Part 12 (1/2)
Ms. Paxton put the pen down and leaned forward, a motion learned in media training school: lean forward fortyfive degrees to show concern. It wasn't reflected in her eyes.
”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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.sure 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 badtempered 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 gla.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+ny, 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.
Inside the third door we were met by Daisy-Nurse Lundgren to us-the ward head.
She looked coldly at Ms. Paxton and demanded to know what the problem was.
”These people are concerned with the escape of that color-that girl, that young person who got away last week.” Ms. Paxton's realization that the colored girl's grandfather and lawyer were present fl.u.s.tered her. ”I want them to see that this ward is very secure. And that however the girl got away it wasn't through any negligence on our part.”
Nurse Lundgren frowned. ”Are you sure you want me talking to them? The memo from Captain Ruzich was very clear on the subject.”
Ms. Paxton smiled with more menace than a mere frown could convey. ”I'm relying on your discretion, Daisy. But the grandfather has driven all the way from Chicago. I'd like him to see that we do take proper precautions when prisoners are entrusted to our care.”
”Very well,” the nurse said. ”I'll take them onto the ward. I expect you have enough work of your own without needing to come with us.”
Ms. Paxton seemed to be of two minds whether to fight Lundgren in front of us but finally swiveled on her motionless hips and stalked away.
”How many escapes have you had from the hospital?” I asked as we followed the nurse into the locked ward.
”Five,” the nurse said. ”But that was before this wing was built. It used to be fairly easy to jump out a window, even if it had bars, because the girls knew how to finagle their way into the cafeteria or some other place they weren't meant to be.”
I glanced in a room as we pa.s.sed. It was empty; Lundgren didn't object when I asked to inspect it. It had the tiny arrow holes of the prison, and no bathroom: Lundgren said the women had to use a bathroom in the hall, which was kept locked and was opened by a correctional officer. The hospital couldn't afford to have hiding places in the room where an inmate could either lie in wait to attack-or kill herself in private.
In the next room a woman was lying in bed, sleeping heavily, wasted as my mother had been by her cancer. Across the hall a young woman with dark curly hair was watching television. It was only when I looked closely that I saw she was handcuffed to the bed.
”How are you feeling, Veronica?” Lundgren called as we pa.s.sed.
”I'm okay, Nurse. How's my baby?”
Veronica had given birth early that morning. She'd be returned to the prison in another couple of days, where she could keep her infant for four months. Coolis was progressive that way, the nurse explained, releasing the lock on the door that separated the nurses' station from the ward. She cut short a flirtation between one of her subordinates and the corrections officer a.s.signed to guard the hall, telling her junior to pay attention to the ward while she talked to us.
”It's hard for them to work here-it isn't like real nursing, and then they get bored when the ward is as empty as it is right now.”
She led us into a tiny room behind the nurses' station that held a table, a microwave, and a small television. It was the one room on the floor with actual windows, but as these were made of wireenforced gla.s.s they didn't offer much of a view.
Lundgren took us through the statistics of the floor without any hesitation.
There were twenty beds, but they never had more than eight or ten of them filled, except one disastrous occasion when there was a major foodpoisoning outbreak at the jail and some of the patients with heart trouble came close to dying.
As to how easy or hard it was for an inmate to get to the hospital, she wasn't privy to prison decisions, but in her experience, women were pretty sick before they were brought over. ”Girls are always trying to get over here. The hospital food is better and the routine is easier to take. In jail there are counts every six hours, and lockdowns and all the rest of it. For someone serving a long sentence the hospital can seem like a vacation. So the prison makes it hard for anyone to malinger.”
”And Nicola Aguinaldo? How sick was she when she came here?”
Her lips tightened, and her hands moved uneasily in her lap. ”I thought she was quite ill. So ill I was surprised that she was able to move enough to leave.”
”What was the problem?” Mr. Contreras demanded. ”Was it some kind of woman problem? That's what the cops told me, but she never said nothing about that to her ma-”
”A doctor didn't actually examine her before she left. I was told by the prison nurse that they suspected an ovarian cyst. But before a doctor could see her, she was gone.”
”How did that little bit of a thing get away from you and the guard and everyone?” Mr. Contreras demanded.
Lundgren didn't look at us. ”I wasn't on duty when it happened. I was told she used her small size to follow behind the laundry cart, on the side away from the guard, and that she probably concealed herself in the cart when the janitor stopped to talk to someone. In theory the laundry would be inspected before leaving this ward, but in practice they probably let it go through without poking at it: no one wants to touch soiled linens. A number of the women have AIDS.”
”And you believe Aguinaldo escaped that way?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral.
”Wasn't she cuffed to the bed?”