“Female difficulties, I understand.” I sounded prim.
“You call pounding a CO on the chest with your bitty fists and getting burned “female difficulties,’ you have a different body than me, miss.”
“Burned?” Now I really was bewildered: I didn’t remember seeing burn marks on Nicola’s body, but there was no way of finding out now.
“You don’t know anything, do you? With a stun gun. The CO’s all carry them to keep order in the workshop. No one would’ve guessed they’d ever need one on Nicola.”
“That’s what took her to the hospital?”
“What about the reward, before you pry any further.”
“Did you see the CO burn her?”
A silence on the other end told its own tale. Before the speaker could bluster into some lies, I said I thought that much information was valuable, probably worth fifty dollars.
She paused again, marshaling her tale, then said in a rush, “Nicola took the gun—the stun gun—from the guard, turned it on him, and he got so mad he gave her a lethal dose. Stuns the heart, you know, just like the electric chair, if they turn up the juice. So the guards thought she was dead and rolled her body out of the hospital themselves to make it look like she didn’t die there. They wouldn’t want an investigation. That’s what happened.”
“I like the story; it’s a good one. But it’s not how she died. Where shall I send the fifty?”
“Fuck you, bitch, I’m calling to help, aren’t I? How do you know when you wasn’t there yourself?”
“I saw Nicola’s dead body.” I didn’t want to tell her what injuries caused the death, because then she’d embroider some story to account for them. I told her it would be worth another fifty to me if she could get me the name of someone at Coolis who’d known Nicola well.
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “She didn’t speak much English, but the Mexican girls didn’t hang with her on account of she was from China.”
I was startled, but then decided it was just garbled geography, not some unusual fact about Aguinaldo I hadn’t heard before. “You said she got injured in the workshop?”
“You know, where we do prison work. She was in the sewing shop. My friend Erica, her roommate Monique was working there the day the CO took after Nicola.”
“Maybe I could talk to her roommate.”
“And let her get the reward money when I’ve done all the work? No thanks!”
“You’d get a finder’s fee,” I encouraged her. “The roommate would get an informer’s fee.”
Before I could push any harder, the line went dead. I called the operator to find out if she could reconnect me, but she told me what I already knew: you can call out from jail, but no one can call in.
I sat back in my chair. So the prison had lied about the ovarian cyst. Possibly had lied, if I could believe Veronica’s tale. The idea of Nicola Aguinaldo attacking a guard seemed utterly improbable, but it was obvious when Veronica had started lying—when she blurted out the tale about the guards putting Nicola’s dead body out of the hospital. Of course, she’d had a week to prepare a realistic story. You don’t have to be behind bars to be a con artist, but the odds are more in your favor there. In my days as a public defender I’d encountered every variation of injured innocence known not just to man but to woman as well.
I needed more information on Coolis, on what Nicola had been doing the day before she went into the hospital. I’d have to make another trip out there, in my guise as a lawyer in good standing with the Illinois bar—which I am, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to retain a lawyer who hadn’t practiced in over a decade.
In the meantime I had more obvious tasks right in front of me. The woman from the temporary agency was standing next to me with a heap of computer printouts that needed sorting.
We were halfway through those when Tessa bounced in. She’d wrapped red beads around her locks and pulled them back in a kino cloth.
“What’s going on around here, V. I., that you put up that ridiculous set of . . . ?” Her voice trailed away as she took in the chaos. “Good grief! I knew you were a bit of a slob, but this is way outside your usual housekeeping. Unkeeping.”
I made sure the woman from the agency was clear enough on her work to leave her alone for a while and took Tessa into her studio to talk. She frowned when I finished.
“I don’t like being so vulnerable here.”
“Me either,” I said with feeling. “If it’s any comfort, I don’t think my marauders would bother you.”
“I want to get a better lock system installed. One that’s more secure than those padlocks you have out front. And I think you ought to pay for it, since it’s due to you that the place was vandalized.”
I expelled a loud breath. “You’re going to choose it and I’m going to fund it? No, thanks. You chose a number–pad system that seemed relatively easy to bypass.”