by Ross Thomas
Inside the small mirrorless and doorless changing room in the discharge area, Blessing Nelson watched Adair dress. After stuffing the tails of a green J. C. Penney long-sleeved shirt into a pair of gray wash-and-wear pants with a thirty-six-inch waist, Adair held the pants’ waistband an inch or so away from his own thirty-four-inch waist and said, “Amazing what a sensible diet’ll do.”
“What a hundred sit-ups a day’ll do,” Blessing Nelson said.
“Well, yes; that too.”
Adair picked up a red and orange tie, grimaced at it briefly, slipped it beneath the shirt collar and, sawing it back and forth, said, “I’ll send word to your mother where I’ll be.”
“Mama’d like you to keep on sending that five hundred a month you been sending more’n she would a word.”
Adair slipped on a short tan rain jacket that reminded him of those once worn by filling station attendants and looked around for a mirror although he knew there wasn’t one.
“Can’t afford it anymore, Blessing,” he said with what sounded like genuine regret. “But I am grateful. Very. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be leaving here with scrambled brains and a distribution franchise for AIDS. Instead, I leave unsullied and-in a certain sense of the word, virginal-save for that unpleasant experience with old Uncle Ralph when I was six and he was what-thirty? Thirty-two?”
Vexation bordering on anger spread across Blessing Nelson’s almost too regular features and made no effort to move on. Adair had managed to provoke that same expression at least twice a day, sometimes three, for the last fifteen months. Accustomed by now to Nelson’s fits of exasperation, Adair still couldn’t predict what would cause one.
“Can we just get the fuck outa here?” Nelson said.
“What about next month when you get out?”
“Next month you be saying, ‘Blessing? Blessing who?’”
Adair denied the charge with a solemn headshake. “I remember my friends, Blessing; as well as my enemies.”
“You got too many of one and not enough of the other and it ain’t hard to figure where you’re short. So maybe I’ll look you up and maybe I won’t. But right now, let’s go.” He grabbed Adair by the left arm and steered him out of the dressing room and almost into the arms of a senior guard who dyed his hair yellow and whose left blue eye looked frozen.
“You,” the hack said, glaring at Blessing Nelson with his one good eye. “Administrative detention.”
“Got me a pass.”
“Had you a pass. What you got now is the hole.” The guard turned on Adair with a kind of fond vindictiveness. “As for you, Mr. Chief Justice, well, you got a treat coming.”
Chapter 3
Jack Adair stood patiently in front of the large gray metal desk and examined the wall-mounted head of the slain black bear, deciding once again it had been much too small when shot and, therefore, far too young. Both desk and bear belonged to Darwin Loom, an associate warden, who was using a twenty-six-year-old Waterman fountain pen to initial all nine pages of a requisition form.
Loom was a barrel-bodied man in his late forties with thyroidic brown eyes, a curiously unlined face and silvery hair thin enough to reveal a candy-cane-pink scalp. He finished his initialing, recapped the pen, squared the form’s nine pages, looked up and pointed at a molded plastic chair.
Adair sat down on the chair and waited to hear what the associate warden had to say. Loom said nothing for nine or ten seconds, letting a scowl and an unblinking stare speak for him. Then came the accusatory demand.
“I still want a straight answer to why you refused parole seven months ago.”
“We’ve been over all that.”
“Humor me.”
Adair sighed. “Maybe this time we should try the catechistic approach.”
“Fine. I always liked my catechism. Simple answers to hard questions.”
“The first question,” Adair said. “Why am I here?”
“You’re a felon convicted of Federal income tax evasion.”
“Are such tax evaders usually confined to maximum-security Federal prisons?”
“Not unless they hope to squeeze something else out of them.”
“Where are such tax evaders usually sent?”
“To Club Feds in Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and Alabama-except the one in Alabama’s kind of crummy.”
“So why am I really here?”
“Because they couldn’t prove you took a million dollars under the table-or half of it anyhow.”
“What happened after all that was dropped?”
“They hit you with the tax evasion thing and you noloed it.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because they had you cold and you didn’t have any choice.”
Adair was again studying the head of the black bear who had been shot too young when he said, “Let’s go back to your original question.”
“Why you refused parole?”
Adair nodded and looked back at Loom. “After I leave here today, to whom do I report?”
“Nobody.”
“And to whom would I report if I’d accepted parole seven months ago?”
“To some Federal parole officer maybe half your age.”
“And what would’ve happened if I’d been charged with parole violation-no matter how minor?”
A fresh scowl rewrinkled Loom’s forehead as he leaned back in his swivel chair. “You’re saying they’d’ve faked a parole violation so they could squeeze you some more on what that bribe thing was all about, right?”
Adair only smiled. Loom looked away and said, “Well, if they’d stuck you with a phony parole violation, and I’m not saying it could’ve happened, but if it had, then you’d have been right back here for another nice visit.” He looked at Adair and almost smiled himself. “This is where you’re supposed to say, ‘I rest my case.’”
“I rest my case,” said Adair.
In the silence that followed, Loom’s expression went from one of near friendliness to total indifference. When he finally spoke it was off to the left in a monotone from lips that scarcely moved. He’s been here so long, Adair realized, that now and then he even talks like some old lag.
“Tell me about you and Bobby Dupree,” Loom said through ventriloquistic lips.
“Who?”
“That razorback who hangs out with Loco of the lightbulbs.”
“What about him?”
Loom snapped his gaze back to Adair and made his voice crisp. “He’s in the hospital with a broken left wrist and possible internal injuries.”
“Then it’s sorry I am to learn of his troubles,” Adair said with no hint of a brogue.
“We found him in the discharge area shower.”
“So?”
“So the last guy to use that shower before we found him was you.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because the last guy to use that shower must’ve been the guy who broke Mr. Dupree’s wrist, which couldn’t have been me, taking my advanced age into consideration and also Mr. Dupree’s considerable size.”
“Fucking lawyer talk.”
Adair nodded politely, as if acknowledging some small but gracious compliment. “What does Mr. Dupree say?”
“That there were four of them and they all wore masks.”
Adair rose from the plastic chair. “Then I don’t see we have anything more to discuss.”
“Sit down.”
Adair sat down. Loom leaned far back in his executive swivel chair, placed both feet on the desk, locked his hands behind his neck and examined the ceiling.
“A rumor,” he said. “We can discuss a rumor.”
“Concerning?”
“Somebody offering twenty thousand cash money to make sure you don’t make it out the front gate. Not alive anyhow.” The associate warden’s gaze fell from the ceiling and landed on Adair. “And since your mouth’s not exactly hanging open-and since even I heard it-it must be kind of old and stale as rumors g
o.”
“Not so old,” Adair said. “And not particularly stale.”
“Whose money?”
“No idea.”
“Bullshit.”
Adair shrugged. “But rumor or no, I presume you’d rather have me walk out the front gate than be carried out all zipped up in a bodybag.”
Loom apparently had to think about what he really wanted but finally nodded his agreement.
“Then I have a proposal.”
The associate warden glanced at the oak-encased Regulator clock that resembled those that once hung from schoolroom walls. “Think you might slice a little off its end?”
“Condense my argument?”
“Try.”
“All right. I want Blessing Nelson to see me through the gate and all the way to the visitors’ parking lot.”
Loom rejected the proposal with a shake of his head. “I’ll give you two guards instead.”
“How much’re you paying hacks these days?”
“A princely sum like always. That’s why I’ve got a whole file drawer full of Federal job applications filled out in pencil by guys who don’t spell too good.”
“For half of that rumored twenty thousand,” Adair said, “all two guards would have to do is look left instead of right for two seconds, maybe three, and snicker-snack, I’m dead and they’re each five thousand richer, if you follow my math.”
Loom’s mouth was already open, a rebuttal obviously prepared, when the green telephone rang. There were two phones on his desk: a cream console model with twelve clear-plastic buttons, indicating twelve lines, and the green phone, which had no buttons at all, not even an anachronistic dial. Loom dropped his feet to the floor, snatched up the green phone and barked his surname into it.
After listening for less than five seconds, he gave Adair a bleak look, picked up his fountain pen, used his teeth and right hand to uncap it, and began jotting down notes on the answers he got to his mostly one-word questions that dealt with where, when and how, but not with who or why. After promising to be right there, Loom hung up the phone, recapped his pen, rose quickly and stared down at Adair with a curious mixture of embarrassment and accusation.
“Somebody just did Blessing Nelson,” Loom said, his tone matching his face’s mixed expression.
“Did?” Adair said, condemning the word’s imprecision by spitting out its consonants.
“Killed. Speared him. With a mop handle-or something that had a sharp point.”
As part of Adair instantly rejected the notion that Blessing Nelson was dead at twenty-nine, another part counseled that his rejection was merely the automatic denial that accompanies grief. But when Adair went probing for grief, he discovered only shame caused by grief’s absence. Yet he did turn up sorrow, regret and a sense of utter waste. And because he despised waste, anger turned Adair’s next question into a near indictment. “You weren’t by any chance waiting for that call, were you?”
All sympathy vanished from Loom’s expression, replaced by total indifference. “No more than Blessing expected to get speared six times. Maybe seven. They’re still counting.” Loom started for the door but turned back. “Stay put. Understand?”
“Here?”
“Right here. Don’t even stir until you get four guards I’ll pick myself.” Loom again started for the door and again turned back. “Who’s meeting you in the parking lot?”
“Kelly Vines.”
Loom recognized the name. “That high-priced lawyer of yours that got himself disbarred?”
“And consequently, my former lawyer.”
Curiosity made Loom almost forget his hurry. “Why’d he get disbarred anyway?”
Adair looked at the schoolroom clock, disliking its contrived nostalgia and suspecting it of quartz innards.
“Turpitude,” he said to the clock and looked back at Loom with a faint smile. “But fiscal, not moral, although I suspect, like most of us, he’s quite capable of either.”
Chapter 4
Kelly Vines reached the city limits of Lompoc at 2:27 P.M. on that last Friday in June and drove the four-year-old Mercedes 450 SEL sedan west on Ocean Avenue until he found a full-service UNOCAL gas station where he could pay twenty cents a gallon extra to have the tank filled, the windshield washed and the oil and tires checked.
As the attendant busied himself with the tires, Vines noticed that across the street Lompoc police were blocking off an intersection with black and white sawhorse barricades. When the attendant said his oil and tires were okay and that he owed $13.27 for the gas, Vines handed him a twenty, indicated the police and asked, “What’s all the excitement?”
The attendant turned, looked, turned back and began handing Vines his change. “Flower Festival parade,” the attendant said. “Happens every year and it’s about all the excitement we can stand.”
The colors struck Vines as he turned north on Floradale Avenue, which led to the penitentiary. Quarter acres of gold and red, pink and blue, purple and orange blazed at him from both sides of the two-lane blacktop. He slowed the Mercedes to fifteen miles per hour and stared at the commercial plots of lobelia, nasturtium, sweet peas, marigolds and verbena.
In his former life Kelly Vines had been an inexpert but enthusiastic weekend gardener. He now noticed flowers he couldn’t identify and wished there were time to ask someone what they were. But there was no time and Vines suspected that if he lingered, sniffing at fields of flowers, it would only drag him down Might-Have-Been Lane, an emotional dead end he had no wish to explore. He pressed down on the accelerator. The Mercedes quickly reached sixty miles per hour and sped Vines toward a speculative future that went by the name of Jack Adair.
Vines drove slowly along the pine-shaded drive that led into the penitentiary grounds, counting the four speed bumps that lay between Floradale Avenue and the visitors’ parking lot. He drove past the parking lot on the left and the family visiting center on the right, past the gymnasium and the penitentiary administration building, which resembled a college dormitory. He turned right into a long U-shaped drive, drove by some low-lying junipers, a flagpole and on up to the three-story space-age guard tower and the double row of high steel chain-link fences that were topped with concertinas of razor wire.
To Vines, the prison seemed to lurk behind the two high fences with their razor-wire toppings. The main building had been built of pale yellow stone with wings that pointed toward the gate like false “This Way Out” signposts. Assuming the Federal government had wanted the place to look as forbidding and threatening as possible, Vines judged it a brilliant success since he could think of nothing more threatening or forbidding than an enormous steel and stone box the state could drop its felons into, lock them up and keep them there for years on end, sometimes even forever.
The Mercedes crept around the curve at the top of the U-shaped drive until a guard in the tower glared down at Vines, who speeded up slightly and headed back to the visitors’ parking lot. It was not quite a third full and Vines parked six spaces away from the nearest car.
When his watch said it was 2:59 P.M., he got out of the Mercedes, opened its trunk and removed the black cane. He closed the trunk lid, moved to the car’s left front fender and, once more leaning on the cane with both hands, waited for Jack Adair.
Six of them came out of the family visiting center that was across the drive from the parking lot. In the lead was a man with silver hair and a barrel build. Behind him came a middle-aged guard, armed with a Springfield ’03 at port arms, who quartered the parking lot, missing nothing.
Kelly Vines stood very still, not moving anything except his eyes. He thought the guard with the ’03 looked like a retired marine who had put in twenty years, maybe even thirty. Right behind the guard came Jack Adair, much, much thinner than when Vines last had seen him fifteen months ago. Adair now walked with a new spring to his step that was nearly a bounce and for a moment Vines almost missed the ex-fat man’s gliding quick-step that had been virtually a trademark.
Flank
ing Adair were two young guards in their mid-twenties, one of them a mouth-breather, both of them armed with shotguns. Back at trail was a gloomy-looking guard of about Vines’s age who had a hunter’s look and an M-16 that he handled with the easy familiarity of someone who has been around guns since he was six.
The man with the thin silvery hair didn’t speak until he was less than thirty feet away. “Mr. Vines?”
Vines nodded, stopped leaning on the black cane and hooked it over his left arm.
“Darwin Loom. Associate warden.”
“Why the firepower, Warden?”
“Disturbing rumors and a…mishap. An inmate died.”
“Killed?”
“Yes.”
Although still looking at the associate warden, Vines spoke to Adair. “Somebody you knew, Jack?”
“Blessing Nelson.”
“I’m sorry,” Vines said, looking now at Adair. “What rumors?”
“There seems to be a price on my head.”
“A price on your head,” Vines said, almost savoring the phrase. “How much?”
“Twenty thousand, I’m told.”
“You should be flattered,” Vines said. “Ready to go?”
“More than ready.”
Adair started for the Mercedes but the associate warden turned quickly to block his way. “Not just yet,” Loom said, taking out a small notebook and the old Waterman pen. Over his shoulder he said, “You can help us with this, Mr. Vines.”
With the black cane still hooked over his left forearm, Vines walked quickly over to Adair and stood beside him. He unhooked the cane, again leaned on it with both hands and examined Loom with polite interest.
“Help you with what?”
“With where the judge can be reached,” Loom said. “Look. Because of his-well, his informal business arrangement with Blessing Nelson, both the sheriff and the FBI’ll probably want to talk to him-or to his lawyer at least.”
