I told her.
“Wait over there,” she ordered, waving at a battered pine bench made for no more than two.
Sitting there I wondered about my life up until that moment. Those many years I had progressed steadily but always on the wrong path. As a lone-wolf cop and a resentful PI I was spry of step but blindered.
It occurred to me that my whole life had been organized around the guiding principle of being completely in charge of whatever I did. Gladstone understood this; that’s why he helped me become a PI.
The problem was that no man is an island; no man can control his fate. No woman either, or gnat or redwood tree.
There I was at a women’s prison, looking for answers I didn’t want, propelled by forces I could not control. For some reason this revelation made me smile. It was as if a great weight had been taken from me. The question was no longer if I might fail but when.
“Mr. Oliver?”
I looked up to see Mary and a smaller woman who had bronze-red skin. Mary’s uniform was dark blue and imposing, where the smaller guard’s costume consisted of a tan blouse and black trousers. She wore a belt that had a truncheon and pepper spray hanging from one side and a walkie-talkie attached to the other.
“Yes, Mary?” I said.
She frowned, then glowered, then said, “The assistant warden will see you. Riatta will show you the way.”
The short guard walked me to an iron gate, opened the door with a keypad combination, and then led me down a long brick hallway that had no doors. We came to another door that needed deciphering and then crossed a grassy courtyard where three prisoners were doing gardening work.
The inmates wore gray uniforms that, for the most part, hid their figures. They looked at me with interests that ranged from come hither to stay away.
The guard named Riatta did not speak to me or anyone else on our journey. We passed maybe eighteen prisoners, three women guards, and two men. Finally we came to a door that had both a sentinel and an electronic lock. Riatta passed both tests and then shepherded me through and to a gray-green elevator door.
When we got there the door opened, revealing a chamber that no more than three bodies might inhabit.
“Get in,” were Riatta’s first and last words to me.
I experienced a sudden pang of fear. I was no longer in New York City, but for all I knew there was a warrant out on me for murder, and here I was in a state prison.
The door closed and a motor hummed. The chamber moved at a pace that was so slow I didn’t feel it. Two minutes later the door slid open and there before me stood a familiar face.
“Hello, your majesty,” she said.
Lauren Bachnell had been a green recruit in the halcyon days of my police career. Her hair could be called either red or blond, and her gait was graceful if not quite feminine. She was tall for a woman, her face was broad, and her skin as pale as any Scandinavian’s.
Her body, in a uniform-like dark blue pants suit, was a bit wider than when I last saw her, but I was not fooled. I had seen her lay low an angel-dusted six-foot man with one punch.
“I’m just a civilian now,” I said.
She turned with military precision and I followed.
We went into an office that had large barred windows set within three of its walls. The desk was pale green, constructed from plastic of some sort. There was a computer on a side table and a blue blotter with not even a pencil in sight. Laur—that’s what I called iher when we worked together—had always been inordinately neat, maybe even a little obsessive.
She sat behind the desk and I took the hot seat across from her.
She gave me a big smile.
“What brings you out here, civilian?” she asked.
“Looking for a woman.”
“You always were.”
“Work,” I said.
Lauren liked me. I never saved her life or even taught her very much, but I treated her like a partner, and not all men did that on the force in our day—today either.
“Name?” she said.
“Lana Ruiz.”
Lauren cocked her head to the side like she used to when we were partners and my voice modulated when talking on the phone to a lover or at least a potential lover.
“No,” I said to her unspoken question. “She has information about something that I need for a job.”
“What?”
“Believe me, darling, you don’t want to know.”
Lauren let a beat or two pass and then reached into a drawer, from which she extracted a phone receiver. Beyond my line of sight she entered a few digits and then said, “Have Lana Ruiz brought to my meeting cell.”
She put the phone away and considered me.
I honestly had no idea what she was thinking. Even though I love the company of women, I can’t claim to understand them very well.
“My husband left me over you,” she said after quite some time of silence.
“Say what?”
“He said that every time I came off a shift with you I was all sexy and did things that I never had before. He said he didn’t realize it at the time, but after you and I were reassigned to new partners he said I hardly even touched him and when I did there was no feeling to it.”
“Is that true?” I asked.
“You made me realize something about myself, Joe.”
“What’s that, Laur?”
“Well.” She hesitated. “It’s like this. I’m definitely a heterosexual woman. I like men’s parts and how they use them. But the world that men imagine themselves living in has nothing to do with the world I know. Their football games and physical violence are just stupid to me. And even though you were one of those men, when we were together in that cruiser I could imagine a life in a world maybe a hundred years from now where my ideas and some man’s might be the same.”
Our eyes met and the phone sounded. Lauren picked up the receiver, listened, and then put the phone away.
“Get in the elevator and it will take you to Lana. When you’re through, knock on the door and the guards will take you back to clearance.”
“What about what you were telling me?” I asked.
“That was then,” she explained.
“And this is now,” I argued.
“My new husband has given me a daughter,” she said with a friendly look on her wide features. “And as many times as I imagined you when I was with George, I’d never upset Cynthia’s applecart.”
I nodded and stood.
“No one will be watching or listening in on you and Lana,” Lauren assured me.
Moving as slowly as it did, I couldn’t tell if the lift was taking me up or down. But when the door opened I found myself facing a riveted metal portal guarded by two women, both of whom were equipped with sidearms and batons. One was brown and the other near black.
“You here for Ruiz?” the darker-skinned guard asked.
“Yes.”
The questioner’s partner unlocked the metal door and pulled it open. I walked through into a room similar to Lauren’s “meeting cell.” The only furniture was a solitary table and two chairs.
A young woman in a gray uniform was looking out the barred window, over the tops of trees.
She turned, saw me, and frowned.
“What is this?” she asked.
“My name is Joe Oliver,” I said. “I’m a private detective investigating the conviction of A Free Man.”
“You think they could kill him two times?”
“I’m trying to prove that Detectives Valence and Pratt had targeted the Blood Brothers of Broadway and finally got killed trying to bushwhack Mr. Man.”
Lana was five five with dark brown skin and hair that was straight and coarse due to hard water and substandard hair products. She was handsome the way beautiful women get after they pass the age of forty. But she was a young woman, in her late twenties, aged by prison and a life that charged more than it gave back.
“Come have a seat,” I offered.
She sneered and then wondered, finally taking one of the battered wood chairs at the sad and slender table.
Sitting down across from her, I noticed that she’d bitten her nails. She saw what I did and put her hands in her lap.