Grave Error

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “What was Karl doing back then?” I asked.

  “Nothing. He’d finished college with a degree in philosophy, but he didn’t have a job. He was drifting, as so many of them were in those days. Drugs. Sex. Politics. I don’t know. None of it seems so wretched, in retrospect. But at the time, well, those were difficult days.”

  “Where was he living?”

  “In Berkeley, I assume. I can’t be sure.”

  “Did you know any of his friends?”

  “Not really. Oh, he brought various revolutionary types around from time to time, and I would endure their calumny for an hour or so before ordering them out. It was all very predictable. And very boring.” Kottle smiled. “Of course I’d give a thousand shares of CI stock if I could relive those moments today.”

  “What about high school friends?”

  “I don’t think he had any. We sent him to boarding school back East. Another mistake.”

  “Do you know of any particular reason he might have for dropping out of sight?”

  “No, I … no. Nothing.”

  Suddenly nervous, Kottle reached for one of the pill bottles that littered the nightstand. In his haste he knocked one of them to the floor. It rolled across the carpet and came to rest against my shoe. I bent down and picked it up and put it back on the table. The name on the bottle was sesquipedalian; the capsules inside it as blue as liquid sky. As I sat back down I noticed one of the capsules lying on the floor, like a frozen tear, just next to the leg of my chair. I picked it up before I could step on it. Then I repeated my question about why Karl might have dropped out of sight.

  “I don’t know,” Kottle answered after washing down his pill. “Perhaps he just needed time alone. I may have given you the wrong impression, Mr. Tanner. Karl was not stupid and he was not a drug addict. He was brilliant, as a matter of fact. When I say he used drugs I mean mild forms. But of course, for someone of my generation, there were no mild forms. Every drug called for maximum denunciation. A pharmacological domino theory prevailed.” Kottle chuckled. “Likewise his opposition to the war. Certainly his vision in that regard was much more farsighted than mine. He was eloquent on the subject. In fact I suspect that part of our difficulties arose out of my own jealousy over that eloquence, and the serenity he seemed to possess at such an early age. Perhaps, afterwards, Karl simply became disillusioned, Mr. Tanner. Cynicism lurks beneath every bed.”

  “Have you made any effort to find Karl before now?” I asked.

  “None.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, actually. I suppose I thought he would eventually come back on his own. And I always had something that seemed more important to do. And I always thought I had time. Christ. We never have time.”

  I got some more details about the boy, but they were all coated with dust. Young Karl had endured the things the sons of rich men always endure—private boys’ schools, French tutors, ’cello lessons—but the war protests and the related turmoil that raged through Berkeley in the sixties had eaten away the underside of Karl’s early conditioning and the boy had ultimately rejected his father and everything he stood for. It was a common pattern, and when the numbers were all filled in it spelled Heartache. I knew parents who had turned their sons in to the cops to get them out of their lives and I knew girls who had turned whore for reasons that had nothing to do with sex or money and everything to do with mom and dad. A tough time, the sixties.

  Kottle went on, reciting the details in a formal, clipped style, even more Teutonic than before, as though he were forecasting the exchange rate of the yen. By the time he was finished I was wondering whether Max Kottle had any genuine emotional attachment to his son, or whether he was just lining up good deeds to trade on that great stock exchange in the sky.

  As though he had read my mind, Max spoke. “I’m not trying to pretend I currently love Karl in any meaningful sense of the word,” he said gravely. “I never have been able to love anything I couldn’t touch or see. But I feel I could love him again, and I would like to. And besides, there are arrangements to be made, assets to dispose of, wills to write, all that. I can make Karl a rich man or I can disinherit him. I would prefer to make an informed choice.” He paused. “He is my son. It didn’t mean anything to me while I was alive. Perhaps I can make it mean something once I am not.”

  The thin lids slipped down over the eyes again and the wizened face fell forward until the chin reached the chest. The discussion had clearly exhausted Max Kottle, but there were a few more things I needed to know so I plunged ahead. In this business you get real good at plunging ahead. “Any suggestions where I should start looking?”

  Kottle stirred awake, but barely. “Only one,” he said thickly.

  “Where?”

  “His mother.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Shelley Withers, she calls herself now … lives in Sausalito. Any gigolo can tell you where. She’s a famous writer, I’m told. I married her when she was nineteen and I was thirty-seven. She gave me a son and I gave her a million dollars plus the plots for her first three novels.”

  “Is she likely to cooperate with me?”

  “Maybe. She likes men.”

  “Anyone else I should see?”

  “Not that I know of. Karl was artistic as a child, that might help. I still have a silver bracelet he made for me around here someplace. He liked peppermint ice cream. He hated to wear shoes. And in time he hated me.” He shook his head. “Karl is a complete stranger. I know more about the doorman in this building.”

  Kottle pinched the bridge of his nose, then looked at me blankly, as though suddenly lost in a place that frightened him. It was time to wind it up. “Have you got a picture of Karl?”

  He reached into the drawer of the nightstand and took out two squares of paper. “Here’s Karl’s high school graduation picture and a check for five thousand dollars. I hope both prove sufficient.”

  I looked briefly at the picture. The face was purposely sullen and flabby from self-indulgence, the jaw hidden by a lot of flesh and a little beard. His hair was long and greasy, masking his face like a cowl. Abandoned and confused. Spontaneous combustion a certainty. I had a feeling it was a face that had changed a lot over the next four years, after it got to Berkeley.

  As if to confirm my assessment Kottle spoke. “Karl lost all of the flab and most of the petulance when he went to college, Mr. Tanner. Whatever he found there made him a man. A man I couldn’t accept at the time, but nevertheless a man.”

  I nodded and looked at the check. “You’ve bought a hundred hours of my time, Mr. Kottle,” I said. “Sometimes a hundred is enough; sometimes a thousand isn’t.”

  “Time is of the essence, as you can see,” Kottle said wearily. “If you need anything further you can reach me here. I won’t be going anywhere.”

  “One last thing. Your illness. I haven’t read anything about it in the papers. Doesn’t the Securities and Exchange Commission like heads of big companies to tell folks when they get sick?”

  Max Kottle managed one last grin. “My lawyers are drafting a statement now. I asume they will release it in a few days, as soon as they’ve driven up the fee to a level commensurate with my ability to pay.”

  “So I don’t have to keep it secret?”

  “No, but use discretion. It should not under any circumstance appear that you are trying to elicit sympathy for me.”

  “Don’t worry. I use discretion once a day whether I need to or not.”

  “And that reminds me,” Kottle said heavily. “The police should not be brought into this. Not in any capacity.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because those are my instructions. Am I clear?”

  “Sure. Just so you know that your five grand doesn’t include my helping young Karl commit a crime. If that’s what he’s into, then the cops may have to be brought in.”

  “I’m certain that’s not the case.”

  “I hope that’s enough.”

 
Kottle’s phone buzzed again. He listened to it for a moment, then said, “All right,” and put down the receiver. “Doctor Hazen can’t wait any longer,” he told me. “I’d better see him.”

  “I’ve taken too much of your time anyway.”

  Kottle shook his head. “I assure you I have nothing better to do with it. If I think of anything further that might help, I’ll call you. Please keep me informed.”

  I told him I would and then stood up. I wished him luck and reached for his hand. It was as malleable as a bag of beans.

  As I bent over, Kottle drew me even further toward him. “There’s no one who can do anything for me now except you, Tanner,” he whispered urgently. “When Karl was young he was a seeker. He was always searching for something—meaning, purpose, truth, call it what you will. Now I’m seeking something, too. I think if we could come together, Karl and I, even for a brief time, each of us might find at least part of what we’re looking for. What do you think?”

  “I think maybe you’re right.”

  “It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  I left the room the way I came in, through a private entrance to a private elevator. I walked out of the Phoenix and crossed to the little park on the other side of the street and sat on a bench beneath my umbrella. On the swings and slides there were raindrops where the kids should have been. On the other side of the street three businessmen got out of a black limousine and hurried inside the Pacific Union Club, eager to confirm their blessedness.

  I looked back at the Phoenix. A man was shouldering his way outside, a man stout and smug and in too much of a hurry to let the doorman do his job. There was a broad smile across his face, not an attractive smile, but one that reassured me not everything was dying, not every cause was lost.

  When I remembered Ethel had never shown up with the drinks I walked downhill, in search of a suitable door.

  THREE

  We cherish the myth that we are private people, free to pursue our pains, our passions and our perversions out of the view of others. Unlike most myths, this one has no basis in fact. We have no secrets. The garbage men and meter readers acquire their insights unavoidably, without design, but other organizations, from the Internal Revenue Service to the Credit Bureau, strive mightily, indiscriminately and often illegally to acquire raw data about each and every one of us, to sate their insatiable computers. The insurance companies know more about us than anyone, but they talk only to each other. The federal agencies know a lot, too, but they talk only to the FBI and the White House staff. So when I need information I’m stuck with the next best alternative—the Public Library and the City Hall.

  The morning after I talked with Max Kottle I did what I always do when I get a new case: I ran a check on the client. It saves a lot of time and per diem money when the client turns out to be who and what he says he is, and luckily that happens about sixty percent of the time. The other forty, well, that’s why I run the checks. When I retire from the business and establish an Academy for Detectives, the motto over the door will read “Know Thy Client.”

  This time it was easy. After flipping through Personalities of the West and Midwest, Current Biography and Who’s Who in Finance and Industry, I knew that Maximilian Kottle had been born in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1911 to Ludwig and Rachael Kottle; that he had a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard; that he had been married three times and had one child, Karl, born in 1949; that he was on the boards of directors of sixteen companies, including Pacific Gas and Electric, and that he was a member of the Bohemian, Pacific Union, Commonwealth and Olympic clubs in San Francisco alone, and about five times that many national and international business organizations. He had been appointed to the Board of Regents by the first Governor Brown and had served in the Kennedy Administration on the international trade and tariff negotiating team. He had even written a book, Microeconomics and the Multinational Enterprise. He wasn’t as powerful as Geneen at ITT or Bludhorn at Gulf & Western, but Max Kottle was quite a fellow.

  I didn’t have time to go back more than a couple of years in the New York Times Index, but it brought me up to date. First, it was clear that, despite being a publicly held company, Collected Industries was still Max Kottle’s baby. Max was the spokesman for the company, and obviously the architect of its business policies. On the few occasions when Max wasn’t quoted about the company, his assistant Walter Hedgestone was. One article noted that no senior Vice President was hired or promoted until after he and his family had spent a weekend with Max at his ranch near Santa Barbara and passed the unwritten but nonetheless stringent test that Max imposed. Another article described the company’s massive entry into the energy field—the establishment of a multimillion-dollar oil shale processing plant near Grand Junction, Colorado. The article concluded that it was too soon to tell whether the gamble would be successful, but it was not too soon to tell that Max Kottle was one of the most farsighted industrialists in America.

  There were two other pieces of interest. One, about three years old, noted that Max had donated five million dollars to San Francisco Bay University for a new wing at their medical center. The second reported that an unknown buyer had tried to take over Collected Industries several months back, by buying up its stock gradually over a period of almost a year. Kottle had finally realized what was going on and had gone to the SEC for an injunction against the takeover, and the buyer had been scared off.

  It was getting close to lunchtime so I stopped collecting information on Max and started trying to find some on his son. The Periodical Room of the library has all the San Francisco city directories and telephone books back to before the turn of the century, and I looked for Karl in each of them for the past ten years. I didn’t find him. Which meant I had to move on to City Hall.

  City Hall lies on the other side of the Civic Center Plaza from the library, its granite dome looking down like an imperious doyen on the derelicts and the destitute who squat in the plaza. I walked across the plaza by way of the reflecting pools, dodging pigeons and panhandlers, and went inside the main doors and stood in line for the metal detector.

  They check for guns at City Hall now—the Mayor and a Councilman were murdered in the building not long ago. I’d known the Mayor pretty well and the Councilman a little and this was where they laid in state, in the rotunda. I don’t suppose I’ll ever not think of that when I walk into the place.

  I pulled open a door marked “Registrar” and talked to a man who finally agreed to find out whether Karl Kottle was registered to vote. He wasn’t. I went through a door marked “Assessor” and pulled out the Alphabetical Index and looked to see whether Karl owned any property in the city. He didn’t. After I threatened to see her boss, a woman in the Hall of Records checked to see if Karl had been issued a marriage license anytime during the past ten years. He hadn’t. The Tax Collector didn’t have any record of him, either. And he wasn’t in the Plaintiff or Defendant indexes in the Clerk’s office.

  I had run out of easy places to look and was standing next to a bust of General Funston, looking absently at the building directory, when I got an idea. Max had told me that Karl had tried crafts as a youth—silver. In this city craftsmen often try to sell their work on the streets, but they need a license to do it. The licenses are given out by the Art Commission, which has an office on Grove, right next to City Hall. Before heading over there I turned and thanked the General for his inspiration. He was a pretty stern guy, but he looked as though he would enjoy a good joke.

  The Art Commission is wedged into a narrow two-story building in the shadow of the new Performing Arts Center. A woman in the office just inside the door told me the street licenses were given out on the second floor. I climbed a dark stairway that rose between walls that seemed to move closer together with each step I took.

  At the top were a large loft off in one direction and some smaller offices off in the other. Nothing was happeni
ng in the loft. There were a lot of pictures on the walls, and a few were pretty good, but they had been put there to prove something, not to be enjoyed. I turned toward the smaller offices.

  No one was sitting behind the reception desk, and the offices I could see into were all unoccupied. Then I spotted a door marked “Street Artists Program.” I knocked. When I thought I heard something, I went inside.

  A man who was older than he wanted to be looked up at me from beneath a mop of unnatural curls. There was a gold loop in his ear and a silver medallion on his chest. He had no eyebrows at all. “What do you need?” he asked flatly.

  “I need to know if a boy named Karl Kottle ever had a street license issued to him.”

  “What you need to know that for?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me. I got work to do.”

  “It won’t matter to the person who runs this place. Those are public records. I’m entitled to know what’s in them.”

  “You ain’t entitled to nothing I don’t entitle you to, man. You want a license, fill out this form. Otherwise, I got shit to do.”

  “Are those the licenses in that cabinet?”

  “No, man, those are fucking toothbrushes. What do you think they are?”

  I could have scooped up the sarcasm and filled a rain barrel. I could also have applied some knuckles to his jaw.

  “Can I look for Kottle’s name myself?” I asked between teeth that wanted badly to clench.

  He looked at me a second, ready to order me out, then backed away from the cabinet. “Help yourself,” he allowed grandly.

  I went behind the desk and thumbed through the files. They had been maintained by a spastic steam shovel operator, but I finally found the K’s and thumbed through them. Kottle wasn’t there. I asked if there were any other files.

  “Some stuff down the basement,” the man said casually.