Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  A sidebar reviewed some of the high points of Lawrence Usser’s career. He had grown up in a Chicago suburb and had attended New Trier High School while his father made a fortune in the advertising business. At Yale he was Phi Beta Kappa in psychology. At Harvard Law he was Coif and editor-in-chief of the law review. He had clerked a year for Justice Bazelon on the District of Columbia Circuit, then a year for Justice Douglas on the Supreme Court, then taught a couple of years during the SDS days at Columbia, where he met his wife. A year after their marriage, the couple had headed west to Berkeley, where ultimately Usser had become the youngest faculty member ever appointed to an endowed professorship at the Berkeley Law School. According to the article, Usser was popular with his students if not with certain factions of the faculty, and had published several seminal articles in his field, most having to do with the history, development and current controversy surrounding the use and abuse of the insanity defense.

  Usser’s public renown had developed as a result of a series of cases in which he had served as a consultant to the defense counsel: a black prisoner accused of the torture and murder of a white prison guard; a Chicano charged with the rape and dismemberment of his faithless girlfriend; a divorcée who had allegedly killed her two children to make herself more attractive to potential husbands; a Vietnamese immigrant who had garroted two teenagers who had been harassing him for months, assuming the Vietnamese was a helpless peasant rather than the former ARVN commando he actually was; plus the two cases Jake Hattie had mentioned—the gang rape and the obsessive suitor.

  All the defendants had been found not guilty by reason of insanity or had been convicted of a lesser offense because the jury found they suffered from a mental disease that diminished their capacity to commit the crime in question. Lawrence Usser had played a large role in each of the defense teams, cross-examining the prosecution psychiatrists, conducting the direct examination of the defense experts and making the major portion of the defense summations. Usser’s fees reportedly ranged from nothing to the quarter-million dollars paid by the parents of the young rapist in Marin County. The implication of all this, at least according to the papers, was that Lawrence Usser helped people get away with murder.

  Usser had become a public personage, on a par with Bailey, Belli, Kunstler and the like. He was in continuous demand, both as a trial counsel and as a lecturer at trial lawyers’ conventions and jurists’ workshops. He had written a book that was the bible of attorneys pleading their clients not guilty by reason of insanity. And, after Hinckley had taken a shot at Reagan, Usser had shown up on Donahue and Good Morning, America to explain the definitions of legal insanity employed in various jurisdictions, and to assert that the Hinckley jury had reached a humane and conscientious verdict based on the facts in that particular case.

  When I’d finished with the newspapers I tried to match their strong suggestions of Lawrence Usser’s guilt with the vision of Usser I carried with me from our luncheon meeting the Friday before, but I couldn’t do it. Something had been flailing the man, but I had come away from the delicatessen convinced that Usser’s demon was not his guilt, but rather a woeful purity. Still, I’d been wrong in such assessments before, erring most often on the side of innocence, so it would not be the first time I’d failed to recognize a killer when he was sitting across from me. But it would be the first time that the one across from me was in so many ways a mirror image of myself.

  I clipped the news articles for reasons not altogether clear and carried them in my briefcase when I went to the office on Tuesday morning. I’d poured my first cup of coffee and was glancing through my calendar for the week when I heard the door to the outer office open.

  I double-checked the calendar. No one was scheduled for another hour. Peggy wasn’t due till one. I took a quick gulp of Italian roast and went out to see who it was.

  She was alone this time, dressed exactly as she had been when I had seen her with her husband the week before. She nodded silently at my greeting, followed submissively when I invited her into my private office, and refused my offer of a cup of coffee, all without altering her dreadful stare.

  The chairs were where they’d left them and she took the one she’d occupied before. In the absence of her husband, Ingrid Renzel held her own hand and waited in stooped and prayerful silence till I had taken a seat. I asked what I could do for her.

  “First, I have a question.”

  “Fire away.”

  “We have been told that when they arrested Lawrence, they took Lisa to stay with the Ussers. His parents. This morning I have talked to people at the Oakland City Hall. They say Lisa is to stay with the Ussers until this matter is resolved. They say if things are as they seem, and Lawrence does not return, Lisa will stay with them until she becomes an adult.”

  I nodded. “What’s your question?”

  She leaned toward me to fasten my attention on her mission. “Is there a way for us to get our Lisa back? Can we take her from the Ussers and bring her to live with us?”

  Her eyes were wide with hope but I had nothing with which to satisfy it. “Don’t you think the Ussers would be good foster parents?” I asked instead.

  Ingrid Renzel paused to be certain of her words. “The Ussers are not like us, not like our Dianne. They do not live the way Lisa should live, the way she lived when her mother was alive. They travel, they go to parties, they have three different homes, one of them in Paris. We are afraid they would not be there for Lisa, not when they were needed. Lisa has been troubled, as I told you. She needs much love. Gunther and I have decided that we want nothing in life but to give it to her. As best we can.”

  Her expression compelled belief, but she was in the wrong place and I told her so. “You’ll have to see a lawyer, Mrs. Renzel. To initiate a custody action yourself or to oppose a temporary order giving custody to the Ussers. Or to try to reach some informal agreement for shared or joint custody among all interested parties. Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Gunther does. For the business.”

  “Good. Talk to him. He’ll help you or can recommend someone who can. I don’t practice law anymore, and I don’t know many lawyers in the East Bay, so I’m afraid I can’t help you on that one. But if you’re worried about my bill, don’t. I haven’t run up much of a tab since Thursday. A couple of hours at most.”

  “We do not want you to stop working.”

  I frowned, surprised and wary. “Why? Don’t you think he did it? I must say I was a little surprised myself when I heard about it, but …”

  Her lips thinned. “The police would not have taken him if he was innocent.”

  Since I was no longer a lawyer I let her wish remain as truth. “Then I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you want me to help make the case against him? I have to tell you that in my judgment it would be a total waste of time. The district attorney’s people seem confident they already have what they need for a conviction.”

  “They may think they have what they need, but they do not.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Mrs. Renzel.”

  She adjusted her position and clasped and unclasped her hands. She seemed even more resolute than when she had asked me to find the man who’d killed her daughter.

  “We received a phone call,” she said when she was ready.

  “From whom?”

  “He would not say.”

  “When did you get the call?”

  “Last night. At bedtime.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that Lawrence had murdered our Dianne, as the police believe. He said that Lawrence would one day go to trial. And he said that Lawrence should be sentenced to death for what he did, that only such a sentence would be just.”

  She paused and wrung her hands, deeply distraught, as though the execution of her daughter’s killer would be worse than even the crime itself. I asked her what else the caller said. The answer came at me in a rush of heated words.

  “He
said that although death should be the penalty, Lawrence would not die. He said that Lawrence was an expert on proving criminals insane, that he had done so for many others, and now he would do it for himself. He said that Lawrence had killed Dianne because he knew he would get away with it, because he knew that he could prove himself insane and then after the trial could prove that he was sane again and be let free. He said they would do nothing to Lawrence, that he would trick them. He said that unless we stop them, Lawrence will go without punishment for what he has done.”

  I was still evaluating what she had said when Mrs. Renzel spoke again. “Don’t you see? Unless you stop him, Lawrence will go free and then my Gunther will try to kill him. He has sworn to it. After the caller hung up, Gunther went to get his pistol from the war. He put the bullets in it and sat with it in his lap for the rest of the night. If the court frees Lawrence, Gunther will track him down and kill him like an animal. That must not happen, Mr. Tanner. I must not bear two sorrows to my grave. Please. I must not, or God will not forgive me. You must prove that Lawrence is not mad.”

  Her words sent rippling chills across my chest. I finished my coffee as my mind manufactured words of death and images of madness. “The phone call,” I said finally. “It was definitely a man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Young or old?”

  “In between, I think.”

  “Accent?”

  “No. He spoke slowly and … carefully. To be sure we understood.”

  “Was it familiar to you at all? Did anyone come to mind during the conversation?”

  “No.”

  “Were there sounds in the background? Traffic, trains, whistles, ocean?”

  “Laughter. And something ticking … a clock perhaps.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “Only what I told you. That Lawrence was guilty and should be punished, but that he would trick the jury and they would let him go.”

  “That’s quite a gamble on Usser’s part, don’t you think?”

  She shook her head. “Lawrence is a brilliant man. I do not think he would see it as a gamble; I think he would see it as a game in which he was the superior player. I think he would see it as a game he would most certainly win.”

  “Are you really worried that your husband will try to kill Usser if he’s acquitted, Mrs. Renzel?”

  “He will do more than try, Mr. Tanner. He will do it or die in the attempt. It is the way he resisted the Nazis during the war. And I am as frightened of that as I am of anything in this world. Or the next.”

  I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. My nerves were jangling already; the case had always had that feel to it, and now it was worse. Mrs. Renzel wanted me to immerse myself in madness, a milieu I dreaded more than murder. It helped only a little that this time the madman was already locked up.

  “I’ll have to think about this,” I told her, reluctant to commit. “I mean, I’m not sure how I can help you. Proof that he was sane? What would that be? What if he eats a peanut butter sandwich every day? Is that sane or insane? A kid might say it’s right on; Julia Child might say it’s nuts. Insanity is basically a medical question, Mrs. Renzel. Psychiatrists for the defense and prosecution examine the defendant and testify to what they’ve found, and the jury flips a coin and decides which of them to believe. I just don’t see what role I’d play in that process, to tell you the truth.”

  I was cynical and I was stalling and it irritated her. Her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. “You could show Lawrence was doing his business—his teaching, his lawyering—as usual, could you not? You could show he paid his bills, mowed his lawn, washed his car? You could show he lived his life the way he always lived it, could you not, Mr. Tanner?”

  “I suppose I could try.”

  “You could talk to the district attorney and see what he suggests? And the police? Perhaps they would welcome your assistance.”

  “Perhaps, but I doubt it.”

  She sighed. I had almost defeated her. “Are you saying you won’t help us, Mr. Tanner?”

  I sensed that Ingrid Renzel was begging for assistance for the first time in her life, that only murder had rendered her a supplicant, that I was the only one she would entreat. If I didn’t help her, she would try to help herself. I didn’t think I could let that happen. “I haven’t decided anything yet,” I told her. “I’ll think about it tonight and let you know tomorrow. Is that okay?”

  “If you prefer.”

  “But if I do go ahead, you’ll be stuck with what I find. You understand that, don’t you?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that if I find Usser was a rational, premeditated killer, then so be it. But if I find evidence that he was nutty as a fruitcake, the defense will probably get wind of whatever I turn up and will probably call me as their own witness. In effect I’ll be helping to do just what you’ve hired me to prevent: give him a defense. Are you willing to take that chance, Mrs. Renzel?”

  Her lips stiffened. “It is nonsense to expect Lawrence to be found insane, Mr. Tanner. He is a brilliant man.”

  “Genius and madness are not that far apart sometimes, Mrs. Renzel. Philosophers from Aristotle on down have suggested they’re two sides of the same coin.”

  She shook her head. “No madman could do what Lawrence has done with his life. And no madman could persuade our Dianne to love him.”

  I abandoned the debate, if not the task. “How did Usser and your daughter meet, Mrs. Renzel?”

  “She went to law school for a year. In New York. She was in one of his classes. She hated law school so she dropped out and went into social work and psychology. He called her to ask why. They met to talk about it. And so on.”

  “As far as you know were they happy?”

  “Yes, but who can tell? We saw them so little. I must be honest. Dianne did not confide in me. I think she came to believe I was not … modern enough to understand her life. If she meant I could not talk about her problems the way people do now—with the fancy words, the empty phrases, the slogans that mean nothing or anything—I suppose she was right. But because I do not understand the words does not mean I do not understand the problems. If she was having troubles with Lawrence, I wish she would have told me. Perhaps I could have helped. Perhaps I would have been able to do what the fancy words and fancy people could not.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Keep my child alive.”

  SIX

  I struggled with the Usser case the rest of the day and night, between the phone calls, the mail, other clients and the rest of it, combating my conviction that it was not worth the trouble, that I could do nothing productive for the Renzels and nothing gratifying to myself by agreeing to Mrs. Renzel’s request. But I kept remembering my talk with Jake Hattie about the nuances of legal insanity, my itchy meeting with Lawrence Usser and his pal the shrink, the mysterious bedtime phone call to the Renzels, and I decided that if the brilliant Lawrence Usser had deliberately murdered his wife and was going to try to walk away from it with the help of a phony insanity plea, I wanted to be there for a closer look. The first thing Wednesday morning I called Ingrid Renzel and told her I’d look into the case enough to assess whether I could be of any use to her. She thanked me with a profusion that embarrassed both of us.

  “You’re a little premature,” I said to put a stop to it, more abruptly than I intended. “I’m not going to approach it quite the way you asked me to. I’m not going to look for evidence that Usser was sane when he committed the crime, mainly because I just don’t know what kind of evidence that would be. Besides, the prosecution’s psychiatrists will presumably be gathering that type of information themselves, with the help of the D.A.’s investigators.”

  “But …?”

  “What I will do is try to find out why he did it. If there’s a clear motive, a discernible reason for Usser to have wanted your daughter out of his way, then I’ll have gone a long way toward proving he was legally sane. If I can’
t come up with a motive that makes sense for Usser or for anyone else, then it’ll be at least some indication that he wasn’t. Does that sound agreeable to you, Mrs. Renzel?”

  She hesitated. “I will talk to Gunther. But it appears satisfactory.”

  “Okay. Let me know if he objects. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you when I know something.”

  I hung up and muttered a silent curse. Despite my fascination with the Usser case, my decision to get involved discomfited me, because insanity itself discomfits me. Predictability is lacking, and like the social fabric as a whole, my survival depends a great deal on predictability. The ones you can’t peg, the ones who have drifted beyond pattern, inhibition, shame or fear, those are the ones who make me wish I’d taken up another line of work or had at least managed to stay out of their way.

  Maybe my apprehension is testimony to the thinness of my own membrane, the tight, transparent drumhead that separates me from involuntary outrage. I’d make a good juror for Jake Hattie, because I’d lost my own grip once or twice, surrendered to the impulse to lash out, to vent rage until it was absorbed in the momentary mindlessness of violence. Once I’d wounded a particularly loathsome suspect who was less a threat to my safety than to my assumptions about evolution. Another time I beat on a mugger long after he had lost most of his consciousness and all of his resistance. Still another time I had said things to a woman who was both a friend and a client that neither of us has ever forgiven me for, because she had implied that my prudence was really cowardice, and in that instance she’d been right.

  But despite such reasons for aversion, I had agreed to dive into the Usser case because those selfsame lunatics and my own collection of irrational outbursts are part of the mosaic that establishes the human mind as the most fascinating engine on earth, in its puckishness and its propensity the most fit subject of a lifetime’s study. Which is why I do what I do, I guess, and why I spent the noon hour in my car, crossing the Bay Bridge from west to east again, this time on my way to a place that in its own way is almost as fascinating as mental madness: the city of Oakland.