“Oh,” she said, and stopped for a moment, then, “I’ll stay home tomorrow. Please come over as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting.”
“You’re really something, Mil. You’re very special.” I paused, and added, “To me.”
“I hope so.”
“Don’t ever doubt it for a minute. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll count the minutes.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, my dear.”
I kept thinking about her. It was my last thought until the jarring bell of the phone roused me from an exhausted sleep.
“Sergeant Bannon?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Clampton, the dispatcher down at Central.”
“Morning,” I said in a voice still filled with sleep. I looked at my watch. It was 6:30 a.m.
“You got an urgent call here about a minute ago. Know a guy named Riker?”
That woke me up. I raised up on one elbow.
“Arnold Riker?”
“Yes, sir. He’s up at Wesco State, says he needs to talk to you toot sweet.”
“I thought he was in Q or Folsom.”
“Yeah, well, he’s at Wesco now. He says he can stand by the pay phone for two or three minutes.” He gave me the number.
Riker was the last person I wanted to talk to. I didn’t want to hear his I been framed litany, particularly at that hour. I am not at my best when I’m still shaking sleep out of my brain. But it was a call I couldn’t ignore. I got the switchboard and gave them the number. It rang once.
“This is Riker,” a sharp, edgy voice said.
“This is Bannon. What do you want?”
“Kind of brusque, aren’t you, Sergeant?”
“Get to the point.”
“I called to do you a favor,” he said. It was a cold voice and surprisingly cultured.
“I don’t need any favors from you,” I said.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“None of your damn business. What do you want?”
“We need to have a little talk,” the voice rasped.
“I’m a busy man, Riker.”
“You haven’t heard what I have to say yet.”
“I’ve heard it from every crook I ever met. You were framed. You’re an angel under your gruff exterior. You’re…”
“You want to know who killed Wilma Thompson? I’ll tell you straight up.”
That got me fully awake.
“Okay, let’s hear it. Save me the trip.”
“Sorry, Sergeant. Not a chance. You’ve got to come to me. The warden’s name is Jasper Rouche. He’ll take care of the formalities when you get here. I’ll be around.” He chuckled. “My calendar’s empty all day.”
And he hung up.
CHAPTER 30
I showered and walked down to the garage, picked up the car, and tried to tip Wilbur, but he held up a hand and shook his head. “The captain’d kill me if I took that,” he said with a lopsided grin.
I thanked him, then called the hospital and learned that Ski was on his way to L.A. Then I got out of town.
It was an hour’s drive to Wesco State Prison, which was forty miles south of Bakersfield and halfway across the state. In Santa Maria, I stopped in a little restaurant and ate a big breakfast while I read Pennington’s story. As usual, it was a thorough, nonspeculative piece and as unsensational as a sensational story should be. There were three pictures: the fuzzy shot of Verna Wilensky, cropped from the shot of her at work, a small picture of Culhane, and a mug shot of Riker. The story was two columns wide, with an eighteen-point headline above the fold on the front page:
Bathtub Accident called homicide
And under it the subhead: detective links drowning victim to twenty-year-old murder case
The lead quoted Bones’s conclusion from the autopsy and revealed that Wilensky had received the five hundred a month since 1924 and possibly before that.
It went on in the second graph to trace the checks back to San Pietro and several other banks, possible links to the twenty-year-old Thompson murder case, and made a reference to the fact that “Homicide Sergeant Zeke Bannon was interested in locating one of the witnesses in the Thompson case.” Wisely, Pennington avoided naming Lila Parrish, probably at the insistence of his editor.
Pennington then did a rehash of the Thompson murder and Riker’s trial. It was a good story and one that wouldn’t get me in trouble. Not that I should worry about that. The icehouse shoot-out, Ski’s wound, and Louie’s crumpled cream puff would be enough to deal with when I got back to L.A. and Moriarity’s hot seat.
I paid the check, bought a package of Chesterfields, and headed east toward Bakersfield and the little town of Marasipa where the prison was located. I got there about ten. Wesco was a medium- security prison and relatively new, a two-story sprawl of brick buildings behind a double barbed-wire fence about twelve feet high. A prison guard in a starched brown uniform checked my credentials at the gate, directed me to the VIP parking lot, and told me how to get to the reception room.
Five minutes later I was met at the reception desk by a short little man in wire-rim glasses and blue prison garb, who introduced himself as Zimmer, a trustee and the warden’s secretary. He led me to the second floor.
Unlike San Quentin and Folsom, which were grim, dank old dungeons with the lingering and pervasive smell of Lysol disguising the odor of old felons and older times, Wesco was clean and the color scheme was pale yellow, which brightened the surroundings. But the sense of hopelessness and desperation was the same as it is in all prisons.
Jasper Rouche was standing in the doorway of his office wearing a politician’s broad grin. I had never been to Wesco, but I knew that Rouche was the brother of Harley Rouche, who had been in the state senate since Moses parted the Red Sea and was one of the most powerful politicians in the legislature. The warden’s credentials were okay, considering his was a political job: a low-grade guard at San Quentin for five years, three more as guard captain, and later, assistant warden at Folsom, and finally warden at Wesco when it was built six years ago. He was dressed in a gray, off-the-rack business suit, a starched white shirt, and a clip-on bow tie. He stood a little under six feet and probably weighed two hundred pounds, with a florid face just beginning to gather wrinkles, slicked-back brown hair, and the beginnings of a beer belly. He also had feet big enough to kick a moose silly. A wad of chewing tobacco was resting low in one cheek.
“Welcome to Wesco, Sergeant,” he said around the grin. I shook a hand that had manicured fingernails and skin as tough as a rhino’s hide. “What can we do for you?”
“I’d like to talk to Arnold Riker,” I said. “Sorry to show up without any notice.”
“We were expecting you,” he said, leading me into his office. “We can monitor the phones in con recreation when someone calls in, since they go through the switchboard-we don’t listen to outgoings unless we got a warrant, which is just about never. So we heard you when you called him back.”
“He’s a clever bastard,” I said. “He said just enough to con me into coming over here.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. I read that story in the Times. Through the years, Riker’s probably talked to every other detective in the state, whistling the same old tune.”
“Yeah,” I said. “One of the ten thousand innocent cons doing time in state prison.”
