Blue. Abigail Padgett

      Chapter Three

      As prisons go, Las Colinas is not unpleasant, at least from the outside. There are no coils of razor wire, no guard towers. There are no kennels of baying hounds waiting to track some hard-eyed woman in unflattering horizontal stripes through thickets and ravines. There are no thickets and ravines. Las Colinas is smack in the middle of a suburban San Diego community called Santee. The town is home to feed stores and barbecue restaurants where country and western bands play on weekends. And while my professional interests had skirted the field of penology, it wasn’t difficult to draw a few conclusions about the prison from what I already knew.

      Women are fond of enclosed spaces. A by-now-infamous study suggested that while boys are prone to build towers with toy blocks, girls build elaborate enclosures, giving special attention to the decoration and security of entrances. Indeed, a classic Renaissance motif symbolizing the Mother of God was a walled garden. And Las Colinas, while scarcely meeting the aesthetic requirements of the term “garden,” looked to me less like a prison than a typical Southern California elementary school. Several single-story buildings, painted an institutional tan, clustered about a chain-linked central open area in which I could see a couple of picnic tables.

      The few truly dangerous women confined here would be in some special, high-security area, I guessed. But the preponderance of the women prisoners could be safely contained with minimal provisions for security. They would display here the same impoverished identities that had led them to the prostitution, drug dealing, or accessory status to a boyfriend’s crime that had captured the attention of the police in the first place.

      A very small statistical minority, the female criminal takes up less than five percent of the nation’s cell space and almost none of its razor wire. With certain exceptions such as the rare sociopath and those with untreated psychiatric problems, women offenders are not difficult to control. Even as children female humans easily comprehend the larger social consequences of theft, battery, and murder, and as adults rarely engage in these activities. Those who do, know themselves to be compromised in a much more devastating sense than their male counterparts. The fall is different, farther, and has broken them long before they wind up in prison. As I completed my “Visitor’s Request to See Prisoner” card I contemplated methodologies for learning the truth about the sequence of events that had landed Muffin Crandall in this sad and sterile place. Even then I suspected that the task might be over my head.

      “Sit in there at phone ten,” a blonde woman directed from the prison reception area. She wore a badge saying “Corrections Trainee,” and was tucking a stray tail of her tan shirt into olive green wool-blend slacks that made me think of Boy Scout uniforms. I noticed that she carried a walkie-talkie but no sidearm, and looked as if she’d just arrived from a Junior League recruiting tea. That aura of cheerful wealth and privilege.

      It seemed odd that she’d seek employment as a prison guard. I decided that she must be doing undercover research for some liberal foundation that would later publish a report decrying the poor prenatal care given pregnant prisoners or something. The fantasy explanation restored my sense of social congruence, as we social psych types are prone to say. It forced something puzzling to make sense.

      “Your client’s in B Unit, so it’ll take a while,” she explained, smiling. “More security there. You know.”

      I nodded, wondering in what sense Muffin Crandall was my “client” and why she needed more security. There had been nothing in the portion of paperwork I’d had time to read to suggest that in prison Crandall would do anything more dangerous than weave potholders out of cut-up socks. There had been no indication of prior criminal activity, not even a traffic ticket. So far, Muffin Crandall’s profile was an epic of law-abiding conformity so devoid of suspicious behavior that I should immediately have been suspicious. Nobody who drives can go ten years without so much as a parking ticket unless there’s a very good reason. Not wanting to come to the attention of police, for example. Unfortunately, this obvious concept had not yet crossed my mind.

      The room with the phones was just off the reception area and a monument to sensory deprivation. Just a long, blah-colored room with a wall down the middle. In the wall were nineteen numbered plexiglass windows with phones on each side. Mismatched plastic chairs were fastened to the floor in rows facing the windows from both sides.

      When the door to the reception area clicked shut behind me I felt something constrict in my chest. Walled gardens notwithstanding, I knew then why I’ve been so scrupulous about not robbing convenience stores at gunpoint. The reality that someone else was empowered to unlock or not to unlock that door tightened my ribs like a vise against my lungs. There wasn’t a single picture on the wall, not even a months-old copy of Good Housekeeping to read. When a woman in blue pants and a blue shirt with “San Diego Jail” stenciled over the pocket was brought to the chair across from mine twenty minutes later, the hair on my neck was slick with sweat and I knocked the phone off its ledge when I grabbed for it.

      “Christ in the foothills!” she rumbled in a gravelly voice. “You look like warmed-over swan shit. Don’t tell me you’ve never been inside a prison before.”

      “Okay, I won’t tell you,” I said too loudly into the phone. “My name’s Blue McCarron. Your brother thinks you’re innocent.”

      The eyes watching me from behind bifocals in expensive alloy frames were the same dark blue as Dan Crandall’s. Unlike Dan’s, however, these eyes were circled with thick coverup that couldn’t cover enough. Muffin Crandall looked twenty years older than I’d expected. The flesh over her facial bones seemed unable to support its own weight and hung in folds. Yellowish skin tones suggested a fading tan that had once been deep. Perched above her ears was a synthetic auburn wig, permanently set in tubular rows. I could see the cheesecloth wig cap between each auburn tube. The cap wasn’t particularly clean. Wisps of dull gray hair jutted stiffly from its perimeter. Muffin Crandall looked like a poster for a very noir version of Annie.

      “My brother doesn’t know his ass from the Holy Grail,” she growled. “And I don’t care who you are or what he’s paying you to do, it won’t work. I have a lawyer who’ll say I’m insane. That may work. I probably am insane. Nobody sane freezes people like stew meat.”

      She lowered pale orange lids over her brother’s eyes and half smiled, revealing perfect teeth behind lipstick in a shade worn by peroxided exotic dancers in Germany at the beginning of the Cold War. A particularly ghastly purplish red. I knew this because I’d read an illustrated history of Barbie dolls and their origins in Teutonic pornography, not that the information was of any merit in deciphering Muffin Crandall. Then she opened her mouth again.

      “Let’s just say I’ve ‘eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner,’” she pronounced in rolling tones. I could see the tones vibrating in the plexiglass window between us.

      And that’s what did it. The line was from Shakespeare, I was sure. Probably Macbeth. And Muffin Crandall was acting. The wig, the grotesque makeup, the tough talk. All an act. I remembered that she’d had something to do with a civic theater.

      “Great voice, but you can cut the act now,” I said. “Your brother’s not paying me to critique a performance.”

      “Cut the act?” she answered, a real smile animating the folds of her face. “If all the world’s a stage, where do we go when we’re not acting?”

      In that moment, in an airless room built to obstruct all but the most superficial human interaction, I became Muffin Crandall’s friend. I liked her. I recognized in her a kindred spirit, a person whose grip on the truly important questions remained unweakened by minor tribulations like dirty wigs and prison. Behind me the grid snapped