The Crimes of Jordan Wise (2 page)

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.

Most of the time I was accepting of my life, if not completely content with it. It was what it was; I was what I was. But there was a restlessness in me, a vague, persistent yearning for something else, something more. I thought I'd like to learn how to sail, but I never got around to doing anything more than daydreaming about it. I had other daydreams, too, usually triggered by a book or magazine article or TV show: faraway places, islands in the sun, tropical breezes and sunset voyages on dark blue water, a life of luxury and ease. I made tentative plans for trips to Tahiti and the Caribbean, but I didn't follow through on those either; faraway places seemed too expensive and too far away. The only vacation I took outside California was six days on Maui. It wasn't what I'd expected and I had a lousy time.

This Life I was leading, by conservative standards, was exemplary. By other standards it was pedestrian, dull, empty. I broke no laws of any consequence, I paid my bills and taxes on time, I was a model citizen by every measure. The only difference between me and millions of other model citizens was that I had never been married and I lived alone, not so much by choice as because I'd never met anyone I cared to share my life with. That, and inertia.

Not that I led a monkish existence. There were women before Annalise, a few casual relationships. Some women seem to like quiet men of average height, average weight, average looks; men who wear glasses that give them a studious appearance. We come across as nonthreatening, I suppose. Blue eyes had something to do with it, too. My best feature, Annalise said, and she wasn't the first. Now and then one of the women would consent to go to bed with me, and this happened often enough to satisfy my normal carnal instincts if not theirs. I considered my instincts normal at the time, anyway, but I see myself now a lot more clearly than I did then.

None of the affairs lasted beyond a month, and I suspect one of the reasons is that I wasn't much of a lover. I'd never felt completely comfortable with my sexuality, had a fairly low sex drive as a result. I didn't get laid for the first time until I was nineteen, and it wasn't much of a confidence builder. I don't remember the girl's name or what she looked like. All I remember is her saying, "Not so fast, not so fast," and "Oh God, couldn't you wait," and thinking there must be something wrong with me because I wasn't able to do it right.

But for all of that, I was ripe for someone like Annalise. Not just someone to fall in love with, to fill the void in my life. A kindred spirit, a kind of female alter ego, even though I didn't realize it until months afterward. Alone I was nothing, would always have been nothing. With Annalise, because of Annalise, I was capable of anything, any possibility.

But the day turned out bright and clear, balmy, and I didn't feel like holing up in the apartment and I didn't want to hurt Sanderson's feelings by not showing up—not that he'd have noticed. So I went. The reception was held at the Alta Mira Hotel, on the hill overlooking the waterfront and the bay. Tables groaning with food, an open bar, waiters circulating with glasses of champagne, a five-piece orchestra. The swarm of guests was as thick as bees in a hive, setting up the same kind of constant, pulsing buzz.

I located Sanderson and his bride and congratulated them. Then I filled a plate and snagged a glass of champagne and tried to find a corner to hide in. There wasn't any inside, so I wandered out to the far end of the terrace. I'd finished the food and champagne and was looking out over the harbor, about ready to make my escape, when a voice behind me said, "You look a little lost, standing there." I turned, and there she was.

The effect she had on me was cumulative, not immediate. The first two things I noticed were her size and how much hair she had. A couple of inches over five feet tall, so that I had to look down into her face; hair the color of dark honey and worn in a thick feathery wave the way Farrah Fawcett wore hers in
Charlie's Angels,
the top-rated TV show that year. Then: Nice smile. Lightly tanned and freckled skin. Brown eyes, heart-shaped face, a bump of a nose with a slight upward tilt. Slender body, small breasts, slim legs. White dress with a red flower pinned to it, and a string of pearls at her throat. It was minutes before I realized just how well her features blended into a harmonious whole, that she was close to being beautiful.

Usually I was at a loss for any kind of clever repartee; I don't think well on my feet. But that day I managed to summon a reasonably bright response.

"I was lost," I said, "but now I'm found."

"What? Oh," she said, and laughed. Nice laugh. Rich and deep, not one of those tinkly giggles that some small women have. Then her eyebrows pulled together and she said in serious tones, "Did you mean that Uterally?"

"Literally?"

"What you said about being found. The way it's meant in 'Amazing Grace.'"

"You mean am I religious?"

"If you're a born-again . . ."

"I'm not. Being born once was enough."

"Good. I have a problem with Holy Rollers."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"As long as you aren't one." She smiled again. "You know, this is a pretty odd conversation."

"I guess it is."

"Not that I mind. I find odd appealing—up to a point."

"Is that why you came over to talk to me?"

"No. Because you looked like a lost stray."

"I don't deal well with crowds," I said.

"Shy?"

"You could say that."

"I'm just the opposite. Outgoing. I love parties, the bigger the better." She sipped from the glass she was holding. "Champagne, too. But I think I've about had my limit. What's your limit?"

"One or two glasses. I'm not much of a drinker."

"Mine's five or six. This is number six."

She was a little drunk, I realized then. There was a flush across her cheekbones, and the brown eyes had a glaze.

I asked her if she was a friend of the bride or groom, and she said, "Neither. Friend of a friend who went to school with the bride. You?"