Love Her Madly (2 page)

Shit.

DATA NOT ENTERED
meant a file existed, but I'd have to deal with it on paper. My fault. It was taking an inordinate amount of time to get all the files entered into our computer system. That's because I figured my personal attention to each would be a good chance to separate out the cases that should be reinvestigated.

My first assistant—previous to the present one I'd hired myself—said, “Reinvestigated? How about we just burn all the files?”

That initial week on the job, each time I brought up a problem the advice was either
burn it, toss it, shred it,
or
lose it.
I fired that first assistant and just about everyone else. As the new crime lab director, I cleared the decks. Got rid of the lazy louts with their patronage jobs and restarted the engine with no-nonsense peace officers, disciplined investigators, and the most talented chemists I could scrounge—out of academia and, even better, the pharmaceutical companies. People who needed something more meaningful in their lives than collecting stock options. People who were willing to dedicate themselves to fighting crime and seeking justice. Whistle-blowers. People like me.

I made a lot of new enemies in addition to the enemies I'd made as a prosecutor in Florida and, before that, as a district attorney in the Bronx. But I figure those kinds of enemies were impotent to begin with, so why worry?

Once I'd gotten everything sorted out, I sat behind my top-of-the-line desk and took in my corner office above all of DC, and then I went in to have a talk with my director. I told him I wasn't meant for office work; I needed to be out in the field.

He immediately said, “Within the FBI, though.”

“Yes.”

I could see he was glad of that. Then he protested my leaving the lab but in such a way as to show me how much he'd appreciated my work. He said, “Poppy, you turned a sinking trawler—infested with a lot of rats, I might add—into one sleek nuclear-powered yacht.”

I said, “Thank you.”

“Did you have something specific in mind?”

“Yes.”

He smiled at me. “I'm listening.”

That's what I wanted to be sure of: him listening. “You know all those files I separated out, the ones that need a good district attorney to reinvestigate them? We need a full-time pseudo—district attorney.”

“You.”

“Yes.”

The man puts justice ahead of troublesome mechanics. He said, “Write out the job description and get it to me. Then I'll do what I have to do to make it official. Essentially, reassure everyone that the crime lab is now functioning perfectly. That there's nothing more you can bring to it and that other departments need Poppy Rice more.”

What a combination. Though he was a superb politician, he respected me.

“I'd like to keep some space here.”

“You got it.”

“And I want my assistant.”

“I could use her.”

“Everyone could use her.”

So now here I was, out in the field with my home base my sofa. I took another look at Rona Leigh's hands, I got up, put on a raincoat over my Victoria's Secret pajamas, a gift from a fellow whose name I no longer recall, and pushed my bare feet into sneakers.

FBI headquarters in Quantico looks like a space station. FBI headquarters in downtown DC looks like an extravagant art museum designed by I. M. Pei.

Our security guard said to me, “You really gotta tie those sneakers, Poppy, ma'am.”

I said, “Who's got time?”

He said, “I got all night. I'll tie 'em for you.”

I said, “Thanks, Bobby. I'll do it.” I bent down to tie the sneakers.

He never said a word about what I was now just noticing—I had a New Balance running shoe on one foot and a Nike tennis sneaker on the other.

I looked up at him from my squat position. “I put them on in the dark, all right?”

“What happens when you don't pay your electric.”

“Oh, shut up, Bobby.”

“Hope you didn't tip your manicure lady either.”

Bobby has a great gap-toothed smile.

I said, “Why don't you apply for a job as an agent, Bobby, you're so damned observant.”

He shrugged. “Security guards got to be observant too. Pay us to stay on our toes.”

I stood. His smile was gone. “Sorry. Didn't mean to condescend.”

He chose not to forgive me. He said, “Body gets used to it.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Least you people don't call me Boy no more.”

He'd started working as a security guard in 1957. He'd been fourteen but lied about his age. Had reached his full height, over six-two, so nobody questioned his statistics.

I went in, got the file on Rona Leigh, went back out, told Bobby I loved him, which I did, and dashed back home. Back in front of the tube again, I pressed play and looked at the ax murderer on the screen and then down at the mug shot of Rona Leigh Glueck tucked into the inside cover of the folder. She was seventeen the night Melody Scott and James Munter were murdered. She was scrawny and obviously still high as a kite when the picture was taken, though it was hours after she'd been brought in. Her thick hair was tangled. She hadn't had a chance to comb it after her bloody shower.

Rona Leigh Glueck had lived in prison for as long as she'd lived out of prison.

I fast-forwarded past the ads. The
Evening News
continued. As Dan interviewed her I found it hard to believe, just like everyone else, that this lovely soft-spoken woman with eyes as large and warm and brown as Bambi's was the same woman in the mug shot.

But that was because she had thrown off Satan and accepted Jesus as her savior.

Don't they all?

Rona Leigh was not a Mexican like the woman executed in 1862. She was white. And she was saying to Dan, “I do so appreciate this honor you have bestowed upon me, Mr. Rather. Letting me speak with you here on the TV in order for people to understand that I have been asked by Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior who has covered me in the armor of salvation, to pursue a very, very special mission in His Holy Name.”

I noted that she spoke these words with her eyes fixed deeply into the camera's lens while at the same time showing that fetching dimpled smile and raising her slender fingers in a small wave, a gesture of
Hello there, y'all.
She could do these three things all at once because a good born-again Christian must master such choreography in order to snooker people in.

Like everyone else on death row, Rona Leigh may have found Jesus, but her conversion wasn't the real reason why a cavalcade of white knights—from the pope to Jerry Falwell—were charging in to save her. The real reason was that she was a pretty woman. Chivalry had come into play as it always does with a pretty woman, arms full of bundles, trying to open a door. A man will knock himself out to help her. If the woman's ugly, she can have two broken arms and the same man will barge past and let the door slam in her face.

Ergo, if a pretty woman is an object placed on a pedestal, how does that square with murdering one in cold blood while two dozen people watch the killing, listening attentively for the death rattle, like they're second-graders waiting for instructions on how to make art out of macaroni. It didn't square. Let us take our lesson from Jesus, who stopped a gang of fellows from stoning an adulteress to death. An adulteress who was, I'll bet, pretty. Jesus was a gentleman.

So the upstanding men of religion using the example of Jesus Christ had all come banging on the door of the good governor of Texas, beseeching him to stop the public stoning of Rona Leigh Glueck. But the handsome good-ol'-boy governor found himself in a bind. There were seven other women on death row in his state, and all of them were black. How ever would he get around denying their pleas for clemency if he granted Rona Leigh the stay she requested?

Just a week or so ago my assistant and I were chatting about this very development. She'd said, “Hell, it's all feminist backlash. Just another way of keepin' us in our place. Let's save girl killers from execution because, after all, they have nothing in the brains department so they aren't responsible for their numbskull behavior. If the governor of Texas was a right-wing extremist instead of this new-style Republican we're seein'—happy-go-lucky instead of…” She searched for the words.

“Instead of a mannerless goon,” I suggested.

“Yeah, instead of an asshole—then Reba Lou might have a shot of slipping out of the noose.”

“Rona Leigh.”

“Whichever.”

I'd brought up Rona Leigh with my buddy Joe Barnow. Joe is chief field adviser at the Department of Guys, the ATF: Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He said, “Clemency for Jesus-finding is in violation of the first amendment, separation of church and state. Also, Poppy old girl, just who should get to decide if a prisoner really has found Jesus or is faking it?”

Then Joe became a redneck prisoner on death row. He said, “Ah b'lieve I have found Jesus. He's right there!” Joe pointed dramatically toward a big plant draped with twinkly lights standing in the corner of his living room, romantic decorator that he is.

I shaded my eyes and searched. “Where? Ah ain't seein' Jesus.”

He grabbed me and turned me to the plant. “Right yonder beside that mesquite tree. Ah found Him! Ah have found the Lord. Now set me free!”

I squinted, and then I smacked his shoulder. “Y'all did not find Him. That there's a possum!”

It was Spike, his cat.

Then I left our much-loved make-believe role-playing game behind because I got depressed. “Shit, Joe, imagine some African American dude wearing one of those little white caps telling a clemency board, ‘I have found Allah!' And all the board people mumbling to each other, ‘Says he found what?'”

He laughed. I didn't. Joe didn't know I was depressed. There are some aspects of my thoughts I keep from him.

All the same, here was Dan Rather talking to Rona Leigh Glueck as though she were a child instead of a condemned prisoner, convicted of murdering two people in cold blood, fighting for her life, and I was finding I understood his going all soft. It was not just those big eyes of hers blinking innocently, it was the pre-makeover Paula Jones matted bangs, a drooping lifeless clump of chemically permed, dyed-black curls. A style that makes a woman look defective and in need of a good man's charity, even though bad men see those same fake curls as a neon sign flashing the message:
Anybody want a blow job?

Dan Rather, as we all know, is the former kind of guy.

I leaned back into my sofa. We just don't have that hairdo in DC.

I looked to the file on my lap and took out the envelope with the crime scene photos, pictures of forms and objects—the bodies, the mattress, a phone—all coated with dark red blood.

In a far corner untouched were ten beer cans, eight down, two upright, a balled-up pair of socks among them. I looked for some forensic notes. None were in reference to what I guessed—that the victims had set up a makeshift bowling alley before they were killed, the game interrupted just after one of them left a seven-ten split. They'd been playing before they would have gone ahead and had sex—just before they would be murdered—rolling the ball from the mattress to their tenpins. Reminded me of Joe pretending to be a prisoner, with me jumping right in as straight man, the kind of game
we
played before settling in.

At a murder scene, one element of the horror and gore, the pathos, is what causes maybe one tear to leap to our eyes before we can head the rest off.

I went back to the bodies. One didn't really look like a body; its torso had been axed flat. That was Melody, the picture taken after the ax had been removed.

Dan Rather distracted me. I looked up again. He was wishing Rona Leigh well. She smiled calmly, gave that little wave, and then Dan said good night to his audience, looking completely abashed as if he couldn't understand how anyone would want to see his sweet little guest dead.

I turned off the TV. In the light of the streetlamp—I don't have any sort of blinds yet—I polished the fingernails on the other hand while I mused on it all. I was waving that hand in the air when I saw a naked man standing in front of me. Not entirely naked: The dial on his watch glowed green. He said, “You intend to get any sleep at all tonight?”

I said, “What in the world are you doing here?”

“You invited me.” He glanced at the green dial. “And about six hours ago we made love.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot. I'm sorry, Joe.”

The pieces of furniture in my living room are a sofa to sit on and a coffee table to put my feet up. Plus the TV. I patted the cushion next to me. Joe sat down.

When Joe Barnow's agents aren't ferreting out smugglers and drug lords, they're shooting and firebombing babies in Waco and Idaho with the help of the FBI, not my section. Joe says when a criminal resists arrest, threatens his agents with guns, lobs
grenades
at them, the responsibility for the repulsive results of the measures required to protect themselves lies with the criminals.

He says, “If those people want to hide behind their babies' cribs while they're trying to kill ATF agents, they're the ones who cause the deaths of the innocents, not us. Rules of engagement. You want to engage us, learn the rules. Your choice, whether to be compliant or hostile, and if you pick hostile, get ready to find out that your house isn't your castle after all.”

He doesn't say,
And I drink too much so I can keep saying shit like this. But then I still can't live with myself so I drink some more.
The man is a mess. I don't hold it against him.

He put his feet up next to mine on the coffee table. I glanced at his lap. His relaxed state of affairs was too precious.

He glanced at my lap, too.

“Whose file?”