HCC 006 - The Confession

by Domenic Stansberry

  “So did everyone.”

  “Did you ever hear voices when you take drugs? You know what I mean?”

  “You trying to see if I’m crazy?”

  His lips tilted into a smile then, and his eyes fixed mine, and just for an instant I saw the charm in the man, the confident lilt and debonair carriage. Inappropriate under the circumstances. Evidence of psychopathic tendencies, maybe—that, and the way he’d tried to twist the conversation back my way—but I’d seen the same behavior plenty of times, in plenty of people, and not all of them were psychopaths. Not all psychopaths were murderers, either. Some were chronic liars. Womanizers. Run-of the mill thieves.

  “Some people, they do drugs,” I said, “it sets off part of their brain. They hear things, do things, they might not ordinarily. That ever happen to you?”

  “No.”

  “That night, at dinner, you went to the Blue Chez, in San Rafael?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you have to eat?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “My wife is dead, and you want to know whether I had the demi-glaze with pearled onions . . .”

  “I am just trying to see how your memory is.”

  “I had steak and she had some kind of fish.”

  “What did you talk about?’

  “Angela’s yacht, in Sausalito. It needs a new hull. Things like that. Domestic.”

  “Did you argue?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “What did you do when you got home?”

  He didn’t slap a beat. “We made love.”

  “You and Angela.”

  “Who else? We were the only ones in the house.”

  “How was it?”

  “You ask some funny questions. How is it with your wife?”

  “I just want to see how you were feeling. How it made you feel.”

  “It was fine,” he said. His eyes were teary now. Genuine or not, I had no idea. Such moments can be hard to gauge even in yourself.

  “Then what?”

  “I got dressed and went out. I went to the fights, like I said.”

  “Did you do drugs?”

  “I had a few beers. A couple shots.”

  “Anything else?”

  He hesitated. “Smoked some pot. It was no big deal.”

  “Were you worked up, when the fight was over?”

  “A little bit—it was a good fight.”

  “Your man lost?”

  “Yeah. My guy lost.”

  I didn’t say anything else for a while, and neither did he. My thoughts drifted to my own predicament, to Golden Hinde, the empty house, to Sara and Elizabeth, and the decision that lay waiting ahead. For an instant I felt caged, too, trapped. Such feelings came over me sometimes, in jail, interviewing clients—and I felt a quiver inside my chest: a desire to penetrate the world, and at the same time to smother that desire into nothing. I loved my wife, I told myself. Dillard glanced at me curiously. Our interview had turned into an interrogation. I preferred the conversation to go differently—for the subject to talk while I listened—but sometimes this was just how things went. You fell into a pattern.

  “You’d been with a couple of your old friends. You’d been drinking and smoking dope. And then you . . .”

  “I came home,” he said, and then he told the same story, more or less, that he’d told the police the second time around, and the same story he’d told the other shrink as well. How he’d come inside the darkened apartment and taken a piss in the hall bathroom, then walked back to the bedroom to the locked door.

  “I figured she locked me out. We’d had some words earlier, and I figured she was angry.”

  “I thought you said everything was okay.”

  “She’d pulled stuff like that, Angela. She was a bit of a case, sometimes.”

  “Then what happened.”

  “I went out to the boat. In the morning, when I came home—I was already to forget about it, just another day m the life—but the bedroom door was still locked. I got a screwdriver—and that’s when I found her.”

  His Up quivered. I didn’t know what to think. To believe Dillard’s story, you had to believe someone else had visited his wife earlier that night. That the visitor had spiked his wife’s drink. Raped her, murdered her, then locked the bedroom door behind him. Possible, certainly—but all the physical evidence pointed to Dillard. His tie around her neck. His fingerprints. His pubic hair in the bed. The spot of blood.

  Then in the closet—inside his jacket pocket—the police had found something else: a vial of Liquid X. The same substance had been in Angela’s blood the night she died.

  “The blood on the shirt?” I asked.

  It wasn’t my job to ask questions about the evidence, of course. But I was curious how he would explain it. And the world of the psychological and the physical, they sometimes overlap.

  “When we made love, after the restaurant. Her lip . . .” He stumbled over his words. “We got a little rough sometimes, you know, just playing around. Clumsy, really. My shoulder . . .” He shrugged. “Listen—if I killed her, if I used my tie, why would I leave it lying around like that? Or the shirt. Why wouldn’t I toss it? I mean I’d have to be pretty stupid, wouldn’t I?”

  “Killers don’t always behave rationally,” I said. “In rage, another part of the brain takes over.”

  Even so there was some truth to what Dillard was saying. Most of the evidence against him was pretty much circumstantial. If it wasn’t for his initial story, he might not even be in custody now. But the he, it drew the prosecution. That—and the blood on his shirt.

  Angela’s blood, the police claimed. Aspirated up the through the lungs as she was dying, onto the lips.

  The prosecution would say the blood had gotten on Dillard’s shirt when he strangled her. But Dillard’s explanation could just as well be true. She could have bitten her lip when he clumsied into her, heaving forward in a moment of passion.

  I tried another tack: the kind of thing I did when I worked the other side of the fence, for the prosecution. If you could catch a subject off guard, antagonize them, sometimes they’d say something to let themselves show.

  “She was a looker, though, I’ll say that,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Angela. I knew a girl like her once. A lot like her.”

  He glinted up at me, full of suspicion. It was a nasty trick, but it was part of my job.

  “Some of these women, sometimes,” I said, “you have to show them. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Give them the back of the hand. A little taste. And if things get carried away . . .”

  He smiled for a second, and I thought I had him. He was going to say something. Let the truth loose with a wink and nod. We were compadres. We knew how to treat women. I gave him an awkward grin, an awful person in league with another awful person. He saw through me then, I think. I was not the person I pretended.

  He shook his head.

  “Can the shit, Doc.” He looked into my eyes. “I’m innocent on this. I came home and I found her body. That’s the truth of it. I’m not going to play nut for you. That’s what my lawyer wants, but I’m being framed up on this, that’s the truth of it. I’m being goddamned framed.”

  Afterwards, I went to the gym on Marsh Road. I put in maybe an hour on the weights, pumping iron. I liked to be methodical about my workouts, to go from station to station, machine to machine, working until my shirt was damp with perspiration and my muscles gave out. Meanwhile I watched the women in their shining spandex, the fading beauties of Marin County. Doctors wives. Yoga teachers. Poetesses. The dilettantes and artistes. I had a certain affection for them. We had something in common. An unfulfilled moment, an instant waiting to happen.

  I left the gym, but there was something brooding in me.

  At such times, I would go down to my trailer—down off Lucky Drive, at the edge of th
e Corte Madera marsh—and that’s where I went now. My fishing trailer, I called it, though in fact I’m not much of an angler. I’d driven it up here from Los Angeles, and I’d lived there for almost a year before I met Elizabeth, while I got my new practice off the ground It was at the end of a gravel road, just beyond the trailer court. I had some files there—overflow from my office—but more than that it was a place I went sometimes to contemplate. I could see San Quentin from here, too, from the front steps of the trailer. The sun was going down, disappearing behind Mt. Tamalpais, and the bay waters in front of the prison shimmered a brilliant red. Then the wind drove me inside and I lay down on the bunk.

  I had pictures here. Clippings. A strong box full of mementos. I kept the metal box in a drawer and I opened it now Nothing really. Just bits of cloth and paper and tinsel. Even so, it was a connection to my past. Things I had done and people I had known.

  Outside night descended over the water.

  Sara, I thought.

  I saw her face. Other women I have known. All their taces tumbling into the darkness. I shut the box.

  What do people really know of themselves? I wondered.

  I sat for a while in the lotus position but it did not change my feeling. I was still restless.

  I called Golden Hinde to check my messages, but there was nothing. I got in the Audi, still not knowing what I meant to do. I felt a black desire, I confess, a certain need.

  Rooted in the body chemistry, in the old hunter instincts, maybe, or metaphysical despair, I don’t know. I wanted Elizabeth then, I told myself, but she was far away. I thought I might go see Sara, but the way things had gone last time, it made me hesitant. I headed down 101 but I did not take the Sausalito exit. Instead I headed over the grade toward the city—catching a glimpse of the bridge from high ground, then the peninsula beyond with its financial towers, its pyramid, its hills—all glittering like Oz across the dark water. I drove into SOMA then, to the club district. I drank in the DNA lounge for a while, then went to another place around the comer. It was Friday, and the bridge-and-tunnelers were out mingling with the city types, though you couldn’t tell the difference. Techies and new wave hipsters. Women in black. They smoked thin cigars and drank and posed like decadent bourgeoisie on a Parisian boulevard. They had ugly faces and beautiful faces smeared with cosmetics and white faces as innocent as the moon and tired faces that glistened with the first blush of alcohol after a long week of tending computer screens and dreaming of secret encounters in places like this.

  Inside the dancing and lights could get pretty vicious. I needed a little bit of escape, a way out of myself. Out on the floor, I met a girl in a loose-fitting dress who had a sheen on her face and threw her arms out wildly as she danced. I didn’t ask her name. We got lost in the moment.

  Then, across the room, I saw a man I recognized, one of those people you meet in my line of work but you don’t really want to see on the street. An extortion artist. Accused murderer. His name was Tony Grazzioni, and I’d interviewed him once, in a professional capacity, down in the San Bernardino County Jail.

  I turned back to the girl then and pulled her toward me. We got a little wilder. She had brown hair and hazel eyes, and she wore a green shift that stopped at mid-thigh and also black jet beads that swung about her neck. Given the way she hugged and thrust, and her dreamy eyes, I guessed she was on ecstasy or one of its variants: MDMA, or gamma, or good old-fashioned chloral. They were all popular in the clubs here. We did the bump and grind, and drank, and I began to feel high, higher than I should, and libidinous, and I began to think maybe she had spiked my drink, because that was the kind of thing people were doing then, casual acquaintances who worried you might otherwise find them a bit drab. I went to the bar to get us a couple more drinks.

  A voice came at me from behind. A hand nudged my shoulder.

  “Hi, doc, remember me?”

  “No,” I said.

  I was lying. I knew who it was, even before I turned and looked. I’d recognized the high-throated voice. Tony Grazzioni.

  Back when I knew him, he’d been charged with murder. A for-hire job. Involving an oil executive’s wife, and a coat hanger tightened with baling pliers about the neck.

  He put his face close to mine. He was a big man, with a big face, acne-scarred, ugly like a dog. He wore a cologne that smelled like the inside of a roadside motel.

  “I see you’re working the scene—again,” he said. “Nice looking girl.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Tony.”

  After he’d been acquitted, Grazzioni had made a clumsy effort at blackmailing me, based on some things I’d told him in a psychiatric session. It was a professional hazard, running into guys like Grazzioni, and sometimes the only way to handle it was to just walk off. I searched out the girl. We drank our drinks and danced some more. Grazzioni didn’t leave right away. He hung around at the back of the bar watching us dance. There was another man beside him, a small-time dealer who was somewhat of a fixture around here. I’d seen him a number of times. A pale wallflower in a black nylon shirt and dark khakis who peddled his wares from club to club, and liked to lean back and watch his clients out on the floor.

  He and Grazzioni started to talk, and I saw Grazzioni gesture at me, and the dealer said something else.

  I didn’t like this.

  I’d been here before in this same club, dancing, and I didn’t like the way the guy was leaning over, talking to Tony, and I didn’t like that grin on Tony’s face.

  It began to feel like one of those fateful moves, my decision to come here, one of those wrong turns you didn’t think anything about at the time but later came back to haunt you.

  I steered the girl away from them and out the door. I tried to put Grazzioni out of my mind. The girl and I ended up in a loft apartment nearby, thumping hard against one another’s glistening bodies. I was pretty high by this time, and felt as if we were on the edge of some precipice, myself and the girl together, with the darkness way down below. We went after it long and hard, and for an instant I was outside myself, watching, looking into the girls face and watching myself from above at the same time, or so it felt, waiting for the moment when I would fall through my reflection, through the blackness at the center of her eyes. Then I remembered Grazzioni, peering at me from across the room. The girl went over the edge, moaning and panting, but I stayed where I was. I tried to follow her but it was no good. Grazzioni had ruined my evening.

  4.

  What can I say to redeem myself? Should I tell you how I rolled over in bed next to that girl and yearned for my wife? How just looking at her filled me with a loneliness I can’t describe? I felt locked out. Filled with disappointment, self-disgust. I gave the girl a lass—a tender lass, sweet and full of self-loathing—but she was all but asleep now and none of it meant anything. I drove over the bridge to my empty house and slid into the hot tub, all alone, trying to wash those emotions clean. I sipped a glass of wine there in the swirling waters, staring meanwhile at the prison across the bay, but the feelings didn’t wash off.

  I settled deeper into the water, the jets lapping against me. For a minute I was a man within a man within the void, and it was the void that imagined me, I told myself.

  But when I opened my eyes, I was still there, flesh and blood, locked in the moment, tormented by unacceptable passions. The mountain loomed over me in the dark. The Sleeping Maiden, the Indians had called Mt. Tamalpais. A child of the heavens, they said, who dreamed the world into existence as she slept. I raised my glass to her looming shadow. Then I finished my wine and went to bed.

  5.

  Two days later, Elizabeth came home. She was a lean woman, elegant, with a pale complexion and very blue eyes. When I first met her, not much more than three years ago now, her hair had still been black, with undertones of gray, platinum really, that she made no effort to hide. She’d worn it mussed, and the effect was that of sophisticated, reckless descent into age. Now the balance had changed, and the platinum was dominan
t. The black and the gray were undertones, carefully controlled by her colorist, of course, but the effect overall was striking. She had the look of blue smoke, of white ice so cold it was hot to the touch. She had just turned forty-four but in a room with other women, a lot of eyes, even those of the younger men, were drawn to her.

  She stood looking through the mail. She wore, as almost always, the pearl necklace her father had given her.

  I went up behind her now, encircled her waist with my arms. I felt her resistance but also the give in her body, the pleasure. Her fingers toyed with the Wilders’ invitation.

  “The party’s not for weeks, it says. Why do they send it so early?”

  “So everyone can make their plans, I guess.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s because they want their party to dominate the summer. The event of the season. You know how they are.”

  “Barbara Wilder has always been nice to me.”

  “That’s because you’re a man.”

  She put the invitation aside.

  “Have you eaten?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Let’s go out then.”

  “Let me change first.”

  “You don’t have to change. You look fine.”

  “No,” she insisted. “Just give me a minute.”

  I walked out to the car to get her luggage. I dallied for a while. Outside the weather was idyllic. The air hung utterly still and the light danced in a breathless way across the grass, giving you the sensation of something just out of reach. Elizabeth and I met on the tennis court, as I may have mentioned. She was a divorcée, good looking, self-sufficient. In those early days, we would talk about depth psychology. About Freud and Jung and Otto Rank. About the attraction of opposites, the yin and the yang. About the exploration of the darkness and the individuation of the soul.

  I glanced around at the house, and all that we had, and at the picture of us, just married, that hung on the wall.

  A good-looking couple, people said about us. Or so I imagined.

  Swank.

  Professional people with intelligence and ambition. Maybe not so much intelligence, though, at least not on my part. Otherwise I would not risk our future the way I did. I could blame my childhood, I suppose. Or Elizabeth. Or the pace of modem living, as the magazines liked to say. I could blame the television, too, and cell phones, and methyl chloride in the bay. The truth was, there were patterns in people’s lives, things that happened over and over. I’d seen it in the people I treated, in the criminals as well as the normal folks, so-called. Little changed those patterns. They were like waveforms, the fundamental energy of the person.