The Confession (11 page)

“We did an investigation into the Dillard business, yeah,” Jackson said now. “I had one of my people scope the police records, looking for a similar MO, unsolved cases. He put together a pretty theory, serial killer kind of thing. Wagoner barely glanced at it. He was focused elsewhere, as you know”

“Any primes?” I asked, and I knew I had to see that report.

“There’s a half-dozen strangulation artists out there. But no one matched our scenario.”

“How about Tony Grazzioni? Did you check him out?”

“Yeah—we checked Grazzioni out, but I don’t know. My feeling, the cops were off base on that murder charge down south. They wanted him for other things, so they dragged him in on that, too.”

“That’s his story. I don’t know if I believe it.”

“My opinion, Grazzioni, he’s a peep show guy—so to speak. Likes to look at funny pictures, talk to weirdos. Get his rocks hot peeking at other people’s laundry, then using it against them. Extortion—that’s his thing. That and gambling. Not murder.”

“So what did Wagoner think of the report?”

“He didn’t find much use for it, like I said. Except for that motel story. He leaked that one to the press.”

I remembered the story, unsubstantiated, but it had made the papers anyway: a rumor that Angela had taken a room in a motel up in Novato, accompanied by an unidentified man. The only witness was a motel maid. “Guatemalan illegal, scared of her shadow,” said Jackson.
“Vestido azul.
Blue suit, that’s all I got out of her. Wagoner could have used her in the trial, maybe, to create reasonable doubt. To show there was another man, somewhere, that might have been the murderer. But no. He didn’t think it was enough.”

“I’ve got a job for you,” I said. “Could you run a make on Grazzioni? Find out where he’s living, where he’s hanging around—that kind of thing?”

“All right, but I don’t think you’ll learn much. Not about the Dillard case anyway. He’s got no connection to the deceased—if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Probably not.” I shrugged. “But do you think I could take a look at the report you told me about? The one you put together for Wagoner?”

He hesitated once more. It was a confidential report, after all, and I could see the spot I was putting him in. “Never mind,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“No. It’s okay. That case—it’s still under your skin, isn’t it?”

“I guess. But I know how these things are. In regard to client information. You can’t just . . .”

“It’s okay. I can the get report for you. I have to dig it out, that’s all. It’s with my other files.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Meantime, let me see what I can find out about Grazzioni. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days. You can swing by—and I’ll give you everything at once.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“I’ll cover your time on this.”

“Don’t worry about it. I owe you, remember.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” I said. “Give my regards to Anabelle.”

“All right.”

“How’s she doing, anyway?”

“Great.”

His voice weakened, though, the sound of a worried parent. His daughter was in Florida, the last I’d heard, working as a governess. Who had hired her, and how much they’d known about her past, those were other matters, and not necessarily a concern of mine.

While Jackson tracked down Grazzioni, I turned my attention to other things in my life. Over the next few days, I drove out to Golden Hinde several times. I needed a few things at the house, it was true, but more than that I wanted to see Elizabeth. My timing was off—or her schedule had changed; she was never there when I arrived. I could have left a message, but I feared she would ignore it, or arrange for me to come out to the house when she was not there. I didn’t want that to happen, so I risked coming to the house unannounced. I wanted to talk. I wanted to make it up between us. The Wilder party was coming up soon—just a week away—and I had it in mind that we might still be able to go together. Maybe I was foolish, the way people are foolish when they don’t want to believe something is finished. Either way I drove out to Golden Hinde several times before at last I saw her car in the driveway—and I walked once again down the pink flagstones to our front porch. When she opened the door, she was wearing her reading glasses, new ones with tortoiseshell frames that gave her a studious look, big-eyed and prim.

“I just need to get a few things,” I said. “I hope it’s all night.”

She dressed simply, in slacks and a white sweater, but her looks still affected me. She had on the pearls, of course, and studied me warily. Her eyes seemed bluer through the reading lenses, larger and more penetrating.

“I won’t be long, I promise.”

She was not quite able to turn away from me. Maybe she wanted to, I don’t know, but something in her face softened and she let me in. I went into our bedroom and gathered some clothes I had left behind. Some good shoes, for the Wilders’ party. My linen jacket. A silk tie. It didn’t take long. I let the moment stretch, lingering in the closet there amongst her clothes. I touched one of her dresses, the sheer fabric, remembering her once upon a time as she leaned against the wall at some party, a little drunk, dallying, waiting for me to come to her, to take her outside and lean against her in the dark. I touched the collar now, I touched the hem. I let my fingers drift down the buttons.

On the dresser, there was a picture of her from when she was a child, maybe six years old, in a checkered pinafore with a wide collar. I picked up the picture and studied her eyes and they were the same eyes I knew so well, taking you apart in a glance.

At length, I left the closet. I found her at the kitchen table with books and papers spread all around.

“Research?”

She nodded, giving me the barest of glances then bowing her head to the papers. “You got what you came for, I assume.”

“I’m glad to see you getting back to it.”

“What?”

“Your book.”

“I never really left off.”

It wasn’t exactly true. The last couple of years, after her father’s death, she’d pretty much abandoned the project. On the table now lay the weather-beaten copies of some old folk tales, raw material for the analysis she’d started not long after her first divorce: a reinterpretation of the transformation stories from the point of view of depth psychology.
Bluebeard. The Bears Son. The Handless Maiden.

I knew her thesis. Stories like these were not just cautionary tales but talismans, messages from the nether land beneath human consciousness—and as such were vehicles for the re-integration of the self, the joining of the conscious and unconscious.

“What chapter you working on?”

“The last one.”

“What’s the title again, of the last chapter?”

Elizabeth was shy about this conversation, a little reluctant. Or maybe she just wanted me to leave her be. The truth was I already knew the answer. We’d had this conversation before.

“The Demon Lover,” she said.

In her book, the last chapter and the first shared the same title. That was the way the Jungians were. Everything circled upon itself. When Elizabeth and I had gotten together, she’d been exploring the anarchic principle, and the importance of welcoming it into your life.

“How are they different,” I asked now. “The first chapter and the last?”

Elizabeth pursed her lips, hesitating. She was a bright woman and understood my interest was not without ulterior motive. Even so, she couldn’t resist talking about her work.

“The opening concerns itself with the act of seduction.” Her eyes skittered over me. On the stove, a teapot had just begun to simmer.

“And the conclusion?”

“With fidelity. The union of the lovers forever.”

Her face reddened. Elizabeth was a fair woman and reddened easily—sometimes for no reason at all, it seemed—but it was embarrassing her, this conversation. The teapot grew shrill. She pushed her hands against the table and stood up, brushing past me as she went.

I could ask her about the in-between chapters, I supposed, but I knew that answer as well. The middle chapters would be about the process of transformation: the movement from one state of consciousness to the other, and acceptance of the fact that each mode had within it the seeds of the other.

I watched her at the counter, steeping the tea in a china cup. “Is there anything else?”

She stood with her back to me, in her white sweater and her slacks and her silver thongs.

“I just have a few things to get from my desk.”

The truth was, though, there was nothing in my desk I wanted. I lingered in the hall, looking at pictures from our life together. Snapshots of our honeymoon in Bangkok. Our vacations in Cancun and Santa Barbara. The Mardi Gras in New Orleans. There were pictures of her family, too: her mother, her father, her maiden aunt. The pictures went back to when she was a child, and at the center of them all was a photo of her father taken some thirty years before. He stood in his polo shirt and his pleated khakis at some community event, a lean man who had the admiration of all concerned. Fair-minded and generous. Charming. With a debonair smile. The kind of guy who did everything well. Made all kinds of money. Played golf like a son-of-a-bitch. Killed a million Japs in the war.

Elizabeth came up the hallway now, her tea cup in one hand, a book in the other, and I knew her routine: how she would spend the evening in the bedroom, sitting and reading, propped up on her pillows—but before that there would be the sauna, out on the deck, and she would let the day soak out of her, her headed tilted back, eyes half-closed, not seeing the prison across the way or Mt. Tamalpais either, shadowing the water.

“You find what you came for?”

“Just looking at the pictures.”

“Oh.”

“Your father, he was a good looking man.”

“People admired him. Yes.”

“You can see his personality, here in the picture. You can really see the life in him.”

My motivation was pretty transparent, I’m sure, but

Elizabeth seemed not to care. She was blind when it came to her father.

“He was a good man,” she said. Tears welled in her eyes all of a sudden, and she choked up as she spoke. I knew the things that touched her, I admit, and took some pleasure in her reaction. I was manipulating her, maybe, but it is the land of thing people do, sometimes, when they seek to get close to another. I’m not sure it is such a bad thing. “Did you find everything?” she asked. Though she was still angry with me, her voice was subdued and in her accent I could hear that small town where she was born. I could hear the railroad going by, and her Negro nanny, and her father, and the birds flocking to the pecan groves outside town, untended now, abandoned to the crows. I imagined for a moment the great swamp she’d walked in as a young girl, its fetid smell, the endless mud, and her laughter as the swamp stuck to her legs, sucking her deeper.

“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.”