verge of a nervous breakdown. She had an anxiety attack only French cuisine could cure.'
'So she's introducing reasonable doubt, and you have no proof, no evidence. Nothing to convince a jury she did these things beyond a reasonable doubt.'
Larry agreed this was so, and added that the Justice Department believed the odds of a conviction for conspiracy were dropping fast, and the chance of convicting her for murder had nowhere to drop as it was already nil. At best, she'd get five years, maybe less. And Jennie's cocky obstinance indicated she was aware of it. He finally came to the point of this call and informed me, 'She says she wants to see you.'
'I don't want to see her. Tell her no.'
'Just hear me out.'
'I'm very busy, Larry I'm going to-'
'You were the one who talked Townsend Into the arrest. You can at least hear what I've got to say.'
'Fine. Why does she want to meet with me?'
'You tell me why.'
'I haven't got a clue, Larry.' Though he and I both knew it was a lie.
But sometimes, Larry explained, recalcitrant witnesses soften up in the presence of people with whom they feel a strong emotional connection. I informed Larry that my emotional attachment with Jennie Margold was the same as a fish to a hook. He laughed. I don't know why; it wasn't a joke.
So we went back and forth for a while, Larry trying to tell me why it was a good idea, me trying to tell him to piss off.
Because on one level, I thought it was a lousy idea, and on another, more personal level, I did not want to ever see Jennie again. I still had not the vaguest idea why she did what she did. I did not want to know.
But back to that first level, whatever romantic sparks had flown between us were hot and deluded on my part, and on her part, a calculated pretense. Jennie suckered me, intellectually and emotionally-she knew it, and I knew it. I was an aching, self-pitying Lothario, Jennie would know this, and Jennie would find a way to exploit it. Putting me in a cage with her was like throwing red meat to a lioness.
Back to that second level, I recalled a warning Jennie once gave me. If you haven't passed through the darkest forest, you cannot imagine the ghoulies and monsters that inhabit the back shelves inside people's minds. She was right. I had prosecuted and even defended individuals whose crimes seemed to be the progeny of madness, but on closer inspection, always the roots of those sins were sunk in more ordinary proletarian muck: greed, lust, or some other idiosyncrasy of human selfishness.
Jennie was most certainly different. For all her outward sanity, I was sure she was utterly insane, whatever that means these days. Some stew of demons had mortgaged her soul, and I did not want even a peek at them.
But Larry was persistent. He said, 'Come on, Drummond. This might be our last chance.' After a moment, he added, 'Incidentally Townsend asked me to pass on that he would regard this as a huge favor to him.'
Well, what could I say? So Larry and I batted around a few ideas, and I agreed to meet with Jennie- conditionally-though not until the next morning, and only after I had had a chance to run down one small detail.
Which was how I ended up pacing in a tiny courtyard tightly enclosed in chain-link and barbed wire, experiencing a quiet claustrophobic fit. Jennie insisted that we would meet out here, or nothing. Probably she was just tired of being ogled by prying eyes through two-way mirrors. Or maybe she thought the outdoor setting would level the playing field a bit. Or maybe both. Nothing was arbitrary with this lady.
Jennie was led to the doorway by a hefty matron, who backed away and allowed her to shuffle into the courtyard alone. The day was warm, though off in the distance dark clouds were gathering, which seemed fitting somehow. She stopped about two yards from me.
We avoided each other's faces and eyes, and the silence grew uncomfortable. I knew she was forcing me to make the first move. I said, 'Would the prisoner like a cigarette?'
'The prisoner does not smoke. Neither do you.'
'Well, one acquires bad habits on death row. Never too early to get a head start.'
She ignored this barb and asked, 'Are you wired?'
'No. Are you?'
'Liar.'
'Spare me Jennie.'
She finally looked up at me. Sounding hurt and annoyed, she said, 'I'm sorry… I'm having a little trouble trusting you these days. The deal, as I remember it, was you'd watch my ass.'
'The deal turned out to be too open-ended.'
'Did it? I saved your life.'
'Did you?'
Jennie reached up and grabbed my chin. She said, 'Look at me. Look at what you did.'
So I did. She did look dreadful. She was dressed, appropriately, in a baggy gray hopsack muumuu with matching foot and hand manacles, and white slippers. Her hair was dirty, stringy, and matted and hung in oily clumps and strands. Dark pits were under her eyes, and her shoulders slumped with fatigue. She was still very pretty, but like a rag doll after a playdate with the family rottweiler. In an accusing tone, she said, 'Now they want you to finish what you started. Right?'
'I'm here because you wanted to see me.'
She acknowledged this truth with an ambiguous shrug. 'And how do you feel now that you see me? Proud? Guilty? Disgusted?'
I knew she was trying to put me on the defensive, and if I let her, I knew I'd never get out of the pit. 'I feel sorry for you.'
She laughed. 'You should. I'm innocent.'
I replied, truthfully, 'In a way, Jennie, I believe you are.'
She looked a little surprised by this admission, and I was sure she wondered why I felt this way. In an irony run amok, the profilers at Quantico had taken a deep and incisive look at the woman who had walked among them not so long ago, one of their top guns. Employing their queer skills, they had cast a net far and wide into her past and dragged back a number of revelations that in hindsight were illuminating, breathtaking, and, mostly, quite saddening.
In preparation for this meeting, I had been provided that file, which I read closely.
As Jennie once told me, she was an only child, and in fact, her parents did die when she was only thirteen, though not in a car crash, as she expressed; they were roasted in a fast-burning house fire in the middle of the night. The neighbors told the investigating officer that Mr. Terry Margold was a heavy drinker, a brown-fingered chain-smoker, an abusive husband, and a father whose cruelty was nearly boundless. Jennie's mother, Mrs. Anne Margold, was meek, timid, and overpowered, or as a neighbor described to a police officer after the fire, 'Old man Margold ruled that house and beat the… well, the dickens outta everybody. You'd always hear howls and screams comin' from that place. I got chills just walkin' past it. Good riddance to 'em, I say. Nicer neighborhood now.'
And from other neighbors, more of the same. Essentially, people who knew Jennie and her family in those early years universally recalled a monstrous man, and a childhood of Dickensian horror, a poor little girl born into pathetically harsh circumstances, molded by brutality and terror.
A few pages later I found this interview, conducted with Mrs. Jessica Parker, Jennie's eighth-grade English comp teacher: 'She was an odd girl, brilliant, highly competitive, though I thought, insular and utterly stressed. I… actually, several of us… we often saw horrible bruises, and scrapes, and scabs. Once she had a cast on her leg. Several times I asked how she got these wounds. She claimed through roughhousing on the playground. She would even make up elaborate alibis about her wounds. She could be terribly deceptive and utterly convincing. I knew she lived in mortal dread of her father. Really-I felt awfully sorry for her.'
I recalled the scars and burns on Jennie's body, and I understood, as I suspected Jessica Parker had understood, that some scars go more than skin-deep, straight to the soul.
On the night of her parents' roast, according to the police report, Jennie had had the rare good fortune to be at a sleepover at a friend's house, only three blocks and a short walk through the woods from her own home. No arson inspectors were brought in to sift through the ashes, as there was no evident cause for suspicion, the house was small and wooden, and the local fire department found traces of cigarette butts sprinkled around the bed of
