The Adderall Diaries (22 page)

“Do I seem worse?” he asks.

“Only a little,” I say.

We sit for another hour at the lake drinking lemonade. I don’t know what it’s in response to but I tell my father, “I’m straightforward. I’m an honest person.”

“You?” he says, laughing like it’s the funniest thing he ever heard. “Sure you are.” Before we met I thought I had created a way for us to see that our memories were equally valid. I don’t know how to spend time with someone who thinks I’m a liar. We both think we’re indulging each other. We both think we’re doing one another a favor by pretending to forget. He says he goes dancing on Friday nights with his wife. I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re crippled if you have good rhythm. He asks if I would go with them.

“I’ve never seen you dance,” he says. “I hear you’re a good dancer.”

“I am,” I say. “I’m a good dancer.”

It’s getting late in the day. I’ve been with my father over three hours. I’m meeting my sister for dinner soon. He asks if I would like a ride but I say I’d rather walk.

There’s a woman nearby with a book open on her lap, a bunch of children playing in a foam-padded park, a homeless guy sleeping on a bench. It could be any hot day in Chicago. What did I want? What did I expect? I had told myself he couldn’t give me anything, but I must have wanted something because I feel disappointed.

“You know, in your memoir you say you killed that guy that beat you up.”

“I did? I wrote that?” He stiffens, not smiling at all.

“Yeah. You did.”

“Wow. I can’t believe I wrote that.”

“But you didn’t. I looked into it. There wasn’t any murder like that that year.”

“With a shotgun?”

“Yeah. I went through all the papers. I even found a study.”

“But you don’t have his name.” It’s almost a question. He doesn’t remember exactly what he wrote and he gave me the only copy. I agree with him. I don’t have the man’s name, and without his name I can’t prove he wasn’t murdered in 1971, less than six months before I was born. And I can’t find the man’s son, which is what I really want. When I first read the memoir I had been certain it happened. I’ve been wrong about him so many times and I wanted to be wrong about this. I looked for assault records from 1970, when the beating occurred, but they’ve all been purged. I’ve thought of asking about this murder many times. But I had decided not to ask him about it today. I thought we had more important things to talk about, and I didn’t want to push him away. I wanted to suck some of the poison out of our relationship. And then I asked him anyway, and now we’re at the lake and he’s insinuating the murder is true. But I don’t want it to be true. That would make me the second child orphaned by my father.

My father grins like a boy playing a prank. All that water spread out before us, the condo towers on either side of us, the tan brick public buildings behind us. Chicago is a sturdy city. It’s possible I know less now than I knew before. I watch my father’s face, the area where the tangle of wrinkles fade into where he wore a beard for many years and his skin is smooth. The sun is full on us.

“Maybe it didn’t happen then,” he says. Though he clearly wants me to think that it did. But do I? This is my father.

On July 7, 2008, two days before he’s scheduled for sentencing, Hans Reiser leads the police to Nina’s remains. He takes them through the woods near his house to a thin deer path that cuts sharply off the trail, then sits for a moment in the dirt. He’s handcuffed to William Du Bois and accompanied by a team of SWAT officers. Helicopters hover overhead. “If you dig there,” he says, pointing to an end of turned earth, “you’ll find her feet.”

I had visited him in the jail just five days earlier. It was our first and only meeting. We spoke over a phone line, staring at each other through bulletproof glass. He told me he recognized me from court. He said he hadn’t received a fair trial and asked me to investigate witnesses against him. He said he would be very impressed if I could find out a few things. He didn’t show any remorse; he was angry about how he had been treated. I said, “Who cares if you received a fair trial if you’re guilty of murder?”

“You can believe whatever you want to believe,” he said, hanging up the phone. But with his sentencing approaching he finally gave in.

In late August Hans gives Paul Hora his recorded confession. He says on September 3, 2006, in a fit of rage, he punched Nina in the face, then choked her. He says he placed her in a duffel bag and stored her for two days in the back of the Honda CRX while he went out at night with a small shovel and dug the hole. He dug the grave at a plateau three hundred feet below a hiking trail. The hole is four feet deep at the end and four feet long in hard, packed ground.

The confession is itself a lie. The murder was premeditated. Sources tell me that prior to giving Hora his statement Hans admitted to digging Nina’s grave two weeks in advance.

On August 29, 2008, Judge Goodman approves the bargain negotiated by Hora. In exchange for leading the police to Nina’s body, confessing, and waiving his right to appeal, the charge is reduced from murder one to murder two with a mandatory sentence of fifteen to life. It’s not a significant reduction. Unless the California Department of Corrections changes dramatically Hans is unlikely ever to be released from prison. Nina’s remains are shipped to Russia so her family can give her a proper burial and begin the process of mourning.

Many think that, despite waiving his right to appeal, Hans will find a way to continue his case. “As long as Hans Reiser is alive,” Assistant Defense Attorney Richard Tamor says, “this story will never end.”

STEPHEN ELLIOTT
is the author of seven books including
Happy Baby,
a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, as well as a Best Book of 2004 in Salon.com,
Newsday, Chicago New City,
the
Journal News,
and the
Village Voice.

Elliott’s writing has been featured in
Esquire,
the
New York Times, GQ, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 and 2007, The Best American Erotica 2006,
and
Best Sex Writing 2006.

In January 2009 he launched TheRumpus.net, a daily online culture magazine.