Death Bed

by Stephen Greenleaf

  This time it was Hedgestone, Max Kottle’s executive assistant. He asked if I was free to see him that evening. I said I wasn’t. He asked if he could come by in the morning. I told him not before ten. He said he’d look forward to seeing me then. When Mrs. Kottle asked me who it was I lied.

  I’m a believer in a zero sum world. When the status quo changes then someone gets more and someone else gets less. It’s true for nations and it’s true for families. All of a sudden lots of people in Max Kottle’s entourage were interested in knowing whether the status of Max’s long-lost son was about to change. I thought I knew why.

  “Talk to me, Mrs. Kottle,” I said brusquely.

  “I think maybe I should talk about money,” she said slowly.

  “So do I.”

  “Max is a rich man, Mr. Tanner.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t. Not precisely. I don’t even think Max knows how rich he is.”

  “I’ve seen the annual report for Collected Industries. I know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Kottle.”

  “But that’s not the half of it. That’s just his public money. In private he has much more. Today he spent the morning talking with some Arab. Yesterday it was the Chinese. Last night a Greek wanted to fly over and have breakfast with him. For Max the world is no larger than Union Square.”

  “So Max is up there with the Sheik and the Shah and the Pope. So what?”

  “So I want to make sure you realize that if you find someone who calls himself Karl Kottle, and if you introduce that someone to Max, that someone may soon end up with a great deal of money and all that goes with it. I’ve never met Karl but I’m not entirely ignorant about him. Just after Max and I married, the first Mrs. Kottle dropped in on me one day. We talked about a lot of things; she was very nice, actually, in a sarcastic sort of way. She told me a lot about Max and a lot about Karl. A lot about herself, too, by accident. Someone like Karl could do a lot of damage with several million dollars to play with, Mr. Tanner. I don’t think that ought to happen if it can be avoided. I want my husband remembered as the great man he is, not as a sentimental fool.”

  No one could accuse Belinda Kottle of that trait, but I didn’t point it out. “Are you suggesting it might be better if I didn’t find Karl?”

  “Not at all. I’m only asking you to consult me after you do find him, so that we can be sure we know who and what he is before we unite him with his father. Until all the facts are known, Mr. Tanner, it would be well for Max and Karl to remain as they are.”

  “Strangers.”

  “Exactly.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll keep the thought in mind. I’ll also keep in mind that if Karl doesn’t show up at all, then you may end up with millions to play with.”

  I’d insulted her and she knew it. She stood up, angry, then hurt, then confused. “The agreement, Mr. Tanner. I wasn’t lying. I did sign that agreement.”

  “Read the sports page, Mrs. Kottle. Contracts aren’t worth the price of the staples these days. There are a hundred lawyers in this town alone who would contest Max Kottle’s will for a twenty-percent contingency without even reading it first. Hell, I’d do it myself if I was still practicing law.”

  “Are you a lawyer?”

  “I’m a member of the bar, but I don’t work at it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I forget. Something about hypocrisy, I think, but I’m not sure whether it was mine or theirs. It’s not important. I just can’t see that your husband needs all the help you’re trying to give him, Mrs. Kottle. The man’s built an empire. Now you say he can’t be trusted to decide how to treat his son.”

  “But things have changed. He’s dying.”

  “Maybe his perspective is better for it, has that ever occurred to you?”

  She stood up. “We’re getting nowhere.” She walked to the door and stopped and looked back. “I don’t think I like you very much, Mr. Tanner.”

  “I don’t earn my living being liked, Mrs. Kottle.”

  She flipped her wrist to show me what she thought of that statement. “I haven’t mentioned the fee I’m prepared to pay for the consultation I suggested. Should I go into it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She nodded briskly. “I’ll wait to hear from you.”

  I could still hear her footsteps when I called my dentist and told his answering machine to cancel my appointment. The machine seemed to be expecting my call.

  When I dialed the number Amber had left me, the voice that answered wasn’t Amber’s. Rightfully or not I matched it with Lila, the frizzy-haired girl who had been sitting at the front desk when I first encountered the Encounter with Magic. The voice was flat and nasal, a bleat of boredom. I asked if I could speak with Amber.

  “She’s busy.”

  “It’s most important that I speak with her,” I said unctuously.

  “It may be important to you, Jack. To me it’s important that Amber give her john all the jollies he paid for.”

  I sighed. “When will she be finished?”

  “Who knows? He brought a movie camera and some Girl Scout uniforms. He could be in there for hours. Hey. Your name Tanner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Amber gave me a message. She says the guy you want used to hang around some joint called Cicero’s down by the Embarcadero.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s it. You’re pretty hot for Amber, huh?”

  “Sizzling.”

  “Well, Amber’s all right, if all you want to do is leer, but she’s a vegetarian, Jack. I got other girls who’ll do anything your heart desires. Tea Party. Circus. You name it.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Do. I guarantee, after an hour with Laurel your mind won’t be the same. Gives you a whole new perspective, you know, when a chick sticks her tongue up your ass. Think about it, Hot Rocks, and come see me.”

  The phone clicked. Miss Frizzy was right about the new perspective, but I already had mine. I got it several years ago when I was helping a man from Seattle locate the twin daughters his wife had skipped town with. It took a lot of time and a lot of money but I finally got a lead. LaVerne Blanc suggested I check out a magazine called Kiddie Kapers. I found it in a Tenderloin smut shop. Beginning on page sixteen was a three-page spread featuring a pair of girls, identical and naked and puzzled, and an equally puzzled and naked boy, doing what you’d expect to find them doing in a magazine like that. The twins were eight years old at the time. It cost the guy from Seattle two years and twenty thousand bucks to convince a judge to take custody away from the mother. The mother published the magazine.

  Perspective. There’s a lot of it out there. Once you get it, it stays with you forever, like malaria.

  The last call I made was to my date. I told her I was too tired.

  TEN

  On the way to the office the next morning I stopped at a camera shop on Columbus and dropped off the film I had taken from the Encounter with Magic. The owner of the shop was a kid named Jerry who did nice work at reasonable prices and would do it in a hurry if you were willing to pay extra. I tossed Jerry the cartridge and he laughed. “You hock the Nikon, Marsh? Business must be pretty bad. I got a Yashica I’ll loan you next time you go out.”

  I explained enough of the situation so Jerry wouldn’t worry about getting paid and told him to get the prints back as soon as he could. He told me to check with him the next afternoon.

  As I was about to leave, Jerry asked me to wait. “Check this out,” he said, and handed me a print enlarged to eight by ten.

  It was a portrait, face only, black and white, high-contrast glossy, shot through a long lens of at least two hundred millimeters. The subject was a girl, with one of those faces that gets pasted onto billboards and stapled into magazines and tacked onto closet walls by kids who have reached puberty a year before their parents suspect it. I whistled. “Who is she?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know.”

  “W
ho dropped off the film?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Some guy. Carrie waited on him, but she doesn’t remember much. I tried to run him down, but the address and phone number he left don’t exist. And his name’s not in the book.”

  “You want me to find her, is that it?”

  “Hell no, Marsh. I’m going to find her myself.”

  I chuckled. “Let me know if you need any tips out of the John Marshall Tanner Crimebusters Manual. For you they come free of charge.”

  “No tips. The fun’s all in the search. Hell, when I find her it’ll turn out she’s married to some Standard Oil Vice President. You know how it goes. You’re okay as long as you’re still looking; it’s when you find it that the trouble starts.”

  I knew. I told him so. I went out the door and took Jackson Street to my office.

  I had an hour to kill before Hedgestone was due so I squandered it the best way there is next to watching the tube: I talked on the phone.

  First, I called a woman I knew at PG&E and had her run Karl Kottle and Howard Renn through the billing tapes. The computer didn’t kick out anything on Karl, but there were two Howard Renns and I wrote down the addresses of both and promised the woman her usual fee—a stinger at Perry’s and an ounce of Bellodgia.

  Then I called the Alumni Affairs Office at the university in Berkeley and put on my important executive voice and spewed out some jargon about a major new fund-raising effort that focused on the graduates of the sixties and the concerns that were so dramatically expressed in those difficult years, and so on and so on. Then I asked for the last known address they had for Karl Kottle, who was an heir to an important fortune, as we all knew, and a potentially key contributor to the drive, as I’m sure she could understand.

  The girl on the other end of the line made a pro forma defense of the confidentiality of the alumni records but she wasn’t being paid enough to risk her job in defense of an abstraction and she wilted when I cast her as the only obstacle between the university that employed her and a million-dollar gift. But the address she gave me was a decade old. I thanked her anyway and told her I’d tell her boss how helpful she’d been. That didn’t mean anything to her, either. First to last, her voice was as flat as Kansas.

  One of the Howard Renns was in the phone book, at an address up on Edgewood Avenue. It smelled right. The poetry business must have been picking up—it was one of the nicest nooks in the city, a bit of Berkeley and a dash of New England thrown together in a blender and airlifted to the side of Mt. Sutro, discoverable by invitation only. I added Renn to my list. Since I couldn’t get a lead on Karl, I was going to have to start picking on his friends.

  I grabbed the telephone again and called the only cop in the city I was sure I could trust. His name was Charley Sleet. He was a good cop and we both knew it. Charley was a witness for the prosecution in one of the first criminal cases I ever defended. The charge was armed robbery—a liquor store in the Tenderloin. My client was young and black and as tough as teeth. He told me he was minding his own business, strolling along Mason, when the cops swooped down and tossed him into a patrol car and hauled him to the precinct house and kept him awake for the next forty-eight hours with questions and more physical forms of inquiry involving their toothpicks and his nostrils.

  This was before the days of Miranda and Escobedo; police methods had to shock the conscience of the judge in order to void a confession. Most judges were pretty unshockable by the time they’d been on the bench a few years and I didn’t think we had a prayer, mainly because in those days the story the cops told on the stand had about the same relation to truth as Star Wars has to Dispatches.

  But Charley Sleet had surprised me. He told it exactly the way it went down, with my client nodding his head beside me all the time, and the confession was tossed out and I’d won my first case. Since then I’d always started with Charley when I needed a favor from the cops. Charley would help me out when my request was legitimate and tell me to fuck myself when it wasn’t, and that’s as good as it gets between private and public police.

  When Charley came on the line I told him I’d buy him lunch anywhere north of Market. He suggested Hoffman’s. I said it didn’t qualify. Charley said I was picking nits just like a lawyer. I said I’d see him there in two hours. When he asked me what I wanted, I told him I wanted to know what the cops had on a guy named Karl Kottle. He said he’d check. I said no one should know he was checking. He swore and said it was my turn to buy.

  By then it was time for Hedgestone to show and, on the dot, he did. When I told him he was punctual, he told me he was proud of it. From the tone of his voice it wasn’t the only thing he was proud of. Then he told me who it was he’d brought with him.

  “This is Professor Monroe Hartwig, Mr. Tanner,” Hedgestone proclaimed. “He holds the William Willis Chair in International Economics at Stanford. I’d like him to speak to you a bit later.”

  “I look forward to it. Have a seat, Professor. Just throw that junk on the floor.”

  The professor’s consultant’s fee overcame his repugnance at the litter on the couch. While he arranged himself I looked Hedgestone over. He was tall, as thin and straight as a chopstick. His suit—gray, herringbone, priceless—fit him as well as disgrace fit Nixon. The only white in his hair lingered over his temples the way smog lingers over L.A. Whenever he wasn’t talking his chin began to levitate. As he eased himself into the client’s chair he wore the expression of a man about to sit on a frog.

  I walked over and closed the door. When I got back behind my desk Hedgestone was looking up at the Klee and deciding not to comment for fear of complimenting its owner. Then he gave me his best smile, his very best. I put it in my hope chest to save till I was in a better mood.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Tanner,” Hedgestone began warmly. “I know someone of your reputation must be very busy.”

  His blue eyes changed shades perpetually, in textured waves, like bird feathers ruffling in the breeze. I guessed he was fifty because he looked ten years younger; a liberal application of money camouflages at least a decade. I asked Hedgestone how I could help him.

  “May I be blunt?”

  “Please do.”

  “As I told you when I arranged for you to see him, I am Mr. Kottle’s Executive Assistant.”

  I did something to show he hadn’t lost me yet.

  “That title, of course, can mean many things. What it means in Mr. Kottle’s case is that he has the world’s foremost authority on the Eurodollar market, and the only economist in the Western Hemisphere who speaks both Arabic and Portuguese, at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Namely, you.”

  He smiled immodestly.

  “Okay. You’re the greatest thing since Bernard Baruch. So what?”

  Hedgestone made a pup tent with his fingers, then began tapping the tips of them together. “You’re looking for Mr. Kottle’s son,” he stated smugly.

  I let the smugness float past. It stuck somewhere on the wall behind me. I hoped I could get it off. “What if I am?”

  “I’m here to make a suggestion.”

  “Good. Outside assistance is always welcome, even from amateurs.”

  Hedgestone tolerated it, but just barely. “My suggestion, Mr. Tanner, is that you fail.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s very simple. You know Mr. Kottle’s condition. What you may not know is that his personality is undergoing dramatic change. The pattern is known. The psychology of the terminally ill is coming under increased study.”

  “I’ve read Kübler-Ross,” I said. “Some of it makes sense; some of it doesn’t. Like most things.”

  “Then you know the stages. Mr. Kottle has moved through the denial, the anger and the fear, Mr. Tanner. They were bad enough. But now he is in a state of passive euphoria. He romanticizes everything. He seems eager to die, once he has been united with Karl, if you can believe it. He is no longer competent to manage his affairs. Unfortunately, the c
ourts as usual are lagging behind the developments of abnormal psychology.”

  “I don’t know. If you have to be anywhere near psychology at all it’s probably better to be behind it, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t think. But that’s not important. I’m not asking you to accept a theory of the mind, Tanner. I’m simply asking you to take steps to prevent a potentially disastrous development. Do you know what the worldwide consequences would be if Max Kottle left his empire to a … a revolutionary?”

  “Let me guess. Cataclysmic.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Let me guess again. That’s what the professor is here to talk to me about.”

  “Correct.”

  “Two for two. How do I do it?” I looked at the professor. “Where did you go to school?”

  “B.A. at Wisconsin. Ph.D. at Harvard. Postgraduate work at the London School of Economics.”

  “Any government experience?”

  “A year with OMB.”

  “How about on the international front?”

  “Two years at the World Bank. Three years at the Brookings Institute, specializing in international credit transactions.”

  “Very nice. Gentlemen, this is one day I’ll for sure record in my diary.”

  “Why?” Hedgestone asked suspiciously.

  “Well, I’ve been leaned on by hoods and by space cadet junkies and by hotheaded husbands, but I’ve never been leaned on by an economics teacher from Stanford.”

  I think it was the “teacher” that got him. I barely got it out before the professor was up off the couch and over to the door, telling Walter it was a mistake to have come. But Hedgestone wasn’t so easily offended.

  “I’m willing to pay you fifty thousand dollars to make sure young Karl stays in whatever obscure little niche he’s chosen for himself until his father dies and his will is accepted for probate.”

  I smiled.

  “A hundred thousand.”

  I chuckled.

  “Two hundred.”

  I shook my head. “There’s only two things in this world a man should never do, Hedgestone. He shouldn’t pay money to fuck and he shouldn’t take money to fail.”