“What time is it?”
“A little after eight... in the morning.”
“Do the lights ever go out?”
“No. Never.”
“What are they going to do with me?”
“They want you for extradition to New York.”
“How long does that usually take?”
“There was this guy in here one time that fought for nine months before Wyoming got him on manslaughter. If the crime’s not too bad sometimes they give up but they want you for murder. On murder they can’t give in. Politicians afraid that their voters might hear.”
“So I just sit here?”
“At least they took you outta the holdin’ cell. Sometimes it can get pretty rough in there. Some niggahs just don’t know how to ack.”
John had no reply to the guard’s wisdom and so instead took a bite out of his burrito.
“My name’s Marle Josephson,” the guard allowed. “I’m gettin’ ready to take the test for Phoenix PD.”
“Oh?”
“You a college professor, right?”
“Yes I am, at least I was.”
“Maybe you could help me with the test.”
“I don’t know anything about civil service exams. I mean, all you have to do is memorize the facts they give you and hope that the psych portion doesn’t make you seem too crazy.”
“How can I fool that?”
“Got me.”
“So what good are you?” Marle Josephson asked.
John took the question seriously.
“What’s a name like Woman anyway? I never heard’a nobody called that.”
“Josephson!” a bodiless voice boomed.
“Yes sir, Captain Anton.”
“Stop talking to the prisoner and get back to work.”
The upper and lower slats slammed shut and John was left again to his adopted shell.
22
John had been in the cell for seven more meals when Marle Josephson opened the upper slot and said, “John Woman.” It wasn’t another meal because he’d just finished lunch: an exceptionally dry, overcooked skinless chicken breast and a paper tub of mustard. If he dipped the fowl in the condiment, taking only small bites, it was possible to chew the jerky-like flesh. There was something very satisfying about all that chewing. He felt full and sated.
“Marle,” John said.
“Stand at the line with your back to the door and hold your hands toward me.”
Marching through the subterranean catacombs of the deceptively large jailhouse John and his guard passed other uniformed men; some in guard-black and others in bright yellow, orange and red prisoner coveralls.
“How come you have me in cuffs, Mr. Josephson? None of the other prisoners are wearing them.” John thought that calling Marle mister might get the silent sentinel to speak, but it didn’t.
They came to a blue metal door.
“Prisoner for interrogation room nine-A,” Marle said to the door as if it were a living sentry.
Various metallic pings, rattles and clanks emanated from the sturdy portal making John postulate the words a sentient door like this might speak.
The door swung inward.
“Go on,” Marle said.
John and Marle walked through between two uniformed guards down an aisle of wooden doors with proper knobs. Each portal had an identifying number painted on it, in red. They stopped at 9-A.
Marle knocked three times.
“Come in,” a woman said.
Marle had a key for this door too.
The room was as bare as John’s cell but the light was warmer. The walls were painted institutional green. The only furniture was a dark brown wooden table attended on opposite sides by folding metal chairs.
A woman was seated in one of these chairs. She rose when John and Marle entered. Wearing a conservative dark green pantsuit she had dyed her hair almost blond, was verging on fifty and had put on ten or twelve pounds. But despite all that John recognized Colette.
“You can take the cuffs off,” she said to Marle.
“That’s against protocol, ma’am.”
“Take them off and leave us.”
John was glad to see that he wasn’t the only one who could be cowed by the policewoman’s authority.
“Sit down,” Colette said after Marle was gone.
John stayed on his feet alternately rubbing his wrists. His fingers felt swollen and on fire with pins and needles.
“Sit,” she said and he obeyed.
Lowering into the seat across from him she took a moment to look at the prisoner.
“Do you know why you’re here?” she asked.
“Tell me.”
“The state of New York has determined that you are the prime suspect in the murder of Chapman Lorraine.”
John hunched his shoulders slightly and breathed in through his nostrils the air of relative freedom.
“Being the head investigator on the missing person case,” she continued, “I was deposed by the department after the body had been identified. I told them what I remembered and turned over my notes. Last week they tasked me to come here to identify you if I could.”
With his eyes alone John asked her the question.
“It is my determination that you are the young man I interviewed.”
“I loved you.”
Back in his cell for a dozen meals or more John had learned to curb his masturbation regimen. Too often and the skin of his penis got chafed, the orgasms less satisfying.
He didn’t think about the regimen of history. Instead his thoughts were of food and women and too much wine. He longed for the holding cell with its hungover businessmen; tangle-haired Christopher Minor; and especially Andrew, the peace-loving, knife-wielding Navajo.
“John Woman,” Marle Josephson announced through the square hole in the door. It had been more than four days since he’d been visited by Colette.
“Hey, brother,” the guard said to John as they navigated the underground holding area for the criminal class of Arizona. “I don’t mean to be cold or nuthin’ but my boss, Captain Anton, been watchin’ me like a mothahfuckah so I’m tryin’ not to talk too much to the prisoners.”
“Okay,” John said wondering what Colette would be wearing.
“I been studyin’ for that exam like you said.”
“How’s that going?”
“Not too good.”
They passed Andrew just then. He was in a cell with its door open. The Navajo sheep thief was clad in a lemon yellow jumpsuit, squatting in a corner, his hands wrapped around his knees, his eyes searching out beyond the jail.
“How come I don’t have a prisoner’s uniform?” John asked.
“Only people convicted of stuff get them,” Marle said. “You aren’t guilty of a crime in Arizona. Are you gonna talk to me about the test?”
“What’s the problem?”
“I read the material and I understand it too... But just a hour later I don’t remember a damn thing.”
“That’s due to computers,” John said.
“I don’t even own a computer.”
“Even so people are so used to putting something into a screen then calling it back that they think the human brain works the same way.”
“What you talkin’ ‘bout, Woman?”
“Reading is rereading.”
“Huh?”
“Read the exam booklet from front to back three times before taking the practice test,” Professor Woman advised. “Then you’ll find that you know more. Not everything but more. Then, when you see what you got wrong and right, you read it again. That’s where the true learning will happen.”
“Really? I got to read it four times?”
“Maybe even five or six but that’s nothing because you’ll be a cop for twenty years.”