I nodded.
She smiled at me reassuringly. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll go ahead and give you the test down here now, and it can be our little secret. Nobody else has to know. How does that sound?”
“That sounds great,” I said. “Thank you.”
She motioned for me to have a seat on the exam table.
“Stone might ask you to go on leave until you know for certain, and that would just be a hassle. You shouldn’t be punished because that little black bastard had bad blood. It’s not right. There’s no justice in this world when people like you and me have to risk our lives just to do our jobs.”
I didn’t respond.
She moved around the room quickly and efficiently preparing to take some of my blood out of the place where I most wished it to stay, my body. All the while she spoke of how high the number of inmates with AIDS had become. And how we were all paying the price for their sins.
While she continued to talk about the same things, my mind drifted. I began to think of how ironic it was that I might have AIDS. Not only had I been monogamous and careful even then, but I was extremely careful in daily life as well. My daily routine in prison involved washing my hands so many times as to be almost compulsive. I didn’t take chances with AIDS, hepatitis B, and the like. I had visited enough hospital rooms to minister to someone in the last stages of AIDS to know that I wanted to avoid it at all costs. If I had it, I would not let it get the best of me. I’ll kill myself first, I thought.
When she was finally ready to draw my blood, she put her delicate hands on me: patting, squeezing, caressing, comforting. She even held my hand as she withdrew the blood. And, after she had finished, she gave me a hug. It was, hands down, the best nursing care I’d ever received.
“How long does it take?” I asked. I remained seated on the exam table, not in a hurry to leave. She busied herself labeling the vile of blood and disposing of the needle.
“About a week, give or take a little. I’ll have to sneak it in with some other tests. I’ll call you the minute I know, okay?”
“Okay. Listen, thanks a lot. You’ve been wonderful. Truly an angel of mercy.”
“You’re very welcome. You’re a special man. I want to take good care of you.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s funny that you called me an angel of mercy,” she said, turning to face me. “I wanted to be a nun when I was a kid. I was raised in a Catholic orphanage.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “But . . .” She made a sheepish grin.
“What?”
“I like men too much,” she said. She walked over to the table and stood between my knees, her face just inches from mine. “Sister said I should become a nurse.”
I nodded my agreement. “Forced celibacy is wrong. It’s going to do nothing but cause increasingly more problems for the Catholic Church, I’m afraid.”
She nodded. “Anyway, I wanted to help people, so I became a nurse.”
“You became an excellent nurse,” I said.
She smiled warmly as tears filled her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered and leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. I could feel her tears.
“Thank you,” I said.
She turned, pulled some tissues from the flower-covered box on the counter, and dabbed at her eyes. I hopped off the table.
When she had finished wiping her eyes, I asked, “How did you wind up here?”
“In prison, you mean?” She smiled. “Old sour Sister Mary Margaret said I’d wind up in prison one day. I worked for a doctor in Tallahassee that I needed to get away from, and this came open, so here I am.” She backed away from me slightly.
“You needed to get away from the doctor you worked for?” I asked.
“Yes, well, it’s a long story,” she said. “Bottom line is that we had a relationship. He had a wife . . . and kids. And . . . it was a bad scene.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Tallahassee’s loss is our gain.”
“Thanks. Anyway, I didn’t mean to get into all that, but you are so easy to talk to. And so nonjudgmental. I’ve heard you went through a divorce and some pretty rough times yourself. I’m sure that gives you a lot of empathy for others.”
“I hope so,” I said as I walked over to the door and opened it. “Thanks again.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d like to talk again sometime, perhaps over coffee.”
“Sounds great.” I walked out, leaving the door open.
Chapter 8
Compared to other investigations I had conducted, I was finding out information quickly. Prison is such a closed society and so self-contained that rather than having a lack of information about the case, it seemed as though I’d soon be faced with having too much. Having such easy access to everyone at all times, with the exception of the first- and third-shift officers, made this more like Murder on the Orient Express than a modern-day investigation.
I was trying to track down an inmate named Jacobson, which on the street would have taken days, if not weeks. In a matter of minutes, I discovered that he was in lockup.
There are four types of lockup in the state prison system. Protective management lockup is for those who are at risk in the general prison population-rapists, child-molesters, ex-law enforcement officers. Close management dorms are for those who, because of their custody, crimes, and behavior on the inside, do their entire sentence inside a cell. Then there is confinement, which has two classifications-administrative and disciplinary. An inmate is placed in administrative confinement when the administration determines that it is best to do so-usually when he is under investigation for a crime. Disciplinary confinement is for those inmates who were accused of a crime and were found guilty. Jacobson was in the latter.
Whereas most inmates in the Florida DOC are housed in open-bay, military barracks-style dormitories, those in lock-up are housed in single six-by-nine cells. Some of the lockup cells house two inmates, some one. All have a sink, toilet, bunk, and a very small window covered with steel mesh. The inmates in lockup are fed through a slot in the metal door about the size of a food tray. Jacobson’s was open, and I was talking to him through it.
Squatting down to talk through the tray slot in the door always made my knees ache and my feet fall asleep. I usually chose to talk to an inmate through the tray slot because of the security hassle involved in arranging to meet him in his cell or the conference room. For me to enter an inmate’s cell, he must be frisked and cuffed, and an officer must be present at all times. The same is involved if I meet with him in the conference room. Many times what the inmate has to say to me is so short that being frisked and cuffed takes longer than our meeting. Other times the inmates have a lot to say, but are unable or unwilling to because of the security officer standing within hearing distance. I was hoping that without an officer present, Jacobson would sing me a song. He did. Unfortunately, it was one I had heard before.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” he said in response to my first question, which was “How are you doing?”
From the last cell of the corridor to my right, I could hear Inmate Starn yelling, “CHAPLAIN, CHAPLAIN, COME HERE. COME HERE, CHAPLAIN.”
He did that every time I came to confinement. It was Wednesday, and I had already seen him twice that week.
It didn’t look like Jacobson was going to cooperate. Perhaps I had spoken too soon about the overabundance of information I was going to uncover during this investigation.
Crouching down on the bare cement floor of the confinement hall, I smelled the same smell I always did down there-sleep. The stale air was thick with smells of drool, perspiration, and halitosis. The cell was one of twenty along a long corridor. There was an officer seated at the end of the hall, a round black man with virtually no hair. Another officer, a tall slender man with strawberry blond hair and pink cheeks, was crouched down by a food slot about five cells down from me.