Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  “Where?”

  “How about Mexico?” This gave me a strange satisfaction, since one of the things he said to me, his second visit to my hospital room, was an offer to send me to a cattle ranch he owned on one of the Islas Marías—to recuperate in the tropical sun, he said. Meaning, to forget about Mary Clare.

  If Meany caught the irony, he ignored it. He said, “What would I do in Mexico? I hate hiding already, and I couldn’t work down there. Except for raising beef, I don’t know the system. I don’t even know enough Spanish to order anything but la comida regular—hell, I’d be drunk all the time.”

  “You could stop forging ahead, you could actually stop for a while and just listen to the sounds of the land.”

  “Shit,” Meany said, “I’m not a hippie.”

  “You don’t have to wear beads. Betcha dying with your boots on is no fun. So retire early.”

  “Retirement’s for people who never knew how to do anything but take orders.”

  I said, “It could also be for someone who’s done more than most men ever will—and has a good reason to get the hell out of the country.”

  He said, “Might as well just sit here and enjoy being alive and free until they come and get me.”

  I was inclined to argue a contradiction in terms, him sitting in the dark while a cop waited outside, but I let it pass. “You have any message for Garcia?”

  The gin was coloring things blue. Meany said nothing, but made another ripple in the shadows.

  “I’ve got to go, Mr. Meany.”

  “Stay and have another drink.”

  “There’s no good solution, you know. There is no good choice—”

  “—About you?” Meany interjected.

  “No, not about me, you don’t have to worry about me. I mean the rest of your life. All you’ve got left is finding the least worst choice. Why don’t you let me get your lawyer up here?”

  “He’ll just advise me to surrender.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  Meany didn’t say anything for a long time. I was not inclined to walk away until an answer came. It looked like my last chance to hear it, because somebody was going to do something about the penthouse, Meany couldn’t just sit here. Knowing Clare, there wouldn’t be enough food to last a day.

  He didn’t even clear his throat.

  “I’ve got to go,” I repeated.

  “Just one more minute,” Meany said.

  “What?” I edged along the bar, a little closer to the elevator. I just realized I was in a corner again.

  Meany said, “I am trying. I can’t get the words together to say what I want to say.”

  “About Clare?”

  “About why I got mixed up with her.”

  “I know why. Anyone who knows Clare would know why.”

  He said, “But there’s a whole lot of people don’t know her.”

  “And you’re afraid they’re going to judge you?”

  “Not the way you mean.” Meany said, “I don’t give a shit what Joe Dokes thinks of me, I don’t even care what the Governor thinks of me, wooden-headed second-rate actor. I don’t want to leave this world known only for having made a fool of myself over some woman. It was not a penny-ante thing.”

  I said, ‘You’ll have plenty of time to say that.”

  Meany said, “I don’t have plenty of time to do anything. I haven’t had plenty of time since I figured out how important time is and how not to squander it.”

  “Then tell me, and let me get the hell out of here.”

  “You’ll laugh at me,” Meany said.

  “Hey, Charlie, I’m the Joe Dokes whose opinion means zilch to you, so what do you care?”

  He was silent for an interminable minute. He finally said, “I was never in love, except in the first grade with a buck-toothed blonde name Katy, had a silly smile. I fell in love with Mary Clare and didn’t believe it, didn’t even know it at first. I just acted peculiar, like time didn’t count so much anymore. I took care of her. I’d tell myself, ‘She’s just a girl,’ and when I got the hots I’d say, ‘She’s a dope fiend, she’s a Jew—how can you be in love with her?’ Wouldn’t even use the word, you understand. All my life I made two choices with every person I came up against: use’em or brush’em aside.

  “I went to cat houses for love. Love was another name for an urge—people love dogs and diamonds and oysters, for God’s sake. I thought anything beyond sex was about owning someone—exclusive rights.”

  He shifted on the bar stool, as if the point were well made. “I was too busy to take up ownership—until I had my own urge. And it wasn’t sex, brother, I could get that. It was children. That’s when I married. It didn’t take any great skill to find a wife, I just had to be careful, after people found out I was looking, not to get trampled.

  “Getting trampled is the biggest danger of money and power, Gattling, people think it rubs off. One of the reasons I liked you, you didn’t seem to care diddly-squat if you had either. But it makes things change—not you, not yourself, the world. People. All of a sudden you can’t help thinking of people as ‘others,’ ‘them.’ Only Mary Clare wasn’t them, that’s why I couldn’t let go of her. I had no experience with a person not being part of them.”

  He rattled the glass on the bar. “She should have been. She’s the only Jew I ever met I didn’t despise. Only woman I met I was pretty certain was smarter than me, whenever she felt like using her head. I thought dope addicts were demons from hell and I don’t know if you’d classify her as a dope fiend but I believe she was when I met her. Shit, I emptied her purse—I put her in a hotel room the first day, maybe she told you—but anyway, she had more junk in her purse that would kill you than a rock’n’roll guitarist.”

  He pushed his glass across the bar. This time I just sweetened it with a little more whiskey.

  “Feels funny, telling the man she ran off with I love her, but it’s not the same for you as for me. I bet you’ve loved a lot of women in your life, it’s just a natural thing with you, like a real estate deal is with me.

  “Part of it felt like buying swamp land in Florida, or a moon rock. It just wasn’t going to bring any return.”

  In a way I felt I was looking at someone through a telescope from a great distance, the man who’d tried to kill me shedding the last veil, confiding more than he likely had to any other human. Holed up in the refuge he’d built for a woman who should have been the “Arch-other,” she had so many things going against her, a lot he hadn’t touched on. I don’t know what loosened Meany’s tongue, but for sure he’d never opened up about things not related to real estate since the football locker room.

  He asked, after letting his batteries charge for a moment, “You plan to marry her?”

  “That’s up to her, too.”

  “Need money?”

  I said, “I start a new job tomorrow.”

  “Another janitoring job?”

  “Janitoring of another sort. I get to wear a suit and tie, but I’m cleaning up someone else’s mess.”

  “What does it pay?” Like a father examining a potential son-in-law.

  “I forgot to ask,” I said.

  “Jesus, Gattling, you need a keeper.”

  “I get the same amount whether I ask or not. I’ve been away from that kind of job long enough I wouldn’t know what to ask for, anyway.”

  He was a regular Gila Monster. I moved down the bar, past the revolver that was sitting close enough for me to grab, and into the foyer. I pressed the elevator call button.

  “Want me to bring your lawyer back? It’ll have to be tonight. They’ll follow him in the daytime.”

  “I could keep you here, if I wanted.”

  I said, “What would be the point?”

  The bell rang, I stepped into the elevator, which was lighted, and pressed L. Meany said, “Goodbye, Gattling” as the elevator door closed between us.

  five

  It dawned on me, half way down from the penthouse, the overhead
lights, their glow stylishly hidden by a false ceiling, hadn’t been on when I rode up. I had time to say, “Oh shit oh dear” three times and I was staring at another pistol, not a compact chrome revolver, a boxy, efficient automatic. I heard a familiar voice say, “Step out with your hands up.”

  “Detective Bolles.”

  “Mr. Gattling.” Sergeant Rutledge wouldn’t have sounded so relieved.

  “Meany’s up there.”

  “Armed?”

  “Yes.”

  He produced a portable radio from his windbreaker pocket and called for backup. He pushed the elevator’s stop button and the alarm went off. “Goddam,” he muttered under his breath. “Is there another way in?” he yelled over the alarm.

  “Stairs. But the door at the top is locked.”

  “What’s his frame of mind?” Bolles asked.

  “Not good.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Let me go up with you. I’m more afraid he’s going to shoot himself than you or me.”

  “V.M. Meany? Not likely.”

  That denial lodged in my subconscious along with images of the Titanic going down.

  A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot, lights flashing but siren silent. Bolles told the officer the situation and asked me to take him around to the stairs. When I got back I told Bolles the man was in place. He took a deep breath and released the stop button. The silence was deafening.

  “Stay here.”

  Bolles was never going to be a Jim Rutledge, and probably Rutledge would still be a sergeant when Bolles made lieutenant.

  In a moment the alarm went off again, this time at the penthouse level. Another police cruiser arrived. I told the officer what was going on and explained the elevator to him, but before he could travel up it, the alarm stopped and the elevator started down.

  “Dead,” Bolles said. The look on the second officer’s face was like a man watching a baseball leave the bat heading for the center field fence.

  “Sorry, Gattling, I have to hold you for questioning.”

  “I’m supposed to start my new job in a few hours.”

  “Sorry. Would you go with this officer? I’ll join you when we’ve secured the crime scene.”

  The officer placed me in the back seat of the vehicle and apologized for the plastic seat. He said nothing else, but informed dispatch that he was bringing in a witness.

  “I didn’t witness anything but an old man pointing a gun at me.”

  He didn’t respond. We reached the police station and he came around and opened the door. “Please step this way.” We went through two sets of doors, past the front desk, where the officer accompanying me asked which interview room was available. Sergeant Rutledge came out of his office as we started towards Interview Room 1 and said, “I’ll take over, Bendix.” He was in his shirt sleeves, tie askew, braces showing.

  He guided me into his office and I sat opposite him. He moved two stacks of papers so that I could talk to him without craning.

  “I thought I’d made a clean getaway to Berkeley.”

  Rutledge said, “No such luck. I just talked to Bolles. He may be there all night. One of the county criminalists is out sick and they’ve had another homicide and a drug overdose. Must be a full moon.”

  “Meany and I had a conversation man-to-man. I guess I didn’t pick up on the clues.”

  “I’m going to do a by-the-book interview in a minute, but before we adjourn to an interview room, give me your impressions.”

  “He and I had a couple of drinks together. He had more than a couple, I had two. I left him sitting at the bar. He’d set the gun down, talked about stopping me from going, but didn’t. He shot himself after I left’”

  “That’s part of the interview. What did you and he have to talk about?”

  I told him the gist of the conversation.

  “It gets me,” Rutledge said, shaking his head, “the guy rubbed elbows with movie stars and Nobel Prize winners, he can’t handle being smitten.”

  I reiterated his remark about either using or pushing aside. “With movie stars and Nobel Prize winners he was figuring out how to use them. He was analyzing and plotting. He couldn’t do that with Mary Clare. Even after she shot him.”

  *****

  After the formal interview, which interjected logical questions that don’t account for intuition or feelings—who-what-where-when-why, opportunity-means-motive an officer dropped me off at my car parked at the high school. We didn’t talk on the way over, but at least I got to sit in the front, next to the twelve gauge that was not so sleek as Jake’s, in fact, ugly as a dead rattlesnake. I was perfectly happy not to talk, I’d talked more than I cared to, but I was talking inside, grimacing at notions such as Great Accountant in the Sky and Divine Accident, dyspeptic at the thought of a simple-pretty. A moose a bear a real estate developer of the fourth kind . . . dead. If the cop hadn’t been there, if there hadn’t been chatter on the radio, I might have cried, not for Meany per se, just for the fucking wonder of humans—divine, devilish, moral giants and immoral midgets, oh my.

  On the way back to Berkeley, my old-new hometown, traffic on Highway 24 was practically non-existent. A fool with a set of horns on his car that played the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth tootling from one end of the Caldecott Tunnel to the other and if I’d had a Sherman tank I’d have aimed my cannon at him and blown him to kingdom come.

  Not only was Berkeley Square closed, so were all the liquor stores in the world. I badly wanted a drink, but I had a meeting with Howie Manheimer at eight-thirty and with the staff I’d inherited as soon as Howie and I were finished. It was better I didn’t; I wasn’t sure I would have stopped.

  Instead of a drink I took a shower. It didn’t make me sleepy, but I felt shut of some of life’s uglier truths and that was like a glass of warm milk. I wished Mary Clare were there. I didn’t want her body, I wanted her simply not to hate me for not having had the insight to guess Moose Meany would use that pistol on himself.

  “Why, you big, ugly sonofabitch? Why’d you have to saddle me with another corpse? I swear, if anyone else in my life dies around me, I’m going to—“

  There was nothing I could do but pound the pillow and cry.

  six

  Crying and pounding the pillow: the reactions of a very self-centered man. You would think, from those reactions, that Meany had shot himself just to kick my guilt up a notch. For a different viewpoint, I offer the words of Jake Pritchett, who didn’t stop being Jake because he was laid low by a bullet.

  From the Jake tapes:

  Mac the bartender is Robert’s common man. Mac runs a serious bar: no juke box, no liar’s dice. You drink, and if you’re lucky enough to be a person of Mac’s liking, you might borrow his ear. Even so, if Robert could have transported Meany, Old Fashioned and all, to Berkeley Square, Mac wouldn’t have caught on. I can hear Mac saying, “Oh yeah, that happens: guy completely in control all his life comes apart at the seams over a dame.”

  That’s only one part of the story, Mac. You might have guys who discover after sixty—a little late by most standards—they love to dress up in spiked heels and pantyhose, or they like curly-haired boys, you never met a guy who waited until sixty to fall in love, period.

  Some people learn to tango at sixty. Others, afraid of water all their lives, learn to swim at sixty. Lifelong junkies have been known to lay off the shit at sixty. At sixty, no one comes back from losing a Mary Clare.

  I see Robert, reaching his truck, saying to himself, “Thank God I’m Robert Gattling.” He’s driving back to Berkeley in the dark of night and from a passing car comes the sound of the Beatles singing “When I’m Sixty-four.” He wants to rewrite the words, something about how love keeps slipping into the future until it circles the globe and comes up behind you to launch a sneak attack. It happened to Meany. What you feel for a person right now isn’t love, it’s either falling in love or falling out of it. And then one day you look back on love, like ha
ppiness, and say, “I guess I really loved her.”

  Meany had.

  The morning Mary Clare was supposed to arrive but hadn’t, Robert came to the hospital to report to me on Meany’s demise but golden Theresa waved him off. So he joined the Monday morning crush of commuters on Highway 24 and made it to the Claremont and had to use the valet parking because he hadn’t asked Howie Manheimer where ABAG employees park.

  He sleep-walked through the meeting with Howie and the later one with a couple of demoralized employees whom he could only promise to come back and talk with at length. They loaded him up with whatever they thought might be helpful, orienting him to the project, and he told them to start creating the matrices for the tables that ought to be the appendix to a final report. He told them the only mistake they could make was trying not to make mistakes. If he hadn’t been a consummate bureaucrat he would have made things worse, but I believe Robert was a good enough bureaucrat to instill hope without promising the project would finally bear fruit. Then he went back to the Pelican and tried to make up for the sleep lost over Meany’s death.

  He woke with a sleep hangover, made “courtesy coffee” on the little cooker hung on the bathroom wall, the little pot taking forever to boil two cups of water but unable to boil just one, because one cup was too light to depress the built-in safety switch. Hung over, too, from the meeting with Meany and its aftermath. Like a powerful play or a movie that haunts you, he would think of Meany and shudder. If it could happen to Meany . . . if what could happen? Breakdown of clear reasoning? Nowhere to run to? All the power drained—shorted out—and nowhere to recharge?

  He wasn’t trying to absolve Meany. The Great Accountant in the Sky would say that his antics since Mary Clare shot him outweighed the good he’d done in rescuing her. He just didn’t want to look at Meany for what he’d become, a circus bear, declawed, muzzled and chained to a stake in the ground.

  Mary Clare had told him, among the interminable conversations in Moraga, about Meany’s childhood, how his fool of a father had died stupidly in the last battle of World War I, drowning in the River Meuse because he’d never learned to swim. He left his son only material things, and those inherited, not earned. His only true bequest was an early weaning—that and the opportunity to be raised by a stern, shrewd grandfather. Meany never reviled his father, he made up for him—by never doing a foolish thing until Mary Clare. He grew up the antithesis of his father, wiser, sterner and far more remote.