David Alexander: Masters of Noir: Volume 4

After awhile Macalay went and looked, too. He turned from the list. “Hey, my name isn’t here.”

Nobody answered him. He went and knocked on Nosy’s door. Nosy yelled a “come in,” and when the door was opened could be seen stretched out on a cot with two mattresses, holding a magazine.

Macalay said: “You forgot to give me any work.”

Nosy stared at him silently and then went back to reading. After awhile, Macalay shut the door and went back to his cot. Somebody laughed, but when he looked around, there wasn’t a smile in the barracks room.

So now he knew how it was going to be; how it was for a policeman who went to prison. You became a ghost, something that nobody could see or hear.

It wasn’t good. But when he’d made the deal, he knew it wasn’t going to be any bed of roses.

It had started in the rain. There were two of them, as per regulations, two patrolmen in a car, making the rounds. That Macalay wasn’t physically fit, his right arm dislocated, was not according to regulations. They were listening to the traffic squad get all the calls while they — Gresham was driving, Macalay on the radio — tooled their weary way through the deserted commercial streets, the rain doing nothing for their spirits, the lack of calls letting them slowly down into a bog of indifference.

It was Macalay who saw the light, just a flicker of it, in the window of a second story salesroom. His hand on Gresham’s arm stopped the car, and they both watched, and then they were sure of it. There was a flashlight up there.

So they had gone up, Gresham first, and found the bars in the jewelry place cut away, the electric warning system carefully extracted, as Macalay had dissected angleworm nerves in high school biology. They saw the three men at the safe with the burning-torch, but they never saw the other two.

After that it was all noise and guns; Gresham dead and one of the safecrackers dying; Macalay in a corner with his right shoulder, the bum shoulder, shot and all the rest of him bruised as a .45 bruises a man; the other four getting away, and later the sergeant’s car and the lieutenant’s car, the headquarters car and the loft-squad truck all screaming down below.

And the ambulance and the trip to the hospital and the brass standing around his bed arguing and questioning.

And finally the hospital orderly — how honest can a skid-row white-coat get? — coming in and turning over the little paper to the inspector. The little paper with two diamonds folded in it that they had found in Macalay’s shoe, just where he had put them before blacking out trying to help Gresham, who was already beyond help.

After that, it got slower. He talked with Inspector Strane and they’d come to an understanding. He’d had a choice to make — which of two eight balls he’d get behind. And then there was the trial, and the district attorney who had asked the chair for Macalay: “If a man is committing a felony, such as grand larceny, and anyone gets killed as a result of said felony, he is guilty of murder under the law.”

But the jury had only given him ten to twenty. Ten years to twenty years in the pen. A reporter in the courtroom had said: “It doesn’t matter. Send a cop to prison, and the cons’ll knock him off anyway.” And this reporter, of course, didn’t know about the deal between Macalay and Strane which made a special target out of Macalay for the cons...

So here he was. In Isolation Barracks No. 7, bed No. 11. With a con on either side of him, and cons across the room; but nobody to speak to. He talked to them but he never got an answer, and even when the prison doctor came around once a day, he grunted at Macalay, though he made jokes with the other fresh fish.

All things pass. The three weeks went by without a contagious disease showing up and Macalay — 116911 — was put in a regular cell-block, No. 9, on the second tier, and given a regular job, running a stitching machine in the shoe shop.

The clerks who assigned the jobs were almost all trusties, and they would have given him hard labor, but his shoulder hadn’t completely recovered from the bullet wound and the old injury that kept throwing the collar bone out of place. It had been weak and strained the night he’d seen the light in the jewelry-loft; that was why poor Gresham had gone up the stairs first.

If it hadn’t been for the shoulder, it would have been Macalay dead and Gresham wounded, and sometimes 116911 thought it might have been better that way.

The needles used on a power leather sewing machine are strong, sharp. Set in the end of a piece of broom handle, one of them makes a lovely shiv. Coming to his machine one morning, Macalay found his needle missing. He went to the foreman, his lie prepared.

“I forgot to tell you last night. My needle broke just as I finished work.”

The foreman looked him over. “Okay. Bring me the broken parts and I’ll sign a new one out to you.”

“I threw the broken pieces in the scrap bin. Last night.”

The foreman was a civilian. He raised his hand, and a guard came over. “Take him to the P.K. Keep an eye on him; he stole a needle.”

As the guard marched Macalay out of the shoe shop, all the cons were, for once, bent hard over their work. But he thought he caught a couple of smiles.

The Principal Keeper was no gentleman; he left all that to the warden. When the guard lined Macalay up in front of him and said: “116911. Stole a needle from the shoe shop,” the P.K. hardly looked up. He just said: “Search him,” picked up a phone and said: “Search 32a, cell block 9,” and went on with his paper work.

Before the block guards could call back, Macalay was stripped and searched standing at attention, naked in front of the P.K.’s desk. When the call came back that there was no contraband in the cell, the P.K. sighed and got up from behind his desk. He walked slowly around to face Macalay.

“Where’s the needle?”

Macalay said: “It broke. I threw it in the trash bin last night.” The P.K. brought the heel of his shoe down on Macalay’s naked toes. “Where is it?” He twisted the heel a little. It was not made of rubber.

Macalay said: “I don’t know.”

The P.K. hit him in the belly. “Stand at attention,” he said, when Macalay bent over involuntarily. “And call me sir. Where is it?”

Macalay found a little wind left in him and said: “I don’t know, sir.”

The P.K. bawled “Parade rest.” Spray from his mouth landed on Macalay’s face.

Macalay advanced one foot, and started to clasp his hands in front of him. As soon as he separated his legs, the P.K. brought his knee up between them, hard. Macalay passed out.

He came to in the Hole, in solitary. He was still naked, but there was a suit of coveralls and a pair of felt slippers in his cell. He put them on, and had to walk bent over, because the coveralls were too short. The slippers were too big.

Nobody tapped on his water pipes, nobody put a message in his oatmeal for two weeks. That was what he ate — a big bowl of oatmeal once a day, put in a Judas-gate in the door every morning, together with a half-gallon jug of water. The Judas-gate only opened one way at a time, so he didn’t know if his food was brought by a trusty or a guard.

That went on for two weeks. Towards the end of that time, Macalay began to have an illusion; he imagined Gresham’s dead body was in the cell with him. When he moved from one side of the Hole to the other, the body slowly moved after him. It took a lot of effort not to think about contacting Inspector Strane and begging him to call the whole thing off.

When he got back to cell block No. 9, he had a new bunky. It didn’t matter to Macalay; none of the cons talked to him anyway. He sat down on his bunk, and the thin mattress and chain-link spring felt wonderful after the floor of the Hole. He pulled his feet up, stretched, and slowly, tentatively closed his eyes; the light hurt them.