The Last Man: A Novel

by D. W. Buffa

  Bannister ignored her. “He goes off like that, doesn’t much matter the cause; he almost kills you, puts you in the hospital – but you make Roger promise not to tell anyone because – Why? You were still in love with him and you didn’t want anyone to think of him as someone who tried to murder the woman who rejected him? You kept him out of prison – you and Roger both – and now he’s done it again, beaten up someone else, and you both think that I should join this little conspiracy of silence and do nothing about it! You may have been in love with him – maybe you still are; Roger needs him for what he brings to the box office, what he means in money; but I’m afraid I don’t feel anything like the same restraint.”

  “I told you I wasn’t in love with him! He doesn’t have room for anybody else’s love: he’s too much in love with himself. I might have married him. It’s probably some kind of sickness, but I could never stay away from him. I tried, lots of times; swore I’d never see him again, but a few days later – a few nights later – it would be the same thing all over again. He’s the same way, only worse. He does things, feels bad about it, swears it will never happen again – and you believe him! That’s what so sick about it: You believe him! He looks at you with those big apologetic eyes of his, you listen to that small boy’s begging voice promising he’ll never do anything to hurt you again, and you know he’s telling you the truth – what he believes at that moment, because you know he won’t remember tomorrow what he promised you today – and you shut your mind to everything you’ve learned and tell yourself the worst lie of all: that this time he means it and that things will be different now.”

  There was a nervous excitement in her voice that had not been there before. She was not just talking about the past.

  “He’s coming here tonight, isn’t he?”

  The question, the blunt, frank way it had been stated, stopped her cold. She started to tell him it was none of his business, but his gaze seemed to go right through her and she could not do it.

  “Yes, he’s coming later. There are some things I have to do first,” she added to make sure he understood it was time to go, but once again Bannister ignored the hint.

  He picked up the wine glass from the coffee table and took a drink in the slow, casual way of someone prepared to make himself quite at home. He made a second, closer, inspection of the portrait, the modern, angular shaded likeness of the woman who sat below it. The arms, the legs, the neck, were all longer and more elegant in the picture, with the effect that if you had never seen Gloria Baker in real life you would think her taller than she was; taller and, from the painted expression in her eyes, more seductive and, in a strange way, more alive.

  “It’s a wonderful painting.” He said this more to himself than to her, a way to remember it and to record, as it were, his own feeling at the moment.

  “Thank you,” she said, as she stood up. “But now….”

  He turned away and walked back across the room to the sliding glass door, opened it and listened again to the muffled roar of the ocean. He took a long, deep breath. He would remember for a long time how clean and good the night air felt against his face.

  “You haven’t given me a reason why I should forget what happened, what I saw Driscoll Rose do. You haven’t even given me a reason why you did – let him get away with what he did to you. Or is it just that you get to keep the house, and now, instead of living here, he has to call ahead when he wants to come over and get laid?”

  Her face went ash white. She shot him an angry stare, but he cut her off before she could shout at him to leave.

  “Who you sleep with is your business, even if you’re crazy enough to sleep with someone who might murder you for no reason at all. But all that tells me is that he’s even more dangerous than I thought, and I’m going to make sure he gets what he deserves.”

  “You can’t do that! You’ll ruin everything. He’s coming over here to talk about the next picture, the first one he’s ever done with me. Talk to Roger – ask him. It’ll be the biggest picture either one of us has made. Ask Roger: ask him why it has to be made, ask him why Driscoll has to be in it.”

  Bannister had had enough. First Roger, and now this girl: nothing mattered – murder, rape, none of it – if a picture could be made and they could become even richer and more famous. There were no other rules, only that, money and celebrity and their two-dimensional silver screen dreams.

  “What do I care about any of that?” he shouted. But she did not hear him; she could only hear herself.

  “That was the reason I didn’t call the police, why I didn’t want anyone to know: the picture, the one I knew we could make. Wasn’t that enough? He almost killed me, and I let him do it, kept him out of trouble. He owes me this!”

  She seized Bannister by his wrists, holding him with all the strength she had, doing everything she could to bend him to her will; insisting that he could not do what he said he was going to do, that he could not go to the police, couldn’t destroy what she had worked so hard to have. Bannister did not try to shake free. He let her cling to him, let her bang her head against his chest and cry her foolish, selfish demands. He stood there, waiting while her rage and frustration ran their course, staring across to the kitchen the other side of the living room where, on the countertop, he saw the set of butcher knives, glistening shiny silver in the light. He realized now just how easy it would be, what he had so often thought about in the dark recesses of his mind. He could almost feel the pen scratch across the paper in his private hidden journal when tomorrow or the next day he wrote down each grim detail of what, finally, he had done.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next morning, following his regular routine, Walter Bannister walked down the winding driveway to the bottom. The newspaper, thrown with the usual careless precision, was waiting for him just inside the gate. With a wistful gaze, he looked around at the thick green shrubbery and the bright colored flowers that bordered the high brick wall on the lower end of the property. It had been his idea to build it, years before when they first moved in, and he had insisted on used brick instead of new to add to the sense of age and permanence he had hoped to create. It was the same reason he had asked the gardener to plant English ivy in front of it, this need for things that, if they changed at all, changed so slowly, so gradually over time, as to be all but imperceptible. His house, like the mind he lived in, was a place of order.

  He bent down and picked up the paper, slipped off the blue rubber band and started to open it, to see what the headlines said, but decided that could wait. Tucking it under his arm, he headed back toward the house, cut across the lawn at the top of the drive, passed through the kitchen door, and got himself a first cup of coffee. An hour later, after he was finished with his preparation for the work he had that day in court, after he had remembered to place his briefcase next to the front door where he would not forget it, he poured himself a second cup and sat down at the kitchen table. Biting into a bagel, he opened the paper and quickly scanned the front page. He sometimes wondered why they called it a newspaper: it was almost always the same old litany, the daily chronicle of economic uncertainty and political disarray, distant wars and local scandals. He looked through a few more pages, but nothing caught his eye, nothing of any real interest. He finished eating, gulped down what was left of the coffee in his cup and, with his briefcase in hand, headed out the door and the long journey through snarled traffic he could have driven in his sleep.

  It was now Indian summer, which in Los Angeles meant only a change of name. There were no crisp autumn days in southern California, nothing of what they know in the east of warm, mellow late September days, the memory of summer already a faded dream and the cold breath of winter only waiting for the leaves to fall. It was still hot, hot as hell as one candid weatherman had put it, pushing past eighty in the morning commute, the only question how far past a hundred it would go before the traffic reversed itself and started home in the late afternoon. Hot as hell, and getting hotter by the minute,
the heat rose up from the hard black pavement in glassy, incandescent waves, as if the air itself, already yellow with dust, had caught on fire. Like all the others who drove along in quiet air-conditioned cars, lulled to mild passivity by the music in their ears, Bannister thought nothing of thirst or safety. There were other things he had to think about, or, rather, not think about at all; but it kept coming back, the look on Gloria Baker’s face, flashing in front of him; and even when he made it go away, he could still hear her voice, that strident whispered shout, drowning everything in noise. Tonight, when he got home, he would write it all down. That would stop it; the vision and the voice would disappear. It was the only way to free your mind, to banish thoughts you did not want: turn them into scribbled marks on paper. It was the catharsis of expression, something he had done often enough before, what he called confession for the unbeliever: a way to cleanse the soul even though you were not quite sure what that was or, for that matter, if you had one, something separate from both the body and the mind. He should have done it last night, pulled out that dog-eared journal of his life-long misbehavior, the secret chronicle of what he did not doubt was monstrous immorality, and written it all out, everything that happened. He would not now be going through this, watching powerless the shattered fragments of a story he did not want to see or hear again, a story he could not understand until he had a chance to write it out, to put an order on it that did not yet exist. The only good thing, he told himself as he parked his car at the courthouse, was that no one else would ever know what happened unless he told, and that was the last thing he was going to do. He would make his confession, but that confession would be private, sealed in the journal that before his death he would destroy.

  Bannister went straight to chambers. Desperate to get his mind on other things, he immediately went to work. He pulled out from his brief case the files he had taken home, stacked them on his desk in their scheduled order, and for a second time that morning set about a brief review of each of them. It worked. His mind followed his eyes, the only thoughts he had the words he read; or rather, because he had read them before, words he remembered so well that, despite their undistinguished prose, he was hearing whole sentences before he saw them on the page. It went faster now than it had before, which was the method he had long since taught himself: the work got shorter and easier each time you repeated it. He had learned it first as an undergraduate: take notes on everything – what you heard in class, what you studied in written assignment – and then makes notes on that, until the work of a whole semester was reduced to perhaps ten typewritten pages, a concise statement of the essentials. In law school he had refined the technique to the point where he could state in a short paragraph everything of importance said the day before in class. Some of the other students, watching the way his hand flew back and forth, taking notes in class, christened him ‘the machine’ and were surprised less at the fact that he invariably had the top grade in class than that he had not had a nervous breakdown. No one worked as hard as Walter Bannister, and he was the only one who did not seem to notice. The work was what he lived for; the work was who he was. His idea of hell was a long vacation or, worse yet, a round of golf.

  He did not hear her when his clerk opened the door to tell him there were just a few minutes left before court was to start. Jessica Holmes rolled her eyes, the way she did every morning when she made this same, useless announcement. In her late forties, she had large drooping eyes and a mouth that sagged at the corners. A smile meant only the brief appearance of a straight line across her lips. She had a deep affection for Judge Bannister, but did not pretend to understand how he could lose himself so completely in what, to her and the other courthouse clerks, seemed the boring routine of the daily docket. Proof against experience, she seemed to think, each time she opened the door and saw him hunched over his desk, that the simple sound of her voice would be sufficient to get his attention. Every day she tried it; every day she failed.

  “Judge, it’s time,” she said, patting him gently on the shoulder, the way she did every morning. The response never varied.

  “Yes, I know; thank you,” he said, rising slowly from the chair.

  It was such a conditioned reflex that, once, when she was out sick, and no one came to get him, he had at precisely three minutes before court was to start, made the very same remark to an empty room.

  There was nothing out of the ordinary about the morning docket, the usual assortment of civil complaints and criminal charges, the same endless routine of motions filed and motions heard, cases set for trial and, for various reasons, trial dates changed, motions amended and motions filed again. A court in session was like the river Heraclites described: always the same and always different. The lawyers and their clients came and went as each case was called, the only spectators the lawyers and their clients still waiting their turn. Some of them, the lawyers who had not appeared in front of Bannister before, or had done so only a few times in the past, stayed after their own business was concluded, watching with the interest of those who take their profession seriously the way a courtroom should be run, and left, reluctantly, only because they had other things to do. One case after another and no time wasted; and yet no one with the feeling that they had been hurried along and not given the opportunity to say everything they needed to say. Bannister was in his element, all his attention on the matter he had to hear, the others in the courtroom nothing more than part of the background, the invisible faces of a silent audience. Then, a few minutes past eleven, something began to change.

  Bannister was too engrossed in the case before him, a request for a change of venue in a criminal case set to go to trial in a few weeks, to notice when the first whispered conversations started among a couple of lawyers sitting on the back bench. The door opened and another lawyer entered, shaking her head in the way of someone troubled by something she has just heard, sat down next to someone with whom she was acquainted and whispered what she knew. Her friend shot her an astonished look, wondering whether it could possibly be true. All over the courtroom heads began to shake in surprise and sorrow as the rumor spread. Bannister began to feel it, sense that something had happened, before he looked up and noticed the change. But there were still cases to be heard and he went back to what he was doing.

  By the time of the noon recess the news was all over the courthouse. Television sets were turned on, lunch plans cancelled, as everyone watched the first, sketchy reports about the death of Gloria Baker, found murdered in her beachfront Malibu home. Whatever channel you turned to, that was the story; though beyond the fact of her death no one seemed to know anything. That did not stop the coverage. Reporters with their camera crews scampered all over Los Angeles, wherever they thought they could find someone who had known or worked with her, anyone who could add the insight of an acquaintance or a friend about what she had been like off the screen and how much she would be missed. Clips from her movies were shown and shown again; pictures of her with other famous people charted the rising fortunes of the young woman who had started as a one line actress in a series of minor, forgettable films, to become, in the idiom of Hollywood that had become the language of the land, one of the moviedom’s brightest stars. What started as a breaking news story became an endless biography, and then, playing out in counterpoint, a chronicle of all the glamour and tragedy of Hollywood, told with a serious straight face that seemed to suggest that this was itself a breaking story. Old films, films that had not yet been made, films that would never be made, were mentioned in the growing litany of things Gloria Baker would, or could, have done. The statement issued under the name of Roger Stanton from the studio where she had made her best pictures and had been scheduled to make more was both the first, and in a real sense, the last word on what everyone would say and most would think. “The death of our friend Gloria Baker is a great loss to the industry and to all the people who loved her.”

  By the end of the afternoon, as more details became available, television began to focus
less on her life and career and more on what happened the night she died; by that evening the metamorphous was complete: the movie star Gloria Baker was now a murder victim, the way she died the only story worth telling. That did not mean that anyone knew much about the facts. If the police knew anything, they were keeping it to themselves. Forced to say something, the chief of police appeared in front of the press and tried to make the obvious seem profound. Yes, the actress Gloria Baker had been found dead in her home. Her housekeeper, whose name he would not release, discovered the body a little after eight o’clock, the time she arrived every morning. She immediately called 911. Someone asked if she had called to ask that an ambulance be sent.

  “Was she still alive?”

  The chief, Henry Freeman, his feet planted shoulder width apart, the muscles around his jaw bulging with suppressed tension, stared hard at the reporter.

  “She was dead, then,” said the reporter, certain that the chief’s ominous silence had only one meaning. “How did she die? Is it true, what we’ve heard: that she was stabbed to death with a knife?”

  It would not have made mattered what question he was asked: Freeman had already decided the answer he was going to give.

  “Gloria Baker was the victim of a homicide. The case is now under investigation. We will keep the public informed as the investigation proceeds.”

  Freeman had said next to nothing, but the fact he said anything spoke volumes. There were murders in Los Angeles every week, but it had been a long time, more than a year, since the chief of police held a press conference to announce the beginning of a criminal investigation. Whatever was taught in the schools, whatever was engraved on the marble courthouse walls, no one needed to be told that the claim of equal justice for all meant everyone but celebrities. Gloria Baker was famous, idolized by millions, and whatever that might say about the mentality of the age, no one charged with the responsibility of finding her murderer could afford to treat her murder as no different than any other violent crime. It was a devil’s bargain, the sacrifice of whatever was unique about her, sold in exchange for becoming what an audience wanted her to be; a bargain in which a life lived on a movie screen could be followed by a death, a murder, that an even larger audience would watch on television.