After Her (25 page)

One of them handed my father a card containing the name of a psychologist who specialized in treating juvenile delinquents and adolescents with substance abuse problems.

After they left, I went into my room, the room I shared with Patty. (Voiceless, still. We didn't know this yet, but that day her vocal cords were permanently damaged. Her condition was later diagnosed as severe vocal nodules, and though she would eventually speak again, she was never again able to speak above a husky whisper, or to call out on a basketball court—
over here, over here—
or to sing. Not that she had ever been a particularly great singer. Just a loud and joyful one. Especially when the person she was singing along with was Dolly Parton, or Dean Martin, or our father.)

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP THE
next morning, I knew the killer was gone. I alone knew this, because I could feel it. As strongly as I had sensed his presence on the mountain, all those weeks before, I felt his absence from it now. Wherever he was—and he was out there—it was someplace else.

 

Chapter Thirty

I
stopped over at the Pollacks' house. I said I'd come to return a book I'd borrowed—not
My Secret Garden;
I wasn't about to admit to having taken that one. This was the autobiography of a former Olympic ski racer who'd become a quadriplegic after an accident. Some weeks earlier, on my way to my sweeping job at the police precinct, Jennifer Pollack had given me the book, explaining that she thought the story would inspire me, and remind me that even when things look really hopeless, they can still get better.
Look at Jill Kinmont: they turned her book into a movie, and now she makes art with a paintbrush in her mouth.

The real reason I had dropped by the Pollacks' was because they had stopped calling me for babysitting jobs. The new baby was due soon, and I'd been hoping to help out with Karl Jr. and make some money for back-to-school shopping. But they hadn't called me in weeks now—not since my picture was in the paper in another article about what was now called the “alleged attack” on my sister and me, and my fake call for help.

“I was wondering if you might like me to watch Karl Jr. sometime,” I said to Jennifer now. “So you could get ready for the baby and stuff.”

“We're probably all set,” Jennifer told me. Normally this would have been the moment she'd invite me in for a Popsicle, but this time she didn't.

“If you wanted to go out Friday, I could come over,” I said.

She was quiet for a minute. Off in the other room, I could hear Karl Jr. making animal noises, and the soothing tones of Karen Carpenter. “We've Only Just Begun.”

“I hope that counselor's helping,” Jennifer offered, as she closed the door.

M
Y FATHER NEVER SAID ANYTHING
about it, but I knew what my actions had cost him. When he came over now—as he did more often since he'd been taken off the Sunset Strangler case—he even said how good it was, thanks to the Novato transfer, to have more time for his family. “I haven't been a very good dad lately,” he said, as if what had happened was all his fault, instead of all mine.

“It's okay,” Patty said, patting his hand. “You do the best you can.”

We were taking care of him now.

I
HAD TURNED FOURTEEN JUST
before that summer began. (Patty was twelve now. She was growing up too.)

Bored by the exploits of
The Brady Bunch
(even the ones I made up), my sister and I still occasionally went to the hillside behind the houses of Morning Glory Court for Drive-In Movie nights. But not as often as we used to. I had my sessions with the therapist—who theorized to my mother that my concocting elaborate and dangerous scenarios on the mountain, in which I pretended to be under threat of attack by the Sunset Strangler, had been a desperate bid for attention on the part of a child of divorced parents, and a cry for help. In addition, I was an adolescent, with clearly demonstrated confusion surrounding sexuality, as indicated by my obsession with a highly inappropriate book that had been found in my room, and my own notebooks filled with stories, which the FBI officers had confiscated and read.

My mother paid attention to none of this.

“What you write in those notebooks is your own business and nobody else's,” she said. “Nobody should ever tell a writer there's something she's not allowed to say.”

She spoke of me as a writer. Maybe this was the moment I believed I might actually become one.

O
THER THAN THERAPY AND MY
work detail at the precinct, summer moved along much as it always had. Sometime in August, Helen's son moved her to a retirement community closer to his home in Washington State, and though hers had not been the only television set visible through the windows at night, the moment she moved away seemed as good a time as any for Patty and me to discontinue our dying tradition of watching
The Brady Bunch
on the hillside. I was sick of television anyway.

Patty continued taking care of Petra, and spending time with Mr. Armitage, who—amazingly to me, though not to Patty—announced sometime that he had gotten engaged to a woman he'd met at work. Her name was Sarah, and she was a dog lover like himself, though what she felt about Mr. Armitage's wardrobe of dresses, if he still had them, we never discovered. We had long since realized life was filled with mysteries, many of which would remain unsolved forever, despite the best detective work.

 

Chapter Thirty-one

I
t was late August, the week before the start of high school. From the other end of Morning Glory Court, I saw my sister on her way home from finishing her paper route, holding aloft a copy of the
Marin Independent Journal
.

“They caught him,” she said, when she was close enough that I could hear her. Her voice was very faint now and sounded scratchy all the time.

“Caught who?”

“The Sunset Strangler.” She handed me the paper then, with the headline taking up the whole top half of the front page: “Sunset Strangler Arrested. Marin County Breathes Sigh of Relief.” The photograph showed a tall, thin man—no more than thirty, from the looks of it—with long brown hair, being led to a police car, wearing handcuffs. He was smiling directly at the camera.

He'd turned himself in that morning, the story said. Walked straight into the headquarters of the Marin Homicide Division and confessed to all fifteen murders.

His name was J. Russell Adler, and he worked as a toll taker on the Golden Gate Bridge and aspired to be a rock star.

“He said he was going to be the next Jimi Hendrix,” one of his neighbors had commented to the reporter who'd written the story about his arrest. “I think he came out here after the Summer of Love. One time he signed my phone book and told me to keep it because his autograph would be valuable someday.”

“Those TV cameras on?” J. Russell Adler had said, as the police escorted him inside the courthouse, surrounded by the press. He'd waved to them.

I studied the photograph again and passed the paper back to Patty. We were quiet for a long time.

“You know it too, don't you?” I said.

My sister nodded.

“This isn't him.”

I
N THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED,
the J. Russell Adler story was front-page news. One story reprinted the lyrics to a song he'd written, and in another one they'd interviewed his mother back in Indiana, who made the comment that she knew all along it was a bad idea, her son coming out to California. A man who sold tickets at the Fillmore remembered meeting J. Russell Adler a few months back, when he'd shown up with his guitar case, demanding an audition with Bill Graham. People called in to talk-radio shows, to offer memories of times they'd paid their bridge toll and a strange young man had given them this scary look as they'd passed through his booth. J. Russell, obviously.

“I knew there was something wrong with the guy,” one woman said.

Another woman—someone who worked at the courthouse and spoke on condition of anonymity—said he'd announced at his arraignment that he had demo cassette tapes, if anyone was interested. “I'm the next fucking Bob Dylan,” he'd yelled to the courtroom.

A
T NIGHT IN OUR BEDS,
we lay there talking about it.

“The real guy's short,” I said. “Remember when you stuck the BB gun in his face? You were taller than him. And he was bald. Mostly.”

“Did you see his hands?” she whispered. “I remember his hands being different too. He had long fingernails, and his fingers were chubby.”

“I know,” I told her. Guitar players cut their fingernails short.

“We should tell someone,” she said.

“No one believes me anymore,” I told her.

“Dad will.”

T
HE FUNNY THING WAS, HE
did. I might not even have tried, but Patty insisted we bike over to his apartment before he left for work that day. We got there just as he was climbing into the Alfa.

“They arrested the wrong guy,” Patty said, without preamble. “The guy from the tollbooth isn't the real Sunset Strangler.”

“Whoever heard of a person saying they were a murderer when they really weren't?” I said, playing devil's advocate. I knew Patty was right, but I was at a loss to understand why anyone would admit to crimes he hadn't committed.

“Actually, there are people out there crazy enough to do that,” our father said. “It makes them excited thinking about all the attention they're going to get.”

“The real guy that came after us was short,” Patty whispered. “And old. And I shot him with the BB gun. Based on all the blood, I think he'd have a scar on his face, at least.”

“We tried to tell you.”

Our father just sat there. But I knew from the look in his eyes that he was paying close attention. After a long time, he spoke.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I should have believed you two.”

“Now you'll just explain to the police that they have the wrong person, right, Dad?” Patty said.

“I don't think they want to hear that from me, Patty Cakes,” he said. “That or anything else. I'm what's known as persona non grata over at headquarters these days. All those Special Forces guys and FBI big shots are just crowing about how people can get back out on the mountain now. The sheriff will get reelected after all, probably.”

“But if everyone thinks J. Russell Adler's the killer, how are they ever going to catch the real killer?” Patty said.

He didn't need to tell us. They weren't.

E
VEN NOW, WITH EVERYTHING THAT
had happened, and his office, that used to have a sign on the door—
DETECTIVE ANTHONY TORRICELLI, CHIEF OF HOMICIDE
—assigned to someone else, my father was still known in the Marin Homicide Division as being irreplaceable for one particular talent: his ability to get even the toughest criminals to confess to their crimes. Even when the evidence might not be sufficient to convict, even when the guy they'd arrested went into that interrogation room ready to stonewall him at every turn, even when he'd got himself the fanciest lawyer to advise him, our father knew how to break a person down. He'd get suspects to the point where they'd be confiding in him every detail of the murder they might actually have gotten away with if they had only kept their mouths shut.

This was his magic. Even now that he'd been stripped of his duties as head of homicide, it was understood that there could be no better person in all of Marin law enforcement to extract a full and complete statement from J. Russell Adler concerning the Sunset Strangler killings than Detective Anthony Torricelli.

They brought our father down from Novato. Gave him the room, the desk. Brought in the man who, of his own volition, had admitted to having murdered those fifteen women. They would have assumed that of all the interrogations my father had ever participated in, this one was sure to be the smoothest sailing. Like taking candy from a baby.

Or should have been.

What our father actually did, when he got J. Russell Adler in the room alone with him, was not what anyone expected, or anything he'd ever done before. For forty-eight hours he worked on getting J. Russell Adler to admit he was not the Sunset Strangler. But unlike virtually every other man or woman who'd ever faced our father across the table in that interrogation room, this one stuck to his story.

When it was over, the D.A. announced that given the full confession, the state felt no need to mount a trial.

J. Russell Adler pled guilty to all fifteen murders—thereby avoiding the death penalty—and was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms at San Quentin.

In the picture that ran on the front page of the
Marin
IJ,
as they led him away after the sentencing, J. Russell Adler was smiling.

O
NE MORE THING.
I
N HIS
confession, it was apparent that J. Russell Adler had known about the electrical tape on the victims' eyelids. In accordance with what the papers had been telling us for months, he had also indicated that he liked to take the victims' clothes off after murdering them. He spoke of having raped his victims, and of his preference (also well documented in the press) for arranging their bodies in a prayer position before leaving them—though he had appeared a little vague as to which victims he had chosen to arrange this way, and where, precisely, each of the victims' bodies had been found.

He drove a Ford Pinto, not a Toyota, but that wasn't a problem.

The important thing was that people didn't have to be scared to leave their houses anymore. The annual Labor Day Pancake Breakfast hosted by the Swiss Hiking Club could once again take place. The governor had extravagant praise for the efforts of the Special Forces team, and the FBI of course. He said nothing about my father, or the work of Marin Homicide.

With J. Russell Adler locked away, life could go back to normal. Except for one thing that I learned during one of my father's late-night visits to my mother.

During the interrogation, my father had asked the man who claimed to be the Sunset Strangler about the shoelaces.

“Shoelaces?” he said. A blank look had come over his face.

“What did you do with their shoelaces?”

“The usual, I guess,” he'd told my father. “What you always do with shoelaces.”

“What would that be?” my father asked.

“You tie them.”

L
ATE THAT FALL, THE MEDIA'S
obsession with the Sunset Strangler finally wound down, and the press moved on to other stories. I had hoped that once this happened, my sister and I could get our father back, restored to his old hero status maybe, or something close. But the hoped-for transfer from his dark little office in Novato back to the Civic Center never came. In the eyes of most people in our county, the heroes of the Sunset Strangler case had been the FBI.

That fall, the
IJ
had run an editorial suggesting that our local law enforcement officers had much to learn from the government professionals who'd finally brought the killer to justice. The
Chronicle
ran a cartoon featuring a man evidently meant to represent my father—depicted as paunchy and balding, with a five o'clock shadow—applying for a job at McDonald's.

F
OR MY FATHER, THE WHOLE
world changed after his failure to apprehend the real Sunset Strangler. He knew that the man remained at large, somewhere out there in a world that included his two beloved daughters.

He wasn't working such long hours anymore. Where in the months before the arrest he'd been getting progressively thinner, he had put on weight, but not in a good way. He looked puffy—from drinking, probably. The stress of the last twelve months seemed only to have been transferred to another location—from his shoulders to where it resided now, someplace even deeper, more irretrievable.

I think that the moment when my father understood his failure, and acknowledged his terrible mistake in not believing the story Patty and I had told him about our encounter with the killer on the mountain, was the moment he stopped believing in his own magic. Once that happened, his magic was gone.

T
HE THREE OF US WERE
out driving somewhere a few months after the arrest of J. Russell Adler. Our usual dinner spot was Marin Joe's, but having found ourselves farther north, we had stopped into an IHOP for a meal.

The waitress pouring his coffee had recognized my father from all those press conferences on television the year before, evidently—surprising, considering I sometimes barely recognized him myself anymore.

“You're the cop that was working on the Sunset Strangler case,” she said.

Yours truly, my father said, but not like his heart was in it. It said something about where he was these days that I (who used to dread these moments) felt only gratitude that he had the chance to haul out the old charmer routine.

“That guy really had you going for a while,” the waitress said. “Thank God for the FBI.”

My sister and I chewed quietly then. At some point when he was finishing his pancakes, and the waitress came back with a refill, my father had made the observation to her that she looked a lot like Jane Fonda in
Coming Home.

“I bet you get that all the time,” he said.

I saw the way he looked at her then, almost seductively, eyes peering up from under those lashes.

This was the first time I could remember that a woman had seemed oblivious. She charged him for the pancakes, like a normal person.

H
IS COUGH, WHICH OUR MOTHER
kept saying he should get checked out, did not improve. Sometimes now I could hear him struggling for breath. One day, when he was dropping us off after dinner, he told our mother he was thinking of quitting the force.

“But you love being a police officer,” she said.

“A cop needs to recognize when he's past the top of his game,” he told her. “It's probably time for the younger guys to step in and take the lead.”

“What are you talking about, Anthony?” she said. “You're not even forty-one yet.”

“Whatever age it happens to a man, he'd better take note when it does,” my father said. “I'm not going to be like one of those old ballplayers who keeps showing up at spring training when his average drops below two hundred.”