Death Bed

  Death Bed

  A John Marshall Tanner Mystery

  Stephen Greenleaf

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  To my mother and,

  in memoriam,

  my father

  ONE

  We had been sitting in the room for close to an hour, talking about this and that—the Warriors, the Democrats, Mozart, Montaigne. I was a nondescript private eye who could stuff all of his assets into some carry-on luggage if he owned any carry-on luggage, and he was one of the ten wealthiest men in the city if you didn’t count the Chinese. He had everything money could buy and most of the things it could rent. In a while he would be renting me.

  The room had once been a den, comfortable and masculine, the repository of riches gathered during a lifetime of commercial conquest. From where I sat I could see a pre-Columbian torso and a post-Impressionist landscape and a harpsichord worthy of Landowska. But the riches had been shoved into the corners to make room for a bed because in spite of all the prizes, or just maybe because of them, Maximilian Kottle was dying. When he realized I knew it he told me why.

  “Cancer,” he said crisply, with cocky defiance.

  I had guessed as much, but even so I had nothing to say worth saying. The word lay in the center of the room, the way it always does, like a dead rat that everyone sees but no one wants to pick up and carry out to the trash.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled finally, embarrassed because I was embarrassed.

  Kottle shrugged. “Don’t be. Poor Belinda, my wife, is sorry enough for both of us. I tried to spare her all this, to send her away until it’s finished, but she will have none of it. I love her very much,” he added unnecessarily.

  He shifted position slightly, making me wonder if he had bedsores, and what bedsores were. “Do you contemplate death much, Mr. Tanner?” he asked when he got comfortable. “I mean, do you attempt to truly engage it, intellectually?”

  “I’m afraid these days the only thing that engages me intellectually is my tax return.”

  He laughed and I was glad. “Come now,” he said. “The subject is ubiquitous. I myself have confronted the concept in earnest for several years, ever since I realized I was the only male in my family still alive.”

  “Have you reached any conclusion?”

  “Two of them. One, I don’t want to die. That’s not as silly as it sounds. There have been times when I wasn’t certain of that. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Everyone with a brain knows what you mean.”

  He nodded in agreement. “Second, I decided, somewhat paradoxically, that whatever comes next must be better than what has gone before. I’m not sure what form it will take—I tend toward a belief in spiritual reincarnation, although an amalgam of the Mormon and Zuñi concepts of an eternal journey is also attractive—but I think at bottom it gets better. I think perhaps that’s what salvation is—our successive and progressive approximation of the good.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “No, but getting there is no picnic. This cancer. There are no choirs of angels, let me tell you. As the most notorious of modern afflictions, I of course often imagined cancer as the eventual cause of my demise. To tell you the truth, I fully expected that, should I in fact contract the disease, it would prove mildly disappointing, as so many notorious things are upon close encounter. Unhappily, I was wrong. Cancer is truly evil, Mr. Tanner. With the exception of certain misguided religious and political movements, it is perhaps the only unmitigated evil that still exists in statistically significant quantities.”

  Kottle chuckled dryly, then seemed to wince. The wrinkles in his face broadened briefly, then returned to their original expanse. I asked if I could get him anything and he shook his head.

  “The insidious thing, of course,” he went on, “is that with cancer it’s not a matter of ill fate or accidental exposure to a source of contagion or a slow and natural debilitation. No. Thanks to modern biology we learn that cancer is an entirely self-inflicted wound. The grotesque result is that millions of us must endure not only the pain of the disease and the humiliation of a host of sincere but ineffective treatments, we must also live with the thought that we brought all of it, our own suffering and that of the people we love, completely upon ourselves. It’s so simple, really. According to the scientists the cause of cancer is stupidity.”

  His closing smile was ironic, but then for a man in his position everything must seem ironic. I tried to show I understood what he was saying, but he didn’t see me do it. There were mirrors in front of his eyes, and he was looking at the reduced and reflected image of his past. When he spoke again it was an incantation.

  “Cigarettes and Scotch, bacon and ham, smog and saccharin. Stress. Too much sunshine. My God, sir, my whole life has been calculated to put me in this bed.” He chuckled again and enjoyed it, then coughed and didn’t. “Shall I tell you something else amusing?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you ever feel that if something good happens to you, then something bad must surely follow?”

  “With me it’s more than a feeling, it’s a law.”

  “Yes. Well, my business has many facets, but the one I have been concerned with most intimately over the last five years is a complex chemical and engineering problem. I’ve poured millions into it. For years there was no progress at all. Now my people tell me we are almost there. Finally. A few more months, at most. And I know as surely as I’m lying here that I won’t live to see it happen.”

  “Is it the shale?” I asked.

  He peered at me with interest. “You know about that?”

  “Some,” I said. “I know your company and others are spending money like drunken sailors trying to get oil out of all that rock in Colorado. I know that the first outfit to do it commercially will have a license to print money.”

  Kottle nodded with sudden vigor. “There’s over a trillion barrels of oil out there, Tanner. We’re going after it. Others are too, but I’ve given my people a blank check. Now they tell me they’re on the track. By the twenty-first century we’ll be pulling four hundred thousand barrels a day out of those mountains. Maybe more.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It is good. It’s good for everyone, but the people it’s best for are the poor people, the ones being knocked silly by OPEC and their prices, the ones whose livelihood depends on what an increasingly penurious government doles out to them. And it’s going to keep this country from being held hostage by a lot of camel jockeys who don’t give a damn about anything but making money and humiliating us.”

  The exegesis had tired him. He paused to catch his breath, then waved a hand as if to brush the words from the air above his bed. “Forgive the monologue,” he sighed. “One of the less attractive aspects of my predicament is that I’ve become obsessed. But then, obsession has had a lot to do with getting me where I am, or at least where I was before I became metastatic. I should probably be thankful that I retain the capacity for it, however perverted it might have become. Which brings us to the purpose of my calling you, Mr. Tanner.”

  The telephone on the stand beside him suddenly buzzed and he picked up the receiver and listened wordlessly. I got up and went over to the window that stretched from floor to ceiling and looked out at the city and the rain that fell on it.

  We were on top of a twenty-story stack of apartments occupied by people who hadn’t had to look at a price tag in years, high above Sacramento Street, sharing the top of Nob Hill with the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins the way a five-year-old shares a beach towel with his older brothers. The building was called the Phoenix. Like the Dakota in New York, it was one of the truly prestigious addresses in town. Max Kottle owned every brick of it.

  Over on California Street a cable car cl
anged to a halt. The people who clung to its sides like barnacles wouldn’t let any other barnacles on. Down by the bay the car lights strung along the freeway stopped moving, as though the commuters had all paused to take a collective breath. Six inches from my nose raindrops beat against the window in a hundred jealous slaps.

  Max Kottle was still talking on the phone so I quickly thought over what I knew about him. He was one of those men who seem born with the ability to make the economic system jump through hoops of their own design. Kottle operated impulsively, almost like a kid, but he collected companies, not baseball cards. Big companies, small ones, solvent ones and insolvent ones—companies with nothing in common except that they all fit neatly into the conglomerate Kottle had begun putting together shortly after the Second World War and which now ranked comfortably somewhere just below the Fortune 500.

  I could remember when Kottle had gone public back in the days when I was a Montgomery Street lawyer instead of a Jackson Square private investigator. For a long time before that Max had run a close corporation, owning his enterprises entirely, but when he needed a big hunk of capital to buy a fleet of tankers from an aging Greek he had offered shares to the public, retaining just enough of the stock to exercise practical, if not mathematically certain, control. At the time, the corporate types I knew were guessing that, given the price the stock had climbed to a month after it hit the market, Kottle’s net worth must have been close to fifty million dollars.

  I didn’t know where things stood now—I stopped following the stock quotations when they took them out of the sports section—but I had vague memories of oil discoveries off Yugoslavia and real-estate ventures in Venezuela and a Justice Department injunction against some merger proposal a few years back. Kottle’s holding company was called Collected Industries. It had hundreds of millions in assets and its holdings spattered the globe the way Pollock spattered a canvas. And Max Kottle ran it all from this room.

  Lately Max himself had become more legend than real, more phantom than fact, appearing in print only among the periodic lists of California’s wealthiest residents or when one of his sorties into the currency exchanges or the art markets resulted in a particularly brilliant coup. I could recall pictures of him sitting on the decks of private yachts and strolling on the shores of private islands, usually alone, looking as hard and brown as a buckeye.

  But that was a different man from the one I had just been watching. The man I was talking to—the man lying naked under a thin white sheet, the man cranked up at the waist by a steel-framed hospital bed, the man whose hair was white and tufted, whose skin was loose and mottled, whose eyes were gray and dull—that was a man I had never seen before.

  “Sorry,” Kottle called out as he replaced the phone. I went back and sat down in the chair beside his bed. For some reason, we said nothing to each other. Over at the window the raindrops seemed to mock us, tittering.

  “Doctor Hazen is here by now,” Kottle began finally, glancing at his watch. “He comes by daily to chart the progress of my disease. He’s my friend as well as my doctor, so I don’t want to keep him waiting.” Kottle smiled at a memory. “Three weeks ago Clifford estimated that I had two months to live, absent divine intervention. I think the only reason he comes by is to assure himself that he can remain comfortably atheistic.”

  “I’m sure he’s concerned about you,” I said inanely.

  “Oh, of course he is. I’m only joking. Now let’s turn to something that is almost as painful to me as my sarcoma. I mention my projected life span only because it has some bearing on the reason I asked you here today.”

  “Which is?”

  “I want you to find my son, Mr. Tanner. I want to see him before I die.”

  TWO

  As though the reference to his son had purloined his store of strength, Max Kottle fell silent, his face slack, his eyes closed. His chest, unclothed and furred with gray, rose and fell mechanically, forcing whistling streams of air through his nostrils. Soon even the whistling ceased.

  Empty of sound, the room seemed empty of all else as well. Dark, draped only in folds of shadow, lit only by the lamp beside the bed, it was a ghostly still life of modern illness. At the edge of light there were suggestions of bookshelves and floor lamps, tables and chairs, but there was nothing vivid, nothing real. Somewhere, something clattered briefly, then was silent.

  Kottle opened his eyes and sighed. Without thinking, I reached for a cigarette, until I remembered the disease that shared the room. I dropped my hand to my lap. Kottle smiled weakly. “Stupidity,” he said. I kept my hand where it was.

  With some effort Kottle looked over at the small digital clock on the nightstand, then asked if I wanted a drink. I said I’d have what he was having. He pressed a button and a door opened and a young black woman wearing a stiff white dress and crepe-soled shoes entered the room.

  “My nurse, Miss Durkin,” Kottle said to me.

  I nodded a greeting and the woman nodded back with careful insouciance. The thin gold bracelets at the wrist of her long brown arm chimed gently. As she moved, her white stockings scraped against each other like brushes across a snare.

  Kottle asked his nurse to have someone named Ethel make some drinks and bring them up. Miss Durkin nodded and left the room without saying a word. Nothing she left behind was intemperate enough to melt. “I suspect she despises me,” Kottle said with a grin.

  “Nurses usually despise the disease more than the patient,” I said, “but she could be an exception.”

  Kottle shrugged absently. He seemed a camera without a lens, unable to sustain a focus. For the next few moments he searched the room, seeming to seek something bright and cheery. I considered suggesting that he read Leaves of Grass, that its optimism might be helpful, that it had helped me more than once. But I didn’t. I’m not that brave. “What’s your son’s name?” I asked instead.

  “Karl. Inexcusably alliterative, isn’t it?”

  “How old?”

  “Thirty. His birthday was last week.”

  “How long since you’ve seen him?”

  “Ten years.”

  “A long time.”

  “A lifetime, as it turns out.”

  “Any communication from him at all in that time?”

  “None. That is, there were letters, but nothing important.”

  “May I see them?”

  “No. They would not be helpful.”

  “I might be a better judge of that.”

  “Perhaps. But I am the judge of which of my affairs shall remain private. I won’t disclose them. I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged, making the mental check marks I always make when the client starts being elusive. “Where did you see Karl last?”

  “Right here. He paid me one of his increasingly infrequent visits. It was my birthday. I thought perhaps some of our problems might have evaporated with age, but Karl was obviously on drugs that evening and we soon quarreled. I threw him out. He never returned.”

  “Have you any reason to think he’s not alive?”

  Kottle started, his head lifting briefly off the pillow. I shouldn’t have asked the question.

  “What?” Kottle sputtered. “Of course not. Why would I think that?”

  I shrugged. “Just asking. What were those problems you and Karl were having?”

  Kottle sighed heavily. “This was 1969. Karl had just finished four years at Berkeley. I was already monstrously wealthy. Karl embraced left-wing politics as though it were a long-lost panda bear. We quarreled about just what you would expect—our values, our pasts, our futures. Karl decided my life was indefensible and I decided to defend it. It seemed important, then. It seems ridiculous now.” Kottle shook his head in puzzlement.

  “What was Karl doing back then?” I asked.

  “Nothing. He’d finished college with a degree in philosophy, but he didn’t have a job. He was drifting, as so many of them were in those days. Drugs. Sex. Politics. I don’t know. None of it seems so wretched, in retrospe
ct. But at the time, well, those were difficult days.”

  “Where was he living?”

  “In Berkeley, I assume. I can’t be sure.”

  “Did you know any of his friends?”

  “Not really. Oh, he brought various revolutionary types around from time to time, and I would endure their calumny for an hour or so before ordering them out. It was all very predictable. And very boring.” Kottle smiled. “Of course I’d give a thousand shares of CI stock if I could relive those moments today.”

  “What about high school friends?”

  “I don’t think he had any. We sent him to boarding school back East. Another mistake.”

  “Do you know of any particular reason he might have for dropping out of sight?”

  “No, I … no. Nothing.”

  Suddenly nervous, Kottle reached for one of the pill bottles that littered the nightstand. In his haste he knocked one of them to the floor. It rolled across the carpet and came to rest against my shoe. I bent down and picked it up and put it back on the table. The name on the bottle was sesquipedalian; the capsules inside it as blue as liquid sky. As I sat back down I noticed one of the capsules lying on the floor, like a frozen tear, just next to the leg of my chair. I picked it up before I could step on it. Then I repeated my question about why Karl might have dropped out of sight.

  “I don’t know,” Kottle answered after washing down his pill. “Perhaps he just needed time alone. I may have given you the wrong impression, Mr. Tanner. Karl was not stupid and he was not a drug addict. He was brilliant, as a matter of fact. When I say he used drugs I mean mild forms. But of course, for someone of my generation, there were no mild forms. Every drug called for maximum denunciation. A pharmacological domino theory prevailed.” Kottle chuckled. “Likewise his opposition to the war. Certainly his vision in that regard was much more farsighted than mine. He was eloquent on the subject. In fact I suspect that part of our difficulties arose out of my own jealousy over that eloquence, and the serenity he seemed to possess at such an early age. Perhaps, afterwards, Karl simply became disillusioned, Mr. Tanner. Cynicism lurks beneath every bed.”