HCC 006 - The Confession

by Domenic Stansberry

  The story infuriated me. It was the kind of thing, once planted in the public mind, that would be difficult to dislodge. Not lies exactly but half truths, incidents exaggerated and made ugly by my first wife’s lawyer in the heat of divorce—and now repeated without mitigation, without context. None of it would be relevant in court—but that wasn’t Minors goal. He had released this information to the press to help build a public case against me, to destroy my character.

  That afternoon I got on the phone to Jamie Kaufman, because things were out of control, I thought, and I did not want my case tried in the media.

  One of her assistants answered.

  “I want this to stop,” I said.

  “Ms. Kaufman’s in Sacramento. She’ll call you back as soon as she’s able.”

  “What?”

  “She’s in court. Another case. “

  “I need to talk to Ms. Kaufman.”

  “I’ll give her the message.”

  “Please.”

  Even if I had gotten through to her, I don’t know how much good it would have done. The case was unfolding rapidly, and the reporters would not let it go. They pursued the bits and pieces of my life, and one of them managed to interview the paramedic who’d been called to Sara’s apartment that day I’d blacked out in Sausalito. He was on the news that evening.

  “Ms. Johnson had a bruised lip,” the paramedic said. “There’d been some violence between them, that’s how it looked—but she wouldn’t admit it. Maybe she was afraid, I don’t know. Either way she was covering for him, you know, how women do.”

  I flipped the channel. The stations had their legal analysts out.

  I was guilty as hell, according to the expert on Channel 5. Innocent, according to Channel 7. A victim of city hall politics. A psychopath. A betrayed spouse. An unfaithful husband.

  The late news added a new bit of information.

  The investigators claimed to have found a vial of Liquid Ecstasy in my trailer: the same substance that had been in Sara’s bloodstream the night she died.

  That from an unidentified source.

  My calm was gone. I paced. I called Kaufman again, but could not get through.

  Finally, the next afternoon, she returned my call.

  “We’ve got troubles,” she said. “The DNA came in, and they got their match.”

  This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I felt the news like a blow in the chest.

  “I just talked to Minor. I told him you would surrender without difficulty.”

  “Christ.”

  “He agreed to let me accompany you. If he gets down there first, he’ll wait. He promised.”

  I thought of the footsteps I’d heard on the stoop in front of Sara’s. Of the tie I’d left behind. Of the alleged drugs in my trailer.

  “I’m being framed.”

  “Calm down.”

  “How can I calm down?” I shouted. “Minors screwing me. And he’s fucking my goddamn wife.”

  “I’ll be there,” she said. “Don’t run.”

  I walked to the window and back. I thought of the rumors I’d heard about Minor and Angela. (That juicy bit of gossip, whispered in the Civic Center halls, linking them together. I hadn’t believed it then, but she was a promiscuous woman, as I knew myself, forever walking the edge.) I thought about the way he’d torn me up on the stand. I went back to the window. I thought of his little house at the edge of the marsh. I thought about the way he pursued Elizabeth. Then I saw a pair of squad cars pull up outside, followed by Minor in his black Caprice. The cops came swaggering towards the front door. Minor brought up the rear, dressed in his blue suit. Vestido azul. The notion I had then, I guess it had been kicking around in my head for weeks, or even longer, but it seemed to come to me more clearly now, in a flash, as they say, one of those intuitive rushes that is like the first rush of a drug and doesn’t seem quite real. The man in the blue suit. Then I slipped out the rear door, headed toward the marsh—and those high waving cattails—at a full out run.

  26.

  What I did next was impulsive and reckless. For this reason, some people will dismiss the suspicions I am about to cast as the kind of projections that guilty men make, trying to avoid responsibility for their actions. They will call me a liar. They will try to discredit my version of events.

  For my part, I can only tell you what happened.

  I ran. I admit. I can’t deny that fact. I ran through the salt grass and the pickleweed. I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing, or if it was utter foolishness, but I knew a rental car waited on reserve for me in Larkspur, and I knew the cops would be sending out a dragnet soon. I paused to catch my breath, wondering if I should go back now before I was caught running. I climbed the berm then to get my bearings. A row of houses lay in the hollow below me. Stucco cottages with wood shutters, all in a row.

  And if I should go down the path now to Minor’s house, I wondered, and be caught with my feet dangling from his window, what would I have to say then? How would I explain myself?

  Minor fit the profile. A man in his late thirties, living alone, no stable relations. He’d had opportunity to commit those murders, and to blame others for his crimes. He worked in the prosecutor’s office after all.

  Murderers of a certain sort, they often collected mementos. Newspaper clippings, photos of the victims, even souvenirs from the crime scene. It was this kind of evidence I’d been after, I would say.

  That was the kind of thing I could tell them if I were caught, I told myself, though I doubted it would bear much weight. The prosecution would cast some other motivation upon my actions, claim I was planting evidence, maybe, or just being perverse, the way certain killers are. (I do not deny there was an element of perversity involved in what I was about to do: entering another’s man’s house, rummaging through his things. But as to my true motives . . .) For myself, the imperatives of the moment held sway. I went down the path and eased through the gate into Minors backyard. I fiddled the glass door open and went inside.

  I searched his office.

  Rumor said he was the kind of guy who took his work home, but I didn’t see any evidence of that.

  I opened his bedroom closet.

  In front of me, on a closet pole, hung maybe a half-dozen dress ties. No-nonsense ties, solid colors, ugly as Jesus I went on rummaging. On the top shelf, in an open shoebox, I found a revolver.

  I searched the kitchen, then the living room.

  Nothing.

  In the nightstand, next to his bed, I found some refuse from his professional life, notes on stationery and pages tom from cop periodicals, old homicide reports and beneath these some bondage magazines. I opened one of the magazines and imagined Minor retreating here. Lying down with the centerfolds. Women in chains. Women bound and gagged. Women with cords around their necks.

  It didn’t fit his public image, these magazines—he would claim a professional interest, I was sure, a connection to some case—but there is always a fantasy underlife. A current beneath the current. A river that runs in the opposite direction, beneath the river we see. Even so, the magazines proved little, and I sat there wondering what to do next, thinking about the dragnet outside. All those cops looking for a man in a floppy fishing hat and a spandex jogging suit.

  And what evidence had I found to save myself? I took off my hat, wiped my hands on my shirt, fumbled with my waistband, nervous like an idiot. I put my hat back on.

  I pawed the drawer once more.

  And in my hand: a small bottle.

  A plastic bottle, about the size of a hotel sampler. Inside—a clear liquid. It drew my attention because I had seen little vials like this before, I could tell them. At parties. On dance floors. On the evidence table, in the courtroom, at Dillard’s trial.

  I opened the top and sniffed. No smell. I dipped in my finger. It tasted vaguely of salt.

  Liquid X.

  And if I showed my persecutors this vial, and told them I’d found it here among the magazines, what would
they say? That I’d had the bottle with me the whole time. Hidden in the liner of my fishing hat, in the waistband of my jogging shorts. That I was planting false evidence.

  “You brought the bottle with you inside the house, did you not?”

  “No.”

  “What were you doing inside Minors wardrobe—rummaging through his ties?”

  I closed my eyes. There was a sound then, a small thump, like a rock splashing deep inside a well. A car door slamming.

  Keys in the front lock.

  I fell to my knees and slid underneath the bed. I heard footsteps shuffling down the hall, a man’s footsteps. For a second I thought the sound was my imagination—I was over-excited, carried away—but then he was closer. I heard him sighing, urinating in the hall toilet. His footsteps came my direction, and I heard him pacing, closer yet, then he paused and spoke. Minor. On the phone, checking with the office. “Yes, one of the neighbors saw him leave his place. . . in his jogging suit, yes—and we’re canvassing the neighborhood . . . I’m headed back to the office, but first I swung by my house for a moment. I had to grab something here.”

  He stood in the room not three feet away, so close I could reach out and touch his black wingtips from where I lay sprawled beneath the bed.

  “My guess, the Queen told him I was on my way—and he ran.” Minor laughed, full of some odd pleasure. “Yes, you’re right. He’s jeopardizing his case, this kind of behavior . . . Okay . . . Yes, yes . . . I’ll let the field cops handle the search, and I’ll be up to the Civic Center, twenty minutes.”

  I heard him shuffle through the nightstand, I thought—though I could not be sure—then I heard the drawer push shut. After a while he sat on the bed and the springs above me creaked with his weight.

  He hummed. He tapped his toes.

  He redialed the phone.

  “Elizabeth,” he said. “This is Minor.”

  I felt the anger inside me. “I don’t want you to be alarmed,” he said, “but Jake—we went to arrest him, and he’s disappeared.” I could picture Elizabeth on the other end: her porcelain skin and her blue eyes and her hair like a white flame. “I’ll come out later this evening after the smoke clears,” he said—and in the pause that ensued I could all but hear Elizabeth’s Pontchartrain drawl, her voice soft and vulnerable in the telephone darkness. I’d lost her, I feared. She’d slipped away from me. “I’ll stop by to check on you, to see if everything’s okay. Meanwhile, keep your doors locked. I don’t think Jake’ll come out to your place, but he might.” His footsteps faded and I ventured out from under the bed.

  I continued my search then, giving everything a second look—running my fingers over the ties, thinking about Minor at the same time, about him and Elizabeth out at Golden Hinde later tonight. Then I went back to the drawer in the nightstand and looked inside once again.

  And beneath the magazines . . .

  “It was gone.”

  “What do you mean? You can’t change your tune like this.”

  “I’m not changing my tune.”

  “You said the bottle was in the drawer.”

  “When I looked in the drawer a second time, it was gone. He had taken it with him.”

  “You expect us to believe Minor Robinson had a bottle of Liquid X in his nightstand, then took it with him. With what motivation?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you see?”

  “You’re a liar.”

  I went through the scenario in my head, imagining myself in that little room beneath the Civic Center, fending off their questions. I thought about calling Elizabeth now.

  Warning her. Minor was coming to Golden Hinde this evening, after all—but she was no more likely to believe the story of the Liquid X than anyone else. The story was cockeyed, I had to admit, and circumstances did not cast me in the best of lights. The only way to prove such a thing would be to catch the man in the act. I went to his wardrobe again. Minor and I, we resembled each other. If I left here later, after dark, wearing his clothes, no one would think twice. It was just Minor Robinson, going for a walk. If I could make it to the rental lot, I could get the car I had waiting. So I opened his closet. I took one of the ties and held it up to my neck in the mirror, just seeing how I might look.

  27.

  I’ve spent time with them, the killers. The psychopaths and the schemers. After a while you know how they think, the pure pleasure they derive from their actions. The ones who are honest, they tell you. If you let me out of this jail, they say, if you put me back on the streets, I’ll do it again. There’s nothing I enjoy better. Likewise you, they insist. You, too. I have gazed into their eyes, heard their talk. I have read the police reports and the psychological studies. I know how they operate. Polite as hell. Funny in an off-hand way. A self-deprecating charm. A series of encounters, the type any couple might have, a lunch date, a dance floor. Maybe you even have sex with the girl once or twice in the usual manner. Eventually, though, the moment comes. You hand her a drink, the girl gets sleepy. You view yourself from outside. The two of them. Him. Her. Watch as he removes his tie. She is thick-tongued, slurry. Gamma hydroxybutrate. Off to the land of no memory. The place of never was. He slips the tie around her neck. Her hands go up her throat, clawing. All the moments of her life rush into this one moment.

  In the past, he used a prophylactic, but hell, he tells himself, I’ll let myself go, and he imagines the evidence men examining the body—not just for sperm but for hair follicles, shreds of skin beneath her fingernails—and he wonders how long, how many times, before they make a match, before they find him, but they are fools, the trail is muddled, there are others to blame, easier targets—and anyway this is the thrill of it, now, when he parts her legs, kisses her lips, notices the skin already turning blue.

  “What were you doing in his wardrobe?”

  I wore his clothes now. I wore his jacket, his shirt, his tie looped around my neck. I had his revolver in my pocket. I knew his game, I could tell them. I knew who he was after next.

  Elizabeth. My sweet wife.

  28.

  There was a part of me, foolish perhaps, that intended a certain ending. I would rescue my wife, and we would reconcile. Or there would be the hope of reconciliation, at least, if not love. Maybe that was the kind of ending I was hoping for as I retrieved the rental, then drove to Golden Hinde. Maybe it was as simple as that, though as a psychologist I know for every intention there is a counter-intention. For every expression of love there is an equal expression of hate. And for every secret revealed, another is more deeply hidden.

  It was dark now, the fog came shuddering over the bay, filling the hollows—but I knew those roads pretty well. I eased up at a gravel drive across from our house. I didn’t want anyone to see me, so I followed the gravel to the top of the knoll, then headed back down on foot. When I got close to the main road, I cut off and followed a culvert to where the creek trestled under the road. I scuttled down the dry bed toward the bay.

  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.”