Here She Lies (15 page)

He looked away.

Against the wall, in a corner, was a shallow cell open to view like a cage. Officer Williams swung open the cell door. Kiatsis unlocked my handcuffs. My arms fell freely to my sides and I felt a warm rush of blood to my hands, realizing only now that they had grown numb. Both officers stared at me, waiting for me to step into the cell.

“Just tell me one thing,” I said. “Who is charging me with grand larceny?”

“The Feds,” Williams answered.

“No, I mean
who
? What organization? Who says I stole from them?”

“Don’t know.” His bland tone spoke volumes:
didn’t
know, didn’t care.
“There’s a felony warrant on you.

We’re just holding you until the Feds get here.” I walked into the cell and turned around to face them. Williams clanked the door shut and turned the key. I was locked in now. Alone.
A prisoner.
And as I realized that, as it really sank in, panic switched on inside my brain. The awareness that I was trapped in this cell amplified my desire to leave it, and my inability to move, to burst out of here, quickly transformed into a feeling of suffocation. I had to get
out
, talk to someone, get some help.

“Officer Williams!” I said.

His attention had swerved to a pair of nearby detectives analyzing last night’s baseball game. He turned partway back to face me now. “They’ll get here soon,” he said. “There’s a phone on the wall. You got three calls.”

“Then what?”

He nodded slowly (like he knew something I didn’t), sighed deeply (like I wouldn’t understand even he if tried to explain), shook his head (like I was a lost cause anyway) and turned his back on me (as if I didn’t exist). Kiatsis was already across the room at the coffee machine.

As soon as he walked away I began to cry, and as I wiped my tears with my hands, I saw that bracelets of red swelling had replaced the depressions left by the handcuffs. I felt massively confused about why I was here—and yet
here I was.

I turned to face my cell.
My cell.
Hard shelf of a bed, stainless-steel toilet with no seat, tiny stainless-steel sink. Affixed to the wall was a boxy blue phone with a short curly cord and push buttons. I lifted the receiver and the dial tone, a direct link to
outside
, was to me as brilliant and miraculous as the sound of the ocean discovered improbably inside a shell. I dialed, but four numbers into it I heard the incessant bleating of a blocked connection. Dialing nine for an outside line didn’t work, nor did any other number.

“They don’t make it simple.”

An obese man in gray slacks and a blue dime-a-dozen button-down shirt was standing on the other side of my cell bars. An accumulation of sweat made his forehead shine. He carried an unlabeled manila file folder stacked atop a yellow legal pad.

“Maybe they should,” I said, “if they’re going to confiscate our phones.”

He laughed, actually
laughed
, and opened the file, humming as he surveyed it. In the tense silence of him reading and me watching him I recognized the theme song of
Evita
. After a minute he closed the file and smiled at me.

“Anais,” he said, pronouncing it correctly. “That’s what I always wanted to name a daughter.”

“Who are you?”

He stepped closer. “Evan Shoemaker, FBI. Sorry about all this. Normally I would have come for you myself, but Federal Plaza’s on lockdown—anthrax scare; can you believe that’s still going on?—so today everyone’s getting processed through the City. Anais.” He repeated my name. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” He reached through the bars to shake my hand. His was sweaty, but I didn’t allow myself to flinch. This might be the person who could get me out of here.

“Thanks for coming,” I said, meaning it, but it came out as a flippant remark that failed in the context of my crying-puffy face. He dug into his pants pocket and handed me a crumpled tissue. “I still don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “The officers wouldn’t really speak to me.”

“They take Poker Face 101 in cop school. The point is to speed up the arrest and get you in here faster so I can get you
out
faster.”

He smiled, a nice smile, and I realized that trapped inside the fat was a handsome man. He motioned for Officer Williams to unlock the cell door and joined me inside. Sitting with me on my bench bed, he opened my file and consulted it again. As he read, I saw that his nails were perfectly filed and that he wore clear nail polish. His breath, each time he breathed out, was no-ticeably sour.

“This is some kind of mistake,” I told him. “I was going to a job orientation. I’m a physical therapist.” He looked up with light brown eyes that struck me as gentle and understanding and even safe—until he spoke. “Grand larceny, it says here: embezzlement of federal funds. That’s a felony. You’re looking at some serious time.”

“But that’s wrong. They must have me mixed up with someone else.”

He read off a list of details and they were all me.

Me
: name, birth date and place, Kentucky address, marital status, number of children, even my height, hair and the color of my eyes.

How could this be happening?

“Who’s bringing the charge?” I asked.

His finger trailed down a page in the file, and stopped. “Says here, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky.” When I heard that, my stomach turned, my face felt clammily cold, my head seemed to spin. I glanced at the toilet, preparing to make a run for it.

“Take a deep breath,” he said.

I did; I took two. And then the nausea passed.

“Agent Shoemaker, please listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“Until recently, I was a commissioned officer with the United States Public Health Service. I worked in that prison, but I never embezzled anything. I am not a thief.

I resigned and I think my boss might be getting some kind of revenge.”

“If that’s the case,” he said calmly, “it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I need to make my calls.”

He crossed the room, dialed in the code for an outside line and held the receiver in my direction. “Here you go.”

I tried Julie first. She didn’t answer at home or on her cell. Then I thought of Bobby. He would be at work; he could speak directly with Kent and find out what was going on. I reached Bobby right away and told him everything.

“All right, Annie,” he said in his most determined voice.
I’m going to build a chair; I can prune that tree
myself; I plan to retire at forty-five; we’ll get married;
I will get you out of jail.
“I’m going to do two things now. No, three. First I’m going to make some calls and find you a lawyer—so don’t say anything else to anyone. Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Second, I’m going to find Kent. I’ve had it with that jerk-off and this time I’m not going to be diplomatic. If he did this, he’s dog meat.”

“
Thank you
,” I said, trying not to cry again. “And Bobby, will you call Julie? I couldn’t reach her. Tell her I’m okay.”

“I will. And I’ll be on a plane as soon as I can. Don’t worry, Annie.”

Don’t worry?
I was beyond worry; I was insane with panic. Alone and under arrest in Manhattan, a hundred and fifty miles from my baby. When I hung up the phone I realized that leaking breast milk had bled through my blouse. I had no choice but to test Agent Shoemaker’s sympathy.

“I’m a nursing mother,” I said. “My baby’s in Massachusetts with my sister and my breast pump is in the apartment where I’m staying on Fifty-sixth Street.”

“Your what?”

“Breast pump. To get the milk out of my breasts before they explode.”

He seemed appalled at the thought of my breasts exploding in this very small cell, exploding all over
him
.

“They won’t literally explode,” I said, “but I could get mastitis and end up with an infection. If I don’t get the milk out right away, it could get very bad.” When Lexy was a newborn I once ignored my swelling, hard-ening, reddening breasts and within half an hour was shaking with fever. I massaged out the lumps and drained the milk, solving the crisis, and later learned that engorgement could lead to a serious infection that might actually land you in the hospital.

He ripped a clean sheet off his yellow pad and handed it to me along with his pen. “Write down what you need. I’ll see what I can do.”

I listed the particulars. “Thank you. You can send someone to the apartment for my pump or you can buy something new—I’ll pay you back.”

He nodded. Clearly he was in new territory here, but at least he was being polite about it. He took the sheet of paper with my instructions and stood up with his pad and file. Then he called to Officer Williams, who unlocked the door.

“I’m taking her downtown,” Shoemaker told Williams.

Officer Williams reshackled me and the chafed skin on my wrists instantly burned on contact with the metal. Shoemaker handed him my list, which he then passed off to Officer Kiatsis as we crossed the room busy with detectives doing their jobs. Anonymity had never frightened me more than during my walk through that bustling room. These were the people, or the people of the people, who had mostly ignored me when I was brought in here before. When an older man with a single earring in his left lobe glanced at me with the shadow of a smile, I felt, instead of grateful, a shiver of hypocrisy; it was a hypocrisy I recognized, having once been on his side of the divide. In my Kentucky prison the staff had been
us
and the prisoners
them
, and now I had flipped categories, becoming one of
them
, without consideration, a social pariah. I knew this well from working at the prison clinic: you had a job to do and you did it the best you could without thinking about whether the prisoners were actually guilty or innocent. All you knew was that they were locked up and you weren’t, and you took it from there.

I ignored the lone friendly detective; despite his presumed good intentions, he could not possibly know my predicament and his almost-smile raised the barrier between us even higher, which made me feel even worse.

My last view as I passed through the glass door—with a half-flaked-off TINU SEVITCETED confusing me for a moment before I realized it was DETECTIVES UNIT backward—was of Kiatsis reading my list and eyeing me with suspicion. And I felt overcome by helplessness.

Would he bother to get the breast pump? Would I have to ask again? Would anyone listen?

After signing me out and picking up my envelope of belongings, Williams led me into the bright May noon-time. Outside: warm springtime air; gas fumes and honking horns from cars jammed at the intersection; a young woman in a red dress and black sandals; a man in jeans and a leather jacket rushing into the precinct; a wiry messenger on a gold bike, weaving through traffic. I was steered toward a waiting squad car, which I’d been told would take us to Central Booking.

Shoemaker sat up front, separated from me by a scratched bulletproof barrier, and I sat alone in the cigarette- and sweat-reeking backseat where perps and prisoners rode to judgment. We drove downtown in a blur of swiftly passing blocks until, between hulking ornate buildings, I caught a glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge. Its spun-sugar supports arced and dipped over the glistening slate blue river and I thought fleetingly of the sea, its endless acreage and horizons so distant they appeared unreachable. And then suddenly a building blocked the view and we pulled up in front of a zig-gurat of a courthouse, tiered like a wedding cake.

Officer Williams parallel-parked in a row of other authorized cars. Shoemaker stepped out onto the curb and opened the back door for me. Three abreast, we walked up the broad steps flanked by giant granite columns into another high-ceilinged nineteenth-century lobby that greeted you with twenty-first-century security checkpoints.

Central Booking was in the basement of the criminal courthouse. We rode down in a too bright elevator that delivered us into a cinder-block hallway with black stenciled-on arrows pointing us to Processing.

There, in full view of everyone, I was fingerprinted, each fingertip rolled individually onto a pad of pur-plish ink and pressed onto a square on a white form labeled specifically for that finger. I had gone through this once before, when I joined the Public Health Service, and so the residual ink staining my fingers came as no surprise. What
did
surprise me, what in fact shocked me more than I would have imagined, was being photographed. A small board was hung around my neck, identifying me by place of arrest, booking number and today’s date. When the flash went off I could feel from within the stunned expression, captured in digital memory, which would forever mark me as Accused. They had my mug shot. I was
processed
.

As I was ushered along another cinder-block hallway, Agent Shoemaker explained that the next step would be my arraignment.

“When?” I asked.

“Soon,” he said. “The law says arraignment can’t be more than twenty-four hours after arrest. In reality, though if it’s crowded sometimes it takes longer.” We reached the women’s holding cells. After consultation with the guard, Shoemaker assured me the courts were on schedule today. The guard was a hefty woman whose hair had been transformed into a mat of shiny, springy Jerri curls. She unlocked the least-crowded cell, where four other women sat or crouched or stood and a clogged toilet putrefied the air. When I stepped inside, the women looked at me and I looked at them, but none of us said hello. One of my cell-mates, a skinny black woman in a plaid flannel shirt, slumped asleep or unconscious on the floor. Two plump Hispanic teenagers in hot pants and matching American flag tube tops watched me closely when I came in and then returned to their high-speed chatter-ing. One girl had a cantaloupe-size bruise on her upper thigh. The fourth woman, a stout Chinese granny with gray hair in an ironed bandanna, stared angrily at the wall.

When I turned around, Officer Williams was gone.