Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “So there are a few people out there who might have reason to think you did less for them than you promised, or at least less than they expected you to do. Someone who spent some time in jail and thinks you should have prevented it from happening, for example.”

  “I suppose one or two of my former clients might feel that way.”

  “Give me a name.”

  Usser gestured helplessly. “I can’t. Not off the top of my head. It’s just so … preposterous … that someone would take out their animosity toward me on poor Dianne.”

  “Preposterous people are your specialty, aren’t they, Professor?”

  The question lay undisturbed for several seconds. Dr. Lonborg opened his mouth to say something, then abandoned the idea. When Usser showed no signs of speaking, I did what I usually do when given the opportunity—I asked another question: “Have you even considered the possibility that one of your clients did it?”

  He shook his head, not meeting my eyes.

  “Would you start considering it now? Would you go through your files this evening and see if any names pop out at you? And give me a list of everyone who ever made a threat of any kind against you, no matter how trivial it might have seemed at the time?”

  “I don’t … I’m so busy, I …”

  “I don’t have to remind you that every day that passes makes the likelihood of finding your wife’s killer that much smaller, do I, Professor? Or that if the killer’s grudge was against you and not your wife, he might not be satisfied with what he’s done to date?”

  Usser lowered his head to his hands. “I can’t believe we’re talking like this. As though there’s some … some fiend running around, trying to ruin my life.” He shuddered briefly and Lonborg patted his shoulder to calm him down. The condescending gesture seemed to work. “I’ll do what I can,” Usser managed finally. “By this weekend at the latest.”

  “Fine. How about over at the law school? Anyone there have a grudge against you that he might have satisfied by murdering your wife?”

  The question was blatant, but Usser let it pass. Finally he was thinking about the problem and not about its cause. “That’s even more ridiculous than your other idea,” he said.

  “It doesn’t seem so ridiculous to me. Some guy down at Stanford killed his math professor for giving him a C, and admits he might well kill someone else on the faculty if they ever put him on parole. It’s not such a big jump from there to killing a professor’s wife to punish her husband for failing him in class.”

  “I’m sure I know no one at the law school who’s capable of that, even remotely.” Usser glanced at Lonborg, who nodded approval of the answer. I doubted either of them was as naive as they were pretending to be. Still, madness is always denied, is somehow the last resort, as though all of us fear a personal psychotic stain from the mere acknowledgment of its existence.

  “We’ve talked about you,” I continued, “now how about your wife? Who might have been angry enough at her to do something like that?”

  Lonborg couldn’t restrain himself. “Please, Mr. Tanner. Surely even you must realize how terrible it is for Larry to think of Dianne in this context.”

  “It’s all right, Adam,” Usser said, then looked at me directly for the first time. “Dianne encountered some very disturbed people in her job, Mr. Tanner. She spent many hours at the crisis center, both day and night. Some of her clients were, well, capable of almost anything. I suppose if I were honest I’d admit that I think it might have been one of them, a client at the center who imagined Dianne had wronged him somehow, who inserted her into some paranoid fantasy and thought he had to kill her to save himself.”

  “Any names?”

  “No. We didn’t talk about our work that much at home. We tried to keep our professional and private lives separate. We weren’t always successful, but we tried.”

  “Who would know the details of that part of her life.”

  “Her supervisor, I suppose. Pierce Richards.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “I’m not sure. Various staff members, but there’s such a high turnover down there, I’m not sure who’s still available.”

  “All right. Now. How about her personal life, Mr. Usser? Anything going on there that might be helpful?”

  “Come now, Tanner,” Lonborg interrupted. “Enough surely is enough, even from you.”

  “Mr. Usser’s a grown man, Doctor,” I said. “If his wife was having an affair and it turned sour, I’m sure he realizes that information would be crucial in a case like this.”

  I’d asked my question indirectly, and Usser answered it by shaking his head. “We were very happy,” he said softly. “Very, very happy. That’s all I can say.”

  Usser was in tears. Lonborg was looking at me with acid eyes. I decided to give up. “Okay. I’ll let you go. But keep my questions in mind, Mr. Usser. If anything comes to you, please give me a call. I’m in the San Francisco phone book. And one last thing. I’d like to talk to your daughter this afternoon. Can you tell me where I can find her after school?”

  Lonborg immediately leaned over and whispered something in Usser’s ear. From his look it was an urgent, vital something. Usser listened, then nodded. “You must leave Lisa out of this, Mr. Tanner,” Usser said firmly. “I will not permit you to grill her about her mother’s death.”

  “I’ll be tactful,” I said. “Sometimes it helps if they talk about it.”

  “No!” Usser thundered. “My daughter is a fragile child. She has been in therapy with Dr. Lonborg for several years. Every time she seems poised at a breakthrough, something happens to set her back. Dianne’s death has been a major block to her development. Dr. Lonborg assures me it is not permanent, but I simply will not have you jeopardizing her treatment or driving her toward even more outlandish behavior by inflicting additional psychic injury. If you attempt to see her, I’ll take whatever steps are required to ensure that she’s left alone.”

  Usser’s heated words caused heads to turn our way. He was so clearly upset that I willingly surrendered. “I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you,” I said to him. “But my clients have rights in this matter too. I’m sure you understand.”

  Usser didn’t say a word. Lonborg draped an arm around his shoulder and patted him as if he were a tyke who’d lost his dog. I was out of the restaurant before I realized I hadn’t ever gotten lunch.

  FOUR

  After leaving the delicatessen I trotted across Shattuck Avenue and used the pay phone at the Safeway, plugging my free ear with a finger to keep out the street noise. Bart Kinn still wasn’t in. They thought he might be in court, testifying in a rape case. They had no idea when he’d be back.

  At the Community Crisis Center they were certain Pierce Richards wouldn’t be in till Monday morning. He was conducting a weekend retreat in Calaveras County and was already on his way. My third dime got me the D.A.’s office, where a secretary told me Howard Gable was waiting for a jury to come back, and then had a bar association meeting to attend, so he couldn’t possibly see me till next week.

  I decided I’d wasted enough dimes for one day. If I went back to the office and cleared the decks I could devote the next week exclusively to the Renzel case. And maybe by Monday there would no longer be a Renzel case; maybe something would break and I wouldn’t have to reengage the stricken countenance of Lawrence Usser or the conceited smirk of his friend the shrink or the grisly details of his wife’s demise.

  It was becoming a heavy weight, my distaste for the Renzel case, and I couldn’t quite figure it out. Maybe it was because I was afraid that whatever the truth turned out to be, it would not be the truth the Renzels wanted me to find. It might even be a truth they couldn’t abide, a suggestion that their beloved daughter was in some portion of her life besmirched. But another part of it had to do with Lawrence Usser. He was precisely what I had once wanted to become, back when I had studied law—a brilliant scholar and a successful practitioner, a respected teacher and trial attorney, a blend of the
poet and the pragmatist that makes men like Usser loom large and leave their tracks in history. Usser’s life was one I might have lived myself had my dreams and my abilities joined hands, and now his life was badly chipped if not entirely shattered. I felt a bit of Usser’s pain myself as my Buick took me back to my office on Jackson Square.

  I signed off on the monthly statements Peggy had prepared, reviewed two new-business memoranda and the transcript of a deposition I’d given in a contract dispute, then glanced through the journals and newsletters that had accumulated during the week. Peggy had clipped an article from the morning paper about the San Francisco Police Department’s new Automated Fingerprint Identification System. It reportedly allowed the police to identify prints in about twenty percent of their current cases, as compared to five percent before they got the computer. A police inspector was quoted, declaring that “this is not the time to commit a crime in San Francisco.” Maybe he was right, but it didn’t matter to me—all the crimes I was working on had been committed out of town.

  Peggy left for the weekend—the Sonoma Inn with her boyfriend, Paul, a patent lawyer. Ruthie Spring called to invite me to a potluck supper, but I begged off. Ruthie’s the widow of the detective who schooled me in the trade. She’s a wonderful woman but she’s also a vivid reminder of her husband, Harry, and just then I didn’t want to think about Harry Spring or about how much I wished he was still around to occupy some of the endless evenings of my life. I put my feet on the desk and read another chapter in the Thomas novel while I waited for the traffic to dwindle and the bars to clear. After a quick beer at the Vesuvio I headed home.

  The first thing on Saturday I went to the library. The Berkeley Gazette folded a year or so ago, so now the Berkeley news shows up in the Oakland Tribune. I got the microfilm reels for the day of Dianne Renzel’s murder and for several days thereafter, threaded them through the reader and spun the first reel to the day I wanted.

  None of the news articles suggested a motive for the murder. If there was any important physical evidence the cops had not disclosed it. Apparently Ms. Renzel had been sexually active a short time before she died, but although she was found naked in the bedroom, and there were stains of sex on the sheets, rape was not suggested. Her clothing was whole and draped on hangers, her nightgown was on its peg behind the closet door, her body smelled of expensive scents. As far as they could tell she had suffered only stab wounds, not the customary bruises of unwanted sex. All of which led the police to conclude that her nakedness and her sexual activity were voluntary. I wondered if that conclusion and its implications were disputed by her husband, who had evidently been away the entire evening, until the moment he’d found her dying.

  The strongest suggestion in all of the articles was that Dianne Renzel was an exceptional woman. She had come out of SLATE politics at the University of California in the early sixties, had gone to Columbia and earned a Ph.D. in psychology and social work, then had scampered through the minefield of Berkeley politics to a position on the city council after she and Usser had moved there from New York a dozen years ago. Her platform had included rent control, free day care and a string of shelters for runaways and transients. Some progress had been made on all those fronts, but after a single term in office, Renzel had declined to run for reelection, saying city politics were too removed from the true needs and concerns of citizens, that in the future she would devote her energies to community action programs that more directly touched the lives of the people of Berkeley.

  She had culminated her social activism by becoming a co-founder of the Community Crisis Center. A long list of co-workers and clients of the center gave eloquent testimony that Dianne Renzel would be sorely missed by the many who clung precariously to Berkeley’s slippery underside. She was, apparently, a genius at calming people down. Still, there were hints that threats of violence to the center’s staff were not uncommon, that many of its clients were temporarily or permanently unbalanced to a degree that made assaults of various kinds an accepted part of the center’s daily regimen and staff turnover a major problem. One of Dianne Renzel’s colleagues had described her as “foolishly fearless.”

  After reading the articles about Dianne Renzel, I looked in vain for comments from her husband. Apparently he was keeping quiet. The only statement made on his behalf came from Adam Lonborg, who announced the day after the murder that Usser would have nothing to say beyond conveying his thanks for the many expressions of sympathy and condolence he had received, and informing well-wishers that a fund had been established at the crisis center in memory of his wife. The fund would be used to hire additional staff and to improve the center’s hotline phone system. It would be administered by Pierce Richards, director of the center. At that point the articles became irregular and repetitive, so I went back to my apartment and spent the rest of the weekend with Don Giovanni, Briarpatch, Tunes of Glory, and a shamelessly lustful longing for a bawdy escapade.

  On Monday morning my phone rang as I was preparing a schedule of the interviews I needed to conduct in Berkeley. It was Rhonda Stein. “You wanted me to call you if anything broke in the Renzel case,” she said after we exchanged pleasantries.

  “Right. So what happened?”

  “Howard Gable left here about an hour ago. He’s going to rendezvous with Bart Kinn and they’re going to make an arrest in the case. All this is confidential, by the way. Until he’s in custody.”

  “Sure, sure. So who did it? Some punk?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Come on, Rhonda.”

  “Usser. The husband.”

  “What? You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. No doubt about it.”

  “But why?”

  “Why did we arrest him?”

  “Why did he do it.”

  “I don’t know for sure why he did it. Gable’s being real careful with this one. No leaks, no pretrial prejudice of any kind.”

  “But what kind of evidence has he got?”

  “I don’t know. I think a witness turned up. I don’t know who, or what he was a witness to, but I think Howard got hold of some testimony of some sort. You’ll have to talk to him about it. Or Kinn. But don’t count on getting anything from either of those guys. Besides, what difference does it make to you?”

  I thought about it. “I guess it doesn’t make any difference at all, if you can make it stick.”

  “Oh, Howard will make it stick. We tend not to book Berkeley law professors unless we can make it stick.” Rhonda laughed and I did, too, until I pictured Usser’s tortured demeanor at lunch three days before.

  “What about the woman’s parents?” I asked. “Do they know about the arrest yet?”

  “I doubt it,” Rhonda said. “First things first and all that.”

  “Mind if I tell them?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure that they’ve got Usser in custody yet, so … wait a minute. Howard just walked by and gave me the high sign. I guess you can go ahead if you want. Gable will call them eventually anyway, but probably not for an hour or so. If you hurry, you can beat the noon news.”

  “Thanks, Rhonda. Sounds like your people did a good job on this one.”

  “We always do good work in this office, Marsh; the mutterings of the defense bar notwithstanding. Maybe I’ll see you in court some day.”

  “You’ll see me at Spengers next week. How about Thursday?”

  “Thursday it is.”

  I hung up and found the Renzels’ number and placed the call. When Mrs. Renzel answered, I asked if her husband was there. She told me he was. I told her I had some news they’d want to hear. She put her husband on the second phone and I told them the police had just arrested their son-in-law for the murder of their daughter.

  “Lawrence?” Mrs. Renzel blurted. “They have arrested Lawrence?”

  “Yes. Within the past hour.”

  “He is in jail?”

  “I’m sure he is. At least for now.”

  “They are saying Lawrence did t
his? They are saying he murdered our Dianne? In that way?”

  “I guess they are.”

  “They are sure?”

  “I suppose so, or they wouldn’t have arrested him.”

  “Is he mad? Tell me. Is he a madman?”

  Gunther Renzel’s words raced through the wire like pointed, pronged projectiles. I didn’t have an answer and I told him so, but his question pricked at me for hours.

  FIVE

  The late papers were full of the case. The theory seemed to be that on the night of the murder Lawrence Usser had come home earlier than expected, discovered hints of his wife’s unfaithfulness, and in a violent rage stabbed her repeatedly with a pair of scissors, then fled the scene only to return an hour later and feign shocked discovery of the carnage. No specific proof of the theory was cited; nor had the murder weapon been recovered; nor was the identity of Dianne Renzel’s paramour disclosed. The theory seemed only that at this stage, since the minor details of physical evidence that were revealed—most involving traces of his wife’s blood on Usser’s clothing—could be explained by Usser’s version of the events as easily as by the cops’. Which seemed to support Rhonda Stein’s hunch that a witness had turned up to make Howard Gable’s case an easy one.

  After the arrest the Examiner had interviewed several of Usser’s colleagues at the Berkeley Law School and some of his peers at Stanford and the University of California law schools as well. All acknowledged that Usser was a controversial figure at the school, with at least as many enemies as friends, but all professed their shock and dismay at the arrest, all doubted Usser’s capacity for such a deed, and all claimed ignorance of any reason for the crime. Usser himself was being held without bail pending arraignment. There was a suggestion that once bail was fixed he would have no trouble raising the premium on the bond, since his parents were importantly wealthy. At the conclusion of the story, the victim’s colleagues were quoted as well. None of them knew of any particular problems between Usser and his wife. All of them were glad that an arrest had been made, since exaggerated rumors of violence at the crisis center were starting to jeopardize their funding.