Daughter's Keeper (11 page)

Olivia scrambled through the piles of clothes strewn all over the floor. She found a pair of panties and a bra and, turning her back to the agent, slipped them on. She picked up a dirty pair of jeans and one of Jorge's sweatshirts and put those on as well. She was looking for socks when the agent grabbed her arms again, wrenched them back behind her back, and snapped the handcuffs in place.

He held her, his hand digging into her upper arm.

“I'd like to put on some shoes,” she said, keeping her voice even.

“Go right ahead,” he answered. He took his hand off her but did not unhook the handcuffs.

Olivia kicked through the piles of clothes until she found a pair of black clogs with worn wooden soles lying together near the end of her bed. She slipped them on her feet. The agent took her arm again, squeezing it very deliberately. It hurt as he yanked her out of her apartment and dragged her down the long alley.

The agent held Olivia with one hand and with the other reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. He read her her Miranda rights in a toneless voice.

At first Olivia lowered her head, her hair falling around her face like a criminal doing a perp walk in a TV show. But then she lifted her chin. She was damned if she'd let the officers see the mortification they had wrought. She pushed her shoulders back, steeled her face, and looked up and into the eyes of her neighbor. He stood, holding his rottweiler puppy, in the doorway of his apartment. When her eye caught his, he lifted his fingers in a barely noticeable wave. Olivia's resolve was swept away by a rush of gratitude at so simple a human gesture. This gentle recognition of her plight was from a man who had no reason to care about her at all, who might, in fact, have remembered her high-handedness toward him and responded with something other than compassion. That was when she began to cry. She stumbled alongside the agent, who seemed not to notice though her tears shook her whole body. He put his hand on her head and pushed her into the backseat of a navy blue sedan that was parked at an angle in front of her apartment building, blocking half the street. He slammed the door behind her, and Olivia was alone.

She sat for a while, crying, until she realized that she could as easily stop as continue. She leaned her face to her shoulder and wiped her nose as best she could. Her arms fastened behind her kept her from sitting back against the plastic of the seat—she had to lean on one side, angled across the length of the bench. Olivia rested her head against the seat and closed her eyes. She had an almost overwhelming urge to roll down the window and call out that they'd made a mistake, they'd confused her with someone else. She wasn't a crackhead from the ghetto. She ­wasn't an uneducated ­criminal. She'd been in all the AP classes at Berkeley High; she'd been to college. She had a mother and an almost stepfather and grandparents in New Jersey. She wanted to wave her arm in front of the agent's face like a flag and shout, “Look, I'm a white girl. See?”

Olivia wriggled around to her other side to relieve some of the pressure on her shoulder. Her wrists hurt. The sharp metal of the handcuffs dug into them. She thought about trying to step through the harness of her cuffed hands—to move them in front of her, but she doubted that she could pull off such a Houdini feat, and even if she could, the agents would yank her back the way she'd been as soon as they returned.

Olivia took a few deep breaths. It was obvious to her that the DEA had found out about Gabriel and Jorge's drug deal. The two of them were probably in custody already, along with Oreste. Somehow the police had found out Jorge's address and arrested her because she was in the apartment.

She looked out of the car. She could just make out the light from her bedroom window. She wondered how long it would be, how much damage they would do, before the agents realized that there was nothing for them to find. And then she realized that there was, of course, something there. She had been sleeping on top of the money. But was there any way they could prove that the money was from the drug deal? She could say it was her tip money, her school tuition. That she didn't believe in banks. Something like that.

She wished she knew where Jorge was. Had they found him with the drugs? The two of them would have to make sure that the police understood that Gabriel was in charge. Gabriel had set up the deal; he'd found the buyers. He'd even put the idea in Jorge's head to begin with. Once they had Gabriel, surely the cops wouldn't need a little fish like Jorge.

Olivia had no idea what time it was, but she'd gone to bed at about 10:00 and had been sound asleep when the cops came crashing into her house. She figured it was maybe 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. She couldn't make the agents aware of her innocence until she knew how much she should or could tell them about Gabriel and Jorge. There was a good chance she would have to spend the rest of the night in jail.

At the thought of jail, saliva gathered in the corners of her mouth, and she swallowed hard, willing herself not to vomit. She had to pull it together—after all, it wasn't like this would be the first time she'd been in jail. She and a few other members of the Homeless Advocacy Council had once spent the night in the Santa Cruz county jail after someone set fire to the symbolic shanty town they had built in the middle of Hagar Drive. It was only one night—they were released the next day when the fire department determined the fire to have been caused by a malfunctioning camping stove and not politically motivated arson. Another time she'd been arrested for blocking a logging road that led to a marbled murrelet nesting area. That time she'd also been released the next morning, uncowed and firmer in her convictions than the day before. This time, though, she would be alone, not accompanied by a group of friends and fellow-protestors cracking jokes and singing songs like “Ain't gonna let Weyerhaeuser push me around, push me around, push me around.”

In the morning they'd either let her out, or she'd ask to see a lawyer and have the lawyer find out who knew what and how much she should tell.

Olivia had a long time to harden her resolve. By the time the cops came back, the sky had lightened to a pale gray. The agent who'd put her in the backseat got in the driver's seat, and another agent, also a young man with short hair and an undistinguished face, got in the passenger seat. Olivia waited for them to try to weasel information out of her. They didn't. They took off without a word. The plastic seats were slippery, and she couldn't get a firm purchase on her side. For the length of the ride, she concentrated on not falling to the floor whenever they turned a ­corner. Once, she tumbled off the bench, and the agent in the passenger seat turned to glare at her. She clambered back up, and he looked away.

They drove through Oakland toward downtown and alongside a pair of huge, elaborate skyscrapers. Olivia recognized the Federal Buildings. She'd once participated in a demonstration against the deportation of Chinese illegal immigrants, and she remembered sitting in the plaza, leaning against a piece of abstract sculpture.

The police car pulled into a driveway marked with large signs that read
Authorized Vehicles Only
and drove into an underground parking lot. Olivia waited in the backseat for the cops to take her out of the car. She tried to calm down by reminding herself that this was just what she had imagined would happen, but the fact that the men had not spoken to her at all, even one word, made her nervous. She had so carefully planned her refusal to answer their questions that being denied the opportunity to do so seemed not only unfair, but frightening. The agent who had been sitting in the passenger seat opened the door of the car and pulled her out, muttering, “Watch your head,” as she ducked out of the open door. For this small consideration, she felt absurdly grateful.

They led her down a dark hall and into a drab, windowless room with a long Formica counter at one end. The agents walked up to a counter and called out. A man in a uniform, heavyset, his bushy moustache still wet with whatever he'd just been drinking, walked though a door behind the counter.

“All yours,” the agent said, handing him a pile of papers.

She had her picture and her fingerprints taken. The ink was black and sticky, and the stiff brown paper towel the uniformed officer handed her didn't get it all off her hands. For some reason, the sight of her dirty fingers panicked her. She rubbed at them, wiped them on her jeans. She felt tears return to her eyes.

“Here,” the officer said, handing her a wad of paper towels he had dampened in the sink.

“Thanks,” she whispered. She scrubbed at her fingertips until finally there were only pale gray stains across the pads of her thumbs.

The officer led her by the arm—gently, not like the others had—into a barred cell. There were two long metal benches bolted along the rear and side walls, and there was a metal toilet with a sink built into the back tucked into a corner. There was no toilet seat and no toilet paper. The officer locked the cell and left the room. The door closed with a hollow thud, and Olivia was alone underneath the fluorescent lights.

She had to pee. She looked around the empty cell and then crossed to the toilet. It stank of disinfectant and something else, something foul. She pulled her jeans down and crouched over the bowl, careful not to let any part of it touch her. She urinated as fast as she could, keeping her eyes glued to the door through which the officer had disappeared. When she was done, she shook herself as dry as possible and zipped up her pants. She flushed the toilet with the toe of one foot and then walked to the far end of the cell. She sat down on the cold metal bench. After a while, she lay down, resting her cheek on her elbow.

She awoke, chilled from the metal bench, to the sound of a key turning in a lock. She had no idea how much time had passed, if it was still early morning or much later in the day. The guard with the mustache reached into the cell and handed her a tray of brown corrugated paper with a small waxed cardboard container of apple juice and a bagel. She gulped the sweet drink and took a small bite of the bagel. It was cold and hard, and the pat of margarine it came with left an oily flavor on her tongue. Olivia left it on the tray, uneaten.

She sat alone for a while, her knees hugged close. The chill of the metal bench reached up through her, along her spine, to the backs of her eyes. She felt like she was watching her own misery from somewhere far away. She wondered if she should pound on the bars of the cell, thick and lumpy with years of careless painting, and call out to the guard that she wanted to see her lawyer. But even if she hadn't recognized the futility of the action, she would not have been able to muster the energy for it.

Little by little Olivia felt herself slip into a warm, seductive bath of self-pity. Why had this happened to her? She didn't deserve this nightmare. She shook her head and forced herself to think of heroes of resistance who had undergone worse incarcerations than her own. Che Guevara. Jacobo Timmerman. Rigoberta Menchú. That was a good example. A woman, not much older than herself, who had suffered so much worse—her family had been murdered by Guatemalan death squads, her village had been destroyed. Olivia had seen her on television once. Menchú had worn a skirt of violet woven fabric and a beautifully embroidered
huipil
. She had spoken about people of all shades of brown united against oppression. Olivia had felt deeply ashamed of her pale skin and blond curls and had ached to be cloaked in the comfortable brown-ness of the people she saw on the screen.

How had Rigoberta behaved when she was imprisoned and tortured? Olivia drew herself up straighter. She put her feet on the floor.

The sudden click of the door opening startled her. She jumped, and her eyes filled with tears. She shook them away and drew her knees up to her chest, rocking slightly as she watched the guard enter the room.

“Pretrial services to see you,” he said, unlocking the cell and motioning her to stand up.

“What?” Her voice came out a broken whisper. She cleared her throat and asked again, “What?”

He didn't answer. With a firm hand on her shoulder, he directed her out the door, down a short hallway, and into a tiny room. The room, no more than a booth, really, had a window on one end with a chair pulled up to it. Sitting on the other side of the glass was a woman.

Olivia slipped into the chair and looked at her visitor. The woman was busily writing on a piece of paper that Olivia could not see. She didn't raise her eyes, and Olivia could see only the top of her head. Her sparse hair was dyed jet black and teased into a bouffant. A full half-inch of dull gray roots showed clearly at the hairline. Finally the woman picked up her head and looked at Olivia. Her face was spackled with a viscous layer of makeup.

“You're here to see me?” Olivia said.

The woman pursed her brightly colored lips and tapped on the window with a violet-painted fingernail.

“Talk into the holes,” she said.

Olivia looked down and saw a pattern of small holes punched into the Plexiglas at roughly mouth level. She leaned toward them. “I'm Olivia Goodman.”

“Priscilla Watts-Thompson from pretrial services. I'm here to determine your eligibility for pretrial release, Miss Goodman.”

“Pretrial release?” Olivia asked.

“Bail.” The woman's voice was harsh and squeaky. Her eyes, tinted a strange shade of television blue and ringed with azure mascara and violet eye shadow, did not meet Olivia's.

Olivia dutifully provided information about her job, her bank accounts, her criminal history. Finally, Miss Watts-Thompson asked, “Is there someone who can provide security for your release? Your parents, perhaps?”

“Security?”

“The federal government does not generally allow the services of bail bondsmen. You'll need someone to act as a surety for you. Do your parents own their home? If they have sufficient equity, they can put that up as security.”

“Why do I need that? I didn't do anything.”