The Last Good Kiss

“Unlike yours, old buddy,” I said, “mine ain’t an act.” Then I grabbed his wrist and squeezed the heavy silver bracelet into his soft flesh. “Intellectual discourse is great, man, but in my business, violence and pain is where it’s at.”

  “My god,” he squeaked, squirming, “you’re breaking my arm.”

  “That’s just the beginning, man,” I said. “Keep in mind the fact that I like this, that I don’t like you worth a damn.”

  “Please,” he whimpered, sweat beading across his scalp.

  “Let’s have the rest of it,” I whispered.

  “There’s nothing, I swear … Please … you’re breaking … “

  “Listen, old buddy,” I said pleasantly, “the U.S. Army trained me at great expense in interrogation, filled my head with all sorts of psychological crap, but when I got to Nam, we didn’t do no psychology, we hooked the little suckers up to a telephone crank— alligator clips on the foreskin and nipples—and the little bastards were a hundred times tougher than you, but when we rang that telephone, the little bastards answered.”

  “All right,” he groaned, “all right.” I released his wrist. “Can’t you get this off?” he grunted as he struggled with the bent bracelet.

  “Sure,” I said, then straightened the silver. His face wrinkled and his eyelids fluttered. He rubbed his wrist as I fixed him a drink. “You had something to tell me.”

  “Yes, right. Once, some time ago,” he babbled, “I thought I saw her in a porno flick over in the city. The girl was fat and awful, a pig, it might have been her, it looked like her, the print was bad, all grainy, and the lighting even worse, but it looked like her, except for this scar, this ugly scar in the middle of her belly.” When he stopped talking, his ruined mouth kept moving like a small animal in its death throes.

  “Why lie about that?” I asked, honestly amazed.

  “I was … I am ashamed of my interest in that … that sort of thing,” he said, then rushed into his drink. “And it was so sordid, that awful fat girl and all those old men …”

  “You remember the name of it?”

  “Animal.. . something or other. Lust or Passion,

  something like that. I can’t remember, it was so horrid,” he moaned, then began to weep.

  “And so exciting,” I said, and he nodded. “That’s all you had to tell me?” I asked, and he nodded again.

  It didn’t sound right, but I didn’t know what sounded wrong. I did know that I couldn’t push him anymore. I didn’t have the stomach for it. The only interrogation I had seen in Vietnam had made me sick, but I didn’t remember if I had vomited because of the tiny Viet Cong’s pain, the Vietnamese Ranger captain’s pleasure, or my own fatigue. I had been in the bush for twenty-three days, and I could sleep standing up with my eyes open, which was good, because I couldn’t sleep lying down with them shut. A few days later, I made the mistake that got me out of Nam and two years later out of the Army. Those times seemed far away, usually, but listening to Gleeson sob into the clear sunlight, they seemed too close.

  “Hey,” I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Oh, I understand,” he blubbered, “that horrid war twisted so many of you boys.”

  “I left Nam nine years ago,” I said, “and I’m no boy, so don’t make excuses for me.”

  “Of course,” he said as sincerely as he could, “of course.” Then he took his hands away from his face and wiped at the tears. “Will you do me one small favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you find her, will you call me? Please. I’ll pay anything you ask. Please.”

  “You might have thought of that ten years ago.”

  ”Ha,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Ten years ago I was still in my thirties, instead of nearly fifty, and I had no idea that I was going to be here ten more years, no idea that the peak of my career was going to be some little high school actress. No idea at all. I didn’t know what she meant to me then. I do now. I’d just like to see her, talk to her again. Please.”

  “I won’t find her,” I said. “But if you do …”

  “I’ll let you know for free,” I said. “Sorry about your wrist, and thanks for the beers.”

  “My pleasure,” he answered, a slight smile curling his lip, then his head dropped into his hands again.

  I left him there on the sun deck, his huge head cradled in his arms like that of a grotesque baby. As I stepped out the front door, a young girl wearing a halter and cut-offs took that as her cue to push her ten-speed bike up the walk. I wanted to tell her that Gleeson wasn’t home, but her greeting and smile were shy and polite with wonder, her slim, tanned thighs downy with sweat.

  “Hello,” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”

  “Stay me with flagons,” I said, “comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, sweetly bewildered.

  “Poetry, I think.”

  Instead of taking her in my arms to protect her, instead of sending her home with a lecture, I walked past her toward my El Camino. Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.

  5••••

  SINCE IT WAS GETTING ON INTO SATURDAY AFTERNOON, and since I didn’t feel like Christian charity on the hoof, I hoped Albert Griffith wouldn’t answer his telephone. No such luck. After I explained what I wanted, he agreed to meet me in his office at five. He even sounded anxious to talk to me. I drove to Petaluma and found an anonymous motel bar and dirge of a Giants game on the television with which to slay foul time until five.

  After a couple of deadly dull innings and slow, carefully paced beers, the bartender drifted by and I asked him for a drink.

  “Stay me with CC ditches, my friend, for I am bored shitless by all this.”

  “Hey, fella, take it easy, huh,” he said, then walked away.

  “That’s Canadian Club and water, you turd,” I shouted at his back. “But I’ll have it someplace else.”

  “That’s fine with me, buddy,” he said.

  For a tip, I left him the remains of a stale beer. When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it’s time for a better world. Or at least a different bar. I found the local newspaper and the nearest bar.

  Albert Griffith, though, had enough romantic notions to gag Doris Day. He kept an office in a restored Victorian house on a quiet side street just outside the downtown area, sharing the house with another lawyer and two shrinks. And he had dressed for the occasion. A dark-blue, expensively tailored, vested, pinstriped suit and a silk tie. As he ushered me into his office, he offered me a wing-backed gold brocade chair and a taste of unblended Scotch. I accepted them both. In my business, you have to buy everybody’s act. For a few minutes. Usually lawyers are too devious to suit me. They seem to have the idea that justice is an elaborate game, that courtrooms are tiny stages, and clients simply an excuse for the legal act. They also have a disturbing habit of getting elected to political offices, or appointed to government commissions, then writing laws you have to hire a lawyer to understand. But Albert Griffith acted as if he were my best friend. For a moment.

  As soon as I was settled, he leaned against the front of his massive desk, his arms crossed as he’ towered over me, smiling in a friendly way beneath sardonic eyes. After I had a taste of his great Scotch, he leaped into his act.

  “All right, Mr. Sughrue,” he said, “let’s get something straight from the very beginning. I don’t know how you persuaded Mrs. Flowers to hire you for this wild goose chase, and I don’t know how much money you have managed to weasel out of that poor woman, but she’s a personal friend of my mother’s, and I intend to put an end to this nasty little gambit of yours.”

  “You want me to cut you in, huh?” I said. “Okay. There’s enough for everybody.”

  “What?”

  While he worked on his confusion, I stood up and walked around behind his desk, took a cigar out of a burled walnut box, lit it, sat down in his leather swivel chair, and propped my boot
s on his desk.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “Making myself comfortable, partner,” I said, then blew smoke in his face.

  “Get up from there,” he sputtered. He couldn’t have been any angrier if I had sat down on his wife’s face.

  “Listen, Buster Brown,” I said, taking a fistful of his cigars for my pocket, “you’ve got a fancy setting here, but you’re just another second-class creep. Your daddy, when he can stand up, holds a sign for the highway department, and your momma put you through law school with a beauty operator’s tips. Your daddy-in-law is springing for this antique whorehouse decor, this whole lawyer scam, and you, Mr. Griffith, aren’t only a failure, you’re a courthouse joke, so get out of my face with this big-shot attorney crap.”

  “If you don’t get out of my office this instant, I’m calling the police,” he said in a voice on the verge of sobs.

  “After you apologize,” I said, “maybe we can start this whole thing over again.”

  At the moment, though, he didn’t have anything to say. I watched his face change hues about four times and examined the shoddy dental work on his back lower molars. At the newspaper bar, I had found an AP stringer who, for the price of a 7&7, had given me Albert Griffith’s life history.

  “If it will improve your attitude,” I said, “give Rosie a call. She’s got eighty-seven bucks, two beers, and a smile into this, and I might take another beer or two, and I might only lose a hundred bucks on this, but -she’s paid all she’s going to pay. So call her while I have another taste of this overpriced whiskey.”

  While I stiffened mydrink, he called Rosie and spoke softly to her for a minute. Then he hung up, loosened his tie, and made himself a really stiff drink. I didn’t have much of a picture of Betty Sue Flowers yet, but just the mention of her name seemed to drive grown men to drink.

  “Let’s sit on the couch,” Albert said, and we sat at opposite ends of a long leather expanse. “Please accept my apology,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve been in the business long enough to understand that most independent operatives are scumbags. Even the corporate security people are frighteningly ugly beneath that slick exterior they maintain.”

  “Thanks.” “For what?”

  “For not thinking I have a slick exterior.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, glancing at my faded Levis and worn work-shirt and laughing. A bit too long to suit me. “Rosie explained everything, Mr. Sughrue, and I am sorry for acting so hastily.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

  “Well, I am sorry,” he repeated. I wished he would stop. “Rosie even said that you told her it was probably a waste of time and money,” he said, then smiled sadly. “Let me tell you that it is definitely a lost cause.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I was a student at Berkeley when Betty Sue ran away,” he said, “and I spent all my spare time for two years searching for her in the city. Let me tell you, my transcript showed it too. I nearly didn’t get into law school,” he said dramatically. I wasn’t impressed yet. “I never turned up a single lead.’ Not one. It was as if she walked away from my car that afternoon and off the edge of the world, off the face of the earth. I even had a friend from law school—he’s in Washington—check her Social Security payment records, and there hasn’t been a payment since she worked a part-time job the summer before she disappeared.” He sucked on his whiskey glass, his hand trembling so badly that the lip of the glass rattled against his teeth. “I can only assume that either she doesn’t want to be found or that’s she’s dead. Though if she is, she didn’t die in San Francisco or any place in the Bay Area. At least not in the first five years after she ran away.” “How do you know that?”

  “I checked Jane Does in county morgues for that long,” he said softly, as if the memory made him very tired.

  “You went to a lot of trouble.”

  “I was very much in love with her,” he said, “and Betty Sue was a very special lady.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said, then regretted it.

  “From whom?” he asked in a voice that tried to be casual.

  “Everybody.”

  “Which everybody, specifically?”

  “Her drama teacher, for one,” I said.

  “Gleeson,” he snorted. “That faggot son of a bitch. He didn’t know anything about Betty Sue, didn’t care anything about her. He encouraged her acting so she would think he was a big man, that’s all. She was good at it but she didn’t even like it. She used to tell me, ‘They just look at me, Albert, they don’t see me.’”

  “I thought Marilyn Monroe said that.”

  “Huh? Oh, perhaps she did,” he said. “I’m sure it’s a common psychological profile among actresses. Betty Sue was very sensitive about her looks. Sometimes when we would be having a … spat, she would cry and tell me, ‘If I were ugly or crippled, you wouldn’t love me.’ “

  “Was she right?” I asked without meaning to.

  “Damn it, man,” he answered sharply, “I haven’t seen her in ten years and I’m … I’m still half in love with her.”

  “How does your wife feel about that?”

  “We don’t talk about it,” he said with a sigh.

  “Could Betty Sue have been serious enough about the acting to have run off to Hollywood or New York, something like that?”

  “Do girls still do that?” he asked, glancing up at me.

  “People still do everything they used to do,” I said. “What about her?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, then asked if he could freshen my drink. When I shook my head, he got up and made himself a new one. “I don’t think so at all,” he said from the bar. “She enjoyed the work— rehearsals and all that—but for her, the play wasn’t the thing.” He sat back down. “She suffered from passing enthusiasms, you know,” he said, as if it were a disease from which he had been spared. “One month it would be the theatre, the acting just a preparation for writing and directing, and the next month she would be planning to go to medical school and become a missionary doctor. Then she would want to be a painter or some sort of artist. And the worst part of it was that she could do damn near anything she set her mind to. For instance, I wasn’t a great tennis player—though I nearly made the team at Cal—and when I could get her on the courts, she gave me a hell of a time, let me tell you.” He paused to look at his drink, then decided to drink about half of it in a gulp. “And, you know, in spite of all the things she could do, she was the loneliest person I ever knew. That was the heartbreaking part of it, that loneliness. I couldn’t help her at all. Sometimes it seemed my attempts just made it worse. I couldn’t stop her from being lonely at all.”

  “Not even in bed?”

  “You’re a nosy bastard, aren’t you?” he said quietly. “Professional habit.”

  “Well, the truth is that I never laid a hand on her,” he said with proper sadness. “Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t still be carrying her around on my back.”

  “Did anybody else lay a hand on her?”

  “I always suspected that she wasn’t a virgin,” he said with a slight smile. “But she wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Did you two fight about it?”

  “I fought, but she wouldn’t fight back,” he said. “She’d just sit there, drawn into some sort of shell, and weep. Or else she’d make me take her home.”

  “Did you have a fight the day she walked away?”

  “No,” he murmured, shaking his head. “It was just a normal day. We drove over to San Francisco for dinner and a movie, and on the way she decided that she wanted to drive through the Haight to see the hippies. We got stuck in a line of traffic, and she just opened the car door, stepped out, and walked away. Without looking back. Without saying a word,” he said slowly, as if he had repeated the lines to himself too many times.

  “You didn’t chase her?”

  “How could I?” he cried. “I didn’t know she was running away, a
nd I couldn’t just leave my car sitting in the street, man.”

  “I thought you had tickets for a play,” I said.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “It was ten years ago, ten goddamned years ago.”

  “Right.”

  “Need another drink,” he either said or asked. When he stood up, I handed him my glass, but he paced around the office with it in his hand.

  “Can you tell me anything else about her?” I asked.

  He stopped and stared at me as if I were mad, then started pacing again, taking the controlled steps of a drunk man. But his hands and mouth moved with a will of their own; he waved his arms and nearly shouted, “Tell you about her? My god, man, I could tell you about her all day and you still wouldn’t see her. Tell you what? That I had loved her since she was a child, that I couldn’t just stop because she ran away? I tried to stop, believe me I tried to stop loving her.” Then he paused. “It all sounds so silly now, doesn’t it?” “What?”

  “That the disappearance of a damned high school chick that I’d never touched was the most traumatic experience of my life,” he said. “And let me tell you, I know something about trauma, growing up with a drunken father. What do you want to know anyway?”

  “Everything. Anything.”

  “That I married a safely dull woman and fathered two safely dull children that I can’t bear to face and can’t bear to leave and can’t bear to love because they might all run away too,” he said.

  “Hey, man,” I said, “take that crap upstairs to the shrinks. Don’t tell me about it. I asked about her, not you.” He stopped to stare at his feet. “You’ve already been upstairs, right?”

  “I’ve been going for two years now,” he said with that mixture of pride and shame people in analysis so often have. “And, in spite of the jokes, it’s working. I meant to go to medical school, you know, but all those visits to the morgue, all those anonymous faces beneath the rubber sheets, were too much for me.” He went to the bar to splash whiskey aimlessly into our glasses, then kept mine in his hand. “As you so aptly said, as a lawyer I’m not even a good joke. But I’m enrolled in next fall’s medical school class out at Davis. Thanks to Betty Sue, it’s taken me ten extra years to get started, but now I’m finally going to make it.”