Beyond Blame Read online

  Beyond Blame

  A John Marshall Tanner Mystery

  Stephen Greenleaf

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For Nana

  And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

  Genesis 2:8–9

  The collective conscience does not allow punishment where it cannot impose blame.

  Holloway v. United States, 148 F.2d

  665 (D.C. Cir. 1945), cert. denied,

  334 U.S. 852 (1948)

  The defense of diminished capacity is hereby abolished. In a criminal action, as well as any juvenile court proceeding, evidence concerning an accused person’s intoxication, trauma, mental illness, disease, or defect shall not be admissible to show or negate capacity to form the particular purpose, intent, motive, malice aforethought, knowledge, or other mental state required for the commission of the crime charged.

  California Penal Code Section 25(a)

  (Added by Initiative Measure,

  approved by the people, June 8, 1982)

  ONE

  They were elderly, in their sixties at least, and like many older couples they radiated the warmth of siblings rather than the sparks of lovers. He was tall and stiff; she was short and stooped. His flesh was pasted right to bone; hers was tucked and pillowed. His eyes were blue and polished; hers were brown and melted. His clothes flapped and sagged; hers stretched as smooth and taut as second skin.

  She had been the first to take a seat in my office, at my invitation. He had placed the spare chair snugly at her side before he followed suit. Now they were holding hands, looking at each other, exchanging the reassurances that, after forty years of marriage, do not make use of words. I knew why they were there, but their business was so delicate and disturbing I had to wait for them to tell me.

  The woman had been elected speaker, but she was reluctant to begin. Her dress was blue and plain, with a pointed collar and white buttons up the front, and she fiddled with the top one until her husband nudged her arm. She nodded, placed her pocketbook on her lap, cleared her throat, and touched the tight bun she had made of her hair. There were streaks of steel through it, and doubtless through her heart as well. There would have to be, for her to have endured the past thirty days and remain as ordered as she seemed.

  “We are here about our daughter, Mr. Tanner,” Ingrid Renzel began, her strong voice clipped by the lingering chip of a Nordic accent.

  When I didn’t say anything, she glanced quickly at her husband. He nodded his approval and squeezed her hand. Fortified, she looked at me with renewed resolve. “We have practiced what to say, so you will understand our purpose, but it is difficult to know the proper words.”

  “Don’t worry about the words. Just talk to me as you would to each other.”

  Her smile was unexpected, a bright new thing. “We speak Swedish to each other,” she said, suddenly the imp, far younger than her years.

  I grinned. “Better stick to English.”

  She quickly sensed that her expression was inappropriate and it vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving her chagrined. “She was … she is … dead, Mr. Tanner. Murdered. Our Dianne—our daughter—was murdered in her home. In Berkeley. Last month. The twenty-first. It was a Friday. I …” She faltered into silence, her words outracing the plan she had hoped would carry her across the day.

  “I read about it in the papers,” I said to help her. “It was a terrible crime.”

  “Death … murder … is always terrible. But this. The police have pictures. We made them show us. The slashings. The wounds. So many, you would think she had been assaulted by a mob. Her flesh was ripped as though she were a demon. It was a monster’s deed, Mr. Tanner. A monster killed our sweet Dianne. She is … was … our only child. It is a thing beyond our thought.”

  The requiem finally faded, leaving nightmare visions in its wake, and my own reluctance to hear more. Ingrid Renzel reached into her purse with her free hand and took out a blue print hankie and touched it to her eyes, which seemed to now stare inward, at the dark grotto where the grotesques she had just described would lurk forever.

  I looked at her husband. Gunther Renzel had bowed his head and closed his eyes. The hand that didn’t hold his wife’s was curled into a fist that pressed like a pylon against his chest. He drew his breaths in rattling gasps, his aspect more indomitable than prayerful, as though he had usurped the redeemer’s role and had damned the world that tortured him.

  I asked Mrs. Renzel how I could help them.

  She placed her hankie in her lap, twisting it into a shapeless snake that crawled between her fingers. “The police, they are working hard. They call, come to see us, tell us they are doing their best. We know that, and we are grateful. But there is so much crime, so many horrors, they have to share Dianne with many others. Although they are trying their best, they tell us they have learned nothing.”

  “These things take time,” I said. “I’m sure—”

  She interrupted with a forthright plea. “We have no name. Do you see? There is no one to whom to ask our questions; no one who can tell us why Dianne was stolen from us in this way. We want you to find this man, Mr. Tanner. We have asked people who know about such things and they have mentioned you to us. Will you assist us? Please? Will you find a name for us?”

  I closed my eyes, as though that would cause her request to vanish. When it lingered, I opened my eyes and offered some excuses. “It might take a long while, Mrs. Renzel. Usually this kind of investigation is either over very quickly or it lasts for months. Even years. That is, usually the motive is obvious, or it’s senseless. It could cost you quite a bit of money before it’s over. My fee is forty dollars an hour.”

  I waited for a response and got the one I expected. “We are speaking of our daughter, Mr. Tanner. We will pay, whatever the amount. Gunther has sold his business. The night they came to tell us about Dianne, we were planning to buy her a gift with some of the money. A small red car. Now our gift will be to name the man who killed her. It will be the last thing we give her beyond our daily prayers.”

  Mrs. Renzel could seal the ducts no longer. She sobbed deeply and convulsively. A gel of tears varnished her rounded cheeks. Her husband tried to comfort her with murmurs and a long thin arm. While I waited for her composure to return I thought over what I knew about the case.

  Dianne Renzel had been forty-one when she died. She went by her maiden name, but at the time of her death she was married to Lawrence Usser, a professor at the Berkeley Law School, a prestigious private school located not far from a more famous Berkeley institution—the University of California, and its law school, Boalt Hall. Usser was an expert in constitutional law and criminal procedure and had been a consultant in several notorious criminal trials over the past ten years or so. He and Ms. Renzel had a teenage daughter.

  A Berkeley native, Dianne Renzel was a graduate of Berkeley High and the University of California. Over the past few years she had been active in many East Bay causes, and was a former member of the Berkeley City Council, the most turbid political body on earth, its most famous current aspirant none other than Eldridge Cleaver, its most abrasive recent controversy whether to pledge allegiance to the flag before each meeting.

  Renzel had been a staff member of the Community Crisis Center which was located near the university campus. A month ago her husband had come home from the law school late on a Friday night and found his wife lying in their hillside home, naked and dying, slaughtered unspeakably by person or persons unknown. Luckily, the daughter had been spending the nig
ht with a friend. Sadly, Dianne Renzel had been dead on arrival at Alta Bates Hospital.

  The police had released little information in subsequent weeks. Speculation in the press centered on rape or robbery as the motive, but neither of those was confirmed, at least as far as I knew. It was the kind of maelstrom I hate to get involved in, the kind of case that is never solved, not really, not in the sense that seeks both reason and remedy for subhuman behavior. But Gunther and Ingrid Renzel were the kind of people I could not easily say no to. By the time I was finished reviewing both the case and my compunctions, Mrs. Renzel was looking into my eyes again, waiting for an answer.

  I cleared my throat. “I have to be frank with you, Mrs. Renzel. This kind of thing usually turns out to have been done by a junkie. A guy with his mind burned away by drugs, his moral sense erased by his need for money to finance his habit. Often the savagery is racially influenced as well. Finding a killer like that will be difficult at best, and it will be something the police are much more likely to do than I am.”

  “We do not care who finds him, Mr. Tanner. Only that he is found.”

  “The problem is, private detectives are like bloodhounds, Mrs. Renzel. They need a scent. This case doesn’t seem to have one.”

  “You don’t know that, Mr. Tanner. Not yet. Not without talking to the police.”

  She had me there and knew it, so I cast about for more excuses. “Even if he is found, there’s a real possibility it won’t be of any help to you. You mentioned questions. A man like that won’t be able to answer your questions in any way that’s meaningful. You badly want this to make some kind of sense, Mrs. Renzel, and it’s very likely that it won’t make any sense at all. Plus, what he says won’t help you learn to live without your daughter. I think you two should talk this over a little longer. It might be best to just forget about the murder investigation, to try to put the whole thing behind you. To—”

  “We have talked of nothing else since that night.” Gunther Renzel spoke for the first time since entering my office, in a voice as raw as a north wind, as crackling as warming ice. “Talking makes it worse. So now we must stop the talk; now we must act. We are asking you to help us. If you do not wish to, we have other names. I ask you to decide. We have no more time for you if you stand against us.”

  I held up a hand in quick disclaimer. “I’m not against you, Mr. Renzel. I just think—”

  “Please. If you do not know that this is a thing a man must do, then you are not the one for us. So. What is your answer?”

  His aqua eyes dared mine to match their unspoiled purpose. I tilted my chair away from their icy insistence. “Okay,” I said, surrendering as I had known all along I would. “I’ll look into it. If it seems like I’m wasting my time and your money, I’ll let you know. If I develop any leads I’ll follow them as far as I can, even if they tell me things about your daughter you won’t want to know.” I paused and looked at each of them. “Agreed?”

  Their nods were firm and immediate.

  “Can you point me in any direction at all? Did you know her life? Her friends and enemies?”

  They exchanged a glance, then Ingrid Renzel answered. “From birth she was an angel. Everyone loved her; her playmates, teachers, everyone. It must still have been true; she was the same person. But since she married Lawrence she was so very busy. They were always doing, going, meeting, speaking. It was as though there were a contest between them, to see who could do the most good deeds. These past years we saw Dianne only in passing, when she would drop off Lisa while they went to a music concert or a political meeting, or would stop in for cake and ice cream on birthdays and such. We can tell you very little about her recent years, Mr. Tanner. It’s best you talk to Lawrence. But …”

  “But what?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That Berkeley. There is such madness there. It is why we moved away, those people. But it was different for Dianne. She loved it so, and worked so hard to make it better, but they were always at her, the wild ones. The ones who do nothing for themselves, who look always to others to solve their problems, who destroy themselves on purpose, as though that would punish the power that made them what they are. Dianne could not be what they wanted her to be—she could not change either the world or their place in it. No person could.” Ingrid Renzel sighed, as though the people she had just described were beyond both her experience and her theology. “So. Maybe one of them. The madmen. Maybe one of them blamed our Dianne for what he was, or destroyed her for being less than God.”

  I nodded because my own experience told me it made sad sense. “Do you have anyone specifically in mind?”

  “No. We know no one.”

  “Who knew the most about her work at the crisis center? About any trouble she might have had there?”

  Ingrid Renzel shook her head. “She never took us to her office. She was afraid we would try to make her quit, I think. To leave that place.” She glanced quickly at her husband, indicating just which one of them had no use for personal crises or for organizations that existed to resolve them.

  “Was she worried about anything at all that you know of?” I went on.

  “No. But she never talked to me, not of such things. There must have been troubles, all lives have troubles, but …” She closed her comment with a shrug.

  “Is there anything at all that came to your mind when you learned she had been killed? Anything that might suggest her killer?”

  Mrs. Renzel shook her head. “What came to our mind was only grief, Mr. Tanner. You should talk to Lawrence. He is the one who can tell you who might have hated her so much.”

  “Have you told Professor Usser you’re hiring me?”

  She fidgeted. “No. We don’t … no.”

  “Will he object?”

  “It does not matter. She was our daughter. It is our sorrow as much as his.” Her voice indicated that she was prepared to have to argue the point, if not with me, then with her son-in-law.

  “Well, it’s possible he might not be happy with me nosing around in his wife’s affairs. He might not be very forthcoming if I just walk in off the street and start asking questions about his private life. Let’s see. This is Thursday. Would you call him tonight? And tell him you’ve hired me and that I’ll be calling him tomorrow? It might save a lot of time.”

  “Of course, though I can’t promise you he will answer you. Lawrence has been … distant since that night. He seems to avoid us, perhaps because we are reminders of what he has lost.”

  “I understand. I’ll bother him as briefly as possible. Now, is there anyone else I should see? Someone who might know if Dianne sensed any kind of danger before she died?”

  Mrs. Renzel closed her eyes tightly, as though to extrude a useful memory. “A neighbor. There was a neighbor who was her friend.”

  “Name?”

  “Phyllis, I believe. She has a daughter Lisa’s age. They came to Dianne’s house to borrow the vacuum sweeper once while I was staying with Lisa while Lawrence and Dianne were at the Ussers’ cabin at the lake.”

  “The Ussers?”

  “His parents.”

  “Do they live nearby?”

  “In Piedmont.”

  “Would you call them as well? Tell them I’ll be around to see them?”

  She frowned. “I’d prefer not, Mr. Tanner. I’m sorry. We are not … comfortable with the Ussers. They do not wish to be disturbed by us, and we try not to disturb them.” Ingrid Renzel started to add something, then stopped. “Please don’t misunderstand, Mr. Tanner. We admire Lawrence very much. He is not responsible for the beliefs of his parents.”

  I nodded, embarrassed for her need to reveal social barriers, class distinctions, ethnic stereotypes, all the things that are supposed to have vanished but haven’t, that seem even to be re-emerging.

  Mrs. Renzel cleared her throat and spoke again. “It is embarrassing that we know so little about our daughter, Mr. Tanner. I had not realized until she died that we had drifted so far from her. Some of it is
natural, I suppose. Parents and children, so hard for each to understand the other, so hard to meet on equal terms. But there was more. All her life Dianne worked to help the disadvantaged. After Gunther sold his business she was surprised at how much money we got for it, at the kind of home we could afford to buy, at the activities we had planned for our retirement. I think Dianne felt our profit was improper. I also think she came to feel that because we had money we had everything we wanted, when all we really wanted was to see much more of her.”

  Ingrid Renzel’s grief seemed somehow to have doubled, the recollection of her daughter’s life now more upsetting than the fact of her daughter’s death. For both our sakes I hurried the interview to its end. “I think that’s all I need for now, Mrs. Renzel. I can get anything else I need from Mr. Usser. Be sure to call him tonight. I’ll talk to him tomorrow and look around and let you know.”

  “Lisa,” she said simply.

  “What?”

  “Lisa. Dianne was troubled about her daughter, Lisa. There were many problems in recent months. Lisa fought her parents like a tiger. The language. The threats. It was a painful thing to see their love become buried under so much bitterness.”

  “What was the trouble, exactly?”

  Ingrid Renzel shook her head. “Lisa has always been an unhappy child. Unable to enjoy what other children do. She seemed to feel that acting silly, having fun, was all too—how shall I put it?—unimportant for her. She was so serious and lonely that Lawrence and Dianne sent her to a psychiatrist. For a while it seemed to be working. Until a few months ago.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I don’t know. There are many reasons to be unhappy with the world, even for those as young as Lisa. I only know that Lisa began to behave badly, to disappear at times, to roam the streets in the middle of the night, to miss many days of school. The police were called at least once to find her. What worried Dianne and Lawrence most was that her new friends were crazies, like those Dianne saw at the center. They suspected she took drugs. They even suspected she once set fire to her father’s study and broke a window in his automobile.” Ingrid Renzel looked pained at the memory. “I believe Lisa was Dianne’s biggest problem, Mr. Tanner. I believe she caused her mother much, much pain.”