“Fast? The hell it was fast!” she starts in. “I was hollering for thirty damn minutes before anyone showed up! Thirty damn minutes!She’s over there strangling, I mean, I could hear it, and I’m hollering and nobody comes. She’s gasping, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I’m going blind, somebody help me, please!’ Thirty damn minutes!Then she got quiet. She’s not answering me anymore, and I start hollering at the top of my lungs for somebody to come….”
In three swift steps Tara Grimm is before the inmate’s door, rapping the glass with her knuckles. “Quiet down, Ellenora.” The way the warden says it makes me think that Ellenora is volunteering this information for the first time. Tara Grimm seems genuinely taken aback and angry. “Let these people do what they need to do, and we’ll let you out and you can tell them exactly what you observed,” she says to the inmate.
“Thirty minutes at least! Why did it take so long? I guess if a body knows they’re dying in here, that’s just too damn bad. If it’s a fire or a flood or I’m choking on a chicken bone, too damn bad,” Ellenora says to me.
“You need to quiet down, Ellenora. We’ll get to you soon enough, and you can tell them what you observed.”
“Tell them what I observed? I didn’t observe a thing. I couldn’t see her. I already told you and all of them I didn’t see nothing.”
“That’s right,” Tara Grimm says coolly, condescendingly. “Your original statement was you didn’t observe anything. Are you changing your mind?”
“Because I couldn’t! I couldn’t observe nothing! It’s not like she was standing up and looking out the window. I couldn’t see her, and that made it awful, just hearing her pleading and suffering and groaning. Making these bloodcurdling sounds like an animal suffering. A body could die in here, and who’s going to come! It’s not like we got a panic button we can push! They let her die in her cell,” she says to me. “They let her just die in there!” Her wide eyes stare at me.
“We’ll have to move you to a secure unit if you don’t stop,” Tara warns her, and I can tell she doesn’t know quite what to do.
She wasn’t expecting this display, and it occurs to me that the inmate named Ellenora is cagey like a lot of inmates. She behaved herself when she was questioned by prison officials the first time, because she wanted a chance to do exactly what she’s doing now, to make a scene when we arrived. Had she erupted earlier, I suspect she would already have been moved to a secure unit, no doubt a euphemism for solitary confinement or a cell where psychiatric patients are restrained.
Colin’s booties make a sliding sound as he walks into Kathleen Lawler’s cell, and Marino opens crime scene cases on the polished concrete floor. He checks out the cameras as I lean against the wall, steadying myself to work shoe covers over my big black boots with their big tread. As I pull on examination gloves, I feel the inmate’s stare. I feel what’s in it, the high voltage of fear, of near hysteria, and Tara Grimm knocks on the window again as if to shut her up in advance. Ellenora’s frightened face in the tiny pane of glass flinches as the warden’s knuckles suddenly are there, rapping.
“What makes you think she couldn’t breathe?” Tara Grimm asks loudly, for our benefit.
“I’m sure she couldn’t, because she said so,” Ellenora replies from behind her barrier. “And she was aching and feeling puny. So tired she could hardly move, and she was gasping. She hollered, ‘I can’t breathe. I don’t know what’s happening to me.’ ”
“Usually when someone can’t breathe they can’t talk. I’m wondering if you misunderstood. If you can’t breathe, you can’t holler, especially through steel doors. You have to have a lungful of air to holler,” Tara says to her so I will hear it.
“She said she couldn’t talk! She was having trouble talking! Like her throat was swolled up!” Ellenora exclaims.
“Well, now, if you tell someone you can’t talk, that’s a contradiction, isn’t it?”
“It’s what she said! I swear to God Almighty!”
“Saying I can’t talk would be like running for help because I can’t stand up.”
“I swear to God Almighty and Jesus Christ it’s what she said!”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Tara Grimm tells her ward on the other side of the thick steel door. “And you need to calm down, Ellenora, and lower your voice. When I ask you questions, you need to answer what I ask and not yell and make a fuss.”
“What I’m saying is the truth, and I can’t help if it’s upsetting!” Ellenora gets more excited. “She was begging for help! It was the most awful thing I ever did hear! ‘I can’t see. I can’t talk. I’m dying! Oh, fuck, oh, God! I can’t stand this!’ ”
“That’s enough, Ellenora.”
“What she said exactly. Gasping and begging, ‘Please help me!’It was terror, pure terror, her begging, ‘Oh, fuck, I don’t know what’s happening! Oh, please, someone help me!’ ”
Tara knocks the glass again. “Enough of that language, Ellenora.”
“It’s what she said, not me. It’s not me saying it. She said, ‘Fucking help me, please! I must’ve got hold of something!’ ”
“I’m wondering if she might have had allergies, food allergies, insects,” the warden says to me. “Possibly to wasps, bees, allergies she never told anyone about. Might she have gotten stung by something when she was outside exercising? It’s just a thought. There’s certainly a lot of yellow jackets when it’s hot and muggy like this and everything’s in bloom.”
“Anaphylactic reactions to insect stings or after an exposure to shellfish, peanuts, whatever the person is allergic to, usually are very swift,” I reply. “It doesn’t sound as if this death was swift. It took longer than minutes.”
“She was feeling bad for at least an hour and a half!” Ellenora yells. “Why did they take so damn long?”
“Did you hear her get sick?” I look at Ellenora through the thick pane of glass. “Did it sound like she might have vomited or had diarrhea?”
“I don’t know if she got sick or not, but she said she had a sour stomach. I didn’t hear her get sick. I didn’t hear her toilet flush or nothing. She was yelling about being poisoned!”
“So now she’s been poisoned,” Tara says, cutting her eyes at me as if to remind me to consider the source.
Ellenora’s face is agitated, her eyes wild. “She said, ‘I’ve been poisoned! Lola did it! Lola did it! It’s that shit I ate!’ ”
“That’s quite enough. Now, stop it,” Tara says, as I walk inside Kathleen Lawler’s cell. “You watch that mouth of yours,” I hear Tara say behind my back. “We have people here.”
21
In the polished-steel mirror that Kathleen Lawler complained about when I was with her yesterday afternoon, Investigator Sammy Chang’s reflection walks behind me and stops in the doorway of the cell.
“I’ll be right here, giving you some room,” he lets me know.
The toilet and sink are combined into a stainless-steel unit with no movable parts except buttons for flushing and turning tap water on and off. I don’t see or smell anything that might indicate Kathleen Lawler was sick before she died, but I note a very faint electrical odor.
“Do you smell something odd?” I ask Chang.
“I don’t think so.”
“Something electrical but not exactly. An unpleasant peculiar odor.”
“No. I don’t think I smelled anything at all while I was looking around. Wouldn’t be the TV.” He indicates the small television encased in transparent plastic on a shelf.
“I don’t believe that could be it,” I reply, noticing water stains in the steel sink and a vague chalky residue.