Two flights of stairs and a half block later, I was snugly encapsulated in the rear of a Lincoln limousine, enjoying an eerily smooth and silent ride through the always unsmooth and unsilent city. When we came to a stop ten minutes later, the house that was visible through the tinted window at my side would have been called a mansion had it been plopped down on one of the double blocks on Drake Avenue in the small city where I spent my youth. I suppose it was a mansion under a lot of other definitions, too, but in Cow Hollow it was only e pluribus unum.
I was still taking in the splendor when Fernandez opened the door for me. If memory served, the last time that happened I was under arrest. “Please come this way, sir.”
We left the limo in the street, something I hesitated to do in my neighborhood even with a Buick, and climbed toward the weighty edifice that looked down on our progress from a distinctly imperial loft. But the grand façade was nothing compared to the man who opened the door when Fernandez rang the bell.
He had stepped right out of the movies, one of those George Raft things that tried their best to make you envy the hell out of the rich and pretty much succeeded. His smile was adequate, no more, but his eyes were flat and businesslike, taking my measure as just another chattel, another potential asset if the price wasn’t out of line, another deal to be done. His clothes—white ascot, brocade smoking jacket, silk slacks, and velvet slippers—were comical or precious, I couldn’t decide which, but the debate caused me to smile.
“Mr. Tanner,” he proclaimed. “How kind of you to come. I’m Marvin Gillis.” He absorbed my grin. “You don’t seem put out about the hour. Good. Please come in.”
I awaited the offer of a handshake but it wasn’t extended, which let me know where I stood, which was about where I figured. After I looked at him in a way that let him know I had registered the slight, I looked at the foyer at his back, which featured a marble floor and a selection of well-aged art and half the mahogany crop of Madagascar for the year 1928. “I’m glad to see the rumors about you are true,” I said. “I hate it when my prejudices prove unfounded.”
His laugh was a match for his smile, which is to say it was rote. “Circumstances have been good to me, if that’s what you mean. As a result, my resources allow me to live with a certain amount of style.”
“Since they don’t look to be scarce, I’d say they weren’t the natural kind of resources.”
“That depends on your perspective, Mr. Tanner. Some people feel the accumulation of wealth is the most natural urge there is.”
I took another look at the foyer. “People like you, for example.”
We gave each other some silent credit for being civilized enough to refrain from open warfare. “Let’s go into the library, shall we? Could we interest you in some excellent brandy?”
“You already have, Mr. Gillis.”
When we were halfway across the marble, Gillis paused to press a button that was hidden in the woodwork, then continued toward a door at the far end of the foyer, one that was hidden behind the staircase. The door was locked, which I found odd, but it opened easily to a key that was tied to a ribbon that was looped around a button on Gillis’s jacket. As he ushered me inside, I felt like a desperate actor auditioning for a role for which I had no aptitude.
Somehow, the brandies were already waiting on the walnut end tables beside the leather club chairs that were flanking the roaring fire. Like Bryce Chatterton’s office, the walls were lined with books, however these weren’t a random and well-read collection but rather leather-bound and gilt-lettered icons, displayed at maximum grandiloquence. If any of them had been inscribed to Marvin Gillis, it would be proof of either forgery or reincarnation.
Gillis motioned for me to sit, so I sat. After he did the same, he grasped his snifter and waited for me to match him. We exchanged a silent toast that lacked grace on my part and sincerity on his.
“I’ve known several historians in my day, Mr. Tanner,” Gillis began, his voice as cultured as his library, with the same touch of pretense to it. “But never one with such a provocative background.”
“How do you mean, ‘provocative’? Like a whore is provocative, or like Kissinger is provocative?”
Gillis chuckled dryly. “It’s good of you to acknowledge the difference.” The tight thin skin around his ears and eyes seemed to redden slightly, indicating he was irritated by my manner. If smart talk was all it took to shake him up, I was surprised he’d lasted this long in the law business.
“When word reached us that a self-styled writer was engaged in a muckraking campaign that could both slander innocent individuals and besmirch the reputation of the finest secondary school west of the Mississippi, we naturally became concerned. So we took steps to learn more about him.”
“So we could scare him off.”
“Oh, we doubted extreme measures would be necessary. We were certain a few thousand dollars—in the used bills of small denominations of which all blackmailers seem enamored—would be sufficient to persuade the gentleman to look elsewhere for his scandals. Had he been the person he claimed to be, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But our inquiries revealed that you are not a historian at all, popular or otherwise, you are a private eye.” He raised a well-trimmed brow. “Is that the cognomen you prefer, by the way? I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with the nuances of the profession.”
“Oh, we don’t have nuances anymore, Mr. Gillis. We tried a few once, but they got in the way. And just between us, the honorific I prefer is ‘maestro,’ but ‘private eye’ seems to be the one I’m stuck with.”
Neither my joke nor my vocabulary merited a smile. “You have done some work for my firm,” he declared brusquely.
“Yes.”
“And you were formerly an attorney.”
“Right again.”
“Until you had a brush with my old friend Judge Hoskins.”
My fist closed so tightly around the snifter I was afraid I was going to snap its stem. “You and the judge are pals, are you?”
“We were until he suffered his stroke. He’s virtually an invalid, you know.”
“That’s swell.”
He rolled his eyes. “Surely you’re not still bearing grudges.”
“A very nice man is dead because the judge cared more about buddies like you than about the laws he swore to uphold when he took the bench.”
Gillis virtually tut-tutted. “All that happened so long ago. Surely you have it in your heart to forgive an old man his mistakes.”
“I’m not in the forgiveness business, Mr. Gillis. If that’s what the bastard wants, have him take it up with someone who is.”
Gillis allowed himself a smile. “Yes, well, I’m sure he has. In his fashion. But we digress, do we not?”
“Not really.”
Gillis adjusted his ascot and drained his drink. “The bottom line is, you are not what you seem.”
“What I seemed to Custodian O’Shea, you mean.”
Gillis bowed infinitesimally. “Arthur is a valued employee, as I’m sure you appreciate. Sometimes I feel that he’s the only one other than myself who truly … Well. That’s beside the point, which is that regardless of your true profession, you seem to be making inquiries into our past.”
“Do I?”
“Come now, there’s no need to fence. What are you up to, Mr. Tanner?”
I shrugged. “I’m undertaking an investigation for hire—that’s almost always what I’m up to. And I thought Sebastian graduates weren’t supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. Although ‘to what are you up, Mr. Tanner?’ does seem a bit awkward. I guess it’s one of those discretionary things.”
“Let’s leave the grammar for another time, shall we?” He adjusted his incline, plucked at the crease in his slacks, clasped his hands atop a knee. “I want you to know that those of us who treasure Sebastian take meddlers like yourself quite seriously.” His eyes were as hard as the wood in the floor.
“Is that the roy
al ‘we’ you’re using?”
“It’s the Sebastian ‘we.’”
“Which implies what?”
“That there are a great many persons of influence in this community who do not take kindly to seeing the institution they cherish above all others being slandered by a … man such as yourself.”
I shrugged. “If there’re no skeletons in the Sebastian closets, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Sebastian is not immune to unfounded rumor, Mr. Tanner. In these days of media zealotry, few institutions are.”
“I’ll try to be discreet.”
“I’m afraid that’s not satisfactory.”
“What is?”
“That you desist your prying immediately.”
I smiled my friendly smile. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. I’m like a bulldog, Mr. Gillis—only the client can call me off. And that’s not a nuance, it’s a rule.”
Gillis closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened them again, they had softened to a subsistence level of civility. “Perhaps it would help you understand my position if I amplified the Sebastian mission for you.”
As I shrugged noncommittally, he got comfortable in his chair. “There are many wonderful families in this city, Mr. Tanner, the families who built this city, the families who sustain it, the families who have given San Francisco the spirit and style for which it is justly famous. Sebastian was founded by those families, and it has served them, it has educated them, it has in a very real sense preserved them. It is Sebastian’s task for the future—my task, if you will, now that I have assumed the mantle of its chairman—to perpetuate the families I have spoken of, by educating their newest members, by qualifying their offspring to attend the finest institutions of higher education in this land, by making the younger generation what its forebears have been—persons of style and skill and signal accomplishment.” Gillis finally paused. “And you, Mr. Tanner,” he concluded with a razor’s keenness, “are a threat to that tradition.”
Though I was congenitally and philosophically disposed to resist everything he had just described, Marvin Gillis had succeeded in scaring me a little—for the merest moment, I was convinced that the future of civilization was in my hands.
But I can only entertain absurdities for so long. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Gillis. And even if I did, I’m not nearly that powerful. And even if I was, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve been hired to do a job. Unless I get called off, or unless the thing I’m looking for has disappeared or never existed in the first place, I’m going to do that job. That’s my style, Mr. Gillis. Such as it is.”
Gillis sighed dispiritedly. “Very well. If you will disclose the name of your principal, we can approach the source of the irritant directly, in order to …”
“Reveal the error of his ways?” I suggested.
I earned a bow. “Precisely. So? Who is it?”
I smiled. “Who’s the Sebastian teacher who was jailed for molestation?”
Gillis just sat there.
“Okay, who’s the student who got molested? Come on, Gillis. Someone’s going to talk. If you want to be sure I get it right, it might as well be you.”
Gillis stood up and smoothed his jacket. “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Perhaps we should both retire and consider what we’ve discussed this evening.”
“Sounds good to me; brandy makes me sleepy.”
I got another glimpse of the depth to Marvin Gillis’s eyes. “You are excessively flip.”
“I get that way whenever I ride in a car that’s got more floor space than my apartment.”
Gillis walked to the door of the library. “You threaten Sebastian at your peril, Mr. Tanner.”
I stepped into the foyer, then turned back. “You know, Mr. Gillis, you’re working so hard at keeping me from poking into the scandal at Sebastian, I’m starting to wonder if there’s something involved that’s even more precious to you than Sebastian’s reputation.”
“And what might that be?”
“Your daughter.”
In the void that followed my speculation, his eyes jabbed me as tangibly as a foil. But “Fernandez will drive you home” was all he said.
I was not entirely a fool. I knew that, consciously or otherwise, young people often explore the reach of their sexuality, testing its powers first on their peers and often, if the initial reaction is buoying, transferring their attentions to the nearest adult. Since the nearest adult is often a teacher, I knew the pitfalls of being alone with a student. Any student.
To my knowledge, contrary to her assertions in the videotape, Amanda Keefer was present in my home on only one occasion—the traditional party following the fall production of the drama club. If memory serves, I had to ask her to leave, because I caught Amanda and two of her friends enjoying surreptitious sips from the bottles in my liquor cabinet when they thought neither my wife nor I were looking. Although her friends were upset by my actions, Amanda, as with virtually everything else in her life, seemed entirely unfazed.
Homage to Hammurabi, p. 87
17
It’s not unusual for a month to pass without anything crossing my threshold but me and the morning paper, yet when I got back to my apartment I had my second visitor of the evening. When I asked her how she’d picked the lock, she shook her head with the kind of exasperation usually reserved for people who admit to preferring steak to seafood.
“Bachelors always stash a key near the door,” she explained. “Yours was in the second place I looked. Which makes you twice as smart as most of the men I know.” Christine White tossed her purse on the couch and, after looking in vain for an acceptable alternative, sat down next to it. “What have you got to drink?”
“Bourbon and scotch.”
“No wine, no vodka?”
“You’re lucky I have bourbon. Someone gave it to me for Christmas—someone who didn’t know me very well.”
“Then that’s what I’ll have. Ice, no water, a twist if you have it.” She looked around the room once more. “Which you obviously don’t. Have you at least got some munchies? All I had for dinner was take-out chow mein.”
“Do you call Oreos munchies?”
“Oreos are junk food; Wheat Thins are munchies. But if Oreos is all you have, let’s have a look.”
I went to the kitchen to fix her drink, then fixed one of my own and took the booze and the junk food to the living room and arrayed them on the coffee table, then eased my weary bones into the chair that flanked the couch and faced the Trinitron.
Somewhere along the way, I decided I was irritated by something. By the time I was settled in my chair I decided it was Christine White’s assumption that because a spark had been struck when we first met, she thought she had permission to invade my life whenever she wanted.
“Tough day in the old salt mine of estates and trusts?” The taunt was in furtherance of my pique. “Your petition for extraordinary fees get denied by some crusty probate judge?”
Her drink stopped halfway to her lips. “What do you mean by that?”
That I had touched a nerve made me perversely glad. “It’s the only thing I could think of that would be regarded as a crisis in your line of work.”
Whatever the impulse that had propelled her to my apartment in the middle of the night, its devil-may-care veneer vanished in an instant. “If you really want to know, I’ve been down at S.F. General, meeting with a group of lawyers I organized six months ago to help terminal AIDS patients write their wills and get their estates in order.”
The apartment got as hot as her temper. “I get you wrong every time, don’t I, Ms. White?”
She stuck out her tongue, which was as red as my face. “When will men realize that women are as capable and compassionate as they are?”
“When men like me are extinct.” I glanced at the calendar on the wall, the one I get for Christmas from my insurance man, the one with pictures of birds with brains about the size of mine. “Whi
ch should start to happen just after the turn of the century.”
I kicked off my shoes and got as comfortable in my rheumatic chair as my conscience would let me, then made a stab at business. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Ms. White? And I apologize for everything I’ve ever said or done.”
While she considered her answer, she kicked off her high heels as well, curled her snugly skirted legs beneath her, undid the center button of her jacket, loosened the scarf at her collar, and unbuttoned the top button of her blouse. When she looked at me it was to indicate I was forgiven for yet another time.
“I just thought I’d stop by to let you know that Speedo was wonderful,” she said offhandedly. “Let’s see, we started with the endive salad with capers and hickory nuts, pita bread with strawberry-honey butter, then herring pickled in—”
I held up a hand. “I’m not much of a foodie. As far as I’m concerned, a pancake sandwich is as good as it gets.”
“You poor man.”
“That’s what my accountant tells me.”
Christine leaned back and undid another button, then took further inventory of the room. From her expression, she might have been touring Calcutta.
I make periodic resolutions to do something about the state of my furnishings. The resolve usually lasts until I flip over a price tag at Breuner’s and discover that it will take three thousand bucks to replace my couch and chair with anything that isn’t constructed from wood chips that have been hacked off Oregon logs, shipped to Japan, pressed into boards that sell for a tenth of the cost of hardwood, then returned to this country to be stapled together into a frame that will collapse the first time I flop down on it after a long night in the tavern.
Luckily, Christine’s glance came to rest on the only item of quality in the room. “How about some music?”
“What flavor?”
“Something soft and stringy.”
I chose some Mendelssohn, got the equipment rolling, and resumed my place. “What really brings you by?” I asked after a second sip at my scotch.
She gave me her lawyer’s look. “The scare you threw into my roommate this morning.”
Book Case Page 14