Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (29 page)

I leaned over the top bunk and asked my roommate her name and whether she had a trial date. Solina, and no trial date yet. With a patient interest I wasn’t really feeling, I pried her story out of her, got her to relax over the narrative of her babies, her mother, the father of the children, how she knew she shouldn’t be doing crack but it gets hold of you, it’s hard to let go of it, and all she wanted was a good life for her children.

At nine the loudspeaker interrupted us. It was time for the day’s final count. We stood in our cells next to our beds while the CO’s looked in, asked our names, checked them on a board, and locked us in for the night. Once again the hiss of the magnetic lock made my stomach turn over. I climbed to the upper bunk as the lights went out and prayed that Freeman would get a message from Mr. Contreras, track me down, and be waiting for me first thing in the morning with a check for my bail.

Fatigue finally pushed me into an uneasy sleep, in which I kept feeling roaches on my face and hands. Sometime in the night the slamming of a door jerked me awake. I heard a woman scream. My heart began to race again: I was locked up and could do nothing, for myself or anyone around me in peril.

I thought of Nicola Aguinaldo, lying in a bunk like mine on the prison side of Coolis. How much more helpless even than I she must have felt, with no lawyer to bail her out, no powerful friends, alone in a strange country, getting commands in a language she barely understood. At least in her last letter to her mother she had said that—I sat up in bed. Nicola had told Abuelita Mercedes not to worry, that Señora Ruby was taking care of her. Miss Ruby, the powerful protector of young inmates.

I’d been a fool to howl over the injustice of being sent to Coolis. I was right where I needed to be: in the heart of Carnifice territory, where Nicola Aguinaldo had last been seen alive. I turned on my side on the narrow bunk and fell deeply asleep.

36 Bail? Why Leave Such Cool Quarters?

When Freeman Carter arrived Tuesday morning, he was appalled at my decision not to post bail. “I agree two–fifty is outrageously high: that’s because it’s Baladine and Carnifice. I couldn’t get the judge to lower it. But Vic, there is every reason to post it and no reason to stay in here. Frankly, you smell awful and you look worse. That makes a hell of a bad impression on a jury.”

“I won’t smell so bad when you’ve deposited money into an account for me here and I can buy soap and shampoo,” I said. “And I’m not going to stay in here until my trial—only until I find out what I want to know.”

That made him explode. “You pay two hundred dollars an hour for my advice, which you proceed to flout, but I’m going to give it to you anyway. Get out of here. If you stay in here on some cockamamie scheme to rout out corruption in Coolis, you will be hurt worse than you have ever been before in your life. And if you then call on me to glue whatever’s left of you back together, I will not be a happy man.”

“Freeman, I won’t claim my brain is in top gear right now. Being locked up is distorting, I agree. But for the last three weeks I’ve been ducking missiles that Carnifice and Global Entertainment have been launching at me. I was sure you’d understand if you watched the video I asked Morrell to send you, the one showing Baladine’s tame cop looking for coke he’d planted in my office. For once in my life I did not go out of my way seeking to make an enemy: they came and found me.”

We were sitting in a special meeting room for attorney visits. It was utterly bare except for two plastic chairs separated by a table that was bolted to the floor. We had to stay in our respective chairs, or the guard watching us through a glass panel would remove me. Supposedly the room was soundproofed, but for all I knew they were taping everything we said.

When I talked to Freeman Monday afternoon, during my fifteen–minute slot for phone calls, I insisted he bring a camera with him to photograph the fading remains of Lemour’s attack on me. He’d harrumphed a bit on the phone but came with a Polaroid. When he saw the marks on my face and arms, his eyes widened with anger and he took a dozen shots. He was already planning the complaint against Lemour, but it made him even less able to understand why I wanted to stay at Coolis.

I pushed my palms together, trying to marshal my words. “It all started when I stopped to help Baladine’s ex–nanny three weeks ago. Until I find out why that matters so much to him and to Teddy Trant, I don’t think there’s going to be much left of me even if I do leave Coolis. The answer is here, at least the answer to what happened to the nanny, to young Nicola Aguinaldo. If I had money in a trust account and some bills for feeding the guards, I should be able to learn what I need to know about her in a couple of weeks. Maybe less.”

He thought I was quixotic as well as insane, and he argued persuasively: I may have thought I wasn’t going out of my way to needle Baladine, but why didn’t I leave well enough alone as he’d asked me when he was dealing with the State’s Attorney about my car last month? And prison was a destructive environment. It wore on you physically as well as mentally, warped your judgment and your ethics.

“You know that as well as I, Vic: you did your share of criminal pleadings in your days with the public defender.”

“I know it from being here four days. I got entangled with the leader of the West Side Iscariots on Sunday and I’ve been watching my back ever since. I hate it here. I’m lonely. Even if the food wasn’t horrible, the dining hall is so covered with roaches you have to keep brushing them off your legs while you’re at the table; every time the locks shut on our rooms at night, my stomach twists up so hard I can’t sleep; there’s no privacy, even on the toilet.” To my dismay I could hear my voice cracking on the edge of tears. “But if I let you bail me out, the only thing that will save me is to close up my business and hide out someplace. Even if my self–respect would permit that my finances won’t.”

“You can’t convince me those are your only two choices, but I can’t stay to argue. I have to get back to Chicago for a court appearance.” He looked at his watch. “Anyway, you’ve already made up your mind to be pigheaded, so there’s no point in my arguing with you. Tell me what you want, both in bucks and in permitted goods, and I’ll send Callie over to your home to collect things. I’ve got an intern who can ferry things out here for you and do the basic paperwork on the money.”

Besides the clothes I was permitted (two bras, two pairs of jeans, three underpants, five shirts, a pair of shorts, and a modest set of earrings) I told him what I most wanted was to see Morrell. “I want to see any friend who will make the drive—I listed Lotty and Mr. Contreras and Sal on my visitor’s sheet—but will you ask Morrell to come out here as soon as possible? As far as the money goes, I’d like three hundred dollars put into a prison trust account.”

I picked my words carefully for the rest of my request. “I know it’s a felony to bring cash in for someone in prison, so I’m not going to ask you to do it. If I could get four hundred dollars in bills, though, it might come in handy. Will you mention the idea—and the risk—to Lotty?”

I wanted money in hand in case I needed to bribe some CO’s or inmates or both. In theory, there was no cash at Coolis: you got issued a photo–ID card with a computer chip when you were admitted. Any money in your account was programmed onto the chip and then deducted when you used the card, whether in vending machines, at the commissary, or doing laundry. The idea was you wouldn’t have gambling or bribing or drug sales if you kept out the cash, but in my four days here I’d already seen plenty of bills changing hands—and not always very secretively.

Freeman frowned and said in his most austere tones that he would speak to Lotty, but only to advise her of the felony nature of my request.

He finished making notes in his quick, tiny script and packed up his papers. “Vic, you know my steadiest advice as your counsel is for you to post bail and come home. If you decide to listen to me, a call to my office will get someone out here on the instant.”

“Freeman, before you go, do you know why I’m here? I mean, instead of at Cook County? Was this some shenanigan of Baladine’s?”

He shook his head. “I have to confess I wondered about that, but once you were arrested, even with Lemour involved, you moved out of Baladine’s orbit. The simple truth is, Cook County is always filled to capacity, and on the Fourth they started splitting at the seams. Women arrested at precincts on the far North or West Sides were automatically shunted out here. Anyway, Baladine is out of the country. He’s taken his family on some exotic vacation.”

“I know: to the South of France. Is Robbie with them? I don’t know what became of him after I left the house on Friday morning.”

Freeman told me that Baladine had wrested Robbie from Mr. Contreras in the middle of the night Saturday. The old man (“He’s been living with you too long,” Freeman said in an unnecessary aside) had tried to hold off a warrant from a Du Page County sheriff’s deputy. He only gave in when Robbie said he couldn’t stand it if they arrested Mr. Contreras; he would leave if the sheriff promised not to hurt the old man. Robbie’s father had taken him to South Carolina, to boot camp, before flying out to join the Poilevys and the Trants with the rest of his family in the Pyrenees.

“I tried to talk to Baladine, but his staff wouldn’t give me his number overseas. They say he left strict orders that even though he has the kid back he’s not doing a deal with you,” Freeman added.

“Freeman—if they don’t know I’m here don’t tell them. If anyone asks, let them think I posted bail and am lying low.”

He gave me a queer smile, half loving, half exasperated. “As you wish, Donna Victoria of the Rueful Countenance.”

He tapped on the window to let the guard know we were finished. I was searched, the guard spending more time than necessary on my bra, and taken back to the jail wing. Now that I was alone I felt unbearably desolate. I lay on my bunk, a strip of towel over my eyes against the light, which stayed on from 5:00
A.M.
until lights–out at nine, and let myself give way to misery.

37 In the Big House

The next four weeks were the hardest of my life. I hunkered down and tried to learn the ropes at Coolis—how to avoid being beaten up by my sisters in chains, how to butter up the CO’s without having to have sex with them, how to keep myself busy enough that the pervasive helplessness and boredom wouldn’t drag me so far down I couldn’t function.

I wanted to talk to Miss Ruby, to thank her for her help on Sunday, but mostly to find out what she could tell me about Nicola, and about getting work in the clothes shop. I let everyone I talked to know that I’d like to meet her, but except for a couple of times in the dining hall, where the CO’s kept us firmly in place at the table, I didn’t see her after that first day.

Freeman’s visit did bring a material change in my physical comfort. True to his word, he sent his intern out with money for my account, along with my clothes allotment. The intern had a stack of legal documents for me to read and sign. In the middle of them was a letter from Lotty. She begged me to post bail in lines of such loving concern I was hard put to stick to my resolve about staying, but in a postscript she added,
I helped Freeman’s secretary pack your clothes and mended various tears.

“She especially wanted you to know about a hole in the waistband to your shorts,” the intern said primly.

Lotty was no seamstress. When I got back to my cell, I surreptitiously picked apart an inch of the waistband seam. Tightly folded bills almost matched the khaki of the fabric. I pulled out a twenty before stitching the seam shut again—it was the safest place to store money, and washing wouldn’t hurt it any.

With my prison trust account set up, I was not only able to buy a toothbrush and soap at the commissary but also some cleanser to scrub out the sink–toilet unit in my cell. The cash I would keep for bribes, once I knew to whom and how to administer them.

Except for being able to buy overpriced, poor–quality shampoo and soap, my first trip to the commissary was a disappointment. The women around me had talked about what they planned to do on their expeditions as if their weekly thirty–minute trip was an outing to Water Tower Place. I suppose the women found the trips exciting because they made a break in the routine. They were also our main contact with the outside world, which we could experience through magazines like
Cosmo
or
Essence. Soap Opera Digest
was also popular.

Besides magazines and toiletries, you could buy canned or packaged food, cigarettes, and artifacts made by inmates throughout the Illinois prison system. A large number of male inmates seemed to like to embroider. We could get handkerchiefs, place mats, head scarves, even blouses with intricate designs of birds and flowers, brought in from Joliet and points south.

Also available were Mad Virgin T–shirts and jackets—the average age of the prison population was, after all, Lacey’s target audience, and many of the inmates were fans. Curious, I inspected the labels. They read
Made with Pride in the USA
, so I didn’t think Nicola Aguinaldo had bought the shirt she died in here. The commissary also stocked spin–offs from other Global favorites, including Captain Doberman and the Space Berets, which women liked to buy for their children.

On my first outing I bought cheap lined writing paper—the only paper the commissary carried—and a couple of ballpoint pens. When I asked the clerk if they had plain paper or roller–ball pens, she snorted and told me to go to Marshall Field’s if I didn’t like the selection here.

When I got back to my cell, my roommate, Solina, apathetically watched me scrub the basin. She had been at Coolis only a week longer than me, and the fact that the sink was filthy when she got here meant it wasn’t her job to clean it up.

“We’ll take turns,” I said, my voice bright with menace. “I’m getting it spick–and–span, and that means tomorrow, when it’s your turn, it will be easy for you to clean up.”

She started to say she didn’t have to obey orders from me, then remembered my prowess against Angie and said she’d think about it.

“We can control so few things in here,” I said. “Keeping the place clean means at a minimum we can control the smell.”

“Okay, okay, I already got the point.” She stomped out of our cell down the hall to watch television on a small set belonging to an inmate who’d been awaiting her trial date for eleven months.

I had to laugh to myself, picturing the friends who’ve complained about my slovenly housekeeping over the years—they’d be astounded to find me laying down the law on hygiene to my roommate.

Besides making it possible for me to bathe, Freeman had also delivered my message to Morrell. On Thursday near the end of my first week, I got summoned to see him in the visitors’ room.

My arrest had stunned him. He hadn’t even known about it until he saw a paragraph in the
Tribune
on Sunday—Mr. Contreras, never fond of communicating with the men in my life, had been too rattled to call Morrell. Like Freeman, Morrell talked to me persuasively about all the reasons to leave Coolis, but unlike Freeman, he could see a point to my staying.

“Are you learning anything helpful?”

I grimaced. “Not about Nicola, so far. About the way people without power turn on each other because they feel too helpless to see who’s really to blame for their day–to–day misery—I’m learning way too much about that.”

I leaned forward to talk more privately, but an alert CO made me back away the requisite arm’s length—if we touched, Morrell might pass drugs to me. After five minutes of glaring scrutiny the CO decided I wasn’t trying anything too heinous and turned her attention to another inmate. Only a handful of women got visitors on weekdays; it was hard to speak privately.

“There’s a place called the Unblinking Eye where you can get a particular kind of watch–camera,” I said in a prison–yard mumble as soon as the CO turned her attention away. “If you buy one for me and bring it on a Saturday or Sunday when there’s a mob here, we ought to be able to make a switch.”

“Vic, I don’t like it.”

I smiled provocatively. “I don’t think they’ll do anything to you if they find you with it—except bar you from visiting me.”

He gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m not worried about that but about you, you fool.”

“Thanks, Morrell. But if I ever manage to get into the clothes shop, I may see something that I should document. And frankly, there’s plenty else to record here between the inmates and the guards.”

Morrell gave me another quizzical look and said he’d see what he could do. He switched the talk to neutral matters—my neighbor, who was so distraught at the idea of me behind bars that he wouldn’t make the trip to see me. He gave me news of Lotty, of the dogs, of all the people whose welfare I cared about and couldn’t attend to. He stayed an hour. I felt a wrenching desolation when he left. I went down to the rec room, where I shot baskets for an hour, until I was wet with sweat and too tired to feel sorry for myself.

When I went back upstairs to shower, the CO at the entrance, a man named Rohde, seemed to react oddly. He looked at me, then got on the phone. I had to wait five minutes before he let me in, and then it was only when two other CO’s joined him. I wondered if they had somehow monitored my conversation with Morrell and were going to put me on report, but Rohde watched me go past the guard station without saying anything. Still, he seemed to have an air of suppressed excitement about him, and he was joined behind the double–glass walls by the other two men. The video cameras were trained on the shower rooms as well as all other common areas, but I had already figured out which shower head cut the camera angle so that it could only catch me if I stood directly under it. If he’d called his buddies for a peep show, I figured I knew how to avoid providing it.

I was jumped almost before I got into the shower room. Two women, one from the front, one from the rear. Rohde’s manner had put me on guard, otherwise they might have destroyed me. I dropped my supplies and towel and kicked, all in one motion. I was lucky; my foot caught the woman in front square on the patella, and she grunted and backed away.

The one behind me had my left shoulder in a steel grip. She was pulling me toward her. I gasped—she had something sharp that sliced across my right shoulder. I hooked my feet around her ankles and used her own force to catapult her forward. The wet floor made it hard to get a purchase and I slipped and fell with her. I chopped across her right wrist before she could recover and forced her to let go of her weapon.

The one I’d kicked was closing in on me. I rolled over on the moldy floor and got up into a crouch. She flung herself at me before I could kick the weapon away. She had her hands around my neck. I held on to her shoulders for leverage and swung both knees into her stomach. She squawked in pain and let go of me.

The woman with the weapon was behind me again. I was winded; I’d already been working out for an hour and didn’t know how much longer I could keep fighting. When she lunged at me I ducked. It was the wet floor that did the rest. She lost her footing, scrabbled to gain it, and careened so hard against the concrete wall that she stunned herself. Her partner saw her fall and suddenly shouted for help.

The guards appeared so fast I knew they must have been on their way as soon as the woman knocked herself out.

“She jumped me! She jumped Celia, too, and knocked her out!”

Rohde grabbed me and held my arms behind me. Polsen, the CO who’d joined him at the video monitor, stood nearby but didn’t touch my assailant.

“Nonsense,” I panted. “Celia is lying there with something in her hand that gave me this cut on my neck. And as for you, whoever you are, if you were waiting to take a shower, where the hell is your towel or your soap? As you two CO’s know, because you were watching all this on your monitor.”

“You stole them from me.”

“Those are my things on the floor there. Where are yours?” I demanded.

At that point CO Cornish appeared. He was the fairest–minded of the CO’s on our wing.

“You fighting again?” he asked me.

“The woman on the floor there cut me with something when I came into the shower room,” I got my story in quickly. “She still has the razor or whatever she used in her right hand.”

The woman was beginning to stir. Before Rohde or Polsen could move, Cornish bent over and pulled a strip of metal from her.

“She belongs on the prison wing. As does the other one. I’m putting all three of you on report. Warshawski, if I catch you in one more fight you’re going into segregation. And you two, off you go to your own quarters. How did you get in here, anyway?”

Rohde was forced to let me go. He and Polsen escorted my assailants off the floor. Cornish looked at my neck and told me to go to the infirmary for a tetanus shot. It was the closest he was going to come to acknowledging that I’d been jumped, but it eased the injustice of the whole situation slightly.

“I’d like to wash off first,” I said.

Cornish waited in the hall while I picked up my shampoo and towel from the filthy floor. I took off my shirt and bra and washed off under the shower most remote from the video monitor. Cornish took me in an elevator down to the basement, which I’d never seen, and waited while I got my shot. The woman on duty put some antibiotic ointment on the wound in my neck. It hadn’t gone deep enough to require stitches, which was fortunate, since she didn’t have the equipment to put me back together.

Cornish took me back to my cell and told me to be very careful where I walked at night. Everyone on my wing seemed to know about the attack. In fact, they seemed to have been warned away from the showers when I came up from my workout.

“You’re in trouble now,” Solina said, gloating. “Rohde’s fucking one of the Iscariots. He got those two to jump you out of revenge for Angie. And he put money on them.”

When we stood at attention for our predinner head count, Rohde handed me a ticket. He had written me up for instigating a fight that injured two other inmates. My hearing would come in a month, after the captain had reviewed the charge. Great. Now Captain Ruzich would realize I was one of his inmates. As I studied the ticket I got my one gleam of hope: Rohde had put my name down as
Washki.
Maybe the fact that none of the CO’s could pronounce my last name, let alone spell it, would save my butt.

Miss Ruby stopped me after dinner and told me she was disappointed in me, that she didn’t think fighting was the right way to solve my problems inside. “The women tell me you’re old enough to be a mother to most of them. This isn’t the way to look after the young ones or set them an example.”

I pulled down my T–shirt to show her the oozing wound in my neck. “Should I have turned the other cheek until I was cut to ribbons?” I demanded. She gave a snort that was half a gasp but wouldn’t stay to discuss the point.

After that I began to wonder if the attack in the shower would make it impossible for me to learn anything about Nicola. I even began to wonder if Baladine knew I was here, if he’d e–mailed the warden from France and told him to stage the attack. Only the realization during the next few days that none of the CO’s treated me any better or worse than the rest of the inmates made me decide that was a paranoid fantasy.

The fight in the shower grew as it was told around the prison. I had moves like you saw in the kung fu movies. I had given the two Iscariots subtle blows that stunned them and then pulled a knife to finish them off when the guards intervened. Some of the women wanted to attach themselves to me as a protector, but others, especially the real gangbangers, thought they wanted to fight me. I managed to talk my way out of several confrontations, but it added to my tension to have to be on my guard during recreation time or in the dining room. Any time I saw signs that anger was about to spill over into combat, I’d leave the area and return to my cell.

Fights were always breaking out, over things that might seem trivial to you if you’d never had this experience, the experience of being crammed behind bars with a thousand other people, without privacy, at the mercy of whatever whims the guards might feel that day. Someone stole someone else’s body lotion, or pushed in front of her in line, or spoke disrespectfully of a relative, and fists and handmade weapons flashed out in an instant.