Dead Souls (13 page)

CHAPTER
NINE

I
T TAKES THE WHOLE NEXT MORNING
and part of the afternoon before Opal shows up—an accident on the bridge—but I ­managed to do a little Internet research while Justin napped. Alejandro was right. No mention of Saul in any of the news archives, although I found a PDF on the site of a student lawyer–­led defense club, which noted the strangely long duration of one “Saul Baptiste's confinement in solitary”—called “the Adjustment Center” at San Quentin. The initial charge was something that didn't necessarily warrant solitary—bank robbery gone bad, he had passed a note to a bank teller telling her to give him ten thousand dollars, and when a pastor tried to stop him, he shot and killed the man—but later infractions in prison itself, like knifing an inmate in the foot, throwing feces at a guard's face, led to his being moved there.
Is that the whole story?
asks the student article.
Or is he a political prisoner?
There was an old photo of Saul taken shortly before his arrest too, leading a march in a pro-Communist takeover of the Golden Gate Bridge. Square-jawed with a beard and thinning hair, he looks like a doppelgänger for Philip K. Dick. I try to see his dark shadow, but it's not picked up by the lens.

I have to go. Opal doesn't buy my work-emergency excuse—she had to stop herself from rolling her eyes—but I whispered to Justin that I have to meet
him
in person, explain why I won't be seeing him for a while. Justin nodded quietly, a gift.

I hate this, having to lie. Two lies already before I'm even out the door. And it does unnerve me—
oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive
and all that. But the end also justifies the means, and if I can save Justin's life as a result, I'm sure he'll forgive these small trespasses. Plus I just may be the only person on earth who could even get close to Saul. Invisibility has its uses.

So I grab my coat, my keys, ignore my cell, which is blowing up with more dead soul chatter about Gary—
Emergency mtg., 7:00 p.m.
—and strike off for Marin.

UP CLOSE,
the prison doesn't look the way I expected, certainly not the San Quentin I always pictured across the bay. From the bridge, it always seemed like a fortress—impenetrable, formidable—an impression cemented by the stories my parents swapped with their druggie friends, tall tales about barbed wires for miles, dungeons, secret booby traps to prevent escape, guards with assault rifles surveying it all from a tower equipped with heat-seeking bullets.

The reality is more like Disneyland took a wrong turn into Soviet bloc architecture. The original Gothic structure looks like a fort or a monastery, but there are other buildings too—a brick one that could pass for a nineteenth-century factory, along with flat-topped, monolithic cement structures of unknown purpose.

And surprisingly there's only one public gate into the prison, manned by a solitary, slightly pudgy guard. I pause at the stop sign, put the car in park, roll down the window. My plan is to pretend I'm lost and ask for directions while I get a good view of the front entrance so I can park somewhere out of sight and then ghost in.

“Hello,” he says with a smile. “Visitor parking is there.” He cheerfully points to a nearby part of the lot. Then he hands me a logbook, which I wasn't expecting. All it takes is a beat of my hesitation for him to take a look at me more closely. Not a regular, obviously.

I see what other people wrote and note several entries for “Museum” under “purpose.”
There's a museum at San Quentin?
Sounds good enough, so I do that too. I pass the clipboard back to him, and he looks at it for a good minute.

“Tourist?”

“Sort of,” I say. “I live in Oakland. But I've never been over here.”

He nods at this, his suspicions somewhat eased. “Saw the show, huh?”

“Yes,” I say, no idea what he's talking about.

“That week it came out, we had to expand the hours. Bus in folks from San Rafael. Thank God it's died down. ID?”

I show him my license, and he notes it, then he waves me through. “Brown building to your right. No photos or using your cell phone on prison property. Enjoy.”

I slowly roll into the lot, feeling a minor thrill of victory, but then it strikes me—the prison's sheer enormity. It'd be easy to wander the hallways all day, and I don't have the time. Not surprisingly, interior blueprints weren't available online, al
though I do have a photo printed on my inkjet of the exterior doors to the Adjustment Center, or so the Web tag said. I've never tried ghosting somewhere unfamiliar, based only on a photo. Essentially I'll be winging it, surrounded by more than four thousand inmates and armed guards.
Great
.

I feel security's gaze on me, clocking time. I can't imagine that disappearing in my car while he's watching would be a good idea.

Well, nothing for it.

I get out of the car, see the sign for the
SAN QUENTIN STATE MUSEUM
, right next to the
SAN QUENTIN HANDICRAFT GIFT SHOP
.
God bless America
. If there's a bathroom with a lock, I might just be able to pull this off.

I walk by another sign,
USE IT AND LOSE IT
, over an icon of a cell phone, and enter the door to the museum.

The air is tepid, and a small, useless fan whirs on the floor. Cinder-block walls painted beige, the floor lined with yellow and white checkerboard linoleum tiles, well worn. There's a desk with a sign-in log, a half-filled mug of coffee with powdered creamer floating on the top, and a scratched old wooden chair, empty for the moment, and a bell, the kind you see in hotels.

I have the place to myself, for now. In case there's a camera, I pretend to be interested in the small labyrinth of displays, keeping an eye out for a bathroom sign.

There's a bit of rope from the last prisoner who was hung, a model of the death chamber that was, according to the descriptive card, built by the inmates it would later kill, an assortment of confiscated shivs. Headline news clippings from across the century blown up serve as wallpaper, detailing the
most horrific executions, the wildest murders. If the museum was anywhere except the grounds of San Quentin, it'd seem like a cheap carny sideshow, but because of the proximity to actual death-row inmates, it offers a shiver cemeteries can't touch. I wonder how many of them were dead souls. How many had a choice.

“That was for ‘Bloody Babs,' ” says a voice out of nowhere.

I turn to find a sixties-ish man in a worn,
CASH, SAN QUENTIN
T-shirt, a slightly gleeful twinkle in his eye. He points to the glass case I've landed in front of. There's a blindfold wrapped around the head of a foam dummy, and next to it a black-and-white photo of a woman who could pass for a 1950s film star.

“She wanted a blindfold before they gassed her, said she didn't want to have to look at the people watching. Understandable, I guess.”

I'm expected to reply, so I say, “Interesting.”

“Susan Hayward played her in the movie.”

Just then a family of six enter, a macabre Sunday outing for the kids. Real tourists judging by the tucked-in T-shirts, brand-new sneakers, and identical cargo shorts. The littlest, wearing a striped prison hat, rings the bell twice before her mother shushes her.

“Duty calls,” he says. I guess he must be the curator and the inhabitant of the empty chair.

“Is there a bathroom?” I ask.

He nods, points me to the back of the building. There's a sign hanging from the ceiling:
RESTROOMS—DAMES & GANGSTERS
.

Strange how a few decades can turn horrific crimes into quaint spook stories, give murderers the shine of celebrity. The
victims aren't represented in the memorabilia; they're part of the story, but not the focus. Never are. I pass by rusted manacles, a straightjacket yellowed by time, brown wooden tombstones with numbers only, 41876, 26213. It's not inconceivable that if Gary survives, he'll be incarcerated here too.

A problem I intend to avoid altogether.

I reach the nook with the restrooms, find a repurposed cell door painted bright pink with
DAMES
in block print. Inside, there's a stainless-steel toilet, plain mirror, stainless-steel sink—leftovers from the last prison refurb maybe.

I click the lock and take a look at my watch. The sign on the museum said it closes at four thirty, and it's three thirty now. Plus I bet one of the little girls in the family will need to hit the bathroom soon—they always do.

I quickly pull the photo of “solitary” from my back pocket. It shows a long hallway with what looks like thick, steel freezer doors painted white, each with a narrow, rectangular opening for food trays and handcuffing. Cement floors, not painted, burnished to a high shine. The floors, I've learned from the Internet, need to be easy to clean because most solitary inmates try to kill themselves at some point, hoping the time it takes for the guards to suit up is longer than it takes to bleed out.

It's a very,
very
long hallway.

I hope the bathroom lock holds.
I can imagine the stir that'd be created at finding a pile of clothes with no person attached to them, the mere seconds it'd take to review the video footage, connect my name to the log. Start a manhunt.

Fuck.

I close my eyes, picture the hallway in my mind. The quiet hum of the bathroom fluorescent light slowly, slowly, starts to fade away.

IT'S COLD IN SAN QUENTIN.
That's the first thing I notice, followed by the stink of unwashed bodies, the echoing reverb of shouts muffled through steel, hands pounding against narrow slits of windows. I shiver, look down. Naked. Check. Invisible. Check. Desperate. Check.

Something white hits my foot—a crumpled, flattened piece of paper folded into a triangle, attached to a clear fishing line. Just as quick, it's yanked back and slips under one of the metal cell doors. Shoots out again but this time I step out of the way, watch as it slides into the cell directly opposite, where the note is obviously plucked because when the fishing line is yanked back, the note is gone.

Next, a folded newspaper glides from another cell down the hall under the door of another. Fascinating. It's like watching frogs snag flies—a lot of activity for what's supposed to be solitary confinement. But then, what else do you do when you have nothing but time on your hands?

Now my problem is finding out which cell holds Saul. There are so many.

An idea strikes the next time a note shoots out from a door. This time I grab it, tug at it three times. Follow the line of string to the small, narrow window.

Just as I expected, an inmate presses his face against the pane of glass to see what happened. Young—too young to be Saul—white and thin as a rail, with tattoos that wrap around
his neck and up the scalp of his shaved head. From his point of view, it must be quite the show, because all he sees is a note floating in midair, drifting back to him airborne like it's held by a ghost, which in a way it is.

I open the meal-tray latch. Drop the note inside. Slowly . . . slowly, the inmate edges forward. Reaches out a tentative hand.

“Where is Saul Baptiste?” I whisper through the slot.

He jumps back like an electric shock passes through him, and his hand starts a junkie tremble. And while yes, it's the disembodied voice that startles him, I think there's another part reacting to Saul's name. He looks the way we look when we talk about Scratch.

“Wha?? Wha??” His eyes dart around his cell, expecting a prank maybe, a bored guard's attempt at breaking up the monotony.

A voice behind me, muffled through glass. “Who wants to know?”

I turn and see another inmate, thick-necked with a dark goatee, peering at me, or right where I'm standing. He licks his dry lips. First I feel the telltale magnetic pull, and then I see it, the dead soul shadow, immune to the bright fluorescent lights.