Victor and I sat in the Mercedes for a long time with the top down, looking out over that bright beautiful empty peninsula, not named, as you might think, after a saint, but after some poor dumb Indian they had hanged there a hundred years or so before. Trees and clouds and blue water, and still no birds making the scene. Even the cats in the black suits had vanished, but now I understood why they’d been there. In their silent censure, they had been sounding the right gong, man. We were the ones from the Middle Ages.
Victor took a deep shuddering breath as if he could never get enough air. Then he said in a barely audible voice: “How did you dig that action, man?”
I gave a little shrug and, being myself, said the only thing I could say. “It was a gas, dad.”
“I dig, man. I’m hip. A gas.”
Something was wrong with the way he said it, but I broke the seal on the tequila and we killed it in fifteen minutes, without even a lime to suck in between. Then he started the car and we cut out, and I realized what was wrong. Watching that cat in the gas chamber, Victor had realized for the very first time that life is far, far more than just kicks. We were both partially responsible for what had happened in there, and we had been ineluctably diminished by it.
On U.S. 101 he coked the Mercedes up to 104 m.p.h. through the traffic, and held it there. It was wild: it was the end: but I didn’t sound. I was alone without my Guide by the boiling river of blood. When the Highway Patrol finally stopped us, Victor was coming on so strong and I was coming on so mild that they surrounded us with their holster flaps unbuckled, and checked our veins for needle marks.
I didn’t say a word to them, man, not one. Not even my name. Like they had to look in my wallet to see who I was. And while they were doing that, Victor blew his cool entirely. You know, biting, foaming at the mouth, the whole bit — he gave a very good show until they hit him on the back of the head with a gun butt. I just watched.
They lifted his license for a year, nothing else, because his old man spent a lot of bread on a shrinker who testified that Victor had temporarily wigged out, and who had him put away in the zoo for a time. He’s back now, but he still sees that wig picker, three times a week at forty clams a shot.
He needs it. A few days ago I saw him on Upper Grant, stalking lithely through a gray raw February day with the fog in, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans — and no shoes. He seemed agitated, pressed, confined within his own concerns, but I stopped him for a minute.
“Ah... how you making it, man? Like, ah, what’s the gig?”
He shook his head cautiously. “They will not let us get away with it, you know. Like to them, man, just living is a crime.”
“Why no strollers, dad?”
“I cannot wear shoes.” He moved closer and glanced up and down the street, and said with tragic earnestness: “I can hear only with the soles of my feet, man.”
Then he nodded and padded away through the crowds on silent naked soles like a puzzled panther, drifting through the fruiters and drunken teenagers and fuzz trying to bust some cat for possession who have inherited North Beach from the true swingers. I guess all Victor wants to listen to now is Mother Earth: all he wants to hear is the comforting sound of the worms, chewing away.
Chewing away, and waiting for Victor; and maybe for the Second Coming.
Plot It Yourself
Wasn’t it Shakespeare who suggested that we kill all the lawyers? Too drastic? Well, then, what about one lawyer?
I am his murderer.
Can you catch me?
I won’t lie to you. Oh, I might tease you a little. Do a bit of business over here with my left hand to hold your eye, say, while over here my right hand is doing, oh, maybe, murder.
A widely held misconception is that Beverly Hills is inhabited by movie folk. But only eight percent of the mansions on those wide, shady, deserted streets, drowsy with the swish of automatic sprinklers and the clip-clip of hedge shears, are owned by the Sly Stallones and the Jane Fondas. In the rest live doctors and dentists and psychiatrists and attorneys and clothes-hanger manufacturers and Rolls Royce salesmen.
Take that white mansion with stately southern pillars set well back from Beverly Glen on an acre of lawn. It houses — pardon me, housed — an entertainment law attorney named Eric Stalker. On the night of his murder, streetlights were going on as Stalker parked his Lagonda (one of twenty-four imported into the U.S. that year) behind a white Continental, a midnight-blue Rolls, and his stepdaughter’s red bat-wing Mercedes coupe.
Stalker was a handsome, gray-haired, vital fifty-six, with the tanning-salon’s all-over mahogany skin color and the spring to his step that only hours in the gym can give. As he closed the car door — a solid, monied clunk — an eight-year-old Chev Nova, with one fender a different color from the rest, crunched to a stop on the gravel drive behind the Lagonda.
Chuck Hoffe fit his machine: early thirties, tough-looking, mean of face and cold of eye, wearing the sort of off-the-rack suit associated in the popular mind with the honest cop.
“Chuck — you don’t mind if I call you Chuck, do you? I’m delighted that you—”
Hoffe shook Stalker’s arm off his shoulder almost testily. “If you invited me here tonight hoping I’ll change my testimony tomorrow—”
Stalker shifted his slim attaché case to emphasize it. “Let’s go to my study before we join the others, Chuck. I have something in here that you’ll find intriguing.”
Eric Stalker, leading this vice cop off toward the French doors to his study, is playing a dangerous game with Hoffe and with his other guests now congregating in the dining room. Did I say dangerous? Deadly, rather. Because, as Dickens once pointed out, if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers. Stalker is a very good lawyer. And his guests — well, they’re the sort of people who need very good lawyers.
It was a small formal dining room, the walls covered by Thirteenth Century tapestries depicting the cardinal sin of gluttony with all the hypocritically self-indulgent detail so beloved of the medieval artist. The chandelier was Czechoslovakian crystal and the flatware so solidly silver that the forks could be easily bent by hand if one were so gauche as to do so.
No nouvelle cuisine here: shad roe aux fines herbes, a duckling in Flemish olive sauce, and pork fillets braised in a nice spiced Burgundy, served with polenta. They had lingered over the fig-and-cherry tart. Stalker finally rose and tapped his water glass with his knife. Conversation ceased abruptly.
“Yes, of course. You each know why you’re here, don’t you?” He began walking slowly down the length of the table behind their chairs, all eyes moving with him. “I hinted—”
He stopped behind his stepdaughter, Merrilee, a sensual, spoiled-looking woman in her early twenties, not at all beautiful but with an obviously very bedable look about her. As he leaned over to speak above her, she stared straight ahead, a sullen expression on her face.
“Right, Merrilee? I no more than hinted—”
“Yes, Father. Only hinted.”
He paused behind Jon Norliss, a distinguished, white-haired man of about seventy who was lighting a cigar as if at peace with himself and the world. He seemed indifferent to Stalker’s face beaming over his shoulder.