HCC 006 - The Confession

by Domenic Stansberry

  “I suffered an attack,” I told the ambulance driver. “Sara didn’t know what to do. She tried to restrain me—and I guess we must have smashed heads.”

  The paramedic turned to Sara. “Is that what happened?”

  Sara rubbed her wrists where I had grabbed her. She looked pretty shaken. I was embarrassed. I am not a violent man, I wanted to tell them, but I held my tongue, knowing the situation appeared otherwise—and the more I protested, the more they might disbelieve.

  “He’s telling the truth,” she said at last. “I saw his body seize up. “

  The driver had wandered into the kitchen. He came back with the empty vodka glass in his hand. He sniffed it.

  “You two been drinking.”

  “No,” said Sara. “I mean Jake had a drink. One. But I didn’t have a drop.”

  I looked at her in surprise.

  “I poured it down the sink,” she explained.

  I nodded but felt betrayed somehow. I remembered how she’d looked in bed above me—full of torpor, sleepy-eyed, as if on the edge of tumbling into a deep languor—but when I’d grabbed her shoulders, she’d jerked up pretty fast. Sober as a pin.

  The skinny one took Sara aside now, going over the story with her in private. The other one helped me clean up my nose. He examined me a little bit, shining a light in my eyes, taking my pulse, my blood pressure. “It might be a good idea to come down to the hospital with us. Get an emergency CAT scan. Test things out.”

  The skinny one came back. He shrugged unhappily, as if disappointed Sara had not changed her story. They loitered around for a while, trying to persuade me into going to the hospital. I refused.

  When they had gone, Sara sat beside me on the bed. The wariness was still there but mixed with something else. Concern, maybe. Compassion. She put her hand on my hand, and I felt the confusion well up once again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe . . .” I stammered, looking for an explanation.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t say. This situation, the way things are with you and me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Maybe it’s the case I’m working. Sometimes, these things, they get inside your head. They twist you around.”

  “You frightened me,” she said softly.

  I put my arm around her. She was still edgy, but she seemed comforted in my presence, in the slow return to normalcy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “There’s something about you,” she said, “I can’t resist.”

  She laughed a little. Then she kissed me with more sweetness than you might expect. She stroked my hair in back, adjusting my ponytail, fiddling. I touched the back of her head, too, and stroked her, telling her again how beautiful she was, how she reminded me of a girl I’d seen once, in a field of flowers, in an elevator, in a barroom, somewhere, once upon a time. She was a sweet girl but there was another side of her, too. She liked the sense of danger, the darkness underneath. I tasted her lips. I pulled away. I looked around. The aura was gone from the room.

  2.

  My wife and I lived out on Golden Hinde, a narrow spit of land that extends into the bay halfway between Sausalito and San Quentin. It was about ten minutes off the freeway, down a road that snaked and wound between the wetlands on one side and the brown hills on the other. The back of the house was all glass—you could see the water, the egrets, the sailboats, and San Quentin, too, castle-like across the bay. On a nice day our spot was as balmy a place as you could want, but often as not the wind funneled down over the hills. It was a nagging, irritating breeze. All the more so because just a few blocks over the air hung still and warm, perfect as can be.

  Later that afternoon I was scheduled to meet with Matthew Dillard, the accused murderer, but I stopped first out at Golden Hinde. I had gotten blood on my shirt and needed to change.

  Elizabeth was out of town. She had gone down to New Orleans to an academic conference—to read a paper on Jung, defending him from the new group of psychologists taking over the field. Then she had gone up to Anders, just outside of Baton Rouge. It was an old town, all but disappeared from the map, everything swallowed by kudzu and bamboo. Everything except the graveyard, that is. It was maintained by a sugar refinery nearby. Her mother and father were buried in that graveyard, and Elizabeth had gone to pay her respects.

  She was her father’s girl, mostly; he was the one she grieved.

  I checked the mail—and found an invitation to the Wilders’ party: an upscale bash we went to every summer. I put it aside and checked the answering machine, but Elizabeth hadn’t called. I studied her picture on the mantelpiece. In it, she wore a necklace her father had given her, a string of pearls.

  My wife and I had met on a tennis court. She worked at a teachers college. I’d liked her long legs and the blunt cut of her hair. She was several years older than myself, but I liked that, too. She was an elegant woman, recently divorced. We’d been married three years but things had become difficult lately.

  My fault, no doubt. My obsession with my job. My infidelities. Venal attractions to status and material comfort.

  We had marble in the entry and granite in the kitchen and a sauna on the deck. We had a slate fireplace and a bookshelf full of metaphysical texts. On the mantle was a statue of the

  Laughing Buddha—a fat-bellied little man who smiled voraciously and looked as if he had just devoured the world.

  We had a hot tub where I soaked and meditated. From there, I could see Mt. Tamalpais looming over the county.

  I was feeling off-kilter. The incident at Sara’s had left me disoriented, but there were other things, too. I’d had affairs before, but usually they were brief things, a handful of encounters, a night here, there, building in intensity—then over. I would cut it off. I would be faithful for a while, six months, a year, then something would build inside me. This time, with Sara, I was more reckless. Letting it stretch out. Being seen. A risky thing. It made you wonder who you were. I wanted something new in my life, I guess, a new exhilaration—one of those moments when you feel the world brush against you, fragile and ungainly—but at the same time I didn’t want to lose Elizabeth. A contradiction, I know, unrealistic. Selfish. I couldn’t help myself. I took off my clothes now. I had to be out at the Correctional Facility in just a little while, to interview Dillard. In the meantime I stood naked in the front of the mirror, regarding myself.

  There was a game I had used to play with my patients. I called it Peel the Onion. The point of this game was self-discovery, to take them deeper into the self. I would pose the simple question Who are you? and the patient would have to respond quickly, in just a few sentences, nothing more. Then I would ask the question again, then again. The trick was for each answer to be truthful yet different than the one before. Lying was not allowed. And to work right, to penetrate to the fundamental core, the game had to be played quickly, without reflection.

  I looked at myself again. My face was a mask.

  Who are you?

  Jake Danser, born 37 years ago in Baltimore, Maryland. Married twice, both times to older women. First marriage fell apart when my wife discovered I was having an affair with a younger woman. She was dead now, my ex-wife. Drowned off the coast of Mexico.

  I reached down for my pants, caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror. My penetrating eyes and high cheekbones. My ponytail, longish in back.

  Who are you?

  A boy raised by his mother. No dad. Mom worked here and there to support little Jake. A teachers pet at school. Interested in psychology. Boy prodigy.

  Who are you?

  Idealist. Worked for five years after college counseling the mentally ill in Los Angeles County Department of Corrections. Listened in patience. Later started my own practice for bored women and delinquent teenagers in Santa Monica. After divorce, moved to Marin County to begin successful, visible career as forensic psychologist.

  I continued dressing as I went through the drill. Unf
aithful husband. Lover. Man of a million faces. I put on my shirt. I combed my hair. I straightened my tie, my suit collar.

  Professional witness. Advocate for the criminally insane.

  I smiled. I was dapper as hell in my outfit, I had to admit. Women liked looking at me, I knew this, and I liked looking back. I liked touching, too. But this guy in the mirror, he was just a shell, nothing more. If you got underneath, what would you find? A hundred Jakes, maybe, and inside those a hundred more—but if you cracked all those open, and peered, and peered some more . . .

  Who are you?

  I felt myself staring into the blackness. In my minds eye, on the mantle, the Laughing Buddha stared back. What did he see? I wondered. A tremor. The smallest quiver in the dark, emanating. I checked myself one last time in the mirror. Smiled. Wiped a black tear from my cheek. Then went out to the Correctional Facilities to do the profile on Mr. Dillard.

  3.

  Before I continue, I know there are people, familiar with my case, who will say I am not telling the whole story here. That I leave out important information. If so, it is only because it’s difficult to divulge everything at once, to get out all the facts without somehow going astray. Still I admit, in regard to the Dillard case, I have not told you everything. It is true, for example, that I had some acquaintance with Angela Mori, the accused’s wife. Our worlds intersected. A few days before her death, I’d run into her at a lawn party at a suburban estate in Ross. We had danced together, and in a lascivious moment she had pressed her stomach close to mine. Dillard had been just a few yards away, his back turned, dancing with another woman.

  Now he sat in front of me in the underground jail at the Marin County Correctional Facility. It was a cold place, dug into the ground beneath the Civic Center, a low-sloping building of spires and paint-gilded porticos that crouched drunkenly into the San Rafael hills.

  Dillard was a good-looking man in his early thirties. He had dark eyes and fine features and skin the color of faded copper. He wore his hair short-cropped. He had grown up in West Oakland near the shipyards, in one of the black neighborhoods under the old Nimitz Freeway His father was Creole. The old man had run a jazz club out on San Pablo Avenue, and Dillard knew how to move back and forth across social lines. Otherwise, he would never have ended up with Angela.

  At the moment, Dillard was not at his best. He had the uncomfortable, smutty look that people get when you put them in an orange prison suit.

  I tended to like him anyway. It is another one of my flaws. I feel camaraderie with my patients despite their crimes, or perhaps because of them. Part of me empathizes, maybe, more than it should. Looking at him, I remembered dancing with his wife. Elizabeth had been there as well that night, off in the back. She was the one who’d given me entry to this world, but it was my world, too, these days: Sara and Elizabeth; the lawyers and shrinks of Marin County; the dead woman and the man in front of me. I was tied to them all, twisted together even here, now, in this cell.

  “How are you?” I asked Dillard.

  “I been better.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “It must be a little rough.”

  I started to explain to him why I was here, but he cut me off. “You can skip the explanation, Doc. I been through it already. The court-ordered shrink was out here, and I know the routine.”

  Shortly after the indictment came down, the court had ordered a psychiatrist to examine Dillard. It was not unusual in cases like this, and in a lot of ways my examination would duplicate what had already been done. There was a difference though. The court psychiatrist had been merely looking to determine mental competence. My job was to gather evidence that might be useful in helping the defense attorney gain acquittal, or at least mitigate the sentence.

  Dillard and I spent some time then going over his childhood, but I didn’t really learn much that hadn’t been established in the earlier report. I could see Dillard had a natural volatility and maybe some problems with impulse control. Even so, my original impressions were in line with those of the court psychiatrist. Just listening, off the top, nothing suggested the man was delusional.

  “You went out with some buddies, the night Angela was killed?” I kept my voice low and friendly, pleasant, down-to-earth as possible. I smiled and tilted my head, waiting. Such mannerisms are all but second nature with me, but there is always another part of me watching wryly, detached, as if regarding the interchange from somewhere outside.

  I thought of Sara then, I’m not sure why. I saw her hovering over me back at the apartment, and I saw Elizabeth, too, watching me the way she does, with that half-smile of hers, that sleepy look, full of knowing.

  “I went to the fights,” he said. “That’s right. But you already know that. It’s been in the papers.”

  He put his face down into his hands. He had very long fingers and they splayed up over his forehead.

  “She rescued you, didn’t she? From that life you were living.”

  The question was over the line, I suppose, presumptive in a way a psychologist is not supposed to be, but I wanted to jog him, to get things started. My goal was to determine Dillard’s psychological state on the night of the murder.

  Dillard glared at me. “What do you mean by that? There was nothing wrong with the life I was living.”

  I’d hit a nerve, I guess. Tennis court gigolo, that was the word on Dillard. An opportunist lounging in the land of silver Mercedes and white skirts. I knew the tag, because it had been applied to myself when I’d first come up here from Southern California.

  It was not completely fair. I have my weaknesses—an attraction to the surface of things, to the glitter and the glam—but I have spent my time in the stacks: amongst the yellowing papers and the fine print and the endless analyses endemic to my profession.

  “I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I have a wealthy wife myself—and I know the kind of things people say.” I smiled again, trying to put us both on the same level. “It’s just women, how they rescue us all, you know. Save us from our worst selves.”

  Dillard bit his lip. His hands shook. I was waiting for the moment when it all started to gush out. When he explained for me his real feelings, and what the hell had happened between him and Angela that night.

  “Maybe we could start with the day before Angela died Go through it slow.”

  Like everybody in Marin County, I already knew the timeline. That evening after dinner, Dillard had gone out with some friends to a boxing match at the civic center Sometime after that—late Saturday evening—Angela Mori was strangled to death in her bed.

  Dillard, though, did not return home that night. Or that’s what he’d told the police the first time around. Instead he’d spent the evening by himself, out on the family boat: a small yacht the Moris kept in the Sausalito harbor. He hadn’t come home until the next day, mid-morning. Her car was parked out front, but the bedroom door was locked. He’d had to force it open—and that’s when he discovered her body.

  That was the story Dillard told in his initial statement to the police. As it turned out, the story did not hold. A neighbor had seen Dillard leave the house around midnight. She’d seen him slam out of the house, agitated, and drive off in a small frenzy.

  So the police had brought Dillard back in.

  The second time around, he told it differently He’d been back to the house, he admitted. Late that night, after the fights. About midnight, like the neighbor said. He found the bedroom door locked. He pounded on it, but Angela didn’t answer. He pounded some more.

  I’d read the transcripts, so I knew Dillard’s explanation. He’d lied the first time out of fear, he told the police. Because he knew how it looked, him driving away from the house in the middle of the night. But the truth was he thought Angela was in there, giving him the silent treatment, locking him out, like she sometimes did.

  So he drove away out of anger. He’d had no idea, he claimed, that Angela was lying dead on the other side of the door.

  According to
the coroner’s report, Angela had been strangled with a tie from Dillard’s wardrobe. The report indicated semen in her vagina, and foreign pubic hair had been found on her body and in the bed. The DNA report hadn’t come back from the lab, but the hair analysis identified the pubic as belonging to Dillard. More incriminating, though, was the small spray of blood on a shirt the cops found in a hamper out on the family boat: the same shirt Dillard had been wearing the night of the murder.

  The coroner’s report had indicated something else, too. Angela had had a drink before she died, and the drink had been spiked with gamma hydroxybutrate. Gamma was a knock-out drug, otherwise known as Big G, or Liquid Ecstasy, or just X—a cousin to the stuff kids were taking over in the Haight, at their tie-dye dances. A lot of people liked it for its dopey, amorous high, but it also could put you under pretty hard, especially when mixed with alcohol.

  “How were you getting along, you and Angela, you know, in terms of your marriage?”

  “How you getting along in yours?”

  I ignored the remark. It was the kind of thing you got sometimes, situations like this, from people who didn’t like the questions; so they tried to bait you, to switch focus, dragging your personal life into the session. The boundaries were thin enough.

  “You ever get jealous?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “This isn’t about me. Did you ever get jealous?”

  Dillard paused, then went ahead and answered. “Angela liked to flirt. It made me angry, sometimes, but I didn’t kill her over it.”

  “You and Angela, you liked to drink.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Drugs?”

  “No.”

  “You used to do cocaine, didn’t you?”