Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  My glib tongue talked Tuffy (and Bill) into the ways of banditry. The three of us—Tuffy, Bill and myself—formed the nucleus of a bandit gang, a gang for which I accept full responsibility, since I dreamed it angrily into existence. I brought its principals together; I stole most of its getaway cars; I procured its guns; I encouraged its operations.

  Our efforts were not crowned with conspicuous economic success. Almost from the beginning we ran into more trouble than money, even though clicking perfectly as a team.

  For weeks we tailed, studied and timed the manager of a large chain store who, every Saturday night, took a week’s receipts from the store and deposited them in a bank chute. He invariably followed a fixed routine—until the night we were ready to rob him. This inconsiderate and unsuspecting change of routine, plus one large, mean dog, which obstinately refused to be intimidated by an impressive display of fire power, hopelessly frustrated our robbery attempt. Instead of making off with a sack containing several thousand dollars, we were left holding the sack. We wound up robbing liquor stores and gas stations that night, whatever came along. And for the money we got out of it, our robbing could just as well have been for practice.

  Another time, after a thorough study of the place, we had a liquor store, which did a huge volume of business, all set up for the taking. Arriving on the scene, we observed what appeared to be a customer in the store and decided to give him a chance to leave. We drove around the block. When we returned the customer was gone. I parked in front of the place, cradling a shotgun. Tuffy and Bill walked in and, displaying revolvers, got right down to business. The proprietor laughed in their faces and invited them to rob away to their hearts’ content. The customer, it developed, had been a collector; he had driven off with a whole week’s receipts! And brainy boys that we were, we’d made sure he got safely away.

  On still another occasion, Tuffy and Bill took a place where I was known, thus excluding me from direct participation. Most of the money wasn’t kept in the cash register but was hidden near it. I knew approximately where and, after my briefing, so did Tuffy and Bill when they walked in. But just as they started to rob this particular place there was one of those spectacular automobile accidents out front. Thus they were obliged to leave hastily—and without the several hundred dollars we knew to be in the “plant.” All they got was about eighty dollars from the cash register.

  When you encounter a dozen or so such incidents in a row you begin to feel frustrated. “Hell,” you comment drily, “it’s getting so an honest bandit hasn’t got a chance any more.”

  So you cowboy it; you rob everything and anything in the way of business establishments that you happen to find open for business. You try to make up in quantity what’s lacking in quality. You knock over six, eight, ten or twelve places in a night. You get as little as nothing, as much as a hundred or so dollars. You’re angry, and not very proud of yourself—your ego is taking a beating—and so you’re just a whole lot harder to handle if the bulls happen to get in your way. And you can be sure the bulls will get in your way, not once or twice, not every now and then, but regularly until they nail you.

  The serious heat, for us, was generated a few days after the new year began. At a few minutes past midnight. Tuffy, Bill and I were seated in a stolen Buick sedan, a new, torpedo-bodied one. We were parked in the Flintridge Hills, off the road. We were waiting, impatiently now, for Tim and Whitey. I had loaned them my Ford on the condition that they meet us here at exactly 11:30. The Buick we occupied was hot, very hot. We had used it in a series of robberies; then the bulls had been in uncomfortably close pursuit and had gotten a good look at it. Now, here we were sitting in it, fuming at Tim and Whitey.

  Impatiently, I lit another cigarette. “What the hell happened to those two clowns?” I demanded.

  As if in reply to my question, the twin beams of a car’s headlights cut a path through the darkness and struck the Buick—and us.

  “This must be them now,” Bill said.

  Then a third blaze of white light burned into the interior of the Buick. A spotlight, with a beam as searching as an angry conscience.

  Blinded, Tuffy growled, “What’s the matter with those fools?”

  I blinked, shielded my eyes and shouted, “Turn that damned thing off!”

  The spotlight died. We heard a door open. We saw, dimly, a shape coming toward us. A uniformed shape! John Law again!

  “Bulls!” I whispered, warningly.

  The radio-car officer was tall. He bent down to look in at us. The head I saw a few inches from my face was large, with a bulging forehead and a receding hairline. There was a craggy strength in the face, and more curiosity than suspicion in the alert eyes.

  “What are you fellows doing up here at this time of night?” the cop asked.

  “Waiting,” I replied, noting that the cop’s brother officer had remained in the police car.

  “Yes?”

  I drew in a breath, said, “It’s like this,” and then launched on a long-winded, plausible account of how we happened to be parked here in the hills at midnight. I concluded, “The girls said they’d be right back but that’s been almost an hour ago and I don’t think they’re coming. I guess we may as well go on home to bed. What do you think?”

  “I think I’d better take a look at your driver’s license,” the cop said.

  “Sure thing,” I replied smilingly. I promptly reached for my wallet, felt it and then contrived an expression of puzzled annoyance. “What the heck happened to my wallet?” I thought about this for a moment. I frowningly pondered the question. “Maybe I put it in the glove compartment.”

  I reached across Bill and punched open the glove compartment and looked studiously at the barrel of my gun, which, from where he stood, the cop couldn’t see. I was hoping Tuffy and Bill would take the hint. “Not in there.” I glanced at my two companions. “Either one of you two guys know what happened to it?” They both shook their heads. “Looks like I lost the darned thing,” I told the cop. “However,” I added innocently, “if all you want is my name and address I can give that to you. I live right down there on Linda Vista, not far from the school.”

  “Is this your car?”

  Cops can ask the damnedest questions!

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about buying the equity in it.” I proceeded to narrate the facts surrounding my prospective purchase.

  “Where’s the registration slip?” the cop then wanted to know. He held a flashlight in his hand and played its beam up and down the steering column.

  “Isn’t it right here?” I said, looking at the column.

  “Just a minute,” the cop said, and then he stepped over to the police car.

  “We better take ‘em,” I whispered. Tuffy and Bill nodded.

  “Say,” I called out, “is there any law against people parking up here?”

  “What’s that?”

  I repeated the question. I received no direct answer. The cop who had been doing the questioning came to the driver’s side, the other cop went around to the passenger side. We were told to get out of the car, to keep our hands in sight.

  The cops began to search us. Tuffy and Bill were ready, but they hesitated because I was gunless and on the wrong side of the car. So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I just walked away from the cop who was searching me, around the front of the Buick to the other side.

  “Hey,” said the cop, surprised, “come back here!”

  “No,” I said, “you come around here.”

  And that’s what the cop did, walking into the trap.

  Tuffy and Bill immediately stepped back, whipped out their guns. “All right, coppers,” Bill said, “up with your hands!”

  Both cops hesitated. One went so far as to make a grab for his holstered gun. I shouted a warning and sprang forward, hearing Tuffy say, very quietly, “Don’t do it, copper! Don’t do it!” Then I was beside the cops; I snatched their guns and audibly cocked them. “Now ge
t ’em up—high!” I barked. “And no more heroics!” The cops complied; they had no alternative.

  I told Tuffy and Bill, “I’ll take the radio car. You two guys follow in the Buick.”

  Tuffy waved his gun at the two cops. “What about them?”

  I grinned. “They can walk. The exercise’ll do ’em good.”

  The motor of the radio car was running. I climbed in behind the wheel, threw the two guns on the seat beside me, and backed out onto the road. Tuffy and Bill pulled out behind me, Bill driving. With a whine of motors, we sped off.

  We abandoned the Buick in Roscoe, first wiping it clean of fingerprints. While doing this, a man came running from a house nearby. “What’s going on out here?” this individual demanded officiously.

  Bill and I kept wiping. Tuffy displayed a gun and said, “I really don’t think that’s any of your business. So get back in that house where it’s nice and warm.” He added, “And safe.”

  We drove off. The police radio kept barking out an urgent summons for this particular radio car to call in. Tuffy, who was occupying the passenger side of the front seat, looked at me quizzically. I nodded and he grinned. First fiddling with buttons and knobs, Tuffy took the microphone in hand and spoke ever so gently into it. Receiving a reply, he beamed triumphantly. Whereupon he proceeded to unburden himself, unpoetically but feelingly, on the subject of this radio car in particular and all radio cars in general. It was a stirring little speech and Bill and I both roundly applauded when he signed off. It also moved the radio broadcaster, but in a different direction. Coded signals began to pour forth.

  We were speeding along a main drag out in San Fernando Valley when we ran into thick fog. The fog slowed us down to a crawl. We crept along for perhaps a mile when suddenly the fog cleared—and there were the cops! Luckily, we spotted them first, parked at the curb not five feet from us. Bill had been cradling the riot gun—a twelve-gauge shotgun—we had found in the radio car. He instantly shoved its long menacing snout out the window, right into the astonished faces of the two uniformed bulls seated in the parked police car. With magical speed, Tuffy also produced a pistol in each fist, barrels pointed at the cops. “Sit still!” Bill shouted. They did. They had no choice.

  We got out of there fast, disappearing back into the fog. “I make a motion that we dump this crate,” I said, turning off onto a side street. “It’s getting too hot to handle.” Tuffy and Bill agreed. The coded signals kept coming.

  We were closest to Hollywood and Bill’s, so I drove to his place first, keeping to the side streets as much as possible. On the way I explained, “We’ll drop you off first, Bill, and then make a run for my place. That way we’ll save a trip, and I can dump this clunker as soon as we can get hold of my car.”

  “You don’t think you’re apt to run into any more cops? I wouldn’t want to be left out of the fun.”

  This, I knew, was Bill’s way of assuring us that if we expected any more trouble he felt he should share it with us.

  I shook my head and laughed. “No, I think the evening’s fun is all over. Now it’s just a matter of abandoning this heap, finding Tim and Whitey and then going on home to bed.”

  After letting Bill off, Tuffy and I proceeded without incident to my Glendale apartment.

  I found the apartment dark and Judy gone. She’d left no note and there was no sign of Whitey, Tim or my Ford. That was strange. It obliged me to admit the possibility that somehow Judy had become involved, and I became coldly angry. I cursed softly.If anything had happened to Judy . . .

  “Tuff,” I said, “I’ve got to go back where we came from. I intend to find Judy and that’s the first place I know to look.”

  Tuffy understood. “Let’s go,” he said.

  We went—on two wheels. We flew like homing pigeons to the exact spot where we had taken this car from the cops, fully expecting trouble, ready for it. But the hills were dark, deserted. No cops; no Judy; no Whitey and Tim. I raced next to my parents’ house, waking my mother. Judy, I was told, hadn’t been there. I put through half a dozen phone calls at an all-night drugstore. Still no trace of Judy. I even phoned the Glendale, Pasadena and Los Angeles police departments, gave her maiden name and asked if she had been arrested on a drunk charge. I said I had heard she had, that I was a friend and that I wanted to bail her out if she had been jailed. In each instance I was told, “Our records don’t show anyone by that name having been arrested.” The search continued. My anxiety drove me. I was ready to storm the gates of Hell if need be to get my Judy back.

  We ran out of places to look. Then we ran out of cigarettes. On sighting a cocktail lounge, I jerked the police car in to the curb. We were still getting the code over the radio, and I was getting fed up listening to it.

  “Wait in the car,” I told Tuffy. “I’m going to run in here and get us some cigarettes.” I exited from the cocktail lounge not only with the cigarettes but with the contents of two cash registers. Speeding away from the scene, I told Tuffy, “That’ll give ’em something to 23-Z about,” referring to the coded broadcasts.

  And it did.

  We pulled two more robberies on the way back to my apartment—because we were angry; because nothing was going right; because Judy had been swallowed up by the night; and perhaps even because we were unwilling to pass up an opportunity to add needed dollars to the coffers. It must have been something of a shock to the victims when they watched the robbers making their getaway in a police car.

  The instant I turned off Glendale Avenue, I spied my Ford at the curb across the street from the apartment house, facing me. “There they are,” I told Tuffy. I speeded up, then braked to a quick stop beside the Ford, startling its three occupants. They were even more startled when I shined the red light directly into their faces and thrust the barrel of the riot gun out the window at them. Tim and Whitey, I decided, needed an object lesson, one they wouldn’t soon forget. “All right,” I growled, disguising my voice, “you’re the two guys we’ve been looking for. Get out of that car and come over here!”

  White-faced and confused, Tim and Whitey fumbled with a bottle of whisky from which they had been drinking. Judy was the cool one of the trio. She faced the red light—and us—and smiled, prettily. Then, calmly she turned to Tim and Whitey, spoke to them sharply, took the bottle, replaced the cap and dropped it to the floor. The three of them alighted.

  My object lesson had gone far enough, I decided. I snapped off the red light, threw the shotgun onto the back seat of the radio car and said to Tim and Whitey, “You know something. You’re a couple of sorry-looking specimens.”

  They recognized my voice and ran over to the car, full of exclamations, questions.

  “Get in,” I told them, dead-panned. “The back seat.”

  “Yeah,” Tuffy said, “and make it quick.”

  They hastened to comply. Tuffy grabbed the shotgun.

  I told Judy, “Follow me, Honey. But not too close. And if any trouble starts, you come on home.”

  Judy followed at about a hundred yards. I drove unhurriedly along side streets for roughly a mile. Tuffy had turned the radio completely off. We were no longer interested in what the cops might have to say. It was a few minutes past two. Only two hours had passed since we had acquired the police car; it seemed more like a couple of years or decades.

  “Jeez,” Tim said, marveling at the idea, “a goddamed squad car! I thought you guys were up to something big.” Tim was half drunk and the tough-guy talk welled up out of him. This was big stuff. He, Tim, was in with an outfit that took police cars away from the bulls! He savored the idea, built it up in his mind. Then he asked, “Did you have to shoot any bulls when you took this crate?”

  That was the wrong question. It didn’t sit well with either Tuffy or me. “No,” I said, making no effort to veil the sarcasm the question deserved, “all we did was explain to the cops we were having a tough time finding a couple of guys who didn’t know what it meant to keep a promise and they insisted we take their car and use
it until we found those two guys.”

  “Hell,” Tim said, going on the defensive, “you got no reason to be sore. We got hung up.”

  “Yeah, you got hung up. And I know where.” I laughed. “You got hung up in some whorehouse. You got so busy fronting for some two-dollar hustler that you either forgot or didn’t give a damn about your promise to meet us.”

  That stung. Tim grew sullen. He had been brooding for a long time about being left in the fringes, in the dark, and it hurt him to be chewed out in front of easy-going, non-violent Whitey. He sought refuge in demanding, irrationally, “Well, ain’t you supposed to be smart guys who know how to take care of yourselves?”

  “Oh, sure,” Tuffy said, answering for both of us, “we’re supposed to be smarter and tougher than all the bulls in southern California.”

  Then Tim exploded—vocally. “If you don’t think I got guts just gimme a gun and I’ll show you! I’ll shoot it out with you or cops or anybody! Just gimme a gun!” He snarled the words, seething with hate against the whole world, because he thought the world was laughing at him.

  I parked, selecting a dark and deserted residential street. We didn’t give Tim a gun. Instead we gave him a talking to. We felt sorry for him. We knew what a terrible, punishing thing was the sense of inadequacy that writhed constantly inside him. Whitey said it was probably his fault that he and Tim had failed to meet us. We knew better but didn’t contradict him.

  Tim finally calmed down. He still wanted and needed his front, and he wanted me to believe in him, to be his pal and trust him. His voice was raw-edged when he whispered, “I’ll be there next time, goddamit. Believe me, Chess, I’ll be there!”