13.
Stan knew that Barb wouldn’t be allowed to make any phone calls during her first week in the prison, but today was the one week anniversary and not a word. It was eight PM now, and likely the prisoners were being locked in their cells for the night, so he had to resign himself to the fact that she wasn’t going to call today.
Was there some problem, had she broken some rule and been denied phone privileges? With Barb, that was certainly a possibility. She had many great qualities, but strict adherence to rules, especially ones that were arbitrary and didn’t make sense, as was doubtless the case in the pen, was not her strong suit.
Worse, Stan worried, what if Barb simply had decided that things were over between them? She was, after all, a switch hitter and prison was nothing if not a smorgasbord of possibilities for girl-girl action. He often tried to minimize it in his mind, but he was a good couple of decades older than her and even though they had a hell of a lot of fun together, perhaps she was re-evaluating her life and not seeing any place in it for him.
Resigned to not hearing from her until at least tomorrow, Stan opened up his laptop and started to peruse some web sites that he probably shouldn’t have been looking at. There were a lot of nice looking women up for kinky things, at least for the right price. Yeah, many of them were in places like Russia and Czechoslovakia-he could hear Barb telling him, “That country split up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia almost 30 years ago, Goldman, you dinosaur!”-and Romania (he was pretty sure that one hadn’t changed its name). His ancestors had left those places generations ago for damned good reasons and he wasn’t desperate enough to go there just yet.
There were dating sites, of course, but he’d tried those after his divorce and before meeting Barb and his batting average there was worse than that of the bottom of the Mets’ order. He even thought about calling his ex; being retired now he would have plenty of time to devote to her needs and, who knows? After all, they had loved each other once and maybe he could prevail upon her to play a few of the games he played with Barb. And maybe pigs would fly, too.
In the end, he decided that all of these measures were a bit extreme given that Barb had only been away for a week and she had two years left to serve. So he poured himself another Scotch and watched the Rangers game, falling asleep mid-way through the third period.
The next day, just after noon, his phone rang. An operator asked if he would accept a collect call from a Barbara Moore. ‘A collect call?’ Stan thought. He hadn’t made or received one of those since the Reagan Administration, if not earlier. But of course, he knew that inmates were forced to use that method in order to keep in touch with their loved ones. He shuddered to think how much some company that had gotten the Department of Corrections contract (probably through some generous campaign contributions to the Governor and key Legislators) would rip him off for a brief chat, but what choice did he have?
“Yes, I’ll accept the charges,” he replied, his voice trembling a bit at the excitement of finally hearing from Barb, and, perhaps a bit, if the truth be told, at the likely hit to his wallet.
“Stan is that you?” the soft, melodious tones of Barb’s voice came over the wire.
“Barb? Is everything OK? I was expecting to hear from you yesterday.”
She hesitated a second. “I’m fine, Stan. I had a touch of the flu the last couple of days, but I’m over it. All these women in close quarters, germs spread like crazy.”
Stan had a momentary vision of Barb snuggling up to some muscular woman with a buzz cut and a bunch of tattoos. He ignored the insistent tingling in his groin that scene provoked. “But you’re OK now, right?”
Barb coughed twice. “Yes, Stan, I’m fine. A little flu, no big deal.”
Stan knew that prisoners’ calls were subject to being monitored by the guards, so he wondered if she would tell him if something really were wrong. He decided she might very well not. “Good, Barb. I really miss you.”
“You’d better miss me, Goldman!” she replied.
Well that certainly sounded like the old Barb. “How is it in there?”
Barb coughed twice again. She must not quite be over the flu, Stan supposed. “It’s boring and the food isn’t exactly like what Marty serves, but it’s really not so bad,” Barb said. “I’ll do my time and come home, no problem.”
“And your cellmates?” he asked.
Barb coughed twice once more. “They’re OK. We stay out of each other’s way.”
“So they don’t know who you are and what you did in your past life.”
Barb coughed twice yet again. “Nope. I told them I was an accountant who got caught fooling with the company books and they seemed to accept that just fine.”
“I hope you didn’t fool with our joint account,” he said.
“Not funny, Goldman.” He noticed that she hadn’t coughed this time.
“But you’re sure everything’s OK and you’re not in trouble?”
Barb coughed twice. “Yes, Stan, I’m fine. I’m a grown up and been in a few tough spots and I can handle myself. Stop worrying. What’s up with you?”
“I fixed that leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom,” Stan said.
“Geez, I’ve been after you to do that for two months and you wait until I’m gone? You’re a prince, Stan.”
“Otherwise, I’m keeping busy,” Stan said. He figured he wouldn’t talk about his on-line activities. He’d have to erase all the traces before Barb came home, but he had two years to figure out how to do that. “Are you cleared to have visitors?”
“I don’t know. Let me ask and I’ll tell you next time I call. Listen, there’s three other inmates waiting for the phone, so I have to go. I love you, Stan and I miss you.”
“I love you, too Barb. Be careful and stay out of trouble.”
Barb coughed twice. “I will, Stan. Don’t worry about me. OK, bye.” And then the line went dead.
‘Well, she sounds OK, other than a little cough,’ Stan thought as he heated up some left over ribs and mashed potatoes from the take-out he’d ordered last night.
It was later that afternoon that Stan suddenly remembered the “secret code” they had used back in the detective squad room when they hadn’t wanted the other detectives to know what they were talking about. Two coughs before a sentence signaled that the meaning was the opposite of what the words conveyed.
Barb had coughed a lot during the conversation and always twice, never once or three times. And, as he replayed the conversation in his head, Stan was pretty sure that she had only done that before telling him that everything was OK. So, that meant that maybe everything was NOT OK!
In his head, he could hear Barb yelling at him, “Geez! How dense can you be, Goldman?” And the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that she was trying to tell him she was in trouble. Maybe the other inmates had made her out as an ex-cop. Maybe one or another of the guards, male or female, had taken a shine to her and was harassing her. That kind of thing was not unheard of in women’s prisons.
He might be misreading the signals, but Barb might really be in a jam. Knowing Barb, which was more likely? But, suppose she were in trouble, maybe even serious trouble, what could he do? She was in prison, and even if he were still a cop, which he wasn’t, what could he do about that?
Then, Stan remembered that he did have a contact in the Department of Corrections, a guy named Harold Coughlin. Coughlin had been a member of the NYPD detective squad that Stan had been on. When he had failed the Lieutenant’s exam for the third time, he had looked for better opportunities elsewhere and taken a job with the DoC. Something in Administration, pushing papers around as far as Stan remembered, but maybe he could help.
The number Stan had for him was out of date, but he couldn’t be that hard to track down, Stan suspected.