Burning Garbo

by Robert Eversz

  The two men came at me from the street as I climbed the steps to I my apartment, moving so quietly they took even the Rott by surprise. “Mary Baker?” One of them asked. I didn’t have to turn and look to know who they were. Mary Baker is my birth name. It’s on my Social Security card and driver’s license. Nobody calls me Mary Baker except telephone solicitors and cops. These weren’t telephone solicitors. Both men wore off-brand sport coats and dress running shoes and, like so many L.A. detectives, sported moustaches like a badge identifying them as cops. So much for the plain clothes. I told them Mary Baker was my legal name and bang like that they advised me I was under arrest.

  “But my dog,” I said.

  The Rott glanced from one to the other, thinking whatever it is that dogs think when they meet strangers who pose no obvious threat. The two detectives swapped glances, then the nearer of the two dropped a cautious hand. The Rott licked it.

  “You know somebody can take care of him?” he asked. He looked like a nice enough guy within the strict parameters of his job.

  I said I did but it would take some time for him to get there.

  “We should call Animal Control,” his partner said.

  “No choice really.” He scratched the Rott behind the ear, thinking it through. “You have a leash for him?”

  I told him he’d find one in my camera bag. I knew enough not to reach into my bag. Women in Los Angeles have been shot for less than that. He lifted the bag from my shoulder and zipped it open. The Rott didn’t have a clue what was going on. The detective snapped the leash to his collar, said, “Don’t worry about your dog. We’ll stay until Animal Control arrives, then I’ll call your friend, say where he can pick him up. Imagine you’ll want to save your one phone call for a lawyer.”

  I thanked him. His partner nudged me down the stairs with a hand between my shoulder blades. I knew the routine. I placed my hands on the cruiser’s roof and widened my stance. He ran a practiced hand under my arms and along my torso down to my feet, twisted one arm and then the other into plastic cuffs behind my back, all while reciting my Miranda rights in a monotone. The Rott, tied to a street sign, barked once, confused. The partner guided my head under the doorframe, sat me in the prisoner compartment, and shut the door. Baby howled. They tried to quiet him but he howled until they opened the door again. I leaned forward in the seat because it’s not comfortable to sit back when your hands are cuffed. I told the Rott I was going to jail and he was going to the pound. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was guilt by association. He’d be out in a couple of hours. Ben and Arlanda would take good care of him. It might be some time before I saw him again. But he’d be okay. I promised him that.

  Then the Animal Control wagon rolled up the street and the detective behind the wheel started his engine. The Rott jumped and strained against the leash. I pressed my face against the glass as the car accelerated from the curb, trying to let him know things would work out for him, not to worry. The cruiser turned the corner and I leaned back in the seat, ignoring the bite of the cuffs at my wrists.

  “Don’t worry, he’ll be fine,” the detective said, the one who’d leashed the Rott.

  I thanked him for waiting until Animal Control arrived. We rode in silence for some miles, then he turned to look at me through the Plexiglas divider. “I got a question for you. Not a legal one. A personal one.”

  I told him to go ahead.

  “You always talk to your dog like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he’s human, I guess.”

  “If my dog was human,” I said, “I probably wouldn’t talk to him.”

  Those unfortunate or deserving enough to be arrested in Los Angeles County are eventually delivered to the Twin Towers, the eight-story high-security pillboxes that hold accused felons awaiting trial, or bail and prisoners serving out their sentences on misdemeanor charges. Fresh arrests are brought by squad car and police van to the Inmate Reception Center, located in a low rectangular building between the towers. A sheriff deputy confiscates the prisoner’s civilian identification, wallet, purse, address book, jewelry, keys, and all other personal items. Another deputy instructs the prisoner to extend her left arm and clips a plastic identity bracelet to her wrist. A bar code is printed across the bracelet face. The bar code contains information that, when scanned, tracks the prisoner’s movements within the towers. For the practical purposes of daily life, this bracelet is the prisoner’s new identity.

  The attending deputy instructs the prisoner to disrobe completely. If you’re lucky, the audience is limited to this deputy and one other, both female. If not, the door will be left open to anyone walking by, or overcrowding will force you to disrobe in the corridor. The business of running a jail the size of the Twin Towers is a bustling one, and regulations on privacy and basic human dignity are often sacrificed to expediency. The deputy instructs you to raise your arms over your head. If you have large breasts, you’re told to lift them to reveal the underside. You raise your bare feet to expose the soles, and if your hair is long you pull it up to show the roots at the nape of the neck and then you shake it out. The deputy tells you to turn 180 degrees, bend, and grab your ankles. This instruction is delivered in a voice no different from the one that told you to raise your arms and feet. You wonder what could possibly be going through the deputy’s mind while she examines you, then she tells you to stand, and you look at her. Her face is flat of expression. She’s bored. You realize you’re just another piece of meat to her. You feel good about that. If she treated you like a human being, the indignity would be worse. It’s nothing personal this way. You wait, the cold concrete floor numbing your ankles, while she inspects your street clothes, feeling each seam and investigating the pockets. Her hands are gloved. It can’t be a pleasant job. Your street clothes go into a blue plastic bag tagged with your prison identification number. You’ll be allowed to wear them again when you go to court. If your underwear is clean of contraband, the deputy will return it to you. In prison they issue every inmate one size fits all. Not in jail. In jail you get to keep your underwear. The deputy hands you a pair of orange overalls, bright as a traffic cone. You zip it over your body. It fits like a traffic cone, too. All that’s left of you then is your face and hands.

  Those accused of a violent felony or whom the processing deputies deem to be a risk to other inmates are diverted to cells designed to hold one prisoner but that, due to overcrowding, usually contain three. All others are channeled to the chicken house, a dormitory with two hundred beds and what seems like twice that many inmates. I was diverted to a cell. The two inmates who occupied the cell were Chicana gang girls, one not older than nineteen going on forty, the other with a homemade tattoo of a tear dripping from the corner of her eye, marking her as an ex-con on her way to becoming a con again. They sat on the lower bunks, backs against the wall and feet kicked out. I vaulted onto the top bunk.

  The older one spoke up, the one with the teardrop tattoo. “¿De dónde eres, nena?” Where you from, girl?

  “Instituto para mujeres en California, CIW. ¿Y tú, guapa?” California Institute for Women. And you?

  “También.” The same.

  Most inmates don’t mix with those of different races but some Anglos and Hispanics crossed race lines, so we knew some of the same people. We talked about our experiences at CIW not much differently than graduates of the same university, comparing cellblocks instead of classrooms and prison guards rather than professors. The time passed that way and then the bolt holding the cell door sprang back and a deputy called my name.

  I followed the deputy down the corridor. Each floor in the Twin Towers is designed to be self-sufficient. Prisoners eat, sleep, and exercise on the same floor. This restricts the movement of prisoners to a minimum. The strict control of the flow of prisoners reduces the risk that something unforeseen happens. In life, the soul delights in the unpredictable. In jail, the unpredictable is the enemy of authority and exterminated. At each security
door we waited for a control-booth deputy to spring the electronic locks and let us pass from secure area to secure area. The last door buzzed open to a small room with table and chairs and a shatterproof Plexiglas observation window. The deputy instructed me to step inside. I did, and the door clacked shut behind me. A few minutes later the glance of my parole officer burned through the Plexiglas. I waved. She didn’t wave back. The electronic bolts threw and the door opened to a muscular blonde my age plus six with eyes the color of steel. By the look of her charcoal-gray pantsuit she’d appeared before the judge that afternoon, testifying on behalf or against one of her charges, something she’d soon be called upon to do for me.

  “You want your attorney present?” My parole officer set a file folder on the corner of the table and pulled out a chair.

  “Not to talk to you, I don’t.”

  “Six months between arrests, that’s quite an achievement.” She didn’t look at me. She sat in her chair and brusquely pointed to the chair opposite. I sat down, too.

  “Just lucky,” I said.

  “You call arson-murder lucky?”

  “I’m a walking target for every incompetent cop with a crime and nobody to pin it on. I’m lucky I lasted six months.”

  “It’s not your fault, right? You tried, right? But everybody is against you, right?” Each time, she pronounced right like a rifle shot. “Tell me something I haven’t heard before. Something I don’t hear every day in this stupid, thankless, piece-of-crap job.”

  “I thank you.”

  “Why should you?”

  “You’ve done great by me. I think you’re a great parole officer. Given of course that it’s a thankless piece-of-crap job.”

  She almost smiled but suspicion cut the smile dead. “Your personal evaluation of my job performance doesn’t carry much weight with me or my superiors.” Anger clipped her pronunciation to hard consonants and she gripped her pen in her fist, better prepared to stab than write. My parole officer is full of rage, just like me. “I’m thirty-six years old and my hair is turning gray. You know why?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Most of the parolees assigned to me, they’re cons to the core. Nothing I can do except the paperwork until the courts ticket them back to prison. And I’m happy to see them go, because they’re dangerous people, dangerous to themselves and others. But a few in my caseload, they’re not worthless. I can talk to them. They listen. They want to improve their lives. So I work with them. Get them training, counseling, a decent place to live. I start to think they have a chance. I even start to hope a little bit, I’m rooting for them, you see, because I like them. For all their sins and crimes of stupidity, I like them.” She reached across the table and gripped my wrist. She worked out regularly with free weights and trained in judo. Her grip was fierce to the threshold of pain. “You know what I found last night?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “This girl, this twenty-year-old girl fresh out on parole. Not violent at all, served eighteen months on soliciting and crack possession. Naturally smart, a good-hearted girl in a bad neighborhood. I thought I could do something for her. I got her into a computer training course. I really thought she had a brain in her head. I really thought she’d make it. Do you know where she made it?”

  Her grip tightened yet again and I might have buckled under the pain but I didn’t. I said, “No, ma’am.”

  “The morgue. That’s where she made it. Stuck in her womb by a knife-happy street trick. She crawled behind a car and bled to death waiting for her pimp to show up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She heard the strain in my voice and released her hold. She hadn’t been trying to hurt me. “Don’t ask me to care about what happens to you. You can’t care in this job. You care, it kills you.”

  “I don’t need you to care. I need you to be fair.”

  “That I can do.” She pulled a visitation form from her file folder and began to fill it out. The tension in her shoulders released at the same time. The great joy of bureaucracy is it dulls the mind. “As your parole agent, I advise you to fully cooperate with the investigative officers on all charges. The more cooperative and truthful you are, the more likely they’ll be convinced of your innocence, and if you’ve transgressed, the more lenient the court will be in sentencing you.” She filled out my name and the date and place where the visit took place, signed the form, and returned it to the folder. “Claymore drinks.” She used her bureaucratic voice, her low and bored tone a warning. “He used to be a top-rate arson investigator. Now he drinks too much and it’s affecting his performance. Some of his superiors are looking for a way to get him into a program or wash him out. He needs a high-profile conviction right now to save his career.”

  “And I’m it,” I said.

  “If you misuse this information in any way you’ll never have my support on anything ever again.” By that I knew that she felt like a traitor to law enforcement by warning me. She knocked on the Plexiglas observation window and she didn’t say good-bye or look back when the door buzzed her out.

  I waited by the door for the attending deputy to escort me back to my cell and when she didn’t show I sat down and kicked my feet up on the table. If they’d forgotten about me, they wouldn’t come looking until the next head count raised the alarm. I closed my eyes, hoping for a moment of sleep. The security door snapped open and the deputy ordered my feet off the table. The man standing behind her in the corridor wore jeans and a jeans jacket over a western-cut white dress shirt affixed at the top with a turquoise bolo tie. The scarred leather bag slung over his shoulder looked more appropriate for the classroom than the courtroom. Even with the heel boost of ostrich-skin Nicona cowboy boots he stood a full six inches shorter than the deputy, but the size of his mouth more than made up the difference. He gave me a professional kiss on the cheek, said, “Darling! We have to stop meeting like this!”

  “Is your fifth wife getting suspicious?”

  “Please, sixth. My fifth was a nightmare.”

  “And the sixth is a dream come true?”

  He laughed. “Hardly, but she’s not so jealous you have to get yourself arrested every time you want to see me.”

  The man was my lawyer, Charles H. Belinsky, and my only advantage over the thousands of inmates doomed for prison, other than my innocence. He asked for a plain and unadorned recitation of what happened on the day Angela Doubleday’s estate burned. Where I’d been. What time I’d arrived. Why I was there. Who I’d seen and when.

  I gave it to him.

  “What I don’t understand is what I’m doing here,” I said. “I’ve admitted I was on the hill the time the fire started. That’s never been any secret. I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m here. Claymore told me he was going to take me down when he first interrogated me. But he didn’t have enough to arrest me three days ago, so why now?”

  “They found a witness.”

  “A witness to what?”

  “To you walking away from your car on Encinal Canyon Road, carrying a five-gallon can of gasoline.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  Belinsky waited for me to protest. I don’t think he was terribly concerned with the truth, but he expected his client to believe in her own innocence, even if no one else did, and if she wasn’t innocent to at least pretend to be so. But the mention of a witness stunned me speechless.

  “The witness describes himself as a fitness enthusiast hiking above Encinal Canyon Road. His description of you and your car is appallingly accurate. According to his statement, he struggled with his conscience for a few days, then decided to report what he’d seen to the police.”

  “I get it. A concerned citizen. Doesn’t want to get involved at first. Thinks it over, decides it’s his duty.”

  “Not an unassailable witness. A judge and jury can get suspicious when a witness takes too much time to come forward.”

  “The detective heading the investigation. Claymore. I’ve heard he drinks too much, needs the arre
st to stick to save his career.”

  “Allegations that Detective Claymore is an alcoholic have been circulating for some time. The problem, friend, lies in proving first that he is an alcoholic and second that his drinking led to specific and significant acts of incompetence during the investigation.”

  “And if you talk to the cops about his drinking, they’ll stonewall you.”

  “A cynical observation about the blue wall of silence and all the more sad for being true. The DA plans to file arson-manslaughter. Your arraignment will be tomorrow morning. I’ll request bail but I doubt his honor will award it in consideration of your past record of transgressions against the law. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “I can go ahead with plans to redecorate my cell, because I’ll be here for some time.”

  “That’s what I like about you,” he said. “You’re always quick to grasp the implications.”

  Sleep is one of the great constants in life, and little difference exists between the darkness of one sleep and the next. When the lights of my cell went out; with all the lights in all the other cells, the silence was forced, the smells foreign, and the bed hostile, but I closed my eyes to the same familiar darkness behind my eyelids that greeted me wherever I closed my eyes, and uncounted minutes later I drifted into the same suspended state of being where the same dreams and nightmares flashed amid fields of blankness. Sleep is the one escape the authorities can’t prevent, and in dreams resides the sole opportunity to experience the unpredictable. In sleep, the inmate is just as free as anyone else.

  The 5:00 A.M. wake-up call is a brutal reminder that sleep is a temporary refuge. They give you fifteen minutes to shake reality into your head, slip into your overalls, and stand by the door. The door bolts open and you step into the corridor, where you turn and move in single file to bathroom and breakfast. Breakfast consists of toast and scrambled eggs. Both are tasteless but edible. If you have a court date, a deputy collects you after you eat. You change into the clothes you wore when arrested. If your lawyer brought a fresh change of clothing, something less likely to scare the hell out of a judge or jury than the togs you were arrested in, you put on those. You pull the overalls over your court clothes. The bright orange marks you as a prisoner every moment except the few you’ll spend standing before the judge.