Westlake, Donald E - Novel 35

by Help, I am Being Held Prisoner (v1. 1)

  “We’ll see what Phil has to say,” Jerry Bogentrodder said, and I heard them all troop away down the corridor.

  I still didn’t know what I’d stumbled into, but of one thing I was sure: Peter Corse had been absolutely right when he’d told me to stay away from this bunch. I was sure I’d seen all of them in that same group with Phil Giffin, even the man in civvies, and if I’d had any choice I would absolutely have stayed away from them forever.

  I sat on a stack of bases and brooded. If only I hadn't let my curiosity get the better of me. If only I hadn't been transferred from license plates. If only those Congressmen had gone to Atlantic City instead. If only I’d been born with a different name.

  I was in there perhaps two hours before it occurred to me there might still be a chance to survive. It was my body they'd been talking about unloading. Did I want that? Of course not. Could I fight off four or five tough cons, one of them armed with a gun? Never. Could I survive despite that, despite everything? Maybe.

  My potential salvation was due simply to my being a prisoner in a penitentiary. Since I was on work assignment right now, I wouldn’t be subject to any sort of headcount until dinnertime, but the instant my cell-block lined up for dinner my absence would be noted. Where was Kiint the last time anybody saw him? Over in the gym. Time for a search, then.

  So. All I had to do was stay alive until dinnertime and the inevitable search. Then I would be found, I would report everything I’d seen and heard to the guards, and I would be safe. Relatively.

  Safer, anyway, than if my body was in the process of being unloaded.

  Well, if I was going to survive until dinnertime, the best thing to do would be separate myself from the tough guys. And the simplest way to do that was to bar the door.

  Meaning these bases I was sitting on. About fifteen inches square and two inches high, they were made of tough gray canvas filled with dirt or some other lumpish heavy material, and they were normally put out on the yard during baseball games. This being November, off-season for baseball, they were all in here, twenty or more of them, heavy stolid things, stacked up along the wall.

  It was a chore to move them, but well worth the effort. One at a time I lugged the bases over and plopped them down against the door. Let’s see them open that, I thought.

  My barrier was about waist-high when the door opened, outward, and Phil Giffin stood there looking at me, poised with a base in my arms. He gave my work a jaundiced look and said, “You expecting a flood?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Get this shit out of the way, will you?”

  The door opened the wrong way. With the base sagging in my arms I said, “You aren’t going to kill me, are you?” I don’t know why, but for some reason his face looked wrong for murder; he wouldn’t be so exasperated if he meant to kill me.

  “That’s all I need,” he said, “a disappearing con. Move this crap, so we can talk.”

  I moved it, hurrying. He leaned in the doorway till the pile was two bases high, then stepped over it and sat on a stack I’d made just to the left of the door. He took out a cigarette and lit it, and watched me move the rest of the bases out of the way. Then he said, “Shut the door. Sit down.”

  I shut the door. I sat down.

  He considered me, critically. “Well, you don’t look it,” he said.

  I didn’t know what I didn’t look, so I just sat there.

  “I did a quick run on your records,” he said.

  That surprised me. I hadn’t been at Stonevelt long enough then to know that a disguised subculture of trusties actually ran the place at the day-to-day level, just as the subculture of career sergeants actually runs the Army.

  Giffin had merely gone to the trusty who was Warden Gadmore’s filing clerk, had put in his request, and had been handed my records faster than if the request had come direct from the warden.

  I felt sudden embarrassment. I had no idea what Giffin was in jail for, but I doubted it was for being a practical joker. I felt the awkwardness of the bush leaguer who has inadvertently annoyed the old pro. I said nothing, and looked contrite.

  “I guess you’re one of those baby-facers,” he said, still studying me as though it was hard to believe his eyes. “Anyway, you must be tougher than you look, so I’ll take a chance on you.”

  What in the name of God was he talking about? Then the wording of the indictment came back to me, the actual crimes with which I’d been charged, and it all became clear. The authorities hadn’t been able to bring me to trial charged with putting a naked mannequin on my automobile hood, nor was being a habitual practical joker a felony, though I’ve occasionally heard people claim that it should be. The indictment had been specific yet vague: “grievous bodily harm,” “malicious intent,” “assault with attempt to injure,” “felonious assault.” I had been convicted of synonyms which had not quite fit my case.

  The result was, Phil GifTin was now prepared provisionally to accept me as an equal. Of course, this decision of his was also prompted by his need to keep things quiet and not do anything that might draw official attention, but my misleading records certainly helped. If he had learned from those records that I was an untrustworthy and possibly unbalanced inveterate practical joker, he might have decided it was safer to let his friends unload the body after all, and brazen out the search that would follow.

  A sheep in wolf’s clothing, I was safe for the moment.

  Giffin leaned closer to me. Smoke curled up over the harsh angles of his face from the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Squinting from the smoke, he said, “I’m gonna tell you a story, Kunt.”

  I did not correct his pronunciation. I nodded.

  “Back when this gym was first built,” he said, “maybe fourteen years ago, there was a guy in here doing a five- and-dime, and it was a cousin of his wife’s was one of the subcontractors. You follow me?”

  I didn’t, yet, but I nodded.

  “So what happened was,” Giffin said, “the wife of the con bought herself a house across the street from the gym, just past where they tore all the other old houses down. Then her cousin and a couple guys, they dug a tunnel across the street from the basement of the house right into the gym construction. You follow me?”

  “He escaped,” I said. And I was thinking that the tunnel must still exist, and Giffin and his friends must be organizing themselves into an escape attempt of their own. I had blundered into the middle of a group of desperate men planning a prison break, and I was God damn lucky those records of mine had painted me as black as they had.

  But Giffin shook his head. “What,” he said, “are you crazy? I already told you, this guy’s doing a five-and- dime. How long’s he gonna be in? Three years at the most, and he’s out on parole. For that he should break out, put himself on the ten most wanted list?”

  “Oh,” I said. A five-and-dime; five to ten year prison term. “Then I don’t follow you,” I said.

  “You got the picture of the tunnel?”

  “I think so.”

  “Right,” he said. “It goes from the basement, it crosses under the street, it comes over to the gym. Now this sub-contractor, he’s doing the concrete block on the outer walls, so what he does, he makes an extra wall in one section, so he’s got a space like three feet wide between two walls that nobody knows anything about. And he puts in concrete block steps, and they lead down to the tunnel.”

  “The locker,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “There’s three lockers across there that you can’t open from the outside unless you got the key. You pull on them otherwise, they act like they’re stuck. You know the way them kind of lockers stick sometimes.”

  I nodded.

  “Behind those three,” he said, “is the way in to the steps that go down to the tunnel.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “But if this fellow didn’t want to escape, what’s the use of the tunnel?”

  “You don’t get it?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t get i
t.”

  Giffin leaned forward even closer, smoke curling into his eyes, and tapped me on the knee. “He used to go home for lunch,” he said.

  1 gaped.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Two, three times a week, the last fifteen months of his stretch, he’d go on home maybe ten o’clock in the morning, shtup the wife, eat a little pasta, watch the reruns on TV, say hello to the kids when they got home from school, then shlep on back over here for dinner headcount.”

  “That’s beautiful,” I said.

  “That’s just the word, Kunt,” he said.

  “Call me Harry,” I said.

  “Beautiful is the word, Harry.” Giffin winked through his cigarette smoke, and finally leaned back. Sitting on the bases, legs spread a bit, hands on his knees, he said,

  “So now you got the idea.”

  I frowned. “Wait a minute,” I said. “That was fourteen years ago. That man's been out for years and years.”

  “Well, sure. Whadaya think, that was him pulled down on you?”

  I didn’t know what I thought. I said, “There’s people still using the tunnel?”

  “Naturally.” Giffin grinned a little, the cocky grin of a man on top of the heap. “A special few of us,” he said. “We get ourselves assigned to sports supply, we work out a schedule of who goes when, and we take life the way we can get it.”

  “You get yourselves assigned?”

  Another wink. “Some of us got a certain influence,” he said.

  The subculture of the trusties again, though I didn’t know it yet. I said, “Then I wasn’t supposed to be here, was I?”

  “Up till now,” he said, “we managed to keep strangers out of here, but for some reason the warden’s got a bug up his ass about you. Usually when the warden wants to give somebody soft duty for a reward, and he’s gonna send the guy here, our friends talk him out of it. If the con’s an intellectual, we get him sent to the library instead. If he’s an ordinary joe, we get him made a driver or maybe a messenger. But the warden’s got this thing about how you should experience teamwork or something, see how people get along together in sports. Nobody could do a thing about it.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Not your fault,” he said. “We figured maybe we could keep you dumb on it, at least till we found out more about you, and maybe after a week or two we could unload you somewhere.”

  “You mean, kill me?”

  “Shit, no. What’s all this stuff about killing? We’d just plant a shiv under your bed before an inspection, something like that. Get you taken off privileges.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But the first thing that happens,” he said, sounding disgusted in retrospect, “is you go poking your nose around and walk right into Eddie coming back.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe such a fuck-up.”

  “I kept seeing these guys go past my door,” I said. “And you and Jerry Bogentrodder were both so mysterious, I thought there was a poker game going on back there.”

  “A poker game.” He shook his head again, then sighed and slapped his palms down decisively on both knees. “Well, what the fuck,” he said. “You’re here, you seem okay, we’ll take a chance on you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You keep your mouth shut and your nose clean,” he said, “after a while we’ll let you go for a little walk yourself.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Giffin,” I said.

  “Call me Phil,” he said. Getting to his feet, he stuck his hand out for me to shake. “Welcome aboard, Harry,” he said.

  I stood. I took his hand. “Glad to be here, Phil,” I said.

  6

  WE WERE STANDING at the shelved half-door, Phil and I, looking out at basketball players practicing their lay-ups. In the last two weeks Phil had gotten steadily more friendly and open with me, based mostly, I think, on the fact that I’d never informed the authorities about the supply area’s tunnel.

  Well, why should I? There was nothing to be gained by informing, and everything to lose. In addition to the promise that someday soon I too would be able to use that tunnel, there was the pleasant safety of my association with Phil and his friends. I was now myself a part of one of those groups that Peter Corse had pointed out to me on the yard, was a member of the group whenever I was in public either on the yard or at the mess hall, and the reputation of the group was now my reputation as well. I could even take a shower on a Monday or a Thursday if I so desired; no Joy Boy would dare to lay a hand on me.

  Now Phil and I were chatting casually about this and that when Eddie Troyn arrived, looking as foolishly neat as ever in his pressed prison denim. A one-time Army officer, Eddie had a passion for military neatness that tended to make him look like a dressed-up mannequin in a sporting goods store. He was the fellow I’d seen in civilian clothing my first day here.

  “Hi, Eddie,” I said. I’d gotten to know all seven of the tunnel insiders in the last two weeks, and they had all reluctantly gotten to know and accept me, though none of the others were quite as friendly as Phil Giffin and Jerry Bogentrodder.

  “Hello, Harry,” he said, and added, “thanks,” when I pulled the half-door open for him to come in. “Going through,” he told Phil, which was the shorthand they used with one another; meaning, of course, that he was taking the tunnel.

  “I’ll walk back with you,” Phil said. To me he said, “See you in a minute.”

  “Right.”

  They walked away, disappearing amid the bins and shelves, and I watched the basketball players do their lay-ups. Figure eight, with the basket at the center. One man looped in from the right, received the ball, drove under the basket and did his shot, while another man looped in from the left, took the rebound, and passed it to the next man looping in from the right. The man from the right than proceeded on to the end of the line coming from the left, and the man from the left . . .

  I was going to sleep. The damn thing was hypnotic; symmetrical, regular, flowing, easy, rhythmic . . .

  I was going to sleep again. Looking around, I saw that Phil had left his cigarettes and matches on the half-door’s shelf. I took a cigarette from the pack, took one paper match, and stuffed it head last into the cigarette. I used a second match to push it well in, so that when I was finished the match head was not quite an inch from the end of the cigarette. I tossed the other match away, shook half a dozen more cigarettes from the pack, put my doctored cigarette back, returned the other cigarettes in front of it, and put the cigarettes and matches back where they’d been on the shelf.

  And all the while I was idly remembering what I’d been told by Phil about the tunnel. That original day tripper, a man named Vasacapa, had been unable to keep its existence totally a one-man secret. He’d been forced to let a few of the trusties in on it, and as a result the tunnel had multiple users from the very beginning. But no one who had ever used it was interested in escaping, nor in doing something foolish that would get them all caught. Either they were short timers like Vasacapa himself, or they were so high on the trusty ladder, with so many inprison privileges and advantages, that they didn’t want to risk losing their position.

  During Vasacapa’s last two months in prison, he had actually held down a part-time job in a local supermarket on the outside, as an assistant produce manager. Once he was a free man, he shifted to full time employment in the same store, and of course he kept the house at the other end of the tunnel. His former fellow inmates continued to use the tunnel, and Vasacapa constructed a private entrance from his driveway into the basement for them, so they could travel at any time they pleased without disturbing himself or his family.

  Three years ago Vasacapa had died, and his widow had decided to sell the house and go live with a married daughter in San Diego. Over the years, as each tunnel insider had finished his prison term, his place had been taken by another inmate, chosen by the insiders in a democratic vote; like a fraternity. When the widow informed the current insiders of her plans,
they realized they couldn’t let the house be sold to a stranger, yet no one of them had the cash—or credit—to buy the place himself. So they pooled their resources and bought the house as a group. The wife of one of them—Bob Dombey, the shifty-eyed first man I’d seen coming from the locker room—had been brought up from Troy, New York to front the combine, had bought the house in her own name, and was now living in it.

  The agreement was that the group owned the house, and that a member whose term was up and who left the prison gave up his share but was paid back his investment. That had originally been twenty-three hundred dollars per man; so that now whenever an insider left prison, the group gave him twenty-three hundred dollars, which it then got back from the man who took his place. If an insider died, which had happened twice so far (both times of natural causes), the new man still paid the twenty-three hundred dollars, which was sent without explanation to the deceased’s next of kin.

  My appearance had screwed up this well-oiled operation completely. The man I’d replaced, a professional arsonist out now on parole, had been paid his twenty-three hundred dollars, but the group couldn’t ask me for the money unless they were willing to let me in as an equal partner, and none of them was at all sure that was the case. I d been more or less shoved down their throats by the warden, and most of them resented it.

  So they didn’t know what the hell they were going to do. Nor did I. And in the meantime my only course was to wait, keep my mouth shut, and hope for the best.

  If only I knew what was best. The idea of going through that tunnel of theirs once was very pleasant, very exciting; but the idea of becoming a part of this conspiracy was terrifying.

  The whole situation raised yet again my old problem: was I good, or was I bad? A hardened professional criminal would simply join in with these commuters, pay his money, and live content within the bent rules. A truly honest man, interested in perfecting society and rehabilitating himself, would have gone to the warden and told him the full story at the first opportunity. But I, stuck somewhere between the two extremes, dithered, did nothing, and waited for circumstances to sort things out without my help.