“They aren’t lawyers, either,” Parker said.
Williams grinned again. “They’re dumbfuck peons,” he said. “Like you and me. But it keeps them calm. They’re working on their cases.”
Yes, it was the dumbfuck peons who’d gone off to work on their cases, but Parker could tell the difference between them and Williams. The whole pop in here was in white T-shirt and blue jeans and their own shoes, so it shouldn’t have been possible to say anything about people’s backgrounds or education or anything else just from looking at them, but you could tell. The ones who went off to work on their cases wore their clothes dirty and wrinkled and sagging; their jaws jutted but their shoulders slumped. Looking up and down the line, you could see the ones who were brighter, more sure of themselves. You still couldn’t tell from looking at a guy if he was square or a fink, but you could make an accurate class judgment in the snap of a finger.
Parker would usually be as silent in here as the other two, but he wanted to know about this place, and the sooner the better. Williams, an educated guy — no telling what he, or anybody else, was in here for — clearly liked to take an interest in his surroundings. And he also liked to talk, about the overcrowding or anything else that wasn’t personal.
Parker said, “A couple others came in with me. I’m wondering how to get in touch with them.”
Williams shook his head. “Never happen,” he said. “I come in with another fella myself. I understand he’s up on four, heard that from my lawyer.”
Parker hadn’t been reached by a lawyer yet; that was the next necessity. He said, “So my partners are gonna be on different floors.”
“It’s a big joint,” Williams said, “and they do that on purpose. They don’t want you and your pals working out your story together, ironing out the little kinks. Keep you separate.” Williams’ grin was mocking but sad; knowing the story but stuck in it anyway. “They can go to your pal,” he said, “tell him, Kasper’s talking. Come to you, say, your pal’s talking.”
Parker nodded. They had the cell doors open this time of day, so he stepped out and leaned on the iron bar of the railing there, overlooking the drop to the concrete floor outside the cage. Heavy open mesh screen was fixed along the face of the cage, top to bottom, to keep people from killing themselves.
Parker stood there awhile, watching guards and prisoners move around down below, and then he went back in and climbed up to sit on his bunk. Williams was in the lower across the way. He looked up at Parker and said, “You’re thinking hard.”
“I’ve got to,” Parker said.
4
The second day, the loudspeaker said, “Kasper,” and when Parker walked down the aisle past the cages in the cage to the gated stairwell at the end, the guard at the metal desk there said, “Kasper?”
“Yes.”
There was another guard present, standing by the stairs. He said, “Lawyer visit.”
The first guard pressed the button on his desk, the buzzer sounded, and the second guard pulled open the door. Parker went through and down the stairs, the second guard following. The stairs were metal, patterned with small circular holes, and loud when you walked on them.
At the bottom, Parker and the guard turned right and went through a locked barred door into a short broad windowless corridor painted pale yellow, with a black composition floor. A white line was painted down the middle of the floor and everybody walked to the right. There was a fairly steady stream of foot traffic in the corridor, because this was the only way in to the cells; prisoners, guards, clerks, a minister, a doctor.
One more guard seated at a table beside one more barred door to be unlocked, and they could go through into the front part of the building, with an ordinary broad corridor down the middle of it, people walking however they wanted. The doorways from this corridor had no doors. The wide opening on the right led to the mess hall, which took up all the space on that side. The first doorway on the left was the library, with the inmates in there lined up in front of the electric typewriters, waiting their ten-minute turn to work on their case. The doorway at the far end led to the visitors’ room, and the doorway halfway along on the left was for lawyer visits.
“In there,” the guard said, and Parker went through into a broad room with a wide table built into it that stretched wall-to-wall from left to right. At four-foot intervals, plywood partitions rose from the table to head-height, to create privacy areas. Chairs on this side faced the table between the partitions, numbered on their backs. Three of the chairs were occupied by inmates, talking to people across the table, lawyers presumably, blocked from Parker’s sight by the partitions. “Number three,” the guard said, and Parker went over to chair number three. In the chair on the other side, facing him, was a black man in a brown suit, pale blue shirt, yellow tie, all of it wrinkled. He wore gold-framed glasses and his hair was cropped short. He was looking in the briefcase open on the table, but then looked over at Parker and said, “Good morning, Ronald.”
“Good morning.” Parker sat facing him and put his forearms on the table.
“I’m Jacob Sherman,” the man said, “I’ll be your attorney.”
“You got a card?” Parker asked him.
Surprised, Sherman said, “Of course,” and reached into his suit-coat pocket. The card he handed Parker showed he was alone, not with a firm. Parker looked at it and put it away.
Sherman said, “I wish I had good news for you.”
“I don’t expect good news,” Parker said.
“George Walheim,” Sherman said, and paused, then, seeming embarrassed, said, “had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital.”
A heart attack. Walheim hadn’t expected things to go wrong. Parker said, “So that’s two of us in the hospital. Is Bruhl still alive?”
“Oh, yes,” Sherman said. “He’ll be all right, eventually.”
“Is Armiston in here?”
“I really wouldn’t know,” Sherman said. “He’s being represented by someone else.”
So that string was gone. The four down to two, the two separated. Parker didn’t think he could work this next part single-o, but how do you build a string in a place like this? He said, “How long, do you think, before trial?”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Sherman said.
Parker said, “You don’t think a trial is gonna happen?”
“Well, California is certainly going to request extradition,” Sherman told him.
“No,” Parker said. “We fight that.”
Sherman seemed surprised. “Why bother? You’ll have to go there sooner or later.”
Any other environment they put him in would be worse than this, harder to handle. Particularly if he was in a jurisdiction where he was known as someone who had both escaped and killed a guard. He said, “I’d rather deal with the local issue first.”
“California,” Sherman said, “will argue that their murder charge takes precedence.”
“But I’m here,” Parker said. “That should take precedence. We can argue it.”
It was clear that Sherman didn’t want the work involved; it was too pleasant to think of this case as a simple one, a fellow here today, on his way to California tomorrow. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
“You can do something else for me,” Parker said.
“Yes?”
“There’s a woman doesn’t know what’s happened to me. She’ll worry. I don’t want to phone her from here, or write her through the censors, because I don’t want her connected to me, don’t want to make trouble for her.” He pointed at the briefcase. “You’ll have some paper in there, and an envelope. I want to write her, so she’ll know I’m still alive, and put it in the envelope, and address it. I’ll ask you to put the stamp on it and mail it, and not show it to the people here. I won’t ask her to do anything illegal, this is just so she won’t worry, but I won’t get the law complicating her life.”