Love Her Madly

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  “Perhaps now we can reconsider. Yes, there are many factors that bring about violent behavior and racism is indeed one of them. But also a simple chemical imbalance, just like any other chemical imbalance, can create antisocial behavior in one person and an utter devastation of the brain in another, as with Alzheimer’s disease, while the rest of us show just the usual effects of simple aging.”

  She held up her stack of papers. “If you want details, specifics, formulas, studies, the mechanics of the whole operation, these pages are only the beginning. The actual notes are voluminous though crystal-clear, thanks to the talents of one very patient chronicler”—she flipped through the stack—“Sister Emily.”

  We all had lunch together, and Scraggs told us that what was left of Gary Scott did not weigh as much as the six little puddles of melted lead the Rangers pulled out of their sifters. A five-gallon jug of gasoline plus a building made of old dried wood will do that.

  Joe leaned over and said to me, “Five gallons of gas weighs more than the ax.”

  Then Scraggs said, “Rona Leigh left us a note in the mission. Taped to it was a lock of her hair. The note said”—he pulled a copy out of his pocket—“This here is a relic. Build my church upon it.”

  I thought the chemist would choke. She said, “You’ve got a lock of her hair?”

  Scraggs said, “Yes, we do.”

  I really hoped some cop back in Texas hadn’t lost it.

  * * *

  That afternoon, my director brought me into his office for a head-to-head. He said, “At the minimum, no more fieldwork. You’re behind a desk until the poison is completely out of your system and the concussion is healed and the Ace bandage is put to rest.”

  All right.

  “Poppy, you turned the FBI crime lab into a work of art. Single-handed. My gratitude knows no bounds. Now I’ve suggested the minimum to you, but I’d like to ask you for a bit more. I know it’s a cliché but, Poppy, you need a vacation.”

  Nope.

  As it turned out, he’d prodded Joe. Joe offered me his cottage on Block Island without him in it. “’Course I’d rather be with you gazing at the sunsets while we fish for stripers.”

  I told him I’d take a rain check.

  He said, “My Poppy Rice rain-check file is getting mighty full.”

  So sweet as always.

  Delby seconded both of them and felt free to add her own opinion. “Go to that place. That island. See what the world is like outside because you haven’t been outside in a damn long time. Go with Joe. Give the man a chance. Give yourself a chance. See if you’re in love with him.”

  I said, “Delby, what has love ever done for anyone?”

  She thought. “Nothin’.”

  We both laughed. I was starting to feel better.

  * * *

  The dragnet created by the U.S. Marshal Service swept around the world and came up empty. They told me that in almost all cases a fugitive will turn to family or friend. Rona Leigh never had either of those.

  There was no sign of her, not anywhere, and she didn’t turn up to kill any law officers, or jurors, or her mother, or the johns who mistreated her, or anyone else. There had been one sighting, a sighting that took place within an hour of Rona Leigh’s offering me a piece of fudge: In Nuevo Laredo a gringa prostitute was seen exchanging her services for a ride to Houston. The guy who gave her the lift would never turn up to offer us leads because the clientele of prostitutes tend to keep a low profile.

  My friend the shrink said to me, “All of it is so intriguing. Tiner was the perfect personality for the role of the maligned guru. He encouraged his followers to project their fantasies upon him. He was asexual, removed, empty of personality, only able to feel satisfaction via a crowd of worshipers, absorbing their energy. Classic.

  “But as to Rona Leigh, who knows? Maybe she’ll never kill anyone else. Maybe she zeroed in on Gary Scott because he epitomized all the men who abused her when she was a child. All the men who used her to satisfy their own needs, though they knew such treatment could only destroy her. Or perhaps he represented all that was perpetrated upon her by a system that doesn’t rescue a child like Rona Leigh Glueck. Maybe a swift sharp revenge has cleansed her. Maybe she’s starting a new life. In which case her poisoning of you, Poppy, was merely what she was forced to do in order to survive.”

  He wasn’t there when she’d cracked me across the face.

  I said, “Maybe she zeroed in on Gary Scott because I forced her hand.”

  “And, pray, what might that mean?”

  “I told her Gary knew he would inherit a lot of money if his wife died. She hadn’t been aware of that.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “My very dear Poppy, might I suggest a one-session counseling meeting for you? I know just the gentleman in Washington. He’ll give you the magic bullet you need to override any guilt. I know you’ll appreciate that kind of practicality.”

  But I already had a counselor. I called Cardinal de la Cruz.

  He didn’t let me off the hook. He said, “Miss Rice, all of us forced her hand. From her mother, to the father she’d never heard of, to the school system who let her pass through without seeing to an obviously mistreated child, to a prison system that no longer bothers rehabilitating teenagers. And I forced her hand with my naïveté.”

  * * *

  Before Vernon Lacker’s trial began, I tried to speak to him but he wouldn’t see me. I talked with his lawyer, though, a court-appointed attorney. He explained to me very carefully that the DA had a confession.

  No kidding.

  I checked in with Max Scraggs fairly regularly. He said he expected the body of Rona Leigh would turn up when we least expected it. Wishful thinking, and he knew it. He was hugely depressed.

  So was I. I’ve always had a hard time opening up a new closet before shutting the old one.

  And Joe just kept battering me. “I’m tellin’ ya, honey, try a few days of breathing air full of salt. A few mornings of heavy fog and the echo of buoy bells. Evenings just listening to the waves plopping onto the beach.… Man, it’s magic. What d’ya say? Give your brain a break.”

  Tempting.

  I had bad nights. But Bobby and the rest of security had orders not to let me come in to work at 2 A.M. Bobby said to me, “I take my break at 2 A.M. Anytime you’re awake then, just call me and I’ll meet you at Starbucks. We’ll shoot the breeze.” I took him up on his offer a couple of times. Bobby knows more about what’s going on in the world than Dan Rather any day.

  * * *

  On the first day of Vernon’s trial I was passing the metro station on Pennsylvania Avenue. The sky was dark; it had been raining since dawn. When it’s raining, my driver leaves me off at the corner fifty feet from the FBI entrance. On Pennsylvania Avenue, rain means he’ll need an hour to extricate himself from the traffic. Better I get a little damp than have the driver so tied up.

  I was just about to go into my dash mode when a woman came out of the metro and fell in step beside me. She was holding out an audio cassette. I glanced down at it and then I took a better look at her, DC secretary type, dressed neatly in a sky blue suit and an unbuttoned black raincoat. Shoes nice but not terribly expensive, short pretty auburn hair. And new Ralph Lauren sunglasses, a pair I’d been considering because they reminded me of the Texas Rangers issue. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars. Very pricey for a secretary, and she was wearing them in the rain.

  She thrust the cassette into my chest and said, “Get this to Vernon’s lawyer.”

  Her face was pale, she was a little on the thin side of slim, and it took me a full five seconds to recognize her because I’d never seen her forehead before.

  I don’t remember taking the cassette from her but I did. What I do remember is drawing my weapon and screaming at her to freeze, while she slipped amid the crush of rush-hour bodies all dashing through the downpour. I fired into the air just in case the shot might get everybody to drop to the ground so I could fire a sec
ond round into her back.

  Nobody dropped to the ground, they just cringed, and I hoped the bullet wouldn’t come down and pierce one of their stupid skulls. A very loud explosion went off in the middle of the street. That dropped them. I managed to shove the gun back in the holster, get out my cell phone, and punch in my emergency code before a gang of good Samaritans bowled me over and sat on top of me till a couple of transit cops came running out of the metro and reached me neck and neck with Bobby.

  He squatted down and tried pulling people off me.

  I said, “Bobby, Rona Leigh Glueck just ran into the metro.”

  He said, “Motherfucker,” and got on his own phone as he took off.

  I shouted at him, “Reddish brown hair, blue suit, black raincoat…” and then I stopped. It would do no good, and I had to get everyone off me. Once the cops knew who I was, I told them to quit worrying about the need of a bomb squad. The explosion was an M-80 that Rona Leigh had tossed into the road before flying down the metro steps.

  She’d managed the perfect stage: picked heavy rain, the perfect in obscura moment, created a distraction, and danced the final dance—disappearing into a convenient hole in the ground. Rona Leigh had found a job and she’d obviously become an expert. She made drops for pros.

  I was almost as impressed by the action to follow. The metro station, the streets all around it, the streets at all the stops the trains departing the stations were heading for—full of cops. But about as futile as firing my gun. Her wig made it all the way to Bethesda. She’d tossed it into one train but didn’t get in herself. Instead, she went through a little doorway set into the concrete wall of the station that opened into a tunnel. It was locked was what the poor transit police kept insisting.

  The blue suit was in the tunnel. So were the sunglasses. She’d sacrificed them. All that probably happened in the time it took me to get to my office and collapse into my desk chair, wet, a mess, my knees bruised. Delby said to me, “Tell me it wasn’t really her, boss.”

  “Sorry. It was. Different chin, though, now that I’ve had a chance to think.”

  “Poppy, nobody believes it. Just Bobby. They’re all sure you flipped out.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “You know that, for sure. Still, you got trouble ahead.”

  That’s when I became aware of the bump in my pocket. “Delby, have we got an audio cassette player?”

  “’Course. This is the FBI. We got everything.”

  She went out and came right back with one.

  I got the little cassette out of my pocket and dropped it into the machine.

  Delby said, “I get a feeling this ain’t gonna be John Cougar Mellencamp.”

  The first sound we heard was a door opening, and it was followed immediately by Gary Scott’s voice. “I’m closed, sugar. Meetin’ an old flame. Come back another time.”

  Long pause. Just the whir of the tape.

  Gary said, “What’s that?”

  Another pause. “Oh, no. No!”

  Then he said, “Jesus Christ. Hey. Please. Please.”

  There was a gunshot, a scream, and then the sound of Gary’s body hitting the floor. He wasn’t dead, though. She’d just dropped him.

  He groaned. He pleaded with her. “Rona Leigh, I didn’t do anything. Listen to me, you gotta understand.…” He groaned a little louder. “My leg. Damn, my leg. Listen, I’m bleedin’ bad here. I can’t—”

  Rona Leigh said, “Shut the fuck up, you piece of shit.”

  Her voice, unmistakably, but with the sentiment and language she’d suppressed for seventeen years until the day she bolted the mission, leaving Jesus behind.

  There was another shot. Gary howled like a dog.

  Rona Leigh said to him, “I want you to die happy. You are going to be glad to hear what I come to tell you. See, Gary, I read that you believe I didn’t suffer when they tried to execute me. Well, you’ll be glad to know I did. I was drownin’. I was tryin’ to breathe, tryin’ to scream, but I couldn’t get no sound out like I couldn’t get no air in. I was bein’ choked, suffocated, same as if there were two hands squeezin’ my neck. Then I had some kind of mountain crushin’ down on my chest. Felt like my insides were ripped apart. I knew I was gonna die, even though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to die. I suffered plenty. Just like you. Except you’re gonna die, aren’t you?”

  Then she shot him again.

  Delby left the office.

  Rona Leigh fired three times more, and Gary was gasping and crying and moaning all at once. There was a rustling on the tape, a bag—the sound of a shopping bag or a grocery bag opening. Gary tried to speak. I could barely make out the panic-stricken words. He said, “What are you doing?”

  Then he found the strength again to shout, “No, no, no!” and begged her not to do it, kept begging her until there was a loud thump—the first swing of the ax hitting home.

  I listened to Rona Leigh Glueck ax Gary Scott to death.

  Then she repacked the bag, and there were footsteps and the splashing of gasoline that went on and on, until finally a match was struck, followed by the whoosh of the flame and then her steps running. The tape ended.

  I went to the outer office where Delby was sitting, blowing her nose.

  She looked up at me. “Where’d you get it, boss?”

  I told her.

  That was right when my director came in to find out what the hell was going on, so I told Delby she’d better go off and have some coffee. No sense in just sitting there while I played the tape again.

  * * *

  Vernon Lacker would not be tried for the murder of Gary Scott. There would be another venue for him, aiding and abetting the escape of a convicted murderer. The jury, I knew, would take pity on him. Juries will do that. After all, he was bewitched. Also, he thought he was in genuine service to the Second Coming of Christ, an unauthorized mitigating circumstance that carries a lot of weight in the Bible Belt, which was why there was also so much talk of mercy concerning Raymond Tiner and the New Believers.

  * * *

  Joe flew me up the Atlantic coast to Block Island in his little Cessna. He’d been overjoyed when I told him I didn’t want to be there alone, that I wanted his company. Most of the cockpit was taken up by his oversized cat carrier, containing Spike, who yowled, pissed, and vomited.

  I could tell the days to come—full of fog and salt air—would be ever so relaxing. Probably should have gone to Vegas with the shrink.

  Also by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  The Book of Phoebe

  Lament for a Silver-Eyed Woman

  The Port of Missing Men

  Masters of Illusion

  An American Killing

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mary-Ann Tirone Smith is the author of five previous novels, including most recently An American Killing, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. She has lived in Connecticut all her life except for two years in Cameroon, where she served as a Peace Corps volunteer. She is currently at work on the next Poppy Rice book.

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

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  Copyright © 2002 by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

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  First Edition 2002

  eISBN 9781466873179

  First eBook edition: May 2014

 

 

 
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