Vanishing Acts (31 page)

Our first in-house batch arrived in a Bible. The same girl who'd played paralegal at court for me brought a leather-bound edition to the minister who leads the Baptist services here. She cried as she explained how her boyfriend–Concise, this particular day–had found Jesus, and how she'd inscribed a Bible specially for him, only to be told by the detention officers that inmates were only allowed books arriving directly from Amazon.com. Was there any possible way that the minister might be able to get this gift to her boyfriend?

What self-respecting minister would ever turn down a request like that?

When Concise received the Bible during his next appearance at services, he thanked the minister profusely, and then came back to the cell and thanked God. Hidden in the spine, under carefully reglued leather, was an ounce of meth to be sold. That ounce, which would net $1,000 on the streets, was worth $400 a gram in prison–or, as Concise figured, $11,200.

Twitch grabs my sleeve again, and I shake him off. “I told you, I'm not the one who makes the deals.” I turn away just in time to witness a transaction going down between Concise and Flaco, one of the Mexican Nationals.

“It's a hundred fifty,” Concise says.

Flaco's eyes darken. “You sold Tastee Freak the same quarter gram for a C-note.”

Concise shrugs. “Tastee Freak ain't no spic.”

Flaco agrees to the price and leaves; he will be given his prize after Concise receives word of a money transfer from his friends outside. “You taxed him,” I say, walking up to Concise. “Isn't that. . . isn't it. . .” I am about to say "wrong/' but realize what a stupid distinction it is.

“Why?” I ask. “Because he's Mexican?”

“Now, that would be jus' plain racist of me,” Concise says, and he grins. “It's because he ain't black.”

From a rec yard rap:

Sittin' in a four-corner eel I block

My weapon is a shank, not a Glock.

Early in the morn in' the cells pop

Off to the chow hall is our next stop

Eatin' cold-ass eggs, that's what it was

See my homeboy Coast, what up, cuzz?

Mobbin' the yard, our car is deep

We always strapped and ready to creep.

Hit the iron pile, gettin' swoll to the hub

Ready to war with any scrub

My big bro Snoop gave us word

Shit is gonna jump is what he heard

So post up and get ready to stick

Any mutha fucca that tries somethin' slick

The handball court was the spot

To run steel in a fool was my plot

Me and this fool on the killin' field

I shanked him in the necc, it got real.

When his punk-ass gasped, I hit him again

Ran my shank right under his chin.

I left the punk dead in his traces

187 tat on my bacc

In this cell I'm left to rot

Doin' life on a murder plot

I don't care, I'll do it again

Doin' twenty-five to life in the state pen.

The diabetic who has been providing Concise with needles also gets him an asthma inhaler, traded from an emphysemic inmate. At night, after lights out, he scrapes the head and foot off the thin tin canister, fashioning a hollow tube. He carefully pries the cylinder open by applying pressure with a toothbrush until it is a flat piece of metal, ready for shaping.

It will become a zip gun, a deadly chamber for the bullet we're still hiding. When I am out of the cell, I make sure Concise will be present to stand guard over our treasure. If he's going to be gone, too, one of us hides it on our bodies. We treat this tiny missile of gunpowder with the care and reverence a new parent would give an infant.

Tonight, Concise is working on his weapon harder than usual. “Do you ever think about what you'll do, on the outside?” I ask quietly.

“No.”

His flat denial surprises me. “There's got to be something you'd like to do.”

“The world ain't no Hallmark commercial, Chemist,” Concise says. “Most of us are just doin' life on the installment plan.”

“You could move away with your son. Find a job somewhere.”

“Doin' what?” Concise asks. “You think people go out of their way to hire brothers with a prison record?” He shakes his head. “Whether or not you get inked in here, you leave with a tattoo.”

I'd like to think that we can be a hundred different people in one lifetime. But maybe Concise is on to something; maybe once you change, there's a piece that stays that way forever. Until, eventually, you cannot remember who you were in the first place.

Concise rubs the edge of the zip gun more furiously along the cement. “What's the rush?” I ask.

Rumors about an upcoming race riot spread like smoke; usually they are so thick in the cells you can barely breathe for all the guarded anticipation. But I have heard nothing. In fact, Sticks spent most of the afternoon in his cell, brooding.

“The white boys jus' lost their supplier,” Concise says. “He got beat to death on the outside. Sticks gotta find himself some drugs, or he ain't gonna get his patch.” For all that Sticks controls the whites in our pod, he is still taking orders from someone upstairs in close custody, someone who will expect him to find a new source.

“He's going to come to us?” If Concise taxes the Mexicans, I can only imagine what fine he'll impose on the whites.

“He gonna come,” Concise confirms. “But that don' mean we got to sell it to him.” Once you have filtered out your solids, add naphtha to the jar. When the mixture separates, add lye. Stir, so that it doesn't boil over.

Pour the contents into a coffeemaker pot. When the mixture separates again, pour the top layer into the liter bottle with a sports top. Shake hard for five minutes. When the liquid settles, invert the bottle, and pour the bottom layer onto a pie plate. A pH strip dipped into the contents should turn red.

Microwave the pie plate until the water evaporates off. The crystals left behind are the finished product.

There are certain corners of hallways in this jail where the surveillance cameras don't spy. One stretch is where church and AA meetings are held, another is leading out to the infirmary. These are the spots for a well-placed elbow to the kidney, or a slip of a shank. Whether or not you intend to do so, you speed up as you round the turns.

I am just returning from the GED course meeting–my Ph.D. in chemistry seems insignificant when compared to an entire hour outside bars–when I feel a hand grab me and push me against the wall. A toothbrush, its handle scraped sharp as a knife, is held to the skin of my throat.

I assume it is Sticks. So when I hear, instead, a Mexican accent, I am almost relieved. “Tell the miyate we don't want to pay extra,” Flaco says. I can smell the sour stink of urine, and I realize it's mine. He lets go of me; I fall onto my hands and knees. “And if you don't listen, gringo,” he threatens, “I know a nice detention officer who will.”

When I get back to the cell, Concise is going through his mail. A packet from his lawyer's return address–a forgery–contains a legal pad full of notes. Concise has pulled back the gummy red fixative at the top of the pad to reveal a tiny square cut through the layers of pages, making a little pocket for contraband. Inside is a tiny plastic bag no bigger than a tooth, filled with our second batch of meth. As I enter the cell, he sniffs and makes a face. “What happened to you?”

“Flaco would like you to reconsider taxing Mexicans.” I turn away from him, strip. Pull on my spare pair of stripes and wad the soiled ones into a ball.

“Flaco's a fool. He's on the fence with the Chicanos, anyway–he screwed up his first assigned hit for the EMEs.”

I sink down onto the lower bunk. “Concise, he's threatening to tell the DOs.” Concise walks toward me and reaches out one finger. He touches it to the spot on my neck where Flaco had held his shank. I brush my fingers across the skin and they come away bloody.

“It's nothing.”

Concise's nostrils flare, a bellows. “It ain't nothin'.” He flattens his palms across the globe of his shaved head; palpable thought. “You're out.”

“Out of what?”

“The game. The business. The whole thing.”

Astounded, I just stare at him for a second.

“You a liability, man. You got too many enemies in here, because you white but you don' act white. I can't take that kind of risk.” He begins to reseal the razor pocket in the legal pad. “I'll buy you out, fair and square.” When you are in jail, trust becomes a commodity more rare than gold. How can you believe someone who has built a life out of lying? How can you close your eyes at night, knowing your cellmate has been arrested for murder? The answer is: Because you have to. The alternative–being a loner–is not really an alternative at all. You have to mesh into a group to survive, even if you are surrounded by people who have cheated and stolen their way into position beside you. You have to find someone worthy of watching your back, even if making that pact means admitting that you are just as flawed as everyone else here.

Having Concise, and the African Americans in the pod, standing up for me has afforded me a freedom from Sticks and his cronies. But more than that, it's given me something I haven't had for years: a sense of belonging. When you spend your life running by design, you may get far, but you rarely let yourself get close to anyone. I've had you, all I've ever wanted, but it has come at a price. I left the only woman I've ever loved; I never whiled away the hours with a fishing buddy; I kept chatty coworkers at a careful distance. When you let people into the inner sanctum of your life, you risk having them see the heart of you, and I couldn't chance that. In an odd, amazing way, Concise is the first friend I've had in nearly thirty years. It doesn't matter that he's a drug dealer; it doesn't matter that he is black; it doesn't matter that he's offering me an honorable discharge from an operation I never felt comfortable with in the first place. All I know is that a minute ago, it was us against them . . . and now it is not.

Vanishing Acts

“You can't do this,” I say, my whole body starting to shake.

“I do whatever I want,” Concise snaps over his shoulder. “Go on, get lost. You supposed to be good at that.”

I am off the bunk and on top of him before he can even finish his sentence. He is, in that instant, Sticks and Flaco and Elephant Mike and every faceless man and woman out there in the world who has passed judgment on me without hearing all the facts. He's younger and stronger, but I've come from behind to surprise him. I am able to knock him to the ground and pin him with my weight.

“You fool. You know what happen if the DOs find out you sellin'?” Concise grunts.

“It's a criminal investigation. It's time on top of the time you already gonna do.” That is when I understand: Concise doesn't want to end this alliance between us; he wants to protect it. He is trying to save me before I can be implicated along with him.

At the altercation, a small crowd has gathered around the front of our cell–Blue Loc, poised to jump in and pull me off Concise, a small knot of White Pride boys who are cheering me on, and Sticks, who stands with his arms crossed, an inscrutable expression on his face.

One of the detention officers pushes through. “What's going on?” I relax my hold on Concise. “We're good.”

The DO's eyes hone in on the cut on my neck, still bleeding.

“Cut myself shaving,” I say.

The guard doesn't buy a word of it. But the spark that could ignite this pod has dissipated; he's done all he needs to. As he pushes at the other inmates, getting them to disperse, Concise gets to his feet and shakes his clothes straight.

“I helped get you into this,” I tell him. “I'm not leaving now.” The next day is my last day for jury selection, and Concise's first day of trial. We are both headed over to the courthouse at the same time. “Bet you got yourself a Brooks Brothers button-down shirt,” Concise says.

As a matter of fact, I do. “What about it?”

He grins. “Chemist, Brooks wasn't no brother.”

“I suppose you think I ought to go to court wearing pinstripes and spats.”

“Only if you're Al Capone.” Our conversation is interrupted as Twitch flings himself into our cell. “I ain't conducting business now,” Concise says tersely. The addict's eyes dart wildly. “I'm doin' you a favor, man,” he says. “Thought maybe you'd do me one, too.”

What he means is that in return for whatever information he thinks he can provide, we might give him a free teener. Concise folds his arms. “I'm listenin'.”

“I heard one of the DOs talking when I was up in the infirmary this morning–they're using the Boss Chair,” Twitch says.

“Why should I believe you?”

Twitch shrugs. “I'm not the one with a bullet up my ass.”

“If I come back from court and what you said is true,” Concise says, “I'll give you what you want.”

At the promise of another hit, Twitch nearly floats out of the cell. Concise turns to me. “We got to hide the bullet in here.”

I look at him like he's crazy. If we're both leaving the cell, and there's no one to watch over the prize possession, then our modus operandi is to take it with us. “If Twitch ain't bullshittin', then today we ain't just gonna get strip searched. They gonna sit us down on a metal detector chair, too.”

Concise wriggles under the bottom bunk and starts to scrape the cement between the bricks. A few minutes of digging creates a hole deep enough to house the .22. He backs out from under the bed and starts rummaging through his personal items for toothpaste, and Metamucil.

He mixes these together in the sink; scoops it into his palm. “Keep an eye out,” he says; and he creeps under the bunk again, this time to grout. Concise and I are handcuffed together for the trip back from the courthouse to the jail. He is quieter than usual, almost haunted. The sad fact about being in jail is that no matter how bad you think it is there, the reality of what you face in court is worse. I am only beginning to taste that bitter future; Concise has swallowed it whole today. “So,” I say, trying to lift his spirits, “you going to pull an OJ?” He glances over his shoulder. “Oh, yeah. I got them eatin' out of my hand, man.”

“But can you get a bloody glove over it?”

Concise laughs. We are buzzed in through the level slider, and strip searched once again before being allowed back into our pod. I follow him upstairs to our cell and fall onto the lower bunk. Distantly, I am aware of one of the DOs beginning his security walk. Late afternoon, the general noise level is at a high hum–guys hollering to one another across the common room or slamming a hand of cards down on a metal tabletop when they get gin, televisions blaring, toilets flushing, showers running.

Concise sinks down onto the stool, his hands between his knees. “My lawyer says I'm looking at ten years,” he says after a moment. “By the time I get out, my boy's gonna be as old as I was when I got jumped into the Crips.” There's nothing to say; we both know that no matter how we try to convince ourselves we'll outrun our past, it always crosses the finish line first.

“Hey,” he says. “Do us a favor and check the goddamn bricks.” I get down on my hands and knees and start to crawl under the lower bunk. But I can smell it before I can even see the telltale hole: the pungent mint, the ground powder that dusts the cement floor.

Then there is a shot.

It is louder than you think. It echoes against the walls, and leaves me deaf. I shimmy out from underneath the bunk and catch Concise as he falls off the stool. His eyes roll back; his blood soaks me. “Who did this?” I scream into the crowd that has already gathered. I try to find the shooter, but all I see are stripes. Concise falls on top of me in a heavy tangle of limbs and desperation. What is black and white and red all over, I think, a joke Sophie once told me. I cannot remember her punch line, but I know a different one: a black man dying in jail; a white one watching him go.

I hear the crackle of a radio, and the jail comes alive with a web of response: Officer needs assistance in three-two B pod. Man down. All officers on levels two and three respond to three-two B pod. David two, did you copy?

David two copies: Ten-seventeen.

Inmates in B pod, lockdown.

Steel scrapes as the cell doors are shut.

I am dragged away from Concise. Someone is asking me if I'm hurt and looking at my arms and chest–places where I am covered in Concise's blood. I am handcuffed behind my back and led to the ghost town of the East Dayroom. In the middle of all this, no one has bothered to turn off the television. Emeril's bursts of instruction are interrupted by the RN shouting to call 911; by a deep voice saying, “More pressure”; by the jangling arrival of the Phoenix Fire Department paramedics.

“This is hot hot hot,” Emeril says.

They will take Concise to Good Samaritan Hospital, the closest trauma center.

“Hey,” I yell out, as he is carried past on a stretcher. “Is he going to be okay?”

“He's dead,” a voice replies. “But then, you already knew that, didn't you?” When I look up, I see a tall, well-dressed black man with a detective's badge clipped to his belt. He stares at my uniform, covered with Concise's blood, and I realize that, like every other black man in the Madison Street Jail, he believes I am a killer.

The Homicide Division Offices at the General Investigation Division are near Thirty-fifth and Durango. I am kept waiting while the detectives systematically interrogate everyone else in the pod–from the officers and the blacks who say that just days ago Concise and I were fighting, to Fetch, the young white boy who watched me vomit out the bullet after the rec yard fight.

Whoever did this knows that no one will believe a white man and a black man in jail might forge a friendship. Whoever did this knows that the blacks will assume I was the one who killed Concise–after all, everyone knows it is my bullet that went into him. The whites, for once, will agree with them.

Whoever did this was trying to punish both of us.

Detective Rydell has hooked me up to a CVSA–a voice stress analyzer. It's like a polygraph, only more accurate: It doesn't measure physiological reactions due to stress, but instead microtremors in a voice frequency range that the human ear can't hear. Microtremors are present only when a person isn't telling the truth, or so the detective tells me.

“I took a shower that morning,” I say. “I knew I was going to court.”

“What time was that?”

“I don't know. Maybe eight o'clock.” I do not tell him about Twitch, and the Boss Chair, and about the way Concise and I carved a hole in the brickwork for our bullet. “Then I read until it was time to leave the pod.”

“What did you read?”

“A novel, something from the jail library. Baldacci.” Rydell folds his arms. “You did nothing between approximately eight-fifteen a.m. and eleven?”

“I might have gone to the bathroom.”

He stares me down. “Piss or shit?”

I rub a hand down my face. “Can you tell me why the answer to that is going to help you figure out who killed Concise?”

Rydell exhales heavily. “Look, Andrew. You got to see this from my point of view. You're an educated man, thirty years the victim's senior. You aren't a career criminal. Yet you're telling me that you bonded with this guy. That you actually found something you had in common.”

I think about Concise, talking about his little boy. “Yes.” There is a moment of silence. “Andrew,” Rydell says, “help me to help you. How can we prove you didn't kill this guy?”

There is a knock on the door of the interview room, and the detective excuses himself to go speak with another investigator. After he lets himself out, I look down at my shirt. The blood has started to dry, stiff, against my chest. I wonder if someone has called Concise's son. I wonder if they'd even know how to find him. The door opens again, and Rydell approaches with a face as blank as glass. “We just found a zip gun in your buddy's locker. Care to comment?” I can see it, buried under the stash of medications and food items that Concise had gotten from the canteen: the zip gun that he had been dutifully crafting to prevent a moment like this. I had assumed that it, too, had been stolen. But apparently, someone else had been making one, too.

I find myself fighting for breath, for logic. “It wasn't used.” Rydell doesn't even blink. “There's no ballistics testing for a zip gun,” the detective says. “But I bet you know that, being educated and all.” I swallow hard. “I'd like to speak to my attorney.” I am given a telephone with a long cord, and Rydell stands over my left shoulder while I dial Eric's cell phone. I try three times, and am told over and over by a tinny voice that the person I am trying to reach is not available. I am beginning to think that single sentence is the story of my life. I am kept alone in a cell, since the detectives can't interrogate me until I reach Eric. In spite of the isolation, however, the rumors reach me. Flaco has been bragging to the carnales, the patch-holding New Mexican Mafia members. The white boys, he says, are too wimpy to pull off a stunt like this. Chicanos are the ones with the big juevos. The detectives ought to be speaking to the real man who killed that nigger.

Forty-eight hours after Concise's death–forty-eight hours during which I am unable to reach my attorney–the detectives take Flaco up on his offer to talk. During the interview, Flaco whips out a zip gun he's hidden beneath his testicles during the pat-down search prior to transfer to GID, and presents it to Detective Rydell. There is only one inconsistency, one that anyone in B pod would realize and that the detectives don't: In jail you know exactly who has what weapon. Concise had been making a zip gun, one that has already been found in our cell, where he'd left it. Only one other zip gun existed in our pod, the one Sticks had tried to use on me during the rec yard fight.

The only weapon Flaco was known to have was the shank he'd made out of that toothbrush.

I think of what Concise told me once, of Flaco screwing up his first assigned hit. Killing Concise would help him save face and prove he's macho enough to be a soldier in the Mexican Mafia. If Flaco knew he was headed for a long prison sentence anyway, maybe he'd rather do it with the respect of the carnales. But how had he gotten Sticks's zip gun?

The next day, I am brought back to CID to speak with Detective Rydell. “Barium,” I say, the moment he comes into the room. “And antimony compounds. Even if you can't match a bullet to a zip gun with ballistics, you can test for gunshot residue.”

“You can also test it for blood, since the most accurate way to use one is to press it up against the victim's head.” He leans forward. “I've got two zip guns. One of them had blood residue on the edge. Coincidentally, that same gun tested positive for the chemical compounds you get when you fire a .22 round, which happens to be what was in your cellie's brain. The other zip gun,” he says, “was the one we found in your cell.”

I fall back against the chair. I cannot find the strength to answer the detective when he tells me I am no longer a suspect.

I am relocated to general population again, this time on Level 2, and placed in a cell with a man nicknamed Hazelnut who has a habit of pulling his hair out in small tufts and weaving them with threads from the blanket into macrame. This, though, is better than the alternative–even if Flaco's in custody, I cannot expect the blacks to protect me anymore, and my status with the whites will not have changed. I wonder how long a body can last without any sleep; how many nights it will take me to make a shank.