The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781781161036
Publisher: Random House Inc Clients
Published: 2011-10-29T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

You’d expect a jail in the largest and most modern city in the world to be something just a little bit special. You know, chrome-plated bars and Hollywood beds and color TV in every cell and guards wearing space helmets. But I’m sorry to say I have to report that the New York City clink has not kept stride with civic pride. The bars are the same old things, heavy and black and rough on the hands, and everything else is made of metal plates, like the hull of a battleship, painted bright yellow. Metal floor, metal ceiling, metal walls, metal slab suspended from chains, this last some city administration joker’s idea of a bed. And everything clangs. They open a door way down at the other end of the corridor, and the clang runs through all the metal, sounding like somebody just hit a J. Arthur Rank gong right next to your ear.

Oh, it’s a lovely place.

And I spent nineteen hours in it. I was booked at six P.M., and the little blue men took me away to my own private cell, with no Hollywood bed and no TV. But there was plumbing, over in the corner next to the metal slab bed, and my first task as a ward of the city was to clean this plumbing, which needed it in a bad way. That isn’t my idea of a wild evening, believe me.

I signed in too late for supper (jugs are on the American Plan, meals included), so I didn’t get fed anything until the next morning. And I didn’t have a cellmate, of course. Most municipal clinks are one-man-cell operations, with a communal drunk tank off on another floor. Nor could I see any of my fellow boarders, since the cell across the corridor from me, the only one I could see into, was empty at the moment.

But there was a guy in the cell to my left, and we talked for a while, about this and that. He was old and stubbly, to judge from his wheezy voice, and we didn’t have a hell of a lot to talk about, since we both carefully avoided mention of what we were in for. So after a while we played checkers. The way you play checkers in the jug, when you can’t see your opponent, is simple. You take a piece of paper and mark out a checkerboard on it. The other guy does the same thing. Then you take twelve book matches and rip them in half. The halves with the head are your checkers and the other halves are the other guy’s checkers. You number all the squares on the board, starting with the top left and working across each row, and then you call out the moves to each other, from number such-and-such to number so-and-so.

This old boy must have spent his whole life in one-man-cells, because he played this blind checkers like a champion, and I only beat him once in the two hours we played.

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