The woman, a thin, bottle redhead, dressed in a nice black pantsuit that reeked of nicotine, said to Mack, “Thanks, Detective, we can take it from here.” She shot him a put-on smile that really meant she was beyond angry for polluting her ripened interrogation subject and it would be addressed later.
Mack stared into my eyes as he got up and left.
The woman had the lead. She sat down with a notebook, held out a red box of Marlboros. “Cigarette?” It was strictly forbidden to smoke in a county building. This was another interrogation ploy, an infraction violation, that said, “See, I’m like you, I break the law.” A minor violation in comparison, but it does work. And when you were talking about a case as large and as important as this one, you tried everything.
I stared at her and didn’t say anything. She kept the phony smile, pulled a cigarette out of the box with her subdued red lipstick lips, but didn’t light it. “So,” she said, her eyes slightly pinned as if she had lit the cigarette and the smoke now wafted up, “I understand you’ve waived your rights.”
I weighed my options: talk to this woman and make a deal or wait to see if Mack had the guts to talk to me later.
When I didn’t immediately say anything, she said to her partner, a bleary-eyed red-faced man in an immaculate navy-blue suit, “John, Mr. Johnson looks uncomfortable. I think we can take the cuffs off, don’t you?”
Her partner got up to take off the cuffs.
“Bruno, you mind if I call you Bruno? My name is Nancy Thorne, and I think you know why I’m here.”
I rubbed my wrists and made my choice. “I would like to talk to an attorney.”
There was no rush in making a deal. I could always do that later.
The sheriff long ago learned to take special care of sensational prisoners. You didn’t put them in general population where another inmate with a yen for fame, a wannabe who had the desire to make a name for himself, could put a shiv between your celebrity’s ribs. There was a place in the jail called Administrative Segregation. The inmates wore green jumpsuits instead of standard blues and were labeled “Keep Aways, Escort Only.” I wasn’t put in Ad Seg because classification labeled me based on my alleged crimes. They’d booked me for everything, the torch murders, the kidnapping, and the train robberies. They threw all the charges up against the wall to see what would stick. Can’t say I wouldn’t have done any different under the circumstances. Homicide Detective Thorne and her crew had forty-eight hours to file the charges.
The jail considered me a suicide risk. I was put on the third-floor hospital in a single room with a fifteen-minute observation. This meant a deputy came by every fifteen minutes and looked in the little square window in the hard steel door to confirm I was still breathing and log that fact on the chart.
Maybe I should’ve been suicidal, but this whole thing was too pat and obviously set up on the fly. I knew, if given the chance, there was an outside possibility I could tear it down. What didn’t make sense was that Robby was smarter than all this. He had to know his house of cards would take a nosedive.
I waited for hours, counting the time off in fifteen-minute increments each time I saw the on-duty deputy put his face in the window of the door. I paced the small room and tried to stay awake by counting how many looky-loos came to my window, besides the on-duty deputy. The others wanted in to see the serial killer who was lighting people on fire, the man splashed across the TV and Los Angeles Times. Jail personnel, hospital staff, trustees, all came and looked in the zoo window. Gradually, the adrenaline bled off. Four hours passed. I laid down on the bed, curled up, fought sleep, prayed that the door would open, and Mack would be there. Ironically, I now depended upon him to save me.
My eyes grew heavy. The light went off and then strobed every fifteen minutes in my semidream state.
When I woke, I’d lost track of the flashes and didn’t know what time it was, whether it was day or night outside in the real world. I went to the window and waited ten minutes before the deputy came by, looked, and then marked the paper. I had to yell to be heard through the door. “What time is it?”
He didn’t answer and gave me the bird before he moved on. I waited. Two inmate trustees in blues pushed a noisy food cart down the hall as two others picked up empty trays. Breakfast. I’d slept longer than I thought. When I was a brand-new deputy, I only worked the hospital a couple of times on overtime and didn’t remember when chow was fed in the morning. I thought it was five o’clock to facilitate preparing the inmates for court. I went back to pacing. Dust motes hung in the air. I couldn’t help remembering that I had read somewhere most dust was particles of skin humans shed every day of their lives.
The activity in the hall increased, then abruptly dropped off all together while everyone ate. The little horizontal slot with a locked door under the window opened and a trustee put a hot tray on the ledge. My breakfast stayed right there on the ledge well past noon and was finally replaced with a brown-bag lunch. I didn’t eat that either, though I knew what was in it: a white bread American cheese sandwich, a bag of chips, a mushy apple, and a dried-out hard chocolate chip cookie.
Mack didn’t come until after dinner.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Mack didn’t look in the window, the key in the door rattled the lock, the door opened, and he stepped in. His face turned red and he clenched his fists. “I’m putting my ass on the line. This better not be bullshit.” He had dark half circles under his bloodshot eyes, and his hair was mussed. It looked as if he hadn’t slept. He wore denim pants, a thick brown belt, a Rolling Stones t-shirt, the one with the large tongue on the front, partially covered by a long-sleeve, tan corduroy shirt stretched tight at the shoulders and biceps. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, the blond hair hardly visible on his lantern jaw.
I sat up on the bed and rubbed my face and looked out the open door at freedom, a sterile institution-beige hallway. “Maybe you should close the door and lower your voice.”
He hesitated.
I may have tried to take control of the meeting too quickly. He stomped over to the door and slammed it. I heard the solid steel door lock automatically. Deputy Mack was prone to those kinds of mistakes.
“You going to start talking or am I going to walk out?”
“The door’s locked.”
His face flushed red.
I held up my hands, “Whoa. I’m sorry, really. Don’t get mad. I’m going to make you a star.”
“Like hell you are. You got nothin’. I don’t even know what I’m doin here.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be here at all. You know there’s something terribly wrong with what’s going on. More so than normal, I mean.”
He calmed down, looked over his shoulder with a quick glance, and backed up to sit in a hard plastic chair.
“I know you have no reason to believe me. I didn’t burn those people and I didn’t shoot Crazy Ned Bressler.”
He opened his mouth to speak. I cut him off. “I know who burned those people. That’s why you’re here. You know it’s the truth.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“You know why?”
He stared, thinking it over, not rising to the bait.
I leaned forward, my hands on the edge of the bed, “Why don’t you tell me why I’m telling you.”
His light-blue eyes were almost gray. He waited a long time, his jaw muscle knitting. Finally, he looked away as if making a confession. “I grew up in south Texas. My daddy was a lawman and so was my grandpap. I wanted to get away from being Big John Mack’s little boy and make my own way.”