City of Sharks

by Kelli Stanley

  Like Cretzer and Kyle, he’d served at McNeil and escaped before coming to the Rock. Unlike Cretzer and Kyle, he worked by himself.

  By all accounts, Hellcatraz was a popular enough story, reinforcing the shudders and dread that shrouded San Francisco’s Devil’s Island like the City’s famous fog, but Gardner wasn’t killed for writing it or his publisher for publishing it.

  So why would Cretzer and Kyle gang members—or anybody else associated with the prison—want Smith’s book squelched? And why would George think stealing it would get him his job back?

  Miranda flipped open the Chief tablet. Wrote GEORGE = BLACKMAILER?

  Short of talking to Smith, George Blankenship was still the best bet for answers.

  The black phone on the desk rang, and she jumped.

  “Miranda Corbie, private—”

  “You could have told me about the Alcatraz connection.”

  Fisher. Tired, disappointed, mad.

  Goddamn it.

  She took a breath. “No, I couldn’t. Not without violating my client’s confidentiality.”

  “Well, that’s shot to hell, so how about telling me what it is you know before I lose all the patience I’ve got left and hold you on an obstruction charge? Attempted murder, successful murder, burglary, gangsters, Alcatraz … what in the hell is going on?”

  “Wish I knew. I figure Blankenship leaked the story as a deal to keep his name out of the papers and hold on to his job. What the reporters didn’t publish is that George wanted Louise to steal Smith’s book for him, for reasons I don’t know about yet. He swore up and down that neither of them touched it—and you know the state of his alibi. I left a message at Greer and will brace him for more answers but so far no reply. I’d put a watch on him—if he panics at all, he might try to skip.”

  Frustration cracked Fisher’s voice. “Don’t have the manpower right now. Blankenship’s not much use to us unless we can break his alibi. What else?”

  “I spoke with Bunny Berrigan. She said she’s sending a wire to Smith, who’s apparently still in Monterey and on a bender with Steinbeck. She expects him here tonight.”

  “If he’s not here in three hours, I’m phoning the Monterey cops to hold him. If I could find a mishegas motive for him stealing his own book, I’d arrest the sonofabitch. What about your client? She explain any of this?”

  “She’s supposed to meet me here at three. She didn’t get much sleep last night and there was a pack of press wolves camped on her doorstep this morning. Louise lied to me, Inspector—I’m just as frustrated as you are.”

  Miranda waited, listening to the clacking of typewriters and a siren somewhere on Kearny, the ambient sounds of sullen B-girls and dime-store boosters.

  “I want her back for questioning. I prefer the easy way, so why don’t you accompany her when you’re done.”

  It meant another long night at the Hall of Justice, but David Fisher was giving her a break, letting her question Louise before he did.

  She let out a breath.

  “Thanks. I’ll bring her in. Expect us around five.”

  “All right. I’ll get the sister here at the same time. She’s at the Oakland station right now, for her own protection—too many damn reporters. We get ’em together, maybe we’ll get some answers. Especially when Smith arrives. Anything else?”

  “I can let you know what I find out from Blankenship.”

  “Good. Or I’ll bring him in, too. Hell, maybe Warden Johnston will release Kyle for the family reunion.”

  Fisher’s breath was shallow, his frustration as palpable as the sweat on her palms. Somebody was leaning on him … somebody big.

  “Look … Inspector. I’ll do whatever I can to help. We’ve been in tough spots before. I can’t see how Alcatraz fits into any of this yet, but I’ll work on it—I’ll work on the angle. In the meantime, can you do me a favor and send me the report on Alexander—toxicology, what was in his desk, his pockets, all that?”

  Fisher’s voice was still deadened, partially obscured by sirens in the background.

  “Yeah. I’ll send over what we’ve got. Remember—bring in Louise Crowley by five tonight. Or I’m arresting her for obstruction and you’ll be next. That clear?”

  “She’ll be there, Inspector. Both of us will.”

  Miranda hung up the phone. Then she shook out another Chesterfield and lit it with the Ronson One-Touch.

  Her hands were still shaking.

  * * *

  Lunch was a tasteless affair, tuna salad sandwich and dried-out French fries at Breen’s Cafe around the corner on Third. The only thing she could taste was the coffee: black, bitter, and strong, the main draw, along with location, for the crowd of rumpled, saggy-eyed newshounds who filled the tables, men and an occasional woman filtering down from the Examiner building on the corner.

  Miranda prodded a piece of cold tomato with a fork tine. She needed a break, needed a way in to Alcatraz, needed to figure out why Smith’s book mattered so much, why George thought it was worth stealing, why Niles Alexander had been murdered and Louise Crowley threatened.

  And she needed to do it in a hurry.

  She eyed the remnants of a San Francisco Examiner, Hearst’s so-called Monarch of the Dailies, thrown open on the green counter stool next to her, left behind by one of his Hearst Building denizens.

  She pushed away the platter and swallowed the last, biting dregs of the coffee.

  Louise would be through with Bunny by three, Rick would be knocking on her office door by three-thirty. She’d grill Louise, brace George, wait for Smith. But meanwhile …

  She glanced up at the grease-spattered clock above the Petty Girl calendar.

  12:19.

  Time to get acquainted with Alcatraz.

  * * *

  Alcatraz Island. Alcatraz Prison.

  The Rock.

  Windswept, bleak, cold, with an arctic chill that knifed through the Golden Gate and straight into the heart of anyone unfortunate enough to be living there. Hell, visitors couldn’t wait to leave, no matter how much they loved their husbands or fathers or brothers, no matter how much they enjoyed the warden’s company, the screams of gulls and the bite of salt-sea wind.

  Inhospitable, like a weird, far-off planet. Like the ends of the earth, like Dante’s frozen hell, an eternal, unmoving, rigid inferno from which no one ever escaped.

  Only the birds, the gulls and pelicans the island was named after, flew high and above it, landing on the plants and the few trees, fishing in the churning waters off the sharp rocks and stony beach.

  Sure, in the spring some flowers bloomed, and the families of the prison personnel tried to make it a home. They had their Social Hall, the Officer’s Club, complete with a pool table, dance floor, and bowling alley. Children grew up in the shadow of the prison, quiet, sheltered, unable to play cops and robbers or wander too far, singing carols at Christmas within earshot of the men behind bars.

  There was a small store for essentials, though the women did their shopping on the mainland, making one of the twelve daily scheduled trips to the Van Ness Pier, arriving to freedom at seven thirty in the morning, returning to the island in the afternoon or evening, voluntary prisoners of their husbands’ jobs.

  But flowers and trips weren’t enough.

  Alcatraz Island had always been forsaken, a rocky pustule on blue Bay water, first a fortress, then a prison, housing Confederate sympathizers by 1861. Its lighthouse—the first one built on the West Coast—cut through the darkness, warning ships not to come closer, protecting the Bay and the commerce that created a City. After becoming part of a federal penitentiary, it excised hope from the breasts of men, white, black, brown, imprisoned behind cement.

  And always, just out of reach, like the varied, beautiful fruits of Tantalus’ tree and his pool of fresh, still water, was San Francisco. Lights gleaming, neon winking, strains of music carried high on the wind, never heard behind fortress walls, never carried to the dungeon or Cell Block D.

 
; By ’39, Treasure Island made Alcatraz even more of a hell, the soft, colored lights and the big bands, the girls on the Gayway, the music and laughter, a World’s Fair, a world of freedom, just two miles away. Another island, almost as close as the City, life in Technicolor, not the dull death of gray, the cold stone, the monotony of minute-by-minute routine, the worry of fending off a stronger, more sadistically bent inmate, the constant threat of physical harm and psychological humiliation.

  And then there was the silence.

  The silence of the men, silence mandated by the warden, the discipline of a life in a five-by-nine-foot concrete cell, the stoic loneliness that drove some to ever more violence and ever less sanity.

  Talking was strictly regulated—both for the prisoners and the men that guarded them. At least the no-talking rule for prisoners was suspended after the first couple of years, deemed too impractical if not too cruel or unusual.

  But since 1934, when the new maximum security prison opened, no warden, no prison guard, no employee had ever divulged what actually happened on Alcatraz. About policy or procedure, about what went on, about statistics or the lives of men on either side of the bars.

  Maximum security applied to everything on the island.

  Not even rumors were allowed to escape.

  Despite the edict, despite the moratorium on the press, despite the censored letters and harshly controlled visits (“No discussion of anything about your time in the prison, no discussion of your food, your exercise, your work, your fellow prisoners, and especially no discussion of guards or the warden”), despite it all, the newspapers created stories.

  That was their job, after all.

  Their narratives relied on the few prisoners who’d made it off or made it out, men like Roy Gardner and his Hellcatraz, men who knew they’d be punished for it later but took a chance to be heard, to be listened to.

  And what they had to say made Devil’s Island look like the county jail.

  The “hole,” a black, lightless pit where you were fed bread a couple of times a day and, if you were lucky, endured an icy bucket of water, thrown at you once a week to wash off the smell of caked excrement. Henri Young, part of an escape attempt just last year, was reportedly still inside.

  The Spanish Dungeon below Cell Block A was where recalcitrant prisoners were chained, medieval-style, in secrecy and retaliation, prison guards with bruised fists taking shifts with men otherwise too hard to crack. The wardens chose the victims, prerogative of rule.

  Prisoners weren’t usually housed in A, which was used for storage, but sometimes the screams from the Spanish Dungeon sliced their way through the drab cement walls.

  Cell Block D was where the chronic hard cases wound up, in a slightly larger cell, isolated, segregated, some cut off even from light. Too much dungeon led to too many medical bills, too many unanswered questions by the newspapers. So men already cracked but not broken, not yet, were confined twenty-four hours a day, every day, alone, unheard, forgotten. Alone even in the exercise yard, where for an hour they learned to walk again.

  The average cell, the ones on Cell Blocks B and C, held a cold-water sink, a cot, and a toilet.

  Rewards for good behavior.

  There’d been countless hunger strikes, prisoners trying to win some margin of life for themselves, find a reason to resist or die in the attempt. Since 1934, four escape attempts, last year’s the latest, when Doc Barker was shot down and William Martin, Rufus McCain, and Henri Young surrendered to continued existence and punishment in the hole.

  Only Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe offered hope to any would-be escape artists. They patiently filed through iron bars in the prison shop, work detail, each shaving a step closer to freedom and the tantalizing dream that lay just out of reach.

  On December 16th, 1937, they escaped in a fog thick enough to blind the watchtower bulls, jumping in the icy water and strong currents, taking their chances on the leopard sharks and the unforgiving Bay.

  Warden Johnston was “certain” they drowned.

  Hoover wasn’t.

  Cole and Roe were still listed as the top two men on his most-wanted list. Just last month, a cabdriver claimed to see them in Oklahoma. And so the dream held for the other prisoners, news from the outside forbidden but somehow leaking under the sweating cement and through the iron bars, for the men on C and B and especially D, the men who’d forgotten what it meant to be men, the ones chained in an underground parlor straight out of the Spanish Inquisition or the ones thrown in the hole for a knife fight.

  It was self-defense, Mr. Warden, sir, he tried to kill me …

  Alcatraz justice—prison justice—always so impartial.

  Miranda shut the giant bound book of Examiner newspapers, the morgue empty except for Rusty, the old beat man from before the Quake and Fire, gently snoring on a stool, his green felt fedora pulled halfway down his face.

  Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, Barker … some of these men were murderers, gangsters, the kind she’d dealt with on the Eddie Takahashi case, the kind she’d met while looking for the man who killed Pandora Blake.

  Martini would have made a home on the Rock if she hadn’t blown his brains out back in February. And Mickey Cohen, the man she owed a favor to … maybe one day he’d be here, too.

  It was difficult to feel sympathy. To feel anything.

  My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time—to let the punishment fit the crime …

  Problem is, some of them didn’t fit the mold. Bank robbers like Roy Gardner, who actually went out of his way not to hurt anybody. Men who’d started life on the rough side and saw it worsen, Depression sinking them below the law. Cretzer and Kyle weren’t public enemies because they left a swath of corpses behind them, but because they robbed banks … a far worse crime to the government.

  Hell, the West Virginia farm boy with twelve brothers and sisters and no food on the fucking table didn’t stop to think about right and wrong or how Wall Street had shuttered the savings and loan and the only factory in town … he only thought about how to survive.

  And still … he could wind up in Alcatraz.

  No wonder they tried, dreamed, fantasized about getting out, the only life spark left, the only motivation for anything. Escape was motivation enough, not just escape from the island, pipe dream of the bold, but escape from the endless, biblical punishment.

  Escape from pain, escape from threat, escape from fear.

  And reading between the lines—between the splattered ink on Hearst’s yellow pages and the stories told and exaggerated by prisoners, both current and ex-, the system could be gamed.

  Escape of the less notorious kind—and hell, maybe even actual exeunts, an exitus ex isola—could be arranged.

  Guards could be bought.

  Maybe even wardens.

  Warden Johnston, dubbed “Old Pussyfoot” or “Old Saltwater” by the prisoners, was, like the wardens in Leavenworth and Atlanta, a political appointee. His associate warden, Edward Miller, had been brought on in ’37, and, according to vague insinuations in various articles, was the real sadist. He’d begun his career as a correctional officer and his tactics soon earned him a promotion.

  Johnston was the political face of the island. Miller’s was the one the men saw in their nightmares.

  Miranda stood up and stretched her legs. She stood in the Examiner morgue, looking down at the table still covered in papers, and shivered.

  The threads were there, waiting for a Howard Carter Smith or someone else brave enough or smart enough to tie them together.

  Collusion. Bribery. Scandal.

  Plenty of motivation for theft … or murder.

  Twenty

  The phone was ringing. Miranda fumbled the key, swore under her breath, and finally pushed the door open, racing to the desk before the bells stopped shaking.

  Her bag fell on the smooth black surface with a thud, gloved fingers grasping at the phone.

  “Miranda Cor—”

  The breath on the other sid
e was noisy, uneven.

  “Don’t fuckin’ call me here—ever. You lose my job for me, you pay for it, I promise you.”

  Nervous, cowardly braggadocio, delivered in a movie-tough monotone that would make George Raft proud.

  Miranda lowered herself into the desk chair, lips stretched taut in a grim smile.

  “Gee, George, and here I thought we were friends. Unfortunately, I don’t have a way of contacting you in a hurry other than phoning that overpriced clip joint you work for—which, by the way, I’m sure will still retain your services, since you’ve probably threatened to reveal their list of clients to the papers if they don’t.”

  If Blankenship was planning to blackmail his ex-bosses, he was probably milking his present ones, too …

  “You—you goddamn bitch—”

  Supposition confirmed.

  “Save it. You’re not out of the water with the murder, not yet—”

  “What the hell you talking about? The coppers can’t crack my alibi—”

  “They’ll still try. And trying will bring results and motive, and motive will bring interviews with your employers, past and present. Nobody likes a squealing little pig, George, or worse yet, one who threatens to squeal—not the bulls on Alcatraz, not the San Francisco cops. Besides, I thought you wanted out of Greer. Is the job really worth it?”

  One Mississippi, Two Mississippi. His breath was raspier, more panicked.

  “Now—wait a minute—I ain’t—I ain’t no squealer. And I don’t wanna see Louise no more, you hear me? I jus’ wanna be left alone. Maybe get a new start somewheres else … yeah, that’s the ticket. Go down south, maybe, they got plenty of these joints in LA…”

  “No traveling just yet. They’re watching you. You run now, they’ll put the finger on you, forget the alibi. No, your only chance to shake it—shake them—is me. You work with me, tell me what you know about Smith’s book, about why you wanted it and what leverage it gave you—then, and only then, will you be in the clear.”

  He sputtered some more, but it sounded empty and hollow.

  “You? You ain’t nothin’ but a freak, some lady peeper who thinks she’s a tough guy. I don’t need you or nobody. I’ll take my chances with the fuckin’ coppers—”