The Last Man: A Novel

by D. W. Buffa

  “He told me what happened…the night you were almost killed.”

  “Almost killed! – What are you talking about?”

  Gloria Baker seemed completely confused, and for an instant Bannister wondered if he had somehow misunderstood what Stanton had told him. But he knew he had not gotten it wrong. Was it possible that she could have forgotten?

  “The night Driscoll Rose almost beat you to death,” he persisted; “the night you called Roger; the night you made him promise never to tell.”

  A flash of anger went off in her eyes. Her mouth began to tremble and then abruptly clamped shut. She leaped off the sofa and vanished into the kitchen. A moment later, Bannister thought he heard her talking to someone and wondered whether she had called Roger to find out exactly what he had said. When she came back a few minutes later, more than her expression, her whole face had seemed to change. She looked older and, in a strange way, more self-sufficient, the soft vulnerability in her eyes replaced by serious calculation, a shrewd sense of her own interest. She held a wine bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other.

  “I’m going to have some,” she announced, lifting her eyebrows as if to say that she needed it. “Why don’t you join me?”

  She poured them each a glass and then threw down a drink.

  “I wasn’t lying,” she insisted. “Driscoll didn’t ‘almost kill’ me.” She held the glass in both hands, just below her chin. With a wounded look in her eyes as if, remembering what had happened, and that, if he had not almost killed her, it had been bad enough, she appealed to Bannister’s sense of decency and honor. “But tell me, what did Roger tell you? Did he say that Driscoll almost beat me to death?”

  Then she had not called Roger. Or perhaps she had, and was trying to see whether he had told Bannister more than he said he had. Bannister turned the question back on her.

  “What did Roger tell you I wanted to see you about?”

  She was staring in her glass, waiting for an answer. She heard the question and looked up.

  “About Driscoll: what he did at Roger’s place in Santa Barbara. He isn’t as bad as you think he is, Judge Bannister, if you -”

  “Walter. I’m not here as a judge; I’m here because I had to stop a fight, stop the same guy who almost killed you from killing someone else. That’s why I asked Roger to call you yesterday and ask if I could see you: so I could find out just how dangerous he really is.”

  “He wouldn’t do that – kill anyone, I mean.”

  It was a tepid protest at best, made without any real emotion. It struck Bannister as a kind of analytical judgment, a balancing of the probabilities: While she would not rule out the most extreme possibility - that he might kill someone - on the whole she thought it unlikely.

  “Probably wouldn’t – isn’t that what you mean? I saw what he did; I saw the anger, the rage. No, if this had happened somewhere else, no one there to stop it, he would have beaten that boy to death; the same way he damn near did you. I believe you when you say you weren’t lying - I can understand why you wouldn’t want to believe it – but the only reason you’re still alive is because he thought he had killed you. He left you for dead.”

  There was a long pause. She leaned the other way and with a sad, wistful expression stared through the windows, watching the moon’s slow dance on the ocean’s mirrored darkness. Suddenly, she tossed her head and laughed.

  “It didn’t happen! What Roger told you – it isn’t true. Driscoll didn’t try to kill me. He didn’t leave me for dead.”

  Bannister did not believe her. There was a shade too much defiance in the way she said it, as if he had no business raising questions about what she had, for reasons of her own, wanted to keep secret.

  “You’re telling me that Roger lied to me? Why would he do that?”

  “No,” she replied, quick to deny it. “He didn’t lie; he just didn’t tell you the truth.”

  It seemed a strange distinction, not because it was illogical, but because it seemed a shade too subtle. Bannister began to wonder if he had underestimated her, had failed to see past the surface of her fame to an intelligence he had not thought she had.

  “And how is not telling the truth different than lying?”

  A smile started, and then vanished, on her lips; and in that moment he knew that she understood precisely what she was doing and that if her words had a double meaning the meaning was intentional.

  “The story he told you was the story he wanted to hear. He makes movies – that isn’t just what he does, that’s what he is! – He sees everything through a lens. I suppose that’s what makes him so good at what he does: the ability to see everything in terms of drama – the dramatic elements in any story he hears. Look,” she went on, throwing up her hands as her blue eyes went wide with wonder, “tell Roger you saw someone step off a curb and he’ll see a car screeching around a corner and a body go flying into the street. Then he’ll start to puzzle out the question why someone committed murder. That’s how Roger thinks.”

  Bannister was not convinced. If anyone was exaggerating, he thought the chances were less that it had been in what Stanton had told him, than in what she was telling him now.

  “You were in love with Rose; maybe you still are. It’s probably natural that would try to protect him, try to minimize what he did, try to -”

  “In love with Driscoll…?” Her eyes flashed with what almost seemed indignation. She shook her head in a tight movement of caustic dissent. “You mean that tabloid marriage that didn’t happen! In love with - ! Is that what Roger told you? Well, he might think so,” she added with some bitterness.

  She lapsed into a long silence, moving in a steady rotation the glass held in her hand. The sound of the ocean rolling endlessly against the shore became constant and hypnotic, adding a rhythm to all the questions clamoring for answers in Walter Bannister’s increasingly disordered mind. He had come there for a reason and had become so distracted had almost forgotten what it was.

  “You weren’t in love with Driscoll Rose? But you were engaged to him – or was that just something the publicists made up?” he asked, matching her apparent cynicism with some of his own.

  She did not hear what he said; not all of it, anyway.

  “I probably thought I was in love with him.” A vague expression in her eyes cast doubt on even that much sincerity of emotion. “Infatuated, I suppose; and I won’t deny there was an attraction.” She reached for the dark green bottle and for a second time filled their glasses. “There still is, if you really want to know; an attraction, I mean.”

  “You’re still seeing each other?” asked Bannister with a kind of polite reluctance that made Gloria Baker smile.

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “There isn’t much that surprises me anymore. So you weren’t – and you aren’t – in love with Driscoll Rose, and he didn’t really try to kill you; and Roger didn’t lie, but did not tell the whole truth; and though you broke off your engagement, and again, were only infatuated and never in love, you’re still seeing the man who sent you to the hospital, because, as you put it, there has always been an attraction?”

  Bannister had swung his right leg over the left, and flung his left arm over the back corner of the chair. With the wine glass in his hand, he laughed at her with his eyes, and then, bending slightly forward, fixed her with a penetrating stare. She was smart, much smarter than he had imagined, and that made it easier: he did not have to bother trying to explain; he could cut with each question.

  “You were taken to the hospital that night weren’t you? – The night Driscoll Rose didn’t try to kill you.”

  “He didn’t leave me here for dead. I was lying on the floor, after he knocked me down. I was looking right at him. He knew I was alive.”

  “And you think that means that when he was hitting you – hitting you so hard he broke your jaw and fractured your ribs – he wasn’t trying to kill you?”

  “He knew I was alive,” she said, insisting that it
had to mean something. “He knew someone would come to help.”

  “Are you serious? ‘Knew someone would - ’! He’d just beaten you up – by your own admission left you lying helpless on the floor – and then run away. And you think he cared - you think the thought even entered his mind – what was going to happen to you? All he was thinking about was how to get away, what he had to do to stay out of jail. He could have killed you each time he hit you, and you’re too intelligent not to know it!”

  Suddenly, he remembered, or rather did not remember at all; the question, the thing that had obsessed him for days, came rushing out of its own accord.

  “What was it like – what went through your mind – when he started hitting you and you knew he might not stop until he killed you? What did it feel like knowing you were about to die?”

  The change in his expression, the strange eagerness of it, the nervous tension in his voice, made her uncomfortable. Bannister apologized.

  “I’m sorry; it’s just that – you’ll have to forgive me – I spend every day listening to cases; murder cases, a lot of them, but it’s always from the outside. All the evidence, all the testimony, it never gets to what it was like for the victim, the murder victim, the one who gets killed. No one can know what that feels like, except someone like you, someone who almost died. Sometimes at a trial, a prosecutor will talk about the awful thing that happened to the victim, what she must have gone through, but it’s like playing a part you can only imagine; nothing that you have experienced yourself.”

  The mention of playing a part caught Gloria Baker’s attention and made her ask a question of her own.

  “Do you do that: try to imagine – put yourself in the place of the killer – when you sentence someone like that Daniel Lee Atkinson for murder?”

  Bannister got up and walked to the open glass door and stood there a moment, watching the long thin line of white surf break gently on the sand. He had already said too much. He should not have told her anything about his desire to know what it felt like to die. Roger had been right about her, and it did not matter if she was on the screen: she drew you toward her and made you think you knew her and, more inexplicably still, made you think she knew you. That was the secret, the great unknowable but obvious fact, that made one woman a movie star and another one, who might be even more attractive, a woman you would not look at twice: this instinctive belief that everything she did, no matter who she was doing it with, was really all done for you. She was the invention of your own desperate fantasies, and she did not exist except in the way you saw her. You had never met her, but you did not need to: she belonged to you in a way no one else ever would.

  From the light inside Bannister could see, reflected in the glass, Gloria Baker get up from the sofa and begin to move toward him. The fugitive thought, the dangerous question about his own original sin, flashed through his mind: what would it be like to kill her; what would it feel like to have her life, and her death, in his hands, to stab her to death with a knife, or strangle her until she fell limp and lifeless on the floor? He shut his eyes hard, banishing, if only for the moment, the strange obsession that had for so long held him in its grip and that at times he found almost impossible to resist.

  “You forgot your wine.” She handed him the glass and stood next to him, looking out at the silver thread of beach that stretched out under a star covered sky. “This was Driscoll’s place. I lived here with him for a while…before what happened.”

  She did not need to finish. Bannister understood. It was the beginning of an explanation, or the beginning of an excuse.

  “And because he felt bad about what happened, he gave it to you.”

  The simple statement of what she had done – taken something in exchange for what Rose had done to her – had no discernible effect. He might have been asking her about the price she paid for her car.

  “He thought he owed me something. He knew I liked this place.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Bannister watched a tiny smile of sly conceit edge its way along the curve of her lower lip. She had not known it was there, this tell-all sign of an instinct for her own advantage.

  “He probably thought he had to do something,” she went on, giving her own, different, meaning to the story Roger Stanton had told him first.

  “That doesn’t tell me why you called Roger, why you asked him not to call the police.”

  She turned toward him, a question in her eyes; a question that she then seemed to dismiss as unimportant. She did not say anything, but walked through the open glass door onto the deck and leaned against the railing.

  “What would have been the sense in that?” she asked when Bannister came up next to her. Leaning back against the railing, she looked up at him. “I know you’re a judge, that everyone is supposed to obey the law, but what would have been the good of it – putting Driscoll in jail? He didn’t kill me; he didn’t really hurt me that much. After the first time, after he hit me the way he did – really hard – I sort of went numb. And, yes, okay, I suppose there was a moment when I thought he might not stop, that he might keep hitting me until I was dead – but it happened so fast, it was all so violent, there wasn’t any time to think about that or anything. All you do is react; try to protect yourself…and then everything went black and I didn’t feel anything. I don’t even remember being knocked down. I just remember lying there, on the floor, looking up and seeing Driscoll – how angry he was, how out of his mind angry he was – breathing hard, his eyes all crazy, swearing at me, calling me a heartless bitch, and things worse than that. I must have passed out again. I know I called Roger, but I don’t remember doing it. I just remember that he was there, talking to me, telling me a doctor was on his way.”

  Bannister would remember later how much he liked listening to her talk, the thrilling bare whisper of her voice. It was not as noticeable indoors with all the lights, but out here, in the moonlit shadows, everything she said was like a private confession, each word meant only for him. It stayed with him, later, a voice he never could quite get rid of echoing in his mind.

  “That moment when you thought he might not stop, that he might keep hitting you until you were dead – I know it all happened fast, but what went through your mind, what did you feel?”

  “That it was all so stupid – That’s what I thought, what I remember thinking: that it was crazy to die this way; that it wasn’t supposed to end like this.”

  She stepped back from the railing. In the soft glow of moonlight, her face betrayed an uncertainty, a doubt, whether any of it made sense. A smile, shy and embarrassed, slipped half unknowing across her mouth.

  “No great thoughts, no profound reflection on what it means to die, no long backward look at the life I had led, nothing the least bit dramatic: just how stupid it was; stupid and pointless, and maybe some resentment. That’s the interesting part,” she said, her eyes much brighter. “The feeling – I remember now – that I was being cheated; and it didn’t have anything to do with Driscoll. No, and I know this must sound strange, but the feeling that dying was unfair because I had not been able to do all the things I wanted to. And it was separate and apart from how I was dying, what Driscoll was doing; it was only the fact of death that mattered.”

  She looked at Bannister in a way that seemed to suggest that she was certain he would understand, even though she did not quite understand it herself.

  “I wasn’t lying when I told you at first that I never thought he was going to kill me. That moment – the one I just described – when I thought it might happen: I think that must be different than knowing for sure that you’re about to die. I was afraid, but I’m not sure I really believed it: believed that I wouldn’t wake up later, that I’d be all right. If he had put a gun to my head or held a knife to my throat, and told me what he was going to do, murder me, it might have been completely different. There’s really no way to know, is there? Or there is, but nothing I’d care to experience. What happened that night was close enough.”
<
br />   They talked for a few more minutes, or rather Gloria Baker talked and Bannister listened; but none of it was about Driscoll Rose and what he had done. She talked instead about how much she liked living there, the sound of the ocean at night, the long walks in the early morning when she had the beach all to herself and did not have to worry about running into other people. She had a childlike enthusiasm for being alone.

  It was starting to get cool and she led him back inside. He noticed when she glanced sideways at the clock and guessed she had other, late night, plans. She sat on the edge of the sofa, ready to get up again to say goodbye, but Bannister stood with his hand on top of the easy chair and did not move.

  “Why was he so angry, the night he almost killed you – what set him off?”

  She had been looking straight at him, expecting a few last words before he left. She kept looking at him, but the trusting openness in her face was now hidden behind a wall of caution and reserve.

  “I broke off the engagement. He didn’t like it.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Don’t -?”

  “Lie to me. He didn’t start beating you up because you told him you’d changed your mind and didn’t want to marry him. He knew that already, didn’t he? He didn’t just find out about it that night. No, he found out something else – he found out you were seeing someone else. You went out – you were going out – with another man that night, weren’t you? Isn’t that what put him into that murderous rage? Isn’t that why he almost killed you, why he called you what he did?”

  She looked at him in a way he had not expected and did not quite understand. It was as if she thought there was something else he wanted to say, something he had to say, and when he did not, when he just stood there waiting for her reply, she seemed to have to think about an answer different than the one she had been prepared to give.

  “Yes, I was going out with someone else; and yes, that’s all it took. He came over here – he had moved out a few days before, after I broke the engagement – said he just dropped by to see how I was, saw that I was getting ready to leave and then….That’s all it ever took with him. You saw it yourself. Isn’t that what happened, last week, in Santa Barbara. Someone says something he doesn’t like, does something he doesn’t like, and it’s a world war.” She checked her watch and shook her head at the time. “Look, I have to….”