I ran over my all-time, all-seen team again: Koufax, Campanella, Musial, Robinson, Smith, Schmidt, Williams, DiMaggio, Mays. No one was out of position except Mays, and certainly Willie could play right field. And I’d have Red Barber broadcast the game. And Red Smith write about it.
The lights went out silently. The darkness was absolute. No trickle of light from anywhere until, eventually, as my eyes adjusted, I could see the hint of light from under the door to the cell block at the end of the corridor.
My basketball team was easy for the first four: Bird, Russell, Magic Johnson, and Jordan. But who’d be the other forward? Should I choose Wilt and play Russell at power forward? It seemed a cop-out. Maybe Bob Pettit. Or DeBusschere, or make Bird the power forward and play Elgin Baylor. How about Julius?
I wondered if anyone was going to give me supper, and decided that they weren’t. They wanted me to be isolated and hungry and in the dark down here while my resolve atrophied. I groped to the sink next to the toilet and ran the water. There was only a cold-water faucet. I drank some from my cupped hand and began to walk back and forth in the cell, feeling for the bars and wall at first, and then, coming to know the size, keeping a hand slightly out, but walking and stopping and turning at the right time by the floor plan in my head.
I remembered the first woman I’d slept with. Her name was Lily, and I remembered her naked body in detail as explicit as if I had seen her yesterday. That was sort of interesting, so I began to remember the other women I’d slept with and found I could remember all of them exactly: how they looked, how they acted, what they said, what they liked, what they wore, and how they undressed. Some had liked me a lot, some were lost in a private fantasy and I was a vehicle for its expression, some had just liked lovemaking, all of them had been fun.
I thought about Susan. She was the most fun.
I thought about football, and whether Joe Montana would finally replace Unitas. Jim Brown was eternal, and certainly Jim Parker. Sarah could sing, and Mel Torme, and Dave McKenna was the piano player, and The Four Seasons, in New York, for that one meal, and Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir, and Catamount beer, and German shorthaired pointers, and Ali maybe was the best heavyweight, though Ray Robinson was, of course, the best ever, any weight, and Krug champagne, and Faulkner, and Vermeer, and Stan Kenton and Mike Royko, and fitful sleep.
chapter twenty-three
I HEARD THEM coming and was sitting on the bunk when the lights went on and six of them carne into my cell. Four of them were big Alton, County Deputies with nightsticks, two of them were in suits. My friend with the hairdo and the almond-shaped eyes was not with them. All six were men.
A guy in a three-piece, blue pinstripe suit said, “On your feet, asshole.”
Bust in suddenly, after hours of isolation, while I’m still asleep, scare me witless, and ask me questions. It was not a brand-new approach. I sat on the edge of my bunk with my hands relaxed in my lap and looked at him. His vest gapped at the waist, leaving two inches of badly tucked-in shirt showing over the belt line.
“On your fucking feet,” he said.
“You want to wear a three-piece suit,” I said, “you gotta get good tailoring. Otherwise the vest gaps.”
Vest jerked his head and two deputies yanked me to my feet. I grinned at him.
“Or not,” I said.
“Sit down,” Vest said and shoved me with both hands. I didn’t sit. I rocked back a little and kept my feet. Vest jerked his head and the same two deputies who yanked me up put a hand on each shoulder and pushed me down. I didn’t go. Vest balled a fist and drove it into my stomach. He was slow. I had time to tighten my stomach and keep it from doing full damage. But it staggered me enough so that the deputies could push me down. I sat.
“Who’s your trainer?” I said. “Mary Baker Eddy?”
He didn’t know who Mary Baker Eddy was, but he tried not to let it show. His partner, wearing a seersucker suit and a straw snap brim with a colorful band, stood against the far wall with his arms crossed. Neither one showed a badge.
“We don’t care,” the partner said, “if you’re a smart ass, or not. We’ll take that out of you. Sooner or later, don’t matter none to us. But we’ll take it out of you, and you know that we can.” He had a soft, almost uninflected voice, with no sign of a regional accent.
He was right. They could, and I knew it. Anybody can be softened up; it’s all a matter of time and technique, and if you have the time, the technique will eventually surface. Didn’t mean it had to be soon, though.
“We’d like to know,” the partner said, “what it is you’re doing around here, and what you’ve found out about Olivia Nelson.”
“You guys got any badges or anything?” I said.
In a perfectly flat and humorless voice, the partner said, “Badges, we need no stinking badges. What have you found out about Olivia Nelson?”
“She went to Carolina Academy. She liked horses,” I said.
There were no other sounds here under the courthouse in the windowless room, only the sounds of our voices and the breathing of the deputies. The overhead light, unshaded and harsh, glared down at us.
“And what else?” the partner said.
He remained perfectly motionless against the wall, in a pose he’d probably practiced a thousand times. Arms folded, hat tilted over his eyes, so that the overhead light put his face in shadow.
“That’s all,” I said. The room was silent.
The partner eased himself languidly off the wall and slouched over toward me. Vest gave way and moved back and replaced him on the wall. The chorus line of deputies stood motionless, while the pas de deux took place. The partner put a hand out toward the nearest deputy and the deputy slapped a nightstick in his hand like a scrub nurse.
“You are in so deep over your head, asshole,” the partner said, “you’re about to drown.”
He was a tall man with high, square shoulders and a wide, slack mouth.
“You don’t seem like you’d be an Alton County Deputy Sheriff,” I said.
The partner laughed.
“No shit,” he said.
And whacked me on the side of the left knee with the nightstick. The pain ran up and down the length of my leg.
“I’ll help you think,” he said. “Maybe you heard something, ah, government-related.”
“Like what?” I said and he whacked my knee again and I felt the inside of my head get red, and, from a seated position, I punched him in the groin, which was about eye-level for me. He gasped and doubled over and staggered back. The nightstick clattered on the concrete floor. The deputies grabbed me. Vest lurched off the wall in a shooter’s crouch with a small handgun. The partner stayed doubled over. I knew what he was doing; he was fighting off the nausea that came in waves.
“Cuff him,” Vest said. His voice was raspy. “Cuff him to the bars.”
The deputies hesitated. Vest stowed his gun, bent over and picked up the nightstick his partner had dropped.
“This ain’t our deal,” one of the deputies said. He was a beefy guy with sandy hair and freckled arms and a big, untrimmed moustache.
“Do what I tell you,” Vest said. “This is a fucking federal matter.”
“You say so,” the deputy said. “But I ain’t seen shit to prove it.”
“You never hung nobody on a cell door before?” Vest said.
“Sure, but Sheriff don’t much like us rousting white people ‘less we have to.”
“Fuck the Sheriff,” Vest said.
“Sheriff don’t too much like people saying fuck him, either.”
“Okay,” Vest said. “Okay. But this is important. National security. We have to find out what he knows. And we have to find out fast.”
The partner had made it to the wall, and was leaning his forehead against it, trying to breathe deeply.
“You got the Sheriff’s call, didn’t you?” he said, wedging the words in between deep inhales. “It’s on him, and us.”