Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (27 page)

I looked up at her, and tears slid from my eyes. “Please find out if my father’s okay,” I whispered. “His name is Samuel Way, from Pine Apple, Alabama. He’s had a heart attack.”

“Hey!” the officer’s voice cut through the sanitized air. “Shut up, Doe.”

The nurse barely closed an eyelid, winking at me, and gave the quickest of nods. “You don’t look like you could hurt a flea.” Her lips didn’t move as she whispered it.

“How long have I been here?” I whispered. “What day is it?”

“It’s Sunday night,” she said, again without moving her lips. “You’ve been here several hours.”

I never saw her again.

Not much time passed before a different nurse accompanied by two female officers burst into the room. There was nothing warm and fuzzy about this nurse. She’d been in the room three seconds before she jerked the needle out of my arm, while the officer freed me from my cuffs and shackles from the other side of the bed. The second officer leaned against the wall looking bored. The words Mississippi Department of Corrections were embroidered on her uniform.

The first one said, “You have one minute in the bathroom.” She tossed me two orange squares of folded cotton. “Leave the door open.”

I was shackled to a wheelchair, but only as far as the front door. After that, I was jerked upright and dragged to the van that carted me off to the police station to be booked.

Bright lights were trained on me from every direction, and I ducked them as best I could. Fifty questions were shouted my way.

“Why’d you do it?” a particularly loud voice cut through the din. “Why’d you shoot Richard Sanders?”

*    *    *

An hour into the booking process I became numb and stopped fighting them. I was simply too stunned and too afraid. The fear factor had nothing to do with what was happening to me, I was afraid for my father. I stared at my cuffed hands in my lap without blinking. The clock on the wall struck midnight.

“Your name?”

“Davis Way.”

The woman tapped a pencil against the desk. She quickly scanned the room—several other female officers were in various stages of booking several other female offenders—then leaned in. “This will go so much easier for you,” she almost whispered, “if you’ll tell me your name.”

I felt a sliver of hope. She was a few years younger than me, probably fresh out of Officer’s Training, and therefore not totally jaded. “Four-zero-seven. Six, one. Six, seven, eight, two,” I said. “Look up my Social.”

“I can’t do that,” she whispered.

“You can. It’s right there on the screen.”

“I’m not supposed to,” she said, visually sweeping the room again.

Instead of grabbing for her pencil, which would have had her grabbing for her piece, I asked if I could write it down for her. “Look it up. You’ll see I spent years on the job in Pine Apple, Alabama. Now I work undercover for the Bellissimo, and the list of reasons you can’t find me in the system is ridiculously long.”

She took the clipboard in front of her and pretended to write. With her head down she said, “Why won’t anyone back you up?”

“Apparently they’re busy.” My head was bowed, too. “The president of the Bellissimo was shot.” I covered my face with my hands, so anyone looking might think I was crying, and it being a room filled with all sorts of emotion, mostly rage, hopefully they’d be bored with me and instead watch the drunk twenty yards away who kept spilling out of her chair. 

“I think my father had a heart attack,” I said to my booking officer, “but they very well could be lying to me.”

“Why would anyone lie to you about that?” the officer’s eyes darted.

“To gauge my reaction,” I said. “To see if I’m who I say I am. Would you please,
please
make a phone call for me?” I begged with my eyes.

She sniffed. She shuffled things around on her desk. “One,” she whispered. “Only one.” She reached for a yellow sticky note, just about when the drunk passed out cold, pitched into the lap of the officer trying to book her, then wet her pants. The officer screamed and spilled the drunk into the floor.

My officer ignored it. “And only if this is a real Social Security number.”

This kind gesture was absolutely more than I could take, at which point I did begin bawling like a baby.

“Get a hold of yourself,” she spoke through clenched teeth. “Let’s go,” she stood.

We had to step around the puddle of comatose drunk.

My booking officer, Raines, her badge read, took me through the fingerprinting process. “You want me to call a lawyer, right?” she whispered while rolling my left thumb. “If you’re with the casino,” she spoke without moving her lips, “call one of theirs.”

“No,” I whispered back. “I need you to call my sister. Find out about my father, and tell her I’ve been sent to—” my mind raced “—Dubai.”

She looked at me as if I were crazy. “If I were you,” she whispered, “I’d call a lawyer.”

She didn’t offer any additional advice while she completed another ten minutes of paperwork, then led me to yet another holding cell.

“What’s this?” I asked, as bars clanked closed to separate us.

“We’re going to need a gunpowder residue test.”

A what? It took a second for her words to sink in, and when they did, I must have fallen into my own puddle on the floor because I was only aware of hard, cold concrete. Voices broke through the fog. My officer. A man. “Get her on the cot,” the man said. “You can still GSR her. Then cart her back to the hospital.”

*    *    *

Having failed the gunpowder residue test, they carted me to the prison infirmary instead. The next day, I was dumped into General Population, better known as the Drunk Tank.

The words “bond hearing” weren’t spoken to me, but the words “bang, bang Bianca” were, always in passing, always with snickers, and never directly to me. Apparently I was somewhat of a prison celebrity. I was pointed to, gawked at, and gossiped about relentlessly. I picked a spot to sit on a green metal bench, a spot on the wall to stare at, and sat there for two days and two nights while prostitutes and DUIs around me were either bonded out or processed.

Sometime during the third day, I was called to the desk.

“Doe!” the overweight and cranky officer in attendance yelled across the room. “Jane Doe!”

I picked up my heavy head and the room warbled around me.

“Jane Doe!”

I’d had so many names in the past two months that I no longer recognized any of them.

“Last call,” the guard said, waving a piece of paper in the air. “Personal message for Jane Doe!”

I jumped up and almost fell down. “It’s me,” I called out, reaching for the wall. I made my way to the desk.

“You’re Jane Doe?” I had seen this woman from across the room, but I had not yet been close enough to notice that she was balding. You could see every bit of her scalp through her thinning hair.

I stood there, holding the edge of her desk for support.

“You’re the one who won’t eat,” she said.

“I guess.”

“Don’t blame you,” she said. “You’ve got a message here from the officer who booked you,” she said. “Maybe you’ll know what it’s about.” She pushed her glasses up the wide bridge of her nose. “
Triple bypass
.”

*    *    *

From there, I spent two more days staring at the infirmary walls, then I was processed and assigned to B Block as Jane Doe, pretrial.

Pretrial status was prison purgatory, and there was no way out of it until someone within the system took an interest in the case. Being at the center of the biggest story since Hurricane Katrina, it was hard to guess if the momentum would speed things along or slow them to a crawl. I could be pretrial for a week; I could be pretrial for a decade.

My cellmates were both of Hispanic descent, and clearly didn’t want a new roomie. They spoke nothing but Spanish above, below, and through me, but would speak choppy English to anyone else. Even though it was relayed to me in overdrive Spanish, I got the message the minute I was shoved into the cell: don’t touch their things, don’t breathe their air, don’t make eye contact.

I crawled into the space they indicated was mine, my size coming in handy, because they didn’t allot me much, a skinny top bunk and that was it. I curled into a ball, my back to the cold wall, and tried to cry, but I was too scared. I didn’t know if my father was dead or alive, and no one from the Bellissimo had come to save me.

The charges against me were multiple fraudulent acts, felony theft, criminal conspiracy, computer trespassing, receiving stolen property, and criminal impersonation. The homicide charges were pending, and I could only guess that was because Richard Sanders was pending. I was told I’d be assigned an attorney as soon as I identified myself.

“Officer Butrum.” I asked every guard every day. “When can I speak to an attorney?”

“You’ll have to get with your counselor on that.”

“I haven’t been assigned a counselor!”

He sucked his teeth. “You will be.”

Phone calls in prison were a joke. For one, you had to have money to use the phone, and I didn’t have a dime. No one knew I was an inmate, so no one deposited money in my account. For another, the two pay phones in the prison cafeteria were under the jurisdiction of two gray-haired lifers, the female versions of Teeth and No Hair. They decided who used the phones, for how long, and in what order. I wasn’t on the list. And lastly, who would I call? I had nothing to do but go over and over this in my mind, blindly and numbly walking the perimeter of the fenced-in prison yard where those of us who didn’t have prison jobs were dumped for four-hour stretches twice a day, rain or shine.

If my father had survived the surgery, he was recovering. Not knowing where I was would certainly be less stress on him than knowing. I wouldn’t call home. I couldn’t contact anyone at the Bellissimo, because there wasn’t a chance in hell the switchboard took prison calls, and I didn’t know anyone’s direct number; they’d all been programmed into my cell phones. If I could get through, Natalie would be the call I’d make, but according to a one-paragraph announcement in the business section of a three-day old
Biloxi Sun Herald
that had blown up against the fence in the yard, the Bellissimo was busy welcoming Evelyn Gardner, interim assistant to the interim President and CEO, Salito Casimiro. The quick announcement made no mention of Mr. Sanders, Jane Doe, the shooting, or his condition; I only knew Natalie and Mr. Sanders weren’t at their desks. For all I knew, No Hair was gone, too. Teeth? I couldn’t care less.

I was truly on my own.

*    *    *

Not soon enough, I was assigned a counselor. His name was Dick Crowder, and he was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in almost two weeks. He had a comb-over plastered onto the back half of his oversized freckled head, watery, buggy eyes, small, misshapen, brown teeth, and his polyester pants were hiked up so high, they were closing in on his man breasts. He had stick-thin twigs for legs and the smallest feet I’d ever seen on a man. He had a nasally, Jersey accent, and he wouldn’t make eye contact when he was speaking; he looked off and up to the right.

“Miss Doe,” he said to the calendar on the wall, “the wheels of justice are turning slowly for you, and for that I apologize.” He shifted in his chair and switched focal points to something else lofty. “First,” he said, “I’ll ask how you’re doing.”

I nodded with my whole body, so grateful for his tone, his genuinely apologetic attitude, and to be sitting in a real chair away from my fellow inmates if only for a minute. Taking a deep breath, I measured my words, my desire being to have at least one decent relationship within these miles of razor wire.

“Mr. Crowder, my father has had a heart attack, and a subsequent triple bypass. If you could get me any information about his condition, I’d be forever grateful.”

His eyes rolled along the squares of ceiling tiles, back and forth. “I’ll see what I can do.” He pushed a piece of paper and a pencil my way. “But under the circumstances, I will only be able to identify the inquiry as coming from incarcerated Jane Doe. Whoever you’re writing down will most likely not be willing to release any information.”

I scribbled down the name of the hospital I was born in and my family had frequented through the years. Stabler Memorial, in Greenville, Alabama, was a twenty-minute drive from Pine Apple if you needed a flu shot, but an eight-minute drive if you needed anything else and had a vehicle with sirens and a light bar. I slid the information to Mr. Crowder.

“What else?” he asked.

“I need to know Richard Sanders’ status.”

“That I can’t help you with.”

I didn’t think so.

“You’ve got a lot of things up against you, Miss Doe,” he said.

I cracked a bunch of knuckles and tried to get in his line of vision, which wasn’t going to happen without wings.

“Pretrial drags on, as you’re finding out first hand, not to mention what a high profile case yours is.”

I felt like standing and waving.
Over here!

He flipped through my file, then looked back to the calendar. “Let’s start with the basics,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Davis Way. D, A, V, I, S, W, A, Y.”

He sniffed. “Have you come up with any way for us to verify it?”

“I’ve given out my personal information a million times, Mr. Crowder, and I’ll be happy to do it again.”

He stared at the calendar. “Unless you have something new, we can move on.”

My shoulders slumped a little more. If that were possible.

“Okay, moving on. Is there anything you need that you don’t have?”

That was a loaded question, but I knew what he meant. “I could use some things from the commissary, Mr. Crowder, and something that fits better.” Three of me could have fit into my prison jumpsuit. “But what I need more than anything is a lawyer.”

“Now there again, I can’t help you with that.”

And for some reason, he locked his gaze on the opposite wall, zeroing in on a framed eight-by-ten of the Governor. For the rest of our conversation he looked to his boss for reinforcement.