After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  “Here’s another possible bargaining chip,” Morgan responded. “He’s terrified that when he goes back to Pennsylvania they’ll send him to Graterford or Western.” Located outside big cities at opposite ends of the state, Graterford and Western were maximum-security prisons, and Graterford, the largest in the state, was especially daunting. Unlike medium-security Rockview, Graterford housed the most hardened, violent criminals, numbering among them the Philly gang bangers. Rockview was like summer camp in comparison.

  “We’ll add it into the mix,” said GraBois.

  Maybe Jon Morgan didn’t want to get involved, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. A few days later, as happens constantly, the seg inmates rotated cells. Morgan was moved into the one previously occupied by Ramos, where he found something interesting his former roommate had left behind. He wrote GraBois to tell him he was holding on to a book about “sex therapy,” annotated and underlined in places. He also told the prosecutor that Ramos was now in another cell around the corner from Jeremy Fischer and the two weren’t speaking to each other. That could change, he wrote, since he knew from his own experience how unpredictable Ramos was.

  Within days, Jeremy Fischer went back down to New York City for a court date. When he returned to Otisville segregation it was agreed they’d take advantage of the move and try once more to put the two men back together. So far, Fischer was still their best shot, and as Morgan had said in his letter, Ramos was unpredictable. On more than one occasion Fischer had been able to soothe the savage beast, and they wanted to give him every opportunity to finish what he’d started.

  “I don’t want that asshole in here. I won’t room with him.” Ramos was already screaming before Fischer walked in, but now he hurled the worst epithet you can use in prison. In a place where obscenities laced every sentence, this word could get you killed.

  “Get him out of the cell. He’s a goddamn snitch.”

  The guards looked uneasy. This was not going to work, but they had their orders.

  “If I’m a snitch,” Fischer returned, “then you’d better watch out. If I want to get you, I have enough on you to turn you in for murder.”

  Ramos was stopped cold. His mouth opened and closed again. Without saying another word, he picked up his cereal bowl and threw it at Fischer’s head. Then he moved toward the other man and tried to throw a punch, but Fischer easily moved out of the way. As Ramos pursued and swung again fruitlessly a second, then a third time, the guards moved in between the two. The operation had clearly been compromised.

  Fuck Fischer! Fuck GraBois!” Jon Morgan could hear Ramos starting up again after Fischer had been moved out, and he braced himself for what was to come. Ramos was alone in an already overcrowded unit, and if no one had wanted to share a cell with him before, he was even more persona non grata now that he was acting so out of control. Ramos himself would only consider one possible roommate, and the guards were anxious to shut him up. After Ramos’s outbursts echoed on the tier all morning, Morgan’s door opened at midday to reunite him with his old cellmate. But one month later, he was hardly the same man.

  It wasn’t so much his physical appearance—he had the same matted beard and hair, the same freakishly long fingernails. But now Morgan was aware of a persistent, noticeable twitch. The morning’s events had completely unhinged Ramos—he was unsteady on his feet, and his eyes moved around the room even more erratically than usual. Although he seemed happy to see Morgan, his mood shifted in an instant. Morgan risked a few benign inquiries, and he watched Ramos’s hand shake as he held it out to brandish a freshly sharpened pencil stub.

  “Don’t push me, buddy, or I’ll use this.”

  Morgan knew people who’d been badly hurt by a three-inch pencil, even one who’d lost an eye. At five foot ten and 180 pounds, he was stronger than Ramos, and he didn’t take the threat too seriously. Still, he knew from the start that he was going to have to tread more lightly than the last time. He couldn’t imagine any further casual discussions of the Patz case.

  From that moment on, Morgan sat back and let Ramos do all the talking. It didn’t seem to calm him down, though. Morgan soon began to feel as if he’d been caged with a junkie going through withdrawal. Ramos feverishly continued to plan his escape and asked Morgan to get him New York City street maps. He still targeted GraBois, but now Jeremy Fischer had joined the prosecutor in the crosshairs. He asked Morgan to find him antitank rockets, grenades, and M-16 rifles.

  “Well, obviously there’s nothing I can do while I’m in here,” Morgan would hedge, “but when I get out, sure, Jose, I’ll look into it.” Ramos knew Morgan had actually done some arms dealing before his current round of troubles, so this wasn’t a totally outlandish request, but Morgan recognized one thing—Ramos himself was an unlit fuse, just one spark away from blowing up the whole cell.

  Morgan tried vainly to determine just what had happened on Jeremy Fischer’s watch to cause this heightened level of fire-breathing paranoia. It wasn’t until a few days in, on a chilly predawn morning, that he began to piece it together. Climbing down from his bunk to relieve himself, he realized Ramos was also awake, with the light on. It looked like he’d been up all night, and unless he turned off his lamp, Morgan would be up now too.

  “Jose, put it out and go to sleep.”

  Ramos mumbled unintelligibly, but Morgan assumed it was the usual fuck off. Ramos then edged farther away on the bed, obscuring a small object he held possessively.

  “What is that?” Morgan could tell by the way Ramos shielded his hands that it was contraband. He climbed back up on the top and leaned over until he could make out two rolls of what looked like tape. No, he realized, it was a typewriter ribbon.

  “What are you doing, you reading the ribbon?”

  A hint of a grin came over Ramos’s face. It was the first time Morgan had seen him smile since he’d been in there. The look was part sheepish, part triumphant, and he held two little attached spools up high, like a trophy.

  “Jeremy is a rat. And this is the proof.”

  The law library typewriter had run out of its carbon ribbon. Normally, to get a new ribbon you had to turn in the used cartridge, but this one had simply been thrown away. The ribbon was supposed to be reversible, so even if potentially sensitive words were typed in one direction, they’d be rendered indecipherable by another layer of typeface going in the opposite direction. But someone had mistakenly ordered single-strike ribbon, which meant every letter typed on that typewriter was in essence copied in reverse typeface, white letters on black ribbon, then rolled up in a tidy spool inside a plastic cartridge. If you were extremely patient, or obsessive, or you had a lot of free time, you could read every piece of correspondence written there, word after tortuously unrolled word. Ramos had salvaged the discarded ribbon from the law library trash can, and that’s exactly what he’d been doing.

  Ramos had already discarded the bulky cartridge and was methodically unwinding one spool and then winding the other, reading carefully as he went. Morgan had no way to know how long it had been in his possession, but it was clear Ramos had already made a damning discovery. For all the precautions Jeremy Fischer had taken, scrawling secret passages after lights-out and hiding them down in his pants, he had written a letter to his lawyer on the law library typewriter, in which he couldn’t help boasting of his success. It was a cryptic note, but all Ramos needed to see were the words “GraBois says I’m on second base” to know that his friend, his only confidant, his onetime savior, was a traitor.

  Morgan frantically searched his memory. Had he written anything incriminating on that typewriter? There were recent letters to GraBois, but most of what he’d written had been by hand and he didn’t know if the ones he’d typed were on this ribbon. As Ramos ramped up his threats against “that rat snitch Fischer,” Morgan tried not think about what would happen if he were discovered too. Fischer was safely out of the cell; Morgan was locked in.

  All through the following day he watched Ramos try to decipher
more of the ribbon and grow increasingly more agitated. It was a weekend and Morgan couldn’t reach GraBois; he didn’t know what good that would do him anyway. The next night he was awakened again, deliberately this time by Ramos, who was shaking him urgently. Ramos was talking, saying the same words over and over, but it took a groggy minute to register.

  “There’s no body.”

  Morgan was half asleep, and he was pissed. “That’s why you woke me up, Jose? To tell me there’s no body? Jesus. Go to sleep.” He rolled over and drifted off himself, a fitful, restless sleep this time. He dreamt he was sleeping with one eye open.

  “He found out that Jeremy was working for you.” When Morgan finally got GraBois on the phone, he was desperate to let him know what had happened.

  “You need to get the warden to change the ribbon in the law library right away. Who knows what else was written on the new one! If he gets his hands on it I could be busted any minute. Tell the warden to get cloth ribbons, you can’t read those.”

  “I’ll call him right now. Did Jose say anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Morgan said. “You’ll like this—he woke me up the other night to tell me there’s no body.”

  The ribbon in the law library typewriter was replaced immediately. But the one Ramos kept twisting and turning in his hand was driving Morgan to distraction. Whenever Ramos read from it, he’d ratchet up a notch, and like a chain reaction, Morgan could feel his nerves fray a little more each time. Ramos even cycled through painstakingly to find Jeremy Fischer’s letter again and made Morgan read it himself.

  An incident at the shower area across the hall finally forced Morgan into action. As he had been doing without a fuss three times weekly for months now, Ramos left their shared cell for the shower “cage.” The guard would typically lock down the inmate before unlocking the cuffs so he could freely soap and rinse. Before the clothes and cuffs went back on, the guard would have the inmate open the curtain to confirm he hadn’t used shower time to remove a hidden weapon from a body cavity. It had been known to happen.

  Ramos had never raised an objection before. But this time, when he was told to draw the curtain back, he refused, and then got into it with the guard.

  “Don’t look at me,” he shrieked. Inmates were lining up at their doors to watch the show. “Don’t touch me. You faggot, what’s wrong with you!?!” Ramos was coiled and poised to strike, like a vicious dog, teeth bared to expose his fangs. It was one thing to lose it with your cellmate, Morgan thought, quite another to go off on a cop. Morgan caught a glimpse of inner venom that he hadn’t seen before, despite all the rantings in the cell they shared.

  “You’ve got to get rid of that ribbon,” Morgan told him later. Maybe if it were gone, Ramos wouldn’t have the constant stimulus to incite him.

  “If you get caught with that ribbon in the cell, there’s no telling what the guards will do. They’ll ban you from the law library—is that what you want? Flush it down the toilet before it gets both of us in trouble.” Morgan watched with relief as Ramos unspooled the tape and it went down. Maybe now he’d get some peace.

  He was wrong. When Ramos found out soon afterwards that Jeremy Fischer had been pulled from segregation altogether, he told Morgan in a panicked voice that could only mean one thing—Fischer was being called before a grand jury in New York to testify against him. Listening to him rail, at times Morgan thought Ramos hated Jeremy Fischer even more than GraBois. Fischer had betrayed Ramos in a way that GraBois had not, and now Ramos believed the betrayal continued, this time under oath. Ramos began strategizing what he was convinced was his own impending grand jury appearance, swinging wildly between moments of despair and a cocky sense of denial.

  “I’ll just say I can’t remember anything,” he’d mutter, pacing back and forth in the tiny cell. Or he would sit on the bed for hours, staring up at the top bunk, and only occasionally make notes for his legal defense. “They have no body,” he wrote at one point, echoing his midnight ravings, but Morgan was afraid to ask what that meant. Ramos talked about needing another “suicide vacation,” and Morgan silently agreed. He actually thought Ramos was in shock. Aloud, he offered to recommend a few attorneys.

  Ramos shook his head. “No attorney will ever represent me. It’s too horrible. I’ll have to represent myself.”

  “What are you talking about, Jose? That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, I know. Any lawyer I could find would sell me out.”

  “Like how bad?” Morgan tried. “What’d you do, kill the kid and put the body in the wood chipper, like the guy in Connecticut?” Two years earlier, a Connecticut man had gotten fifty years for murdering his wife and disposing of her in a wood chipper. They’d convicted him without a body on the basis of stray hair, teeth, and five drops of her blood.

  Ramos said nothing, just stared morosely at Morgan, who didn’t have hopes of getting much more. In fact, soon afterwards, Ramos stopped talking altogether.

  He began passing Morgan notes and demanding written responses only, claiming first that the cell was bugged, then that the whole tier was wired. Next he complained he couldn’t read Morgan’s handwriting, so Morgan was forced to type his notes on that same law library typewriter. On the one hand, Morgan was relieved to no longer hear Ramos running his mouth, but on the other hand this new system didn’t help him do his job. He knew there were plans to wire the cell—he’d agreed to be recorded just a few days before—but never knew what might happen or when. As it turned out, even though Ramos was right to be suspicious, a combination of impenetrable cinderblock walls and the constraints of early-’90s technology protected him from incriminating himself when the bug yielded nothing.

  By the end of their second week together, Morgan was counting the handful of days left before the hearing that would determine whether or not he’d be punished in the disciplinary section of seg or released back into general population. In any case, he was looking forward to getting away from Jose Ramos. He’d decided he would stick it out in the cell until then, but by this point Ramos seemed to have written him off anyway, and the threat of violence was rapidly outweighing the benefit of working the case. When Ramos talked again of going to suicide watch, Morgan encouraged him.

  “If you are sure that this cell is bugged,” Morgan wrote him in one of the many messages they were now passing back and forth, “go to the hospital, and then when you come back you’ll be in another room.”

  When he wasn’t pacing the cell, Ramos spent hours taking notes from his cherished Stephen King novels, studying deranged kidnapper Annie Wilkes in King’s Misery to perfect his act for an insanity defense. Morgan promised to send him more books after his release, knowing that any offer of help would in turn ensure his own safety. He hoped that despite Ramos’s suspicions, he still needed Morgan too much to turn on him.

  “Any minute now,” Ramos wrote in his notes to Morgan, “I’ll be called down to testify. They’ve got you in here ’til then, to monitor our conversations.”

  “He is bugging out,” Morgan wrote in his own notes on his last day, the ones he carefully kept hidden. He noted how upset Ramos seemed to be, both at the thought that his cellmate was leaving and in reaction to any of Morgan’s final questions. Ramos wasn’t sleeping most nights, Morgan wrote, which meant he wasn’t either.

  On those nights, Morgan lay in bed with visions of Ramos choking him as he slept. If he stayed awake, at least there would an instant of warning. He began to imagine a scenario where he’d be forced to kill Ramos in self-defense. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He’d incapacitate Ramos if he could and mentally rehearsed a one-two combination: full-on kick to the groin, followed by a hard blow to the Adam’s apple. He regretted he hadn’t been able to steer Ramos to a confession, but Morgan was now convinced Ramos had killed Etan Patz. And while he felt sadness at this conclusion, in practical terms, if true, that meant Ramos was capable of murder. Specifically, he thought, Ramos is capable of murdering me.

  Annie was writhing and moaning.
A lick of flame shot up through the gap between her left arm and the side of her body. She screamed. Paul could smell frying skin, burning fat.

  —excerpt from Misery by Stephen King, the book Jose Ramos read in segregation

  Morgan was vaguely aware of his mattress rising and falling. In his stupor he thought he was riding a gentle wave until he shook himself awake and realized Ramos was banging on the underside of his bunk. How had he fallen asleep? He remembered then that Ramos himself had finally dropped off, giving Morgan blessed relief and license to do the same.

  “Wake up, wake up. Talk to me.”

  Ramos must have been so overwrought that he’d forgotten about the self-imposed ban on words, and now they were pouring out. He’d had a nightmare, he said. Morgan noted the worn copy of Misery that had probably first put Ramos to sleep but then had woken him up. His cellmate wasn’t very coherent, but Morgan put it together. Ramos had dozed off while reading a particularly vivid scene about burning bodies in the Stephen King book, probably the brutally violent ending, and now he wanted Morgan to help calm him down.

  Ramos lay in his bed, shivering. The passages had brought him back, he told Morgan, to the work he’d done for the super at his Lower East Side apartment. The basement boiler had a large fire box, large enough to accommodate a grown man’s body. Ramos talked of unscrewing the front of the box and crawling inside to clean it out.

  His story brought Morgan wide awake. If Ramos had killed Etan Patz, this would be the most logical explanation for how he’d disposed of the body. For a second, he considered voicing his thoughts, but he didn’t dare. He made a mental note instead to pass the information on to GraBois. Morgan couldn’t understand why Ramos was telling him this, and he never would. They would never speak of it again. In a matter of days, Morgan was relieved to say his goodbyes. His disciplinary charge had been dismissed, his hearing canceled, and he was going back to general population.