I’d thought undressing in the high school locker room every day in front of all the WASPy girls who called me names would be the most humiliating era of my life, but the body cavity search before they put me in a jail cell was right up there.
The orange jumpsuit they gave me was too small and rode uncomfortably up my crotch and stretched obscenely across my chest. I tried to tell the lady I wasn’t a small, but a medium, and she pretended like she was deaf, turning her back on me until the guard prodded me from behind.
The fingerprints and mug shots weren’t as bad as I thought. I couldn’t decide whether to look tough or smirk. Sitting in a small holding cell waiting for someone to come get me to take me to my jail cell, I knew that even considering how to pose for a mug shot was deranged. I wasn’t taking any of this very seriously. Maybe something was very wrong with me. Was I in shock? All I knew was that I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that I was under arrest.
But that drop of blood. Remembering it made my stomach flip flop. They’d need more than that. I’d just tell them exactly what happened. I started laughing hysterically. Exactly what happened? That I’d gone there with the intent of killing Vito but was scared off by the real killer? I definitely was losing it.
Before they took me to my cell, they gave me my one call.
Sal, Vito’s attorney, sounded sleepy when he picked up. It was eleven at night.
“It’s Gia. I’m in county. They say I killed Vito. But I didn’t.”
He gave a long sigh. “I’m in Bodega Bay. I’ll be down first thing in the morning.”
My small jail cell had a metal bed, a thin mattress, no pillow, and a toilet without a lid. No toilet paper. I banged on the bars to get someone, but my rattling went unanswered. The woman in the cell beside me mumbled something that sounded like “shut the fuck up” and “I’m gonna cut your tit off in the shower tomorrow morning.” One or the other. Or both. Rather than answer, I curled up on the bed, which probably would give me bed bugs, crabs, and scabies in one fell swoop, and tried to sleep.
In the morning, the guard brought me to a small visitor room. I looked around for cameras or recording devices before I even met Sal’s eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Sal said, noting my glance around the room. “This is all privileged. No wires here.”
He was dressed in a three-piece suit perfectly tailored to his tiny frame. His black hair was slicked back like an Italian film star. His shoes gleamed in the overhead light and his buffed nails did, too. I’d never had nails that looked that good in my life.
I hugged him. His body was stiff and awkward as if he couldn’t wait for the hug to end. I immediately drew back and pulled up a chair.
“They’re going to charge you with murder one. Any reason they might think you did it?” His tone was casual, but firm.
“Yeah. Because I actually went there to kill him, left a huge drop of my blood on his pajamas and then ran away before the killer got to him.” It all came out in a rush. When I was done, I bit my lip and tried not to cry. Saying it out loud made it all real. I was fucked. I’d spend the rest of my life in prison.
“Back up a little, Gia. Last time I saw you, Vito had just given you your Ferrari and you were proclaiming your love for him to the heavens, asking if he would be your new father since your own dear dad was dead.”
“Yeah. Well, things changed.”
I spent the rest of the time filling Sal in on what had happened, starting with the letter from the forensic pathologist’s wife. Sal, a lifelong Catholic, paused from his note taking to make the sign of the cross whenever I mentioned any of the dead’s names.
When I was done, I stared at the scummy, jail-issue slippers I was wearing. When Sal didn’t say anything, I looked up. Hi face remained expressionless. The silence seemed roaring. Finally, he cleared his throat.
“Gia, how long have you known me?”
I shrugged.
“Let me put this another way. Gia, how old are you?”
“Twenty-three?” I said it like a question.
“So, we’ve known each other for twenty-three years. I was at your baptism and pretty much every big event in your life.” He paused and looked me in the eye. “Is there any reason why you didn’t come to me with all this?”
I swallowed hard and nodded. “I didn’t know who I could trust.” My voice was small and quiet and a bit ashamed.
He clamped his lips tightly together and nodded his head. “Okay. I get that. But now you have to trust me.”
I nodded.
He told me he’d try to get me out on bail during my arraignment tomorrow and for me to hang in there.
Right before the guard took me away, Sal gave me a serious look.
“Spend the next twenty-four hours wisely. I want you to let all those pieces of information you’ve gathered, whether they are in your conscious or subconscious — put your brain to work and try to figure out who is behind all of this. I think you know who it is somewhere in your brain. It’s just a matter of revealing that information to yourself.”
I was deep in thought about Sal’s words as the guard led me back to my cell. So much so that I don’t think I even heard the catcalls and rude statements on any conscious level. I had a feeling Sal was right. While he’d always been a little mystical about dreams and other superstitious things I scoffed at, I believed he was onto something. They say that we only use a small percentage of our brain’s capacity, right? I also believed that sometimes the answer to our questions was already floating around somewhere in our heads.
True warriors have access to universal knowledge. Everything that is known, will be known, or has been known, is the warriors for the taking if only he knows how to open himself up to that plane of existence.
I spent the rest of the day in my cell in a near meditative state, turning over every piece of information I knew that could be connected to the murders, over and over again.
The next day I spent three hours in a jammed holding cell at the courthouse. I’d woken up at peace, but with no clear answer as to who the killer was. The first step was getting out of this hell hole.
While I waited, I cast sideways glances at the two other inmates in my holding cell. We were all waiting for a guard to come get us and take us into the nearby courtroom. The two black women had amazing hair. One had a sleek red bob. The other had a close-cropped cut that framed her heart-shaped face perfectly.
Me? My Italian hair could not be tamed. I was pretty sure I looked homeless and would not make a good impression on the judge who was going to consider granting my bail. I surreptitiously put some spit on my fingers and tried to smooth it down, but the woman with the shorn head sneered and said, “That’s nasty. Now your hair smell like your nasty breath and still don’t look good.”
“Thanks.” I rolled my eyes, but shrunk further into my little corner of the bench.
The women talked about some dude named Jamal and how they were going to “kick his scrawny little ass” for letting them get arrested and how the Salinas jails were so much nicer than the San Jose ones.
“I ain’t hooking in Gilroy no more,” said the short-haired one with the heart-shaped face and small pink lips. “That place is a garlic reeking cesspool. I smell like garlic for like two days afterward.”
It was the woman who said my breath was nasty.
Finally, a guard took her away.
The other girl gave me a sideways glance.
“Don’t worry, mama, we all got bad breath in the can. You get used to it.”
I looked at her for the first time and gave a small smile. I self-consciously smoothed my hair again.
“Champagne, she just a freak about hygiene, you know. Every time she locked up, she spends all her money on mints and gum and toothpaste and deodorant,” the woman smiled and shrugged. “We all got our things, you know.”
“Amen,” I said, shaking my head. If being a hygiene freak was Champagne’s only character defect, she was doing pretty good.
I got in front of the judge, gave Sal a glance, and in a flash, it was over. I wasn’t sure what happened. When the gavel slammed down, I realized I was free. For now. But I had to stay in town.