Through all of this the only constant in her life, it seems, has been the instinct to protect her children. In this she has the maternal impulses of a cheetah with its young, extended claws longer than the spiked heels on the shoes some women wear.
The door opens. Laurel is cuffed. The glint of metal, a chain encircling her waist, runs down between her knees to the locked shackles on her ankles, so that when she moves she sounds like something from the yule season. There are little steps here like a Chinese peasant with bound feet.
She wears an orange jail jumper three sizes too big, and canvas shoes, an indication that she has already undergone the indignities of admission to this place — cavity searches in places only your physician should see, and a shower with antiseptic soap so astringent it could lift paint from metal.
She clears the door, and the first thing I see are Laurel’s hands as she holds them out to me. They are a vibrant shade of red, like someone may have cooked them over an open flame.
‘What happened to her?’ I look accusingly at the guard.
‘Ask your client,’ she says.
‘It’s all right,’ says Laurel.
The guard gives me her best cop’s smirk.
‘You can take those off,’ I tell her. I’m talking about the cuffs and shackles.
‘In your dreams,’ she says.
‘You want, we can call your boss to discuss it,’ I tell her. ‘My client has a right to confer with her lawyer without a ton of metal on her feet and hands.’
‘Not down here on the main floor,’ she says. Testing the water. How far can she push? Too lazy to work the keys.
I look her in the eye, and she blinks. I start to move to the door, toward a higher level of appeal.
‘Your party,’ she says. If looks could spit. She works with her keys, more locks than a chastity belt. Then, dragging six yards of chain, she stations herself, her back leaning up against the wall five feet away.
‘Outside, if you don’t mind,’ I tell her.
Coming to the county jail to talk to a client is like being dropped into a sandbox filled with snarling pit bulls. The guards who can’t bite will at least try to piss on you. Generally these are deputies who higher authority won’t put on the street for fear of causing a riot among rational citizens. So they are left here to develop their public personas like Quasimodo. She moseys out the door, dragging metal behind her.
They have just booked Laurel, a charge of first-degree murder. She is slated for arraignment tomorrow morning, the reading of formal charges, and an appearance to set a date for entry of a plea. I think Harry was right. It would appear I can take little comfort in the state’s case, though I have yet to see any part of it. Harry is busy preparing a motion for discovery. Apparently the cops believe they’ve got a dead-bang winner based on the evidence already in hand. I have heard rumors of a witness. Perhaps it is something they would like us to believe.
Laurel sits in the chair across the table from me. She is stone-faced, but there are no tears, no frazzled hysteria.
Other women I know would recoil in horror at this place, beefy guards and other inmates with an attitude on the hardness scale of a diamond. But it is the thing about Laurel. She is one of those people who always seem to find a second wind in adversity.
I can see Lama’s beady little eyes outside in the hallway, through the window with its blinds. He has finally found a place where he is comfortable, in the company of other misfits, peering through a window on a private conversation. I close the blinds in his face.
Now we are quiet, enclosed and hopefully private.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
‘Where are the kids?’ she says. She’s back to first thoughts.
‘They’re all right.’
‘Do they know I’ve been arrested?’
‘Danny does,’ I say. I can only assume that by now someone has told Julie of her mother’s fate.
This is the Laurel I know. She looks off at the middle distance — a woman who moments ago was in cuffs and chains, charged with first-degree murder, and her headiest concern is sheltering her kids from the knowledge.
‘Have you talked to Gail Hemple? Will he get custody?’ She’s talking about Jack taking the kids.
‘We’ll have to talk about that later,’ I say.
‘No — now,’ she says. ‘Will he get custody?’
‘The kids have to live somewhere while you get through this mess,’ I tell her.
‘Not with Jack,’ she says. ‘You can take them,’ she tells me. ‘At least temporarily,’ she says.
Laurel’s looking over her shoulder now, paranoia like maybe somebody is listening. Here, in this place, this is a healthy attitude.
She puts a cupped hand to the side of her mouth. ‘Her name is Maggie Sand,’ she says. ‘Write it down.’
I have a glazed look. ‘Who’s Maggie Sand?’
‘My friend from college,’ she says. ‘I told you about her on the phone — lives in Michigan. It’s all arranged.’ She’s talking quickly, before the guard comes back to take her to her cell. ‘The airline tickets are purchased.’ She gives me the airline and flight number. ‘They’re in the last name of Sand,’ she says. ‘Danny and Julie Sand.’ This so that Jack or the cops won’t be able to trace them. ‘All you have to do is get them on the plane. Maggie will pick them up in Detroit.’
‘You’ve got bigger problems right now,’ I tell her.
She brings up her hands and buries her face for a moment in thought, no tears, just a few seconds of private contemplation as if she’s making one final stab at getting it together.
‘What happened to your hands?’ I ask her. The soft pale skin is turned a shade of red more vibrant than any sunburn in a warm shower.
‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you about it later.
‘I hope I did the right thing?’ She changes the subject. ‘Deciding not to fight it.’
My heart skips a beat, images of some fatal admission.
‘You didn’t make a statement?’ I say.
‘About what?’ Her face is a puzzle. Then she gets it. I’m talking about a confession. Her expression turns to a mocking little smile, severe to the edges of her mouth.
‘You think I did it,’ she says. ‘You think I killed Melanie.’ Her face turns to the side. Tight lips as if she were about to talk to someone in the empty chair next to her.
‘Well, the fact is she deserved it,’ says Laurel. Her face whips to the front, eyes boring in on me. ‘But I didn’t do it.’ She gives herself a pained expression.
‘I hope you can believe that,’ she says, ‘because if you can’t I’m gonna need another lawyer.’
From the tone of her voice you might think I had arrested her. The look on Laurel’s face at this moment brings me down.
‘I was talking about the extradition,’ she tells me. ‘Giving up my right to a hearing. Was it a mistake?’
Like ships we have passed in the night. ‘Ahh.’ I shake my head. ‘No major mistake,’ I say.
At most a fight over extradition would have been a skirmish for delay across the state line, a battle that we would have ultimately lost and that the state might have used against us in a subsequent trial. I tell her this. We don’t have much time. The guards are shuffling in the corridor outside, anxious to get her upstairs to a cell. I had to pull every string to keep from having this conference delayed until tomorrow.
I give her quick instructions, the basics intended to get her through the night. Seeing Laurel’s exhausted condition, and knowing Lama, he will probably house her with some jailhouse snitch in hopes that my sister-in-law will unburden her soul to a friendly face in seemingly similar circumstances.