Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  If the CHP managed to spot Clare, and if they managed to spot an ugly green Buick Riviera behind her, they would stop the Buick and delay it as long as they dared. They’d run it for outstanding warrants. They would hope for brake lights or mufflers or anything else malfunctioning.

  “Dandy,” I said.

  “That’s the best they can do. Of course, if they’re a couple of desperados, they’ll have them. And even if they aren’t, knowing somebody’s on to them, those guys won’t try to speed up to catch Mary Clare after they’re pulled over. So figure she’ll beat them here by some. I’ll put her car in the third bay, in place of my roadster.”

  I said, “Then there’s nothing for us to do but wait.” I finished my cappuccino and licked the sugary foam off my upper lip. “I guess I’ll go out and get my résumé copied. Need anything downtown?”

  “What if she calls?”

  “You’ll be here,” I said. I simply couldn’t imagine the Buick Twins curbing Mary Clare and spiriting her away.

  Jake said, “You know, you and I are a lot alike, but sometimes, brother, you’re more like Amanda.”

  “What does that mean?” I said, sure it was not a compliment.

  “Never mind; just don’t go all the way to the Reproduction Clinic for God’s sake.”

  “Just downtown, Jake. Trust me, nothing’s going to happen while I’m gone.”

  *****

  Something did happen, though. I walked into the den, which was, in reality, Jake’s home office, and he was cleaning a pump action shotgun.

  “The fuck?”

  “Protection,” he said.

  “From geese and pheasants?”

  “Sorry, I know how one of these must look to you, but it’s what I have. And if I also have a vivid imagination, pardon me all to hell. In my mind I see Mary Clare tooling down the highway, back towards the Bay Area, and that’s all these guys know until they see the flashing lights in their rear view mirror and they know they’ve been made and that Mary Clare is driving away from them at ten miles an hour over the speed limit while the cops verify they are spotless citizens without outstanding warrants or broken taillights.”

  “So, when they drive up, you’re going to blow them away. What’s that loaded with?” I could not disguise my distaste for shotguns.

  He said, “I thought about why they’re after her. Correct me if I’m wrong: either they’re just providing Meany with intelligence—what she’s doing, where she’s going—or, he’s told them to kidnap her and bundle her off to someplace no one’s likely to look—Costa Rica, the Cayman Islands—where he can persuade her to start life over; or, he plans to kill her, that’s scenario three, and that’s why the gun, goddamit.”

  “Kill her? Kill her why?”

  Jake said, “Why did Othello kill Desdemona?”

  “Jake, you’re going paranoid on me. We don’t even know if they’re the same two as last night. Maybe there’s four of them, working in relays. Let’s call the cops.”

  “Didn’t I just do that?”

  “I mean the local cops.”

  He said, “You have to assume that they’re as clean locally as they are somewhere between Placerville and Sacramento.”

  I said, “I’ll call Rutledge, he’ll understand.”

  “Rutledge is a La Morinda cop, this is Moraga.”

  “Maybe he can get to Meany, talk some sense into him.”

  He said, “Moose Meany, his high school chum, the guy who made him a star running back?”

  “Meanwhile, put the shotgun away.”

  “Robert, all I intend to do is let anybody who threatens us know that I’ll bring this to a conclusion they won’t like.”

  “Oh Jake, we might not like it either.”

  He rubbed the gun with a polishing cloth from muzzle to recoil pad, closed his cleaning kit and leaned it, beautiful and lethal, against his desk.

  I said, “If you meant, when you said I was like Amanda, that I was one-minded, you beat me by a mile, brother.”

  two

  In the kitchen I opened the phone book and called the La Morinda police, asking for Sergeant Rutledge. The dispatcher wanted to know what I wanted him for. “It has to do with that bombing on Bobwhite Court,” I said, assuming that was still a hot topic at the La Morinda Police Department. Apparently not. The dispatcher wouldn’t track down Sergeant Rutledge for me. She took a message. I depressed the lever and dug out my wallet, to find the sergeant’s card and dial his direct line.

  Nada.

  “Kids off swimming?” I asked Jake. He moved the shotgun from the kitchen to the wall by the bay window. I couldn’t stop my brain from lopping off butt and barrel to make it the gun I briefly owned in Nevada.

  He said, “I sent them to spend the night with Bienvenida.”

  “Good idea. —Amanda?”

  “Committee meeting—Tissue Committee. It’s a long one, but she’ll no doubt be home before this is over.” As he was speaking he was eyeballing gin into two Old Fashioned glasses, which seemed like an excellent idea.

  When I tasted it I said, “Tastes like you added a twist.”

  He said, “I squirted the glass with lemon oil.”

  “No kidding; how’d you do that?”

  “You have this little aerosol can like Binaca, only it’s just lemon oil.” He opened the liquor cabinet and showed it to me. “—Okay, Mr. Planner, have you come up with a plan yet?”

  I said, “Indeed, I have come up with a plan.”

  *****

  The plan required a drivable car the Buick Twins hadn’t seen yet, namely, the Mercedes. There was a slight hitch. On a book shelf in the spare room sat one of its two carburetors, with a rebuild kit alongside.

  The Mercedes was Jake’s baby. He’d painted it and repainted it, polished everything, shown it several times at Concours d’Elegance and won two ribbons, although never a best in class—yet. He was as compulsive about the things the judges couldn’t see, like the condition of carburetor floats, as the exterior. He’d found a lug nut here, a tachometer there, everything about the car was the best he could make it.

  Now we were sitting at the kitchen table, I with the instructions and Jake with the rebuild kit, putting the hundred and one pieces together to make a functioning carburetor. It was an ideal time to talk about things you might not want to look the other guy in the eye while saying.

  “The day you and Mary Clare chatted in San Francisco,” I started off, “did she want you to carry a message to me?”

  “How perceptive of you. Yes, she wanted me to give you the kiss-off for her. Naturally, I refused.”

  “Why?”

  “—I screw this all the way in and back off how many revolutions?”

  I said, “One and a half. —Tell me why.”

  “She said she was no good for you.”

  “She give a reason?”

  “Is she no good for you?” The ceiling lamp had a built-in reel, and Jake pulled it down, closer to his work. He looked like a little old watch maker.

  “I said, “She’s everything my heart could long for.”

  Jake said, “Then why should I repeat a bunch of bilge?”

  “She never told me how she met Meany—was that part of it?”

  He said, “She tell you about the boyfriend, the one from Boston she followed out here?”

  “Sandro?”

  “Then you know why Meany rescued her.”

  “But how did they meet?”

  “It was at a political fundraiser. She needs to tell you the rest.”

  “She didn’t look like his sainted mother, or an old girlfriend?”

  Jake said, “Nope. —I’ve got the pins in the float swivel, how do I make the initial adjustment?”

  “Jake.”

  “She looked like she might be ready to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge—which is what she had in mind. And that’s all I’m saying on that subject.”

  “But aren’t we friends?” I whined.

  “I’m her friend, too, jo
cko.”

  *****

  The Bay Area was having the equivalent of Santa Ana winds that afternoon when Mary Clare pulled into the driveway. It was not a record-setting day, it was not even as hot as June 6, when she borrowed my bathtub. It was too hot to have her top up, which she did, hoping, I assume, for anonymity.

  I was upstairs, standing at the bay window. Jake was below, installing the rebuilt carburetor alongside its twin. When I stomped on the floor three times (meaning ‘hey, she’s here, the big, ugly Buick is not in sight’) he opened the garage door next to the Mercedes’ bay and waved her in.

  Mary Clare was giving Jake a hug and a kiss when I got downstairs, he holding his dirty hands away from her. Then she turned and flung herself at me with vigor.

  “You lost them,” I said.

  “I took the Green Valley Cutoff,” she said, beaming proudly.

  Jake and I exchanged looks.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  What’s wrong was, the Green Valley Cutoff, which took fifteen minutes off the driving time between the East Bay and Sacramento, was a two lane highway that ran through acres and acres of wetlands. There are a couple of duck hunting clubs at the Bay end of the road, and a couple of houses at the other. On a busy day you might see more egrets fishing than cars the half hour you were on the Green Valley Cutoff. If a bad guy wanted to overtake you and run you off the road, there was no better place between Placerville and Moraga.

  “Oh it’s nothing,” Jake said. “It just gets pretty windy along there, been known to blow over big rigs at its worst.”

  “It was windy, but not enough to slow me down.”

  “Good,” I said, hiding my sense of relief.

  “If those guys are after me, what am I going to do?” she asked.

  Jake said, “While you were coming back, Robert concocted a plan.”

  My plan—shit, I wish to God I hadn’t thought of it—was for me to wait until nightfall and drive the Triumph, leading the Buick duo on a wild goose chase, while Jake drove Clare to South Lake Tahoe in the Mercedes. After I lost the Buick I would catch up with them. In the morning she’d be on her way again, minus the tail.

  “They’ve never seen the Mercedes, have they,” Clare said, buying into the plan.

  “Even Amanda’s forgotten what it looks like,” Jake replied.

  There were hitches in my plan from the start. Jake, getting the two carburetors synchronized in a closed garage bay, almost asphyxiated himself. When he came upstairs he was bleary-eyed and said, “Quick, I need oxygen.”

  I said, “How about some gin instead?”

  “Oh if you insist.” His only regret was that, if we were to keep the Mercedes hidden until I’d led off the Buick duo, he couldn’t give it a test drive.

  Then Amanda came home from the Tissue Committee meeting. She confronted a scene in such emotional contrast to hours of reviewing medical records, lab reports and oral presentations by the pathologist and chief of surgery that she was initially charmed by it. It was as if she’d come in to form the fourth in a joint holiday of two couples. We were a little giddy, waiting for the time to put my plan in motion. Jake was cooking scrambled eggs and sausage for four, we were drinking gin, we were three musketeers and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be the fourth.

  Too much fun and too much devil-may-care, getting ready to foil these thugs or operatives, Jake and I upbeat, Mary Clare running on the kind of energy a teenager produces when two rivals are vying for her affections.

  Amanda at first refused a drink, but after a couple of bites of egg got up and poured herself a glass of Chablis. Her anger at not being in control of the situation showed in jerky motions and in avoiding any of our eyes.

  I looked at Jake and the look he gave me in return said that for once he would not succumb to his wife’s Southern belle tyranny.

  She heard my plan and couldn’t buy it. She couldn’t accept the major premise, that Meany had hired thugs or private detectives, even, to shadow Mary Clare. And, with her East Texas Protestant upbringing, where morality seemed mostly to do with seemliness, she couldn’t quite forgive me for mixing up her husband with a kept woman. And—getting down to the nitty-gritty—she couldn’t forgive Mary Clare the sin of having used sex to attain security. It was as if she had never used her beauty to influence men while Mary Clare had.

  So if there was the slightest risk to Jake from getting Mary Clare out of town, mine was a flawed plan. It was flawed, all right, but it wasn’t because Mary Clare was morally wanting. Its flaw was assuming that keeping a date in Waltham, Massachusetts, was important enough to load a shotgun, hoping to ward off a couple of pros.

  three

  It isn’t pretty to watch a woman who’s used to being in control lose it. Amanda switched from wine to brandy after eating a few more bites of eggs and toast. For a couple of minutes she said nothing and wouldn’t look at us, which made we three coconspirators feel both antsy and embarrassed. She wore a look of threatened reprisal, a look that said it would serve Jake right if she drove off again and called one of the doctors who were always trying to get her into dark corners at parties, ask him to meet her to discuss ominous events shaping up at home.

  When she finally did address us I tried not to listen at first. But then she was too shrill to shut out.

  “What I don’t understand,” she was saying, “is why you’re all such sheep. If this Meany person is trying to bust things up here, he’s certainly doing a good job of it. I’d just ignore him. And if I found out some hired hooligans were following me, I’d call the police in a minute.”

  Jake measured her a long moment before he spoke. “Problem is, Amanda, we’ve called the police—you honestly think I wouldn’t? There’s nothing to pin on the men who followed Clare this morning, so, until Meany does what he’s planning to do, it’s futile. We know those two men didn’t just happen to be on the same highway, going the same direction as Mary Clare, turning around at the same place. But they’re as anonymous as the car they’re driving, and there’s no law against driving Buicks.”

  Amanda said, “Why on earth would he want to do this? It seems so childish.”

  Jake said, “People do childish things when they lose control. I would guess he’s still clinging to the idea that Mary Clare’s very existence depends on his rescuing her. Well, he did that, he needs to move on, but he won’t. He won’t let go, so Robert’s a threat—to Mary Clare and to Meany’s self esteem.”

  Amanda turned to Clare and said, “How does it feel to be the center of all this attention?”

  Clare shot her a look that said, ‘Sorry to steal the spotlight, Amanda.’ I prayed she wouldn’t say it aloud.

  Amanda said, when Clare didn’t answer, “I assume you know how risky this helping you is for everyone else.”

  “Amanda,” Jake said.

  Amanda said, her voice rising, “I’m talking about the shotgun I saw propped up in the living room.”

  Mary Clare looked over at Jake.

  “For the one in a million chance they might get violent.”

  Mary Clare looked at me, asking me to come up with the simple-pretty this standoff demanded.

  I looked away.

  She said, “Robert?”

  I shrugged. “I’m the wrong person to ask. I wouldn’t grab a shotgun in this circumstance, but that’s me.”

  “The Vikings,” Mary Clare said, “believed it was bad luck to leave an edged weapon on your doorstep.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I know about that. Someday I’ll tell you about my personal experience with deadly weapons.”

  Amanda said, “We’ve watched death on television for years now, our boys and Vietnamese villagers and we’re talking about it as if it’s an abstraction. This is America in the Seventies, not the Old West.”

  She got up and walked away.

  Jake said, “Tomorrow this will all be over and we’ll think this conversation silly. Unless they come busting in here with guns blazing nothing’s going to happen, t
he shotgun will go back to gathering dust.”

  There was a hitch when we descended to the garage. Amanda saw the shotgun in Jake’s hand and said, “I thought that was to protect our home. You’re not taking that with you? Tell me you aren’t!”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t hear of it.”

  Jake said, “I sense violence; I can feel it.”

  “Then don’t go; call the police, make them understand about Meany.”

  Jake said, “We’ve been through all that.”

  Amanda turned first to Mary Clare and then to me. “You’ve got nothing to lose, letting him jeopardize himself, but he’s got nothing to gain. Can’t you see that?”

  Mary Clare said, “I have to go, whether Jake takes a shotgun or not. I can’t choose for him, because I don’t know what I’d do in his shoes.”

  I said, “You’ll look back on this someday, Amanda, and call it a lark.”

  “Letting Jake die for you is a lark?”

  Jake said, “Why this sudden concern? It’s not like you’re sending your best friend off to battle.”

  “No,” she said, starting to cry, “we never got to be best friends, did we. I guess I just got my mind set on it happening someday, I don’t know why.” She turned to me—or, rather, turned on me. “What if those men don’t follow you at all? What if they wait till you’re gone and break in here?”

  “Because they won’t,” Jake said.

  “Well,” she said, “at least we have one bond left between us. You’re willing to jeopardize my welfare as cavalierly as your own.”

  Jake said, “I’ll call you when we get to Tahoe and I’ll call again when I’m heading back.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “I’m not a fool, I won’t be here.”

  four

  Jake stashed the shotgun behind the seat of the Mercedes while I tied on Mary Clare’s scarf and climbed into the Triumph, throwing a flight bag in the passenger seat. When I looked up Mary Clare blew me a kiss and smiled an “I’ll be seeing you” smile. Jake came up to my driver’s side window. I said, “Lights out. Soon as I clear the door, close it behind me.” He nodded, I hit the ignition switch; the engine obliged. He went to the wall switch and killed the lights while I found reverse. I did not look up from the rear view mirror again as I backed out to the street and swung the car’s tail to the right. I ground the gears slightly going from reverse to first.