The Man Who Loved Women to Death (19 page)

He just stared at me.

“Well, if you’re going to insist.” I took out my wallet and handed it over.

“Nice-looking baby, Hoagy,” he said, inspecting her picture carefully. “Say, isn’t her head kind of large?”

“It is not,” I snapped, snatching it back from him.

“First thing I thought of when I saw you on the news tonight was that it must be another one of your publicity stunts. Like the baby was. You’ve always been one for the limelight, haven’t you?”

“That’s not something I plan, Ez.” I had not realized until this moment just how thoroughly Ezra Spooner disapproved of me. “It just happens.”

“Sure, sure. It happens. Stuff happens.” He looked around at his office. “I know about that.”

“I’m an innocent bystander. I don’t know why the answer man chose me. Unless, that is, he knows me.”

Ezra frowned at me. “Knows you? What do you mean, knows you?”

“Ez, there are certain references in the chapters I’ve received. References that lead me to believe that the answer man may be Tuttle.”

“Tuttle?”
Ezra didn’t seem at all upset by this news. He seemed tickled. “No way!”

“Have you had any contact with him lately?”

“Who, me? Naw. We were never really that close. And then after he … well, no. I haven’t heard from him in years.”

“Tuttle says you despise him. I seem to be rather blank as to why.”

Ezra opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out two hand-rolled joints. Lulu perked right up—her mind, such as it is, on what Very had said he’d found in Bridget Healey’s apartment. I told her to cool it.

“Want to get stoned?” Ezra asked me with a sly grin.

“Not right now, thanks.”

“You didn’t used to say no.”

“I didn’t used to be high on life. Since when do you ?”

“This kid at the office got me back into it last summer,” he answered wistfully. “Real cute kid. What a bod.” He left the joints there on the desk and sat back, put his feet up. “It’s true, I do hate Tuttle. Have ever since that night we celebrated your first book. Your best, in my opinion. Your second one missed the mark, not that it didn’t have a few good scenes.”

I nodded politely. People don’t hesitate to casually slam an author’s work to his face. This is not something they would do to their internist or their plumber, but for some reason they have no problem doing it to us. Is that because they don’t realize how vulnerable we are? Or is it because they
do?

He was looking at me. “Tuttle never told you what happened?”

“Tuttle never told me what happened.”

“I guess because it was no big deal to him. That’ll give you an idea just what kind of bastard he—” He broke off, took a drink of his beer. “I met up with you guys at Elaine’s. I was with D-Dana.”

“Dana?”

“Gorgeous girl. A nice girl. Always had a smile on her face. I met her at the office. She went to Barnard, came from a good family. I was serious about her. Until that bastard, h-he …”

“He stole her?”

Ezra sneered at me unpleasantly.
“Stole
her? Oh, no. Nothing that classy.” He ran a soft, white hand over his face. “Christ, that was what, seventeen years ago? I can still remember every detail.… Ten minutes after we get there she gets up and goes to the ladies’ room. Doesn’t come back. Tuttle goes to the men’s room. Doesn’t come back. After, I don’t know, half an hour I’m wondering what the hell’s going on. So I go back there looking for them. Found him giving it to her in the ladies’ room, his pants down around his ankles. Her tits were hanging out, lipstick smeared all over her face. I was going to
marry
her! And h-he just
took
her, Hoagy. Because he felt like it. Because he was Tuttle-fucking-Cash, the great big fucking football hero.” He drained his beer, slamming the empty bottle down on the desk. “She chased after him for weeks after that. He wouldn’t even call her back. She was just last week’s quickie to him. One of a dozen. Dana …” He trailed off, lost in his memories of her. Until, abruptly, he shook them off. “Want another beer?”

“Thank you, no.”

“He’s no hero, Hoagy. Want to know what my definition of a hero is?”

“Yes, I would, Ez.”

“A hero is someone who takes responsibility for himself and his family. A hero is somebody who pays his bills on time. A hero is somebody who tells the truth in business. A hero is somebody who doesn’t screw other people. I’m starting to feel like I was brought up in a different world, Hoagy. I don’t understand what’s happening to people anymore. I can’t believe how they have no scruples. How they think you’re some kind of weakling if you do. I guess that’s why I’m looking for a job now instead of sitting in a corner office billing people three hundred dollars an hour. They canned me last summer, you know.”

“Price Waterhouse?”

“Oh, no, no. I haven’t been with them for years. I was with Fine, Weinberger, one of the big law firms. Only, they said I wasn’t lean and mean enough anymore. I got the news the day after we poured the foundation here. So now here I am,” he reflected miserably, “trying to get out from under this place, trying to hook on somewhere. I have two kids who hate me. A wife who thinks I’m the loser of the century. I thought maybe if we could get a fresh start out west …”

From the house there came the sound of a door slamming, followed by footsteps on the hard dirt. Ezra quickly shoved the joints back in the desk. Then he held a finger to his lips. For one oddly nostalgic moment, I felt like we were two little boys hiding in their tree fort from the big, bad mommy.

The big, bad mommy was a drab, wrung-out dishrag of a woman with limp brown hair, a strand of it stuck to her forehead with Scotch tape. Heidi Spooner was thin but it was a wilted, unhealthy-looking thin. Her color was the color of bread dough left out on the counter too long. The expression on her face was sour. And she moved heavily, ploddingly, like a much bigger, much older woman. She wore a baggy gray sweatshirt, baggy gray sweatpants and a pair of fuzzy green slippers, the kind of fuzzy green slippers that are popular among chain-smoking grandmothers in Far Rockaway, Queens.

She stopped in the open doorway. “Oh, I didn’t realize you had company.” There was a dreary, forlorn quality to Heidi’s voice. She sounded like she was out on the sidewalk in the cold, begging for spare change. Or maybe it was just the way her nose was running. She dabbed at it with a wadded tissue that she then proceeded to tuck, used and moist, into the wristband of her sweatshirt.

I found myself staring at it, knowing that I would remember that tissue for a long, long time. Just as I would remember how cheerless the air got when she walked in. It was the air of two people who don’t love each other anymore and don’t know what to do about it.

Ezra grinned up at her uneasily. “You, uh, you remember Hoagy, don’t you, hon?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Not that she seemed too pleased to see me. Lulu she wouldn’t even look at. “Jason thinks he’s driving down to Daytona Beach for New Year’s with his friend Jade instead of staying here and packing up his room.”

Ezra considered this with a judicious frown. “Which one is Jade again?”

“The rabbi’s daughter.”

“The rabbi has a daughter named Jade?”

“Her real name is Tovah, but she hates it.”

“So?”

“So he’s sixteen years old and he’s not going.”

“So?”

“So
talk
to him, would you?”

“What, now?” he said sharply.

“What, now,” she answered sharply.

He got up, muttering to himself. “Be right back, Hoagy.”

Heidi started to go inside, too, but decided that would be too overtly rude. So she lingered there, sniffling. I offered her my linen handkerchief. She declined it. I didn’t know Heidi well. I had met her only once. But about her I had no doubt—I
knew
she didn’t approve of me.

“We saw Merilee in that musical last year,
Gilligan,”
she said blandly. “We went in for our anniversary. I didn’t much care for it.”

I nodded. Another critic. “Get into the city many evenings, Heidi?”

“No, I hardly ever do.”

“How about Ez? Does he?”

“Well, yeah. Naturally.” She looked at me oddly. “I thought … I figured he’s been hanging around with
you.”

“With me?”

Her eyes searched my face carefully. “What, you mean he’s not?”

“No, he’s not.”

“Oh, that’s great,” she said defeatedly. “That’s just great. I don’t know where he is half the time anymore. He just gets in his car and he goes. Or he sits out here by himself, brooding. He’s very upset about what the firm did to him. He’s not like you, you know. He played by the rules.”

“And I didn’t?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“He’s not talented. He’s had to work within the system for everything he’s gotten. He’s a decent, hardworking family man from a good school. He did everything he was supposed to do and he got crapped on. He’s on his ass, Hoagy.
We’re
on our ass, and that’s just not supposed to happen to people like us.”

“Exactly who
is
it supposed to happen to?”

“We
just
built this place and now we have to pick up stakes and move.”

“There’s no other jobs in this area?”

“I don’t even know if he looked. All he keeps saying is he wants to start over out west—Eugene, Oregon, of all places. What the hell’s so special about Oregon?”

That one I left alone. Didn’t want to touch it.

Ezra returned now, looking grim and unhappy.

“Did you take care of it?” she asked him.

“I told him he’s not going,” he answered irritably. “If that’s taking care of it, then I took care of it, okay?”

“Well, you don’t have to bite my head off, okay?”

“Well, I’m busy, okay?”

“Well, okay.” She went scuffing out, slamming the door hard behind her.

Ezra stood there staring at the door in tight silence. “Did I ask you if you wanted another beer?”

“You did, and I didn’t.”

He nodded and sat back down in his chair.

“Whatever happened to Dana, Ez?”

“I have no idea, Hoagy. She couldn’t face looking at me every day at the office so she quit. Moved to Chicago. That was years ago. I never heard from her again.” He pulled one of those joints out of the desk and lit it. He drew on it deeply, holding the smoke in a moment before he slowly let it out. “Tuttle didn’t remarry, did he? After the business with Tansy, I mean.”

“Malachi told me he was seeing a stripper until recently.”

Lulu got up and scratched at the door for me to let her out. I did. Marijuana smoke makes her gaack. Plus, for some strange reason she’s very susceptible to a contact high. Trust me, you don’t want to be around Lulu when she’s stoned.

Ezra studied the joint in his hand. “And you really think Tuttle’s the answer man?”

“Unless
you
are.”

Ezra’s eyes widened.
“Me?
Why would I do something crazy like that? I don’t hate women.”

“But you do hate Tuttle. His typewriter, his words. It’s a helluva frame, Ez, and there aren’t too many people around who could build it. There’s me. There’s you.”

“Sure, sure,” he conceded easily. “I hear you. Only, if I wanted to get even with Tuttle I wouldn’t go to that much trouble. I’d just hire some guy to kill him.” He smoked in silence a moment. “Is that why you came all the way out here in the snow? Because you think I’m some kind of crazed serial killer?”

“I came out here,” I said, “because I’m trying to figure out what’s going on.”

“You want to know what’s going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on. Tuttle Cash has no respect for human life, that’s what’s going on.” Ezra was waving his arms now. “Particularly if that human life happens to be female. He
uses
women. He
destroys
women.
Killing
them’s not a whole lot of a stretch from what he did to Tansy, is it? Hell, that’s just making it official. I hope they get him for this, Hoagy. I really do. And I know it isn’t politically correct to say this, but I’m glad we have the death penalty in this state again. Because I hope to God they fry him.”

“I believe they use lethal injection now. What do you do with yourself when you’re in the city, Ez? Heidi said you go in a lot.”

“I’m not porking anyone, which is what she thinks. I do
nothing,
Hoagy. I leave the car in a garage and I walk. Or I ride the subway, sometimes for hours at a time. The city has changed so much, but in a lot of ways it hasn’t changed at all. I guess I’m …” He trailed off, reflecting on it. The marijuana was having its way now. “I’m just trying to get back the feeling of what it was like when I first moved there, y’know? The enthusiasm. The energy. The desire. That make any sense?”

“Yes, it does.”

“I thought about calling you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I dunno. Figured you and she lead such a glamorous life.”

“I change diapers, like I said.”

He nodded. We were silent. We seemed to have run out of things to say. I got up and reached for my coat.

“Want me to do it for you, Hoagy?”

“Do what, Ez?”

“Turn him in. I know how hard this must be for you. You two were close. I’ll make the call if you want me to.”

“You’d do that?”

“In a flash,” he said, reaching for one of his phones. He was more than happy to do it. Hell, he was eager to do it.

“No, no, wait,” I said, stopping him. Why so eager?
Was
he building a frame? He
was
prowling the city alone. He
was
riding the subways. Was he the older man from the office who Bridget had been seeing? Why not? Why the hell not? “When it’s time to do it, Ez, I’ll be the one to do it.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, backing off. “And you don’t have to worry. I’ll keep this to myself. We teammates have to stick together, right?”

“Track’s not really a team sport, Ez. It’s just you against the competition.”

“All the more reason to stick together. A man’s got to have
somebody
watching his back.” Ezra got up and stuck out his hand. “Good to see you again, Hoagy. I’ll send you my new address.”

“Do that,” I said, shaking his hand.