Chapter 8 - The Visitation Room
The Cook County Department of Corrections facility at 26th and California was a monument to mid-century municipal neglect: six square blocks of yellowing brick, reinforced concrete, and five-inch bulletproof glass that had turned amber with sixty years of floor wax and tobacco smoke.
It smelled of commercial bleach, damp wool, and the unique, sour ozone of industrial floor scrubbers that ran twenty-four hours a day to keep the holding cells from smelling like an open sewer.
I sat on a round steel stool bolted into the concrete floor of Visitation Room 4B.
The partition was two inches of scarred Plexiglas, reinforced with a wire mesh that distorted the reflection of the fluorescent tubes overhead into tiny, shimmering crosshatches.
To my right, an elderly Black woman with swollen ankles was speaking into a black plastic receiver, her voice soft and rhythmic as she told her grandson about his sister’s graduation from vocational school. To my left, an attorney in an off-the-rack seersucker suit was frantically shuffling three-part carbon paper forms while his client stared at the ceiling with dead, unblinking eyes.
The heavy steel door on the opposite side of the partition clicked open.
Garrett was brought in by a correction officer with two gold chevrons on his sleeve.
He was not wearing his custom Brioni three-piece. He wore an oversized two-piece uniform of thick, stiff cotton the color of a dried tangerine, stamped across the back with the black stenciled letters C.C.D.O.C. His hair had been cropped close to his scalp by an institutional barber three days ago to treat a lice outbreak in Division 9; without his carefully sculpted side-part and the volume at the crown, his head looked smaller, his ears prominent and thin, his cheekbones jutting out like two dry shelves beneath his hollow eye sockets.
He sat down on the steel stool, his hands chained together at the wrists by a ten-inch link of carbon-steel chain that clinked against the stainless-steel counter.
He picked up the heavy black receiver with both hands.
I lifted mine.
“You look terrible, Garrett,” I said. My voice was conversational, the tone I used when checking the status of a delayed shipment of structural timber.
He didn't yell. The manic, theatrical fury that had fueled him at the dinner table six weeks ago had been burned out of him by forty-two days of institutional oatmeal, cold communal showers, and sixteen hours a day in a four-man cell with three men from the Latin Kings who didn't care about his family’s box at the Lyric Opera.
“Claire,” he whispered. The plastic diaphragm of the receiver buzzed with his breath. “Harold says... Harold says the grand jury returned thirty-six counts on Friday. He says the federal sentencing guidelines start at eleven years.”
“Eleven years and four months,” I corrected, looking down at the notes on my legal pad. “Assuming full acceptance of responsibility and zero disciplinary infractions in the holding block. If you go to trial, the mandatory minimum on the international wire fraud triggers at twenty-two.”
He closed his eyes.
A single, greasy drop of sweat tracked down his temple, through the three-day stubble along his jawline, disappearing into the collar of his orange jumpsuit.
“My mother,” he said, his voice cracking on the first syllable. “Claire... where is she?”
“She’s in an assisted living facility in Downers Grove,” I said. “The Presbyterian Home on Maple Avenue. She has a room on the second floor overlooking the parking lot. Her room has a twin bed, a chest of drawers from Sears, and an electric kettle.”
“Downers Grove?” he repeated, his eyes snapping open, wide and bloodshot with sudden, visceral horror. “She’s... she’s seventy-one years old! Her family has lived in the Gold Coast since nineteen-thirty! You put her in a county-rate facility in the western suburbs?”
“I didn't put her anywhere, Garrett,” I said, resting my elbow on the stainless-steel counter. “Her lawyer put her there. When the federal marshals executed the civil asset forfeiture warrants on her checking accounts, she had six hundred and forty dollars in liquid funds. The country club expelled her on the first of the month for three quarters of unpaid dining minimums. Her sister in Naples refused to take her calls. The Presbyterian Home was the only facility within the regional transport zone that accepted her remaining state pension allotment.”
Garrett leaned forward until his forehead hit the Plexiglas with a dull thump.
“She didn't know about the Florida house, Claire,” he wept, his hands coming up to press against the glass, the steel chain dragging across the counter. “She thought the money was coming from my logistics fees! She’s an old woman... she just wanted to have her tea with the women from the guild... please, Claire. Talk to the prosecutor. Tell them she was a non-managing beneficiary. Take my name off the lease, take the boat, take everything... just let her go back to the Drake.”
I looked at his hands through the scratched plastic.
The skin on his fingers was gray, the cuticles cracked, the knuckles swollen from the cold concrete floor of his cell. For five years, those hands had signed contracts they couldn't fulfill, raised glasses they couldn't afford, and finally, when the bill arrived, whipped four thousand dollars worth of red wine into my face to prove that he was still the master of the house.
“Do you know what my father did when the foundry closed in seventy-nine, Garrett?” I asked.
He blinked, confused by the shift in the current, his mouth hanging open like a broken trap.
“He didn't borrow money from his mother’s friends,” I said. “He didn't forge his wife’s signature on an equity loan. He took a job driving a fuel tanker between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, seven nights a week, three hundred and sixty days a year, until his knees gave out and his lungs filled with sulfur dust. When he died, he owed eight hundred dollars on his pickup truck and twelve dollars at the hardware store. And every man who carried his box into the church was wearing a clean suit that he had paid for with his own labor.”
I stood up from the round steel stool.
The room smelled of floor wax and defeat.
“Your father didn't leave you an empire, Garrett,” I said, looking down through the wire-reinforced glass at the small, bald patch on the crown of his head. “He left you a set of manners and a pile of debts. And you spent twenty years pretending the manners were an asset.”
“Claire!” he shouted, the sound muffled by the thick plastic as I set the heavy black receiver back onto its metal cradle. “Claire, don't leave me in here! CLAIRE!”
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I didn't look back.
I walked through the heavy steel door into the sally port, through the three security turnstiles, and out onto the broad concrete steps of California Avenue, where the winter wind was blowing from the north, cold, clean, and completely unburdened by his name.
