The Mars Room(27)

“Honey, it was NOT the El Cortez,” Betty yelled up the vent. “It was Caesars Palace. And honestly, if you’re going to tell my story and you don’t know the difference between Caesars and the El Cortez, there is just so much else you can’t know. The El Cortez is for off-duty limousine drivers and Filipinos. Got nothing against them. Should have hired one to get rid of Doc while I had the chance.”

Doc was the dirty cop, Sammy said.

“He’s tried to take a bounty on me about five times. You’d think a woman on death row could get some peace. Be left alone.”

Among the evidence that led to Betty’s conviction was a photo of her lying nude under a pile of money. The photo was taken by Doc, the dirty cop, just after she got her husband’s life insurance payout. Betty loved money, Sammy said, and had slept with a pillow stuffed with bills in county jail. She asked Sammy to guard her pillow when she went to court. Sammy said she felt like a queen, to think that a high-class person like Betty LaFrance trusted her with her pillow full of money.

Betty and Doc had been arrested in Las Vegas. Sammy knew the stories but any new audience for Betty was worth a repeat. She told us through the vent about the Nevada jail where she was held before they extradited her back to California. She said the girls there—the gals there—all worked. Every female in the Las Vegas county jail had to count playing cards, put them in proper order to make decks for the casinos. They made her do it, she said, and her fingers got terribly chapped.

We were buzzing by then from the hooch.

“Did she ever show you that photo, of her with the money?” I wanted to see it.

She had not, but Sammy said Betty had a whole file on herself down there, all the articles that had appeared in the newspapers, her trial transcript, everything. Her case was a big deal, big news, Sammy said. Betty hiring multiple hit men, the cop implicated in a lot of other cases, major scandal with the LAPD. Sammy shouted down to Betty and asked if we could look at the photo. All I wanted in my drunken state, my full set of hopes and wishes, was to see this picture of the person whose voice I heard through the vent, a woman covered in money. But really I wanted to see anything besides the concrete walls of our tiny cell.

Betty refused to send the photo through the toilet. She was afraid it would get damaged. You can wrap things tightly enough in plastic that no water seeps in. We send ice cream sandwiches from canteen through the toilets, wrapped in Kotex as insulation, then plastic wrap. She was playing hard to get. Sammy asked McKinnley, the sergeant working ad seg that night, if he’d pass a book from Betty for her to read. Everyone called him Big Daddy. “I got to finish it, Big Daddy,” Sammy said. “I read every chapter but the final one, last time I was back here.” If he said yes, Betty could slip the photo into the pages.

“I can’t do any passing, Fernandez. You get caught with property that ain’t yours, they’re gonna add time. You know that. I don’t like to see my little girls suffer back here. Just follow the rules, Fernandez, and you’ll be mainlined soon.”

“Big Daddy,” Sammy said, “I wish you’d been my father. My whole life could have gone different.”

“Now, Fernandez,” Sergeant McKinnley said, “I’m sure your own father did the best job he could.”

We heard his boots moving down the hall.

“I never knew my father!” Sammy called after him, through the food flap. “My mother didn’t know him, either! She’s not even sure who he was!”

Betty heard us laughing and that was what did it. She was no longer the center of attention and agreed to flush up the photo.

After we got the thirty layers of plastic wrap unpeeled, Sammy unfolded a newspaper article that featured the incriminating image. I had pictured a classic nude with a bikini of hundred-dollar bills, the long tan legs insured for millions.

The image was of a woman lying on a bed stony as a corpse, with an enormous landslide of money crushing her, only her head emerging from the pile. She looked as if a gravel truck had backed up to the bed and slid its multi-ton load over her, entombing her in money.

We didn’t either of us say a word. Sammy folded up the image, rewrapped it, and sent it down the pipes.



* * *



Our once weekly yard time was not a real yard, just the ad seg yard. A small concrete area wrapped in razor wire. But we got to see Conan out there, on his own adjacent razor-wire concrete patch. Conan did push-ups and talked to me about cars. It had started when Conan asked where I was from.

“Frisco, huh,” he said, “where they were doing that extended-axle thing back in the nineties. Pokers. Man, you guys have something to answer to.”

To say “Frisco” is as goofy and wrong as an extended axle, but Conan was right. It was as if one morning I’d woken to discover that every neighbor on my block had extended their axles, so that the wheels of the cars stuck out on both sides. Now it was a distant memory, something unfashionable. That was before I’d moved from the avenues downtown, when the city was invaded and I could no longer afford anything but a place in the Tenderloin. Extended axles were no less important than any other memory we made the subject of our talk: life as we had known it.

Conan and I reminisced about big rims, floater rims, spinners. Neon undercar kits. Holley carbs and Hemis. Popular trucks and SUVs. The Chevrolet Intruder. The Dodge Rendition.

The Intruder, Conan and I agreed, looked like something that was designed to be inserted in something else.