“Same way Angie did,” I said softly. “On the streets of Chicago. Ninety–first and Commercial to be exact. But I was lucky. My mother wanted me to have an education, and she made me study when the other girls on my street were getting pregnant or doing drugs.”
Miss Ruby thought this over. “I don’t know whether to believe you or not. But I hear you’ve been asking questions about a young woman who used to be here. I hear you’ve been saying you want to talk to me about her. And so here I am, talking to you, wondering how you know her and if that’s the real reason you’re at Coolis.”
I sidestepped the comment. “I never met Nicola Aguinaldo. I know her mother. Se?ora Mercedes is grateful to you for looking after Nicola.”
“Hmm. She’s not very grateful in person.”
“She doesn’t have any money. And she doesn’t have a green card. She’s afraid to come out here in case they inspect her documents and report her to INS, and she can’t write in English. But Nicola’s last letter to Se?ora Mercedes brought her great comfort, because Nicola told her mother you were keeping an eye on her.”
Miss Ruby inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment. “And how did someone like you come to be friends with Nicola’s mother?”
I smiled. “I didn’t say we were friends, but that I know her. Before my own arrest I was trying to help Se?ora Mercedes find out what happened to Nicola. You know that she died?”
Miss Ruby gave another brief dip of her chin.
“All the women say you know everything that happens in this prison. I want to know what happened to Nicola. How did she get to the hospital?”
“If you’re not a cop yourself, they put you here to talk to me.” She spoke with finality but didn’t try to move away from me.
“Cops don’t give a rat’s toenail for who killed a poor little girl who didn’t even have a green card to her name.”
“So who did put you in here?”
“You know who Robert Baladine is?” When she shook her head no, I explained that he owned Coolis and that Nicola had worked for him before she was arrested. “He’s the man I was talking about, and he’s got way more power and money than I ever will. He likes the idea of me being locked up in his prison.”
She finally looked at me directly, thinking over my story, which had the unusual virtue of being mostly true—even if it might leave her thinking Baladine was my ex–husband. “Nobody knows what happened to Nicola. I heard a lot of different stories, and I don’t know which is true. The CO’s said she had female difficulties and went into the hospital, where she ran away. Someone else said she got tangled up in one of the big machines in the clothes shop and got killed and the guards were scared they’d be punished for not turning the machinery off in time, so they dumped her body in Chicago. And some girls are saying she beat up on a CO, which is silly, because she wasn’t much bigger than a minute, let alone those men.”
“She actually died in Chicago,” I told her.
Miss Ruby liked having inside information, more than a whole bushel of tomatoes, and she questioned me closely on Nicola’s death. After I told her what I knew—omitting how I’d come on Nicola to begin with—I asked how she came to take Nicola under her wing.
“Too many of these girls here don’t have any respect for any other human being on the planet. Nicola came from a country where old people are treated with respect—someplace near Japan, which is probably the reason why. She saw how my shoulders and neck bother me after talking on that phone for six hours, and she used to rub the knots out for me. Of course I tried to help her in a few little ways myself.”
While Miss Ruby talked, I wondered if perhaps Nicola had never made it to Coolis Hospital. Maybe Captain Ruzich had her taken to Chicago directly from the prison. No, that didn’t work—the floor head at the hospital’s prison wing clearly had known about Nicola. Unless she’d been primed to say Nicola had been on the ward when she wasn’t?
“I need to find someone who will tell me what went on in the shop the day Nicola left here. Or I need to get a job working over there.”
Miss Ruby grunted. “You can’t get girls to talk about what goes on in the clothes shop. Of course everyone around here is more or less scared, the guards can take away your commissary privileges or your phone calls or put you in seg. But the girls in the clothes shop, they don’t talk to anyone. And of course, for the most part they don’t speak English anyway.”
“So if I wanted to get into the clothes shop, I’d have to be a foreigner.”
“First, you have to lose at your trial. The jail girls, they get kitchen duty and other ugly stuff, but they don’t ever get the jobs that pay anything decent.”
“I really need to see the inside of that shop,” I said, looking across the room. CO Polsen was in the doorway, eyeing me in a way I didn’t like, but I willed him out of my mind. “How much would it cost, and who could arrange it for me?”