The Devil's Interval Page 2

  “And the name?”

  “Come on, Maggie,” she said. “Surely it hasn’t been that long since you had babies. What did you obsess about?”

  “Sleep. Getting back into a size eight. Flawless birth control.”

  “No, I mean about the babies?”

  “Oh, colic, poop, and naps.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “So, at our first meeting, we realized that we were talking about gas, gas, and more gas. Who’s got it? Who hasn’t? What do you do about it? And then, before lethal injections came along, executions took place.…”

  “In the gas chamber,” I said. “I get it.”

  “Right. And by the way, they still use the same puke-green room to do their dirty work. So, we decided we were the Gasworks Gang.”

  After my lunch with Eleanor, I assigned a writer to research a feature on the gang for Small Town. I sent Calvin Bright, my favorite photographer and willing sidekick during my debut days as an amateur sleuth after Quentin’s death, to shoot one of their meetings.

  He showed up, contact sheets in sweaty hand, and delivered nonstop commentary as Linda Quoc, Small Town’s art director, and I looked through the shots.

  “Those women are fine, fine, superfine,” he said.

  “They do very good work,” I agreed. “It’s thankless, but somebody’s got to do it.”

  “Oh, loosen up, Mags. I mean, that was one sexy group of broads.”

  “They’re all new moms, Calvin. Have a little respect. Plus, didn’t they look awful? Circles under their eyes and everything?”

  “I don’t care. All those hormones in one room, all that ‘fullness-of-womanhood’ shit, cooing over each other’s babies….”

  “Unbuttoning to breastfeed,” Linda added dryly.

  “Yeah,” said Calvin, “that too. Yummy icing on the cake. You know what? I think we ought to do a once-a-month follow-up for a while.”

  Linda and I exchanged glances. “Get out, Calvin,” I said. “You’ve got the mind of a lecher and the maturity of a twelve-year-old.”

  “And that,” said Calvin, on the way out the door, “is why you girls find me so irresistible. Plus, you know what they say, ‘once you’ve gone black….’”

  “No one says that, Calvin. Not one single real human being. Dream on,” I said. It was too late. He was gone. And the pleasant distraction of bickering with a real person instead of staring at a screen came to an end.

  But the Gasworks piece was a big hit for the magazine, and Eleanor and I became friends. So now, all these many months later, it was my turn to call for help. The Gasworks Gang, with their up-close-and-personal relationship with San Quentin, seemed like the perfect way to make sure my books got delivered to the Death Row Library.

  When Eleanor answered the phone, I explained my request.

  “Bring your books over,” she invited promptly. “We can have coffee and catch up. Besides, there’s somebody in our group who wants to meet you. I’ve been meaning to call.”

  “Advice on criminals or colic?” I asked.

  “Something weird has come up,” she said.

  “Weird?”

  “Isabella Fuentes is the member who wants to meet you. She’s got an innocent client on Death Row.”

  I laughed. “Hey, Eleanor, isn’t that what they all claim?”

  “I’m not kidding, Maggie. I don’t mean legally innocent; I mean really innocent.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” she said seriously. “It’s one of a kind. We could use some ink.”

  Interval No. 1 with Dr. Mephisto

  The night before we went to our first session with Jessie McQuist, MFT, PhD, and couples counselor to every other yuppie/buppie/guppie committed twosome in the East Bay, some miserable brew of guilt and dread gave me a killer case of insomnia. Beside me, Michael snored gently, deep in the untroubled sleep of not just the guiltless but also the noble and forgiving wronged spouse. At first he’d been furious, then cold and businesslike, and slowly he’d started to return to his normal, careless, affectionate self. But therapy! Yuck. That seemed likely to reignite the whole cycle of fire and ice. To distract myself, I focused on Dante’s second circle of hell, the one that was home to those who lusted. At least it was a cool club that would welcome me—Cleopatra was there, and Helen of Troy, and Guinevere. Beauties, queens, and me, a weak, slightly bored, and hassled dilettante writer-editor-mom. The irony, I realized, was that it hadn’t even been lust that had tempted me into the affair with my late boss. It was curiosity about someone who seemed so elegant and elusive. It was hero worship. It was a chance to see myself as something other than the mom on the Wednesday pickup for soccer practice. It was exciting to feel seductive, to make love in the middle of the afternoon, to have a secret. But of course it was also the secret that made me miserable. And the worst moment of my life rolled around, as I should have known it would, when Michael told me he knew. It was the morning after Quentin’s death, and we were jockeying for mirror and sink space in our bathroom, as we did every morning. I sniffled something about what a wonderful, irreplaceable editor and friend Quentin had been. And then Michael shut me up. “Was he a wonderful lover, too?” he asked. We were both facing the mirror, Michael shaving, his eyes cold and flat. “What do you mean?” I stammered. And then he told me. He knew. He’d known for a long time. He knew it was over, and he didn’t want to talk about it. Ever.

  And here we were, more than a year later, about to go sit on the couch of shame in some touchy-feely Berkeley shrink’s office, and I thought, “That really will be the second circle of hell.” And then my alarm went off.

  Near the end of our first therapy session, I had two realizations: Michael, who could be one tough, judgmental guy about people who did what he perceived as vague things for a living, had decided he liked, or at least trusted, Dr. McQuist. Go figure. The other insight was that I didn’t like her much at all. And that it was going to be oh so easy to morph her name from Dr. McQuist into Dr. Mephisto. Easy. And fun.

  Just looking at Jessie McQuist made my head hurt. Black, black, black hair tipped with gold highlights, an embroidered hot pink vest, purple Lycra pants. Blue fingernails. I don’t care how many initials she had after her name, I had a hard time taking a therapist seriously who had such a promiscuous relationship with color. The Craftsman bungalow that housed her office, lime-green cupola and all, should have tipped me off. Of course, I was having a hard time taking therapy seriously. Which became obvious in the first few minutes of our conversation.

  “Michael, Margaret,” she said, sitting cross-legged in her big chair, in that annoying way show-offy limber people do. Okay, okay, I get it! You do yoga.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” said Michael.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Weird to say, ‘fine,’ if we’re here for therapy,” I offered.

  “Nothing’s weird,” she said.

  I wanted to say that a lime-green cupola and blue fingernails on someone past the training-bra stage seemed pretty weird to me. Instead, I said, “Oh, you know, it’s like the Garrison Keillor joke about the Lutheran farmer who goes to the therapist every week, and the therapist asks how he is, and the farmer always says, ‘Can’t complain.’ And then they just sit there for fifty minutes.”

  More silence.

  Michael sighed and not so surreptitiously sneaked a look at his watch.

  “Are you Lutherans?” asked Dr. McQuist.

  This was hopeless. “No,” I tried to explain, “we’re SO not Lutherans, but the joke is that if he’s not going to complain or something, why is he there? He doesn’t get the point of therapy.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” asked Dr. McQuist. “To complain?” She took a sip from her big mug. At least it was black. Even from across the room, seated on her lavender, squishy couch, I could smell the tea. Musty, herbal, yuck. What’s wrong with coffee, anyway?

  “Maggie’s here to complain,” said Michael. “I’m h
ere because we had some…problems last year, and they keep whack-a-moling back up.”

  “Whack-a-mole?”

  I could see we were going to need a UN simultaneous translator to talk to Dr. McQuist.

  Michael gestured, as if he were mercilessly bringing a baseball bat on targets in front of him. “It’s a game. You try to hit the mole with a mallet, and he keeps disappearing into his burrow or whatever you call it. You whack him, and he keeps popping up again.”

  Dr. McQuist blinked. I could see the wheels turning. “Not that anyone does any hitting,” I said, hoping to whack-a-mole down a misguided line of inquiry about domestic violence.

  “I don’t know,” said Michael. “Josh popped Zach a pretty good one last night about whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher.”

  “Our sons,” I explained. “They’re eight and almost thirteen, and they don’t usually hit each other.” I felt my fingers creeping toward my phone, in that irresistible maternal need to just see their faces. “They’re very handsome,” I said. “I have photos, if you’d like to see them.”

  A tiny line appeared between Dr. McQuist’s eyes. “Another time, thanks.” No one spoke. “Okay,” she said. “Michael, why don’t you tell me what you meant about the—I think you called them ‘problems’—last year.”

  Michael complied, providing a longish but very lawyerly summary of last year’s events: my affair with Quentin Hart, Quentin’s murder, my perseverance investigating the murder, the risks I’d created for our sons, and the denouement, which endangered my life.

  Dr. McQuist listened. I thought I had explained all this on the phone, but oh well, I guess she can’t be expected to keep all her philandering-wife/murder-investigation couples sorted out.

  “Endangered,” I offered brightly. “But I’m still here. All’s well that ends well. Plus, our au pair, Anya, met a very nice doctor at the emergency room where I ended up, and they’re still dating.” I paused. “Off and on.”

  Dr. McQuist blinked. “He’s Indian,” I offered. I touched my forehead and then put two fingers up in back of my head, as Dr. Singh had done when he met me at the ER. “You know, ‘dots, not feathers,’ Subcontinent Indian.” Dr. McQuist waited.

  “I wonder if that’s offensive,” I said. “Do you think it is, if an Indian person says it to you?”

  Dr. McQuist blinked again, then turned to Michael.

  “All’s well? Is that how you’d sum things up, Michael?” she asked.

  Michael shifted on the couch, putting just a touch more distance between us. He shrugged. “Not from my perspective. But I may not have as finely developed a sense of happy endings as Maggie does. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise?” prompted Dr. McQuist.

  “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, spending time and money we don’t really have to spare,” Michael snapped. The ice man was back. I glanced over at Michael, but he stared resolutely ahead. The warm, relaxed man I had married kept disappearing into someone aloof and detached. Some days I felt as if our marriage had turned into a businesslike partnership of convenience. I wanted to wave my hand, asking Teach for permission to speak, but she was refusing to catch my eye.

  “Michael,” she began again, “you mentioned that things keep coming back up from those issues last year. Why don’t you tell Maggie what those things are? Just forget I’m here.”

  I could see Michael sizing up Dr. McQuist and the situation. This seemed gimmicky to him, I was willing to bet. On the other hand, this therapy had been his idea, he had scrupulously researched Dr. McQuist, and she had a number of very happy, unexpectedly effusive references among our own extended circle of pals. Straight, gay, happy, miserable, in transition, new relationships or old ones, everyone loved Dr. McQuist. That alone made me suspicious. But Michael was a careful consumer and he liked consensus. Plus, we were paying for the hour, so not giving her a chance felt like getting the plumber out to the house and then not inviting him to unclog the sink.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just tell her?”

  “Right,” said Dr. McQuist. “Talk to Maggie.”

  He settled back into the arm of the couch and faced me.

  “After your shenanigans last year, I thought we had an agreement.”

  “We did,” I said. “We do.”

  “No interruptions,” said Dr. McQuist. “Listen to what Michael is saying.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said meekly. “Sorry.”

  Michael turned to look at Dr. McQuist with something like wonder and admiration.

  “Thank you,” he said politely.

  “Our agreement was, first….” He raised a finger. “No more affairs. Not ever, ever. Ever. Second, you’ve taken on a full-time job, and you’re still—unless I missed something—a wife and mom, so no more investigating, no more poking your nose where it doesn’t belong. Just—oh, Christ—cut us some slack. Enjoy what you’ve got.”

  He sat back.

  “May I speak?” I asked Dr. McQuist.

  “Please.”

  “Michael, I don’t know how many ways to say it. The affair was a dumb, dumb, stupid mistake. You don’t have to worry it will ever happen again. Second, you’re jumping to conclusions about this Death Row story. You’re right, I’ve got a day job. And I like that job. I’m willing to go listen to the death-appeal mommies because I’ve done a story on them once, and maybe there’s a follow-up.”

  “Liar, liar, liar,” said Michael.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. McQuist said, “we have to end now.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Aside from a childhood fascination with Susan Hayward’s over-the-top performance in I Want to Live!, I’d never given much thought to the people who occupy Death Row. At the office, before I left to meet Eleanor and her Gasworks pal with the “innocent” client, I Googled up a little info.

  The condemned make up quite a crowd in our country. There are 3,565 of them in the United States: 3,517 men and forty-eight women. Many are mentally ill; some have IQs that would make great golf scores but are lousy intellectual equipment for life. Some are just plain wicked. Most are guilty—of one thing or another. But not every single one. Or at least that’s what the movies would have you believe—and according to Eleanor, one of the innocent was represented by a Gasworks member.

  I rang the doorbell at Eleanor’s just before noon. The spring bulbs were already showing some promise of color in her front flowerbed. The sun was doing its best, but March in San Francisco is still coat-and-gloves weather, even in the warm neighborhoods. The Inskeeps lived in leafy Forest Hills, an elegant but chilly part of the city, where old money and newer tech fortunes existed side by side. The Inskeeps’ elegance was somewhat compromised by the large bundle on the front steps awaiting diaper-recycling pickup.

  Eleanor flung the door open and pulled me inside. “Maggie! It’s great you’re here. Come in and warm up.”

  I followed her down the hall toward the living room, where I could hear sounds of chamber music drifting through the doors. Inside was a fire in the fireplace and a tray of coffee and pain au chocolat on the table.

  Eleanor steered me to the couch, where a woman dressed in head-to-toe red raised a mug in greeting. Eleanor said, “Maggie Fiori, meet Isabella Fuentes.” She gestured at the pot. “Help yourself. Peet’s. Good and strong.”

  I poured, stirred, and settled in. No one spoke for a moment. “This is such a wonderful room, Eleanor,” I said.

  She grinned. “This is it. The one room free of baby clutter, work papers, and Edgar’s Oakland A’s paraphernalia. I just need one room that feels like this.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “It’s the dining room in our house. Just one room….” I glanced at Isabella. Eleanor laughed. “Isabella can’t participate in this conversation. She’s so tidy, so perfect, and a single mom, so there’s no pile of Sports Illustrateds or old sweatshirts hanging around.” Isabella did, indeed, look perfect. Snug red T-shirt, red jeans, red tennies. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head and skewered with a red
pencil. The red was dramatic against her golden skin, glowing like a ripe Comice pear. She had the long limbs of a track star and Eurasian features. And while both Eleanor and I both had on lipstick, Isabella had what Calvin calls “twenty-minute” lips, carefully outlined in a darker color. She held a file on her lap, with not one messy spare piece of paper peeking out.

  “Okay,” I said. “Isabella, Eleanor hasn’t told me much. Why don’t you tell me about your client?”

  “How much do you know about death-penalty appeals?” she asked.

  “Very little. Just what I read in the piece we did on you all for Small Town. And what I’ve seen in the movies. I’m sorry. I should know more.”

  “Don’t apologize. Most people know just what you know. And frankly, we don’t talk about our work all that much with outsiders.”

  “How come?”

  Isabella sighed. “Where do you think ‘three strikes’ legislation came from? Most people think our system coddles criminals.”

  “In the Bay Area?”

  “The Bay Area is more liberal,” said Eleanor. “But it’s a finite piece of territory. Let’s remember,” she added, “what killed Rose Bird’s career on the California Supreme Court.”

  “She was recalled, because…” I began.

  “Because people knew she opposed the death penalty—and they didn’t like it.”

  “That’s our reality,” said Isabella. “People don’t like lawyers in general, but they especially don’t like people like us. They think we’re conscienceless, amoral hired guns defending the scum of the earth, and we’re spending their money to do it.”

  “Okay, that’s a basic question,” I said. “Is it all taxpayer money funding your work? Don’t private attorneys ever handle death-penalty appeals?”

  “Maggie,” said Eleanor. “Get real. Death-penalty appeals take years and years. Virtually no one is rich enough to retain counsel in a capital case.”