“Not exactly.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I guess- the short answer is that I was still in love with her. Still am in the parts of me that don’t remember what happened when I wake up in the morning. Only now it’s all messed up. I got involved with a married French woman.”
“You – with a married woman? Jesus Christ, I expect your head to start spinning and you to start vomiting green pea soup. Were you possessed by the devil?”
“No. It’s a long story. I doubt you’d understand even if I gave you the sordid details. But I just found out that I probably wrecked her marriage and maybe caused her to lose contact with her son. I have done a royal job of fucking my life up and now the damage is spreading.”
He leaned forward and put his hand over mine which I’d rested on the coffee table. I looked down and noticed he still had at least a semblance of an erection.
“You’re not going to try to put the moves on me, are you? A lot of things have changed, but I really haven’t changed that much.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I was just trying to lend a little moral support. As far as fucking up a life, you’re not even in the running. I have been fired from six major movie projects in the last seven years. Usually for showing up drunk, or high, or bombed out of my mind. I have judgments against me – the last time I bothered to add that up – of about $20 million. I figure if I keep working I might pay them off sometime in the 22nd century.
“I have had sexual relations – to the best of my reckoning and I know I’m a few hundred off – with at least 1000 women. Before the shootout, I had sex with 22 women and thought I was hot shit. I have been treated for a couple dozen strains of sexual illnesses. Fortunately no HIV. I have been admitted for treatment – involuntarily twice – for alcohol and drug abuse six times.
“I have been married three times. The longest lasted eight months. I have two children. Two daughters. I saw the oldest one the last time three years ago. I’ll never see her again. Momma is an actress from a very wealthy family. When it got to court, her attorneys cut me to pieces. A drunk. Drug abuser. Unable to hold a job, any job. Violent. Bar fights, a couple of drunk and disorderly arrests when I got so uncontrollable that the local cops had to arrest me. A killer. They used the gunfight to damn me as too violent to be allowed around children.
“So that’s my life. Oh, forgot to mention, I’ve been named as the other party in three fairly high profile divorces. Just never could learn to keep it in my pants.”
“Good to know I’m not the only screw-up out there.”
He got up and came back with a magnum of champagne and two water glasses. He poured healthy slugs in both and handed me one.
“Free. Provided by the hotel. Another perk of fame. I’m supposed to get pictures taken with the management they can put up in the lobby. More advertising for them. So everybody wins.”
It was good. I sipped. Probably champagne wasn’t the best thing to mix with Tequila and a few other drinks, but fortunately, I’d always had a cast-iron gut when it came to booze. And complete immunity to hangovers. I had never been able to figure that out. No matter how much I drank. I might pass out, but I always woke up fresh and head clear. Probably when God gives you a life full of shit, he feels compelled to throw in a few nice things.
“I’m sorry, Richard. I had no idea.”
“Don’t feel too sorry for me. I did it all myself. And I’ve been places and done things and seen things I never would have seen if not for the Gunfight.”
Then he mentioned the name of a twenty-something Part-Indian (subcontinent) and part French actress I’d seen in a few movies and more than a few polls of the 10 most beautiful women in the world. She had it all, the boobs, ass, face, eyes, lips, but it was more than that. She was like a younger, more exotic Sophia Loren.
“I fucked her. In every hole. For three days.”
“That’s hard to believe. And if it’s true I really do hate you.”
‘I was trying to hide from two different sets of attorneys a few years ago. I wound up in a small California town right on the Oregon border – Yreka. I was in some halfway decent motel with a pool. It was mid-summer and I was doing some laps when this woman came and slipped into the pool. I tried not to look for a few minutes, but Hell! Women usually like it when I look. I knew I’d seen her before, just wasn’t sure where.
“She actually came to me and asked me if I was that gunfighter guy from the movies. That broke the ice and we started talking. Long story short, she was hiding from her own set of attorneys and a guy she was married to but getting ready to dump. We went out from a meal, had drinks and wound up fucking away all our frustrations in her place and mine for the next three days.
“Then she called her agent, flew back to LA and that was the last time I ever saw her, in the flesh. As far as I know, she’s never told a soul about that three days. Neither have I. So now you’re in a privileged minority”
“Why do I not feel privileged?”
“It could have happened if I hadn’t been famous. But, that’s another reason why you take the bad with the good. The good can be pretty damned overwhelming.”
We both drank silently for a few moments and I tried not to listen to the sounds coming from the bedroom. Evidently they were having a good time without Richard.
He took another sip, swirling the golden liquid in the glass and then looked at me.
“You know why we really clicked, don’t you?”
“You always had a thing for my body?”
“Despite the fact that I can’t get this damned erection to go down – it’s the Viagra – that’s not it. It’s because we’re the same type of people.”
I just nodded. I already knew that. I always had. I had been in the office only a couple of years, but I’d already been bitten by the bug and I spent more time in the office and in the field than I should have, because I knew instinctively that I was taking time away from Debbie and the kids. But it was my life, it was what I did, every day counted and made a difference in someone’s life. I told myself there would always be time to make it up to Debbie and the kids.
I wasn’t the best attorney in the office, but I worked harder than anybody else. And over the years I realized that Richard was the same type of player. He wasn’t as good a writer as Carl Cameron. But I’d never met anybody who was. Harry Bass was the other more or less regular police reporter and he was just – different. He had earned the nickname of the Love Bug in past years because there were stories about his snake-bit love life that had to be heard to be believed, and they were hard to believe even then. But Harry had a way of ending up with stories, some of which could have been novels in their own right, that nobody could have seen coming. Nobody could compete with that.
But Richard Anderson worked his ass off every day and on his days off as well. He didn’t have a personal life, but he managed to squeeze in enough female companionship to keep him in good spirits most of the time.
We sat drinking silently. The noises from the bedroom were growing louder and I began hear cries of “Dickiiiieee” rise again. He looked over his shoulder and sighed, “Shit, the natives are growing restless, Maitland. I’ve always made it a policy to never let a hot pussy go to waste, and I don’t want to let this (pointing to his visible evidence lust poking out from his robe) go to waste. Waste not, want not.”
“It’s a rough life, but –“
“I know,” he said shaking his head and reading my mind, “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”
We both sat quietly. It was time for me to go. I probably wouldn’t see him again. He’d go back to his life and me to mine. There was a sadness there. Maybe it was just because he reminded me of a much better time in my life.
“There are times, Bill, when I think about what it would have been like if I’d rode with Suzanne a different day. Or those assholes had chosen a different day to commit suicide.”
He looked into the distance of years past.
&n
bsp; “It would have been a routine day. I’d have gotten a decent story and had a chance to flirt with Suzanne and I know – I just know – I would have made a run at her. I think I would have had her. Not that day. She wasn’t that kind of woman. But she liked me. You can tell when a woman is interested, even if she shouldn’t be. I probably would have had her sometime in the next six months. And she’d have been guilty about it and broke it off in a few weeks or months and we’d have smiled at each other anytime we ran into each other over the years.
“She’d be alive today, probably, and her husband. And I’d be working here or maybe in Atlanta or Miami, who knows Chicago or LA. I think I would have found my ticket out of here, the story that would get people looking at me. I might not be Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite, but I’d be a good reporter wherever I landed.”
He looked down at his hands, which he held out in front of him as if he’d never seen them before.
“When I got out of the hospital and got the offers for the first books and went to LA and New York and did the talk show circuit, I loved being the center of attention. I loved the money. You wouldn’t believe how much they threw at me. And the women. It took me a long time to see past the glitz and the fancy restaurants and the chances to write opinion pieces and the chance to sleep in in $500 a night suites in Manhattan.
“All that came to me because I was a hero. Because I got pissed about a woman I knew being shot to death and I went out and killed four bad guys to make them pay. But, being a hero is not an easy gig. I could stand around as the guest of billionaires and cut ribbons at supermarket openings and do guest shots on television series and movies.
“But, when I went for jobs at newspapers, nobody really wanted me. Yeah, they’d give me a shot, but I didn’t fit in because women who were supposed to be mentoring me were more interested in fucking. The guys were jealous and the higher-ups never thought I could be a working journalist after being spoiled with the celebrity lifestyle.
“I wrote two books, by myself. They were okay. But, people either expected them to be illiterate celebrity trash, or to be great literature. And I’m not a great writer. Not even really very good. Cameron could have made it. But I just didn’t have it in me. I can write newspaper stories, not much else.
“I went out for parts in movies where I didn’t have to shoot anybody. I took acting lessons. I’m not an actor. I could get parts based on my name, but after the first or second time, casting people didn’t call me back for real acting jobs.”
He stood up.
“The truth is, I’m nothing but a hero. Probably never will be. And you can’t go back.”
He looked around the hotel room and he looked like he wanted to cry.
“When you come right down to it, Bill, strange as it sounds, I miss this life. This life, here. Who would have thought?”
He reached out and I stood, taking his hand.
“I would tell you not to let it suck you in, Bill. You’ve got a taste of it and it’s growing. It will be easy to let it pull you in, especially if you win more high profile cases as the Angel of Death. They’ll come to you with movie and television series offers. I don’t know that women will be any temptation considering that walking wet dream you’re seeing now. But there will be money and women and every lure they can dream up to tempt you into that life.
“I would tell you not to forget who and what you are, but I don’t need to. You’re different from me. You love what you do. You ARE what you do. When I go back, I’m going to think about you from time to time. Doing your thing, being a prosecutor, a father, probably a husband again because you’re a marrying man. I’m going to envy you, Bill.”
“If you ever need anything, Richard, legal advice or a place to hide out, you know where to find me.”
He walked me to the door and as I stepped out into the silent hallway, he smiled at me.
“You know I’m going to forget all that noble shit as soon as I open that bedroom door and see all that naked female flesh, don’t you?”
“Enjoy, Richard. I’ll remember for you.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN – SOME DATES YOU CAN’T FORGET
November 13, 2005
Saturday Morning, 12:45 A.M.
After I walked out of Anderson’s room at the Omni, I took a deep breath. Winter doesn’t get to Jacksonville usually until January, really February although there had been rare snows as early as December. Still, the air was cold as I breathed it in. I felt the cold even through the lined coat I’d thrown on before picking up Myra to take her to the Riverwalk.
I felt the cold more now than I had this time last year. I think fat really does act as an insulator. Fifty pounds ago I could have walked around in this area without the chill biting as deeply as it did. And it bit as the wind blew off the river.
I could have gone home. I had decided I didn’t want to partake of Anderson’s hospitality. There might come a time when I might, but honestly, Myra had drained me. It was hard to even think about another erection right now. And I could have gone back to Myra’s. We had cuddled on other nights. We were good together without the lubricant of sex, although I understood why she didn’t want to rely on my will power.
But, there was that phone call. I had made the right decision not to say anything directly to her. We were still early in our relationship as lovers, sexual partners. I didn’t know what the rules in this game were. Actually, I’d never played this game before.
Oh, there had been times back in college when I’d dated more than one girl at the same time. And I’m pretty sure they were dating others. That had been the high water mark of my sexual exploits. But even if I had sex with them, it was so tentative. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, committed. We just people that went out together and sometimes wound up naked.
With Myra…I was in Limbo. It wasn’t just two people getting naked together and having sex. I wasn’t in love with her. I was certain she wasn’t in love with me. But there were feelings. Cassandra, in the manner of women from time immemorial, had intuited something. And she hadn’t been completely wrong.
But there were things going on under the surface that I couldn’t get clear in my head. Granted, I’d found out the cool and level headed Myra Martinez was really even more screwed up than me, seriously more screwed up.
But as much as I enjoyed her, as much as I liked her, as much as I’d lusted and fantasized about her in a way I’d never felt about another woman, I didn’t feel about her the way I still felt about Debbie and Aline.
So should it have bothered me to know she was seeing other men? Be honest. She was fucking other men. Because one thing I now knew that despite her cool reserve, she was a very voracious sexual animal. If she was dating a man for any length of time, she was fucking him.
And so what? I kept coming back to that. I could be with other women. I thought I would be if I got a call from ????” or ????” one night when Myra was unavailable. And I’d take what they offered without feeling guilty about Myra. So why shouldn’t she be free to do exactly the same thing- especially when men were a thousand times more likely to want her than throngs of women were likely to lust after my body.
Logically, there was no reason to look at it with any concern. But since when did logic have anything to do with feelings? I knew in my gut that it bothered me. And I knew that I didn’t want to sleep next to her, with her hot, yielding body draped against mine. It wasn’t that I knew I couldn’t have her the way I wanted. I just didn’t feel comfortable there tonight. And I knew that my Thanksgiving invitation would come back to bite me.
Here and now, tonight, there was nothing I could do about it but put it out of my mind.
But there was still something going on in my head.…I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was keyed up. Nervous. This had been a LOOONG day and a lot of things had happened. I’d learned of the existence of David Bludwurth, like some prehistoric monster alligator looming out of the mists. It threw all my plans for the Sutton trial into the air.
&nbs
p; And I had learned that Myra was still the conundrum she’d always been, a mystery with secrets that I was only now beginning to grasp.
I knew there were still Mexican drug lords out there that did not want the trial of Mendoza to come to me, and if it did, I had no idea what would happen or IF I could protect my wife and children from their wrath. And even knowing that I had powerful allies, didn’t relieve the fear that lurked in the dark corners of my mind.
And like a phantom drifting in the shadows, I had a zealous, intelligent federal prosecutor on the scent of the secret that had given me a little bit of protection from the Mexicans. And Prentice might be the most dangerous, more dangerous than the Mexicans, or Bludwurth.
All of those things would explain the unease that gripped me, but somehow I knew that wasn’t it. I found myself crossing Water Street and headed back toward The Landing. My wristwatch under a streetlight showed it was nearly 1 a.m. There were still partiers, people making their ways to their cars, but it was more quiet, more alone. I breathed in the night air and it felt good.
I was back at the Landing now. There were still crowds of diehard partyers and a few restaurants like Hooters and Cinco de Mayo and Fionn MacCool's Irish Restaurant & Pub still rocked as the owners attempted to separate partyers from as much of their money as possible.
As I watched the entrance of MacCool’s, a group of about ten men and women made their way out the door. There was a stroller and one young man in his 20s carried a toddler across his shoulder where the boy had passed out. A pretty young brunette reached up to stroke the boy’s hair and leaned up to give him a kiss.
I looked down at my watch. It was 1:15 a.m. On Saturday morning, November 13.
I looked up at the fat, almost full moon that hung over the river and the city of Jacksonville like a poster from a science fiction flick. It looked close enough to touch. Its light gilded everything beneath it.
The light gleamed through the prism of tears.
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