I took my computer to the third floor and sat in my bathtub for half an hour, listening to Bach, trying to relax. It would have helped if I knew what my opponents wanted. Besides to drive me crazy with uncertainty. By and by I poured myself a whisky and went downstairs to see my neighbor. I wanted to persuade him to lie low until this miserable business had come somehow to an end. When he came to the door, I put a hand over his mouth and led him through his apartment to the back. A couple on the second floor was entertaining on the back porch. The reassuring clink of glasses and friendly laughter drifted down to us. Under its cover I told Mr. Contreras how someone had frightened Mary Louise into backing away from me and that I didn’t want the same people terrorizing him.
“I don’t want you to be a sitting target for BB Baladine,” I whispered urgently. “What if he comes around trying to find who went with me to Coolis? For all I know they had a security camera taking pictures of us—I wasn’t very bright. I bolted headlong into trouble without stopping to think. I’m worried I put you at risk as well. You were right not to want your name on the record.”
“It ain’t like you to scare easy, doll.”
“It isn’t very often that I come across a man who thinks bayoneting newborns is all in a day’s work. Will you do me a favor and go to your daughter’s until, well, until this Aguinaldo business gets sorted out?”
Of course he wouldn’t. Aside from the fact that he and his only child had as much in common as a dog and a fish, he wasn’t about to turn tail. Didn’t I ever listen to him when he talked to me about Anzio?
“Listen!” I screeched, forgetting to whisper, so that the party above us momentarily grew quiet. “You were twenty–something at Anzio. You may have the will you had then, but you don’t have the strength. And if this guy figures out the relationship between us, which he will if he puts any energy into the matter, then he’ll know it was you with me at the Coolis hospital, not Nicola Aguinaldo’s grandfather.”
We argued for an hour, but all he would agree to was to deny any relationship with me if someone came around asking. Oh, Ms. Warshki, she lives in the building, but she’s a young woman, we know each other to say hi coming in the door at night. Of course, if someone questioned the rest of the tenants, one of them was bound to say that the old guy and I were pretty tight. The woman on the ground floor, for instance, who complained about the noise the dogs made when I came in late. Or even the party above us tonight: Mitch and Peppy, bored with lying in the yard, went up to the second floor to investigate. I followed just in time to grab Mitch before he helped himself to a plate of hummus. Those neighbors certainly would remember Mr. Contreras and me barbecuing together in the backyard.
“Okay, I won’t open the door to no one I don’t know while you’re away from home, but even if I ain’t the guy I was at twenty, I can still look after myself without running off to Hoffman Estates like a scared mutt.” That was the best I was going to get out of him.
Thursday morning I got up early, took the dogs for a long swim, and headed out to Coolis. Even though I wasn’t stopping for lunch, without Mr. Contreras the ride seemed to take longer than it had last week. Still, I pulled into a visitors’ lot at the prison a little before noon.
I had dressed professionally, in my wheat rayon trouser suit. The drive in the un–air–conditioned car had left my white shirt wet around the armpits and neck, but I thought the front still looked pressed and clean enough for my mission. I carried the briefcase my dad gave me when I graduated from law school. It’s almost twenty years old now, the red leather worn pinky–white around the edges. To preserve it I use it sparingly, but today I needed to feel his presence in my life.
The prairie sun pounded on me as I walked across the asphalt to the first checkpoint. In the distance I could hear grasshoppers whirring in the high grasses, but in the prison compound no trees or grasses mediated the heat, which shimmered from the pavement in knee–high waves. The white stone was so bright that my eyes watered behind my sunglasses.
I stopped at the first checkpoint, held out my ID, explained I was a lawyer here to see one of the inmates. At the second my briefcase was examined for weapons. I waited forty minutes there for an escort to the prison entrance. The CO who finally came for me was a short, plump woman who joked with the guard but didn’t say anything to me.
At the entrance the door slid slowly open on its pneumatic trolley. We then faced an inner door, which would open only when the one behind us had wheezed shut again. Inside, I was escorted to yet another guard station, where I explained my business: I was a lawyer, here to see Veronica Fassler.
I was sent to a waiting room, a small windowless space with plastic chairs on top of worn linoleum and a television mounted high on the wall. Oprah shouted down at me and the three other women in the room.