At the thought of jail, saliva gathered in the corners of her mouth, and she swallowed hard, willing herself not to vomit. She had to pull it together—after all, it wasn’t like this would be the first time she’d been in jail. She and a few other members of the Homeless Advocacy Council had once spent the night in the Santa Cruz county jail after someone set fire to the symbolic shanty town they had built in the middle of Hagar Drive. It was only one night—they were released the next day when the fire department determined the fire to have been caused by a malfunctioning camping stove and not politically motivated arson. Another time she’d been arrested for blocking a logging road that led to a marbled murrelet nesting area. That time she’d also been released the next morning, uncowed and firmer in her convictions than the day before. This time, though, she would be alone, not accompanied by a group of friends and fellow-protestors cracking jokes and singing songs like “Ain’t gonna let Weyerhaeuser push me around, push me around, push me around.”
In the morning they’d either let her out, or she’d ask to see a lawyer and have the lawyer find out who knew what and how much she should tell.
Olivia had a long time to harden her resolve. By the time the cops came back, the sky had lightened to a pale gray. The agent who’d put her in the backseat got in the driver’s seat, and another agent, also a young man with short hair and an undistinguished face, got in the passenger seat. Olivia waited for them to try to weasel information out of her. They didn’t. They took off without a word. The plastic seats were slippery, and she couldn’t get a firm purchase on her side. For the length of the ride, she concentrated on not falling to the floor whenever they turned a corner. Once, she tumbled off the bench, and the agent in the passenger seat turned to glare at her. She clambered back up, and he looked away.
They drove through Oakland toward downtown and alongside a pair of huge, elaborate skyscrapers. Olivia recognized the Federal Buildings. She’d once participated in a demonstration against the deportation of Chinese illegal immigrants, and she remembered sitting in the plaza, leaning against a piece of abstract sculpture.
The police car pulled into a driveway marked with large signs that read Authorized Vehicles Only and drove into an underground parking lot. Olivia waited in the backseat for the cops to take her out of the car. She tried to calm down by reminding herself that this was just what she had imagined would happen, but the fact that the men had not spoken to her at all, even one word, made her nervous. She had so carefully planned her refusal to answer their questions that being denied the opportunity to do so seemed not only unfair, but frightening. The agent who had been sitting in the passenger seat opened the door of the car and pulled her out, muttering, “Watch your head,” as she ducked out of the open door. For this small consideration, she felt absurdly grateful.
They led her down a dark hall and into a drab, windowless room with a long Formica counter at one end. The agents walked up to a counter and called out. A man in a uniform, heavyset, his bushy moustache still wet with whatever he’d just been drinking, walked though a door behind the counter.
“All yours,” the agent said, handing him a pile of papers.
She had her picture and her fingerprints taken. The ink was black and sticky, and the stiff brown paper towel the uniformed officer handed her didn’t get it all off her hands. For some reason, the sight of her dirty fingers panicked her. She rubbed at them, wiped them on her jeans. She felt tears return to her eyes.
“Here,” the officer said, handing her a wad of paper towels he had dampened in the sink.
“Thanks,” she whispered. She scrubbed at her fingertips until finally there were only pale gray stains across the pads of her thumbs.
The officer led her by the arm—gently, not like the others had—into a barred cell. There were two long metal benches bolted along the rear and side walls, and there was a metal toilet with a sink built into the back tucked into a corner. There was no toilet seat and no toilet paper. The officer locked the cell and left the room. The door closed with a hollow thud, and Olivia was alone underneath the fluorescent lights.
She had to pee. She looked around the empty cell and then crossed to the toilet. It stank of disinfectant and something else, something foul. She pulled her jeans down and crouched over the bowl, careful not to let any part of it touch her. She urinated as fast as she could, keeping her eyes glued to the door through which the officer had disappeared. When she was done, she shook herself as dry as possible and zipped up her pants. She flushed the toilet with the toe of one foot and then walked to the far end of the cell. She sat down on the cold metal bench. After a while, she lay down, resting her cheek on her elbow.
She awoke, chilled from the metal bench, to the sound of a key turning in a lock. She had no idea how much time had passed, if it was still early morning or much later in the day. The guard with the mustache reached into the cell and handed her a tray of brown corrugated paper with a small waxed cardboard container of apple juice and a bagel. She gulped the sweet drink and took a small bite of the bagel. It was cold and hard, and the pat of margarine it came with left an oily flavor on her tongue. Olivia left it on the tray, uneaten.
She sat alone for a while, her knees hugged close. The chill of the metal bench reached up through her, along her spine, to the backs of her eyes. She felt like she was watching her own misery from somewhere far away. She wondered if she should pound on the bars of the cell, thick and lumpy with years of careless painting, and call out to the guard that she wanted to see her lawyer. But even if she hadn’t recognized the futility of the action, she would not have been able to muster the energy for it.
Little by little Olivia felt herself slip into a warm, seductive bath of self-pity. Why had this happened to her? She didn’t deserve this nightmare. She shook her head and forced herself to think of heroes of resistance who had undergone worse incarcerations than her own. Che Guevara. Jacobo Timmerman. Rigoberta Menchú. That was a good example. A woman, not much older than herself, who had suffered so much worse—her family had been murdered by Guatemalan death squads, her village had been destroyed. Olivia had seen her on television once. Menchú had worn a skirt of violet woven fabric and a beautifully embroidered huipil. She had spoken about people of all shades of brown united against oppression. Olivia had felt deeply ashamed of her pale skin and blond curls and had ached to be cloaked in the comfortable brown-ness of the people she saw on the screen.
How had Rigoberta behaved when she was imprisoned and tortured? Olivia drew herself up straighter. She put her feet on the floor.
The sudden click of the door opening startled her. She jumped, and her eyes filled with tears. She shook them away and drew her knees up to her chest, rocking slightly as she watched the guard enter the room.
“Pretrial services to see you,” he said, unlocking the cell and motioning her to stand up.
“What?” Her voice came out a broken whisper. She cleared her throat and asked again, “What?”
He didn’t answer. With a firm hand on her shoulder, he directed her out the door, down a short hallway, and into a tiny room. The room, no more than a booth, really, had a window on one end with a chair pulled up to it. Sitting on the other side of the glass was a woman.
Olivia slipped into the chair and looked at her visitor. The woman was busily writing on a piece of paper that Olivia could not see. She didn’t raise her eyes, and Olivia could see only the top of her head. Her sparse hair was dyed jet black and teased into a bouffant. A full half-inch of dull gray roots showed clearly at the hairline. Finally the woman picked up her head and looked at Olivia. Her face was spackled with a viscous layer of makeup.
“You’re here to see me?” Olivia said.
The woman pursed her brightly colored lips and tapped on the window with a violet-painted fingernail.
“Talk into the holes,” she said.
Olivia looked down and saw a pattern of small holes punched
into the Plexiglas at roughly mouth level. She leaned toward them. “I’m Olivia Goodman.”
“Priscilla Watts-Thompson from pretrial services. I’m here to determine your eligibility for pretrial release, Miss Goodman.”
“Pretrial release?” Olivia asked.
“Bail.” The woman’s voice was harsh and squeaky. Her eyes, tinted a strange shade of television blue and ringed with azure mascara and violet eye shadow, did not meet Olivia’s.
Olivia dutifully provided information about her job, her bank accounts, her criminal history. Finally, Miss Watts-Thompson asked, “Is there someone who can provide security for your release? Your parents, perhaps?”
“Security?”
“The federal government does not generally allow the services of bail bondsmen. You’ll need someone to act as a surety for you. Do your parents own their home? If they have sufficient equity, they can put that up as security.”
“Why do I need that? I didn’t do anything.”
“That is an issue for your attorney to discuss with you.” Miss Watts-Thompson tapped on her pad with her pencil. “Again, do your parents own a home?”
Olivia nodded. “My mother does.”
The woman made a notation. “Would she be willing to put the house up for you?”
Olivia shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so. What does that mean, put the house up?”
“That means that she signs over the house, and if you don’t appear in court when you’re supposed to, we take it away from her.”
“You take her house away from her?” The tide of panic that she had kept dammed up since the night before now began to fill her lungs.
Miss Watts-Thompson pursed her lips again. “The house would be taken only if you absconded. Is that your plan, Miss Goodman? Is that what you’d like me to inform the magistrate judge? You need to understand something, young lady; we are not required to release you. In fact, since you are a defendant in a large-scale drug conspiracy, the presumption is that we won’t release you. If you have any interest in getting out on bond, I suggest you cooperate.”
The blast of rage Olivia felt at the woman’s condescending sneer pushed aside her fear. She drew herself up and narrowed her eyes. “What large-scale drug conspiracy? I don’t know anything about a large-scale conspiracy.”
“Again, that is an issue to discuss with your attorney, Miss Goodman. My role is simply to evaluate whether or not you are eligible for pretrial release. Quite frankly, given your attitude, I’m not convinced that you are a good risk.”
“My attitude?”
“Your answers to my questions indicate to me that you’re a poor risk for bail.”
Olivia drew herself up. “As far as I know, I have a constitutional right to refuse to answer any questions at all,” she said, glaring at the woman.
“Shall I call your mother to determine her willingness to post bond for you, or would you rather just stay in jail?”
The other times she had felt so proud to be arrested; she’d been glad to have the police call Elaine. Olivia had seen those midnight calls as part of her mother’s political education; how else would Elaine have learned about the actions of American oil companies in Brazil or the paucity of tenured African-American women on the faculty of the University of California? This time was different. Olivia felt not heroic but filled almost to an unbearable level with shame. She didn’t want her mother to know she was here. She couldn’t bear to imagine her mother’s horror at the sordid drug deal. This disappointment would be too much for Elaine to tolerate. At the same time, some part of her was wild to believe that when her mother heard what had happened to Olivia she would come and take care of it, make it all go away. She would walk into the holding cell, give the guard a piece of her mind, unlock the door, and take her little girl home.
“I suggest that you answer me when I’m talking to you,” the pretrial services officer said, sharply.
Olivia wanted to scream “Fuck you!” to the over-made-up little troll and storm out of the room. Instead, she closed her eyes for a moment and willed herself to be calm. She recited her mother’s phone numbers at home and work. The woman noted the numbers, gathered up her papers, and left. On her way out, she called out, “I’m done with Goodman, Archie.”
Olivia waited to be taken back to her cell. Nobody came. Through the half-open door on the other side of the Plexiglas she could see only a wall painted in a muddy off-white. Suddenly, a young man with dreadlocks popped his head into the room.
“Hey! Are you Olivia Goodman?”
She nodded.
“Great.” The man came inside. He was no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. His long dreadlocks were caught at the nape of his neck with a thick black rubber band. His eyes were a startling green in his café-au-lait face. He wore a nicely tailored three-button suit in charcoal gray, with a crisp white shirt and a moss green tie. He flipped the chair around, straddled it, and shot his cuffs. He was wearing gold cufflinks with large stones in the precise shade of green as his eyes.
“I’m Izaya Feingold-Upchurch—that’s I-Z-A-Y-A,” he said. He reached into his jacket pocket and waved a business card at her.
“Guard!” he called out. Nobody came. “Hey, Archie! I need you to pass something to my client.”
“Are you my lawyer?” Olivia asked.
“Yup. I’m with the federal public defender. Know what that is?”
“I guess so,” she said. She was ashamed of herself for noticing that he didn’t sound like a black man, or at least like what she would have expected from a black man with dreadlocks. He spoke like her, or for that matter, like many of the black and biracial kids with whom she’d taken honors classes at Berkeley High School. But by the time they’d all started college, those students had adopted the homeboy accents of their fellows from the less rigorous academic programs. Olivia had almost forgotten what it was like to speak with a black person who sounded as white as she.
“I’m a public defender in the federal court.”
The guard stuck his head in the door of the lawyer’s side of the interview room. The lawyer handed him the business card and a sheaf of papers. “Give these to her, okay?” he said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Feingold-Upchurch. Right away, sir,” the guard said, and laughed. He leaned ostentatiously against the wall in the room.
The lawyer shook his head and laughed, ruefully. “Okay. Please give those to my client.”
“That’s more like it.”
The guard disappeared through the door and a moment later appeared in Olivia’s cubicle. He handed her the card and the papers and walked out, shutting the door behind him with a bang.
“So our first order of business is to figure out how to get you the hell out of here,” the lawyer said.
Olivia sighed with relief. Finally. “I didn’t do anything. I have no idea why they arrested me. I mean, I know why they did, but I didn’t have any part of any of it.”
“Right. We’re going to have a lot of time to talk about all of that. And I even want to hear some of it right now. But first let’s fill out some forms that will get me appointed as your lawyer, and then we’ll figure out how to get you out on bond.”
At the word bond, Olivia’s heart sank. She knew it was unreasonable, but somehow she’d expected him to unlock the door and let her out. For good.
“I already talked to someone about bail.”
“Was Cruella DeVil here already? Damn, if I’ve told that bitch once I’ve told her a thousand times to lay off my clients until I’ve talked to them.”
Olivia felt a rush of gratitude toward her lawyer for so obviously and vociferously taking her side. “Does she work for the prosecutor?” she asked.
Izaya shook his head. “No, but she might as well. She’s with pretrial services. They give a bail recommendation to the court, and then, if you’re released, they supe
rvise you while you’re out. Did she get the name of any possible sureties from you?”
Olivia recounted her conversation with the unpleasant woman, and Izaya jotted down her mother’s name and numbers.
“I’m going to call your mom myself. If Cruella hasn’t convinced her otherwise, maybe I can get her to post bond for you. Okay, now, I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions, okay?” He flipped open a folder in front of him and began jotting down her answers to his questions. They got through the basic biographical information pretty quickly, then he asked, “Did you finish high school?”
“Yeah.” She nodded.
“Where?”
“Berkeley High.”
“Really? Me too.”
They looked at each other for a moment, not sure what else to say. Finally he said, “Any college?”
She nodded. “UC Santa Cruz. But I dropped out in my second year.”
“Okay,” he said, making a few final notes in his folder. He lay his pen down. “Now, do you want to tell me a little bit about what’s brought you to my humble place of employ?”
Olivia sat silently for a moment. She liked Izaya. She liked his dreadlocks and the way he had seemed to take utterly for granted that they were on the same team. She even liked his clothes. They were obviously expensive, and on a white boy with floppy hair and a prep-school accent they might have looked too slick. But they gave him an air of competence, of being so good at his job that it was only right that he should dress the part.
“This drug dealer convinced my boyfriend to carry a box for him. That’s all. The cops must have arrested them, and they came and searched our apartment. They found the money under our mattress, and I guess that’s why they arrested me.”
“So you’re basically just an innocent bystander here, right? The girlfriend. That’s it.”
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