Authors: James Ellroy
And two weeks away from the release date he'd eaten smoke, fire and bullshit to earn, he'd fucked it up and probably earned himself a first-degree assault charge and
at least
another ninety days of county time.
And Vandy hadn't written to him or visited him in a month.
“On your feet, Blue. Wristband count.”
Rice jerked his head in the direction of the words. “I won't let you medicate me,” he said. “I'll fight you and the whole L.A. County Sheriff's Department before I let you zone me out on that Prolixin shit.”
“Nobody wants to medicate you, Blue,” the voice said. “A few of L.A. County's finest might wanta shake your hand, but that's about it. Besides, I can
sell
that goose juice on the street, make a few bucks
and
serve law and order by keeping the Negro element sedated. Let's try this again: wristband count. Walk over to the bars, stick your right wrist out to me, tell me your name and booking number.”
Rice got up, walked to the front of the cell and stuck his right arm through the bars. The owner of the voice come into focus on the catwalk, a pudgy deputy with thin gray hair blown out in a razor cut. His name tag read:
G. Meyers.
“Rice, Duane Richard, 19842040. When do I get arraigned on the new charge?”
Deputy G. Meyers laughed. “What new charge? That scumbag you wasted was in for assault on a police officer with a half dozen priors, and you carried three L.A. County firemen to safety during the Agoura fire. Are you fucking serious? The watch commander read your record, then scumbag's, and made scumbag a deal: he presses charges on you, then the county presses charges on him for grabbing your shlong. Not wanting a fruit jacket, he agreed. He gets to spend the rest of his sentence in the hospital ward, and you get to serve as blue trusty here in the Rubber Ramada, where hopefully you will not get the urge to whip any more ass. Where did you learn that kung fu shit?”
Rice kicked the news around in his head, sizing up the man who'd delivered it. Friendly and harmless, he decided; probably close to retirement, with no good guys/bad guys left in him. “Soledad,” he said. “There was a Jap corrections officer who taught classes. He gave us a lot of spiritual stuff along with it, but nobody listened. The warden finally got wise to the fact that he was teaching violent junior criminals to be better violent junior criminals, and stopped it. What's a ding trusty do?”
Meyers took a key from his Sam Browne belt and unlocked the cell. “Come on, we'll go down to my office. I've got a bottle. We'll belt a few and I'll tell you about the job.”
“I don't drink.”
“Yeah? What the fuck kind of criminal are you?”
“The smart kind. You booze on duty?”
Meyers laughed and tapped his badge. “Turned my papers in yesterday. Twenty years and nine days on the job, iron-clad civil service pension. I'm only sticking around until they rotate in a new man to fill my spot. Ten days from now I am adios, motherfucker, so till then I'm playing catch-up.”
As Gordon Meyers explained it, the job was simple. Sleep all day while the dings were dinged out on their “medication,” eat leftovers from the officers' dining room, have free run of his collection of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
, be cool with the daywatch jailer. At night, his duties began: feed the dings their one meal per day, move them out of their cells one at a time and mop the floors, get them to the showers once a week.
The most important thing was to keep them reasonably quiet at night, Meyers emphasized. He would be using his on-duty time to read the classified ads and write out job applications, and he did not want the dings dinging his concentration. Talk softly to them if they started to scream, and if that failed, scream back and make them scared of you. If worse came to worse, give them a spritz of the fire hose. And any ding who smeared shit on his cell walls got five whacks in the ass with the lead-filled “ding-donger” Meyers carried. Rice promised to do a good job, and decided to wait five days before manipulating the fat-mouthed cop for favors.
The job
was
simple.
Rice slept six hours a day, ate the high-quality institutional fare the jailers ate, and did a minimum of one thousand pushups daily. At night, he would bring the dings their chow, G.I. their cells and stroll the catwalk exchanging words with them through the bars. He found that if he kept up a continuous line of cell-to-cell communication, the dings screamed less and he thought of Vandy less. After a few days he got to know some of the guys and tailored his spiels to fit their individual boogeymen.
A-14 was a black guy popped for getting dogs out of the Lincoln Heights Shelter and cooking them up for Rastafarian feasts. The bulls had shaved off his dreadlocks before they threw him in the tank, and he was afraid that demons could enter his brain through his bald head. Rice told him that dreadlocks were “out,” and brought him a copy of
Ebony
that featured ads for various Afro wigs. He pointed out that the Reverend Jesse Jackson was sporting a modified Afro and getting a lot of pussy. The man nodded along, grabbed the magazine and from then on would yell “Afro wig!” when Rice strolled by his cell.
C-11 was an old man who wanted to get off the streets and back to Camarillo. Rice falsely reported him as a shit-smearer for three nights running, and gave him three fake beatings, thumping the ding-donger into the mattress and screaming himself. On the third night, Meyers got tired of the noise and turned the old man over to the head jailer of the hospital ward, who said the geezer was Camarillo quail for sure.
The tattooed man in C-3 was the hardest to deal with, because the white trash he grew up with in Hawaiian Gardens all had tattoos, and Rice early on figured tattooing as the mark of the world's ultimate losers. C-3, a youth awaiting a conser-vatorship hearing, had his entire torso adorned with snarling jungle cats, and was trying to tattoo his arms with a piece of mattress spring and the ink off newspapers soaked in toilet water. He had managed to gouge the first two letters of “Mom” when Rice caught him and took his spring away. He started bawling then, and Rice screamed at him to quit marking himself like a lowlife sleazebag. Finally the young man quieted down. Every time he walked by the cell, Rice would roust him for tattooing tools. After a few times, the youth snapped into a frisking position when he heard him coming.
Around midnight, when the dings began falling asleep, Rice joined Gordon Meyers in his office and listened to
his
dinged-out ramblings. Biting his cheeks to keep from laughing, Rice nodded along as Meyers told him of the crime scams he'd dreamed up in his sixteen years working the tank.
A couple were almost smart, like a plan to capitalize on his locksmith expertiseâgetting a job as a bank guard and pilfering safe-deposit box valuables to local beat cops who frequented the bank, staying above suspicion by not leaving the bank and letting the beat cops do the fencing; but most were Twilight Zone material: prostitution rings of women prisoners bused around to construction sights, where they would dispense blowjobs to horny workers in exchange for sentence reductions; marijuana farms staffed by inmate “harvesters,” who would cultivate tons of weed and load it into the sheriffs helicopters that would drop it off into the backyards of high-ranking police “pushers”; porno films featuring male and female inmates, directed by Meyers himself, to be screened on the exclusive “all-cop” cable network he planned to set up.
Meyers rambled on for three nights. Rice moved his plan up a day and started telling him about Vandy, about how she hadn't written to him or visited him in weeks. Meyers sympathized, and mentioned that he was the one who made sure his photo of her wasn't destroyed when the bulls choked him out. After thanking him for that, Rice made his pitch: Could he use the phone to make calls to get a line on her? Meyers said no and told him to write her name, date of birth, physical description and last known address on a piece of paper. Rice did it, then sat there gouging his fingernails into his palms to keep from hitting the dinged-out deputy.
“I'll handle it,” Gordon Meyers said. “I've got clout.”
Over the next forty-eight hours Rice concentrated on
not
clouting the dings or the inanimate objects in the tank. He upped his push-up count to two thousand a day; he laid a barrage of brownnosing on the daywatch jailer, hoping for at least a phone call to Louie Calderon, who could probably be persuaded to check around for Vandy. He stayed away from Gordon Meyers, busying himself with long stints of pacing the catwalks. And then, just after midnight when the ding noise subsided, Meyers' voice came over the tank's P.A. system: “Duane Rice, roll it to the office. Your attorney is here.”
Rice walked into the office, figuring Meyers was fried and wanted to bullshit. And there
she
was, dressed in pink cords and a kelly green sweater, an outfit he'd told her never to wear. “Told you I had clout,” Meyers said as he closed the door on them.
Rice watched Vandy put her hands on her hips and pivot to face him, a seduction pose he'd devised for her lounge act. He was starting toward her when he caught his first glimpse of her face. His world crashed when he saw the hollows in her cheeks and the blue-black circles under her eyes. Strung out. He grabbed her and held her until she said, “Stop, Duane, that hurts.” Then he put his hands on her shoulders, pushed her out to arm's length and whispered, “Why, babe? We had a good deal going.”
Vandy twisted free of his grasp. “These cops came by the condo and told me you were really sick, so I came. Then your friend tells me you're
not
really sick, you just wanted to see me. That's not fair, Duane. I was going to taper off and be totally clean by the time you got out. It's not fair, so don't be mad at me.”
Rice stared at the wall clock to avoid Vandy's coke-stressed face. “Where have you been? Why haven't you been to see me?”
Vandy took her purse off Meyers' desk and dug through it for cigarettes and a lighter. Rice watched her hands tremble as she lit up. Exhaling a lungful of smoke, she said, “I didn't come to see you at camp because it was too depressing, and you know I hate to write.”
Rice caught
his
hands shaking and jammed them into his pants pockets. “Yeah, but what have you been
doing
, besides sticking shit up your nose?”
Vandy cocked one hip in his direction, another move he'd taught her. “Making friends. Cultivating the right people, like you told me I should do. Hanging out.”
“Friends? You mean
men
?”
Vandy flushed, then said, “Just friends. People. What about
your
friends? That guy Gordon is looney tunes. When he brought me up from the parking lot, he told me he was going to organize this hit squad of Doberman pinschers. What kind of friends have
you
been making?”
Rice felt his anger ease; the fire in Vandy's eyes was hope. “Gordon's not a bad guy, he's just been hanging around wackos too long. Listen, are you okay on bread? Have you got any of the money I gave you left?”
“I'm okay.”
Vandy lowered her eyes; Rice saw the fire die. “You holding out on me, babe? Ten K wouldn't have lasted you this long if you were on a coke run. You feel like telling me about these frâ”
Vandy threw her purse at the wall and shrieked, “Don't be so jealous of me! You told me I should get in with people in the Industry, and that's what I've been doing! I hate you when you're this way!”
Rice reached out for her wrist, but she batted his hand and moved backward until she bumped the wall and there was no place to go except forward into his arms. With her elbows pressed into herself, she let him embrace her and stroke her hair. “Easy, babe,” he cooed, “easy. I'll be out in a few days, and I'll get working on your videos again. I'll make it happen.
We'll
make it happen.”
Wanting to see Vandy's face, Rice dropped his arms and stepped back. When she brought her eyes up to him, he saw that she looked like the old Anne Atwater Vanderlinden, not the woman he molded and loved. “How, Duane?” she said. “You can't steal cars anymore. Another job at Midas Muffler?”
Rice let the ugly words hang there between them. Vandy walked past him and picked her purse up off the floor, then turned around and said, “This whole thing wasn't fair. I've been making friends who can help me, and I deserve to do a little blow if I want to. Your control trip is really uptight. Uptight people don't make it in the Industry.”
There was a rapping at the door, and Meyers poked his head in and said, “I hate to break this up, but the watch commander is walking, and I don't think he'll buy Vandy here as an attorney.”
Rice nodded, then walked to Vandy and tilted her chin up so that their eyes locked. “Go back to the pad, babe. Try to stay clean, and I'll see you on the thirtieth.” He bent over and kissed the part in her hair. Vandy stood still and mute with her eyes closed. “And don't ever underestimate me,” Rice said.
Meyers was waiting for him on the catwalk, tapping a billy club against his leg. “Listen. A-8 is acting up. He shit on his mattress and smeared food on the walls. You go give him a few whacks with the ding-donger while I escort your girl downstairs. When you get him pacified, come back to the office and we'll bat the breeze.”
Rice grabbed the billy club and strode down the catwalk, pushing images of Vandy's decay out of his mind by concentrating on the jumble of ding noises, wishing the babbles and shouts would engulf him to the point where all his senses were numbed. Slapping the ding-donger harder and harder into his palm, he turned into the open front of A-8, wondering why the light was off. He was about to call out for Meyers to hit the electricity when the door slid shut behind him.
The darkness deepened, and the ding noise grew still, then fired up again. Rice yelled, “Unlock A-8, Gordon, goddammit!” then squinted around the cell. As his eyes became accustomed to the dark, he saw that it was empty. He smashed the billy club into the bars full force; once, twice, three times, hoping to scare the dings into temporary quiet. The crash of metal on metal assailed him, and the force of the blows sent shock waves through his entire body. A hush came over the tank, followed by Meyers' mocking laugh and the words “Told you I had clout.”