Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  I thought about telling Cal that Lisa had gone to stay with her grandparents, but I decided I didn’t know enough of the situation to decide whether uniting the two of them would be a good idea. Instead, I told Cal I didn’t know anything about her, but if I heard anything I’d let him know. “How can I get in touch with you?” I asked him.

  “Just come down to Fifth Street. Or ask at Hell House.”

  “Where?”

  He was about to explain when some alien sounds drifted back to us. Someone was coming up the front steps, more than one person. Cal and I exchanged looks. “Fuzz,” he whispered.

  “Probably.”

  “There’s a way out of here,” he said, “but you got to crawl on your belly.” He glanced at the back hedge, then looked at me inquiringly.

  I was flattered by his invitation, but I shook my head. “You go ahead if you want. Or you can stay and I’ll just tell them you came by to see if Lisa was here.”

  “It’s okay with you if I split?”

  “Sure.”

  “The cops around here fuck you over if you’re punk, so I’ll see you, man. If you see Lisa, tell her to come see me at the van.”

  “Where’s that?” I asked, but Cal was gone, trotting to the hedge, dropping to the ground, low-crawling through an invisible gap in the tangled, twisted vines.

  EIGHT

  They were on the porch, a black man and a white woman. He was tall, as bright and straight as a polished pole. She was small, prim and powdered. Both were dressed stylishly and immaculately, both carried themselves with an imperial detachment, both were a bit disdainful of and disconcerted by their companion. When they heard me climbing the steps behind them, they seemed relieved to have something to contemplate besides each other.

  He let me get within touching distance before he spoke. “You have business here?”

  His question came packed in a sonorous baritone; hers was asked only with her wide gray eyes. “My name’s Tanner,” I said, looking first at the woman and then the man. “I’m a private investigator from San Francisco. Howard Gable of the D.A.’s office in Oakland might have mentioned me to you. That is, if your name is Kinn.”

  “I’m Kinn,” he said. His smudged eyes measured me, labeled me, let me know who was boss and who was not.

  The woman started to speak, then stopped, then began again. Her hand rose to her throat and fiddled with the pearls in her necklace. Below her linen jacket her pink polka-dot dress rustled lightly in the wind. “I’m Carlotta Usser,” she managed finally. “My son and his … my son lives in this house.” She glanced apprehensively at Kinn, as though she feared he would dispute her. When he said nothing she looked back at me. “Do you have something … official to do here?”

  “I’ve been asked to look into the case,” I said.

  “By whom?” Her slivered brows rose in hopeful inquiry. She clearly thought I was there to help her son. What I had to do was defer her realization that I was there to do just the opposite.

  “My client’s identity should be confidential for now,” I answered affably. “At this point I’m just gathering information.”

  “But are you on our side or not?” Mrs. Usser blurted. In the next moment she was wishing she could retract her question and reestablish the aura of quiet confidence that she had so carefully marshaled, that had gotten her through the hours since her son had been so shockingly hauled to jail. But it was too late; the task too formidable. She was his mother and she was scared as hell.

  “What do you want here?” Kinn asked me, the question as forbidding as his sunless face.

  “To look around inside. And to talk to you if you’ve got the time.”

  “The scene is under seal.”

  “Come on. She was killed a month ago. Usser’s been living here ever since. You’re not going to find anything you didn’t find the first time you came out.”

  “The first time we came here we weren’t building a case against Lawrence Usser.”

  “Look. You’re obviously on your way inside. Can’t I just follow you around?”

  Kinn frowned impatiently. “She needs some things for the girl,” he explained, gesturing toward Carlotta Usser. “We’ll be in there five minutes, max.”

  “That’s fine by me.” I thought of adding a broad hint that I was on Kinn’s side in this one, not the suspect’s, but I decided to hold my tongue. Kinn looked like a man who believed his side was an army of one, always and forever.

  Kinn hesitated a minute, perhaps remembering his conversation with Howard Gable, then muttered an oath, then shrugged. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t drop anything. Don’t go anyplace I don’t lead you. And the same goes for you, ma’am,” he added.

  “This is my son’s house, Lieutenant,” Mrs. Usser bristled. “I don’t feel it’s necessary for you to—”

  Kinn gestured toward the notice by the door. “As long as that’s up there, this house is mine. So do as you’re told and we’ll get along fine. Ma’am.” He concluded the lesson with a burlesque bow.

  Carlotta Usser’s eyes swelled. “My son is not guilty, Mr. Kinn. Don’t you understand? He’s a brilliant, brilliant man. He could not have done what you say he did. You must believe—”

  “It’s not important what I believe, ma’am. He’ll have his chance. With Jake Hattie as his lawyer he’ll have a better chance than most. So just relax, ma’am. It’ll all be straightened out sooner or later.”

  “But—”

  “Lady, just let me do my job, huh? Save the rest of it for the judge.”

  Mrs. Usser hated to give it up, but Kinn turned his back to her and pulled out a key with a tag on it and unlocked the front door. We entered as silently as we would have entered a catacomb.

  The foyer was dark, but subtly varicolored from the light passing through the stained glass panel above the door. To the right a staircase rose to the second floor. Beneath it was a bicycle with a flat tire. We followed Kinn into the living room, past an empty coatrack and a marble-topped table displaying a bouquet of dried flowers. Along the way I almost stumbled over a painted milk can with three umbrellas and a cane growing out of it.

  The living room was large but dark, with wide wood trim around the draped windows and matching wooden frames around the prints and drawings on the walls. The furnishings were thick and masculine, the rug oval and egg-colored, the walls a beige print wallpaper. Books and magazines were abundant, many of them strayed from the bookshelves that flanked the fireplace and fallen into clusters beside the matching swivel rockers and the corduroy-covered couch.

  The stereo along the far wall looked new and expensive. The upright piano in the back was suitable for honky-tonk. On the floor beside the fireplace was a painted plaster pig with a matchbox on its back. Over the mantel was an oversized replica of the Declaration of Independence. Beneath it a bronze bust of Jefferson gazed approvingly on a photograph of Martin Luther King. But the handsome décor and the honorable ideals were coated with a layer of dust, as though the house had already decided Usser’s guilt and had sentenced him to stay away for a long, long time.

  Kinn came to a stop in the center of the room and asked Mrs. Usser where she wanted to go. “Lisa’s room,” she said.

  “Upstairs? At the back?”

  Carlotta Usser nodded, and we trooped along in single file, a small squad on a secret mission, back the way we’d come, up the hardwood stairs, down the runnered hallway, past the paisley wallpaper and the Audubon prints, halting at the entrance to the small bedroom at the very back of the house.

  As Mrs. Usser began her search and Kinn kept his eye on her, I wandered around the room. The windows looked out over the back patio and garden and the little potting shed at the rear of the lot. As I looked down on the patio I noticed the trellis that climbed the back of the house and supported bougainvillea. I wondered how many times Cal had climbed it or Lisa had descended, bent on secret trysts. I wondered what they did, where they went, how angry and alienated they really were, whether they were like
the ones you see frequently on the news, untethered to anything but rejection and rebellion, supposedly made hopeless by the specter of the bomb. I surveyed the outdoor scene for several seconds more, but saw no sign that Cal had returned to spy or plunder, so I turned my attention to the interior.

  If civil rights was the religion of her parents, music was Lisa’s orthodoxy. Rock posters mocked the bourgeois room—Billy Idol, Eurythmics, Judas Priest, Cyndi Lauper, Twisted Sister, Ratt. A two-foot stack of record albums was further testimony to Lisa’s worship of punk and heavy metal. On the mirror above the desk were ticket stubs and other souvenirs of concerts at venues such as the Greek Theater and the Oakland Coliseum, and clubs like the Keystone and the Mabuhay Gardens. In the center of the mirror was a photograph of an outrageous and sullen someone who signed his name as Jello.

  If memory served, Jello Biafra was the lead singer in a local punk band that called itself the Dead Kennedys. I didn’t know anything about their music, but I guessed that Lisa Usser could have formed no more provocative alliance than with persons who blasphemed that name.

  Though she was obviously at odds with her parents, and was susceptible to the simplistic anarchism of pop-song philosophers, Lisa’s room was not entirely a bleak, depressing den. There were signs of another, more tranquil Lisa—Cal’s school picture was taped to the mirror next to Jello’s, beside a name tag indicating that Lisa had been a Humanities Symposium participant at some time or another, and above a schedule of her classes written in a baroque blue script. A trophy topped by a golden tennis racket rested on the corner of the desk, beside a volume entitled World’s Greatest Love Poems. I opened the flyleaf. It was inscribed to Lisa from Cal, and expressed Cal’s wish that he had written each of the poems for her.

  The rest of the room was tattered and untended, as though Lisa forbid repairs. The beanbag chair was leaking plastic pellets; the carpet bore several singes from discarded cigarettes. At one place on the wall Lisa had evidently begun a tempera mural and abandoned it after a few messy minutes. A dominant species on the floor below, books were endangered here. The reasons might have been the color TV that was next to the compact stereo that was next to the video disc player that was next to the cordless phone that was next to the tiny Walkman that was next to the bed, which was a thin pallet in the center of the floor, covered with a camouflage net from army surplus.

  As I completed my inspection, Mrs. Usser reached into her handbag and drew out a sheet of paper. She read the list with her tongue between her teeth, then went to the stack of records and picked out three or four, then to the closet and emerged with clothing that included some plastic shoes that laced up the leg in the fashion of ancient Rome and a pair of Levi’s faded to the color of the sea and patched in the rear with a piece of cloth that somehow bore the face of Beethoven.

  The final item she collected was a little cedar box on a shelf beside the bed. I wondered if it contained the stash Cal had come to reclaim. As she was about to stuff it in her handbag, Kinn motioned for her to show it to him. She started to object but finally didn’t, handing the box over without a word. Kinn raised the lid, then laughed disparagingly and handed it back. “Fake fingernails,” he said. “Purple ones. Christ on a crutch.”

  Mrs. Usser put the box in her bag and gathered a few more scraps of clothing off the floor and folded them neatly and tucked them under her arm. Then she gestured toward the pallet. “Would one of you carry that to the car for me? Please? It’s the blue Cadillac.”

  Kinn made no move beyond a smile of chilled reproach. I rolled the pad and cover into a floppy bundle and dragged it down the steps and out to the car. By the time I got back to the house, Mrs. Usser was coming down the steps to meet me, ready to leave.

  “I’d like to talk to you and your husband about all this sometime,” I said to her.

  The lady frowned from the step above me, which put our eyes on the same level. “What about? I don’t even know why you’re here, young man.”

  “I’m just trying to get some facts about the case.”

  “Are you trying to find who really killed Dianne? Is that it?”

  There was enough hope in her voice to float a stone. “I guess you could say that.”

  Mrs. Usser brightened. “We’re incensed, of course, that the police think Lawrence guilty. They have no proof at all, needless to say. It’s so unlike them to make a mistake like this. I wonder what’s behind it?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “Lawrence has his enemies, of course. Anyone who accomplishes so much so quickly in life makes enemies. My husband did, and now Lawrence.”

  “Who are some of your son’s enemies? Do you know?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not good with names. My husband could tell you, of course. Carlton and Lawrence are very close. I know that some men at the law school have been upset at some of the things Lawrence has been doing. I remember a discussion Lawrence had with my husband about it one night; the jealousies, the envy. I believe one of the men opposing Lawrence was named Greenberg, or something like that. A Jew. You know how competitive they are. Jews have been envious of Lawrence ever since he was at Yale. Then there were his law trials, of course. Why, Lawrence has had to hear the most awful things from the families of those victims. They are naturally upset, I understand that, but it’s hardly Lawrence’s fault, after all. I …”

  Mrs. Usser fell silent and looked at her watch. “My. I must be off. The garden club is coming at three. We are transplanting tuberous begonias. This evening would be convenient, I believe, Mister … ah …”

  “Tanner.”

  “Yes. My husband will be home then. Perhaps you could come by about seven. We’re on Wildwood Drive in Piedmont.” She gave me the number. “It’s quite easy to find.”

  “Will Lisa be there as well?”

  A cloud dropped over Carlotta Usser’s face, as shielding as a purdah. “Lisa. I’m afraid I don’t know when she will be available. Lisa is, well, a handful. Her adjustment has been difficult.”

  I nodded in understanding.

  “Do you have children yourself, Mister, ah …”

  “Tanner. No. I don’t. But I know it’s hard to keep up with kids these days. To understand why they do the things they do.”

  “Yes. The awful music. The clothes. She puts thumbtacks through her ears, Mr. Tanner. And wears a necklace made of rat bones. At least that’s what she says they are. They couldn’t possibly be rat bones, could they? Surely they’re imitation, something cooked up by those little Japanese.”

  “Probably,” I agreed, not quite suppressing a smile.

  “We’re doing the best we can with Lisa, of course,” Mrs. Usser prattled on, “but we are old now, and, well, it will be better when Lawrence is released. She’s a lovely child, but she lacks … direction. Lawrence will take care of it. He’s brilliant, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Well, thank you so much for carrying Lisa’s bed to the car, Mr. Tanner. Why she prefers that horrid pad to the beautiful Simmons we bought her is beyond me.”

  I smiled with more sympathy for Carlotta Usser than I knew I had. Kids. A subject beyond my expertise, beyond the expertise of almost everyone, if you believed your eyes and ears. Difficult anywhere, raising kids in Berkeley would be akin to raising orchids on the Gobi.

  NINE

  When Carlotta Usser and her Cadillac had disappeared, I trotted up to the house and went inside. Bart Kinn wasn’t in the living room so I went back up the stairs. Kinn had left Lisa’s room and was standing in the doorway to the large bedroom at the front of the house, motionless, contemplative, a stern sentinel guarding a weapon he doesn’t understand.

  Kinn didn’t say anything even after I joined him. “This where it happened?”

  Kinn nodded wordlessly. When he didn’t offer anything further, I glanced around the room.

  As the newspapers had suggested, it was neat, almost frilly, distinctly feminine in contrast to the thick masculinity of th
e floor below. The bed was king-sized and contemporary, the headboard containing built-in reading lamps, bookshelves and a radio. The coverlet was fringed, the pillows plump. The remaining furnishings were an eclectic mix, doubtlessly assembled one by one over the years of the marriage, as financial circumstances allowed. All were well-worn and looked well-traveled except for the two new upholstered wicker chairs that faced each other in the front dormer. The crystal decanter on the table between them was half full of what looked like fine brandy. The little nook was so cozy and intimate I couldn’t see how Usser could bear any longer to look at it. But maybe it was just for show. Maybe he and his wife hadn’t exchanged a single word across their crystal snifters. And maybe I’d never know whether they had or not.

  I asked Kinn where the body had been found. He pointed to the floor beside the foot of the bed. I looked for stains or other signs of carnage but saw nothing at first glance. Kinn sensed my search. “He replaced the carpet and the bedding first thing. And painted the walls.”

  I looked closer at the bed. “How about that line on the bedpost and those spots on the box spring?”

  Kinn’s grin twisted. “Yeah, well, it spattered a little when she rolled off the bed. Not that it did her any good.” Kinn breathed deeply. “Man, there was enough blood in here to float a boat. I can still smell it. And the bastard still sleeps in here,” Kinn added, the music of dismay finally breaking through the rock-hard monotone of his professionalism.

  Kinn lapsed into silence again, but if anything his eyes intensified their scrutiny. Somewhere a clock ticked off the seconds and made time itself seem ominous, the room seem incendiary. “You look like you’re still trying to decide what happened in there,” I said.

  He took a moment before he answered. “I know what happened. I don’t know why.”