Confessions of an Innocent Man: A Novel

PROLOGUE

•   •   •

On the cinder-block wall, twelve feet away from the bars to the cages where my prisoners spend their days, a digital clock counts down toward zero. When they saw that clock for the first time, before I pressed the start button to get the numbers moving, it read 58656:00:00. That’s how many hours they’re going to be where they are: twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, for 2,444 days—six years, eight months, and eleven days. Today the clock says 49896:00:00. One year down, a bit more than five and a half to go. To celebrate, the three of us are having cake.

I say to prisoner number 1, whose name is Sarah, Happy anniversary.

She doesn’t answer.

I say to prisoner number 2, whose name is Leonard, You too.

He doesn’t say anything either.

I cut the cake in thirds and put their two pieces on two paper plates. I stick a plastic fork in each slice, like a birthday candle. I say, Y’all enjoy now.

And I slide each plate through the 4.25-inch space separating the bottom of the iron bars they’re behind from the poured concrete floor of their cells. Once they have their pieces, I take a bite of mine.

I say, The cream cheese frosting doesn’t have very much sugar; I don’t like it too sweet. The black flecks are Madagascar vanilla, no expense spared.

I smile.

I say, Some recipes call for nutmeg, but I leave it out. I’m not a fan.

Neither Sarah nor Leonard replies.

I’m already planning ahead. I say, I’m thinking we’ll have angel food next year, red velvet the year after that, followed by apple, then coconut for our fifth anniversary, and German chocolate, that’s my favorite, for our sixth. But I’m open to suggestions.

More silence. I say, And we can have devil’s food a few months later to commemorate your liberation. Funny, huh, devil’s food?

Not even a smile. They’re both in a bad mood today. I’ve gotten to where I can tell.

I made the cake myself. I’m not a particularly skilled pastry chef, savory was how I earned my stars, but I’m reasonably competent, and besides, somebody might notice if a single middle-aged man who appears to live like a hermit in perpetual mourning waltzed into a bakery and came out with a three-layer cake big enough to feed a family of eight.

They each put a piece on their forks at the same time. Sarah says thank you. Leonard still says nothing. We talk from time to time, arguments mostly, but my feelings haven’t softened much. There’s no reverse Stockholm syndrome happening here. These people stole from me, and I am without qualm about stealing right back.

On the flat-screen TV molly-bolted to the steel-fronted cinder-block wall, CNN is advertising upcoming coverage of the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I was still locked up when New Orleans got flooded, so I stood and watched video of a scene I’d never seen before. There were people on boats floating in the French Quarter, still photos of an abandoned amusement park, and what looked like a refugee camp inside the Superdome.

I said, Unbelievable.

Sarah and Leonard were watching the TV too, but neither one said anything back. I keep CNN running sixteen hours a day down here, off at eleven each night, on again at seven. The first week I had them, I asked whether they wanted Fox or MSNBC. I knew what their answer would be, but I asked anyway. I told them if their decision was not unanimous, I’d make the call on my own. They didn’t express an opinion, so I said, So be it, and I put it on CNN.

They both have a pair of disposable earplugs, to block the sound if they feel like it, and an eye mask to keep out the light. I give them new earplugs every week. It’s not like I plan on taking them to a doctor if they get an ear infection, but still, I’d rather they didn’t. I guess if they were really bad, like oozing pus or running a burning fever, I’d fake a sore throat, go to a doc-in-the-box, get some penicillin, and treat them with that. So far, though, knock on wood, they’ve stayed pretty healthy.

I say, See you around, Your Honors.

Neither one of them laughs, but I do, just a little hint of a chuckle. Your Honors. I do still amuse myself.

I drop the rest of my cake into a plastic trash container I’ll empty tomorrow or the next day, then I exit the open steel door, listen to it shut like a bank vault, turn the three bolts, and walk back upstairs. It takes me a while. I’ve gotten a bit out of shape, my knee is bad, and I’ve been feeling under the weather.

Also, their prison is six stories underground.

PART

1

•   •   •

If you ask a lucky person to tell you what happened on the worst day of his life, he can do so without hesitation. If you ask the same question to a homeless mother of three whose earthly possessions all fit in a stolen grocery cart, she won’t have a clue. I know this is true, because I am one of the lucky ones, but my father was not.

Even by Mexican standards, we were poor. Our tiny three-room house constructed from bamboo and mud was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and leaky when it rained. On a good day, we had two meals of frijoles and corn tortillas. My father never finished second grade. He couldn’t read, and when I needed his signature on a form so I could get financial aid for college, he signed his name with an X. His job literally killed him, and his death killed my mom.

But when Papá rose at dawn he was singing, and at night after dinner he would take Mamá in his arms and dance with her on their rotted porch to the sound of Tejano music coming from the transistor radio by the stove. I saw him frown only once, and never heard him raise his voice. He was the most positive, upbeat person I have ever known. Twenty years after he died I figured out why.

The lucky or the rich can name their worst day because it is special. For people like my papá, daily challenge is mundane. The bad becomes invisible, and they can see only the good. Optimism is not a personality trait; it is a strategy for coping with your lot.

Mamá taught me English and Papá sent me to college. They made sure I was a lucky one. That is why I can tell you my worst day. It was the day someone murdered my wife.

I’m different from my father in a second way too. He was a good and decent man. I am not. It took me a while to admit that to myself. I doubt it will take you as long. What kind of man has sex a couple of times a month but never with his own wife?

I’ll answer that question. I’ve had plenty of time to think. What kind of man am I? I am a shameful human being. You can call me the harshest name you like, and I will not disagree. I am all of those things and probably more, but there is one thing I am not.

I am not a murderer.

•   •   •

My wife’s name was Tieresse. Eleven years ago an ex-con beat her to death with an antique silver-and-crystal candlestick we kept on a rolltop desk in the parlor adjacent to our bedroom where she did her work. I was not there, but my imagination was. An endless video loop of the scene plays in my head, and I wouldn’t stop it even if I could. Some of it I know to be true. His back is to me. He’s short and stocky, with greasy shoulder-length hair. He’s wearing a denim jacket with no sleeves. A tattoo of a swastika dripping blood covers his upper arm. My wife lies on the floor, faceup, hands raised, her nose broken, a deep raw gash running down her left cheek from the corner of her eye to the cleft of her chin.

After we got married, I moved most of my things to Tieresse’s house, but I kept the studio apartment on top of my restaurant. I stayed there when she was away for business, or when I was too tired or drunk after closing time to drive across town. That’s where I was the night she died, in my apartment, having sex with one of my waitresses who was heading off to culinary school the following week.

Tieresse had seen the waitress several times. She knew her casually, knew her name, enough to say hello and exchange pleasantries, but she didn’t know her well. She didn’t care whether I slept with her. I promise she did not. At least I think she didn’t care. Or I believed she didn’t. I suppose the completely honest thing to say is I’d convinced myself she didn’t. Selfish, insensitive people can delude themselves. It doesn’t make them murderers.

At the trial my lawyer used the word arrangement. I felt an electric shock as the word hung in the air. The jurors had to have noticed, but I would not meet their eyes. My lawyer did not ask permission to offer that characterization. If he had, I would have said no. Arrangement is a grotesque and malevolent word. If Tieresse had been alive, hearing our relationship described that way would have wounded her. The fact she was dead didn’t make it okay. I imagined her violently shaking her head, saying to the lawyer, to the jury, to everyone, No, no, you do not understand at all.

Tieresse was my love and my soul mate. I could not have cared less about her money. Roll your eyes if you want to. I don’t care. I adored her. We’d sit next to one another on our sofa for hours, our shoulders touching, and read or watch TV. She liked to watch YouTube videos of unknown lounge singers she’d seen in New Orleans or clips of old black-and-white television shows that were older than I was. We held hands in the movies like teenagers. She’d slip off her shoes and put her feet on top of mine under the table at the restaurants where she loved to eat and drink. She knew as much about contemporary art as a university scholar, and she could talk intelligently about anything—well, anything other than sports. Half the stories in the four newspapers she read every morning made her cry. She was my best friend and the kindest and most generous person I have ever known. She simply didn’t like to have sex. It caused her enormous physical pain. There are people like that. I didn’t use to know it either, but there are.

The waitress’s name was Britanny. By the time my trial finally started, more than a year after the murder, Britanny was married to an investment banker she had met her first week in New York, but she testified for me anyway. She had cut her hair very short and lost weight since I’d seen her. She cried softly as she spoke and had no reason to lie. I cried too. She alternated looking at the judge, the jurors, and me. It was obvious she was telling the truth. I don’t know why the jury didn’t believe her.

Tieresse was fifty-two when she died. I was thirty-eight. She inherited a small fortune from her dad, whose family had come over on the Mayflower and promptly begun acquiring timber land. Tieresse told me he fancied himself a baron and spoke with an exaggerated Brahmin accent. I’d never heard of such a thing. She tightened her mouth and said through a clenched jaw, Dickens was far overrated as an author, dahling. He can’t hold a candle to Jane Austen, and she laughed and laughed. She said, Mother sounded like the Upper West Side, but not on purpose. Father cultivated sounding different. He rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror. She did not exactly dislike him, but I wouldn’t say she loved him either. He left her more than a hundred million dollars. She took that fortune and made it huge. She bought real estate and developed subdivisions all across the Midwest and western US. Her intuition about which cities were set to boom was so flawless a cottage industry of home builders, mortgage brokers, and real estate agents got rich just by following her moves.

Her dad had not been on the Forbes list of richest Americans, but she was. On the day she died, Tieresse was number ninety-nine. Along with Reinhardt, her twenty-five-year-old son from a first marriage that lasted less than a year, I was her only beneficiary, at least until they took it away.

Reinhardt used to hate me. When the police and prosecutors convince a young man his mom was beaten to death by her much younger husband who cheated on her serially and was with her only to take her money, it makes perfect sense for the son to hate the man. I would have hated me too. For seven years he spat my name if he used it at all. He detested every single thing about me. But not anymore. Now he hates the people who lied to him and railroaded me. That’s another thing we have in common.

Until she and I got married at city hall in front of a justice of the peace and a witness we met on the way, Tieresse lived alone, dividing her time between New York, Houston, Paris, and Rome. The four best cities in the world for whiling away the hours in a sidewalk café, she used to say.

Houston? I had asked her. It’s like dining in a sauna. She’d laughed and said, Yes, you’re right. In July and August, Tex-Mex, barbeque, and briny Gulf coast oysters do taste better in an air-conditioned room. But during the wintertime and spring, there’s no place I’d rather be.

That’s how I met her: at one of those cafés she so very much loved. Actually, it wasn’t truly a café. It was La Ventana, a small restaurant and bar I owned near the soccer stadium where real estate had once been cheap. When I bought the building with ten percent down and a small business loan, the ground floor had graffiti-covered sheets of plywood in place of windows, and the story above had moldy carpet covering wide oak-plank floors. I spent fourteen months restoring it myself. Every morning, seven days a week, I would drive my truck to a spot on Westpark where the day laborers waited for work, and at nightfall I would drive them back or offer to let them crash in sleeping bags on my floor. The day before Halloween, when the final lightbulb and framed black-and-white photographs were all in place, I bought a keg of beer and two hundred dollars’ worth of pizza from Frank’s and fed my crew and their friends. We had converted the second floor into a high-ceilinged loft where I’d live, and in the space below we’d installed a slate bar, ten tables, four booths, and a gleaming kitchen with a wall of glass. From late fall through early spring, when dining al fresco in Houston really can be grand, we added six more tables on a deck out front.

I’d been open less than six months when, on one of those days, a cool, crisp evening in early March, the tables were full. My general manager, Benita, ran into the kitchen and told me a guest wanted to see me right away. I peered out through the glass from my station behind the stove, and I saw a gorgeous woman with straight black hair, enormous lucent eyes, and cheekbones that cast shadows. My first thought was to wonder what such a person was doing dining alone.

Tieresse had ordered a red snapper sandwich on a house-made potato roll with fresh-fried garlic-laced potato chips on the side. She’d cut the sandwich in half, and I could see from where I stood that only a single bite was missing. Oil glistened on the tip of her index finger and a fleck of fleur de sel sat at the corner of her mouth where her upper and lower lips met.

I knew the fish was fresh. I’d bought it myself at the market that morning and had eaten a raw slice before I cut the filets for the early dinner crowd. I wondered whether I had missed a small bone.

Benita told me the guest’s name, and I recognized it instantly. Everyone in Houston knew who she was. Her name was on museums, buildings at Rice University, food pantries, and shelters for battered women. I was prepared for this dazzling, imperious, obscenely rich philanthropist to tell me in great detail exactly what I had done wrong.

Her tongue flicked the salt crystal into her mouth, and she asked, Are you the owner?

I felt my knees start to buckle. I told her I was, and it took me some time to process her reply.

She said, I wanted to say this directly to you, not your waitstaff: I’ve never actually felt inclined to compliment a chef for a sandwich, but I must make an exception for this one. Everything about it is extraordinary. How do you manage to get a hint of lemon inside the filet?

I was paralyzed. I could not form the words to answer her. Benita came to my rescue. She said, He poaches it briefly in a Meyer lemon beurre blanc before moving it to the grill.

I stammered, Yes, that’s what I do.

Tieresse said, Well, I might never be able to eat red snapper again.

She smiled. Her teeth sparkled. Her eyes were two shades of green. I wanted to say more but could only manage, Thank you.

She held out her hand, and I shook it. She told me her name. I said, I know who you are, and I told her mine. She said, Well, Rafael Zhettah, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.

I do not believe it is only in hindsight I am able to say I felt the magic right then, at that very first touch of her skin on mine, in the wake of words that surprised me yet that I immediately forgot.

I said, If you come back again it will be exactly the same.

And she said, Oh believe me. I intend to.

A month later, she was sipping a dirty martini on the La Ventana deck at half past five. I walked outside to check on her. She said she wanted to invest in me, and she asked whether I would like to open a bigger place.

I told her no. I liked my life. A bigger place would complicate it. The next day and the day after that, she asked again, and each time I said no. On that third day she said she understood, that she would not ask me anymore. The next day she came in again.

She said, I have a different question for you today.

I waited, surprised to realize I was nervous. She said, I apologize for prying. I asked Benita about your situation.

I felt my stomach lurch. My neck felt hot and damp. She asked whether I wanted to have a drink that evening after I closed. It was not the question I was expecting. I stood there mute.

She said, It’s okay. Never mind. I shouldn’t have asked.

I said, Yes I do. Very much. But we don’t close tonight until midnight.

She said, Perfect. I’ll see you then.

Tieresse had just turned fifty. She was nearly fifteen years older than I was. I had never been married. I had no children. I liked cooking, camping, reading, and canoeing. I lived like a graduate student. I had never known anyone like her. More money had slipped between the overstuffed sofa cushions in her den than I made in a year.

In other words, it was no surprise at all when, two years later, I was the first person police suspected when Tieresse was bludgeoned and killed. From the outside, I might have suspected me too. Being convicted, though, well, that was a different matter.

•   •   •

On our first date, Tieresse got to the restaurant a half hour before we closed and helped the busboys clear the final tables. I came out of the kitchen and saw what she was doing.

I said, Let me pour you a drink while we finish here.

She said, If I help out, you’ll finish here sooner.

She smiled and dropped a handful of utensils and two water glasses into a square plastic container.

Later that night we sat outside and shared a bottle of prosecco with a slab of local cheese and a loaf of warm sourdough. She told me about her son, Reinhardt, twenty-two at the time, doing graduate work in computer science at MIT.

She said, We talk nearly every night. He tells me what he is working on, and I don’t understand a word he says. I go to sleep smiling.

She asked whether I had children, and when I told her no, she asked whether I wanted them.

I said, Awfully intimate question for a first date, don’t you think?

She said, Yes, I do.

She said, Well?

I told her for better or worse, I was not much of a planner.

I said, Possibly I’m Buddhist at heart, but I’ve never dreamed about the distant future. Even here, I think about what I am serving that night, and whether we have enough traffic for me to meet the payroll at the end of the month.

She said, Well, I think you should.

I should what?

Dream.

Before she climbed into the back seat of a town car an hour before dawn, she hugged me and said, Can we do this again?

I said, I sure hope so.

That night I couldn’t fall asleep. Her words were ricocheting inside my brain. Yesterday there hadn’t been anything missing in my life, then she asked me what else I wanted, and I realized not that there was, but that she had asked me a question I should have thought about before. A friend I had known since I was in college wondered what had happened to me, how I had been so smitten so fast.

I said, I realize it makes no sense, but when you fall in love, if you do, you fall in love. That’s why it’s called that. Until it happens to you, it’s impossible to understand.

•   •   •

Valley Falls, Kansas, population fifteen hundred or so, straddles State Highways 4 and 16, thirty miles north of Topeka, in the northeast corner of the state. Four years before I opened La Ventana I had been renting a two-room apartment in Olathe, just south of Kansas City, where I was in flight school getting certified to fly twin-engine planes. My dad taught me how to fly his boss’s crop duster when I was a boy, and I had flown hundreds of hours, but I had never gotten around to getting my pilot’s license. Being a chef was option b; my dream job was to sleep under the stars. So I planned to start a company supporting rafting and kayaking excursions in remote parts of the West. We’d land on a dirt strip near the river’s put-in, and after spending the day on raging whitewater and exploring the canyons on foot, my clients would enjoy first-class catered meals. None of the other outfitters were doing it. But the investors I approached balked at the price of the insurance premiums and potential liability. My fledgling business never got off the ground. Yet I have no regrets. Flight training was its own reward.

One September day, on a cross-country training flight to Nebraska, my flight instructor pulled the power on both engines just south of the state line, simulating a double engine failure. I scanned the ground for a place to land. There are plenty of flat, treeless opportunities in Kansas, but not many are paved. I spotted what looked like an unused road and set the plane down there. The road was actually a mile-long driveway bisecting a hundred-acre wooded tract. It ended at what appeared to be a pasture of nothing.

My instructor congratulated me on both choice of spot and execution of the landing. We got out of the plane and walked around.

I said, Did you know this place was here when you pulled the power?

He said, I’ve never seen it before in my life.

•   •   •

During my sophomore year of college, I was on a second date with a girl I’d met in my accounting class. She was the youngest of eight siblings from a devout Mormon family. She sang in the choir and started the campus organization lobbying to end discrimination against same-sex couples. She asked about my family, and I told her. A few nights later I invited her to dinner again, and she demurred. I was surprised. I said, I’m disappointed. I thought we’d had a nice time. She said, You know, Rafael, there are times you should dole out truth sparingly.

If I’d learned my lesson, or been quicker to construct a lie, I might not have made the same mistake with Tieresse. It was our second date, too, when she asked me to tell her about my family. I told her I was an only child whose parents were dead. She asked how they died.

I said, My father was shot to death by Mexican drug agents during my freshman year of college.

Tieresse asked, He was a drug dealer?

I said, If you ask the DEA, they will say he was, but that’s not exactly true. He was hired help. He flew a crop duster and sprayed the marijuana and cocaine crops with organic pesticides.

She said, There’s such a thing as that?

I said, I have no idea.

She asked, For how long?

I said, For as long as I knew him. He couldn’t read or write but he could fly in places only a crazy person would try. He wasn’t macho. He was responsible. He did it for his family.

And your mom?

I said, She died two weeks later. The