HCC 006 - The Confession

by Domenic Stansberry

  “How are you doing?” Paulie asked. His voice managed the sound of genuine concern.

  “Not so bad.”

  I was suspicious. He’d been appointed by the court, and his findings would be open to the prosecution.

  “You know the reason I’m here?” he asked.

  I nodded, and he nodded, too. The nod of camaraderie. Shrink to shrink.

  “I hear you grew up in Baltimore.”

  It was an effort to get me talking. I went along, telling him how I’d grown up in the row district down by the old stadium. I gave him my family background. I was careful the way I phrased things, but my mom and I, we were a social service case and there were records. He had access to them, I figured. Even if he didn’t, he was savvy enough to guess the kind of details under the surface. Father who disappeared before I was born. Mother who tinted her hair a different color every week. A timid woman who had a secret love for things brutal and lurid. Who had trouble with little yellow pills that made her sleepy, and when she took them became amorous in a stupid, unconscious way. Men took advantage.

  “I had a rocky childhood, I admit. Raised by a single mom, but she loved me. She did her best.”

  “Of course.”

  I could guess what he was thinking. My background matched the FBI profile for certain kinds of criminals. So did that of a lot of other people though. President Clinton, for example. Martin Luther King.

  “You suffered from blackouts when you were a kid, didn’t you? Sudden fits of rage.”

  “I outgrew it.”

  He nodded, made a note on his pad.

  We were playing each other now. He wanted to draw me out, not caring so much what the subject matter was, just wanting to hear me talk, to listen to my associative banter and the kind of logical connections I made, so he could see if there were any indications of delusional thinking, or paranoia, or psychopathic manipulation of events.

  “This has been hard on you, I imagine.” His voice was sympathetic, and there was a blue glint in his eye. “The murder charges, all the publicity—it must be hard.”

  “It hasn’t done wonders for my marriage.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “We separated just before this happened, and . . .” I paused. “I’m sure you’ve read the stories in the paper.”

  “I don’t imagine they are necessarily true.”

  “To be honest, it was good between Elizabeth and I for a long time. But more recently I don’t know . . . maybe it has to do with her father’s death. Her expectations . . .”

  I put my head in my hand. Then a sound came out of me, from deep in my chest. The land of solitary, wrenching noise you might expect from a man in my position, alone on a hospital bed, charged with murder, estranged from his wife.

  He laced his fingers, wondering perhaps if the sob was real.

  “You attended Chesapeake College, didn’t you—for your undergraduate work.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You were there at the time of the Winkle murder.”

  I hesitated, taken aback at this sudden shift—but that’s the way it was in my business. The talk always turned to murder. At any rate I knew the case. You couldn’t have attended Chesapeake College when I did and not know. A co-ed, Karen Winkle, had been strangled to death in her room. They blamed the boyfriend for a while, but he had some kind of alibi, said she was into lanky sex with strangers, pushing the envelope. Some of her girlfriends said the same thing. Into popping, they called it then, asphyxiation as a way of heightening the orgasm. Walked around with rope burn on her neck, under the collar. Liked to pick up strangers. People speculated it was an incident of that type: a pick-up gone out of control.

  “Why are you bringing this up?” I asked.

  “In graduate school, I studied the case. Wrote a paper.”

  “What aspect did you study?”

  “How the first time, for a serial murderer, it can set the pattern. It’s not planned. It’s something that happens in the course of another incident. The killer gets his first taste. After that, the events become more ritualized.”

  “I’m familiar with that phenomenon, yes.”

  “There were more deaths later, weren’t there? A series of strangulations. Eventually, they arrested another kid at your college. He’d been dating one of the girls. Claimed he’d been framed.”

  “He was executed, if I remember.”

  “You were living with your mother at the time.”

  “Yes,” I said, still agreeable, but I didn’t much care for this line of questioning.

  “Your mother died shortly after that, didn’t she? A drowning incident. Same as your first wife.”

  “That’s true.”

  “It must be hard for you.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “A number of women in your own life have died under unusual circumstances. Now—these allegations.”

  I understood what Paulie was doing. Trying to see if he could trace me back, establish a pattern that went deep into my past, knitting the events of my life together. Just doing his job, you might say, trying to see what he could see—but I didn’t like it. I began to feel quite enraged. Then suddenly he stood up, glancing at his watch.

  “Your doctor told me I could only have an hour today. He was quite firm. He doesn’t want to wear you out.”

  “That all right. I don’t mind talking.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, and gave me a wink. “I’ll be back in a few days.”

  32.

  Something will happen, I thought. Something will come clear, some flaw will be found, and I will be set free. The next day, though, they transferred me over to the county jail. Jamie wasn’t there this time; she let them take me unaccompanied. They handcuffed me in the back of a cruiser and drove me over, and once again I walked down that long corridor into the tombs. I was nobody in the tombs, just another prisoner. With each step, I felt myself disappear a little more. Inside my cell, the walls were gray and I knew it wouldn’t be long before that grayness invaded my head. Images of the outside would come to me—my house, the sky overhead, a restaurant filled with people—and I would feel an anxiety, a sense of hopelessness. Some say it is the early days of incarceration that are the worst. After a while, the prisoner disassociates himself from his memories, and the outside world ceases to exist. It is a survival strategy, I suppose. If you don’t learn it, you suffer. So it is best to be estranged, unattached, and let the memories drift by as if they belong to someone else.

  Myself, I did not know if I could achieve that state. I am no aesthete. I am full of yearning.

  I had a visitor.

  The visitor was Nate Jackson, the detective, and he was the same as ever. Chinos and a polo shirt and his hair thinning across the top. He had the same sweet look as always, the same fat cheeks and mild, puzzled expression, and the same foul odor. He was nobody’s fool though. He’d learned the hard way, I guess, the soft, fat lad on the school grounds, big but not strong, who kept the other kids off his case by knowing their secrets, the little things no one else knew. As long as you didn’t cross him, he was your friend forever.

  “What’s up?”

  “Remember, you asked me about Tony Grazzioni?”

  “You found him?”

  “Tahoe City. Down the other side of the lake. I got his address, you want it. Also the phone number of the people looking for him.”

  I was surprised sometimes how far out of his way he would go for me. What he owed me on account of his daughter, it was endless. Or that’s the way he felt, it seemed. “I appreciate the information, Nate.”

  “The tape,” he said. “The one you made of my daughter, when you interviewed her out at Napa.”

  “I told you Nate, that’s safe with me. It’s confidential. Psychiatric privilege.”

  “Nothing in this world’s confidential, you know that, Doc.” His voice was soft and earnest. “Besides I got it on the inside the cops are looking to subpoena your files. I just can’
t risk them getting that tape.”

  “It’s safe. Don’t worry.”

  “Doc, if you don’t give it to me . . .”

  It was the same voice, mellifluous and hypnotic as the late night rain pattering against a darkened window—but there was something else there, too. Nate’s eyes went narrow. I thought he’d come out here to help me, but now I wondered. I’d seen this look once before, back when I first mentioned the tape to him—and the things his daughter had described.

  “Just as soon as I get out of here. I’ll get that tape for you. You can count on it.”

  Nate shook his head. He loved his little girl, that man, I have to say that for him.

  “Let me tell you,” he said. “I have an operative Works out of Tahoe. He found Tony in one of those little casinos on the Nevada side. He couldn’t resist the pull of the cards, that Tony. Anyway my guy struck up a conversation. He’s a friendly son-of-a-bitch, my guy. Looks like nobody, loses at cards, listens good. So Tony loosens up. He starts talking about you, since you’re all over the news. He says some things about you, some girls . . .”

  “No,” I said, “Listen . . .”

  Nate held up his hand. “No,” he said. “You listen.” I heard the faintest rasp, something ugly and discordant that had been there all along, I supposed, beneath the surface “This operative told me what Tony had to say about you. Then I went back to that scenario we constructed for Wagoner, and I thought how the wheels would start clicking in the DA’s office if they heard Grazzioni talk. If somehow, some way, someone saw that document we prepared. They might start looking at some of those old cases . . .”

  “Come on,” I said. “You’re not buying into that. Grazzioni, he’d extort his mother if he could. If you’re going to help the cops create a paper trail to prove his nonsense then . . . to say that I . . . all those girls . . .” I stammered, “then I don’t know, I just don’t know . . .”

  “Then there’s the matter of the motel,” he said. “And the man in the blue suit.”

  “I don’t appreciate this kind of innuendo, Nate.”

  “Of course not. You know, I know, everybody in the world’s got a blue suit. You. Me. General Eisenhower—all dressed up in his box there, under the ground. A detail like that, all alone, all by itself, it doesn’t mean much.”

  His tone had turned nasty now. It was what made him a good investigator, I suppose, the ability to wrap his intentions in a sweet voice, then come after you full-throated, with a larynx full of pus. “Second time around, I sent a Spanish tongue to that motel,” he said. “Someone a little better with the language than myself. Second time around our maid remembers another detail, about the way Mr. Blue Suit wore his hair.”

  I touched the back of my head where the pony used to be. “The maid didn’t say any such thing,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I want that tape.”

  He was bluffing. He had no proof, but it was the kind of thing people did when they found someone in my position, who could be easily bossed. I could call his bluff, but in the end he would do anything for his daughter. You couldn’t blame him, I suppose. Either way it wasn’t worth fighting him on this. So I told him where the tape was. I gave him the key code to my storage facility in Greenbrae. The police didn’t know about it, not yet. The information seemed to take the edge off.

  “Grazzioni is living in a condo with his brother,” he told me. “Number fifty. North Shore Drive.”

  “What about the others? The ones he double-crossed.”

  “I have their phone number, too, if you want it.”

  I thought of the sky outside. I thought of the highway and the smell of leather upholstery and imagined a woman waiting for me somewhere, in a life up ahead. And I saw the road winding out of Marin, past all those beautiful brown hills, and for a second I was gripped by that horrible yearning—and a fear I would never escape.

  “You call them for me, Nate. Tell them where Tony is.” We both knew what this meant. It wasn’t hard to guess what Tony’s old friends would do to him, given the money he owed. Nate looked offended at my request. He shook his head. “You’re on your own. You want to make that call, you make it yourself.”

  I blinked. “Nate, please. It’s not so easy for me to get to the phone here.”

  “I don’t do that land of thing.”

  “Getting kind of moralistic on me aren’t you, Nate. I mean, given your daughter and all.”

  He fell quiet. His eyes were lost in the fat now, the lids all but shut, his nostrils widening, closing.

  “I’m sorry Nate. I didn’t mean anything. “

  I had crossed the line and he sat there studying me, breathing heavily, judging whether he was going to forgive me. He was a hideous man really. His shirt was yellow with perspiration and his brow was damp. I could smell his foul odor despite the Plexiglas that kept us apart. He put his mouth up to the hole in the shield.

  He whispered the number. I felt his breath through the hole. It stank of offal. Then he rose up, moist and rancid, an ugly mound of flesh, sweating his way across the jailhouse floor.

  33.

  The criminal imagines his victims, fantasizing, projecting, willing them into existence. I have read about this phenomenon in the psychiatric journals, and its opposite as well: about the victims who imagine their persecutor until at last, one day, the son-of-a-bitch appears.

  Is the ultimate encounter by design then? Mutually created, by victim and criminal dreaming in concert? Or is it accident, fate, the random imposition of will by one human upon another?

  I didn’t know the answer, but a similar thing was happening to me, or so I felt: I was being imagined into my current existence, into this cell, by the mass who needed someone to blame, though in fact all they had against me so far were the usual sins. Shallowness, vanity, an obsession with the self. For most of them, though, these were good enough. I tried to escape the only way I knew, crossing my legs, imagining myself on the mountain. Meditating. All moments lead from this moment, I told myself, breathing deep. All possibilities, endless worlds, other lives. But when I opened my eyes I was still Jake Danser, still here, still in this cell.

  34.

  In the Marin County jail, the cells are grouped in pods, and each pod has its own common area. Everything in the pod is controlled electronically, and at certain times of the day the cell doors unlock, allowing you into the commons. I stood in line now waiting for my turn at the phone. I could see one of my fellow prisoners hunched in the phone booth on the other side of the surveillance glass. His ten minutes were all but expired. There were two more men in front of me. My fever had returned. My mouth was dry. My knees trembled.

  I know what some of you are thinking. If I was innocent it wouldn’t really matter. Let Grazzioni say what he wanted. Let him implicate me in every strangulation between here and Tehachapi, because when the circumstances were examined, Grazzioni’s testimony would be revealed for what it was.

  Only how could I be sure? Better men than myself have been put away with less cause.

  The prisoner hung up. Another man took his place. I edged forward. He finished his call and I edged up again.

  A guard tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Your appointments here. The psychiatrist.”

  “Can I make my phone call?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been waiting my turn here.”

  “Your turn is over,” he said. “Come with me.”

  The guard escorted me down the hall to an interview room where Madison Paulie waited once again, smiling and affable, regarding me with the same half-turned head and quizzical glance as before, as if peering at me from around the side of a houseplant. He was an odd man. Curious about me, no doubt. Wondering if I was guilty. If my tears were feigned. If I was the man I seemed or some facsimile, some second image that reflected back onto the first. No matter, I wasn’t insane by legal standards, surely he would see that. I was capable of standing trial and participating in my own defense. Ultimately that was all
he had come to determine. But the conversation could go wrong, I knew. It could go wrong and I could end up at Napa or he could come to other conclusions that would send the case spinning in a direction I did not anticipate. So I had to be at my best.

  “Last time, during our discussion, we touched on Blackout Syndrome. Do you remember?” he asked.

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Given your background, you must be familiar with the use of the term in criminal cases. Regarding patients who claim amnesia. Total loss of memory in regard to the crime itself.”

  His manner was more relaxed than last time, congenial in an off-hand way—as if the official part of the interview were over and we were just chatting now.

  “I’m familiar with the syndrome. Or alleged syndrome, I should say.”

  “What’s your opinion?”

  He was flattering me, I knew, but I was willing to play along. “Most of them are malingering,” I said. “Most of them are liars. But not all. Sometimes, if outside forces are powerful enough—the mind can be overwhelmed. Plummeted into darkness.”

  “Was that your opinion in the Dillard case?”

  I shook my head. “That whole defense was misguided. An embarrassment.”

  “Yes, attorneys. They’ll push the limits sometimes. Against our better instincts. It’s an ethical dilemma—but let me tell you something.” His eyes were earnest, fixated with a certain light. “I had a case not so long ago. It centered around a young man, a serial murderer. The evidence against him was overwhelming. He claimed he couldn’t remember what he had done. Eventually he broke down in front of the jury, crying, full of remorse, as his memories swept over him in a flood. In the end, the jury sent him to an asylum.”

  “I have heard of such cases,” I told him.

  Like I said, I understood what Paulie was doing, talking to me on the professional level, flattering me up.