The Confession (16 page)

“Let me give you a short list,” I said. “You call around.

Vouch for my character. And my ability to pay.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said. He did not seem as enthusiastic as I might have liked, but I gave him the list and he took down the names on the other end. I could hear him typing into his computer.

“Is there any one you’d prefer?”

I didn’t hesitate.

“Kaufman,” I said.

Jamie Kaufman was the attorney Dillard had mentioned the other day. Queen Jamie. Princess of the Damned, they called her. Defender of child molesters and incestuous fathers and women who’d murdered their own children. Bad company, maybe—but Jamie Kaufman won more often than she lost. She was busy, I knew, but she was good, and mine was the kind of case that might interest her these days. High profile—and the client had money.

“I’ll call her,” Hejl said at last. “And the others as well.”

“One more favor,” I asked. “Can you get in touch with Elizabeth for me?”

Hejl paused. When he did speak, there was the reserve again, the hesitancy. “I should tell you,” he said. “I talked to Elizabeth a couple of days ago. She’s considering a divorce.” I understood his hesitancy now; he was her attorney, after all, and maybe this was a conflict for him. I understood, maybe, but I didn’t like it.

“Tell her I’d like to see her very much, if you could. Tell her, please. I’d appreciate that.”

“I’ll give her the message.”

Our conversation ended and the guards took me down another hall through the electronic gates into one of pods, past a surveillance window, through the common area, into an empty cell. The walls were gray, and the energy inside the space was trapped. It was not a pleasant place. It had bad Feng Shui.

In solitary, facing the possibility you may never emerge, it’s funny the thoughts that come to you. You see yourself as a little lad. You see your mom across the room, with those big sad eyes of hers. You see yourself dancing through time, all the people you have been. Then you see your wife on the tennis courts on Magnolia Avenue, just before dusk, simmering along the blacktop in her white skirt, and you remember the perfect unity in that moment, all the desires of all your many selves focused on her shadow knifing through the twilight. You see yourself under the moon, sliding into the sauna, and you remember your hand rippling towards her. You put your lips over hers and feel her move beneath you, there in the water, your hand touching her breasts, her neck, the pearls, and then you hear the voices rising up through the ventilation ducts,
Who am I?
, the voices of all those prisoners, whispering in the darkness, and you fear you will never get out of here, that you will never attain the simple wonder you almost had, you almost possessed, that moment, sometime in your past.

Elizabeth did not come to visit me in jail the next day. Nor did Ted Hejl the attorney. Nor any of his emissaries.

Another night passed. Another morning.

Then a guard came and led me down the cellblock to a dank little room where the table and chairs were bolted to the floor and there was a panic button on the wall. I was told to sit and wait, and after about fifteen minutes a woman sauntered in.

She was a small woman. Not handsome, no, not by the usual standards, but there was something about her presence, very raw and blunt, difficult to ignore.

She took my hand.

“Kaufman,” she said.

Milofski and Minor Robinson entered the room. A step behind them was a man in a white lab coat, carrying a black bag.

“Jamie Kaufman,” I said. “I’m so happy to see you.”

She smiled the smile of a person who understands her own importance. She was in her mid-forties, ugly and good-looking at the same time, well-endowed but slump-shouldered, with eyes that took you in at a glance and suggested she already knew more about you than you might like.

“Are you taking my case?”

“They don’t have enough evidence to press charges. Not yet,” she said. “So they’re going to have to let you go.”

“For the time being,” said Minor. He was not pleased.

Queen Jamie had a glossy smile, not quite real, but underneath you could sense her intelligence, hard and wry. She had a dark complexion and mahogany hair. She wore a skirt suit, electric green, and a flame-colored scarf. She’d grown up in the garment district and moved to San Francisco a dozen years back. She’d made a reputation for herself on account of her unscrupulous behavior, and her ability to manipulate the press.

Minor’s distaste for her was clear. “Before your client gets out of here, we need some tissue samples.”

The man in the lab coat began to unpack his bag.

“A little taste of your blood, that’s all,” Milofski said to me. “Some hair. A scrape of skin.”

I turned to Queen Jamie. “Do I have any choice?”

“They don’t have a court order,” she said. “But they can get one. My advice, give them what they want. Then let’s be on our way.”

The man in the lab coat clipped a little bit of my hair and put it into an evidence baggie. He scraped some skin from my fingertips. He drew my blood. I felt a horrible emptiness at the pit of my being. That emptiness grew larger as I watched the syringe fill.

“I’m dizzy.”

Milofski laughed. “You’re a gem, you know that. A priceless land of guy.”

He shoved a paper bag at me. The rest of them left, all but Queen Jamie.

I looked inside the bag.

My street clothes.

I grinned.

“I wouldn’t celebrate yet,” she said.

Her voice had a certain polish, but I could hear the urban squalor just underneath—the sound of a gull overhead, winging its way across the Jersey marsh. “Your friend, Minor Robinson, he’s going to pursue an indictment. I’m all but certain.”

“I’m innocent.”

She gave me another smile now, all alone, one on one. It was the smile of someone who had dealt with a million cons.

When I got out of jail, there was nowhere for me to go. My trailer had been sealed off, and my car was in impound. Queen Jamie made arrangements; she found me temporary quarters in an apartment owned by one of her cronies—a fellow lawyer who spent half the year down in Argentina. The building stood down by the old Corte Madera lagoon, on a road that twisted along the creek and ended on the backside of 101, in a wash of gravel and noise, from the street the place looked pretty battered, but inside a picture window overlooked the lagoon. It was surprisingly quiet. Through the window I could see an egret out on the water, and a path along the levee, winding back into a ragged bit of wetlands.

“I’d like you to stay close to the apartment,” she told me. “Inside, preferably. Your face is all over the news right now, and I don’t need the press camping outside.”

“Will I have to go back?”

“Where?”

“To jail.”

“If the tests go their way, if they have enough for an indictment. Bails not likely, not in a case like this. They’ll arrest you, and hold you for trial.”

“I don’t know if I can do that. If I can spend that time. My wife . . .”

“Let’s see what happens.” She patted my shoulder then, the same way I had patted Dillard’s. “Just stay put,” she said. “I’ll give you a call this evening. I have some ideas.”

“My wife and I, we’re estranged.”

“I know.”

“I’d like to see her.”

“Your estrangement might be a problem, image-wise. Or it might be to our advantage.”

“I’d like to see her,” I said again.

“Just stay put, please. I’ll call you later.”

I hung close to the apartment for a while, but I needed air and the path through the marsh was too tempting. So I put on an old sweater I found in the closet and a fishing cap and some sunglasses and went out for a walk.

The path ran along a berm on the inland side of the Corte Madera marsh, then joined my old jogging path, snaking over this way from Lucky Drive. As I brooded along that trail, the terrain grew more familiar, and I remembered Minor Robinson’s house nearby—on the last street of a subdivision that backed into the marsh. When I reached his place I glanced down and saw the sliding door still as it had been, crooked in its track. It would be easy enough to get inside, I thought; I could rummage through his life in the same way he and his buddies were rummaging through mine. It wouldn’t be wise, though. Instead I wandered back through the marsh, thinking about Elizabeth. I whistled, but forlornly, like one of those loons that haunts the edges of the water.

Back in the apartment, I dialed Elizabeth’s number. There was no answer. She had disconnected the machine. Dodging the press, maybe. Avoiding me.

Later that evening, Jamie Kaufman called, as she promised she would. She was an abrupt woman, artless and disarming, but I was glad to hear from her nonetheless. She’d made arrangements for a strategy session in Bodega, an old fishing town up the coast, a couple of hours north. “Your wife will be there. And me, of course. We’ll spend a couple of days.”

“You talked to Elizabeth?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t know if she’ll go along.”

“She has a role in this case—and she’ll understand. It’s in her interest.”

“Shouldn’t we talk in advance,” I said. “Me and you. So you can get a clear idea . . .”

“Friday—I’ll be by your place. First thing in the morning. We can talk on the drive over. In the meantime, don’t call her. Don’t go to her. Let me handle this.”

I realized the police had no intention of letting my car out of impound, so I got myself a rental in Larkspur, a functional car, plain as they make them, that wouldn’t draw any attention. Though my name and face were all over the local media, the man at the rental counter didn’t recognize me. Or if he did recognize me, he didn’t let on. Myself, I just wanted some breathing room. I drove out the Panoramic Highway up the spine of Mt. Tamalpais. It was a well-trafficked road, popular with tourists and weekenders from the city. For those who knew its history, it was a spiritual center, that mountain. The place where the old transcendentalists had meditated under the redwoods. Where Gertrude Stein had built a Buddha out of paper mache, and the Dali Lama had rewritten the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

I knew the old legends, how the mountain itself was a maiden girl, daughter of the sun, transformed to stone by her father when she got uppity and mean with greed. So now she lay slumbering, and her dreams manifested themselves in the lives of the people who strolled her hillsides. According to the stories our world would last only so long as she lay sleeping, dreaming, and would vanish when she woke.

I walked in solitude along the path towards the summit. Marin lay below me. Near the top, there was an outcrop known as Spirit Rock, and from there you could see in all directions, towards the Pacific, or east to the bay, or down slope to Cathedral Grove and Muir Woods. Closer by, I could see in a gully the remains of the Eighth Way Retreat, a commune that had been built on the shell mounds of the old Miwoks. I could see also the television towers across the narrows, on a hill in the city.

I stood on the outcrop. There was a smooth spot in the stone, worn by visitors, and I sat there and crossed my legs.

I closed my eyes.

The white noise rose from the valley floor, the sound of machines turning and people laughing and trucks grinding on the highway all mixed into one sound, I imagined, into the wind along with the noise of jackhammers and pneumatic drills. It was easy enough to imagine as well the whispering of the broadcast towers, the sales pitches and the news, all that noise in the wind. I concentrated on my breathing. Telling myself I was searching for nothing, just being, as you are supposed to tell yourself at such moments, though in reality you are searching for everything, this moment, up on the mountain.

For an instant, maybe, I felt the membrane between myself and the world dissolve.

I saw myself as if from above. I watched that man below me, with his legs crossed. He couldn’t be still. He began to tremble, and in my mind’s eye I saw him rise to his feet. He began to swear, to curse. To kick at the dirt. He pounded his head on the stones. He raged on—trapped in the maidens dream—but the mountain was oblivious. The maiden went on sleeping until he exhausted himself, collapsing onto the dirt.

I had my moment of peace then.

I got up and drove down the hill. I was tempted to keep going, to drive and never come back. I could probably outsmart the police. I could probably vanish if I wanted, escape, change identities, never be found again. But there was no need for that, I told myself. I had a good attorney and my own wits. I would extricate myself, I was sure, though I thought, too, of what I’d told the police, how the killer was still out here, and I felt a sense of danger beneath the veneer of the moment, everything about to break loose.

Just as she’d promised, Jamie came by early the next morning. She didn’t talk much but took me straightaway to a barbershop out in Santa Venetia, on the north end of San Pedro. The salon, if you wanted to call it that, was on a busy intersection across the way from the Civic Center and the County Jail. There was a bail bondsman in the office overhead and a deli around the corner and attorneys of various stripes had hung their shingles on the side street that ran haphazardly up the hill, eventually narrowing to a bottle-strewn path that took you—if you followed it far enough—to a homeless encampment in an old creek bed. Men fresh out of jail took that path, sometimes—along with joggers who did not know any better, looking for a pleasant trail through the woods.