Hard Time

by Sara Paretsky

  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. Pax
ton’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.

  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 passed.

  “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 assigned 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 wire–enforced glass 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 food–poisoning 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 glass 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, compassionate. 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.