Besides making it possible for me to bathe, Freeman had also delivered my message to Morrell. On Thursday near the end of my first week, I got summoned to see him in the visitors’ room.

My arrest had stunned him. He hadn’t even known about it until he saw a paragraph in the Tribune on Sunday—Mr. Contreras, never fond of communicating with the men in my life, had been too rattled to call Morrell. Like Freeman, Morrell talked to me persuasively about all the reasons to leave Coolis, but unlike Freeman, he could see a point to my staying.

“Are you learning anything helpful?”

I grimaced. “Not about Nicola, so far. About the way people without power turn on each other because they feel too helpless to see who’s really to blame for their day–to–day misery—I’m learning way too much about that.”

I leaned forward to talk more privately, but an alert CO made me back away the requisite arm’s length—if we touched, Morrell might pass drugs to me. After five minutes of glaring scrutiny the CO decided I wasn’t trying anything too heinous and turned her attention to another inmate. Only a handful of women got visitors on weekdays; it was hard to speak privately.

“There’s a place called the Unblinking Eye where you can get a particular kind of watch–camera,” I said in a prison–yard mumble as soon as the CO turned her attention away. “If you buy one for me and bring it on a Saturday or Sunday when there’s a mob here, we ought to be able to make a switch.”

“Vic, I don’t like it.”

I smiled provocatively. “I don’t think they’ll do anything to you if they find you with it—except bar you from visiting me.”

He gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m not worried about that but about you, you fool.”

“Thanks, Morrell. But if I ever manage to get into the clothes shop, I may see something that I should document. And frankly, there’s plenty else to record here between the inmates and the guards.”

Morrell gave me another quizzical look and said he’d see what he could do. He switched the talk to neutral matters—my neighbor, who was so distraught at the idea of me behind bars that he wouldn’t make the trip to see me. He gave me news of Lotty, of the dogs, of all the people whose welfare I cared about and couldn’t attend to. He stayed an hour. I felt a wrenching desolation when he left. I went down to the rec room, where I shot baskets for an hour, until I was wet with sweat and too tired to feel sorry for myself.