“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. Paxton’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.