The Confession (17 page)

Jamie ushered me inside the barber’s shop. Though it should have been apparent, I could not figure at first how come she had brought me here.

“Untie the pony,” said Jamie.

“I don’t understand.”

“My man here, he gives the best cuts. And there’s no appointments.”

“I thought we were headed to Bodega.” Lovingly, with a sense of impending loss, I touched my hair. It was superficial of me, I admit, but I can’t help my concern with such things. Maybe it has to do with growing up poor, relatively speaking—and so appearance takes on an exaggerated importance. I notice the details, the cut of a man’s clothes, or a woman’s, their shoes, the car they drive, the style, the surface of things. Odd concerns for someone in my profession, perhaps, whose job is to look into the depths; but I would not be the first to insist upon a relationship, however skewed, between the surface and what lies beneath. “I have my own stylist,” I said. “I get my hair trimmed every few weeks. This man here, he can tell you that, just looking. I don’t need a cut.”

The barber shrugged. He was a big man with a jailhouse tattoo. “If you’re going to court, you need a cut,” he said.

“Juries don’t like ponytails,” said Jamie. “Not on men. Or on women either, for that matter. And as far as the general public goes, you’re already on trial. It’s an image problem.”

“She’s right,” said the barber.

“I look fine.”

“Vain,” she said. “Too conscious of style.”

“No”

“Arrogant.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You’ll be convicted,” said the barber.

In the end, I relented. I sat in the chair and the barber unbanded my pony, trimming it away, then trimming some more, taking my hair back shorter than I’d worn it in years. He did a reasonable job, I admit—and I enjoyed this new angle on my face, more exposed, more raw and wholesome. Nonetheless, when he was done, I looked down at the black and silver strands lying on my slacks with a genuine sadness. “I feel naked.”

Jamie ignored me.

“Your wife’s riding down separately with one of my people. This’ll give us a chance to talk, you and me, on the way over.”

We headed north to Petaluma in her Mercedes, then took I-16 slanting west toward the ocean. Jamie and I both sported disguises of a sort. Jamie wore her russet hair in a high swirl, with a curl trailing down each cheek. She wore brown slacks and red boots and except for her size did not much resemble the woman who’d picked me up at the jail-house a few days before. My short hair gave me a regular guy look. I dressed pretty much the same as usual, a button down shirt, dark slacks, an Italian-cut Angora sweater. I wore one of those sports caps though, and dark shades, and for good measure a small mustache the barber had fixed on with adhesive.

“What do you need to know?” I asked.

We were on the outskirts of Petaluma now, working our way through mud hollows and gravel washes and high yellow hills that had been chicken ranches and dairy farms not too many years back. The old ranches had been divided into five acre lots, and there were mailboxes at the edge of the road, and gravel drives that snaked back from the mailboxes to hidden valleys covered with orange poppies. Mobile homes crouched here and there, and custom giants made of stucco and glass. Up ahead, the terrain changed quickly. It was apple country and the cider stands slouched along the highway. “The night, at Sara Johnson’s house, what happened?”

I told her the story then pretty much as I’d told it to the police. It had taken on the air of truth to me, as stories do when they are told often enough. I looked out the window. The apple country wouldn’t last long. It was a transitional zone between estate parcels and the forest ahead, where the soil was full of rock.

“So you’re telling me you had sex with this woman that night at the party?”

“Yes. Out at the arbor.”

“You ejaculated?”

“Yes.”

“While inside her vagina?”

“Yes.”

“So those tissue samples out at the jail yesterday, when they come back from the federal lab, with the DNA analysis—the police are going to find a match. Your sperm, inside her vagina”

“I suspect so.”

We drove through redwoods now, a forest of trees, high and thin, shooting upwards from old stumps and pine needles and slanting creeks choked with debris. Overhead, above the crowning trees, I glimpsed the coastal light, the sky blue and dizzy. This was the other California, the one that was wet and damp, where the sun didn’t quite reach the forest floor. Full of mold spores and ferns and ugly little plants that never stopped growing.

“What you just told me—it means we won’t be in position to dispute the physical evidence.”

“I understand.”

“It’s going to be your version—against theirs.”

“Yes.”

Tour wife seems somewhat confused. She’s not sure what to believe.”

“She knows I would never do such a thing.”

“Did she visit you in jail?”

“No”

Another curve. Then another. After a while we crossed a bridge and pulled onto Highway One and started to climb, so pretty soon the road was high above the ocean. The blue sky had disappeared and it was all fog. I glanced at her hands on the shift knob. Nimble hands with red fingernails and a gold bracelet around the wrist. Plenty of jewelry. I looked her over then and she felt me looking and shifted gears in a way that told me I could look till kingdom come, it didn’t matter to her.

“I asked Elizabeth some questions, in regard to some rumors I’ve been hearing.”

“Elizabeth is a sensitive woman,” I said. “She has a lot of pride.”

“These rumors, they involve the prosecutor and your wife.” Jamie downshifted, and I listened to the sound of the motor racketing against the hillside for a second, then fading as the cliff fell away. We thrummed along in the fog. Jamie shifted again and a thin smile creased her face. “I can understand how you would be reluctant to talk about it. Elizabeth certainly was. Except from a defense point of view, that kind of information . . .” She stopped herself then, and the smile faded. “Right now, a ceasing of hostilities might be nice. There’s some things that need to be worked out.”

“You’re thinking about your fee?”

“Indirectly, I suppose, I’m always thinking of my fee. But before we talk about that, before the three of us have our meeting, I’d like you and Elizabeth to spend some time together. Talk things out, the two of you. You need a reconciliation of sorts. Nothing grand. Just enough so we can all sit down together and talk.”

She drove firmly, in control of the road, and it wasn’t long before we arrived. The lodge was just off the main highway—a wind-driven place on a bluff overlooking the ocean. There was no doorman, so I dragged our luggage into the lobby. The clerk was just getting to us when Elizabeth arrived. She wore those oversized glasses of hers and kept her hair under a scarf.

We didn’t say much to each other in the lobby. It seemed like maybe we should have, but we didn’t. I was an accused murderer, standing in the lobby of an oceanside bed-and-breakfast with my wife and my attorney, but there just wasn’t anything to say. The clerk directed us to the second floor.

As it turned out Elizabeth’s room and mine adjoined, and the door between us stood open. She and I lingered on either side of that threshold, regarding each other through the passageway.

“It’s good to see you,” I said.

“You, too,” she said, though her voice was less than convincing.

“It looks like we got our trip to the coast after all.”

“So it seems.”

She turned her back on me, unpacking her things. “You can close the door if you want your privacy, “ I said. “I won’t be offended.”

“I’m not frightened.”

“No, of course not. There’s no reason you should be.”

The smell of the ocean filled the place. I put my suitcase on my bed. I went down the hall, exploring. There wasn’t much to see, just the kind of trinkets and antiques you might expect in a place like this, driftwood and seashells and a few pieces of furniture from the old days, when this building had been the town grade school, or nursatorium, or whatever it said in the fine print on the tourist brochure. After a few minutes I came back.

The connecting door was closed.

Later that day, at Jamie’s insistence, Elizabeth and I descended the narrow sidewalk into town. Bodega Bay was a gray emptiness over the scudding ocean. It was wind and pampas grass and a jumble of houses on a ragged slope that tumbled down to the sheltered inlet below. We stood at the moorage and looked back up at the houses: the old clapboard ones and the fisherman’s cottages and the smooth new homes of colored concrete and tinted glass.

“I’m sorry to put you through this,” I said.

The road bent away from the moorage to the main street, more or less sheltered from the wind. Not much of a town really. A drug store and some tourist shops. We had done this kind of thing a hundred times during our marriage. Killing time, idling through shops. Elizabeth touched the merchandise and a kind of paleness filled my head. The world smelled of filigreed bedclothes and gray clouds.

We fell into this by rote, because we had done it before, and it was my best hope now, I knew, this roteness, the way habits of mind accompany certain actions, then the emotions follow, too, running down familiar paths, returning us to where we have been.

“I’ve done some foolish things.”

“Indeed,” she said. “You have.”

We made our way down the street now to a cafe with clear glass windows and an asphalt parking lot. I got a glimpse of the two of us in the glass as we walked in. We were other people. A couple on holiday.

“But I’m not a murderer,” I said. “You know that. I didn’t kill anyone.”

It is the kind of thing you are compelled to say in my situation but which sounds less believable with each repetition. As we sat there, waiting for our coffee, Elizabeth regarded me closely, in a way I had not felt her regard me before, and I could sense her mulling me over, reserving judgment.

Outside the window, the gray of the asphalt seemed to merge with the gray of the ocean. It was the endless gray of the coast, of rain in the distance and clouds overhead and salt-stained wood. Everywhere windows overlooked the sea.

“I still have my hopes,” I said.

“About what?”

I smiled then, my best smile, sweet as I could, though there was a part of me watching as if from the outside, mocking. Even so, I was not insincere.

“I love the sound of your voice,” I said. “You know, I always have.”

In the past, when I said something like that, out of the blue, a compliment from nowhere, she would smile back, knowing my tactics but not caring, taking the flattery.

Even now, I thought, there was a hint of a smile. Even though she had all but abandoned me. Even though she had not visited me in jail.

“Hopes about what?” she asked

“Us.”

The ocean swelled. A single black bird scuffled over the asphalt plaza; it perched on a stone, hunching there like an angry little man. Then it squawked and flew away, joining a dozen or so birds of identical carriage on a wire overhead. They were black-winged with gray breasts, and they surveyed the scene like judges on a panel, gazing about with hard black eyes.

“Don’t push,” she said.

“I don’t mean to push. It’s just—time is short.”

“Once, I used to believe the things you told me.” She had a little twist to her lips, a turn of the mouth that made her seem detached from what she said. “You’re good at disguising things. Smoothing things over. A word here. A smile. Sometimes lately I don’t know if I can stand to have you look at me again. Then, other times . . .”

She let it trail off.

Some more birds had joined the others. They stood along the wires there.

“You shouldn’t be seeing Minor Robinson,” I said.

“He’s an old friend.”

“It doesn’t look so good with him trying to put me away. Besides, it makes me jealous.”

She didn’t say anything to this. We finished our coffee, and the waitress brought the check and we went outside. The wind was loud and gave the sense of the world being reduced to its elements. The sidewalk was old and crumbling.

“I want things to be how they used to be,” I said.

“You pursued me pretty hard,” she said.

“I was head over heels.”

She looked at me then with eyes that were very clear and I could see beneath her fragility an iciness that if you could crack it, if you could penetrate it. . . then . . . I didn’t know.

If you pierce our shells, crack the exterior, then . . .

“I still the feel the same,” I said.

She crossed her arms in front of her, clutching the wind-breaker close to her body. It was a practical piece of clothing, off the rack, plain and ordinary, not like her usual wardrobe at all. Her face was pale and young-seeming under the scarf. Here and there her hair tufted out, wispy and flaxen.

“Lately, I’ve been wondering if I really ever knew you,” she said.

I took off the mustache. “I’m Jake Danser,” I said, smiling like an idiot. “Your husband.”