T. Parker - Laguna Heat

“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.”

“Not the visitor’s room. I need to see him on his own ground, where he’s comfortable.”

“It isn’t comfortable anywhere in this place.”

Shephard set his Python on TeWinkle’s desk and stood up.

The sounds of West Block echoed around him as he stepped through the last set of sliding steel doors, flanked by two solemn guards. Music blurted from several of the cells, cacophonic and competitive. Two men screamed at each other — one dressed like a woman — from inside the cubicle to his left. From down the block, something raked against the bars in a clanging, methodical riff. Someone was singing and strumming a guitar, and a harmonica whined accompaniment from across the walkway. A Dylan song; Shephard recognized it. He could see faces coming into the dull light as he walked by, hands wrapping around bars. Somebody yelled, “Hey, sweet thing, come here to daddy.” The guard on his right nodded to the stairs at the end of the hall. “Matusic, two hundred B, as in boy. Upstairs.”

Shake got off his bed and came to the bars as they approached. Shephard studied his small eyes, set like jewels in the meaty face. He was a big man, but plump, and his expression hinted at a boy picked on for his softness. But when he smiled, Shephard saw the brutish guile of a man who’d learned how to get even. There was something damaged in it.

“Got a visitor, Shake. Mr. Shephard. Behave yourself, and show him this is a joint with class.” The guard opened the door. “I’ll be top of the stairs. Call when you’re done.”

Shephard stepped in, glanced at the open notebook on the bed, and the pen beside it. “A writer. Shake for Shakespeare?” The door slammed closed behind him. He’d forgotten to ask what Matusic was in for.

“And ’cause I shake when I move.”

They shook hands. “Tom Shephard. What are you in for?”

“Mostly rape. You’re a cop.”

“Laguna Beach.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s a long way.”

“You can sit on the bed or the chair.” Shephard took the chair, and Shake fluffed his pillow before sitting back on his bed. He balanced the notebook on his belly. “I don’t want out. So if you’re here to make a deal, forget that kind of stuff. I’m home. Everything in the world I got right here.”

“Not a thing you want? Nothing?”

Matusic pondered the question, doodling in his notebook. Shephard looked around the cell: two stacks of books in a corner, piled almost head-high; more books under the bed; a sink and toilet; one wall covered by a huge photograph of mountains with flowers in bloom; the other by large sheets of graph paper clotted with tiny, dark handwriting.

“Always use a little money,” Shake said finally. “I collect it. What you want’s the question, isn’t it?”

Shephard studied the man’s face for some avenue of appeal. “Where do you keep your stuff? Your writing?”

“Under the bed. This is my hundred and forty-third book, when I’m done with it. Collect them, too, like the money.” He tapped the notebook with the pen, and something seemed to catch his eye. He wrote slowly, his face tensing with concentration. When he was finished, he looked back to Shephard, relaxed and grinning as if he’d been caught torturing a cat. Shephard felt the hairs bristling up his neck. He put a twenty on Shake’s bed.

“I need to know some things about the riot in ’eighty, Shake. Nothing you tell me is going to come back on you, on anyone. It’s a... personal thing for me.”

Matusic’s little eyes seemed to light up. He crumpled the bill toward him and grinned. “Bad riot. Four days of confusion and pain. Sixteen men and one guard died. Brought in the National Guard, finally.” He leaned forward, catching the notebook as it slid away. “Fire everywhere and everything busted up. Guards thought we caused it, but it was the fleas caused it. That, and too many of us in the blocks.” He spread out the twenty, pressing it against his knee.

“Do you remember it well?”