Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “Lonborg?”

  “I think. I can’t remember. They weren’t here for long. Lisa didn’t look very happy about being here at all.”

  “How about Lawrence Usser? Did he come around much?”

  Sandra frowned and shook her head. “I’ve never seen him before in my life, except for his picture in the papers. If he killed Dianne the way they said, then they should hang him, don’t you think?” She put her hand over her mouth. “Mr. Richards wouldn’t like to hear me say that. He thinks capital punishment is evil.”

  “And he thought Dianne Renzel was pretty special, didn’t he?”

  Sandra opened her mouth to answer, then changed her mind. “I don’t think I better talk about that. I mean, I like my job, you know?”

  I started to ask another question, but Sandra noticed something behind me and quickly lowered her head and began to type. What was behind me was Pierce Richards. What he had in mind was getting me out of his center. The way he did it was to ask me politely to leave.

  It was only three long blocks from the center to the law school. I trotted back to my car, fed the meter, grabbed the Reds cassette from beneath the seat, then walked back up the hill and entered the Berkeley Law School behind an animated group of students who were discussing the merits of the doctrine of comparative negligence. I followed them to the second floor, then went to Lawrence Usser’s office and knocked on the door.

  When no one answered I knocked again and waited, but Usser didn’t answer and neither did the person I wanted to see—his secretary, Laura Nifton. I went back to the main hall and was about to wend my way to Elmira Howson’s office when I saw her standing beside the entrance to the library, exchanging heated words with Gus Grunig.

  “It’s despicable that you want Dean Randolph to bar him from the school,” Professor Howson was saying as I approached, hands on her hips, her jaw thrust like a cudgel.

  Her ex-lover was at least six inches shorter than she was, but he was the calmer of the two, in control of himself and the situation. “He is a criminal defendant, Elmira,” Grunig said patiently, as though he spoke to a child.

  “He is accused; he is not guilty.”

  “If he remains not guilty after the trial has concluded, I will be the first to welcome him back to the classroom. But until then we should not ignore reality.”

  Elmira Howson swore. “The reality is that you want Larry dismissed from the faculty and since there are no legitimate grounds for discharge you’re seizing on this ridiculous murder charge to do what you can’t accomplish otherwise.”

  Her charge fazed Grunig not at all. “I understand he pleaded insanity, Elmira. Can that be true? And if it is, can you possibly suggest he be allowed to instruct law students as long as he assumes that posture?”

  “I—” Ms. Howson noticed me for the first time, and cut off her rejoinder. “I saw you in court. What are you doing here?”

  “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  “Did you see Larry at all? Did you talk to him after the arraignment?” She was so eager it was embarrassing to both Grunig and myself.

  I nodded.

  “How is he? That prima donna Hattie wouldn’t let me get near him.”

  “He’s okay,” I said. “He didn’t like jail much, but I’ve never talked to anyone who did. The bail thing got worked out, so he could well be home by now.” I hesitated, and looked at Grunig. “Your discussion may be moot,” I went on. “He’s thinking about staying away from here till the trial’s over, spending his time with his daughter instead of his criminal procedure students. She’s been hanging around with a guy named Nifton who calls himself the Maniac. Sleeping in the streets, taking drugs, possibly becoming promiscuous. Usser’s worried about her.”

  I kept my eyes on Grunig. It was my intention to blunt his enmity for Usser by showing they shared a vulnerability to the Maniac’s obsessions, but Grunig didn’t seem to have heard a word. He dropped his arms to his sides and stomped off as though I’d somehow insulted him.

  “I’m going to try to call Larry,” Elmira Howson said, and started for her office.

  “Do you have a video recorder up there?” I called after her.

  “Yes. What about it?”

  “Is it beta?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I use it for a minute?”

  She smiled malevolently. “Do you have some sweaty little porno number you picked up down on Telegraph? And you can’t wait till you get home to see all those bodies slither in and out of each other?”

  I ignored her slur with difficulty. “I have a tape that says Reds on the outside. It used to be in Lawrence Usser’s study. His daughter took it out of there and buried it in People’s Park. I want to find out why.”

  Elmira Howson still wasn’t as apprehensive as I was. “She did what? I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand either. Let’s go watch the tape.”

  She started to ask another question, but held it and turned and led me to her office.

  The recorder was where I remembered it being, on a shelf beside a thirteen-inch Panasonic television set, next to a row of BNA and CCH binders. I looked over the machine, pressed the on button, pulled the cassette out of the jacket and pushed it into the slot.

  The machine absorbed the tape with a mechanical whir. “You have to turn on the set separately,” Elmira Howson instructed. “Then press channel four.”

  I did, and the lines and shadows of the cassette began to stream across the screen, black and white, suggestive of nothing but technology. I waited, but even after several seconds I couldn’t tell what was on the tape. It certainly wasn’t Reds, or any other professionally recorded film. I waited longer. The stream of shadows finally stopped, abruptly, but the dissolve didn’t clear things up. If anything the images were blurred even more, blobs of light and dark, jerky streams of movement from one shape to another, all of it indecipherable. My guess was that someone was trying to photograph something with a hand-held video camera, and wasn’t using enough light, and didn’t have enough experience. Behind me, Elmira Howson dialed a number on her phone.

  I picked the remote control unit off the top of the TV set and went to the nearest chair and sat down. As I did so, a face appeared on the screen, a face I didn’t know. It mugged in close-up, stuck out its tongue, then disappeared. What followed was more darkness, bits of light in liquid streaks, all accompanied by the harsh white noise of nothingness. I began to think I was wasting my time. To my right, Elmira Howson had begun to leaf through an issue of the Supreme Court advance sheets as she pressed the phone to her ear, no longer interested in what I was doing.

  I punched the speed search button on the remote control. The abstractions quickened their pace, as though they were being chased. Then the diffused and senseless imagery dissolved and I thought I saw a coherent object. When I realized what it was, I pressed the stop button and the off button and turned to Elmira Howson. “If you don’t want your life to get real complicated over the next few days, I suggest you find something to do somewhere else.”

  She looked up, frowning. “Larry isn’t home,” she said as she replaced the telephone. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I think this tape is going to be evidence in a murder case. If you don’t want to spend a lot of time telling the police how I happened to be here and what you happen to know about what’s on this tape, then I suggest you get out of here for about twenty minutes. If anyone asks, tell them I asked to use your VCR, you told me where it was and how to use it, and you don’t know any more than that.”

  “But—”

  “You don’t want to see what’s on this tape, Ms. Howson. Really, you don’t.”

  “Does it have something to do with Larry?”

  “I think so.”

  “Does it mean he’s guilty?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I think I should stay.”

  “I don’t.”

  “But …” Her voice trailed
away to silence. She thought about it for so long I thought she was going to stay just to spite me, or to prove she was as brave as I was.

  It took thirty seconds to decide, but she finally gathered an armful of journals and stood up and headed for the door. “I’ll be in the faculty lounge if you need me,” she said without looking back. “Which I’m sure you won’t.” When the door closed I advanced the tape on speed search and watched it till I was certain the production had ended, then rewound and watched at normal speed.

  The first few minutes were static, the next section some sort of unsteady experiment, as though someone was trying to figure out how to use the camera. Then came a section that was so underexposed I could make out nothing but vague shapes—human, it looked like—but so faint the forms and faces were anonymous. Then came another blank section, followed by the portion of the tape that had caused me to ask the professor to leave the room.

  To remedy the exposure problem, someone had found some flashlights to light the scene. After being aimed at by the lights, the camera zoomed onto a flickering image, one that made me sit up straight and rub my eyes for a clearer view, one that made me wonder what the whole thing meant.

  It was a body, a woman, naked, lying on what I finally decided was bare ground. She didn’t move, and though it was what I expected, no one joined her for erotic foreplay or sadistic stunts. Shapes moved about her, swooping, bowing, but none of them were captured clearly by the flashlights. They remained mysterious attendants, a band of shrouded lechers.

  At first I thought what I’d found was a homemade stag film, something Usser had shot for kicks, probably using one of his willing law students as his star. But when the woman still hadn’t moved two minutes later, I looked more closely and decided she was dead.

  I could see no wound, no scar, no deep dark seep of blood, but I was certain I was looking at a corpse. Even on film the dead look strangely empty—hollow eggs that lack the churning stuff of life—and this bone-white woman was as soulless as any cadaver I’d ever seen.

  The camera continued its march around the body. For a moment I assumed the woman was Dianne Renzel, the tape a trophy for her killer. But by the time the camera reached the decedent’s head and peered down from above like some mercenary mourner I could see that I was wrong.

  The face that had stared happily at me from the pages of the newspapers that had reported her murder was not the face that stared at the heavens in the smudged and grainy videotape. This face was younger, ravaged by more than its demise, old beyond its years, abused. I was still struggling to determine who it was when the shadowy forms surrounding her began tossing dirt atop the body. Then I realized that the woman lay in a shallow grave and the camera was there to prove her burial.

  They had placed her on a sheet of plastic. After the first ceremonial handfuls of dirt, the attendants draped the plastic around the body before covering her completely. Handful by handful, clods and clumps defiled the head and torso until the flesh had disappeared beneath a soft black blanket and the camera panned the sky and caught the ghoulish, peeping face of the Mortician in the Moon.

  By the time it panned back to the grave, someone had scrawled various symbols in the dirt, crypto-religious scratchings that presumably warned of calamity or protected from defilement. One was a swastika, another a fish, a third what looked to be an erotic illustration out of the Kama Sutra. The camera made one final sweep across the grave, zoomed onto a pair of human hands clasped in prayerful penance, then faded to black at the instant I realized who the dead woman was.

  I rewound the tape, ejected it from the recorder and left the office. I got out of the law school as quickly as I could, then jogged back to the car and put the tape back under the seat and took out the little cedar box and opened it. As I suspected, the outlandish fingernails weren’t fake at all. Their backsides were caked with tiny crusts of blood and flesh, their painted sides scarred by the pliers that were used to pull them off the fingers of the dead woman in the film. I put the box back under the seat, locked the car and walked to where I was certain the interment had taken place.

  It was still too early for the regulars to gather in the park. They were still out scrounging, pawing through dumpsters, begging for change, scavenging aluminum cans, plying the derelict’s universal trade. I went back to where I’d found the buried tape and looked around.

  The ground seemed uniformly firm and flat but for the place where I’d uncovered the box and the tape. I got down on my knees, probed the ground in various places, traced the outline of what seemed to be its softest spot and began to dig.

  Again the earth came free in crumbling clumps of dust and litter. Again it took only a few minutes to duplicate the hole I had dug two hours earlier. This time I kept going, pawing like a dog for a bone. The smell I’d thought was garbage now was suspect. Two feet beneath the surface I came across the plastic shroud, and the smell of rotting flesh seared a passage to my brain.

  I broadened the hole, convincing myself that I was pursuing an accurate identification rather than an unhealthy curiosity. I worked my way quickly to the head. I was careful, considerate, dainty, but when I brushed away the dirt and peeled away the plastic I wasn’t certain I was looking at the girl I thought it was, the one whose mother clung so desperately to the false hope of her existence.

  The body had begun to decompose, the stench its defensive weapon. Flesh had changed its color and contour, had yielded space to bone. When a maggot crawled from behind an eye, it was more than I could stand.

  I was trying to replace the shroud when I noticed the single black incisor peering at me from above an obscenely drooping lip. The discoloration duplicated that in the photograph that Phyllis Misteen so fiercely cherished. I redraped the face and went to the corner and called Bart Kinn.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Kinn got there in twenty minutes. I spent the interval warding off wanderers disposed to share the grove with me. I succeeded with all but one, a grizzled transient who, like a virus which thrives on penicillin, took my baleful gaze and donned it like a nightshirt as he made a comfortable cabin for himself beneath the lowest bows of a spreading spruce. By the time Bart Kinn arrived the transient was noisily asleep, an empty bottle of Night Train cradled in his palms like a badly damaged bird.

  Kinn and another plainclothes officer got out of an unmarked car and strolled into the grove with professional intensity. When they got to the grave they circled twice, once looking down into the pit, the second time looking at the surroundings, which included me.

  The initial inspection finished, Kinn said something to the second man that sent him back toward the car. When he got there, I could hear the squawk of his radio as he called for a technical crew to come and tell him exactly what he’d found.

  In the meantime, Bart Kinn trudged toward me, his jaw bulging, his lips tightened into twin thin cords in his effort to control his anger. I wondered whether he was more angry at me than at the crime.

  “How long ago did you dig that up?” The question was gruff and mean.

  “Just before I called you.”

  “You look inside the plastic?”

  “Yes.”

  “You got any idea who’s in there?”

  “Yes.”

  Kinn didn’t bother to ask the question. “I think it’s a girl named Sherry Misteen,” I said.

  Kinn frowned. “Who’s that?”

  I was certain he’d heard the name before, and almost certain he knew exactly who she was and so was testing the limits of my own knowledge before he questioned me further.

  “A girl about eighteen,” I told him. “Disappeared about two months ago.”

  “How long’s she been dead?”

  “No idea. A while,” I added.

  “How’d you happen to come across her body?”

  “I smelled it.”

  “Shit.” Kinn crossed his arms across his barrel chest. His hands looked big enough to palm a basketball, and strong enough to crush it till it popped. “It�
�s foul but not that foul. How’d you know where to sniff?”

  “If it’s who I think it is, she lived across the street from the Usser place. Her mother was a good friend of Dianne Renzel’s. I talked to her after I saw you and Mrs. Usser, and she asked me if I’d keep my eyes open for her daughter while I was fooling around with the Renzel thing. So that’s what I did.”

  “This have anything to do with the Renzel murder?”

  “Not as far as I know.” It was the truth as things stood then, but it might not be the truth for too much longer.

  “I suppose you know who killed her.”

  Kinn’s sarcasm was heavy, even for him. He’d probably never had an outsider solve a case for him, probably never had to fit such kismet into his delicate self-image. When I told him I didn’t know who’d killed the girl, he seemed relieved, and his next question was both easy and earnest.

  “How about taking a guess?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t even do that. I don’t know how she died, or where, or why. I just stumbled across her body while I was looking for something else.”

  “Here?” Kinn gestured at the park, as though only a lunatic could expect to find anything of value within its tattered boundaries.

  “Here and there,” I said.

  “This have anything to do with you being over here the other night? Checking out the Maniac and his crew?”

  Kinn was getting close to bone. I had always felt he was reticent about the Usser case, was for his own reasons pursuing it with less than normal energy. But if I told him everything I knew, he’d intensify the search for Lisa Usser. If he found her before I did, she’d be instantly incommunicado. I wanted at least one real conversation with her, away from the Maniac and the cops and her father and her drugs and anything else that might warp her response to my questions. I looked at Kinn and tried to barter a little lie for a little block of time.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment in downtown Oakland in an hour. I don’t want to break it, so I’ll offer you a deal.”

  Kinn eyed me skeptically. “What deal?”