Shocking True Story

by Gregg Olsen

  Chapter Six

  Monday, July 15

  IT TOOK ME ABOUT TEN MINUTES to be processed by the guards at Riverstone. That was a good thing because seeing Jeanne on the slab had cost me precious time. And shook me up hard. They ran my driver's license and verified my Social Security number. A female guard behind a counter that looked like a library reference desk told me to take off my shoes, put my things in a locker and pass through the metal detector. I could keep my notebook and a pencil. No pens.

  "Community Relations is coming down to get you," the guard said, motioning me through with a rubber-gloved hand.

  The buzzer sounded.

  "Take off your belt!"

  My face went hot. I started to protest.

  "Scanner is reading your buckle, sir! New equipment, more sensitive than Rick. " She motioned to Rick, a Pacific Islander with keys to a private room. He looked like he was itching to probe anyone who made fuss.

  I removed my belt faster than a Chippendale and passed through without a sound.

  The public relations flack at the prison was a good-looking petite woman with red hair, picture perfect teeth and a trim figure who answered to the name Muriel Constantine. Her blood-red nails had been glued and lacquered by a professional. I figured she probably made the ladies of the cell block wet with desire. Muriel apologized for keeping me waiting, but explained she had been delayed by a camera crew from Nancy Grace who was there to do an interview with a woman who claimed she had a sexual relationship with Satan's brother.

  "I didn't know he had a brother," I said as I stuck my feet into my laced-up shoes and worked the heels inside. My socks bunched up, looking flaccid and droopy. I felt stupid as I struggled to put on my shoes to catch up with her.

  "He apparently has two. She was involved with the younger one."

  I clipped a visitor's pass to my shirt pocket and walked with Muriel through the gates that led from the reception area to a breezeway to the unit where mother and daughter were to meet me for our first interview. Coiled razor wire was a deadly slinky atop a twelve-foot fence. Muriel's heels clacked against the pavement and a couple of ladies pulling weeds looked up to watch her pass.

  "Must like you," I said.

  "Must like you," she shot back without a smile.

  My mind raced to every Chained Heat type of prison movie I'd ever seen. I hated that I felt a little flattered and said nothing more while the red disappeared from my face.

  I always liked the part of the true crime book-writing process where I came face-to-face with the person doing time. I knew that when they wrote back and said they were only "considering" talking to me that they were ready to spill their guts. Women and men in prison are lonelier than hell. They act as though they have ten thousand people visiting them, but the truth is unless they have had a TruTV or Lifetime movie produced about their story, or an ID channel episode, the list is usually quite short. As time goes by, it grows even tinier.

  I followed Muriel's clacking heels to a little conference room where I was told to wait. The blind-date feeling always sets in during the minute or two it takes to retrieve the inmate from the holding cell for the interview. Outside the window, more women were weeding the flowerbeds and a few others were in small clutches of disharmony on various benches. Sometimes I wondered why these ladies had ended up where they did and why some just as tough as them were rolling back prices at a Walmart store. I felt a little queasy. I wondered if the women I was about to meet would like me. Will they trust me? Should they trust me?

  And more importantly, was I their last shot?

  Muriel clacked back into the conference room.

  "Janet changed her mind. But Connie is on her way."

  "Oh," I said, registering obvious disappointment. "I hope she's all right."

  Muriel shrugged, stuck her pen in an empty Starbucks mug, and informed me that she'd be down the hall taking care of business.

  Connie Carter and I would be alone.

  Connie was in her late forties, a former NASCAR Barbie with bottle blonde hair, a penchant for swimming-pool-blue eye shadow, and tube tops at least one size too small. She had chipped teeth, puffy eyes and the kind of throaty laugh that spoke more to a two-pack-a-day habit than a terrific sense of humor. Now she was tired, worn out and dressed in jeans and a blouse. She was a woman who had literally gone back to her roots—no longer blonde, but now with brown hair was so unbelievably dark it boggled the mind that she even thought she could get away with a nearly platinum color.

  When she entered, I stood up and extended my hand in courtesy.

  "Mr. Ryan?" she asked.

  Who else would be here? I thought.

  "Mrs. Carter?" I answered back, though she had a Washington State Corrections Center for Women ID tag and it didn't say "staff" so there was no room for doubt that this social hour would be between the author and the inmate. That done, I waited for her to sit and we talked about the weather, the food, the fact that her daughter had become involved with a prisoner. In fact, Janet had been Connie's roommate until the week before when she requested a transfer and ended up with another cellie.

  "Her name is Angela and I don't like the looks of her. She's scary. Really scary."

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  "Me, too. It's too late for me to change. Everyone tells me that I'll be a lesbian before I get out of here, but they're wrong about that. Too late for me to go that way."

  Connie played with her file folder of briefs as we talked. She had carried them into the room like a shield; her proof that she was innocent of any wrongdoing. Every page within that folder verified the tragedy that had befallen her. She had been framed. She had been set up. She was the victim.

  God, how I had heard that before. The woman in one of my books had put cyanide in headache capsules to kill her husband and in an effort to throw the authorities off the track, set more tainted bottles out in grocery stores. A young mother, an innocent bystander, took some tainted pills and died. The convicted tamperer told me in unblinking eyes that she had been framed.

  Everyone said so.

  Another woman I wrote about had been convicted of suffocating her son repeatedly in an effort to gain the sympathy and attention of others. She too, insisted quite convincingly that she had been a victim of a witch hunt. Was there anyone in prison who was supposed to be there? Or at least owned up to the possibility that she had done something to warrant the desolate accommodations of an eight-foot cell?

  Connie Carter was not to be the one to stake that claim. As we neared the end of our allotted time, I asked her if Janet was as innocent as she.

  "I've agonized over that one," she said carefully. "I'm not ashamed to tell you that I've even prayed over it since I got here."

  I decided to push. "Well, what do you think? Could she be guilty?"

  Connie bit her lower lip. Lipstick scraped off in the parallel lines left by her front upper teeth. Either she was a damn good actress or she was having a difficult time letting her words come.

  "I am beginning to wonder. I... I... I think she might have led on Danny Parker so that he would shoot Deke."

  I prodded her for evidence, something to back up her story. She didn't seem to have anything. She made me promise to keep her theories to myself and I gladly agreed.

  "It... it's just a feeling, really. A feeling that she's lying. Now, don't tell her I said that. We have to have trust, you know."

  Considering where she was and why she was there, trust would be hard to come by. I agreed again. I thanked her and told her I'd see her again soon.

  ♦

  I DID NOT CONSIDER MARTIN RAINES a close friend, but I certainly knew him well enough to feel confident when I made that first call to his office at the Pierce County Sheriff's Office. He was the lead investigator for the county and we had met at a symposium in Portland three or four years before. Ostensibly, I was there to talk about crime writing and the responsibility writers shared with law enforcement. I was really there to sell books and provide
a little sizzle for the two-day event.

  Raines cornered me the first day to tell me he had considered writing a few books of his own.

  "I've seen it all," he said over a beer in the hotel lobby bar. "From the boy next door who slaughters his parents to the woman who shoved a hot poker up her husband's ass when she found out he was having a homosexual affair with the man who detailed their cars every Saturday."

  I swallowed the last of a plate of deep-fried ravioli. "You really have seen it all," I said. Marinara dripped on the front of my shirt. I quickly moved my convention name badge to cover the stain.

  Raines and I talked for two hours, and while I encouraged him to contact my agent, I doubted he could pull off a book, no matter how much firsthand knowledge he had. Outside of a parking ticket, most cops can't write. We exchanged phone numbers and actually talked once or twice a year, whenever an interesting case popped up in his jurisdiction.

  Until the Carter women, there hadn't been any interesting enough to cross over from “interesting” to “book material.”

  "What do you think about Connie Carter and Janet Kerr's case?" I asked over the phone after my meeting with Connie at Riverstone prison.

  His recognition was swift. "Piece of work, those two. A dumb crime."

  "A book?" I asked.

  "Not like any you've written or I've read."

  "Good," I said. "That's just what I'm looking for. I've got to come up with something different or I'll be back at the Food King passing out samples."

  "Could be the one," he said.

  ♦

  OVER THE COURSE OF THE WEEKS and months that would consume me as I researched the story and listened to the players, the words of my editor would ring in my head like some insipid ditty I could never shake.

  "We want a story that's bigger than life. More bizarre than bizarre! That's what we're after. That's what will pull you out of the midlist to compete with Jan Rule."

  "Ann," I corrected him.

  "Huh?"

  "Ann. Not Jan."

  "Yeah, right. Ann."

  "Something over-the-top! Run-of-the mill cases just can't compete."

  When I was ready, when it was all laid out, I would spring it on the pointy-nosed New Yorker whose yea or nay had hung my life out like a row of diapers on a saggy clothesline. I promised my wife, like a losing gambler who can't give up the craps table or the fat person who can't stop at one dish of ice cream, I would make one more stab at the genre.

  "Valerie," I said, "this is our chance out of the middle class!"

  My wife let out a sigh of exasperation. "When you used to say that I thought you meant up from the middle class," she said. "I didn't think we'd be dropping below it."

  "Just one more, Val, and then I'll quit. Then I'll get a real job."

  I had said that so often, even I thought the words were hollow. I was almost forty. Four-oh. I had held more part-time jobs than an alcoholic, yet drinking was never my problem. I had two beautiful and bright little girls who could do a crime scene analysis as good as any criminal science major—or at least I thought so. I had a wonderful wife who could no longer feign excitement over the free samples I brought home from my latest job. We still had a freezer full of chicken taquitos that I had been given in lieu of cash from my stint as a supermarket food-demo person. I had flipped burgers. I had sold RVs. I had done it all, and I only did so to get food on the table.

  "When you said, 'Food on the table,'" I could hear Valerie saying, "'I thought you meant groceries, as in a variety of foodstuffs, not twenty-five pounds of taquitos.'"

  "God, Val, how would I know old man Martinez was a scammer? His first name was Jesus!"

  We had a lovely home in a wooded country setting with neighbors we cared about. We had fled the city for greener pastures because we wanted to and because we could. Just barely. Valerie commuted to call on clients for the artists she represented. Approaching twelve, our daughters, Taylor and Hayley, were making what every father considers the nightmarish but impossible-to-stop leap from girls to young women.

  Even though I felt like I had not achieved much in the career I chose, I knew that as far as the Jetts of the world were concerned, I lived like a king. I had two vehicles, a computer, and a purebred dog that went to the groomer every single month. I even had a plasma TV. We went on vacations, though mostly to places where I could research a book. We lived a life that wasn't anybody's dream but our own.

  Hedda underfoot, I took the last blue Mr. Freeze pop from its hiding place under a frozen pillow of tater tots and sat down at my Mac to type the title that would set the tone for the story that I would try to shape into a book. I tried several ideas, different titles and the subtitles that reminded the reader of what they were going to read, "Tell them and tell them what you told them," I heard over and over. I sucked the last bit of blue from the plastic tube and dropped it into the waste can. Hedda worked on a flea that was giving her grief at the base of her hot-dog-cropped tail.

  It wasn't too bad. At least I felt it gave the editors what they were clamoring for:

  Love You to Death:

  The Positively Shocking True Story of Murder,

  Obsession and a Wedding in Vegas.

  By Kevin Ryan

  I studied the title further, wondering if Love You to Death should be punctuated with an exclamation mark. Maybe the subtitle was a little off-the-wall, but I felt it truly fit the absurd nature of the story. It was ridiculous. Besides, if my editor didn't like it, he'd change the whole damn thing. He always did, anyway. I'd leave that decision in his hands. I just wanted to get on with it.

  ♦

  I FOUGHT THE URGE TO TURN ON The Rita Adams Show. To start watching was to see an hour whirlpool into a black hole of wasted time. Instead, I made myself a pot of coffee and waited for the kitchen clock to hit three in the afternoon. I knew that Monica Maleng's masseuse finished working her over by 2:30 and Monica would be settled back into the sumptuous hunter green leather of her office chair at Green Light Pictures off Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

  Before I tackled any project, I talked with Monica. She was a TV producer and also my ears and eyes to what television networks and cable companies were optioning. Monica had worked for seven years as Rita executive producer when Rita, rich with a five-year multimillion-dollar contract, spun her off to Green Light Pictures. I met Monica when I was on Rita's show promoting Dead No More, the true story of a Baltimore man who faked his own death so he and his wife could collect on life insurance benefits. The twist was that the wife had a lover and the two of them killed the supposedly already dead husband.

  Green Light optioned the book as its first or second property. It looked good for Dead No More. I was certain it was going to be produced. I told Valerie to start picking out carpet samples (and upgrading the pad) for the living room. It went through four rewrites before it finally came together. Eddie Cibrian was slated to play the hapless husband; LeAnn Rimes, the murderous wife. Then rival Slash TV Network beat Green Light to the punch and did its own movie about a similar case that took place in Florida. Slash TV did the story without the rights to a book. Without paying a dime to the sources whose story they were telling.

  They did it "public domain."

  I loathed the very concept of public domain. Public domain meant that producers could send a screenwriter to the local library and courthouse, and cobble together a story based on what was in the public record—newspaper accounts, court documents, trial transcripts. It didn't matter how true it was, for they were always able to use the Inspired by a True Story tag line. Inspired by was a cannonball dive below Based on.

  If TV people were the worst, than worst among them was Adena King. Years later, even typing her name gives me the creeps. She claimed to be a former series actress (actually, she appeared on Law & Order SVU in a courtroom scene and in Home Improvement as an audience member on Tool Time). She telephoned me out of the blue one afternoon to say she had read a copy of Murder Cruise before it had even b
een typeset.

  "Kevin, don't get mad at me!" she said during the first call. "I love your work and I want Murder Cruise!"

  "It isn't ready, and when it is my agent will send it to you."

  "Murder Cruise is mine!"

  "Not ready, sorry."

  "Don't get angry, but I got a copy this morning!"

  I thought I must have misheard her. The book wasn't available for months. "How?"

  "It's done all the time, Kevin. It's called a 'slip it.' I had someone at your publisher's slip it to me."

  "For money?"

  "Guilty!" She laughed. It was an obnoxious, horsey laugh that sounded almost unearthly. I tried to imagine the face that went with the awful laugh.

  I dialed my agent immediately after I hung up. She promised to look into it. The next day she called back with the bad news. Adena King had already shopped the book to everyone in town as if she already optioned it. I was stuck. I was ruined. No one wanted to work with Adena; no one wanted Murder Cruise.

  I loathed the woman. She had burned my best chance for a TV movie before the book even hit grocery store racks. The topper was when a T-Mobile operator called to inform me that my "friend" Adena King had put me in her "calling circle" as a member of her Colleagues and Confidants Group.

  "Take me out or I'm going to Verizon," I told the phone company solicitor. "I want out of her damn circle!"

  Monica Maleng, on the other hand, had integrity. I trusted her. She was someone whose advice I sought when I considered taking on a new book project. She knew what the networks and cable companies were salivating for, and we had actually developed a couple of projects together.

  At three on the dot, I called her.

  It turned out there had been no time for a massage that afternoon. She had come back from a meeting at Lifetime that she said didn't go particularly well. The network that still reveled in true crime was feeling a bit of the backlash churned up by a family rights group calling for a kinder and gentler type of TV fare.

  Monica was dejected. "Nobody wants any more stories on family members killing each other," she said. "It seems so unfair. The numbers for movies based on true stories are still solid. America is as bloodthirsty as ever. These network people go whichever way the wind blows."