The Last Man: A Novel

by D. W. Buffa

  “Who would have believed me? – The cops…, you? Who we kidding? Everyone thinks I’m guilty. There wasn’t much for me to do but play the part.”

  “Play the part? What are you talking about?”

  “Give everyone what they’ve paid to see: the guy that would kill your mother and not just enjoy it but make you watch; rape your wife, kill your children. They’re going to give me the death penalty; might as well make them feel good about it.”

  Atkinson was laughing with his eyes, but the reason remained a mystery. Was it because everything he had said was true and he enjoyed being the only one in on the joke, or because he could tell lies like this, tell them all day, and not care in the least whether anyone believed a thing he said. Harlowe did not believe him, but it was enough for Atkinson that he had created this tiny shadow of a doubt, this possibility, slim almost to the point of non-existence, but still real, that he might just be telling the truth, that he might be what every defense attorney fears more than anything: an innocent man who was certain to be convicted.

  “I want to testify, and I’m going to testify. It isn’t your decision.”

  Chapter Five

  Walter Bannister was still thinking about the trial. The gate opened and he drove up the long winding driveway that led to the sprawling tile roofed Spanish style house where he had lived since his marriage nearly twenty five years ago. He kept pondering the relative importance of what he was now convinced the prosecution had simply missed. It probably did not matter in terms of the ultimate result; there was scarcely any doubt what the jury would do. But it was not good work, especially from a lawyer as competent as Hector Alfonso. Perhaps the district attorney had too much of his own ambition on his mind, too much of his imagined future to see what was right in front of his eyes.

  He parked the car in the usual place, on the circle just past the front doorway, and, as he often did, stood for a moment at the edge of the thick close cut grass, staring at the tall palm trees that towered overhead and the purple bougainvillea that twisted up the cream colored stucco wall that hid from view the swimming pool in back. Green birds with bright red markings called to each other in a harsh, mocking chatter. Walter Bannister told himself that he had nothing to complain about, that there was not one man in a million who would not envy the life he had. And then, as now happened more and more frequently, that thought was immediately followed by another, the knowledge that he could share their envy, be envious of himself, if he could somehow see things only from the outside, see what he had, the life of a respected judge, the home in Bel Aire, the fortunate son of a father who had become one of the richest men in Los Angeles, the husband of a woman, wealthy in her own right and just about the first person anyone would call who wanted any major charitable event, any gathering for a good cause, to become the kind of success that everyone would be talking about for months.

  There was a smell of jasmine in the air, the golden scent of luxury and unreality, the scent of ancient kingdoms and moonlight adventures, the scent that reminded Walter Bannister of the movies. He was not sure if it was the place – Los Angeles and the business that made it thrive – or the movies he had watched as a boy, sitting in the darkness of a downtown theater, mesmerized by brave and reckless adventurers who never fought a fight they did not win or discovered a risk they would not take. It had all seemed so much more thrilling that what he had to do in school. It was not that he did not like school. He was good at it, very good, the best in his class, valedictorian when he graduated from high school, valedictorian of his graduating class in college, editor of the law review at Yale. He mastered all the dead abstractions, all the dry formulations, the endless definitions, all the changing rules, all the subjects of the college curriculum, and all the things law school had to teach. And every year there was more to learn, and he learned it. He could reason about anything, but – and this was the essential problem - there was no excitement in his life, no sense of adventure, nothing like what he thought he had seen in those movies of his childhood, the ones he had liked to watch.

  “You’re late. Did you forget?”

  The voice, a woman’s voice, seemed to float disembodied through the soft summer air. He turned to see his wife, Meredith, dressed in something new, standing in the shadows of the open doorway. The long black lashes over her eyes beat with impatience as she waited for an explanation.

  It lasted just an instant, too brief for her to catch the meaning, but for a moment he was not certain who she was. She had become a forgettable part of his past, a woman with whom he had once been in love, or at least had thought he had been, a woman become a habit more than a desire. He seldom thought about her when she was not with him, and barely remembered when she was.

  “Dinner at your brother’s,” he heard himself tell her, wishing as he said it that he had somehow forgotten. “And I’m not late,” he added as he brushed by her with a meaningless kiss on her powdered cheek. “It won’t take me ten minutes to change.”

  He was ready in eight, changed from the suit and tie he wore every day to the courthouse, a tribute to judicial formality, into a tan sports jacket and a pair of lightweight gray slacks. It was one of the advantages of living in Los Angeles that, unless it was a black tie affair, one of those charitable events his wife was always involved with, he could dress down for dinner, get out of the structured uniform of his position into the casual clothing in which he could, at least at times, relax.

  They did not say much to each other on the drive from their place in Bel Aire to her brother’s home out on Mulholland Drive. She did ask him how the trial was going, but before he could start to answer she pointed out the window at what she was quick to call another ‘garish monstrosity’ that someone with more money than taste was building on the demolished ruins of a house that, having been there for nearly fifty years, was considered in Los Angeles historic.

  “I knew the people who lived there,” observed Meredith in that vague way of hers that left him in doubt whether she had actually known the people or was referring to the passing of a whole generation. “Someone new to the business,” she went on. “Made their money somewhere else and have to show everyone what they’ve got. By the way,” she said, turning to him with a look that suggested something that concerned them both, “you didn’t see Wilson when you left this morning, did you? He didn’t come home today.”

  Bannister kept his eyes on the twisting road ahead of him.

  “No? Well, I imagine he’ll be back. I know you didn’t want a cat, but you have to admit –don’t deny it – that you’ve grown fond of him, nearly as much as I have. Well, he’ll probably be there when we get home.”

  “Cats sometimes disappear,” replied Bannister as they turned onto Mulholland Drive. “Sometimes they don’t come back at all.”

  She did not hear him. Her brother’s place was just ahead, and she started talking about who the other guests were going to be.

  Roger Stanton was a year and a half younger than his sister, and one of the most influential men in Hollywood. He was called a producer, but only because the title carries a certain mystic glamour in the industry. His name, or the name of his company, was among the title credits of dozens of major motion pictures, but other, lesser, names were responsible, at least in the details, for what those films were like. Stanton put things together, made the arrangements, secured the financing; in other words, he made what everyone else did possible. If you had an idea, a really good idea, for a movie, one that could make those who did it famous, or if they were already famous, more famous still, and if you believed, which was the only way to believe if you wanted to be successful in Hollywood, that you should, in that old American saying, start at the top and work your way down, you started with Roger Stanton. Or you tried to, and like nearly everyone else, you failed. Walter Bannister may have been the only person in Los Angeles who could see Roger Stanton whenever he wanted to and did not care if he ever saw him or not.

  They turned into the drive and were sudd
enly at Roger Stanton’s rather famous house. Famous, not just because he lived in it now, but famous because of those who had lived there before: movie stars, the names that everyone had known, a whole series of them, at least six, going back to the 1930s when the house was first built for a famous movie star couple who wanted to spend the rest of their lives in it and moved out two years later when their marriage ended in a scandalous divorce. Everyone who owned it had changed it, and then, having in that way made it their own, began to imagine that it had in some sense always belonged to them. They changed the colors, they changed the size of rooms; they tore down fireplaces and built new ones; they changed the shape and, when someone wanted to make it bigger, even the location of the pool; but no matter what they did, when you approached it from the front on Mulholland Drive it looked exactly the way it had that day in September all those years ago when the first owners first moved in. It was still the same two story place, the same green shutters on the windows, the same stately white square columns standing two stories straight up, the same black lacquered double doors that seemed to invite you in. It was a California, or rather a Southern California house, with short shady dark green trees and what looked an acre of grass cut close as a putting green. The doors were standing open when they arrived.

  There were a dozen people gathered around the dining room table and the conversation was, as usual, all about the movies: who was going to be cast in the next big blockbuster hit Roger Stanton was going to make, what was happening, what were the box office receipts, from the film released just last week. Nearly everyone there was in the business, the industry; two of them, a young woman and a much older man, were actors, film stars as they were called in all the magazines; the rest worked behind the camera or in the board room. Walter Bannister smiled and nodded when he had to and pretended an interest he did not feel.

  “We should make a movie about the trial.”

  Bannister had just turned to say something to Gloria Baker, the film star sitting on his left. He had not heard what his brother-in-law had said, but he saw the young woman’s eyes suddenly flash past him to the end of the table.

  “What do you think, Walter?” asked his brother in law, Roger Stanton. “It’s all anyone can talk about, what that – what’s his name? – did: murdering all those people, a whole family, two small children.”

  “Daniel Lee Atkinson,” said Bannister, filling in the name.

  He was about to add that he could not discuss the case, that he was presiding at the trial and could not say a word about it, but he was bored by the trivial nature of the conversation and a little angry by the suggestion that the best thing anyone could think to do with a trial as serious as this was to turn it into a money making fiction.

  “Make it into a movie? – Only if I get to play the defendant, the one on trial for murder.”

  Stanton almost choked.

  “You – play a killer? Good God, no one would believe it. You…! You don’t look anything like a murderer.”

  “That’s the point Harlowe was trying to make,” said Bannister without thinking.

  They all looked at him with puzzled faces, wondering what he meant. He tried to shrug it off, to suggest that it was not important, but it was too late. Irving Leonard, Stanton’s favorite director, would not let it go. Short, with bushy eyebrows and a tangled mop of reddish gray hair, he had a slightly demonic look and, when things did not go well, a temper to match.

  “Harlowe, the defense attorney – he said something about looking like a murderer? He’s trying to tell them, tell the jury, that his client doesn’t look like a murderer? I’ve seen the pictures of this guy – Daniel Lee Atkinson – and if he doesn’t look like -”

  “No, that isn’t what he was saying,” interjected Bannister, forced to correct a wrong impression. “He was saying just the opposite: That his client – the defendant – looks like a murderer; that he looks just like what they imagined a murderer must look like.”

  Leonard was stunned. It did not make sense, but it also did not make sense that a lawyer as good as everyone said Harlowe was – the best defense lawyer around – would do something that stupid. There must be more to it, some reason for what on the surface seemed an obvious mistake. Bannister was ready with the answer before Leonard could think through the question.

  “He had to do that, bring it out like that: what everyone was thinking the moment they saw him: that he looks like a killer – what we think a killer looks like. It was the only way to make the jury confront their own prejudice, the only way to make them realize they even had one. Now they have to think that they might be convicting someone just because of the way he looks instead of what the evidence proves. Harlowe is as good at what he does as anyone I’ve seen. He knows what he is doing, especially,” he added with a shrewd, barely visible grin at the side of his mouth, “when it looks like he doesn’t know what he’s doing at all.”

  “Good, bad, or indifferent, he isn’t going to win this case,” said Leonard with perfect confidence.

  Bannister leaned to the side, braced his thumb against the side of his face and with two fingers covered his mouth. He did not say a word. There was no change of expression. Leonard began to feel uncertain.

  “He isn’t – I mean, he can’t, can he?”

  “Walter never discusses a case, not even with me,” explained Meredith. She said this with the satisfaction, the residual pride she felt in the reputation he had, the judge of unquestioned honesty and integrity. “He can’t; he won’t.”

  But he could, and he did; obliquely and, as it were, at one remove. Resting on his elbows, he folded his hands together and as gently as he could explained what a trial was all about.

  “The longer I do this, the longer I preside over cases, criminal cases, the more convinced I am that we do it all wrong. For example, no one can be forced to testify against himself.”

  “The right against self-incrimination,” said one of the other guests, an executive in Stanton’s company, with a crisp, authoritative manner. Judith Charles knew Bannister’s reputation, but a trial court judge, no matter how brilliant, had no influence on anything that mattered to her. “You’re not suggesting we take that away,” she said with the same certainty with which she said most things. Her eyes glittered with impatience. She hated these abstract arguments, these dinner table disquisitions that never went anywhere.

  Bannister grasped immediately the cause of her irritation and did not hesitate to irritate her even further. He raised his eyebrows in friendly challenge.

  “What good does it do to have it? Why should the defendant in this trial of mine – why should anyone - have the right to refuse to tell what really happened? Forget the fact that we have that right – that’s no answer. What is the reason we have it, and is the reason all that good. The British don’t allow it; or rather, they allow it – they don’t force a defendant to testify – but they make him pay a price for his silence, something we don’t do.”

  Everything about Judith Charles was tight and concentrated, from the skirts and jackets she wore to the smile that now flashed without humor across her half-closed mouth. Every inch the well-educated, professional woman, with both a law school degree and an MBA, her head was full of books and her heart was, well, according to those who knew her best, empty of any genuine sentiment, anything that went beyond her own self-regard. Her mind, an engine that never quit, was always full of calculation.

  “I don’t think we need to take any lessons from the British,” she remarked with the air of someone used to having the final word.

  “Then who should we take lessons from, or do you believe we have nothing to learn?”

  She was caught, and she knew it, and she did not like it. She tried to cut her losses.

  “I’m not saying we don’t have anything to learn. What I am saying is that I don’t think we should start by throwing away something as fundamental as the right against self-incrimination.”

  “You may be right,” replied Bannister, �
��but if a defendant charged with a crime like rape or murder chooses not to testify, I don’t see that he has anything to complain about if the judge then instructs the jury that they may note the fact that he could have given his version of what happened and chose not to do so.”

  “But a judge couldn’t do that – you couldn’t do that – could you?” asked Leonard, sitting on the edge of his chair, intensely interested.

  “Here, no; but in Great Britain, yes: the judge summarizes the evidence at the end of the trial and tells the jury what he believes are the reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from it. Here, we just preside over the trial, rule on questions about evidence and instruct the jury on the law. We don’t get to play nearly so active a part. It’s too bad, really. If we had that power – if we could interrupt and ask questions of our own, trials would not depend quite so much on which side had the better lawyer.”

  Leonard ran his fingers through thick, disheveled hair and stared at the judge with manic eyes.

  “But it wouldn’t make any difference in this case, though, would it?” asked “You showed me a few minutes ago, and you said it yourself: this guy Harlowe is pretty damn good at what he does. The thing I can’t figure out is why would he take a case like this? No one is paying him, from what I understand; and no matter how good he is he must have known he doesn’t have a chance.”

  Bannister glanced across at Judith Charles who had just picked up her wine glass.

  “There are no eyewitnesses, and as you reminded us: the defendant has the right against self-incrimination. He can’t be forced to testify, and the jury will be instructed – if the defense asks for the instruction, which it will – that they may not take the defendant’s failure to testify into account, may not read anything into it whatsoever.”

  “You think there is actually a chance that monster might go free?” asked the young actress, Gloria Baker, with a shudder.