“But what will happen to …?” Margaret’s question was too egotistical to complete. “I mean, why would Marvin murder someone? Good Lord. He’s no angel, heaven knows, but Marvin is … Marvin.”
“That was the problem. Linton was going to show the world that Marvin wasn’t Marvin after all.”
“What does that mean?”
“There were some shenanigans at Sebastian. Pretty serious, enough to destroy the school. There’s no point in going into them, but if you have any more trouble with your property settlement, have your lawyer get in touch with me. Suffice it to say, Linton threatened to expose the scheme, so Marvin had him killed.”
Bryce coughed. “I hate to sound like a broken record, but if Linton didn’t write the book, and Jane Ann didn’t, then who did?”
I smiled. “My next candidate was Margaret.”
Margaret stiffened. “What would make you consider that for even an instant?”
“Because you’re intelligent enough to have done it. Because you knew more than any of the other candidates about what really happened at the school. And because you had a powerful motive to punish your ex-husband and a good way to do it was make a thinly disguised allegation that Gillis was a sex pervert.” I paused. “But I don’t think you would have done it the way it was done in Hammurabi, because you had to know that if you did, your daughter would get dragged into it.”
“Is there something I’m missing?” Bryce asked earnestly. “I don’t understand why Jane Ann is involved in this at all.”
I looked at him. “As Jane Ann relentlessly points out, you’re her stepfather. Which means you didn’t know what she was going through back then. Which means the real author of Homage to Hammurabi is one Bryce Chatterton.”
Face red, fingers clenched, he looked for a minute like he might resort to violence. Luckily, he opted for rhetoric. “I hired you, Marsh. Why would I do that if I was the one who wrote the book?”
“Because it was part of the process that let you get the word out in publishing circles and the media that there was a mysterious manuscript at Periwinkle that could blow the whistle on some of the city’s upper crust. The hype machine has kept pace with me all along, Bryce. And you’re the one who would know how to make that happen.”
“But—”
“Except you didn’t get it right. Oh, it was right that Wade Linton wasn’t a criminal, but it wasn’t right that the father was the bad guy and it wasn’t right that Linton was out for vengeance for the frame-up. There were lots of things you missed, and since you had to rely on gossip and eavesdropping instead of truth, you’re the only one in the room who would have missed them.”
Bryce rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t write it, Marsh. You have to believe me.”
I walked to the table beside him, placed my briefcase on its middle, and flicked open the hinges. “I brought it back,” I said as I lifted out the manuscript. “The only copy.”
He nodded miserably.
I looked at the roaring fire at the end of the room, then glanced at Margaret and Jane Ann. “Under the circumstances, I think it’s best for all concerned if this doesn’t see the light of day.”
I marched toward the blaze, manuscript in my hands, my purpose clear and catastrophic. When the heat was enough to stop me, I looked one more time at Bryce, then prepared to pitch my burden into the greedy flames.
“Don’t, Marsh. Please. It’s all I have.”
I still owed him. So I didn’t.
And then I didn’t owe him anymore.
It looks like the book deal isn’t going to work out.
Homage to Hammurabi, p. 345
32
She answered the bell herself, still tiny, still garbed in black, still fearful of every living thing that coiled beyond her doorway. “Is Alfred still up?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He’s been asleep for hours.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow. What would be a good time?”
A lip and eyelid quivered. “There wouldn’t be one.”
“I’ll get to him one way or another, Ms. Lucerne. You’ll both be better off if you make it easy for me.”
Her eyes sought safety in the distance, which was gray with fog, impenetrable and uninviting. “What do you want him for?”
“I just want to tell him something. About his father.”
“Paul?”
The word surprised me. “Wade.”
She stiffened as though I had struck her. “I can’t imagine what.”
“Linton wasn’t a ghost, Ms. Lucerne, as much as you might wish it. He was out of jail and living in a car parked along the Panhandle and he saw Al almost every day. They got along quite well, till the cops drove him off.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t believe you. I can’t believe you.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
Her eyes flamed as bright as the fire that had almost claimed the book that had started it all. “Where’s Wade now? I want to put a stop to this. He can’t waltz in here and—”
It was my turn to be surprised. “They didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“He’s dead.”
“Wade?”
I nodded. “He was killed by a custodian at Sebastian. They found his body earlier today.”
Even before she absorbed its entirety, the news was already lifting the strain off her features, leaving them rounded and alive, as though she’d just unmasked. “Who would murder Wade? Was it something to do with that girl?”
I assumed it was Jane Ann she was talking about, until I realized it must be Carrie Devlin. “It wasn’t about that, but it did have to do with Sebastian.”
“That awful place.”
I nodded. “Records were being altered so the Sebastian kids could get into the best colleges. Your husband suspected something of the sort and was going to put a stop to it, so they framed him.”
Her voice grew throaty and reminiscent. “Wade was always a do-gooder. The students hated him for it.”
“Not all of them,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. “The bottom line is, he didn’t do what they said he did. He didn’t touch a hair on Carrie Devlin’s head.”
“I wish I could believe you.”
“Take a chance, Ms. Lucerne. Give him the benefit of the doubt. For Alfred’s sake.”
Her voice rose. “But don’t you know what that would mean? About me, I mean?”
I nodded. It would mean that once upon a time she’d been mistaken and unfair. Just like all the rest of us.
She worked with it for so long I thought she was going to stick to the Gillis script, even though the show had finally been canceled. When she looked at me, her eyes were small but curious. “Was that what you wanted to tell my son? That his father was dead?”
I shook my head. “Though if you want me to, I will. I assumed he already knew.”
“I should do it,” she said, trying to be valiant. “Shouldn’t I?”
I agreed with her. “I just want to make sure Al knows that his father didn’t do what he was imprisoned for—that he wasn’t a criminal, he was a nice guy.”
“I still have a hard time believing that.”
“What matters is that Al believes it.”
When she didn’t react, I began my final message. “There’s a bike out in the yard, a pretty good one. Tell Al his father got it for him. Tell him it was the last thing he did before he died.”
“Is that true?”
“Does it matter?”
Some cases close, other linger. This one is still around, even after all these months, the epilogue still being written in little scribblings all over town. It’s one of the cases I cling to, with the idea that what I accomplished will seem significant enough to keep me going till the next one comes along. It’s a nice enough concept, crucial even, but it almost never works.
Homage to Hammurabi was published in December. Although it was enthusiastically though ineptly reviewed by Colt Harrison, as part
ial consideration of the resolution of his wife’s property settlement, Bryce agreed not to promote it or print more than 1000 copies, so it was ignored by the retail chains and the national media. It sold fewer than half the printing.
Not long afterward, the DA dismissed all charges against Marvin Gillis and Rufus Finner in return for a plea of guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud. The jail sentences were suspended in lieu of a program of community service that Charley Sleet managed to require be performed at a storefront mission in the Tenderloin.
I had wanted Gillis to do time, but it had always been more a prayer than a possibility, and with Arthur O’Shea out of the picture there was no chance to make it happen, especially not with Jake Hattie as his lawyer. But I dropped by the mission one day, to make sure Gillis was doing his duty. And he was. He even seemed to be proud of it.
Carrie Devlin remains in Morocco, as a stringer for Le Monde. Just before Christmas, her mother had a show at a small gallery on Geary. Darryl Dromedy proclaimed it a commercial triumph and an artistic nightmare.
The Periwinkle Press is thriving, not because of Hammurabi but because of Gridlock, which became a cult icon, the best-selling book of its kind since Fup. Ironically, Bryce’s model for Periwinkle, the North Point Press, was recently put up for sale by its owners, who denied the company was overextended.
Jane Ann Gillis is taking art lessons from Lily Lucerne. I saw her one day, walking along Clement Street with her son, sharing her ice cream with him. Al was pushing his bike. Jane Ann was laughing, as far as I know for the first time. Her friend Lloyd has been missing since the day Wade Linton died so I haven’t returned his buckle.
My own version of the case, written in fits and snatches during televised ball games and sleepless nights, tentatively entitled Book Case, was abandoned on page eighty-two. At about that time, Christine White informed me that she and Emma had made a lateral transfer to a bigger firm for bigger money, and that she was about to marry a pharmacist. Since then, I’ve been seeing a lot of Betty Fontaine. I never did buy a computer.
Charley Sleet’s friend Homer was found dead in an alley within sight of City Hall. Charley thinks it was foul play, but no one else thinks about it at all.
I still haven’t heard from Peggy.
Turn the page to continue reading from the John Marshall Tanner Mysteries
ONE
Among other things, I’m a drinking man. Not an alcoholic, mind you—I don’t imbibe till I pass out, or go on weekend benders, or wake with the shakes and shivers, or lose track of blocks of time in which I’ve done things I’m ashamed of when apprised of them—but I do take a drink most nights of the week. I like the places my mind visits when it’s been primed with a half-dozen ounces of scotch and I like the person I become when my congenital tethers are loosened up a bit—I’m friendlier and funnier in such a state, less prone to the charms of gloom and doom. That I’ve been able to stay a drinking man rather than descending into a drunk is due less to my character than to my genes, the experts tell me. Which is fine, theoretically, except it doesn’t explain why you can’t find Melanoma Anonymous or Multiple Sclerosis Watchers in the phone book.
The primary task of a drinking man is to gauge the amount of fuel necessary to take him to the optimum state of being and keep him there. That’s mostly a matter of practice, plus an appreciation of the variables—current psychological state, type of tipple employed, size and propinquity of most recent meal, congenial companionship or lack thereof, ambience of the scene of the undertaking. After thirty years of working at it, I get the quantity part right almost every time, except on the occasional evening when I don’t want to get it right, I want to get it wrong. Such catharses excepted, the hard part for a drinking man is drunks.
In my experience, drunks are arrogant, assertive, and antagonistic; drunks are loud, lewd, and lecherous; drunks are dumb, dull, and demoralizing. Drunks demand excessive sympathy and dole out excessive blame. Drunks love the bottle more than they love themselves, and themselves more than anything but the bottle. If my only alternatives were to spend my time surrounded by drunks or give up drinking altogether, my choice would be the latter. Luckily there is a third option, which is to find a drinking man’s bar that caters to nothing but. It took me a while, even in a drinking town like San Francisco, but a few years back I finally found a place that fills the bill.
The bar doesn’t have a name. It’s secreted in the back of a popular North Beach restaurant two blocks down the slope of Telegraph Hill from where I live and is filled with a noisy mix of domestic yuppies and imported tourists every night from six to midnight. The distant drone of these unknowing foils provides a perfect white noise for those of us who assemble, one at a time, like members of a secret sect, behind the partition at the back of the restaurant’s main room—the partition with the posters of Tuscany and Tintoretto and Toscanini tacked to it—to enjoy our libations out of sight and mind of everyone but the few we regard as peers.
A dozen barstools, four tables. No waitresses, no ferns; no Muzak, no tipping. Peanuts and popcorn in bowls, pasta à la carte upon request, TV above the bar with a ball game on the screen and the sound blessedly turned off. No hookers, no drunks, no swells from out-of-town who’ve just discovered Fuzzy Navels and have something they want to sell you. And most of all, a bartender named Guido who doesn’t speak even when spoken to and pours two ounces of what you want without being asked and keeps your glass topped up till you tell him you’ve had enough, which you keep track of because that’s your part of the deal. As a token of their appreciation, the regulars call the bar Guido’s even though the name doesn’t appear on anything in the place, not even the Yellow Pages. Come to think of it, I’m not sure Guido is the bartender’s real name.
The regulars number about forty, more or less, of which a score or so are present at any given time if the time is after noon and before closing at 2:00 A.M. I know each of them by name, but with most that’s all I know or care to. There are a few exceptions—the criminal lawyer who collects fountain pens and first editions, the banker who writes turgid essays on free will and named his son after Immanuel Kant, the triple divorcée who’s wearing herself out holding down two jobs in order to get enough money together to open a bar of her own. These are the ones I relate to, sometimes more, sometimes less, enough to care and be cared about. The divorcée, for example, brought me a tuna casserole the last time I was sick. I reciprocated by driving her to Yosemite on her birthday. It was the first time she’d seen the Falls or Half-Dome, and she’s lived in San Francisco all her life. She talks a lot about going back.
My only real friend at Guido’s, other than the times Charley Sleet, the cop, drops by after another bout with municipal mayhem, is Tom Crandall. Tom’s a decade younger than I am, chronologically, but in spirit he’s one of those people the New Agers call “Old Souls.” In some ways, Tom’s a vat of contradictions. He lives like a monastic, yet he’s married to a torch singer. He’s a fountain of information on a vast array of subjects, but rarely opens his mouth without being prodded. He drives an ambulance by day and reads history and philosophy by night except on Mondays, which is the only night of the week his wife has off. Tom always has a book with him when he comes to Guido’s, and unless we lock onto a mutually absorbing conversation, he’ll spend the evening reading. Since our respective vocations are essentially intrusive, what each of us respects the most is privacy—we only engage each other once or twice a week.
Tom and I talk about a lot of things, but seldom about our work. I’ve seen some nasty things in my dozen years as a detective, and Tom is hip-deep in them nearly every day, but by unspoken agreement we’ve decided Guido’s should remain unsoiled by the subhuman aspects of our lives. We’ve both seen service in wartime as well—Tom as a medic, me as a rifleman—but we don’t dredge that up, either. As I said, we’re drinking men, not drunks.
For the most part, we leave our private lives alone as well. Mine doesn’t amount to much, of course, so confidenti
ality isn’t difficult—what’s difficult is finding something interesting to say about it even when it’s on a roll. Tom’s situation is different. His wife is a celebrity of sorts, the featured chanteuse with one of the hotel bands on Nob Hill. She’s on her way to becoming a local institution, referred to in the columns as San Francisco’s answer to Julie Wilson and Barbara Cook. Because of their work schedules, she and Tom rarely see each other, which must have caused all sorts of problems, but if it had I didn’t know what kind. All I knew was that whenever her name came up, Tom got vague and misty and maybe a little melancholy, then steered the conversation somewhere else. I figured if he wanted me to know more he’d tell me, the way he tells me what he thinks about Tom Wolfe—he hates him—or Philip Glass—he loves him—or George Will—he thinks he’s a closet liberal.
Mostly Tom and I talk politics—local and global, pragmatic and theoretical. Of late, the sidebars had ranged from the inept management of water resources during California’s five-year drought to the spread of AIDS among the city’s homeless population and, most heatedly, to the issue of German reunification. Tom believes it’s essential. I’m less sanguine, though my view is based on little more than Hitler and a hunch. Tom’s is the result of an analysis that encompasses personalities from Charlemagne to Metternich and phenomena from the first Treaty of Versailles to the second partition of Poland. But that was last month. This month’s agenda is war.
Iraq had invaded in August. We began bombing in January. Now, almost a month into what the media was calling the Crisis in the Gulf, the betting pools centered on the ground campaign—when would it start and how long would it last. As usual, Tom placed the war in a context that included citations from the Code of Hammurabi, the Bible, the Koran, the United Nations Charter, and the spot-market price of oil. My memories of Vietnam led me to anticipate a protracted ground war with much suffering and many casualties on both sides. Tom’s delving into Jane’s encyclopedias of aircraft and weaponry led him to believe the war would be over a week after we attacked in force. What he envisioned was a slaughter on the order of the Crimean War. What he feared was that, like a middle-aged roughneck who’s no longer top dog and picks fights with weaklings to prove his manhood, America would welcome the carnage and even revel in it. I wasn’t sure which of us I hoped was right.
Book Case Page 27