The Confession (24 page)

“All right”

“You’ve spent your life talking to criminals, just like I have. You’ve heard a million stories.”

“That’s true.”

“So you’re familiar with the violent impulse. It’s deep-rooted in the brain. Though in some people, it’s true, that impulse displays itself more than others.”

“Yes.”

“If we believe the Jungians, everything is born in its opposite. When a soul is out of balance, we nurture it with opposing elements. Beauty with violence, man with woman, fire with water. Opposites heal the psyche, move the individual toward self-integration. Though in the criminal population, such transcendence seldom occurs.”

“No.”

“Except, possibly, in the violent act itself.”

He was appealing to my professional self again, or pretending to. It was one way to flush a psychopath into the open. Such individuals invariably regard themselves as more intelligent than anyone else. They like to play games. So one way to uncover them is to indulge their pretensions. String them along. Knowing this, I said nothing. I didn’t think it wise. Paulie wanted to engage me. He was trying to draw me out, to get a glimpse inside of me, to see if in all of my manifold selves there was the one self he was looking for, and if I would somehow reveal it to him.

“The murderers I talk to,” he said, “most of them, they don’t fall to their knees tormented by guilt. No, far from it. They give you the big wink, the big smile. You’ve seen it, I’m sure: how they behave when they’re escorted into the courtroom, in their bright orange suits. The arrogance. The sidelong smirk.”

He was working me, like I said, or trying to work me, but I could also sense that this was not completely an act. These issues troubled him.

“When I first went into this field,” he said. “I thought you could help individuals achieve spiritual balance. You could overcome the demons. It was a hard battle, I thought, but listening, talking, we make a contribution to criminology.

“After a while I came to look at it differently. There was just them over there, and us over here. Our job was to keep the door shut. Lock them away. Only they kept getting out. So I determined the function of our profession was something else altogether.”

“What’s that?

“We are conduits.”

“I don’t understand.”

“By listening, we are letting the demons loose. We let them into the world. They spawn, multiply. Whisper in every comer.”

In Paulie’s face, I saw his own disturbance. Listening all these years, interviewing criminals—at some point it was as if he were no longer listening to someone else, but to a voice inside.

“You know that kid, I told you about? The blackout victim, the one they put in the asylum?”

“What about him?”

“They let him loose. He was a model patient. Sweet as hell. After a few years, they declared him cured.”

“A happy ending?”

“He integrated himself into a new community. Remarried. Then it happened all over again. Three new victims. When they brought him in, it was the same story as before. He didn’t remember.”

“No?”

“I might have believed him, except for one thing. While he was out in the world, he confided in someone. Another con. In a bar. He told his buddy he remembered every minute. Every goddamn glorious minute. It was the pleasure of his life. You see, there’d been no amnesia. He knew exactly what he was doing. He’d fooled us all.”

“So he’s off the streets at least. He won’t fool anyone again.”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“That’s good.”

“He was murdered in prison.”

“I see.”

“Castrated—with a razor. It happened in his cell.”

I glanced inward now, and in that inner darkness I saw another self, bleeding to death on the prison floor. I touched my head. I was burning up.

“I’m innocent,” I said.

He regarded me a long moment. “You look pale.”

“I have a fever.”

He came over and put a palm on my forehead. I looked at him and he looked back, and I could see him probing me. He was working on intuition. After the tests, the examinations, and our conversation, it all came down to this one moment. He realized, I’m sure, that I wasn’t delusional. I was capable of standing trial. Even so he held his palm there a moment longer, trying to read my face, looking for that smile, maybe, for that small turn of the lips. Wanting to know something more. To get a glimpse way down into me. But whatever he saw, it was just himself, mirrored in my eyes. He took away his hand.

“You’re burning up,” he said. “I better call the guard.”

Fever overtook me once again, worse than before. I fell in and out of dreams, and in each one of those dreams, at the center of hell, was Tony Grazzioni, talking to the grand jury.
Yeah
,
yeah, the doc, he told me all kinds of stuff. We shared confidences, you might say, and he told me some things. That woman in Vegas, strangled during the forensic convention, he knew the color of her blouse. The kind of pumps she was wearing.
Then I would wake up from this dream, in the jail infirmary, thinking I had to get to the phone, but it was night, it was dark.
The doc told me little details only an insider would know. Trying to draw me out, you know, like the shrinks do, tell you a little bit of theirs so you tell them a little bit back. Except he got carried away. Told me how in the beginning it was girls he didn’t know, met in bars.
Then it was day, and I struggled up—but the nurse came, a male nurse, big as an elephant, and he put his hand on my forehead, forcing me back. Tony sat upright, naked from the waist up. His belly wiggled as he talked, like the words were emanating from his navel.
Later it was close to home. Women under his nose. Like Angela Mori. Acquaintance of mine saw them both together. Sold him some Liquid X down in SOMA.
Another morning, then night, then morning again. I was groggy. Someone poked me, jostled me awake. It was a mild-mannered little doctor who had the look of a torture expert.

“He was crying out all night,” said the nurse.

“I need to make a phone call.”

They ignored me. Grazzioni would testify soon, and I needed to get to the phone before that happened.

“Keep him another day,” said the doctor. “He’s still feverish, and we don’t want him dropping dead before he goes to court.”

They gave me something to sleep and on the way under I caught a glimpse of Sara’s face, and Angela’s, and other women, too, a line that went back in time to the Winkle girl, but then all those faces vanished into flames, like pages in an incinerator.

Elizabeth
. . .

My fever had broken. For good, I hoped—but I still needed to get to the phone. The doctor felt my forehead, nodded. He gave his approval. The guards came and escorted me back to the pod.

That afternoon, I waited in line once more. Once more I watched the prisoners ahead of me, talking on the other side of the glass. I edged forward. The con in front of me hung up. A guard passed.

My turn.

I dialed the number Nate Jackson had given me.

“Who is this?”

I closed my eyes. If I had an ounce of misgiving, it was here, now. Or maybe it was pleasure. I closed my eyes and saw him inside me then, that greedy fuck staring into the void, sucking me in. Insatiable.

“I knew where Tony is,” I said. “Tony Grazzioni, I can tell you. But if you want him, you better move fast.”

Monday was Tony’s day in front of the Grand Jury, but he didn’t show. Not that day, not the next. Not until two weeks later, when a water skier up at Tahoe hit something soft and ungainly out in the middle of the lake. By that time, the grand jury had made its decision. And Jamie was right. The DA’s office bungled its presentation. The prosecution failed to expand the charges against me—and the indictment was limited to the murder and rape of Sara Johnson.

The official trial is a matter of public record, and there are many of you, I am sure, who know the outcome, and have some idea of my own fate, and of what happened to Elizabeth later, after this was all over, when she fled to that little cottage she’d always wanted, down in Tomales Bay, with the steps down to the water, and no prison on the other side. Still I know that events such as these slip quickly from the public consciousness, and there are some among you, I imagine, who know nothing of the trial at all.

There is much that I could relate. I could for example create a picture for you of Richard Sabel. A blonde, punchless man in his mid-thirties, full of ambition. Forever waving his arms, forever glowering. I could tell you, too, how I sat at the defense table, listening in silence to his accusations while Queen Jamie sat beside me, businesslike in her high-collared blouse and her gray jacket, with her russet hair pulled back and that hard smile on her face.

I could recreate for you as well the lurid atmosphere of the trial. The morgue photos Sabel projected onto the courtroom wall. Sara full-length, Sara up close, Sara in extremis. The string of confidantes Sabel called to the stand. All with their stories to tell, implying my pursuit of Sara had been full of ill intent from the beginning. This followed by endless experts—blood, saliva, skin—leading up to the DNA specialist, a squirrelish little man whose testimony was filled with charts and calculations, a recitation of probabilities—a million to one, a billion—all indicating, yes, the sperm inside Sara Johnson belonged to me, Jake Danser, and no one else.

Yes, I could relate all this to you, and the feeling of doom that overcame me, and how that feeling did not abate even as Queen Jamie launched my defense. I could tell you how she maneuvered to make this trial about Minor Robinson rather than me. How she recalled Milofski to the stand, and got him to admit the irregularities in the searching of my trailer. And how Lady Wilder told the jury, in her recollection, no I had not been wearing a tie when I left her party—but yes, she had seen Minor Robinson poking around the arbor after I’d gone. I could relate all of this to you, but in the end it is simple prelude. Because it was only Elizabeth that mattered. Only my wife, and her testimony before the court.

Elizabeth entered the courtroom that day wearing a gray jacket with black lapels, a matching skirt, a white blouse. She had a classy air about her, demure and elegant, but there was also the air of scandal. I felt a small rush as she walked by. I could smell her fragrance, hear the rustle of her skirt. She didn’t glance in my direction. She took the oath, and the jury heard for the first time her backporch drawl, the jasmine in her voice, the cobbler mixed in there with the East Coast education, and they wondered, I guess, at the truth behind the news stories. How this woman with the proud manner, the expensive clothes and the flame white hair—a handsome woman, a scholar, a person of means and intelligence—how she could have gotten herself at the center of such a mess.

“How long have you been married to the defendant?”

“Three years.”

“Happily?”

The line of her jaw tightened with disdain. “We were happy for a while.”

“You separated recently, is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Were you seeing anyone else during this time?”

“Objection!”

Throughout the trial, Jamie had been doing her best to provoke Sabel—with her constant insinuations against Minor Robinson. The prosecutor was quick to jump up in outrage. Now the two attorneys approached the bench. There was some heated whispering. Meanwhile Elizabeth sat quietly. She wore her father’s pearls, as always. I know I have mentioned them more than once, how her father had given the pearls to her as a way of claiming her forever, and there were times, I admit, when I’d felt like yanking them from her neck.

“The night of the party at the Wilders’. What time did you arrive?”

“At about nine. Maybe a little after.”

“Did you come alone?”

“Yes. I took a taxi.”

“Why a taxi?

I leaned forward in my seat and felt the eyes of the jury on me. At stake here were two versions of the truth. One in which I’d drugged and strangled Sara with my necktie in her apartment. Another in which I was the victim, a betrayed husband framed by an overzealous prosecutor.

“The reason I took a taxi . . .” Elizabeth faltered, her face blossoming a sudden red. “I didn’t want to worry about driving home later, after a couple of drinks. I don’t like to drive if I’ve been drinking.”

“Did you expect to meet Minor Robinson at the party?”

“Objection!” Sabel took to his feet again.

“Nonsense,” said Jamie. “The prosecution introduced the subject of the party, including the matter of Minor Robinson’s presence there. It is well within our purview to pursue this matter.”

“Objection overruled,” said the judge. “The witness will answer the question.”

“I was aware of the fact Minor might be there,” said Elizabeth.

“In fact—didn’t you meet him out front, and walk in together?”

“We bumped into each other.”

“Did you talk to your husband inside the party?”

“Briefly.”

“What did you talk about?”

“He wanted to know if I had come alone. Or with Minor Robinson.”