“Sorry it took so long,” she told me as we waited between the double steel doors of a mantrap in the women’s tower. “I had to go find her, make sure we still had her.”

She signaled that everything was all right to a camera above the next door and its lock clacked open. She pushed through.

“She was up in medical getting fixed up,” she said.

“Fixed up?”

I wasn’t aware of the jail having a drug-treatment program that included “fixing up” addicts.

“Yeah, she got hurt,” the deputy said. “Got a little banged up in a scuffle. She can tell you.”

I let the questions go at that. In a way, I was relieved that the medical delay was not due-not directly, at least-to drug ingestion or addiction.

The deputy led me to the attorney room, which I had been in many times before with many different clients. The vast majority of my clients were men and I didn’t discriminate, but the truth was I hated representing women who were incarcerated. From prostitutes to murderers-and I had defended them all-there was something pitiful about a woman in jail. I had found that almost all of the time, their crimes could be traced back to men. Men who took advantage of them, abused them, deserted them, hurt them. This is not to say they were not responsible for their actions or that some of them did not deserve the punishments they received. There were predators among the female ranks that easily rivaled those among the males. But, even still, the women I saw in jail seemed so different from the men in the other tower. The men still lived by wiles and strength. The women had nothing left by the time they locked the door on them.

The visiting area was a row of booths in which an attorney could sit on one side and confer with a client who sat on the other side, separated by an eighteen-inch sheet of clear Plexiglas. A deputy sat in a glassed-in booth at the end of the room and observed but supposedly didn’t listen. If paperwork needed to be passed to the client, it was held up for the booth deputy to see and approve.

I was led to a booth and my escort left me. I then waited another ten minutes before the same deputy appeared on the other side of the Plexiglas with Gloria Dayton. Immediately, I saw that my client had a swelling around her left eye and a single butterfly stitch over a small laceration just below her widow’s peak. Gloria Dayton had jet-black hair and olive skin. She had once been beautiful. The first time I represented her, seven or eight years before, she was beautiful. The kind of beauty that leaves you stunned at the fact she was selling it, that she had decided that selling herself to strangers was her best or only option. Now she just looked hard to me. The lines of her face were taut. She had visited surgeons who were not the best, and anyway, there was nothing they could do about eyes that had seen too much.

“Mickey Mantle,” she said. “You’re going to bat for me again?”

She said it in her little girl’s voice that I suppose her regular clients enjoyed and responded to. It just sounded strange to me, coming from that tightly drawn mouth and face with eyes that were as hard and had as much life in them as marbles.

She always called me Mickey Mantle, even though she was born after the great slugger had long retired and probably knew little about him or the game he played. It was just a name to her. I guess the alternative would have been to call me Mickey Mouse, and I probably wouldn’t have liked it much.

“I’m going to try, Gloria,” I told her. “What happened to your face? How’d you get hurt?”

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand.

“There was a little disagreement with some of the girls in my dorm.”

“About what?”

“Just girl stuff.”

“Are you getting high in there?”

She looked indignant and then she tried putting a pouting look on her face.

“No, I’m not.”

I studied her. She seemed straight. Maybe she wasn’t getting high and that was not what the fight had been about.

“I don’t want to stay in here, Mickey,” she said in her real voice.

“I don’t blame you. I don’t like being in here myself and I get to leave.”

I immediately regretted saying the last part and reminding her of her situation. She didn’t seem to notice.

“You think maybe you could get me into one of those pretrial whatchamacallits where I can get myself right?”

I thought it was interesting how addicts call both getting high and getting sober the same thing-getting right.

“The problem is, Gloria, we got into a pretrial intervention program last time, remember? And it obviously didn’t work. So this time I don’t know. They only have so many spaces in those things and the judges and prosecutors don’t like sending people back when they didn’t take advantage of it in the first place.”

“What do you mean?” she protested. “I took advantage. I went the whole damn time.”

“That’s right. That was good. But then after it was over, you went right back to doing what you do and here we are again. They wouldn’t call that a success, Gloria. I have to be honest with you. I don’t think I can get you into a program this time. I think you have to be ready for them to be tougher this time.”

Her eyes drooped.

“I can’t do it,” she said in a small voice.

“Look, they have programs in the jail. You’ll get straight and come out with another chance to start again clean.”

She shook her head; she looked lost.

“You’ve had a long run but it can’t go on,” I said. “If I were you I’d think about getting out of this place. L.A., I mean. Go somewhere and start again.”

She looked up at me with anger in her eyes.

“Start over and do what? Look at me. What am I going to do? Get married, have kids and plant flowers?”

I didn’t have an answer and neither did she.

“Let’s talk about that when the time comes. For now, let’s worry about your case. Tell me what happened.”

“What always happens. I screened the guy and it all checked out. He looked legit. But he was a cop and that was that.”

“You went to him?”

She nodded.

“The Mondrian. He had a suite-that’s another thing. The cops usually don’t have suites. They don’t have the budget.”

“Didn’t I tell you how stupid it would be to take coke with you when you work? And if a guy even asks you to bring coke with you, then you know he’s a cop.”

“I know all of that and he didn’t ask me to bring it. I forgot I had it, okay? I got it from a guy I went to see right before him. What was I supposed to do, leave it in the car for the Mondrian valets to take?”

“What guy did you get it from?”

“A guy at the Travelodge on Santa Monica. I did him earlier and he offered it to me, you know, instead of cash. Then after I left I checked my messages and I had the call from the guy at the Mondrian. So I called him back, set it up and went straight there. I forgot I had the stuff in my purse.”

Nodding, I leaned forward. I was seeing a glimmer on this one, a possibility.

“This guy in the Travelodge, who was he?”

“I don’t know, just some guy who saw my ad on the site.”

She arranged her liaisons through a website which carried photos, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of escorts.

“Did he say where he was from?”

“No. He was Mexican or Cuban or something. He was sweaty from using.”

“When he gave you the coke, did you see if he had any more?”

“Yeah, he had some. I was hoping for a call back… but I don’t think I was what he was expecting.”

Last time I had checked her ad on LA-Darlings.com to see if she was still in the life, the photos she’d put up were at least five years old and looked ten. I imagined that it could lead to some disappointment when her clients opened their hotel room doors.

“How much did he have?”

“I don’t know. I just knew he had to have more because if it was all he had left, he wouldn’t have given it to me.”