Read Online Love Her Madly by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith - Free Book Online Page A

entitled to know what your aim is here, considerin’ my hospitality.”
    I would be honest. Why not? “Rona Leigh Glueck’s defense requested information from the FBI pretrial. Through a bureaucratic laxity, they didn’t get the information. I have it. I want to determine if it would have had any bearing on the outcome of the trial.”
    â€œYou aim to spring Rona Leigh?”
    He was half smiling at me.
    â€œI aim to know the truth.”
    â€œAin’t got a hell of a lotta time, have you?”
    â€œNo, I don’t.”
    â€œYou know, ma’am, I have had to call on her many times without her askin’. I had to lay down ground rules throughout this past year when all the other do-gooders decided to come to her rescue.”
    I was a do-gooder. I’d been demoted from agent to ma’am.
    â€œShe isn’t deserving of rescue is your feeling?”
    â€œMy feeling? My feeling doesn’t enter into it. I am not paid to cross the courts, no matter what my feeling might be.”
    â€œWarden, why do you think there is such a clamor to save her? The do-gooders aren’t your typical anti-death-penalty people. Many of the people who are calling for the governor to save her life support the death penalty.”
    â€œAll but one of ’em: the pope. He ain’t for the death penalty. But the rest of them—Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, each and every member of the Christian Coalition—they are. But them and the typical do-gooders like that Morley Safer, say, or the guy from 20-20 Vision, all those fools think Rona Leigh isn’t a murderer anymore. She was, sure, but now she’s a woman-aglow-with-Jesus instead. Hell’s bells.
    â€œA murderer stays a murderer, no matter what she’s like years after she committed the crime. And all murderers are actors, I’ll tell you that right now. Some movie producer ought to cast these killers for their pictures. A psycho can act any role he wants to. Rona Leigh Glueck has spent every wakin’ minute playin’ a part. That sweet-as-molasses smile a hers? An act. You ever see a picture of that Catholic statue, ma’am? The one with Mary holding Jesus across her lap after they took him down from the cross?”
    â€œYes.” I didn’t say I’d seen the statue itself. “The Pietà. ”
    â€œThat’s the one. Who built that?”
    â€œMichelangelo.”
    â€œRight. I was readin’ about that statue one day in Christianity Today. Long time ago, someone asked Michelangelo why he’d given his statue the face of a young girl. And he said that the mother of Jesus was chaste, a virgin; he was a Roman Catholic, after all. He said, Therefore she don’t age.
    â€œRona Leigh, at her trial? She was still in her teens, but she had the face of a played-out, drugged-up, alcohol-sodden, hooker killer, which is what she was. Inside a few months, once Rona Leigh was dried out? She didn’t want to be in prison anymore. She figured it would take a miracle to get her off death row. So that’s what she decided to go for: a miracle. Honest to Pete, she put on the face of the actual mother of Jesus, like Michelangelo’s statue. No lines, no wrinkles, pure white skin, and she’s stayed the same even now and she’s no spring chicken.
    â€œI’m sure you know, ma’am, the power a psycho can call upon. Besides that power, she was able to make the most of her hookin’ skills to create something a lotta johns paid good money for. She became young, innocent, a darlin’ child who could pray with a sincere and heartfelt fervor.
    â€œNow, ma’am, you’re FBI. I know I can’t shock you. So I’ll tell you that not long after she got here her sister came to visit. Rona Leigh had the corrections officer tell the girl she was too busy prayin’ to have any visits. Sister raised a little fuss so I got called over—girl was goin’ on