“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.”
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&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 st
ate 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 déjà 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 déjà 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.
“I told you, I have information that will make your day—although not for the better I would guess.” Riker tapped the ash off his cigarette but never took his eyes off me.
“I assume this great revelation is going to cost me.”
He leaned forward, put his elbows on the table, and said, “Not one red cent. I don’t indulge in blackmail.”
“Then that’s about all you didn’t indulge in.”
“A smart mouth,” he said with disdain. “You think it’s so funny? A person facing life for something that person never did? That’s your idea of justice, isn’t it? I bet you and Culhane got along famously.”
“One murder’s as bad as another.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’ve dusted a lot of people in your time, Riker. You deserve every minute you’ve served, even if you were framed for the one thing they got you for. The one you keep whining about.”
He jumped up, forgetting he was cuffed to the table leg, and his arm snapped at the end of the cuff. I didn’t move, I just stared at him. He stood for a moment, his face reddening. Then he composed himself, smiled, and sat back down.
“I don’t know what else you’ve lost in stir,” I said quietly. “One thing you damn sure haven’t lost is your rotten temper.”
“I don’t whine,” he hissed.
Still staring at him, I said, “Whine, cry, whatever you call it. You’re in here to stay.”
He realized I was getting to him and his mood suddenly changed. He relaxed and slouched back in his chair again.
“He who laughs last, laughs best,” Riker said.
“It’s ‘laughs best, laughs last,’ ” I said. “You’re just full of homilies, aren’t you? I’ll tell you what, why don’t you sit there and have a big laugh. Me? I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.”
I started to get up.
“Who do you think you’re kidding?” he said.
I was perplexed by the question. “About what?” I asked.
“That stuff about that Parrish dame?” he said. “You’re showboating, Sergeant Bannon. To be crude about it, you’re pissing in the wind.” He leaned forward again. “You aren’t any closer to Verna Hicks than I am to the King’s palace in London.”
“And you are?” I said.
“What do you think you’re doing here? When I saw the front page this morning I knew what was going on. As soon as I saw the paper today, I knew you’d been grabbing at straws.” He made a little motion with his hand, grabbing an imaginary speck in the air. “Grabbing at straws.” Then he chuckled. “Been working this case what, five, six days? A week, maybe? Still on square one?”
He was annoying me but I didn’t want to show it.
“Why don’t you just say what you have to say.”
“Maybe Lila’s picking up five C’s a month just like old Verna was. Maybe she had a little work done on her face. Culhane’s easy with the favors—all those rich friends lay it out for him.”
“That’s what you think? Everybody who leaves San Pietro has a meal ticket for life?”
“Verna’s paycheck ran out, didn’t it, Sergeant?”
“Why would anybody kill her?” I said.
He shook his head and chuckled.
“Your boy’s running for governor, certainly you’ve heard? The word is, he’s going to announce this week. Maybe that’s why Verna’s no longer with us.”
“Make your point, Riker. Why would Verna pose a threat to Culhane?”
“Verna Hicks could have blown Culhane out of his big, comfortable saddle.”
“With what? What did she have on him?”
He leaned as close as the cuff would let him, and whispered. “You’re supposed to be so smart, Bannon,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, it was my red jacket Lila Parrish saw the man wearing that night, my gun that was fired, my car Wilma got thrown into. But I didn’t shoot Wilma Thompson.”
I didn’t say anything. I sat there looking stupid, waiting for the punch line, and it was a showstopper.
“Don’t you get it, Sergeant? Nobody shot her. Wilma Thompson was Verna Hicks.”
CHAPTER 31
“I knew it as soon as I saw that picture on the front page,” Riker hissed softly, his black eyes glittering. “She was about fifty pounds heavier and she let her hair go natural and she had her nose bobbed, but I knew Wilma better than anybody. I knew she peroxided her hair back then because she thought it made her look like a movie star. I knew she had big dreams that wouldn’t happen, knew she had broken her ankle hiking up near Monterey, because I was with her that day. I piggybacked her down to the first-aid station. And here’s the clincher. I know that lady in the morgue, the one you found in the tub, has bridgework.” He stuck a finger in the corner of his mouth, rubbed it across three teeth. “These three, right side on the bottom.”