'What in the world are you doing with Rita's yucca?'
Diana demanded. 'You know you're not supposed to touch those.'
Davy looked up at her, his eyes filling with tears. 'I'm trying to make her a basket,' he said. 'But I don't know how to do the center.'
Chapter Nine
WHEN HE LEFT the storage unit, Andrew Carlisle took with him only the hunting knife. The blade had been honed to a razor sharp edge, which years of careful storage hadn't dulled- The knife was big enough to be deadly, but small enough to conceal in the brightly colored summer bag among his other purchases.
Back in the Valiant, he drove to the Reardon Hotel off Fourth Avenue.
He had checked his bank balance and found that he didn't have as much cushion as he wanted. Once finished with Diana Ladd, he would disappear. He needed cold hard cash, running money. He wanted it quickly and from a quarter where no questions would be asked.
When it came to not asking questions, the seedy Reardon suited his purposes admirably. Carlisle had heard about the hotel and bar and its singular clientele from some of the other residents of the joint.
Joint. Thinking about Florence in that jading bit of jargon always brought a mental smile to Carlisle's Ph-D.- trained ear. Phraseology wasn't all he'd picked up in prison, not by a long shot. There were always lessons to be learned in that all-male, survival-of-the-fittest environment where sex was a valuable commodity, a bargaining chip. It was a milieu that regarded small men as prized possessions, and Andrew Carlisle was a small man.
Once he understood that exploitation was inevitable, he surrendered willingly and made himself available to the highest bidder, to partners who could make the physical pain and mental degradation most worth his while. He closed his mind to the reality of it even while it was happening, and learned to stand outside himself during the blowjobs and the rest, to calmly total up the privileges each encounter would give him, all the while keeping score of what the outside world would owe him once it was over the world in general, and Diana Ladd in particular.
Every blow-job, every bloody submission, had its price.
Carlisle registered at the Reardon Hotel under an assumed name. The guys in Florence claimed the queers at the Reardon to be easy pickings for an apparently willing stranger. Prison gossip suggested that the closeted homos who frequented the place were always interested in a new piece of tail. Male-to-male prison trysts were a necessary evil, but legitimate fruits, people who lived that way because they chose to, were looked down on with absolute contempt by the convicted felons in the Arizona State Prison: Carlisle had listened avidly to tales about the Reardon and other such places. He listened and drew his own conclusions, deciding how such men might fit into his long-term planning. Now, he was ready to transform plan to action.
He dressed carefully, applying makeup and adjusting the wig in a practiced manner. He'd done it before, in Florence, at the behest of one of the prison's head honchos, a man the inmates called PS, short for Peeping Supervisor.
PS, a voyeur par excellence, enjoyed arranging private amateur theatricals. Scripts usually called for an ersatz conjugal visit in which inmates played both female and male roles. Brutally forced sex often came into play in these dramatic sketches, with PS and his buddies gaping from the sidelines.
PS was high enough in the prison hierarchy to be able to make suitable arrangements for the shows, including times, places, and appropriate costumes for all performers. Since PS was also in charge of inmate work assignments, plums of which were handed out on a strict patronage basis, his presentations never lacked for volunteer performers.
tarlisle, lusting after a choice inmate-clerk assignment that would give him access to both typewriter and postage, auditioned for PS in private. His enthusiastic performance allowed him to be drafted into the ensemble. Due to small stature, which made costuming him as a woman fairly easy, Carlisle was typecast in female roles. He enjoyed himself immensely. Not the sex per se. Women characters were, by definition, victims. What happened to the 'wife' was often physically unpleasant, but Carlisle managed to discover certain psychic rewards.
one was a sense of kinship to his scholarly roots. He had always been struck by Elizabethan drama, by the complex female roles that, during Shakespeare's time, were performed by male actors. Carlisle considered himself capable of doing justice to King Lear's Regan or to Lady Macbeth.
He shrugged off typecasting, ragging from other inmates because he saw his performances as a challenge. It wasn't his fault that those other ignorant bastards were too dumb to realize he was playing a part in an ancient and ongoing tradition.
His relationship with PS and his theatrical accomplishments provided the cushy job as Mallory's inmate clerk that had been his initial objective, but there was one additional benefit as well. Seeing the effect the playacting had on PS and his like-his cronies gave Andrew Carlisle a powerful sense of validation. He found it amusing to observe the audience's reactions, to see the rapt attention on their stupid faces and hear their ugly sounds of approval.
They liked seeing someone stripped and brutalized before their very eyes. They probably would have liked doing it themselves if they'd just had guts enough, which they didn't.
And that was where the validation came in-from knowing there was no difference between him and those bastards in the audience, between the jailer and the jailed, between the acknowledged perpetrators of crime and violence and those who, theoretically, were dead set against it.
Not all the corrections folks were like PS and his pals.
Compared to PS, Mallory was a damned Eagle Scout, but between the bad apples and the criminals, there was hardly an iota of difference. If anything, the inmates maybe had a bit more guts since they had demonstrated the courage of their convictions and had balls enough to act on their baser impulses. But then again, they were also dumb enough to get caught.
Dumb enough to get caught once, Carlisle added to himself as he examined the effect of his cross-dressing in one of the Reardon's deteriorating bathroom mirrors.
Once, but not twice. He'd see to it.
For almost an hour, Diana joined Davy on the couch, and the two of them tried to pull together the center coil of Davy's basket, but the stick pieces of cactus sprang apart again and again. Diana had been in the same room while Rita started hundreds of baskets. Now, the Anglo woman berated herself for not paying closer attention. When Rita did it, the process seemed totally effortless. Finally, Diana gave up.
'How about some dinner?' she asked, stretching.
