Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  “Hold that thought until a detective gets here. Just give me your name and address.”

  The name part was okay; when I got to where I lived, pointing to the house we were standing in front of, his face registered suspicion. “Uh, I thought Mr. Pritchett owned the house.”

  “I didn’t say I owned it. I’m staying here temporarily. —You know who knows about all this? Sergeant Rutledge, over at the La Morinda Police Department.”

  “And he has to do with this incident how?”

  “I tried to contact him this morning about the two men in the Buick following my girlfriend, but I couldn’t get a hold of him.”

  The deputy held his hand up in a way that meant ‘Stop.’ “You’re going too fast for me.” Just then a gray Chevy sedan pulled up and a man in sports coat and slacks got out and came up the driveway. “There’s Sergeant Cochran. You can tell him your story.” He intercepted Sergeant Cochran, took him by the elbow and walked him down the driveway, out of earshot, and ran down what he knew of the incident, as he kept calling it. As he was talking the detective looked up at me once, his expression giving away nothing. He nodded. He nodded again. He came up to me and introduced himself, shaking hands. A Eurasian, he was taller than I and ruggedly handsome. Up close his eye were like opponents’ I had met in the ring.

  “So, what’s going on?” he asked.

  “My friend’s been shot. In the chest. They’ve taken him to—shit, I don’t know—Walnut Creek General? I’d like to see about him if I can.”

  “You can go over there just as soon as I have enough information. So why don’t you start at the beginning.”

  I started with my working at Bobwhite Court for Mr. Meany when the bomb went off.

  “What does this have to do with what just went on here?”

  I said, “You need to find those two guys in the metallic green Buick.”

  He took out his notebook and a pen. “License number?”

  “I didn’t have time to get the license number. The thing came out of the garage straight at me. I had to jump—look, the car is a Buick Riviera, couple of years old, its left headlight will be out, the windshield on the passenger side is shot out—”

  “Who shot first?”

  “One of those men.”

  He said, “You know this for sure?”

  “If it wasn’t one of the men in the Buick, the shooter’s still in the goddam garage.”

  “You saw a man fire at your friend.”

  I said, “It was dark. I saw a flash and heard a bang. Jake was carrying the shotgun, he reacted by getting off a shot. Which hit the windshield.”

  “Did it hit a person, do you know?”

  I said, “I have no idea.”

  Sergeant Cochran said, “Hang tight for just a second, will you?” As he said it he clasped my elbow in a friendly way and I winced. “You all right?”

  “Bumps and bruises, Sergeant, bumps and bruises.”

  “Want someone to take a look?”

  I said, “I hate to be nasty, but I want to get the fuck out of here, my friend’s been shot and I’m about to have a shit-fit.”

  “Just hang on.”

  two

  A Sheriff’s Department cruiser pulled into the space just vacated by the rescue pumper. The deputy conferred with Sergeant Cochran in earshot. The fleeing Buick, he related, had spun out on Moraga Way and caught a telephone pole. One of the Buick Twins had been apprehended, the one with several birdshot pellets in his face. The other fled on foot.

  There was a brief discussion of whether the crime scene included the interior of the house. As soon as I heard ‘interior of the house’ I had visions of slaughtered children, Bienvenida and Amanda in pools of blood. I ran into the garage, illuminated now by the fluorescent tube over Jake’s work bench, and sure enough, the door to the kitchen was ajar. I tried to run in, but a deputy sheriff stepped in front of me. Sergeant Cochran yelled, “Hey! Just stand still till I decide if this is part of the crime scene.”

  “Jake has a wife and two kids, and there’s a housekeeper.”

  Cochran switched on his flashlight and walked into the house. I watched the flashlight beam disappear into the dining room. He came back after a while and said, “Com’ere,” beckoning. I followed him into the living room, where he pointed to the sideboard that held, among other things, liquor and glasses. Atop it sat a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two Old Fashioned glasses. Cochran pointed, I shook my head. “Not there when I left. Could have been the wife; could have been the goons. Can I go to the hospital now?”

  Cochran shook his head. He looked more disinterested than annoyed. I wanted to annoy him.

  “Goddammit,” I said, more vehemently than I meant to, “why won’t you talk to Sergeant Rutledge? He’ll tell you that the guy who hired these two goons is already charged with assaulting me, he was also shot by the woman these goons were after, and he can tell you the facts in copspeak faster than I can.”

  *****

  Rutledge came to Moraga and the facts did get clearer.

  Rutledge shook hands with Cochran, and I guess said all the things you say when you’re on the other guy’s turf, plus some pertinent facts. The younger man’s face light up with an ‘Oh, I get it’ look and Rutledge came over to me, saying, “How do you know it’s Meany?” Cochran stood at his shoulder.

  I said, “Who else could it be? I told Walleke, told him Mary Clare said I should get out of Moraga, Meany was talking about killing me.”

  “You gotta help me, here,” Cochran said, “were the two in the Buick after you or after your sweetheart?”

  “I thought I knew, but I don’t anymore.”

  Rutledge picked up the kitchen phone and dialed. “Pick up Meany, and let me know when you have him. Material witness, for the time being. Check.”

  “That motherfucker. You do not want to know what I’d like to do to him.”

  Two uniformed deputies hovered, looming large, with flack vests under their uniform shirts, giving me the bad eye. Rutledge took me aside and said, “They may not be as comfortable as I am with your big mouth, so could you cool it? Besides, you could have called these guys before the bullets flew, you know.” He gestured towards the men in the kitchen.

  “I called you and you never called me back.”

  Rutledge said, “I’m not your pet cop. I’ve got my own back yard to tend to, you know.”

  Rutledge said to Cochran, “You through with Mr. Gattling for now?”

  Cochran came up to me, business card in hand. “Call me tomorrow; set up an appointment. I need a coherent statement.”

  “Come on,” Rutledge said, “I’ll run you over to the hospital.”

  It had got late enough the world seemed to have packed it in: condensation on the windows of parked cars, blinking yellow lights at intersections. On the freeway Rutledge lit a cigarette and flicked ashes out his half-open window. The wind blew them back in. Finally he said, as if we’d been having a conversation and it was his turn, “Imagine who turned out to be the bad actor. His baby was drowning in the bath water and you told him to throw out the one without throwing out the other, and now he’s pissed at you, he thinks his baby walking away is all your fault.”

  “It’s as simple as all that,” I said.

  “It usually is, to the onlooker. Cops are used to this, every day you can see stuff more off-the-wall than on the soaps. If I were an insensitive bastard I’d say it was all over who was gonna get into that pretty troublemaker’s underpants.”

  “And if I were a red-blooded American boy, I’d take offense if you did. But I gotta tell you, there’s a lot more to it than that, Sergeant.”

  “I don’t know if you believe in God, Gattling, but if there is one, He’s looking down and thinking this is insignificant, right down to whether you friend lives or dies and whether my friend gets locked up for the rest of his life. You remember that.”

  I remembered it until we got to the hospital. It looked as settled in for the evening as the streets did,
access only through the emergency entrance. One woman sat in the waiting room, and I barely noticed her, following Rutledge (after he smoozed the ER registrar) farther into the hospital. I stuck to his shoulder, apprehensive, and I knew why when I saw Amanda standing in the corridor, conferring with a colleague in scrubs. Then I became extremely apprehensive. I knew instantly, as she turned her head just enough to see me, that I’d become the Hitler of her Europe.

  Rutledge saved me having to speak first. He took off his fedora and nodded to the two doctors and said, “How is he?”

  Amanda looked straight at me, deadpan, and said, “The bullet may have saved his life—if it doesn’t kill him.” She was not the same woman who was doing her own high anxiety before we left. Part of the Southern Belle tyranny had dropped away, but what showed now was stony, not sweet.

  “You explain it, Bert.” And she walked away. Her back, a coat draped about her shoulders, saying she could not stand the sight of me.

  It seemed the bullet had hit a rib on the way in and fragmented. None of the fragments, miraculously, hit major blood vessels. The largest fragment, however, had come to rest touching the pericardium. In the process of trying to extract that fragment—it could migrate, it was lead, too toxic to leave in the body—x-rays showed that Jake had a ticking time bomb in his chest, an aneurism in the descending aorta, of such a size that it might rupture at any moment. (“Thank God none of the fragments hit that.”) With Dr. Wirth’s blessing, they were repairing the aneurism while extracting bullet fragments.

  “Is that what she meant,” I asked, “when she said the bullet may have saved his life?”

  The doctor shrugged then nodded.

  I took a sudden jolt of hope to counter the despair of ‘if it doesn’t kill him.’

  three

  Jake’s side of the shooting and its consequences:

  When I was conscious again—no, able to speak again, because I was conscious I don’t know how long—the first words I spoke were, “What happened?”

  This to an ICU nurse, one who understands every squiggle, buzz and clachet of the monitoring machines.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  I had her all to myself: Theresa Flannery, chestnut hair, Playboy bosom, tennis legs. She was of African ancestry, so the chestnut hair disconcerted at first, as did her green eyes and the fine golden down on her arms. She made the appellation, Black, obsolete, she shone in various shades of gold. ‘Gold is beautiful’ replaced a time-honored slogan.

  It was as if God had sent me a black white woman, or a white black woman, knowing I would fall in love with the person I woke to keeping me alive. He was making it easy for me to get over it; Theresa was married, emphatically so, it would turn out, and as there was no duplicate anywhere, I quickly realized it was as quixotic a crush as my adolescent hots for the film actress, Susan Hayward.

  To my first words Theresa replied, “You were shot, sir.”

  Of course I knew that. I wanted to say, “I know, I was there,” but I saved my breath for something more important. She was reading a printout of a continuous EKG and taking my pulse. I realized my penis hurt, and that preoccupied me until I thought to feel it, only to discover that around my wrists were bands that kept me from feeling anything.

  “Undo me?” I begged.

  “Directly, Mr. Pritchett.” She finished making a notation on my chart and then undid both my hands and my ankles.

  “You were good, you didn’t thrash about, but restraints after delicate surgery like yours are SOP around here. You won’t start any thrashing now, will you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Many are a bit off their rockers coming off a general anesthetic, but I can see you have your wits about you. I bet you need a drink.”

  I nodded, she held up a slurpee-sized cup with a glass straw coming out its lid and I sipped.

  “Catheter?” I asked.

  She said, “Leave it in a while. It’s one less thing to worry about.”

  If Theresa had said, “Get up and tango,” I’d at least have tried. But she hadn’t satisfied my need to know. I remembered—and it was coming back to me the more I stayed awake, the surprise of being shot, the equally surprising reaction of shooting back and the ride in the ambulance. What was not coming through was what happened between leaving the ER on a gurney and waking up to see the golden Theresa. I was naked under the covers and impeded by tubes and wires, so I couldn’t go off and find someone to fill me in on the pieces.

  I heard Theresa on the telephone saying, “Have Dr. Backus call seven two three,” before I slid back into my long sleep.

  The next time I tuned in much sooner. I recognized Dr. Backus as a man with whom I’d exchanged hellos at annual staff picnic dinners. He was examining me and telling Theresa to bump up the morphine by point five ml and something about dressings.

  “I’m tip-top, really,” I said. “Feeling no pain.”

  The doctor said, “This is going to keep you tip-top.”

  I was wheeled into an operating room before I again zonked out completely, the IV right alongside me, dripping a large but legal dose of morphine into my vein, a delicate game, given I was breathing with but one lung at that point, third day post-op, but Backus, a traumatologist, was not going to have me coming off the table when he removed the packing from my wound and replaced it with fresh packing.

  I woke again, to find a nurse not nearly so prepossessing as Theresa ministering to me. I said, “Robert?” and she said, “Robert? I’m only allowed to let your wife in,” and I passed out again. Maybe I went through this before, her answer was awfully pat, but I didn’t care to see Amanda, I knew what a raft of shit I’d get from her, not directly, more likely by what she wouldn’t talk about, or by a manner at the extreme—the dry, professional anesthesiologist—or she would be wifey-poo, a persona she only brought out for public consumption.

  (Just then I realized the only spontaneous Amanda I ever knew was the one who was a pretty darned good mother, which did not make me want to see her so much as see the kids.)

  The day they moved me from the ICU—having endured Amanda in all her guises: dry, professional anesthesiologist, wifey-poo, but also Southern belle and suffering martyr—I asked Theresa Flannery, “Has Robert Gattling been around?”

  “Every day, morning and evening.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “You got it.”

  After I was settled into a private room on the med/surg ward she was as good as her word, Robert walked through the door and I said, “Fill me in.”

  “Where should I start?”

  Robert is a good talker. He is cerebral, not prolix, and sees sharing his life with a friend as natural as sharing a meal. That’s how I know so much about him.

  I rate myself as a good-to-excellent listener, I complement Robert in that respect, though occasionally, when he goes into an anecdotal mode, I will say, “Could you cut to the goddam chase?” or some such.

  But this time it being my life I was interested in, I outdid myself as a listener. I said to Robert, “Tell me as much as you know, everything, every last iota.”

  *****

  I told Jake about Rutledge’s remonstrations riding over to the hospital. How Rutledge talked to the ER admitting clerk like an old friend while I watched a woman, who looked a lot like Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and Mary, sitting stoically holding a handkerchief over her eye. She wore a smart skirt and blouse in complimentary shades of persimmon, and a string of pearls. She had no doubt arrived when everyone was mad-dashing about, tending my pal, Jake.

  Through the glass doors into the hospital proper I saw another beautiful woman, Amanda Wirth. The composure I’d maintained since the shots exchange with the Buick Twins melted. I said, under my breath, “Oh damn damn damn damn.” The lady holding the handkerchief to her eye glanced briefly at me with the eye not covered.

  Amanda had, like Cassandra, uttered warnings of dire consequences to which no one gave credence. I needed back-up to face h
er, a tough cop named Rutledge, but he was schmoozing a nurse at the closest nursing station, one who looked like his type.

  So I decided to face the music and went up to Amanda and her colleague in his hospital uniform, only to have her walk away. He filled me in on the inside of Jake’s chest, way more than I wanted to know, given Guilt was stalking me like he had me in a corner, and I badly wanted to go someplace private and duke it out with him . . .

  . . . when Suzanne Arnold walked in.

  four

  Her walking in was no surprise, except for the hour. Hospitals and the consequences of violence were Suzanne Arnold’s province. As she was walking towards me, in her standard uniform, Amanda made an about-face and headed towards me as well, her stride menacing. Suzanne got to me first, deftly wheeled and, before Dr. Wirth could unload the broadside she’d been priming, said, “I’m on deadline, may I borrow him for a few minutes—please?”

  Despite the ‘please,’ Suzanne would not have brooked any opposition, a stance which stopped the doctor in her tracks.

  When I told her whom she’d just rescued me from, she said, “Hold on a sec,” and caught up with Amanda and introduced herself with a handshake. They exchanged brief words. I could see Amanda’s face, neither open nor hostile and then Suzanne was gesturing with her head towards me and I saw yet another facet of the little piece, she was less pat and more fluid with Amanda than with me.

  She came back and took me by my tender elbow to guide me towards the main lobby. I winced. She said, “The old back still bothering you?”

  “I bashed my elbow jumping over a car.”

  “Ah,” she said, “another one of those things. Should you see someone about it?”

  I told her what I told Sergeant Cochran: it could wait.

  She went around to my other side and slipped an arm around my waist, to walk me towards the lobby, as if I were invalided or derelict “What happened this time?” she asked as we found an unoccupied couch.

  I brought her up to date, explaining how Jake and I had tried to foil the Buick Twins.

  “Who were they after?” she asked.

  I shrugged “It’s hard to tell. They definitely followed Mary Clare east, but when we lost them they came back and ambushed Jake and me from Jake’s garage.”

  “They were out to kill you,” she said. Her eyes registered awe before saying she was glad they hadn’t.