The Confession (8 page)

“Hard day?” I asked.

Elizabeth didn’t answer, but continued undressing. She undressed with her back to me and soon stood naked except for the strand of pearls. I watched her put on her robe: raw silk, very fine and elaborately embroidered—a gift from myself to her a few years back, something we had picked out together in a shop in Chinatown. I would have gone to her then: lifting the robe from behind, sliding my hand around her waist, down into the open fold—but she bristled away down the hall. She poured herself a glass of cold Chardonnay and went outside to the deck. From behind the glass door I watched as my wife took off the robe and slid into the Jacuzzi. A green mist rose from the churning water.

I followed her out.

“We should go someplace together,” I said. “Maybe to the coast.”

Elizabeth’s eyes were closed. She placed the glass of wine on the edge of the sauna now, her fingers still on the stem, and hung her head back, taking in the steam, letting her body go loose. Her neck was long and beautiful and she was wearing her father’s pearls. The prison lights glistened on the other side of the inlet, and I imagined all those men inside their cells, unable to see anything like this.

I had done the right things in regard to Sara, I thought. I had made the right decision—though it occurred to me as I looked at my wife that perhaps the decision was not altogether mine. Everything could change.

“We could spend a few days,” I said. “Maybe check out some property in Tomales. Just for fun.”

Back when we first got together, Elizabeth had talked often about going over to Tomales, buying a little place close to the water. On the other side of the mountain, where things were quieter. It was a dream of hers, to escape to the coast—but she was not ready, not yet, to give up her work at the college.

I undressed and stood for a second naked outside the tub, feeling the night air. Then I dipped in.

“Just the two of us,” I said. “We could spend some time together.”

Elizabeth’s eyes were still closed, her head back. My leg brushed against hers. I put my hand on her breast and kept it there and studied her open mouth, her turned cheek, and at the same time toyed with her father’s necklace between my fingers. I tugged gently on the strand and imagined it breaking apart then, the pearls disappearing into the water.

“Please,” she said. “Not now.”

She took another sip of her wine, a delicate wine, fragile and well made, then climbed out of the sauna, trembling as she put on her robe.

A few days later, I went to the courthouse to give my testimony in the Dillard Case. The Marin Civic Center was an unusual building, as I may have mentioned. A series of buildings really, interconnected, low and flat to the ground, trussed and arched in such a way so as to make it appear as if the buildings themselves were part of the hills. The walls were clay-colored, and the roofs were blue. A gilded tower, Hinduist in design but empty on the inside, without function, rose from a dome over the Hall of Justice.

It was early and the county workers were making their way up the terrace toward the building. A little dowdy, frumpy and out of shape, like county workers everywhere. I sauntered behind them, a bit envious maybe. At times I yearned to be one of the group, a regular guy, free of this wry smile, this hollowness inside. Meanwhile I could hear the thunder of the freeway in the arroyo nearby, and overhead a hawk was circling, feathering the currents above the road. I followed the workers up the hill and inside, near the elevator, I bumped into Minor Robinson. It wasn’t surprising, I suppose; he was the prosecutor after all. We were dressed the same more or less. Blue suits and black wingtips. White shirts, ironed crisp. Such coincidences of wardrobe are not unusual among courtroom professionals but Minor and I bore other resemblances as well. I had been mistaken for him once or twice in these halls. Something about our build, maybe, or the way we stood.

There were other ways, too, in which we were similar. We’d both lived in LA for a little while. We’d both had ragged childhoods, and we’d both studied criminal psychology. Also we’d both lost our first wives, mine to drowning, his to cancer.

Now we stood together waiting for the Otis to make its way down. I was scheduled to testify, and Minor would cross-examine.

“So, are you going to take it easy when I’m on the stand?” I meant it as an off-hand remark, nothing serious, as I certainly didn’t expect him to go easy—there was no reason he should—but I smiled anyway and we shook hands and he smiled, too.

“I’d like to, Jake,” he said, “but the way you charm a jury, I can’t take any chances.”

We both laughed now. It was a collegial laugh: buddies, just joshing around. The truth was he’d bumped me from the county roster, and I knew he’d show no mercy once I was on the stand.

“You’re on quite a hot streak yourself,” I said. “It’s been a while since you lost a case, hasn’t it?”

“I lose my share.”

“Don’t be modest. With your trial record, you’ll be in charge of the office before long. You’ll advance.”

“I’m just a county prosecutor. That’s all I am. That’s all I want to be.”

“That’s what I admire about you,” I said, “your civic intention. It’s pretty rare these days.”

If he suspected I was flattering him unduly, such suspicion did not show in his face. He smiled gamely. His eyes were clear. Meanwhile the elevator took its time. A couple of trial lawyers drifted by, a man and a woman talking passionately not about law but about real estate, about the cost of property, about their soaring portfolios, they were sure, and a wine ripening in one of their cellars.

A professional romance, I gathered from their postures, the way they leaned toward one another. Illicit as can be.

They went on chatting as they drifted down that long hall, with its pink walls and open roof and palm fronds reaching toward the sun. The building was like a crevice in a mountain, a canyon that wound through the shadows then back into the open. There were spots of cold, of ferns and stone, and places where the sun poured down from the upper arcades. The couple wandered into one of those spaces now and high above I could see trumpet flowers tumbling over the terrace walls. I thought of the moment those two would spend together later, furtive, full of themselves, and I remembered my time with Sara.

“What do you get, a case like this?” he asked I didn’t quite follow. It seemed an odd question. “Money, you mean?”

“There’s more to it than that, don’t you think?”

The elevator was caught on another floor, and I regretted not having walked on, taking the stairs. Minors shirt was very white, whiter than mine, and his collar starched, and I remembered someone telling me once upon a time that he’d studied to be a priest.

“No, people don’t go into my profession for money,” I said. “It’s not something you get rich at. Not usually.”

“No?” He was mocking me, I thought.

“The accused is entitled to a defense,” I said. “And the law has long recognized that the circumstance under which a crime is committed, the how, the why, these are a legitimate part of the defense. A person’s past, the abuse he has suffered, his mental state, his biochemistry—these are part of the circumstances a jury needs to understand. Not always, but sometimes, in some cases, such information is extremely pertinent.”

Minor’s face had gone hard but there was still that angelic look in his eyes, the soft voice. “You’re good,” he said, but there was something stem there, judgmental—as if he did not mean it as a compliment.

The elevator came at last and we stepped inside. “The schedule’s been shuffled, you realize,” said Minor. “You’re not on till this afternoon.”

“Yes,” I said, though I did not realize this at all. I had expected to take the stand first thing.

“I guess you’re Haney’s lead psychiatric witness now that Madison Paulie dropped out.”

“Excuse me?”

He smiled then: the same boyish smile I’d seen him give Elizabeth that night at the Blue Chez—but there was something else there as well. Some pleasure at my expense. And I realized this was where he had been leading me all along.

“Paulie, and one of the others specialists, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Haney scratched them off the witness list. He’s got Sherman and Lowe instead. They’re scheduled for this morning.”

My discomfort showed plainly, I’m afraid. My respected colleagues had bailed from the case and Haney had not told me. So I would be teamed with Sherman and Lowe, notorious experts of last resort, men who appeared routinely in every hopeless case between here and Eureka. The elevator door opened with an ugly jolt. As Minor and I stepped into the paneled lobby that led to the criminal courts our eyes met, regarding one another, and I studied those slanted eyebrows that someone had told me looked like my own, and the lips that were flush and wide and sensuous like a woman’s, and eyes that were so clear and wholesome they surprised even me.

“I’ll see you this afternoon. On the stand.”

I nodded.

“It’s all business, you know. I have the utmost respect for you as a professional.”

“I feel the same.”

“We’ll have a drink after this is all over.”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll have five drinks. We’ll have a dozen. Good friends like you and me.”

“I look forward to it,” he said, and there was that smile again, the eyes clear as a running stream, then he was gone down the hall. He was not the man he pretended, I told myself. He was looking forward to taking me on this afternoon. A skirmish, a battle—a little moment to relish—in which he would eviscerate me on the stand.

I wondered now about Haney’s tactics in this case. It was more usual these days, at least in California, to fight the evidence during the first phase of the trial; then, if convicted, you came back with the psychological profiling to mitigate sentencing. Haney, though, had chosen to incorporate the psychological evidence into the main trial itself, as part of the argument against guilt.

The original plan had been for Paulie to testify on Dillard’s general mental condition, then I would discuss Hayes Syndrome. But there had been no coordination between myself and the other specialists—and now I understood why. They’d never agreed to testify.

I ended up taking the stand in the afternoon, after Sherman and Lowe were done making fools of themselves and Minor had gutted them on cross-examination. The courtroom itself was a circular, windowless room with a dome roof and geometric shapes everywhere: paint-gilded ornaments embedded in the friezes, on the railings, even on the jury box. Haney Wagoner stood in front of me in his gray suit, with those round cheeks of his, those over-sized brows, and he didn’t seem in the least conscious of the dilemma in which he had placed me. He took me through the usual preliminaries. Slowly, we made our way into the heart of things. I described the conversations I’d had with Dillard, and also the tests I’d administered to him: the Minnesota Multiphasic, the Rodgers Profile, the Kleinsdt Double-Blind.

Wagoner hitched a thumb into his waistband.

“Could you summarize your findings, please, as to the defendant’s state of mind at the time the crime was committed?”

With Madison Paulie out of the picture, I had been put in an awkward position. My choices were not great. I could bend the evidence the way Wagoner wanted, or I could leave him to twist in the wind. Neither one would do a lot to enhance my professional reputation.

“Mr. Dillard is a borderline personality,” I said.

This was a catch-all phrase, used differently by different people in the profession, to describe behavior that skirted the edges without falling into a clear category. Wagoner hitched himself up. Underneath it all, he was a slow-witted man. He regarded me with a kind of amiable wariness, still expecting I meant to help him.

And all this time Minor watched from the prosecutors table, a man who missed nothing, sitting there with his legs all askew, his pencil between his fingers, waiting his chance at me.

“What do you mean borderline?” asked Haney.

“I mean the test results were mixed, and he was not easily defined. He displayed some aspects of normalcy—but there were also asocial tendencies. Whether these have their roots in a native impulsivity, or a full blown psychopathy, or some kind of childhood trauma . . .”

At this point, the judge halted my testimony. He asked me to start over: to elaborate my meaning in a way that would not confuse the jury with psychoanalytic jargon.

“Could you define the phrase psychopath?” asked the judge.

“I would be pleased to. Going to the Greek. Psyche has to do with mind or soul. While pathology has to do with sickness. So a psychopath is one who suffers from an illness in the soul, a sickness of the mind or spirit. In truth, in real life, psychopaths can often be quite charming.” I smiled at the jury then. And several of the jurors smiled back. “They are in touch with the basic manner of interacting with other people. They emote quite well. They make good eye contact.” I paused, my eyes skittering over the jurors, drawing in first one, then another. I was flirting with them, I suppose, the way a speaker flirts with a crowd, bestowing a glance here, there. “But their social dexterity is a mask. Underneath, psychopaths lack compassion, as well as conscience. That’s the simplest way of putting it. Sooner or later they take off their masks,” I made a gesture, like a man unpeeling a rubber face, “and they indulge their asocial impulses. Which in some cases, can be quite violent.”