The Confession (21 page)

Our bedroom had a glass slider onto the deck. From where I stood, I could see Elizabeth sitting on the bed, raw-boned and beautiful, lost in one of her books.

I worked my way around to the other end of the house, to the French doors off the den. Soon I stood in the big room at the center of the house. The foyer was in front of me, opening to the bedroom hall. To the other side was the kitchen and the dining room table, and on the serving board near the table lay a set of cutlery.

A teapot whistled in the kitchen, low and faint at first, then louder. In a moment Elizabeth appeared, illuminated in the hall light, wearing her silk night jacket over her black pajamas. Her complexion was pale, as I have mentioned, and her hair was moon white, and she walked barefoot across the tile with her back arched and her head up. She was matter-of-fact in her elegance, and despite everything I found it hard not to reveal my presence to her. She glanced into the shadows, but she did not see me. The room was big, the shadows long and dark—and she passed through the vestibule into the kitchen to prepare her tea.

I listened to her clattering and tried to determine how I should position myself inside the house. Where should I be when Minor arrived, and what should I do? The impossibility of my situation seemed suddenly immense. I wondered if I should just step out of the shadows and tell Elizabeth my story. I imagined her backing away, not believing. It sounded wild even to me. So I stood in the dark. Then she appeared in the vestibule, holding a cup carefully in front of her, going back the way she had come.

I waited then, alone in the shadows, and what kind of thoughts went through my mind, what images, what impulses, I cannot tell you without you thinking the worse of me. I loosened my tie, though, I will tell you that much. I imagined Elizabeth beneath me in the dark, her body contorted in ways the body does not contort—no, it was Minor she was beneath, not me (the faces shift, as in a dream)—and then the pair of them jerked up, surprised, as I entered the room from behind.

The doorbell rang.

Elizabeth answered and I glimpsed Minor under the porch light. I saw his good looks, his boyish cunning. His manner was reserved, like a good man back from some hard duty. I watched his hand fall down her back and linger on her waist, touching the robe, the soft fabric; then they kissed and I felt something like a knife in my heart. I glanced at the shelf then, at the little statue there, the lascivious Buddha with his hands on his belly, laughing. Maybe this was the real reason I had come. To watch. To discover for myself if the rumors were true. Part of me was sickened and fearful, but another part relished the moment. As Elizabeth turned from him, I glimpsed her face. Her lips were gaping and voluptuous, and her eyes were focused inward. She was not in love with him after all, I told myself. He had been groping her. She had gone to him because she was angry—because she wanted some small revenge.

“I can’t stay long,” he said.

“You don’t think Jake is actually on the run do you? I mean, couldn’t he just be out somewhere, for the evening?” She was calm, full of the Southern willingness to be reasonable and hospitable, but beneath her decorum she was afraid. I heard the shake in her voice, however slight, and how her accent went soft, like it used to at night sometimes, lying beside me. “Part of me, I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Don’t worry.”

She trembled again, more visibly now. She clutched herself and shivered on the tile floor. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t have my slippers. Do you mind if I go get them?”

“No. I’ll make you a drink, if you like.”

“I was just having some tea—but all right. Pour me one.” Minor sauntered into the kitchen and emerged at the other end of that room. I watched him through the open archway. He pulled a bottle of J&B out of the cabinet and placed it on the counter. He turned my way then, squareshouldered and whistling like a fool, headed for the cocktail glasses in the living room hutch.

He did not see me at first. Then his posture stiffened and I felt things about to go haywire. I stepped forward with the gun pointed at his chest.

“Stay where you are.”

I reached up under his jacket, patting him down, but I already had his gun. I’d taken it from his house. I made him take off the jacket altogether. I searched the pockets.

“I know what you’re up to,” I said, “the Liquid Ecstasy. Where is it?”

We stood in the living room, in the gloom. I caught our reflection in the window just behind him. There was a beam of light from the kitchen and Minor glowed a little bit in his white shirt. I stood like a shadow nearby, still wearing his clothes, the jacket I had taken from the closet, the tie. If anyone saw us from outside, they might easily mistake one for the other. I was Minor. He was me. So if by chance you could step outside this story, and see our images reflected in the window glass this moment, right now, you might be confused about which man it was who reached out then and put that small vial on the table. You might look from the reflections in the glass to the people standing before you and wonder whose hand it was that had snaked out of the darkness and left the bottle behind, and some of you might even believe the story the police tried to tell later: that it was I who’d brought the GHB, and Minor who’d tried to intervene.

“You killed Angela,” I said. “You killed her and fixed the blame on Dillard. Then you killed Sara.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You did the same with those other women, too, didn’t you? Doping them up. Framing their lovers. Sometimes, you even got it to stick. Now you mean to do the same to Elizabeth. You mean to strangle her same as the others, and blame me.”

“It’s you.
”

His voice was a whisper, so faint I wondered if he’d said anything at all, or if it was my imagination. He stood there like a stone, barely breathing, watching me.

“You.
”

I laughed then. These psychopaths. Always switching things about. Comer them and they hold up a mirror. Try to blame the one who has discovered their crimes.

He looked at me as if I were the one who’d gone mad. As if I were the one whispering in the dark.

“Get on the floor,” I told him, not knowing what I meant to do once I had him prone on the ground. Elizabeth would be back soon, and when she came i would have to do something. It would my word against his, her husband against this man on the floor—but I was in no way certain how she would choose.

“Get down.”

He made a movement as if to comply, then suddenly swiveled his head. “Elizabeth,” he yelled. It was a risky thing to do, I might have shot him, but instead I turned my head, looking, and in that instant he moved swiftly. He kicked the gun from my hand. I went after it, but he lacked it again, so it went spinning across the carpet, then he hit me hard in the face. My head snapped, I was stunned, and he plunged towards the cutlery table. I grabbed his hand. I tried to twist the knife away from him, but my footing was poor, and he forced me against the wall. I gripped his wrist. The blade was between us, in his hand, and I struggled to push it away.

Then I saw Elizabeth at the other end of the room. She was in a crouch, picking up the gun.

My hand slipped.

“Elizabeth,” I gasped.

Whether she recognized the voice as mine, or his, I had no idea. It was an animal voice, full of pain. He had stabbed me, and in that instant time suspended itself. Minor and I stared into each other’s eyes. He had his hand on the hilt. I felt my blood pulse. Across the room, the muzzle flashed in Elizabeth’s hand.

Minors back arched. He keeled away, turning towards Elizabeth. Then he stumbled to the floor. He ended on his back, halfway between us. I pulled the knife from my stomach and covered my wound with my hand. I moved toward my wife, out of the shadows.

“Elizabeth,” I said again.

I could see the disbelief in her face

“No!” she cried

I took another step. Minor lay at my feet. The world was blackening.

“No!”

She had mixed us up. Me, in Minors jacket, against the wall. Him, in his white shirt. She had confused us one for the other. I staggered toward her, bleeding, the knife still in my hand.

“No!”

She fired, point blank. Then she fired again. My body jerked. A wild flame burned inside my chest. I felt an excitement in my loins, the death excitement, I thought, I am dying. I fell down, on top of Minor, and the blade slipped through my fingers and onto the floor.

I should be dead, I suppose. After all I was the criminal at large. I had been stabbed in the belly, then fired upon twice at close range. Even so, Minors wound was through the heart, while my wounds, bloody and spectacular as they might have been, were not enough to carry me away. The one bullet had gone wide, the other lodged high in the shoulder. The knife wound had been more serious, but the county trauma unit had done a wonderful job. Minor, on the other hand, had been dead on arrival.

The police had come out to Golden Hinde the night of the shooting, but my memories of the shooting’s aftermath are hazy and jump-cut. Dream images, almost. Minor lay dead beneath me. His lips were parted, his eyes open. Someone rolled me off him. They weren’t too gentle about it, and I ended face up, with my hand across my stomach and the blood seeping through my shirt. Then a rescue squad burst through the door. They put me on a gurney, and I saw myself as if from above, my hands bloody, a froth at my lips, foamy and pink; meanwhile Elizabeth sat not far away, there on the sectional couch, hands between her knees. She was pale and calm in the way that people sometimes are when something terrible has happened. A cop leaned over her, trying to get some kind of statement.

They took her downtown later that night, I know. Though I wasn’t there, I can imagine the scene well enough.

I can see Milofski in his rumpled shirt, and Elizabeth in her black pajamas, and Ted Hejl the lawyer by her side, with his suspenders and his cotton shirt and his accent carefully modulated to sound as if he were from nowhere at all.

What did she tell them?

The truth, I suppose.

That she’d seen two men struggling. That she’d shot Minor by accident, thinking he was the intruder. And when I stumbled from the shadows, holding the knife in my hand . . .

The memory grew more vivid. I stood with the family cutlery in my gut, looking into my wife’s eyes.

Had she recognized me before she fired?

I could hear her voice telling them how she’d been afraid when she saw us struggling in the shadows. She hadn’t known who was who, or even that the intruder was me. It was the same voice that had whispered to me hotly once upon a time, and the same voice, too, that had grown remote these last months, scolding me bitterly on the hillside

Another DA’s office might have reacted differently, but in the end they had decided not to prosecute Elizabeth. She was the victim. A confused woman, acting in self-defense.

I was the one they wanted.

On account of my condition, Jamie managed to secure me a room outside the county jail, in a private recuperation facility over in Ross. She kept me sequestered there. The police wanted to blame the shooting on me, as I have said, but it was difficult. It was clear I had not fired the gun. I was not trespassing—as it was my house, and there was no restraining order preventing me from being there. It wasn’t even clear I’d been resisting arrest.

I lay recuperating for quite some time. There was a risk of an infection, and I ran one of those troubling fevers, on-again, off-again, that rose and peaked and vanished, only to return once more at the last moment, just as I was about to be taken to the county jail.

There was a television in the room, and also a telephone, and a cop outside the door. The nurses were frightened of me, but Jamie stopped by on a regular basis, and she stood by my bed when Milofski took my statement, making sure I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t. We played it pretty tight, and it got on Milofski’s nerves—but my story was simple. That afternoon, when I’d disappeared from the apartment, I’d had no idea the cops were looking for me; no, I’d gone out to Golden Hinde to visit my wife. When she didn’t answer, I went around back. I’d called out her name as I came in the door. Then Minor jumped me, thinking I was an intruder. We tussled in the dark and Elizabeth shot before the whole thing got sorted out.

When I was finished with my story, Milofski grinned. It was his bear grin, and it told me he wanted to grab me by the collar and throttle me and hiss in my face while I gasped for air.

“We found a bottle of Liquid X sitting on the table. Do you have any idea how it got there?”

I paused a moment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you come there with the idea of drugging your wife, and killing her, the same way you did Sara Johnson?”

Jamie interrupted. “You’re straying into bad taste, Milofski. Our cooperation here is voluntary.”

“Why did your wife shoot you, you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The room was dark. Maybe she couldn’t see too well.”

“Yeah. Or maybe she don’t like you so much.”

Milofski started to laugh now, a noise that came from deep in his gut, and you could see in him his Russian ancestry, the Cossack giving some poor no-good a push in the belly, a little poke with the bayonet. He was just getting started, but Jamie cut him short.