Judy threw her friend an unconvincing frown.
“Sam and I aren’t married, Mr Meredith.”
“Yes, you are or the knuckleheads at Chino won’t let you past the gate,” the man countered wearily. “That’s just the way it is. Like I said when I agreed to take this thing on the deal is that you do things my way. Like we agreed?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t like telling lies, that’s all.”
The California Institute for Men had been opened in 1941 as the first purpose built big low security prison in the United States. Since the October War it had become a huge sprawling, partially tented holding center for anybody the State did not know what else to do with who did not obviously pose an immediate threat to the general populous. The place was a dumping ground for petty thieves, drug addicts, white-collar malfeasants, drunks, bail breakers and men awaiting a first pre-trial hearing anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area.
Judy stared out at the traffic around the Lincoln.
The last week had been the best, the worst, the most sublime, weirdest, most surreal, utterly terrifying week of her life. Given what she and Sam had gone through last winter that was really, really saying something!
Tabatha Christa Brenckmann — Kennedy had been Judy’s maiden name but like her married name, Dorfmann, she had not used it since the October War — had emerged into the world in the back of an LAPD cruiser on Mulholland Drive. That was all a pain-filled, unreal in a nightmarish sort of way, blur and mercifully she only recollected parts of it. Mainly the parts that hurt more than the others, Sabina’s mother-bear reassurance and, well, love actually and at some stage being presented with her thankfully, miraculously lustily squalling baby. The two young cops in the cruiser had been as blown away by the whole thing as the two women by the time they arrived at the hospital. They were probationers as yet hardly sullied by the milieu into which they had been inducted, and one of them had got into a fist fight with the others they had left behind in the Canyon…
Sometimes Judy wondered if she had dreamed that or if it had actually happened. Lying in a hospital cot with her daughter in her arms she had honestly believed the worst was over. But the worst had hardly begun. There had been a riot near the hospital, gunfights in the surrounding streets, at one point all the power had gone off in the maternity ward. And then Sabrina had discovered that The Troubadour had burned down and that there were at least twenty people dead.
Sabrina had hurriedly remembered to tell her Sam was alive.
In jail but alive.
The cops were charging his with being an accessory to murder…
And then Sam had been lost in the system!
And reappeared…
All the while her daughter had needed to be mothered; Sabrina had clucked around her like some kind of demented mother goose and the other women at Gretsky’s had circled the wagons to protect the newest addition to their little family.
“The thing you have to understand about the way the California Prison Service operates is that you have to play by its rules. Down on the gate or the cell door the average warden or guard doesn’t give two,” Vincent Meredith was about to say something vulgar but refrained at the last minute, “hoots about anybody’s constitutional rights. He just cares about what he thinks the prison’s rules say. And that’s just the knuckleheads who are half-way literate. When we get inside just be a nice quiet, polite wifey.”
Judy’s face pinched with vexation; partly because she liked to think that most of the time she was a ‘nice quiet, polite wifey’ even though she was not married to Sam. However, it was one thing being that, another entirely being described that way.
In the noisy, hangar-like waiting area just inside the razor-wire inner fences of the prison complex Judy discovered she was not the only woman with a relatively new born baby in her arms. The hall reverberated with the infernal wailing of infants needing to be fed and cleaned, and in many cases, loved a lot more than they were ever likely to be loved.
Judy felt uneasy surrounded by so many Blacks and Hispanics, was confused by the Latino babble of voices that made it impossible to overhear any other exchange in any language she comprehended.
The signs said NO BREAST FEEDING.
But there was no water to be had, no private corners and the toilets, just three for several hundred men, women and children, sat in a stinking, half-flooded outhouse.
Judy buried her daughter under the woolly shawl she used to swaddle her. Sabrina patrolled and stood in front of her, arms crossed and ready to take on all comers; the handful of bored guards stalking the crowded hall left the two women alone long enough for the baby to briefly forget her distress.
Periodically, a booming public address system broadcast a list of names.
The man calling the names sounded so bored that he might have been drunk.
“RAMIREZ, CHAVEZ, PORTER, BRENCKMANN…”
Chapter 21
Claude Otto de Chateau-Betancourt — in the old days Joe Kennedy’s go to East Coast corporate litigator and legendary New England Democratic Party eminence grise — rose stiffly to his feet when the young man entered the ante-room. Betancourt had had his eye on Daniel Brenckmann, the second son of his friend and associate of many years, Walter from before the Cuban Missiles War. Moreover, nothing he had seen or learnt about the twenty-seven year old freshly minted member of the Massachusetts Bar who had safely chaperoned his daughter on the night of the war had remotely disappointed Claude Betancourt. Quite the contrary, in fact.
One way and another over the years the Brenckmann family had been of inestimable service to the Betancourts. The boy’s father had stepped up to the plate any number of times in recent years. Yes, Claude had kept Walter Brenckmann’s modest but highly reputable and very well regarded Boston practice alive during and after the 1945 wars but it had been, all things considered, probably among the wisest investments he had ever made. Walter Brenckmann senior was one of those attorneys whom everybody, even his opponents in court respected and liked, and more importantly trusted implicitly. The man positively reeked unimpeachable integrity; he was incorruptible at any price, an absolutely invaluable man to have at one’s side in extremis.
Latterly, Dan’s mother, the indefatigable Joanne Brenckmann had briefly taken Gretchen under her roof and astonishingly, given Gretchen’s wilfulness, successfully taken his daughter under her wing when the jackals were chasing her from pillar to post over J. Edgar Hoover’s lies that she was inappropriately ‘involved’ with her then boss, United States Deputy Attorney General Nick Katzenbach. Unfortunately, not even Joanne’s maternal diplomacy had prevailed upon Gretchen to stay away from DC.
On the morning after the rebellion kicked off in Washington Dan Brenckmann had persuaded Claude Betancourt’s staff to put his call through to him, no mean achievement in itself.
‘Gretchen had an appointment at the State Department just before the coup, or whatever it is, hit Washington, sir.’ The kid had not minced his words. ‘The whole city will be a closed military zone by now and that won’t change until long after the fighting is done. I have to find Gretchen.’