The Confession (10 page)

Her lips trembled, and I recognized that trembling, and I thought for a minute she was vacillating.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but she would not let me touch her. I had miscalculated. She had made her decision. It was all hers, I realized now, and she had made it weeks ago, perhaps months. Even so, I could see the hesitation in her eyes. She was still drawn to me, she still loved me. She was a sentimental woman, underneath it all, fragile, raw with disappointment. She needed to be touched.

There was still a future for us, I thought. I felt its inevitability.

“You don’t mean this.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

“I do mean it,” she said.

“I’m a beast,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I tried once again to put my arm around her.

“Don’t.”

I was angry now, all of sudden.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I went down the path. She didn’t stop me. When I hit the bottom, I glanced back up the hill. There was a spot up there, under the oak, where you could look down at the house. She stood there now, I imagined, looking beyond me at the beautiful view, the blue water, the prison. Standing defiantly in her carmine blouse, in the high grass, fluttering like a flower in the wind. This way. That. Waiting for me to drive away.

I packed a couple of bags, then dragged them out to the car, laying my suits in the back seat so they would not wrinkle. I drove down to Sausalito, to Sara Johnson’s apartment, not knowing if I meant to stop—but her car was gone. Off with her boyfriend, I figured. So I went into a diner nearby. I called Golden Hinde, thinking maybe Elizabeth would have calmed down by now and we could talk in earnest. No one answered. I sat in the cafe. I read the paper—a front page article about the Dillard trial, written by the court reporter. The piece was a hack job. The defense was one blunder after another, the writer said, and he took particular glee in my own blundering. There was even a picture of Minor tearing me apart on the stand.

I thought about going into the city, to one of the clubs. I could dance all night. I could lose my identity, become someone else. In the end, though, I didn’t have the appetite. My last experience there had left me cold. So I drove down to Lucky Drive. I walked out to the edge of the marsh and stared at the prison, its lights reflecting off the black water.

I went into the trailer and took my box out of its drawer. I put it on the bed beside me. I didn’t open the box though. I just lay there staring at the ceiling, at the darkness, listening to the wind.

When I went out to my office on Monday, I found an invitation from the Wilders identical to the one they’d sent to Golden Hinde. I was on more than one list, I guessed, and they’d mailed it out to my work address as well. As my first appointment had canceled, I had plenty of time to regard it: the fiesta colors, the embossed lettering on handmade paper, all in a bright little envelope, the color of a gin fizz.

Barbara Wilder was an artist. It was a summer party, at the height of the season, so she’d lithographed an image of the sun into the margins—a sun with two faces sketched in the fashion of a Zen mandala, one side light, the other dark.

I wanted to go. The Wilder parties were giddy affairs, the evening was always beautiful, it seemed, and there was an effervescence in the air on that hillside up above Ross, a lingering sense of glamour, of wealth, of something about to happen. As I sat there alone in my office, the Wilder party suddenly seemed indicative of all I was about to lose if I lost Elizabeth. Those things did not mean so little to me as I’d tried to pretend the other day, out walking with Elizabeth, quarreling—when I’d waved my hand at the handsome world and said none of it meant a damned thing to me, not at all.

But I could go to the party without Elizabeth, I told myself. Though there was still a part of me, I confess, that hoped I could change things between us, back to the way they had been.

My office in those days was out in Greenbrae, in a suite on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. An assortment of psychologists inhabited the building there. Sex therapists. Mid-life transition specialists. Gurus and transcendentalists. On occasion, our clientele overlapped. There were criminals among the enlightened, and vice versa, and they came to me at times with their violent thoughts, hoping to escape them, or at least find the deeper meaning therein. The truth was I could give them little solace, and I had troubles of my own.

If I were a Freudian, I might tell myself I was acting out a hatred with its roots in the womb. That I had never truly escaped my mother, so I was acting out the escape now as an adult, over and over, with the different women in my life. But Freud was out of fashion, so I had only my biochemistry to blame.

I glanced out the window and looked at the world. It was a beautiful day, with the cars glinting by and the sprinklers turning and an occasional blonde on the sidewalk. The magnolias were heavy with blossom and so were the jasmines and the azaleas and the bougainvilleas and the potato vines, too. The pears were in season and the apples and the cherry plums and they fell on the ground but were never eaten because there were just too many, the land was just too fruitful.

For me, though, things had been slow since the trial. People were canceling—even my pro bono clients. Maybe it was the summer doldrums, or maybe it had been my performance at the Dillard trial, but either way my two o’clock didn’t show, and I sat contemplating that empty space between appointments. It grew wider, emptier. After a while, the phone rang. The voice on the other end was runtish and cruel.

“How are things?” Grazzioni asked.

I wasn’t overjoyed to hear from him. My opinion, Grazzioni was a psychopath. A real switch artist, as they say in the profession. Someone who takes his own trip and lays it into your head, as if the ugliness comes from you, not him. When I’d interviewed him for San Bernardino County, I’d gone along with his game—all his crap and shine, the violent fantasies, the sex jokes—acting like it got my rocks hot, the way you feign such things on occasion (never mind it’s not kosher for a psychologist to play such games, it happens sometimes, it’s part of the routine), luring the patient along, finding out what you can. Later the bastard had tried to use it against me.

“When I saw you down at that club,” he said, “with that girl, it made me remember old times. Our talks together. Then I see you on the news during the Mori trial. It gets me thinking.”

“Listen, Tony, I’m kind of busy here.”

“I heard you’re remarried. New wife. She’s from some wealthy family, isn’t she?”

I’d spent enough time with Tony to guess where this was going. He had a gambling habit, and it got him in trouble. The murder charge had fallen apart but he’d done time for extortion, trying to get money to pay off his gambling debts.

“It’s not going to work, Tony. So what, you saw me dancing in a club?”

“It’s not the dancing, doc.”

I should have gotten off the phone then, but that pig voice of his had a certain allure.

“You remember the man I was standing with that night I saw you, at the lounge there?”

“No,” I lied.

“Well, he remembers you. Says he’s made a number of transactions with you in the past. You had a different companion each time, he says. One of those companions was Angela Mori. He didn’t know who she was at the time. Not until after the fact, he says, after she was dead. When her picture was all over the tube.”

“He’s pulling your leg, Tony”

“I tell you, I hear how she died, doc, I think about you, our little conversations. Well, certain lights go off in my head.”

“Tony . . .”

“I think of those other girls . . .”

“Tony

“You don’t have to worry. My friend in the club, he’s a dim bulb, low wattage. But me, I got needs.”

“He’s got me confused with someone else.”

“That’s a good one, doc. You and your ponytail. How many guys wearing those any more? Makes me think, deep down, you want to be caught. Sub-conscious, like. You know how I mean. Isn’t that the way it is sometimes, guys like you?”

I fell silent. I was at a loss, I suppose, how to respond. “I’m thinking twenty grand for starters. I wouldn’t pinch you so hard except I got people breathing on me, too. You know how it is.”

“I don’t have time for this, Tony,” I said at last. “I’ve got patients to deal with.”

He started to laugh then. It was an ugly noise, that laugh of his. I hung up, but he had gotten to me. I tasted my heart up there in my throat. I glanced at the Wilders’ invitation again and felt my old life slipping away, disappearing into that ugly laugh.

That evening, before the sun went down, I ran along the wetlands by the side of the bay, then underneath the freeway into Corte Madera. It was a popular trail, and once or twice I’d happened into Minor Robinson. He lived on the last street of a subdivision that backed into the old salt marsh.

I was brooding along with my head down, jogging on the berm above the swamp, thinking about the notion that the things that happen to us, they are not just arbitrary, but a reflection of our inner state. The turmoil of the self is the turmoil of the world. I did not really subscribe to such thinking, but there were times you couldn’t help but wonder. As I ran, I happened to catch a glimpse of Minor’s place below me, down a path overgrown with anise and salt grass: a modest house, small and tidy, built on a concrete slab back in the ’50 s. I had been inside once, at a retirement party for a colleague. (Elizabeth had been along, too, more quiet than usual, almost shy.) In the course of the evening, a couple of the guests had inadvertently locked themselves out of the house. They’d gotten back in easily enough, jiggling the slider around in its track. Even so, the episode had been a bit of a joke at the party and something to laugh about later, in the halls of the Civic Center: how easy it was to break into the Prosecuting Attorney’s house. The incident really hadn’t been so funny as people made out, but I remembered it as I glanced down into Minor’s yard. The sliding door looked as flimsy as ever.

I kept running, jogging along.

I thought about Grazzioni and his threats. It is true, there are a few things I haven’t mentioned here about Angela and myself. I pursued her for a little while, in the same manner I pursued Sara. She was reckless in similar ways, and I have a hard time resisting such women, but there is not really much more to tell. You can imagine our encounters: the dark rooms, our damp bodies, mouths wet with liquor. Unfortunately, Grazzioni could imagine it all, too. I feared he would tell Elizabeth, and other people as well, and let his imagination run. Even so, I had no intention of paying him. Because if I paid him once, he would only dial my number again. And he was a complication I did not need, no matter my karma, as they call it, no matter the illusory nature of the world and of the demons herein, selfcreated or otherwise.

I was suspicious about Grazzioni, wondering why he’d shown up just now, if it was coincidence or if there was something else at work. In the past he’d tried to extort people for crimes he himself had committed—which is not uncommon with a certain type of criminal—and I wondered just how desperate he was, how short of money, and if he might be connected to Dillard and Angela in a way I was not aware of.

I decided to call Nate Jackson, a private detective who specialized in defendant work. He’d worked for Wagoner on the Dillard case, but I’d known him for a while—and he owed me a favor.

“Hey Jake,” he said. “It’s nice to hear from you.”

Nate Jackson had a good phone voice, down-to-earth and sonorous. The detective was short on looks, though, obese and sweaty—and when you met him he gave off a rank odor from hauling around all that weight. Though I’d been face-to-face with him a number of times, it was still hard to put those looks together with the voice on the other end of the line.

“It’s great to hear from you,” he said again.

How I knew Jackson was on account of his daughter, Anabelle, who’d spent a few years up at Napa, in Ward C, in the wing for the criminally insane. Before that Anabelle had used to work as an au pair here in Marin. Then one of her charges, four years old, had drowned in a swimming pool under suspicious circumstances. Anabelle had been found unfit for trial. Meantime, as fate would have it, the state’s case fell apart due to a mishap with the evidence. A few months later Napa let her loose. Part of it had to do with my testimony. I’d seen no sign of delusion when I re-examined her. Her reasoning was clear as a bell.

Her dad, Nate, was eternally grateful. The truth was I had just played it by the rules, but he felt like he owed me a favor.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“The Dillard case.”

“I heard he was convicted.”

“Yes.” My voice cracked and I let it do so, deliberately maybe, because I wanted his help and his sympathy—and needed him to hear my disillusionment with the way the case had gone. Or maybe it was just the emotion of the last few weeks. “Tell me, did you do an alternative suspect search? Did Wagoner ask for one of those?”

He hesitated on the other end. Wondering why I was pursuing this, I supposed. It was a good question. It could be that I felt badly about Dillard’s conviction. That I was doing a little research, looking to help out on the appeal. That may have been part of it—but if I am honest, I knew there wasn’t going to be an appeal. Not by Haney, anyway. The money was exhausted, and Dillard would have to use a court-appointed attorney now. No, I had another reason. I wanted to know if Grazzioni could be linked to the case—and if there was a way to get him out of my life.