Best Friends

by Thomas Berger

“He’ll be perfectly all right in a minute or so.” Roy spoke really for his victim’s benefit. “It’s not lethal. I’ve been hit in the solar plexus. There’s no permanent damage.” He had nothing against the man. In fact he pitied him and not because of the punch. Anyone to whom Francine meant so much was in trouble.

  She thrust away from Roy, crying, “I have to get out of here. Right now!” She even stamped her foot, which caused him incongruously to remember she had exceptionally small feet and could not always find her size in the shoe she set her heart on. That was the kind of stuff he knew about her, but next to nothing about her children and very little about poor Holbrook except that he was dull, which might not even be true in a universal sense. He might be the kind of guy with whom Roy would hit it off, discussing the business situation or playing golf. Roy was not a very good golfer; Holbrook might enjoy beating him.

  Roy extended a hand to the fallen, which Holbrook however could not yet see, head toward the ground. “Come on, Martin. It’ll help if you try to walk it off.”

  Holbrook groaned. He raised his head far enough to squint up and say hoarsely, “I’m suing you,” then hung it low again.

  “Okay,” Roy said amiably, “but you ought to come up where you can get more air. It’ll make all the difference. You’ll see.”

  His attempt to be decent to her ex was seen as treachery by Francine, who shrieked in fury, “Stop talking like a fag. He could have killed me! Call the police. I’m going to charge him with attempted murder.”

  Roy stepped behind Holbrook, bent, and, grasping him under the armpits, lifted the man as if pressing a barbell of equivalent weight, one fifty-five, sixty pounds.

  Holbrook did not resist. He was so passive that Roy feared he might collapse again and therefore warned him, “I’m going to let you go now. Try to walk some. It won’t take long till you’re back to normal.”

  He did as promised and Holbrook sagged but did not fall, though neither did he try to walk.

  “He’s all right,” Francine said. She was quieter now, not so angry as bitter. “He’ll survive. He always does. I’m the one the shit sticks to.”

  “Let me see your face. Come over here under the light.” Roy drew her to the nearest lamppost, the wrought-iron standard of which was wrapped with wrought-iron ivy. “Some reddening on your cheek, it looks like.” Francine’s skin was naturally on the wan side. She was much concerned about makeup and would now want to effect repairs. “Better go inside to the powder room, under good lighting.”

  She raised her eyes to his and produced a soulful expression that he could not remember as being in her repertoire. “This hasn’t worked out,” she said, a statement that seemed to reflect a state of mind that was also unique. “I’m sorry.” He assumed the regret was for herself as always.

  Behind them a car’s engine came to roaring life, and in the next instant a vehicle gunned past them and shot out of the exit onto the dark road. Its taillights did not come on until it had traveled at least a hundred yards at a speed that was probably not all that high but seemed desperate.

  “I guess he’ll live,” Roy said when the red lenses had dwindled to the vanishing point.

  “You don’t really care, do you?”

  “Sure I do. I didn’t want to hurt him.”

  “I don’t think you care about anything that breathes.” Francine’s latest mood sounded stoical, but there may have been irony in her faint smile.

  Roy had had enough of her for this night, or, in truth, for the far side of never. “Better go into the ladies’ room and tend to that bruise. It’s getting darker.”

  “Goodbye, Roy.” She abruptly turned away and, at a measured pace, walked to her Navigator, its big black bulk standing by itself in a corner of the lot, well away from the other parked cars.

  Roy kept watch lest any further harm was offered to her, until she had driven away in the direction her ex-husband had taken, but at a much more deliberate speed. Roy had lied to Sam about once having loved her, because lying to one’s best friend was the next best thing to lying to oneself. How could it ever have been love? It was nothing but lust. Lust could be defended as having merits of its own, but he or she who mistook it for love was pitiful. Francine, to give her her due, had never made that mistake.

  4

  Roy lived in a duplex apartment fashioned from the north wing of a mansion built by a rich eccentric of the early twentieth century. The imposing pillared façade and the great semicircular sweep of the front driveway made a superb backdrop for photographs of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. It would have been perfect for a Model J Duesenberg, but he considered such great classics as out of his reach now that they fetched millions at auction.

  After the daily workout in his home gym, he breakfasted on the usual high-protein, multivitamin cocktail of which the base liquid was skim milk. He had awoken with a clear head and a positive prospect. The incident in the parking lot of The Hedges had not been pleasant, but maybe it would prove therapeutic for all concerned, including the unfortunate Martin Holbrook.

  As to Francine, Roy assumed his previous problem in getting free of her had now been solved in the cleanest way; that is, by her being able to believe she dumped him. At least so he interpreted her final, curt goodbye, a style of leave-taking she had never used before. For Francine, one moment was but the prelude to the next. Whenever they parted company she responded to his farewell with a fluid turn on the ball of the foot and quick, almost dancing steps away, all in utter silence. Then, soon as he reached home, if that was where he went—and if he had not, he had better explain why—she would check on him by telephone. She would not admit this was policing. “I’m always worried, driving the way you do, and more about you getting arrested than having an accident.”

  She had never loved him, but neither did she want him to have any alternative existence. Being himself largely immune to jealousy of a sexual kind, which could never be anything but negative and grow more destructive in the degree to which more energy was applied, he had little patience with hers.

  He had just stepped out the front door when a police car entered the driveway, probably in response to a call from the aged widow who lived, with a female companion almost as old as she, in the remainder of the cavernous house. Her late husband, C. Edgar Swanson, had been a good customer of Roy’s, and when Swanson died he bought back, at favorable prices, some of the vintage cars he had once sold to the man. Not to mention that the rent Roy paid for the high-ceilinged apartment, from which the river was visible through the upstairs windows in all seasons, was set by old Doris at scarcely above the level she remembered from her bachelor-girl days many decades earlier when she had worked as secretary to Swanson, who had made a fortune manufacturing plumbing fixtures.

  Doris frequently called the cops to come check the premises after a night in which she and Myra believed they had heard unusual noises in the wee hours but did not want to bother the officers with it then; and because she was rich, and generous to the charities they endorsed, they always showed up and performed a cursory inspection that found no cause for alarm.

  As a courtesy to the policemen, Roy waited now until the two of them left their car. Usually only one came on these calls. Doris was getting royal treatment today.

  The officer who emerged from the driver’s side was Howie, whom Roy had met in the contretemps at Sam’s house the day before. The man leaving the navigator’s seat proved to be the chief of police, Jim Albrecht, who except on ceremonial occasions usually wore mufti. Today it was an open nylon golf jacket over a navy-blue T-shirt bearing the logo of the television program America’s Most Wanted.

  “Hi, Jim,” Roy said, nodding at Howie. “I hope Doris doesn’t have a serious problem.”

  “No, sir, Mr. Courtright.” Albrecht was almost as big as Sam, but a dozen years older and hard of body, and had served as a marine in both Grenada and the Gulf actions. As usual he was diffident when speaking with Roy. “I was wondering if we might have a word with you?”


  The chief looked especially uncomfortable, so Roy spoke with levity to lessen the man’s strain. “It’s not that coffee machine Howie caught me stealing from Sam Grandy’s house, is it?”

  Albrecht frowned briefly but otherwise disregarded the question. “Would you mind coming down to Central?”

  Roy had no clue as to what this was about, but he liked the chief and thought the department did a fine job of keeping civic order. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you fellows drop in at my place and have a cup of cappu—uh, fresh-made coffee—any way you like it.”

  “That would be nice, Mr. Courtright, but I’d rather you come down to Central, if you don’t mind.”

  Roy suddenly understood the invitation bore more weight than a polite request and was extended by an officer of the law. “Why sure, Chief, any time.”

  Albrecht had yet to show the broad smile that he displayed so liberally on other occasions. “We’d like you to come right now.”

  Suspense was now in play, one of Roy’s least favorite emotions. “Jim,” he asked, “mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “I’d rather wait till we get to Central, Mr. Courtright. It makes more sense.”

  Which of course is what it definitely did not do, at least for Roy, nor did riding as a passenger in the police car, which the chief preferred him to do rather than follow in his own vehicle.

  Nobody said another word until he and Albrecht, joined by three other men in civilian clothes, sat in the chief’s office in the overcrowded municipal building, only a block and a half from Roy’s place of business.

  “Mr. Courtright,” said Chief Albrecht, behind the littered desk in front of which was Roy’s straight, armless, hard wooden chair. “Will you tell us how you spent last evening and night?”

  Roy spoke levelly. “I want to know what this is all about.”

  Albrecht nodded with his jutting jaw. “Make a deal with you, Mr. Courtright. Soon as you tell us what you did last night, I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on. Now, you can’t say that’s not fair.”

  Another questionable theory, along with the one about making sense, but Roy proceeded to comply to the letter, even unto the little dust-up in the parking lot, which, as he was summarizing the incident, he recognized as surely the pretext for the matter at hand: Holbrook was charging him with assault and battery!

  “He hit her, and then he was choking her. So I slugged him to get him to stop. I’d do it again. Any of you would have done the same.”

  Albrecht had listened without expression. The putative detectives stood somewhere behind Roy, where he could not see them.

  One now spoke up. “What did you do after the fight?”

  “It wasn’t a fight. It was what I just described…. I drove back to town.”

  “With Francine Holbrook?” The voice was of yet another man.

  “No. She left in her own car, SUV. I was driving a vintage model from my inventory. I took it back to our showroom and switched it with the Jeep Grand Cherokee we use, because I don’t have a garage where I live and I don’t like to leave a valuable automobile outside all night.”

  “Where’d you go then?” Albrecht asked. “And what did you do?”

  “Drove home, drank a beer, put on the TV, and fell asleep immediately. I woke up in the middle of the night and went to bed…. Now, keep your part of the bargain.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “Tennish, ten-thirty?”

  “And you didn’t leave again?”

  “Not till this morning.” Roy snorted. “Don’t tell me Holbrook claims I followed him and beat him up further. I hit him exactly once, in the solar plexus.”

  “It’s not Martin Holbrook who was found dead,” Albrecht said in an official-sounding drone, “but Mrs. Francine Wilkie Holbrook. It’s a homicide. Nobody beats themself to death, alone in an apartment.”

  “My God, how terrible!” said Kristin, whom Roy had phoned at the bank.

  “I couldn’t upset Sam with this.” He found his voice hard to control. “We were just talking about her yesterday.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “The lobby of the Municipal Building.”

  “You’re free to leave?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Roy. “I can’t believe they ever thought I did it, and they never charged me with anything, which is why I didn’t call my lawyer till the whole thing was almost over, and then of course he’s in court and hasn’t gotten back to me…. I’m running off at the mouth. This thing has really shaken me up.”

  “You wouldn’t be much of a person if it didn’t,” Kristin said. “Stay where you are. I’ll be right over to get you.”

  When the report came in that Martin Holbrook’s dead body had been found with an accompanying suicide note, the police were abruptly and unapologetically finished with Roy. He learned later that Holbrook had deposited the children at school, then returned home to a self-inflicted death by an unlicensed .32-caliber pistol, leaving behind the note confessing, or perhaps bragging, that he had furnished his ex-wife with the punishment the slut had long deserved. But nobody at headquarters gave a full account to Roy. He now felt abandoned by all, alone with the awful conviction that had he not humiliated Holbrook in Francine’s presence, both of them would be alive today.

  That Holbrook had been at The Hedges at the same time as they was no coincidence: Obviously Francine had set up the encounter. But try as he would to blame the victims, rage against himself was Roy’s predominant emotion. By the use of poor judgment he had killed two persons. That a loser like Holbrook would have murdered Francine at another time was no mitigation, nor was the near certainty that she would have provided her ex with ample pretexts for rage. But would Roy have felt better if he had let Holbrook strangle her in the parking lot? There are times when all choices must, as if by divine law, be disastrous, but heretofore he had only heard of this as happening to others and more typically in works of the imagination than in the structurelessness of real life.

  It had been, to say the least, presumptive of him to call Kristin, but he had no one else to turn to at the moment. Sam was in the hospital in a delicate condition that might well be adversely affected by hearing his best friend’s awful news. All their lives, Robin had been the worst person with whom to seek solace. He did not dare approach her with anything to announce but a success, and of course she would endeavor to disparage that. A failure of any kind would make her crow. In the case at hand she would say, “Sleep with dogs, get up with fleas. What do you expect when a trollop is your idea of a suitable girlfriend?” Her idea of a woman for him was someone from her own circle of embittered divorcées with child-support problems: Ironically, people much like Francine in situation but presumably less bawdy or anyway more circumspect. Francine in fact had been a neighbor of Celeste Brownson, a pal of Robin’s whom his sister had urged him to date. “I call her Celezzy to her face,” Francine told him, “and she doesn’t mind at all! Her trouble is, she can’t ever admit to herself that she basically hates men. Poor Evan! It must have been like sticking it into a bowl of cold risotto.”

  When Sam was well, Roy did not have to search for a confidant. If he thought about the matter, he would have to confess to himself that Kristin was a surrogate, so he must try to avoid an impulse to overapologize for intruding on her workday, which he would not have had to do with Sam, who usually had no work as such and when he did, its demands could never have been as important as the needs of his best friend.

  While Roy waited for Kristin at the curb outside the Municipal Building, the cell phone vibrated in his pocket.

  “Roy, returning your call.”

  It was Seymour Alt, his lawyer, during a recess in some trial in a courtroom in the very building from which Roy had just emerged.

  Roy told him what had happened. “I guess I’m lucky that Holbrook left the note. Poor Francine. It would have been even worse if I was suspected of killing her. Well, I’m legally in the clear now, so I won’t need yo
ur services.”

  “You let me be the judge of that,” said Alt, switching off.

  Roy regretted having called the counselor, with the man’s vested uninterest, if not disdain, for morality. Sy was a nice person when with his family or playing golf but changed into another order of being when he practiced his profession. Unfortunately it was not possible to operate a business for more than an hour nowadays without consulting an attorney. To your lawyer you were always right in every phase of every matter, as everyone else was wrong and even if badly hurt deserved no sympathy when their interests were not your own. “Of course,” Alt said when Roy once privately made that point to him. “Else you’d sue me for taking money under false pretenses.”

  Kristin was as good as her word, arriving in the Corolla soon after he had put the phone away. Her promptness was all the more impressive in the traffic of what he realized, looking at his watch for the first time all day, was already noontime.

  “This really helps,” he said. “At the moment I can’t stand being in my own company…. I’m sorry. That sounds like anyone would do. Obviously I don’t mean that.”

  She was an attentive driver, keeping her eyes, after a quick glance at Roy, on the car ahead. “And I was about to say I’m only doing what Sam would be doing if he could.” She smiled at the windshield. “Obviously, I don’t mean exactly that. You’re my friend, too.”

  Roy was moved by the sentiment while being aware that any humanitarian acquaintance might say the same under the conditions at hand. The need for caution in his associations with women—even those with whom his relations were only polite, as with Kristin—had been more than confirmed by the tragedy of the Holbrooks, which he found more unbelievable each time he reviewed the sequence of its events…yet he felt compelled to keep doing so.

  She drove, and he talked. He paid no attention to where she drove and did not really care whether she was listening to what he said, which could hardly have been fascinating to her. He sensed he might even feel a retroactive humiliation later on, looking back on what was the moral equivalent of vomiting or diarrhea.