Death Row Breakout (2 page)

The traffic signals of the era were red and green, without a yellow warning light. A metal flag swung up simultaneously, “Stop” and “Go”.

Booker hit the brakes. The Packard stopped. The car behind did not. One second of squealing tires; then the dull crash followed by tinkling glass.

Booker lurched into the steering wheel. His ribs hurt, but that was nothing to the sudden pain in his mind. Oh, God!

He opened the car door and got out. Approaching him in the twilight was a uniformed police officer. Booker’s fear was immediate, less from personal experience than from ghetto tales. It was decades before rampant black crime, but not before racist police.

“What the hell kinda stop was that?” the policeman asked. “Let’s see your driver’s license. Whose car is this?”

Booker produced the driver’s license, but ignored the question.

The policeman looked at the license and handed it back. “Ever been in trouble with the law, Booker?”

“No, sir,” Booker said. Mama had been strict about having good manners and showing respect. He was apprehensive about police without feeling hostile toward them. LA still had few Negroes and the police, sure of their omnipotence, were often paternalistic instead of repressive. Booker’s respectful demeanor softened the officer’s initial irritation.

The bumpers were hooked together. The Packard had suffered no damage except a broken taillight, but the police car’s radiator had been punctured. Water was running down into the street.

They tried jumping on one bumper and lifting the other to separate the cars. Had it worked, Booker might have gotten away. Alas, the cars remained hooked together. Two-way police radios were not in use yet. “Stay here while I call in,” the policeman said. “There’s a call box on Figueroa.” He set off down the street and Booker watched the figure disappear. It never crossed his mind to leave. His fears were about his boss’s reaction. It was embarrassing to have a cop car hit him in the rear, but he had done nothing illegal. It was the cop’s fault – and, except for the first few seconds, which were understandable, the cop wasn’t hostile, and Booker was sensitive to any current of prejudice in word or tone or attitude. It was a time in history when, despite Jim-Crow and the Klan and good American writers who used “nigger” without a sense of its insult, there was less black crime than white, and it was substantially less violent. Policemen felt no need for bulletproof vests in the ghetto, or to draw their weapons when they pulled over a carload of young colored men. This particular cop felt sorry for most colored guys, and he had no sense that Booker had done anything wrong. His concern was what his superiors would say about the bashed in radiator. The cop reached the call box and made the report.

The Desk Sergeant thought it was funny. He would send someone right away. He started to walk back to the intersection.

Booker smoked a cigarette and waited, worrying over what he would tell the boss about the broken taillight. Would it cost him his job? He’d taken the Packard without permission.

Another police car pulled up. A Sergeant got out. “You the driver?” he asked.

“Yessir.”

“Where’s the officer?”

“He… uhh… went to make a telephone call… I think.”

The Sergeant grunted and went to look at the hooked bumpers. Booker’s sense of the Sergeant’s hostility was confirmed when the Sergeant turned to him. “Where’d you steal the car, boy?”

“I didn’t steal no car, boss man. Honest.”

“Where’s the registration.”

“I dunno. Lemme explain, please. I work in a gas station with a garage. The car was in for the night –”

“The owner said it was okay to take it?”

“Not the owner – my boss.”

“Your boss, huh? What’s his name?”

“Phil Collins. It’s the Collins Texaco station over on Alameda.”

“What’s the phone number?”

“Nobody’s there now. It’s closed.”

“What’s his home number?”

“I dunno. I mean… it’s back at the station, but I ain’ got it on me.”

The officer who had gone to the telephone arrived back on the scene. He and the Sergeant, whose name was Bilbo, stood to the side as they discussed matters. Booker caught a word here and there, but the single sentence that sounded clearly was the sentence of doom: “We’d better run him in and check it out,” the Sergeant said.

Until that moment, Booker had been worrying how long it would be until he could see Belle. Never had it crossed his mind that he might go to jail. “Hey, man, you ain’ gotta do that,” he said, his stomach falling.

“No, that’s right,” the Sergeant said. “We
ain’ gotta
… but that is what we’re doing.” As he said it, he came forward and Booker heard the rattling sound of a pair of handcuffs slipping through its notches. A moment later the steel encircled his wrists behind his back. As he rode in the back of the Sergeant’s police car, Booker had the ache that goes with tears, although he restrained them. He looked out at the City of Angels, still clean and new, and felt loss and longing, but never did he imagine his future.

After a night in a cell, a pair of detectives unlocked the gate and took him to a windowless room furnished with a table and three chairs.

“Siddown, Booker,” one detective said.

“Your boss doesn’t back you up,” the other detective said.

He looked into their white faces and blue eyes, and the deeply imprinted terrors of the black man in America pulsed through him. He was entangled in white man’s justice. All night long he had believed things would be all right this morning.

“Let me talk to him,” Booker said.

“It’s out of his hands. He doesn’t sign the complaint.”

“No,” said the other detective. “It’s the district attorney’s office.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You will.”

“Take it easy, Phil,” said the other detective; then to Booker: “We’ll take you to Municipal Court this afternoon. The DA is going to charge you with joyriding. The judge is going to set bail; probably five hundred dollars. You have to put up fifty to the bail bondsman. Can you handle that?”

Booker shook his head.

“Don’t you have anybody who will?”

“My mama… but she ain’ got nuthin’. I give her my check day ’fore yesterday.” She had paid the rent with most of it. She wasn’t going to understand even a little bit. Still, he had to tell her what was going on. She was probably worried sick.

“Could I make a phone call?” he asked.

“Why, didn’t you make one last night?”

“They took my money. I didn’t have a nickel for the phone.”

“Okay, we’ll let you make one on the way out.”

But, on the way out, one prisoner was already using the phone and two more were waiting. The detective looked at his watch and said they didn’t have time. “They’ll let you make a call downtown. C’mon, we gotta roll.”

Again Booker felt the steel bracelets. They walked him through the parking lot, his eyes blinking in the glare of LA’s noonday sun.

The bullpen of the Municipal Court was like the hold of a fishing boat. Everything scooped from the streets of the city was dumped here to be sorted out. They handed his papers to a uniformed deputy sheriff and took off the handcuffs before locking him in the bullpen. “Take it easy, Booker. Good luck.”

“What about the phone call?”

“Tell the deputies. They’re running things now.”

Booker looked around the bullpen. No windows, walls covered with graffiti. Why would anyone write his name on a jailhouse wall? Did they want friends who came in to see it?

The gate opened again; three more prisoners were dumped in. The large room was already full. The bench that ran around the wall had no space, although a length of it was occupied by a stretched out man in a white shirt splattered with blood. An open newspaper, covering his face, moved perceptibly as he breathed.

Looking around, Booker saw other men with bruised faces and black eyes. Most were scruffy and unshaven. They looked more like bums than his idea of criminals. One younger man was lying on the concrete, repeatedly kicking his legs, as if trying to loosen them, and simultaneously wiping his runny nose with toilet paper. Next to Booker was an older colored man in a stylish jacket. He noticed Booker watching the man on the floor. “He’s kicking a habit,” the older man said.

“Kicking a habit?”

“Morphine addict… maybe heroin.”

“That’s why he’s kicking his legs?”

“Right.”

“It looks terrible.”

“It is.”

“They don’t do anything for him?”

“They might laugh if he asked.”

A deputy sheriff and a young man in a business suit stepped up to the gate. The deputy banged a key on the bars. “Listen up in there!” The noise went down, but not completely. “Hey,” the deputy yelled, “you turkeys better shut up or I’ve got something for you.”

Silence ensued.

The young man stepped up. He had a yellow legal pad attached to a clipboard. “All of you guys were brought in for arraignment and bail setting. If you have a misdemeanor, don’t pay any attention – but if you are being charged with a felony and don’t have a private lawyer, line up and give me your name.”

Over half the prisoners lined up, Booker among them. Every man had something to say, some story to tell, some question to ask, until the young deputy public defender had to insist, “Just your name. No questions now. Court is going to start any minute.”

Despite the admonition, when Booker stepped up, he had to say: “I never got to make a phone call.”

“The… uhh… deputies will… uh… handle that. What’s your name?”

“Booker Johnson.”

The young man added it to the list on the yellow pad. A bailiff came up and whispered that court was about to start. “I’ll have to see the rest of you later,” he said to the several who still waited. Voices grumbled, but the young man departed anyway.

A pair of deputies stepped up. “When we call your name, step out.” The gate was opened and a dozen names were called. The prisoners were lined up outside the bullpen and marched through a door at the end of the corridor.

Fifteen minutes later, the first batch returned and another dozen were called. Booker was among these. The deputy unlocked the door at the end of the corridor. “Okay, stay in line and go into the jury box on the right.” He opened the door and the motley dozen followed him through. Going from the packed bullpen with its defaced concrete walls and stench of sweat and urine and Lysol to the wide, wood-paneled courtroom with lawyers in trim business suits and hair sleeked back like Valentino and the smell of Bay rum about them was like going from the outhouse to the mansion.

“Okay, move on in… move on in,” said the deputy as he guided the scruffy dozen men into the empty jury box. All were bedraggled from one or more nights in precinct cells. All needed shaves. Booker and two others were colored. A couple of the others were Mexican. Some of the prisoners had friends or family in the gallery outside the railing. They gestured and signaled and tried to communicate while keeping an eye on the bailiffs, who closed fast on any sign of noise. Booker craned his neck to scan the room, both hoping and afraid to see his mother. She wasn’t in the room.

The judge came out from another door, a small man until he mounted the bench and sat beneath the Seal of California between the flags of the United States and California. Then he looked like Pharaoh on a throne.

The arraignments began. The Court Clerk gave the bailiff a list, and the prisoners were brought out of the jury box one at a time in that order. Each one waited at the edge of the jury box while the man before him stood in front of the judge with the young public defender beside him. The deputy district attorney handed the defendant a copy of the complaint and stated for the record that he had been served. The public defender waived a reading of the complaint. The district attorney recommended the amount he thought the bail should be. Sometimes the public defender asked that it be lower, arguing that the defendant was a resident, had a job and family and was no risk for flight. Not once did he prevail. Once the bail was decided, a date was set for preliminary hearing and the prisoner was guided back to the jury box as the next prisoner stepped forward. One man tried to speak, but the judge admonished him to speak through his lawyer. “My lawyer… Who’s my lawyer?”

“Standing there beside you.”

“This guy! I thought he was a public defender.”

“I assure you that he’s a lawyer.”

“Hellfire, he don’t even shave yet.”

“I’m not going to discuss it with you,” the judge finished with a flicking of his fingers and the bailiffs closed around the man. Instead of bringing him back to the jury box, they took him straight through the door back to the bullpen.

Booker was next. He walked with the bailiff until signaled to stop beside the lawyer.

“…violation of Section 502 and 503 of the California Vehicle Code, both felonies. Defendant is herewith served with a copy of the complaint.” The district attorney handed some papers to the Clerk, who handed them to Booker.

“Waive reading of the complaint,” the public defender said.

For bail, the People recommended $500. The judge was looking down at him; the judge’s eyes seemed immense behind thick glasses.

“Sir,” Booker said, surprising himself. “Can I make a phone call?”

“How long have you been in custody?”

“Since last evening.”

“And you haven’t made a phone call yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Why hasn’t this man had a telephone call?” the judge asked, looking at the bailiff.

“I don’t know, Your Honor. We assume they had a telephone call when they were arrested.”

“Look into it… tell the escorting officers to see that he gets his call. He’s entitled to that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bail is set at five hundred dollars. How long will the preliminary take?”

“Half a day at most,” said the deputy district attorney. “We have three witnesses – the car owner, the gas station owner and the arresting officer.”

“We’ll set preliminary for ten a.m. on the fourteenth.”

The public defender made a note of it. The deputy was already beside Booker, waiting to guide him back to the jury box, and then he took the next man to stand in front of the judge.