V.I. Warshawski: Hard Time Part 28

Once when I woke, the woman in the sweater handed me my father's watch and helped me strap it onto my wrist. I was relieved to have it back but still felt upset, as if I were missing something of even greater importance. The woman in the sweater urged me to drink miso broth. I was getting stronger-in a few days I'd be able to have rice, and then I'd be strong enough to remember what was troubling me.

I was too tired to think. I gave up worrying about the watch and drifted between waking and eating and struggling upright: the wound in my abdomen made sitting up an exquisite pain. It was only three days, in fact, between my first waking up and my shaky progression from bed to chair and a tour of the hallway, but the pain and the painkillers stretched time's pa.s.sage in odd ways.

On the day that Mr. Contreras helped me into a chair so that I could eat my rice and watch the Cubs, Lotty came in. Sammy Sosa had just hit his fortysixth home run, but Mr. Contreras muted the television and with rare tact left us alone.

When Lotty saw me out of bed and in a chair, she burst into tears and knelt with her arms around me. "Victoria. I thought I was going to lose you. Oh, my dear one, I am so thankful to have you back."

Close to her I could see how much gray was in her hair; for some reason that made me cry as well. "I thought you would chew me out."

She blinked back her tears. "Later. When you're strong enough to fight back."

"She mustn't have too much agitation, Dr. Herschel," the nurse said.

Lotty pushed herself to her feet. Despite the gray hair, she still moved with easy agility. I smiled foolishly at her. She didn't stay long but the next evening she returned with Morrell. The two together told me my story.

A state trooper had found me on the Belmont exit ramp to the Kennedy around three on Sunday morning. The boxes that tumbled out of the back of the truck when CO Polsen drove off had saved my life: a motorist, swerving to avoid them, noticed me lying in the road and called the cops. The state troopers rushed me to Beth Israel, where Dr. Szymczyk-the same surgeon who'd been on call the night I found Nicola Aguinaldo-patched me together.

I had been luckier than Nicola on several counts. When Hartigan kicked me, I'd managed to twist away enough so that my ribs took the main force of his blow. He had badly bruised my intestine and I had developed a severe infection, which accounted for my fever, but when the state trooper found me, the wound had only just begun to perforate the peritoneum. Nicola already had such advanced peritonitis when I came on her that she didn't have much chance for survival.

And then, unlike Nicola, I was in good physical condition and I was used to defending myself, so that despite the jolt from the stun gun-which was what Hartigan shot me with-I was able to shield myself from the worst of his blows. I had apparently managed to put my hands over my head, so that the kick that knocked me out broke the fingers in my right hand but didn't do serious damage to my skull.

"You were lucky, Vic," Lotty said. "But you also don't have the habit of victims."

"But how did I end up here instead of in the hospital? The Grete Berman Inst.i.tute is for torture victims, isn't it? That isn't really me."

"I didn't think you should be moved from Beth Israel until you were more stable, but Morrell persuaded me that the man Baladine could get access to you in a hospital if he was looking for you. I wanted to bring you to my home, but the Berman Inst.i.tute is secure and fully staffed, so I finally agreed to let you be moved here as soon as you were out of surgery. But besides that, you-" Her voice cracked and she steadied it. "You were in a helpless situation, at the mercy of the law, shot with an electric weapon, beaten, and then chained to a bed. I think you were tortured, Victoria."

"She needs to rest now, Dr. Herschel," the nurse intervened.

Over the next several days, as I got back on my feet and began to get some exercise in the Berman Inst.i.tute gardens, Morrell put together the rest of the story for me. He had called Freeman Carter when he got back to Chicago from Coolis that last Thursday, urging him to try to get me a bail hearing in Chicago on Friday; Morrell told Freeman he was worried that Baladine might not let me survive the weekend. Freeman was skeptical at first, but Morrell managed to persuade him.

Freeman spent all day Friday shaking up the judicial system trying to find me.

It was three on Friday afternoon before the head of the circuit court granted Freeman permission to post my bail in a Chicago courtroom and have me released that afternoon instead of making us wait until a circuit judge rode out to Coolis on Monday.

At that point, although no one outside the prison knew it, I was already chained to a bed in the segregation wing, with a rising fever. Freeman couldn't get anyone at Coolis to admit to my whereabouts and finally was told that they lacked the administrative personnel to process my release after 5:00P.M. on Friday, that Freeman would have to come back on Monday.

Freeman went to the state appellate court and got an emergency writ requiring my immediate release. The prison then told him I had faked an injury at my work station and they had put me in the hospital. On Sat.u.r.day, as my fever rose, they played a sh.e.l.l game with Freeman, pa.s.sing him between the prison and the hospital, each saying the other had possession of my body.

Of course neither Freeman nor Morrell knew what discussions took place at the prison end of things, but the most likely guess was that the staff panicked.

Perhaps they thought I might die, and Freeman was making it clear they would face intense scrutiny if they didn't produce me in good shape. They probably figured they could repeat what had sort of worked for them with Nicola Aguinaldo: dump me in Chicago-where I'd either be hit by a car or die of my wounds-and put out word that I had managed to escape. Morrell showed me the HeraldStar 's report.

PRIVATE EYE, HELD ON KIDNAPPING CHARGE, FLEES COOLIS.

For the second time this summer, a woman managed to run away from the experimental jailprison complex operated by Carnifice Security in Coolis. This time, though, the hue and cry is much louder: the woman in question is notorious in Chicago, being private eye V. (Victoria) I. (Iphigenia) Warshawski.

Warshawski had been arrested on charges of kidnapping the son of Carnifice chief Robert Baladine and spent a month in the jail wing at Coolis after failing to post bail.

She was not an easy prisoner, Warden Frederick Ruzich said, often getting involved in fights with other inmates and ignoring orders from corrections officers, whose job includes trying to smooth the adjustment for women new to the Coolis system.

How Warshawski managed to escape may never be known. Her body was found at the foot of the Belmont ramp to the Kennedy. Although she is still alive, she suffered severe brain damage and may never speak again. Dr. Charlotte Herschel, Warshawski's physician at Beth Israel Hospital, says Warshawski is able to breathe on her own, which gives them hope for some partial recovery. She has been moved to a nursing home, but Dr. Herschel declined to tell reporters where.

Warshawski is best known for the work she did in tracking down the murderer of social activist Deirdre Messenger last year, but her successes in investigating whitecollar crime have earned her respect from many quarters in Chicago, including the Chicago Police Department.

Robert Baladine, the president of Carnifice Security, is angry at lapses in security at the Coolis complex, which have made escape begin to seem like a routine matter for the inmates. He promised a thorough investigation of security measures at the prison. Illinois House Speaker JeanClaude Poilevy (ROak Brook) says the legislature granted a number of tax breaks to Carnifice to get them to take on the women's prison and expects them to live up to their side of the bargain. (See Murray Ryerson's story on Page 16 for a summary of Warshawski's most notable cases.) The story included a map of Illinois, with a blowup of the northwest corner showing the town of Coolis, the prison, and the roads running to Chicago.

I put the newspaper lethargically to one side. I didn't even care what Murray had to say about me. I had remembered recently what was troubling me about my watch, and it left me feeling so futile that it was affecting my recovery.

"That minicamera that got me these wounds-it's disappeared," I muttered to Morrell. "I don't know if they took it off me when they put me in segregation or if it just got lost at the hospital, but it's gone."

Morrell's eyes widened. "V. I.-they were supposed to tell you when they gave you back your father's watch. I have it. I took it to the Unblinking Eye to get the pictures developed. I didn't mention it because they keep telling me not to get you excited, and I thought you'd bring it up when you were ready to look at the pictures. They'll be ready in another day or two."

After that I felt giddy with relief. "Did you and Lotty really think I might never talk again, or was that wishful thinking?"

Morrell grinned. "Alex Fisher from Global kept pumping me, so I thought I'd play it safe. When I told Freeman what she and I said, he thought it was such a good idea that he put it out in a press release. The only people who know the truth besides him and Dr. Herschel are Sal and of course your neighbor. Dr. Herschel thought it would be intolerably cruel to Mr. Contreras to imagine you in such straits. And it gives us some wiggle room to figure out what to do with Baladine and Global Entertainment."

Yes. Baladine and Global Entertainment. I wanted to do something about them, but right now I couldn't imagine what. My first week at the Berman Inst.i.tute I was too tired and too sore to think about what I'd been through. As I grew stronger physically, I was bewildered by my wild mood swings. At one moment I'd be euphoric over my escape and the knowledge that I had managed to smuggle out pictures; the next I'd see a stranger coming toward me and think it was one of the corrections officers, Polsen or Hartigan. I'd start feeling unbearably helpless, as I had in Coolis, and would find myself moving away as fast as I could, my legs wobbly, as if I expected to be hit again with fifty thousand volts of electricity.

The inst.i.tute treated many people who had been held longer and in greater duress than I. I felt guilty for taking up room that someone from Rwanda or Guatemala could have used, but the psychologist who met with me twice a week told me the inst.i.tute didn't see it that way.

"Do you think our doctor shouldn't treat your broken hand because someone else has breast cancer and needs more intense medical attention? You deserve to make the best recovery you can from your experience."

"But the other people here didn't choose to be tortured," I burst out. "I chose to stay at Coolis. If I'd followed my lawyer's advice and made bail, none of the rest would have happened."

"So you blame yourself for your misfortunes. But many of the people here torment themselves in the same way: if I had not gone back to my home that morning, if I had followed my mother's wishes and gone to see her, if I had not signed that pet.i.tion. We wish we had power over our fates, and so we blame ourselves when something goes wrong. You wanted to stay in Coolis to try to understand what happened to a poor young woman you tried to help. I think that was n.o.ble. And you cannot blame yourself for the fact that men-and women-with unlimited power over the lives of others used that power in very s.a.d.i.s.tic ways. If Coolis were run along humane lines-well, your young friend would not have died to begin with."

I tried to accept his advice, but my dreams were still so shocking that I often dreaded going to sleep. I knew if I could only rest properly, I would recover more rapidly.

"What will help you sleep?" he asked the next time we talked.

"If I could stop feeling so humiliated. I know I can't shut down Coolis. I can't change any prison anywhere in America. All these degradations will go on and on for any woman who lands there, the s.e.x talk and the rape and whatever else. The law makes it almost impossible for a woman to lodge a complaint, and even if she does, the guards have so much power they can stop her voice."

Freeman Carter was filing lawsuits for me-one against the Chicago Police Department for the violence committed against my person and against my office by Douglas Lemour. The other was against the Illinois Department of Corrections for my injuries there. Bryant Vishnikov was studying the OR films of my injuries and thought he might be able to prove they'd come from a particular set of boots.

Such as those of the man Hartigan out at Coolis.

"But these cases will take years to work through the courts," I told the Berman psychologist. "By that time I could be out of business and too broke for a settlement to help me. I want Robert Baladine to pay a price now for siccing his bent cop on me and for having me arrested on a trumpedup charge. I want that cop out of the force, and I want Baladine publicly exposed. And of course I need him off my back if I'm ever going to run my business again." Miss Ruby had told me if I wanted to eat revenge it would give me indigestion, but it seemed to me pa.s.sivity was making me sicker than revenge ever would.

The psychologist didn't exactly endorse my wish: he told me he thought it was helpful to imagine a recovery of my own power and see where that left me.

A recovery of my own power meant I needed to recover my physical fitness. I began working out in greater earnest. Four weeks after I was found on the expressway, I ran a wobbly mile, but after that my strength grew measurably every day. On the Thursday before Labor Day, as the El Nio heat finally subsided into a bearable warmth, I felt ready to move on.

43.

Planning Session I'd decided it was time to move on, but I wasn't sure where to go. My own apartment would leave me a sitting duck as soon as Baladine learned I'd surfaced. For the same reason, I resisted Lotty's invitation to come home with her: I'd rather be killed than endanger her life one more time in one of my exploits.

It was Morrell who suggested that I spend a week or two in Father Lou's rectory.

I kept asking him to make sure he'd discussed it with Father Lou and that the priest understood the potential risk; Father Lou in the end sent me a terse note saying I was welcome as long as I didn't smoke. The kids around the school were used to strange families moving in and out as the priest offered refuge to people who'd been evicted or were seeking sanctuary; they wouldn't blow my cover through idle chatter around the neighborhood. And so the Friday before Labor Day I moved from the modern, warmly furnished rooms of the Berman Inst.i.tute to a narrow bed under a crucifix and a bathroom holding a badly stained tub and toilet. It was still a big step up from Coolis.

During the weeks I was healing, Morrell or Lotty came to see me almost every day. Lotty brought flowers that wellwishers, believing I was in a braindamaged stupor, sent to her office. Darraugh Graham, my most important client, sent a miniature orange tree and a note that said if I ever felt able to get back to work he was eager to continue to do business with me. I was touched, and relieved as well, although Morrell, collecting mail from my office, found an ominous number of letters from clients canceling my services. (We find a large firm such as Carnifice better meets our security needs at this time. . . .) Mr. Contreras visited me regularly while I was at Berman. Once he learned he could bring Mitch and Peppy, he'd bundle the dogs into the Rustmobile and drive down, careful to follow Morrell's instructions to keep anyone from tailing him.

The dogs helped my recovery. When I ran around the gardens behind the inst.i.tute with them, I started feeling more like myself.

A bouquet of anemones came with a note from Abigail Trant, wishing me a speedy recovery from all my ailments. After her surprise visit the week before my arrest, I wasn't exactly startled, but I was very pleased.

I saw Mrs. Trant's name in the papers from time to time, especially as the swim meet Eleanor Baladine had organized drew near: the HeraldStar, in its new role as shill for Global Entertainment, actually treated the event as frontpage news. The meet was to raise money for several children's programs dear to Abigail Trant, Jennifer Poilevy, and Eleanor Baladine. The three women were photographed around Eleanor's pool, looking like beauty queens in their sleekly fitting swimsuits. Tickets were a thousand dollars; anyone with a child under thirteen who wanted to compete should get in touch with Alex Fisher at Global.

Another evening Lotty arrived with an outsize bouquet of scarlet and gold flowers and a letter from Murray Ryerson.

Dear Vic, I can't believe you're really lying in a stupor. Half of it's denial, and the other half is my sources: they can't find you in any of the nursing homes in the area. So maybe Lotty Herschel will bring you these flowers and my letter.

I'm sorry you were arrested. I'm sorry you spent time in the big house. I don't know how you got out without posting bail, but my compliments: that took some doing. I'm sorriest of all I blew up at you over Frenada's finances. I don't know who or how that strange data got into his LifeStory report, but it was bogus. When his sister tried to access one of the accounts, it turned out there was nothing there. For reasons I haven't been able to find out, Carnifice may have wanted to discredit Frenada. At any rate they certainly have the technical wizardry to plant phony data on Frenada.

Anyway, I want you to know that I tried to do the right thing. I tried to tape a followup to my show explaining that I had received erroneous information about Frenada. The station wouldn't allow the tape. I tried to print a story in the Star, but the editor blocked it. I've been asked to take a vacation for a few weeks to see if "I can regain a sense of proportion."

If you're alive and well, give me a call. On the other hand, if you're really in danger of your life, V. I., I wish I could see you to tell you I'm sorry. And beg you not to die. I don't think I could keep working in Chicago if you weren't part of the landscape.

Murray I pinned one of the flowers to my blouse and danced around the Berman gardens with it. I had a moment's euphoric impulse to phone Murray, to relieve his own anxiety. We had worked out some amazing stunts together in the past. But I couldn't afford to take risks right now, even for an old friend. Murray's course this past summer had been too rocky for me to trust him based on one letter.

The day I heard from him was the same day that Morrell brought in the pictures I'd taken at Coolis. There were thirtythree: I hadn't had time to shoot the whole roll. A few showed scenes in the jail, like the time CO Polsen was trying to pull down Dolores's jeans, or the pustular burn on the arm of a woman in the kitchen. Where I'd had time to focus, however surrept.i.tiously, the quality was good enough to make out detail.

Many of the two dozen I'd taken in the back room were blurred because of my nervous flying around the s.p.a.ce, but there was one clear shot of Lacey's face on a Tshirt, with a man in an IDOC uniform standing behind it. I had two shots of women operating the stamping machines. And somehow, at the end, I'd photographed Hartigan standing over me with the stun gun pointed down at me. I didn't remember taking it; perhaps his shooting or kicking me had inadvertently clicked the shutter. He was foreshortened by my lying on the floor, with his head, bloated and shining in s.a.d.i.s.tic pleasure, looming larger than his body. The gun appeared in one corner.

Looking at the picture made me start to sweat. I had to take a walk around the Berman gardens before I could sit down again with Morrell. I felt embarra.s.sed by my weakness.

"What do these pictures show, Vic? Besides the idea of a certain amount of sadism in the prison, I mean."

I'd had a lot of time to think during my recuperation, and I spelled it out slowly, putting the events in order as much for myself as for Morrell. "A prison is a great place to run a factory. Labor is cheap and it's captive: you never have the danger that a union will form or that anyone will protest work conditions. Even if you're paying the workers more than you would in Southeast Asia, you still save money because you don't have any capital costs. The state provides the physical plant. The state buys the machinery. Shipping to the world's biggest market is cheaper than from Thailand or Burma, especially if you're close to the main shipping routes out of Chicago. So Coolis started producing shirts and jackets for Global Entertainment."

He frowned. "It sounds disgusting but not a reason to try to kill you for finding it out."

"Illinois law. You can only make things in prison for sale in the prison system.

Baladine and Teddy Trant at Global are good friends. When Baladine started running Carnifice Security and got the bid to build and run Coolis, the two of them probably saw what great potential there was in the captive workforce. The two men are very tight with the Speaker of the Illinois House. Poilevy ran a special legislative session exclusively on crime a couple of years ago. I think he probably promised Baladine that for enough money sprinkled around the right way he could overturn the law, but labor balked. Usually they do pretty much what the Speaker says, but they wouldn't budge on this one, because they'd face a rebellion from the rank and file if they undercut real jobs in the state."

Morrell fiddled with the photographs. "I still don't get it. Did Baladine have his nanny arrested simply to send another body to the prison factory?"

"No. That was one of those things. Nicola was arrested for stealing. She was tried, and sentenced, and ended up in the clothes shop because she was small with quick little fingers and because she didn't speak much English and the prison tries to keep discussion of the operation to a minimum. They intimidate the women who work in the clothes shop and try to keep them separate from the rest of the prison population. I discovered early on that women were scared to work in the clothes shop, even though they could make better money for piecework than they could at some of the other gigs.

"Then Nicola learned her little girl had died of asthma, the same little girl whose hospital bills put her in so much debt that she stole the necklace to begin with. She wanted to see the dead child herself and bury her, and they laughed at her. She lost her head and pounded her little fists on this guy's chest-" I flicked my middle finger against Hartigan's face. "He shot her with a stun gun. He kicked her. Her intestine perforated. They shut her in segregation, then they got scared and sent her to the hospital. I'm guessing the hospital said she needed expensive surgery to fix her up and even then she might well die. They thought if they dumped her body near her apartment, they could pretend she'd run away and been killed at home."

My voice became drier and drier, more and more impersonal as I tried to keep from feeling anything about the narrative. Morrell put a hand in mine, giving me a chance to draw away if I wanted to: it's one of the things they train you in at the Berman Inst.i.tute. Let people have plenty of room to get away if they're nervous about being touched. I squeezed his fingers gratefully, but I needed to get up, to be in motion. We went back to the garden and talked while I restlessly moved around the lateflowering bushes.

"When they got Nicola to Chicago they saw that the stun gun had singed her shirtfront. In case the medical examiner noticed the burn holes during an autopsy, they stripped off her clothes and put on a Mad Virgin Tshirt-I'm pretty sure one that Lucian Frenada had made on spec for Global."

I explained to Morrell what I had learned about Frenada and Trant the night I'd been at Father Lou's, right before my arrest, that Frenada had made some shirts for Global and had argued both with Lacey and Trant over what became of them.

"He claimed Trant had stolen one, and Lacey laughed it off. I did, too-why would a Global boss steal a shirt when he could get a dozen of them free anytime he wanted? But the ones Trant could get all had a label reading Made with Pride in the USA , a kind of Arbeit macht frei label we had to sew into the necks of the Tshirts we made. Why they wanted a Mad Virgin Tshirt on Nicola I don't know-maybe Trant had a crazy idea that they could finger Frenada for the murder if anyone was asking questions. Everything they did had a Bmovie feel to it; it was just the thing that a studio executive would come up with. Or maybe it was Alex Fisher's idea.

"When they thought I was dying they took my damaged shirt off in the cell and put on another one. They made some comment about it at the time. Even though I kept blanking in and out, I was aware of what was going on, although at the time, it didn't make sense."

Before my arrest, I had wondered if Frenada had something to do with Nicola Aguinaldo's death, but during a wakeful night at Coolis I remembered the sequence of conversations we'd had. It was when I asked him how a shirt he made came to be on her body that Frenada suddenly became quiet, then hung up on me.

The night that Robbie saw him in Oak Brook, Frenada had gone out to confront Trant and Baladine. The trouble was, I couldn't prove that Baladine killed Frenada-I could only guess it. I asked Morrell if Vishnikov's autopsy had turned up anything unusual.

"Oh, that's right: we've had so much else to talk about I forgot about that,"

Morrell said. "Frenada definitely died by drowning. Vishnikov says he had a blow on the side of the head that could have come from slipping on the rocks by the harbor-he got it before he died, and that might have been why he went into the water. Other contusions had appeared postmortem."

I scowled. "He was out at the Baladine estate the night he died. Robbie saw him there and later overheard a most suggestive remark from Trant, something about that taking care of the problem. I think they drowned Frenada in the pool and carted him off to Lake Michigan, but I guess that didn't show up on autopsy."

Morrell shook his head. "After you asked me to go back to him, Vishnikov did a really thorough study of every organ in the body, but he says there's no way to prove whether he drowned in fresh or chlorinated water."

I started shredding the wilted flower in my b.u.t.tonhole. "If I can't pin something substantial on that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I'm not going to be able to work again. I can't prove he killed Frenada. I can testify to someone somewhere about the shirts, but I can't prove they're running a factory out in Coolis either. That is, I can't prove they're selling the shirts and jackets and whatnot outside the prison system, not without a huge amount of effort."

"What would it take to prove it?" Morrell asked.

"Oh, the grubby kind of detective work we used to do in the days before we could check everything out online. Watching for service vans like the one that carted me off, follow them, see which ones contain Global products, where they get dropped off. You could probably bribe the drivers and shorten the process, but it would still take weeks. And then there'd be hearings, and somehow during that time I'd have to come up with money to live on, not to mention money to fund the investigation. It would be easier if I could get Baladine to confess."

Morrell looked at me in astonishment. "You don't really think you could do that, do you? That kind of guy won't. His selfimage, his need to be the top dog-"

While he was talking I was imagining the way Baladine had come after Frenada and me: trying to plant cocaine in both our shops, arresting me for kidnapping, planting phony data on the Internet about Frenada's finances. Baladine wasn't just a hightech operator; he liked to get his hands dirty. But I began to see a way in which I could use his technology to make the confession happen. Was I going to be foolhardy once again? To be daring without judgment? In a way, I didn't care. I had been through the fiery furnace; I had been badly burned, but I had survived. No harms that befell me in the future could be as bad as the ones I had already endured.

"I have an idea." I interrupted Morrell abruptly. "But I'm going to need a little help."

44.

Diving in with the Sharks The Baladine Invitational swim meet drew a respectable crowd. Morrell dropped me twenty yards from the front gate. It stood open but was protected by uniformed members of Carnifice Security's private security division. I joined a line that spilled into the road, standing between a couple of small girls arguing over a gym bag and two wellcoiffed men discussing baseball. We crawled forward as guards checked tickets with a handheld scanner. They ran the scanner over my media pa.s.s and looked into my briefcase but saw only videoca.s.settes and a notebook. Another man handed out maps and programs. He directed me toward the pool, where a special tent had been set up for media, with refreshments.

"And you can use the bathroom off the kitchen, ma'am. The public and swimmers are using the facilities in the cabana."

It felt good to be called "ma'am" by a member of the Carnifice organization. I thanked him genially and mingled with the crowd going up the drive. I wasn't exactly in disguise, but hoped that a widebrimmed hat and the fact that no one expected to see me would protect me. I skirted the drive, clogged with SUV's and the occasional actual car, and moved around to the back of the house, where the crowd was thicker.

In the media tent I got the press packet marked for Morrell but ducked back outside before I had to get into idle chitchat with anyone. Alex Fisher's hapless a.s.sistant was there; I didn't want her questioning me on where Morrell was. Besides, I had recognized several reporters I knew, and it would take only about three sentences before they'd realize it was my face behind the big hat and sungla.s.ses. I planned to talk to them all soon enough, but it would be disastrous if they saw me now.