The Confession (22 page)

“You can go,” she said. “My client’s told you all he can tell.” Jamie wore a red jacket with a velveteen collar, a matching skirt, black boots. Milofski gave her the once over, hard and ugly, like he was on patrol and she was a whore on the street. “I don’t think so,” Milofski said. “He hasn’t given me his little speech yet. How he’s innocent, and the real killer’s out on the street.”

“Go,” she insisted.

“What—and leave you two unprotected?”

“Get out.”

Milofski left but he dallied outside the room, chatting it up with the cop on duty, telling him to shoot me if I tried to leave. He said it loud enough for me to hear. The cop guffawed, and Jamie closed the door. “You’ve made a mess of this,” she said to me. “You should have turned yourself in, like I asked, rather than going out to your wife’s place.”

“I wanted to see her.”

“Why?”

“Love, perhaps. She’s my wife, after all.”

“The GHB—what do you know about it?”

I hesitated. “They must have planted it out there—same as they planted it at my trailer.”

Jamie didn’t have anything to say to this. I considered giving her a more elaborate explanation, full of details: telling her I’d been out to Minor’s house and seen the knock-out bottle, then driven out to Golden Hinde to save my wife. In the end, I decided no. I had no proof. Besides, if I changed my story now, even with my lawyer, it might only work against me.

Anyway I was not lying about why I had gone out to Golden Hinde. Not entirely.

“They’ve assigned a new prosecutor to the case,” Jamie said. “Richard Sabel.”

“I don’t know him.”

“He’s new in the department. He’s seeking to expand the indictment.”

She wore a gaudy necklace and her hair hung loose and her eyes glistened in the dark room. She smiled oddly and her smile showed her teeth. I’d heard rumors about her private life, too, of course, the kind of rumors you might expect concerning a single woman in her profession. She was a lesbian. A nympho. She carried a knife in her purse.

“They’ve already got their evidence for the grand jury, for the murder and rape of Sara Johnson. Now they want to add new charges.”

“They can’t charge me with Minor’s murder. I didn’t even pull the trigger.”

“Maybe not—but from what I hear there’s a rumor going around that links you to some other strangulations around the state. Then there’s the similarities between this and the Mori case. It’s got people thinking.”

She stood close by my bed, a little too close, smiling that odd smile of hers, regarding me with a certain affection, the way a young child regards an animal in a cage.

“It’s all slander.”

She shook her head and dropped her hand, fingers splayed, onto the white sheet: a dainty little hand, surprisingly so, with her nails painted rust—to match her hair, her Ups—and an oversized bracelet dangling from her wrist.

“Perhaps, but the prosecution’s added a new name on the witness list for the grand jury. A former patient of yours, Tony Grazzioni. Do you have any idea what that might be about?”

“No,” I said.

She looked at me long and hard, as if she saw right through me, to the small lump of fear in my chest.

“Why do you do this?” I asked.

I put my hand on her hand. I was tempted to pull her towards me then. To feel her hard body with its limbs that were all angles and lines. To put my hand up her red skirt and stare into those black eyes. Meanwhile her hand moved underneath mine, and she looked at me as if I were something to be eaten and excreted. She had the purse over her shoulder and I imagined her reaching into that purse as I pulled her down, slitting me up the middle.

“Do what?”

“The work you do? Why?”

She grinned. She ran her eyes over my body and I felt low and vulnerable. I took my hand away.

“For the pleasure of a job well done.”

Then she took a step away from the bed, and seemed to grow taller. She went on talking as if nothing had passed between us. “My guess, these new accusations, they’re just so much noise. A way of drumming up some nasty press. Still, I don’t want Sabel expanding the indictment. If successful, it gives him the opportunity to drag other evidence into the trial.

“I want to get this to trial quickly. They’re bunglers up there in the DA’s office. If we push them, they’ll stumble. They’ll contaminate the evidence just walking down the hall.”

I nodded my agreement. It was a common enough strategy, and I did not catch at first the twitch in her expression, the small shift of the eyes that should have told me something else was coming, out of the ordinary. I touched the wound in my belly and ran my fingers through my hair, through the missing pony.

“To get us on the fast track, I had to make a compromise of sorts. I made an agreement with the judge. To a psychiatric evaluation.”

“What?”

“Someone you know, I believe. Madison Paulie—he’s going to talk to you on behalf of the court, to determine fitness to stand trial. I know this often takes place a little later, after the indictment has been finalized, but I agreed to let them talk to you now.”

“I’m fit to stand trial. There’s no question about that.”

“Just talk to Mr. Paulie. He’ll be along tomorrow.”

“When’s the grand jury meeting?”

“Next week.”

“I don’t like this.”

“Just cooperate.”

I tried to disagree, but her time was up now and she did not intend to listen. When she left, I heard her heels clicking down the long hall. I imagined the cop watching her ass swing its way to the elevator, thinking his cop thoughts, despising her and wanting to fuck her at the same time. Maybe she’d even given him one of her hard-ass smiles, her Jamie Kaufman smiles, Queen of the Damned. Ugly, like I said, all angles and calculation, but not without her own land of appeal. Still, I was wise not to have pulled her any closer. She might spring you, she might set you free, but for her own reasons. It made her feel powerful. It swelled her up, the idea of a guilty man out in the world, free by her doing. But move the wrong way, foul things up, she’d cut you to pieces, feed you to the swine. Innocent or no. Even so, she knew how to work the tabloids. She’d scolded me but the story of the lovelorn prosecutor, accidentally shot to death by his mistress, wife of the accused, it was everywhere now, and the prosecution’s case was swamped in the backwash, in the flashbulbs and innuendoes, and Sabel was too new, too green, to fight her off. Or that’s what I hoped, anyway.

That night my fever returned. I had dreams, and in those dreams I divided into a hundred selves—and each of those divided into a hundred more—and one self was as innocent as could be, betrayed by his wife, framed by her lover—another was the man the prosecution claimed him to be: murderer, serial killer—another the poor boy raised in Baltimore, little boy Jake, poor Jake—still another walked by the marsh, wretched thoughts in his mind, the wind in his hair—danced in clubs, caught glimpses of himself in the mirror—while on the television other Jakes wandered in and out of living rooms—materialized in radio reports—in conversations—in the story I am telling now, to try and set the record straight.

By morning my fever had receded. Madison Paulie came to visit, as Jamie said he would. Paulie was dressed in a gray suit, but he still had the same scarecrow look, gangly and wild-limbed. His red hair was frayed and unkempt. His face was thin and pale, and the black mole on his cheek loomed larger, as if it had grown since the last time I’d seen him, at the Wilders’ party. He had a way of regarding you, from the side, glancing away then back, that made it seem as if he were looking at you from two directions at once.

“How are you doing?” Paulie asked. His voice managed the sound of genuine concern.

“Not so bad.”

I was suspicious. He’d been appointed by the court, and his findings would be open to the prosecution.

“You know the reason I’m here?” he asked.

I nodded, and he nodded, too. The nod of camaraderie. Shrink to shrink.

“I hear you grew up in Baltimore.”

It was an effort to get me talking. I went along, telling him how I’d grown up in the row district down by the old stadium. I gave him my family background. I was careful the way I phrased things, but my mom and I, we were a social service case and there were records. He had access to them, I figured. Even if he didn’t, he was savvy enough to guess the kind of details under the surface. Father who disappeared before I was born. Mother who tinted her hair a different color every week. A timid woman who had a secret love for things brutal and lurid. Who had trouble with little yellow pills that made her sleepy, and when she took them became amorous in a stupid, unconscious way. Men took advantage.

“I had a rocky childhood, I admit. Raised by a single mom, but she loved me. She did her best.”

“Of course.”

I could guess what he was thinking. My background matched the FBI profile for certain kinds of criminals. So did that of a lot of other people though. President Clinton, for example. Martin Luther King.

“You suffered from blackouts when you were a kid, didn’t you? Sudden fits of rage.”

“I outgrew it.”

He nodded, made a note on his pad.

We were playing each other now. He wanted to draw me out, not caring so much what the subject matter was, just wanting to hear me talk, to listen to my associative banter and the kind of logical connections I made, so he could see if there were any indications of delusional thinking, or paranoia, or psychopathic manipulation of events.

“This has been hard on you, I imagine.” His voice was sympathetic, and there was a blue glint in his eye. “The murder charges, all the publicity—it must be hard.”

“It hasn’t done wonders for my marriage.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“We separated just before this happened, and . . .” I paused. “I’m sure you’ve read the stories in the paper.”

“I don’t imagine they are necessarily true.”

“To be honest, it was good between Elizabeth and I for a long time. But more recently I don’t know . . . maybe it has to do with her father’s death. Her expectations . . .”

I put my head in my hand. Then a sound came out of me, from deep in my chest. The land of solitary, wrenching noise you might expect from a man in my position, alone on a hospital bed, charged with murder, estranged from his wife.

He laced his fingers, wondering perhaps if the sob was real.

“You attended Chesapeake College, didn’t you—for your undergraduate work.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You were there at the time of the Winkle murder.”

I hesitated, taken aback at this sudden shift—but that’s the way it was in my business. The talk always turned to murder. At any rate I knew the case. You couldn’t have attended Chesapeake College when I did and not know. A co-ed, Karen Winkle, had been strangled to death in her room. They blamed the boyfriend for a while, but he had some kind of alibi, said she was into lanky sex with strangers, pushing the envelope. Some of her girlfriends said the same thing. Into popping, they called it then, asphyxiation as a way of heightening the orgasm. Walked around with rope burn on her neck, under the collar. Liked to pick up strangers. People speculated it was an incident of that type: a pick-up gone out of control.

“Why are you bringing this up?” I asked.

“In graduate school, I studied the case. Wrote a paper.”

“What aspect did you study?”

“How the first time, for a serial murderer, it can set the pattern. It’s not planned. It’s something that happens in the course of another incident. The killer gets his first taste. After that, the events become more ritualized.”

“I’m familiar with that phenomenon, yes.”

“There were more deaths later, weren’t there? A series of strangulations. Eventually, they arrested another kid at your college. He’d been dating one of the girls. Claimed he’d been framed.”

“He was executed, if I remember.”

“You were living with your mother at the time.”

“Yes,” I said, still agreeable, but I didn’t much care for this line of questioning.

“Your mother died shortly after that, didn’t she? A drowning incident. Same as your first wife.”

“That’s true.”

“It must be hard for you.”

“I don’t follow.”

“A number of women in your own life have died under unusual circumstances. Now—these allegations.”

I understood what Paulie was doing. Trying to see if he could trace me back, establish a pattern that went deep into my past, knitting the events of my life together. Just doing his job, you might say, trying to see what he could see—but I didn’t like it. I began to feel quite enraged. Then suddenly
he
stood up, glancing at his watch.

“Your doctor told me I could only have an hour today. He was quite firm. He doesn’t want to wear you out.”

“That all right. I don’t mind talking.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, and gave me a wink. “I’ll be back in a few days.”

Something will happen, I thought. Something will come clear, some flaw will be found, and I will be set free. The next day, though, they transferred me over to the county jail. Jamie wasn’t there this time; she let them take me unaccompanied. They handcuffed me in the back of a cruiser and drove me over, and once again I walked down that long corridor into the tombs. I was nobody in the tombs, just another prisoner. With each step, I felt myself disappear a little more. Inside my cell, the walls were gray and I knew it wouldn’t be long before that grayness invaded my head. Images of the outside would come to me—my house, the sky overhead, a restaurant filled with people—and I would feel an anxiety, a sense of hopelessness. Some say it is the early days of incarceration that are the worst. After a while, the prisoner disassociates himself from his memories, and the outside world ceases to exist. It is a survival strategy, I suppose. If you don’t learn it, you suffer. So it is best to be estranged, unattached, and let the memories drift by as if they belong to someone else.