The Confession (19 page)

A red-headed woman in her mid-forties looked at me hard. She was the store owner, I gathered, the girl’s mother—a spitting image only forty pounds heavier. She studied me, then raised a hand to her lips. Her mouth made a perfect oval.

“Aren’t you that man—that psychologist I saw on the news. The one . . .”

The pair of them looked at me in a land of awe. I thought of the image of myself on the television since my arrest—playboy psychiatrist, psycho shrink—thousands of images broadcast over the air and duplicated so at any particular time there were hundreds of thousands of light-filled versions of myself in living rooms throughout the Bay Area. Mother and (laughter seemed to glow, entering that space with me. The girl let her hand fall between her legs.

“Can I take your picture?” asked the mother.

Jamie stepped up. I thought she would forbid it, but she surprised me again. She positioned Elizabeth next to me and crowded herself into the frame as well. “I’m his lawyer, and this is his wife,” she said. When the picture-taking was done, she handed the woman a yellow business card. On it was the name of an editor at one of the tabloids.

“Talk to this man,” she said. “He might be interested in what you’ve got there.”

Then sure enough, a few days later—after the defense fund had been established, and the documents signed—the photo appeared in the supermarkets. Below was this caption:
Amidst rumors that her clients wife has been having an affair with the prosecutor
;
legal eagle Jamie Kaufman swooped the accused and his wife off for a weekend of kisses and flowers while awaiting formal charges in the murder of Sara Johnson.

Queen Jamie was ruthless. She’d gotten Elizabeth to set up the defense fund by threatening to reveal the rumors regarding Minor Robinson. Then, once she’d gotten the fund, she’d revealed them anyway. Whether they were true or not, it didn’t matter. I understood her strategy. I would not be the only one to stand accused. Indeed, if Queen Jamie could help it, this trial wouldn’t be about me at all. No. It would be about the prosecuting attorney—and his relationship with my wife.

I was a free man, but the mechanism of the court can be a grinding thing. It holds you in limbo. Whatever my ambitions, I could not return to my life as it had been, and I could not start anew. The media was after my identity, chipping away. My practice had fallen to hell, and my trailer was under quarantine. Most of the time, I stayed close to the apartment—but I was anxious, fluttery, on the verge of flight. On one hand I could sense the police investigation moving inexorably forward, encircling me, but at the same time I could not escape the feeling that something unexpected was about to happen—some new revelation, some legal maneuver—to catapult things in a new direction. I exercised in the early morning, starting when it was still dark outside, running along the marsh, and as I ran I tried to put everything out of my mind. As the sky lightened I saw white egrets in the weeds and the houses pinkening along the marsh. The water was black. The tarn held my reflection and I saw myself moving on the water, running through the high grass under the telephone wires, darting by the pump houses as the morning broke and my shadow grew in the light.

The world shimmered.

I missed Elizabeth. I missed the age around her eyes, and the smell of her body in bed. I missed her clothes hanging in the closest.

I ran in the afternoons, too, and sometimes in the evening.

Elizabeth did not return my calls. The news stories angered her. I didn’t like them much either. It hurt my pride to hear my wife linked to another man. I wondered how much truth was behind the stories, and I wondered if Elizabeth realized the prosecution was manipulating the media as well.

Other times, I roamed in my car. Once I drove to Grazzioni’s address, on Polk Street in the city, and found his mail slot overflowing. There was no sign of him. I visited the roadside motel where Angela Mori had been seen before she was killed. I settled into one of the chaises by the pool and unbuttoned my shirt and watched the maids in the outside hall, wondering which one had seen the man in the blue suit. I wanted to ask, but it was too risky; it would raise too much suspicion. Another time I went to Angela’s old place in Mill Valley, a handsome little house with a picket fence and a birch tree out front, and I sat outside mulling her murder in my head, imagining the incident as Dillard had described it, and perhaps for a moment I felt a kindred excitement, erotic and cruel. I took a similar trip to Sara’s apartment, and one furtive day I climbed the hill above Golden Hinde and watched Elizabeth below me, working in the garden. She was beautiful, all alone, digging in the dirt.

What did I mean to accomplish by these trips?

I could tell you I sought to vindicate myself in some way. That I was looking for some secret to be revealed. For some way of connecting events that would show my innocence. I could tell you this but there are people, I fear, who will never accept any explanation I put forth. I was doing what all criminals do, they say. Visiting the scene.

I had just come in from one of my jogs, one warm afternoon, sweating copiously as I came up the stairs. I heard the phone ringing and I approached it with the mix of dread and hope, knowing that it could be Jamie with news of the pretrial preparations—and it might not be good news. Instead, it was Nate Jackson. The detective’s voice was so smooth and professional, so suave and out-of-the-blue, that it was hard to associate him with the overweight man who sweltered in the dusty office down off Lincoln Street.

“Tony Grazzioni’s on the lam,” he told me. “Some Vegas people. He owes them money.”

“Gambling?”

“What I hear, he’s made contact with the DA’s office, trying to work out a deal. One of those identity switches—if he gives them information on a case they’re trying to bust.”

“Where’s Grazzioni now?”

“I’m still looking—and so are his buddies.”

“So he’s in hiding, seeking asylum. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the way it looks.”

I didn’t like the news, but Nate’s voice was soothing, and I was hesitant to let him off the phone.

“Anything else?”

“No,” he said. “That’s it.”

“Call me when you find out more,” I said.

“I will.”

It wasn’t the whole story, but at least I understood why Grazzioni had vanished. He was looking to save himself by turning state’s evidence against his gambling buddies. I worried he might tell the police other things as well. Tony Grazzioni was clever, a shrewd talker. Adept at innuendo, shuffling the blame. If it were to his advantage to help Minor in my case, he might do that as well. He might do it just because he thought it was funny

The prosecution, meanwhile, was building its case against me. I read snippets in the paper, but there was nothing I could do. I hung close, like Jamie advised. I stuck to my routine.

The next morning I went jogging through the marsh once again. It kept my spirits up to run along the berms, weaving through the cattails under the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais. I felt the power of the mountain as I jogged under its shadow.

I ran hard. I followed a chaotic, shifting path through the mudflats behind the tract houses. I ran past the high school, the drainage lagoon, the park. As I ran, the morning sun shone over the pond that lay behind the ranch homes on Lakeview Drive. The first cries of the children rose happily, shrilly, on the bike path as they scooted off to school.

When I came to Minors house, I slowed to a walk.

There were parallels between our lives, it was true. We’d both been raised by single mothers. We’d both been on the fast track coming out of college. We’d both taken our first jobs in Los Angeles, and we’d both lost our wives and moved up to Marin.

We’d both studied human deviancy. His reaction had been to become a prosecutor. To drive the unwanted emotions underground. My own attitude was quite different. The nature of my profession was to understand, to enter into conversation.

I stood looking down at his house. On the walls of his office, at work, there would be charts, photos, clippings. An artificial matrix, a construction of his own making, of which I was at the center.

I thought about Minor and the resoluteness with which he pursued me. It wasn’t right, no. There was something wrong in the clockwork. I glanced down the narrow path to the garden gate. I wondered if inside Minor’s house—hidden in his papers, in his closets—I might find the key to the man, and I wondered if turning that key I might find my way out of the prosecution’s trap before it was sprung. It would be a risky thing to do, though, foolish really. I kept on my way.

That afternoon I drove my rental back into Larkspur. There was a problem with the car—it was stalling out on me, dying all of a sudden—so I returned it to the rental lot behind the Exxon station there on the comer of Dougherty and Magnolia. Larkspur was a non sequitur of a town, hacked out of the redwoods some hundred years before. It had been a logging town once—full of speakeasies and strip joints—then the German dairymen had come with their cows, and the Italian farmers with their broccoli, and these were followed by vacationers from the city, building their cottages in the hills and the flats, coming every summer to picnic, to walk in the redwoods and hunt along the shores. Now Larkspur was a bedroom community for San Fran-cisco, and the streets were lined with foreign roadsters. The sun was out and the sky was blue. You could smell the money in the air mixed with the hydrangeas. Looming above were the coastal mountains, green as the rain forest, almost as lush. There were canary palms sprouting from the eucalyptus groves, alongside pines and oak and wild plum. It was a beautiful day, and in the air there was the sense of possibility. Eyes ran toward me and away and back again. For a little while, eating lunch, I felt as if my troubles would pass. I glanced into the eyes of an older woman, elegant, vulnerable. I felt a sense of well-being just looking at her. Of recklessness and infinite possibility there beneath her tailored suit with the big buttons down the front.

Things will be all right, I told myself.

There were complications with my rental. The fuel pump needed replacing, and all the other cars were rented. They couldn’t give me a new one till tomorrow. I walked home following the creek along the public trail, then back along the gravel berm to my place, overlooking the lagoon.

The afternoon paper lay waiting on the step.

The Johnson Murder

Dead Woman’s Lover had Violent Past

Though Marin psychologist Jake Danser was released without charges in the murder of a county legal clerk, he remains at the center of the police investigation.

Research into Danser’s background has uncovered a number of similar incidents, sources say, which suggest a pattern of violence.

Before moving to Marin, Danser was accused of attempted rape and assault of a woman colleague he had met for drinks in a bar at Venice Beach. Though the charges were dropped, the incident was later cited in a divorce complaint filed by his wife at the time, who said her husband like to “troll for women”. The complaint also alleged Danser had become violent in the couples marital relations, and insistent upon anal sex.

Not long after the divorce, Amanda Danser died in a drowning accident off the coast of Baja.

In the Johnson case, the victims boyfriend recently stepped forward, claiming the psychologist had attacked Ms. Johnson several weeks before her death, in an incident which necessitated the intervention of county medical personnel.

Sources within the DA’s office have said that they are examining other leads, which may tie Danser to other cases—but the Prosecuting Attorney, Minor Robinson, would neither confirm nor deny these reports.

The story infuriated me. It was the kind of thing, once planted in the public mind, that would be difficult to dislodge. Not lies exactly but half truths, incidents exaggerated and made ugly by my first wife’s lawyer in the heat of divorce—and now repeated without mitigation, without context. None of it would be relevant in court—but that wasn’t Minors goal. He had released this information to the press to help build a public case against me, to destroy my character.

That afternoon I got on the phone to Jamie Kaufman, because things were out of control, I thought, and I did not want my case tried in the media.

One of her assistants answered.

“I want this to stop,” I said.

“Ms. Kaufman’s in Sacramento. She’ll call you back as soon as she’s able.”

“What?”

“She’s in court. Another case. “

“I need to talk to Ms. Kaufman.”

“I’ll give her the message.”

“Please.”

Even if I had gotten through to her, I don’t know how much good it would have done. The case was unfolding rapidly, and the reporters would not let it go. They pursued the bits and pieces of my life, and one of them managed to interview the paramedic who’d been called to Sara’s apartment that day I’d blacked out in Sausalito. He was on the news that evening.

“Ms. Johnson had a bruised lip,” the paramedic said. “There’d been some violence between them, that’s how it looked—but she wouldn’t admit it. Maybe she was afraid, I don’t know. Either way she was covering for him, you know, how women do.”