David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 4

“So now you want out. You know I can’t—”

“No. No. I don’t want to get out.”

The Inspector sat up a little straighter. He looked almost angry. “What did you want to see me about?”

“I want to be transferred to the laundry.”

“You got me down here for that? Why, I can’t—”

“There’s somebody I got to get next to.”

“Why?” The old voice cracked like a whip.

“This guy was Russ’ buddy. He’s on the office force and he got there by squealing on me. He goes through the laundry every day for a check.”

“You’ve gone stir-crazy! You think I’d help you kill a man, even a con? You think Principal Keeper Odell wouldn’t know he had to keep you apart?”

“He’s a sadist,” Macalay said. He finished his liquor and reached for the breath-killers. “He’d like to see this Hanning hurt. He’d like to see me hurt, too. He’d like to see every con hurt. This Hanning was Russ’ buddy. You know Russ is dead? I take it, you know that.”

Strane nodded, watched Macalay chew the breath-killers.

“I was getting somewhere before I got into The Hole,” Macalay said, “and to go on, I’ll have to work in the laundry. I tell you I’m onto something good.”

“You got guts,” Inspector Strane said. “I’ll be damned if I don’t want to see this work out for you.”

“Thanks,” Macalay said bitterly.

“Stop and think, will you? What am I going to tell Odell? I got no reason to ask him to transfer you.”

“You’re not much help.”

Strane swore. “And you keep your hands off that Hanning.”

“I’ll get to him,” Macalay said. “I have to.”

The P.K. laughed. “He’s a real dyed-in-the-wool lowdown con,” he said. “They never talk. Supposed to be a first offender, but I’ve sent out tracers. I’ll bet you he’s served time in a half a dozen other places.”

Macalay stood at attention.

“He’s not your favorite prisoner, eh?” Inspector Strane took out a cigar, handed it to the P.K.

“I got no favorite among the cons,” the P.K. said, heavily. “A nestful of snakes, the whole bunch. I’d like to pump poison through the cells.”

Strane said: “Well, if there weren’t any criminals, we’d both be out of jobs.”

The P.K. chuckled his heavy, belching chuckle. “A thought. Need this boy any more, Inspector?”

“No,” Inspector Strane said. “But think it over, Macalay.”

“Hold that boy outside, Strauss,” the P.K. said. “I want to talk to him...”

Strauss snapped his fingers at Macalay, who about-faced and marched out with the guard. Outside, Strauss sat down on a bench, staring at the convict-clerks; Macalay started to sit down next to him. Strauss snapped his fingers. “Attention!”

After awhile Inspector Strane came out, putting on his hat. He never glanced at Macalay, standing stiffly at attention.

One of the clerks, a little nance Macalay couldn’t remember seeing before, was giggling at him, for no apparent reason. By the time the P.K. sounded his buzzer, Macalay was considering violence.

Strauss snapped his fingers again — he was really a natural to turn out just like the P.K. — and Macalay marched back into the office, stood at attention in front of the desk.

After awhile the P.K. looked up. “All right, Strauss.” He waited till the screw had left. Then his sour gaze went up and down Macalay. “So you didn’t tell that city dick anything.”

“No, sir.”

“Pretty anxious for you to talk. Wanted me to bribe you.”

“Sir?”

“Give you a laundry job so you’d talk. Yah! Why should I? What did these cops ever do for me, except send more renegades in here to make me trouble? I wouldn’t do a city inspector a favor if he paid me!”

Macalay waited. So Strane had tried and it hadn’t worked. So—

“Yeah!” the P.K. snarled again. “I never liked you, Macalay. I don’t like cons, and you’re the worst kind. Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“But I got you trained,” the P.K. said. He ran a finger over the desk, inspected it for dust. “You don’t talk to cops, and that’s because I trained you. You’re a real con, now. You know what that inspector gets a year?”

Macalay felt very tired. He said: “No, sir.”

“Twenty-three hundred bucks more than I do. And he gets to go home at night, not live in a lousy stir. And he gets to go to dinners with all the big shots in town, and get up an’ make speeches about how we’re putting down crime, an’ all.”

Apparently the P.K. hated cops as well as cons. Macalay wondered how he felt about civilians. Probably hated them, too, because they didn’t have to take state jobs. Probably hated himself for that matter.

“Yeah,” the P.K. said, “that inspector sure went off with a bee in his high hat. You, Macalay. I’ll transfer you, but where I want to transfer you. You think you got brains enough to hold down an office job?”

“I could try, sir,” Macalay said, and held his breath.

“Yeah. I’ll have you transferred. You start tomorrow. Can you type?”

“Yes, sir.” This was too damn good to be true.

“Good, boy, good. A big boy like you in with the fags. Be nice.”

Macalay nodded imperceptibly. The sadistic sonofabitch wanted to see him and Hanning tangle. He wanted to see two cons knife one another. His own perverted pleasure was all the sonofabitch ever thought about.

The office job was okay. Only the P.K.’s office — the fancy one where he did not interrogate prisoners — was air conditioned, but there were fans in all the clerical rooms, and, as winter came on, heaters. There were washbasins where the convict-clerks could wash their hands if they soiled them on the carbon paper; there were pots of coffee sent up from the kitchen whenever they wanted them, because the office staff could do a lot for the other convicts, could transfer their cells or their work-assignments.

Several of the clerks were punks, pansies, girl-boys; these were the various phrases the prison world used to describe them. They flirted with the normal men on the convict-staff, and two or three couples of clerks were “married.” Of course it was a cinch for a clerk to see that he shared the same cell with his beloved. But in addition to all this, they were cons. Especially vicious ones. The limp wrists and the wiggling behinds didn’t make you forget that.

The arrival of Macalay, a new man in the office, had given the pansies a great big old thrill, as Macalay put it to himself. One of them had presented him with a personal coffee cup with his name painted on it in the fluid they used to correct mimeograph stencils; another had put flowers on his desk, and a third had given him a chair pad, hand-knitted.

But when he didn’t respond to their attentions, the girl-boys relaxed back into routine, and left him alone. Quizzically, he noticed that inside himself he rather missed the fuss they’d made over him, and, shuddering, he told himself he had to finish this up quick, make his play before he slid down the easy chute of convict thinking.

So he concentrated on Hanning.

It was a thing he could do well — hate Hanning. The convict part of him and the copper part of him could hate Hanning equally.

Hanning didn’t bat an eye when he found Macalay in the office. He didn’t allow himself to be stared down. What Hanning might be cooking up for him, he had no way of knowing. But he was wary, even as he knew Hanning to be wary of him.

He found out something right away: Hanning was “married” to one of the file clerks. Somehow or other this surprised Macalay; it changed his opinion of Hanning from sheer hatred to something pretty close to contempt. Still, he worked on how he could put this information that he’d uncovered about Hanning to use.