The Confession (7 page)

“I need some time alone with my client,” said Haney. “I’ll give you a call at your office, to talk strategy.”

“Sure.”

“Say hello to Elizabeth for me.”

“Yes.”

“She’s a wonderful woman. You take care of her.”

“I will.”

I gave Dillard another pat on the shoulder. Then I drove home, taking the freeway down through San Rafael, winding under the high brown hills and the oak trees and all those houses with their glass windows, their redwood decks and their great big view of the world.

Absent death, the attention flags. Every newspaper editor knows this, as does every writer of lurid tales.

Those of you who do not know my story—who missed it as it ran through the tabloids—may find yourself impatient.

Of what am I accused?

What are my crimes, you wonder, and what is my motive for this so-called confession?

To deceive.

This is what my enemies would say. To place the blame outside myself. To charm and seduce. And along the way take yet further pleasure in my deceptions.

As you have already seen, though, my charms are limited. There is a darkness in me I cannot easily conceal, and in the end such concealment is not my intention. I have my moments of compassion, of tenderness, but I do not mean to suggest this makes me an innocent, without ulterior motive. Even so my intention is to tell this story as straightforwardly as I can. Patiently, without rushing ahead. Because we learn from the telling, as they say, and there are pearls hidden in the meanest tale.

Still it’s not easy. Like anyone, I want to be understood. I want sympathy. So I am tempted to jump ahead of myself.

To the evening of the Wilders’ party, when I saw my wife from across the room, elegant and beautiful. Or to the instant later that evening when I ran from the arbor and pursued Sara across the soft grass. Or to the moment the next day when Milofski the homicide detective and Minor the prosecutor slid the photograph across the table and I closed my eyes, knowing what I was about to see.

I turned my head but my eyes were drawn back to that picture, just as my memory is drawn to it now.

To the figure splayed out on the bed. Strangled, in the way that Angela had been strangled. Other women, too, as it happens. I felt Detective Milofski’s eyes boring into me.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Since the beginning of the Dillard trial, I had kept my distance from Sara Johnson. We met once quite by accident in the halls of the Civic Center, and this encounter ended up in one of the atriums of that odd modernist building, with its turrets and long, sloping halls. She wore a yellow shirt dress, belted at the waist.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.

“No,” I said. “That’s not true.”

I was lying of course. One of those small lies that everyone tells, but I was trying to do the right thing. I wanted to drift out of her life without making a fuss. At some point, without really thinking about it, I had made this decision. Not quite consciously maybe, but I had made it. Even so, I dallied a moment there in the hall. Her eyes held a certain vulnerability, and a wildness, too.

“Are you feeling better?” she asked.

“More embarrassed than anything,” I said. “What happened, that’s not like me. It’s not usual.”

She touched me then and kissed me on the cheek. Despite my inclinations to the contrary, I might have responded more intimately, but we were in a public hall. The courts were down one end, the building department on the other, and there was a clerk walking by. As it was, I put my hands on Sara’s waist and felt her body soft through the yellow dress.

“We need to talk,” she said.

For some reason, I thought of Angela Mori. The victim has a role in the crime, too, some psychologists say. Or so I had read lately, studying for the Dillard case. Because even action is an interaction, and the criminal seeks a certain consent. Communicated through gestures. A turn of the head. An open door.

The clerk gave us a glance and I let my hands go from Sara’s waist. It was for the best, I told myself—and I was grateful now for the passerby.

“I’m on my way to court,” I said, though this wasn’t quite true. In fact I was headed for the law library, in the upper reaches of the building, but admitting that would have given me excuse to dawdle.

“Call me,” she said. “Come see me.”

I kissed her then. I meant it as a quick good-bye, but I was sloppy and let the moment linger. The feel of her so close reminded me of that moment in her bed, back in her apartment.

I pulled myself away, avoiding her eyes, trying not to think of how she looked standing there in that yellow dress, leaning into herself, one foot tucked behind the other

In the end, though, I didn’t go to see Sara. I didn’t call. I concentrated on my work and tried to put her from my mind. I wanted things under control. The business with the ambulance had rattled me—and I did not want Elizabeth to find out about us. (Or that is what I told myself. There was an edge I walked, a line between revealing myself and staving hidden. It excited me, if I admit the truth; part of me wanted to be discovered.)

A few days later, Sara caught me on the phone. I was in my office going over my notes for the Dillard case.

“Jake?”

“Sara,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to call.”

There was an awkward pause. I could feel her wanting something more from me, there on the other end of the line. She was upset with me for not having come.

“Is it cold?” I asked.

It was the first line of a game I had played with her on the phone a couple of times. I resorted to it now, I guess, because I didn’t want to face what was on her mind.

“Not now, Jake. I don’t want to play that game. We need to talk.”

“Is it breezy?”

“No, Jake. I told you. I don’t want to play that right now.”

“Oh. So it’s hot. That’s what you’re telling me. It’s hot. And I’ve just got on too many clothes.”

Sara laughed, but it was a weary laugh, and I could feel things shifting between us. “Yeah, Jake. It’s hot. But I don’t know how much longer it’s going to stay that way.”

“You’re wearing your summer dress?”

She didn’t answer, and I felt the moment fade. My heart wasn’t in it, and neither was hers. Maybe she was wearing her summer dress, maybe she wasn’t. Ultimately that wasn’t the point of the game. We guessed at each other’s clothes, then took them off in our imaginations. The last time we’d talked like this, it had been a few weeks back, in the evening, while Elizabeth sat in her armchair in an adjoining room, reading one of her books.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Sara said. Her voice was earnest and sad.

“I can’t either.”

“The incident—the other day at our apartment,” she said. “I know what was behind it, and so do you.”

“You do?”

“The stress, the infidelity. It’s too much. No matter how bold we think we are, how sophisticated. It’s not healthy.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We have to make a decision. About us. Can you get away? Come talk to me.”

“The Dillard case. It’s got me swamped.”

“Jake,” she said. “I think it’s gotten to a certain point. Either we do something with what’s going on between us. Or we let it go. We end it.”

Once again I was silent. In some ways I was surprised that she pushed things this hard.

“Deceit, it causes tension,” she said. “It makes things build up inside. I pretend like I’m one way. Like I can do this kind of thing, but . . . Why don’t you come over, and we can talk.”

“Sara . . .”

I heard sorrow in my voice, and regret, and for a second I didn’t know what to say. I imagined Sara over me—that unfulfilled moment, when I had been reaching toward her—and though part of me wanted to go back to that moment, another part said no. Elizabeth was supposed to be home around five. She had gone off to another one of her academic conferences, but this one was nearby in Sonoma.

“It’s not a good time,” I said. “I’ve got this report. I’ve got to prepare my testimony.”

“All right. If that’s the way it is.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you don’t have to be. I should tell you. Bill—he wants to get serious.”

Bill was Sara’s old boyfriend. A young attorney who lived in San Francisco’s Mission District and did a lot of pro bono work for the Hispanic population there. They’d dated for several years and been on the verge of marriage before I stumbled along. My sense of it—she half wanted him, and half didn’t. Her relationship with me was a fling, a way of escaping the decision. Flirting with the unknown. Underneath it all, she knew this as well as I.

“Not tonight,” I said.

“Fine,” she said, and hung up the phone.

An instant later it started to ring. I heard her voice on the answering machine. I was tempted to pick it up but it was the kind of thing, you’re damned either way. In the end, I resisted. I gathered up my work and went home to see my wife.

When I got home Elizabeth had not arrived yet. I did not think much of it. She often dragged in late—distracted by a student or a colleague—and I figured she would be along soon. In the meantime, I went to my bookshelf and pulled out my copy of Kleindst. I plunged into my work with a renewed energy. Whether I did so as a means of escape—as a way of forgetting Sara—or in earnest pursuit of a greater end, I can’t tell you. It may be that both things were true at the same time. Regardless, it had been a while since I’d read Kleindst, and I wanted to reacquaint myself with his ideas:

Situational memory loss is an acute form of amnesia, a blackout of memory that has its roots in early abuse, and typically reoccurs after an incident in which the suppressed abuse has exploded into rage. After such incidents, the afflicted patient will not remember his own rage, or the attendant violence, until much later, >if at all.

I thought about Dillard’s story. The locked door, the intruder, the gamma hydroxybutrate in Angela’s blood. I thought, too, about my moment with Sara, at her apartment.

If the memory does return, it is often fragmented, and marked by severe disassociation, in which the core identity of the afflicted individual separates from his or her actions—and as a result he sees the perpetrator of the crime not as himself but as a shadowy other In such situations, the individual will go to great lengths to preserve this false view of events.

It unnerved me, this analysis. I understood the tack Haney Wagoner wanted to take. Rather than fight the physical evidence, he meant to build his defense on the notion that the greater truth lay shrouded in his client’s psyche, in a netherworld of abuse where memory had been destroyed and everything Dillard had told the police was not a conscious lie but a delusion, a metaphor for his unconscious state.

Would the jury believe this? More importantly, would they see it as reason for acquittal? I didn’t know the answer, but I’d seen odder things happen in the courtroom.

A word of caution. This syndrome should not be confused with the feigned memory loss common among the criminal populations, and practiced with great flair by psychopaths and other malingerers.

I went on reading. About genuine amnesiacs and certified fakes. Case histories and interpretations. Rulings and counter rulings. Every once in a while I glanced at the clock. Nine thirty and Elizabeth still had not returned.

I thought about the case.

There was supposed to have been some kind of coordination between myself and Paulie and the other experts. A meeting of the minds, so to speak. So far it hadn’t happened. It was Haney’s job to bring us together, but he kept canceling, putting things off.

It was midnight before Elizabeth returned. She wore a peach-colored suit, well-tailored but simple, with buttons going up the skirt. And the necklace her father had given her.

“Where have you been?”

“At the conference. Didn’t I tell you?”

I knew about the conference, as I have said. They held it every year. A psychiatric convention based on the healing power of myth. “Healing the Demons Within,” it was called. Attended by teachers and shrinks and New Agers. This year, Elizabeth had been on a panel regarding the transformation stories:
Jekyll & Hyde
,
Frankenstein
,
Little Red Riding Hood.

“Yes, you told me. I thought that was a daytime event. Over at five.”

“That’s true.”

She lounged in front of her mirror unbuttoning her blouse. She regarded herself with a wry smile.

“Where were you then?”

“Out to dinner.”

“With whom?”

“Fran.”

There was something coy in her expression.

“I don’t know if I believe you.”

“You have your nerve,” she said, then tossed her heels into the closet.

It was the kind of gesture she’d been making a lot these last few days, angry, with the source of the anger left unexpressed. Reflecting back, I realize I could have asked her what was on her mind, but I chose not to pursue the matter. Perhaps I already knew.