HCC 006 - The Confession

by Domenic Stansberry

  Inside I found Elizabeth in the den, on the phone. Her blouse was untucked. She stood with her back to me, very still. She laughed more lustily than usual. Then something all but imperceptible changed in her stance. She had sensed my presence.

  She got off the phone.

  “Who was that?”

  “Fran.”

  Fran was an old friend of hers, a loud and busty woman with whom she’d had a falling out some time back. They were competitive, the two of them, and I was surprised to hear them back in touch.

  “What’s she up to?”

  “Not much. She wants to get together and tell me about her newest fling.”

  “I thought you were angry with her.”

  “Not so much.”

  Elizabeth smiled but I sensed her aloofness and felt again the confusing emotions that dominated our marriage lately. I would want her, then I wouldn’t. My feelings were complicated. Desire intermingled with flashes of anger—and the sense of something about to end.

  I watched her change clothes. Something more demure—black slacks and a gray blouse, open at the collar—but she kept the pearls.

  “How was the conference?” I asked.

  “Not so bad.”

  “No bloody noses? Fights in the parking lots?”

  “Not this time.”

  In the old days, it had been the Jungians against the Freudians, and both sides against the followers of B. F. Skinner. Those who saw personality rooted in the soul against those who believed it was a matter of social conditioning. Nowadays they had all fallen to the background and the field was dominated by researchers and statisticians—in short, by the genetic determinists—who believed everything we did, who we are, how we behaved, was all determined by biochemistry, which in turn had its roots in the genetic code.

  “So they’ve discovered civility.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  I was trying to be funny, the way we were with each other sometimes, frothy and tart.

  “It’s a bit of a relief, really,” she said.

  “I understand, but it spoils our conversation. I used to enjoy hearing about them. At each other’s throats.”

  “Actually, the field is moving towards a consolidation of ideas. It’s an exciting time.” She enjoyed her work and was not in the mood, at least at the moment, to mock her colleagues.

  “How’s the Dillard case going?” she asked.

  “It’s too soon to know.”

  “Who’s handling the prosecution?”

  “Minor Robinson.”

  “Oh, yes, Minor.”

  I watched her face in the mirror. She kept expressionless, pretty much. Minor was a widower. He had moved here from LA about the same time as myself, but he’d met Elizabeth sooner, and the two of them had gone out for a while. I’d seen them playing tennis a couple of times before Elizabeth and I had gotten together. He’d been my rival, I guess, though how much spark there’d been between them, I didn’t know. I did know that Minor wasn’t fond of me. Since he’d been promoted to lead prosecutor, my referrals from the county had dropped off. Almost all my clients were on the defense side now.

  “How’s Minor doing?” she asked.

  “He’s doing fine. I ran into him at the courthouse last week.”

  “I saw him myself, a couple of weeks back,” she said. “In Larkspur—at the racquet club. I was waiting for Fran.”

  “Oh.”

  She turned to me now. The gray in the blouse brought out the gray in her hair, but the effect was not unattractive. Her eyes were an icy blue. Something about the way she looked at me, it went right through me.

  “Where do you want to go to dinner?”

  “The Blue Chez.”

  It was a place we went often. So did a lot of other people we knew, particularly in the legal profession. It was an upscale restaurant in the so-called French Quarter up in San Rafael. It had been a larger neighborhood once, I think, but it was hard to tell because now it stood isolated under the downtown underpass, a block or so of plankboard Victorians done over in muted colors, with bright flowers in the boxes outside.

  It was also, as I have mentioned, the place Dillard took his wife the evening she was murdered.

  A valet took our car. On the restaurant walls hung paintings of the French countryside. In those pictures blowzy women swung baskets of cheese and bread down cobbled alleys. The alleys were clean and bright, with no sign of menace.

  We made small talk.

  The waitress brought the first course, asparagus and walnuts in a fruit vinaigrette.

  We ordered a Chardonnay from the Alexander Valley.

  The room bubbled, and fragments of conversation from the surrounding tables drifted through our first course. I experienced one of those moments when the boundaries between myself and the world seemed less pronounced than usual, as if the snippets of talk originated from within myself. I’ve been reading Thomas Moore, you know, his book about the nature of the soul A Mexican waiter refilled our glasses, head bent. High-throated laughter echoed from somewhere nearby, disembodied. The baby boomers are inheriting everything, but they don’t deserve it. It’s their parents did all the work. My thoughts were filtered through the wine, part of the conversation around me. Elizabeth’s gaze was on the table, focused inward. Have you been following the Mori case? She was a bit of a run-around from what I hear.

  The waiter returned

  More Chardonnay. Same vintage. With a taste of oak and not too fruity.

  Never mind the price.

  It was a weeknight, and before long the Courthouse Gang arrived, as they called themselves, and they took a table by the window. I had been a member of the group myself once. Among them were Minor Robinson and also Alex Milofski, the homicide cop.

  After a while, Minor came over to our table.

  “Elizabeth, Jake,” he said, nodding to each of us in turn. “How are you doing?”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Just wonderful.”

  He was a good-looking man about my age, lean and well built, with black hair and a spike of gray at the temple. People said we looked alike but any resemblance was pretty superficial. He had a certain warmth, it was true, a wholesomeness that women liked—but there was also something about him that was a little too crisp, too earnest, for my taste anyway, a land of FBI officiousness, a moral sensibility, a confidence in what is right, what is wrong, that got under my skin.

  Elizabeth smiled.

  “How was your trip to Louisiana?” he asked.

  “Fine.” Elizabeth lowered her eyes and I thought about the two of them out on the tennis court.

  “Would you like to join us?” I asked.

  “No, no. I heard you were working with Haney Wagoner on the Dillard case. So I thought I’d come over and give you a friendly, adversarial hello.”

  “Well, hello, then,” I said. “This place is pretty busy for a Monday night.”

  “It’s been busier since the murder, I understand,” said

  Elizabeth. There was a small gleam in her eye. “They ate here that night, didn’t they?”

  “Sure,” I said. “A little murder, it’s good for business.”

  “Yes. But Dillard didn’t kill her here,” said Minor. “Maybe he didn’t kill her at all,” I offered.

  “Come on. There’s not much doubt about that. Otherwise, why’s Haney lining up his psychiatric experts? You examined him yet?”

  “Can’t talk about that.”

  “No?”

  “You’ll have to ask Haney. If he goes with the psychological defense, I’m sure you guys will get your shot.”

  It was the kind of case, a couple of years back, I would have been testifying as a prosecution witness myself, gathered around the table with the rest of them, drinking and joking. Things had changed, though, since Minor’s promotion—and I was on the outside now.

  Finally Minor left us and went back to his table. I couldn’t say I was sorry to see him go.

  Elizabeth
raised her glass to her lips.

  “He sounds confident.”

  “Well, he’s got a good case. And Angela’s coffin—it makes a great stepping stone.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “I’m not. You know that, hon. I’ve got everything.”

  I leaned over and smiled as well as I could. She was skeptical but she couldn’t help herself, she smiled back. I put my hand on her hand, and listened to her talk about her father, her home, and as she did her accent thickened, the Southern voice, central Louisiana, no longer the drawl with the edges taken off—softened by a few years out east and another dozen in California—but the younger voice, raw and melodic, the sound of the swamp and petticoats and the radio over the water on a humid night, the kind of voice men hear in their dreams as they drift off to sleep on the long drive over Lake Pontchartrain. Her accent always thickened as she talked about home, and I was seduced into seeing myself as part of that world, in that old house, walking in her father’s shadow

  By the time we finished dinner, the Courthouse Gang had left. It didn’t matter, I knew I’d see them again soon, like it or not. If not in the courtroom, then at the Wilders’ party, in the not too distant future. The Wilders had a fondness for forensic types, particularly those involved in the psychological end of things.

  We drove back through the dark along Marsh Road. We wound away from Highway 101, following the bay, snaking along the low ridge between the marsh and the high brown hills. On occasion, you could see the prison, glistening across the inlet. Houses lay in the hollows below us, on the shore between the bay and the road.

  “How did Minor know you were in Louisiana?”

  “I must have mentioned it to him. Didn’t I tell you? I ran into him at the racquet club.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize you had spoken.”

  “We talked—for a little while. He’s a bright man.”

  “In a pedestrian kind of way.”

  She laughed. “That’s not nice.”

  “I’m not trying to be nice.”

  We pulled into the driveway. I put my hand on her leg, and kissed her. Her lips were wet and cool, but her response was abstract, far away. Still, she excited me. I touched the collar of her expensive blouse, kissed her again and tasted the drawl in her mouth.

  “I’m so tired. It was a long trip.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll let you be.”

  We went inside. Despite what I said, I wanted to reach for her. I watched her take off her blouse. She had a black bra on underneath. I watched her take off that, too, and then she slipped away from me, into the tub, and shut the door behind her.

  Elizabeth was a glamorous woman in many ways, sophisticated in her manner and her ideas. In some ways, though, she’d never gotten over her first divorce. Her first husband had been a writer—an alcoholic, a womanizer—and the break-up had come not long after her father’s death. She was vulnerable when she met me, not long divorced. We’d driven down to Stinson Beach, on the other side of Mt. Tamalpais. I’d been quiet and shy and kept my hands to myself. A bit of an act, though there are times, around certain women, that I feel this way. I’d studied her age lines, the fine web about her eyes, and smelled her cosmetics, the silk blouse faint with sweat. We’d sat in the open convertible beneath the Monterey Pines in sight of the ocean. I’d been pursuing her and she’d been pursuing me, and people were talking, we both knew this. I’d liked her convertible, I admit, and her father’s money. In the end it wasn’t those things, no. There were other women with those things.

  It was the smell of her maybe. Something in her eyes, at once vulnerable and haughty, a glance that cut to the quick, full of presentiment, a suggestion there was something waiting ahead for us.

  We kissed. I touched her all over.

  If I could have lost myself inside her then, that moment at the beach, if I could have crawled inside her and disappeared, I would have done so.

  Who am I?

  I yearned now to be one of my other selves. One of those other Jakes. The earnest psychologist, perhaps, in love with his college teacher wife. The faithful husband.

  I went away from Elizabeth into the living room. The little Buddha was there, with his mouth twisted into a smile. I found a copy of the Examiner and went through it. There was a story about Angela Mori. Details about the murder. There was more on the inside page. Information unearthed by the defense and leaked out to reporters. Angela’s sex life, the many men she had slept with; rumors, unsubstantiated, about secret liaisons in a hotel in Novato. An unidentified man—a man in a blue suit, the paper said. A search of the hotel records turned up nothing. The story made me uneasy.

  Angela was reckless, it was true. I remembered how she’d leaned against me and put her tongue in my ear. There were always rumors about a girl like that. There was even one rumor—a joke, really, muttered in the courthouse halls—tying her to Minor Robinson.

  No one believed it, though. He was too concerned with his image to risk himself like that. Too much the prig.

  I laughed thinking about it, clutching the newspaper in my hand, a laugh that was a bit forced, I realize now, clumsy and awkward, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time.

  I didn’t hear Elizabeth finish her bath. When I went into the bedroom, the lights were out, and she was on the edge of sleep. I put my arm around her. She was in her pajamas, white silk. She moaned softly in the dark, and I lay a little while like that, thinking about Angela Mori and also about Sara and the episode from a few days before. Lying in the dark as I was now—inside our house, on this narrow point of land, extending into the bay—it seemed to me for a moment that everything else in the world was nothing but a dream, all the events of the world, the news, the daily buzz. There was in reality nothing but this dark, and all else was illusion. I put my hand up over Elizabeth’s breast, on the outside of her pajamas, and pushed myself against her from behind. “No,” she moaned, “Honey, no,” and I pushed a little harder, feeling for the opening between the buttons in her blouse, touching her nipple, the aureole. She lay on her side, her back to me, and I cradled her buttocks with my free hand, and then I slid down the pajama bottoms “No, honey, please . . .” she said again, but that was all. She was on her stomach now. Her face was in the pillow. She began to breathe more heavily, panting more deeply. Not quite voluntary. I reached lower, between her legs. I spread her buttocks. “No,” she said, her fingers reaching, “no.” I pushed harder. She gasped as I entered from behind.

  PART TWO

  The Decision

  6.

  I know, of course, the latest research suggesting evil originates in a particular part of the brain. Near the hippocampus, some say, beneath the memory center, in the old lizard part of the mind. In a neurological space where everything we pretend to be, ail our mores, disappear like stray thoughts into the abyss. Where the whisperings of the neocortex no longer matter and the blood impulses take over.

  But how does this happen? By what mechanisms? Under which conditions?

  Such questions are at the heart of every criminal case, I suspect, if not everything we do, and they were on my mind then, as I went once again to the Correctional Facility, to the little room with the plastic chairs and the panic button on the wall.

  I enjoyed my work. Though my role was a subversive one in many ways, and there were quite a few who did not like me—the prosecutors, the cops, the jailers—I enjoyed it nonetheless. Like all work, it was a form of self-exploration, but at the same time it gave me refuge from my self, and refuge, too, from my personal life, from certain things looming on the horizon of which I was aware—but there was a part of me (as there often is, I suppose) that did not want to acknowledge such concerns.

  I had to make a stand sooner or later, if only with myself, but I was not ready for that yet. So I immersed myself in my work.

  I had been called to the jail by Dillard’s lawyer, Haney Wagoner, a congenial-seeming man with oversized eyebrows whose wife was friends with Elizabeth. Elizab
eth had introduced us, and though I had qualifications of my own—and experience as well—that introduction had helped get me the case. Wagoner was fond of Elizabeth, and asked after her wistfully, as men often did.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “Absolutely wonderful.”

  “Good, good. We used to see more of her, in the old days.”

  “She misses you both,” I said, though in fact she seldom mentioned either of them unless it was in regard to their increasing girth. “I’m afraid we all used to get together more often, in the old days.”

  “Yes, we used to see her quite a bit. When she was married to David. Not that it was a good marriage. No, no.” He leaned toward me confidentially, arching those large brows of his. “He had a charming manner, her first husband. He was the kind of guy you like to be around. At first. But there was a darkness underneath. I was glad to see him go.”

  “Me, too.” I joked, though in fact I had never met him. He laughed, and so did I, but there was awkwardness between us, something stiff and uneasy. Wagoner was in his early fifties and had a reputation among the public on account of a celebrity he’d helped acquit some twenty years before. Among his peers he was not so well regarded. He had a one-track mentality, people said, and his office was poorly run. I didn’t know if these things were true. Though my own dealings with him had been cordial enough, and his manner suggested he knew his business, it soon became apparent he was having trouble with his client.

  “I don’t want to do my defense this way,” said Dillard. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t do it.”