“I only had about twenty bucks, and the fine for vagrancy was twenty-five, so they put me over on a bench with the peo ple who were going to jail. Nobody hassled me. It was like an assembly line.
“The two guys right behind me were longhairs. Acid people. They’d been picked up for vagrancy, too. But when they started emptying their pockets, the whole room freaked. Between them, they had $130,000, mostly in big bills. The cops couldn’t believe it. These guys just kept pulling out wads of money and dumping it up there on the desk-both of them naked and kind of hunched over, not saying anything.
“The cops went crazy when they saw all that money. They started whispering to each other; shit, there was no way they could hold these guys for ‘vagrancy.”‘ He laughed. “So they charged them with ‘suspicion of evasion of income taxes.’
“They took us all to jail, and these two guys were just about nuts. They were dealers, of course, and they had their stash back in their hotel room-so they had to get out before the cops found out where they were staying.
“They offered one of the guards a hundred bucks to go out and get the best lawyer in town . . . and about twenty minutes later there he was, yelling about habeas corpus and that kind of shit . . . hell, I tried to talk to him myself, but this guy had a one-track mind. I told him I could make bail and even pay him something if they’d let me call my father in Chicago, but he was too busy hustling for these other guys.
“About two hours later he came back with a guard and said ‘Let’s go.’ They were out. One of the guys had told me, while they were waiting, that it was going to cost them $30,000 . . . and I guess it did, but what the hell? That’s cheap, compared to what would have happened If they hadn’t got themselves sprung.
“They finally let me send a telegram to my old man and he wired me 125 bucks . . .but it took seven or eight days. I’m not sure how long I was in there, because the place didn’t have any windows and they fed us every twelve hours . . . You lose track of time when you can’t see the sun.
“They had seventy-five guys in each cell-big rooms with a bowl out in the middle. They gave you a pallet when came in, and you slept wherever you wanted. The guy next to me had been in there for thirty years, for robbing a gas station.
“When I finally got out, the cop on the desk took another twenty-five bucks out of what my father sent me, on top of what I owed for the vagrancy fine. What could I say? He just took it. Then he gave me the other $75 and said they had a cab waiting for me outside, for the ride to the airport . . . and when I got in the cab the driver said, ‘We’re not making any stops, fella, and you’d better not move until we get to the terminal.’
“I didn’t move a goddamn muscle. He’d have shot me. I’m sure of that. I went straight to the plane and I didn’t say a word to anybody until I knew we were out of Nevada. Man, it’s one place I’ll never go back to.”
11. Fraud? Larcent? Rape? . . . A Brutal Connection with the Alice from Room Service
>I was brooding on this tale as I eased the White Whale into Flamingo parking lot. Fifty
bucks and a week in jail for standing on a corner and acting curious . . . Jesus, what kind of incredible penalties would they spew out on me? I eked off the various charges-but in skeleton, legal-lan re form they didn’t seem so bad:
Rape? We could surely beat that one. I’d never even coveted the goddamn girl, much
less put my hands on her flesh. Fraud? Larceny? I could always offer to “settle.” Pay
it off. Say I was sent out here by Sports Illustrated and then drag the Time. Inc. lawyers