Illusions

20

“I thought I had it all figured when I went out there,” I said to Kerry. “Cut-and-dried, and no matter what Sondra Nelson said it wouldn’t make any difference. But when I heard and saw what he’d done to her, those bruises... it did something to me. Now it doesn’t seem half as simple as it did before.”

“He must’ve been a monster. Erskine.”

“Yeah. But I already knew that... Oh, hell, I don’t know. I just feel bad for both of them. Smug and self-righteous, Kendall called me, and she was right. I paid lip service to having compassion, but I didn’t take enough of it out there with me.”

“Are you saying you’re sorry you found out the truth?”

“Christ, no. I’d feel twice as bad if I’d heard it later, after I dumped my version on Battle.”

The water in the tub was cooling; I turned the hot water tap on full blast again. Steam rose in thick floating layers that gave Kerry, seated on the clothes hamper across the bathroom, an ethereal quality, as if I were talking to an ectoplasmic representation rather than a real person.

She said, “You are going to tell him, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know yet. I still haven’t made up my mind.”

“You will,” she said.

“Will I? What makes you so sure?”

“Because you know they won’t confess of their own volition and Battle probably won’t find out without your help. There’s nobody else to see that justice is done.”

“Honorable, dutiful, Mr. Do-the-Right-Thing.”

“That’s you. You couldn’t let two people get away with murder.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Compromise your principles, jeopardize your career, for a pair of strangers—?”

“A pair of badly used human beings.” My principles aren’t exactly what they used to be, either, I thought, but I kept that to myself. “Kerry, what would you have done in Sondra Nelson’s place?”

“Come on, that’s not a relevant question.”

“It’s relevant to me. Suppose that screwball ex of yours was stalking you—”

“Ray? He may be crazy, but he was never abusive.”

“All right, but suppose he was and he’d been stalking you ever since you left him. And he found you and threatened your life in front of witnesses and you knew he meant it. Would you throw away the new life you’d built, a man you loved and who loved you, and start running and living in fear again? Or would you take desperate action?”

“I can’t answer that,” Kerry said. “No woman can, really, unless she’s living in such a situation.”

“Right. Exactly. You get pushed to the limits and then you find out. So it is possible you’d’ve done just what Sondra Nelson did. You don’t rule it out.”

“I doubt I could kill anyone.”

“Not even if you were beaten and raped? Not even to save your own life?”

“In self-defense, yes. I came close to doing just that not so long ago, don’t forget.”

“I’ll never forget that night in Cazadero.”

“Premeditated murder, though... no, I couldn’t plan and carry out a cold-blooded act like that. Not many people could.”

“Neither could Nelson. That’s central in her case. She didn’t shoot him until he beat and raped and threatened her again. And when he did those things, he made it self-defense.”

“You’re splitting hairs,” Kerry said. “She went to the motel with the intention of killing him. She admitted that she tried to do it when she got there.”

“But she didn’t. Besides, does self-defense always have to be spontaneous to qualify? Always, in every case?”

“Maybe not. But taking a human life is still wrong.”

“So Nelson and Kendall should be punished.”

“Yes.”

“Because the law says so.”

“Well?”

“Even if they could be convicted,” I said, “and Kendall was right that it isn’t likely, what purpose would be served? Who’d benefit from them going to prison, two essentially law-abiding women who’re no longer a threat to any individual or to society at large?”

“How can you be sure they’re no longer a threat? What if somebody else harasses one or both of them? If they got away with murder once, they might be inclined to try it again.”

“I don’t think so. Erskine was the psychopath, not Nelson or Kendall.”

“You could be wrong.”

“I could be, sure. No absolutes.”

“Except for our laws — they’re the closest to absolutes we have. If there wasn’t punishment for people who break them, what good would they be? You might as well have anarchy.”

“No argument there. But what’s more important, punishment or justice? The two aren’t always synonymous. The law isn’t always inviolable, no matter what the legal profession would have us believe, and justice isn’t always best served by legal interpretation.”

“Now you’re rationalizing.”

“Maybe.”

“Or worse, thinking of playing God.”

“Babe,” I said, “judges and lawyers and juries play God every day. Strangers who know little and care less about the individuals they sit in judgment of. You think they always play strictly by the rules? That they don’t manipulate and maneuver and rationalize and exercise personal prejudice and deliberately misinterpret facts simply because they’re empowered by the legal system? That’s another illusion we keep fooling ourselves with. We all play God sometimes. And sometimes the God we play is more just than the God the lawmakers play.”

She sat quiet. The steam had dissipated again and I could see her face clearly. The frown she wore said she was doing a little God-playing herself at the moment, sitting in judgment of me and my heretical argument.

“Besides,” I said, “I’m the one who put Erskine in a position to harm his ex-wife, and her in the position of having to defend herself against him. So if I do decide to keep what I know to myself, all I’d be doing is reversing myself on the judgment seat. Trying to be a better God-player than I was before.”

“You really believe that? Everything you’ve been saying?”

“Fundamentally. And if you’re going to say that I’d be putting myself above the law, that’s not true. I’m bound by it and a slave to it just like everybody else, and you know I wouldn’t have it any other way. What we’re talking about here is interpretation by one man in one specific case. My interpretation of justice here doesn’t necessarily coincide with the laws of California. That’s the bottom line.”

“So you’re going to do it. Let those women get away with murder.”

“I didn’t say that. I told you, I still haven’t made up my mind. All I know right now is, I can’t stop thinking about Sondra Nelson and what that son-of-a-bitch did to her. I can’t get the image of all those bruises out of my mind...”

I went to bed early, dropped off right away — more a passing out than a falling asleep, as tired as I was — and immediately dreamed the Eberhardt dream. Join me for a midnight snack? And then dreamed it again. Let’s eat. And kept on dreaming it, as if it were a phantasmic snake rolling on and on while it tried to gobble its own tail.

Join me for a midnight snack?

Corner ahead, just come around the corner...

I was sitting up in bed. Wide awake, with no sense of transition between unconscious and conscious.

Beside me, Kerry stirred and made a disturbed sound, but she didn’t wake up. The bedside clock read 3:11.

My mind was fuzzy at the edges but clear and sharp in the center, as though I were looking at something far away through a telescopic lens and the magnification brought it up close in all its detail. There was sweat on my neck and throat as I examined it. The palms of my hands felt moist.

I sat there.

Ask the right questions, you get the right answers. Look at something long enough and in the right way, dreams included, and all the distortions and blockages disappear and you see it for what it really is. Open up your mind and the light, too damn much light, shines in.

I sat a while longer, then got up and used the bathroom. Came back and lay down beside Kerry and listened to the gentle rhythm of her breathing.

Jesus, I thought, please let me be wrong about all of it this time.

But I knew I wasn’t.

I stayed in bed later than usual for a weekday morning, letting Kerry get up first. She brought me coffee, tried to make conversation and gave it up when she saw that my mind was elsewhere. A kiss, a lingering whiff of the spicy perfume she favored, and she was gone. I hauled myself out of the warm nest and showered and drank more coffee, killing time until the kitchen clock showed that it was past nine. Then I was out of the condo to start my day.

Another bad one. Even worse than yesterday.

At San Francisco General I avoided the ER and went up to the administration wing instead. This was Tuesday and Dr. Caslon was off on Tuesdays, but I no longer needed him to answer questions for me. A Chinese woman in the billing department took care of that chore. All it required were a couple of glib lies and the dropping of a name that wasn’t my own.

Right questions, right answers.

Running on the right track at last — and wishing I could get off before the finish line.

My flat.

The scattered piles of Eberhardt’s office records, a quick hunt through them for his final Cellular One bill. And there it was, the last charge, the last call — the last piece of proof.

So that part of it was clear and irrefutable. I could still be off the beam on the other part, the way I’d been off on what had happened in the Pinecrest Motel room a week ago yesterday — not much but enough to make the truth a little less repellent, a little more tolerable.

Slowly I got up from the desk and slowly I went into the bedroom to the phone.

In the car again, driving.

Too-familiar route the past few days, and wouldn’t you know that traffic would be light. It never seemed to be that way when you were in a hurry.

Thirty-eight-minute trip. I marked the passage of each on the dashboard clock, hating every one.