Miss Ruby inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment. “And how did someone like you come to be friends with Nicola’s mother?”

I smiled. “I didn’t say we were friends, but that I know her. Before my own arrest I was trying to help Señora Mercedes find out what happened to Nicola. You know that she died?”

Miss Ruby gave another brief dip of her chin.

“All the women say you know everything that happens in this prison. I want to know what happened to Nicola. How did she get to the hospital?”

“If you’re not a cop yourself, they put you here to talk to me.” She spoke with finality but didn’t try to move away from me.

“Cops don’t give a rat’s toenail for who killed a poor little girl who didn’t even have a green card to her name.”

“So who did put you in here?”

“You know who Robert Baladine is?” When she shook her head no, I explained that he owned Coolis and that Nicola had worked for him before she was arrested. “He’s the man I was talking about, and he’s got way more power and money than I ever will. He likes the idea of me being locked up in his prison.”

She finally looked at me directly, thinking over my story, which had the unusual virtue of being mostly true—even if it might leave her thinking Baladine was my ex–husband. “Nobody knows what happened to Nicola. I heard a lot of different stories, and I don’t know which is true. The CO’s said she had female difficulties and went into the hospital, where she ran away. Someone else said she got tangled up in one of the big machines in the clothes shop and got killed and the guards were scared they’d be punished for not turning the machinery off in time, so they dumped her body in Chicago. And some girls are saying she beat up on a CO, which is silly, because she wasn’t much bigger than a minute, let alone those men.”

“She actually died in Chicago,” I told her.

Miss Ruby liked having inside information, more than a whole bushel of tomatoes, and she questioned me closely on Nicola’s death. After I told her what I knew—omitting how I’d come on Nicola to begin with—I asked how she came to take Nicola under her wing.

“Too many of these girls here don’t have any respect for any other human being on the planet. Nicola came from a country where old people are treated with respect—someplace near Japan, which is probably the reason why. She saw how my shoulders and neck bother me after talking on that phone for six hours, and she used to rub the knots out for me. Of course I tried to help her in a few little ways myself.”