Death Bed

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “Are you absolutely sure he’s missing?”

  “I wasn’t until ten days ago. Mark drops out of sight fairly often, for obvious reasons. But there was an editorial board meeting last week, and a staff meeting afterward, and he wouldn’t have missed them for anything. Budget problems. Greer wanted to cut way back on the slush money, you know, the dough we use to follow up leads, pay informers, that kind of thing, and Mark was going to fight the cutback all the way. Also, Arnold’s been flirting with the so-called neoconservative line on various issues and Mark couldn’t stand that, either. But he didn’t show.”

  “And no one else has seen him?”

  “No one I can find.”

  “How hard have you looked?”

  “Well, not too hard, I guess, mainly because I’m not sure where to look. Covington leads a pretty low-profile existence. He didn’t want to be known, felt it would hamper his undercover work. Other than his wife and the people at the paper, I’m not sure who to ask.”

  “So you want me to check it out?”

  “Can you?”

  “I guess so. Like I said on the phone, I’m as free as an osprey these days. But why not the cops?”

  “Fuck the cops. I won’t let them in the door, not since those Supreme Court bums gave them license to snoop around in our files. The only way a cop’s going to get inside the Investigator is over my dead body.”

  “Overreacting, aren’t you, Chet?”

  “The hell I am. Wake up, Marsh. Look at what’s going on. Reporters go to jail for not revealing their sources. Cops are given the right to paw through newspaper files anytime some half-wit Muni Court judge says there’s probable cause. Any nut who files a libel suit can depose a reporter for days on end about why he wrote what he wrote. They’re even talking about licensing newsmen. The free press is dying in this country, Marsh. The Bill of Rights is about as respected as a role of Charmin.”

  “Come on, Chet.”

  “No. You’ve got me going now, Marsh. I know you’re probably not up on what those guys have been doing since you’re not practicing law anymore, but read up on it. The Fifth Amendment’s shot to hell—anything you put on paper can be used against you. The Fourth Amendment—shit, the cops can search anywhere. And the First—reporters in jail, Marsh. In jail. I tell you, Nixon’s going to have the last laugh after all. Those justices are fascists. All of them.”

  Chet’s face was as red as a radish. “Look on the bright side,” I told him. “You’re going to have a lot of help pretty soon.”

  “From whom?”

  “The lawyers. I see where the Attorney General has started asking for warrants to search lawyers’ offices for evidence against their clients. When the cops start rummaging around in the lawyers’ files the feces will hit the propeller real fast. Besides, Burger can’t live forever.”

  “The hell he can’t. Guys that nasty never die. They pickle in their own bile.”

  I laughed. “I feel for you, Chet, but you news guys made the same mistake the lawyers made.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You strutted around for too damn long acting like privileged characters. You told everyone you were exempt from the rules. Well, folks are getting tired of being told how special you are. This is the Age of Narcissism. Everyone’s as good as everyone else. Better start disguising your pedestal a little instead of trying to jam it down everyone’s throats. But what’s all this got to do with Mark Covington?”

  Chet clenched his fist and starting pounding on the table. “Just this. There’s three members of the South Bay Planning Commission and two real-estate developers and a psychiatrist and a couple of door-to-door outfits that have criminal convictions on their records because of Mark Covington, and the people they were bilking or seducing aren’t being bilked or seduced anymore, and unless guys like Covington can keep on doing their jobs without the cops sitting on their shoulders like goddamn vultures, that kind of curruption is going to be more pervasive than the happy face.”

  “You sound like the cops sounded the day after Miranda came down, Chet. If you listened to them you’d believe there’d never be another arrest in the history of the world.”

  “And you’re starting to sound like Agnew, Tanner.”

  “Touché, Chet. Touché.”

  The splash of my little joke finally washed Chet’s face out from red to pink and he gulped the rest of his martini in one swallow. “I’ve got to go,” he said quickly. “Can you come down to the paper tomorrow morning? Greer will be there, and I want him to know I’m bringing you in on this. He’ll have to pay your fee. I’ve been on half salary for six months.”

  “That’s rough,” I said, suddenly sad that Chet had felt he had to go through with our fifty-buck dinner the week before, that he hadn’t felt he could level with me. “In the meantime,” I went on, “get up a list of Covington’s enemies. If all those people you mentioned have bit the dust because of his snooping, there must be enough motive floating around to choke a hippo.”

  “You’re right about that. Hell, there are a few people in our own office who wouldn’t shed a tear if Mark never drew another breath.”

  “Sounds interesting. Tell Greer my rate is fifty an hour.”

  “Jesus. He might not go that much, Marsh.”

  “I have to put a quarter in the machine to get his paper, Chet. He’ll have to feed my meter, too.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. See you, Marsh. And thanks for listening to me. Maybe I’ll get some sleep tonight.”

  We shook hands and Chet moved off toward the elevators at half the speed of his arrival.

  I finished off my drink and was about to leave, too, when I remembered the black woman down by the window. She was still there, and when she cocked her head to look at her watch the position of her head and the scowl on her face reminded me of where I’d seen her. I got to her table before she saw me coming. “You know Doctor Hazen,” I announced to the top of her head.

  When she looked up she was already frowning, already annoyed, already closing down anything that might have been open. She didn’t say anything with her lips but her eyes said, “Get lost.”

  “May I join you? Just for a moment?”

  She looked me over carefully, her features unyielding as teak. If she was trying to decide whether I was, after all, the reason she’d come up to that sky-high bar, I don’t think she’d reached a decision by the time I seized the initiative that was dangling somewhere between us and pulled out a chair and sat across from her.

  Her eyes stared at me coolly, communicating more bale than interest. One hand cupped her chin. The fingers were long and tapered, black on top and buttery on the bottom, the nails long and yellow-white, like old paper. Her wrist still wore the three thin bracelets I remembered from before, flimsy rings of allure. But her face still wore a visible mask of antipathy.

  “My name’s Tanner,” I said calmly. “You were on duty at Max Kottle’s place a week or so ago.”

  “I remember,” she said. “He’s a memorable patient.”

  “Miss Durkin, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s kind of dreary out tonight, isn’t it, Miss Durkin?”

  “In and out.”

  I put on my disarming smile, such as it was. “May I buy you a drink?”

  “No, but thank you.”

  I glanced at the table. A single glass, a single napkin, a single swizzle stick. Miss Durkin had a low limit. She didn’t trust herself; she didn’t trust me. I started to wonder what I was doing there, why I seemed bent on making a fool of myself. While I did that Miss Durkin’s head lowered, but not before I saw a tear flip over the edge of an eyelid.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked quietly.

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “No. Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even know you.”

  “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  She smiled, but it was a wan, lifeless exercise.

  “Then I
’ll take a guess,” I said. “You came here to take a look at other people and then at yourself, to help you decide whether you liked who you were and what you had become. About five minutes ago you reached a decision. What you decided was that you were off the track, out of control, heading right for the concrete abutment. Am I close?”

  She chuckled humorlessly. “Close enough. What I decided was that my life makes me sick. Sitting in this place makes me sick. Men like you on the make for black women make me sick. Everything makes me sick.”

  I leaned toward her. “Let me tell you something. I don’t know whether you’re a good nurse or not, but I know enough to tell you that nothing anyone in this room is doing or ever has done is more important than what you do. And besides,” I added, “anything will make you sick if you look at it too closely. Even aspidistra.”

  “Aspidistra? What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know. The word just popped out. That happens to me a lot—words pop out. I’m not sure I even know what aspidistra is.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “A house plant.”

  “Oh. Well, if one walks in and sits down at the bar in the next few minutes, point it out to me. I like to improve my mind.”

  Miss Durkin laughed this time, which I guess is what I wanted her to do. At that instant she seemed—brown, ivory, bristly, regal—a species I had never encountered before.

  “What is it really?” I asked. “A man?”

  She shook her head. “I kind of set men aside when I went to nursing school and I’m certainly not in the habit of worrying about them. Not that I enjoy sitting here being hit on by a different guy every five minutes.” The contempt on her face was broad enough to encompass me.

  “Problems with the job?” I asked.

  She paused. “I suppose that’s it, more than anything. I came out of the Fillmore District and worked my little black ass off to get that RN’s cap, and now instead of being back helping the people I grew up with I work for a doctor with an office on Sutter Street who has only one patient and who wishes he were a sculptor instead of a radiologist. Not exactly the direction I planned to take, way back when.”

  “Seems to me you shouldn’t have to justify the color of the patients you see.”

  “Hah. You should talk to some of the cats in the bars I used to hang out in. I’m not real popular with some of my racial brothers and sisters.”

  “You can always go back to the Fillmore, can’t you? Or work at San Francisco General? You’ll be hip-deep in black suffering the minute you set foot in that place.”

  “I tell myself that, but I don’t really know anymore. I may have gotten too used to the way I live these days. I hope not, but it could be true. This suit I’m wearing cost three hundred dollars. I don’t have anything else that nice but I have this. In the old days I went to school barefoot.”

  “Maybe you ought to run a little test on yourself. Work part-time at a neighborhood clinic or something. Check out the sensibilities.”

  For the first time some warmth broke through, melting the chocolate, making it irresistibly delectable, better than anything Blum’s ever made.

  “You white boys are smarter than you look,” she said smiling. “That’s just what I had decided to do when you so rudely intruded upon my private little drama.”

  That ended it for a time. I sipped my drink and she toyed with her swizzle stick. I think we were both measuring the new environment, checking for weak spots, alert for traps for the unwary. I didn’t find any myself; I couldn’t tell about her.

  “Tell me more about your boss,” I said, just to move things along. “He sounds a bit strange.”

  She shrugged. “He is, I guess. I feel sorry for him, actually. Clifford’s a disappointed man. He really and truly set out to win the Nobel prize. God’s truth. And he says he might have gotten it, or come close—his theory had something to do with manganese and superoxide levels in cells—but then something happened and his research got fouled up and he couldn’t get funding. When he knew he’d never get the prize he kind of lost interest in medicine. Not completely, of course. He’s Chief of Radiology at Bay Area University, and he’s a Fellow in the College of Radiology, but most of what he does is administrative. The passion for medicine just isn’t there anymore, not even at the tertiary level. So, he’s decided to become a sculptor. You should see his studios. There’s one at the office and one in his home. A foundry, a kiln, some kind of generator. Hunks of metal all over. What a place.”

  “How’s his art work?”

  “Terrible. I hate to say it, but it’s true. No one will show it. Poor Clifford takes his little slides around to all the galleries, here and in New York and L.A. too, and no one’s interested. It drives him crazy, and keeps him bankrupt, but he plunges on. Someone always says something that’s just encouraging enough to make him keep going. Unfortunately, the poor man’s taste is all in his mouth.” She shook her head in sympathy. “I posed for him once,” she went on. “Something called the lost wax process, I think. I came out looking like a cross between a pine cone and a Brillo pad.”

  I laughed with her and told her Clifford must be totally devoid of talent if he couldn’t make anything out of such a lovely source of inspiration and she thanked me for the compliment and I told her there were several more from where that came from if she played her cards right. She told me she’d never been lucky at cards. I told her I had a system that I’d be happy to teach her. She said that might be fun. Then I backed away. We seemed to be going somewhere but we didn’t know the road. We wouldn’t get there if we took it too fast.

  I made conversation. “You said Doctor Hazen had only one patient. Max Kottle, I suppose?”

  “Oh, I was exaggerating a little, of course, but since Clifford became Chief of Radiology he’s had to do more administrating than treating patients. He keeps old friends on, but not many others.”

  “Old friends and rich friends.”

  “I suppose that’s part of it. Clifford always seems short of money, even with patients like the Kottles.”

  “The Kottles? You mean he treats Mrs. Kottle too?”

  “Not her. Karl.”

  “Karl? How long’s he been treating Karl?”

  “For years. Every three months.”

  “When’s the last time he saw Karl, do you know?”

  The swizzle stick stopped spinning between her fingers. “I don’t think I’d better say anything more about that,” she said, suddenly wary. “Clifford’s a bear about confidentiality. You’re working for Mr. Kottle, and I was especially instructed not to say anything to Max about Karl.”

  “I’m not working for Max anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “The problem he wanted me to solve suddenly solved itself.”

  “Really? How?”

  “I thought you’d be one of the first to know.”

  “Why?”

  “He died. Max died.”

  She hadn’t known. I hoped her sorrow was a bit more than professional. “I was off this weekend and Doctor Hazen didn’t come in today. The great Max Kottle dead. It’s too bad, actually. For a rich guy he was all right.”

  “Let’s get back to Karl,” I said. “What’s wrong with him? Why does he see Hazen so often?”

  Her lips froze in two red stripes. “No. If you ask any more questions about Doctor Hazen or his patients I’ll leave. I mean it.”

  I held up my hands in surrender. The Kottle case was closed, Max and Karl had been united to some degree or another before Max died, and whatever might have happened in the past was as cold as day-old soup. I had to work at it, but I left it that way.

  I asked Miss Durkin her first name and she told me it was Gwen. I asked if she wanted to go to North Beach for dinner and she said, “Why not?” Later, when I asked if she wanted to see my beer can collection, she said, “I suppose I should, shouldn’t I?” I didn’t have any beer cans, but it didn’t seem to
bother her, at least not at first.

  Then, right in the middle of what I thought was a perfectly adequate kiss, she leaned back and looked at me and said, in words brought with her from the Fillmore, that she didn’t want to ball me that night, she just wanted to sleep on my couch. Because I was mad at her I let her. From the creaks and groans of the couch I knew she had a hard time getting to sleep. I had a hard time, too, until I went in and picked up her three hundred dollar suit off the chair where she had draped it and hung it on a wooden hanger in the closet, right next to my bathrobe.

  SEVENTEEN

  We must have readjusted our expectations sometime during the night because we were both pretty perky the next morning, laughing and joking over the flapjacks like a couple of “LaughIn” rejects. Somewhere along the line we decided to walk to work, since the sun was out and all, and we skipped down the Filbert Steps like the ingenue and the swain out of something by Busby Berkeley.

  The bay that spread out before us was a blue-green mat with “Welcome” printed on it. The world seemed bathed, rendered, cleansed. I felt the same way. At the corner of Battery and Union Gwen continued toward town and I trotted up the steps toward the entrance to the Bay Area Investigator.

  Chet Herk’s paper was published out of a squat, square brick building on Battery Street a few blocks north of Broadway. Its neighbors were the Ice House, Barsocchini’s and Soraya’s Oriental Rugs. Once upon a time the building had been a cheese factory, and if you inhaled too exuberantly you could still smell something that had curdled long, long ago.

  There was a sign over the door, black on white, hand-lettered to look as though it had been set in giant type:

  When there is much desire to learn,

  there of necessity will be much arguing,

  much writing, many opinions; for opinion

  in good men is but knowledge in the making.

  Milton, Areopagitica

  I pulled open the door and went inside. An entryway of sorts had been established just inside the door. A couple of folding chairs and a card table were scattered around in clubhouse modern. The rock poster on the wall was supposed to create a with-it atmosphere, but the effect was institutional, penal more than anything. Across the room was a brick wall, and on the wall were two words, each with an arrow beside it. The “Production” arrow pointed down, the “Editorial” arrow pointed up. I went up.