Land Of The Blind

It's the ex-wife. It dawns on Caroline as she reads Clark Mason's bitter divorce records, as it also occurs to her that this nice philosophical, theoretical discussion of crime may in fact refer to an actual crime – messy, banal, and ordinary, a new pile of old shit: Woman bangs everyone but her husband. Takes all the money from the divorce. Remarries before the ink is dry.

So he kills her.

Clark or Tony Mason – whatever he calls himself – why should he be any different from any of the slag-headed, short-tempered men who end up here? Most murderers kill someone close to them, and most murderers are men and most victims women – the unrequited, the girlfriends, the wives and ex-wives, women who spurned or cheated or simply didn't get dinner on the table in time. Caroline had wanted this to be different, wanted him to be different. But that's what happens when you go trolling for meaning in the truth. Fables are for children, parables for priests. All true stories are melodrama. Or noise.

The noise in these divorce papers is deafening. Caroline winces as she flips through the charges and countercharges recounting the three-year matrimony and acrimony of Clark A. and Susan A. Mason: Complainant was unfaithful… Respondent forced complainant to quit her profitable job in Seattle and move to Spokane… Complainant hid joint money in private accounts… Respondent irresponsibly spent couple's savings, mortgaged their home, and liquidated stock to run for Congress… Infidelity… Impotence… Emotional abuse.

From the dissolution papers, Caroline learns that Clark and Susan were married in December 1999 in Seattle and divorced in January 2001 in Spokane. It was his first marriage and her third. There were no children. In 1999 they left Seattle and moved to Spokane, and bought a swanky, sizable house on Manito Country Club – with cash. Caroline can imagine it. Stories like this seem apocryphal in Spokane, because they never happen to anyone from Spokane. It's always a cousin in Seattle… or a friend in the Bay Area.

Clark's story starts like all of those: Guy sells stock holdings right near the high-tech peak. Sells a house in the inflated Seattle market. Pulls a few million from investments and a million more out of a waterfront condo. Comes to Spokane with enough money to buy half of downtown, so it's a cinch to pick up a top-of-the-line $500,000 house abutting the city's best country club – with cash.

That's where this story diverges from the fairy tale. Clark uses the rest of his dough to run for Congress, and when he realizes he's losing, he starts draining the bank account. When that's gone, he mortgages the house. The wife is the kind of woman – Caroline can see her with handled shopping bags climbing into her Lexus outside the Bellevue Nordy's – who doesn't pay attention where the money comes from, as long as her pedicure is paid for. Clark loses the election, of course, and when she finds out he spent all the money, well… the divorce lawyers are called in.

Apparently, there was some kind of settlement in which Clark was supposed to make payments to Susan, because the last court filing – and the probable spark for killing her – is from only a week earlier. Clark has missed a payment (for the second time this year, the papers note) and Susan's lawyer wants the court to garnishee his wages. Caroline can see the whole thing play out. He is served the court papers. He's listed as representing himself (ouch – a lawyer who can't even afford a lawyer). As he reads the court order (over and over) his face tenses up. The woman has cheated on him, bled him dry, and mocked his dream of running for office. He's all full up. So he whacks her.

It's hard for Caroline to admit, but if Clark's ex-wife is dead, then all his talk of contrition and nonsense about 'nameless crimes' is just so much rationalization – the sound the guilty make when their mouths move.

Oh, I can name your crime, she thinks. And there's one other thing that worries her. Susan is apparently remarried. When the divorce papers were first filed, she was Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason – a maiden name and three husbands – but in this last court order she is listed as Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason Diehl, and Caroline worries for a moment if husband four, Mr. Diehl, is facedown in the same ditch as his new wife.

It also strikes Caroline in a moment of cattiness and self-abuse that this woman – who is her age, thirty-seven – has managed to snag four husbands in the time Caroline has gotten exactly zero.

The Diehls aren't listed in the telephone book, so Caroline checks the reverse directory. Doug Diehl is listed as having a house on Five Mile, a hilltop neighborhood of big, newer homes just north of the city. He's part owner of a Mazda and Ford dealership. No wife is listed, but they have probably just gotten married. Caroline calls Doug Diehl's home number.

'Hello!' Two voices answer together, in a terrible singsong. Caroline can imagine them bent over the answering machine as they recorded this, probably holding hands. 'What's the Diehl?' asks the male voice. 'We are!' says the female voice. 'The real Diehls!' they sing together.

'We're not home right now,' she says, 'but if you leave a message for Susan-'

'Or Doug,' he chimes in. He sounds older than her, and there's just a hint in his flat voice that these are her lines that he's reading.

'-we promise to call you back. So, do we have a Diehl?' she asks.

'We sure do,' he says.

Caroline drops the phone into the cradle. 'My God,' she says aloud. Play that tape in court and Clark might just make a case for justifiable homicide.

She grabs her jacket, and on her way out peeks in the window of Interview Two. Clark Mason is rubbing his eyes, his pen still poised over the legal pad. It's eleven o'clock Saturday morning, fourteen hours since he began confessing. Maybe it's some sort of endurance test, she thinks, for him or for me. Or maybe it's an angle. After all, he is a lawyer. So what, he dresses and acts like a loon because he wants her to get fed up? Wants her to send him home so that later, when he's arrested for killing his ex-wife and her new husband, he can say that he tried to confess, but the police sent him away? It's a stupid idea, but it makes as much, or as little, sense as any of this – as much sense as a guy who wants to make a religious confession to a cop.

The confession has stretched now into its third shift. She tells the new desk sergeant there's a potential witness in Interview Two making a statement, and that if the guy wants to leave, to please call her. The sergeant promises to check on him, but he doesn't look up from the lurid paperback he's reading.

The drive north is quiet and peaceful, the early spring sun melting any last pockets of snow. Spokane lies in a long east-west river valley – pinched, it feels some days – and leaving downtown either to the north or the south takes a person up a progression of short hills blanketed with modest homes. Five Mile is one of the last and most drastic hills, where the houses lose their modesty, a steep three-hundred-foot tree-lined shelf, as if a huge cruise ship had improbably ground ashore at the edge of a city.

Doug and Susan Diehl's grand house is perched on three or four fenced acres on the starboard side of this ship. It is a new home of brick and cedar, three stories, with a massive attached garage that has four progressively larger doors: the smallest for a golf cart, the next two a standard two-car garage, the last door for a big motor home. The grounds are landscaped and fountained, covered in flowers, and there is a horse barn in back. Caroline parks behind an old, beat-up pickup truck with a metallic sign that reads JACK'S STABLE SERVICE. Out of habit, she feels the hood of the truck. It's cold.

The white gravel crunches beneath Caroline's feet. She walks between flower beds to a big, arched front door, rings the bell, and waits. Nothing. She looks inside the window next to the door. The sunken living room is immaculate. White carpeting and white leather furniture and white lamps. It's like heaven. There are no bodies anywhere. That's a good start. She walks around back and sees no sign of anything suspicious, which doesn't prove a thing, of course. Doug and Susan could be in the basement, their heads crushed. The Real Diehls!

Sixty yards behind the house, the barn stands in a field of cut alfalfa. It appears to be new, painted bright red, with a white X on the door. A horse is grazing in the bunchgrass outside it. The barn door swings lazily in the wind. Caroline walks across the backyard toward the barn. Halfway, she bends over and picks up a woman's sandal. She walks through an open gate and keeps walking until she reaches the barn door. The horse looks up, sees her, and looks back over its shoulder, into the barn. Caroline follows its gaze to a bench across from the horse's stable and sees what appears to be Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason Diehl, very much alive, and very much naked, astride what appears to be Jack of Jack's Stable Service, who looks about twenty and whose cargo pants are bunched up around the ankles of his cowboy boots. Jack must be pretty good at the service he provides in stables, because Susan's eyes are pressed shut and she is grinding her upper teeth into her lower lip. Caroline turns back to the horse, who turns back to her, as if he's going to speak, as if he's been waiting all morning for someone to come