HCC 006 - The Confession

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Don’t worry.”

  She trembled again, more visibly now. She clutched herself and shivered on the tile floor. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t have my slippers. Do you mind if I go get them?”

  “No. I’ll make you a drink, if you like.”

  “I was just having some tea—but all right. Pour me one.” Minor sauntered into the kitchen and emerged at the other end of that room. I watched him through the open archway. He pulled a bottle of J&B out of the cabinet and placed it on the counter. He turned my way then, squareshouldered and whistling like a fool, headed for the cocktail glasses in the living room hutch.

  He did not see me at first. Then his posture stiffened and I felt things about to go haywire. I stepped forward with the gun pointed at his chest.

  “Stay where you are.”

  I reached up under his jacket, patting him down, but I already had his gun. I’d taken it from his house. I made him take off the jacket altogether. I searched the pockets.

  “I know what you’re up to,” I said, “the Liquid Ecstasy. Where is it?”

  We stood in the living room, in the gloom. I caught our reflection in the window just behind him. There was a beam of light from the kitchen and Minor glowed a little bit in his white shirt. I stood like a shadow nearby, still wearing his clothes, the jacket I had taken from the closet, the tie. If anyone saw us from outside, they might easily mistake one for the other. I was Minor. He was me. So if by chance you could step outside this story, and see our images reflected in the window glass this moment, right now, you might be confused about which man it was who reached out then and put that small vial on the table. You might look from the reflections in the glass to the people standing before you and wonder whose hand it was that had snaked out of the darkness and left the bottle behind, and some of you might even believe the story the police tried to tell later: that it was I who’d brought the GHB, and Minor who’d tried to intervene.

  “You killed Angela,” I said. “You killed her and fixed the blame on Dillard. Then you killed Sara.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You did the same with those other women, too, didn’t you? Doping them up. Framing their lovers. Sometimes, you even got it to stick. Now you mean to do the same to Elizabeth. You mean to strangle her same as the others, and blame me.”

  “It’s you.”

  His voice was a whisper, so faint I wondered if he’d said anything at all, or if it was my imagination. He stood there like a stone, barely breathing, watching me.

  “You.”

  I laughed then. These psychopaths. Always switching things about. Comer them and they hold up a mirror. Try to blame the one who has discovered their crimes.

  He looked at me as if I were the one who’d gone mad. As if I were the one whispering in the dark.

  “Get on the floor,” I told him, not knowing what I meant to do once I had him prone on the ground. Elizabeth would be back soon, and when she came i would have to do something. It would my word against his, her husband against this man on the floor—but I was in no way certain how she would choose.

  “Get down.”

  He made a movement as if to comply, then suddenly swiveled his head. “Elizabeth,” he yelled. It was a risky thing to do, I might have shot him, but instead I turned my head, looking, and in that instant he moved swiftly. He kicked the gun from my hand. I went after it, but he lacked it again, so it went spinning across the carpet, then he hit me hard in the face. My head snapped, I was stunned, and he plunged towards the cutlery table. I grabbed his hand. I tried to twist the knife away from him, but my footing was poor, and he forced me against the wall. I gripped his wrist. The blade was between us, in his hand, and I struggled to push it away.

  Then I saw Elizabeth at the other end of the room. She was in a crouch, picking up the gun.

  My hand slipped.

  “Elizabeth,” I gasped.

  Whether she recognized the voice as mine, or his, I had no idea. It was an animal voice, full of pain. He had stabbed me, and in that instant time suspended itself. Minor and I stared into each other’s eyes. He had his hand on the hilt. I felt my blood pulse. Across the room, the muzzle flashed in Elizabeth’s hand.

  Minors back arched. He keeled away, turning towards Elizabeth. Then he stumbled to the floor. He ended on his back, halfway between us. I pulled the knife from my stomach and covered my wound with my hand. I moved toward my wife, out of the shadows.

  “Elizabeth,” I said again.

  I could see the disbelief in her face

  “No!” she cried

  I took another step. Minor lay at my feet. The world was blackening.

  “No!”

  She had mixed us up. Me, in Minors jacket, against the wall. Him, in his white shirt. She had confused us one for the other. I staggered toward her, bleeding, the knife still in my hand.

  “No!”

  She fired, point blank. Then she fired again. My body jerked. A wild flame burned inside my chest. I felt an excitement in my loins, the death excitement, I thought, I am dying. I fell down, on top of Minor, and the blade slipped through my fingers and onto the floor.

  PART SIX

  Incarceration and Trial

  29.

  I should be dead, I suppose. After all I was the criminal at large. I had been stabbed in the belly, then fired upon twice at close range. Even so, Minors wound was through the heart, while my wounds, bloody and spectacular as they might have been, were not enough to carry me away. The one bullet had gone wide, the other lodged high in the shoulder. The knife wound had been more serious, but the county trauma unit had done a wonderful job. Minor, on the other hand, had been dead on arrival.

  The police had come out to Golden Hinde the night of the shooting, but my memories of the shooting’s aftermath are hazy and jump-cut. Dream images, almost. Minor lay dead beneath me. His lips were parted, his eyes open. Someone rolled me off him. They weren’t too gentle about it, and I ended face up, with my hand across my stomach and the blood seeping through my shirt. Then a rescue squad burst through the door. They put me on a gurney, and I saw myself as if from above, my hands bloody, a froth at my lips, foamy and pink; meanwhile Elizabeth sat not far away, there on the sectional couch, hands between her knees. She was pale and calm in the way that people sometimes are when something terrible has happened. A cop leaned over her, trying to get some kind of statement.

  They took her downtown later that night, I know. Though I wasn’t there, I can imagine the scene well enough.

  I can see Milofski in his rumpled shirt, and Elizabeth in her black pajamas, and Ted Hejl the lawyer by her side, with his suspenders and his cotton shirt and his accent carefully modulated to sound as if he were from nowhere at all.

  What did she tell them?

  The truth, I suppose.

  That she’d seen two men struggling. That she’d shot Minor by accident, thinking he was the intruder. And when I stumbled from the shadows, holding the knife in my hand . . .

  The memory grew more vivid. I stood with the family cutlery in my gut, looking into my wife’s eyes.

  Had she recognized me before she fired?

  I could hear her voice telling them how she’d been afraid when she saw us struggling in the shadows. She hadn’t known who was who, or even that the intruder was me. It was the same voice that had whispered to me hotly once upon a time, and the same voice, too, that had grown remote these last months, scolding me bitterly on the hillside

  Another DA’s office might have reacted differently, but in the end they had decided not to prosecute Elizabeth. She was the victim. A confused woman, acting in self-defense.

  I was the one they wanted.

  30.

  On account of my condition, Jamie managed to secure me a room outside the county jail, in a private recuperation facility over in Ross. She kept me sequestered there. The police wanted to blame the shooting on me, as I have said, but it was difficult. It was clear I had not fired the gun. I
was not trespassing—as it was my house, and there was no restraining order preventing me from being there. It wasn’t even clear I’d been resisting arrest.

  I lay recuperating for quite some time. There was a risk of an infection, and I ran one of those troubling fevers, on-again, off-again, that rose and peaked and vanished, only to return once more at the last moment, just as I was about to be taken to the county jail.

  There was a television in the room, and also a telephone, and a cop outside the door. The nurses were frightened of me, but Jamie stopped by on a regular basis, and she stood by my bed when Milofski took my statement, making sure I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t. We played it pretty tight, and it got on Milofski’s nerves—but my story was simple. That afternoon, when I’d disappeared from the apartment, I’d had no idea the cops were looking for me; no, I’d gone out to Golden Hinde to visit my wife. When she didn’t answer, I went around back. I’d called out her name as I came in the door. Then Minor jumped me, thinking I was an intruder. We tussled in the dark and Elizabeth shot before the whole thing got sorted out.

  When I was finished with my story, Milofski grinned. It was his bear grin, and it told me he wanted to grab me by the collar and throttle me and hiss in my face while I gasped for air.

  “We found a bottle of Liquid X sitting on the table. Do you have any idea how it got there?”

  I paused a moment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Did you come there with the idea of drugging your wife, and killing her, the same way you did Sara Johnson?”

  Jamie interrupted. “You’re straying into bad taste, Milofski. Our cooperation here is voluntary.”

  “Why did your wife shoot you, you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The room was dark. Maybe she couldn’t see too well.”

  “Yeah. Or maybe she don’t like you so much.”

  Milofski started to laugh now, a noise that came from deep in his gut, and you could see in him his Russian ancestry, the Cossack giving some poor no-good a push in the belly, a little poke with the bayonet. He was just getting started, but Jamie cut him short.

  “You can go,” she said. “My client’s told you all he can tell.” Jamie wore a red jacket with a velveteen collar, a matching skirt, black boots. Milofski gave her the once over, hard and ugly, like he was on patrol and she was a whore on the street. “I don’t think so,” Milofski said. “He hasn’t given me his little speech yet. How he’s innocent, and the real killer’s out on the street.”

  “Go,” she insisted.

  “What—and leave you two unprotected?”

  “Get out.”

  Milofski left but he dallied outside the room, chatting it up with the cop on duty, telling him to shoot me if I tried to leave. He said it loud enough for me to hear. The cop guffawed, and Jamie closed the door. “You’ve made a mess of this,” she said to me. “You should have turned yourself in, like I asked, rather than going out to your wife’s place.”

  “I wanted to see her.”

  “Why?”

  “Love, perhaps. She’s my wife, after all.”

  “The GHB—what do you know about it?”

  I hesitated. “They must have planted it out there—same as they planted it at my trailer.”

  Jamie didn’t have anything to say to this. I considered giving her a more elaborate explanation, full of details: telling her I’d been out to Minor’s house and seen the knock-out bottle, then driven out to Golden Hinde to save my wife. In the end, I decided no. I had no proof. Besides, if I changed my story now, even with my lawyer, it might only work against me.

  Anyway I was not lying about why I had gone out to Golden Hinde. Not entirely.

  “They’ve assigned a new prosecutor to the case,” Jamie said. “Richard Sabel.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “He’s new in the department. He’s seeking to expand the indictment.”

  She wore a gaudy necklace and her hair hung loose and her eyes glistened in the dark room. She smiled oddly and her smile showed her teeth. I’d heard rumors about her private life, too, of course, the kind of rumors you might expect concerning a single woman in her profession. She was a lesbian. A nympho. She carried a knife in her purse.

  “They’ve already got their evidence for the grand jury, for the murder and rape of Sara Johnson. Now they want to add new charges.”

  “They can’t charge me with Minor’s murder. I didn’t even pull the trigger.”

  “Maybe not—but from what I hear there’s a rumor going around that links you to some other strangulations around the state. Then there’s the similarities between this and the Mori case. It’s got people thinking.”

  She stood close by my bed, a little too close, smiling that odd smile of hers, regarding me with a certain affection, the way a young child regards an animal in a cage.

  “It’s all slander.”

  She shook her head and dropped her hand, fingers splayed, onto the white sheet: a dainty little hand, surprisingly so, with her nails painted rust—to match her hair, her Ups—and an oversized bracelet dangling from her wrist.

  “Perhaps, but the prosecution’s added a new name on the witness list for the grand jury. A former patient of yours, Tony Grazzioni. Do you have any idea what that might be about?”

  “No,” I said.

  She looked at me long and hard, as if she saw right through me, to the small lump of fear in my chest.

  “Why do you do this?” I asked.

  I put my hand on her hand. I was tempted to pull her towards me then. To feel her hard body with its limbs that were all angles and lines. To put my hand up her red skirt and stare into those black eyes. Meanwhile her hand moved underneath mine, and she looked at me as if I were something to be eaten and excreted. She had the purse over her shoulder and I imagined her reaching into that purse as I pulled her down, slitting me up the middle.

  “Do what?”

  “The work you do? Why?”

  She grinned. She ran her eyes over my body and I felt low and vulnerable. I took my hand away.

  “For the pleasure of a job well done.”

  Then she took a step away from the bed, and seemed to grow taller. She went on talking as if nothing had passed between us. “My guess, these new accusations, they’re just so much noise. A way of drumming up some nasty press. Still, I don’t want Sabel expanding the indictment. If successful, it gives him the opportunity to drag other evidence into the trial.

  “I want to get this to trial quickly. They’re bunglers up there in the DA’s office. If we push them, they’ll stumble. They’ll contaminate the evidence just walking down the hall.”

  I nodded my agreement. It was a common enough strategy, and I did not catch at first the twitch in her expression, the small shift of the eyes that should have told me something else was coming, out of the ordinary. I touched the wound in my belly and ran my fingers through my hair, through the missing pony.

  “To get us on the fast track, I had to make a compromise of sorts. I made an agreement with the judge. To a psychiatric evaluation.”

  “What?”

  “Someone you know, I believe. Madison Paulie—he’s going to talk to you on behalf of the court, to determine fitness to stand trial. I know this often takes place a little later, after the indictment has been finalized, but I agreed to let them talk to you now.”

  “I’m fit to stand trial. There’s no question about that.”

  “Just talk to Mr. Paulie. He’ll be along tomorrow.”

  “When’s the grand jury meeting?”

  “Next week.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “Just cooperate.”

  I tried to disagree, but her time was up now and she did not intend to listen. When she left, I heard her heels clicking down the long hall. I imagined the cop watching her ass swing its way to the elevator, thinking his cop thoughts, despising her and wanting to fuck her at the same time. Maybe she’d even given him one of her har
d-ass smiles, her Jamie Kaufman smiles, Queen of the Damned. Ugly, like I said, all angles and calculation, but not without her own land of appeal. Still, I was wise not to have pulled her any closer. She might spring you, she might set you free, but for her own reasons. It made her feel powerful. It swelled her up, the idea of a guilty man out in the world, free by her doing. But move the wrong way, foul things up, she’d cut you to pieces, feed you to the swine. Innocent or no. Even so, she knew how to work the tabloids. She’d scolded me but the story of the lovelorn prosecutor, accidentally shot to death by his mistress, wife of the accused, it was everywhere now, and the prosecution’s case was swamped in the backwash, in the flashbulbs and innuendoes, and Sabel was too new, too green, to fight her off. Or that’s what I hoped, anyway.

  31.

  That night my fever returned. I had dreams, and in those dreams I divided into a hundred selves—and each of those divided into a hundred more—and one self was as innocent as could be, betrayed by his wife, framed by her lover—another was the man the prosecution claimed him to be: murderer, serial killer—another the poor boy raised in Baltimore, little boy Jake, poor Jake—still another walked by the marsh, wretched thoughts in his mind, the wind in his hair—danced in clubs, caught glimpses of himself in the mirror—while on the television other Jakes wandered in and out of living rooms—materialized in radio reports—in conversations—in the story I am telling now, to try and set the record straight.

  By morning my fever had receded. Madison Paulie came to visit, as Jamie said he would. Paulie was dressed in a gray suit, but he still had the same scarecrow look, gangly and wild-limbed. His red hair was frayed and unkempt. His face was thin and pale, and the black mole on his cheek loomed larger, as if it had grown since the last time I’d seen him, at the Wilders’ party. He had a way of regarding you, from the side, glancing away then back, that made it seem as if he were looking at you from two directions at once.