The Last Man: A Novel Read online

  THE LAST MAN: A NOVEL

  D. W. BUFFA

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Blue Zephyr

  Copyright © 2013 D. W. Buffa

  www.dwbuffa.net

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  * * * * *

  To Tom Larscheid

  For a lifetime of friendship

  “It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, become the masters.”

  -Nietzsche

  Chapter One

  The long awaited murder trial of the infamous Daniel Lee Atkinson was over before it started. Everyone knew he was guilty; nearly everyone thought he should die. No one knew it with more certainty than his lawyer, Michael Harlowe. He had listened in stunned silence to a confession of moral depravity the like of which he had never heard before. It was not so much what Atkinson had done, as the absence of all remorse, the indifference to what he had done, the sense that murder could be shrugged off as no worse than speeding down a highway late at night, that was so disturbing. Harlowe had to know why.

  “You murder a whole family, shoot the parents at point blank range, slit the throats of two children, and you don’t seem to feel anything about it. How is that possible?”

  They were sitting across from each other at a small metal table in a dimly lit room in the county jail. Atkinson replied to the question with a trace of annoyance, the lingering resentment that he had been put to more trouble than he should have been.

  “They weren’t supposed to be there. They were supposed to be away that weekend. Christ, you think I’d go rob a place that had people in it? Do I look like that much of an idiot?”

  “You killed four people, two of them kids. A jury isn’t going to be too sympathetic with an argument like that,” added Harlowe, studying him closely. “And neither will the judge.”

  “Not my fault they changed their plans.” Atkinson raised his hands, shackled together at the wrists, to scratch the side of his face. The fingers were thick and misshapen, twisted at the knuckles, beaten into deformity, scarred by years of violence. His eyes, dull and suspicious, moved in a random circuit of the narrow room. The dawn of something like a thought brought a sudden light. “They’re the ones that changed, not me. I didn’t have any choice.”

  Harlowe did not try to hide his disgust.

  “You killed four people, wiped out a family, because you didn’t have any choice?” Shaking his head, he got up to leave. “I’ve been doing this a long time, but that’s one defense I’ve never even thought of trying!” He shoved the chair back in place and turned away, but then, immediately, turned back. “You don’t feel anything about those people, the people you killed?” he demanded. “Nothing at all?”

  Atkinson looked at him as if he were a fool even to ask. Suddenly, his expression changed, became more serious, as if there was something that he also could not quite understand.

  “I don’t think they liked each other very much -” A strange sinister smile cut across the prisoner’s thin, dry lips. He bent forward, drawing Harlowe closer into the secret he seemed almost eager to share. “They saw me standing there, at the foot of the bed. I said I was going to kill one of them and they could choose. And you know what? – They both wanted me to kill the other one. And I did - killed them both - but I shot him first. You should have seen the look on her face: horror, but also relief.” Atkinson shrugged and then laughed. “It wasn’t what you might call a perfect marriage.”

  Harlowe knew then that there was nothing he could do, that Daniel Lee Atkinson was as good as convicted. It was not just that Atkinson was guilty – most of the people Harlowe defended were guilty – the evidence was overwhelming. He had been seen running down the street moments after gunshots had been heard, the gun he had used to murder Jonathan Lewis and his wife still in his possession, a gun he had then used to fire at the police during the manhunt that followed. And not just the gun, he still had the knife, the knife with which he had brutally and without hesitation murdered two small children, the knife caked with their blood.

  Hector Alfonso was sympathetic.

  “I thought you weren’t going to take any more court appointed cases,” remarked the district attorney, lifting his eyebrows in mild astonishment.

  There was none of that polite hostility with which prosecutors and defense attorneys usually deal with each other. They had both been around long enough, had both tried enough cases, to have become their own worst critic and their own best judge. They knew, in the way only someone who has mastered their craft can know, that of all the measures by which to determine whether a lawyer knew what he was doing, winning or losing was one of the least reliable.

  In mock despair, Hector Alfonso glanced at the stack of files on his cluttered desk and threw up his hands.

  “Police reports, forensic reports, ballistics reports, crime lab reports….” He picked at a pile on the corner closest to Harlowe. “…and not one, but four different eye witness statements, people who saw him running from the house; people who saw him running down the street.” With a significant look, he added, “Statements from the two cops he took shots at. The only thing we don’t have is a confession. It’s a textbook case, everything any prosecutor could want; and that, I have to tell you, terrifies me, because the only thing that can go wrong is if I screw up.”

  “I suppose that could happen,” replied Harlowe. “You might only be able to get him executed three times instead of four.”

  Hector Alfonso dressed better than most other prosecutors, especially the assistant prosecutors in his own office, with their rumpled suits and wrinkled shirts and deplorable ties. His suits were always pressed, with a crisp seam down the leg, the cuff at exactly the right angle above his expensive, always polished shoes. The shirts, bright and starched, and the tie precise and symmetrical in a tight Windsor knot, he had more the look of a prosperous merchant, or a successful politician – the Hispanic mayor some in his community thought he might one day become, the mayor of that city that was not a city at all, but more a state of mind, that vast urban desert known as Los Angeles where Alfonso had been born and bred. Hector Alfonso spoke fluent Spanish, but only because he had learned it in school. He had only been to Mexico as a tourist, and his parents, like their parents before them, instead of recent immigrants had been doctors and lawyers, who had long since forgotten precisely when their ancestors had first settled here. After finishing near the top of his law school class at Yale, he had chosen to take a job as an assistant prosecutor. His family already had money, and he wanted more than that.

  “Seriously,” continued Harlowe with a droll expression. “If someone murders four people, why should his punishment be only what it is for someone who kills only one? Where is the justice in that?” Tapping his fingers on the corner of Alfonso’s desk, he thought for a moment and then suddenly looked up. “Figure out how to do that – hang someone for every murder – and they’ll elect you governor by acclamation.”

  As he always did when someone, even someone he respected as much as Michael Harlowe, mentioned higher political office, Alfonso ignored it.

  “You didn’t answer my question. Why did you take this case? You’re one of the best known criminal defense attorneys in the city. What are you doing, taking court appointed work?”

  He said this with the arrogant mouth of someone used to winning, bu
t with a sparkle in his coal dark eyes that seemed to admit that most of what happened, in and out of the courtroom, depended on chance.

  “I was asked,” replied Harlowe simply.

  “Bannister, right? Yeah, it would be hard to say no to him.”

  “Anyone else, I wouldn’t have done it; but Bannister…. He didn’t even ask me himself; he had his clerk call.”

  The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes tightened, spread farther out, as he searched for an explanation. Hector Alfonso caught that look, knew it as a shared experience and understood the perplexity that went with it.

  “There’s no one else like him, is there? The rest of them, they get on the bench and all they think about is how to get out of doing any work and how soon they can start collecting their pension. But Bannister –every judge should be like him.” With a quick, incisive glance, he asked, sure of the answer, “You didn’t even think about it, did you? You said yes right away, probably didn’t even know what you had said yes to until you hung up the phone.”

  “Hung up the phone?” Harlowe remarked with a grudging smile. “I didn’t know what I had agreed to until I spent a wonderful hour with my client.”

  Hector Alfonso reached without looking for a file folder that among all the others stacked on his desk had been held, off to the side on the right, separate and apart. A look of disgust swept across his face as he passed it to Harlowe.

  “Crime scene photos,” he explained.

  At the age of forty six, Michael Harlowe was not the innocent he had been when he first started practicing in the criminal courts twenty years earlier. He had become used to murder, accustomed to the graphic depiction of death, the photographs of homicide victims, all the obscenities of deliberate brutality and mindless violence. Murder was a fact of his profession, one which triggered an immediate response, an attempt to analyze it, break it down so as to tear it apart, find a way to show that the undeniable evidence of a violent death did not mean that his client was responsible. The trouble was that the more vicious the murder, the more brutal the crime, the greater the sense of urgency, the public need, to do something about it. The more savage, the more atrocious what had been done, the less chance to banish from the minds of a jury the sense of revenge.

  He could not tell Hector Alfonso what the depraved and despicable Daniel Lee Atkinson had told him, how he had murdered four people, a whole family, the parents in their bed and two small children while they slept, done it not only without hesitation and without any later regret but apparently with pleasure and a perverse sense of achievement, a mad man, a dull-witted animal, whose only purpose in life was to kill. He could not say anything about what Atkinson had told him, but he told him with a look, just as he started to open the file folder, that he knew what he was about to see and that he was not going to be surprised.

  But he was, and not just surprised, shocked, a shock that grew each time he turned one picture over and looked at the next. Atkinson had lied. Not about killing them, but the way he had done it. He had not said anything about the sheer butchery that had taken place. Harlowe could not have guessed at the number of crime scene photos he had seen, but nothing ever like this. He looked up and stared hard at Hector Alfonso as if he expected him to explain how something like this could happen. With something like a warning in his eyes, Alfonso shook his head. There was a danger going too far into things, a loss of all illusions about the limits of depravity.

  “I can’t even offer you life imprisonment in exchange for a plea. If we didn’t have the death penalty we’d invent it just for this guy, and no one – and I mean no one – would complain.”

  Harlowe did not try to disagree.

  “So we go to trial, and the jury sees these.”

  “Unless your client decides to save everyone the trouble, and we both know that won’t happen. So, yeah, we go to trial, and the jury may not even reach the jury room before they decide to announce they’ve found him guilty and the Honorable Walter Bannister, after presiding over a meticulously proper trial, will then sentence him to death. And you know what – those people will still be dead and then we’ll have another brutal murder and another trial and….It just never stops, does it? – And it keeps getting worse, not just more killing, but….” He glanced toward the folder, back in its place, isolated and alone, on his desk. “…but more violent, more grotesque.” He took a deep breath, as if to clear his mind, and when he spoke again his voice was calm, and not much more than a whisper in the silence. “Though nothing worse than this, the worst I ever saw, the worst I ever heard of.”

  A little unsteadily, Harlowe rose from his chair. His eyes drifted toward the folder full of unspeakable photos and then, immediately, drew back.

  “The strange thing is he didn’t have much of a record. Break-ins, stealing, minor assaults – that’s it; never killed anyone, never even tried.”

  Hector Alfonso walked him to the door.

  “Never killed anyone that we know of. You have any idea how many murders go unsolved, how many don’t even get reported? Someone, some faceless vagrant, disappears: no one knows him; no one knows he’s missing. Atkinson could have murdered dozens of people and we wouldn’t know anything about it.”

  It was a question Harlowe was tempted to put to Atkinson directly, but the next time he saw him, sitting in his orange county jail jumpsuit, his wrists shackled together, saw those blank, empty eyes that did not seem to register anything except his own immediate reaction to what he wanted or what he feared, Harlowe changed his mind. If Atkinson had killed a dozen other people it could not make what he had done – what those pictures showed he had done – any worse; and it would not create a conscience where, as far as Harlowe could tell, none had ever existed. With a man like Daniel Lee Atkinson numbers did not matter. There were no gradations of guilt, no new or different measure, when you were dealing with pure evil.

  Instead, he asked Atkinson all the routine questions that had to be asked, about his background, where he had been born, about his parents, about how he had been raised, where he had gone to school and what he had done when he dropped out, whether he had been married, whether he had children. The answers were all of them vague and fragmentary, as if he had not only forgotten most of what had happened to him, but could not remember anything as uninteresting and provisional as his own existence. He did not know where he had been born, somewhere in California, he was not sure. He did not know his father, a common enough fact among those who were often in trouble with the law, but Atkinson also did not know his mother. Raised in foster homes, a different one every year as far as he could remember, he left school at an early age, probably the eighth grade, but certainly before he ever got to high school. He was sure of that. He had never been married or even lived with a woman, though he had, as it put it, “known a lot of whores.” If he had any children, no one had ever told him. He did not read the papers and had never read a book, and as near as Harlowe could tell, barely read at all. He was a predator, pure and simple, someone who would kill you for no other reason than that he felt like it and then, having done it, never think about it again. Harlowe hoped the trial would be short.

  And compared to the length of most murder trials it was. But for those who were involved in it, those who had to sit there day after grueling day, it seemed an endless journey through hell. Twelve jurors, seven men and five women, most of them middle aged, tried to mask their emotions, and not always with success, through three weeks of testimony that had to shake, if not destroy, whatever confidence they may have had in the natural goodness of human beings.

  They had been warned. Walter Bannister had told them that they were going to see things no one should have to see, things they would find disturbing, more disturbing than anything they could possibly imagine. He could have told them they were there to witness an execution, not one of those performed with a lethal dose of chemicals, but one full of torture and blood, a head lopped off, a body boiled in oil, and they would have thought that they would get thro
ugh it without any great loss to themselves, sure that if there were any harm in it, he would not ask them to do it. Walter Bannister had that effect. He had the look, that manner that nothing can rival and no one can imitate, and with it a rare intelligence and perfect rectitude, complete self-command and not a trace of vanity or a hint of ambition for anything he did not already have.

  Some people, perhaps most of us, go unnoticed when they walk into a room; others, not many, but a few, have such an immediate effect that once they enter it is as if they had been there the whole time. That was what it was like in Walter Bannister’s courtroom. One moment everything was all chaos and confusion, a hundred babbled voices, lawyers, jurors, spectators crowding the benches; the next moment the door at the side opened and there was nothing but silence. The bailiff must have called everyone to order, ordered everyone to rise, announced that court was in session, that the Honorable Walter Bannister was presiding; he must have done that, but no one heard it, or remembered it if they had. No one could remember anything except what was right in front of them, the judge tall, thin, the slightest touch of gray just above the ears in the auburn hair cut short and parted on the side moving with a scholar’s eye and the sure, gliding step of a man who had been something of an athlete in his youth. He glanced once at the two counsel tables where Hector Alfonso and, closest to the jury box, Michael Harlowe stood waiting, and then, after a quick nod, looked at the jury with a simple, confident smile that made them forget whatever apprehensions they may have felt. Then he was on the bench, leaning forward, the smile become muted and quite serious, but a sparkle, a shared intelligence, the assumption that wherever they had come from, whatever their backgrounds, the jurors, and even the anonymous crowd that was only there to watch, were capable of following every instruction he gave them, glittered unmistakably in his clear, grayish green eyes.