Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  As she straightened up she said, “You pulled the ultimate boner, sweetie.”

  “Several persons have told me that, even my doctor, but I suspect they’re all talking about different things. —Which boner were you referring to, Meryl?”

  “I’m talking about the one that produced this,” pulling an envelope out of her purse.

  I held out my hand to receive the letter. She ignored it.

  “Severance pay through August,” she said.

  “Your idea?”

  “Mr. Meany didn’t want to appear shabby, you being a hero and all.”

  She dropped the envelope on my chest. I declined to give her the satisfaction of tearing it open and reading its contents. I set it on the night stand while I composed my face.

  Meanwhile, still smiling, she said, “You look so sweet and helpless there.” She looked around the curtain at my slumbering roommate. Grinning, she whispered, “Tell me, what’s it like, sharing the boss’s girlfriend? A thrill? Or what?”

  And I thought I was a snoop.

  “Com’on, I won’t tell. You can talk to me in complete confidence.”

  Trying not to sound snotty, I said, “In the first place, I'm an independent contractor, so he wasn’t my boss—remember? In the second place, I didn’t share anybody with anybody.”

  “Is it like an affair with a married woman,” Meryl persisted, “or better?”

  “Is my check in that envelope?”

  She smiled her enigmatic smile, which I assume meant ‘yes.’

  “So tell me,” she said in a coy, girlish voice.

  “Com’ere,” I said. I used a conspirator’s tone and crooked a finger at her. She bent down as if to catch my whispered words, the lights of her eyes equally conspiratorial. I slid my hand up the back of her thigh and snapped the suspender from her garter belt.

  After the thwack of elastic on flesh she swung back her purse, as if to smack me with it. Then, without another word, she stormed out of the room.

  *****

  Right behind her a nurse appeared and handed me a business card. “Would you care to speak to Ms. Arnold?” This was the nurse who’d tossed her out on her first visit. When I nodded she brought me a cup of coffee (in what she like to call a ‘tippy cup’) and a cigarette, asking, “Ready?” Then she hung around after Miss Arnold came in, I’m guessing to make sure my blood pressure didn’t skyrocket.

  But our reporter, so pissed on first meeting, was this time mortified. Someone had got to her since her first visit, her shoulders no longer showing outrage at trampled constitutional rights. Chastened, she more than ever imitated a somnolent saw-whet. Her face showed no character lines at all: no furrows, no laugh lines, no age lines. She was a Muppet awaiting buttons and bits of cloth to fit her chosen persona. What a poker player she would make. A prurient curiosity made me wonder what her face would register during a sexual embrace.

  After she refused a cup of coffee I came right to the point. “Can I trust you?”

  “After what you said to me yesterday?”

  I said, “I’m sorry about that, but can I?”

  She said, “I have to pick up a photographer in forty minutes and go see some folks in Walnut Creek about saving an oak tree.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I think Walnut Creek must be the last stronghold of the Druids. Wouldn’t be on Orchard Lane, would it?”

  “How did you know?” she asked. I decided there wasn’t time to tell her about Cooper Ivey coming a cropper over the same tree. Another damned fool developer risked losing his shirt to irate citizens.

  “Before, when I got so upset, I was hoping the lady in question wouldn’t make me do this. I’m now ready to answer any and all of your questions. —Care for a cigarette?”

  She shook her head.

  “I need to trust you, Suzanne, because what I’m doing amounts to playing God, and that means you end up doing the same.”

  She said, “You give me the facts first, and then, if I have time, I’ll listen to your speech.”

  “Fair enough; ask away. But before I answer, satisfy my curiosity: do you want her name just because your uncle and I tried to keep it from you?”

  She said, “I’m writing a Saturday morning feature my city editor gave a pretty high priority. I have to evaluate what facts are important, then he evaluates me on how I interpreted the facts and wrote them down. Not naming her implies there’s a mystery here, and believe it or not, readers don’t like mysteries—unless it’s a mystery that’s bound to be solved in a few days, or, it appears insoluble. The reading public seems to know when you’re kidding them about a mystery.”

  “Her name is Mary Clare Morrison.”

  Suzanne Arnold stared at me, waiting for a punch line.

  “She’s the mistress of La Morinda’s largest land baron.”

  Her owlish eyes grew larger by a perceptible tad.

  “She’s V.M. Meany’s kept woman.” I involuntarily shuddered as I said it, feeling guilty as hell but certain I was doing the right thing.

  “I can’t use that,” Suzanne said.

  “A minute ago you couldn’t wait to find out.”

  “Meany and my publisher play poker once a month.”

  “And you accused me of fucking with the First Amendment. How about the public’s right to know?”

  “Why are you trying to use me?”

  “Look at it like sex, Ms. Arnold: I’m giving you something. Is it wrong that I should happen to gain something thereby?”

  She sat silent, placid as the pastel hues of the room, eyes changing as slowly as a cloudless sunrise on the desert. I caught a hint of language in her eyes and facial muscles. My gaze was diverted by the tapping of her ballpoint, like a metronome, on her reporter’s notebook.

  “Give me the straight stuff, Mr. Gattling.”

  “About the giving and receiving of sex?”

  “Many of our readers,” she said, “will already know about that, or think so.”

  Our eyes met; I couldn’t help but smirk. She rolled her eyes and shook her head slowly. Which was when, I reflect, I could mark the beginning of my back mending, from a sudden vision of Suzanne in bed. What a challenge she would be. I decided I trusted her.

  six

  I told Suzanne the story backwards. Mary Clare’s role in disarming Homer Smith, how she came to be in my apartment, how she was beholden to Meany and afraid, until the bomb blast, to let go of him and what I understood of why. I told the story with no embellishments, taking my cue from the metronome tick of pen on notebook.

  “That’s about the size of it,” I concluded.

  She waited a moment, her head cocked to one side. “Now tell me why you want to expose this bleak affair between the woman you say is your sweetheart and Mr. Meany.”

  “She needs a push.” I elaborated on the theme of the happy dependent, the conditioning, the drugs, the fear of independence.

  Suzanne sat looking at me, giving no clue as to what passed through the brain behind that poker face. Finally she said, “Well well well well.”

  “Well what?” I asked.

  “You’re either a scab on the chin of society, as a professor of mine used to say, or you love her enough to risk everything. I’ll vote for the latter, although I bet for you that’s a rare place to be.”

  “Rare?”

  “I didn’t mean bad by it. I’ve got to go see about a tree.”

  “What are you going to write?”

  She rose. With higher heels and a puffier hairdo, she might have measured five-two that day. She put on her most poker-ready owl’s face and said, “I haven’t decided yet.”

  I said, “I would kiss your feet if you could help me.”

  She said, “I’m sure you would.” A miniscule smirk slipped from hiding and played about her lips.

  I shook hands with her before she left, once again apologizing for my reckless words of the day before. Her handshake measured a good five-foot-six.

  “Do I have an exclusive?” she as
ked.

  “Until I see your byline I’m not to be disturbed.”

  “See that you aren’t, Mr. Gattling with the two tees.”

  Alone again, I poked around inside and felt forlorn and wicked. There was something of the sheen of tainted flesh about outing Mary Clare, something green and iridescent. I also reflected about this business of climbing back on the merry-go-round, as Jake liked to term it. It had about it the logic of the habituated yardbird committing a felony to end up behind bars again.

  My moment of reflection came to an end when a voice like a Nashville-bound cowboy came over the curtain from the other bed. “Of all the lowdown skunks. You’d sell your mother’s diary to the Enquirer, wouldn’t you.”

  It was a moment of confusion. Then I realized that my previously zonked roomie had listened to my interview with Suzanne. “You’re damned lucky, buster, I can’t get out of bed, cause I’d come over there and give you a lip you couldn’t talk through for a week.”

  “And you’re damned lucky I got one arm in a sling and the other hooked to this IV thing, or I’d come over and stomp you like an egg-sucking snake deserves to be stomped.”

  We were two dogs separated by a chain link fence, snapping and snarling with abandon.

  “You hadn’t been asleep before now you’d understand why I did that.”

  “Oh I heard the words you used on that little reporter lady,” my roommate said, adding in a mincing tone, “I’m only doing it for her own good. —My ass.”

  “If I could have thought of another way to do it I would have.”

  “How about waiting till you’re out of that bed then go over and run her old man out of town.”

  I guffawed. “I’d have to kill him first. He’s got a taproot that reaches China.”

  He said, “Then you take an axe to him.”

  “Thanks for the metaphor. Metaphors are what I hit ladies with instead of bricks.”

  “Proverbs says, ‘The righteous, like sandalwood, shall perfume the axe that fells them.’”

  “In a way, that’s what I just did, though my preferred metaphor would be ‘Shedding the light of day on the subject.’”

  “But think about what you’re doing to her in the process.”

  “How much of my life have you been listening in on, anyway?”

  “Enough to know you’re a scumbucket.”

  “You’re taken in by the tears, lunkhead. She’s been indulged by every man in her life, and all of us added another bar to her cage in the process. Well, no more. The best education she could get would be to end up on the street with the clothes on her back and not a single man to turn to for protection.”

  “Oh,” was all that came from the other side of the curtain before the nurse came in and looked at him, feigning zonkedness, for she left as quickly as she’d come.

  Smarting from the undiluted attack on my judgment, I searched for a final word, a devastating put-down. I was beaten to the punch by my roommate: “Well, at least I riled you enough you won’t be lying there feeling sorry for yourself.”

  All I could do was let out a growl like a bullmastiff.

  With A Vengeance

  one

  From interviewing Druids in Walnut Creek, Ms. Arnold went to Jake’s office. The APHA meeting had ended, but Jake wasn’t resting until he’d followed up all the connections he’d made during the five days. Bird-dogging he called it. He chose to endure the racket across the hall, putting Homer’s office back together, to assault Suzanne Arnold’s senses, hoping—futilely, it turned out—to keep their interview short. He came by my room for a debriefing as the sun was going down.

  “Keep your fingers crossed,” he said.

  “You don’t think she’ll go along with it?”

  Jake said, “Honestly, I don’t know. She’s persistent. She’s suspicious. She’s afraid of sounding like a gossip columnist if she identifies Mary Clare. She’s bouncing around, trying on various ideas, like doing the feature focusing on me instead of you. I made myself sound as dull as haggis, but she’s got a hound’s nose and a terrier’s tenacity, so, like I said, keep your fingers crossed.”

  Suzanne leveled with Jake more than me, and why not, given my treatment of her. She expressed her doubts: how could either of us claim Mary Clare wasn’t just a typical gold-digger? And how about Meany as an altruist. Her credulity had run out of elastic.

  “You know, it struck me, she might be conflicted because she likes you,” Jake said. He wasn’t smirking, even when I gave him my evil eye.

  “She what?”

  “You’re good-looking, you’re a maverick, you did a boy-scout-grade good deed—all very attractive. But you’re trying to muck up a romance for base ends—hence the conflict.”

  I said, “No, none of that. Her interest is strictly reportorial.”

  He said, “She wouldn’t be the first woman to have her maternal instincts aroused by a good man needing help.”

  “Get out,” I said.

  He laughed, “I will—but literally. I need to see if the wife and kids still remember who I am.”

  *****

  From Jake’s cassette tapes:

  Sitting in the breakfast nook reading the Courier, I opened to the “Valley Life” section to see Suzanne Arnold’s byline and two pictures of the Bobwhite Court complex, one from the night of the bombing, across the crime scene tape and through the rescue vehicles, the other a daytime picture of the buildings as originally built. The headline read: “Bombing Disrupts Private Lives.”

  As I read the article—she’d done a rather non-gossipy version of what she called a gossip piece—my fascination was swallowed by fast-growing anxiety: V.M. Meany, back from skeet shooting or whatever tycoons do Saturday mornings—would be sitting over coffee in his breakfast nook, reading the very same piece.

  The lead paragraph was innocuous enough: “In the wake of the bombing that rocked offices and apartments here this week, the quiet lives of several La Morindans are being resurrected from the scattered rubble.”

  I got first mention: Jacob Pritchett, health care consultant, trying to forget the mutilated body of Javier Garcia. It went quickly on: a quote from me about using techniques learned in the boy scouts while trying to stop Garcia’s arterial bleed-out; transition to Homer Smith and why his attempted kidnap of Robert Gattling was sufficient to keep him in jail without bail. Then came a description of Robert’s heroics.

  My adrenaline production increased geometrically when I came to the actual capture:

  Gattling’s opportunity to capture Smith came on a diversion created by another resident of the Bobwhite Court apartments, Mary Clare Morrison. Her unexpected presence in Gattling’s apartment diverted Smith long enough for Gattling to jump him and knock him unconscious.

  I scanned the rest of the article, reading as quickly as possible, gulping down as much coffee as I could while standing and calling to Amanda. I checked myself in the hall mirror—I was decent enough; I just wondered if I would be in time.

  . . . Offices shut down the day after the explosion and fire while FBI and police sifted through the debris . . . a quote from Meany’s secretary, Meryl Destrier, about Smith being a messy though otherwise unnoteworthy tenant . . . the search for Garcia’s accomplices and the arms they’d secured from Smith, even while the rebel’s body was being claimed by relatives in exile from Guatemala.

  Long section about Robert’s rich life before becoming a janitor and how he would be casting about for a new career, since he could no longer push a broom.

  And then the sentence, “Mary Clare Morrison, of late the protégé of V.M. Meany but described by friends as a graduate student, is planning to return to school soon.”

  It wasn’t much, but in a place like La Morinda, calling a woman “protégé” was code for “concubine.” Mrs. Meany would understand it that way, and so would a number of judges, mayors, supervisors and police chiefs, one or more of whom were bound to be laughing up their sleeves at the idea.

  My swearing at lo
llygagging motorists in Moraga and Walnut Creek made them move no faster. At last I pulled into the emergency room parking area, closest to the patio and the sliding glass door to Robert’s room, parking opposite a familiar white Cadillac with a silver longhorn hood ornament, already running as I slammed the car door.

  I found the pastel curtains parted but the door locked, involuntarily snarling as I looked through the glass at Meany thrusting aside a rather substantial nurse in the doorway, crumpled newspaper in hand, moving to the foot of Robert’s bed. Watching his roommate’s eye widen, turning to me, knowing he was too encumbered to get out of bed to unlock the door—

  —so I tore half-way around the building to the side entrance of the outpatient tower, along the corridor, startling staff and visitors, homing on the med/surg wing, legs like mercury, nerves of glass shattering shard upon shard—

  —into the room where two white-smocked physicians were shouting and trying to wrestle Meany back from Robert’s bed, where he had the crumpled newspaper pinned between them, nose to nose, shaking Robert the way a terrier shakes a rat to snap its back.

  I was an MP again, the berserk patient, the swift stomp to the back of the knee, taking Meany down and applying a half Nelson.

  Only the man was stronger than any demented GI I ever tackled, this man was the bear we all joked about, and I hung on for dear life as he bellowed his rage and swung me about like an excited hound bred not to let go.

  two

  Meany kept saying, “You little bastard, you little bastard.” One of the physicians, who’d graduated from Mount Diablo High School two years after Meany, knew him well enough to shout “Moose!”

  “Moose,” he shouted, “for Christ’s sake, he’s a patient.”

  Just like that, Moose Meany, panting from exertion and anger, threw Jake off his back. Thanks to the breakaway nightie the nurses had me dressed in, he’d done me no real, physical hurt. But I had plenty of impressions of his anger to decorate my nightmares: the smell of coffee on his breath, the spray of saliva as the word ‘bastard’ exploded on his lips, the enraged gleam in his usually mute eyes. I wanted to wipe my face and straighten my gown, but instinct told me to lie perfectly still for fear I might set him off again.

  Strangely, I wasn’t scared.