Guilt

by John Lescroart

  Sam leaned forward. 'It's difficult to say the words, isn't it?'

  'Yes.' The monosyllable hung between them. 'It's been a long time now. I didn't know if I'd ever say it.'

  'How long?'

  Again, Diane's eyes raked the small room. Sam had the feeling she was trying to decide whether or not she should continue with this, whether it was too late to back out. All the staring around, putting off bringing the rape into focus.

  She put her mug down and crossed her hands on her lap. 'A long time ago. Twenty-seven years ago.'

  'And you've been silent about it?'

  Diane folded her arms, self-protective. 'Now it's called a date rape. I knew him. He seemed so nice. I've been living with it all this time. I don't think I've denied that it happened. I suppose mostly just feeling that it happened so long ago, what difference can it possibly make, you know?'

  'But it has, of course.'

  A nod. 'I don't really know how I feel about it all anymore. Not clearly. All the parts of it.'

  'That's all right. Why don't – as you said – why don't you just start somewhere. What do you feel the most, right now?'

  'It changes. That's what's funny. I guess now, today, it's all resentment because I've been thinking about it so much. First, though, when it came up again, it was just this overwhelming anger, this rage. But for such a long time before that, you know, living my life with my husband and being the school mom and doing soccer leagues and just living – I didn't see what good it would do to bring it all up again.'

  'Does your husband know about it?'

  'Don. He does now, but…' A lapse into silence. 'He's a great guy, but I'm not sure he understands. Not completely.' The cultured voice was flattening by degrees, losing what had appeared to be a natural animation. 'What I'm trying to deal with now is, I guess, my anger over this sense of loss, of having lost so much of my life over this one… this one episode.' A wistful smile. 'It's funny, you know. You don't really believe that one day can change everything, I mean if you'd just done one little thing differently…'

  'Everybody feels that, Diane. If that's any consolation, it's one of the mechanisms we use to blame ourselves. Somehow, at least a little bit, it's our fault.'

  This didn't seem to help. 'But I really wonder if it was my fault -I don't mean just the rape, where okay, no doubt I led him on, but I really believed… I didn't know anything then. I mean, I was a virgin. You said "no" and it stopped, right?'

  'That was the theory,' Sam said.

  Diane sat back in the chair, put her head all the way back and closed her eyes briefly. Opening them, she abruptly reached for her mug of coffee. Something to do that wasn't this recitation of history. She forgot to drink from it. 'Even now,' she said, 'even now I wonder how much of it was my fault.'

  'Diane, if he forced you…'

  'He said he'd kill me.'

  'Well, then, you-'

  But she was shaking her head. 'No, not just that. Not just the rape itself. Everything after that. My whole life.' Another silence, another shake of the head. 'No, not my whole life, that's an exaggeration. Only most of a decade. Only.' Suddenly, she slapped the arm of the chair. 'God, I hate this victim thing! I'm not a victim. I don't want to be a victim.'

  Sam waited.

  'Before, I was going to be a doctor.' The brittle laugh shook her. 'It wasn't ridiculous – you don't get into Stanford if you're dumb, and I'd never gotten a "B" in my life. I was fun, smart, pretty. And now I tell myself – have for years – I've had to tell myself that it was this… this thing that made it all change. That it wasn't my fault.'

  'That wouldn't be so unusual, Diane. In fact, it would be more normal if it was.'

  'I know that. I'm still not stupid. But don't you see, it makes me sick, that victim excuse. I should have just risen above it, put it behind me. Instead, it just ate me up, and I let it. I just let it.' Her fists were clenched on the chair's arms, and one of her eyes overflowed. 'I'm sorry.' She reached into her purse, pulled out a handkerchief, dabbed. 'There's no reason to cry about it. This is stupid.'

  'No, it isn't.'

  She managed a condescending smile. 'Well, of course you're trained to say that.'

  Sam wasn't going to fight her about it. Yes, she was trained to say that, and that was because it was the truth. It wasn't stupid to cry about it. Almost everyone did. 'So what happened, Diane? What do you blame yourself for?'

  'Everything! Don't you understand? I'm mad that it happened! I'm mad that I do blame myself, I don't care what the proper modern response is supposed to be. I could have been… I don't know, more somehow. Who I was really meant to be. And instead,' she visibly deflated, 'instead I'm who I am.'

  'And is that so bad?'

  'I don't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out, I suppose. That's why I'm here. I can't believe… it seems so small a thing, somehow.'

  'The rape – a small thing?'

  She nodded. 'I know that sounds crazy, but it's what I tell myself when I'm just so full of loathing. It was one small thing, and I let it change the whole direction of my life. I mean, one day I'm in pre-med pulling "A"s, I go to football games, I'm kind of ra-ra and carefree, and the next day, the next time I turn around, I'm a mess. I'm taking every drug in America. And this was the sixties, remember, there were a lot to choose from. I survive another year or so before dropping out of school. And sleeping with anybody, not caring. Losing touch with my mom and dad and family and not caring at all.'

  'So what happened finally?'

  She brought the handkerchief back to her eyes, left it there a minute, pressing. 'Finally, I woke up. I don't know how else to put it. I just woke up. I guess I didn't want to die. And I never thought about that until my mother did. That's the thing I regret the most, I think. I mean, if she could see me now, it'd be all right. But I was still that other way, that other person, when she died. So she never knew.'

  Sam nodded. There was nothing to say. Sometimes, she knew, closing that circle could be the toughest pull of a person's life, and it seemed to her that Diane Price was well on her way to doing it.

  Diane was going on. 'And by now it seems behind me. I married Don, went back to school and at least got my degree. I've got two great teenagers, and I'm actually working in a lab where my brains count. And I got there – I got all of that – by finally not being a victim anymore, just pulling myself up by the bootstraps and deciding, that was it, deciding I wasn't going to have this cancer in my life. I wasn't going to talk about it, think about it, refer to it. It was the past, over, done.'

  'But you're here?'

  'I'm here.'

  Sam hesitated. 'Did something else happen?'

  Diane shook her head. 'Not to me, thank God. But then, suddenly, last week, I was reading the paper and I started shaking at the breakfast table. I couldn' t stop shaking.'

  'What was it?'

  'The story about this woman who'd been murdered, Sheila Dooher her name was.'

  Sam felt the hair begin to stand up on her arms.

  'So the name caught my attention, and I looked down the article, and then opened to the inside page and there was the picture of her and her husband at some charity thing last year. Her husband Mark.'

  Sam knew what was coming.

  'The man who raped me.'

  Father Gorman knew why he'd been summoned to the Archbishop's office. Not only had he been absent at the rosary when Sheila's body had been laid out, he'd not attended the wake afterward, then begged off officiating even peripherally at the funeral Mass. He hadn't gone to the gathering at Dooher's home afterwards.

  Now they'd kept him waiting nearly twenty-five minutes at the end of the day. Not a good sign. He was more exhausted than he'd ever been in his life. For weeks, he'd slept no more than four hours a night, plagued by nightmares about his own long-gone parents, of all things. And then, finally, he was inside the austere office. James Flaherty stood up behind his desk, but didn't come around it, didn't offer the kiss of peace as he sometimes did. In
stead, his lips moved into a perfunctory smile, but his eyes did not change in any way at all, and he sat back down immediately.

  'Gene, I'll get right to it,' he said. 'Mark Dooher is one of my most trusted advisers. He is also, not incidentally, a substantial contributor to the Church and to your parish. He's been President of your Holy Name Society, President of your Parish Council, President…'

  Gorman didn't need the glowing litany. 'Yes, Your Excellency. I know who he is.'

  Not used to being interrupted, the Archbishop's eyes flared briefly. After a long silence, Flaherty continued. 'He has also lost his wife to murder, as you well know. The police have been hounding him on another matter because of some kind of political vendetta. This is not a time to abandon those people who need us most. The man is going through some kind of hell right now, and I found it incredibly un-Christian, not to say callous as a human response, that you didn't see fit to assist at his wife's funeral or visit with us afterward.' He changed the tone of his voice, making it more personal. 'Mark was incredibly hurt by it, Gene. Incredibly.'

  'I'm sorry,' Gorman said. 'I…' He didn't know what else he could say, and left the sentence unfinished, hanging in the room.

  Flaherty waited for more, but it didn't come. 'You're sorry?'

  'Yes.'

  'Sorry doesn't seem like quite enough, Gene.'

  'I'm sorry about that, too, Your Excellency.'

  Flaherty cocked his head. 'What's going on here? You two have a disagreement, a fight?'

  'No.'

  'Do you want to talk to me about anything else? I checked your most recent reports, and things at the parish seem to be going along smoothly. Am I wrong about that?'

  'No, Your Excellency.'

  Flaherty tapped the table. 'Let's drop the Excellency. I'm Jim Flaherty. We've known each other a long time. Is there something going on in your parish?'

  Gorman knew what he was asking – was he having an affair, was there a scandal brewing? He shifted his burning eyes to the ceiling, to the sides of the room. 'I do feel like I'm under a lot of stress lately. I'm not getting much sleep. I…'

  Again, the rogue syllable, and again it hung there.

  'What would you like me to do, Gene? Would you like some time off? A short retreat?'

  'Maybe so, Jim. Maybe that would help.'

  The Archbishop sat still a minute, lips pursed, eyes unwavering. 'All right,' he said at last. 'Let's give that a try.'

  Farrell knew he was fouling the air. The Upmann Special tasted delicious, and normally he made it a point not to smoke cigars in small offices, but he didn't much like Craig Ising, and it gave him some pleasure to realize that Ising was going to have to get his suit cleaned to get the smell out. Farrell thought it was a fair trade – he felt dirty near him, but he was a client and your clients were not always people you admired.

  'But I didn't do anything wrong. This isn't even a crime in Nevada!'

  Farrell coughed, then blew a vapor trail into the air above them. 'We've been through that, Craig. You should've been in Nevada when you committed it.'

  Thirty-six years old, physically fit, nicely tanned, Ising had told Farrell all about the suit that he would soon have to clean. It had set him back $450 in Hong Kong. A silk blend that supposedly felt even better than it looked. If you could get it in America, it would go for more than a grand.

  Farrell had spent most of the day in this tiny conference room in Ising's plush Embardacero office, the two men discussing a plea so Ising wouldn't have to go to jail. That was the hope, anyway. And Farrell was ready to go home.

  Ising's position, early on in the day, was that he was a businessman and all he'd done was take advantage of an investment opportunity. He'd been making some pretty serious money at this particular endeavor for the past couple of years. The investment was straightforward enough – Ising had been buying the insurance policies of people infected with AIDS, in effect becoming their beneficiary when they died.

  In Ising's views, everyone benefited by this arrangement. The AIDS patients sold their discounted policies for cash which they needed for their medical bills – normally sixty percent of the value of the policy – and their policies were then sold by middlemen to investors like Ising, who paid between $6,000 and $200,000 for the policies, based on the patient's life expectancy.

  Ising had gotten lucky with the first couple – the patients had died almost immediately and he'd cleared nearly half a million dollars in less than a year. Unfortunately for him, the State of California regulated this particular investment (by outlawing it) and Ising was looking at two to five years in state prison and a six-figure fine.

  'This doesn't bother you at all, does it, Craig?'

  'What bothers me is they're trying to take me down for it. That's what bothers me. Other guys have done a lot worse.'

  This was inarguable, so Farrell didn't push it. Instead, he got down to tacks. 'You're lucky, you know. The DA's taking heat for the court's dragging along on violent crimes, so he gets the idea he wants to clear some massive backlog on these white-collar cases, get 'em processed out without taking up court time. You fall in the crack. Otherwise, you'd be looking at hard time. This is actually a sweet offer.'

  Ising rolled his eyes. 'It's so sweet, why don't you put up the money?' The deal was a fine of half a million dollars earmarked for AIDS research and two hundred hours of community service for Ising. 'And the time. Where am I supposed to get two hundred hours?'

  Farrell shook his head. Two hundred hours is five weeks full-time, Craig. You get the minimum prison time and it's two years. Five weeks. Two years. Think about it.' He sucked on his cigar, keeping it lit. The air in the room was getting as opaque as fog. 'But hey, it's your decision.'

  'It's robbery is what it is. We ought to sue them.'

  'Sue who?'

  'Whoever passed this law. It's criminal. No wonder this state's down the tubes. A man can't make any kind of living.'

  Farrell didn't know exactly what Ising had made last year, but the rent here in the Embarcadero highrise was not close to cheap, and Ising had personally ponied up nearly $30,000 for Farrell's legal fees in the past year, so it was a little hard for Farrell to work up much sympathy for how difficult it was for an entrepreneur without morals to make a living in California. 'What's the matter, Craig? You afraid this community service is going to put you in contact with the riff-raff?'

  'Yeah, among other things. You got a problem with that? You get your commoners out there rubbing shoulders with me and they find out who I am and next you know I'm getting hit up for money. You wait, you'll see. It'll happen.'

  'Does that mean you're going with the plea?'

  Ising pulled at his upper lip, drummed his fingers on the table in front of him. 'Damn,' he said.

  'I didn't know if I should call. I was worried about you.'

  'You've always been able to call, Christina. I appreciate it. But there isn't anything to worry about. I'm a big boy. I'll be all right.'

  'I'm not trying to argue with you, but you don't sound all right. And Saturday…'

  'I thought Saturday I was pretty good.'

  'But it was an act. I could see that.'

  'Well, yes. But what was I going to do with everybody there? I couldn't very well sit in a corner and cry, could I?'

  'No. I'm sorry. I didn't mean…'

  'I know what you meant, Christina, and I thank you. You're right. You're saying it's okay if I show it a little. People aren't judging me so hard right now. Is that it?'

  'Of course you see it. You see things.'

  'Still, it's good to remember. And I'm very glad you called. A time like this, you don't want to… you don't want to push yourself on your friends. The house has seemed to get pretty big…'

  'Mark?'

  'I'm still here. I'm thinking maybe I should just sell the damn thing.'

  'I don't think I'd make any decisions like that for a while. Give yourself a little time.'

  'For what, though?'

  'F
or things to become clearer.'

  'Oh, they seem clear enough now. That's almost the problem. Everything's crystal clear. This is just the way things will be from now on.'

  'Time will make it better, Mark. Eventually, it will. It does.'

  'Okay.'

  'I'm sorry. I'm not saying it's not horrible now.'

  'No, I know, that's all right. Well, listen, I'm not much for conversation right now. And I do thank you for calling me. Really. I'll be back in the office in a couple more days. I'll see you there?'

  'Sure.'

  'Okay then. Take care.'

  She put the phone down gently, stood looking out at the traffic passing by her front window, then picked it up and hit the redial button.

  'It's me again.'

  A surprised chuckle, wonderful to hear. 'How've you been?'

  'I've been insensitive.'

  'Not at all.'

  'More than I want to be. I don't know what you're feeling, other than the pain, Mark. It's stupid to say time will make it better. Maybe it won't. I just wanted you to know that if you need to talk sometimes, it wouldn't be a burden. That's all I wanted to say.'

  He didn't respond right away, and when he did, the voice was husky with suppressed emotion. 'You're great,' he said. Thank you.'

  When he realized that the AIDs-insurance matter involving Craig Ising was going to take up most of the day, Farrell had called and left a message with Sam's brother that he'd pick her up on his way home and they could go out to dinner someplace.

  Larry and Sally lived over Twin Peaks from Sam's old place in a gingerbread Victorian, and Farrell wasn't halfway up the dozen stairs leading to the front porch when the door opened. Sam was coming out to him, slamming the door behind her, moving fast. 'We've got to talk,' she said. 'Where have you been?'

  'So let me get this straight,' he said. 'Some lady…'

  'Some woman, Wes.'

  'Okay, some woman comes in to where you work and tells you this story…'

  'It wasn't a story. It was the truth.'

  He stopped. She walked a couple more steps. 'Here we go, now,' he said.

  'I'm going to try to finish one sentence. Then you can have one. How about that?'