Act of Deceit

Chapter 46

“T hat’s absurd,” William Sherwyn said to Donnally, standing on the landing of the doctor’s Spanish Colonial in the Berkeley hills. “Completely absurd.”

Sherwyn’s hand still gripped the front door. He glanced past Donnally toward downtown San Francisco across the sunlit bay. He then locked his eyes on Donnally’s and said, “And I’m not going to risk a lawsuit talking about someone who may, or may not, have been a patient of mine.”

“Have it your way, but Charles Brown’s lawyer is filing a motion to withdraw his plea, and it’s all going to come out.”

“There’s no ‘it,’ other than the disturbed fantasies of a troubled man.” Sherwyn smiled. “Did you ask this hypothetical patient where these so-called parties were? Who attended them? What about names? Did he have names?”

“He was a confused thirteen-year-old kid.”

“And now he’s a confused adult.”

Sherwyn looked skyward and tapped his chin.

Donnally had the sense that the doctor was picturing himself framed by the mansion, his authority buttressed by its fortresslike solidity.

“Let me see who your witnesses would be.” Sherwyn looked at Donnally again. “There’s the bipolar Mr. Brown. There’s Trudy who lost touch with reality sometime in the 1970s and who treated Anna like a lost dog she took in, rather than as a human being with a family who might have been anguished by her disappearance. It never even crossed dear Trudy’s mind that Anna might have been a kidnap victim. And there is, of course, the delusional Melvin.” He grinned. “I would pay to watch those three testify.”

“They’re not the only ones.”

“New Sky? The ones who hid murderers, who conspired with Trudy, and who became drug dealers when their so-called dream died?”

“You were part of that dream for a while, until they threw you out for molesting a boy.”

Sherwyn laughed. “Not only did that not happen, but everyone in New Sky knew it didn’t happen. I was thrown out because they discovered what I was really doing there, observational research for my dissertation on counterculture sexuality.” Sherwyn pointed inside his house. “You want to read it? I can loan you a copy.”

“The way I heard the story, it was participant research.”

“Let me guess, from somebody like Sonny the ex-con? The drugged-up dope fiend who saw the world through the windowpane of LSD and the brown haze of heroin.”

Donnally felt the fragile web of Brown’s and Melvin’s half memories tear apart under Sherwyn’s practiced hand, but the threads remained attached to something real, and Donnally fought back with that.

“I wouldn’t be standing here if that’s all I had,” Donnally said. “Anna left a diary.”

Sherwyn made his rabbit face for a moment, as if searching for an answer to a cross-examiner’s unanticipated question.

One finally came: “The diary of a little girl written in the midst of the New Sky fantasy world is hardly evidence.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s the diary of a schoolteacher that ended on the day she was murdered.”

Sherwyn laughed again. “And the last entry says, ‘Today I will be murdered by Father Phil McGrath.’ ”

Donnally shook his head.

Sherwyn threw up his arms. “Is that what this is about? You’re trying to say I killed her?” He jabbed a forefinger at Donnally’s chest. “You’re an idiot. Father Phil had the motive, not me. Anna couldn’t do anything to me. She’d lose her house and her mother would go to jail for harboring Artie and Robert, and maybe even as an accessory to the murder of that cop in Berkeley. She was the first one to yell, ‘Right on,’ when they said, ‘Let’s kill the pig.’ And then she went out and bought them guns. She was no different than those naive Symbionese Liberation Army women for whom blood in the gutter was merely an abstraction.”

That was it, Donnally thought. It had to be Sherwyn. Had to be. He hadn’t argued back by giving reasons that he didn’t do it, but only for why Trudy would never turn him in. And Donnally understood why Trudy had kept her silence about who had killed Anna: to save herself. A tug by detectives on any of the threads that tied their lives together would have led to her arrest.

Donnally felt nauseated. Every time he peeled back a layer of Trudy’s self-deception, she became more and more disgusting.

“You know,” Sherwyn continued, “this story of yours doesn’t work all that well as evidence. Perhaps you should turn it into a screenplay and give it to your father. He seems to have the same tenuous relationship with truth that you do.”

With that, Sherwyn stepped back and closed the door in Donnally’s face.

Donnally reached into his pocket and turned off his tape recorder as he walked down the steps, but he was already replaying it in his head. No one so far had known who his father was. All any of them knew was that he was an ex-cop who flipped pancakes in a Mount Shasta cafe. Not even the press had bothered to investigate his background.

But Sherwyn had.

Sherwyn knew that Donnally would become his enemy long before Donnally did, which meant that Sherwyn had something to fear.

Donnally paused at the bottom step and looked back up at the house.

Sherwyn had inadvertently respun the web, no matter how tenuous it might be.