He laughed as he leaned over, and spit a dollop of tobacco juice in a brass spittoon beside his desk.
“By last count, there were about eight felons in the whole system who agreed with the jury that sent them up. I’ll call over to block C and have them bring him over.” He made the call and leaned back in his chair. It would take ten minutes to get Riker over there, so we had coffee and doughnuts.
“Tell me a little about Riker, Warden. All I know is what I’ve read in the clippings.”
“He did ten years hard time in Q and four in Folsom, before he was sent down here,” Rouche said. “That was six years ago, right after we opened. He’s what I call a firecracker-straining to blow but you gotta light his fuse. Clean record in the other two pens and a little angel here. He reads everything. Two, three books a week, newspapers, magazines, and has a memory like an elephant. In fact, he runs the library. He’s the only lifer we have here and he has a kind of gentlemanly quality about him, so he gets a lot of respect from the other cons.”
“And he’s been clean for all these years?”
“He had some trouble in Q,” Rouche said. “You know, he went in with a certain amount of notoriety, so some of the long-timers tried him out. Story goes, a con jumped him in the shower with a shiv. Riker broke the guy’s arm, dropped the shiv down the drain, and called the guard, told him the other guy slipped in the shower. After that, they left him alone. At Folsom he built up a circle of pals who covered his back. He never got in any trouble. That’s why we got him. But he’s tough, make no mistake. You don’t do all that time without becoming a hard case. His sheet, when he was back in Chicago, had a murder rap and a couple of A amp;B’s. He never took the fall for any of them.”
“How about visitors?”
“Not too many. We keep a record of that. I can have Harve draw you up a list for the last few months. He’s captain of the guards.”
“That’d be swell,” I said. “He indicated he had called his lawyer, too.”
Rouche pressed a button under his desk and a minute later a mountain of a man came in.
“Harvey Craddock, this is Sergeant Bannon, L.A.P.D.”
Harvey was two inches taller than Rouche and all muscle. He stared at me with the bored eyes of a man who had been around so long nothing surprised him anymore.
“Harve, how many calls did Riker get this morning?” Rouche asked.
“Three out, two in.” He nodded at me. “You were one of them, Sergeant. Schyler was the other one. I don’t know who the third call was to, whoever it was didn’t call back.”
“Sidney Schyler is Riker’s lawyer?” I said with surprise. His nickname in the press was “Spring ’em Schyler.”
“The same,” Harve answered.
I answered with a low whistle. Schyler was the bane of every cop from Sacramento to San Diego. He had sprung more guilty cons than all the other lawyers in the state combined.
Harve then volunteered that Riker had gone berserk when he read the morning paper. “He usually gets the paper first thing. Next thing, he was demanding he get to the phone in recreation. It’s Saturday, so we let him. The first call went to Schyler, the second to you. Again, I have no idea about the third one. You called back immediately. Schyler’s call was about five minutes later but their conversation was blocked. Lawyer-client privilege, y’know.”
“And that was after he read the paper?”
“Yeah, he had it with him, was raving on the phone to Schyler, waving the front page around,” Harve said.
“Does Schyler call often?”
“Not really,” said Harve. “I’ll get the book out and check. Schyler comes up every three or four months. Henry Dahlmus visited him once, a while back.”
“Who’s Dahlmus?”
“Ex-con. He and Riker were roommates for about six months,” Harve said.
“Dahlmus was illiterate,” said Rouche. “Riker taught him to read and write. He did four years of a two-to-five for manslaughter. Shot a clerk in a grocery store down in Ventura.”
“Anybody else?”
“Guilfoyle used to come over here every so often but I ain’t seen him in a while,” Harve said. “He calls Riker every now and again.”
I finished my coffee and doughnut, and said, “Okay, let me take a crack at him.”
Rouche gave me a small tin ashtray. “Bring it back when you’re finished,” he said. “They can be made into a shiv in the machine shop in about two minutes flat.”
I had a feeling of deja vu when I entered the interrogation room. I had seen it in various versions a dozen times before. Two chairs facing each other across a large metal table that was bolted to the floor. A high, screened window at one end of the room. Walls painted slate gray, the same color as the table, giving the room a depressing monochromatic look. Over the table, two 150-watt bulbs staring down through chicken wire.
Riker was sitting with his back to me when Rouche ushered me into the room. His right hand was handcuffed to one of the table stanchions, leaving his left free to drum on the tabletop, his thick fingers looking like the legs of a tarantula doing the lindy hop.
“Just rap on the door when you’re through,” the guard said. The bolt clicked as he pulled the door shut.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” Riker said without turning around. “Took you longer than I thought to get here. Must have stopped for breakfast along the way.” He spoke in a low but harsh voice that had the quality of fingernails scratching down a blackboard.
I walked around the end of the table and faced Riker for the first time. He was wearing blue denim prison garb and was shorter than I had pictured, five-seven maybe, although it was hard to tell since he was seated and slouched back in his chair. He was lean, with bony shoulders that emphasized a thin neck topped by a pale, creased, leathery face, ridged by years of hard time. His brown hair was cut scalp-close and streaked with gray. A thick nose separated dark brown eyes that looked almost black and peered up at me from a permanent squint. His thin lips struggled to keep from sneering.
More deja vu.
A face I had seen in various incarnations in every pen I had ever visited. Suspicious, wary, bored, angry, tough, desperate, wily. Assets for any lifer who wants to stay alive and relatively unscathed. But unlike most cons, his English was impeccable.
I moved the chair two or three feet back from the table before I sat down.
“What’s the matter, Sergeant?” he said coldly. “Afraid I’m contagious?”
“I like to stretch out my legs,” I said. I put the ashtray on the table, along with the pack of Chesterfields and my Zippo. He shook one loose and fired it with the lighter.
“The indefatigable Zippo,” Riker said, fondling its stainless steel case. “Invented in Bradford, Pennsylvania, 1932, by George Blaisdell. The unique feature is the patented windscreen. To date, it has outsold all other cigarette lighters in the world combined.”
“You own stock in the company?” I asked.
“Eighteen years in stir,” he said softly. “Nothing else to do but read. The library at Q was contemptible, same with Folsom. This one isn’t bad. I’ve scrutinized almost every book in here. Actually, I’m up to the F’s in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I read four newspapers a day, line by line, and do the crossword puzzles.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re a regular whiz kid. What do you want from me?”
I kept my eyes on him, watching all his moves. He didn’t have many. He speared a forefinger at me whenever he made a point he thought was worth emphasizing and his left eye blinked occasionally as if he had no control over it. When he stared back at me, the light from the overheads revealed the telltale milky-white opacity of a cataract forming over the eye’s lens.
“It isn’t what I want, Sergeant,” he said with a cryptic smile. “It’s what you want from me.”
“I don’t have a lot of time,” I drawled. “Just get on with it.”
“How much did you have to pay that Pennington reporter for writing that laudatory piece about you in the Times today?”
“I bought him a beer,” I answered.
He chuckled. “He sells out cheap.”
I let the crack go by.
