The Devil's Interval Read online

  Advance Praise for

  The Devil’s Interval

  “Murder and music, discord and harmony, guilt and innocence, domesticity and passion, smooth talk and rough sex: In The Devil’s Interval—Linda Lee Peterson’s virtuoso second novel—journalist-sleuth Maggie Fiori scores all the notes. Maggie, like the book, is smart, stylish, and surprisingly steamy.”

  — JON JEFFERSON (Jefferson Bass)

  New York Times bestselling crime writer

  “Smart and sexy, with the schemes of high society on full display, The Devil’s Interval takes readers on a tour of everyone’s favorite city, San Francisco. As Maggie Fiori attempts to solve this intricate mystery, what will happen to her damaged marriage? You’ll be turning pages to discover the answers.”

  — NAOMI HIRAHARA

  Edgar Award-winning author of the Mas Arai mysteries

  “The Devil’s Interval is an entertaining mystery, and shines with crisp prose, layered characters, and a gripping plot.”

  — JONNIE JACOBS

  bestselling author of the

  Kate Austen and Kali O’Brien mystery series

  “An intelligent and gripping novel. Maggie Fiori is a witty, feisty protagonist, and Linda Lee Peterson deftly weaves a compelling tale of how far a mother will go to save her child. The Devil’s Interval is a roller-coaster ride through the streets and alleys of San Francisco that will evoke Robert Parker’s Spenser novels with a dash of Janet Evanovich. Get out the flashlight. You’ll be up late.”

  — ROBERT DUGONI

  New York Times bestselling author of The Conviction

  Praise for

  Edited to Death

  “Strong focus, admirable prose, and a nifty story line.”

  —Library Journal

  “Brave, if blithely arrogant, character Maggie Fiori [is] a thirtysomething something Oakland writer/know-it-all sleuth/Volvo-driving wife and mom who solves the murder of her boss, the urbane editor of a chichi regional magazine.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

  “If you are a Susan Isaacs fan, you will love Linda Lee Peterson’s journalist-turned-sleuth, Maggie Fiori. This is a San Francisco and Oakland story with sparks flying as wisecracking Fiori, with her razor-sharp wit and rampant curiosity, sets out to find out who killed her editor boss. I couldn’t put the book down. A very satisfying read for mystery lovers.”

  — JACQUELINE WINSPEAR

  New York Times bestselling author of the

  award-winning Maisie Dobbs mysteries

  Learn more about Linda Lee Peterson at

  www.lindaleepeterson.com

  THE DEVIL’S INTERVAL

  By

  Linda Lee Peterson

  Copyright © 2013 by Linda Lee Peterson

  This book is a work of fiction. With the exception of a few musicians, names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Prospect Park Books

  969 S. Raymond Avenue

  Pasadena, California 91105

  www.prospectparkbooks.com

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution www.cbsd.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Peterson, Linda Lee.

  The Devil’s Interval / by Linda Lee Peterson.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-938849-12-1

  1. Mothers--Fiction. 2. Murder--Investigation--Fiction. 3. San Francisco

  (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.E8434D48 2013

  813’.6--dc23

  2013017922

  Cover design by Howard Grossman.

  For Ken Peterson, my toughest and kindest critic

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Afterword: The Girl in the Black Hat

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  A few minutes before Grace Plummer died, she remembered that someone other than the regulars at the Crimson Club had called her Amazing Gracie. She was drifting, conscious of the sweat-sticky leather upholstery underneath her, vaguely wondering about the faint dome light overhead. What did it illumine, there in the back seat? Lumen, luminous, illumination…. Other, disconnected thoughts floated in and out—who had sung the “Evening Benediction” in Hansel and Gretel at the opera last season? “When at night I go to sleep/Fourteen angels watch do keep.” And was it cinnamon or something else with a “c”—cloves, cardamom—on top of the tiny holiday pastries her grandmother made? She didn’t really struggle for the answers to these questions. She felt a pleasant little disconnect, like breathing deeply of nitrous oxide; feeling pain, but not really caring about what hurt or why. Or who was doing the hurting. But it was a surprise, wasn’t it? The one with the cruel hands. And then, she remembered—it was cardamom, for sure. With that memory came the image of her grandmother, tall, shoulders back, one beautiful white braid wound around her head, teasing her, “Come, try one more, Amazing Gracie, just one more bite of the eplekake.” And then, she felt hands on her head, like her grandfather’s blessing at bedtime, and she was gone.

  CHAPTER 1

  Here’s a piece of useful fashion advice: Don’t wear a metal underwire bra if you’re visiting San Quentin Prison. They’ll turn you away at the jailhouse door, when the underwire sends the metal detector into overdrive. And you can’t just take the bra off, because braless ladies are not allowed inside. Those are just a couple of the things I learned when I found myself in the middle of an attempt to spring an innocent man from Death Row.

  It all began when I took a break from a bookshelf purge in our family room, slapped the dust and stray dog hair from my hands, poured a cup of coffee, and sat down with The Wall Street Journal. Love that paper. Their editorials suck, since they perversely take political sides in opposition to my own, but wow, what great writing. The WSJ goes in for stubbornly conservative editorials, whereas I, a journalistic giant myself as editor of San Francisco’s trendy, superficial, but oh-so-readable city magazine, Small Town, am an unreconstructed, knee-jerk liberal. Sitting there, surrounded b
y bags and boxes of dusty hardbacks and paperbacks that were slated to go directly to the book drive at our sons’ school, I began reading a front-page story about publishers sending remaindered books to prisons. Inmates, with time on their hands and a less-than-great selection on the prison library shelves, regularly write to publishers and ask for their overstock to be donated. “Most grievously word-hungry,” read the Journal, “are the Death Row inmates with their segregated, pitifully stocked library.”

  I lowered the paper and surveyed the family room floor. Our German shepherd, Raider, apparently exhausted from watching me work, had fallen asleep in the midst of the mess. Books, books, and more books. Bags and boxes of books. “Hey, babies,” I said softly. “You’re going to jail.”

  Within a few minutes, I had a polite community affairs officer at San Quentin on the phone.

  “Bags of books,” he said patiently. “You want to bring me bags of books?”

  “Right,” I said. “For the Death Row Library.”

  He sighed. “Wall Street Journal article?”

  “Right again,” I said.

  “Prison,” my husband, Michael, corrected me that evening when I told him where our extra books were going. “Jail’s where you go to wait, prison’s where you end up. There’s a technical explanation, but it’s more than you need to know.” We were dawdling over coffee, enjoying the half hour between post-dinner and hardcore homework nagging. Though our three-story, sixty-plus-year-old rambling house teetered on the edge of permanent disorder, the dining room somehow managed to rise above the detritus of sports paraphernalia, pieces of electronics, and Raider’s innumerable chew toys everywhere else in the house. Maybe there just weren’t enough surfaces to clutter. Deep, deep forest-green walls seemed to take the noise down a notch, and my grandmother’s chandelier sparkled soft light onto the table. We ate there every evening, a family agreement to slow down and feel civilized at least once a day.

  “Want to split that last brownie?” I asked Michael. “And what does a tax lawyer know about jail or prison anyway?”

  He pushed the plate with the lonely brownie my way. “All yours,” he said. “Where do you think tax evaders go?”

  “Congress,” I said. “Maybe the White House. Corner office in some Fortune 500 company.”

  “Very amusing, Maggie. Did those bleeding-heart criminal-defense Gasworks chicks put this idea in your head?”

  “They did not,” I said indignantly. “I read an article in The Wall Street Journal. But Gasworks, that’s a great idea. I’ll bet they can cut through some of this red tape for me.” The Gasworks Gang is an ad hoc group of stay-at-home mommy-lawyers who handle death-penalty appeals. Since the community affairs officer at San Quentin had been less than enthusiastic about my proposal to personally stock the shelves with my bags of books, I knew I’d need some insider help getting access.

  “I know the Dewey Decimal System,” I’d burbled over the phone. “My junior year I worked as a library aide at St. Agnes High School.”

  “Well, now, Mrs. Fiori,” he began, “you have to understand that we have procedures,” which roughly translated into, “Okay, lady, drop your books at the gate, get on with your sweet suburban life, and keep your friggin’ Dewey Decimal System to yourself.”

  Oddly enough, Michael raised that very question.

  “Maggie, why can’t you just drop the books at the guard gate? You don’t have to turn this into ‘Avon calling’ on Death Row, do you?”

  I was silent.

  “Cara?” prompted Michael, “what are you up to?” He used Italian endearments primarily when he felt I wasn’t listening to him.

  “I’m just curious,” I said. “I’ve lived in the Bay Area almost twenty years and I’ve never been to San Quentin.”

  “It’s not a tourist attraction,” he said. “That’s Alcatraz.”

  “Well, I know.” I vacillated. “This whole thing about books and—”

  “And felons. Killers,” Michael completed my sentence.

  “Books and desperate people,” I said. “It interests me. Maybe there’s a story.”

  Michael sighed. “Well, maybe. But they’re not going to let you take a little library cart around so you can interview these guys. Which is,” he muttered, “a big relief to me.”

  I waited a moment. “Are you telling me not to deliver the books, Michael?”

  His face went blank. “Certainly not,” he said. “Entirely your decision.”

  “Thank you,” I said formally. “Just clarifying.” I stood and began clearing dinner plates. Time to leave the room before the chill in the air froze us both into familiar conflicts. Our marriage had been tested the last year or so, and it had been my fault. Entirely. Completely. And not a day went by that I didn’t regret a series of moral missteps, beginning with temporarily abandoning the whole “forsaking all others” thing, continuing through an inadvertent run at ruining Michael’s career, and ending with imperiling a few lives, including my own. I did, to be perfectly fair, unsnarl the murder of my boss (and former lover) at the magazine along the way.

  Since that series of misadventures, I had become painfully aware that the life Michael and I had made together, which once seemed relatively easy to navigate, had become strewn with hidden ordnance. In what felt like an endless loop, I relived every dim-witted detour I had taken off the moral high road. Turns out there’s no page in the Dick Tracy Crimestoppers Notebook warning amateur sleuths about collateral damage to marriages caused by adultery or sleuthing or, worse yet, both. Which led me to remember that we’d decided to join the rest of the Bay Area’s middle-class, overly self-scrutinizing couples in marriage therapy. Our first session was coming up and, all in all, I would have preferred to have an encounter with the Brazilian wax specialist.

  Still, before the all-too-familiar chill had hit our conversation, Michael had innocently planted the Gasworks Gang idea in my head, and it seemed like precisely the access I might need. I had discovered the group via Edgar “the Invincible” Inskeep, a ruthless and very successful criminal attorney. We’d met when Michael introduced him to our friend, and my former managing editor, Glen. It was the climax of my annus horribilis when Glen confessed to murdering our former boss, Quentin Hart, the late, great—but not particularly nice—editor of Small Town. Edgar, in turn, had introduced me to his wife, also a criminal attorney. Unlike her money-grubbing husband, who defended drug dealers and society batterers for big bucks, Eleanor Inskeep was a public defender. Like many other women, when she became a mom, she looked for more flexible ways to run her professional life. She began doing death-penalty appeals and found it was satisfying but lonely work. To her surprise, she kept bumping into other new moms who were doing the same kind of work—and feeling the same way. Ninety percent of the time, they found themselves researching and writing, all alone by the computer and the phone. No more offices full of gossipy colleagues willing to dish fellow members of the criminal bar or commiserate when the same clients showed up for one, two, and then three strikes. Even your clients don’t call—or at least, not often. And when they do, it’s collect.

  In the process of thanking Edgar profusely for mitigating Glen’s troubles, I’d made one of those “anything I can do for you” offers we sometimes live to regret.

  “Yeah,” he said, “take my wife out to lunch. She’s going stir-crazy at home with the new baby, and she’s taken up with a posse of other new moms, death-penalty types. I think they’re up to no good.”

  Eleanor was delighted to go out for lunch, especially when I dispatched Anya, our live-in Norwegian art student/au pair, to babysit.

  “Lunch?” she said. “And you’re sending a babysitter? You’re my new best friend.”

  She explained Gasworks to me over sand dabs and chardonnay at Tadich’s. Tadich’s is a long, wooden bar and boothy, clubby-looking San Francisco fish house where they put mashed potatoes in the tartar sauce and the waiters are all old enough to have been honorably discharged after the War of 1812.

/>   “Hope it’s not too noisy,” I said when we sat down.

  Eleanor waved her hand at the room. “This is what I miss. The sound of adults eating and drinking.”

  “So, tell me about Gasworks. What is it and why is it?”

  “It’s a cross between a professional interest group and a new mom survivor society,” she said. “A whole bunch of us criminal-defense types became new moms all at once. You remember what that’s like, right?”

  I nodded. “More or less. It fades or blurs or something. Or I guess the species would die out.”

  “Right,” said Eleanor. “Exhaustion, isolation, days and nights on end when you can’t figure out if you’ll ever do a productive grownup thing again. And then you’re just brought to your knees by this helpless little tyrant you worship.”

  “Been there,” I said.

  “But then,” she continued, warming to her soapbox, “you’re a trained professional, you’re a criminal-defense lawyer. So you’re trying to hold on to your self-respect and bring some money in, so you agree to accept death-penalty appeals.” She buttered her sourdough bread with more vigor than necessary.

  “More isolation?”

  “No kidding. It takes months and years, and the only people you talk to have bad news and horrible stories. Investigators who keep turning up tales of hellish childhoods, social workers who want to let you know that your client’s mother just died and that her deathbed wish was that you ‘take care of her boy.’”

  “Holy shit,” I said softly.

  Eleanor’s eyes brimmed. “I was nursing Tyler when I got that particular call from the social worker.” She swallowed. “I looked down at my son and thought: Once upon a time, my awful, terrible, pathetic, dumb ass violent client was somebody’s baby, just like Tyler. Once upon a time, he was innocent.” She took a gulp of wine. “Plus, you know, all that postpartum emotional stuff. I was falling apart. That’s when I got on the phone and started calling around to my old buddies in the Women Defenders.”

  “Women Defenders? They sound like superheroes.”

  She laughed. “Well, we think we are. It’s a bunch of lefty criminal-defense lawyers from all over the state. We’re the daughters of the women who did sit-ins at Berkeley and Columbia. Anyway, within a few days, I’d hauled together a few of us who were new moms and did death-penalty appeals. And that’s how the Gasworks Gang got its start.”