Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “There is no there, there,” Gertrude Stein is supposed to have said about the place, but like most things she said, her meaning was probably not the most obvious. Oakland labors under some severe handicaps—some of them common to all major industrial cities and some unique, such as the tragic death of its inspiring young symphony conductor and the loss of its equally inspiring professional football team. Oakland has suffered for decades from the wet fog of arrogance that drifts its way from the city across the bay, an arrogance less justified and therefore more wounding with each day. But Oakland is fighting back. Its downtown is in the process of renewal and its governors are alert to the infections of the inner city and are more imaginative than many in trying to cure them. Indeed, if you’re an average joe or jane, a working stiff just trying to make your way in the world by doing a day’s work for a day’s pay, Oakland’s probably a far better place to live than San Francisco. San Francisco no longer needs you; Oakland does. But it’s not an easy choice. In the past eighteen months, forty people had been murdered vying for position in Oakland’s freewheeling drug trade. One of the killings occurred in broad daylight in front of an elementary school while a thousand children were in recess.

  I left the bridge and took the Nimitz Freeway south to the downtown exit, then headed for Fallon Street and the Alameda County Courthouse. The entrance to the high white tower was oddly placid compared to the first time I’d approached it, during one of Huey Newton’s early trials. On that day the Black Panthers had lined the steps like a museum exhibition of a redneck’s nightmares, armed and uniformed, disciplined and disdainful, splashing an acid mix of awe and terror onto those of us who scurried past beneath their razored stares. I haven’t heard much about the Panthers lately, but the way things are going I expect them or something like them to reappear before too long. The American dream is shrinking, leaving lots of people out. Sooner or later someone is going to offer them a different one.

  The blue and gold elevator took me to the office of the district attorney, on the ninth floor. Through the small round hole in the high glass wall that protected the receptionist from me and everyone, I stated my business. The receptionist pressed some buttons, attended to her intercom, then told me that Rhonda Stein was in court and that Howard Gable was in room 920. After checking my ID she admitted me to the private offices and I walked down the empty marble hall until I found him.

  When I tapped on his door, Gable looked up from behind some horn-rim glasses and a stack of California Reporters, each volume marked with slips of paper sticking like flat white tongues from the pages of the relevant appellate decisions. Gable was broad, not tall, with thick shoulders and a barely discernible neck. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the tie tugged loose. His arms were freckled, thick and hairless. His jaw was square and pink, his nose wide and flared, his expression harried but happy. His sandy hair was an inadequate veil across his pate. His blue eyes seemed to give off rays that would penetrate to essence. I resisted an urge to let my own eyes dodge away, instead let Gable’s have their way with them. When he was finished with the inspection, I told Gable who I was.

  He looked at me, frowned, then nodded. “Didn’t Rhonda Stein say something to me about you?”

  “Probably.”

  “The Renzels wanted you to find out who killed their daughter.”

  “Right.”

  Gable smiled. His face wrinkled in odd places, as though unaccustomed to the gesture. “But we beat you to it.”

  “Right again.”

  “So you’re out of a job. Looking for work? Or maybe you just feel we made a mistake and arrested the wrong man.”

  From within their fleshy caves his eyes dared me to confirm the latter guess. His grin was the careful arrogance of an older brother whose sibling had just challenged him to fight for the very first time. I raised my hand and shook my head. “I don’t have any problem with the arrest. Neither do my clients.”

  The disclaimer prompted Gable to relax. He took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair. “So why are you here?”

  “The Renzels still want to hire me. But for a different job.”

  “Oh? What job is that?”

  This time I was the one who managed an imperfect smile. “This may sound a little strange.”

  “That’s okay. I hear strange things all the time. For instance, on Monday I heard Lawrence Usser claim he didn’t kill his wife.”

  Gable folded his hands and placed them piously on what passed for his bible—the latest utterances of the highest court in the state. I leaned against the doorjamb to ease my aching feet. “The Renzels got a phone call Monday night,” I began. “Anonymous. Male. Voice unknown to them. The caller wanted to talk about the Usser case.”

  “And?”

  “The caller told them that Usser had definitely killed his wife, and that he deserved the death penalty. Then he said that Usser wasn’t going to get the death penalty or any other penalty, he was going to get away with the whole thing by feigning an insanity plea. In other words, he told them Usser was going to beat the rap.”

  I was watching Gable closely. His face reddened and he seemed to freeze, as though my words were Star Trek weapons that inflicted something even more useful than death. “You can imagine how such a call might upset the Renzels,” I added when Gable didn’t speak.

  Gable’s cocky smile had been replaced by the slit-eyed stare of swift and brutal intelligence that is common to lawyers who are good in court and know it. “Is this a joke?” Gable demanded.

  “Nope.”

  “This call thing is for real?”

  “The Renzels aren’t the kind of people who make up fairy tales or hear voices that aren’t there.”

  Gable thought about it, then nodded. “So what’s the story? Why the hell are you here? What does the phone call have to do with it?”

  I gestured toward a chair. “You mind if I sit down? Since we’re going to be here for another minute?”

  Gable muttered an apology and I sat down and looked around. Like its occupant, the office was nondescript but for a single exception. In the corner was a table, homemade from studs and plywood, perhaps four feet square. On it was a miniature railroad, N gauge, complete with mountains and tunnels and streams and bridges and several yards of well-embedded track. Almost soundlessly, a train of gondola cars was being tugged up a mountain grade by a tiny steam engine blowing smoke. The railroad was the Union Pacific. The gondolas were full of rocks painted to look like gold.

  Gable saw where I was looking. “Well, you’ve got to have something, right? To take your mind off it?”

  “You’re lucky yours is trains.”

  Gable shrugged away the digression. Out in the hall, the bureaucracy of justice made muffled noises, as though its plans were secret. Gable cleared his throat. “So like I said, Tanner. Where do you come in?”

  I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms. “They want me to find proof the guy is sane. They want me to keep Usser from getting away with it.”

  “You mean they want you to work for us?”

  “In a way.”

  “That’s a switch.”

  “I suppose it is. But I’ve made it before.”

  Gable shook his head dubiously. “We’ve got our own investigators, as I’m sure you know. If Usser pleads insanity, our people can dig up whatever the shrinks think they need to establish capacity. What I’m saying is, I’m not sure how you’d fit into the picture.”

  “I had a little trouble with that myself. I told the Renzels as much. I told them I didn’t know what kind of evidence makes a man look sane, told them your people could handle that project better than I could.”

  Gable opened his mouth but I hurried on. “What I also told them was that I’d try to come up with a reason for the crime. If Usser had a motive—if he was jealous of her, or if he would profit from her death, or if he was in love with someone else and didn’t want to lose half his assets in a property settlement—then it seems to me th
at such a situation would go a long way toward showing he was sane. At least in the legal sense. If he loved his wife and I can’t find anything to contradict that, then maybe he was nuts. That’s the kind of thing I told the Renzels I would look for. Of course maybe you already have the answer.” I raised my brows and gave Gable a chance to comment. He stayed quiet. “Maybe you can tell me exactly why he did it. Then I can resign the case and get back to one of my own distractions, the one that comes in a bottle straight from Perth.”

  There was silence for a time, during which I decided not to mention the rest of it, which was Ingrid Renzel’s conviction that her husband would take matters into his own hands if Usser ever walked the streets again. I also decided Gable wasn’t certain in his own mind why Usser had done what he’d been arrested for doing, which meant there was room for me in his case if he let me enter it.

  “They don’t just walk out the door, you know,” Gable said finally. “I mean, even if he’s found insane, in this state he has the burden of affirmatively establishing the restoration of sanity before he can be released. And even at the expiration of the time he would have served had he been convicted of the crime, we can still hold him if we can show he’s dangerous to himself or to others.”

  “But even so,” I said.

  “Even so they sometimes walk a few months after the verdict’s in,” Gable agreed. The possibility that Usser would do just that seemed to make Gable more gregarious. “So what are your plans?”

  “First, do you have any problem with me poking around in the case?”

  “Don’t know yet, to be honest. I’ve given some thought to this insanity thing, but not enough as yet. That’s Usser’s field, isn’t it?”

  “Right. The best in the country, Jake Hattie tells me.”

  Gable wrinkled his wispy brows and sat up straight. “Hattie? When did you talk to him?”

  “Last week, after the Renzels first contacted me. Jake’s worked with Usser a few times, and his office is near mine. I thought he could give me some background on Usser and his wife. Why?”

  Gable’s forehead rolled with puzzlement. “Usser hired Hattie to defend him, that’s why.”

  “You’re kidding. Jake?”

  “Yep.” Gable finally turned loose of his suspicion and leaned back in his chair again. “I’ve never been up against a hotshot like Hattie. Kind of looking forward to it.”

  Most prosecutors looked forward to opposing Jake a lot more when the case was beginning than they did when it was ending, but I refrained from pointing that out. “When do you think you’ll decide whether you’ll cooperate with me in the investigation?” I asked instead.

  Gable grinned. “Who knows? When you screw up, probably.”

  I started to say something but Gable stopped me. “I know, I know, you’ve got a good reputation over in the big city. Of course, a decent reputation in Frisco can get you three to five in most other states of the union.”

  Gable’s grin widened, and I guessed we had passed a barrier of sorts. Whether there were many more to get across remained to be seen. “So what’s your first move?” Gable asked again.

  “Talk to people. See if there were marital problems. Financial problems. And if I don’t come up with anything, maybe I’ll try to prove a negative.”

  “Like what?”

  “Try to show that Usser demonstrated no signs of insanity up to the night his wife was killed. Try to show the guy was normal across the board.”

  “Lawrence Usser’s anything but normal,” Gable announced heavily.

  “Crazy?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said he wasn’t normal.”

  I took a deep breath. “I hate to ask this, but are you certain he did it?”

  Gable smiled a long thin smile. “Off the record?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m not as sure as I’d like to be. And I’m not as sure as I will be on the morning of trial. But I’m sure enough to take him off the streets, at least until some nincompoop of a judge sets bail. A motion I will oppose with vigor, I assure you.”

  “What kind of evidence do you have?”

  Gable scratched his nose. “So far it’s mostly negative. To borrow your term.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning there’s no evidence anyone outside the house broke in, no evidence of a struggle, no evidence of rape or robbery. No evidence of anything that points to anyone but Lawrence Usser.”

  “What else?”

  “Pubic hair.”

  “You found his pubic hair on her body?”

  “Right.”

  I shook my head. “He was her husband, for Christ’s sake. It could have been there for days.”

  “Maybe; maybe not. Our information is that they hadn’t had relations for quite some time.” Gable shrugged. “We’ve got more if we need it.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t see any reason to go into it.”

  “So how about motive?”

  Gable’s face went blank. “How about it?” he repeated. “I can assure you there was one.”

  “What was it?”

  “No comment.”

  I debated whether or not to editorialize, then decided what the hell. “Sounds to me like you may have moved a little prematurely,” I told him. “What if you don’t get past the preliminary hearing?”

  Gable managed a cocky grin. “We’ll get him bound over, don’t worry about it.”

  “But why’d you move so soon?”

  “We had our reasons.”

  “Which were?”

  “Confidential. We’ll be ready when the time comes, Tanner. No sweat.”

  I wondered if the reasons were more political than criminological, given Rhonda Stein’s label of Gable as ambitious. “Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Got an eyewitness?”

  “No comment.”

  “Can I get into the house?”

  “What for?”

  “Just to nose around.”

  “It’s been sealed again, I think. The tech boys wanted to make another pass after we zeroed in on Usser. I can’t give you formal permission, but if you find a key under the flowerpot on the porch, I guess it might get you inside. Just don’t mess things up and don’t let Bart Kinn catch you in there.”

  “He’s the guy who has the case for the Berkeley P.D.?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good man?”

  “The best, when he wants to be.”

  “Put in a good word for me with him?”

  “Kinn hates my guts,” Gable said affably, as though it was a compliment.

  I suppressed an urge to ask the reason. “When’s the arraignment?”

  “Tomorrow, if they don’t ask for a continuance.”

  “You expect a plea?”

  “Sooner or later.”

  “Which one?”

  Gable gestured toward a stack of books. “Let me read you a little nugget I picked up on this morning.” Gable pulled a tattered tome out of the stack and began to read. “‘It is not every kind of frantic humour or something unaccountable in a man’s actions that points him out to be such a madman as is to be exempted from punishment: it must be a man that is totally deprived of his understanding and memory, and doth not know what he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute, or a wild beast, such a one is never the object of punishment; therefore I must leave it to your consideration, whether the condition this man was in, as it is represented to you on one side, or the other, doth shew a man, who knew what he was doing, and was able to distinguish whether he was doing good or evil, and understood what he did.’” Gable closed the book and smiled. “Not bad, huh? Unfortunately that was written by an English judge, in the case of Rex v. Arnold, in the year of 1724. But precedent is precedent, right, Tanner?”

  Gable’s grin seemed almost giddy. I watched him for several seconds more. “You think it’s possible Usser really is insane?”

  “Sure he’s insane. He’
d have to be to do what he did the way he did it. But he’s not legally insane. Legally, he’s guilty as hell. And I’m going to see to it he pays the proper penalty.”

  “Death?”

  “Oh, yes. Torture is a special circumstance in this state, and Dianne Renzel was definitely tortured. So I’m going to see to it that Lawrence Usser forfeits his life to the people of the State of California. I’m going to see to it he takes the pipe.”

  “No one’s been executed in this state for twenty years.”

  Gable’s face took on a slavering glow. “That’s all right, Tanner. The people will be satisfied if Usser lives the rest of his life under the big black cloud of that possibility.”

  SEVEN

  I should have gone to see the Berkeley cops after I left Howard Gable’s office—to let them know I was in the area, to establish my bona fides, to genuflect, to wipe my feet before I stepped into the middle of their case—but I didn’t do any of those things. If the Berkeley cops were like the cops in San Francisco, they wouldn’t want me anywhere near the Usser case and particularly not anywhere near the house where the crime took place. They might, in fact, order me to stay away and put someone on my tail to see that I did. I decided not to give them a chance.

  Often the scene of a crime is static, barren, impotent, a poor memorial to the status quo ante death. But once in a while a crime scene comes alive and begins to give off auras and vibrations, ghostly hints of what might have happened, even of who might be guilty of the offense. At such times you become wiser than you were, and I wanted to see if the Usser house would perform such services for me. After leaving City Hall I drove up Broadway, took a left on College and a right on Dwight Way, and approached the university just south of the law school and the football stadium.

  The Ussers lived a short stroll from the southeast corner of the campus, on Hillside Lane. The map in my glove compartment indicated it was a tiny finger of a street, short, a dead end, apropos of nothing but seclusion. I found it only after a couple of wrong turns and one pass right by it because I thought the thick shrubbery on either side of the lane meant it was merely someone’s driveway.