The Triumph climbed toward Edwards Avenue and by the time I caught up to it, it was parked across from the home of the first Mrs. Maximilian Kottle, Shelley Withers, authoress. The blonde must have been the one whose naked derrière I’d seen three days before, the one Randy had called a whore.
I pulled over and cut my engine and my lights and tried to decide what it all meant. Fifteen minutes later I decided it didn’t mean anything, yet. I hadn’t been running on anything but bluff when I’d told the bartender I thought someone at Cicero’s knew Karl Kottle, and for all I knew Howard Renn had warned the girl and her friend off because they were about to deal some cocaine or perform some other deed equally inconsequential as far as I was concerned.
Still, the link was there, and links often—though not always—make a chain. The trouble with chains is, if you follow some of them you find something nice hooked onto the other end, but if you follow others you just go round and round, finding nothing but your own frustration.
I got out of the car and walked up the steps and through the hedge to a point where I could see the house. No one went in or out. From time to time some shadows moved behind the linen curtains, a faint and lissome shadow play, and then were gone.
The bay lapped like a wolfhound at the shore below, the sound dissonant with the mindless roar of the commuters on the freeway above. Then all of a sudden the thing I heard best was the sound of a woman singing about love and sadness. It sounded like Carole King. The sound was on a record and the record was scratched, like the singer’s heart. The sound came from deep inside the house. I figured the girl with the formerly bare behind was in for the night, so I went home.
FIFTEEN
The apartment was cold and empty so I decided to build a fire, the first one of the winter. I had enough old Chronicles to paper train the zoo and enough hickory and plum logs to build an ark: I tend to overanticipate my enthusiasms. It took some time for the chimney to begin to draw properly, but within the hour I was as toasty as a flea on a sheepdog.
I poured a drink and put on Mozart’s D Minor Concerto—Köchel 466, Rubenstein, with the Beethoven cadenzas. The logs in the fireplace hissed at me like cats on the veldt. The music and I were slightly sour, slightly melancholy, and just ever so slightly glad to be that way.
Across the street an engine roared, the signal for the neighbor girl to run out and hop into a customized Camaro and slide over till she was indistinguishable from the slick-haired driver so they could roar off for an evening of disco delight. The girl’s name was Debbie. I’d only spoken to her once, on a Sunday when I was out washing my car and she came over to ask if I wanted to buy some hash.
My jacket and tie and shoes were on something other than my body and I was on my third helping of Scotch and my second helping of Oreos when the doorbell rang. I opened up and looked into the cavernous eyes of Belinda Kottle.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello. Slumming?”
“Not at all. I just had dinner with some friends down on Green Street and I wanted to see you. Am I disturbing anything?”
“Only solitude.”
“Solitude can be very precious.”
“Not to me. I could hold a fire sale. Come on in.”
She gave me a smile I’d remember for a while and swept into my living room.
She was dressed for the evening—long gold gown, emeralds at throat and lobes, hair swept up onto her head and swirled into some kind of knot that was held in place by a gold pin the size of a Ticonderoga Number 2. I helped her off with her little jacket and pushed some papers off a chair and asked her to sit down. Then I asked if she would like a drink.
She shook her head. “I’ve had my limit already this evening.”
“No limits allowed here. How about a B&B? Just to ward off the chill.”
She tried to be mischievous. “The chill outside or the chill inside?”
“This is the warmest place in town,” I said.
“Well, I’ll have a little taste, just to be sociable.”
I went to the kitchen and washed the dust off a liqueur glass and filled it with thickness, feeling more than a little guilty because, like a kid at his first fraternity party, I felt suddenly eager for Belinda Kottle to become intoxicated in my living room.
I went back and handed her the glass. “Here’s to crime,” I said.
“Here’s to punishment.”
We both laughed; then we both didn’t. “How’s your husband?” I asked in the uncomfortable silence.
“The same. Worse. Who can tell? I feel so guilty when I leave him, but sometimes I just have to get out of there. Do you know what I mean?”
“Sure. Your husband does, too.”
“I know. It’s just that it seems so wrong to have a good time with Max so ill.”
“You’re not doing Max any good by becoming miserable yourself.”
“I keep telling myself that.”
“Good. But just so you don’t feel too bad I won’t bring out the hats and horns.”
“You’re kind.”
“Not really. If I was kind I wouldn’t be sitting here wondering if there was any chance of getting you into the bedroom.”
I wouldn’t have said it if I’d been sober, and I probably wouldn’t have said it even then if I hadn’t been anticipating another attempt by Mrs. Kottle to prevent me from doing the job I’d been hired for. But it was still lousy.
Her eyes were closed. “I suppose I deserved that, for the way I acted before.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Well, there isn’t any chance, you know. Of that.”
“I know.”
“Can we leave it there? Can we forget it?”
“Let’s. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I came to show you something.”
She fished around in a sequined clutch bag, then pulled out some papers and handed them to me. There were eight of them, and they all said the same thing, in block printing, done in crayon by someone who didn’t want the handwriting traced: “You will die for what you have done.”
“Hallmark’s got something for everyone, don’t they?”
“I don’t think these are funny at all, Mr. Tanner.”
“Where’d they come from?”
“My husband. That is, they were sent to him, once a year for the past five years, postmarked January second.”
“Does he know you have them?”
“No.”
“Why do you have them?”
“The other day I tried to persuade you to be cautious about uniting Max and Karl. I didn’t do a very good job of it and I thought these might help.”
“How?”
“Max is convinced Karl sent them. He’s also convinced they’re nothing to be concerned about. I think he’s being foolish. Karl is not a child. If he really did make these threats he’s fully capable of carrying them out.”
I nodded. “But given the circumstances it doesn’t make much difference, does it?”
“If what you’re saying is that Max will be dead soon, perhaps you’re right. But surely you can see that if Karl did send these it could be very painful for Max to be confronted by all that hate. I only want to spare him. Do you understand me now?”
I understood her. In my stocking feet, in the firelight, in the warm apartment, I could understand anything she cared to say.
She rearranged the lamé that spilled over her thigh like well-pulled taffy. I watched her do it. Right in the middle the telephone rang. I crossed the room and answered it.
“Mr. Tanner?”
“Yes, sir.”
“This is Max Kottle.”
“Yes. How are you?” It took some effort, but I managed to keep my eyes off his wife.
“Fine. I’ve heard from Karl.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’m overjoyed.”
“That’s great. I’m happy for you.”
“Thank you.”
“Where is he?”
For the first tim
e there was something other than ecstasy in his voice. “I’m not sure. He said he would call again tomorrow. I think he wants to see me. At least I hope he does.”
“I’m sure he does. Well, I don’t think I’ve earned all that retainer you gave me. I’ll check the books and remit the excess in a few days.”
“No. Keep it all. I insist. For all I know he could have called because of something you did.”
“I doubt it.”
“In any event, I wanted results and I got them. Keep the fee.”
“If you insist.”
“I do. Well, I won’t take any more of your time, Mr. Tanner. Thank you for all your efforts.”
“Sure. And good luck to you. I hope it works out all right.”
He laughed crisply. “Thank you. I’m sure it will, one way or another. Now that I’ve heard from Karl, nothing else matters, if you know what I mean.”
“I guess not,” I said.
“You should be encouraged, you know. Apparently no man is so abandoned that his last wish cannot be gratified.”
“That’s nice to know.”
“Isn’t it? Well, good-bye, Mr. Tanner.”
“Good-bye.”
The dying man hung up. I went back and sat down across from his wife. “Business at this hour?” she asked.
“Another satisfied client.”
“Service with a smile, is that it?”
“Sometimes, when I’m on retainer. I think you’d better go, Mrs. Kottle. I’ll keep your concerns in mind. Somehow I don’t think there’s going to be a problem.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I can’t be sure, but I can be lucky.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Hell, I don’t know. You’d better go. I’m not as certain of my ability to keep my hands off you as I was a few minutes ago.”
She looked at me with some puzzlement and then stood up and gave me her hand while she looked around the room with full confidence she would never see it again. “Nice place,” she said.
“No it’s not.”
“Well, it could be.”
“Not as long as I’m the only tenant.”
She looked me over. “I’m starting to like you better,” she said. She gave me a smile to take to bed with me, and was gone.
I stoked the fire and thought about love and death and their accoutrements and then went over to the phone and called Chet Herk and asked him if the thing he was worried about would keep till Monday. He thought it would. Since he was spending Monday with some Bank of America bankers, we arranged to meet in the Carnelian Room at five thirty that evening.
I hung up the telephone and went to the bedroom and threw a change of clothes into my AWOL bag and got in the Buick and drove down to Carmel. I spent the entire weekend in a cabin that had once been owned by a woman named Sara, a woman I’d liked and maybe loved, a woman who’d killed someone else and then herself and had left the cabin to me in her will. Over a year later I was still uneasy about having accepted the bequest, but more and more the place is good for what ails me as long as I don’t think too much about her.
By the time the sunrise brought Monday morning with it I felt refurbished. The drive home was slow and halting, but I was enjoying it anyway when I turned on the radio while waiting for a light to change in Morgan Hill. The news rolled around five minutes later, and there it came, flat and emotionless, sandwiched between a story about a flash flood on the Russian River and a story about a show-business wedding.
Maximilian Kottle was dead.
Of a lingering illness.
Services pending.
I pulled into a vacant parking lot and shut off the engine and brought Max Kottle to mind. I didn’t know him, not really. And he was of a class I despised, or at least mistrusted, but there was something he had wanted to do before he died and I hoped he had been able to do it. And more than that, I hoped it had happened the way he had imagined it would, that he and Karl each had found part of what they sought, maybe the most important part, maybe the only part there is. I hoped it had happened just that way.
By the time I started the engine again I had almost convinced myself that Max Kottle had been ready to die.
SIXTEEN
If you can’t see it from the top of the Bank of America headquarters you can’t see it from anywhere in the city, or so they like you to believe, but on Monday evening the clouds were thick, swirling gobs of gray and the most visible thing in the windows was your self, the precise thing a lot of the people around me had come up there to escape.
There were other people in the place, too, of course: the tourists down from Redding to do their Christmas shopping in stores that ridiculed everything about them except their money, the hardware salesmen in town for the Snap-On-Tool convention getting juiced enough to open up the possibility that something would happen to them that evening that was different from anything that had ever happened to them before, the secretaries sitting across from their bosses listening to the rushed endearments they had heard a hundred times before because it was the last time they would have a chance to until after the holidays. All of these and more. Me, I was just waiting for Chet Herk.
My highball was oversized and overpriced. I sipped it slowly, thinking of nothing but the visible, watching the maneuvers to see or to be seen. In the fifty-one stories beneath me were some of the most powerful people in the city—financiers, advertisers, lawyers, developers, consultants, brokers—promoters of everything from themselves to nirvana. I didn’t know a soul in the place.
Chet came in some ten minutes after I’d ordered my second drink. He was red-faced and round, rolling his way past the hostess and the other imbibers the way a bowling ball rolls past the six-seven-ten. A few faces turned to him in wonderment, white moons briefly shining in the bar-gloom, but Chet didn’t notice. When he reached his objective, me, he muttered a greeting and sat down.
“What a day,” he began. “Christ. Talking about money is my second favorite thing. My first favorite thing is poking myself in the eye with a fork. What a crock. ‘Financing statements, subordination clauses, sale and leaseback agreements, chattel mortgages.’ Thank God it wasn’t my money they were talking about.”
“Whose money was it?” I asked.
“Greer’s.”
“Who’s Greer?”
“The publisher. It’s his paper and the bank’s money at this stage of the game I guess, and if the paper starts making a profit again they’ll both be happy. But if it doesn’t, the bank will own the paper and a yacht and a house at Sea Ranch and a condominium at Tahoe and Greer will get to sell pencils for the rest of his days. At least that’s the way it sounded to me. Those bankers have hearts like Sno Cones.”
“You sound like you could use a drink or ten,” I said as Chet puffed and wheezed to catch his breath.
He nodded. “What I need most they don’t sell up here.”
“What’s that?”
“Peace of mind.”
“I don’t think you can buy that. It’s kind of like free samples. It comes in the mail, addressed to occupant, free of charge, but you never know when.”
“I guess. Hell, I wouldn’t know peace of mind if it stuck its hand in my shorts and jerked me off. I’m probably allergic to it anyway. That and every piece of flora between here and Truckee.”
I smiled and Chet relaxed a bit, too, his body settling further into the Naugahyde, the planes of his face moving like drops of oil on water, rearranging themselves in more familiar patterns. A waitress glided over to our table and Chet told her to bring him a fifth of Beefeaters with an olive in it and she smiled tolerantly and faded away without a sound.
Chet and I chatted for a while about sports and the weather and the Ayatollah and even some important things, and then he coughed and looked at his watch and said, “Okay, Marsh. Let me spill it, huh? I’ve got to get this off my mind or I’m going to explode. Plus, I have to be in Hillsborough by seven to tell some guy who made a fortune in electronic Ping-P
ong games why he should put fifty grand into the Investigator, so I don’t have much time.”
“Fire away.”
Chet cleared his throat, making noise enough to pave the way for Caesar’s Gallic Wars. “You know who Mark Covington is?”
“Sure. He’s that hotshot reporter on your rag, isn’t he?”
“That’s the guy. You ever meet him?”
“No.”
“I figured not. Mark’s a loner. I mean a real loner. Kind of a prick, too, to be honest. But he’s the best investigative reporter on the West Coast right now, maybe the best anywhere, next to Sy Hersh.”
“So what about him?”
“He’s disappeared.”
“How long ago?”
“Almost a month.”
“Any ideas?”
“None.”
Chet looked at me earnestly, as though I just might tell him he was mistaken, that it was all a misunderstanding, that it wasn’t real. Unfortunately, by the time people get around to me reality is usually graven in stone, immutably and forever.
Chet wiped his pate and rubbed his nose and downed half the martini the waitress had placed in front of him and looked around to make sure no one could overhear what he was saying. What he saw were a lot of people listening only to themselves.
I looked around, too, and what I saw was a black face I thought I recognized. She was sitting at the other end of the room all by herself at a table by a window, attracting stares the way fire engines attract kids. Her lowered eyes looked into her drink or into something even more murky, and when she didn’t look up when the next group of customers arrived I decided she wasn’t waiting for anyone. But I still hadn’t quite figured out where I’d seen her before when Chet started talking again.
“I’m sure you guessed from what I said about the bankers that the paper’s in trouble, Marsh. Costs are out of sight, plus people aren’t reading the kind of thing we do anymore; the inner workings of government bore them and the scandals just confirm their suspicions. Our circulation is way down. Covington’s the only thing that keeps us going, really. He’s probably going to get a Pulitzer this year and that plus the other stories he’s bound to dig up are the only things that keep us from folding the tent.”
Death Bed Page 11
