The Last Man: A Novel

by D. W. Buffa

  “Yeah, I found out.”

  “But she did not tell you who it was?”

  “No.”

  “And then later, she still didn’t tell you who it was, only that she had a habit of falling in love with the wrong people?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She didn’t tell you that this person – whoever it was – had hit her?”

  Rose seemed surprised. “No, she didn’t say anything like that.”

  “Or that this person – whoever it was – had threatened her with any harm?”

  “No.”

  “And she didn’t tell you that any of the other people with whom she had fallen in love - all those ‘wrong people’ she mentioned – had ever used violence against her or threatened her in any way, did she?”

  Rose began to understand where this was going. He folded his arms across his chest and sank down in the seat and with a look of incorrigible indifference gazed at his shoes.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “So, while she may have had a habit of falling in love with the wrong people, the only one among them who had ever done her any harm – violent, physical harm – was you. Isn’t that correct, Mr. Rose?”

  “It was the drugs; it wasn’t me,” he insisted, clinging to the belief that he would never otherwise have harmed her.

  With a half-turn toward the jury, Alfonso flashed a glittering smile of unqualified triumph.

  “That’s an interesting excuse. The reason you could not restrain yourself is because you could not restrain yourself: The reason you could not stop yourself from almost killing her is because you could not stop yourself from using narcotics. And you could not stop yourself from doing that because you could not stop feeling sorry for yourself. That’s pretty much how it is with you, isn’t it? – You have fame, money, everything anyone could want; but if someone you want doesn’t want you back you think you’ve suffered more than anyone ever has. Gloria Baker didn’t want you, and you killed her, because if you couldn’t have her you were going to be damn certain no one else ever would!”

  Harlowe was on his feet shouting an objection, but he might as well have been yelling at the sea for all the difference it made. Bannister could sustain the objection with all the stern-eyed vehemence he could summon, but nothing could erase from the jury’s mind what Hector Alfonso had said.

  “You say you found her lying dead on the living room floor; you say there was blood everywhere; you say you were afraid the killer might still be there; you say that’s the reason you ran away, got in your car and drove – Where did you go?” he snapped.

  “Where did I go? I don’t know. I drove all around. I think I must have been in a state of shock. I just drove, that’s all.”

  “Yes, I remember: you said you were ‘out of my mind with grief and fear.’ You got there about what time? – I believe you said around eleven.”

  “Yes, that’s right: around eleven.”

  “Could it have been a little earlier than that, say closer to ten or ten thirty?” Alfonso asked this in an off-hand, almost casual way, as if the question had no particular importance.

  Rose hesitated, turned his head slightly to the side, but kept his eyes focused on the district attorney. “No, I don’t think so. It was around eleven, maybe even a few minutes after.”

  “Really! You left the restaurant where you were having dinner at nine-thirty, correct?”

  “Yes, around then.”

  “From there to Malibu is – what? – thirty, forty, minutes.”

  “I didn’t drive straight out there. I drove around for a while, thinking things through.”

  “Thinking things through! Yes, I see. You seem to spend a lot of time driving around, thinking things through. You spent how many hours in your car that night – after you found the dead body of Gloria Baker?”

  “I don’t know. All night, I guess.”

  “All night, you guess. And you did this because, as you told your attorney, you were out of your mind with grief and fear. How long did the fear last, how long did you have to drive before you decided you were safe, that the killer wasn’t right behind you waiting to kill you, before you called the police?”

  Rose swallowed hard and rubbed his forehead. There was anguish in his eyes.

  “I already said: I didn’t call the police; I didn’t call anyone.”

  “No one? You just drove around all night and didn’t call anyone? You loved Gloria Baker, but you didn’t call the police so they might have at least a chance to catch the killer; didn’t call to police to warn them that, as you told us when your lawyer was asking you questions, the killer might be a homicidal maniac who was going to kill anyone he could find? My, that was brave of you, wasn’t it? Not like all those heroes you play so well on the screen!”

  “Your Honor, I -” Harlowe began to object, but with one last withering glance at the witness, Alfonso suddenly announced he was finished.

  There was one more witness for the defense, a witness that unlike everyone else who had testified, seemed actually to enjoy the experience. William Dunsmore – Billy, as everyone called him – had dropped out of college his sophomore year. The work was too difficult, or rather, because he was not unintelligent, took too much of his time. A child of southern California, he preferred to spend his days on a beach and his nights at a party. As he had not yet turned twenty, this was not the unfortunate choice it might otherwise seem; he still had years ahead of him to learn to live according to the world’s expectations. Wearing the only sports jacket he had and a tie borrowed from a friend, he took the oath with a kind of quiet shyness and then, settling himself on the witness stand, looked around the crowded courtroom with bashful but yet confident eyes.

  Michael Harlowe wanted to know only one thing.

  “Did you see someone leave the home of Gloria Baker the night she was murdered?”

  The witness leaned forward, nodding his head emphatically. Harlowe smiled.

  “You have to answer out loud, Mr. Dunsmore.”

  “Oh, yeah; okay.”

  “And?”

  “And?” he asked with a blank look.

  “Did you see someone leave her house?”

  “Oh, yeah, right; I did.”

  “Tell the jury how you happened to be there. What was the reason you were in Malibu, close to Gloria Baker’s home?”

  “Delivery,” he replied with a quick, nervous grin. Too late, he remembered to look at the jury. “I was delivering a pizza to one of the houses near there, maybe half a block away. That’s what I do – deliver pizzas, I mean. It’s not a regular job; just something I do part time.”

  He grinned for no apparent reason and waited for some sign that the jury understood. Such was his guileless enthusiasm that several of the jurors smiled back. Harlowe tried to keep him on point.

  “You were delivering a pizza to one of Gloria Baker’s neighbors. What time was that?”

  “Time? Oh, I don’t know. Not exactly, I mean. A little after ten, maybe a little later than that.”

  “Very good. Ten, or perhaps a little after that. Tell the jury exactly what you saw.”

  They had been through this in private three different times, reviewing the questions Harlowe would ask and the answers, the truthful answers, Billy Dunsmore would give. But now, in the strange formality of the courtroom, watched by a somber faced crowd that numbered in the hundreds, Billy Dunsmore would have been hard pressed to remember his own name.

  “What I saw?” he asked with a gulp.

  “Yes, what you saw. Take your time,” said Harlowe in a calm, soothing voice. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Just take your time and in your own words describe what you saw that night. Someone was leaving Gloria Baker’s house.”

  Billy Dunsmore nodded with even more energy than before, and this time he remembered to speak.

  “Yes, someone was leaving, leaving in a hurry, almost running – that’s what caught my eye.” He said this as if he were surprised, not at what he had seen, but that i
t had somehow suddenly come back to him again. This had the effect of making him speak more rapidly than normal, eager to get it all out while he still could. “He was almost running – like someone scared. Yes, that’s it! – In a hurry to get away. He didn’t look around, like he was afraid someone might see him. He just kept moving, until he turned the corner and was out of sight.”

  “Could you tell who it was? Did you get a look at him at all?”

  “No, it was dark, he was too far away, and he was going in the other direction.” Billy Dunsmore paused, looked at Harlowe for a moment and then looked past him to the counsel table where the defendant sat alone. “But it wasn’t him; it wasn’t Driscoll Rose.”

  Harlowe had waited for this moment, had rehearsed in his mind the slow turn he now made and the long, thoughtful look with which he stared at the defendant.

  “It wasn’t the defendant. You’re sure of it?” he asked, glancing back over his shoulder. “You’re sure that the man you saw leaving the home of the victim, Gloria Baker, the night of her murder was not Driscoll Rose?”

  “I’m sure. I couldn’t see his face, but it wasn’t Driscoll Rose. He’s famous; everyone knows who he is. I would have recognized him anywhere.”

  A smile danced on the mouth of Hector Alfonso as he rose from his chair to begin his cross-examination.

  “You would recognize Driscoll Rose anywhere, even in the dark, more than half a block away, when he was running – or almost running; I don’t want to put words in your mouth – in the opposite direction; even when, as I believe you put it, he didn’t look around and you never saw his face?”

  “It wasn’t him,” insisted Billy Dunsmore with an eager, lop eared grin.

  “It wasn’t him. I see.” Alfonso crossed his arms and began to pace. “Had you ever seen the defendant in person before today? I mean, other than that night.”

  “No, but I -”

  “But you have seen him in the movies. Have you seen a lot of his movies?”

  “Almost all of them, I think.”

  “Does he always play the same role?”

  “No, of course not; that’s why he’s so good: he can play all sorts of different people.”

  “Hard to know - isn’t it? - what he’s really like, he’s so good at being other people,” asked Alfonso as if he were sharing a confidence.

  “Yeah, I imagine. I mean, anyone who could be so many different….”

  “Yes, you were going to say?”

  Billy Dunsmore had realized that there was now nothing he could say, that he had been tricked into making something of a fool of himself. He thought hard for a moment, trying to remember just why he was so sure that, whomever he had seen that night, it was not Driscoll Rose. Then it hit him.

  “He was older, a lot older – the man I saw. It wasn’t Driscoll Rose.”

  “Older. I see. A lot older, you say. Can you tell us anything more about what this older man, this man a lot older than the defendant, looked like? Did he have gray hair, white hair – was he as old as that?” asked Alfonso, smiling broadly.

  “Well, I don’t know,” replied Billy Dunsmore. He began to look around, not at the spectators lined up on the benches the other side of the bar, but at the people closer to hand, first at the jury box and then back the other way. “He looked a little like – I don’t know – he looked a little like you, judge!”

  “I see!” laughed Alfonso. “You think the judge might be the killer! I admit that for some reason the police never included him in their investigation, but -”

  “I didn’t say I saw the judge; I said I saw someone who looked a little like him from a distance. He was older, he was -” But before he could finish, Walter Bannister interrupted.

  “Perhaps I can help clear this up. When you say you saw someone who looked like me, do you mean by that someone who looked older than the defendant?”

  Billy Dunsmore cheek was crimson. He wanted the judge to understand that he had meant no disrespect, that it was just an example. “I didn’t say I saw you, your Honor; all I said was -”

  “Yes, I know; it’s all right,” said Bannister with an understanding smile that restored Billy Dunsmore’s lost confidence. “When you say older, just how old do you mean?”

  Billy Dunsmore thought about it. He liked the judge. He wanted to be precise.

  “At least forty, your Honor.”

  The laughter that echoed through the courtroom was friendly and sympathetic and from the baffled expression on his young face it was apparent that Billy Dunsmore had no idea the cause. Bannister bent toward him.

  “That may be the nicest thing anyone has said about me in years.”

  And still Billy Dunsmore did not understand.

  Chapter Twenty

  Like most of us, Driscoll Rose saw himself in the mirror of other people’s eyes, and, like most of us, he took his bearings by what he thought other people believed. As he listened to what the district attorney said about him during his summation, as he watched the faces of a jury entranced by what they heard, he began to wonder whether he might actually have done what they said he had, murdered Gloria Baker, and then somehow blocked it out of his mind. He had heard of people doing things they later had no conscious recollection of having done; he had heard of men, and women, too, who had done something terrible in a violent, and temporary, fit of insanity. Perhaps he had gone crazy and could not remember it. Maybe it was the reason that to this day he did not know where he had gone after he left the house in Malibu and started on that long pilgrimage to nowhere. He had been out of his mind, and no memory of what he had done, except that he remembered clear enough what he had seen when he walked in and found her lying on the floor. Or was that just an illusion invented by his unconscious mind to conceal from himself what he had really done? Was it what he saw, not when he first arrived, but when he turned back for one last look before he ran away from the murder he had just committed?

  No, it was impossible. He would not have murdered Gloria; he could not have killed anyone. But then why did everyone look so certain that he could, and that he had? He could see it in their eyes, those twelve anonymous men and women who held his fate in their hands, the way some of them looked at him with such deep suspicion and almost open hostility as Hector Alfonso postured in front of them, calling him a killer and a coward and someone who by his own admission had more than once almost beaten someone to death. They hated him. He was sure of it, and he did not blame them, given what they had been told. The things he had done, the few times he had lost control of himself and done something he later regretted, were magnified out of all proportion, made to seem the constant, chronic condition of his life, as if he had never done anything except look for someone to beat with his fists. His engagement, the way he had literally got down on his knees to ask Gloria to marry him, all the traditional old-fashioned laughing excitement of it, all the aching loneliness of the days and night he could not be with her, all that was forgotten, never mentioned, when the only thing that seemed to matter, the only thing that had relevance, was the fact, which he had admitted and tried to explain, that the engagement had been ended and that he had done what he should never have done as a result.

  He noticed with an actor’s sensitivity that his lawyer, sitting next to him, was becoming more and more tense. Harlowe’s eyes stayed on the district attorney, but he was thinking about something else, probably what he was going to say when it was finally his turn to speak. Alfonso had gone on for nearly an hour; Harlowe, with his competitive nature, would go that long and a little more besides. He had learned certain things about Harlowe during the course of the trial, none of them quite as shocking as the fact, which was indisputable, that his lawyer did not care at all whether he was innocent or guilty. It simply did not matter. Harlowe, it is true, might feel worse if someone were found guilty of something he had not done, but not that much worse. His main concern would be that he had lost a case he had had a chance to win. That was what they were all concerned about, everyone involv
ed in the trial, the effect it would have on them after it was over. He could see it on the face of Hector Alfonso, finishing his closing argument, the smug certainty of a man convinced he was going to win. He could see it on the face of Michael Harlowe, walking toward the jury box ready to begin his own summation, the determination that, despite the odds, he was not going to lose.

  Hector Alfonso had been passionate and strenuous, sweat dripping from his smooth, shiny face before he was halfway through his summation. He described in grim, nerve-shattering detail the way Gloria Baker had been murdered, dwelling in particular on how she had been made to watch while the killer – ‘the defendant, Driscoll Rose’ – had slashed her portrait, a preview of what he was going to do to her next. Over and over again, he accused Rose of violent, aberrant behavior, a pattern of misconduct that had inevitably ended in homicide. When he was finally finished it would have been hard to find anyone in that courtroom, or anyone on that jury, who did not believe that Driscoll Rose had been born with the mark of Cain, destined to murder someone, and that if it had not been Gloria Baker it would, sooner or later, have been someone else.

  Harlowe had seen the same thing Driscoll Rose had seen. That became obvious the moment the defense attorney began to speak to the jury, or rather, with his hand resting on the jury box railing, did not speak at all. He started to say something; he opened his mouth, but then changed his mind. He smiled to himself and, shaking his head, stared down at the floor. Then, quite unexpectedly, he walked away, not far, just a few steps, but far enough to make the jury wonder what the lawyer for the defense might be thinking. It was a tactic, a gesture, that Rose himself immediately understood, a way to draw the eyes of an audience, and with their eyes their thoughts, to you. He liked especially what Harlowe did next, the question that brought the jury up short.

  “Do you really want to convict someone of murder because the district attorney tells you he did it, or would you rather consider the evidence and decide for yourselves whether the prosecution has proven its case?”