The Last Man: A Novel

by D. W. Buffa

  “Daniel Lee Atkinson. He was real. Stupid beyond measure, all violence and brute instinct, but he made me wonder whether killing for the murderer, a murderer like him who kills without motive, whether violence altogether, is nothing more than a form of expression, a way to define himself against a world that wants nothing to do with him. An actor plays a murderer on the screen: the performance is judged as an artistic achievement. Is that how Atkinson, too stupid to reason it out, looks at what he has done? The actor goes through the motions, an empty pantomime, and no matter how vile the action he portrays, wins applause. Who applauds the real killer, or is the only audience he cares about the jumbled voices in his own head, not the kind of mental disease or defect by which we define insanity, but the beliefs he holds about what will prove his own existence has meaning? Daniel Lee Atkinson wasn’t ashamed of what he had done. That means, we think, that he has no morality; but what if it only means that he has a different morality, one we might call savage, one we don’t want to understand?

  “I told Roger who wants me to help him cover up, to keep quiet, what Driscoll Rose did, that it was worse than what Atkinson had done. That isn’t true, of course. Rose hasn’t killed anyone; not yet, anyway. They should both have been lined up and shot the first time they hit a woman or hurt someone who could not defend himself. There is this bizarre dichotomy the world thinks is fair: a homicidal maniac without a name or influence, a moral pariah everyone wants to kill, and a rapist who isn’t yet a murderer only because he left for dead the woman he attacked, fortune’s favorite who when he commits a crime there isn’t a mouth in Hollywood that isn’t talking excuses.

  “Both of them, Rose and Atkinson, the actor and the murderer, have in common the belief that the world is made only for them, that their own impulses are the only measure of what they think right. Both are cowards, the objects of their violence always smaller, weaker, or made defenseless; but Atkinson has the strange monstrous superiority that he doesn’t shy from taking credit for the evil he has done. Rose, helped by others, hides from blame, or, worse yet, blames the victim. When I had my hands on him, when I pulled him off the boy he was beating, it was all I could do not to start beating him. I could feel the blood surge through me, feel the way everything started to go dark. The phrase ‘blind rage’ is no exaggeration. If no one else had been there – I think this is true – I don’t think I could have stopped myself. No, that’s a lie. I could have stopped myself, but I wouldn’t have wanted to, and I would have done it: beaten him to death, if I had been able. At least I would like to think I would have. Someone should.

  “The monster I saw on the face of Daniel Lee Atkinson, the same thing was there on the face of Driscoll Rose. I felt the same thing in me. I know it is there: the desire for the forbidden evil knowledge of what it is like to kill. But I realized tonight, listening to Roger, that there is another knowledge, not so much forbidden as avoided: what the victim of a killer’s depraved brutality must feel. We can imagine, we are forced to imagine, what it must have been like for the four that Atkinson murdered – Did he really make the husband and wife choose who he was going to murder first? – We imagine it, listening to the testimony at trial, but we never really know. The only one who could is someone who had every reason to think she was about to be killed. The actress, Gloria Baker, the one Roger talked about, the one Driscoll Rose thought he had murdered –she would know.

  “Could I kill someone without knowing that; really do it, kill someone in cold blood, plan it all from start to finish, if I didn’t know, not just the cause, what was making me do it, but the effect, not just the fact of death, but what it was like to die?”

  Bannister sat there, thinking, imagining, wondering what was going to happen, whether he would ever do anything, or just go on torturing himself with his own indecision and his own growing sense of inconsequence. Sometime after midnight he shut the door to the study and, throwing on a windbreaker, went for a long walk outside. An hour later, when he got back, his wife still was not home.

  Chapter Ten

  Whatever time he went to bed, Walter Bannister was always up at six. His eyes opened, his hand reached out automatically to the clock next to the bed and the alarm was turned off just before it would have started to ring. There was really no reason to set it in the first place: he had never slept late. It was part of his fastidious mind, a habit he made himself acquire, one that he had held so long he was not aware he had it: a second layer of protection against the possibility that, even if only once, he might not be the first one to court. Whatever else he did as a judge, he was there to set an example.

  Ten minutes later, he was showered, shaved, and dressed. Pausing outside the door to his wife’s bedroom, he wondered what time of the night she had finally come home. He felt an unexpected sense of relief that she was there, safe in her bed. However much things had changed between them, however little intimacy there was, she was part of how he lived; part of the background, perhaps, but something he was used to and would miss if it ever disappeared. Meredith was home, asleep; he did not have to think of her again.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, he put on a pot of coffee and went out to get the morning paper. Each month he gave a handsome tip to the boy who delivered it, a reward for the dexterity with which he threw it high enough to clear the gate and far enough to land square in the middle of the asphalt drive twenty yards up from the street. Some days he went early just to watch him do it. He picked up the paper, removed the blue rubber band that held it folded in place and, walking slowly back to the house, began to glance through it. If there was anything about the near murder that had taken place at Roger Stanton’s Santa Barbara estate he could not find it.

  The morning sun felt warm on the back of his neck. It was another cloudless day, with what little breeze there was coming from the west. The fires still burning in the mountains would be pushed east for a few more hours, until the winds shifted in the afternoon and the smell of smoke would start to come closer. Tucking the paper under his arm, he cut across the grass to the kitchen door. The light on the coffee maker, signaling that it was ready, had just come on.

  For the next hour he sat at his desk in the study, reviewing each of the court cases on that day’s docket. There were a dozen different motions that had to be decided, decisions he had already made; decisions, as was his habit, he would consider one last time. There were briefs filed in support of motions scheduled to be heard in the afternoon. He had read them all, studied the cases cited in them, and then read the briefs again. Two defendants, one of them convicted at trial of extortion, the other ready to plead guilty to something less serious than the armed robbery charge on which he had been indicted, were scheduled for sentencing. Bannister reviewed, line by line, the pre-sentencing reports.

  With his ability to concentrate, he got quickly to what was essential. It was not that difficult: most of what he read was repetitive and redundant; the slipshod product of lawyers who thought language impressive to the degree to which it was unintelligible. At seven-thirty, exactly one hour after he had begun, Bannister, without looking at the clock, pulled together the various documents and files scattered across his desk, placed them neatly inside his tan leather briefcase and turned out the lamp. With his usual quick, but unhurried step, he walked directly to the front hallway and, as he did every morning, put the briefcase down next to the door. He would not have to think about where he might have left it when he left the house and started for the car.

  Once he had done that, made certain that he would not forget to take back to court the work he had brought home with him, he went to the kitchen, poured himself a second cup of coffee, sliced and then buttered a bagel, grabbed a banana from a large ceramic bowl on the counter and, spreading the newspaper down in front of him, sat at a long wooden table scarred by centuries of use in a farmhouse somewhere in the south of France and ate his brief breakfast. He had finished and was just about to leave when someone buzzed from the gate. He was surprised; it was too early for
anyone he knew. He was even more surprised when he learned that it was the police.

  “Sorry to bother you so early, Judge Bannister,” said the boyish young officer when Bannister opened the front door. After introducing himself, Officer Kilpatrick introduced his partner, a fresh faced young woman who also looked like she was just out of the academy. Kilpatrick flashed an embarrassed grin. “Really, I’m sorry about this, but I understand you often go for a walk late at night.”

  Bannister stood there, holding his briefcase in his hand, a puzzled expression in his eyes.

  “Almost every night; last night included,” he replied in the affable, understated way he often spoke to juries. “Why? Has something happened?”

  “You didn’t see anything last night, did you: anything unusual; anyone who looked suspicious?”

  Bannister stepped aside and was about to invite them in, but the officer apologized again for the intrusion.

  “Your wife – Mrs. Bannister, I mean – she told us, when we came by a few weeks ago, after your cat was killed, that you often went for a walk before you went to bed. We thought at the time that what happened – your cat – was just some random thing, something some screwed up teenager might have done; but it’s happened several times since: cats, and even a couple of dogs. Someone is going around slashing their throats. Never happens during the day; always, so far as we can tell, late at night – after midnight. That’s why we thought we’d ask if you might have seen anything - seen anyone - that seemed odd or out of place; anyone who….”

  With a look of serious concern, Bannister shook his head. “No, nothing at all, I’m afraid. I never see anyone; the streets around here are pretty much deserted that time of night, and except for an occasional car – someone coming home – I don’t see anything.”

  This seemed to confirm the other officer’s suspicions. It was her belief that whoever was doing this was doing it in the hours just before dawn. If anyone heard something, she explained, they would think it was an early morning delivery, one of the different newspapers that circulated in the neighborhood, or someone leaving early for work or to catch a flight. Bannister agreed that might be a possibility, and then, nothing more to be done, walked with the two young officers as far as their patrol car.

  “I hope you catch whoever is doing this,” he said shaking hands with them both. “There’s no excuse for that kind of thing, killing animals like that. I’ve had cases like that in front of me. There seems to be some irresistible impulse at work; and it’s always a man, usually a young man – often a teenager. Once in a while it’s a woman, a young woman; but that’s rare.”

  Knowing his reputation, they listened in an attitude of respectful attention, considering it a privilege that the famous Judge Bannister would spend a few minutes telling them what in his years on the bench he had observed about the kind of crime they were now investigating.

  Bannister watched them drive away, waiting until the police car vanished out of sight before he went to the garage and climbed into his Mercedes. It was rather astonishing, when he thought about it, that the only one known to walk the adjacent streets late at night was the one person no one would ever suspect. He could walk into someone’s bedroom in the middle of the night and insist that he had thought he had seen a prowler, a burglar, and had only come to help. There was at least that advantage in the reputation he enjoyed.

  Starting the engine, he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. He had the look - despite the hard stare now in his eyes - he had the look that people trusted, the look that told them he was serious and important; someone so intelligent that he said more with his silence than others could say with words. That was how others saw him, and all of them were deceived. What would they think if they happened to chance upon the journal he kept hidden and read even a page of what he had written! Even then they would not know the full degree of his deception and the truth of what he really was.

  The freeway traffic moved, when it moved at all, in fits and starts, speeding up, and then inching along, a slow crawl to nowhere in particular. Los Angeles was a place without corners, bent back on itself and all its manufactured dreams; a journey without a destination because, this close to the ocean, there was nowhere left to go. It was one mirror held up to another, a constant, growing repetition, a blank white sky and, lying flat beneath it, a day that never changed. Bannister had taken this same route to the courthouse for so many years that he had forgotten how he got there; it was habit become an instinct, a part of his everyday routine. Unless there was an accident, he did not notice either the traffic or the buildings he passed. The car radio was set to a station that played classical music and, because that had also become part of the background, seldom entering his conscious mind, he never changed it. Walter Bannister stared out the window and all he saw was what his morning was going to be like.

  That is not to say that Walter Bannister did not think about what happened each morning on his way to work. He was actually quite fascinated by what might be called the mechanics of motion: the question why, however bad the traffic, the time it took to get to the courthouse seldom varied by more than a few minutes. He always started early, and was usually one of the first to arrive at the courthouse; he was certain, based on his own experience, that if he were a practicing attorney, instead of a trial court judge, he would have been just as punctual. He tried to explain this to the unfortunate attorney who showed up six minutes late for the first order of business on the morning docket.

  “What time is it, Mr. Wilkins?” he asked in an even tempered voice that, unusual for him, was accompanied by a penetrating stare. A lawyer who had appeared before him more often would have been warned of trouble.

  Gerald Wilkins, a divorce lawyer who represented only wealthy clients, stroked the sleeve of his cashmere jacket, and replied without any obvious regret that he knew he was a few minutes late but that he was ready to proceed.

  “Tell me, Mr. Wilkins; have you been to this courthouse before?”

  “Yes, of course, your Honor,” he replied, glancing down at the notepad he had just placed on the table in front of him.

  “I ask that question just to be certain that you know how to get here and hadn’t got lost, the way a first time visitor might have done. Just what excuse then do you have for being late?”

  Wilkins still did not understand. Turning the page of the notepad, reviewing what he had come there to say, he shook his head with indifference.

  “Traffic.”

  “That is an unusual thing to have happen in Los Angeles, isn’t it?” said Bannister. With an air of expectation, he tilted his head and waited.

  “I’m sorry, your Honor,” said the attorney, finally looking up. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “There’s nothing really to understand, Mr. Wilkins: you’re late; the rest of us are on time. You blame traffic, but traffic is a condition of existence, something that a lawyer of your knowledge and capacity must surely understand. This hearing was scheduled for nine o’clock; it was scheduled, moreover, at your request. You filed a motion for an increase – a substantial increase, I might add – in the amount of support your client is to receive during the period until there is a final settlement. Six minutes late, Mr. Wilkins. The question is why not thirty minutes, or even an hour. Why six minutes only?”

  Wilkins was not sure if the judge was serious, but he knew now that he had to answer, and that the answer had better take the form of a more elaborate apology than the one he had given.

  “I’m sorry, your Honor; as I said, the traffic this morning was unusually bad, and I’m afraid that -”

  “My question was why weren’t you thirty minutes or an hour late, instead of only six minutes.”

  “Because I gave myself enough time to get here, your Honor; and, as I said, if it hadn’t been for the traffic -”

  “That’s my point, Mr. Wilkins. You’re wrong about that. You didn’t give yourself enough time; you tried to cut it too close. You were trying to get
here on time, when you should have tried to get here early, and in that way, Mr. Wilkins, be ready to go in the time you were allotted.”

  Without another word, Bannister glanced at the other attorney, who had through this whole episode stayed quiet, and with a quick, decisive nod let him know that a conclusion had been reached. Reciting by heart the title of the case and the nature of the motion that had been filed by the petitioner, Bannister announced: “The motion has been denied.”

  “But, your Honor!” Wilkins, gone red in the face, howled in protest. “I wasn’t given a chance to make my argument, to -”

  “That is what that six minutes was for, Mr. Wilkins.” Bannister held up his hand to shut off any further complaint, and in that same even tempered voice told the clerk to call the next case. “Time is everything, Mr. Wilkins. I’m sure that next time you won’t forget it.”

  The bailiff, standing next to the empty jury box, tried not to smile. The court reporter, sitting at her place just below the bench, tried not to laugh. It was Walter Bannister’s courtroom and, taught by the friendly discipline he imposed, lawyers seldom made mistakes and almost never made the same one twice. He was the teacher you always wished you had had, the one who knew everything there was to know and did not treat you like an idiot just because your education had only just begun. He was there to help you and the only competition he cared about was the mutual effort to try to get things right. If Irving Leonard was a director’s director, the one to whom all the others looked for guidance, Walter Bannister was a lawyer’s judge, the one to whom every sane practitioner looked for the standard by which to judge the lazy habits, at times bordering on negligence, of so many of his brethren on the bench. For all the blazing anger on display as he left the courtroom, Gerald Wilkins would one day realize that had he not been forced to pay a price he never would have learned a lesson he was now unlikely to forget.