“It wasn’t a one-way street, though. Clarissa seemed agreeable to what Sands wanted, so why would Sands regard Tom as an obstacle? And anyway, a prominent man like that, why would he take the risk?”
Ellen shrugged. “I suppose it’s silly. But I don’t believe Tom just … died. Senselessly. That’s what they’re saying, right? That it was a mugging or something?”
“At this point, they’re mostly fishing, I think.”
“Tom was a soldier. He’d have known if he was in danger, and he’d have something done about it.”
“Assaults come from strange places sometimes, Ms. Simmons. You don’t necessarily get a warning.”
She scoffed at my rebuttal. “Tom Crandall wasn’t a victim, Mr. Tanner. After all he’d been through, he wouldn’t just let himself be beaten up. He was careful. Brave and foolish, sometimes; but careful.”
“What’s your point?”
“I think someone did something to him. Someone he knew; someone he went to that place to meet.” She paused, reviewed what she’d just said, and seemed more convinced than ever that the love of her life had been deliberately taken from her. “You must think the same thing, or why would you be here?”
“I do have a feeling that something doesn’t add up,” I admitted. “But it’s only speculation. I don’t have the faintest idea where to start to—”
“Of course you do,” she interrupted.
“What do you mean?”
“You start by doing what you’re doing now—asking questions.”
I reddened like a schoolboy being corrected at the blackboard to the delight of his peers. “We’ll know more when the M.E. issues his report about the cause of death. It might have been natural causes, you know. It happens.”
“Not like that,” she said confidently. “Not to Tom.”
“Let’s wait and see.”
She put a hand on my arm. “Will you call and tell me what the medical report says? We don’t take a newspaper—Father says it’s filled with sedition and sacrilege—and I don’t always have time to see the one at work.”
I glanced at the room at her back, to make sure Father wasn’t on a rampage to root out seditious sinners like me, then took down her phone number and promised I’d call. “Was that your father who came to get you at the chapel?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Why did he do it?”
“Daddy doesn’t like the Crandalls.”
“Why not?”
She hesitated, and her eyes lost focus. “There was trouble once. A long time ago. Father hasn’t gotten over it.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Footsteps sounded from inside the house, then Paul Harvey’s voice oozed from a nearby radio and Ellen’s spell was ended. “It doesn’t matter what happened,” she said firmly. “It doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
I waited for more, but it didn’t come. That a similar disclaimer had been issued by Tom’s mother made their stance either truthful or provocative. “Did you and Tom grow up together?” I prompted.
She nodded. “Second grade till he went to war.” She pointed. “We went to a little school that used to be down where that church is. He walked me here after class during the entire junior high. I’d make lemonade from real lemons. We’d talk about birds and baseball.” She tried to swallow and didn’t quite make it. “When he went to war, he took both my Bible and my virginity with him. I never got either of them back. Not that I minded,” she added wistfully. “The Bible did its work—Tom lived through it. It was my virginity that was wanting.”
We exchanged long looks, mine more embarrassed than hers. Then she nodded in answer to a question I hadn’t asked. “My first and only time. Amazing in this day and age, isn’t it? And now I’m the proverbial old maid. When Tom and I were dating, that was the last thing in the world I saw in my future.” She started to say more, then stopped herself. “I should go in; this kind of talk isn’t seemly.”
“Two more minutes.”
Behind her, someone said something that made her stiffen, then retreat toward the safety of the screen. “I have to go. If I don’t have dinner ready on time, I never hear the end of it. But I’m here every night by six, and on weekends, if you want to talk some more.”
“Where can I reach you during the day?”
She shook her head. “The bank doesn’t like me to do personal business.”
The idea that Ellen Simmons would abuse her work privileges was incomprehensible. “Just one more thing,” I said. “I was wondering if Tom said anything unusual the last time you saw him. Was he worried about anything, or frightened, or—”
“Tom was always frightened. He thought the world was mad, capable of viciousness at any moment. It’s why it was so remarkable that he forced himself to minister to the worst of it.” She hesitated. “No, not the worst. Only the least fortunate.”
“But there was nothing specific on his mind the last time you talked?”
“Not really. Just … regret, I suppose is the word for it.”
“Regret about what?”
She reddened. “Me, I suppose. My life and what’s become of it. But his life, too, I think. He felt bad that it hadn’t worked out better for either of us.” Her eyes searched the distances; what they found was Tom. “He kept saying he’d done what he thought was right at the time, that if he’d known what he knew now he’d have done it differently. But he didn’t, so there we were. Twenty years down the drain.”
“What exactly was he talking about—what would he have done differently?”
“Not coming to see me after the war, I think. Not giving me a chance to …” She shrugged helplessly, the past incapable of narration.
“A chance to what?”
“Show him that nothing had changed, no matter what had happened. Show him we could be like we had been before he went away.”
“Did he mention anything else? About his marriage, for example?”
She shook her head. “Not that last time.”
“How about money? Did that come up at all? Did it sound like he had some kind of business deal going?”
She shook her head. “Tom thought money was directly proportional to corruption. I never heard him mention it except disparagingly.” She blinked. “Sometimes I think the reason he didn’t come by to see me more often was that I work in a bank.”
I thought she meant it as a joke, but I wasn’t sure. “Do you think he could have been mixed up in something criminal? Medical people have access to drugs, for example.”
She adopted a pose as martial as the soldiers who’d fired their rifles across Tom’s grave. “Never.”
“Was he using drugs himself, do you think?”
“I am certain he was not.” She looked at me. “Aren’t you?”
Since I didn’t see any point in denting her illusions, I didn’t tell her that Tom had admittedly used drugs after he’d returned from the war. Given the stress he was under near the end, he could easily have repossessed that crutch.
Ellen prepared to close the door on me and my aimless musings. “Tom was a special man, Mr. Tanner,” she offered in benediction. “If someone killed him, they should be brought to account.”
I nodded. “But let’s wait for the medical report. If it indicates something shady, maybe you and I can see to it that justice is done.” When I looked at her again, I realized I wasn’t the only one who regarded the proposal as a pledge.
“One last thing,” I said. “Does Tom have a brother or not?”
Ellen Simmons looked at me for several seconds. “I don’t know,” she said cryptically. Before I could ask her to explain, the screen door banged like a gunshot between us.
EIGHT
I got in my Buick and headed for the nearest onramp. Along the way, my mind began to flood, with images of Tom and with snatches of his conversation.
“America needs a good scare,” he’d said once. “It’s the only thing that will bring us to our senses. The problem is, the scariest th
ing in the world is us.” And, “The Japanese will take whatever we’re prepared to sell them, and we’re prepared to sell them everything. That’s because we no longer know what things are worth. Capitalism’s Achilles’ heel is that the only value it admits is money.” And, “The most salutary step a politician could take—and it may be our only hope—would be to abolish commercial TV. But then how would he get elected without saying anything?” By the time I reached the onramp, these and similar aphorisms had become so immediate that I decided to return to the cemetery and say one last word to Tom myself—one last word in private.
The little graveyard was empty of family and friends; not even the grave-digger lingered: No one stood guard over the dead, who probably weren’t worried about it. When I got to the site, I expected to discover the shovel had done its job and Tom had been interred, but what I saw was the hole I’d left an hour before and its attendant mound of earth. I crossed my arms and walked around the gravesite once, and then again, careful not to examine its contents, letting my mind wander away from reason and reality and drift toward the transcendental. At the same time, a part of me tried to think of something to say to someone who, in my less emotional moments, I was certain could no longer hear me.
What I settled for, in the end, was, “Sorry.” And, “We’ll miss you at Guido’s.” And finally, “It would be easier if I knew why.” But the lines were evidently busy; I got no message in return.
In a mix of loneliness and the odd exultation that accompanies a surge of spirituality, I took one last look around to mark the spot in case I wanted to return some day, then started back to my car. But as I backed away from the grave, I tripped, stumbling over a clod that had rolled off the pile of dirt that was waiting to become Tom’s blanket. I struggled to regain my balance, and inadvertently looked down. What I saw inside the grave made me drop to my knees and crawl to its edge and examine the contents more carefully.
Lying atop the casket that rested peacefully within its vault, as precisely placed as if they had been readied for the week’s inspection, were some simple army artifacts: a faded bush hat, a pair of jungle boots, and, as shiny as its heavenly template even in the depths of the oblong pit, a single Silver Star. I had no doubt the articles were Tom’s, no doubt they’d been placed in the grave with reverence, no doubt it had been done in secret. What I didn’t know was who had performed the rite, or why.
When I got back to the office, I called Atlas Ambulance, the service Tom had worked for. When they realized I wasn’t in the throes of medical emergency, they stuck me on hold for five minutes. Finally someone in authority got on the line, but only long enough to tell me he didn’t know the answer to my questions—didn’t know why Tom had been in the Tenderloin the night he died, didn’t know of any particular difficulty he’d had on a call to that area or elsewhere, did keep files that would break out their emergency runs by location but they were private records and wouldn’t be made available to me under any circumstances, not without subpoena.
The upshot was, if I was going to learn anything about Tom’s work, it would have to come from Tony. I left a message with my Atlas antagonist for Tony to call when he got off duty, but the person who took it implied it was about as likely that Tony would get the message as it was that I would regrow hair on my bald spot.
The bout with the ambulance people was so enervating it was almost a relief that none of my other calls got through. Clarissa Crandall not only didn’t answer, she left a slap of the supernatural in her absence: The voice on her answering machine was still her husband’s, sounding firm and businesslike and very much alive, willing if not eager to receive my message. The unexpected visitation shoved me back to the gravesite for several minutes more. Afterward, my disposition was sufficiently sour that I was certain his wife had loosed Tom’s ghost on purpose.
My next call was to Charley Sleet, but once again he wasn’t at the Central Station and no one knew where he was or when he’d be back, which was par for Charley’s course. The person who answered the phone at the Chronicle acted as if he didn’t even know what an obituary was, let alone who might have written the one for Tom. And, as I’d predicted the last time Tom and I had talked at Guido’s, I didn’t even get past the first level of resistance when I called the headquarters of Sandstone Enterprises and asked to speak with its chairman and CEO.
The Sandstone call depleted my store of energies. After I made myself some coffee, I leaned back in my chair and began to drift.
If you can attend a funeral and not become immersed in thanatopsis, you’re a better person than I am, or maybe you’re just a clod. Anyway, I’d thought about death quite a bit as I made my way back through the Oakland Hills and across the Bay Bridge and through the tricky streets of the city on my way to my office in Jackson Square, and now I thought about it some more. I thought about peaceful death and violent death, anonymous death and heroic death, death in all its guises and gradations, culminating with the fact of Tom’s death and the inevitability of my own.
I’d come close several years ago, to death of the violent kind. On my very first case after I’d switched from lawyering to whatever it is I do now, I’d been gut-shot in an alley just south of Broadway, gut-shot by someone I’d never seen before or since, gut-shot, I’d decided after a two-month inquiry, mostly by mistake. It had taken six weeks of hospital help and another month of homestyle convalescence before my innards were functioning properly and I was back to anything I could consider my norm.
I didn’t have any out-of-body sensations as I lay bleeding in that alley, or see a lovely light or hear a heavenly harp; I just writhed in extremely uncelestial agony and tried to stem the flow. But during my recovery I’d learned a few things. I learned that I have an impressive tolerance for pain and an impressive intolerance of doctors. I learned I would rather run the risk of duplicating the torment of a gunshot than return to the even more excruciating pain of a law practice, even though the latter pain is purely psychological. And I learned that, despite my youthful indoctrination through a decade of sermons and Sunday school, I don’t believe in an afterlife—not in heaven or hell or purgatory, not in reincarnation or resurrection or any of the other comforting versions of immortality that humans have devised to give them succor. I believe that when the liquid of life runs dry, we are as dead as our dogs and our dandelions.
Still, a part of my Sunday schooling must have taken, the part about effort and achievement, sacrifice and obligation, the Golden Rule and the eye of a needle, and other maxims that are even more a part of me than Tom’s, which leaves me with the burdens of the doctrine but not the benefits. I’m a disappointment to myself as a result, some days more than others. Lots of people are, I suppose; it’s too bad the Sunday schools don’t spend more time teaching you what to do if you don’t turn out to be quite perfect.
Fortunately a siren sounded at this point and ended my ruminations. I looked at my watch. It was after five—time for a drink, so I had a couple. Tony hadn’t called. Neither had Clarissa Crandall; neither had Charley Sleet; neither had anyone at the Chronicle. The radio had nothing new on the war, which was still pretty much invisible.
When I looked Tony up in the book, I found a listing for a Milano on Greenwich that I figured for him, but all I got was his machine with a macho message directed toward the other sex, which apparently had little on its mind but Tony. I left my name and number, reminded him who I was, asked him to call me back. Since I wasn’t in the mood to hear Tom’s disembodied voice, I left his wife to a later time and place and tried the Central Station.
Charley Sleet sounded angry. Given the personnel problems in the police department, Charley was angry a lot of late. When he calmed down, I asked if he’d had dinner. He said he’d grabbed a burrito on the run about three hours ago. I said I’d spring for some pasta at Capp’s if he could sneak away for half an hour. He said he’d stopped sneaking the day he got caught pawing through his sister’s underwear when he was twelve and curious about what a brassiere looked
like up close. I told him I’d meet him at Capp’s in twenty minutes.
He was there when I arrived, burly, bearish, bald, sitting atop his chair at the communal table the way ice cream sits atop a sugar cone. As though to make sure I wouldn’t change my mind, Charley had his order in before I was settled in my seat. I decided on the gnocchi, and we opted jointly for Chianti, which is the only wine I drink. I’d seen less red at a knife fight than the waiter had on his apron, but he had a jug of the grape and some vegetable soup in front of us in less than ten seconds. Five minutes after that, the jug was almost empty.
The couple to our left was discussing movies. Charley listened for a minute, then grunted. “I’m not much of a movie man,” he said. “But I went to this Tracy thing.”
“Good. Crimestoppers should compare notes.”
“You see it?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you think?”
“Awful.”
Charley nodded. “I couldn’t see who they were or figure out what they were saying. Was that just me or was that the way it was?”
“That’s pretty much the way it was.”
“If this Beatty guy’s so old he’s afraid to show his face, what’d he make the movie for in the first place?”
“Five million dollars or so.”
“Is there anything those Hollywood guys won’t do for a buck?”
“How should I know? I don’t know any Hollywood guys.”
The couple to our right was discussing the war. We eavesdropped for another minute, then I looked at Charley. “We won’t see another Democratic president in our lifetimes. Not unless the ground war gets bogged down.”
Charley swore. “You think this will settle anything? They been at each other for three thousand years over there; the Arabs and Jews been scuffling every day since forty-seven. A year from now, it’ll be the same fucked-up place it always was—neither Bush or Quayle or anyone else will be bragging about this thing, and Schwarzkopf will pretend he was a private.”
Charley’s plate was almost empty after a handful of bites, and he was back to business. “You don’t buy unless you want something,” he grumbled.
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