I smile. "Damn few people can make that claim."
"If it's the truth. What kind of crimes?"
"Oh, they were all major felonies."
"And you got away with them?"
"I wouldn't be sitting here if I hadn't. That's what 'perfect crime' means, doesn't it?"
"You must've been born lucky, then," Talley says.
"Lucky? Well, luck had something to do with it. Other factors, too. But mainly it was ingenuity All three, in one way or another, were creative as hell. If I do say so myself."
"You made money from these crimes?"
"Just the first one. A small fortune."
"But the money ran out, is that it? Or you squandered it."
"Wrong on both counts. I still have a fair amount left. That's how I make ends meet."
He frowns. "Then what're you doing living way out here on the cheap, spending your days drinking in a place like this?"
"That's the long version of the story."
"And I suppose you wouldn't care to provide details."
"I didn't say that."
"So you are willing? Why?"
"Why not?"
"Oh, I get it," Talley says. "After more than twenty years, the statutes of limitation on your crimes have run out."
I don't answer. The motor sailer has cought my eye again. I watch it move down the bay, cleaving the water smoothly, her wake a long smear of cream on the dark blue surface. I have always preferred sailing vessels—ketches, yawls, schooners—to those big power yachts, but there is something majestic about any boat taking the sun on her way out to sea. For a few seconds, I feel a stir of the old yearning. But it doesn't last long. It never does.
"Wise? Did you hear me?"
I look at Talley again. He taps a small device he has taken from the pocket of his shirt. "Voice-activated tape recorder," he says. "Of course I won't use anything you say without your permission. I'll give you a signed statement to that effect—"
I wave that away. "Go ahead and turn it on. But it'll take a while to tell it the way it needs to be told."
"I've got plenty of time. And a spare cassette."
"Talking's thirsty work."
Talley says, "So's listening," and signals to Jocko for another round.
When I have a full glass in front of me, I say, "From the beginning, then. The summer of 1977, when I met Annalise . . ."
SAN FRANCISCO
1977
NONE OF IT would have happened if I hadn't met Annalise. Sure, I know—that's the way a lot of stories start. Mister, I met a man once. Mister, I met a woman once. You go along living a normal life, more or less on the moral high road, and then you meet the wrong person and suddenly everything changes and you find yourself losing control, running against the wind. It's almost a cliche. Hell, it is a cliche.
But it wasn't like that with me. Annalise was no Circe-like temptress luring me to ruin. The reverse was true, in fact. I was the one in the helmsman's seat all along. The tempter on the first crime, the prime mover on all three. She was the catalyst. If it hadn't been for her, I wouldn't have and couldn't have done any of them.
Yet I didn't corrupt her, any more than she corrupted me. I don't believe one person can corrupt another by intent alone. I think you have to be born with the capacity to commit acts of what some might term moral anarchy; to possess a dark side that you might not even be aware of until the right set of circumstances reveals it. If you meet another person who has the same sort of dark side, as Annalise and I did, fusing the two spreads the darkness through both, until they're consumed by it. Like when you mix chemical agents that individually are harmless but that together produce a volatile reaction.
I was thirty-four when I met her, the summer of 1977. But before I get to that, I should give you a little background on those first thirty-four years of my life, so you'll understand the man I was then.
Born and raised in Los Alegres, a small town north of San Francisco. Father a cabinetmaker, mother a clerk in an arts and crafts store. I was their only child, a surprise change-of-life baby—they were both forty-two when I was born and had long since given up any hope of having a family. You might think, given my sudden arrival, that they'd have lavished a great deal of love and affection on me, but you'd be wrong. It wasn't that they resented me, or that they didn't care; it was that I was a new and difficult complication at a point in their lives when they could least afford another one. They were hardworking, gray little people who'd spent the years of their marriage in a constant struggle to maintain a comfortable lower middle-class existence. Before I was born my father developed a lung disease that ate up most of their savings and kept him from working more than two or three days a week. My mother had to quit her job to take care of me. There was no family member on either side to help out, and no money to hire someone to do it.
So I grew up in a shabby rented house with no frills—a radio instead of a TV, few toys, no books because my parents had no interest in reading. Just enough food to keep from going hungry, just enough clothing to keep me warm and dry, just enough of everything to get by. I grew up listening to long silences broken now and then by mild complaints and heavy sighs and my old man's dry, consumptive coughs. I grew up pretty much alone.
School wasn't much better. I didn't make friends easily—too quiet, too shy. Average student, except for mathematics, the one subject I excelled in. All types of math, anything to do with numbers and calculations. That's the kind of mind I have. Logical, deliberate, precise. Give me an equation in algebra or trigonometry or calculus, and sooner or later I'll work out the answer. Present me with a nonarithmetical problem to which I can apply the principles of mathematics, and the same is true. There has never been any conundrum, no matter how difficult, that I haven't been able to solve. That gift is the central reason my three crimes remain perfect to this day.
My father died when I was a senior in high school. My mother was so tightly bound to him that she went into an immediate decline and died four days after my graduation. Both of them had small life insurance policies that they'd managed to keep up the premiums on. I was my mother's beneficiary, and there was a little left from my father's policy as well—a total of about five thousand dollars. I took this money, and another few hundred from the sale of my parents' meager possessions, and moved to San Francisco.
The only career option that seemed both worthwhile and affordable was accountancy, so I enrolled at Golden Gate University to pursue a BA; they offered a very good accounting program and had a reputation for placing their top graduates in well-paid positions. I found a studio apartment on the fringe of the Tenderloin, I took a part-time job to help with expenses, and I spent most of my free time studying. The hard work paid off. When I graduated I was second in my class and highly regarded by my professors.
I was hired at the first place I applied to, as a clerk in the accounting department of Amthor Associates. You may have heard of Amthor—a large San Francisco-based engineering firm along the lines of Bechtel Corporation, with the same sort of worldwide activity. I applied myself there as determinedly as I had at Golden Gate University and received my first promotion, to junior accountant, in less than three years. Over the next ten years I worked my way up to assistant chief in charge of accounts payable, at an annual salary of $37,000 with health benefits and stock options.
By then I had moved into a comfortable one-bedroom apartment on the lower slope of Russian Hill. I owned a three-year-old Ford, a small portfolio of conservative stocks, a twenty-one-inch TV, a stereo system to satisfy my taste for classical music, a closet filled with Arrow shirts and Roos Atkins suits, and a shelf of books about sailing and seafaring adventure, subjects that had interested me since my teens. I ate dinner fairly often in medium-priced restaurants. I went to an occasional movie or play or symphony performance, alone or sometimes with a date. Sports bored me; I left the only baseball game I attended before it was half over. I paid no attention to politics, or to what was going on in remote places like Vietnam. (I'd avoided the draft out of high school because my vision is less than perfect and I had an inner-ear problem that made me prone to mild dizzy spells.) I was sympathetic to human rights and environmental causes, but never to the point of activism. I lived in a tight little world of my own choosing. I was neither happy nor unhappy. I had few experiences and no expectations, and so there was little to judge happiness by.