Death Row Breakout (13 page)

The old guard looked through the small window to the Garden Beautiful inside the prison. The escorts were ten seconds away. “C’mon, Eddie. Your bodyguards are here.”

He stood up wearing handcuffs, as the old guard opened the inner steel door and one of the escorts stuck his head in. “Ready, Eddie?” his reply was a nod and a step through the heavy steel gate into the bright warm sunlight. He momentarily closed his eyes and mentally photographed the scene and the sensations.

“Move on, Eddie,” the lead escort said from behind.

He walked head up, chest out, conscious that convicts were watching him from the second and third floor windows of the Adjustment Center – and from the crowd outside the chapel off to the right beyond the fishpond. He remembered some convict stealing a baby alligator from the education building and dropping it in the fishpond. Albert, the homicidal maniac (he wiped out his family) assigned to care for the fishpond went out of his mind. Convicts stayed away from the fishpond for a week. Albert was eyeing everyone suspiciously – and nobody wanted to be Albert’s chief suspect, and probably the ‘gator’s dessert. The memory was funny and Eddie choked back a laugh. The guards would think he was laughing at them.

The Adjustment Center was a three-storey building on the left. The door was at the far end. The Adjustment Center was next to a redwood structure reminiscent of a smallish hot dog stand or coffee shop. It was the Yard Office, with glass walls so that people outside could look into the lieutenant’s office at the rear. The building that preceded this one had a back room notorious for the out-of-sight beatings that frequently occurred there.

As often happened when Eddie returned from a visit, a white convict, about forty years old and elderly for prison, was seated with a book on a window ledge across the asphalt road from the Yard Office. He always looked up, watching Eddie cross the last thirty yards to the Adjustment Center door. They looked at each other and both gave the slight nod of acknowledgement. They reached the Adjustment Center door and an escort pushed the bell.

“Who’s that convict back there?”

“Which one?”

“That white guy who is always reading right there?”

“That’s Jimmy Farr. Yard Office Clerk.”

The AC door opened and Eddie was ushered in. Now he had to strip for a skin search.

The shadows moving across the concrete floor could tell the approximate time of day. When the shadows crossed a crack in the concrete, the food cart was due. When the front gate opened, Eddie began doing four sets of twenty-five push-ups, as the food cart moved from cell to cell. Eddie finished both the push-ups and the meal by the time the cart reached the last cage and came back to the front on the way out. It would go to the cages on the other side, where the militant whites and
chicanos
were locked up next to each other. There were no hostilities between them. Many knew each other from the vast interlocked
barrios
of East Los Angeles where they lived side-by-side. They even wore identical tattoos from the same street gangs: White Fence, Hazard, El Hoyo Mara, Tortilla Flats, Clanton, Temple Street and dozens more. Lately they follow the blacks in the formation of a super-gang that superseded all the others.

He could hear the unique sound of spoons scraping the last scraps of food. Scott called out, “Hey, Eddie, wha’s up, man? Was that youngblood come to see you?”

“Yeah.”

Willy Easter was far down the tier. “Scott,” he said, “ask Eddie if ‘blood had a message for me.”

“Tell him yeah. Everything is all right,” Eddie called.

“I heard him,” said Willy. “I’ll run it by him tomorrow when I get out to shower.”

“Tell him that’s cool,” Eddie called.

“Eddie says that’s cool,” Scott relayed.

“Right on! Right on! Right on!” he said excitedly, imagining his moment a few days away. Someone in an adjacent cell would have heard him snorting and grunting as he shadowboxed with the same slippery grace as when he danced. He’d come through the gate at age twenty, having been caught taking someone’s El Dorado by looking mean and asking for it. Now he remembered and grinned. He sure did put white folks off their feed.

Willy heard the front gate open one cell away. He looked between the bars and saw the young bull (what the old timer convicts called them) coming in with the “clicker” to count the bodies one by one, and distribute an armload of mail.

“Hey, Eddie!” Willy yelled, “you got another
bag
of mail on the way.”

Willy got one letter, from his lawyer, and the other cells got from none to four. Eddie had thirteen letters and everyone thought it was hilarious.

Except Spotlight Edison in the last cell; #17. “I’ll be a dirty motherfucker,” he cursed vehemently. “You got fifty bitches writing you goat mail. Me, I ain’t got shit. If they killed and buried me under this big greasy motherfucker, ain’t nobody would ever ask one damn question about where I was.”

“Quit snivelin’, punk,” Eddie retorted. “You’re with me in the revolution.”

“Revolution! Shit! They got us buried in this fucker. They wanna send us to the gas chamber… especially you, Eddie.”

“Leave me alone. I’m reading my mail.”

“You get anything from Angel?” That was the nickname both had given to the beautiful young black woman who had appeared frequently in the courtroom; always smiling at Eddie.

His answer was a grunt. He was immersed in Angel’s words:

“…had never seen a black man in chains until I saw you stand in front of that white judge, white district attorney, white lawyers, white cops, and almost all white people in the audience. You stood tall and proud as a king, or Jesus. I wanted to stand beside you and face the world as one. Rest assured that you will have support on the next appearance. Power to the People. A…”

He read it twice and put it over his face, savoring her odor. Although he would never admit it to anyone, he had never made love to a woman. There had been a gangbang on a stupid girl who had ventured down the wrong alley in the neighborhood to get drugs, but Eddie’s reaction was disgust rather than arousal. He stopped the others and, in fact, helped the girl straighten her clothes before taking her almost home. He didn’t go to the door for obvious reasons.

From the front came the sound of the cell control box being opened and a door opening, “Exercise, one hour, McGinnis!”

“That be me, boss man. Comin’ on out.”

The cell gate slid shut, followed by the rattle of the control panel and the spraying shower water. Eddie had heard it all.

With the background sound of the shower, he finished going through his mail. When the shower stopped, McGinnis appeared outside the gate. “Hey now, Eddie.”

“Wha’s up, homes?”

“I need a favor. An important one. I need you to call me as a witness. I need to see someone in court.”

“Can you tell me what’s so important?”

“I gotta get to the pay phone in the bullpen and call my old lady. She done got herself knocked up and thinks I’ll hate the baby. She’s planning on getting an abortion. We ain’t married, so they won’t let her visit me. Fuck all that. They be killin’ too many black babies all around the world.”

“Yeah. No bullshit about that.”

Later, the guard rattled the cell gate from the control box in front and called out, “Shower and exercise, Johnson!”

“Rack it. Comin’ out.”

The cell gate slid out on rollers. He stepped onto the tier, wearing shorts, shower thongs and a towel draped around his neck. He swaggered along the cells, giving each some salute or wink. At Willy’s gate he stopped and leaned close to the bars, ignoring the guard who immediately called for him to keep moving.

“Add McGinnis to the list,” he told Easter.

“Ahh, man, I dunno if I can.”

“You can. Just do it. If the lawyer won’t go for it, you tell the judge that it is necessary.”

The guard began banging the bars of the front gate.

He went into the first cell, which had been converted to a shower. He disappeared into the steam rolling out.

*

It was Willy Dupree’s trial day. Eddie was being taken to court with him as a potential witness. All hell had broken loose the day before, when the smuggled pistol had been discovered by a white prisoner on garbage detail. Seeing it as a sure ticket out of prison, the con turned it into the first bull in sight, not knowing that it had been Eddie’s ticket out of jail.

He’d told Willy to look for Paul’s signal. If this was the day they would be breaking out he did not want them to leave him behind in the holding cell.

The security in the move to the courthouse was extraordinarily tight. Scott was coming to court, too. He was Willy’s alibi.

When the motorcade left the prison, a bystander might have thought that the Governor or the President was passing through. Two police cars with lights and sirens blaring led the way followed by three cars filled with armed guards with screened off back seats, each of the three carrying one prisoner. Bringing up the rear was another carload of guards and a roving motorcycle that kept other cars from passing or cutting in. When the convoy reached the courthouse, it was met by a crowd of boisterous protestors, some carrying signs, all loud and pugnacious, cheering loudly as each prisoner was taken from the vehicle and hustled into the building.

It was always tense, with glaring eyes watching the defendants being brought to the courtroom. And the trial hadn’t even begun. This step was for motions to be argued. Both Scott and Willy refused the deputy public defenders, arguing that they were facing the death penalty, and there were lawyers who wanted to represent them pro bono. And Sally Goldberg had Eddie’s case. It was chaos, but it was ultimately tight.

Where Willy Dupree’s trial was being held, there were some cells, a bullpen and three armed bailiffs in addition to the correctional officers. The lead officer had a pistol. The others had ‘gas billies’, little clubs that also blasted forth tear gas. Hit with the gas a few feet away, you were through for the day. It wouldn’t kill you, or permanently blind you, but for the rest of the day you were
hors de combat
. After decades of total control, there was an undercurrent of relaxation. Most of the guards were older men, because this was pretty easy duty. This wasn’t a case of double murder with a hundred and four stab wounds, some right through the eye sockets. Willy Easter had simply gone nuts. He’d been a model prisoner until that morning. Officer Murchison described it very simply; “I was standing at the end of the number one steamtable in the North Dining Room. The inmates were filing along the steamtable, holding out their trays for the inmate servers to put a correct portion into the proper compartment. As I recall, they were having cinnamon rolls and peanut butter.

“I noticed this gentleman as he picked up his tray and spoon at the very start of the serving line…. He was eyeballing me in a hostile manner. I’m kind of accustomed to it. I mean San Quentin isn’t all that cuddly, y’know what I mean?

“Anyway, I glanced at him again. He’d just gotten the roll, the peanut butter was coming, then the dipper of milk. I was at the end, supervising, so some convict wouldn’t reach over and grab a score of rolls.

“He, that guy, he ain’t looking at the rolls. He’s still burning me. I see he’s got the tray in both hands – some do that, but most use just one hand. It looks awkward. The instant he tensed, I broke and ran. He was cutting at my ass. We went down the aisle between the long tables, the old ones where everyone faced in one direction. Then I jumped up on top and ran about two steps before a foot came down on a tray and went out from under me. My feet went up, my ass and back came down, and I slid the length of the table on food trays. I was a mess when I came off the other end. The convicts were laughing, I was running and this guy was in hot pursuit with a big shiv, probably an old file that had been honed or ground down to a point.

“I got by him and ran flat out into the kitchen. He chased me around the big kettles, everybody got out of the way, until Lieutenant Seemen and Sergeant Snellgrove arrived and teargassed him.

“No, I have no idea why he picked me out. I’d seen him around the prison, but I can’t recall any previous conversation or confrontation with him…”

The spectator benches were empty as a precaution against Eddie’s appearance. The judge did not want Willy’s trial to turn into what Eddie’s was becoming – a trial in front of the world’s media.

In the parking lot, a tall, slender black youth exited a yellow rental van and, carrying a heavily-laden paper shopping bag, entered the courthouse from the side entrance. There would be metal detectors at all courthouses after this day. The corridor was empty save for lawyers and other interested parties huddled with cigarettes outside one of the four courtroom doors. That wasn’t the trial in which he was interested.

He looked through the small observation window in the next door and saw a correctional officer coming up the aisle toward the double entrance doors. He stepped aside. The door was pushed open and the prison guard walked past him. The black youth entered as the officer on the witness stand was being told that he was finished testifying for the morning.

The Judge said, “However you are still under subpoena and oath and should remain available to the process until the court dismisses you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. I stick around in case somebody wants me.”

“Precisely…” the Judge looked up over the courtroom. “This trial is in recess until one-thirty this afternoon.” He punctuated the pronouncement with the gavel.

The young black man was Eddie’s brother, Boo. He stepped into the aisle and extracted a short-barreled Israeli Uzi from the bag.

“All right, gentlemen, I am taking over.” He swept the uzi over the Bailiff standing inside the courtroom door. “Come up to the front where I can watch you.”

The Bailiff was a retired serviceman who augmented his pension with the income from this courtroom job. He wanted no trouble with this angry young black with the automatic rifle. The Bailiff walked down the aisle, hands above his head, and pushed through the swinging rail to the front. The other Bailiff was frozen beside the door into the bullpen, where the inmates were. They were pounding on the door while yelling: “Rack it, man! Open this fucker! C’mon, brother! Let us out.”