The Confession (9 page)

Wagoner looked distressed. I was engaging the jury, true, but the content of my remarks was not what he wanted. In the parlance of the law, psychopaths were not subject to much mercy. They possessed cognizance of their actions, that was the key. So in theory, if you wanted mercy from the court, you did better to show your client suffered from uncontrollable delusions.

Perhaps that was the intent of the next question. To address the matter directly, so that I could dismiss it—and remove the subject from the table.

“In your professional opinion, the tests you conducted, the interviews—did any of this suggest that Mr. Dillard was a psychopath in the sense of the word you have just described?”

I pondered a moment, feeling the jury watching, curious, desirous of guidance and insight. Wanting a show. (And I remembered then how Elizabeth, before we married, had come to see me testify, sitting in the spectator pew in her worsted suit, and how later when we’d kissed in the elevator it had been like there was some secret between us, some complicity in the crime, some voyeuristic pleasure, there in the Otis, touching each other all over.) Now my eyes met Dillard’s, and I could see his misery and confusion and the jury saw me watching him and we all knew the trial had been going badly and his fate hung in the balance.

“I would say he displays tendencies in that direction,” I said, “but I would not put him definitively in that category, no.”

“Mr. Danser, didn’t you indicate earlier in your testimony that there were contradictor) indications on the tests you administered?”

At the prosecutor’s table, Minor made a note. It was a bad phrasing of the question. It gave Robinson an avenue to attack the results of my tests during the upcoming cross-examination.

“Yes, that’s true,” I said. “There are often contradictory indications on such tests.”

“In your own conversations, with me, after interviewing my client, did you not suggest a quite specific clinical diagnosis, in regard to Mr. Dillard’s mental state at the time of the crime?”

I realized where he was headed now, and what I was expected to do.

“No. I don’t believe I made a definitive diagnosis, no” Wagoner blanched. He didn’t like the answer, but I was only telling the truth. He had talked, and I had listened, but I had never actually put forth the diagnosis he wanted me to repeat now, in front of the jury. I could not go out on that limb, not with Paulie gone from the case. I could not join the likes of Sherman and Lowe.

“You did evaluate my client for delusional thinking, though, and memory loss, did you not?”

“Yes.”

Wagoner went to the defense table and gathered up his copy of Kleinsdt. He read from the text out loud, reciting the passage on situational memory loss. He pivoted on his heels and arched those eyebrows of his, trying to look confident, maybe, wise and capable. A man on the verge of bringing the truth to light.

“In your judgment, did Mr. Dillard suffer from this disorder?” he asked. “I mean, in the sense that he could have blacked out, and killed Ms. Mori in an act of unconscious rage that he would not remember later.”

At the defense table Dillard was full of trepidation, I could see, and I felt my dilemma more acutely. This was the moment my testimony had been building to. I didn’t want to punish Dillard for his lawyer’s incompetence, but I couldn’t manufacture the kind of evidence Haney wanted.

“I’d say it was possible,” said, and I felt the energy leak out of the courtroom.

“Possible?”

“Yes. Possible.”

“Possible,” said Wagoner.

Wagoner repeated the word again, as if savoring it, as if he had won some major point. The truth was, my testimony was lukewarm at best, and he knew it. I had not given him what he wanted. He poked at me a while longer, the way one pokes at a piece of overcooked cod on a dinner plate, hoping it is really not so bad as it seems. Eventually he’d had enough.

“No more questions your honor.”

Then came Minor Robinson. It would be anticlimactic now, I thought, his battle with me. For all practical purposes, I was a neutral witness. My guess, he’d sweet talk me, work out a gem or two for the prosecution, then let me go. But I was wrong. He went after me the same way he had gone after Sherman and Lowe.
Possible
,
you say?
With a glee that was a bit too personal.
What do you mean by possible?
Tearing me apart, mocking me.
So you have doubts about your own diagnosis
,
and changed it here on the stand?
Going on far longer than necessary, attacking me in a fashion I have no appetite now to repeat. I suffered. I squirmed. Later, I tried to shrug it off—a bad case, these kinds of things happen—but Dillard was doomed, and my testimony had done neither of us any good.

The day the verdict came, it was windy out at the point. I was in my hot tub, out on the deck, trying to empty my head. To ease the stress, as they say. I had the radio on KPFA, the old underground station over in Berkeley. They were playing music from Windham Hill. Strains of Art Pepper mingled with ocean waves and the digitized crying of whales. The jockey mixed in a little Thelonius now and then, and mumbled something incoherent about the Coming of the One. On the other end of the cove, meanwhile, I could see a couple out on their deck, sunbathing. They lay leeward of Golden Hinde on the sheltered side of the bluff, and towering above them was Mt. Tamalpais, serene and dappled under the light, with its spiritual retreats, its spas, its Beaux Arts homes overlooking the canyons. From my deck, I could see the mountain, and Highway 101, too, rippling over the mudflats along the fringe of the old redwood forests that had been sluiced down a hundred years before. The sounds of the traffic carried across the inlet, and I thought about the people in their cars, in their houses, in the prison, all connected somehow in this current moment. Then the music was over. We were into the news hour, fresh atrocities everywhere. Serbs and Croats. The Israelis. A girl in Petaluma, kidnapped from her bedroom. And in Marin County, a verdict had been reached in the Dillard case.

Guilty.

Not just of murder, the jury decided, but murder premeditated—and rape.

Outside the wind grew erratic. It blew hard for a while, then died away. In one of its waning moments, I settled deeper into the water, closing my eyes, taking in the sun. Then the wind blew cold again, and I decided to hell with it. I got out. I put on my muscle shirt and my shorts and went down to the Paradise Gym. I worked out for a good hour. I made my mind empty, focusing on that depth, that place inside where there are no thoughts. It was hard to dwell for long on that inner void. The great wellspring, the Buddhists called it. I could sense its presence but I could not enter. Even so I kept pumping. I felt hot prickles on my legs. The sweat streamed down in rivulets.

I exhausted myself and went home.

By the time I returned to Golden Hinde, it was late afternoon and Elizabeth still hadn’t returned. Though we’d made love several times these last weeks—rough and sensuous, a little bit frantic, my face pressed into her shoulders, her backside, my hands on her breasts—there was still something unsettled between us. I tried the hammock out front, despite the wind, trying to dream the breeze away, to drowse beneath the chill. For a minute I was back with my mother in Baltimore, and I was just a small lad with my head resting against her chest as she rocked on the porch. I felt my mother’s hand in my lap. I squirmed at her touch. I raised my head.

Elizabeth came toward me now, walking up from the house. I was glad to see her. She wore a dark skirt and an imported blouse—a bright fabric, mottled blue and carmine. It was an exotic print, with buttons in the back. The color brought out the fairness in her skin. She approached me with a sense of purpose, a stride I recognized from the tennis courts.

I raised myself to the edge of the hammock and smiled. I wore a yellow polo shirt and white slacks. She faltered. My glance had an effect on her. My gray eyes, my good looks. (I have always had my conceits, my vanities. An infatuation with clothes and style, the surface of things. They overcome me even now, these frailties, a desire to look good, to be admired. Though perhaps these are not such awful flaws, I think. Perhaps they are common trade.)

“I want to talk with you,” she said.

Elizabeth stood with her arms by her side, and her voice quavered. I heard her resolve though, and it occurred to me we were at a crossroads of sorts. “There are things we need to discuss.”

“We lost the case,” I said. “Dillard was convicted.”

“I want to talk with you,” she said again.

She folded her arms. Something in that gesture summarized everything that had happened between us in the last three years. There was the skirt that fell just at the knees; the hips slightly cocked, inviting; the lips upturned—but then the arms that protected the body, and the eyes, too, blue with skepticism.

She’d fallen for me three years ago because I was younger, because she liked my silk shirts and my tapered pants. She liked how I flattered her and touched her, roughing her up in ways other men were too polite to do. She liked our reckless courtship, and the idea that people talked, and the wild taste of me in her mouth as we tumbled about on those white sheets in her big house. She liked the vengeance on her husband—who’d not only been alcoholic and impotent but unfaithful in the bargain—and she liked, too, though she would never admit it, that her money gave her a measure of control.

“I’ve been thinking the same,” I agreed. “We need to talk.”

“Let’s go inside. This wind, it carries a chill.”

Her voice was impatient. In it, I could hear her Southern bearing. She could be sweet when she wanted, but at the moment she was full of bristle.

“Honey,” I said. “Let’s walk to the leeward side. Around the cove. We can talk as we go.”

“Jake . . .”

“Please—it’s a nice day on the other side, out of this wind.”

“If you insist.”

We followed the trail winding along the bluff to the south. There were places along the bay where the path dipped to the shore—but these involved a steep descent through rocks and weeds. So we stuck to the higher spurs skirting along the cliff tops. The path went up, climbing inland through the scrub oak, then it snaked toward the water again, through a meadow of junca grass and poppies, emerging over an isolated cove.

The path widened. I tried to take her by the hand, but she shrugged me off.

“What’s the matter?”

“Too
don’t know?”

“Tell me.”

“Your girlfriend. I know all about her.”

I felt as if I’d swallowed something cold. The feeling moved through my chest into my stomach, then downwards, deeper into my core. Part of me had known, though. Part of me had guessed this was coming.

“I didn’t believe it at first,” she said. “Or I told myself I didn’t. Then I realized it had been happening all along. I thought to myself, not again. Not this time. Why can’t I have a life? Why can’t I have what I want?”

She let loose then. Saying things that surprised me. You act the big shot, she said, but you don’t make the money you pretend. You drain our account. My account. Business expenses. Trips to Los Angeles, Hawaii. And your office, why does it have to be so plush? The leather couch. The secretary. All of your suits, the car, the shoes. And the world’s most expensive barber. All of it, for whom? Another woman. Endless other women.

“It’s not true.”

“You fucked Angela Mori, too, didn’t you?”

“That’s a horrible thing to say.”

“Did you?”

That wasn’t a question I intended to answer. The path climbed. There was no breeze and I could feel the sun and see the long drop down to the rocks in the cove. Elizabeth whirled on the path. She stood with her back to the water. Her hair was the color of mercury, of platinum under a white sky.

“I want a separation,” she said.

I felt myself dividing, hovering, watching from the outside. I glanced at the rocks below.

Separation meant divorce. I had been through this before.

“No,” I said. “Don’t be this way.”

I glanced into her eyes and remembered that moment between us in her convertible, the first time, before we’d kissed, when she’d been assessing me, trying to see who I was, knowing only the tennis court rumors, suspecting they were true, at least in part, but then studying my face, my lips, the watery glint in my eyes, the way I edged toward her—my hand already on her crepe blouse, touching the studded buttons—then she had pulled me towards her. She’d decided to take the chance. We’d revisited that moment more than once, I admit—it was a ritual: anger followed by passionate submission—but this time her eyes flashed and her lips curled. They were wet with gloss, those lips, and her eyes had been done with a faint blue. Something about her then—something in her face, maybe, in her stance—gave me pause.

Where had she been earlier this day? I wondered. “Remember that night at Stinson Beach . . .”

“Stop it,” she said. “I know how you are. I didn’t know before but I know now.”

Her voice was heavy with implication.

“Do you think I care about all this?” I waved my hand dramatically, taking in all of Marin. “The million dollar views, the houses, the swimming pools. Do you think I’m that shallow? Do you think that’s why I’m here?”