Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “You let me go now, and in return I’ll stop on the way and tell Mrs. Misteen her daughter’s dead. That way you won’t have to do it. Then I’ll come by your office at four or so and we can talk some more about the case. I’ll tell you whatever else you want to know.”

  “If you’ve got any firm leads to this killing, I need to know them now.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know any more than I’ve already told you. The only people in Berkeley I know anything about are connected to the Renzel case, not this one.”

  “You better not be shitting me, Tanner.”

  “I’m not. The most likely prospect is that she was killed because of some street scam. Her mother gets phone calls from time to time, saying Sherry needs clothes or money, telling her where to drop them off. She’d always try to follow whoever came to pick the stuff up, but she always lost them. Sherry herself never showed up at the drop point. Maybe it’s because she’s been dead all the time. Maybe someone killed Sherry so she wouldn’t go back home and the guy could keep bleeding her mother dry.”

  Kinn thought it over. While he did so, the medical examiner arrived with his satchel, walked to the grave, bent down, and did something in its depths that Kinn and I couldn’t see. “Doc?” Kinn called out to him. “How long’s she been dead?”

  “How’d you know it’s a she?”

  “Never mind. Just tell me if she’s fresh or stale.”

  The sound of rippling plastic was followed by a muffled curse. “She’s been down here a long time,” the M.E. called back. “More than a month; less than six. God damn she’s putrid.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Can’t tell yet.”

  “She in shape to be identified?”

  “Not from her looks, she isn’t, unless her kin’s got a Teflon stomach. Charts on this one.”

  Kinn grumbled to himself and looked at me. “Okay. You can take off. Tell the Misteen woman we’ll be in touch after we finish up here. Tell her she can claim the body after the autopsy’s been done. Tonight or tomorrow. Probably tomorrow.”

  I nodded.

  “And I’ll see you at the station at four sharp.”

  “Right.”

  I got out of there as quickly as I could, before Bart Kinn changed his mind.

  It took four minutes to get to Hillside Lane. When she saw who had rung her doorbell and what expression he wore on his face, Phyllis Misteen flinched and then recoiled. “Is it about Sherry?”

  I nodded.

  “Is it bad?”

  “Maybe I should come inside.”

  She stopped retreating and held her ground. “She’s dead.”

  The words were firm, rehearsed, the dire conclusion somehow a balm to her. Instead of collapsing into a wayward grief, Phyllis Misteen straightened her back and blinked here eyes clear of sleep and sloth. “Would you come in and tell me how you know?”

  “Sure.”

  I followed her inside. It was still dark and dreary, but the first thing she did was open the shades and invite in as much sunlight as would come. The bright splash was like a new piece of furniture. Phyllis admired it for a moment, then picked up some newspapers and magazines, coffee cups and cigarette wrappers, and stashed them out of sight. “Would you care for coffee? Or a drink?”

  “No, thanks. Nothing.”

  “Then would you excuse me for a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  She went off, her sweat clothes flapping, her hair a spidery tangle, her hands clenched white against the threatened mugging of despair. Her daughter stared at me from within her silver frame. I stared back and tried to decide why she was dead, and whether she knew what she had done to convince someone they had to kill her.

  I heard some kitchen sounds, and a bathroom flush, then nothing. I stared at Sherry, hoping she would send me signals. When she hadn’t in the next five minutes, I realized her mother had been gone too long. I began to worry that she’d fled, or collapsed, or done something to herself. As I stood up to go look for her, she materialized in front of me.

  “I’m sorry I took so long. Are you sure you won’t have anything?”

  Her smile was as bright as the swatch of daylight on the wall. Her hair was combed and pinned, her body proud in tailored slacks and a silk print blouse. Her hands fluttered before her in lithe and elegant positions.

  I told her I was fine. She took a seat across from mine and crossed her legs and placed her hands on her upraised knee. Her composure seemed genuine, not a fragile crutch, further proof that the aftermath of death is as various and unpredictable as its cause.

  “When you were here before I told you I was certain Sherry was still alive,” she said, her voice now modulated by intelligence, not longing. “I was lying. To you. To myself. I have known, somehow, for quite a while that Sherry was gone to me.” She met my eyes. “I assume there’s no doubt about it.”

  “No. But formal identification may require her dental records.”

  She trembled, then regained control. “Where was she found?”

  “In People’s Park. Buried.”

  “My God. How long has she been dead?”

  “Apparently for at least a month. My guess is it’s more like two. The police want an autopsy. Then you can claim the body. They’ll probably be over here in a while, after they finish at the scene.”

  “She was murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know. The police don’t, either.”

  “Will they try to find out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if I don’t want them to?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I see.”

  The silence was all-consuming. Phyllis Misteen bathed in it, found solace in its cleansing powers. “Do you have any idea who might have killed your daughter?” I asked.

  “No. None.”

  “She was apparently killed even before Dianne Renzel. Was there a connection there that might have been a motive for someone to kill them both?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Dianne knew Sherry, of course. And vice versa. But they were only neighbors, as far as I know. Of course Lisa and Sherry were friends, so Sherry spent lots of time over there. But that was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “I don’t know. Before they quarreled.”

  “You really don’t know what happened between them?”

  “No. The breach was bitter and complete. But I have no idea what caused it. You know teenage girls.”

  “Could it have been jealousy? Over a boy named Cal, perhaps?”

  “Cal?” Phyllis considered it, then shook her head. “Sherry knew Cal; he was around here quite a lot. But she was never interested in him emotionally, not that I know of. He was a bit too bland for Sherry.”

  “He didn’t look so bland the last time I saw him.”

  “Not on the outside, maybe. But inside he was … what word did she use? Yogurt. That’s what Sherry said. Cal was just plain yogurt.”

  I tried again. “How about a guy named Nifton? No one would confuse him with yogurt. He also goes by the name of the Maniac.”

  She frowned. “Nifton. The name seems familiar, but I …”

  “You probably saw it in the papers. He killed a girl a couple of years ago. Lawrence Usser defended him. Pleaded insanity and was acquitted. Now he’s out and collecting a little harem of girls who are more cooperative than the one he knifed. They seem willing to do anything to keep him happy.”

  “Lord. I certainly hope Sherry wasn’t involved with someone like that. But I have to admit she might have been. Teenagers are so determined to keep their lives secret from their parents. I think they need to feel their problems are unique and momentous. They seem offended by the idea that their parents were ever young themselves, and so might be able to help. I don’t know anything specifically. I’m sorry. I don’t think Sherry ever mentioned him.”

  “Needles? Does that name mean anything?”


  “No. Nothing.”

  “Did Sherry have a drug problem before she left home? A serious one?”

  Phyllis Misteen shrugged. “She experimented, I’m sure. But I don’t think she was a regular user. I looked, of course. For all those signs they talk about? But I don’t know. They’re always surprised, aren’t they, the parents of the ones who go bad? As though they never had a clue. But that’s impossible, don’t you think? There’s always something. There’s a blindness there; both ways.”

  She drifted into a nostalgic silence. I let it settle for a while, then said what was on my mind. “I have to tell you, Mrs. Misteen, I think Sherry’s murder has something to do with the murder of Dianne Renzel. It seems likely they were killed by the same person. So while I can understand your reluctance to explore the last weeks of Sherry’s life, that information might lead to other evidence that would explain the Renzel case. So I’m going to be—”

  “Wait a minute,” she interrupted. “Lawrence killed Dianne. Are you saying he killed Sherry too?”

  “I’m saying I don’t think he killed either one of them.”

  “But the police—”

  “Are wrong sometimes.”

  “But if Lawrence didn’t kill Dianne, then who did?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I need to do one more thing before I go.”

  “What?”

  “Look at Sherry’s room.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if there’s anything in it that explains why she and Lisa quarreled, or why she left home, or was killed. Do you mind?”

  She lowered her eyes and sighed. “Not if I don’t have to go with you. It’s down the hall, first door on the left. I’ve already looked for those things, you know. Things that would let me understand why Sherry did what she did. But I didn’t find anything. Anything but me.”

  She paused, and I started to get up, but she began to speak again. “She used to be upstairs, the room next to mine. But that was too intimate for her all of a sudden, too violative of her privacy. So she moved downstairs. I hardly ever saw her after I started working nights. I worried I wasn’t being a good mother. Dianne and I spent hours and hours talking about our responsibilities—to our families, our community, our sex, our world. We never quite figured it out. I mean, something always took a back seat. I tried to convince Dianne that we were the neglected ones, that everyone took from us but no one gave anything back. She didn’t believe it. But then she had Larry and then Pierce Richards and I didn’t have anyone. Anyone but Sherry.”

  Her smile was sad, resigned to truth and to the unbroken horizon of her future. I left her and went to look over her daughter’s private things.

  Sherry’s room was much like her ex-friend Lisa’s. Clothing and music were the passions, though Sherry’s tastes in both were even more bizarre than those I’d encountered across the street. There were strong hints of sadism and bondage in the clothing accessories and the pictures on the record albums. A poster on the wall read LIFE IS HARD. THEN YOU DIE. A stuffed teddy bear on top of the dresser had a pencil through his heart. A rosebud had been dipped in black enamel and made to seem macabre.

  Everything else was similarly fierce or homely; nothing was attractive or serene. The air itself seemed angry and resentful. The strangest thing of all was that the door to the room was missing.

  I had no idea what I was searching for, but there was no point looking in the obvious places. Anything of interest would be under, above, behind, or inside something else. A hiding place, a secret stash, a private trove. All kids have them, though these days they’re likely to contain an illegal substance or a lethal weapon instead of a dirty book or a pack of Camels or a pressed corsage.

  The desk contained the tools of art and literature, a collection of psychedelic stickers, pens imprinted with revolutionary slogans, a ball of string. The dresser drawers were so full that clothing leaped onto the floor when I opened them. There was nothing unusual under the mattress or behind the reproduction of Picasso’s Demoiselles. I looked inside shoes, aerosol can lids, blue jean pockets, pillowcases, lampshades, album jackets, even a sealskin muff. I looked everywhere I could think to look, until there was but one place left.

  There weren’t many volumes in the little walnut bookcase. I gave them a quick once-over, trying to guess which pages might compress a secret. Not the books for school—dictionaries, Elements of Style, thesaurus. Not Gatsby, Jane Eyre, or Pamela; such novels don’t excite a youthful passion for intrigue. Not the art books or the biographies of Lennon, Joplin and the Rolling Stones. Maybe the poets.

  I tried Plath. Nothing. Then Sexton. When I riffled through the pages, something fell out. I picked it up, a Polaroid snapshot of a young man, naked and unfamiliar, with an erection he displayed like a fresh-caught fish. I replaced the erotica and tried Browning, Maya Angelou and Virginia Woolf. Then Living at the Movies by Jim Carroll. Something drifted to the floor again.

  This was a photograph as well, of Sherry, taken at school beneath a banner for Berkeley High. This time Sherry was smiling, but someone had taken red and black grease pencils and added a rather realistic bullet hole to her forehead and a slender thread of blood across her nose and down her cheek. I looked on the back but there was no message beyond the graphic wound. I put that one back as well.

  In the living room I asked Phyllis why there was no door on Sherry’s room.

  She sighed. “She used to slam it all the time. After we had a fight? It was usually after I ordered her to clean her room before she left the house. So I told her if she did it again, I was going to take the door off for a month. She did, and I did, too. That was a month before she left. I guess I’ll keep it off. Hell, maybe I’ll take them all off. I’ve got no one to hide from anymore. And no one’s left to hide from me.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I needed more than ever to talk to Lisa Usser, and the best place to start looking for her was right across the street. Freed from the maze of Phyllis Misteen’s grief, I trotted up the now-familiar steps and knocked on the door.

  The police notice had been removed, but the house still seemed hollow, of historical interest only. I knocked again but heard nothing that resembled an occupant. I wondered if Lawrence Usser was away or was merely hiding, struggling to find an attitude from which to endure the days until a jury of his peers declared his guilt or innocence, his sanity or lack thereof, while all around him everyone assumed the worst. I started to return to my car, then decided to look in one more place.

  The rear yard was as I’d seen it last, down to the recumbent garbage can that Cal had overturned in his dash to evade my capture. I stood in the center of the patio and looked back at the house. No one peered through windows, no curtains slid suspiciously aside to make way for spying eyes. The wind chimes played a piece that might have been by Hindemith—atonal, eerie, portentous.

  I walked toward the far corner of the yard. Cal had said he’d lived for a time in the potting shed at the rear of the lot, so maybe it was a nook where Lisa hid as well. I approached warily and felt ridiculous for doing so, since the little hut made me think of Hansel and Gretel.

  The little door was closed, but the padlock dangled by its shackle from the eye of an open hasp. I walked to the side of the shed and tried to look through the window but it was too filthy to reveal anything. I returned to the front, grasped the knob and eased open the door. Daylight entered tentatively, as though the darkness charged admission.

  She didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe. I got down on my knees and leaned over her till I was certain she was alive, then sat back and curled my legs under me and watched her sleep. Suddenly soothing, the wind chimes blended with the whistling cadence of her measured breaths.

  She wore a man’s blue work shirt, sleeves rolled to doughnuts at her elbows, tails flapping freely down her sides. Beneath the work shirt was a thin cotton undershirt, also a man’s, in the old strap style. Her slacks were a baggy burlap, gathered tightly at the ankle by elastic and at the waist
by a knotted necktie. Her shoes were chartreuse canvas high-tops, laced halfway.

  She was lying on a foam camp pad. A flannel-lined sleeping bag, unzipped, was bunched below her feet. As I tried to decide how to get her in shape to talk to me, Lisa moaned and raised a hand to her face to shield it from the light that poured like a waterfall through the open door. I waited. As she slipped back into a purring slumber I closed the door so her face was in shadow, then inspected her cluttered lair.

  She and Cal had rigged it like a tent, with camping equipment they had doubtlessly pilfered from their parents’ stores. Above her head, a Coleman lantern dangled from a nail in the ceiling joist, its unlit mantles shining like the product of two imprisoned spiders. A second sleeping bag was rolled and stuffed along the wall that Lisa curled against. A half-full bag of peat moss had been molded into a makeshift chair. Beside it was a pile of science fiction novels, an empty bag of Cheetos and an empty can of Sprite. The rest of the shed’s contents were mostly garden supplies—tools and hoses, buckets and pots, chemicals to make things grow or die. The smell of fertilizer combined with the fumes from the gas in the Lawn Boy to create a surprisingly nostalgic fragrance.

  As time drifted away from us, I began to hear things that lurked outside—birds, sirens, traffic. Suddenly I was certain Lawrence Usser was approaching across the lawn, but when I peeked out the door it turned out to be a dog, heading down toward town, crossing the yard from east to west. A few minutes later I was remembering how meticulous my father had been about our yard back home, how he’d made me mow it every Saturday morning before I did anything else, how I had to hand-trim the edges and pull all the foxtail and the water-grass and sharpen the blades on the hand mower with a file.

  The lawn mower had broken down, and I was hiking toward the highway, barefoot, with the blade reel in my hand, when Lisa Usser coughed, groaned, rolled from one side to another and woke us both up. Our eyes opened simultaneously, our senses returned at matching rates. “Who …? Where …? Who are you, anyway?” She wasn’t as frightened as she should have been, was used to waking beside a stranger.