There it was again; but then I’d hardly expected it not to be, bearing a closer resemblance to a medical clinic than the clink, if you subtracted the hoops of razor wire and the rows of police growlers and armored vans parked in the restricted zone; at that hour the sun turned the windows into sheets of metal, masking the bars. I slid in beside a glandular case of a Dodge Ram jacked up on tractor tires, with the double horses’ heads of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters pasted to the girder-like rear bumper. That made it a guard’s personal ride. In that neighborhood my muscle car looked like a case of TB.
Before getting out I unpinned the honorary deputy’s star from my ID folder and stowed it in the glove compartment. I only kept it to balance out my wallet in the opposite pocket; it wouldn’t fool a reality-show host and only teed off the authorities. I’d left the small arms in the safe. At that point I didn’t think it would be of any use in a homicide case that was old enough to vote. At that point.
The prison had a different protocol for private visitors. The female guard in the booth directed me down a hall to an office whose door stood open. There a young man in uniform sat at a steel desk with a laptop on it. Whatever kind of chair he was using was concealed by an ass as big as a diving bell. He looked at my ID, rattled his keyboard, read what came up, and nodded. From a drawer he took a wand like the ones the TSA personnel use at the airport.
That was a relief. I was afraid he was going to take out a rubber glove.
He braced a hand on the desk, his face reddening, and got up with a woof. The vinyl cushioned seat on his chair let out a long windy sigh like a mule when its packs are unloaded.
I set what I’d carried in on the floor, emptied my pockets of wallet, change, and keys, put them on the desk, and assumed the cruciform position. He finished with the wand and put it away. He sat back down, making the same sound as the cushion had, and pointed a bratwurst finger at the object on the floor. It was the size and shape of a football helmet with a folding handle on top.
“What’s that?”
“CD player. It comes back out with me when I leave. I thought he could use the entertainment.”
He hoisted it onto what passed for his lap and spent ten minutes examining it inside and out. He removed the CD, looked at both sides, put it back, opened the battery compartment, plucked out four AAs, and gave each the same treatment. He put everything back and held it out.
Five minutes after he spoke to someone on the phone, another turnkey came to the door and looked me over as thoroughly as his colleague had the CD player. This one was Indian or Pakistani, with eyes as hard as walnuts and a chronic five o’clock shadow. Guard Dumbo’s uniform would have made three of his.
I had to trot to keep up with him as we passed down a series of taupe-painted corridors—walls, floor, ceiling, the works, the identical dishwater color you get mixing any combination of paint in existence—with nothing on the walls. It was so monotonous it was damn near hallucinogenic.
Just as I started to wish I’d brought along peanut shells to mark the trail, we turned yet another corner into a short hallway that dead-ended at a blank steel security door, painted the same color; if you weren’t paying attention you’d walk right into it. He swiped his ID through the slot. A buzzer sounded and the door unlatched itself with a clunk.
He opened it, stood aside for me to go through, then followed, letting the door close on its pneumatic sausage. That was when the Huron Valley Men’s Correctional Center looked less like a hospital complex and every bit like a penitentiary from a studio backlot. The room was a hundred-yard rectangle, two stories tall, and stacked to the ceiling with tiers of cells. Troughs of fluorescent tubes washed it in bright light and the concrete floor was polished to a high shine. From the white-enameled bars of the cells to the catwalk that separated the tiers, the place was as clean as a cotton swab. Guards armed with folding batons walked the floor and catwalk, and a sharpshooter manned a corner balcony twenty feet up cradling a scoped rifle. Every scrape of a sole or clink of keys echoed. The place was an amphitheater.
Apart from that it was as quiet as anywhere on earth.
We took a flight of gridded steel steps to the second tier and passed along the cells there at that same busy clip. The occupants had managed to find some gloom inside the cages, or maybe they created their own; aside from the occasional fists gripping the bars and forearms resting on the crossbars, hands dangling outside in the only freedom they knew, they were shadows only. It wasn’t a sadistic guard or the hard labor or even the threat of a shower-room rape that gnawed and gnawed at human hope; it was the crushing boredom.
I didn’t make eye contact. I’d seen The Silence of the Lambs too many times.
The block guards watched us, paying particular attention to the CD player. Time dragged for them too, and any wrinkle in the routine was worth looking at.
We came to a cell near the end, where the Asian officer rapped his knuckles on steel. “You’ve got a visitor. Stand back from the bars, hands behind you.”
It was the first time he’d spoken. Instead of the singsong cadence of tech-support, his accent was pure Chicago, hard and flat as a manhole cover.
A figure stretched out on a cot swung its feet to the floor and did as commanded. The guard rattled a fistful of brass keys on a ring the size of a tennis ball and twisted one in the lock. He opened the door and gave me just enough room to step in past him. He remained facing the prisoner.
“Sing out when you’re ready.”
The door crashed shut. That sound never failed to scramble up my spine.
The architect who designed the first modern prison cell could loan money to a Saudi royal, if he were entitled to dividends: standard eight-by-ten, steel corner sink, steel toilet without a lid, steel bunk bolted to the floor to discourage the occupant from picking it up and swinging it at a guard’s head, no second-story bunk; Michigan law prohibits more than one to a cell. It’s promoted as humane, but the state legislator who’d introduced the bill was probably a man with a wife, kids, and five in-laws in residence. In the long history of incarceration, not one suicide had taken place in the presence of a cellmate. At least, not unassisted.
He took his hands from behind him and sat on the edge of the bunk, feet apart and his hands on his thighs. His eyes glittered under their heavy lids. In the dim light from outside the cell his skin was gray-white.
He glanced at the CD player I’d put on the floor, said nothing. Twenty years of being told what to do and not asking why had burned all the curiosity out of him. That was the major takeaway when you left the joint; if you left it. One more thing you’d never get back.
“You know why I’m here,” I said.
Nothing moved in his face. “Sure. Prison telegraph; Morse code knocked out on the plumbing. How many movies have you seen?”
I ducked the question. “Guards’ gossip. They make the Joy Luck Club look like the CIA. Also procedure. You had to sign off on the agreement. Why?”
“Chrys.”
“She spoke to you?”
“No. I knew she was behind it. I was pretty rough on her last time. Throw her a bone, you know?”
I had him then; his soft spot. It takes a lot of character to hang on to one after so much time.
“It’ll take me a while to come through on that thing you asked,” I said. “About the drainage system here. Bureaucracy.”
He was Buddha for a solid minute. Then his lips peeled apart in that same way I remembered. Didn’t he say even a word to his inmates?
“Thanks for coming.”
I let half a second pass. It was a beginning. “I was in the neighborhood.” Even a lukewarm response can break the ice.
“Tell you truth, it was getting kind of dull around here.”
I grinned. Even when I grin in a mirror it comes back. Not in this case.
“What do they do around here now, anyway?” I said. “I guess they don’t break rocks. India’s nailed down the textile racket, Washington’s farmed out license plates to China. You might be laid off anytime.”
He sat solid.
I leaned back against the bars, hands in my pockets. “There’s activity in your case. I’ve got the first responder at the crime scene on board.”
“What crime?”
That threw me for a second; but long-time isolation can lead to dementia. I started to remind him of the details of the investigation. He cut me off; first time he’d shown aggression.
“April killed herself. They say that’s illegal, but if it’s successful it’s the perfect crime.”
There was a spark of life in his face then, but as far as it went I might have galvanized a frog, jerking a limb from pure electric shock. There was nothing of actual life in it.
I leaned down and switched on the CD player. “Hope you like recorded books.”
“Why?” He raised his voice over the jabber coming from the speakers.
I shushed him. I leaned in close and kept my voice even. You can make yourself heard in a hurricane once you find the level. I waved a hand around the cell. “The walls have ears—maybe. The Justice Department decided it couldn’t win, so it kicked over the board.”
It was a John Grisham novel; something about a courageous lawyer fighting a corrupt system, read by the current Hollywood flash in a monotone that could put the Tasmanian devil to sleep. A skilled techie might be able to record and untangle our conversation from the reading, but it would take time and cost plenty. I didn’t think even Chester Goss would foot the bill.
“So I’m government property now?” Corbeil said. “I thought I only killed a coed.”
He was a fast learner. He’d keyed his volume down to match mine, just under the celebrity’s core decibel. It was kind of like communicating over a lower frequency; half vocal, half lip-reading.
It was silly as hell. He was right: No one would be listening in on a twenty-year-old domestic murder. But strings had been pulled on this one, and they might still have had some tensile strength in them.
“Did April Goss tell you she might not be pregnant?”
He showed emotion for the first time, if twin streaks of copper on his cheeks were any indication. Apart from that the muscles in his face might have been cured in salt. “You went to all this trouble to ask me that? Read the report! It must be in public domain after all this time, like Moby-Dick!”
“I need a refresher. The fact that it was suppressed from evidence may be the key that springs you. Answer the question. What’ve you got to lose?”
He looked down at his hands. The fingers were tying themselves into knots and he seemed to wonder what they had to secure. Then he looked up. His eyes were dull under the bloated lids.
“I never heard a word about it till the trial.”
“Did Mihalich know?”
“Ask him.”
“I will. I would have when I saw him, but I was too busy convincing him to take you back on. The point I’m making is if the prosecution sprang it in the courtroom without letting the defense in on it in Discovery, it could have been used to appeal the verdict and get you another chance in court.”
He blinked. Otherwise his expression didn’t change. It’s one of the first survival tactics you learn in the penal system.
“Mihalich didn’t object at the time,” he said. “That much I remember.”
“He was green then. That’s why public defenders come so cheap. After all this time, though, an oversight like that isn’t likely to draw much water.”
“Then why go into it?”
“Block by block, that’s how you build a case. You had to have found out later that the fact that she wasn’t pregnant after all was kept from the jury. Someone went to a lot of trouble and probably expense to make sure it didn’t come up. Mihalich could have raised the issue that you knew she wasn’t—the other side couldn’t prove you didn’t—and that would’ve blown holes in the case against you. Convictions have been made without establishing a motive, but with an experienced defense attorney in charge, a hung jury and a mistrial is a strong possibility.”
He’d been sitting with his palms on his knees. He leaned back against the wall, drawing them up to his thighs, leaving wet patches on his prison denims. That was a breakthrough. Before that his sweat glands might have dried up and turned to dust for all he made use of them.
“What you’re saying is I might have swung a new trial based on my lawyer’s incompetence. You do know you’re working for him.”
“And he knows he wasn’t equipped to handle a major homicide case while the ink was still wet on his diploma. That’s why he agreed to take you back on. Dan, that brings the people on your side up to three.”
“Swell. Now all we have to do is convince the attorney general, the governor, and every goddamn player in the twenty-four-hour news cycle.”
My game leg had gone to sleep and the bars I was leaning against were digging furrows in my back. I straightened, sending electrical impulses tingling down my thigh, and put my hands in my pockets. Grinned.
“Piece of cake,” I said. “Until I came into this cage, Team Corbeil didn’t even have Corbeil. Once you’ve put fight in the patient, the disease don’t stand a chance.”
“Try peddling that in the prison cemetery.”
I let him have that one. It was pretty good, at that.
He said, “So that’s what you came here to accomplish? Cheer me up so you can keep gouging my baby sister?”
“I’ll be lucky if I make expenses on this one. When Goss gets wind I’m still on it, he’ll crank the heat up so high it’ll make global warming look like the last ice age.”
“Then what’s your end?”
“I’m a sucker for a good joke.”
He started to get mad; the breakthroughs were coming one on top of another, like fish swimming up the rapids. “You think this is funny?”
“Not yet. So far all I’ve got is the setup: ‘Guy walks into a bank…’”