Guilty Wives (21 page)

I SAT WAITING
in the visitation room, watching the female prisoners interacting with their children and siblings and spouses. It was hard to watch. Hard to watch couples wanting desperately to embrace but being limited by the rule of
contact minimale,
nothing more than a brief kiss upon entry and departure. Hard to watch mothers being pried away from their kids at the end of a session. Hard to listen to the agonizing wails of small children who didn’t understand why Mommy couldn’t come home with them.

These women had it rough. The vast majority of them were inside because of drugs or because of the man they were with. Most of them lacked a high school education. Many of them were illiterate. Most of them would get out of prison with little hope of making it and would end up addicted again, or they would commit another crime, or both.

My visitor was late, so my eyes dropped back down to the newspaper I was reading. We usually got the French papers a day late, and the American papers two or three days after publication. But it made no difference to us prisoners. The papers were our only consistent source of news, so the information was current as far as we were concerned.

I was reading a
USA Today
from three days ago, an article on a guy I once knew named Damon Kodiak.

Damon had been pushing a film for several years, without any takers in Hollywood.
Der Führer
would be a controversial movie, to say the least. A biopic of Adolf Hitler that explored in depth his childhood, his friendships, his relationship with Eva Braun. A sympathetic portrait of a man whom history regarded with little sympathy.

Hollywood had flatly said no. Kodiak had a concept, but he didn’t have money. Still, he didn’t stop. Over the last eighteen months he’d managed to scrape together financing—private money—and finally made the film. His first time behind the camera, also starring in the lead role. Written by, directed by, and starring Damon Kodiak. It would be his
Passion of the Christ,
or it would be a colossal flop.

Last weekend,
Der Führer
had opened in the United States with a box-office gross of seventy-two million dollars. It was the biggest opening of Damon Kodiak’s career and perhaps signaled his rebirth at age forty-eight. The movie would be opening soon in Europe, where it was projected to set box-office records.

So our lives had taken slightly divergent paths since our night together in Monte Carlo.

“Sorry I’m late.” Joseph Morro, the Paris correspondent for
The New York Times,
dropped his satchel on the table and pulled out a notepad. “Thanks for agreeing to the interview.”

“I agreed to talk to you,” I said.

Morro didn’t seem to catch the distinction. He looked down at my newspaper. “Reading about your boyfriend, I see.” He didn’t try to conceal his sarcasm. He’d made it pretty clear in the daily blog he wrote during the trial that, like most everyone else, he found it utterly implausible that a gal like me would have spent the night on a yacht with Damon.

“I’m innocent,” I said to him. “And I intend to prove it at my appeal. I will find the real killer if it’s the last thing I do.”

He cocked his head. “Great. Now can we start the interview?”

“I didn’t agree to an interview. I agreed to talk to you.”

“You agreed—” Morro drew back, replaying the words. “You’re not going to let me ask you questions?”

“Now you’re catching on, Joe. Here’s my quote for you: I’m innocent. I intend to prove it at my appeal. I won’t rest until I find the real killer.” I stood up from the bench. “Have a safe trip back.”

“Abbie, c’mon. There’s nothing for me to print.”

But he’d print it. These guys were starving for news on the Monte Carlo Mistresses. It would be a nice lead-in for a story on the upcoming appeal. It wasn’t much, but it was more than any other reporter had from me.

And for my purposes, it was all I needed to do.

IN THE WARDEN’S
office, the phone receiver remained in its cradle. The government-issued cell phone rested on the warden’s desk as well.

No, this was a call the warden, Boulez, would take on his private cell phone.

“You know why I’m calling, don’t you?” the man said to Boulez.

“I believe I do.” Boulez had the Internet open on his computer, to the lead story by the
Times
correspondent in Paris, Joseph Morro. The headline alone said it all:
ELLIOT: “I WILL NOT REST UNTIL I FIND THE KILLER.”

A defiant Abbie Elliot, proclaiming her innocence to
The New York Times
and vowing to prove it at her appeal.

“How did you let that happen?” the man asked.

“I cannot keep reporters away,” Boulez whispered into his cell phone. “And I cannot control what she says to them.”

“You’re the goddamn warden, Boulez. You control
everything.
So control
her.
”

Boulez looked at the photos on his ego wall, a shot of him receiving an award for distinguished service from the Minister of Justice and Liberty. He saw his reflection in the glass and looked away.

“We have tried,” he said. “She is…exceptionally resistant to persuasion.”

“‘Exceptionally resistant’?” The man scoffed. “Then be exceptionally persuasive.”

“I will…evaluate our methods. Perhaps—”

“Perhaps,” the man said, “there is an alternative to a confession. So that we’d never hear from Abbie Elliot again?”

Boulez paused a beat. The thought had crossed his mind, of course. “But now?” he said to the man. “After she just gave this…defiant statement to the press? It would be more than just a coincidence if something happened to her now. And a suicide would be impossible to believe.”

The man was quiet a moment. “She probably knows that,” he said. “That’s probably why she said those things to the reporter. To insulate herself.”

“Perhaps so,” Boulez conceded. “She is smart.”

“Then you’ll have to be smarter, Boulez, won’t you?”

Boulez exhaled slowly. “There are still two months remaining before her appeal.”

“I don’t
have
two months, Boulez. Which means you don’t, either. Get this done right away. I want that confession yesterday. And if you can’t do that, then take care of the problem the other way.”

The line went dead. Boulez pinched the bridge of his nose. Abbie hadn’t cracked yet, hadn’t confessed and dropped her appeal. And he was running out of time.

But surely he could think of something.

“THE SUITE WAS
like a square,” I said to Linette, as she sat on one of the beds in the infirmary. She had a laceration on her arm. The nurse, Leonore, had treated it and now I was wrapping it with a bandage. “Winnie and I were in the front room. Bryah and Serena stayed in the back room, by the balcony.”

“How long would it take?” Linette asked.

I thought for a moment. “Not long to get to Winnie’s and my room. That was right by the front door. Pull out some Kleenex that Winnie had used from the trash for her mucus. Grab one of my used Q-tips for the earwax. Pull hair out of our brushes. Find something with our fingerprints. Two, three minutes?” I estimated. “Then do the same in the other bedroom—Bryah and Serena’s bedroom. Then plant the evidence at the crime scene.”

“But why didn’t they get any DNA from Bryah? Serena, yes, but not Bryah?”

I shrugged. We could never figure why there was no evidence planted at the crime scene that implicated Bryah. The three of us, dead to rights; Bryah, nothing.

“Maybe…they only got to the first room,” Linette suggested. “Yours and Winnie’s. Maybe they were afraid to stay longer than that.”

I shrugged. That made some sense, of course. Whoever it was, not wanting to linger and be caught, might just pop into the first bedroom and then get out. But that logic had one obvious flaw. “That would explain why they had nothing from Bryah,” I agreed. “But then how did they have forensic evidence of Serena?”

Linette shook her head. She didn’t have an answer. Neither of us did.

The dimensions of the infirmary reminded me of my high school gym, except the ceilings were very low here. It was exceptionally bright—so bright that I had to squint every time I walked in. But I welcomed the contrast from the dreariness.

There were twenty-five beds on one side and a cage on the other side, where the prisoners waited to be seen. On one of the short sides of the rectangle was
la pharmacie,
the room with medical supplies and prescription drugs. On the other short side was the room where Linette and I were right now—a secure area, big enough for five patients, usually reserved for special cases, such as people with contagious maladies or those who posed security risks. If the room was otherwise vacant, as it was now, we used it for overflow.

Up in the corner of the room, a security camera monitored us. This room, with its wall of thick glass separating us from the main room, its privacy blinds, and a door that locked from the inside, could otherwise be pretty private if not for the surveillance camera. A fortress, actually. That thought drifted in and out of my mind.

“Abbie, I need ampicillin.” The nurse, Leonore, was in the main room, treating a prisoner with a bladder infection. She spoke passable English and liked to practice it on me. “Can you re—receive it for me?”

“I can
retrieve
it for you,” I said with a smile. She laughed at her mistake. She handed me the key to the pharmacy. This was, as a technical matter, strictly forbidden. Only doctors or licensed nurses could enter the room. But as a practical matter, the nurse couldn’t afford to spend her time going back and forth to the drug room. The infirmary was notoriously understaffed. We were lucky if even a single nurse showed up on a daily basis; a doctor came, at most, every other day. The waiting line to get treated usually went out the door. So time was precious, and if an assistant could be trusted to run back and forth to
la pharmacie,
so much the better.

That was a big “if,” though. Letting a prisoner near drugs was like letting a bank robber into Fort Knox. So Leonore was saying something here by trusting me.

You took what good you could in here. It didn’t come often.

After I delivered the ampicillin to Nurse Leonore, waited for her to use it, then returned it to the pharmacy and signed it back in—all under the watchful eye of a security camera—I returned to Linette in the secured room.

She was done now, her bandage wrapped. She wagged a finger at me.

“That’s what you have to figure out,” she said to me in French, the language in which she felt more comfortable. “You have to figure out why they had evidence of Serena, but not Bryah.”

SEVENTEEN HUNDRED HOURS,
or five in the evening, was the time for “lockup.” With very few exceptions, all prisoners were required to be in their cells from then until morning. For
la compte,
the nightly accounting of inmates before nightfall, we had to stand at attention in the middle of our cells for the guards to see us through the hatch and count us. Usually, somewhere along the way they would miscount and have to start over. Once we were all accounted for, dinner was served.

After we were counted and recounted, we settled in and waited for dinner. I watched with indifference as a rat the size of a Chihuahua poked its head out from under one of the beds and then retreated. He must have heard about dinner, too.

“Lexie,” Josette called out. I wasn’t sure what Josette had done to become the unofficial leader of our cell, but the leader she was. She was telling Lexie, the deranged arsonist who never left the cell, that she had to find the spot from which the rat had entered the cell and plug the hole. All along the intersection of the floor and the wall, we had stuffed newspaper, pages from magazines, or, if we had nothing else, balled-up underwear or T-shirts in the cracks.

Lexie jumped off the bunk, pulled some newspaper out of the trash, and crawled under the bed. Lexie was afraid of leaving her cell—hell, she was afraid of her own shadow—but the rats and roaches didn’t faze her.

“Where’s Mona?” I asked. Mona, the only overweight one of our bunch, usually ate her own dinner and then some of ours.

“La bibliothèque.”
The library, Josette explained. Mona worked there, and tonight a new shipment of books had come in that would require the removal of some old periodicals to make room.

The prisoners with the most privileges—or, if you prefer, the drug dealers—were the “porters” who delivered the food on wheeled carts. They knocked on the door and we held out our tin plates, on which they dropped our meat and vegetable and starch, plus juice or water. Usually a quarter loaf of French bread as well. And then some extra goodies, like a hash cigarette or pills, for those who had made that purchase.

They slipped the hash to Josette tonight, not even trying to conceal it from the rest of us. I retreated to the corner with my plate of mystery meat, green beans, and something brown that could have been sweet potatoes or maybe baked beans. Another gourmet meal
chez
JRF.

At midnight, the door latch popped open. My heartbeat fluttered. It was Lucy. Another night of torture.

We walked in silence, the two of us. Lucy kept a distance behind me. I wasn’t handcuffed but she’d frisked me, as always, so she knew I wasn’t carrying a weapon.

She was humming to herself. Having a grand time. After descending the stairs, we walked back through several barred doors to the center of the prison—to get from any block or wing to another, you first had to return to the center—and turned toward H wing.

This was different. Usually we went to the basement.

Each wing was secured by a guard at the intersection of the wing and the center. If there was a way out on the other side of the wing, such as H wing’s exit into the prison yard, there was a guard at that end, too. Always in a booth with bulletproof glass and a weapons stash.

Lucy removed her pepper spray and handed it to the guard in the booth. Same for her handcuffs. That was also different. I’d never seen her surrender these weapons.

Where were we going?

It was sickly hot in the corridor, the humidity lingering from the scorching temperatures today. And my nerves were twitching. It wasn’t like I enjoyed being subjected to the “scarecrow” or the “chair” or the pepper spray—but at least I knew what to expect. Something was different tonight, and I doubted it would be a pleasant surprise.

We stopped at room H-11. When the door opened, I saw a cot and a card table, on top of which was a bottle of vodka and three paper cups.

And Sabine, the head guard, standing in one corner with a grin on her face.