The Confession (6 page)

It was the smell of her maybe. Something in her eyes, at once vulnerable and haughty, a glance that cut to the quick, full of presentiment, a suggestion there was something waiting ahead for us.

We kissed. I touched her all over.

If I could have lost myself inside her then, that moment at the beach, if I could have crawled inside her and disappeared, I would have done so.

Who am I?

I yearned now to be one of my other selves. One of those other Jakes. The earnest psychologist, perhaps, in love with his college teacher wife. The faithful husband.

I went away from Elizabeth into the living room. The little Buddha was there, with his mouth twisted into a smile. I found a copy of the
Examiner
and went through it. There was a story about Angela Mori. Details about the murder. There was more on the inside page. Information unearthed by the defense and leaked out to reporters. Angela’s sex life, the many men she had slept with; rumors, unsubstantiated, about secret liaisons in a hotel in Novato. An unidentified man—a man in a blue suit, the paper said. A search of the hotel records turned up nothing. The story made me uneasy.

Angela was reckless, it was true. I remembered how she’d leaned against me and put her tongue in my ear. There were always rumors about a girl like that. There was even one rumor—a joke, really, muttered in the courthouse halls—tying her to Minor Robinson.

No one believed it, though. He was too concerned with his image to risk himself like that. Too much the prig.

I laughed thinking about it, clutching the newspaper in my hand, a laugh that was a bit forced, I realize now, clumsy and awkward, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time.

I didn’t hear Elizabeth finish her bath. When I went into the bedroom, the lights were out, and she was on the edge of sleep. I put my arm around her. She was in her pajamas, white silk. She moaned softly in the dark, and I lay a little while like that, thinking about Angela Mori and also about Sara and the episode from a few days before. Lying in the dark as I was now—inside our house, on this narrow point of land, extending into the bay—it seemed to me for a moment that everything else in the world was nothing but a dream, all the events of the world, the news, the daily buzz. There was in reality nothing but this dark, and all else was illusion. I put my hand up over Elizabeth’s breast, on the outside of her pajamas, and pushed myself against her from behind. “No,” she moaned, “Honey, no,” and I pushed a little harder, feeling for the opening between the buttons in her blouse, touching her nipple, the aureole. She lay on her side, her back to me, and I cradled her buttocks with my free hand, and then I slid down the pajama bottoms “No, honey, please . . .” she said again, but that was all. She was on her stomach now. Her face was in the pillow. She began to breathe more heavily, panting more deeply. Not quite voluntary. I reached lower, between her legs. I spread her buttocks. “No,” she said, her fingers reaching, “no.” I pushed harder. She gasped as I entered from behind.

I know, of course, the latest research suggesting evil originates in a particular part of the brain. Near the hippocampus, some say, beneath the memory center, in the old lizard part of the mind. In a neurological space where everything we pretend to be, ail our mores, disappear like stray thoughts into the abyss. Where the whisperings of the neocortex no longer matter and the blood impulses take over.

But how does this happen? By what mechanisms? Under which conditions?

Such questions are at the heart of every criminal case, I suspect, if not everything we do, and they were on my mind then, as I went once again to the Correctional Facility, to the little room with the plastic chairs and the panic button on the wall.

I enjoyed my work. Though my role was a subversive one in many ways, and there were quite a few who did not like me—the prosecutors, the cops, the jailers—I enjoyed it nonetheless. Like all work, it was a form of self-exploration, but at the same time it gave me refuge from my self, and refuge, too, from my personal life, from certain things looming on the horizon of which I was aware—but there was a part of me (as there often is, I suppose) that did not want to acknowledge such concerns.

I had to make a stand sooner or later, if only with myself, but I was not ready for that yet. So I immersed myself in my work.

I had been called to the jail by Dillard’s lawyer, Haney Wagoner, a congenial-seeming man with oversized eyebrows whose wife was friends with Elizabeth. Elizabeth had introduced us, and though I had qualifications of my own—and experience as well—that introduction had helped get me the case. Wagoner was fond of Elizabeth, and asked after her wistfully, as men often did.

“She’s fine,” I said. “Absolutely wonderful.”

“Good, good. We used to see more of her, in the old days.”

“She misses you both,” I said, though in fact she seldom mentioned either of them unless it was in regard to their increasing girth. “I’m afraid we all used to get together more often, in the old days.”

“Yes, we used to see her quite a bit. When she was married to David. Not that it was a good marriage. No, no.” He leaned toward me confidentially, arching those large brows of his. “He had a charming manner, her first husband. He was the kind of guy you like to be around. At first. But there was a darkness underneath. I was glad to see him go.”

“Me, too.” I joked, though in fact I had never met him. He laughed, and so did I, but there was awkwardness between us, something stiff and uneasy. Wagoner was in his early fifties and had a reputation among the public on account of a celebrity he’d helped acquit some twenty years before. Among his peers he was not so well regarded. He had a one-track mentality, people said, and his office was poorly run. I didn’t know if these things were true. Though my own dealings with him had been cordial enough, and his manner suggested he knew his business, it soon became apparent he was having trouble with his client.

“I don’t want to do my defense this way,” said Dillard. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t do it.”

Wagoner wore a vest with a white shirt beneath, open at the collar, and no tie. He took off his vest, getting down to business, and sat across from his client. He seemed agitated, as if he had been at this for a while. “If we don’t convince the jury there were extenuating circumstances,” he told Dillard, “they’ll give you the death penalty.”

Dillard looked smaller since that last time I’d seen him, worn down by his time in the stir.

“I didn’t kill her,” he insisted.

Haney turned to me then, drawing me into the conversation. “Dr. Danser,” he said. “You’re familiar with the kind of tricks the mind can play on itself, in traumatic situations. You know the term. Anxiety-induced situational memory loss.” Haney spoke the phrase with a certain flourish, as if it held the key to his case.

I knew the term. It was from Rudolf Kleindst, the man who wrote the book on memory blackout. It was a subject in which I found myself involved on occasion—partly, I suppose, because my own clinical history had prompted an interest in the subject. My interest was natural enough. People who suffer certain conditions tend to study them with a passion others might not possess. So I had some expertise.

In the medical community, selective amnesia has long been known to accompany certain sorts of physical injuries and convulsive fits. The idea that such amnesia might accompany emotional trauma—this was a cloudier subject. Murkier still was the notion that suppressed memories of violence could spur violence by the victim himself, and this violence, too, would go unremembered. It was controversial stuff, but Kleindst’s forays into the subject had been enjoying a renaissance in the popular imagination lately, spurred by the media.

“You’re the expert,” said Haney. “Explain this syndrome to my client here, this psychological condition. Explain it so a regular person can understand.”

What Haney wanted to do, I realized, was coach his client: to prepare him to testify in such a way as to support the alleged mental condition. I had my doubts as to whether all the markers were there in regard to Dillard. Also I’d been following the case, and I knew that some irregularities had emerged regarding the hard evidence, particularly the DNA. One of the samples had been contaminated. Most attorneys would go after that flaw in the evidence. They would pull at it, then pull some more, doing what they could to unravel the prosecution’s case. In contrast, Haney remained focused on the psychological.

It was a risky strategy, the land that had worked a decade before, when the insanity defense was popular. Now juries were different—and so were the laws.

Looking back, I tell myself I should have been more forceful about my reservations, but I knew Haney had enlisted a number of well-known psychologists as expert witnesses. Among them was Madison Paulie, who’d made his reputation profiling serial killers. Those of you who work in the profession will recognize his name: a specialist in criminal deviancy, known for his objectivity, one of the few who worked both sides of the aisle, prosecution and defense, and had the respect of both. He’d taken the stand on behalf of the Vampire Killer, over in Sacramento, pleading for clemency, but he’d also testified against the Chinatown Rapist, laying out the accused’s irremediable psychopathy in no uncertain terms. I had met Paulie once in passing—at one of the Wilders’ parties, as it happened—and it appealed to my vanity, I confess, to be part of a top-flight team. I was flattered.

“This kind of syndrome,” I said, “the one you’re talking about—the victims block out memories of their abuse. Things that happened to them in the past. Violent things. Unpleasant things. They block out those memories. And they block out their own abusive actions.”

Wagoner turned once again to Dillard. The prisoner looked bewildered. The case was moving away from him—and away, too, from whatever had or had not happened that night between him and Angela.

“Did your father ever abuse you?” asked Wagoner.

“No.”

“Did he ever hit you—you know, with a strap, or a belt?”

“Not that I remember.”

Wagoner ignored the answer and returned his attention to me. “If Dillard suffered from this kind of memory loss, in regard to his father beating him, how would this affect his memory of those events.”

“Well, any number of ways,” I said. “He could remember some of the incidents but not others. He might remember them to a certain point—say to when the beatings started to get intense. Or maybe the whole incident would float somewhere in the back of his head, and seem more like a dream than a memory. He could see his father looming over him . . .”

“Please,” Dillard interrupted. “My father was a good man.”

Haney sighed and shook his head. He knitted those unwieldy eyebrows together—they were a natural calamity of sorts, those eyebrows, thick and black, a line of charcoal across his brow—and his face furrowed. “Let’s approach this from another angle. You told me you had a special relationship with your Aunt Florence. You carry a picture of her in your wallet, don’t you.”

“Yes,” said Dillard. “Aunt Flo helped take care of me growing up. She died when I was sixteen. In a car accident.”

“She was a good-looking young woman.”

“I guess so.”

“She wasn’t so much older than you. Seven, eight years. Did you ever think about her?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Well, maybe there’s things you don’t remember here as well. Auntie Flo—she had a temper? She was abusive, bossed you around.”

“No.”

“But on other hand, there was a kind of special relationship between you. Sometimes at night—”

A light came into Dillard’s eyes. He realized where Wagoner was headed.

I thought of my own childhood, once upon a time.

“No. Not Aunt Flo.” He shook his head, emphatic. “Absolutely not Aunt Flo. I just can’t say what I think you want me to say. I’d rather die.”

“Well, I think that can be arranged.”

Wagoner’s tactic was apparent. The attorney meant to build a case that Dillard’s attack on his wife was rooted in revenge for years of abuse that had been suppressed. His relationship with Angela—the abuse alternating with sexual passion—had unleashed the anger, the rage, he felt for his dead aunt, and that had lay sleeping all these years. He had killed Angela, yes, but under severe duress, unconscious of his actions. This was evidenced in the way Dillard’s mind had disassociated from the awful event, creating a fictional intruder.

“Not Aunt Flo,” Dillard said again, but when he looked up I saw the weakness in his eyes.

I put a hand on his shoulder then, and our eyes met, and I reassured him the best I could, by looking into his eyes and smiling and giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze, the kind you give someone at a hospital, or a kid going off to war. I’ve reassured other prisoners the same way, guilty or innocent, sane or otherwise.

“I don’t want to do my defense this way,” he said, “I want a new lawyer.”

Wagoner crossed his arms. He’d heard this kind of thing before; so had every attorney.

“Kaufman,” said Dillard. “Jamie Kaufman.”

Wagoner let out small laugh. A smile tempted my lips as well, not that I blamed Dillard. Kaufman was a hot ticket these days, ever since she’d taken a death row case out at San Quentin and gotten the man released. It was just that everyone else wanted her, too. Every accused murderer and three-time loser up and down the coast knew her name, and half of them had written her letters, pleading their case. The truth was Dillard had already drained his wife’s estate to pay Wagoner’s retainer, and Queen Jamie wasn’t doing gratis work anymore. All her clients these days had plenty of money.