Because nothing happens fast in Stateville, I was surprised that my visit to Merton happened ahead of the transcript and seeing Sister Frances. Inmate letters typically sit in bags for weeks, sometimes months, waiting for someone to get around to sorting them. When Johnny’s lawyer Greg Yeoman called me a scant ten days after I sent my letter to Johnny with the news that the old gang leader would see me, I knew the Hammer still had plenty of influence.
My visit to Stateville was scheduled for the day before Brian Krumas’s big shindig on Navy Pier. Before driving to Joliet, I took Mr. Contreras to his safe-deposit box in his old neighborhood so he could pick up his medals.
Even though he was keyed up almost beyond bearing, talking nonstop about the fundraiser, what he thought I should wear, whether he should call Max Loewenthal to borrow a dinner jacket, Mr. Contreras took time to warn me-again-against getting involved with Johnny Merton.
“He’s got a lawyer, you said so yourself. Let the lawyer ask him your questions. If those black friends of his ain’t talking to you, there’s a good bet Merton won’t, either. Would you trust some black detective who came around asking questions about your childhood friends?”
It wasn’t our first go-round on the topic. “I hope I’d have enough sense and skill to evaluate their sincerity and skill. And not judge them or any person on their race.”
“Yeah, well, if you have to have a dish perfect before you eat it, you’re always going to starve to death, cookie, and that’s a fact. It’s pretty darned hard for the rest of us to be perfect enough for you.”
I was just perfect enough not to tell him he could get himself to Petra’s damned fundraiser. At the bank, I waited in the lobby while he went to his safe-deposit box. He returned, glowing with justifiable pride over his collection: a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, his Good Conduct Medal with stars, and his ETO medal, also with stars. I left him polishing them while I drove west to the Big House.
It wasn’t even as though I wanted to visit Johnny, certainly not that I wanted to go to Stateville. I had been locked up once myself. It had almost killed me, and the helplessness and pain from those two months still haunt my nightmares. Prison is one endless round of violations of every human boundary-your mail, your time alone, your time with others. All these are invaded. Someone listens to your phone calls. Toilets and showers are open to any prurient guard. And your body itself is constantly violated, you being powerless to protest the frequent strip searches.
As I left the interstate for Route 53, my stomach twisted so hard that I doubled over at the wheel and had to pull off the road. I knew I would be searched, and that was the problem. I kept telling myself that it was impersonal. Too many people-civilians, lawyers, guards-had smuggled in weapons and drugs to exempt anyone from a thorough inspection of person and property. But the thought of willingly submitting to it turned me so cold I was shaking. I switched on the heater despite the warmth of the July day. Gradually I calmed down enough that I could drive through the gates.
I showed the sentry my letter from Greg Yeoman announcing me as part of Johnny Merton’s legal team. I showed my letter from the warden authorizing my visit this afternoon. The guard did a thorough inspection of my car, including the old towels I keep in the backseat for the dogs.
When I passed through the three sets of razor wire, the electronic security, and the body search, I felt myself shriveling, disappearing into a numb place so I couldn’t feel pain. I was panting when the search was finished and I was escorted into the lawyers’ holding pen.
Like everything at Stateville, the room was old and poorly lit. The sagging deal table where I was going to meet Merton might have been manufactured in 1925, the year the prison opened. Stateville consists of a series of circular cellblocks, with a guard station in the middle of each. Guards, in theory, can see all the cells without the prisoners being able to tell if they’re observed.
As it stands today, the lighting in Stateville is so bad that no one can see much of anything. Many of the inmates spend days in the dark. Pigeons fly through their cells and along the corridors, getting in easily through the cracks in the windows and walls, but, like many of the humans, never finding their way out again.
Because of staff shortages, the men are essentially in a Supermax facility, allowed out briefly once a day, often going weeks without getting to use the exercise yard. Their starchy meals are slapped through the bars at them. I guessed that’s why Johnny agreed so readily to let me be part of his legal team. Even if the state wouldn’t let him use a gym or a library, they had to let him see his lawyer.
I’d been in the meeting room more than an hour before the locks scraped back. A guard came in with Johnny in cuffs and seated him at the scarred table. He left us alone for a minute, then returned with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. Johnny clearly had clout! The guard stepped to the corner of the room, supposedly out of earshot.
“So, little white girl lawyer couldn’t take the heat at Twenty-sixth and California.” Johnny gave me an evil grin. “Had to jump to the pig side of the fence, huh?”
“Good to see you again, too, after all this time, Mr. Merton.” I sat down across from him.
Actually, seeing Johnny was a shock. He was almost bald, and what remained of his close-cropped hair was white. He had once been lean and lithe, as supple as his anaconda namesake, but the loss of exercise and increase of heavy food had weighed him down. Only the anger behind the tearing in his bloodshot eyes was familiar. That, and the coiled snakes tattooed on his arms.
“And what brilliant new insights are you bringing to my legal team, little white girl?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “The pleasure of knowing I don’t have to try to make you look good to a judge again.”
That silenced him. I hoped he was remembering the time I represented him all those years back. In our meetings, after showering me with the barrage of insults that had become his second skin, he had raged against the rampant racism of the courts, the cops, the economy. I somehow persuaded him to tone it down, to speak civilly to the judge and opposing counsel, and, in the end, we got an aggravated assault charge reduced to a sentence for battery.
“I read through your file over the weekend. I expect the cops could have got you anytime they wanted you for the rackets, but they were waiting for you to make a big mistake and do it in front of a guy with a wire.”
He smacked the table with his palm. “You think I’m admitting to anything in front of you, bitch, you are so wrong!”
I pulled Suite Française from my briefcase and started to read. After watching me in mounting fury, Johnny suddenly gave a bark of a laugh. “Right. Ms. Detective, I should have said.”
“Close enough.” I closed the novel but didn’t put it away. “I’m looking for an old pal of yours. Lamont Gadsden.”
The ugly look, never far from his face, came back full bore. “And what do you want to frame him for, Ms. Detective?”
“I’m the wrong kind of detective for that, Mr. Merton. I only want to find the guy.”
“So someone else can stick him in here next to me?” His face was mean, but he knew the prison system: he spoke in a jailhouse whisper.
“Is there a reason he should be? Was he complicit in one of those murders they booked you for?”
“They booked me but never proved anything. No evidence but a high-wire act, and that acrobat ain’t soaring too high these days.”
The man who’d fingered Johnny for three gang-related slayings had been Johnny’s second-in-command at the Anacondas. He’d been found dead in an alley the day Johnny’s trial started, as I’d read in the Herald-Star ’s account of the trial. They’d never arrested anyone for the man’s murder, although his ears were missing, the telltale sign of an Anaconda who’d been abandoned by the gang.