Not because she was carrying a gun in the car, which she wasn't.
But because what was left of the kilo of gold was in her tote bag.
They found the dope in three minutes flat, and then they—
"Do you really want to hear the rest of this?" she, asked Willis.
"Yes," he said.
CHAPTER 13
They told her they had informed the American Consulate in Monterrey of her arrest. She did not believe them. In Mexico back then—and for all she knew, it was the same now—a narcotics violation was a felony and any felony suspect could be held and interrogated for a maximum of seventy-two hours without access to a lawyer. Within six days, if a magistrate found that a trial was indicated by the evidence, and if the offense was punishable by a term of more than two years (which Marilyn's alleged offense was) the prisoner could be held for as long as a year before his case was brought to trial. Mexican law was—and is—premised on the Napoleonic Code. In simple terms, you were guilty until you proved yourself innocent. When Marilyn demanded that she be allowed to make a personal telephone call, the local police officer told her this was something to be discussed with the District Attorney; he would either allow it or he would not.
Eight days after she'd been arrested, a consular officer came to see her at the Comisaría. He told her she was being charged with possession of marijuana. He told her that if she was convicted, she could expect a prison sentence of from five years and three months to twelve years. He promised he would call the people she listed for him on a sheet of American Embassy stationery: her mother, Joseph Seward, and the beach bum she used to live with in Los Angeles. The consul later told her he'd been unable to contact any of these people. She did not know who else she could ask him to call.
On the twelfth day of September, she stood trial in Saltillo, represented by a Mexican lawyer whose name had been supplied by the consular officer. She was sentenced to six years' imprisonment for possession of what turned out to be eight ounces of marijuana, all that was left of the kilo she had bought in Iguala. The consul told her an American Embassy official would report the arrest, trial, and sentence in detail to the State Department, which would in turn notify relatives or friends in the States. But she did not know where her mother was, and most of her friends were transient hookers.
On the morning of September fifteenth, she was transported by van to La Fortaleza, a centuries-old prison in the state of Tamaulipas, some two hundred miles southwest of Brownsville, Texas. In the van with her were a woman she later learned had killed her husband with a grubbing hoe, and a man who had stolen a typewriter from the offices of an air-conditioning firm in Monterrey. Marilyn was still wearing the white cotton caftan and thonged sandals she'd had on when they arrested her. Her tote bag had been requisitioned in Ramos Arizpe, presumably because it contained evidence of a crime. Her makeup, her diaphragm, her passport, and her underwear were in that bag, together with several pieces of silver jewelry she could have used to good advantage at La Fortaleza.
She learned there on the day she arrived, and only through deductive reasoning, that the only thing you could get in that place was what you paid for. She discovered this after the internal search, when she and a dozen female prisoners from towns all over Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas were standing in a line that led to a long table upon which were piled blankets and clothing and woven straw mats and thin mattresses covered with striped ticking. The grubbing-hoe murderess—a short, hefty dark woman with curly black hair, solemn brown eyes, pendulous breasts and wide buttocks—took from a black leather purse on a chain around her thick neck a wad of pesos which she handed to the matron, a stern-faced woman with hair dyed a flaming red. The matron then passed over the table a mattress, a blanket, two pairs of cotton panties, and several tentlike faded grey smocks.
When the woman protested in voluble Spanish, the matron generously added another pair of panties to the pile she now held on her extended arms. She protested again. The matron shook her head and waved her on. Marilyn's money had disappeared somewhere between the Ramos Arizpe roadblock and the local jail; she had nothing with which to engage in prison commerce. She had only the caftan folded over her arm, the long flowing cotton robe somewhat less than pristine after almost three unwashed weeks in Ramos Arizpe. The matron said something to her in Spanish. Marilyn did not understand. She repeated it. Marilyn shook her head. The matron waved her on, naked.
La Fortaleza had been built by the Spaniards back in the sixteenth century as a second-line coastal defense. Some two thousand feet above sea level, it dominated the countryside and afforded a distant view of the Gulf of Mexico, some twenty-five miles to the east. The prisoners never saw anything but the walls. In the late 1820's, when the new Mexican government took over the fortress and turned it into a prison, only a hundred and ten convicts were transferred there. Now there were four hundred and eighty of them, sixty-seven in the women's compound alone. Because this area had once been used for the solitary confinement of male prisoners—at a time when female murderers, armed robbers, extortionists and kidnapers were virtually unheard of in Mexico—it was in effect a prison within a prison, a square within a square, its walls twenty feet high, the higher walls of the prison proper visible beyond them. The thickness of the compound walls was dictated by the width of the cells into which the women were locked each night at ten and released into the courtyard each morning at six, when the cells were hosed down. Marilyn visualized the whole as a sort of labyrinth in the puzzle books she used to buy when she was a little girl.
The walls surrounding the entire prison were eight feet thick, a conglomerate of boulders, bricks and concrete. The only gate into the prison was at the front, where the bars were four inches in diameter, and this opened onto a cobbled, arched passageway—a holdover from when the prison was a fortress—to a second gate beyond that opened onto the warden's office on the left and the search room on the right, where the monied prisoners had purchased the clothing and other articles they needed for survival here. Immediately beyond these two rooms, and opening onto the courtyard lined with the men's cells and the various prison workshops, was a third barred gate. Marilyn and the other women were marched through this gate and past the watchful eyes of the male guards and prisoners idling in the courtyard—some of them squatting in the dirt playing cards, others smoking or talking, some playing guitars—to the smaller inner prison where first there was a barred gate and then a massive wooden door that shielded the women from the further prying eyes of the male population, but not from the eyes of the machine-gun guards in the four watchtowers, who could look down from their vantage points directly into the enclosure.
There were seven women, including herself, in Marilyn's cell.
The cell was six feet wide by eight feet long.
On either side of the cell, there was a double-decker wooden bunk. There was a three-foot space between the bunks. Immediately inside the bars, there was a space of perhaps two feet between them and the footboards of the bunks. In this space, in one corner of the cell, was the toilet hole over which the women squatted to relieve themselves in full view of the guards in the towers. For the first three days of her confinement, Marilyn did not move her bowels. Neither did she eat the foul-smelling food prepared in the prison kitchen and distributed twice daily, at eight in the morning and at six p.m. She learned later that the male prisoners operated a small cocina in the outside compound and that edible food could be purchased there—but in the beginning, she had no money, anyway.