Nothing Lost

by John Gregory Dunne

  No more chestnuts.

  It was still not five-thirty. Take stock. I lived on a cul-de-sac. The Bonaventures next door were on a frequent-flier trip to Albuquerque visiting the daughter they didn’t like and the granddaughter they did. The O’Learys across the street were in Japan for the economic summit. The Ackerman house on the other side had been empty since Marvin Ackerman’s posting as DCM in Warsaw. The Nigerian economic attaché who had rented it would not move in until March. The Sheridans were in the middle of a messy divorce and the bank had taken over their house. That pretty much took care of the neighborhood. Saturday. Slow news day. A blessing. His death might not hit the papers until Monday. Look around. See if there is anything to get rid of. The needle and the prostaglandin E-1. Definitely. It was not as if this were a crime scene. No. Not thinking. If there was an autopsy, the toxicology results would indicate the presence of—what did he call it—a corticosteroid in his system. As if his stiff dick was not a dead giveaway. Dead. Why did I think dead giveaway? Jesus. Where to put the paraphernalia of erection? In the change pocket of his dinner jacket. Where it might be overlooked. The glasses and the half-empty bottle of red wine. Out of the bedroom and downstairs into the kitchen. Rinse the glasses. A swig of wine, then a cork in the bottle and into the fridge. For cooking. Back to the bedroom. Put his socks in his patent-leather shoes. Try pulling on the paisley shorts once again. Over that fucking thing. Which was what it was. A fucking thing. Why didn’t it go down? It was like penile rigor mortis.

  Success.

  At least a little dignity.

  Then the large protuberance made its way out of the fly in his shorts.

  What the hell. I couldn’t do any more.

  R.I.P., John Broderick.

  Now, be prepared: 911 brings EMS.

  D.C. police will pick up the 911 and dispatch a squad car.

  Daddy had taught me how to talk to cops. Look them in the eye. Don’t bullshit, but don’t tell them anything they do not need to know. Do not lose your nerve.

  I dialed 911.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EMS was discreet and professional. The paramedics noted the MedicAlert bracelet with its reference to an aortic valve prosthesis and the necessity of anticoagulants. They asked the name of the deceased individual—“individual” was their word—and how long he had been on the premises and if I had been aware of any signs of cardiac unrest prior to his becoming deceased and when had I noticed that he had in fact expired. I thought credit cards and driver’s licenses expire, not people, people die, but “die” was not a word that seemed to figure in the paramedics’ professional vocabulary. They made no mention of the residue of sexual activity on the rumpled bed or the still-erect penis sticking out of the shorts on the deceased individual. I was in a penis mode now, not dick, prick, cock, or johnson. I had considered changing the sheets, but another piece of advice from my father was never do anything that might invite suspicion. Humiliation is not an indictable offense. They asked how the deceased happened to be on the floor, and I told them, I hope in a flat uninflected voice, that I had been trying to put on his shorts. By this time, the squad car had arrived, and the paramedics told the senior uniformed officer that the cause of death appeared to be MI, that MI was consistent with the type of heart surgery indicated both by the deceased’s MedicAlert bracelet and by the scar on his sternum, that there was no evidence of foul play, that the name of the deceased was John Broderick, his ID was on the bedside table, and perhaps it would be best if they interviewed me in another room as they thought it might be unsettling for me to watch as they bagged the body. As I left the bedroom with the two policemen, I heard one paramedic whisper to the other that they would need a van with a sunroof if the deceased did not lose his wood. Humor on the EMS beat.

  Downstairs in the kitchen the officers declined the coffee I had made while waiting for the paramedics. The officer who did the talking looked familiar. His plastic name tag identified him as WILKES, and my inability to immediately recognize him seemed to irritate him, one more proof he did not need that white people thought all black men looked alike. “Two years ago,” he said finally. “Alex.”

  Of course. He was the officer who came to my house that night. Another weekend, another sexual misadventure. Two days on Nantucket with someone else’s husband. Name of Kris. As in Kringle, he would say to people he just met. That should have been clue enough. Kris as in Kringle told me he could not leave his wife and marry me because she had not signed a pre-nup, and a divorce would leave her with assets he was not willing to surrender. Getting off Nantucket in mean March weather meant chartering a fishing boat to Hyannis, and more seasickness than I care to remember. Then a rented car for the endless drive to Washington. Fury kept me awake. I should have known by then that someone else’s husband was always a bad idea. It was nearly 3 a.m. when I got home. I wanted nothing but a bath and some red wine, the more expensive the better, which in moments of duress I find soothes the fragile psyche no one seems to think I have. I was opening a bottle of Prieuré-Lichine when I saw the red light blinking on my answering machine.

  Four messages. First a hang-up. The second from Marty in New York. Martha Buick had been my roommate at Smith. When it was a straight school, she liked to say. Before it became Sappho State. Marty was maid of honor at my first wedding, matron of honor at my second. Hi, her message said. How many times? Marty had an avid interest in my sex life, enjoying it vicariously, I suspect, more than I did actively. She was married to Jimmy Sebastien, the marriage seemed to work, or at least they did not get in each other’s way, they had three kids, Jimmy put seed money into start-up companies and was very rich. While Marty ran a modeling agency she called VVV, the three Vs standing for Veni, vidi, vici—“I came, I saw, I conquered.” She was good at it. VVV, or Three V, as it was called in the fashion world, was the agency all the hot young models wanted to join. Marty’s home and office was a former warehouse in the West Village. Everything was white, gray, stone, minimal, the floors polished concrete, the spaces lit with photographer’s lights, photo blowups of her clients from shoots around the world covering the walls. On the top floor, under a huge skylight, there was a lap pool. Marty traveled to the spring and fall collections in Paris and Milan in Jimmy’s G-4, and she was guardian angel and foster mother to some of the weirder specimens of the female gender, many of whom were burned out, in rehab, or DOA by nineteen. She knew all about Budd Doheny’s quirks and collection of erotica and of course she would want to know every nuance of my thirty-six hours on Nantucket. She was also the only person to whom I had ever confided my speculation about the identities of my real parents, the speculation that Jack had confirmed in what he did not realize would be his final bequest.

  Then an automated message from a bank promising high interest and free travelers’ checks if I would open an account, and a chance to enter the draw for a Lexus sedan, with CD player, wraparound sound, alarm system, and a computerized navigator screen. The last message began with a desperate guttural voice. “This is Alex. Listen, I can’t meet the schedule, I need more time, you have to give it to me, you owe me that, you fuck . . .” Suddenly he began to cough, that smoker’s cough I still remember from the days when my father chain-smoked, two packs a day, maybe three, his face almost purple from the exertion, veins about to burst. Alex seemed to gasp for air, and I could hear a strangled exclamation, “Oh, shit,” and then a noise that sounded like the last water in the tub going down the drain.

  “Alex,” I said. “Alex,” as if I were talking to a real person, not a machine, and then there was a banging that cut the message short, the caller had hung up or fallen on his telephone; at any rate the connection was severed. “Sunday, ten forty-eight p.m.,” the neutral voice on my answering machine said, logging the time the call came in, and then, “End of final message.”

  I didn’t know any Alex.

  Like a good Samaritan I called 911. It took a while to convince the operator that I would like someone to listen to the message f
rom Alex. Officer Wilkes had responded to that call, too. He asked some questions. I recognized the tone. It was the one he would use on possible perps, somewhere between threatening and hostile. Was it my voice on the machine? No. It was computer-generated. Saying? Leave your name, number, and a brief message after the beep. It give your number? No. Let me hear it, he said. My truthfulness was not to be taken for granted. So we were acquaintances, after a fashion. “Did you ever find out . . .”

  Wilkes nodded. “Alex Dimanche. Dimanche is French for Sunday, they tell me, although I bet you know that already, I bet you speak it, French.” He made it sound like an accusation. “Small-time gambler. Into his shy for twenty-seven K. Couldn’t make the vig. Afraid his ankles were going to get broke. Which is what almost happened. The muscle came to rough him up, but he was dead by his telephone. They steal everything they can carry, then being good citizens they call 911, tell ’em where there’s a body going rank. Reason he called you was he transposed your number with his shy’s.”

  “I would have appreciated knowing.”

  “Why?”

  More advice from my father: Never argue with a hostile cop unless he’s on the stand under oath. Then eat him alive.

  “Your friend Broderick, first name John, he live here?” Wilkes asked. I said no. “In D.C.?” I shook my head. “Where’s he staying then?” I think the Madison, I said. “You might let them know they have a room free,” Wilkes said. “You wouldn’t have a Q-tip, would you?”

  I found a box in a drawer on the serving island and handed it to him. He cleaned his ears vigorously as I watched, closely examining the wax he had dislodged, then arched the Q-tip toward a wastebasket. It missed. He made no effort to pick it up, just stared silently at me. Resentment seemed to leak from him, like sweat. Finally I retrieved the Q-tip from the kitchen floor and deposited it in the garbage pail under the sink.

  The paramedics were bringing the body bag downstairs. They strapped it on a gurney and pushed the gurney into the van.

  Officer Wilkes brushed by me without a word, followed by his partner, who had not spoken the entire time he was in the house. Wilkes opened the passenger door on the squad car, and then surveyed me over its roof. “You call the Madison,” he said after a moment, pointing a finger at me. He made it seem like a warning. “Hear?”

  I closed the door before the EMS van pulled out of the driveway.

  It was not yet six-thirty.

  I did not call the Madison.

  Nor did I call Marty Buick.

  I was not up to any more explanations.

  The obituary actually did not appear until Tuesday, and then in The New York Times, not The Washington Post. The cause of death was a heart attack, and the Times said he had died at my house. A reporter in the Times’s Washington bureau had called to ask how long I had known Mr. Broderick, and I said he was a friend of my mother’s, which seemed to satisfy him, and was true, after a fashion; it just wasn’t the mother with Alzheimer’s across the Potomac in Virginia. The obit was extensive, with an automatic “He was a good friend and a graceful, witty man” quote from former President Finn, but Jack seemed to merit the space allowance only as a lesser member of his own family. He was identified as Hugh Broderick’s son, Augustine Broderick’s brother, and the ex-husband of his first wife, the murdered radical attorney Leah Kaye. His two books, many screenplays, and discovery of the long-lost Blue Tyler were not mentioned until the penultimate paragraph, after the paragraph saying he was a much sought-after extra man in New York, Los Angeles, and various venues around the world favored by the gilded classes.

  The Times said funeral arrangements were pending.

  The phone began ringing early that morning.

  Condolences first from Margaret and Duncan Dudley.

  Followed immediately by Marty Buick. Marty assumed the worst, or considering her natural train of thought, the best. She said it reminded her of John Garfield and Spencer Tracy. Both of whom, she felt impelled to explain, died in the saddle. I replied quite sharply that “in the saddle” was an unpleasant figure of speech, and in any case it was inaccurate. Marty never gave up a position easily. Well, they were both someplace they should not have been. In beds not their own. And why hadn’t I called in the first place? I thought I was your best friend.

  I did not argue. Nor did I mention the prostaglandin E-1.

  His death did not make the Post until Wednesday. Washington is a company town, and the Post less a newspaper than the government’s trade paper, and in its scheme of things a G-12 assistant undersecretary in the Department of Agriculture gets billing over a Hollywood screen-writer. For the self-absorbed of Georgetown and Cleveland Park, Hollywood seems to exist only to give them someplace they think they can look down on, since it would never occur to them that the people who live in what they insist on calling “out there” are richer, smarter, meaner, and tougher than they are. It was only when a Post editor remembered Jack’s name on the guest list at the president’s annual dinner for the Supreme Court that his death was deemed worthy of the Style section. I was screening my calls by this point, and left the Style writer’s message on my answering machine. The Post is across the street from the Madison, where out-of-town guests at White House events regularly stay, but no reporter bothered to check the concierge to see if the hotel had any information about the late Mr. Broderick. Grudgingly, the Post writer picked the bones of the Times obit, sneering at several movie stinkers Jack had written and digging up unsubstantiated stories (“Rumors persist . . . sources maintain . . .”) about sex and money in the Broderick family.

  That evening I moderated a PBS panel in Baltimore on whether civil redress after acquittal in a criminal court constituted double jeopardy. I was so detached from the proceedings that I scarcely noticed when two of the panelists nearly came to blows, and a third suggested that the fourth was an “asshole,” an invigorating if unintentional departure from the deadening civility so characteristic of PBS. Afterwards the producer complained that I had so lost control of the panel that he would have to edit the tape rigorously before it was fit for broadcast. I just nodded and headed for my car. When I got home, there was a message on my machine saying simply, “This is Wilkes,” and then ten or fifteen seconds of silence before he hung up. And a second message from the writer who did the Post’s “Reliable Sources” gossip column, demanding and self-important, he was on deadline and needed me to confirm new information about the circumstances of John Broderick’s death.

  Circumstances unspecified.

  I called Marty and asked if I could come up and lay low with her for a few days until the story blew over.

  It was at Marty’s that I met Carlyle.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Carlyle. No last name. Like Madonna. Named after the hotel.

  “Not the one in Miami Beach. Deco is for scuzzes. The one in New York. I tell people it’s where I popped my cherry is how I picked it.” This was in her Rolling Stone interview. “It wasn’t. Shit, I lost it on the hood of Kile Purdy’s Crown Vic when I was like thirteen. Not with Kile. He was puking in the back seat. With Waylon Madden. Who was wearing a dirty T-shirt that said NEVER TAKE A SIX-PACK TO A JOB INTERVIEW. Fun-nee. The only thing Waylon knew about a job was that he never had one. The hood burned my buns, it was so hot. My buns were the only thing that got hot, you want the truth. Waylon’s was about the size of a toothpick. I thought they all looked like that. How was I to know? Him and Kile cracked up that Crown Vic two months later. Skidded into a Burlington Northern grain train at the Albion crossing. Toast. He was always racing trains, Kile. He thought he was Dale Fucking Earnhardt, and look at what happened to that fucker at the Daytona Five. There were twenty-two empty cans of Midlandia Lager in what was left of the Crown Vic. Eleven each. Except that asshole Kile was such a hog I bet he had a couple more than Waylon. I was so pissed. I was supposed to go with them, but I got my period, and Waylon said he didn’t want someone riding the cotton pony tagging along. Fuck him, he’s dead, I’m not. I just tho
ught Carlyle sounded cool. I mean, I wasn’t going to call myself fucking Marriott, was I? Days Inn?”

  Her real name was Alice Faith Todt.

  She had been on the cover of Newsweek when she was fifteen. The slash line was LOST YOUTH: TOO OLD TOO SOON. Carlyle hadn’t seen it that way. “What’s so great about being a kid anyway?” she had told Newsweek. “Chemistry tests? Being a pom-pom girl? Going to the prom? Getting knocked up? Getting totaled in Kile Purdy’s Crown Vic?” She was the official face of the Jacquot cosmetic empire, with her own product line. Marty had negotiated a Jacquot deal paying her six million dollars a year, escalating by the end of the contract to nine, plus a hundred thousand dollars a day for public appearances. Her contracts stipulated that she would only travel by private jet. She had been on seventy-seven magazine covers around the world, forty-one of them shot by her favorite photographer, Alex Quintero, who also directed her Jacquot commercials, which he had parlayed into a Hollywood film contract, two one-man photography shows at the Gagosian Gallery, and induction into the Fashion Hall of Fame. On the runway in Paris and Milan, she earned fifty-eight thousand dollars a show, and she was booked three years in advance. Her website—Yo! Carlyle—was the Internet site most visited by men and women under twenty-five. The site had a shop selling Carlyle postcards, Carlyle beauty products, and Carlyle exercise tapes, a bookshelf selling Carlyle’s fashion tips, a message board, a fan focus where each month one of Marty’s staffers answered five letters in her name: “Yo! Carlyle: Please tell me what I’m supposed to do with my cellulite. I’m 19 years old and maybe just a little overweight. Thank you—Tarawa.” And the answer: “Yo, Tarawa: Carlyle’s Action Cream is just the ticket for those fat thighs. Use it, love it, get a life—Carlyle.”