by Otto Penzler
I nod agreement, then feed him the line I should have fed Hafez Islam and which I’d made up on the way to the warden’s office. “It was late in the game and we were tied. I wanted to start a fast break, see if we could get some numbers on the other end.”
“Bubba, there was nobody within ten feet of that tip-out.”
“What can I say, Warden? I mean, nothin’ went right for me the whole game. Somehow I thought Spooky was there. I thought I saw him.”
“You’re so full of shit it’s leaking out of your ears. I can smell it, Bubba. It’s stinkin’ up my office.”
Ever the humble convict, I lower my head before disagreeing. “Swear on my mother, Warden. When I saw the tip go out of bounds I flipped out. Like, it’s the championship game and I’ve been fucking up and now I fucked up the worst of all.” I raise my eyes, meet his gaze. “You know what I’m sayin’ here because you been there, too. I took it out on the moron, all my frustration, everything he said.” I ball my fists, don the most fearsome scowl in my repertoire. “I wanted to kill him, Warden. I wanted to put the motherfucker down.”
I’m six inches taller than Warden Brook’s six-three, and, at 270, eighty pounds heavier. Still, he’s unimpressed by my ferocity. “You gonna have a bad game next week, Bubba? You gonna tip the ball to a phantom teammate?”
“Does that mean we’re playing?”
“If Spooky…” He pauses, starts again. “If the incident had nothing to do with the basketball game, I don’t see why we should punish the players and the fans. It doesn’t make sense.” He contemplates his hands for a moment. “As for the fight… well, you say he threw the first punch and he says you did. The officials didn’t see what happened and neither did anyone else who counts. I think the league’s gonna be inclined to call it a wash.”
So far, the conversation’s gone pretty much the way I expected. Menands is populated mainly by white-collar crooks: lawyers who raided a client’s trust fund, bankers who robbed their own banks, doctors who plundered Medicaid, boiler room operators who hung around a little too long. These are folks with money; they love to bet on sports and the persistent rumor is that the cons making book in the yard pay off to a certain deputy warden who pays off to Warden Brook. I don’t know if the rumor’s true, but when I finally respond, I’m definitely hoping.
“If you’re worried about the game, Warden, there’s something you might wanna try. You know, to help the team along.”
“And what would that be?”
“Well, you could put a little bug in the ears of the officials. I’m not talkin’ about high pressure here. I’m talkin’ about very low-key so it doesn’t get around.”
“Bubba, you wanna make your point.”
“Okay, Warden.” I lean a little closer, drop my voice. “The way it looks right now, what with all the bad attitude out there, the first hard foul next week and somebody’s gonna go off. Unless the officials take control of the game in the first two minutes. Unless they call a few touch fouls, a few offensive fouls. Unless they send a clear message.” I lean back. “Later on, the refs wanna let us play, that’ll be great.”
Though Warden Brook says, “Bubba, you don’t have a redeeming bone in your body,” his smile, as I read it, is purely admiring.
It’s after midnight when I’m finally hunkered down with Road Miller and Tiny Lee in the day area of our housing unit. There’s a forty-watt bulb over the door, enough light for the three o’clock count, but not enough for me to read the messages in my partners’ eyes.
“Talk to me,” I tell Road. “Tell me what’s on your mind. ’Cause I know you been thinkin’ about it all night.”
Roger “Road” Miller is our starting power forward. He’s a little too light for the position, especially on the defensive end, but he can elevate on the jumper and he rolls to the basket with determination. I’ve always wondered if Road’s mother deliberately named him after a white country singer. Road is ebony-skinned and proud of his heritage, but he’d once admitted to me that his nickname was derived from the Roger Miller hit “King of the Road.”
“Freddie is what’s on my mind,” he tells me. “As in Freddie fucked us.”
Freddie Morrow is the team drudge. He does everything from stacking the equipment to washing our dirty uniforms. I knew when I recruited him that he was the weak link in the chain, but I had no other way to get the coke out of the locker room.
“Freddie was sitting on the bench when Spooky went down,” I point out. “Plus, he hasn’t got the balls of a canary.”
“I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody,” Road insists, “and Tiny didn’t say nothin’ neither. We ain’t stupid enough to brag on our business, not when we ain’t done it yet.”
“What about Spooky?”
“No way.”
“And me? What about me?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Tiny Lee declares. Tiny’s our point guard. He’s five-eight and doesn’t weigh more than 150 pounds. Meanwhile, he fears nothing. “If Spooky got whacked over some beef with another con, the coke would still be there. It wasn’t and that means somebody had to tell somebody else. There’s no way around it.”
We’re sitting at a rectangular plastic table bolted to the floor, on gray plastic chairs, also bolted down. We’re supposed to be in our bunks, but we’re the basketball team and the screws won’t bust us for petty violations.
“I don’t know about you guys,” I say, “but I want my coke back.”
Tiny says, “That or somebody’s blood.”
“No, Tiny. I want the coke, which, if you recall, we still haven’t paid for.” I rub my fingertips together, then sing, “Money, money, moneyyyyyyy.”
I came into the deal as part of an effort to turn my life around, an effort which included my anger-management and computer classes. Though I’d been incarcerated for a crime of violence, then passed four years in a very violent prison, my short stay at the Menands Correctional Facility presented me with an inescapable truth: when it comes to white-collar crime, the profits are long and the sentences short. And what I figured, when Tiny first approached me, was that if I sacrificed and worked very hard, I could accumulate enough capital to buy into a top-tier boiler room operation when I finally made parole.
“Oh, man,” Road moans. “I’m gonna catch hold of Freddie and rip his arms off.” It was Road’s Aunt Louise who stuffed the coke into Spooky’s shorts and it was Road who arranged to have the coke fronted. And it was Road, of course, whose ass was on the line.
“Nobody talks to Freddie,” I tell him, a calculated act of disrespect. I’m Road’s partner, not his boss. “Let’s take a little time, take a look around. We got nothin’ but time, right? Time is what we’re doin’.”
Road smiles, cheered, perhaps, by my attitude. “Wha’chu thinkin’, Bubba? I know you schemin’ somethin’.”
“Look around you, Road, next time you’re in the yard. How many cons you think you’re gonna see out there with the heart to cut Spooky’s throat? Because Spooky was spooky.”
Tiny has a terrible burn scar on the right side of his face, and he scratches it when he’s lost in thought. He’s scratching away now, and I lean in his direction as I continue. “You see Spooky’s hands, his wrists? You see any cuts? Spooky came down from Clinton, where you can get your ass shanked for brushing up against somebody’s shoulder. There’s no way he’d let anyone he didn’t trust get close enough to take him out before he could put up his hands.”
By this time, I have a pretty good idea who capped Spooky. What I don’t have is a way to get the coke back. I don’t know where it is, and this particular individual can’t be approached directly. I can’t lay my suspicions on my partners either. I have to keep them under control, especially Tiny, who’s liable to go off, do something stupid, get us all shipped out.
“Like I said, let’s take a few days, look around, see who’s out there. Meanwhile, come Tuesday’s practice, we’ll send Freddie a little message.”
I go to my computer class on
Monday. I’m learning how to keep books using Windows NT and Lotus. Hafez Islam is there, and a few other cons, but more than half the desks are empty because most of the prisoners at Menands are familiar with computers. Though I’m also on good terms with the technology, I’m an avid student, more often than not staying after class to work directly with my instructor, Clifford Entwhistle. Cliff came to Menands via one of Manhattan’s most prestigious accounting firms. In class, he teaches me to keep the books. After class, he teaches me to cook them.
“You holding?” he asks. Cliff will put virtually anything down his throat or up his nose. He’s an incredibly hairy middle-aged man with a beard that starts at his cheekbones and runs all the way to his ankles. In the shower, he looks like a bear with an ass.
I shake my head. “Look, I need you to do me a favor. And I need you to keep it quiet.”
“What’s that?”
“I want you to get me the name of the screw who worked the door to the locker room last night.”
Cliff is a very soft guy with a very hard mind and he gets it right away. “You think a screw killed Spooky?”
“That’s the wrong question, Cliff. The question you’re supposed to ask is, What’s in it for me?” I shift my chair closer to his, until our knees are touching. I can see the fear in his eyes and address myself directly to it. “One other thing, my friend. You’re gonna have to keep this to yourself. That’s because if anybody finds out, I’m gonna kill ya.”
Cliff’s lips curl into a little pout. All along, he’s thought us, if not friends, at least comrades. Now he knows better. “You didn’t have to say that,” he says.
“Yeah, I did, Cliff. I had to say it because I meant it and because it’s very, very important. You fuck up, you’re gonna die.”
I give him a second to absorb the information, remembering that I’d issued the identical threat to Freddie Morrow and it hadn’t stopped him from shooting his mouth off. For a moment, I wish I really meant what I said, but then my anger-management training kicks in, and I move on.
The central computer that runs Menands cannot be reached via the computers available to inmates. But Cliff works in the accounting office, where he routinely processes the Menands’ payroll. From there, he once explained to me, it was just a matter of looking over Deputy Warden Monroe’s shoulder as Monroe entered his password.
When I’m sure he’s not about to put up even a token resistance, I put my hand on Cliff’s shoulder and say, “You do this for me, I won’t forget it. I’ll keep you high for as long as we’re in Menands. You have my word on that.”
I offer my hand, just as if I hadn’t threatened him, and he takes it because he has no choice, sealing the pact.
There are eight or nine serious bookmakers in population, and maybe double that number of contraband dealers who peddle everything from dope to steroids to pornography. I’m sure they had nothing to do with stealing our coke because all the inmates—players and spectators—were subjected to a very intrusive strip search before returning to their cells. But the dealers do figure on the other end. Sooner or later the coke will have to be sold off and one (or more) of them will have to do the selling. As a group, they’re not nearly as vicious as their counterparts in Attica, but they’re not punks either.
I watch these players as Road, Tiny, and I walk along a jogging track that frames the yard at Menands. Wondering if one of them has already taken delivery. If my coke is already disappearing up some rich con’s insatiable nose.
“No sign of Freddie Morrow,” Tiny observes.
“As expected.” I want to tell my partners what I think and what I’m doing about it, but I still can’t risk either (or both) of them blowing their cool. “We need eyes and ears,” I say. “Anybody starts moving coke, we have to know right away.”
My partners solemnly agree and we break up a short time later. I stroll across the yard, graciously accepting the adulation of my fans and the advice of my critics. By this time, everybody knows we’re going to make up Sunday’s game and the question of the day is how we’re gonna do. The Menands’ bookies originally made us ten-point favorites to win the championship, but not only didn’t the Menands Tigers (and especially yours truly) meet expectations, Spooky’s loss at the small forward position has weakened the team. All of that was okay with me because I intended to get a bet down (through a third party, of course) on the Menands Tigers. That was another reason I’d kept Sunday’s game close, why I’d let the moron have his way. With a little luck, the makeup game will be pick ’em by the time we step on the court. Maybe we’ll even be underdogs.
I help my luck along, as I make my way across the yard to where Clifford Entwhistle stands with his back against the outer wall of D Unit, by sticking to the party line. I had a bad game, but I expect to get it together. Though we all miss old Spooky, Bibi Guernavaca can do the job for us at small forward.
The last part is pure bullshit, and though I’m shown no disrespect, everyone I speak with knows it. Bibi, our sixth man, is a good point guard and a decent shooting guard, but he’s too short and too light to play small forward. Somebody else is gonna have to have a big game and I expect that somebody to be me. I’d faced the moron for the second time in yesterday’s game and I knew I could take him. Especially if Warden Brook convinced the officials to call the game tight in the opening quarter.
As I approach, Cliff pushes himself away from the wall and we begin to walk. I don’t say anything, just wait for him to get to the point. The sun has dropped to the ridgeline of Blue Top Mountain at the western edge of the Menands Valley. It sparkles in the chain-link fence surrounding the prison, in the razor wire that tops the fence. Prisoners huddle in small groups. They speak softly, their collective conversation an insectlike hum, a swarm of bees heard at a distance. Suddenly, I feel very good about myself. I’ve set goals and I’m moving toward them and I’m not letting obstacles throw me off course.
“Percy Campbell,” Cliff tells me, “was manning the door outside the locker room last night. He’s the one who found the body.”
Cliff is wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball jacket and I slide a small package into his pocket, a down payment (and all the payment he’s likely to get) on my promise. “Now remember,” I tell him, “the only way to keep a secret is not to tell anybody. Anybody.”
Coach Poole begins Tuesday’s practice with a moment of silence in Spooky’s honor, then declares that because we played so poorly on Sunday, every starting position is up for grabs. “It’s preseason all over again. It’s training camp. You wanna play, you gotta make the team.”
I’m not particularly worried because I know that if the Tigers blow the championship, Coach Poole will have to answer to Warden Brook, and the Tigers can’t win without me. Nevertheless, because I’m a team leader and I don’t want Coach to lose face, I practice hard. By the time we begin our regular scrimmage two hours later, my knees are aching. Both knees, so I don’t know which one to limp on first.
“You ready?” I ask Road as I take the ball out of bounds a few minutes later.
“Yeah. Past ready.”
I toss the ball in, nod to Tiny, then set a pick at the top of the key. Tiny goes by, dribbles to the baseline, then passes back to me. As I receive the ball, Road, posted in the opposite corner, takes off for the hoop. I fake left, then put everything I lave into a pass that misses Road’s outstretched fingertips by a good six inches before slamming into the side of Freddie Morrow’s traitorous head.
We catch a break here. Freddie’s ear is torn halfway off and the doc ships him to the infirmary for an overnight stay. That evening, I pay him a visit, but I don’t tell him how sorry I am for my errant pass. Instead, I sit at the foot of his bed, take his hand in mine, and say, “Who’d you blab to, ya little fuck?”
“Bubba, I…”
I’m an ugly man. I have a jaw like the prow of a ship, a pronounced underbite, a small flat nose with perfectly round nostrils, tiny eyes overhung by a slab of a brow. For most of my life, I’v
e been extremely self-conscious about my appearance. It’s only recently, since coming to Menands, that I’ve made a more positive adjustment. Everything in life, I now understand, has its uses. You just have to look on the bright side.
The bright side here is that I don’t have to lay a finger on little Freddie. All I have to do is stare at him.
“You snitched us out, Freddie. You ratted on us. I just wanna hear it from your lips.”
“Bubba, I…”
“We’re not gonna kill you, Freddie. We’re not even gonna hurt you any more than you’ve already been hurt. That’s because you’re gonna help us get our product back.” I pull him toward me, until we’re nose-to-nose. “Take the first step,” I tell him, my voice steady, my tone encouraging. “The first step is always the hardest. You take the first step, the rest is easy.”
“Bubba…”
“No, don’t start with Bubba. You’ve done that three times and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Start with somebody else’s name, like the name of the screw you told about the coke.” I give his hand a playful squeeze. “You confess, maybe we can dream up a way to protect you.”
I can hear the little switches in Freddie’s mind as they click into position. With Spooky dead, he’s now the weak link on two chains.
“You know what I think, Freddie? I think it was pure accident. I mean, we didn’t run the scam until near the end of the fourth quarter and the screw had to be in and out before the end of the game. Most likely, when he snuck into the locker room, he figured Spooky was already back on the court. ‘Turn around,’ is what I would’ve said in his place. ‘Face the wall. I’m gonna search you.’ Then out comes the knife and it’s judgment day for Spooky Jones.”
“Bubba…”
“Start with the name, Freddie. You’re gonna feel so much better when you tell me the name.”
“Percy Campbell,” he finally blurts.
