“I can’t promise anything, of course.”
“Of course not. By the way, you’re not the only woman Baladine taped on that couch. He also took advantage of his kids’ ex–nanny, the one who died. Not a nice man to be around.”
Her throat worked as the implications of that struck her. She started to ask me what I’d seen and then swept out of my office without saying anything else.
I’d thought about trying to use the Aguinaldo tapes as counters to get Baladine to drop the kidnapping charge, but I hated to exploit her in death as she had been in life. And I was sure by now I could beat the charges in court. In fact, six days later when my trial date came up, the judge dismissed all the charges. He made a stern statement to the effect that he didn’t know why the state had charged me in the first place, but since the parents were not present to offer any explanation about why they’d called the police, he couldn’t begin to speculate on their underlying rationale. At any rate, the arresting officer was dead, and that was the end of it. A real whimper after all that banging.
When I got home I found a hand–delivered envelope from Alex including copies of the termination orders for Wenzel from Global and Polsen and Hartigan from Carnifice. The three were fired for misconduct in performance of their duties and were not eligible for workers’ compensation. I sent Alex her tape but kept the other three in a safe deposit box at the bank.
A discreet report in the paper the next day said that Baladine was suffering from exhaustion brought on by overwork and that the Carnifice directors had accepted his resignation while he received medical care in Houston. His wife was moving to California with her daughters to enroll them in a premium swim program while she took a job coaching the University of Southern California swim team. Good old Eleanor. She sure hated hanging with losers.
And still I couldn’t sleep at night. I finally decided I had to go back to Coolis. I had to see the place, to know it had no power over me.
They were harvesting corn as I drove west the next morning. The bright greens of summer had given way to drab tans in the groves along the Fox River, but the weather still held an unseasonable warmth.
As I approached the prison, the place in my abdomen where Hartigan had kicked me tightened. I was coming here of my own free will, a free woman, but the sight of the razor–wire fences made me start to shake so badly, I had to pull over to the side of the road.
Morrell had offered to come with me, but I wanted to prove I could make this journey on my own. I wished now I’d taken him up on his offer. I wanted to turn around and head back to Chicago as fast as I could go. Instead, I made myself drive inside the front gate to the visitors’ parking lot.
The guard at the first checkpoint didn’t give any sign of recognizing my name. He passed me on to the next station, and I was finally admitted to the visitors’ waiting room. It was CO Cornish who was assigned to escort me from there to the visitors’ lounge.
He tried to greet me jovially. “Couldn’t stay away, huh?”
I grunted noncommittally. I had filed a suit against the Department of Corrections for inflicting grievous bodily harm, and against Polsen and Hartigan by name. Cornish would probably be called as a witness; I didn’t need to alienate him.
Miss Ruby was waiting for me in the visitors’ lounge. “So you made it out, Cream. Made it out and now you’ve come back. You’re a kind of hero around here, do you know that? The girls know it’s because of you they kicked out Wenzel and Polsen and Hartigan. They closed that T–shirt factory too, but I suppose you know that.”
I knew that. A report in this morning’s financial section announced that Global was returning their sewing operations to Myanmar. I guess it made me happy to know that the Virginwear line was now being made by inmates in Myanmar’s forced labor camps instead of inmates in an Illinois prison.
“They’re still making things here, but not for Hollywood anymore, so production is way down. It’s hard on the women who got let go; they don’t speak English and they can only get work in the kitchen now, which doesn’t pay as well. But I think they appreciate not having to work in that atmosphere over there. Everyone was too scared all the time. So I guess you are a hero, at that.”
“You sound bitter. I didn’t set out to be a hero.”