HCC 006 - The Confession

by Domenic Stansberry

  “I miss you,” I said.

  She raised her head, becoming larger for a moment, womanly and full. I saw her haughtiness through her tears, and in that haughtiness a pleasure that made me think things were not quite over between us. “If we let this separation go on,” I said, “it might become permanent. You know how that kind of thing can happen. So I’m thinking, maybe we should get together and talk this out. Away from the house, on neutral ground.”

  I could not express it, but I knew what her father meant to her. Here in this living world—here in Marin, with the sky so blue, the clouds so white, the air so sweet—people like she and I, we consumed one another. We were hungry, the world was chocolate, it was candy. Her father existed outside time, a generous man who scattered his riches everywhere. Or so she believed. I had never had a father like that. I stepped toward Elizabeth now, wanting to possess her. To possess him, too, I suppose. She edged away. The Wilder party seemed infinitely far off, unimportant. I wanted her now.

  “Why?” she blurted. The tears were back. They rolled vigorously down one side of her face, and her cheek twitched like that of a stroke victim. “The other women. Why?”

  “My work . . .”

  She laughed then, bitter.

  “The stress . . .”

  She laughed again. “Everyone has work,” she said. “Everyone has stress.”

  “I know,” I lowered my voice. “Come on. Let’s be friends.” I listened to myself, to the sweet murmur in my throat. She’d found it sweet once, anyway, and seductive, unable to resist the duality in my voice, the irony beneath the sweetness, the sense there was something on the horizon yet to come. “How about tomorrow, we go some place quiet. We talk. Maybe we go down to Tomales, look at some property . . .

  She stiffened now.

  “I have other plans.”

  “Elizabeth . . .”

  “No.”

  Her tone gave me no admittance. I should have dropped the matter there, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Who are you going out with tomorrow?”

  “That’s really none of your business.”

  “You’re still my wife. We’re still married.”

  “We’re separated.”

  There was silence between us. Outside I heard the sound of the insects in the grass and the birds, too, and the slow building of the tide.

  “Fran,” she said at last. “I’m going over to Fran’s house. Girls’ night out. Dinner and maybe the movies.”

  “All right.”

  I left then. I walked back up the flagstone to my ear. I was alone, but the smell of her was still with me, and the imagined feel of her body. It was almost dark. I could hear the tide rolling in, noisy, pushing the brackish water up onto the rocks. It was a sweeping, primal noise. When I’d lived here it had used to catch me by surprise. Like something rising from within myself that I had forgotten. Then I drove away, back to my trailer on Lucky Drive.

  On Saturday evening, I went by Fran’s place. A jealous thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself.

  The house was lit up. Fran’s Mercedes stood in the driveway, and there was no sign of Elizabeth.

  She had lied to me.

  Then I told myself no, that wasn’t so—and I drove up Marsh Road toward Golden Hinde. Maybe Elizabeth and Fran weren’t going out till later. Or maybe one of them had canceled. Or maybe Elizabeth had just decided to stay in, to be alone.

  I won’t bother her, I told myself. I just want to know. I just want to see her car in the driveway, at home.

  The car would be there, I was all but positive. I was right. But there was another car in the driveway as well. A black Caprice.

  I knew that car. It belonged to Minor Robinson.

  14.

  The next day I left my trailer and walked along the marsh. I had not slept much. I was feeling the way you might expect a man in my position to feel, clenching then unclenching, jealous, angry, then telling myself there was no reason to be so; all I’d seen was his car, after all. In my gut, I suspected otherwise. I was the fool, the cuckold. I walked onto the spit, to where the marsh meets the bay, where the dirt gets soft and the drainage rivulets intertwine. I began to feel morose—which is rare for me—and that moroseness turned to a feeling of nothingness—which is not so rare—and down there in the water, among the reeds, I saw a fallen log in the shape of a woman’s body, I imagined, its arms still above water, and I stood on it for a while until those arms, too, submerged, then I stepped off. All that remained now of the log was a small, black hump above the water, and I knew that pretty soon the tide would come in and that, too, would be gone.

  15.

  I had a sensation those days that my life was building toward something. Toward what I didn’t know. Though perhaps I am not altogether honest when I say that. I knew what had gotten me into this situation, and where it had led me in the past. Nonetheless, I felt at times an exhilaration—as if I were about to break free, to satisfy all my vagrant impulses—and then I would remember Grazzioni and his wild mouth, I would feel the trap closing in.

  Around this time, I went over to see Nate Jackson, in his office in downtown San Rafael. San Rafael was getting spruced up—but it was always getting spruced up. There was an old mission at the center of town, and some high palms in front of the bank, but the large stores were vacant and the small ones were hawking used furniture and secondhand clothes. Jackson’s place was over a busy comer on Lindaro, not far from the bus station. There was a lot of foot traffic here. Latinos from the Canal District. Day laborers, on their way up Prospect Hill. Winos stumbling in the lurid light—and locos, too, from the rehab centers that lay along Lincoln Avenue, housed in old bungalows, alongside all those motels and falling-down joints that lined the road out to the county jail.

  Jackson’s office was up some terra cotta steps in a deco building that had a fresh wash of paint but little else. I found him upstairs in a cramped office, sitting at his desk.

  Nate was an unlikely detective. An obese man, like I said before, white-skinned, pale as a grub. He wore an open collar shirt, a couple sizes too small. He didn’t fit too well in his chair either. He had a hard time getting around and didn’t bother to stand up when you came in but instead shook your hand from behind his desk. The room had an unpleasant odor—acrid, ammoniac, like a house full of cats—and it was hard to hang around very long. Nate had that polished voice, though, soft and gentle. He had a reassuring manner, too—and also a network of moles and informants.

  “Oh, my friend, I was just about to get in touch with you. We’ve been tracking your buddy, Grazzioni.”

  “Any luck?”

  “He’s got an address in the city—Polk Street. Only he hasn’t been there for a while. Mail’s piling up in the box.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. So I had one of my operatives check out his other hangouts. Reno, Vegas—no one’s seen him around lately. Word is, he’s gone over his head with the gambling debts. Meanwhile he’s been hitting his marks hard, all the people he can squeeze—but it isn’t enough. He can’t get the money.”

  “So he’s in hiding?”

  “Either that, or he’s dead.”

  “Can you keep looking for me? I’ll cover your time on this.”

  Nate raised his huge hand off the table, dismissing my need to pay. Then he glanced up at me sidewise, like one of those big animals in the zoo. His eyes were watery and sad. There was something on his mind. His daughter, I guessed. Though I didn’t want to talk about her, I wanted to get that report—the alternate suspect search he’d done for Wagoner on the Dillard case.

  “How’s Anabelle doing?”

  “Fine. You know how it is. You have kids, you worry about ’em all your life.”

  “She still in Florida?”

  “Yeah, she needed some help recently. I had to fly down, get her resituated. You’d think, all the way across the country, you could escape the past, but no. Once something gets out on you, a certain rap, it has a way of following
you around. Something happens—and it’s your fault. Now there’s talk of extradition. Of bringing her back here on the old charges.”

  “That’s hell,” I said.

  I shook my head, and he shook his, and we both sat there for a while, thinking about his daughter Annabelle down in Florida. She was a big girl, like her dad. She had the same mannerisms, the same inflections. The same awful looks. Neither of them, I didn’t think, would be invited to the Wilders’ any time soon.

  “The report?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  He reached into his file drawer and handed it to me. It was quite a sheaf.

  “I hope that helps you,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  I held out my hand, reaching across the desk. He took it and didn’t let go right away. His grip was moist, encasing.

  “You know, remember, last time, on the phone, we talked about those records you have in your office.”

  “Records?”

  “When you interviewed my daughter. You made a tape, took some notes.”

  He was sweating now and the smell in the room seemed to have gotten worse.

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “One of those sessions, remember, she said some things.”

  I’d interviewed her a few times. Early on, she’d been pretty disturbed and said some things that might be regarded as incriminating. Nate still worried that information might get out.

  “Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “Those tapes are all confidential.”

  “This extradition talk. I’m worried they might subpoena for the information. The parents of the boy who drowned, they’re influential. They won’t let this thing go.”

  “The law protects us on this issue.”

  “Not always. So, well, I was wondering: how often you purge records?”

  “I understand. If it makes you more comfortable, I’ll send you the originals, and I’ll clear the files.”

  “I’d appreciate that, doc. I don’t know where I’d be without you. My daughter—she’s a sweet kid.”

  “Very sweet.”

  In times of trouble, people find solace in the familiar. They seek out old friends, family. They find escape in routine, perhaps, or in work. Myself, I was no different. I was upset about Elizabeth—and I plunged into the report Jackson had given me. I studied it compulsively. It was the land of work I’d done in the past—studying criminal histories, looking for patterns—and the truth was I found release in studying such documents, poring over the details. Such details could be gruesome but they hinted at something large and elusive, a deeper mystery I found difficult to resist.

  I would skip the Wilders’ party this weekend, I decided; there was no reason to subject myself to social scrutiny. Then I would change my mind. I vacillated, and in the meantime I studied Jackson’s report.

  There were two parts to the report, first the raw data—all the cases the investigator had pulled from the computer. Then his synthesis. I thumbed through the raw stuff first, hundreds of cases. Some were pretty famous. Dominique Dunne, the actress who had been strangled bare-hand by her husband, a chef at Wolfgang Puck’s. Then Lolly Desanto, the politician’s wife. And the socialite Marina Grabel. The list went on, young and old, known and unknown. A seven year old girl in a ditch, molested and asphyxiated. An old woman in a bathtub. Crimes by fathers and lovers. Mothers and friends. Brothers. Sisters. Drifting strangers.

  The investigator had sifted through all these, looking for a pattern, for similarities with the Dillard case. In the end, it came to this. Fifteen women over twelve years, doped to the verge of unconsciousness, all strangled with a man’s necktie.

  You would think, somewhere along the line, someone else—a cop, a homicide detective, somebody—would have recognized this same pattern. But the cops were busy, and there were other factors, too, that muddied the waters. In ten of the fifteen cases, arrests had been made. Seven of those arrests had gone to trial. Five had led to conviction.

  That was one reason, maybe, why no one had pursued the notion these murders might be related. A good percentage had been solved, or at least prosecuted. So there was no reason to suspect a common perpetrator.

  There was another factor, too. The killer had altered his MO over the years. The drug had been chloral hydrate at first, then rohypnol, now gamma hydroxybutrate. In the earliest crimes there had been no sexual contact, but later there had been foreign saliva in the mouth, sperm on the clothes. In the latest incidents it appeared the man had molested the woman after she was dead. The killer was escalating. Less able to control himself, you might say. Or more bold, more brazen. Titillating himself—and the authorities—by becoming more intimate with his victims, and leaving more of himself behind as evidence. Or it could mean something else altogether. Maybe you didn’t have one killer here, but several unrelated murders with similar MO’s.

  Either way, Nate Jackson had been right: there were no real links to Grazzioni. Or nothing I could use to scare him off me, anyway.

  Ultimately the point of the report had not been to prove its case—but to give the defense a way to point the finger in another direction. To create a line of causality that led someplace other than Matthew Dillard.

  I studied the victims.

  Attractive, professional, women. Late twenties to early thirties. Seven from the Bay Area, including Angela.

  Five more in Los Angeles.

  One in Portland. Another in Vegas.

  Then number fifteen, across the ocean, in Hawaii.

  For each crime I recreated in my imagination the circumstances of death. The time. The place. I looked at the pictures of the victim, and I felt, too, that odd, creeping, stalking joy the investigator feels. I have read about it in memoirs and psychological journals: how the investigator enters the mind of the criminal—and for a minute becomes the other, recognizing himself in the shadow he pursues.

  Of the women in Los Angeles, two had lived in my old neighborhood, in the flats of Santa Monica. Another had worked in child services, in downtown Westwood, in a building not far from my office. The one who died in Vegas, I knew the hotel, the lobby, the slot machines. I’d taken business trips to Hawaii and Portland, too.

  Atypical memory loss. Decompensation of the conscious mind. Blurring of dream and waking life.

  As I have said, people who kill in a moment of rage, sometimes do not remember the act itself for several days, even months, years. It is as if the event took place behind a curtain, and the participants—the victim, the killer—are silhouettes, shadows on a screen.

  This kind of memory loss, though, is relatively rare. At least that is the current thinking. Most of these amnesiacs, in criminal cases, they are liars. In reality, they remember every instant. They relish their crimes. They compose memoirs, elaborate testimonials that feign innocence yet contain within them the secret admission of guilt. When cornered, they place the blame elsewhere—on some associate, perhaps, scheming against them.

  But beneath it all, always, the nod and the wink. The charm. The psychopath’s smile.

  You, me, hey, we’re all in this together.

  16.

  I’d always enjoyed myself at the Wilders’ parties. They were well attended, rife with the sense of deja vu, a sense anything could happen. This year, I hesitated. Elizabeth was likely to be there, and I had mixed feelings about seeing her in public. There would be a lot of other people we knew as well. Courthouse types and socialites, lawyers and shrinks, a swirl of chatter and the passing scent of celebrity. The Wilder parties whirled with personalities—people you knew and people you didn’t, all glimpsed through the gauze of alcohol and ephemeral conversation: a client you hadn’t seen in five years, an office worker from down the hall, the ex-mayor, a comedian friend of the hostess who’d just bought an estate down the road, ha, ha, and was appearing on Letterman later this week.

  Though I had my reservations about going, I needed to get out. I needed to mingle: for professional reasons, if not personal. So I put on my evening cl
othes—my linen jacket, my white slacks, a pastel shirt—and drove out Sir Francis Drake to the little hamlet of Ross.

  I wore a tie, blue silk, imported from Italy, knotted loosely about my neck. I had my sunglasses on and my hair tied back, and the breeze felt good as I whipped along the edge of the valley. The road was a four lane with a yellow stripe down the center, and the air was awash with the flowery, lotus smell of Marin. The road narrowed going into Ross, tunneling under some wild oleander: giant hedges dangling pink blossoms, poisonous and bright. It was a quaint town, a commons at its center. There was a market, and some filigree shops filled with old women and Italian pottery, and a corner with a little bandstand set up, where a trio stood playing Sufi music to passersby. I roared past them all into the hills.

  The Wilders lived above the town itself on a hillside in the Kent Woodlands. The Woodlands, like all of Ross, had been a hunting grounds once. Now the old oaks were gone, and palm trees grew in their place, in front yards landscaped with colored stone. Wild parrots squawked in the eucalyptus trees, and the lotus smell was thicker then ever.

  In the circular drive, an attendant took my car. I strolled under the arbor toward the house. A knee-high Buddha—Prajnaparamita, the contemplator of nothingness—stood in the rocks by the front door.

  Mrs. Wilder and her husband had made their money in undergarments. She was a small, stylish woman, mid-forties, who wore her hair cut short and feathered close to the skull. It was blonde hair, heavily bleached. At the moment she hovered by the door, as she often did during her parties.

  “Jake,” she said, “how good to see you!”

  I heard a murmur from the little group behind her, a whisper, I thought: my name and Elizabeth s, too—a whisper like the sound of those wild parrots chuttering in the eucalyptus. Everyone knew everything. The gossip was out.