Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  The conversation was where I wanted it to be. “Isn’t motive a part of your case?”

  “With a husband and wife there’s motive for a dozen murders.”

  “So what was it with Usser? Jealousy? Did he catch her sleeping with the milkman and lose control when he confronted her and she admitted it?”

  Kinn grumbled a basso curse. “That’s a pretty long line you’re fishing with, Tanner.”

  “You can’t keep the elements of your case secret forever, Kinn. It’ll all come out at the preliminary hearing anyway. Why don’t you given me a preview? Maybe I can help you out.”

  “And maybe you can fuck things up even more than they are already.”

  Kinn’s discontent grew more obvious by the minute. He was bothered by the quality of the investigation, maybe even by its results; so bothered that he didn’t care who knew it. “You have any doubt that Usser did it?” I asked.

  Kinn shrugged. “Doesn’t matter if I do or don’t. The D.A.’s filed the charge.”

  “You think Gable’s got enough to make it stick?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “You still investigating? You still looking for more?”

  “I look for more till they’re locked up. Sometimes after that. Not just Usser. All of them.”

  “Why’d Gable move on Usser so soon, if his case is thin?”

  Kinn shrugged again. “Gable doesn’t consult with me about strategy.”

  “If Usser didn’t do it, who did?”

  Kinn eyed me disgustedly. “I never said Usser didn’t do it.”

  “But you don’t think Gable’s got a case.”

  “I didn’t say that, either.” Kinn chastened me with a baleful stare. “Man, you come on like a reporter, you know that? Twisting everything, till it says what you think it ought to say.”

  “Sorry.” I shifted gears. “Was I close? About Ms. Renzel and the milkman?”

  Kinn cocked his head. “We’re still checking that out.”

  “Anything so far?”

  “Some. Me, I don’t think it matters. Even if she had someone she was screwing, and even if Usser caught her at it, I don’t think he’d give a shit. That’s just my personal opinion.”

  “Why wouldn’t he care?”

  “People in glass houses, man, and like that.”

  “A cocksman?”

  “Full time.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “We’re making a list.”

  “Any of them think they were in line to succeed the late Ms. Renzel in that bed over there?”

  Kinn shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  “Like who, for instance?”

  “You get names, you get them from Gable. But if you’re any good at your trade, you’ll run across one or two of them before long. The man cut a wide swath.”

  “You sound as though you know Usser pretty well.”

  “Had him in class a couple of years ago, back when I thought being a lawyer beat the hell out of being a cop. Back when I thought how much money you made had something to do with how smart you were.”

  Kinn looked as if he expected me to object to his implication. When I let his comment stand it seemed to make him voluble. “What was Usser like?” I prompted.

  “He got off on me being a cop, for one thing. Always having me tell the class how it really was out in the street.” Kinn chuckled at the memory. “Then, after I’d tell them how some deal went down, how we finally made a case against some snot ball who lived off whores and sold kids dope, Usser would pipe up and say it didn’t matter how warped the guy was, that the law couldn’t concern itself with special cases, that it only applies to crimes, not criminals.”

  “You thought he was naive?”

  “Hell, everyone’s naive. You think those almighty judges know what goes down on the streets? Or the defense lawyers? They live in caves, man, like all civilians. Come out by day to earn their bread making Walt Disney rules for their Walt Disney world, then hole up at night behind Mr. Yale and Mr. Cyclone and hope no one breaks in and takes all the jewels they earned by being ignorant.” Kinn eyed me closely, as if to gauge whether I was worthy of hearing truth. “Ever notice all the fancy cars around these days?” he asked finally. “Mercedes? BMW? All that shit?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why you think there’s so many of them?”

  “People want to advertise their money?”

  “Naw. That’s the old days. Today people who spend twenty, thirty grand on a car want it to do one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Get them the fuck through the ghetto without breaking down. The wheels give out in the wrong part of town and you’re deep in a world of the extremely pissed off. People willing to pay Mr. Mercedes and Mr. Maserati a whole lot to keep that from happening.” Kinn laughed. “Usser’s got one, you know. Big BMW. Even the great Lawrence Usser don’t want no vapor lock down in West Oakland.” Kinn sighed, shook his head and looked back into the bedroom. “What the hell you want to know, Tanner?” he asked, his sarcastic argot replaced by a weary resignation.

  “Whether Usser was insane.”

  Kinn gave me his look again. “He used some scissors on her,” he said carefully.

  “I read about it.”

  “You read what he did with them?”

  “Not precisely.”

  “You want to know?”

  I sighed. “Not really. But maybe I better.”

  Kinn looked back into the room. “Those babies must have been honed as hell, ’cause he cut off about everything she had that was loose. Hair. Ears. Tip of her nose. He cut off her tongue and shoved it up her cunt. He even cut her nipples off. Not the whole thing, just the little pointy part. Nipped them off like rosebuds.”

  There was nothing to be said until time and memory diluted all his words, redefined them so Kinn and I could shed their deepest meanings. “A sane man do that?” Kinn asked finally.

  I thought about it. “Maybe. If he was trying to make someone think he wasn’t.”

  Kinn met my glance. “Insanity plea. Yeah, I’ve thought about it. The guy knows his law, and he’s buddies with a lot of shrinks. For sure he’s defended enough corkscrews to pick up on the vocabulary.” Kinn took yet another look at the bedroom, as though this was one of those times it had begun to speak to him. “But if he was trying to make it look like he was nuts, why’d he wipe away the prints, hide the murder weapon where we can’t find it, stuff his bloody handkerchief away in the back of the closet?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “And why’d he try to wipe off the mirror?”

  “What mirror?”

  “That one.” Kinn pointed to the oval mirror above the dressing table that was against the far wall.

  “What was on it?”

  “All kind of stuff. Religious, sort of. But bent. ‘Death Is Redemption. Slay the Sinner, Slay the Sin. Free the Flesh. Sainthood Is Slaughter.’ Shit like that, written in lipstick, then wiped off with a towel. Lucky for us, he didn’t do a very good job. Now, why would he try to erase all that, Mr. Private Detective, if he was trying to pretend he was stone cold loco?”

  I shrugged and smiled. “Maybe to get you to ask that question.”

  “Okay. You sound like a fucking lawyer yourself, always with an answer. So what about the sex?”

  “That doesn’t seem so hard to explain,” I said. “She and Usser started making love, and sometime along the way she said something that set him off.”

  “That’s not how it was.”

  “The papers said she’d had intercourse before she died.”

  “Yeah, well, what they should have said was that there were signs of sexual activity. The sign was semen. But it was on the outside, not in. How we figure is, he beat off on her. When she was dying, the guy stood there and whacked his pud and squirted his jazz all over her. Now you tell me. A guy do that to his wife? Doesn’t seem that way to me,” Kinn answered before I could. “To another broad, maybe. But no
t the wife.”

  I could only keep silent. Kinn began to fidget, then looked at his watch. Before he could order me away I gestured toward the bedroom. “Care if I go in there?”

  “You won’t find anything.”

  I waited.

  “Hell, go ahead,” Kinn said. “We only resealed it after Gable decided to move on Usser. We didn’t find anything the first time and we didn’t find anything this time, either. I’ll be downstairs looking at the books.”

  Kinn went off toward the stairs and I went into the murder room, stepping softly, as though I trod on fragile facts.

  There was a lot to look at, but the first thing that caught my eye was a photograph, formal, framed in gold, that leaned against the wall atop the headboard shelf. It must have been Lisa, and contrary to what I’d heard about her, this was a vibrant, laughing child, with long dark hair and flashing black eyes and a smile that would have sold a lot of toothpaste or persuaded you to drive a Ford. I went over for a closer look.

  If there was trouble in her, if she had become as rebellious and defiant as Mrs. Renzel said, then this picture had been taken before all that boiled over. I wondered if Usser kept it there because it was the way he wanted her to be rather than the way she was.

  I picked it up, conscious that I was violating Bart Kinn’s orders. The girl stared at me as though I had an answer to a question we both shared. She seemed about to speak, to ask a favor or to give one. I put the portrait back in place and wondered if she had ever smiled that smile since the day her mother died. Then I began to look for signs that her father had coldly planned the deed.

  The bed was covered with a quilt and pillowed with fat blue cushions trimmed in lace. The nightstands on either side contained facial tissues, aspirin, Vaseline, Desenex, a Rex Stout mystery, a Rosellen Brown novel, and a box of tampons that, given the fact and circumstance of Dianne Renzel’s death, had now become pathetic.

  The dressers on either side of the room were stuffed with the expected items in unexpectedly sexy designs—bikini and plunging and see-through and the like—all of it newish and expensive. After flipping through some argyle socks and eelskin belts and Dean’s sweaters and Bali bras, I probed the corners and found nothing extraordinary, with two exceptions—in the back of one bottom drawer were five hundred dollars in uncashed traveler’s checks and a .32-caliber revolver, complete with leather holster, a box of cartridges and a trigger guard locked in place. I assumed the police had checked out the gun and decided it had nothing to do with the crime. Or maybe Usser had bought it afterward, to help ward off nightmares.

  On my way to the closet I stumbled over various pairs of athletic shoes and a pair of wool sweat socks stained and stiff from dirt and sweat. Inside the closet were more athletic shoes and a cardboard box marked GOODWILL that was half full of things I supposed were Dianne’s. In addition to the clothing there were tennis rackets, ski poles, backpacks, bike helmets, and other paraphernalia of an active western Yuppie. I patted my way through the clothing in the closet and found nothing but a stray dollar bill, several matchbooks and handkerchiefs, and a pocket calculator lying forgotten in one of Usser’s sports coats that hung way in the back. The shoes in the deep end of the closet were a historical record in themselves, which made them the most interesting things in the room.

  I probed and poked and peeked and pried for five more minutes, but in the end I concluded that if there had ever been anything illuminating in that room, the police had already confiscated it. I abandoned my search and trotted down the stairs and joined Bart Kinn in the den.

  All four wall were books, tier upon tier of them, books of all shapes and sizes, colors and bindings, subjects and styles. In the center of the room, a Queen Anne desk was piled high with papers and magazines, law journals and psychiatric publications, each of them splayed and awry as though laid waste by the whirlwind of Usser’s brilliant mind. The credenza behind the desk held a Kaypro word processor, a Sanyo VCR, an Adler typewriter and an Aiwa cassette player. Next to the VCR were some prerecorded movies—The Big Sleep, Patton, The Right Stuff, Reds—as well as five or six blank tape cartridges. Beside the credenza a Sony video camera rested on a bright chrome tripod. My guess was that Usser had used the video equipment in his practice, to tape depositions and evidentiary matter that was immobile. The end of the credenza was a charred, black scar. I assumed it was the leavings of the fire that Lisa had tried to start.

  After my quick inventory I looked back at Kinn. “Nice place,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  The brief word contained a lot of awe. I wondered what Kinn’s intellectual ambitions were, whether he had realized all or any of them, whether he had given most of them up, the way he had given up law school, the way I had given up learning Spanish and reading Proust, and given up the law as well.

  “Care if I look up close?” I asked.

  Kinn shook his head. “As far as I know, nothing happened in here that had anything to do with it.”

  I went to the nearest wall and looked at random book titles. The shelves farthest from the desk were novels, Russian and European mostly, classics known to all, though a few Wambaughs and Puzos and Micheners were hiding in there too. Next to the novels were a few pop psychology and spiritualist tracts, the kind that cater to our need to believe that we can somehow make it better than it is. A volume entitled The Astral Light was so stained and tattered it looked to have been read daily, as prayer or penance.

  Next came brief sections on music and sports, a larger one devoted to biographies of men like Einstein and Jefferson, Lincoln and Huey Long, and then a single shelf of poetry, a lot of Keats and Whitman, Eliot and Baudelaire. Below the poets were the philosophers—Santayana and Buber, Heidegger and Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel and Spinoza. And then the law books took over.

  There were hundreds of them; thousands, maybe. Biographies of Darrow and Marshall, Stryker and Brandeis. Legal philosophy from Holmes and Pound and Cardozo, sets of Wigmore in cloth and Greenleaf in calfskin, hornbooks on subjects from civil procedure to real property, and textbooks old and new—Casner and Leach, Prosser and Smith, Halbach and Scoles, Louisell and Hazard. And law reviews, legal newspapers, Congressional Records and legal directories; loose-leaf services and three-ring binders and soft-covered advance sheets. It was very impressive to a former lawyer like myself, and maybe forbidding or maybe enticing to a layman like Bart Kinn. I looked at Kinn again, then looked where he was looking.

  Just above the credenza, where Usser could reach them with an easy cast of his arm, were several shelves devoted to psychiatry and the law. Most prominent of the volumes was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. But most of the books addressed a more specific subject: The Insanity Plea, The Mark of Sanity, The Reign of Error, The Madness Establishment, The Myth of Mental Illness, Insanity Inside Out, Murder and Madness, The Criminal Mind, Psychiatric Justice, The Responsibility of Criminals, The Powers of Psychiatry, Manufacture of. Madness. And dozens more, an entire array discussing the jagged line between legal sanity and insanity, undoubtedly containing enough data and examples and case studies to support a script capable of fooling the most expert shrink, to say nothing of a jury of people who had never heard such terms before.

  I looked at Kinn once more. His face was set in a dark fury. He seemed to have suddenly made up his mind that Usser was a fraud, that he was doing what the phone call to the Renzels had suggested he would do. I was more than halfway to that conclusion as well.

  After we exchanged glances, Kinn backed out of the room. I started to follow him when my glance fell, entirely by accident, on a potted orange tree in the corner behind the door. There was something sticking out of the dirt at the base of the tree, something shiny. I went over and looked at it, then started to pick it out of the dirt, then stopped myself. “Hey, Kinn. Come in here a minute.”

  In a second he was at my side. I pointed to the object without saying a word. “Son of a bitch,” Kinn said, then told me he’
d be back in a minute. When he returned, he had a pair of tongs and a plastic bag. He plucked at the object with the tongs and finally loosened it enough to raise it out of its shallow grave.

  The shiny thing was a pair of scissors, of course; the murder weapon. “These fuckers weren’t here a month ago, I can tell you that,” Kinn said as he put the scissors in the plastic bag. “He must have ditched them somewhere and went to get them later.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that a lot of things in that house didn’t make much sense.

  TEN

  Kinn bid me a gruff goodbye, then stood in the street and waited for me to drive away. I did what he wanted me to do, but only briefly. After a left and a right, I stopped in the shade of a eucalyptus tree, waited ten minutes and drove back to the Usser house.

  The main reason I returned was to see if Cal showed up again. Cal gave off hints that he knew more than he was saying, about the Ussers, perhaps even about the murder. All kids give off those hints, of course, at least to those of us who aren’t parents ourselves and therefore aren’t used to that reluctant, suspicious style, but given the circumstances I wanted to talk with Cal again, about what he knew and about what his girlfriend Lisa knew as well.

  When Cal hadn’t shown up five minutes later, I got out of the car and strolled up the Usser steps again. When I didn’t hear anything abnormal I ambled to the back yard, watched and waited, then ambled back to the front again. No one saw me, as far as I could tell. It was one of those streets where privacy is as guarded as if it were illegal.

  I considered staking out the back yard but I wasn’t in the mood. It was too early in the case for a stakeout—as far as I’m concerned it’s always too early in the case for a stakeout—so I trotted down the steps to the street and walked to the house at the end of the block, one of the turquoise cantinas. I knocked on the door, rang the bell, then knocked again.

  Only then did I notice the sign: NIGHT WORKER. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB. I gave myself a mental kick in the pants and retreated. When I was halfway to the street, I heard a door squeak open. A voice, languid and irritated, tossed a question at my back. “What is it you want?”