Millie Read online

  I thought about it for a little while, and then I told her I could accept the fact. “I’ll get the New York cut for two.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “You want fried onions, dipped in batter?”

  “Please.”

  “Garlic bread?”

  “Please.”

  “You don’t mind if I drink beer?”

  “I don’t mind, Al.”

  5

  The clock on her night table said two o’clock in the morning, and I said that I thought it was time for me to go home.

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s a sort of convention. She comes home. I might as well.”

  “I thought you’d be liberated, now that you’re not an impotent old man,” Millie said.

  “It really sets you up, doesn’t it?”

  “Why not? I feel like a doctor who’s delivered his first baby.”

  “That’s an interesting analogy.”

  “Why don’t you leave her?”

  “I have thought about it.”

  “For nine years?”

  “No one else I wanted.”

  “What did you want—the house on North Canon?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why doesn’t she leave you?”

  “I suppose she’s thought about it. The men she makes it with are mostly bastards. She knows that. I’m her home base, her protection. The day she becomes unmarried, she’s naked.”

  “I’m naked,” Millie said, throwing back the cover. Her limbs were long and well-formed, and stretched out, her breasts were slight round hills. She lay like that, motionless, while I dressed.

  “Tomorrow’s a workday,” I told her. “Get some sleep.”

  “Now that you’ve screwed the secretary.”

  “You’re not a secretary. You’ve got your own damn secretary. Do you want to be a partner in the business?”

  “For one night in bed?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “How much would I draw?”

  “Seven hundred a week.”

  “Double. Just like that.” She grinned at me. “That makes me just about the highest-priced lay in Los Angeles, doesn’t it? I’d still draw half of what you do.”

  “You’re the junior partner. Don’t push me out yet.”

  She was serious suddenly, and stared at me for a while, and then said, “You know what, Al—if you ever did go through with that partnership gambit, there’s one thing I’d never do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d never take a stupid nonentity like Senator Bellman and build an image that was all mine and turn a damn fool into a public hero, and then let him walk off with my balls.”

  “You don’t have any balls, thank God.”

  “Wait and see.”

  “And I get paid for the image. What he does with it is his business.”

  “What about your image?”

  “Get some sleep,” I told her. “It’s been a nice night. Don’t louse it up.”

  “Go to hell,” she said tiredly and turned over, and then I put out the light and left.

  Driving home, I was as wide-awake as I had ever been. I had the beautiful feeling that I was young and vital and renewed, and maybe I was falling in love because I had some affection for myself and for the whole world, and even for my wife; and even knowing it was as meaningful and stable as a kid’s toy balloon did not change it.

  The house was very quiet, and the door to Evelyn’s room was closed and probably locked. I had moved into the study nine years ago, without urging and with Evelyn’s silent approval, and I am sure that when our friends discussed us, they always remarked upon the fact that we were civilized in our relationship. That was all right. It was a new world—as the kids keep saying—and Beverly Hills was full of couples who were not kids but were nevertheless most civilized in their relationships.

  When I took off my jacket in the study, I felt the weight of Andrew Capestone’s wallet. I took it out of my breast pocket, placed it on my desk and sat down and contemplated it, wondering a little why all through the evening, talking to a woman named Millie Cooper about a thousand and one things, I had never mentioned the wretched death and departure of Andrew Capestone. A man calls you, desperately reclaims a casual college acquaintance, demands you witness his death, lays upon you the decent responsibility of seeing that his remains don’t go into a pauper’s grave—an event that wrenches your whole life out of routine day-today work—and you don’t even mention it, casually or profoundly, to a woman you embrace and tell yourself you are falling in love with. Why?

  I suppose I knew why, even before I opened the wallet. The whole lunatic notion that was possessing me must have been born the previous day—before I ever spoke to Andrew Capestone—born with that look in Senator Bellman’s eyes when he said to me:

  “I hate to be brutal, Al.”

  “Be brutal. I love it. It’s your new image of honesty and integrity. Don’t mince any words.”

  “It wouldn’t work, Al. Anyway, what in hell do you need Washington for? You got a hell of a business here, and you’re making money hand over fist. You are what you are.”

  “What am I? Tell me that, Senator. Be forthright.”

  “You’re not the image I need.”

  “You’re going way up, aren’t you?”

  “Right to the top, Al.”

  And I couldn’t even be truthfully, decently angry. I was only moderately disappointed, not because I had lost a job as the senator’s right-hand man in Washington, but because every goddamned image I created turned out to be a stinking turd.

  6

  Andrew Capestone—pronounced Kapston—born 1924, New Haven, Connecticut. That and a few other odds and ends of information I gathered from his army discharge and an ID card issued by Crombee, Felton and Sutherland, a legal firm in Hartford. There was a card showing membership in the American Bar Association. Evidently he had been a lawyer. Spreading the contents of his wallet on my desk, I tried to recollect a picture of him as a young man in college, but the effort failed. I remembered the name, not the man. There were three unused checks on the Bank of America. Evidently he had had an account there once; almost certainly it was defunct. There was an expired American Express credit card, and there was a slip of paper with a name on it: Joe Leone. Just the name. There was a card with a telephone number, 555 1819, no area code, no name. There was, oddly enough, a membership card for the North American Peace Institute, a small, semi-religious but rather prestigious peace organization whose director, Warren Beard, I had had some dealings with. And there were five yellowed newspaper clippings. So much for a man’s life and estate.

  The first clipping I looked at summed up a case of murder in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1955. A young black man named Aaron Dudly had been accused of murdering a housewife. Three witnesses, including a daughter of the murdered woman and a domestic at her home, had identified Dudly as the murderer, being eyewitnesses to the fact. The third witness was a postman, who had seen the murderer in flight. Evidently Capestone had defended the accused brilliantly, had provided an alibi that stuck, and proved the old saw that when it comes to identification by whites, one black man is easily mistaken for another. The case must have meant a great deal to him, for the clipping represented a reasonable portion of his entire worldly possessions.

  The second clipping referred to a speech he had given at Yale Law School. His subject: Law, Humanity and Civilization—a title broad enough to cover anything. The clipping quoted a paragraph from his speech and referred to his estimable qualities as a speaker.

  The third clipping was a sort of non sequitur. Dated April 1, 1956, just a few days after the law school lecture, it told of the death of one Alice Richmond, age twenty-three, of an overdose of heroin. Evidently the girl had not been an addict. As far as anyone knew, she had never used drugs before. She was a brilliant student and came from an excellent Boston family; the circumstances of her death were a total mystery. Yet Capestone had been an addi
ct; but when? Then or years later? The lunatic notion I mentioned before was firming up in my mind, and I found myself annoyed and provoked at this connection with hard drugs.

  The remaining two clippings were book reviews, one from The New York Times and the other from the Law Journal In the spring of 1957, a year after the date of the clipping that referred to the girl’s death, the publishing firm of Crimm & Lowe had published a book called Law and Civilization. The author was Andrew Capestone.

  The New York Times review was laudatory for the most-part, summing up the book as “a wise and profound study of the failure of Anglo-Saxon law to provide either a path or a guide to man’s efforts to get out of the jungle of violence and hatred.” The Law Journal was more critical, pointing out that the author failed to take into consideration “the fact that codified law was the result, not the cause, of social structure.”

  I looked up from my desk and saw the first gray light of dawn corroding the black of my windows, and suddenly I was tired, utterly exhausted. I got out of my clothes, set the alarm for nine o’clock and fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.

  7

  Over my orange juice and coffee I missed the recriminations that should follow adultery. The house was empty, except for Clara, the housekeeper, who was middle-aged, white, moderately anti-Semitic and consistently disapproving of me. Nor was she given to long speeches or confidences. When I asked her where my wife was, she said:

  “Out.”

  “Where?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I drank my coffee and stared through glass panels to the swimming pool. Then I got in my Cadillac and drove to the office. Like a chosen few in America, I live the good life.

  Millicent Patience Cooper was unruffled and unchanged, without rings under her eyes, and she registered neither delight nor regret. She sat at her desk, going through Senator Bellman’s file.

  “Is he still our client?” she asked me.

  “What does he pay us now?”

  “He’s up to twenty-five thousand annually.”

  “Raise it to thirty thousand and bill him. If he pays the bill, he’s still our client.”

  “He was the top of the list at twenty-five. Why don’t you dump the louse? You can afford it.”

  That was the first evidence of our sharing a pair of sheets. She would not have said that yesterday.

  “I like the money too much,” I told her. “When you finish whatever you’re doing, come into my office. We have a new client. And by the way, send Anne over to the public library and tell her to find a book called Law and Civilization by Andrew Capestone. It was published in 1957 by Crimm and Lowe.”

  “Who is Andrew Capestone?”

  “Our new client.”

  “Oh?”

  So it was done, and as I went into my office and sat down at my desk, I created a conversation with the psychiatrist who had taken six hundred dollars for a dozen visits when I first learned that my wife was being what is euphemistically called unfaithful. He had helped me very little then but more during the ensuing years simply by appearing in my mind whenever I decided to have a conversation with myself. I always had him begin the conversation by his asking why. “My wife.” “That doesn’t hold up.” “The senator.” “That doesn’t hold up either.” “Myself. I make the image. What’s there in the beginning is meaningless. I can take a drifter off the street or a corpse in the pathology room of the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception—and it doesn’t make one damn bit of difference.”

  I was opening my mail when Millie appeared, pad in hand, her pale blue linen dress uncreased, her manner unruffled, and seated herself in the chair next to my desk.

  “Do you know,” I said to her, “you never enter this room without that damn pad.”

  “You didn’t mind it yesterday.”

  “I had three hours of sleep. How much did you have?”

  “About six. Who is our new client?”

  “Capestone, Andrew. You pronounce it Kapston, spell it Capestone.”

  She wrote in her pad.

  “Age?”

  “Forty-seven, I imagine. We can check it with Who’s Who.”

  “Current Who’s Who?”

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly, wondering whether he had actually made Who’s Who. “He’s been hiding his light under a bushel. Try 1957 or 1958.”

  “What do we charge him?”

  “Five thousand.”

  “Oh?” She raised a brow.

  “He’s an old classmate of mine. Harvard. He’s not rich.”

  “Where do I bill him?”

  “Here.”

  “You’re not getting through to me, Mr. Brody.”

  “I’m Mr. Brody again?”

  “During business hours.”

  “This will be his reference address.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I closed my eyes for a moment, and then I replied, At this moment he’s somewhere in Rhodesia.”

  “Al!” She stared at me for a long moment. “When did he become our client?”

  “You took his call yesterday morning.”

  “I know that,” Millie said. “Was he calling from Rhodesia?”

  “No, my dear. He was calling from the Los Angeles airport. I spent an hour with him before he boarded his plane for New York. From there he went on to Rhodesia. He landed in Rhodesia two hours ago, and by now he is in the clear and we can move. Which is why I mentioned nothing to you yesterday.”

  “What do you mean by ‘in the clear’?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Ad Hoc Committee for Black Liberation?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds like the name of a dozen committees I hear about these days.”

  “Well, to put its history in a nutshell, it’s an African group, formed by a hundred black intellectuals and professionals in South Africa. Its program is nonviolent liberation, but still it’s very sub rosa. Now they’ve sent a delegation to Rhodesia to meet with a similar committee there, and they consider it very important, very critical to the situation in that part of Africa, and they asked Capestone to join them as an adviser. Concerning law and colonialism, he’s probably the best legal mind in America, and while no one knows precisely what will come out of the meeting, he desperately wants support built for himself in America. Until now he has despised publicity and avoided it. Now he needs it.”

  “Is this a public meeting?”

  “Very damn secret. When he lands at Salisbury, he disappears, possibly for two weeks.”

  “And meanwhile we create his image in America.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Al …”

  “What bugs you?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know.” She stared at me thoughtfully. “What’s his family like? Where are they?”

  “No family. A total loner.”

  “Married?”

  “And divorced. She doesn’t enter into the picture.”

  “Talking of pictures, what have you got?”

  “Nothing yet. Telephone the Stamford Sentinel in Connecticut. They should have some in their files. Also his publishers.”

  “That goes back quite a while, doesn’t it? If we want him as a child prodigy, why don’t we go to your college yearbook?”

  “I never thought of that. Good idea.”

  “Come off it. What do you want a kid’s picture for?”

  “We might use it.”

  “All right, Mr. Brody—we might use it.”

  “And will you have dinner with me again tonight?”

  Before she could answer, there was a knock on the door, and Anne Jones, Millie’s secretary, entered and placed a library-bound book on my desk. “There it is,” she said. “Law and Civilization. I never knew the two went together.”

  Millie was looking at her, as if she were seeing her as a black woman for the first time. “Anne, did you ever hear of the Ad Hoc Committee for Black Liberation?”

  “Hear of it? I have been on a dozen of them.”


  “This one’s in South Africa.”

  “They have their own problems,” said Anne.

  8

  I had finished a dozen pages of Law and Civilization, impressed with Capestone’s writing and thinking ability, when Millie opened my door and told me softly that a Mr. Richards of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics desired to talk to me.

  “Shall I send him in or let you get out the back way?”

  “Big joke.”

  “On your head. I’ll send him in.”

  “And dinner tonight?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  She left and Mr. Richards entered. Mr. Richards was square-jawed, broad-shouldered, about sixty, well preserved and a little less suspicious in manner than an ordinary plainclothes cop might be. He even made a pleasantry, telling me that the Bureau could use a good PR man and that from all he had heard, I was the best.

  “That will set me up for today. What brings you here?”

  “The body at the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception. You see, Mr. Brody, we’ve asked the hospitals to cooperate because the situation is pretty damn desperate, as I’m sure you know. When an addict dies, they inform us.”

  “You mean Andrew Smith.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “But they told me he did not die of narcotics.”

  “Not strictly speaking, no. In a broader sense, yes. He was a user and his body bore all the evidence. He appears to have kicked it at some time. How well did you know him?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Oh? According to the people at the hospital, you called the ambulance and then arranged for his funeral.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you didn’t know him?”

  “He telephoned me,” I said, slowly and carefully. “He claimed that we were classmates at college.”

  “What college?”

  “Harvard. He told me he was dying, and I went there.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that—yes. I didn’t remember him. As far as I am concerned, he was a dying man in awful need. I called an ambulance and I put out a few hundred dollars for a cremation.”