Guilty Wives (23 page)

I STOOD AT THE
door of my cell at twelve forty-five, standard operating procedure when moving about the prison. Stand at your cell fifteen minutes before your assignment—work, library trip, visitation, whatever—and wait for the guard to escort you where you needed to go. My shift at the infirmary started at one o’clock.

My brain was buzzing from what Jeffrey had told me this morning. Not the divorce, of course, but his comments about my behavior at the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel on the afternoon before President Devereux’s murder. It was a slip of the tongue, in the heat of the worst kind of argument—one between unhappy spouses, in which the rawest of emotions surface. Jeffrey hadn’t even realized he’d said it. He apparently had no idea what he’d just revealed to me.

I thought about it over and over. Yes, the evidence presented at trial established that we had spent some time at that hotel swimming pool. But there weren’t any photos of us. Zero. And there wasn’t any mention of us flirting with anyone, or of my wearing a bikini. Nobody had said one word about how we conducted ourselves at that pool.

No. Jeffrey would have had to see these things himself, personally.

Jeffrey was in Monte Carlo that day.

I didn’t know how to process that information. I didn’t know what, exactly, it meant. He never told anybody, that much was clear. In fact, he’d lied about it. But what did it mean? I hadn’t, for even one second, considered the possibility that Jeffrey—my
husband
—no, it couldn’t be. No.

No?

All I knew for sure was that certain avenues, previously closed to me, were now open. I needed to talk to Winnie.

I was handcuffed and frisked and escorted to G wing. I gave my ID number to the guard stationed there and then walked the corridor unescorted. I passed a door on my right, which led down to the underground parking garage for the prison staff, accessible only by a key card and monitored by a guard at a secure booth. I walked past another door that I had been told was a fire escape. I stopped at the red line before the infirmary, where another guard was stationed in a secure booth, complete with a weapons arsenal, security cameras looking inside the infirmary, the whole thing.

“Hi, Abbie.” The guard was named Cecile. I liked her. One of the decent ones who treated us civilly, either out of compassion or because she realized that we were easier to manage when treated with some measure of respect.

After a loud, echoing buzz, the door marked
INFIRMERIE
released with a hiss.

I squinted into the bright light and fought off the impulse to gag when I inhaled the wretched smell of bodily secretions and powerful disinfectant. It was like not showering for a week but bathing yourself in cologne. Like riding in a cab in New York City.

The beds were filled, as usual. Pack two thousand people into a space reserved for roughly half that many and even the most mundane virus or malady becomes an epidemic. Plus, being sick gave people an excuse to get out of their cells. But it cost them. Unless you were really sick, getting the okay to visit the infirmary was like everything else around here. It wasn’t free.

I saw Winnie at the far end, wrapping a bandage on an Arab woman’s foot. Her shift was ending. The warden didn’t allow us to communicate, so they tried to arrange our shifts so we never worked together. It wasn’t a perfect system, but typically we only saw each other, as we did now, in passing.

“Hey.” She whispered in her lovely British accent. Her fingers touched mine. “I heard what happened. You okay?”

Everyone had heard about Linette. She was a favorite around here. “Living the dream,” I said. “You?”

She wasn’t in the mood for humor. “Movie night,” she whispered. “I’ll save you a seat. Love you.”

Movie night. I would tell Winnie tonight. I would tell her what Jeffrey had inadvertently blurted out to me. She could help me figure this out.

“Love you, too. Get some rest.” Our fingertips released.

I quickly went about my assignments. This job, the chance to help people, was about the only thing propelling me forward now. I did some bandage wraps. I helped flush some minor wounds. I fetched some drugs from the pharmacy across the room for the nurse. An hour passed. Two o’clock was a shift change for the guards, and out the window I could see various cars driving up the ramp from the underground garage. Pulling up to the large main gate. Swiping their key cards to open it. Waving to the attendant, who was raised ten feet off the ground in a fortified booth. Driving off to freedom, once the gate opened.

Another half hour later, I heard the commotion as the hydraulic door buzzed open. I had my back turned to the entrance. I was helping a nurse dress a laceration wound to an inmate’s rib cage when one of the nurses shouted,
“Urgence!”

Emergency. Not uncommon. We had a suicide a week in JRF. I turned as guards and a nurse wheeled in an inmate on a gurney.

“Oh, God, no.” I dropped the gauze pads I was holding. I started running before the realization had fully formed in my head. The shock of black hair hanging below the gurney. The look on the face of one of the nurses, who had turned back from the commotion to look at me, to see if it had registered with me who the new patient was. Everyone knew the four of us as a group, after all.

“Winnie,” I whispered.

The guards saw me coming and restrained me. I fought them, tried to break through them, as the doctor worked feverishly on Winnie. I cried out as the guards forced me to the ground, slamming my head against the tile.

This was too much. Overload. Not Winnie, too. Not
Winnie.

I fought and I screamed and I pleaded. The doctor stopped working on her and called out the time of death and I shouted and kicked and I felt something inside of me die, something that would never return.

OVER THE NEXT
ten hours I put it together.

I awoke in Le Mitard, solitary confinement, handcuffed to the metal ring protruding from the wall. Blood in my mouth, burning pain in my ribs, bruises on my wrists.

My first instinct was to scream, but my vocal cords were worn raw. And I’d cried enough already. I’d shed enough tears to fill the Seine. That reservoir was now dry. And another emotion had overtaken my sadness: fear.

I gave myself a window of time, eyes squeezed shut, thinking about my dear friend Winnie, my neighbor for so many years in Switzerland, all the times we’d shared a bottle of wine while our diplomat husbands were off on their travels, how many times I’d wiped the noses of her children. She’d been more like a sister than a friend. She’d made mistakes, yes, but she hadn’t deserved what came her way the last year. I would remember her for her generous soul, her animated spirit, while the rest of the world would remember her as a cold, calculating killer.

But then, after a couple of hours, I took a deep breath and refocused my mind. Because if I was understanding things correctly, my own window of time would be closing soon, too.

It wouldn’t do any good to mourn Winnie if I was dead, too.

So I lay in the solitary cell and just thought.

They’d killed Winnie as they had Linette, right around a shift change for the guards. Winnie’s time of death was called at 2:40 p.m., but clearly she’d been poisoned earlier than that. No doubt the official investigation would place the time of her poisoning just before, or just after, the 2:00 p.m. shift change. Just as they had with Linette, the guards, once again, would have cover.

Two murders in six days. First my best friend inside this place, the person I saw on a daily basis. Then my best friend, period.

Not a coincidence. Not even subtle. Just the opposite. They were sending me a message. They wanted my confession desperately, more intensely with each passing day, as my appeal quickly approached.

But they couldn’t keep killing my friends. Winnie, maybe, as she was the most clearly guilty of all of us and had never really disputed it. Anyone watching our trial remembered her as despondent, defenseless, defeated. The public wouldn’t have trouble believing that Winnie had killed herself, which I assumed would be the official story.

But Serena? Bryah? If the Monte Carlo Mistresses kept dropping left and right just before their appeal, even the most cynical of observers would raise an eyebrow.

The cell door buzzed open and, predictably, in walked the chief asshole of the prison, Boulez. Dressed, as always, to the nines, looking more like a greasy politician than anything else.

“I will not waste our time with pleasantries,” he informed me.

It didn’t matter. He could be pleasant or unpleasant.

“Tell me what drug you used,” he said. “It will be a simple matter of inventorying the contents of our drug cabinet to see what is missing. Easier for us if you just confess.”

I coughed. Blood spattered onto my brown pants.

“I will not ask a second time,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “So I won’t have to keep ignoring you.”

Nothing had changed. I bit my teeth fiercely into my tongue to suppress the rage, to hide it from Boulez. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

“Or was it suicide?” Boulez asked. “Each of you had access to the drugs. Either she killed herself or you poisoned her. Which was it, Abbie?”

We went back and forth like that for a few rounds, Boulez taunting me, yours truly ever defiant.

Boulez walked toward me, confidently enough given my restraints. He stood just a few feet away, just outside the reach of my legs should I kick out at him.

“Confess to the double murder,” he said. “And what happened to your friend Winnie will be considered a suicide.”

He was still trying. Looking for the path of least resistance. A simple, signed confession from me and all his problems were solved. I played along with the banter, but there was no way I was going to confess. Not a chance.

“Boulez,” I said. “You won’t win. One day I’m going to walk out of this place.”

His eyes narrowed. Then his smile broadened. “Madame, you are the most famous criminal in the history of France. You’ll never walk out of here.”

It was clear to me now. He’d sent all the messages he could possibly send. He couldn’t kill another one of my friends.

And he couldn’t stop my appeal from starting, less than a month from now.

He was out of alternatives.

They were going to kill me in here.

THE LAST TIME
I’d seen Giorgio Ambrezzi was ten days ago, when the prison had a memorial service for his fiancée, Linette. It had been a surreal affair given the circumstances of Linette’s death. A hundred inmates had attended. Giorgio had looked broken beyond repair. Surely he suspected that Linette had suffered more than an accidental slip-and-fall in her cell, but his grief, for the moment, had overtaken his anger, and it hadn’t been the time or the place for me to raise the subject with him.

Now was the time.

After Winnie died, I spent seven days in solitary, Le Mitard. Boulez had threatened a thirty-day stay—in fact, he’d even mentioned forty-five days, which was beyond the legal limit—but I knew he was bluffing. I knew it was a bluff for one very important reason: they couldn’t kill me in solitary confinement. It would be impossible to blame anyone but the guards if I died in Le Mitard. They needed me out.

Now I was out. And I wasn’t safe. It was just a matter of time. Days, not weeks.

I’d met Giorgio twice before the memorial service. He always had a gentle expression, an artist’s carefree perspective. He’d been in good spirits because he was counting down the days until Linette would come back to him, when they would, once and for all, move on with their lives after their addictions and criminal behavior.

Now his eyes were sunken and lifeless. He was unshaven and pale.

“J’ai entendu les nouvelles de votre ami,”
he said to me. He’d heard about Winnie. Everyone had. The official story was that Winnie had committed suicide. She had returned to her cell, they said, and self-injected a very high dose of methadone—a drug used to treat addiction. She was found unconscious in her cell. The time of her poisoning was said to have been between 1:00 p.m. and 2:15 p.m.—right around the 2:00 p.m. shift change for the guards.

My favorite guard, Lucy, as it happened, had worked the shift ending at 2:00 p.m.

The official story was that Winnie couldn’t bear another trial, revisiting her shame once more. It was a pretty good story, actually. Winnie had been the only one of us who was not pursuing an appeal, so this whole thing fit into a nice, neat package. There was the typical rumor and intrigue following her death, but all in all, nobody had trouble believing the official line.

“Winnie’s death wasn’t a suicide,” I told Giorgio in French. “And Linette’s wasn’t an accident.”

Giorgio stared back at me, his face and body posture intense. He blinked his eyes to indicate his acknowledgment. He’d figured as much. He’d been in prison. He knew enough to know that the prison guards had their run of the place and could make almost any story stick; and he knew enough to know that they were watching us now, and he had to contain his emotions.

“Pourquoi?”
he whispered. Why?

I thought he already knew the reason. I pointed at myself. “She’s dead because of me,” I said in French.

Giorgio’s face twisted in agony. Tears fell. I told him I was sorry, over and over again, and I cried as well. He took my hands and squeezed them hard.

“Elle vous aimait,”
he said. She loved you.

I loved her, too. I loved them both, Linette and Winnie. This was so unfair. So unbelievably unfair.

I cleared my throat and got hold of my emotions. I wasn’t doing this only for myself. I was doing this for them, too.

“Giorgio,” I whispered.
“J’ai besoin de votre aide.”

I need your help.

“Mais il pourrait être dangereux.”

But it could be dangerous.

Giorgio let my words sink in for a moment. He wiped at his eyes and then fixed them directly on me. He answered me in one word. In English.

He said, “Anything.”