“I can’t. I can’t do it. None of it’s true.”
“Shut up and listen to me. You think I’m enjoying myself? You think everybody else is having fun? You think your mother likes being locked in a cage?”
“I don’t think anything,” the boy said listlessly. “I don’t want to think anything.”
“Don’t make things any tougher for us than they are, Mike. There’s a limit to what I can take.”
The guard reappeared. “You can come along now, Mr. Williams. How are you doing, Mike? Still getting those fancy grades of yours in school?”
When the boy didn’t answer, his father said, “He’s doing great in school. Doesn’t take after me, I can tell you. His mother’s got the brains in the family. She passed them along to him. He ought to be grateful.”
“I’m not. I don’t want any brains from her, I don’t want anything.”
The three of them went out into the corridor.
Quinn waited another ten or fifteen minutes. He studied the paintings on the walls, the upholstery on the chairs, and the view from the windows of a three-storied concrete structure identical to the one he was in. Quinn wondered how many of its occupants would be rehabilitated. The same people who were building spaceships to reach the moon were sending their fellow human beings to eighteenth-century penal colonies, and more money was spent on seven astronauts than on the quarter of a million people confined to prisons.
A heavy-set woman in a blue serge uniform appeared at the door. “Mr. Quinn?”
“Yes.”
“Your name isn’t on Miss Haywood’s approved visiting list.”
“I explained that to the people in the administration building.”
“Yes. Well, it’s entirely up to Miss Haywood whether she’ll talk to you or not. Come this way, please.”
The visiting room was buzzing with conversation and nearly every cubicle was filled. Alberta Haywood sat behind the wire screen with as much composure as if she were still at her desk in the bank. Her small hands were loosely clasped on the counter in front of her and her blue eyes had an alert, kindly expression. Quinn half expected her to say, Why, of course, we’d be delighted to open an account for you...
Instead, “My goodness, you do stare. Is this your first visit to a prison?”
“No, it’s not.”
“The matron said your name is Quinn. Several of my old customers were named Quinn and I thought you might be one of them. I see now, of course, that you’re not. We’ve never met before, have we?”
“No, Miss Haywood.”
“Then why did you come here?”
“I’m a private detective,” Quinn said.
“Really? That must be very interesting work. I don’t recall ever having met a private detective before. What exactly do they do?”
“What they’re paid to do.”
“One naturally assumes that,” she said with a hint of rebuff in her voice. “It fails to shed any light on why you should want to see me. My world has been rather limited these past few years.”
“I was hired to find Patrick O’Gorman.”
Quinn wasn’t prepared for her reaction. A look of fury crossed her face, and her mouth opened as if she was struggling to catch her breath. “Then find him. Don’t waste your time here, go and find him. And when you do, give him what’s coming to him. Show him no mercy.”
“You must have known him pretty well to feel so strongly about him, Miss Haywood.”
“I don’t feel strongly about him. I barely knew him. It’s what he did to me.”
“And what was that?”
“I wouldn’t be here in this place if he hadn’t disappeared like that. For a month the whole town did nothing else but talk about him, O’Gorman this, O’Gorman that, why, how, who, when, on and on and on. I would never have made that silly error in the books if my mind hadn’t been distracted by all the shenanigans over O’Gorman. It made me so nervous I couldn’t concentrate. Such incredible fussing over one ordinary little man, it was quite absurd. Naturally my work suffered. It required a great deal of concentration and careful planning.”
“I’m sure it did,” Quinn said.
“Some fool of a man decides to run away from home and I end up serving a prison term—I, a perfectly innocent bystander.”
She sounded as if she really thought she was a perfectly innocent bystander and Quinn wondered whether she had always thought so or whether the years at Tecolote, the hours of boredom, of waiting, had made her slightly, perhaps more than slightly, paranoid. She was the martyr, O’Gorman the villain. The white and the black.
She was staring at Quinn through the wire mesh, her eyes narrowed. “Give me your honest opinion, was that fair?”
“I’m not well enough acquainted with the details to form an opinion.”
“No further details are necessary. O’Gorman put me behind these bars. It may even have been deliberate on his part.”
“That hardly seems likely, Miss Haywood. He couldn’t have anticipated the results of his disappearance on your powers of concentration. You were only slightly acquainted with him anyway, weren’t you?”
“We nodded,” she said, as if she regretted doing even that much for the man responsible for her predicament. “If our paths should cross in the future, of course, I intend to cut him dead, shun him like a rattlesnake.”
“I don’t think your paths will cross again, Miss Haywood.”
“Why not? I’m not going to be stuck in this place forever.”
“No, but O’Gorman may very well be stuck in his,” Quinn said. “The majority of people believe he was murdered.”
“Who’d go to the trouble of murdering O’Gorman? Unless, of course, he pulled the same kind of dirty trick on somebody else as he did on me.”
“There was no evidence of anyone bearing a grudge against him.”
“Anyway, he wasn’t murdered. He’s not dead. He can’t be.”
“Why not?”
She half rose as if she were going to run away from the question. Then she realized that the matron was watching her, and sat down again. “Because then I wouldn’t have anyone to blame. Somebody’s got to be blamed. Somebody’s responsible. It must be O’Gorman. He did it to me deliberately. Perhaps he thought I acted too snobbish towards him? Or he was angry because George fired him?”
“What happened to O’Gorman wasn’t intended to involve you at all, Miss Haywood.”
“It did involve me.”
“It wasn’t planned that way, I’m sure,” Quinn said.
“They keep telling me that, too, only they don’t know everything.”
She didn’t explain who “they” were, but Quinn assumed she was referring to the prison psychologists and perhaps George as well.
“Your brother George comes to visit you quite frequently, Miss Haywood?”
“Every month.” She pressed her finger tips hard against her temples as if she felt a sudden intense pain. “I wish he wouldn’t. It’s too sad. He talks of old friends, old places, that I can’t afford to think about any more or I’d lose my—I would get overly emotional. Or else he talks of the future and that’s even worse. In this place, though you realize there will be a future, you can’t feel it inside you because every day is like a year. By my estimate,” she added with a small bitter smile, “I’m now about 1,875 years old and it’s a little late to be thinking of futures. I don’t say things like this to them, naturally. They’d call it depression, melancholia, they’d have some name for it, any name but the right one: prison. Prison. It’s funny how they try to avoid that word around here and substitute ‘Correctional Institution’ or ‘Branch of the Adult Authority.’ Fancy terms that fool no one. I’m a prisoner in a prison, and listening to George prattle merrily on about a trip to Europe and a job in his office makes me sick. How can a trip to Europe seem real to someone who’s locked in a cell and hasn’t been further than the canteen for over five years? Why am I here? Why are we all here? There must be, there has to be, a better method. If society wants revenge for our crimes why don’t they flog us in front of the city hall? Why don’t they torture us and get it over with? Why do they leave us here to pass endless unproductive hours when we might be doing something useful? We’re like vegetables, only vegetables grow and get eaten and we don’t even have that much satisfaction. We’re not wanted even for dog food.” She held out her hands. “Put me in a meat grinder, chop me up, let me feed some hungry dog, some starved cat!”