The Four Stages of Cruelty (12 page)

Work should have been easy that night, with the gen pop inmates still under restricted movement, but I’ve never liked lockdowns. Caged up, they had too much time on their hands. They stewed and fretted. Their spite and anger got jacked up and became even more unpredictable. They plotted. Fantasized. Schemed ways to fuck someone up. Better when they had their regular routine and you had yours, distractions that kept everyone relatively honest. Of the many things inmates and COs had in common, a desire for the time to pass quietly had to be tops on the list.

I supervised meals and meds most of the evening. It was dull, thankless delivery work. The crazies and addicts were bouncing off the walls. The slightest goddamn delay in receiving their medication sent them into conniptions of desperation and anger. No wonder they were locked up in six-by-nine
drawers. Addiction was the defining focus of their entire lives. It was the reason they were inside—whatever murder, robbery, rape, extortion, or drug violation they’d been sentenced for was spawned from a need that made them barely human. It was the reason they did what they did inside. Prostituting themselves. Begging for hits. Stomping each other’s guts out. Conspiring to arrange deliveries and sales with the acumen of a payroll manager. Addiction distorted every word that came out of their mouths, made it all lies. What they wouldn’t do for drugs, I didn’t want to imagine.

In B-3 I saw the Pen Squad in full force around Crowley’s old cell, not the one in the infirmary where he’d spent the previous nine months, but his permanent home in population. The officials crowded the entrance as if they were trying to get into a small nightclub. MacKay’s joke: How many Pen Squad members does it take to solve a crime? A minimum of three. One to stand around where the evidence was before the inmates destroyed it. One to get told to fuck off by each witness in turn. And one to concoct a bullshit story so the case could be filed. Crowley’s old cell was undergoing a total breakdown and disassembling. Rubber gloves on everyone. Belongings in boxes stacked up in the range. Mattress propped against the pillar. Crowley’s block mates were watching from their bars, calling out the occasional insult, the occasional question or idiotic request. My helper, a semi-retarded thug named Martin, pushed the cart of meds and meals from cell to cell like we were a married couple at the grocery store. Martin delivered the meals; then I passed out whatever meds were lined up.

“About fucking time.”

“Shit, Officer, that’s the same piece’a ham as yesterday. You know I gone Muslim.”

“Pigs serving pig.”

“How come our buddy Crowley got a dirt sandwich?”

“I get four fucking pills. This is two fucking pills. I need four fucking pills.”

“You tell that fucker next door to shut up. I’ll be knocking him with a can’a soup in my sock soon as these doors open.”

“This is already cold. You trying to bacteriate us?”

“When do we get out of lockdown? I got a scheduled visit tomorrow.”

“This is some no call bullshit.”

I answered some, ignored others, kept moving down the row. When I got to the Pen Squad outside Crowley’s cell, I stopped, just as I normally would, even though I wanted nothing better than to scurry along like a flitty roach. It was a large mixed crew, and I only recognized a few officers. Melinda Reizner, who ran most of the in-house investigations, walked out of the cell with an evidence bin and gave me a nod.

We stood beside each other, a rare meeting of the “paramilitary without penises” support club. Melinda was five years older than me, give or take, but light-years ahead in terms of career. I just did a job—Melinda was going places. Once, during a break in a training session in which she instructed us about what not to do when we found evidence, I asked her how I could go places, too. The inquiry seemed to stimulate something mentorly in her mood, but it had not
paid off in actual helpful advice. I figured she’d mulled me over but hesitated to relay the bad prognosis.

This time Melinda was the one eager to see me, a sparkle of enthusiasm in her eye, a respect almost.

“So you’re the one who found him, huh?” She said it low-toned and casual, less an official question and more just something she was excited to talk about, like I’d done something remarkable. The ego stroking worked, even though Melinda had joked with me once that flattery was a tool. That’s what investigators do. They make you feel special by playing on your vanity and lead you along like a sucker. With all the casual cool I could muster, I admitted that I had indeed been the one.

Melinda put the box down. “Lucky girl.”

I didn’t feel very lucky. “Are you expecting a shit storm?”

She shrugged and seemed to ignore my question. “Autopsy reports will get here in a couple weeks. Want to see them?”

“How can I resist?” I asked. Normally the voyeur in me would have been excited. Instead, I just felt queasy.

“We should talk next week about everything that happened.”

“Officially?”

“You found him, you get your name in the file.”

“Great.”

“And you thought there was no glory in this business.”

“That’s the only reason why I’m here.”

We wished each other a happy new year, and I moved on. Three cells later Marty pulled the cart up alongside Billy Fenton.

“If it isn’t Officer Williams,” Fenton said. “How nice to hear you strolling down my hall for a change.” He took his allotment of pills from my tray. He had a rainbow assortment, which meant he was smart enough to complain of the right symptoms to the right doctors and psychologists to earn a nice fix, unless he really was a manic-depressive with high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, and a chronic sleep disorder. He held a piece of paper in his hand, just obvious enough that I could read it through the bars without having to stop and stare.

“Pleasant dreams, Fenton,” I said, and passed by without pause, forcing myself to keep trudging. The paper said, “Need a favor?”

Some inmates played with your mind. And if you weren’t careful, they’d end up permanently occupying a part of your cerebral cortex.

My shift finally ended. I wanted to go home. I wanted to throw myself on my couch and sleep with the TV running. I wanted to obliterate every memory and enter the big nothingness, the hum of ancient reruns.

When I opened my locker, I found a note taped to the top shelf. A note where a drawing had been only a few days before. I needed a new lock. I needed a world without juvenile men.

I opened the note. Someone wanted to see me. Someone wanted to talk to me. Someone gave me a cell phone number and asked me to call them as soon as I got out into the world.
Meaning as soon as I was sitting in my truck. It was urgent, the note said, in case I didn’t read between lines. I saw the name at the bottom, Mike Ruddik. Our very own fink. The last man in the world I wanted to meet up with.

I had my parka on and was ready to slide on out when Wallace caught me just outside the locker room and gave me more bad news. I could tell it was bad by the way his puffy cheeks had pinked up.

“We’ve got some trouble. You’re drawing press attention.”

The words as somber as a creaking elevator cable. I waited for more.

“There’s been some calls from a reporter about the encounter between you and Shawn Hadley.”

Encounter? I was slow with surprise. The reporter’s calls were about Hadley? Crowley was the one who had gone missing and turned up dead. Crowley was the big story. Not Hadley, a shit disturber who’d taken a crack to the knee and might miss a tennis game or two.

It had to be a mistake, right? I asked if he meant Crowley. I couldn’t stop myself.

It was obvious I still didn’t get it. I saw bottomless wells of experience in Wallace’s weary eyes, and maybe a glitter of smug.

“Everything about Crowley is in-house. We’re taking care of it our way, thoroughly and methodically and fully. And so far, Kali, no one has broken ranks.” Meaning no one but me. Meaning if anyone did break ranks, it would be me. Meaning no one outside knew enough about where Crowley had been found and what condition he’d been in to even know there were questions worth asking.

Wallace went on. The institution would need to put Hadley through a disciplinary hearing sooner rather than later because of the attention. He left the rest unspoken, but I knew the way it worked. There were two ways disciplinary hearings got handled. The first was to hold a public hearing in the prison before a judge, with lawyers present. The second, for more minor offenses, was to hold a closed hearing with the Keeper as judge and no lawyers present. A good keeper made sure everything disciplinary stayed in-house. This often meant reducing the severity of the charges so that punishment could be more freely doled out. But if the inmate went Al Sharpton on you, all bets were off.

I could see the lines of separation being drawn. I tried to get analytical about it, put all my objections aside and dig for information.

“You said calls. You mean more than one caller?” I asked, remembering my late-night stalker.

Wallace’s shrug was weary with indifference. “One reporter. A fellow named Bart Stone. He’s been persistent. He’s reached out to me, the warden’s office, and a bunch of COs.”

He left that detail hanging. Other COs. I knew what those calls would concern. What kind of CO was I? Was it actually easier for a woman to commit an abuse? Was I capable of handling the same pressures and strains as a man? Off the record, what in particular was wrong with me?

Then Wallace interrupted my interior rant with a tactical explosive device.

“Someone, apparently, has some kind of photographic evidence showing you standing over Hadley with your baton
raised. I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know how serious a problem we have.”

“How could someone take a picture of that?”

Wallace shrugged. “We had the incident camera rolling. Maybe it’s video. Maybe someone snapped a cell phone shot. I have no idea. But pictures make everything hotter. A story with a picture can spread.”

The idea of photograpic evidence shunted everything else aside and left me utterly silent.

Then Wallace suggested that I look into getting myself a union-appointed lawyer and start seeing a therapist.

He must have caught the look on my face because he offered some unexpected advice: “A good counselor can turn your life around, even your career.” A pause. “I’ve seen therapy be of significant help to those who needed it. And I’ve seen those who should have gotten it fall into serious trouble very suddenly.”

I was overcome by the suspicion that everyone around me, perhaps especially the Keeper, secretly wanted me to fail. I’d found Crowley when they couldn’t. You’d think, in a reasonable world, such conduct would merit a free pass on other minor transgressions, a wiping clean of the dirty slate. Not here, not with me.

“Kali,” Wallace added, using my first name with a touch of urgency, “make sure you think clearly about all this. Don’t let your emotions push you around.” Emotional wreck that I am. “You don’t want to talk to those reporters. You’d do yourself more harm than good.”

It felt like an accusation. But nothing could be further from my mind than talking to some reporter. I did not want to
be at the center of any attention. That would only make my situation worse. My secret anxiety was that none of them saw me as one of the guys. Instead, in their eyes, I was an interloper, an affirmative-action occupant of someone else’s job.

I drove home fast at one in the morning, my hands tight with anger, little sniffy sounds coming from me once or twice, watching the dashed white lines suck under my wheels. The offer of therapy was a setup. It would allow the administration to paint me as someone who didn’t have the mental makeup to do the job. If Hadley’s lawyers pressed for action, my employment would be the easy sacrifice and the institution could resume its normal routine without pause. Wallace knew I couldn’t see a counselor under those circumstances. The administration encouraged it with vigor and enthusiasm whenever there was a trace of PTSD, but it was different for a woman. The men could talk macho about their sessions and joke about bullshit psychological terms because it showed them trying to be more sensitive, but if a woman opened a counselor’s door, all her normal emotional reactions got labeled as softness or instability. I’d be forever marked.

On the way home I stopped for gas and picked up the newspaper. In the kitchen, with my uniform still on, I worked up the stomach to flip through the pages. A piece about Crowley took up a portion of the front of the city section.

It was appropriately hard-toned for a prison piece, and all lies, hewing to the warden’s message that Crowley had killed himself in detention, a not particularly unusual occurrence in an institution for inmates. I looked for comments on the editorial page, anything to raise a question or call bullshit, but found nothing. I continued through the city section until the
word
INMATE
in medium-size lettering below the fold drew me to an article about Shawn Hadley and me. It took a few moments with my head in my hands to summon the courage to read on. How bad was it? Short on details or information, a tone of pious neutrality in sentences that read a tad more literary than normal, the article covered the complaints of the lawyer and the legal actions being initiated against a number of corrections officers, in particular, Kali Williams and Raymond MacKay, as well as Warden Gavin Jensen and the Department of Corrections. I kept coming back to a particularly florid line about the canceled Christmas visits and the resulting disappointment of Hadley’s three children and girlfriend.
“The eight-hour drive home that afternoon, in a beat-up Impala burning through gas, left the children exhausted and gave Cindy Harris the dreadful feeling she might never see Shawn Hadley again.”

The writer was listed as one Bart Justin Stone. Angered, I googled him and found a page full of links. He’d done a few short pieces on the state primaries, a before-and-after job on the marathon last year, in which he’d apparently participated, and a series about a crystal meth lab in Kino Park. According to Stone, practically the whole town knew about the lab, yet it took the death of a teenage user to push the police into action.