Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  I did her bidding and took my questions somewhere else. “You work with Usser every day, I imagine.”

  She nodded. “When he’s in town.”

  “Research.”

  “Yes.”

  “Books and articles and speeches.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Briefs, sometimes. Particularly when he’s been designated amicus curiae.”

  “Does all of it involve legal insanity?”

  “Yes. For the most part.”

  “Have any of your assignments been peculiar of late? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean did he have you do anything that wasn’t obviously related to his academic or trial work?”

  I was fishing for a sign that Usser had launched his research assistant on a search for a derangement he could persuasively adopt, a look at madness from a perspective different from the scope of his normal pursuits. But Krista Hellgren was shaking her head, offering nothing helpful.

  “How long have you been his assistant?”

  “Two years.”

  “So outside his immediate family, you must know him as well as anyone.”

  She lowered her eyes and squirmed. “I hope that is the case.”

  “So tell me. Is there any chance that Usser is insane?”

  I expected a vehement rejection of the proposition, but instead I got a reflective stare. I thought back to what she had said about the Mozart film, and about its essay on the flaw of genius.

  Her eyes were looking past me, at the center of the dancing fire. “I have considered that possibility,” she said. “After I learned of the arrest I thought back over the months before his wife’s death, to see if anything might have changed him, to see if anything had happened to force Lawrence across the chasm.”

  “What chasm?”

  “It was what he called it, the skip into insanity that so many of his clients took: crossing the chasm between the sane and the insane.”

  “What does he think sends people there?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Sure.”

  Krista leaned back against the couch, tilted her head against the wall and stared at the thick beams in the ceiling overhead. “What Lawrence thinks is that madness is a physical, not a psychological, disability, and thus is subject to eradication. Like polio and smallpox. He believes madness is triggered by biochemical changes in the brain, an alteration of the normal balances of the electrochemical processes that constitute both intelligence and consciousness, that govern mood and behavior as well as motor functions. For example, research indicates that much if not all schizophrenia results from an excess of dopamine transmission, which in turn causes a corresponding decrease in the activity of the neurotransmitters. Also, various depressive disorders have been found to correspond to a depletion of serotonin and norepinephrine, which results in turn from the activity of enzymes such as monoamine oxidase, plus related amino acids and peptides, the exact operation of which is yet to be understood by the neurochemists. Lawrence is confident that other mental illnesses admit to similar explanations, which will one day be discovered.” She lowered her head and looked at me. “Okay so far?”

  “I guess so.”

  She smiled a teacher’s smile. “For Professor Usser’s purposes, which are the purposes of criminal justice, it is the origin of those neurochemical changes that is important, the causative propulsion that send his clients across the chasm. Lawrence believes that mental illness is like cancer and heart disease in that certain life experiences—fear, anger, stress, frustration, the exposure to environmental pollutants—trigger chemical responses in both the mind and the body, and that ironically the legal system is therefore correct in its focus on the sociology of crime, although it is correct for outmoded reasons. Lawrence believes that certain objective stresses, combined with certain aberrant behavior, automatically mean madness given a finding of abnormal chemical responses, and that therefore madness should not be punished by the judicial system, no more than the disabilities resulting from multiple sclerosis or epilepsy should be punished by it. He believes that, in fact, madness is uniquely its own punishment. He also believes madness cannot be effectively treated except pharmacologically, by use of proven drugs such as the phenothiazines and the tricyclics, but he doesn’t say that very often or very loud, for fear of alienating the alienists who continue to be essential in criminal prosecutions if not in therapeutic situations. He believes, in short, that the system is right in theory—the insane should not be punished—but wrong in practice—evidence of insanity is medical and chemical, not psychological. And that about sums it up. In a nutshell, so to speak.”

  Krista raised her brows and inspected me. Some of what she’d said made sense and some of it sounded naive and superficial. Possibly she’d tailored the digest for me, however, because she assumed I was naive and superficial myself. “Let’s assume he’s right,” I said. “What stresses was he under just before the night his wife was killed?”

  “Well, there were the usual things. His workload was enormous. He was having trouble with the last chapter of his new book, and the publisher was pressing him to complete it. He was doing more administratively than he should have been, advising the law review on top of all the rest. And the usual faculty wrangles. I believe there was pressure on him to try for the deanship, in opposition to Professor Grunig. Also he was considering joining the defense team for that mass murderer up in Washington State, the one that killed those prostitutes.”

  “Not a popular cause, I imagine.”

  “No, but Lawrence feels it is exactly the most hideous of crimes that demands assertion of the insanity defense. Of course there was the usual pressure on him to keep out of it, that it would be bad publicity for the school, that the alumni would use his work as an excuse to cut back contributions and like that. Also, one of his former clients, a man named Nifton who had been acquitted on insanity grounds and treated for a short time and then released, was back in Berkeley causing problems for his sister and all kinds of other people. Lawrence was feeling pretty responsible for that, although there was no reason why he should.”

  She finally stopped. “That’s quite a list,” I said.

  She shook her head sadly. “People see only the success, the power, the display; they never see what all that cost him in terms of his energy and his compassion. He would come over here sometimes and literally collapse from exhaustion. That was the basis of our relationship, actually, that Lawrence could relax with me, that I put no pressure on him. None. Ever.”

  “If he was subject to all those stresses, what was the aberrant behavior that resulted?”

  She shook her head. “That’s just it. There was none. Not before his wife died. I mean, Lawrence got depressed from time to time, deeply depressed, but …”

  “Why? Most people would say he had everything.”

  “He worried that he was doing more harm than good, that he didn’t understand madness, not really, that his conclusions were all wrong. But after a few days he’d snap out of it and go on about his business.”

  “Did he take drugs?”

  “No. Never. I offered him marijuana one night and he shoved me away from him. It was the only time he ever struck me.”

  I realized she had begun to speak of Usser as though he were dead. And I realized I was sorry for her because of it. “You say there was nothing strange about his behavior, but from what I hear, he was sleeping with all kinds of women besides his wife and he didn’t seem to mind that everyone knew it. I find that a little aberrant, don’t you? Particularly if he loved her, as you say?”

  Pain skewed her face. “That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? To talk about sex.”

  “I’m too old to get my kicks hearing about other people’s sex lives, Ms. Hellgren. Usser seems to have been promiscuous. Which means he must have left some heartache in his wake. And where there’s heartache, there’s motive,
and that’s what I’m looking for. So. Will you help me out?”

  She got up and went into the kitchen and came back with both brandy and Bordeaux. She poured without being asked, then curled up on the couch. “How can I help?”

  “First of all, was there any change in your relationship with Usser recently?”

  “No.”

  “It was sexual, right? In part?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know there were other women in his life?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did he talk to you about them?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Did he tell the others about you?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter if he did.”

  “So you weren’t jealous.”

  “No.”

  “Were any of the others jealous of you?”

  “I don’t know. They had no reason to be.”

  “Why not? Most women like to feel they give their man everything he needs, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not every woman. I gave him things he didn’t get from the others, and that was enough for me.”

  “What kind of things?”

  She met my eyes. “You don’t need to know, but I’ll tell you anyway. They were things of the flesh, and things of the soul as well. Our relationship was entirely one-sided. I wanted nothing from Professor Usser, except to give him whatever it was he wanted. Mostly what he wanted was my mind. I’m an intelligent woman. I was proud when Lawrence put his name on my work and published it as his own. I was proud to see my work quoted and cited, even though no one knew it was mine. And I was proud, Mr. Tanner, to give Lawrence my body when he wanted that as well. It wasn’t that often, actually. But whenever he needed me, I was there for him. He knew it because I told him so.”

  “It’s hard to believe you were satisfied with such a one-way relationship, Ms. Hellgren.”

  “Different people are satisfied with different things. I have studied eastern philosophy and religion. There the tradition is to serve, to erase the self, to please yourself by pleasing others. I was satisfied by helping Lawrence Usser be everything he could be, which was far more than I could ever be on my own.”

  “You don’t sound like a disciple of women’s lib.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know if I am or not. I’m satisfied with my job but I’m not dependent on it, so in that sense I am truly liberated. I also know that one day Lawrence will want neither my body nor my mind. He will have absorbed all my ideas and he will move on to those of someone else. I will be sad, but I will not be devastated. And I will move on to someone else as well, though I suspect my movement in that sense will inevitably be downhill.”

  Her blind devotion made me furious. It reminded me of the religious cultists who equate nirvana with the absence of thought and the acceptance of absurdity. It also reminded me that I was no longer young enough to court a woman like Krista Hellgren, and perhaps that’s why my fury stirred.

  When I spoke again it was with a bitter bite. “You’re writing off the rest of your life before you’ve begun to live it.”

  “Don’t feel that way, Mr. Tanner. I don’t. Some people never get to the top of the mountain at all.”

  She leaned back and drank her wine, as content and enduring as a slug. I was still determined to poke holes in her bubble of rapture. “So nothing at all bothered you about your relationship with Usser?”

  “Only that I might give him less than he needed.”

  “What about what you were doing to his wife? What about her feelings when she learned you were sleeping with her husband?”

  Krista lowered her head. “It wasn’t Dianne that I was concerned about. It was Lisa.”

  “Why Lisa?”

  “Because she was very upset by our relationship. She didn’t understand it at all.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Lawrence hinted at it. And once shortly before he was arrested he and I were having dinner at a place on Telegraph. Lisa walked by and saw us through the window. I thought she was going to have a fit. I felt terrible about her pain.”

  “But not bad enough to leave her old man alone.”

  I was still ashamed of my remark when the telephone rang and broke the tension that had curdled the air between us. Krista excused herself and went up to the desk to answer it. I turned around and jiggled the fire with a poker, wishing that what I poked was Krista’s wrap of self-delusion and my own reaction to it.

  I couldn’t help hearing her side of the conversation. “Hi, Danny.… That’s all right.… Good. I’ll look it over in the morning and give you a memo by the end of the day.… No.… Yes.… No, I can’t. Come on, Danny; don’t do this to me again.… Yes.… Okay, I forgive you.… Sure. See you then.… It’s okay. Good night.”

  She hung up and came back down to the living area. “Business,” she explained.

  I nodded and tried to apologize for my earlier insult. Krista waved it away, then tried to stifle a yawn but couldn’t. Then, as though she remembered the lines her role required, she curled herself at my feet and rested her hand on my knee and her cheek on my thigh. She smelled of lilacs. I patted her hair. It was as soft as sable.

  “You think I’m strange, don’t you?” she asked sleepily.

  “A little.”

  “You wouldn’t if you knew more about me.”

  “Maybe you’ll tell me more about you sometime.”

  “Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll do more than that.”

  “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “Don’t have to what?”

  “Sleep with me to help your boss.”

  She stiffened, but kept her place. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Sure you would. But it wouldn’t work. Believe me. Not that I wouldn’t do it, you understand. Just that it wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “I see.”

  “Good.”

  “I might want to anyway, someday.”

  “Good.”

  “But not till Lawrence is free.”

  “That might take a long time. And I might be helping to see to it that it does.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I was tired, and more than a little depressed by my conversation with Krista Hellgren, and I wanted to go home and sleep it off. But if I was going to get anywhere with the Renzel case I needed to catch up to Lisa Usser, and there was one place I might be able to do it even at this time of night. I found my car and drifted down the hill toward Telegraph Avenue, made two right turns, and lucked into a parking place on Haste Street, just opposite the undeveloped parcel of real estate that has become known as People’s Park.

  It’s a cheerless place these days, a park in name and symbol only, but for a decade or so people marched and chanted and fought to keep the block unoccupied by the owner, the University of California, and its project, a multilevel parking lot. The Berkeley Barb had been the first to sniff out the university’s plan, and in April of 1969 it had summoned the faithful to act before the school could implement its parking plan. A park of sorts was built in a day, with sod and plantings and the other trappings of urban nature, at a happening of the sort that occurred periodically in those days in response to joy or jeopardy.

  On that first day, the Barb people had gotten their way without opposition. Beautification of the park continued for a month. But the university administration decided that a statement of its rights was needed, a symbol of its affirmation of the concept of the private ownership of land, and it awarded a contract to erect a steel fence around the property. On May 15, while a small contingent of Berkeley police occupied the property, the president of the university’s student body exhorted a noon rally to “take the park.” The confrontation was on, and it turned violent immediately.

  The students tossed bricks and bottles and worse; the police retaliated with tear gas. The violence escalated, as violence does, and when the county sheriff’s deputies arrived they began to fire their weapons. A bystander observing the actio
n from the comparative safety of a rooftop was killed by a sheriff’s shotgun, and another student was blinded by a similar weapon. Six police officers were injured, and more than sixty students as well. By nightfall the National Guard had been called in, and People’s Park had become a legend and a cause.

  Conflict continued for several days in the form of skirmishes and demonstrations. A National Guard helicopter “bombed” protesters with tear gas as they approached the chancellor’s residence, and on May 22 almost five hundred demonstrators were arrested, ending the violence for a time. The university eventually removed the fence, and only halfheartedly proposed to utilize the area over the next decade. A few weeks ago, I had read that the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Committee had declared People’s Park an official city landmark, because of its “unique place” in the city’s history. But the scruffy, scrambled plot of ground I was looking at seemed appropriate only to lament the dead and the forgotten.

  The east end of the park was a grove of evergreens in various stages of maturity. Some high pines swayed in the night wind; some small firs looked abused and neglected. From where I sat I could see only shapes and shadows within the grove, moving blobs of black that congregated around a small bonfire at the center of the stand of trees.

  The central portion of the park was an open field, its grasses worn away in paths that crisscrossed the block in dusty shortcuts. The only structure I could see was a flat stage, raised some three feet off the ground, sprayed with graffiti, suitable for rock bands or orators if oratory was still in style. On the stage a couple was copulating under a grimy blanket, or giving a good imitation of the act. Elsewhere in the field, isolated individuals lay prone or sat hunched over, heads bowed, backs bent, consciousness erased by sleep or drugs or the cumulative catastrophe of their lives. Oblivious to it all, a preppie couple strolled hand in hand across one of the shortcuts, in the blithe certainty that none of the despair around them was worthy of concern or even a moment’s glance.

  The west end of the park was subdivided into little garden plots, most of which looked stricken by a viral blight. A valiant bamboo bush tried to eke out a life in the middle of it all. Beside it, an overstuffed couch and a grocery shopping cart constituted someone’s worldly possessions. The someone was asleep on the ground beside his chrome container, his sockless ankles glowing in the moonlight like the tusks of a jungle beast.