by John Farrow
Courtney stared back at him as she considered his request, and eventually turned to look at Doi. The woman had held her at knifepoint and threatened her life. She still sat with the dagger in her hands. A communication occurred between them; Courtney could tell that the older woman wanted to hear her read a letter. She disentangled her legs and strode across the room to her bunk. She fished a letter-in-progress out from her books on loan from the prison library, then returned to her previous position on the floor, near Jodi.
She started to read the letter silently to herself at first, perhaps to make sure that she could go through with this.
‘Courtney?’ Cinq-Mars inquired of her.
She put the letter down and implored him with her gaze to let her off this hook. Instead, he encouraged her to proceed with a gentle nod.
Courtney lifted up her pages again to read from them.
Hi, Mom,
I’m good. How are you doing? I guess you know what day it is.
She let the pages drop into her lap again, and explained, ‘I wrote a few days ago.’
The women of Lady Jail were interested, and they nodded to let her know that they understood. They wanted her to read on. Courtney raised her pages again.
Yep, it’s my birthday.
‘Oh my God, little girl, Happy Birthday!’ Temple exclaimed. The others took up the refrain with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but they all noticed that Courtney was ignoring them. The room fell silent again. Waiting.
I didn’t tell anybody because I can’t stand it. I’m twenty-one now. When I’m thirty-one I’ll still be here. I won’t get out then, either. I know I deserve it but it’s hard to imagine. Ten years ago I was eleven! Eleven! I was still your little girl. That seems like so long ago I can’t count that far back. The same time is ahead of me and then a bit more and it will all be the same.
If I told people, maybe Abigail – you’d like her Mom, she’s nice – maybe she’d’ve baked a cake. She makes good cakes. So yummy. They’re the best thing we have in here. But I didn’t tell her because I can’t stand it, thinking about how many years are left. I should be celebrating my birthday with you. Instead, I make you sad. I make you sad every day because of what I did but I bet you were extra sad on my birthday. I’m so sorry. I say that all the time but I’m so sorry it’s like this big gigantic blob inside me, this sorry blob, it’s so huge I don’t know what to do with it sometimes. Or all the time. I don’t know how to live with it, this big sorry blob. Some days it’s all I am.
I’m learning, though. I want you to know that. I don’t want you to be so sad. I’m a human being who acted like a monster. I’m not a monster though. There’s a big difference. I killed Daphne in a wicked way. She’s dead now. She always will be. I can’t bring her back. I’m so sorry. All I can say is, all I keep saying is, I’ll never do nothing like that again. Sorry, again, double negative. I know you hate those. If I could erase it I would, but I can’t. I can’t erase anything. If I scratch it out it just makes a bigger mess but it’s still there. All I can do is promise you that I won’t do anything like that again. (There! No double neg!) Not even in here where sometimes a person can get to feel that way. Like killing somebody, I mean. Like the murder in here I told you about. That made you worry, you said. But I’m all right, Mom. Really, I am. I want you to know that. I’m all right, I just can’t celebrate – and here comes a double negative on purpose! – I just can’t celebrate nothing.
Me and my friend, Jodi, I told you about
Courtney put her pages down. ‘Far as I got,’ she said.
The room was quite still.
‘That was lucky,’ Jodi remarked. ‘You didn’t say nothing bad.’
‘Real lucky,’ Courtney agreed.
DOI
i
‘Doi?’
Cinq-Mars noticed her consternation, directed inward. Her head suddenly jerked from side to side, three times, four, then more, as if she battled a demon in her sleep.
‘Doi!’ Sharply. Loudly. To call her back to the room from a different locality, to knock her loose from her derangement.
Everyone was watching, both frightened and fascinated, as Doi disintegrated internally before them. Rising from the depths of her diaphragm she disgorged a colossal guttural bellow, a roaring, her mouth stretched to its limits. Her throat warred open and out of that cavity a reflux of caterwaul and moaning overwhelmed their enclosure. Anyone might have expected the walls to splinter, the roof to collapse from the ferocity of her shake and shudder. She took a breath and did it again. A windstorm of rage and torment emitted from a tempest of visceral regret. No one had heard anything similar. Not even those who had struck a blade into another’s gut or beaten a face without regard had heard such sound. They had experienced the dreadful outcries of others, the grievous suffering, the jeremiad of pain and fright, of utter despair or of loathing, yet no one had heard remorse bray so profoundly.
They were each struck numb.
Moments passed before anyone noticed that Jodi, with the bellow loud and fearsome at her back, had pitched forward in surprise on to the floor, then rolled halfway over to face her captor. Too shocked to respond further, she looked as stunned as any deer in headlights, as if she had indeed leapt from her skin. Émile Cinq-Mars caught the sudden advantage. He strode forward. Doi was too deep inside her manic trance to notice him step right over Jodi and hover above her. If Doi was going to use her knife now, he feared, it would be on herself, this vociferation of her spleen a prelude to that. He considered a fierce slap but shocked her instead with a hellacious roar of his own. A grizzly’s foursquare thundering over her, then her name, again, ‘DOI!’
He broke through.
Having stripped herself to the marrow of her own false pretenses and the vast subterfuge she had so long used to ignore both her ruinous life and the atrocity of her actions, and the atrocity of actions committed against her, what remained of her sat still, a tottery shell, as delicate as crystal, as acrid as smoke. She could be snapped with a word or wrecked by a look.
‘Doi,’ he said, and this time Cinq-Mars summoned the depth of his sympathy to strike the right note.
She turned to him. Gazed up, emerging from her mania. She was returning to herself, to an honest reality, to finally accept that she had indeed taken a furious hatchet to her daughter and landed in prison for it where she deserved to be. A hell of her own devising.
‘I think it would be a good thing,’ Cinq-Mars suggested, rather than leaping forward and seizing the knife, or her, which he could do now with every chance of success, ‘if you would kindly pass the knife to Courtney. We don’t forget everyone’s wrongdoing, do we? But who knows? Maybe this is how we can start to forgive.’
He didn’t expect her to know what he was talking about, but felt that she could respond to his tone, and to the notion that an action could be taken now that could not have been contemplated before. No real logic in it other than a fury’s demise. The woman looked exhausted and spent.
Doi passed Courtney the knife. Just like that. The girl took it. Like that.
‘Put it down,’ Cinq-Mars directed the younger one, ‘in the center of the room.’ To the others, he said, ‘If someone wants to make a dive for it like you did before, go ahead. Just be the person who killed Florence. I’ll pin that on you whether you did it or not.’
‘The wheels of justice,’ Abigail said, but he was no longer giving countenance to her script.
‘Dive for it and find out,’ he warned her.
She put her hands up, declared, ‘Just sitting here. Bump on a log.’
‘Good. I hope that holds for the rest of you, too.’
Temple made eye contact with him, received his approval, and went down on her knees next to Doi. Rozlynn went over, too. Each lightly held one of her hands. The older woman half-wept, half-despaired of being able to speak again and uttered a few lines of gibberish. That made the women laugh, and Doi laughed a little, too. She was trembling. Her lips quivered. Cinq-Mars saw in th
at moment a chance to get through to her.
‘Doi, here’s an old saying. One that’s touched up with a gracious truth. At least some of the time it’s true, maybe not every day of the week as Abigail once pointed out to me. The truth will set you free. Three questions, Doi. Where’d you get the knife? What set you off today? And what do you think has set you apart from the others in here? You can answer the first two, if you’re willing. I can help you out with the last question, if you like. Doi, tell us. Where’d you get the knife?’
‘She’s still an inmate,’ Abigail pointed out.
‘Why are you speaking?’ Cinq-Mars asked over his shoulder.
‘Just saying. The poor woman, what’s she’s been through just now and you’re asking her to be a snitch? The truth can set us free to be killed in here, Detective, if we don’t watch out. Not by me. To be perfectly clear. I’m just saying.’
‘Won’t all of you forgive her?’
‘All but one maybe,’ Temple said, taking up Abigail’s side.
‘All but one,’ Cinq-Mars noted. She had a point.
‘Maybe more,’ Abigail tacked on.
‘I’ll tell you,’ Doi piped up. Her voice had lost its impetus, having run its course perhaps and requiring a recharge. She barely spoke above a whisper. She looked around the room and noticed that many heads – most of the other women, in fact – were nodding encouragement.
‘Go ahead,’ Cinq-Mars said.
She chose silence.
Cinq-Mars tried again. ‘When you screamed. I don’t mean for Flo. I mean today. Nothing was happening but your scream shocked us. Why did you let loose at that moment? Try to think back. You were holding Courtney, then suddenly something set you off. What?’
She shook her head, as though she didn’t know.
‘What was I saying, do you remember? Seconds before you screamed.’
She looked at him. She remained silent, but this time he could tell that she knew the answer.
‘I said, didn’t I, to everyone, to the room, “Next, we have Malka.” I mentioned that I was going to talk about Malka, and you went around the bend. How come?’
She stared back at him a while. She was looking away when she finally told them all, quietly, ‘I found the knife in Malka’s bed.’
‘You bitch,’ Malka murmured from her place on the floor. ‘No business. You had none.’
‘Where did Malka get it, do you think?’ Cinq-Mars asked quietly.
Silence for a moment, which Cinq-Mars interpreted to mean that Doi really didn’t know. He looked at Jodi, who rolled her eyes, but she admitted, ‘Yeah, yeah. I gave it to Malka. So what?’
‘Fuck you, too, bitch,’ Malka said. ‘Whose side you on anyhow?’
‘Enough with the tough-girl talk,’ Cinq-Mars instructed her. ‘We know that’s not you.’
‘Maybe it is. A nail was stuck in my leg. That’s tough-girl shit.’
Cinq-Mars let her stew. He came back to Doi. ‘What set you off today? Before your big scream? In the beginning. Tell us why finding the knife turned your world inside out and backwards, because that’s what happened.’
She seemed to think about it but once again didn’t come up with anything.
‘Try,’ he suggested. ‘Think back to when you went batty. When you grabbed Courtney.’
She did. ‘When I found the knife in Malka’s bed. I sat on it by accident.’
‘I see. You’ve been friends with Malka. In your mind, the two of you are not supposed to be here. You’re the ladies of the house. That’s how you used to think anyway, until a moment ago. The ladies in Lady Jail who don’t belong here. You know differently now. Am I right?’
She nodded. Her eyes welled up.
‘You attacked your daughter. You belong here. But until now you haven’t thought that way. You and Malka were not only the older ones in here, Doi, in your head you were also the innocent pair. Today, you know better. When it hit you that Malka was more like the others than you knew, that she had a knife, just like any bad criminal, that maybe she was dangerous, you saw then that you were alone. You probably thought that she might have killed Flo if she concealed a weapon in her bed. That left you as the only innocent one. As the only true lady in jail. Just you. Which meant you now had no support inside. That’s when you went a little nuts. You took the knife. Then you grabbed Courtney.’
Doi’s nod indicated that that was true.
‘I can come up with other considerations that perhaps you missed. Malka might want the knife for her own protection. Why not? Two women have been murdered recently. She may have felt the need to protect herself. Did you think of that?’
Doi shook her head to indicate that she hadn’t.
‘You may have leapt to the wrong conclusion, Doi. That’s something I’ve tried not to do since I’ve been here. All of you have given me a lot of practice with that.’
He was able to evoke a small smile or two around the room.
‘Doi, the third question I asked has allowed me to solve this case. At least, I think so. What set you apart in here? You believed you didn’t belong here. You denied the obvious truth. You were alone in thinking that way. Malka could argue that she killed her husband as an act of mercy. She told you that, didn’t she? She confided in you. It’s why you were such fast friends. It was true, too. She did do it as an act of mercy.’ He gazed at Malka where she lay wounded on the floor, one hand stretched down to clamp a bandage to her calf. ‘Except Malka only wanted you to think that she was a nice, suburban lady. She never felt that way herself. She knows that she belongs here, on the inside. Maybe not for mercifully ending her husband’s life. But she was the mayor of a midsized town in Ontario that permitted the Hells Angels to have a clubhouse and do their business in the countryside. How many of you knew that?’ He awaited a response. Got none at first. Then Jodi tentatively raised her hand. ‘Yeah. Jodi knows. She’s biker Ontario. When the citizens of Malka’s town learned how their mayor helped out the bikers and received their financial support, they kicked Malka out of office. The Hells could not let that stand. They arranged with their money and their intimidation tactics to get her back on council. They needed her there. Right, Malka?’
‘Sing me a song, Cinq-Mars. Learn the violin while you’re at it.’
Cinq-Mars smiled, which he shared with Doi. ‘It won’t be a pleasant song. Let me ask you, Malka, how does a woman acquire poison to kill her man? Not as easy as some might think. Not unless you have friends in very low places who can help a pal out with something like that. And then, of course, they have something over on you, don’t they? Another favor granted is another favor owed, at least in some quarters. You rose like cream to the top of my list, Malka, when a biker on the outside mentioned you. He spoke of your innocence, or maybe he wasn’t so sure about your innocence. He may have suggested that you might be guilty. Either way, why would he bother when there’s no reason on earth for him to ever have heard of you? How would he know you even exist?’
She twisted her neck as though she wanted to belt someone.
‘None of that gets me a stretch in the can, Cinq-Mars. Not past the time I’m doing now.’
‘Killing Flo does.’
The charge created a bustle in the room. He said nothing more, and Cinq-Mars and Malka stared one another down. Neither moved. Neither relented. Until Malka did.
She said, ‘Blow it out your fancy pink ass, copper. You got no proof.’
‘My opinion? Everyone shares the blame for Flo’s murder. All of you let her grow more isolated. Lonelier. That left her vulnerable. But one person here – at least one – knows something the others do not. One person here was so afraid of what she knew, that she messed up the map I had all of you draw. She didn’t want me to know what she knew so she deliberately messed up her map. Why, Courtney, did you mess up your map?’
The room went dead quiet again. Women looked around at each other, and it seemed that they were reaching a consensus, even while a question, or an issue, or a fear, still hung in
the air. They all looked then at Courtney.
‘Perhaps everyone here should decide if you’re going to look after your own lives or let yourselves be led around by men on the outside. Personally, I wonder if you all don’t owe something to Flo.’
Temple and Jodi, an adversarial pair, and Abigail, perpetually an outsider, worked the matter through and appeared to reach a conclusion amongst themselves without uttering a word. Temple spoke up for them, ‘Go ahead, Court. We got your back.’
Courtney nodded, then quietly attested that, ‘Flo went to the toilet. I was there myself, coming out. I didn’t want to say that. Then Malka went in. I saw her come out. Flo didn’t. I saw Doi go in later. Then Doi started screaming.’
The women appeared to be breathing the news, in and out.
‘You see,’ Malka pointed out defiantly, ‘it could’ve been me; it could’ve been Doi. It could’ve been Courtney, no? No proof. It could’ve happened before that and nobody noticed. Flo was down at the end. People come in, go out, without seeing her. Not until Doi did.’
Cinq-Mars returned to the center of the room again. He bent low. He picked up the knife by the tip of the stock. ‘I believe her. And I hear you. Her testimony won’t be enough to get you another prison term, but you probably don’t deserve the one you have, so maybe this makes up for that. However, my believing that you did it is enough to get you out of Lady Jail, back into a regular penitentiary. Back into a jumpsuit. People in here want to live in peace.’
He walked across the room toward the exit and placed the knife down on a high shelf by the door. Then turned back.
‘Speaking of staying here or going … Jodi, you have a long, long way to go to prove that you should stay. Do you want to stay? If so, it won’t be easy. Before you answer with your tough girl lip, and we both know that you’ll have biker support wherever you go, think about this: You are unlikely to get another chance like this again. A life-changer. It’s all or nothing for you, right here, right now.’