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The desk wasn’t a desk. It was a piece of metal stuck to the wall. It was hard, it was cold, it was unfriendly. Two stools were provided to sit on while trying to write a letter. They were uncomfortable. The felt like someone had designed them for a torture chamber. When you sat on one it did not feel as though it were designed to accommodate the person’s posterior. It felt more as though it were designed to assault it in an obscene manner.
Somehow money had appeared on her books, allowing her to buy what few luxuries were allowed. Paper and something to write with were among them.
So she was trying to write a letter to her mother.
She hadn’t started when the older tattooed woman spoke to her. “Be damn careful what you put in that. They read every word and it will come back to bite you in the ass.”
“First time I got arrested I was just a scared kid. I wrote a letter home about how upset I was, all my feelings, I just poured it out.”
“Yeah. I can see doing that.”
“If you are a scared kid with no lawyer they can keep you for seventy-two hours. By then my letters home were so frantic the prosecutor petitioned the judge to have me sent to observation for possible mental problems. According to them I had no reason to be scared of nothing. No reason to cry either. So I spent a year in a cuckoo’s nest. I was never charged, never convicted, never nothing. Just kept.”
“Shoulda kept on keeping ya.” It was from the woman in the bunk. Her name was Violet. She was the most muscular woman L C had ever seen in her life. When she told L C “I’m a professional boxer,” her response was, “I guess I’ll try not to make you mad at me then.”
“Kid, I’m a professional. You can’t tick me off. If there isn’t a purse I don’t fight.”
“Purse?”
“You know. Prize. Money. A professional boxes in the ring for money. You don’t pay me I don’t fight.” She tapped the newspaper in her hand. She subscribed to it, said she needed it to keep up with her professional career. “A philosophy you could use according to the paper here.”
“Huh?” L C Wasn’t sure where the conversation was leading.
Violet shoved the paper under L C’s nose. It was a picture of her with the caption, “Family discusses home wrecker who allegedly murdered their husband, father, brother.” As L C read Violet went on,
“From now on don’t do no home wrecking unless you get paid for it. You can’t just be giving this stuff away for free, you know.”
The tattooed woman, Margie, chided, “I thought you were in here for street fighting.”
“No. I’m in here for mouth trouble. This guy hit his woman and blacked her eye. I told him he was a pretty sorry piece hitting a woman like that. So he took a couple a swings at me and couldn’t hit me. He got mad and when the cops come he said I’d hit the woman and give her the black eye. She scared of him. She won’t say boo.”
“You need a high priced mouth like cinderella here.” She indicated L C “How’d you getta lawyer like that? You ain’t got the bucks to pay him.”
She explained Tulkhorn was the Langlin’s lawyer.
“And you trust him?”
“He told me he is my lawyer.”
“You poor little fool. He isn’t here for your benefit. He is here to keep the richy bitchy Langlin’s nose clean. He don’t care about you. He’ll toss you anywhere he needs to to keep the people who pay his wage looking good.”
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The Homewrecker Series (tm) 
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