The lieutenant stopped in at about half past ten. When Frieda came downstairs from one of her trips through the halls, he was standing by the office door.
Frieda unlocked the door, and they entered. She wished she could ask the lieutenant what the motive was behind the seemingly dangerous decisions being made about Willis and Greene, and who was making those decisions. But she didn’t try. Earlier in her career, on another shift, she had asked questions and expressed opinions about ways things could be made safer or more convenient in the prison, and her efforts resulted in her becoming an outcast. She’d requested a transfer to third shift and forced herself to stop caring about the institution and the people who worked in it.
Apparently the lieutenant was expecting her to complain because after his first few attempts to encourage her to talk about the problem, he brought it up himself. “I pulled the file on Greene,” he said. “Just what is the problem with him?”
The lieutenant is playing concerned uncle, Frieda thought. In turn, Frieda was supposed to pour all her woes onto his broad and caring shoulders, and then sit through a lecture that would boil down to “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” She said, “Does the file include the incident and conduct reports written by Ray and Derrick?”
The lieutenant looked startled. “Er, yes,” he said. “But there’s more?”
Frieda shrugged. “I haven’t seen their reports,” she said, as if none of it really concerned her.
“Something happened this afternoon?” he prompted.
“Nothing more than what I told you on the phone. I have the paperwork here.” She indicated the forms lying neatly on the edge of the desk.
The lieutenant was looking uncomfortable. Now Frieda was puzzled. Maybe he did want to talk about the situation. Maybe he didn’t like it any more than she did. Frieda waited politely.
The lieutenant cleared his throat, looked at Frieda, looked away, looked back. “Do you think Greene is getting special treatment?”
“I’m third shift, lieutenant. The guys are usually pretty mellow by the time I get here. Everyone knows better than to let Greene provoke them into a fight after eleven at night. They just go to their rooms and close the door. Greene doesn’t want to make a ruckus by himself.”
“Do you think Greene is unsuited for minimum security?” When Frieda didn’t answer, he asked, “Why did you call me at suppertime?”
“It’s not my place to make judgments on the security decisions you all make,” Frieda said, smiling. “I called at suppertime in case you wanted to check it out right then rather than waiting for me to bring the paperwork up front tomorrow morning. You got Derrick’s report from yesterday? I wanted to keep you up to date.” Frieda couldn’t control a little hysterical giggle. She blinked the tears from her eyes and wiped away her smile with one hand. “The potatoes could as well have hit me instead of the door frame.” She giggled again, imagining the picture. “Splat! right in the puss,” she said, and let the laughter come.
The lieutenant saw the picture, too, and tried not to laugh. “It’s not funny,” he said, his face turning crimson. He cleared his throat again. “Anyway, that was, um—” he paused, looking at Frieda’s report “—Willis. That was Willis.”
“Right.” She let the word hang there, and looked into the lieutenant’s eyes. She wanted to see if he knew what was going on and was uncomfortable with it or if he knew and was part of the problem.
He wasn’t giving anything away. “Do you think Willis is a threat?” he asked.
“No,” Frieda said flatly, “he’s not. Lieutenant, I need to cruise through again, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, rising. “It’s my job to see that Greene stays in his room, you said, so I’d best be seeing to it.”
“Frieda, help me out here. We were sergeants together on second shift. I know you have a feel for, for—” he searched for a word “—injustices. I see an odd situation here, I just want your take on it.”
Frieda was saved from replying when Officer Don Hendricks clumped in the front door and into the office, keys jangling. His studded leather jacket flapped open, exposing a huge, snarling Tasmanian Devil that covered the entire front of his T-shirt. “I can give you a real good take on it, lieutenant,” he said. He pulled a can from his jacket pocket and handed it to Frieda. “I brought you a Coke, Freddie, for your next shift.”
“What are you doing here already?” Frieda looked at her watch. “Good grief, it’s eleven oh-five. Excuse me, lieutenant, I do have to count now.” She grabbed up her clipboard and pen and escaped into the hall.
Frieda expected to find Hendricks alone in the office when she returned, but the lieutenant was still there. She called her count total in to the security office.
“If you could bear to remove your hand from Lieutenant Austin’s fly,” Ron began.
Frieda bent quickly toward the floor. “Ooooh, oof,” she said as she straightened up and pressed the speaker-phone button. “I’m sorry, Ron. I dropped my lunch here. I didn’t hear what you said.”
Ron repeated what he had said and added, “George is waiting here to commune with him.” George Fuller was the third-shift lieutenant.
Lieutenant Austin’s face reddened. He took the receiver and disconnected the speaker phone. “Put George on,” he said.
Officer Hendricks and Frieda looked at one another, eyebrows raised.
“George, I’ll be up front shortly,” he said stiffly. “Meanwhile, please inform Officer Aiken that I’ll be writing a report for his file concerning his comment about my fly and Sergeant Ferguson’s hand.” He hung up abruptly. “Does he always talk to you like that?” he asked Frieda.
Frieda took a deep breath. She was sure the lieutenant knew how Ron talked to her. Didn’t he work in the same office? She’d hoped that hearing Ron’s words in mixed company would embarrass him a little. Lieutenant Austin looked more shocked than embarrassed, and that surprised her. She’d always painted the entire security office bunch with the same brush. That included Ron Aiken, the desk officers on the other shifts, all the lieutenants, and the captain. They had the leisure for boredom and crude jokes. They didn’t spend eight hours each day alone in the company of twenty-five felons who had nothing more pressing to do than think of ways to drive the house sergeant crazy. The staff in the security office didn’t feel the isolation and need for friendly communication that the officers in the housing units felt.
“He usually talks to me like that, yes,” Frieda said. “And depending on my level of stress, I either ignore him or insult him in return.”
“You could file a sexual harassment suit.” The lieutenant looked as if that were the last thing he would want to see her do. Frieda was surprised that he even brought it up.
“I could,” she said. “But then I might as well quit, and I like this job. He doesn’t really insult me, I just consider the size of his brain. It only bothers me if I have an emergency here and he wants to play sexy-poo on the phone.”
“Well, maybe this will slow him down some. Thanks for letting me hear it.” He stood up. “Well, goodnight, Frieda, Don.”
After Lieutenant Austin had gone, Frieda asked Hendricks, “So, did you give him your take on the Greene, slash, Willis caper?”
“I sure as hell did. I even suggested he become a steady reader of the Inlet, the weekly rag that prints news the regular press is afraid to touch.”
“Yikes,” Frieda said. “Did you really...”
“Bunch of us were in Lenny’s the other night. Our regular beer ’n’ bitch session, you know, and we were filling each other in on the Greene, slash, Willis caper as you call it. Apparently Greene torments Willis out in the yard and at the gym, too. Everybody had something to say about him.” He smiled, remembering. “A writer from that paper was at the bar eavesdropping. He introduced himself and said it sounded like an unhealthy situation and was the warden insensitive or was he intentionally setting somebody up to get hurt? Well, we told him that if he would make sure the story got a lot of press when the situation exploded, we’d tell him anything he wanted to know.”