The Confession (25 page)

“What did you say?”

“Alone. I told him I had come alone.”

“When in fact you had come with Minor Robinson?”

“No. I ran into Minor out front. It wasn’t planned.”

“But you went home together?”

“He gave me a ride.”

“What time was that?”

“About midnight.”

“Did he come inside?”

“No.”

The little rush in my heart grew faster, more erratic. I wanted to believe Elizabeth and Minor had not been together. Not that night, or any other. I wanted to believe despite what I myself had seen from the shadows at Golden Hinde, and despite the fact that the more unfaithful she’d been, the more wanton, the more it helped my case. She danced at me then. The jury saw. It was the briefest of glances, but our eyes met and held, and in that instant it was as if we regarded one another from trawlers unhinged at sea, the chasm between us grower wider with each passing instant, the water colder, deeper.

“At the party, you saw your husband with Sara Johnson?”

“I caught a glimpse of them, dancing.”

“Did you see them go out to the arbor together?”

“I heard about that later.”

“Were you aware of the fact that Minor Robinson went out to the arbor, after your husband had left.”

“No,” said Elizabeth.

“Now, the coroner has established the time of Ms. Johnson’s death between one a.m. and four a.m. Was Mr. Robinson with you during the hours in question?”

“Objection!” Sabel exploded. He was standing now and his yellow hair was straight up in the air, like a figure in a cartoon. “This line of questioning is designed to implicate the prosecutor. It is unseemly. The prosecutor was killed in the line of duty. He is not on trial here.”

Jamie gleamed. In his righteousness, Sabel had voiced out loud the point she’d been trying to make through insinuation. Minor had visited the arbor after Sara and I. Perhaps he had found the tie I’d left behind. Then, between the hours of one and four . . .

“Overruled,” said the judge. “Answer the question, please.”

“No. He was not with me. I don’t know where he went.”

The examination went on. Sabel fought every question, but Jamie was relentless. She asked Elizabeth about other times she and Minor had gotten together. For coffee in San Rafael. After the conference in Sonoma. At the Racquet Club. The movies.

I listened with the dread of a jealous husband, humiliated, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks.

The judge had prohibited cameras, but the reporters were here. Studying me, studying Elizabeth. Scribbling their observations. Like everyone else, I’d been following the newspapers, and I knew how absurd those observations could be. The case had been magnified, presented as an example
au courant
, reported not only for its own sake but used by editorialists to berate anything that needed berating. The criminal justice system. The efficacy of modern psychology. New Age religion and the lifestyles of the middle-aged. There was, of course, the inevitable analysis in the Sunday supplement. You can almost predict the words, I am sure: how the trial was more than a trial—a window into society at large and the way we live today.

We are too concerned with the surface of things. Accumulation for accumulations sake. We fail to see what lies beneath. We move from thing to thing, person to person, belief to belief. Materialism is the spirituality of the New Age, cloaked in self-help, in psychology, in a pan-religious Unitarianism that ignores the real demons within.

To fill that emptiness, the writers concluded, we consume. Not just objects, but each other as well.

Nonsense, of course. I’m sure you agree.

The kind of babble you might expect from a freelance journalist in the Sunday supplement. Nonetheless, the writers were still here, scribbling away, and we were impressed by their presence. Elizabeth’s testimony continued. Jamie asked her about a night she and Minor had gotten together at Golden Hinde, not long after I was brought in for questioning.

“What was the subject of that conversation?”

“Minor was worried. The evidence against Jake, he said it looked pretty bad.”

“What was your reaction?”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“Did it ever occur to you that he was trying to remove your husband as a rival?”

She hesitated. “No.”

“Did you believe the case against your husband, when Minor first told you?”

“Not at first.”

“But later you did?”

“I began to wonder.”

“In other words, the more intimate you became with Minor Robinson, the more you doubted your husband’s innocence.”

Sabel jumped to his feet. “Leading the witness.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

Elizabeth’s composure had diminished. Her blush had begun to deepen but it wasn’t a pretty blush. It made her face look raw. She still had her beauty, more or less—but her white hair under the courtroom light had lost its platinum sheen. It no longer seemed dramatic but rather colorless and frayed. She touched the pearls about her neck. It was a small gesture, one that I’d seen many times—a simple flourish, the kind that wealthy girls make, with bluing in their blood—but at the moment the elegance was gone and she seemed fragile and a little bit old.

“Mrs. Danser,” Jamie asked, “did it ever occur to you in regard to Mr. Robinson, that your friendship—as you refer to it—and his role as prosecutor, that these two things might put him into conflict?”

“It made for a conflict in us both, I think.”

“Yet you continued to see him, even though he was prosecuting your husband.”

“He came by the house a couple of times. To talk.”

“About what?”

I could sense her weakening. If I could have gone to her then and erased everything that happened—and returned to that moment in her convertible, to that halting look in her blue eyes—I might have done so. “After the lab evidence came in, Minor was more and more convinced that Jake was the killer. He was worried for me. He was concerned, about what Jake might do.”

“Were you in love with Mr. Robinson?”

“We had friendship that went back a number of years.”

“Friendship?” Jamie’s voice inflected higher, and her face lit up. “Was it this friendship that inspired him to come out to Golden Hinde on the evening of the 29th? The evening he was shot and killed.”

Elizabeth’s lips quivered and her eyes misted and I thought for a moment she might collapse into tears.

“Come now, the police have cleared you of all charges. Tell us what happened.”

“Jake had disappeared,” she said. “Minor was worried he might come by the house. He was concerned for my safety.” They went over the evening again, detail by detail. Minor knocking on the door. The scuffling in the shadows. The gun on the carpet. How Elizabeth, in the darkness, could not recognize for certain which of us was which.

“When you shot Mr. Robinson, who did you think he was?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Please, Mrs. Danser. You must have had some thoughts in your mind. When you pointed that gun, you had two figures to choose from.”

“I was confused,” she said. “Minor and my husband, they have similar builds. Minor had taken off his coat, but I didn’t know that. All I saw was the white shirt. I thought maybe Jake, or someone else, I don’t know who, had broken in somehow. And when I saw the man in the white shirt, pressing the other man against the wall—when I heard him cry out, I fired.”

“So you shot him?”

“Yes.”

“And when it turned out you were mistaken, and you saw Minor Robinson on the floor, and your husband emerged from the shadows, what did you do?”

Elizabeth looked resigned. She was undone. Jamie had gotten her to pay for my defense, then double-crossed her, releasing information about her and Minor, turning her life into a tabloid affair for the sake of my defense. Now Jamie sought to humiliate her in the courtroom.

“I shot him,” she said, with the faintest of smiles. “Twice. But as you can see, he refuses to die.”

There was laughter in the courtroom. I might have laughed, too—if it had been some other man’s wife up there, and she were talking about someone other than myself.

“Mrs. Danser, were you having an affair with Minor Robinson?”

“Objection.”

“Overruled. The witness will answer the question.” Elizabeth glanced at me as if from the bottom of the sea, her eyes glassy, remote. The truth was going to come out now. I had been cuckolded. I saw sorrow in her aging face, and grief—and a dark expectancy, too.

The judged prodded her again. Jamie repeated the question.

“Were you having an affair with Minor Robinson?”

“Yes,” she said at last.

She said it proudly, and with malice, and her expression reminded me of how she had looked that day out on the cliff when I’d realized she meant to end it between us. My affair with Sara, she meant to hold it bitterly in her heart. I felt my own anger now. Maybe it was not reasonable, but I could not help feeling that if she had not pushed me away, that night at the Wilders’ party, I would not have pursued Sara. This trial would never have taken place.

I am innocent.

Queen Jamie pressed on. She had the angle she wanted. She puffed herself up, slatternly with indignation.

“Are you telling me, Mrs. Danser, that you were sleeping with the prosecuting attorney. The man who was manipulating evidence against your husband—”

“Objection! Leading the witness.”

“Sustained.”

“The same man who went back to the arbor to gather the silk tie.”

“Objection!”

The judged rapped his gavel. “Order!” he snapped.

“The same man who—”

“Objection!”

The judge gaveled her down. “Ms. Kaufman, be quiet! And stay quiet! Or I will cite you for contempt!”

Finally Queen Jamie obeyed. The judge ordered her last remarks stricken from the official record. Jamie stood chafing, pacing, angry, but it was all calculated, part of the show. She had accomplished what she had meant to accomplish. The jury knew what she wanted them to know. The former prosecutor had been sleeping with the defendant’s wife. And all the evidence against me was tainted by this simple fact.

What follows, it seems like a dream, and in that dream, I see the last days of the trial, and the faces of the jury, and feel again the swings of emotion. I see Sabel, too, delivering his final statement, repeating the evidence in his slow, methodical way, building towards the moment when he would point in my direction, and ask the jury to convict me for the murder of Sara Johnson. Then it was Jamie’s turn, summarizing our case, explaining again how I had walked out to the arbor that night, and made love to Sara, and left behind my tie. I was an innocent man, guilty of indiscretions, yes, she admitted, but were these any worse than the indiscretions committed by the deceased prosecutor? Whose hands were all over the evidence, guilty of the baldest of manipulations, for the basest of motives? How could you trust the evidence gathered by Mrs. Danser’s illicit lover? What kind of justice is this? she asked, and at some point in this memory, this dream, I see the jury file out. I am alone in my cell. My heart races. The walls are gray, and I can see myself disappearing into that grayness, down long corridors into days that are yet more gray and in that grayness the jury returns. The foreman stands, reading the crimes of which I am accused. A woman on the jury gives me an unhappy smile. Then the verdict itself, the rush of noise, the gargled cry of Sara’s boyfriend, the disbelieving sobs of her relatives, cries of injustice—Jamie embracing me meanwhile, an embrace like the devils, spider-like and cold—and the video strobe in my face. On the courthouse steps, Jamie speaks for me, pushing back the crowd, insisting I am too exhausted to make a statement, saying this has been very hard on me, but now is the time for healing, and at this I bow my head, moving toward the waiting car, but not before a smile washes over my face, and the tears well up, and ten thousand shutters snap all at once—and it is that picture I see the next day on the tabloid, the smile together with the gleam in the eye, the smirk, that photo underneath the headline:
PSYCHO SHRINK GOES FREE

I have rebuilt my life. I know there are people whose blood curdles at the thought. Who believe I have gotten away with murder. Not just of Sara but also of Angela Mori. And others, they say now, compiling a growing list. Blaming me for every corpse in a wayside ditch.

After the trial, I tried to stay on in Marin, but I was too much recognized. Vilified in convenience stores. Spat upon by women with remade breasts and dyed blonde hair. People would slow down their white sedans and point at me as I walked under the pepper trees. It was a hard bit of ignominy, but there were others also who sought me out. Men who clapped me upon the back and women who, when they saw me in the supermarket aisle, suddenly became wide-eyed and flirty.

I was photographed in nightclubs. I was seen dancing, drinking, dating. There are those who say I stayed in my old haunts to rub my nose in the justice system, to pose in front of the cameras, to mock. To torment poor Elizabeth. But that is unkind. I’m aware that there were those, after the trial, who wanted to reopen the case against her. For the death of Minor Robinson, for my shooting. But the DA’s office declined—it was too great a reversal to go after her now. I am aware, too, of the fact that Elizabeth moved from the area, and of what happened to her afterwards. Or of the stories anyway. The house on Tomales Spit. The abandoned dinghy. The man who rented it, under an assumed name, and disappeared.