bail hearings the next day. They released Carter. No charges. He wasn't even on suspension.

They set Mandisa's bond at $5,000. They'd only charged her with unlawful possession of a weapon. If I knew her, she had all her gun registration papers in order. At least she'd be free. I was sailing in a different ship.

My bail was $1.5 million. Newspaper reports alleged I was under investigation for the murder of my wife. The prosecutor called me a “lifelong criminal and definite flight risk”; probably right on both counts. I didn't see myself waiting around to be a target for whatever Carter and the DA had in mind with Jeffcoat as financial backer. I couldn't think of a way to ensnare Carter in his own web.

The only thing that went my way was that when I got back from the bail hearing I had a new cellmate—Elmer Jones. They called him L'Amour since he'd claimed to have read all two hundred plus of Louis L'Amour's shitkicker novels. Elmer's reading days were behind him for the most part. Even with the strongest glasses the jail commissary offered, he could barely make out the print. After about five minutes of squinting he'd drop off to sleep. The Rip Van Winkle approach to doing time. It suited me perfectly.

After the bail setback I was, as they say, “hard-timing”—worrying myself sick. I couldn't take my mind off the horrendous possibilities that lie before me. Hours would pass and I'd do nothing but lie on my bunk and stare at the graffiti scratched into the cement ceiling. “Fatal, July 1998”; “Rabbit, June ‘87”; “Orange Julius, Xmas ‘83.” Everyone had a nickname they'd left to posterity. Would my only legacy be what I scrawled onto a prison ceiling?

The following morning I dragged myself to the phone to call Tsiropoulos. We had an arrangement. If he had any news, he'd accept my call. If not, he'd refuse the chance to spend $3.89 to say “hello” and offer meaningful words of consolation. Not even the Hyatt Regency could top jailhouse rates for a local call.

He had some news. He said he'd gotten the envelope and was going to take it to a meeting with Jeffcoat's lawyer.

“Can't say more on the phone,” he said. “I'll be by as soon as I find out something.”

After the phone call I went back to hard-timing. I must have walked five miles just pacing up and down in my cell while L'Amour snored himself into oblivion. There was no way I was going to survive another fifteen years of this. No way at all. When you've been out for a while, you start to think that because you handled it once, you could handle it again. But if they got me this time, it would be for keeps. I'd be doing all day as they like to call a life sentence in these hellholes. And I didn't have enough money to make bail and sneak off to Brazil.

Just as I finally got to sleep the sirens started screeching. Something was jumping off somewhere. A cell fight, a suicide. Not much else can happen in the middle of the night. By morning, we were on lockdown and the rumors were flying around the pod about what had happened. I didn't pay any attention. A few minutes after I finished gobbling up the hard-boiled egg and stone cold oatmeal breakfast, the guard came and told me I had an attorney visit. We were on lockdown, so he put me in waist chains and leg irons and I shuffled off to learn my fate.

S
ince it was lockdown we had to visit through glass. No Almond Joys this time around. They didn't even take off the shackles. I was hoping for a big smile on Tsiropoulos's face when he saw me. No such luck. He looked hung-over, more like he'd come to tell someone their mother died than celebrate the DA dropping all the charges.

One of my Jap flaps came off as I scooted onto the round iron stool that passed for a chair. I kicked it out of the way.

“Get those cuffs and leg irons off my client,” Tsiropoulos told the guard.

“We're on lockdown, counselor. That's the rules.” The guard trundled away.

Tsiropoulos put a pile of papers on the counter in front of him. “You want the good news or the bad news?” he asked.

“Just shoot.”

He went on one of those long, closing-argument kinds of speeches where he told me how once he showed Jeffcoat and his lawyer the list, that new versions of the truth started to emerge and Jeffcoat's loyalty to his teammates started to fade fast.

The reworked official story portrayed Carter as a “rogue cop” who got carried away when he realized a clever African girl had outsmarted him so that instead of making money off her seductive powers and getting free sex to boot, he might end up owing her for the rest of their life.

“He was just supposed to scare her,” Tsiropoulos said, “but he got carried away.”

Somewhere along the path, Washkowski had also joined in the fun, either driving the getaway car when Carter pushed Prudence into the
pool or throwing the brick through my window. None of this was really a surprise for me. I told Tsiropoulos to cut to the chase.

“You're not walking on this one, Cal,” he said. “I think I can get you out of the murder rap. Hopefully, that's going to be Carter's beef. Jeffcoat has agreed to give a statement to the police and testify in exchange for immunity on all counts. If the DA will agree and we can get Washkowski to roll, it's a done deal.”

“So Jeffcoat will just walk away, apologize to the old lady and go back to the fourteenth floor?”

Tsiropoulos nodded. Then he told me I was looking at two to five years for the obstructing. “I don't think I can do better than two,” he said.

I started thinking about the sound of that cell door sliding open every morning as I got ready for “another day in paradise.” I could make two years, seven hundred and thirty morning cell door openings. Five was a push. For the first time in my life I was counting on a millionaire and a snitch cop to save me.

Three months later I was on the bus to Old Folsom, the place Johnny Cash made famous. Back in the day it used to be a killing field but it had mellowed out. The young bangers and haters who loved to rock and roll ended up at Pelican Bay, High Desert, or New Folsom. Old Folsom was a place where I could just do my time reading a few books, slapping down some dominoes and walking the track.

A few weeks later, Carter's trial hit the headlines with Jeffcoat as the star witness. Carter's counterpoint, trying to cast Jeffcoat as the “quarterback” of the operation failed when Washkowski came forward and recalled the events that day when he drove the getaway car from my house. As they pulled away, Carter supposedly informed Washkowski that “African bitch” wouldn't be bothering them anymore. Washkowski told the jury he was “shocked,” that he never expected Carter would seriously hurt Prudence, let alone kill her. The jury bought it. Cops are just like anybody else except an old school convict—they'll do whatever they have to do to save their ass.

Jeffcoat came on the news the night he testified with his solemn-faced
wife at his side. He told a press conference how he'd made a mistake of marital infidelity for which he would be “eternally regretful” to his family but that he never agreed to violence. He didn't take questions.

The jury found Carter guilty of second-degree murder and he got fifteen to life. With some luck he'd be eligible for parole after thirteen years. Luck wasn't likely to be on his side. Cops don't survive that long in prison. Convicts have long memories when it comes to remembering who kicked their ass, stole property from their home, bullied them in front of their families and friends. Carter had plenty of those skeletons in his closet. Besides with politics being what they are in California prisons, his little sojourn with an African woman would gain him the title of “race traitor” among the white gangs and quite a few of the guards. For once it seemed the impossible had happened: Karma had visited the justice system.

In the end I decided two years in the state pen was a small price to get justice for Prudence. To pay Tsiropoulos and erase bad memories, not long after Carter's trial I sold my house. When I got out, I'd buy an apartment in a neighborhood where I'd fit in a little better. I wasn't quite sure where that would be. Maybe Red Eye would get us a place once he finished doing a year in some state ranch for violating his parole.

Selling the house also gave me a little extra money to fund a trip for Mandisa to Zimbabwe. I gave her $15,000 to hand over to the Mukombachoto family and told her to give them all the spectacular details about Prudence's meteoric career in the world of California architecture before she died in that tragic collision in her new BMW. Some myths deserve to be perpetuated, like the myth of my wife, Tarisai Prudence Mukombachoto, the African Princess.

J
ames Kilgore was a 1960s political activist in California, who ultimately became involved with the Symbionese Liberation Army. In 1975, he fled a Federal explosives charge and remained a fugitive for twenty-seven years. During that time, he rejected the politics of small-group violence and built a life as an educator, researcher, activist, parent, and husband in Southern Africa. Using the pseudonym of John Pape, he earned a PhD, authored a number of academic articles and educational materials, and coedited the acclaimed 2002 anthology
Crisis of Service Delivery in South Africa
(Cape Town: HSRC; London: Zed Books). Authorities arrested Kilgore in November 2002 and extradited him to California where he served six and a half years in state and Federal prison. While incarcerated, he worked as a teacher's assistant and also completed drafts of several novels and a screenplay. Umuzi Publishers (Cape Town) released his first work,
We Are All Zimbabweans Now,
in June 2009. It was republished by Ohio University Press in 2011. He is also the author of the 2011 novel
Freedom Never Rests: A Novel of Democracy in South Africa
(Johannesburg: Jacana Media).

He currently lives with his family in Illinois where he is a Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois.

PM Press was founded at the end of 2007 by a small collection of folks with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. PM Press co-conspirators have published and distributed hundreds of books, pamphlets, CDs, and DVDs. Members of PM have founded enduring book fairs, spearheaded victorious tenant organizing campaigns, and worked closely with bookstores, academic conferences, and even rock bands to deliver political and challenging ideas to all walks of life. We're old enough to know what we're doing and young enough to know what's at stake.