While I waited for Coffey, whose real name was Sarah, I popped another strong peppermint into my mouth and breathed in, placing the pack on the table, knowing that I wouldn’t leave with them. At some point when my head was turned, Coffey would carefully roll them off the tabletop and secret them in her pocket.
Eventually we’d get to her petty thievery. But in the meantime we had bigger issues to deal with.
“Morning, Doc,” she said after the guard had opened the door and let her in.
I tried not to look surprised. One of her eyes was swollen shut, and if her nose hadn’t been broken, it had been badly injured. A long scratch, crusted with dried blood, ran the length of her neck.
“You should see what I did to her,” Coffey said, bragging a little.
“Yeah?”
She smiled. “It was self-defense, but not the guards or nobody knows that.”
“How come?”
“Just because I’m mad at Billy, I was not going to rat on Caty. She had a nail file. Shit. Who knows how she got it. But she had it and she was heading for my eye with it.”
“Because?”
“I had a visitor yesterday.”
“Who?”
“Tyson.” She gave me the self-satisfied smile of a woman who knows she has a man so hot for her that he’ll come all the way out to a prison just to look at her through a wire-andglass partition.
“So he’s back?”
Coffey nodded. We’d had a few conversations about her pimp, and she knew that if she wanted to get out of prison and stay off the streets, she was going to have to break off with him.
“He’s going to try to get me an interview with someone really big when I get out. He thinks I can do more. He thinks I have something extra. He’s worried about me. This guy who is killing girls and dressing us up like nuns? He’s got everyone freaked. And Tyson cares about me too much to let me back on the street. So he’s gonna get me an interview.”
“An interview?”
She leaned forward like she had a secret.
“Did you ever hear of a woman named Cleo Thane?”
I was not an actress. That was what my mother had done with her life. So it was an effort to keep my face expressionless.
“Who is she?”
“Only the most successful bitch in the business. A prettyas-a-picture princess who you’d guess lived in one of them fancy-dancy high-rises on Fifth Avenue and did nothing but shop and work out all day.”
“She is a prostitute?”
“She is a prostitute?” Coffey mimicked me and laughed. “Yes. She’s the Patron Saint of Sluts.”
I laughed along with her, but something inside of me contracted and the skin on the back of my neck prickled.
“Funny moniker. How did she get it?”
“Yeah, well. You gotta understand how this bitch treats her girls. She gives them health insurance. Starts those retirement accounts for them. It matters to her that we get taken care of, do you know what I mean?”
It’s not often that you get to talk about one patient with another patient. You’re generally forced to accept the version the other patient wants you to have.
“And how does Tyson come into this?”
“He says he knows someone who knows her and that when I get out he will set up a go-see. She runs her place more like a modeling agency than a whorehouse. You gotta be able to speak and think and have insight to work for Cleo. But Tyson says I’ve got all that. And he says her girls are safe. The safest in the business. That the Saint just takes care of things right.”
Coffey was a twenty-four-year-old prostitute who had stabbed one of her clients in self-defense when he pulled a knife on her and demanded that she make him come, blaming his own impotence on her failure. It was only then, with his knife at her throat, that he was able to finally ejaculate, and while he disappeared into a few pathetic moments of ecstasy, she pulled the knife out of his hand.
In the fight that ensued she cut him and he started to bleed. She had no way of knowing she had sliced through his carotid artery.
He died at her feet. His pants down around his ankles, his sperm drying on his stomach. And now she was serving a sentence of six to thirteen years, hoping to get out in three.
“So you have a hero,” I said.
Coffey shot me a dirty look. “What the hell is wrong with me looking up to someone? Having a role model? Huh?”
“It’s not going to get you off the streets if you pick a prostitute to emulate.”
I said it without any inflection, but inside I felt as if Coffey had pierced me a little. Cleo was my client. I didn’t want to start thinking about her in any kind of demeaning way. That wasn’t my job.
Not back in Manhattan, it wasn’t.
But it was here.
Coffey was biting her thumbnail and looking up at me from under her eyes. Despite her battered face, you could see the strong bone structure and how good her skin was. Her hair was still thick and lustrous. But she hadn’t been in prison that long. She hadn’t hit bottom yet. This was her first fight, but there would be more. And they might be worse.
“Coffey, let’s talk about this. Isn’t there anyone else you can think of who you look up to?”
“You have a problem with me thinking the Saint is special?”
“Can you think of any reason I would?”
“Don’t you ever answer a question with an answer?”
“Fair enough. I think that there are other women who might be more positive role models for you. I want to help you realize that there are other jobs you can do besides being a prostitute.”
Coffey cackled. With one sound she’d gone from winsome, sad prisoner to witch.
“You don’t get it, sister. You have got to meet her. You have got to listen to her talk about what we all do for a living and why we deserve something other than undercover cops on our tails all the fucking time. You keep talking about her like she is some low-down, dirty whore. She’s not. This woman is shining. She stands up against anyone who gets in her way. She wears Jimmy Choo shoes and fucking designer clothes. You should see her. There is not a hair out of place, not a crease in her jacket that doesn’t belong there. She’s beautiful.”
And then Coffey gave me one more big, openmouthed laugh that revealed the silver amalgam fillings in her back teeth.
“You remind me of her, Doc Snow. In fact, if you had blond hair like her, the two of you could be fucking sisters, you really could.”
15
I was quiet as Simon drove away from the prison and headed the car toward the city.
The sky ahead of us was gray, streaked with clouds. The closer we got to the city, the darker the sky became, and as we crossed the George Washington Bridge, it started to rain.
Traffic was backed up. The rain turned to a downpour. The cars came to a standstill and humidity fogged the windows in Simon’s car.
Up ahead was the coffee shop we usually stopped at on our way back to New York. Simon parked and we ran from the car into the restaurant, only getting a little wet.
He ordered a Coke and a grilled cheese sandwich. I was used to him eating what I called “kid food” whenever he wanted. And envious. I ordered a salad and an iced coffee, and when the drink came I used artificial sweetener. Even though I tried to walk and go to the gym a few times a week, I always needed to lose ten pounds.
Finally he moved the conversation away from the light banter we’d been enjoying in the car. “What’s wrong, Morgan?”
“I know depression is anger turned inward, but I can’t seem to use that information to help myself as much as my patients.”