“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.
10.
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?”
Her lips trembled, and I recognized that trembling, and I thought for a minute she was vacillating.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but she would not let me touch her. I had miscalculated. She had made her decision. It was all hers, I realized now, and she had made it weeks ago, perhaps months. Even so, I could see the hesitation in her eyes. She was still drawn to me, she still loved me. She was a sentimental woman, underneath it all, fragile, raw with disappointment. She needed to be touched.
There was still a future for us, I thought. I felt its inevitability.
“You don’t mean this.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
“I do mean it,” she said.
“I’m a beast,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I tried once again to put my arm around her.
“Don’t.”
I was angry now, all of sudden.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”
I went down the path. She didn’t stop me. When I hit the bottom, I glanced back up the hill. There was a spot up there, under the oak, where you could look down at the house. She stood there now, I imagined, looking beyond me at the beautiful view, the blue water, the prison. Standing defiantly in her carmine blouse, in the high grass, fluttering like a flower in the wind. This way. That. Waiting for me to drive away.
I packed a couple of bags, then dragged them out to the car, laying my suits in the back seat so they would not wrinkle. I drove down to Sausalito, to Sara Johnson’s apartment, not knowing if I meant to stop—but her car was gone. Off with her boyfriend, I figured. So I went into a diner nearby. I called Golden Hinde, thinking maybe Elizabeth would have calmed down by now and we could talk in earnest. No one answered. I sat in the cafe. I read the paper—a front page article about the Dillard trial, written by the court reporter. The piece was a hack job. The defense was one blunder after another, the writer said, and he took particular glee in my own blundering. There was even a picture of Minor tearing me apart on the stand.
I thought about going into the city, to one of the clubs. I could dance all night. I could lose my identity, become someone else. In the end, though, I didn’t have the appetite. My last experience there had left me cold. So I drove down to Lucky Drive. I walked out to the edge of the marsh and stared at the prison, its lights reflecting off the black water.
I went into the trailer and took my box out of its drawer. I put it on the bed beside me. I didn’t open the box though. I just lay there staring at the ceiling, at the darkness, listening to the wind.
PART THREE
Murder
11.
When I went out to my office on Monday, I found an invitation from the Wilders identical to the one they’d sent to Golden Hinde. I was on more than one list, I guessed, and they’d mailed it out to my work address as well. As my first appointment had canceled, I had plenty of time to regard it: the fiesta colors, the embossed lettering on handmade paper, all in a bright little envelope, the color of a gin fizz.
Barbara Wilder was an artist. It was a summer party, at the height of the season, so she’d lithographed an image of the sun into the margins—a sun with two faces sketched in the fashion of a Zen mandala, one side light, the other dark.
I wanted to go. The Wilder parties were giddy affairs, the evening was always beautiful, it seemed, and there was an effervescence in the air on that hillside up above Ross, a lingering sense of glamour, of wealth, of something about to happen. As I sat there alone in my office, the Wilder party suddenly seemed indicative of all I was about to lose if I lost Elizabeth. Those things did not mean so little to me as I’d tried to pretend the other day, out walking with Elizabeth, quarreling—when I’d waved my hand at the handsome world and said none of it meant a damned thing to me, not at all.
But I could go to the party without Elizabeth, I told myself. Though there was still a part of me, I confess, that hoped I could change things between us, back to the way they had been.
My office in those days was out in Greenbrae, in a suite on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. An assortment of psychologists inhabited the building there. Sex therapists. Mid-life transition specialists. Gurus and transcendentalists. On occasion, our clientele overlapped. There were criminals among the enlightened, and vice versa, and they came to me at times with their violent thoughts, hoping to escape them, or at least find the deeper meaning therein. The truth was I could give them little solace, and I had troubles of my own.
&nbs
p; If I were a Freudian, I might tell myself I was acting out a hatred with its roots in the womb. That I had never truly escaped my mother, so I was acting out the escape now as an adult, over and over, with the different women in my life. But Freud was out of fashion, so I had only my biochemistry to blame.
I glanced out the window and looked at the world. It was a beautiful day, with the cars glinting by and the sprinklers turning and an occasional blonde on the sidewalk. The magnolias were heavy with blossom and so were the jasmines and the azaleas and the bougainvilleas and the potato vines, too. The pears were in season and the apples and the cherry plums and they fell on the ground but were never eaten because there were just too many, the land was just too fruitful.
For me, though, things had been slow since the trial. People were canceling—even my pro bono clients. Maybe it was the summer doldrums, or maybe it had been my performance at the Dillard trial, but either way my two o’clock didn’t show, and I sat contemplating that empty space between appointments. It grew wider, emptier. After a while, the phone rang. The voice on the other end was runtish and cruel.
“How are things?” Grazzioni asked.
I wasn’t overjoyed to hear from him. My opinion, Grazzioni was a psychopath. A real switch artist, as they say in the profession. Someone who takes his own trip and lays it into your head, as if the ugliness comes from you, not him. When I’d interviewed him for San Bernardino County, I’d gone along with his game—all his crap and shine, the violent fantasies, the sex jokes—acting like it got my rocks hot, the way you feign such things on occasion (never mind it’s not kosher for a psychologist to play such games, it happens sometimes, it’s part of the routine), luring the patient along, finding out what you can. Later the bastard had tried to use it against me.
“When I saw you down at that club,” he said, “with that girl, it made me remember old times. Our talks together. Then I see you on the news during the Mori trial. It gets me thinking.”
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