Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (14 page)

Morrell gave the same self–mocking smile he’d shown in his photo and sat down to try the piano. He ran through part of a Chopin nocturne with unusual feeling for an amateur. When he saw “Erbarme dich” on the music rack, he started to play and I began to sing. Bach produces a certain kind of balm. When Morrell got up to go, with an apology for showing off, I felt calmer but no more certain than I was earlier whether he was telling the truth about Nicola Aguinaldo’s mother. But if she didn’t have the body, where was it?

Perhaps those researchers who want you to listen to Bach or Mozart to boost your brain are right, because when he left I had an idea for the morning. It wasn’t the best idea I ever had, as it turned out, but that wasn’t really Bach’s fault.

I went down to Mr. Contreras’s when I heard the front door shut. As I’d expected, my neighbor was waiting up to see how long I kept a strange man in my apartment.

“How would you like to go on a wild–goose chase with me tomorrow?” I asked him before he could comment on Morrell. “Be a grieving grandfather whose darling baby ran away from jail and died a sad death?”

He revived instantly.

18 These Walls Do a Prison Make

The next morning, while Mary Louise sat at my desk organizing files, I collected my maps and set out with Mr. Contreras and the dogs for the long drive across the state to Coolis. The muffler was rumbling more loudly than ever. The air–conditioning didn’t work, so we had to ride with the windows open and our teeth rattling.

“That muffler wasn’t this bad when we picked up the car,” Mr. Contreras observed when we stopped at the Elgin toll plaza to throw in our quarters. “Guy must have stuck it on with duct tape to sell this heap.”

“Let’s hope the thing holds together until we’re back in Chicago.”

The dogs kept their heads out the windows, periodically switching sides as we moved into the real country and they picked up the scent of the river. West of Rockford we pulled over at a rest area for lunch. Mr. Contreras was a willing but uncertain partner in the outing; while the dogs swam in the Fox River we went over his lines until he felt confident enough to fly solo.

Even with that long break, by keeping the Rustmobile roaring at its top speed—around seventy—we managed to get to Coolis a little after twelve. It was a pretty town, built in a valley of two small rivers feeding the Mississippi: the big river lies ten miles to the west. Coolis had been a lead–mining hub in the 1800s, but was close to death when the state decided to build its new women’s prison here.

I’d never known who in Coolis had enough money or clout to grease Jean–Claude Poilevy’s wheels, but as we drove through town to the prison, we passed Baladine Hardware, followed by Baladine Lincoln–Mercury. I could see BB as a boy at Baladine Hardware, playing with the combination locks and fantasizing about someday playing with really big locks and keys. As a friend of Poilevy’s, Baladine would have had the inside track anyway on where the legislature awarded the prison contract, but the decision to build in his family’s town must have taken a major contribution to the Republican party coffers.

Illinois seems like a large place when you look at a map, stretching four hundred miles from Wisconsin to Missouri, but it’s really just a cozy little hometown, where everybody knows everybody else and nobody tells secrets outside the family. Businesses pay money to politicians to get even greater amounts of money pumped back to them via state contracts, and while some of it may be scuzzy, none of it’s illegal—because the guys who have their hands in one another’s pockets are writing the laws.

The prison stood two miles west of town; scraggly strip malls had grown up along the route. Signs warned drivers against hitchhikers, since they might be escaped prisoners and should be considered dangerous. Women like Nicola Aguinaldo, for instance, might bleed all over you; that would be bad.

Even Mr. Contreras grew quiet when we passed the front gate. Three layers of high fencing, with razor wire along the tops and current running through the outermost, separated us from the prison. It looked in some ways like a modern industrial park, with its low white buildings laid out in a kind of campus—except that the windows were mere slits, like the arrow holes in a medieval castle. Also like a castle, watchtowers holding armed guards covered the perimeter. A kind of reverse castle, where the guards thought the enemy lay within rather than without.

Although the land around the prison was dotted with wildflowers and trees, inside what wasn’t concrete had become hardscrabble from too many marching feet and too little care. In the distance we could see some women playing what might be softball; as they ran they kicked up dust eddies.

“Umph.” Mr. Contreras let out a grunt after I turned around and headed back into town. “If you wasn’t desperate before you landed in that place, you sure would be after you’d been there a day or two. If that didn’t cure you of a life of crime nothing would.”

“Or it would get you feeling so hopeless you’d feel you didn’t have any choices.” My neighbor and I do not think as one on most social issues, but that doesn’t stop his wanting to be involved in helping me tilt at whatever windmill I’m charging on a given day.

The hospital lay inside the town boundary, off the main road leading to the prison. Behind it ran Smallpox Creek, flowing northwest to the Mississippi, although not at any great pace. We let the dogs out again to cool off in the water, then checked the side roads around the hospital. Just as my maps had shown, you could either go directly to jail or into town from the hospital, but you didn’t have any other choice for escape than the creek. After driving the route long enough to memorize it we returned to the hospital and parked.

Coolis General had started as a small brick building. With the arrival of the prison and wealth, two enormous wings had been attached, giving it the appearance of a dragonfly. We walked up a long path, past beds of summer flowers, to the entrance, which was in the old part, the body of the insect. Signs directed visitors to the Connie Brest Baladine Surgicenter, to radiology, and to patient information.

“Howdy,” Mr. Contreras said to the bored woman at the information desk. “I need to talk to someone about my granddaughter. She—well, she was a patient here up to last week, and things didn’t turn out too good for her.”

The woman braced herself. I could see
what to do if family threatens a malpractice suit
running through her mind as she asked Mr. Contreras for his granddaughter’s name.

“Nicola Aguinaldo.” He spelled it for her. “I ain’t saying we blame the hospital or anything, but I sure would like to know how she come in and how she left and all. She—well, she got herself in a little bit of trouble up in Chicago, and she was over here in Coolis, in the jail, when she took sick.”

Once he got past his initial nervousness, he was in full stride. I began to believe that Nicola Aguinaldo really had been his granddaughter, with the family that worried about her, but you know how it is with today’s young people, you can’t ever tell them nothing. The woman at the desk kept trying to interrupt him—she wanted to explain that she couldn’t talk to him about patients, especially not when they were prisoners, but she finally gave up and summoned a superior.

In a few minutes a woman about my own age showed up. If she’d been sprayed with polyurethane she couldn’t have been glossier or more untouchable. She introduced herself as Muriel Paxton, the head of patient affairs, and invited us to follow her to her office. The back of her crimson suit barely moved as she walked, as though she’d figured out how to use her legs without involving her pelvis.

Like all modern hospitals, Coolis General had spared no expense on their administrative offices. Radical mastectomies may be done now as outpatient procedures, but heaven forbid that management skimps on any attention to comfort. Muriel Paxton enthroned herself behind a slab of rosewood that clashed with the red of her suit. Mr. Contreras and I, feet sinking to our ankles in the lavender pile on the floor, sat in faux–wicker side chairs.

“Why don’t we start with your names.” Ms. Paxton held a pen like a dagger over a legal pad.

“This is Nicola Aguinaldo’s grandfather,” I said, “and I’m the family lawyer.”

I spelled my last name slowly. As I hoped, the presence of a lawyer kept Ms. Paxton from demanding Mr. Contreras’s name—he didn’t want to call himself Aguinaldo, and he’d told me on the way over if he was going to take part in this scheme he didn’t want his name taken down.

“And what seems to be the problem?” The administrator’s smile was as bright as her lipstick, but no warmth came with it.

“The problem is, my little girl is dead. I want to know how she could have got out of here with no one the wiser.”

Ms. Paxton put the pen down and leaned forward, a motion learned in media training school: lean forward forty–five degrees to show concern. It wasn’t reflected in her eyes.

“If a patient wants to check out, even if it’s not in her best medical interest, there’s little we can do to stop her, Mr. Uh—”

“Huh, that’s a laugh. She come over from the jail, in chains like as not, and you say she can check herself out if she wants to? Then I bet the waiting list from the jail over to here must be five miles long. How come we never was told she had female problems? How come when she called home she never said nothing about that, that’s what I’d like to know. You tell me you can let someone waltz away from this hospital without their family knowing they was even in here to begin with?”

“Mr. Uh, I assure you that every precaution—”

“And another thing, who even did the diagnosis—some prison warden? She didn’t have nothing wrong with her that we ever heard of. Not one person from this hospital got in touch with us to say, “Your baby is sick, do we have your permission to do surgery?’ or whatever it was you was planning on doing. What happened—did you mess up on the surgery and—”

I had briefed Mr. Contreras as best I could over lunch, but I needn’t have worried: with the bit in his teeth not much short of a bullet can stop him. Ms. Paxton kept trying to interrupt, growing progressively more angry at each failure.

“Now, now,” I said soothingly. “We don’t know that they did surgery, sir. Can you look up Ms. Aguinaldo’s record and let us know what you did do?”

Ms. Paxton jabbed her computer keys. Of course, without a subpoena she shouldn’t tell us anything, but I was hoping she was angry enough to forget that part of her training. Whatever she saw on the screen made her become very still. When she finally spoke it was without the fury that I had been counting on to push her to indiscretion.

“Who did you say you were?” she demanded.

“I’m a lawyer and an investigator.” I tossed my card onto her desk. “And this is my client. How did you come to let Ms. Aguinaldo out of the hospital?”

“She ran away. She must have feigned her illness as an excuse for—”

“You calling my baby a liar?” Mr. Contreras was indignant. “If that don’t beat the Dutch. You think because she was poor, because she went to jail trying to look after her own little girl, you think she made up—”

Ms. Paxton’s smile became glacial. “Most of the prisoners who seek medical care either have injured themselves on the job or in a fight, or they are malingering. In your granddaughter’s case, without the permission of the doctor in charge I am not at liberty to reveal her medical record. But I assure you she left here of her own free will.”

“As my client said earlier, if anyone can walk out of here of her own free will, you must have a prison full of people trying to injure themselves in order to get moved to the hospital.”

“Security is extremely tight.” Her lips were opened only wide enough to spit the words out.

“I don’t believe you,” Mr. Contreras huffed. “You look at that machine of yours, you’ll see she was just a little bit of a thing. You brung her over in a ball and chain, and you telling me she sawed it off?”

In the end, he got her angry enough that she phoned someone named Daisy to say she had a lawyer here who needed proof that you couldn’t get out of the prison ward. She swept out of her office so fast that we almost had to run to keep up with her. Her high heels clicked across the tile floors as if she were tap dancing, but she still didn’t move her hips. We trotted past the information desk, down a corridor where various hospital staff greeted Ms. Paxton with the anxious deference you always see displayed to the bad–tempered in positions of power. She didn’t slow her twinkling tapping across the tiles but did nod in response, like the Queen of England acknowledging her subjects.

She led us behind the hospital to a locked ward separated from the main hospital by three sets of doors. Each was opened electronically, by a man behind thick glass, and the one behind you had to shut before the one in front of you could open. It was like the entrance to the Fourth Circle in Dante. By the time we were in the prison ward I was pretty much abandoning hope.

Like the rest of Coolis General, the ward was built out of something white and shiny, but it had been created with the prison in mind: the windows once again were mere slits in the wall. So much for my idea that Nicola had jumped out a window when the staff’s back was turned.

A guard inspected Mr. Contreras’s pockets and my handbag and told us to sign in. Mr. Contreras cast me an angry look, but signed his name. When I filled mine in below his, I doubted whether any state employee could have found him by his signature—it looked like
Oortneam.
Ms. Paxton merely flashed her hospital badge—the guard knew her by sight.

Inside the third door we were met by Daisy—Nurse Lundgren to us—the ward head. She looked coldly at Ms. Paxton and demanded to know what the problem was.

“These people are concerned with the escape of that color—that girl, that young person who got away last week.” Ms. Paxton’s realization that the colored girl’s grandfather and lawyer were present flustered her. “I want them to see that this ward is very secure. And that however the girl got away it wasn’t through any negligence on our part.”

Nurse Lundgren frowned. “Are you sure you want me talking to them? The memo from Captain Ruzich was very clear on the subject.”

Ms. Paxton smiled with more menace than a mere frown could convey. “I’m relying on your discretion, Daisy. But the grandfather has driven all the way from Chicago. I’d like him to see that we do take proper precautions when prisoners are entrusted to our care.”

“Very well,” the nurse said. “I’ll take them onto the ward. I expect you have enough work of your own without needing to come with us.”

Ms. Paxton seemed to be of two minds whether to fight Lundgren in front of us but finally swiveled on her motionless hips and stalked away.

“How many escapes have you had from the hospital?” I asked as we followed the nurse into the locked ward.

“Five,” the nurse said. “But that was before this wing was built. It used to be fairly easy to jump out a window, even if it had bars, because the girls knew how to finagle their way into the cafeteria or some other place they weren’t meant to be.”

I glanced in a room as we passed. It was empty; Lundgren didn’t object when I asked to inspect it. It had the tiny arrow holes of the prison, and no bathroom: Lundgren said the women had to use a bathroom in the hall, which was kept locked and was opened by a correctional officer. The hospital couldn’t afford to have hiding places in the room where an inmate could either lie in wait to attack—or kill herself in private.