You’re wrong, kid. You’re already there, I thought to myself. Chapter 18
T HE ARREST WARRANT with Otis Baylor’s name on it was federal, but eventually the storm-impaired processes of the Orleans Parish DA’s office would kick into gear and state charges would be filed against him as well. Ironically, the Feds were busting Otis under a Reconstruction statute that defined murder as a deprivation of a person’s civil rights by the taking of his life, the same kind of orwellian application of law that had been used to prosecute the Klansmen who lynched three civil rights workers in neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964. Otis had caught his necktie in the garbage grinder. I suspected that when the judicial system was finished with him, he would have to be washed off the grinder with a hose.
On Friday morning I accompanied Betsy Mossbacher’s male colleague and a uniformed state trooper to Otis’s temporary office on Main Street to serve the warrant. The FBI agent was the same agent who had retrieved the Springfield rifle from Otis’s closet. His name was Tisdale and he was all business. We had parked our vehicles by the bayou, directly opposite Victor’s Cafeteria, and were walking down Main under a colonnade when he said, “I’ve got to be back in Baton Rouge in less than ninety minutes. We’ve done all the paperwork on our end. All you’ve got to do is print him and get him into a cell. The transfer of custody will take place in two or three weeks. Don’t fuck it up.”
“Say that last part again?” I said.
“He’s getting warehoused. It’s not nuclear science. Feed him, give him a shower every three days, and don’t lose him in the system like you did Chula Ramos. You got a question about anything, call Mossbacher. Don’t do anything on your own. You got a problem, call us. That’s the key. We’re renting space in your gray-bar hotel. All you got to do is make sure the toilets flush.”
I saw the state trooper look at me from the corner of his eye.
“Tell you what, bub, we’ll arrest Otis for you and you can head back for Baton Rouge,” I said. “Or, if you like, you can stand around as though you’re part of the procedure, but you need to keep your mouth shut and stay out of the way.”
“You like Lou’sana?” the trooper said to Tisdale, smiling broadly.
We busted Otis and took him out of his office in handcuffs, his long-sleeved white shirt crinkling, his tie blowing in the wind, his big arms pulled tightly behind him.
For most middle-class people, the word “jail” suggests punishment by means of confinement. To a degree, they’re correct. Jails separate miscreants from the rest of us. But “confinement” doesn’t come close to the realities of life inside any kind of serious can. The word “violation” is much more accurate.
It starts in the booking room. Your fingertips are rolled on an ink pad by someone you never saw before. Then you are told to clean your skin with a petroleum gel that looks like a glandular excretion. You are placed against a wall and told to hold a brace of numbers against your chest while you’re photographed front and sideways. Then a polyethylene-gloved screw does a digital probe of your rectum and sprays you for crab lice. Your physical person belongs to people who do not want to know your name or make eye contact with you or have any level of communication with you. Most of them do not like what they do for a living and they do not like you.
You soon discover that jail is not a place but a condition. You defecate in full view of others. Your fellow inmates urinate all over the toilet seat you must use. The food you eat is prepared and served by people who wouldn’t wash their hands at gunpoint. You take showers with men whose eyes linger on your genitalia and others who will shank you from your liver to your lights and that night sleep without dreaming.
As the twelve-string guitarist Huddie Ledbetter cautioned, you don’t study your “great long time.”
The recidivists of years ago have been replaced by a new breed of criminals, eighty-five percent of whom owe their lifestyle to narcotics, either the sale of it or the use of it or both. Some of them got their first hit of cocaine or morphine derivatives through the umbilical cord. Some of them were subjected to forms of child abuse that I will not discuss with anyone, not even fellow officers. Almost all of them will pay out their lives to the state on the installment system.
Otis Baylor thought he would call his lawyer or a bondsman and be back out on the street within a few hours. “That’s right, isn’t it?” he said to me in the booking room. “I get a phone call and then I post bond?”
“I don’t think you understand your situation,” I said. “You’re actually in federal custody, charged with a civil rights violation. In effect, we’re acting as friends of the federal court. That’s because the legal system in southern Louisiana has been in meltdown since Rita and Katrina. My guess is you’re going to be indicted by a state grand jury and prosecuted for murder. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I don’t think you’re going anywhere for a long time.”
“I’m not a flight risk. I own two houses here. I have a family. I’ve been with the same insurance company for over two decades.”
“You’ll be going to court eventually. Explain your situation to the judge.”
He still had cleansing cream on his hands and he didn’t want to touch his clothes with them. He began looking around for something to wipe his hands on.
“There’s a roll of paper towels on the shelf,” I said.
“I want my phone call,” he said.
“You’re going into a holding cell right now, Mr. Baylor. A deputy will escort you to a phone later,” I said.
He couldn’t seem to think. He squeezed at his temples and looked around the booking room, disoriented. “Where did you say the paper towels were?” he asked.
“Behind you, sir.”
But he forgot what he was looking for. “My daughter is home by herself. She meets me for coffee and a doughnut each morning. She shouldn’t be by herself for long periods of time,” he said.
I’ve had prouder moments in my career.
MOLLY WORKED FOR a Catholic mutual-help center on the bayou that assisted poor people in starting up businesses and building their own homes. The charity had been founded by a group of Catholic Worker nuns who had come to southern Louisiana in the 1970s to organize the sugarcane workers. You can take a wild guess as to how they were received. But since that time, they had earned the respect and even the affection of most people in the area. After the death of my wife Bootsie, I met M
olly by chance at the center and a short while later we were married. We were an incongruous couple, an Irish-American blue-collar nun who demonstrated regularly at the School of the Americas and a sheriff’s detective with a history of violence and alcoholism. Friends who wanted to be kind wished us well, but I always saw the lights of pity and caution in their eyes.
But we surprised them. Sister Molly Boyle was my grail and I loved her in the same way I loved my church community.
On the Friday I busted Otis Baylor I called her at the center and asked her to meet me for lunch at the Patio Restaurant on Loreauville road. We sat under a fan, in a corner, away from the crowd near the buffet table. I could feel her eyes on my face. “Bad day at Black rock?” she said.