The Man Who Loved Women to Death

by David Handler

  Of course it was. Was there ever any doubt? Tuttle Cash was the answer man and I knew it. What I didn’t know was what the hell I was going to do about it.

  KING TUT’S WAS the classiest and most tasteful of the jock bars to be found in the city that season, which is to say it had the best kitchen, the finest selection of single-malt scotches and no LeRoy Neimans hanging on the walls. Just old prints of bare-knuckle boxers. And, behind the bar, a certain old photograph of three young and obnoxious college track stars. The decor was mostly dark wood and aged leather, the menu, steaks and chops. Not a terrible Caesar salad. There was an antique pool table, a fireplace that burned real wood, a clubby and collegial atmosphere. Pro athletes were known to hang out there, as were league and network executives, high-end sportswriters, selected literati and the usual gang of Madison Avenue and Wall Street jock sniffers. There was always a chosen place like King Tut’s around town. P. J. Clarke’s had been it for a time, Oren & Aretsky, Jim McMullen. For the past three years it had been King Tut’s. Tuttle didn’t own the place. Just fronted for it. Four wealthy former classmates, lawyers all of them, were the money men. It was located on the corner of Third Avenue and East Seventy-seventh Street. Dinner reservations recommended.

  It was four in the afternoon when I got there. The lunch crowd had cleared out. The happy hour had yet to begin. A pair of supremely self-important Yushies in suspenders were shooting pool, badly. Otherwise it was deserted. A fire crackled in the fireplace.

  Malachi Medvedev was behind the hand-carved walnut bar playing a game of solitaire, impeccably turned out in a crisp white shirt, black bow tie and black chalk-striped vest. Malachi was a well-known New York character in his own right. Mayoral candidates came pleading for his support every election year. Don Imus frequently phoned him for live interviews during his radio show. Malachi Medvedev was no mere bartender, after all. Malachi was the hub of the invisible wheel that held the city together. Among other things, he owned a fleet of cabs, a dozen or more newsstands and controlling interest in several racehorses and prizefighters. If you wanted to place a bet, you asked Malachi. If you needed two tickets to Sunset Boulevard or a good, clean used car, you asked Malachi. If you wanted your stolen watch found, or a city building inspector off your back, you asked Malachi. You knew you had arrived in this world if he asked you what your name was. Once you told him, he never forgot it. In appearance, Malachi was a cross between a teddy bear and a pumpkin. He was short and chubby and had a large round head and no real neck or legs to speak of. He had pink, clean-shaven cheeks, a squashed nose that seemed to disappear down into his upper lip, moist, brown eyes and brows that were like two strips of electrical tape. He wore his jet-black hair combed straight back from a razor-sharp Eddie Munster—style widow’s peak. The widow’s peak was real. The black was courtesy of Grecian Formula. Although, frankly, it was impossible to tell just how old Malachi was. Somewhere between thirty-eight and seventy-eight was my best guess.

  “You can’t do that, Mal,” I said, taking a stool.

  “Can’t do what?” he growled, not looking up from his cards.

  “Put a black eight on a black nine. It’s against the rules.”

  “Says who?”

  “Hoyle, for one.”

  “Who’s playing this game, Hoyle or me?” he demanded, glancing up at me. His round face immediately broke into a smile. That was his usual expression. Malachi had to be the most cheerful man on the planet. “How the hell are you, Hoagy?”

  “Older and dumber.”

  “What it’s all about, m’boy.”

  “So I’ve come to realize. And you, Mal? How are you?”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” he replied, beaming at me.

  “That’s what I was waiting to hear.” It was his trademark reply. I had never known him to say anything else. “Just between you and me, Mal, do you ever have a shitty day? Do you ever feel like saying life just plain sucks?”

  “Well, sure,” he replied. “But who wants to hear that? Besides, if I put a smile on somebody’s face while they’re in here, maybe they’ll go put a smile on somebody else’s face when they leave. It’s contagious. What you call a random act of kindness.”

  I froze. “A what?”

  “A random act of—”

  “Did you make that phrase up?”

  “Hell, no. Some shrink did. Heard it on Oprah.” He peered across the bar at me, his brow furrowing. “You okay, Hoagy? You look like shit.”

  “It’s nothing. I should be fine by the beginning of the century.”

  “You feel chilled to the bone? Hot head, cold feet?”

  “Well, yes, now that you mention it.”

  He nodded. “Whole lot of that going around. Rangers’ team doctor was in here last night. They all got it.” He waggled a stubby finger at me. “Got just the cure.” He went waddling back through the kitchen doors. My eyes followed him, roaming over to the closed door next to the pay phone, the one that was marked “Private.” “Here you be, my friend,” he said, returning after a moment with a steaming mug. He placed it before me on the bar. “Homemade chicken broth with eight garlic cloves in it. Drink that down as fast as you can, then chase it with a brandy. You’ll feel like a new man.”

  “I’ll certainly smell like one.”

  “Old country remedy,” he insisted.

  “Oh, really? Which old country is that, Mal?” No one had ever been able to figure out Malachi’s ethnic origin. It was a subject of keen debate. Lupica of the Daily News had cast his vote for Lithuanian Druid.

  “You wearing wool socks?” he asked, instead of answering me.

  I sipped the broth. It was scalding. “Why, are you selling socks now?”

  He reached for a brandy snifter. “No, but a lot of people forget and wear cotton. If your feet are cold, you’re cold.”

  “They’re cashmere. And make it a Macallan.”

  “The twelve-year-old or the eighteen?” He clapped himself on the forehead. “Forgive me. I forgot who I was talking to—don’t sip that, drink it!”

  I drank it, Lulu grunting at me unhappily from the floor. She hates the smell of garlic.

  One of the crack pool players came up to the bar for a refill. Between the two of them they still hadn’t cleared the table. Malachi drew a New Amsterdam for him and sent him on his way. Then he poured my scotch and set the snifter before me, looking Lulu over from nose to tail with keen interest. “What did she used to be, anyway?”

  I downed some of the Macallan, feeling the warmth of it spread throughout my body. “She’s always been a basset hound, as far as I know.”

  “No, no. I mean her breed. Before they were domesticated.”

  “She hunted down bunny wabbits. Why?”

  “We got us a little problem down in the cellar. Thought maybe she was a ratter and could help me out.”

  Lulu’s response was to let out a strangled yelp and to scramble up onto my lap and then onto the bar, where she crouched low, front paws close together, her eyes nervously scanning the floor. I patted her. She was shaking.

  Malachi watched her. “I guess that answers my question, huh?”

  “I guess it does,” I said, grinning at him. His cure was working. I was already starting to feel better.

  “You should do that more often, Hoagy.”

  “Do what, Mal?”

  “Smile. You have a very nice smile.”

  “I had them bleached.”

  “No kidding. Who did it?”

  “My dentist, why?”

  “I know a guy out in Pelham Bay Park could have done you the mold at cost. Next time you run out of gel, let me know.”

  Suddenly, it was quiet in there, except for the hissing of the logs on the fire and the sound of the billiard balls clicking against each other.

  My eyes were on the closed door again. “Is he here, Mal?”

  “He’s here,” Malachi answered evenly, his eyes revealing nothing.

  “How is he?”

  Mal poured me a littl
e more Macallan, plus a short one for himself. He took a sip, smacking his lips. “He’s circling the drain, that’s how he is.”

  I drank down my scotch, eased up off my stool and started back there toward the door.

  “Hey, Hoagy?” Malachi Medvedev called after me.

  “Yes, Mal?”

  “Watch out or he’ll stab you in the front.”

  I knocked and went in. Tuttle Cash was seated behind his desk wearing a coat and tie. He was the only person left in New York besides me who always wore a tie. But Malachi was wrong—Tuttle wasn’t going to stab me. Why, the man didn’t even have a knife in his hand. That was a gun he was clutching. Besides which, he wasn’t even pointing it at me.

  He was pointing it down his own mouth.

  Five

  “IF YOU’RE SERIOUS ABOUT eating that,” I said, leaning against the doorframe with my arms crossed, “I’d try some piccalilli or chow-chow on it. It’ll go down a lot easier.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes were off somewhere else. Way gone. Good-bye gone.

  My eyes were on his finger, the one that was squeezing the trigger. It was trembling, the knuckle white. Until, suddenly, it spasmed. And relaxed. And then, slowly, his eyes came back. All the way back to the room we were in.

  It was a bare, drab little office. Just enough room for a desk, a filing cabinet, a couple of chairs and an exposed hot water pipe, which clanked. The rug was worn. The paint was peeling. The restaurant business is no different than show business—the show is all out front.

  Tuttle blinked several times, started to say something but couldn’t. Not with that gun barrel in his mouth. He removed it. “Hey, Doof,” he said hoarsely. “Still picking those feet up?”

  “Every chance I get.” My eyes stayed on the gun. He was caressing his temple with it, almost lovingly. “Say, you’re not actually going to use that thing, are you?”

  He grinned at me mischievously. He often grinned that way when he was with me. It was as if we two shared a joke no one else was in on. “You know what they say—no brain, no pain.” He lowered it, then stared at it there in his palm. It almost looked like a toy in his big hand. It was not a toy. It was a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. “Tell me, Doof. Do you still believe in death after life?”

  “No, Tuttle, I believe that once you’re born into this world you just keep on living forever.”

  “You believe in hell, in other words.”

  “Exactly. Not a bad tie, by the way. Really picks up the red in your eyes.” It was an old school tie. Our old school, actually. I found myself staring at it, wondering if it had been wrapped around Laurie London’s throat. I found myself staring at him. It had been a while, and time had not been on his side. Not that Tuttle Cash was a terrible-looking man in middle age. But you had to know how good he once looked to know just how bad he looked now. His lean, hard body had grown fleshy and suety. His clean, handsome features were melting, like wax that someone was holding a match to. The narrow, chiseled nose had grown coarse and blotchy, the blond hair thin and dull. I suppose it was his eyes that bothered me the most. Not so much that they were puffy and bloodshot. It was the look in them. Where once there had been a spirited certainty, now there was only confusion and defeat. Everything Tuttle Cash did he had to do better than anyone else. Right now what he was doing was failing. His breath was sour there in the small, hot space, as if something was eating away at his insides. He wore a good shirt. A gentleman always does. It was a blue chambray with a tab collar, a bit snug at the neck. His jacket was a lush herringbone tweed. The suede vest he had on made for a jaunty, chesty appearance. He looked plenty prosperous and dapper. That was his job. It was not his job to order the beef or get the napkins cleaned. It was his job to be Tuttle Cash, the great American golden boy. He nearly pulled it off, too. Provided you didn’t know him.

  He put the gun down on the desk. He reached for a bottle of pills in the top drawer. He popped two of them in his mouth and poured three fingers of Courvoisier into a snifter and chased them down.

  I reached for the gun and hefted it. I’m always surprised at how heavy they are. I dropped it in my coat pocket and said, “Rather inconsiderate way to go, Tuttle. Just think of the mess.”

  “Oh, I was,” he assured me, brightening. “They’d have to repaint, redo the plaster, the rug … and imagine the publicity.”

  “Who is this they?”

  His eyes looked past me at the door. “The partners. Place is running in the red at the rate of seven thousand dollars a month. Pretty expensive little clubhouse, even for four really rich assholes. They’re trying to decide whether to pull the plug on the whole damned place or just on me.” He poured himself three more fingers of brandy. “They don’t seem to feel I’m worth a whole hell of a lot anymore.”

  “Hell, I could have told them that.”

  He let out a short, jagged laugh. There was an edge of hysteria to it. I didn’t know it. He held the bottle out to me. “Drink?”

  “Had one, thanks.”

  He raised his eyebrows at me. “I don’t remember you ever saying no.”

  “That puts you one up on me. I don’t remember anything.”

  “They were right, you know.”

  “Who was?”

  “The people who told us that all of those drugs would fry our brains.”

  “Well, of course. That was the whole idea, wasn’t it?”

  He caught my eyes flicking around the tiny space. “What are you looking for?”

  “The computer. I thought all restaurants were computerized now.”

  “Oh, we are. It’s out back—I won’t use it. Turns out I’m something of a Luddite in addition to all of my other problems.”

  Lulu ambled in and nosed around briefly before she decided the bar was more fertile territory. I didn’t blame her. I closed the door after her. I sat down.

  “What’s it been, Doof? Two years?”

  “At least. You hear anything from Ezra?”

  He let out that laugh again. “Not too much chance of that happening, is there?”

  “Why not?”

  He watched me curiously from across the desk. “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “Yeah, you do,” he insisted. “You just forgot. Ezra doesn’t speak to me anymore, Doof. Goes back to that night you flipped your Morgan.”

  “It does?” I had no recollection of this fact. None. “What—?”

  “I’ll let him be the one to tell you about it.” Tuttle crossed his arms in front of his chest, stretching his jacket so tight I thought the material would tear. “How is she, Doof?”

  “Merilee’s fine, thanks.”

  “Fuck Merilee,” he said roughly.

  “Oh, I do. And, lately, in the oddest places.”

  He glared at me in cold silence. He was waiting for an answer.

  I gave him one. “I wouldn’t know, Tuttle. We haven’t heard from Tansy in quite a while.”

  “Have you tried calling her?”

  “Merilee’s left a million messages. She never calls back.”

  He raised his chin at me. “I’m surprised you haven’t called her.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You trying to tell me you never had a load in your pants for her?”

  “I am. That was my wallet.”

  “Sure, Doof. Whatever you say.” He sat back in his chair with his hands clasped across his thickening stomach, a wistful glow on his face. “Tansy and me … that was the best time in my life.”

  “You didn’t say that then,” I reminded him. “You said you felt like you were drowning.”

  “I didn’t appreciate what I had.”

  “I suppose that explains why you slept around on her.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “And why you beat the crap out of her.”

  “Once. One time, that’s all.”

  “Oh, cut the bullshit, Tuttle. You turned her into a punching bag. She�
��d walk into the Gotham Bar & Grill with a black eye and people would say, ‘Oh, hi, Tansy. When did Tuttle get back into town?’ It got to be a running joke. All that was missing was the humor.”

  “We loved each other, Doof,” he said stubbornly.

  “Maybe you did.” And maybe I should have done more. I had tried to steer him into counseling. I had even offered to go with him. He wouldn’t go. Maybe I should have taken a more active role. Maybe I should have taken a baseball bat to him. I’d wanted to.

  “She won’t answer any of my letters,” he said. “Why won’t she answer my letters?”

  I frowned at him. “I thought the judge said you weren’t supposed to contact her.”

  “The restraining order says I’m not supposed to phone her or approach her. It doesn’t say anything about writing her.”

  “I see,” I said, liking this less and less. And I hadn’t started out real up about it. Already, I could feel myself getting sucked in.

  “Why won’t she forgive me, Doof?” he asked pleadingly. “Why won’t she give me another chance? I made a mistake. I’ve paid for it. When convicts serve out their sentence, they get a second chance. Why can’t I get a second chance? I still love her. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

  “It’s over, Tuttle. You have to accept that.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to.”

  “She belongs to me.”

  “She does not. You don’t own her. She’s not a snowmobile.” I was starting to raise my voice in frustration. A too-familiar response. I crossed my legs, smoothed the crease in my trousers. I lowered my voice: “I take it you haven’t met anyone else?”

  Before he could respond a buzzer sounded.