The Last Man: A Novel Read online

  “That’s a question – the guilt or innocence of the defendant – I never think, or at least try never to think about, during a trial. If he’s convicted, I have to pass sentence.” He paused, and for a moment stared down at his hands. “I do wonder, sometimes, about what makes someone do the kind of things this man is accused of doing.” Raising his eyes he looked around the table. “Most crimes are easy to understand.”

  “But not murder?” asked Stanton. “Not crimes of violence?”

  “No, murder is often the easiest crime to understand, easy to understand why someone did it. There is a reason someone dies. But a crime like this – there isn’t any reason.”

  “But there was a reason,” insisted Judith Charles. “There was a break in, a burglary. There were people in the house. Maybe they tried to stop him; maybe he didn’t want anyone who could identify him later. It was terrible, but there was a reason why he did it.”

  “No, that’s what no one seems to understand, what the prosecution missed. It’s what -” He shook his head abruptly, remembering what at all costs he must not do. “I’m sorry; I got carried away. You’re right, of course. Based on what we’ve heard in court, what all the papers have reported….But I shouldn’t be talking about this.”

  Leonard bent forward, his eyes darting all around. He wanted to know what Bannister really thought.

  “You were telling us something interesting. Forget the trial, forget the case: there are some crimes that can’t be explained. Isn’t that what you were saying? What are you saying, that there are some cases where the killer just does it because – because why?”

  A troubled expression spread across Bannister’s face. His eyes turned inward and for a long time he did not say anything.

  “Because he likes it,” he said reluctantly. “Because there is something about it he enjoys, that gives him pleasure and something more than that.”

  Judith Charles was the first to catch the hint, the scent of a quality mysterious and ineffable. She struggled to understand more of what that strange comment meant.

  “Something more than that,” she asked. “Power, control, the feeling that he can do whatever he likes?”

  The words had been used too often to express anything specific, anything that would explain, rather than characterize, what some predator had done. It was not that Walter Bannister disagreed with her; it was that she had made only a half-step toward the truth. He tried to be diplomatic.

  “Power, control – certainly there is an element of that: the feeling that the killer can, in the most extreme way possible, impose his will. But you can say that about a lot of things. Every time I sign an order I’m exercising power – control, if you will. Every time you, or someone at the studio, decide what movie you are going to make and who is going to play what part in it, you’re doing the same. But that isn’t why you do it – because if it is, you’re not the right person for the job. No, there’s more to it. Now, remember, I’m not talking about the usual case, murder for the usual reasons: money, revenge, rage over some act of betrayal – the husband who finds his wife in bed with another man - and I’m not talking about that other kind of murder, the serial killer who keeps killing until he’s caught, the one for whom killing becomes an obsession, the only thing he thinks about, the thing he cannot control.”

  “But how is that different?” asked Leonard. With his elbows on the table, he held his face in both hands, studying Bannister with the single-minded concentration with which he measured the angle of a camera shot. “A serial killer – or this guy, Daniel Lee whatever his name is – what difference does it make whether they do it once or every chance they get? Either way, they have some deep psychological disturbance. They’re crazy – insane – driven by something they don’t understand. We did a movie about this, couple years ago. I read everything I could about it: what goes on in the mind of a madman like that, what kind of personality they have. There’s a pattern: narcissistic, unable to develop stable relationships, abusive childhoods.”

  “I’ve read the same things,” replied Bannister, “and I still haven’t found anything that really explains it. You can tell me everything you want about the pattern, the profile, the characteristics supposedly common to those who commit multiple murders, but there are all sorts of people with all the same characteristics who never murder anyone. Forget about profiles. What makes this particular person do it? But again, I’m not talking about serial killers. The person I’m talking about may kill more often than once, but it isn’t because of a compulsion he can’t control.”

  Judith Charles remembered a name, or rather two names. It surprised, and rather pleased her, that she could suddenly recall a once famous but now largely forgotten case, a case that had been made into a once famous and now largely forgotten movie. She looked at Walter Bannister with a new interest.

  “Loeb and Leopold. The case in Chicago in the 1920s: two students who killed a young boy just to see if they could do it. Brilliant students, they wanted to find out if they could be like one of Nietzsche’s supermen, act without morality. Clarence Darrow represented one of them, pled him guilty and argued, successfully, for life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.”

  Bannister hesitated, the way he sometimes did in court, taking under advisement a question he needed time to consider. With a pensive expression, he stroked his chin for a moment before he finally replied.

  “Darrow argued that they should be kept alive, these two young killers, so that perhaps something could be learned about why they did it. There had to be a reason, something wrong with them that explained what they had done, murdered that young boy. Darrow had to make that argument to save their lives, but what if he was wrong; what if the reason they did it was the one they gave? They wanted to be one of those that, at least in their surface understanding of what Nietzsche wrote, refuse to follow any rules other than the ones they make themselves. What if they murdered that boy because they wanted to know what it was like to make the rules for other people, the rules by which we decide who should live and who should die?”

  “That’s monstrous,” insisted Judith Charles with some heat. “You’re not suggesting that what they did – Loeb and Leopold – was right or reasonable?”

  “Right? – No, of course not; but reasonable – that’s another story. Certainly not reasonable from the perspective of what we regard as right and wrong; but if you believe that all morality is relative, a function of time and place, that it is up to you to decide the values by which you want to live – if you believe that one person’s values are as good as any other, and that to say one is better than another is a foolish prejudice and the failure of tolerance – if you follow that logic to its ultimate conclusion, murder becomes as reasonable as anything else.”

  Judith Charles was speechless. She tapped her hard lacquered fingernails until her coffee cup began to rattle. The color vanished from her cheek.

  “You’d never let anyone make an argument like that in court! You’d never let a murderer go free on the ground that murder is just as good a value as anything else!”

  “No, of course not: murder is against the law,” said Bannister with a quiet smile that had its intended soothing effect. “We punish people who kill; sometimes we kill them. We kill them because the law – our law - tells us to. The question that Darrow did not address; the question that lies at the heart of what Loeb and Leopold thought they were doing; the question that, if you think it through, lies at the heart of what we are today, is: Whose law do you choose to follow?” For just an instant, he seemed to hesitate, but then, narrowing his eyes, he said what he was thinking. “The very notion that that choice is somehow ours to make is the cause of half the troubles we have.”

  Whatever that meant, it escaped Judith Charles. Her mind was fixed on what he had said earlier.

  “It is never right to kill. The death penalty is wrong; it should never be used, it -”

  “Where do you think that comes from?” asked Bannister. Furrowing his b
row, he tapped his finger on the white table cloth, not, like Judith Charles had, with hard emotion, but gently, in the way of someone trying to remember something. “This notion that killing is always wrong. No one really believes it. You’d kill someone if they were trying to kill you.”

  “But that’s self-defense,” objected Leonard. Leaning back in his chair he rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It is, if you’re the one who winds up dead.” Gloria Baker smiled in satisfaction at her own bright comment. Judith Charles shook her head with impatience, turned back to Bannister, and continued the argument.

  “But it’s the only way to save your own life. And that really proves my point: everyone has a right to live.”

  Irving Leonard stretched out his arms as if he wanted to yawn, and then, leaning forward, rested his arms on the table. He did not much care for Judith Charles. He did not much care for anyone who did not immediately do what he said.

  “Even the murderer, the one we’ve been talking about?” he reminded her with a caustic gleam in his rabid eyes. “The one who kills for no reason except the experience; the one who murders someone just to know what it feels like? Even a guy like the one Walter is probably going to have to sentence to death when the trial is over?”

  “It’s wrong to take a life,” repeated Judith Charles, made more certain by Leonard’s nagging opposition that all right-thinking people agreed with her. She turned to Bannister. “Don’t you think so?”

  “It doesn’t really matter what I think,” replied Bannister with a serious, thoughtful expression. “The law allows and – yes, it’s true – in the case before me, requires, the death penalty. I’ve been doing this a long time, and what seemed obvious to me in the beginning isn’t so obvious anymore. The question is always about the guilt of the defendant – whether he did it, whether it was murder – because, you’re right, killing someone is sometimes justified: self-defense or the defense of others. But what if before we put someone on trial for murder we first asked whether the victim deserved to die? Shouldn’t it make a difference whether you’ve killed a monster or a saint?”

  “Murder is murder; it doesn’t…it shouldn’t - !”

  “So if I murdered Hitler in, say, 1936, you would treat it the same way as if I murdered Mother Theresa today?” A sympathetic smile darted across Bannister’s mouth. “That’s a terrible comparison, and completely unfair. I was trying to make a point. Let me try to make it another way. A few years ago I had to sentence a man who had murdered someone who produced pornography. He seemed to think this was the only way to stop him, and I felt an obligation before I passed sentence to remind him that no one had the right to take the law into his own hands. He was not unintelligent, and I’ve never forgotten what he said.

  “‘Whose hands, then?’ he asked. ‘What good is the law if it doesn’t protect you against the things that would make you want to kill someone, the only way to make them stop? What good is the law if it allows, and even protects those who make humans into beasts? Someone poisons the food you eat – this is a serious charge; someone poisons the minds, corrupts the spirits, of our children – we smile knowingly and extol the virtues of free expression.’

  “As I say, I’ve never quite been able to get out of my head what he said that day. On its own terms, it makes a lot of sense, but of course you have to have the law: you can’t let people go round murdering just because they think it is in a good cause. But, still, it raises questions about this belief we have in the essential equality of everyone, this idea that even the worst murderer, if you will, has somehow the right to live. And I wonder sometimes where it comes from: this belief in the essential equality of everyone without regard to what they are; this regret that even the worst murderer should be put to death. Perhaps it is all that’s left of the ‘soul’ in this irreligious age of ours. I’m not really sure.”

  Judith Charles was sure. “If we don’t believe in life, I don’t see what else we can believe in.”

  Irving Leonard was not interested in what anyone believed in or why they believed it. What mattered to him was the kind of movies he wanted to make. He turned to Roger Stanton who had known him long enough to guess immediately what he wanted to talk about.

  “A picture about a murderer the audience applauds, the victim someone who needed killing. It’s been done, but that’s no reason not to do it.”

  “Not exactly,” said Leonard. “What Walter was talking about before: a murderer who kills someone – maybe someone who needs killing – but does it because he wants to be different, separate and apart from everyone else; someone who doesn’t follow anyone else’s rules.”

  Stanton glanced at the others at the table. “Irving always wants to make a serious movie. I keep telling him that the days of Orson Welles are over, but he never believes me.”

  “I don’t know,” laughed Gloria Baker as she tossed a linen napkin on her empty plate. “Sounds just like a vampire movie, only without the vampires.”

  Leonard fixed Stanton with a droll expression. “She has a point.”

  The conversation was now all about the movies and how to make them, the kind of talk they all enjoyed. Their reality was all in their imaginations. Walter Bannister retreated into the public silence of the detached observer, nodding when necessary, smiling when he had to. It did not matter the subject, however awful it was, their first, and so far as he could tell, their only thought how they could show it on the screen. He could have told them that Daniel Lee Atkinson was innocent and that he was guilty instead; that he, Walter Bannister, had murdered four people, slaughtered a whole family, and after a single moment of stunned silence, they would have been thinking through the possibilities, how something so wonderfully unexpected might become an Oscar winning film.

  “I’ve never heard you talk so much about what you do,” said his wife as they drove home. Bannister did not see as well at night as he did during the day, and so Meredith was behind the wheel. “Roger was impressed. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.”

  “I shouldn’t have done it, not in the middle of a trial. I let them get to me, all that mindless chatter about things they know nothing about,” he said gloomily.

  The silence became profound, each of them dwelling in their own, separate, world. Meredith drove along, reliving the moments when she had said something especially witty, remembering the remarks several of Roger’s guests had made about how well she looked and how much they admired the work she had been doing with the charities. She glanced across at her husband’s brooding countenance, considered that despite his age he was still handsome, and felt that surge of pleasure, that state of well-being, she always experienced at the knowledge that other women envied her for who she was and what she had.

  They were just passing through the gate at the bottom of the drive, when she remembered.

  “I hope Wilson comes home. I hope nothing has happened to him.”

  The gardener found the cat the next morning in the bushes a few feet outside the gate. Its throat had been cut.

  Chapter Six

  The police came by the house to tell the judge’s wife that what had happened to her cat had unfortunately happened in that neighborhood before. Several cats had been killed in the last few months and even a small dog. The two officers suspected it was some teenage kid who lived close by. The area was heavily patrolled, there was almost never any crime in that area, and an outsider, someone who obviously did not belong there, would easily be recognized.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” agreed Meredith Bannister. “My husband goes for a walk nearly every evening. I’m sure he would have noticed if some stranger had been lurking about.”

  Probably some kid, they told her again, as they left, some kid with a twisted imagination.

  “They see too much violence,” offered one of the patrolmen. “That’s all some of them do: sit in their rooms playing video games, everyone getting killed. Not too surprising some of them decide they want to try it for themselv
es.”

  She thanked them for coming, told them that she knew her husband would appreciate it, and then called the security company and asked them to come out to make sure their system, with all its intricate electronic monitoring, was in perfect working order. When she left later that morning for a luncheon meeting downtown she asked the gardener to bury Wilson somewhere – and then, as she drove off, wondered whether when she got a new cat she should get the same kind or something different. She thought maybe something different might be better.

  At almost the same moment Meredith Bannister, wearing a new dress, was handing her car keys to the parking attendant at the Biltmore Hotel, her husband was in his courtroom, a few blocks away, listening to the end of Michael Harlowe’s brief cross-examination of the state’s last witness in the murder trial of Daniel Lee Atkinson.

  “The district attorney asked you a lot of questions about the family, the four victims of what everyone agrees was a brutal murder.” Harlowe did not have to pretend to sympathize with the witness, a neighbor who had often taken care of the two children. His whole manner was apologetic. “You did not make the 911 call; you didn’t see the defendant. You didn’t hear the shots – Or did you?”

  Nancy Jarvis had a round, friendly, and rather shy face. She had twice burst into tears during Hector Alfonso’s direct examination. The memory of what had happened had left a permanent scar. There was a part of her that, even now, could not believe it was not just some awful dream.

  “I don’t know. I mean, whether I heard shots. I woke up, and I wasn’t sure why. I heard sirens, and at first I thought it was a fire. That’s when I got up and went to the front door. That’s when I saw the police cars start to come and then there seemed to be people everywhere.”

  “We understand. You woke up, you weren’t sure why, went to the front door, looked out thinking there might be a fire. My question – and you have already answered it, but I have to ask it anyway – is that you didn’t see the defendant that night, did you? You didn’t see him running away from the house, and you certainly didn’t see him doing anything inside the house – you didn’t see him…?”