The Last Man: A Novel Read online

  Chapter Eight

  There was a dry taste of ash in the air, a dull sense of something burning. Somewhere in the San Gabriel Mountains, too far away to be seen, a fire was skipping hot through a tinder box of brittle underbrush and half-dead trees, dancing like a painted harlot to its own manic applause. Later, when night fell and the sun went searching in the west, a bright orange halo would light up the long dark shadow of the barren eastern hills. It seemed to Walter Bannister a little like Sodom and Gomorrah, Los Angeles surrounded by fire and water, everyone living there destined to be consumed by the flames or driven into the sea.

  “Cecil B. DeMille,” he said without warning.

  Watching out the passenger side window, his wife thought she must have missed something.

  “I was just thinking, we keep talking about the earthquake, the big one that is supposed to destroy everything; but it will probably be a fire – a fire and the Santa Ana winds – a huge conflagration building on itself, burn through everything, across the whole basin, all the way to the shore. This was a desert before we brought water across the mountains; it may become a desert again.”

  “You said Cecil B. DeMille,” she reminded him.

  Bannister kept his eyes on the road. They were on the Pacific highway, just past Ventura, heading north toward Santa Barbara. A narrow strip of beach lay like a tan ribbon between the ocean and the road.

  “It’s what happens when you live all your life in L.A. The first thing that comes into your head when you think of something biblical is the kind of movies they used to make. Cecil B. DeMille,” he said, repeating the name with a kind of nostalgia in his eyes. “The Ten Commandments. Someone says Moses and you see Charlton Heston holding up a stone tablet. They made that movie, part of it – the Red Sea opening up – on the beach in Guadalupe, a small town not far from Santa Maria, about a hundred miles up the coast. People still go out there and dig in the sand and sometimes find a wooden wheel from one of the chariots they used. They get more excited about that than if they had been archeologists digging in the sands of Egypt! Only the movies are real. Ask your brother – he’ll tell you.”

  “Roger knows the difference,” replied Meredith, quick to come to her brother’s defense. “I don’t know why you always feel the need to criticize him the way you do.”

  “I don’t criticize Roger. I never have. I’m just not convinced that making motion pictures is the pinnacle of human existence: that nothing is more important than keeping people entertained.”

  “You know, sometimes Walter…!” She tried to stop herself, but it was too late; it all come rushing out, the frustration, the pent-up hostility. “You think watching a bunch of criminals every day is so much better? Listening to a lunatic like that child murderer, Daniel Lee…whatever his name, lie about what he did, is that - what did you say: ‘The pinnacle of human existence’?” Roger makes great movies, wonderful movies. He’s won three Academy Awards for them. I know what you do is important, but sentencing someone to death – how many people would want to do that?”

  A thin smile cut across Walter Bannister’s mouth. “You mean, as opposed to making a movie about it? But I’m sure you’re right. I don’t imagine many people would want to trade places with me.”

  The ambiguous nature of this last remark was lost entirely on Meredith Bannister. Before she could even wonder whether there might be some second, hidden meaning in those otherwise prosaic words, he changed the mood with another, brighter, smile. Embarrassed by her angry outburst, she smiled back, and then, in a gesture of affection she had often used before, reached across and patted his hand.

  “You’re a great judge, Walter. Everyone admires you and respects what you do.”

  He was not sure which he disliked more: the condescending tone and the false glittering smile or the fact that she actually thought herself sincere.

  There were only a few more miles to go. He knew it all by heart: take the Montecito exit and then wind his way into the hills, follow the narrow twisting road past the high stucco walls and the private iron gates until, finally, near the very top, one of those places that instead of a numbered street address had just a name, a Spanish name, invented not that many years before by a shrewd developer who understood that the rich like nothing so much as to advertise their anonymity.

  “I’m not sure why I let you drag me to these things,” he said in a light-hearted banter. It touched the surface of his discontent, but went no further. There would not have been any point. The surface was all there was, not just with his wife but, so far as he could tell, with everyone. He had tried at times to have conversations about what he thought serious things; it was hard enough to find a lawyer to talk about the law, but one of the eager blank faces invited to one of Roger Stanton’s lavish weekend gatherings in the sun drenched hills of Santa Barbara?

  “Makes you wonder why we bother to have a language. A couple dozen words, half of them obscenities, and you have the full repertoire of what gets said.”

  “You’re hopeless, Walter; just hopeless,” laughed Meredith. There were few things she liked as much as attending one of her famous brother’s parties. “Half of Hollywood will be there.”

  “And the other half? – No, I know the answer: ‘Bitterly disappointed they weren’t invited and jealous of those who were.’”

  He could tease her all he wanted, but nothing could change her good mood. She was like a schoolgirl going to her first dance.

  “It’s a gorgeous blue sky day, and some of the most famous people in the world will be here.”

  “I think I may have sent a few of them to jail.”

  “Yes, but at least one of them, don’t forget, still writes you letters thanking you for what you did, getting him into treatment for his addiction.”

  She said this with an air of triumph. There was no one more famous in Hollywood than Driscoll Rose, and no more chronicled story than his struggle with the demons of his addiction. Walter had given him the chance he needed.

  “It was his third time,” replied her husband. “I wasn’t sure if he believed me when I told him that if I saw him again, instead of a treatment center I was going to send him to death row.”

  For a moment, she was not sure if he was teasing or telling the truth.

  “I did; that’s exactly what I told him. It was nothing but a fiction, of course; nothing I could have done. But he didn’t know that, so why not scare the hell out of him. Nothing else had worked.” He glanced across at Meredith who was looking ahead to the gated entrance at the bottom of the long drive. “I’ll make you a bet. If he’s here, this actor you think I saved, he won’t have any idea who I am; he won’t remember me at all, or rather,” he added with a shrewd glint in his eye, “he’ll pretend he doesn’t. It was just an episode, something he wants everyone to think he’s forgotten; something that wasn’t important enough to remember.”

  With an impatient smile, she dismissed it as too impossible to take seriously. “He wrote you letters; he -”

  “Someone wrote me letters,” interjected Walter with a wry expression. He did not need to remind her that it was the sort of thing publicity agents were hired to do. She knew how Hollywood worked better than he did. It was just that, in this instance, she did not want to believe it.

  A college-aged parking attendant ran to open the driver’s side door while another one helped Meredith out of the car. There was not room to park all the cars up at the house, and so several guests at a time were shuttled up the long, winding drive in one of several limousines. The house, or rather, the villa, could be seen from the sea, dominating all the other, lesser houses, around it. A dozen gardeners worked every day tending acres of rolling lawns and terraced flower beds, walls covered with bright colored bougainvillea and a variety of ornamental trees no one had ever bothered to count. A labyrinth of stone pathways and staircases was bordered by terra cotta pots full of geraniums and marble vases full of purple orchids, while off in the distance, among an oasis of inevitable palms, a family o
f green and red parrots, imported from some place in South America, squawked their displeasure at being disturbed by the presence of so many people, hundreds of them, wandering around, smiles on their faces and glasses in their hands, certain they were part of something, a world which they had dreamed since childhood of entering, a world which, whatever happened, they would never give up. It had become the American obsession, the chance to be seen by others, starring in a movie in which you pretended to be someone else; the test of authenticity how well you could make fiction believable.

  Or so Walter Bannister told himself as he stood next to the stone balustrade at the edge of the terrace and gazed at the crowd on the wide expanse of lawn below.

  “It’s like I was telling you before, that night at Roger’s house.”

  The voice was vaguely familiar. When Bannister turned around he was almost glad to see someone he knew. Irving Leonard continued talking as if instead of beginning, he was in the middle of what he had to say and that Bannister had followed every word.

  “There’s no movie in it, that’s for sure,” he said, shaking his head in disappointment. Dressed in a casual tan jacket and pale blue shirt, he sipped on a scotch and soda, trying to puzzle it out. The lines on his high forehead deepened and spread wider. “There’s no dramatic element. He murders four people, gets caught, goes to trial, gets convicted and is going to die. Good. He deserves it. But no movie. Who would want to see it?”

  “You mean the Atkinson murder case?” asked Bannister, just to be sure.

  “I think that was his name: The guy you sentenced to death.” Leonard looked at him with his owl-like eyes, expecting him, as it seemed, to know without being asked the question he wanted answered. He sipped on his drink, watching Bannister as if the judge were some actor having trouble remembering his lines. “What was it like?” he asked finally. “Telling someone they’re going to die.”

  Bannister turned his gaze toward the changing colors of the changing crowd below, small groups forming and then, one by one, drifting apart, everyone eager to find something, or someone, just a little more interesting or important than the people they were with, the endless cycle of shining expectation and faded disappointment, a lifetime’s biography told in a few hours on a golden sun drenched afternoon. Taking a deep breath, the clean, sweet taste of the ocean air on his lips, he remembered a little his own vanished youth and, for a moment, what it had felt like, years ago, when in the cool California night the only future he had to think about was that hour and the next one after that.

  “You want to know what it’s like to sentence a man to death?” He turned suddenly back to Leonard who still stood waiting. “No different than any of the other papers I sign in court. A restraining order, a death sentence: a bureaucratic routine. You don’t believe that, because a man’s life is at stake? But I don’t make that decision; Daniel Lee Atkinson made it when he murdered four people. The man who murders, he’s the one who makes that decision, decides someone is going to die. A judge, a jury, all we’re really doing is finishing what he started. You’re right when you say there isn’t any dramatic element to it; the drama is in that decision: how it is made, who makes it – that someone is going to die, someone who doesn’t have to die; someone that, according to the law at least, is supposed to be safe.”

  Leonard nodded the way he always did when he listened, as if, whatever was being said, he had heard it all before.

  “I don’t understand: ‘according to the law, supposed to be safe.’”

  Bannister saw his brother-in-law working his way toward them. Exchanging a few words with a couple eager for the privilege, he greeted Bannister with a raised eyebrow and a quick toss of his head.

  “Nothing to understand,” said Bannister. “Not every killing is murder, that’s all.”

  “Sure; I get it: self-defense, that kind of thing. So what you’re saying is that we should make a movie about what some guy goes through, what he has to decide, when he murders someone: a murder mystery from the point of view of the killer. But no one sympathizes with a killer, so….”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Bannister watched Roger Stanton coming closer, but slowly, forced, or rather required by the fact of who he was to stop and say something to everyone he passed. Roger was good at this, playing the relaxed and affable host, always interested in what anyone wanted to tell him, always able, in ways Bannister did not so much envy as fail to understand, to find the right word by which to make others believe he thought them every bit as interesting as they thought themselves to be. You could see it on the faces of the two women he was talking to now, flushed with encouragement by something he had said and realizing only later, if they realized at all, that he had not made any commitment of his own. They might have the wonderful future he predicted, but it would not be because he had done anything to help.

  They were only a few feet apart, but they might as well have been on opposite sides of the room. Stanton drew people to him. Nearly everyone who had come had come with the idea that an invitation meant an invitation to spend time with him. Proving, as if there needed proving, that a kind of delirium comes with the proximity to power, the crowd around him grew thicker and more boisterous. Women smiled and their bright eyes grew brighter; men smiled, and not only looked, but felt, more confident. Bannister, seeing this, began to back away; Stanton, seeing that, threw him a helpless look and gestured toward the house. They would see each other later.

  “Come on, I’ll introduce you to a few people,” said Irving Leonard, taking Bannister by the arm in the amiable, confidential manner of a friend.

  Bannister scarcely knew him. They had met a few times, but always at something Stanton had put on, and with the exception of the Atkinson trial, they had never exchanged more than the normal pleasantries of dinner table conversation. Bannister was an outsider, given entry into Hollywood’s inner circle only by virtue of his marriage. He was Roger Stanton’s brother-in-law; that he was also a trial court judge was an awkward irrelevance. No one understood this better than Bannister himself. It was a matter of intuition for Irving Leonard and others like him, a felt sense of the difference; nothing they could have explained. Bannister had the advantage of looking from the outside in, seeing everything with the eyes of the observer, someone with nothing at stake in the game. He could laugh, silently of course, at ambitions he did not share and pretensions he did not have; smile at the whole carnival of dreams, the circus of success swirling all around him, because none of it meant anything to him. But as he stood there watching, he realized with a kind of brooding melancholy that they were lucky to have the dreams they had; that it did not matter how empty, evanescent, and insecure they might be; that they were, if looked at closely, like every other dream, just an excuse for getting to the front of the line, of making everyone else look at you and know you were every bit as important as you thought you were.

  He followed Leonard down the steps from the terrace to the long green grass expanse where, as his wife had put it, half of Hollywood was wandering in and out of the white silk tents in which every kind of liquor and, so far as Bannister could tell, every kind of food had been put on display. At the front of a gray stone fountain, Meredith Bannister was laughing at something said by a distinguished looking man with graying hair and a black mustache, a producer that, though Bannister could not now recall his name, he remembered having met at some point. The producer said something else, smiling at Meredith as he said it, and this time, instead of laughing, she rose up on her toes and kissed him gently on the side of his face. Bannister saw it all through the crowd and did not have any doubt what it meant: Meredith, his wife, was having an affair. It did not surprise him, and while it was not exactly surprise, he found it curious that he did not feel anything, certainly not jealousy and not even disappointment. He discovered that he simply did not care, that he was past caring what she did, and that if he needed an explanation for her behavior that was probably it: his own indifference, the absence of any feeling for who she was o
r wanted to be.

  “Here’s someone I want you to meet,” said Leonard, a touch of eagerness in his voice. Bannister did not hear him: he was still watching his wife, trying to remember whether that was the way she had once looked at him.

  “Yes, I’m sorry….” He turned back and found himself face to face with Driscoll Rose, the actor he had the year before threatened to send to death row. He shook hands with him and waited for a sign that Rose remembered him. There was something, just behind his eyes, a glimmer of recognition, and then even that was gone. The handshake was limp and cursory, the scorned duty of someone who thinks he sets his own rules.

  “Judge…,” he remarked, not bothering to repeat the last name.

  Bannister could not resist. “We’ve met before.”

  A lot of people tried to remind Driscoll Rose of their existence. A twitch at the side of his sullen mouth was the only response. Bannister pretended not to notice.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, a couple of times. You appeared in front of me, not dressed the way you are now, in a sports jacket and slacks, but in an orange jumpsuit, property of the county jail.”

  Rose shot a look of bored irritation at Leonard, but Leonard was enjoying this too much to interfere. Driscoll Rose might be the most sought after property in Hollywood, the star that guaranteed the profitability of any movie he was in, but off the screen he was as easy to dislike as anyone with whom Irving Leonard had ever had the misfortune to work.

  “What a coincidence,” he fairly chuckled. “You were in Walter’s courtroom. Did you know then he was Roger’s brother-in-law? Probably not. Wouldn’t have made a difference. He just sentenced a guy to death, Walter did. Probably he wasn’t that tough on you – or was he?”

  Rose ran his hand through a tangle of thick hair and dropped his eyes. He stood there like that, the way he often did in the movies when he was trying to show contempt, and then, looking up, shook his head and walked away.