The Devil's Interval by Linda Peterson Page B

You just have to look like your own sweet WASPy self. We all have our gifts and our connections and yours enable us to get inside Grace Plummer’s social scene. You’re our hidden asset in the City’s A-list.”
    Starchy Storch had seen right through me. But she was warming to the story and got busy interviewing the rich, thin, medicated, and moisturized crowd in Pacific Heights, and the people who served them—caterers, florists, valet-parkers, and mani-pedi experts. Now, with Isabella’s help, I was back at the Q, trying to understand Travis’s relationship with Grace, and getting impatient with his reluctance to talk.
    Travis reached over and put his hand on the pad.
    â€œSorry, Maggie, I’m just tired of reliving, retelling, remembering, re-everything.”
    I nodded. “Can’t help if I don’t know,” I said.
    â€œOkay, so…first, it wasn’t exactly a moment. It was more a whole string of moments. Right from the start, we’d talk while I was driving her around.”
    â€œAbout?”
    â€œHell, everything. She’d give me the gossip on all those skinny, rich broads she hung out with at charity events. Books, movies, restaurants, the Minnesota Twins…”
    â€œTwins? Baseball? She was a baseball fan?”
    â€œI don’t know how much of a fan she was, but much of her family was originally from the Midwest. Her grandparents had taken her to watch the Twins play the As when she was a kid, on trips back to Minnesota and when the Twins came to play Oakland.”
    â€œNot her parents?”
    Travis looked away. “I don’t know; she didn’t talk much about them. Just her grandparents. Her grandmother called her Amazing Gracie, which was pretty strange, because…” he stopped.
    â€œBecause…”
    â€œBecause the night our relationship went to a different place is the night I realized other people called her Amazing Gracie.”
    â€œOther people? Like her friends?” I pushed.
    â€œNot exactly.”
    â€œTravis,” I said, “I’ve got limited time here, as you know. So, before they ring the bell and send us all home, I’d like to make some progress. Can you just talk to me, so I don’t have to wring every last syllable out of you?”
    â€œChrist, Maggie,” he said, “wait ’til those kids of yours are teenagers. You’re going to have to polish up your interrogation techniques.”
    â€œGood to know,” I said. “So, what other people called her Amazing Gracie?”
    â€œThe people at the Crimson.”
    I flipped through the file lying in front of me, the summary of notes Travis’s habeas attorney had given me.
    â€œCrimson? The club on Tehama?”
    All around the city, private clubs had made a resurgence. But instead of the chlorine-smelling, faux-bath environments that had flourished in the pre-AIDS days, these were primarily straight, elegant and likely to attract the moneyed and restless. I knew about them, first from one of Michael’s more adventuresome partners, and then the newspaper started covering them as a trend—which probably meant they would be so-six-weeks-ago very soon.
    Travis grinned, “That’s the one. You hang out there, Maggie?”
    â€œOh, right,” I said, “me and all the other soccer moms. We climb into our little black dresses and drive the SUVs with the spilled Cheerios in the backseat right down Tehama.”
    â€œActually, the Crimson Club involves more climbing out of little black dresses,” said Travis, “but I like the picture.”
    â€œTalk,” I said, glancing at my wristwatch.
    And he did. About driving Grace and Frederick together to nights out at the Crimson and other clubs. About how he’d wait in the car, reading, listening to music, until 3 or 4 in the morning, when they’d emerge. Usually Grace and Frederick together. Once in a while, another couple