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 and sizzled, leaving a scent of ozone in the air. It meant I was supposed to be there.
“We only have ten or fifteen minutes,” I told her. “How did you get the prison authorities to let you keep that wig?”
“I told them it holds my brains in and that without it I forget where I’m supposed to go to the bathroom. Fear-of-potty is the great American phobia, you know.”
“I know; I’m a social psychologist. But why do you want to wear a dirty Shirley Temple wig?”
“Because it holds my brains in and without it I forget . . .”
“Never mind,” I interrupted. “Why are you called ‘Muffin’?”
“I thought it sounded better with ‘Crandall’ than ‘Cupcake.’” She sighed, managing to suggest that the decision had been a difficult one. I could feel the minutes ticking by inside my watch as I got nowhere.
“You’re not used to interviewing people, are you?” she asked after a long silence.
“No,” I answered. “Usually I just interview data.”
“What have you learned?”
“Oh, you know,” I hedged, wondering what gem of social science might push her off balance, “stuff about the effect of annual rainfall on Iowa voting patterns, ethnic demography among jockeys, profiles of murders committed by women, the usual.”
“And?”
“And there are a lot more black and Latino jockeys than you’d think.”
Muffin Crandall laughed. Actually it was a rumbling guffaw that made her eyes twinkle but seemed to tire her.
“So my brother wants you to say that the murder I committed five years ago isn’t like the typical profile for murders committed by women five years ago? What is the typical profile?”
“Well—” I sighed as if reciting something everybody already knew, “for starters the victims of female murderers are typically husbands/boyfriends, or children, or least often strangers killed in the commission of felonies orchestrated by husbands/boyfriends.”
“No lone women defending themselves from attacks by strangers?”
“Doesn’t happen,” I stated with authority because, in actuality, it rarely happens.
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“Because women are by nature passive and silly,” I lied, expecting to be struck by lightning. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, we assume a sweet smile will defuse danger. We’re simpering wimps. We don’t defend ourselves.”
Through
