Shephard dredged up the name from memory. “Assistant Warden TeWinkle is a friend. Call him for me, would you, buddy?”
“Told you he’s busy...”
“Don’t know he’s busy until you try, now do you? He’s expecting me.”
The guard poked the telephone buttons with martial address, waited, explained the situation. Then the hold button: “Never heard of you, Shephard. Maybe you ought to make an appointment and—”
“I got people back in my hometown dying by fire, mister. You heard of that? I’m a cop and I need some help, so tell TeWinkle this is the biggest emergency he’s had all night.”
The guard eyed him, sighing. This time his tone was a little more encouraging. He explained again, nodded, hung up. “Be right with you.”
“Thanks, chum. You’ve done a fine thing, really.”
Assistant Warden Dave TeWinkle was right with Shephard a half hour later. He was a thin, wiry man in his late fifties, Shephard guessed, with taut orange hair and the bright nose of a drinker. He led Shephard upstairs to his office, which was paneled in redwood and oppressively hot. “Mercante? Sure. Won’t ever forget that sonofabitch. Killed in the riot of 1980, along with fifteen other inmates. Could have saved yourself a trip and used the phone, detective.”
Shephard gathered what assurance he could muster. “What I want, Dave... what I need is to talk to someone who was there. At the riot. Someone who knew Mercante.”
“Well, I was there. Me and a riot gun, holding down what was left of the east wing for twenty-four hours. Watched most of it burn.” TeWinkle jerked his thumb toward a photograph framed on the wall. Behind the dense smoke in the picture’s foreground, Shephard could see the forms of men scurrying through the cellblock surrounded by flames, like bodies lost in hell.
“What happened to Mercante?”
TeWinkle chortled, as if he were being pestered by a four-year-old. “He died. I wasn’t that close. I didn’t blast him with the twelve gauge, though I wouldn’t have minded too much. What do you mean, what happened?”
“How did he die? Fire? Shot? How?”
TeWinkle leaned back, put his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. “Guess I don’t remember exactly how it went down for old Azul.”
“Can you get the account? The record? His file?”
“Get anything I goddamned want,” TeWinkle said with a dry smile. “Stay put.”
He was back in five minutes with a thin manila folder that bore a red sticker saying INACTIVE on it. He laid it on the desk in front of him, hunched over, and brought a pair of reading glasses from his pocket.
“Bad time,” he said. “Late summer and quiet. That’s how you know something’s up in the joint. You come to work and the men are fighting and swearing and generally making a scene, you know things are okay. You come in and it’s nothing going on, look out. I was in charge of guards back then. Supervisor. Spent a lot of time in the north tower, just watching.” TeWinkle flipped a sheet and nodded.
“Started about this time of night,” he said. “Fight in the mess hall got out of hand, and when the guard came to break it up they were ready for him. Half a dozen of them was the story. Beat the hell out of him and dragged him off to the east block and put him on the phone to the warden. They had a whole list of crap they wanted. Longer time in the yard, better extermination, I remember. The summer was a hot one and the place was full of fleas and roaches. Full of inmates, too. Much too crowded. Warden said he’d see what he could do if they’d let Connell go, but they killed him instead, then started setting fire to things. Mattresses, blankets, their own stuff mostly. Everybody runnin’ wild. Couldn’t hardly tell who was who, so much fire and smoke. Got into the rec room and set that on fire too.
“The prisoners held the blocks for four days. Guards shot three of them dead. Couple more died in the fire. One or two got killed by their own kind... here, that was Mercante. Says right here: ‘Killed by unknown assailants during prison disturbance of August, 1980. A piece of sharpened bed frame was driven into his chest.’ Someone shanked him. Couldn’t have happened to a better guy. Open and shut, Shephard. That do ya?”
He handed the folder across the table. Shephard studied the profile and face shots, a fresh set taken every few years. In the last pictures, taken in May of the year Mercante died, he wore a full beard and mustache.
“Strange fellow, that Azul,” TeWinkle said. “Little guy, but everybody scared of him. Even the gangs left him alone. Got sent up for murder, life, I think. Now I’m a skosh hazy on this — you can check it there if you want — but I think he killed a guy while he was inside. Long before I came here, late fifties maybe. A fight down in the showers, and when it was over, Mercante had busted the fella’s head open on the tiles. So they tacked on another life sentence for that. Hell, he’d a been out a long time ago if he’d stayed low. Life is more like twenty if you do it straight up and keep clean.”
Good memory, Shephard thought, reading a paragraph from the third sheet in Mercante’s file. The man was jumped in the shower — three on one — and he lived to be sentenced for it. Azul’s first five years had been hard time: three fights, two vacations in the cooler, moved to the trouble block, then back out with the regular population until he tried to use the bathroom. But after 1962, Shephard saw a change in the man’s lifestyle.
“Understudy to the prison priest?”
“The worst of them always end up on God’s side,” TeWinkle said as he fiddled with a pipe. “No wonder He’s losing. Look at Manson out at Vacaville. Everybody’s saved. Know why? Because it makes them feel good.”
Shephard looked back at the file. Mercante, the acolyte, had outdistanced three prison priests in his twelve-year career. He witnessed daily to the prisoners, made some converts, upped the church attendance. He still had time for a job in the Folsom records room, $1.25 an hour, a trusty.
And he painted. The transcript mentioned a “successful” business he ran, charging inmates to have their portraits done. His work was featured twelve years running at the annual prison arts and crafts show. The guards commissioned him in 1972 to do a likeness of a retiring warden. He gave classes. And if his file was accurate, Azul Mercante changed. A 1953 entry described him as “deceitful, extremely violent, untrustworthy and not improving.” Ten years later he was “patient, agreeable, and apparently without violent tendencies.” By early 1973, his goodwill was no longer a hot topic among prison observers, and Mercante was “quite simply a model prisoner in all respects. It is regrettable that the inmate’s past record prevents his consideration for parole.”
“Detective?” Shephard looked up to find TeWinkle studying him from behind a thin cirrus of smoke. “Mind me asking just what the hell you’re looking for?”
Shephard tossed the INACTIVE file onto the desk. “Someone who was there. When he died. Right in the middle of it.”
“If I knew what you were—”
“If I knew, I’d ask, Dave. Someone inside at the riot. Someone who might have picked up the gossip afterwards. A man who’s been inside a while. It’s important. Can you get me inside, alone, with someone like that?”
“Shephard, you expect the damndest things. Yeah, I can get you into a visitor’s room. If you want somebody who’s been here and knows the place, I got that too. Ed Matusic, but we call him Shake. Writes all the time.”