Book Case Page 5

  When he saw who it was, Charley’s scowl began to fade. For my part, when I saw what was blocking the light in the doorway I was hurtled back in time—Charley was wearing a houndstooth sportcoat he’d purchased off the rack at Cable Car Clothiers twenty years before, to commemorate the conjunction of his promotion to detective and the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I’d been with him when he got it, his unpaid sartorial consultant: the blind leading the blind. One of the things I’m most thankful for is that neither Charley nor men’s fashions have changed much in the interim. Nor has the moon, for that matter.

  Charley would have been bald even if he hadn’t cut his hair with a straight razor and big even if he didn’t put away half a fifth of Bushmills a day. Blessed with the genetic makeup of a hunk of concrete block, he was a bastion of honor in a department that was, in the rampant racism and penchant for brutality of too many of its members, increasingly an embarrassment to a city that had remained willfully deaf and blissfully blind to its police problems for years.

  As I was remembering our ancient shopping spree, Charley shook his head with feigned disgust. “That’ll teach me to get home before midnight; there’s all kinds of riffraff afoot out here in the evenings.”

  I sniffed at a peculiar scent that had made the air as itchy as wool and gestured toward the house. “Toilet back up on you?”

  Charley shook his head. “One of the Lord’s more neglected children barfed on me while I was trying to get him to a shelter before the detox boys threw a net over him. I been in the shower for twenty minutes and I still reek.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” I said as I took a step back. “Homer, I assume.”

  “Right.”

  Among other things, Homer’s the guy Charley invites over at Thanksgiving every year, then deposits back in the Tenderloin when the last piece of pie is gone. Homer’s been living in the alley next to a dumpster behind the Clift Hotel since seventy-six—he lost his job to a binge to celebrate the Bicentennial is how he explained it to Charley. I’m not sure why he picked Homer as a surrogate for the thousands of men in the city just like him—probably Charley doesn’t either—but there’s no doubt in my mind that Homer is as important to Charley as I am.

  Charley muttered a curse. “It’s too rough for him out there now. Some young dudes discovered the dumpster, and Homer’s been beat on so many times defending his turf he barely knows me. He’ll disappear one of these days—they’ll tag him as a Doe at the morgue and put him in a pauper’s grave in Colma.” Charley glared at the stars that were peeking at him over my left shoulder. “I just hope wherever he goes there’s someone paying more attention than there is down here.”

  Charley’s expression darkened to match the night, and I stayed silent while he contemplated an afterlife that, according to Charley’s old-time orthodoxy, necessarily included several of his colleagues as well as the woman he’d worshipped for forty years, the last five after she’d been interred.

  “You have much quake damage?” I asked, gesturing toward the house.

  Charley shook his head. “A few cracks in the plaster—needed a spray coat anyway.”

  “Jim Gibson’s piano flipped over.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Baby grand. Quake flipped it over on its back.”

  “Jesus.” Charley took time to envision an acrobatic piano, then sniffed the air as though that would tell him if he was needed anywhere. Apparently the answer was no. “You want a beer, or you just here to get me to sign your petition?” He gestured at the papers I was holding. “What is it, another plan to prod the mayor into building a new ballpark? Or some AIDS thing?”

  “I’ll take the beer if you’ve got anything better than that rotgut you usually drink,” I said. “And it isn’t a petition, it’s the first five pages of a novel.”

  Charley looked at me as though I’d grown a horn. “Decided to do the full Hammett, have we? The exciting careers of private eye and detective novelist wrapped up into one?” He bowed elaborately. “John Marshall Tanner, San Francisco’s newest Knight of the Mean Streets. How may I serve you, sir?—by relating some incidents of suitably grisly realism drawn from my years of experience with such matters?”

  I shook my head, oddly self-conscious once again, this time at the implication that I possessed an ego sufficient to deem myself an author without ever having written a word. “You’re confusing your writers,” I said gruffly. “It was Chandler who called them mean, not Hammett. And Hammett had left the Pinkertons before he began to write. And anyway, they’re not mine,” I added quickly, holding up the pages.

  “So what do you want me to do with them?” Charley asked. “I haven’t read a novel since they made Tropic of Cancer legal.”

  Some people read novels and some don’t. Normally I prefer the company of the former, since they’re more likely to come to their own conclusions about life rather than parrot the best-selling pablum some slicker is promoting that month, but in this as in a lot of ways, Charley was an exception to my rules.

  “I want you to check the pages for fingerprints,” I told him. “If you find any, I want you to ask the cop computer who they belong to.”

  “This have anything to do with the commission of a crime?” Charley asked skeptically.

  “This has to do with Bryce Chatterton.”

  “If this will bring him back to the poker table, I’ll check it out tonight; I miss the fifty bucks a week I used to relieve him of. How’s he doing, anyway? Haven’t seen him since he married that witch who thinks football should be a felony.”

  “She says nice things about you, too; I think the term ‘Neanderthal’ came up.”

  Charley swore.

  “Bryce is okay, I think, but he’ll be better if he can find out who these belong to.”

  I waved the pages under his nose. Charley took them and examined them. “How’d they get so dirty?”

  I shrugged.

  “This spot here looks interesting.” He pointed to a smudge on the title page, then looked up at me. “I guess writers really do sweat blood. Or is there more to this than meets the eye?”

  I shook my head. “Not as far as I know. So you’ll check it out?”

  “That depends,” he countered. “Do you owe me, or do I owe you?”

  “You owe me,” I declared, then made reference to the last time we had a mutual interest in a murder, one whose reach had almost included my secretary, one I had delivered to Charley wrapped in a tidy package, suitable for indictment.

  Charley’s effort to dredge up a response made him look like Yul Brynner. “How about that tip I gave you last month at the track?”

  “Your tip faded down the stretch, whereas my tip finished in the money.”

  “I don’t call eight to five a tip, for God’s sake.”

  “Did you cash a ticket on him or not?”

  Charley cursed my lineage and led me to the beer, which was rotgut as I’d suspected. But bad beer is like bad art—if you endure enough of it, eventually you forget the alternatives.

  Adolescents seek someone to blame for the turmoil biology inflicts on them. Most of them too readily blame their parents; many ultimately blame themselves. For some reason, on a gray November day in 1980, Amanda Keefer decided to blame me.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 59

  5

  I carried the manuscript and a Budweiser buzz up to my apartment and got ready for bed. Normally the approach of midnight and a few beers is all it takes to send me straight to slumberland, at least till three A.M., when more often than not I am jolted awake by the crystal conviction that something in my life has gone substantially awry. It is the peculiar fiendishness of such moments that the dreamed-of debacles are so variable there is no way to catch up, no way to take suitable precautions, no way to fully, finally set things right. I expect to wake up at three A.M. forever.

  I stumbled through my evening’s routine, casting off my clothes, checking the cable news, making sure the deteriorating furnace and the equa
lly infirm appliances were turned to nonlethal levels, nipping the barest bit of brandy after I was in my pajamas but before I’d brushed my teeth. But this time, after I turned off the light and was curled cozily between my flannel sheets, there was a twine-tied Siren beckoning in the moonlight, aglow on the corner of my desk.

  We maintained our standoff for thirty minutes, until my imagination had exhalted the manuscript into something like scripture. I got up, fixed some hot chocolate, opened a pack of Fig Newtons and a bag of M & M’s, grabbed the manuscript, brought them all to bed, and began to read. Such was the allure of the exercise that I didn’t stop until the comestibles were gone and the final page had been dropped to the floor and the light in the room came less from the lamp beside the bed than from the re-emergent sun.

  Frankly, I was surprised I liked it that much. Bryce Chatterton had projected Homage to Hammurabi as a sure best seller, and I don’t usually enjoy novels that attain such heights. To me, the fevered couplings of the rich are mundane and unenlightening, the schemes of terrorists and drug dealers banal and uninvolving, the thump of impending horror essentially laughable except when matched with the age of those who constitute the genre’s chief consumers. In the books I prefer, the driving force is not the imminent ignition of an explosive device but the intricate warble of the language. The plot unfolds not in an exotic foreign capital but in a house much like the one across the street, and the characters are not hulking mafiosi or silk-smooth financiers but people I might find in line behind me at the Safeway or in the chair across from my office desk. What was impressive about Hammurabi was that while it managed to satisfy these expectations, it would, if my guess and Bryce’s were right, meet those of the mass market as well.

  The story was a simple one—confessional and ultimately allegorical. A young man named Dennis Worthy—idealistic, altruistic, optimistic—graduates from college and is hired as an English teacher at St. Stephen’s, an exclusive private high school in an unnamed city. His work with students is frustrating and challenging, but occasionally rewarding. A few years after taking the position, he falls in love with Sharon, the instructor of fine arts at the school, and a year later they marry. Over the succeeding decade they thrive in the intricate society of the school, dote on their students to the extent the students are receptive, have a child of their own. With the aid of some school alumni, Sharon discovers a market for her endearing portraits of people’s pets and leaves teaching to become a modestly successful artist. Dennis begins a novel that even his most cynical associate on the faculty declares to be “promising.”

  Life is proceeding splendidly, if not munificently. The frustrations of trying to educate the increasing number of unteachables produced by the age of dual incomes and TV are outweighed by Dennis’s successes with the small but persistent trickle of talent that comes along each year: One of his students is admitted into the writing program at Iowa, another has a poem published in Antaeus, a third becomes an editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster, a fourth writes soap operas for daytime TV. These and others make a special effort to look up Mr. Worthy when they return for class reunions, to tell him how important he was to their futures, that they remember his class with fondness, occasionally that they have found time to reread one of his favorite books.

  In the middle of this idyll, a fracture suddenly occurs—the morning after Election Day in 1980, Dennis is called into the headmaster’s office and informed that he has been accused of sexually molesting one of his students. In deference to his record, the police are not called and no charge is filed, but an informal inquiry is undertaken by the chairman of the board of trustees. The student—Amanda Keefer—is examined by two physicians and is found to have unquestionably suffered sexual assault. The chairman convenes the entire board for counsel and advises all concerned to keep the matter confidential.

  Dennis is confused, frightened, dismayed. Rumors roar through the school, increasingly irrational and unfounded, wounding all the same. Dismissal procedures are updated to include the most recent demands of due process; the girl’s parents erupt during a secret session of the board and engage a lawyer of their own to seek civil damages; colleagues pledge unswerving support, but are increasingly engaged in furtive colloquy whenever Dennis joins them in the lounge; anonymous callers accuse him of all varieties of bestiality, some with such specifics they seem necessarily to be speaking from experience. Six female students transfer out of his course in modern lit; the yearbook is assigned a new adviser.

  In response to his inquiry, the teachers’ union pledges Dennis its support and offers the assistance of its counsel. The ACLU chimes in as well, but Dennis decides to eschew such mercenaries and fight the battle on his own. To calm the tide of suspicion and surmise and allow the school to return to some semblance of its mission, he agrees to a leave of absence, pending the conclusion of the inquiry by the chairman, certain he will be exonerated. The investigation takes two months; at its end, the finger of suspicion still points exclusively at Dennis Worthy.

  The power of the opening section of the novel lay in its rendering of the young man’s deteriorating psychology. The war he wages with himself as he struggles to find both a mental and moral pathway through the wilderness into which he has been cast by the girl’s appalling accusation was so deftly set forth that when Worthy ultimately finds no escape from the charge—when he pleads guilty to a lesser offense and is sentenced to jail for a period of eight years—I absolutely believed his sanity had been so fully shredded.

  At the pivotal point in reaching the decision to resist the juggernaut no longer, Dennis Worthy reflects on its origins:

  The best proof of my state of mind—proof that I was no longer among the rational—is that a life in prison began to seem preferable to the life I was living as a supposedly free man. I was propelled to that conclusion, absurd though it now seems, by two events I did not anticipate, events that made me desperate for a refuge, even though the only sanctity available was behind a row of greasy iron bars.

  After the accusation had echoed through my life, after my friends began to consult with me in increasingly pessimistic timbres, after the chairman informed me of his findings, after it was found to be better for all concerned that I spend my days at home rather than educating young people at St. Stephen’s, I was finally allowed to confront the evidence against me: Not live, to be sure, but in the form of a videotape of the informal deposition of the complaining witness.

  Alone in the headmaster’s elegantly appointed chamber, the only light the accusatory glow of the TV screen, I dug my fingers into the stiff brocade of a wing chair as Amanda Keefer bravely told her tale—how she’d joined my class because she’s overheard a cheerleader say that I was “mint,” how she tried out for the school play because she’d found my discourse on Macbeth “far-out” and because people always said that with her looks she could make it big in Hollywood, how she hadn’t gotten the role (Lady Macbeth) she wanted and even with a minor part she’d had difficulty learning her lines to the point where I’d offered to tutor her privately in a series of evening meetings in my home.

  True, all of it, even the claim that Amanda embodied the common conception of the vapid loveliness that has long been the staple of the silver screen. True, that is, up to the point where Amanda looked into the camera—looked straight at what she doubtless had been told would one fine day be me—crossed her arms and said, “All of a sudden he started talking about my breasts—about how nice they were and stuff. I mean, the guys talk trash like that all the time, you know, but Mr. Worthy? Get real.

  “Then he asked if he could see them. And I laughed because I thought he was joking, but then he asked again and I could tell he was, like, serious and stuff, so I said no way, Mr. Worthy. Then he grabbed them. Kind of pinched, you know, and it sort of hurt since I was about to get my period and they get sore when that happens. So anyway, I told him to stop and he just looked at me funny and said, ‘I don’t think that’s really what you want, Amanda. What you really
want is this.’ Then he took hold of my T-shirt and ripped it down the middle, which made me mad because it was my new Liz Claiborne.

  “Then he grabbed my breast and kissed it, the left one, real quick, right on the nipple. I told him to stop, but he pushed me back on the couch and pulled down my biking shorts and before I could do anything he put it in me. I mean, I fought back and cried for help and stuff, but he was way too strong, and there was no one around to hear me anyway.

  “When he was done, he asked me how I liked it. So I told him it was gross. And he just laughed and said it’d be more fun the next time. Then he asked when I wanted my next lesson because he couldn’t make it Wednesday, he had to speak to the Alumni Club about the play. I told him never, and when he went to get me a can of diet Sprite I ran out the door and went home.

  “He hurt me real bad. I still have bruises. See?”

  As she raised her shirt to accuse me with contusions as purple as her curiously affectless assertion, the screen went as dark as the stain that spread across my heart as I realized that, whatever the consequence to me or to my family, I could never allow Amanda Keefer to say such things about me in public, could never allow her to say such things about herself.

  A more painful encounter occurred that night. Dazed by what I’d endured in the headmaster’s office, confused by the scope and power of the lie being wielded against me, I went to bed at sundown. When Sharon joined me some time later, I was still awake in torment. I reached to her for comfort, reached for what had always been there, reached for who she had always been. But instead of offering me a quick embrace, I felt her pull away. All the sordid stories, all the slimy speculations, all the horrid fates my pessimism had projected, were validated by that single flinch: The woman I loved more than I loved my life believed I was capable of the abomination Amanda had just accused me of.

  The next morning I did what that fateful confluence demanded—I called the chairman of the board and told him I was guilty. I left the consequence of my confession in his hands, and I must admit, he handled it quite nicely. If I acquit myself well in this place, I will be released before my forty-seventh birthday.