V.I. Warshawski: Hard Time Part 12

Ms. Paxton put the pen down and leaned forward, a motion learned in media training school: lean forward fortyfive 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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.sure 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 badtempered 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 gla.s.s, 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 fl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.sed. 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.

In the next room a woman was lying in bed, sleeping heavily, wasted as my mother had been by her cancer. Across the hall a young woman with dark curly hair was watching television. It was only when I looked closely that I saw she was handcuffed to the bed.

"How are you feeling, Veronica?" Lundgren called as we pa.s.sed.

"I'm okay, Nurse. How's my baby?"

Veronica had given birth early that morning. She'd be returned to the prison in another couple of days, where she could keep her infant for four months. Coolis was progressive that way, the nurse explained, releasing the lock on the door that separated the nurses' station from the ward. She cut short a flirtation between one of her subordinates and the corrections officer a.s.signed to guard the hall, telling her junior to pay attention to the ward while she talked to us.

"It's hard for them to work here-it isn't like real nursing, and then they get bored when the ward is as empty as it is right now."

She led us into a tiny room behind the nurses' station that held a table, a microwave, and a small television. It was the one room on the floor with actual windows, but as these were made of wireenforced gla.s.s they didn't offer much of a view.

Lundgren took us through the statistics of the floor without any hesitation.

There were twenty beds, but they never had more than eight or ten of them filled, except one disastrous occasion when there was a major foodpoisoning outbreak at the jail and some of the patients with heart trouble came close to dying.

As to how easy or hard it was for an inmate to get to the hospital, she wasn't privy to prison decisions, but in her experience, women were pretty sick before they were brought over. "Girls are always trying to get over here. The hospital food is better and the routine is easier to take. In jail there are counts every six hours, and lockdowns and all the rest of it. For someone serving a long sentence the hospital can seem like a vacation. So the prison makes it hard for anyone to malinger."

"And Nicola Aguinaldo? How sick was she when she came here?"

Her lips tightened, and her hands moved uneasily in her lap. "I thought she was quite ill. So ill I was surprised that she was able to move enough to leave."

"What was the problem?" Mr. Contreras demanded. "Was it some kind of woman problem? That's what the cops told me, but she never said nothing about that to her ma-"

"A doctor didn't actually examine her before she left. I was told by the prison nurse that they suspected an ovarian cyst. But before a doctor could see her, she was gone."

"How did that little bit of a thing get away from you and the guard and everyone?" Mr. Contreras demanded.

Lundgren didn't look at us. "I wasn't on duty when it happened. I was told she used her small size to follow behind the laundry cart, on the side away from the guard, and that she probably concealed herself in the cart when the janitor stopped to talk to someone. In theory the laundry would be inspected before leaving this ward, but in practice they probably let it go through without poking at it: no one wants to touch soiled linens. A number of the women have AIDS."

"And you believe Aguinaldo escaped that way?" I asked, keeping my voice neutral.

"Wasn't she cuffed to the bed?"

Lundgren nodded. "But these girls have nothing to do all day long except figure out how to use a hairpin on their handcuffs. It happens now and then that one of them gets loose, but since the ward is locked it doesn't do them much good. I don't think there's anything else I can tell you. If you'd like some time alone in the chapel before you set out, I can have an orderly show you to it.

Otherwise he'll escort you to the main entrance."

I left my card on the table when we got up to leave. "In case something else occurs to you that you'd like me to know about, Nurse."

On the way out, Mr. Contreras exploded with frustration. "I don't believe it. A laundry cart, huh? Things ain't bigger than a minute, and not even Nicola was that tiny. I want you to sue them. Sue them for-what was it you said-not taking due something?"

Veronica, the woman who'd had the baby, managed to be in the hall, cuffed to the orderly, who was escorting her back from the bathroom. "You know Nicola? What happened to her?"

"She's dead," I said. "Do you know why she was in the hospital?"

Nurse Lundgren appeared next to us. "You can't be talking to the patients, ma'am. They're inmates even if they're in the hospital. Veronica, you're well enough to parade the hall, you're well enough to get back to the house. Jock, you can take these visitors out to the main entrance. Show them where the chapel is before you come back."

Veronica looked momentarily furious, then, as if her powerlessness were something she'd just remembered, her shoulders sank and her face crumpled into despair.

Jock gave permission to the man behind the gla.s.s wall to release the doors. At the entrance to the main hospital wing, he pointed down a hall to the chapel.

19.

Power Dining "So what do you think, doll?" Mr. Contreras asked as he buckled himself into the seat. "That nurse seemed mighty uneasy. And how would a little thing like that girl was get out of a place like that?"

I didn't have an answer. Nurse Lundgren seemed competent, and even, for the setting, compa.s.sionate. I agreed she'd seemed uncomfortable, but it would be easy for me to read into that what I wanted to. Maybe she was troubled at the loss of a patient rather than covering up special knowledge of Aguinaldo's escape.

We drove over to Smallpox Creek to let the dogs cool off again before the drive home. Mr. Contreras, suddenly seeing Nicola Aguinaldo as a person, not an illegal immigrant or a criminal, was subdued during the ride. We got home a little before six. Mary Louise had shoved a packet underneath the locked inner door with a report on her day's work. She had delivered our report to Continental United; the human resources vice president had called to say they were delighted with our work, but that they thought they would have to send someone down to Georgia to check on things in person. And that someone would likely be me-unless Baladine persuaded the company to turn all their work over to Carnifice.

I didn't want to hang about the back roads of Georgia, waiting for someone with a tire iron to hit me on the head. On the other hand, if I stayed in Chicago I might start doing unlucrative things like tailing Morrell, to see if a man worried about committing himself on the phone might drive to Nicola Aguinaldo's mother's home.

A man named Rieff phoned from Cheviot Labs at eleven, Mary Louise had written in her round schoolgirl hand. He says he can provide a printout of what is on Aguinaldo's dress, but he does not know how meaningful it is. It was a long Tshirt with Lacey Dowell as the Mad Virgin on it. A label said it was a specialty shirt but did not identify where it was manufactured. There are traces of sweat, which are presumably Aguinaldo's, but without a DNA sample he couldn't say. There is a trace of cigarette ash around the inside of the neck. He is not charging for that information because the a.n.a.lysis was already done when they inspected the dress last week, but if you want to know what brand of cigarette, that will cost around two hundred extra.

Cigarette ash around the inside of the neck? I wondered if Aguinaldo was a smoker, and how hard or easy it was to drop ash down your own neckline if you smoked.

I turned back to Mary Louise's notes. At two o'clock Alex Fisher phoned. She wanted to know if you had thought over her offer any more. I said you were out of town for the day and would get back to her in the morning; she urged me to push you to take the job, it would mean a lot for your agency one way or another however you decided. Vic, what does this woman want?

She'd underscored the question several times. I was with her there: what did Alex want? What was Teddy Trant going to do to me if I didn't dig around in Frenada's affairs? Put a V chip in my TV so I was forced to watch nothing but Global programs? If Abigail Trant had persuaded her husband to give me some work, was that enough reason for him to be surly at my refusal to accept it?

Of course the other connection to Global was Lacey Dowell. She, or at least her face, kept cropping up. Now she was on the shirt Nicola Aguinaldo had on when she died. Was Global's big star involved in something so ugly the studio wanted to pin it on Frenada? But there was nothing to link Lacey with Nicola Aguinaldo, at least as far as I could tell.

Maybe I should try to see Lucian Frenada. I had entered the phone numbers Alex Fisher gave me into my Palm Pilot. When I called his home, a machine told me, in Spanish and English, that Frenada regretted not answering my call in person, but that he was perhaps at his factory and would get back to me if I left a message.

I thought it over, then got up abruptly and went downstairs. If Frenada was perhaps at his factory I could see him in person. My back was stiff. A nagging sensible voice-Mary Louise's or Lotty's-told me if I had to poke at this wasp's nest at all to do it in the morning. Or at least to take my gun, but what was I going to do with it-pistolwhip him into telling me what secret Trant wanted me to find?

There is no direct route from my place to Frenada's factory. I snaked south and west, through streets filled with small frame houses and fourplusone's, past boys skateboarding or in small gangs on their bikes, now and then crossing pockets of lights around bars and pool halls. As I pa.s.sed the fringes of Humboldt Park, the streets revved up with boom boxes and lowriders but died away again at the seedy industrial corridor along Grand Avenue.

A freight line cuts northwest through the area, making for oddly shaped buildings designed to fill odd lot sizes right up to the embankment. A train was rumbling past as I pulled in front of a dingy triangular building near the corner of Trumbull and Grand.

Lights blazed through open windows on the second floor. The outer door was shut but unlocked. A naked bulb glared just inside the entrance. Drunken letters in a notice board listed a wig manufacturer and a box maker on the ground floor.

SpecialT Uniforms was on two. As I climbed concrete steps slippery with age, light glinted on long falls of hair in a display case. It was like walking behind the guillotine after dark.

The noise coming down the stairwell sounded as though fifty guillotines were all whacking heads in unison. I followed light and sound along a metal walkway and came to SpecialT's open door. Even though it was nine at night, nearly a dozen people were working, either cutting fabric at long tables in the middle of the floor or a.s.sembling garments at machines along the wall. The racket came partly from the sewing machines, but mostly from the shears. Two men positioned layers of cloth at the end of the tables, clamped them in place under a pair of electric shears, then wielded a control box to release the blades.

I watched, fascinated, as the shears whicked through the fabric and the men carried pieces over to the sewingmachine operators. One person was sewing letters to the backs of shirts, another attaching sleeves. At least half the crew was smoking. I thought of the cigarette ash smudged into the neck of Nicola Aguinaldo's dress. Maybe it had come from the person who made the garment, rather than from Aguinaldo herself.

Lucian Frenada was standing at one of the cutting tables next to a stocky man with thin black hair. They seemed to be discussing the proper placement of a pattern stencil. I walked over to stand in his range of vision-if I touched him to get his attention he might be startled into landing under one of the fabric scythes.

Frenada looked up, frowning."Si? Le puedo ayudar en algo?"

I held out my card. "We met at Lacey Dowell's party last week," I shouted over the noise of the machinery.

The man next to him stared at me with frank curiosity: was I a girlfriend so enamored that I would pursue Frenada into his shop? Or was I with INS, about to demand that all hands produce their papers? Frenada touched his arm and said something in Spanish, then pointed at the floor, ankledeep with sc.r.a.ps of cloth. The man pa.s.sed a command on to one of the cutters, who stopped his work to start sweeping.

Frenada took me to a cubbyhole at the rear of the floor, which was protected enough from the floor noise to allow conversation. Fabric samples and patterns festooned the top of a metal desk; production schedules were taped to the door and the sides of an old filing cabinet. The only chair had a motor on it.

Frenada leaned against the door; I perched gingerly on the edge of the desk.

"Why are you here?" he demanded.

"You mentioned Tuesday night that something odd was happening at your shop."

"Do you usually sell your services like this, door to door?"

My cheeks and neck grew warm with embarra.s.sment, but I couldn't help smiling.

"Like encyclopedias, you mean? A reporter I know has been asking questions about your business. And I remembered what you said, so I wanted to see SpecialT for myself."

"What reporter? What kind of questions?"

"Wondering what secrets you were hiding here at SpecialT." I watched him steadily, but he looked only puzzled, and somewhat scornful.

Another freight train began to thunder behind the building, drowning Frenada's reply. While I waited to be able to hear him, I looked around the office. On his desk, underneath one of the fabric swatches, I saw a glimpse of a slogan I knew from Emily Messenger's wardrobe: The Mad Virgin Bites.

The train pa.s.sed, and Frenada said, "Secrets? I can't afford such things. I thought you meant-but it doesn't matter. My business runs on a shoestring; if something a little strange happens, then I have to accept it as an act of G.o.d."

"Lacey rea.s.sured you when you saw her on Thursday?"

"Did she-who told you-"

"No one. It was a deduction. That's what I do-get facts and make deductions.

They teach it in detective school." I was babbling, because of the Mad Virgin Tshirt.

Frenada looked around his office and caught sight of the shirt. He got to his feet and moved me toward the door.

"My business has nothing to do with Lacey. Nothing at all. So keep your deductions to yourself, Miss Detective. And now, by another gracious act of G.o.d, I have a large order to get out, the largest I have ever been blessed with, the uniforms for a soccer league in New Jersey, which is why you find me here so late at night." He hustled me out through the shop floor to the metal walkway, waiting until I reached the stairwell landing before he turned back inside.