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 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?”