The Hanging

Chapter 8

I met Zev Prosky, Eunice Stillwell’s court-appointed attorney, at a Denny’s in Corona. The man looked like an antique, but the Bar Association listed him as only fifty-one; working in the Public Defender’s office grinds people down.

“So you’re Maggie MacGowen,” he said, sliding into the booth opposite me. He nodded at the waitress walking past with a coffeepot as he extended a hand to me. “You ever meet Eunice Stillwell?”

I shook my head. “When I wanted to find her, I could never locate a fixed address for her.”

He smiled at that. “I guess drawing life without the possibility of parole gets her about as fixed an address as there is. What do you want with her?”

“I’m working on a film about her son. I have some questions for her about his background, her background, anything useful she might have to offer.”

“Can’t imagine Eunice being useful to anyone. Ever.” Prosky wrapped both hands around the coffee mug set in front of him and studied me over the steam rising from the cup with a calculated shrewdness that experienced interrogators come to wear over time. “You said, when you wanted to find her. Past tense. When was that?”

“Years ago,” I said. “When we brought Sly in off the streets he was a pretty confused little guy. We thought that finding his mother, letting him know something about her and her family-their family-might help unravel some of his issues.”

He asked, “Who’s we?”

“My husband and me.”

“Your husband,” he said. “That would be Detective Mike Flint. I knew him. A real hardass.”

I was beyond tearing up at every mention of Mike, but not beyond defending him. Prosky must have seen some heat in my reaction to his comment. He added, “But he was a good man. I’m sorry.”

Without a pause, he went on, “You’d think an old cowboy like Flint could find a woman with a rap sheet as long as Eunice has.”

“She moved around a lot, used different names; used a fake name on Sly’s birth certificate, took it from a MediCal card she stole. But Mike did find her, eventually,” I said. “By then, Sly had settled into a fairly stable living situation. His counselor didn’t want Eunice, or whatever her name is, to show up and upset the status quo, so we let it be. And then, a decade later, you showed up on his doorstep.”

He held up his hands in a smart-alecky “whaddya know?” gesture.

“Why?” I asked. “You didn’t really think Sly’s testimony could help Eunice.”

“Worth a shot,” he said. “I was trying to keep her off Death Row. I thought that if the jurors knew she had a son who was doing okay we’d generate some sympathy.”

“Is she crazy?” I asked.

“Of course she is.” He gave a sardonic snort. “But you could call the majority of the people in prison crazy; the prison system is the biggest mental health institution in the state, not that anyone’s health is actually looked after.

“But is she insane?” He leaned toward me, narrowed his eyes. “The court said not. But the jury, in their infinite wisdom, decided she was too crazy to execute, so she’s here for the rest of her life instead of on Death Row at Chowchilla.”

“Are you appealing?” I asked.

He thought for a moment before he decided on an answer. Then he shook his head. “It’s what you said earlier: she’s in a fairly stable situation; let’s not upset the status quo.”

“Ready?” I laid some bills on the check the waitress slapped on the table, encouraging Prosky to bestir himself and go with me to the prison. After the events of the night before, images of Holloway’s face flashing through my dreams all night, I felt short-tempered. Otherwise, I might have found Prosky to be an amusing companion for the next hour or so. If it hadn’t taken four weeks to set up this meeting, I would have canceled it and slept in.

As we reached my car, he said, “The kid has a fancy-pants lawyer. I thought he might come with you.”

I just shook my head. There were no legal issues here to bother Max with.

At the prison’s Visitor Center, there was the usual rigmarole of forms, permissions and searches, but we made it through. When we entered the enclosed yard we each had empty pockets and carried nothing except our photo I.D.s and a clear plastic bag containing quarters for the vending machines.

The yard we were shown to was a large slab of concrete surrounded by tall steel fencing. The only furnishings were molded concrete picnic tables with attached benches that were bolted to the ground and a rank of vending machines secured inside a heavy cage with slits to give access to the business parts. Already there were maybe a dozen prisoners and their visitors in the yard, each group claiming its own table. Kids were permitted, but it seemed that most of them were more interested in the goodies stuffed into the vending machines than in the mothers they had been brought to visit, mothers they might hardly remember.

We chose a table with a good view of the prisoners’ gate and waited for Prosky’s client to show. I doubted I would recognize Eunice Stillwell. When Zev Prosky asked Sly to give a statement at Eunice’s sentencing hearing, I pulled up a mugshot the LA Times ran the morning after she was arrested for murdering three transients for their Social Security checks. She looked a right mess, with a black eye, missing teeth, and blood-clotted hair; not her own blood. That was over two years ago. Mike had been sick then, and the best I could offer when Sly asked for my advice about what he should do when Prosky contacted him about testifying for his mother, was to set up a meeting between Sly and Uncle Max.

On Max’s advice, Sly declined Prosky’s request, but Sly was curious enough about Eunice that he and Max went to the hearing. Sly did not remember her when he saw her in court-the county took him away from her permanently when he was three-but from what he learned about her that day, he got a pretty good idea about what he had missed out on, and decided that what he ended up with was a better deal.

“Prosky!” A skeletal black woman in a bright pink Sunday school dress strode towards us across the yard, hands on snaky hips and apparently an old grievance on her mind. “I want a word with you.”

“Jeez,” he muttered wearily.

“Another satisfied client?” I asked.

“Sister of one.” He used my shoulder for support as he lumbered to his feet to intercept her. “Lower the volume, Bernice, or the screws will bounce your scrawny ass out of here before your sister comes through.”

He drew her off toward the side, leaving me to watch for Eunice. The prisoners came through the gate one at a time. Each scanned the yard, looking nervously for familiar faces. One of them, a middle-aged-woman of middle height and weight, graying hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, caught my eye because of the way she walked, crablike, as if her feet were taking her in a direction her body didn’t want to follow. She kept her head down, looking askance at the yard the way an abused dog might; wary. Psychotic, I thought, but as I’ve said, I’m a filmmaker, not a shrink.

“Uh-oh,” she said, suddenly on the alert and pointing at me. “Uh-oh. Bad juju. M.M. is cancelled. Do you hear me? M.M. is cancelled. This is a trick. Bad juju.” Then she swept her hands as if to shoo me. “Get the hell out.”

A guard approached her, but Prosky got to her first. I couldn’t hear what he said to the guard-the woman was still agitated, still trying to shoo me away-but after a word or two the guard shrugged and let Prosky have her. The lawyer whispered something into her ear and she seemed to calm down a bit though she was still wide-eyed and agitated. He held her by the elbow and brought her over to me.

I stayed quiet, waiting for Prosky’s cue.

“Eunice,” he said, sitting her down across the table from me and standing behind her, hands on her shoulders to keep her from floating off, like the lead weight on the string of a helium balloon. “This lady is Maggie MacGowen. She wants to talk to you.”

Eunice shook her head. “M.M. is cancelled. She’s gone.”

“Now, that’s not a nice thing to say, Eunice,” he said calmly. “The economy is in the shitter and a lot of people have lost their jobs. It just is not polite to remind them of it. Okay?”

She watched me, unsure, while she thought that over.

“My TV show was cancelled,” I said. “But I’m still around.”

Hearing my voice seemed to confuse her. She reached out and touched my arm, then gave it a hard squeeze as a test to see if I was actually there.

Prosky, the wiseass, smirked. “You watch a lot of TV, Eunice? You saw Miss MacGowen on TV?”

She nodded.

“You like the show?”

“The officers put it on. I like ‘Wheel of Fortune.’”

That was as noncommittal an answer as I’d ever heard.

Prosky said, “Miss MacGowen has some questions for you, Eunice. About your son.”

“Which one?” she asked.

“How many have you?” I asked.

She answered by raising one shoulder. Did she not know, or wasn’t she saying?

“Ronald Miller,” I said.

“I think I used to know a guy named Ronald Miller. Tweaker. Big-time tweaker.” She tilted her chin up and looked at me down her nose. “I think he died.”

“A tweaker, meaning he used crack cocaine?”

She nodded. “A tweaker.”

“Did you tweak?”

After a quick glance at Prosky, she said, “On the advice of my attorney, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege.”

Prosky laughed out loud. “Eunice, honey, you’re already in here for the rest of your life. What more do think they can do to you? Go ahead, answer the lady’s question, for chrissake. She’s trying to help your son.”

Looking askance at me she said, “Yeah, I used.”

“Were you using when you were pregnant with Ronald?”

The question seemed to throw her.

“Let’s try it this way,” I said. “When did you start using?”

“High school, like everybody.”

“Were there times when you were clean?”

“Yeah. Sometimes, when I was incarcerated I couldn’t get high. Sometimes.”

“But even on the inside you could usually get your hands on something,” Prosky said.

“Usually.”

I looked around the yard, at all the little family gatherings. “What about here?”

Prosky touched my arm. “Wrong question. If Eunice answers that one she could be sent to a punishment unit. I’ll tell you, though, there’s always something available; these people are like walking chemical laboratories. Bath salts, hand sanitizer, they’ll try anything.”

“Hand sanitizer?” I’d heard about people snorting bath salts, but Purell?

“You put salt in it,” Eunice said. “Separates the alcohol.”

I put that nugget away for later. I asked, “When you were pregnant with Ronald, were you using?”

She shrugged, saying she couldn’t remember. I had brought a couple of photographs to show her, but had to leave them in Reception. Not that it mattered. I realized early in the conversation that she had no idea who Sly was, and probably who or where her other children might be.

We gave her the bag of quarters and she went over to the vending machines to spend them. She must have missed school the day they taught about waiting one’s turn. She elbowed away the kids who were between her and her heart’s desire.

“Impulse control problems?” I said as I watched kids scatter out of her way; no one came to their aid.

“You could say that,” Prosky said. “Get what you want?”

“I think I got all I’m going to.”