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“Step to the side,” she said to me. “Mary! This man needs assistance,” she called to another woman sitting behind a metal desk maybe fifteen feet away.

Mary had broad shoulders, and when she stood up I had the feeling of being faced by a man. She was very upset to have to deal with hoi polloi like me. I imagined she was once the custodian on duty for visitation and now she had risen to a more supervisorial rank.

“Yes?” she said to me. Rather than calling her a black woman, I would have used the descriptor caramel-buttercream. Together her fists would have been the size of my head, and I had no doubt she was close to using those hams on my jaw.

“My name is Joe Oliver and I’m here to see Lauren Bachnell.”

“Assistant Warden Bachnell has a secretary and a phone.”

“And yet here I stand, talking to you.”

“I can’t help you.”

“I’ll tell Lauren that when I call from the phone booth outside.”

Mary didn’t like me. Most people don’t. I push them and then make them do things that insult their sense of independence. Since my own stint in prison I especially enjoyed making prison guards into pretzels.

“What’s your name again?” the woman named after our savior’s mother asked.

I told her.

“Wait over there,” she ordered, waving at a battered pine bench made for no more than two.

Sitting there I wondered about my life up until that moment. Those many years I had progressed steadily but always on the wrong path. As a lone-wolf cop and a resentful PI I was spry of step but blindered.

It occurred to me that my whole life had been organized around the guiding principle of being completely in charge of whatever I did. Gladstone understood this; that’s why he helped me become a PI.

The problem was that no man is an island; no man can control his fate. No woman either, or gnat or redwood tree.

There I was at a women’s prison, looking for answers I didn’t want, propelled by forces I could not control. For some reason this revelation made me smile. It was as if a great weight had been taken from me. The question was no longer if I might fail but when.

“Mr. Oliver?”

I looked up to see Mary and a smaller woman who had bronze-red skin. Mary’s uniform was dark blue and imposing, where the smaller guard’s costume consisted of a tan blouse and black trousers. She wore a belt that had a truncheon and pepper spray hanging from one side and a walkie-talkie attached to the other.

“Yes, Mary?” I said.

She frowned, then glowered, then said, “The assistant warden will see you. Riatta will show you the way.”

The short guard walked me to an iron gate, opened the door with a keypad combination, and then led me down a long brick hallway that had no doors. We came to another door that needed deciphering and then crossed a grassy courtyard where three prisoners were doing gardening work.

The inmates wore gray uniforms that, for the most part, hid their figures. They looked at me with interests that ranged from come hither to stay away.

The guard named Riatta did not speak to me or anyone else on our journey. We passed maybe eighteen prisoners, three women guards, and two men. Finally we came to a door that had both a sentinel and an electronic lock. Riatta passed both tests and then shepherded me through and to a gray-green elevator door.

When we got there the door opened, revealing a chamber that no more than three bodies might inhabit.

“Get in,” were Riatta’s first and last words to me.

I experienced a sudden pang of fear. I was no longer in New York City, but for all I knew there was a warrant out on me for murder, and here I was in a state prison.

The door closed and a motor hummed. The chamber moved at a pace that was so slow I didn’t feel it. Two minutes later the door slid open and there before me stood a familiar face.

“Hello, your majesty,” she said.

Lauren Bachnell had been a green recruit in the halcyon days of my police career. Her hair could be called either red or blond, and her gait was graceful if not quite feminine. She was tall for a woman, her face was broad, and her skin as pale as any Scandinavian’s.

Her body, in a uniform-like dark blue pants suit, was a bit wider than when I last saw her, but I was not fooled. I had seen her lay low an angel-dusted six-foot man with one punch.