Blood Type
A John Marshall Tanner Mystery
Stephen Greenleaf
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
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 confidentiality 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 b
elieve 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.
Tom usually arrives at Guido’s about nine. I’m usually already there, at my stool at the end of the bar. But this time there was a deviation—Tom didn’t have his book bag with him. I decided that at the very least the omission meant Tom was headed my way with something on his mind more immediate than the collective psychology of the Teutonics or the number of sorties that had been flown that day. A moment later, he was standing next to the stool beside mine, beer in hand, waiting for an invitation to join me.
When I motioned for him to take the empty seat, Tom collapsed onto it as though he had rocks in his pockets and a pack on his back. He was dressed as usual—Levi’s and flannel shirt—and both above and below his thick black mustache his expression was dour and Lincolnesque, also as usual. Since empathy was epidemic in Tom Crandall, it wasn’t odd to see him burdened by someone’s plight, but for the first time I could remember, the object of the exercise was Tom himself.
Before he said anything, he drank deeply from his glass, licked the ensuing foam off his lips, crossed his long, thin arms atop the bar, and looked at me with eyes as wild as weeds. “I’ve got a question,” he said gruffly.
“Shoot.”
Since Tom seldom relinquishes a subject till he’s worried it to a creative conclusion, I expected it to have to do with Bismarck or Hussein. But what he said was, “What the hell can you do about it if some son of a bitch sets out to steal your wife?”
TWO
Spurred by silent-movie images of black-hatted villains abducting wide-eyed ingenues when the rent on the farm fell due, I felt an urge to laugh. But when I looked to see if Tom was serious, what looked back were eyes afloat on inkblots of exhaustion and bracketed by fine white lines of worry. I tried to get as serious as Tom was, but I didn’t quite make it.
“Once upon a time,” I began easily, hoping he was at least being hyperbolic, “they called it ‘criminal conversation’ or ‘alienation of affections,’ and you could sue the guy who tried it, even get an injunction ordering him to stop. If it was too late to keep her from running off, you could make him pay you a fair price.”
“You said ‘Once upon a time.’ What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means the legislature abolished that particular cause of action back in 1939.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t want to clog the courts with any more domestic disputes than they already had. And because the concept smacked too much of indentured servitude: the analogy to rustling, the monetary measure of the wife’s worth, the husband’s proprietary interest in her affections—stuff like that.”
Tom’s argumentative bent asserted itself. “They measure her worth if someone runs her down and kills her, don’t they?”
“Sure, but that’s an event that seldom includes the wife’s cooperation and complicity.”
Although a surrebuttal could be made, Tom’s usual thirst for debate had been slaked by the subject matter. “So there’s nothing I can do,” he concluded glumly.
“Not as far as the law is concerned, I don’t think. Oh, you might dig up a lawyer who’d help you run a bluff—file a claim of unlawful interference with the marriage contract or intentional infliction of mental distress or something. It would be thrown out of court, eventually, but it might be enough to make this character back off.”
Tom shook his head morosely. “Not this character.”
He drank till his glass was empty. Guido replaced it before it hit the bar. I sipped some Ballantine’s and chewed some ice, then asked a question I seldom asked outside the confines of my office. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Tom’s only answer was to stare, blindly and blinklessly, at the bottles on the back of the bar. The prospect of making his problems public, even to an audience of one, seemed to roast his anguish.
But Tom was Tom, so he gradually retreated to reason and then to the rituals of our relationship. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Not at all.”
His smile was only semisuccessful. “We don’t do this, you know.”
“Maybe that’s because it hasn’t been necessary before.”
“Necessary.” He sighed and shook his head, then looked at his beer but didn’t touch it. “It’s amazing what can become encompassed within that definition. Here I sit, married fifteen years, happily married as far as I knew, and suddenly it’s become necessary for me to hurry to the local saloon so I can share the burden of my wife’s dalliance with another man.”
“Only if you want to, Tom. Only if you think it will help.”
He blinked in surprise, as though he’d never considered otherwise. “Oh, it will help. It always helps to toss off some agony onto someone else—it’s why behind half the doors in town lurks someone who calls himself a therapist.” He tried to smile, but the mechanics broke down halfway through the process. “I’m afraid the subject won’t be nearly as interesting as our conversation about the timber industry and the spotted owl. We’re cutting trees faster than Brazil is cutting the rain forest, you know. I just learned that this week.”
I smiled. “Why don’t we talk about your wife?”
Tom drained his glass and turned toward Guido, who had already started our way with another draught in his hand. “Bring me a brandy in a minute, will you, Guido?” Tom said after he had his beer. “A double.”
Tom hadn’t ordered brandy for months, since the night before the morning paper had reported a particularly grisly rip-off retaliation in which rival crack dealers had gotten it on down by the Cow Palace and two of the losers had been decapitated. I hadn’t asked, and Tom hadn’t volunteered, but I knew he’d gotten the call to go out there that morning, and it had taken the brandy to get the carnage tucked into a place in his brain that wouldn’t haunt him, at least not till he was home.
When the brandy was in front of him, he looked into its blood-red depths as though salvation might be beckoning. Like most people who look for messages in a bottle, Tom didn’t find one to his liking.
“I’ve never talked to you about the war before,” he murmured finally, not looking at me, not really talking to me, either. In common with most people who confess their sins to others, Tom was primarily trying to explain things to himself.
“And I don’t want to talk about it now, really,” he went on, “except to say that when I came back from Vietnam I was pretty messed up. Not only because of the war, I admit—there were things from my life before I went overseas that … well, let’s just say I was fucked up. Drugs. Booze. Nightmares. The whole megillah.”
He peeked at me then, just for a moment, to be sure I understood that the situation he’d abbreviated was nonetheless extreme. “It’s weird, but at the worst moments in my life, women have always rescued me. Of course, maybe that’s not so weird, maybe it’s what women do best; hell, maybe it’s the answer Freud was looking for—maybe rescuing men is what women really want in life. I mean, it’s not the worst job in the world, right?”
He paused to consider his insight. When it didn’t seem to please him, he returned to his story. “When I was confused and crazy in high school, a girl came along and gave me, well, whatever it was I needed. Esteem, I guess. Or understanding. She liked me for the right reasons, was what it came down to, when everyone else was reacting to things that didn’t matter. She was so sweet—God, I love it when they’re sweet. She used to—”
Someone at the other end of the bar started laughing, and Tom broke off his reverie. He looked up the bar, then back at me. “But it didn’t work out,” he said simply. “I went in the army, things happened at home, and …” He shrugged. “Anyway, when I got back from Nam, I was even more screwed up than before, and a
long came Clarissa. It was enough to make me believe in God.” He peeked at me again. “Almost.”
I smiled at the qualifier. We had discussed religion ad nauseam over the years. Tom clearly wanted to believe in a higher power, perhaps even needed to, but his preexisting faith in the gods of reason and reality wouldn’t let him make the leap, at least not yet. Me, I was still working on the problem, though since I read the newspapers more often than I read the Bible, the trend was generally the other way.
I was still pondering theological imponderables when Tom banged his hand on the bar. “How could I have been so stupid?”
The question was rhetorical, but I responded anyway. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re about as unstupid as anyone I know.”
“That’s not quite right,” he growled bitterly. “What I am is informed. I know a lot of stuff, a ton of stuff—useless facts, misleading statistics, irrelevant information. My head’s so full it creaks at the seams.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong is, I seem to know far more about the world than I know about my wife.”
The words were slurred, less from the quantity of beer and brandy than from the pain of the revelation. The variables were catching up to him, and Tom was on the verge of getting drunk.
“I imagine you’re not the first husband to feel that way,” I said.
“No. And a lot of them end up wasting away their lives in places like this.” From the look on his face, we might have been patronizing a cockfight.
Startled by his outburst, then chagrined at its implicit indictment of persons he regarded as friends, Tom looked around the bar as though he were wearing a new set of spectacles. What he saw seemed to alarm him.
“It was a miracle she married me, of course,” he went on after a moment, the alarm become bemusement. “To this day, I don’t know why she accepted my proposal. We’re as different as two people can be. She’s an entertainer, for God’s sake. I have to get embalmed just to summon the courage to ask a gas jockey to check the tires.”
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