The Halo Effect

14

The walk from the parking lot to the prison itself was bizarrely lovely. It was about a quarter of a mile down a path that bordered on a state park with trees spilling into the grounds of the institution. Towering old oaks, maples, cedars and pine trees bathe the path in shade, and you could easily forget where you were. Until you reached the summit and saw the guardhouse, the barbed-wire fence, the huge spotlights and a fleet of police, prison and state cars in the smaller parking area beside the building.

The prison sat on the estate of a wealthy industrialist whose three-year-old son was brutally murdered in the house while everyone slept. The murderer was his mother: a woman who had been troubled and in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals for years.

Regardless of her mental history, she was sentenced to life in prison and hung herself the first week she was there. The noose was made of her bedsheet, ripped with her teeth.

Her husband, Al Serwin, moved away, leaving the property, the house and an endowment to the state with the express desire that it be turned into a women’s prison. But a special house of incarceration, one where the most hopeful cases would go, with a generous fund to ensure that every prisoner got psychiatric help. The best, brought in and paid in full. Not the sad social workers who took whatever work they could get and sat through appointments, only slightly more capable than the people they were counseling.

It was warmer than I’d anticipated and I took off my jacket as we approached the doors. Just as well, as I had to be patted down and all my pockets emptied before I could go in.

Once inside we were greeted by Mary Kathryn Evans, the guard we had seen every Thursday for the past few years.

“We had a little scene here last night,” she told us with a rueful smile. She was heavyset and always chewed cinnamonflavored gum.

Her hands were on my hips.

“What happened?”

“One of the ladies had a visitor. Turns out he was the ex of another one of our ladies.”

Her hand moved down my legs, pat, pat, pat, feeling for something that wasn’t there.

“There was quite a fight. Scratching, biting. Turned into a party.”

“Anyone hurt?”

Her hands were on my arms now.

“Stitches, concussions. Some of the bites broke skin-and, you know, with AIDS, that can be serious business.”

Mary Kathryn was finished and moved on to Simon. “I don’t know where Joe is. You want to wait? Or do you mind if I do this today?”

“I’d rather if you did it, darling,” he joked.

She started her hands down his hips and I watched the way her fingers so impersonally felt for the nonexistent contraband.

“One of your patients was involved,” she said to me as her hands moved around Simon’s ankles.

Now she had my full attention.

“Who?”

“Coffey Gerard.”

I was hoping she wasn’t going to say her name. “Did she get attacked or was she the instigator?”

“She’s the one who got attacked. Caty Laine attacked her.”

Coffey was a gorgeous African-American prostitute whom many of the other girls were jealous of.

“But I can see her?”

“Guess so-you are on the sheet with her at eleven.” Mary Kathryn nodded to a printed sheet of doctor appointments for the day. And with that she buzzed Simon and me through.

We walked down the hallway to the waiting room reserved for doctors and therapists and correctional officials. We usually didn’t have to wait long.

The smell wasn’t too bad in that room, other than the use of too much disinfectant. But I knew that once the next guard came to escort me to the room where I conducted my sessions, the stench would be overwhelming.

The prison was crowded, even though this was one of the better places to be holed up in. But there were no good prisons. There were no easy ways to do time.

“Dr. Snow?” A male guard stood at the door. I didn’t recognize him. Standing, I turned back to Simon and said goodbye.

“See you later, alligator,” he said.

I smiled and followed the guard out.

As soon as I left that room and started down the hallway, I bit into the mint I’d put in my mouth so that the peppermint would overwhelm every other odor. If I focused on breathing through my mouth it was always better. But the stale body odor, the whiff of urine, the cigarette smoke and the cheap perfumes and shampoos that some of the women used to try to pretty themselves up were still stifling. It was like inhaling desperation.

Dante wrote about the three circles of hell: every Thursday I walked through purgatory.

I took a seat in the windowless room. There was a couch and a chair next to a desk. An approximation of a therapist’s office. At least the room was not filthy. The women here had to do cleanup, and they worked harder in some rooms than others. The therapy room was one of those they took pride in keeping pristine. Many of them wanted to come to therapy. They said they felt better after it. We treated our patients the same way here we treated the patients we saw in our own offices, and that dignity was precious to them.

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.”