The Last Man: A Novel

by D. W. Buffa

  With the sunlight behind him, the features of Stanton’s face became vague and indistinct, his expression impossible to see. He stood there, his arms folded across his thin chest, his mood suddenly solemn and profound.

  “But she wasn’t dead when you got there?” he asked with a kind of whispered urgency.

  “No, she wasn’t dead when I got there,” admitted Bannister. “I went there to talk to her about Rose. You remember I was going to do that. I had promised I wouldn’t do anything about him – what he had done that day, here, when he attacked that young Hispanic kid. I had to see her; I had to make sure she understood how dangerous, how violent, he could be. But she didn’t want to hear about any of that. I told her I didn’t have any choice: that I was going to do whatever I had to do to make sure he got sent away for what he had done. She begged me not to, and then she started screaming at me, telling me I didn’t have the right, telling me that she could take care of herself, that she could handle Driscoll, that they were getting back together. She just kept screaming, telling me it was none of my business, beating her fists against my chest, in a rage; and then I saw it, the knife in the kitchen, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. With all the strength I had, I shoved her away from me and….”

  Stanton turned away, as if to avoid hearing any more, and for a long time stared out at the distant sea, shining silver blue under the high arching sky. Around the corner of the great house, down along the descending, step-like lawns, the murmured noise of a hundred different conversations rose up in a single playful chorus.

  “I think she did that to everyone,” he said finally; “drive them all, one time or another, a little crazy.”

  “I saw that knife; I felt that sudden urge to strike out, to kill.” Bannister got to his feet and stood there, waiting until Stanton turned around and they could see each other clearly. “If I had done what I should have done – called the police; if you had done what you should have done – called the police the night he beat her up and left her for dead – none of this might have happened. She might still be alive and we would be talking about her next picture instead of her murder.”

  It seemed to strike Roger Stanton as odd. A strange, enigmatic smile cheated its way past his conscious reserve.

  “Her ‘next picture’. That was it, wasn’t it? – the picture, the portrait I had done of her. That’s when you knew.”

  Bannister watched intently, listening with a heightened awareness to every word. He did not say anything. He wanted Stanton to say it first, what they both knew, what they both understood.

  “You’re right, of course. The portrait – that picture of what she was; what she could have been. Do you know what she -! No, of course you don’t. But tell me first – you saw the knife, you knew what in that moment you wanted to do, and then you shoved her away from you. And then, angrier with yourself than you ever could have been with her, you left. Isn’t that what happened, Walter? – You left, you just walked out. And then you find out the next morning she’s been murdered and you blame yourself. You think that if you had only done something, made her agree to stop seeing him – Driscoll Rose – she’d still be alive. And then something happens, during the trial, and you realize that Rose didn’t kill her after all. And then I said something about the portrait – the way it had been slashed to pieces, and you knew.”

  “Yes, I knew.”

  Stanton walked past him, out to the private garden at the side. With his hands on the small of his back, he took a long, deep breath. The scent of bougainvillea floated in the warm, California air. Bannister stood in the open doorway, watching.

  “I knew it had to be you, Roger. No one else knew anything about what had happened to the portrait. Nothing had been said about it at trial; nothing had been written in the papers. I knew it was you, but I still could not believe it.”

  “Couldn’t believe it? Why not? You were just telling me how close you were to doing the same thing! She’s beating her fists on your chest, screaming at you. You see the knife. You know exactly what you want to do. You feel the urge, insistent, overpowering -”

  “But I didn’t! And even the thought of it – the idea of killing someone – might never have entered my head if I didn’t have to listen, day after day, year after year, to all these stories of senseless, wanton violence! You begin to wonder what it must be like; you try to put yourself in the mind of the murderer; you want to know what it must feel like, what the killer must experience. I sometimes even write it down. But that doesn’t mean I could actually -”

  “Doesn’t it? Why, because you think it out of character? What do you or I know about character? Who do you know who really has one - something permanent, unchanging? That’s what that damn picture was about, what it was meant to say: that this is who you really are: better, more interesting, than the way you too often behave. So look at it, my dear Gloria, and every time you do remember that this is what you really are and that I’m the one person who knows it, the only one who really understands you and what you can become, not Driscoll Rose, me, Roger Stanton!”

  “You were that much in love with her?”

  “More than that – or maybe not at all, because the woman I was in love with always wanted to be someone else.”

  “You were the one she was seeing; you were the reason she broke off her engagement. What were you going to do – get a divorce and marry her?”

  “I never thought that far ahead. When I was with her, I never thought at all.”

  “What happened? She breaks off her engagement with Rose, but then she breaks it off with you -?”

  “That’s why I went there, that night. She called me, told me you were there, that you knew all about what happened the night Driscoll beat her up. She wanted to know how much I had told you, how much I had said. She was in love with him; she was always in love with him, and I was a fool not to know it. She didn’t care about anything except the effect it would have on him. When she was a little sane, she knew what might happen, what he might do. That was the reason – the only reason, I think – she convinced herself for a while that she was in love with me. She knew she could trust me, that I’d take care of things. She was in love with me, but only when she was the woman in the picture.” A look of disgust flashed through Stanton’s eyes. “That’s why she did it, why she slashed the damn thing to ribbons.”

  “She slashed -!”

  “It didn’t happen the way you think it did. I got there – just in time to see you leave; I waited in the car until you were gone. She was furious, furious that I was there, furious that I’d ever said anything about Driscoll, furious with herself for ‘betraying Driscoll’ with me. Can you imagine! But I was worse, a schoolboy fool trying to get her to see her mistake, telling her that Driscoll was no better than some spoiled adolescent, that she was better than that, better than….And suddenly she was laughing at me, a mean, bitter, derisive laugh, pointing to that portrait of her over the sofa. ‘Better? – You mean, like that!’ And then, before I knew it, she had that knife in her hand and she was standing on the sofa, ripping into it. I grabbed her, pulled her away, down onto the floor.”

  Stanton’s eyes narrowed into a somber, reflective stare as he turned over in his mind, more than what happened, the meaning of it; what, the more he thought about it, the longer the time that passed, seemed to become only more elusive, more incapable of any kind of definition.

  “I didn’t go there to hurt her. I went there to plead with her to change her mind – I would have married her; divorced Helen and married her - but she was going to marry him, that phony coward. Can you imagine!- after he damn near killed her, after she called me to save her life, after she had told me when she was lying in the hospital, her face all but shattered, that she had never loved him, that she had always loved me. And now she’s telling me that she never loved me, that she only ever loved him; and she’s taunting me with that caustic smile of hers, laughing at me, while she starts tearing that portrait – the thing she always said she priz
ed more than anything she owned – and I couldn’t let her do it and I took the knife away – tore it out of her hand – and then there was blood all over and she was lying on the floor looking up at me, a question in her eyes, like she was not sure it wasn’t all pretend, that I would tell her it was all over and she could get up. And then she wasn’t looking at me anymore; she wasn’t looking at anything.”

  He walked a few steps, slowly, his lips moving in the silent way of someone listening to the echo in his mind, trying to be sure they have not left anything out, that they have it right.

  “I killed her. I could tell you that I didn’t mean to, that I didn’t go there with that intention, that I’d never thought of doing such thing; I could tell you that I was out of my head – temporary insanity, isn’t that what the lawyers call it? – that I didn’t know what I was doing. And I’d be telling the truth. It happened. I didn’t want it to happen, but it did. There’s more to it than that. I knew what I was doing when I did it. It was like sex. Does that sound obscene, talking about sex and murder as if they were the same? Maybe they are. When it happened, when it started….There’s a point when you begin to have sex with a woman, it blacks out everything. You know what you’re doing – it isn’t that. But there isn’t anything that can stop it, nothing. You’re in a blind trance, driven by something you can’t stop, that you don’t want to stop. That’s what it was like, those few short seconds, when I was stabbing at her with that knife. Once it started – once I started – it was too late. I couldn’t stop.”

  He sank down on a stone bench a few feet from the open French doors and covered his face in his hands. After a while, he straightened up and forced a grim smile.

  “What are you going to do? Have me arrested?”

  “The only evidence anyone would have would be your own confession, and if you had wanted to do that, you would have done it already.”

  “Confess – to save Driscoll Rose? Let him rot in hell. It’s all his fault anyway. If it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t been so selfish, so self-absorbed….I would have confessed if they had arrested you; if someone else had seen you leaving; if you had gone to trial and been convicted. But Driscoll Rose? Exchange my life for his? He destroyed everything he touched, everyone he got near. Besides, after what you did for him he’ll be out soon enough. You’re the only person who is ever going to know the truth of this, which means that you’ll be the only one to understand it. I don’t understand it at all, none of it, not one damn thing. To tell you the truth, I don’t even feel guilty.”

  Bannister left Roger Stanton sitting alone in the private garden and made his way through the winding corridors outside to the terrace and down the steps into the crowd of shining, eager faces. He watched for a while, marveling at the glittering vanity of things, the way that so much of what seemed important at any given moment of our lives had no real importance at all. He remembered a line, though he could not remember the source, that what happened to us in this lifetime did not matter, that what mattered was how we dealt with it. It seemed to him the sum of all wisdom and he wished more than anything that he had remembered it the last time he had been her, when he might have changed everything and saved not just Gloria Baker but his brother-in-law as well.

  He was suddenly aware that his wife, Meredith, was standing next to him, pressing his hand, telling him that if he was ready, she thought it might be a good time to go.

  “I thought you’d like to spend more time with your friend, the producer – what’s his name? I saw you with him when we first arrived.”

  “Stephan? He’s always fun. And they asked me – Stephan and David – that’s Stephan’s partner. You’ve met him: a young musician, early twenties, curly hair, blue eyes. They asked me to come along to dinner back in L.A. but I’m just not in the mood, I’m -”

  “Stephan and David. They’re partners ...you mean…?”

  “Yes, of course; it’s scarcely a secret. Everyone knows.”

  “I didn’t. I thought that….Never mind.”

  On the drive home, Meredith wanted to know what he and Roger had been talking about.

  “The two of you disappeared. You were gone more than an hour. Is something going on? Is Roger - is the studio - in some kind of trouble?”

  “No; nothing like that. There were some things about the trial, things about Driscoll Rose and Gloria Baker, he wanted to talk about.”

  “It’s what I was trying to tell you. It’s been hard on him. He cared about them both. That’s always been Roger’s problem. He cares too much for people, does too much for them. He tends to think people are better than they really are.”

  “I suppose that has something to do with it,” agreed Bannister.

  They were almost home, the gate at the foot of the drive in the headlights, when she remembered.

  “If you’re going for one of your late night walks, you don’t have to worry anymore.”

  “I don’t have to…?”

  “I forgot to tell you. The police came by this morning. They caught the man who was killing all the cats and dogs.”

  “The man? - It wasn’t some teenager, like they thought?”

  “You won’t believe this: a doctor – a psychiatrist – the one who lives just down the street! That’s the problem with psychiatrists, isn’t it? They spend so much time trying to figure out what makes people do crazy things, they must start to wonder what it feels like to do something like it themselves. I’ve never met one yet I didn’t think a little twisted.”

  The gate opened and they headed up the long, winding drive.

  “I don’t think I’ll have time for a walk tonight,” said Bannister as he parked the car. “I have another murder trial starting in the morning and I have a lot to do to get ready. This one should be interesting. Nothing about it seems to make sense.”

  A Note from the Author:

  Thank you for reading The Last Man: A Novel. Please let me know your thoughts about the book. You can send me email, sign up for my newsletter and get updates about new releases by visiting my web site at www.dwbuffa.net.

  - D.W. Buffa

  OTHER BOOKS BY D.W. BUFFA

  The Defense

  The Prosecution

  The Judgment

  The Legacy

  Star Witness

  Breach of Trust

  Trial by Fire

  The Grand Master

  Evangeline

  Rubicon

  (Released under pen name

  “Lawrence Alexander”)

  The Swindlers

  The Dark Backward