Beyond Blame Read online

  “That might be important,” I said. “If you think of anything else about Lisa, let me know.”

  Ingrid Renzel nodded, gradually relaxing. The planes of her face slipped into a less concentrated configuration and she seemed another person. “Poor Lisa,” she said softly. “Who will be her mother now that our Dianne is dead? Who will love her no matter what she does?”

  I said the only thing I could think of to say: “Maybe you can be that person, Mrs. Renzel.”

  She shook her head. “We are too old. Too old, and too afraid.”

  She looked over at her husband. He frowned, then stiffened his back as if to disprove her statement. She smiled at him with affection, then looked away. Her eyes sought whatever it was that lay beyond the window and above the clouds. “My dear sweet Lord,” she murmured. “What sins have we committed, that we should be cursed to live longer than our only child?”

  TWO

  The Renzels departed under a cloud of bereavement, leaving a dark gray tuft of it behind for me. I convened beneath it for a time, along with their daughter’s ghost and my own reservations.

  There were a lot of reasons not to get involved in the case. It was notorious, which meant the cops would be on edge and uncooperative because of pressure from the media, and the media would be determined to do what they do best—make everything they focus on seem more unseemly than it is. Plus, Dianne Renzel had been killed in Berkeley—Berserkley, the natives call it—that mix of intellectual frenzy and socioeconomic frustration that regularly boils over into the bizarre, and often into worse.

  Berkeley isn’t what it was fifteen years ago, but it’s closer to what it was than any other place I know, so I viewed the prospect of wading through its frenetic scene with trepidation. But it was 1984. An Orwellian landmark, and also the twentieth anniversary of the day Jack Weinberg was arrested on the Berkeley campus for the high crime of collecting public funds for a political purpose. When a group of sympathetic students surrounded the police car and refused to let it haul him off, the Free Speech Movement was born. That struggle, in turn, was mother to the antiwar turmoil of the next ten years, a turmoil that touched us all and Berkeley most of all. How better to commemorate the anniversary than by solving a murder committed within strolling distance of Sproul Hall, where Joan Baez had sung and Stokely Carmichael had threatened and Mario Savio had convinced a surprising number of students that “there is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop.”

  I was thinking back to the old days—to the demonstrations and sit-ins and love-ins and the rest—when Peggy took Ingrid Renzel’s place in front of my desk, armed with a watering can and sponge. “Was that about that horrible Berkeley thing?”

  I nodded. “Their daughter.”

  “It sounded just ghastly in the papers.” Peggy closed her eyes and shuddered. “What are you going to do?”

  “See if there are any motives lying around loose, I guess. If so, I’ll check them out. If not, I’ll bail out and let the police do their thing. My guess it was some kid shoved out of West Oakland by his habit and his rage. I told the Renzels that if that’s what it looked like, I didn’t have the resources to track him down.”

  Peggy shook her head. “I think you’re wrong, Marsh. I think it was someone she knew. A stranger wouldn’t have kept hacking at her like that. There was some kind of personal vengeance going on there, that’s what I think.” Peggy grimaced at her own morbidity.

  “I hope you’re wrong for a change,” I said.

  “I do too. For your sake.”

  Peggy eyed me for a long minute, then tried to change the subject. “Time to water the plants. You look a little dehydrated yourself, Marsh Tanner.”

  “How would you look if you’d just agreed to go looking for the man who slit Dianne Renzel’s throat?”

  “About like you,” Peggy admitted, and wrinkled her face once again. “You must hate this job sometimes.”

  “It’s not the job, it’s just the world it comes in.”

  I looked toward the window. The shadows cast by the rays of sun that slanted through the glass made it seem like everything in the office was disappearing. Peggy emptied her watering can into a potted palm and dusted the philodendron with her sponge and went off to wherever she went after work to help her discard the hours she spent with me. I picked up the phone and called a lawyer.

  Jake Hattie was the best criminal lawyer in town now that Jim MacInnis was dead and Hallinan and Garry were getting along in years, at least he was if you could afford him and could stomach his politics, which were to the dark side of Jesse Helms’. But that didn’t matter much if you found yourself on the wrong end of an indictment, because when he was in court, Jake Hattie didn’t truck with causes or crusades and didn’t care about philosophies or propaganda, he just went to war for anyone who could pay his rates. Nine times out of ten, when all was said and done and the verdict had come in, his clients walked out the front door with Jake instead of the back door with the bailiff.

  I’d done some work for Jake from time to time—locating witnesses, taking statements, testing alibis, searching records—and I thought he could give me some unbiased dope on Professor Lawrence Usser, husband of the late Dianne Renzel. I hadn’t mentioned it to the Renzels, but when a wife is murdered, the best bet is that the husband did it: one third of all the murdered wives are murdered by their mates.

  I got through to Jake after three different secretaries had made me say my name. “Hey, Jake. Marsh Tanner. Got a minute?”

  “Sure, Marsh.”

  “Be right down.”

  I left my office, locked the door, went down to the alley, trotted around the corner and approached Jake Hattie’s legendary digs.

  Over the years, Jake’s office had become his own best monument. Evolving daily, visible from the street through floor-to-ceiling windows, its current degree of vainglory exactly matched the man. The mahogany paneling and Tiffany lamps and crystal chandeliers set off everything from expressionist abstractions to art deco monstrosities. The law books and the furnishings were wrapped in calf. The tables were oak and walnut and were piled high with research material for Jake’s latest book which, like all of Jake’s books, was about himself.

  The shelves on the wall were heaped with evidentiary souvenirs: murder weapons, fraudulent bank ledgers, falsely advertised ointments that cured baldness and small breasts, worthless stock certificates from uranium mines and oil wells, and framed legal documents that recorded not-guilty verdicts, divorce decrees and million-dollar personal injury judgments. A row of photos was autographed by the great and near-great, the holy and the profane. A stripper’s G-string and a pornographer’s book jacket lay near a safecracker’s stethoscope and an arsonist’s blowtorch. And all of it was arrayed beneath a giant oil portrait of Jake Hattie himself, presiding in a slightly skewed majesty from its place above the magnificent mantel and the roaring fire that, like Jake himself, blazed year round.

  The same secretaries I’d spoken to on the phone guided me one by one to the sanctum sanctorum. When he heard us coming, Jake swiveled away from his rolltop desk and crossed the room to greet me. My lovely guide evaporated as silently as water after her employer blew her a kiss. She was so delighted by the gesture she must have been new. Jake went through secretaries the way the Pentagon went through money.

  Jake was short and round, wore high-heeled black boots and three-piece black suits and a toupee that glowed like patent leather and almost worked but didn’t. His portly physique and antique half-glasses made him look like a kindly chemistry professor until you noticed the glint of an assassin’s cunning in his eyes and the three-inch monograms on all his clothes.

  “Marsh. How’s it happening for you?” He pumped my hand and slapped my back. Jake had never met a st
ranger, found fascination in the entire reach of humankind, which was probably why he was so good at what he did, which was to persuade jurors to believe him or at least to doubt the other guy.

  “Tolerably, Jake,” I said. “Yourself?”

  “Crime still pays damned well, Marsh. Bought a little horse ranch last month. Up in Sonoma County. You’ll have to come up some weekend. Always a spare girl or two around. Or bring your own. Always room for two more tits in the Rolls.”

  “I’ll only come if I can keep away from the nags. Something bad always happens when I get on a horse.”

  Jake laughed. “I hate the bastards too. Stupid fucking animals. I only got in it for the tax dodge, but damned if I’m not about to make another bunch of money. Got a little two-year-old my trainer wants to take to the derby. A finish in the money will guarantee a million in syndication fees, maybe more. Or so he claims.”

  “The rich get richer, Jake.”

  “That does seem to be the way it works, doesn’t it? Wish I could breed kids as well as I do Thoroughbreds. Youngest boy just joined the Moonies.”

  “Rough,” I said.

  “Yeah, hell. Now I got to change my will again. I got five kids and I’ve changed my will four times. Lucky for me Gary, the middle boy, he’s too dumb to realize the world’s fucked up so I got him working for me. What’s on your inquiring mind, Marsh?”

  “Lawrence Usser,” I said.

  Jake’s bright countenance darkened several shades. He pointed me toward the leather couch then sat down at his desk, which had once been used by the younger Holmes, or so the story went. When we were comfortable, Jake spoke in his courtroom grumble. “Usser. Hmmm. The wife thing, right?”

  “Right. Know anything about it?”

  “Only what I read. The only thing that gets me over to Berkeley these days is the Big Game, so I haven’t picked up on any bullshit. Looks like the papers aren’t pressing and the cops aren’t talking. Who’s your client?”

  I smiled. “An interested party.”

  “I amend my invitation. You’ll have to supply your own woman and she’ll have to sit on my lap all the way up.”

  I lowered my eyes. “I better have her bring a search party.”

  “Fuck you, Tanner. You get as old as me, then you can start making cracks about my waistline. You ain’t Fred Astaire yourself, I might add.”

  “Touché,” I admitted. “How about Usser? You worked with him once, didn’t you?”

  “Couple of times.”

  “And?”

  Jake lit a cigarette. “Bright guy.”

  “And?”

  “Lots of ideas; lots of energy.”

  “And?”

  Jake shrugged.

  “Come on, Jake. What’s his problem?”

  Jake chuckled. “Inscrutable, aren’t I? Well, Larry’s a humorless, inflexible, idealistic twerp, is about it, I guess. Intense as hell. Always certain he’s on the side of right and justice, always impatient, always a little disdainful of the rest of us poor saps who have to do this kind of thing for a living.”

  “Nice guy.”

  Jake sighed a cloud of smoke. “He’s not so bad, I guess, he’s like a priest with a new religion. Always armed with the latest theoretical claptrap spouted by some professor who couldn’t find a courtroom with a guide dog. Trouble is, all that theory is usually guaranteed to accomplish only two things—get the judge pissed off and cost the client a few hundred grand in defense fees. Larry’s specialty is the insanity thing, you know.”

  “Right. I’d forgotten.”

  “I hate insanity pleas,” Jake said.

  “Why?”

  “Because when you plead insanity you have to deal with shrinks. Ever had to rely on a shrink for anything, Marsh?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s like relying on a Doberman—never know when they’re going to turn on you and leave you bleeding. I’ve represented some real Wiffle balls in my time, Marsh, and every time I’ve sent one to see a psychiatrist he turned out to be goofier than my client on his worst day. Luckily, the legal insanity business is in recession, at least in this state.”

  “Why?”

  “Remember the election of ’82? Proposition 8?”

  “Refresh my recollection. Lately I’ve tried to forget elections as soon as I see the results. Even before then, this year.”

  Jake grinned. “Not a Reagan man, huh, Marsh?”

  “Nope.”

  “He’s the best thing that’s happened to this country since Roosevelt. Teddy, I mean.”

  “The best for you, maybe.”

  “Hey. I’m not my brother’s keeper; I’m just his lawyer.”

  I laughed and Jake did too. Then he launched a lecture. “In 1982, the voters of this great state, in the exercise of their initiative powers, abolished the diminished capacity defense in criminal prosecutions. The law is probably unconstitutional as hell, since it amounts to a conclusive presumption of the capacity to commit a crime, but for the time being the chief generator of psychiatric evidence in the California legal system has been eliminated.”

  “Diminished capacity,” I repeated. “That was when the defendant claimed he was too mentally disturbed to form the specific intent necessary to commit the crime. Or do I have it wrong?”

  “No, that’s it. If the diminished capacity defense prevailed, that meant the jury found no crime had been committed because the mens rea was lacking. Take a guy who steals a loaf of bread. If he was too nuts to form an intent to steal—if he thought he already owned all the loaves of bread in the world, for example—then he was not guilty of theft, of intentionally taking the property of another. Or, to use the example the Model Penal Code people use, if a guy believes he is squeezing lemons when he’s actually choking his wife, then he isn’t guilty of murder because he didn’t knowingly cause the death of another person.”

  “So all that’s out now.”

  “Right. The only thing left is the full insanity defense. In California we use a hyped-up version of the old M’Naughten rule, which means the guy may well have had the intent to commit the crime but he was so nuts the law says it wouldn’t be humane to punish him for it. Sure he meant to steal the bread, but he stole it because God ordered him to. Get the distinction?”

  I held up a hand in a gesture of surrender. “I’m getting flashbacks to law school.”

  “It’s complicated all right. And since the Hinckley thing it’s even worse. When a state court in Michigan ruled a while back that an insanity acquittee had to be treated like any person who had been civilly committed for mental illness, over sixty persons who had earlier been found not guilty by reason of insanity were immediately let out of the mental hospital because the state and their psychiatrists couldn’t prove they were dangerous enough to hold. Well, surprise, surprise. One of them proceeded to commit rape; another murdered his wife. So in Michigan now the jury can find a defendant ‘guilty but mentally ill.’ Since Hinckley a bunch of other states have adopted that verdict too. The problem is, it amounts to abolishing the insanity defense entirely, since it gives the jury what it thinks is an easy way out. They think they’ve done something humane by finding him guilty but mentally ill, but in reality the prison term is the same as if he’d been convicted for the crime itself and the poor defendant doesn’t get any more psychiatric treatment than the normal prisoner, which is none in seventy-five percent of the cases, at least in Michigan. So the law’s in a hell of a mess. Me, I blame the shrinks. They keep claiming they can tell who’s going to be a danger to society and who’s not, but they keep releasing guys who commit some atrocity or other the very next day. If the shrinks could get their act together it wouldn’t be so bad. Actually, they should get out of the game entirely, admit they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Christ, Freud himself said psychiatry couldn’t predict future behavior. And the American Psychiatric Association admits its members can’t reliably anticipate future violence. But they keep giving it the old med school try. The truth is, M
arsh, if a jury is really frightened by the guy—if he’s a Manson, say—no way in hell they’re going to find him insane, no matter what the shrinks have to say, because they’re scared he’ll be out on the street again and come looking for them. Hinckley got off because he was only a danger to presidents and Jodie Foster, not to jurors.”

  I shook my head. “From what I read, not many people are happy with the state of the law—shrinks or lawyers, either one.”

  “Well, a few are, and Lawrence Usser is one of them. He’s one of the best guys in the country for wending his way through the jargon. He knows his law and he knows his psychiatry. A formidable opponent, as many a prosecutor has learned.”

  “Which cases were you and Usser on together?”

  Jake leaned back against the desk, causing a stack of files to teeter. “The first was that gang rape over in Mill Valley. Rich college kids on speed and angel dust, banged the local homecoming princess. Larry got his boy dumped down to simple assault, two years’ probation, on a plea of diminished capacity. Showed the kid was so abused by his father over the years that he became powerless to resist the demands of an authority figure, such as the kid who led the gang. That particular psychosis they called a folie à deux. The jury bought the entire package Usser offered them.”

  “How about your guy?”

  “Oh, he walked, as I recall. Seems he only watched, or so twelve of his peers believed.”

  Jake Hattie shook his head in wonderment, whether at the mutability of the system of criminal justice or at his own impressive skills I couldn’t be sure. “The other thing was the Nifton case,” he said.

  I remembered it. “The guy who followed that coed around for a year, begging her to go out with him, and finally stabbed her one night when she started necking with another guy on the porch in an effort to torment Nifton into leaving her alone.”