“There’s a reason for that! Please! Contact my father, he’ll explain everything!”
“We’re trying. We’ve had to send agents to Pine Apple, because no one will answer a phone there.”
That struck a fresh new terror in my heart.
“We did get through to the last number you gave us,” he glanced at a slip of paper, “Mel and Bea Crawford, and when we asked if they knew a Davis Way, they disconnected, and the line has been unavailable since.”
Oh, God, save me.
“And you’re not Marci Dunlow, either,” he said, “because she doesn’t exist. Who are you? This is your last chance, and if you don’t give me your name, I’m booking you as Jane Doe. With all you have ahead of you, trust me, you don’t want to go in the system Jane Doe.”
I had no idea what time it was, but I’d been in this room forever. I was cold, starving, and I’d cried so hard, I think I was dehydrated. At this point, I was truly willing to tell them anything—where and when I lost my virginity, where and when Bradley Cole lost his (I’d read the details in a letter from his high school sweetheart when she tried to start things up again after seeing him at their ten-year reunion), or even about the time I’d locked up my old nemesis Danielle Sparks for no good reason other than I couldn’t stand her.
I’d spilled all the beans, told them everything, yet not one of them believed me and there was no one to back me up.
I took one last huge breath. “What is it, exactly, that you’re going to charge me with?” I asked. “I’ve told you who I am, why I’m here, and where I got the casino chips. If someone who looks like me shot Mr. Sanders, you need to be looking at his wife. I work here, and I’m a former police officer.”
I searched the faces for any traces of consideration, and found none.
The Gaming Commission representative who’d been manning the door the entire time crossed the room slowly, bent over, and put the tip of his nose almost up against mine. “One last chance,” he said. “Why did you shoot Richard Sanders?”
“I didn’t.”
“Where did you get them?”
“Get what?”
“The counterfeit chips.”
“Jeremy Covey’s desk! Call him!”
“Jeremy Coven is unavailable.”
“Ask George Morgan.”
“There is no George Morgan.”
“Morgan George!” I shouted. “Morgan George!”
“Who’s deceased!”
“What about Mary and Maxine? The little old ladies in the casino?”
“We’ve looked ten times. There are no little old ladies!”
Was it Sunday? The Lord’s Day? Holy shit!
“Do you see a pattern here?” He stood, towering over me. “There is no Marci Dunlow, no Davis Way, no little old ladies, no George Morgan, no Morgan George! There is no cab! We finally heard back from Bradley Cole, and he said he thought his renter was a woman named Anna Merriweather, who, by the way, DOESN’T EXIST!”
Now a sudden-onset expert at crying, tears dropped off my chin that I didn’t know were coming.
“You have the opportunity to help yourself here if you’ll tell me who you are and where you got the counterfeit chips.”
“From Jeremy Coven’s desk.”
“Before or after you shot Richard Sanders?”
“I. Didn’t. Shoot. Richard. Sanders.”
“Do you think we’re idiots, Miss Doe?”
“At this point,” I screamed, “I do! And stop calling me Jane Doe!”
The man shook his head in a tsk-tsk way, and motioned someone in at the same time. The door cracked open, and a female police officer entered.
“Stand up,” my interrogator demanded.
I couldn’t. There was no way my legs were going to hold me.
The female officer took two steps and helped me by jerking my shoulder out of its socket, wrenching me upright.
“Jane Doe, you’re under arrest—” Jane’s Miranda Rights followed.
I launched into a panicked screaming blubber. “My father! Why won’t you call my father?”
Gaming Commission Two looked straight at me as I was being cuffed. “The chief of police in Pine Apple,” he said, “who you claim is your father, has had a massive heart attack, and that, apparently, has made the whole town unavailable.”
The room began spinning around me. I heard a woman’s piercing scream, then everything went black.
TWENTY
It might have been hours, it could have been days later, when I woke up cuffed and shackled to a hospital bed. My left side was cuff-free, but connected to hospital apparatus. I was alone in the room, but saw an officer stationed outside of the door.
I turned, as best I could maneuver, toward the wall.
“Daddy.” I said the word, but no sound came out.
There was no clock, the television screen was dark, and nothing was within my reach, not even a sip of water. My inclination was to scream, but I stifled that into the thin pillow. I stared at the wall, putting the pieces of the nightmare together, and I stayed that way, frozen, until a nurse, accompanied by a female police officer, entered the room.
“Oh,” the nurse said and stopped short of the bed, the officer almost piling into her. “You’re awake.”
The officer turned away and spoke into her headset.
“Do you have any information about my father?” I begged her.
A look of confusion slid down her face, and she began flipping through the chart she was holding, as if the answer might be in there. “Your father?” she asked.
The officer’s raspy voice filled the room. “No chitchat.” She opened the door and stuck her head out to speak to the other officer, as the nurse began fiddling with the IV in my left arm, then strapped a blood pressure cuff around my bicep.
The nurse, probably in her late forties, had an ample midsection along with ample everything else, and she hugged my arm into her warm middle while she pumped the bulb of the blood-pressure gauge.
I looked up at her, and tears slid from my eyes. “Please find out if my father’s okay,” I whispered. “His name is Samuel Way, from Pine Apple, Alabama. He’s had a heart attack.”
“Hey!” the officer’s voice cut through the sanitized air. “Shut up, Doe.”
The nurse barely closed an eyelid, winking at me, and gave the quickest of nods. “You don’t look like you could hurt a flea.” Her lips didn’t move as she whispered it.
“How long have I been here?” I whispered. “What day is it?”
“It’s Sunday night,” she said, again without moving her lips. “You’ve been here several hours.”
I never saw her again.
Not much time passed before a different nurse accompanied by two female officers burst into the room. There was nothing warm and fuzzy about this nurse. She’d been in the room three seconds before she jerked the needle out of my arm, while the officer freed me from my cuffs and shackles from the other side of the bed. The second officer leaned against the wall looking bored. The words Mississippi Department of Corrections were embroidered on her uniform.
The first one said, “You have one minute in the bathroom.” She tossed me two orange squares of folded cotton. “Leave the door open.”
I was shackled to a wheelchair, but only as far as the front door. After that, I was jerked upright and dragged to the van that carted me off to the police station to be booked.
Bright lights were trained on me from every direction, and I ducked them as best I could. Fifty questions were shouted my way.
“Why’d you do it?” a particularly loud voice cut through the din. “Why’d you shoot Richard Sanders?”
* * *
An hour into the booking process I became numb and stopped fighting them. I was simply too stunned and too afraid. The fear factor had nothing to do with what was happening to me, I was afraid for my father. I stared at my cuffed hands in my lap without blinking. The clock on the wall struck midnight.
“Your name?�
�
“Davis Way.”
The woman tapped a pencil against the desk. She quickly scanned the room—several other female officers were in various stages of booking several other female offenders—then leaned in. “This will go so much easier for you,” she almost whispered, “if you’ll tell me your name.”
I felt a sliver of hope. She was a few years younger than me, probably fresh out of Officer’s Training, and therefore not totally jaded. “Four-zero-seven. Six, one. Six, seven, eight, two,” I said. “Look up my Social.”
“I can’t do that,” she whispered.
“You can. It’s right there on the screen.”
“I’m not supposed to,” she said, visually sweeping the room again.
Instead of grabbing for her pencil, which would have had her grabbing for her piece, I asked if I could write it down for her. “Look it up. You’ll see I spent years on the job in Pine Apple, Alabama. Now I work undercover for the Bellissimo, and the list of reasons you can’t find me in the system is ridiculously long.”
She took the clipboard in front of her and pretended to write. With her head down she said, “Why won’t anyone back you up?”
“Apparently they’re busy.” My head was bowed, too. “The president of the Bellissimo was shot.” I covered my face with my hands, so anyone looking might think I was crying, and it being a room filled with all sorts of emotion, mostly rage, hopefully they’d be bored with me and instead watch the drunk twenty yards away who kept spilling out of her chair.
“I think my father had a heart attack,” I said to my booking officer, “but they very well could be lying to me.”
“Why would anyone lie to you about that?” the officer’s eyes darted.
“To gauge my reaction,” I said. “To see if I’m who I say I am. Would you please, please make a phone call for me?” I begged with my eyes.
She sniffed. She shuffled things around on her desk. “One,” she whispered. “Only one.” She reached for a yellow sticky note, just about when the drunk passed out cold, pitched into the lap of the officer trying to book her, then wet her pants. The officer screamed and spilled the drunk into the floor.
My officer ignored it. “And only if this is a real Social Security number.”
This kind gesture was absolutely more than I could take, at which point I did begin bawling like a baby.
“Get a hold of yourself,” she spoke through clenched teeth. “Let’s go,” she stood.
We had to step around the puddle of comatose drunk.
My booking officer, Raines, her badge read, took me through the fingerprinting process. “You want me to call a lawyer, right?” she whispered while rolling my left thumb. “If you’re with the casino,” she spoke without moving her lips, “call one of theirs.”
“No,” I whispered back. “I need you to call my sister. Find out about my father, and tell her I’ve been sent to—” my mind raced “—Dubai.”
She looked at me as if I were crazy. “If I were you,” she whispered, “I’d call a lawyer.”
She didn’t offer any additional advice while she completed another ten minutes of paperwork, then led me to yet another holding cell.
“What’s this?” I asked, as bars clanked closed to separate us.
“We’re going to need a gunpowder residue test.”
A what? It took a second for her words to sink in, and when they did, I must have fallen into my own puddle on the floor because I was only aware of hard, cold concrete. Voices broke through the fog. My officer. A man. “Get her on the cot,” the man said. “You can still GSR her. Then cart her back to the hospital.”
* * *
Having failed the gunpowder residue test, they carted me to the prison infirmary instead. The next day, I was dumped into General Population, better known as the Drunk Tank.
The words “bond hearing” weren’t spoken to me, but the words “bang, bang Bianca” were, always in passing, always with snickers, and never directly to me. Apparently I was somewhat of a prison celebrity. I was pointed to, gawked at, and gossiped about relentlessly. I picked a spot to sit on a green metal bench, a spot on the wall to stare at, and sat there for two days and two nights while prostitutes and DUIs around me were either bonded out or processed.
Sometime during the third day, I was called to the desk.
“Doe!” the overweight and cranky officer in attendance yelled across the room. “Jane Doe!”
I picked up my heavy head and the room warbled around me.
“Jane Doe!”
I’d had so many names in the past two months that I no longer recognized any of them.
“Last call,” the guard said, waving a piece of paper in the air. “Personal message for Jane Doe!”
I jumped up and almost fell down. “It’s me,” I called out, reaching for the wall. I made my way to the desk.
“You’re Jane Doe?” I had seen this woman from across the room, but I had not yet been close enough to notice that she was balding. You could see every bit of her scalp through her thinning hair.
I stood there, holding the edge of her desk for support.
“You’re the one who won’t eat,” she said.
“I guess.”
“Don’t blame you,” she said. “You’ve got a message here from the officer who booked you,” she said. “Maybe you’ll know what it’s about.” She pushed her glasses up the wide bridge of her nose. “Triple bypass.”
* * *
From there, I spent two more days staring at the infirmary walls, then I was processed and assigned to B Block as Jane Doe, pretrial.
Pretrial status was prison purgatory, and there was no way out of it until someone within the system took an interest in the case. Being at the center of the biggest story since Hurricane Katrina, it was hard to guess if the momentum would speed things along or slow them to a crawl. I could be pretrial for a week; I could be pretrial for a decade.
My cellmates were both of Hispanic descent, and clearly didn’t want a new roomie. They spoke nothing but Spanish above, below, and through me, but would speak choppy English to anyone else. Even though it was relayed to me in overdrive Spanish, I got the message the minute I was shoved into the cell: don’t touch their things, don’t breathe their air, don’t make eye contact.
I crawled into the space they indicated was mine, my size coming in handy, because they didn’t allot me much, a skinny top bunk and that was it. I curled into a ball, my back to the cold wall, and tried to cry, but I was too scared. I didn’t know if my father was dead or alive, and no one from the Bellissimo had come to save me.
The charges against me were multiple fraudulent acts, felony theft, criminal conspiracy, computer trespassing, receiving stolen property, and criminal impersonation. The homicide charges were pending, and I could only guess that was because Richard Sanders was pending. I was told I’d be assigned an attorney as soon as I identified myself.
“Officer Butrum.” I asked every guard every day. “When can I speak to an attorney?”
“You’ll have to get with your counselor on that.”
“I haven’t been assigned a counselor!”
He sucked his teeth. “You will be.”
Phone calls in prison were a joke. For one, you had to have money to use the phone, and I didn’t have a dime. No one knew I was an inmate, so no one deposited money in my account. For another, the two pay phones in the prison cafeteria were under the jurisdiction of two gray-haired lifers, the female versions of Teeth and No Hair. They decided who used the phones, for how long, and in what order. I wasn’t on the list. And lastly, who would I call? I had nothing to do but go over and over this in my mind, blindly and numbly walking the perimeter of the fenced-in prison yard where those of us who didn’t have prison jobs were dumped for four-hour stretches twice a day, rain or shine.
If my father had survived the surgery, he was recovering. Not knowing where I was would certainly be less stress on him than knowing. I wouldn’t call home. I couldn’t contact anyon
e at the Bellissimo, because there wasn’t a chance in hell the switchboard took prison calls, and I didn’t know anyone’s direct number; they’d all been programmed into my cell phones. If I could get through, Natalie would be the call I’d make, but according to a one-paragraph announcement in the business section of a three-day old Biloxi Sun Herald that had blown up against the fence in the yard, the Bellissimo was busy welcoming Evelyn Gardner, interim assistant to the interim President and CEO, Salito Casimiro. The quick announcement made no mention of Mr. Sanders, Jane Doe, the shooting, or his condition; I only knew Natalie and Mr. Sanders weren’t at their desks. For all I knew, No Hair was gone, too. Teeth? I couldn’t care less.
I was truly on my own.
* * *
Not soon enough, I was assigned a counselor. His name was Dick Crowder, and he was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in almost two weeks. He had a comb-over plastered onto the back half of his oversized freckled head, watery, buggy eyes, small, misshapen, brown teeth, and his polyester pants were hiked up so high, they were closing in on his man breasts. He had stick-thin twigs for legs and the smallest feet I’d ever seen on a man. He had a nasally, Jersey accent, and he wouldn’t make eye contact when he was speaking; he looked off and up to the right.
“Miss Doe,” he said to the calendar on the wall, “the wheels of justice are turning slowly for you, and for that I apologize.” He shifted in his chair and switched focal points to something else lofty. “First,” he said, “I’ll ask how you’re doing.”
I nodded with my whole body, so grateful for his tone, his genuinely apologetic attitude, and to be sitting in a real chair away from my fellow inmates if only for a minute. Taking a deep breath, I measured my words, my desire being to have at least one decent relationship within these miles of razor wire.
“Mr. Crowder, my father has had a heart attack, and a subsequent triple bypass. If you could get me any information about his condition, I’d be forever grateful.”
His eyes rolled along the squares of ceiling tiles, back and forth. “I’ll see what I can do.” He pushed a piece of paper and a pencil my way. “But under the circumstances, I will only be able to identify the inquiry as coming from incarcerated Jane Doe. Whoever you’re writing down will most likely not be willing to release any information.”
Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) Page 21