He got up to leave but stopped to admire the piano. “You must be a serious musician to keep a baby grand in your living room. I play some, but not on anything this nice.”
“My mother was a serious musician. One of her old friends keeps this in shape for me, but I never made it past Thompson’s fourth book.” I loved action too much, even as a child, and my hours of practice were a misery when I longed to be running or swimming.
Morrell gave the same self–mocking smile he’d shown in his photo and sat down to try the piano. He ran through part of a Chopin nocturne with unusual feeling for an amateur. When he saw “Erbarme dich” on the music rack, he started to play and I began to sing. Bach produces a certain kind of balm. When Morrell got up to go, with an apology for showing off, I felt calmer but no more certain than I was earlier whether he was telling the truth about Nicola Aguinaldo’s mother. But if she didn’t have the body, where was it?
Perhaps those researchers who want you to listen to Bach or Mozart to boost your brain are right, because when he left I had an idea for the morning. It wasn’t the best idea I ever had, as it turned out, but that wasn’t really Bach’s fault.
I went down to Mr. Contreras’s when I heard the front door shut. As I’d expected, my neighbor was waiting up to see how long I kept a strange man in my apartment.
“How would you like to go on a wild–goose chase with me tomorrow?” I asked him before he could comment on Morrell. “Be a grieving grandfather whose darling baby ran away from jail and died a sad death?”
He revived instantly.
18 These Walls Do a Prison Make
The next morning, while Mary Louise sat at my desk organizing files, I collected my maps and set out with Mr. Contreras and the dogs for the long drive across the state to Coolis. The muffler was rumbling more loudly than ever. The air–conditioning didn’t work, so we had to ride with the windows open and our teeth rattling.
“That muffler wasn’t this bad when we picked up the car,” Mr. Contreras observed when we stopped at the Elgin toll plaza to throw in our quarters. “Guy must have stuck it on with duct tape to sell this heap.”
“Let’s hope the thing holds together until we’re back in Chicago.”
The dogs kept their heads out the windows, periodically switching sides as we moved into the real country and they picked up the scent of the river. West of Rockford we pulled over at a rest area for lunch. Mr. Contreras was a willing but uncertain partner in the outing; while the dogs swam in the Fox River we went over his lines until he felt confident enough to fly solo.
Even with that long break, by keeping the Rustmobile roaring at its top speed—around seventy—we managed to get to Coolis a little after twelve. It was a pretty town, built in a valley of two small rivers feeding the Mississippi: the big river lies ten miles to the west. Coolis had been a lead–mining hub in the 1800s, but was close to death when the state decided to build its new women’s prison here.
I’d never known who in Coolis had enough money or clout to grease Jean–Claude Poilevy’s wheels, but as we drove through town to the prison, we passed Baladine Hardware, followed by Baladine Lincoln–Mercury. I could see BB as a boy at Baladine Hardware, playing with the combination locks and fantasizing about someday playing with really big locks and keys. As a friend of Poilevy’s, Baladine would have had the inside track anyway on where the legislature awarded the prison contract, but the decision to build in his family’s town must have taken a major contribution to the Republican party coffers.
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.