The Man Who Loved Women to Death (12 page)

I owed Tuttle Cash my life. I only wished his own could have been happier after that. Because he was the rarest of individuals: someone who had it all. Someone who could have been anything. And what he ended up becoming was the lead character in his own personal Greek tragedy, someone who spent his days and nights stumbling around in a cloud, morose and haunted and confused.

A few months after the novel came out I met Merilee and my own life changed forever. I invited Ezra to the wedding but he didn’t come. For some reason, he had decided to keep a safe distance from me and from Tuttle. As for my best man, he was drunk at my wedding. And he stayed drunk for months and months after that. There was a darkness, an ugliness building inside of him. More and more, it started to bubble to the surface. He grew bitter, hostile, difficult to be with. Until one morning he showed up at my door, filthy and disheveled and soaking wet. He’d spent the whole night at the grave of Hobey Baker, who was buried somewhere outside of Philadelphia, and he was smiling. Smiling like I hadn’t seen him smile in years. Something had clicked, somehow. He had decided it was time to get his life in order. And he did. He checked himself into the Smithers Clinic. He joined AA. He took a job selling bonds for a brokerage house that was headed by an old classmate of ours. He did well at it, too. Worked hard, stayed sober. He was fun to be around again, like the Tuttle of old. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. I swear I wouldn’t.

I wouldn’t have fixed him up with Tansy.

Tansy Smollet … She was Merilee’s dearest friend. Had been since they were at Miss Porter’s together. Tansy’s father owned most of midtown Manhattan. She herself was raised on Park Avenue. She was tall. She was leggy. She was blond. She was beautiful. She was also smart and tough and independent. After Miss Porter’s, the modeling agencies all wanted her. Tansy blew them off. Ended up getting a master’s degree in landscape architecture at Cornell and opening up her own very successful practice in Tribeca. Only for some reason, she could never find the right guy. I couldn’t understand why. I thought she was way cool. And if I hadn’t met Merilee first … well, never mind about that. So I introduced her to Tuttle Cash. The two of them fell hard for each other. I was best man at his wedding, just as he had been at mine. And for a while, they were good together. Not long, though. He stopped showing up for work. Started drinking again. Started fucking around on her. And, when she objected to it, he started hitting her. Until one night he almost killed her. Tuttle broke so many bones in Tansy’s face it took months and months of operations to put it back together again. Briefly, the story made the papers. She was a socialite and he was King Tut—wherever he went, people recognized him. But Tansy refused to press criminal charges. Just filed for a divorce and quietly went on with her life. And the story dried up and blew away.

By then, Merilee and I were in trouble, too. Those were my black hole days. Don’t ask me how long they lasted. I didn’t keep count. As for Tuttle, he stopped calling me. I didn’t ask him to. I was his friend. I was there for him. But I was grateful for it. Because Tuttle never got any better. Because all he ever did was wring me dry. Because I had more than enough problems of my own. I bounced back from mine. Kind of. He did not bounce back from his. And he never would.

It had been a long time since I’d heard from Tuttle. But I knew where he was. I always knew.

And now I sat there with his bundle of old letters, Lulu curled up on the loveseat, dozing. I undid the rubber bands and glanced through them. Many were handwritten in his rather primitive scrawl. But a number were typed. Typed on that battered old Olivetti he’d taken to Europe with him back when he wanted to write a novel. One phrase in particular caught my eye: “Just think how much fun I’d be having if I didn’t have to work.” It was his trademark sign-off. He ended every letter that way. It was the exact same phrase the answer man had used to end Chapter Two. I turned on the bridge lamp next to my chair. I held one of Tuttle’s old letters up to the light. I pulled my copy of the answer man’s last letter from the breast pocket of my jacket, unfolded it and laid it directly over it. That characteristic lower-case
A,
the one that Mrs. Adelman mentioned, was exactly the same in both. A perfect match.

Of course it was. Was there ever any doubt? Tuttle Cash was the answer man and I knew it. What I didn’t know was what the hell I was going to do about it.

KING TUT’S WAS
the classiest and most tasteful of the jock bars to be found in the city that season, which is to say it had the best kitchen, the finest selection of single-malt scotches and no LeRoy Neimans hanging on the walls. Just old prints of bare-knuckle boxers. And, behind the bar, a certain old photograph of three young and obnoxious college track stars. The decor was mostly dark wood and aged leather, the menu, steaks and chops. Not a terrible Caesar salad. There was an antique pool table, a fireplace that burned real wood, a clubby and collegial atmosphere. Pro athletes were known to hang out there, as were league and network executives, high-end sportswriters, selected literati and the usual gang of Madison Avenue and Wall Street jock sniffers. There was always a chosen place like King Tut’s around town. P. J. Clarke’s had been it for a time, Oren & Aretsky, Jim McMullen. For the past three years it had been King Tut’s. Tuttle didn’t own the place. Just fronted for it. Four wealthy former classmates, lawyers all of them, were the money men. It was located on the corner of Third Avenue and East Seventy-seventh Street. Dinner reservations recommended.

It was four in the afternoon when I got there. The lunch crowd had cleared out. The happy hour had yet to begin. A pair of supremely self-important Yushies in suspenders were shooting pool, badly. Otherwise it was deserted. A fire crackled in the fireplace.

Malachi Medvedev was behind the hand-carved walnut bar playing a game of solitaire, impeccably turned out in a crisp white shirt, black bow tie and black chalk-striped vest. Malachi was a well-known New York character in his own right. Mayoral candidates came pleading for his support every election year. Don Imus frequently phoned him for live interviews during his radio show. Malachi Medvedev was no mere bartender, after all. Malachi was the hub of the invisible wheel that held the city together. Among other things, he owned a fleet of cabs, a dozen or more newsstands and controlling interest in several racehorses and prizefighters. If you wanted to place a bet, you asked Malachi. If you needed two tickets to
Sunset Boulevard
or a good, clean used car, you asked Malachi. If you wanted your stolen watch found, or a city building inspector off your back, you asked Malachi. You knew you had arrived in this world if he asked you what your name was. Once you told him, he never forgot it. In appearance, Malachi was a cross between a teddy bear and a pumpkin. He was short and chubby and had a large round head and no real neck or legs to speak of. He had pink, clean-shaven cheeks, a squashed nose that seemed to disappear down into his upper lip, moist, brown eyes and brows that were like two strips of electrical tape. He wore his jet-black hair combed straight back from a razor-sharp Eddie Munster—style widow’s peak. The widow’s peak was real. The black was courtesy of Grecian Formula. Although, frankly, it was impossible to tell just how old Malachi was. Somewhere between thirty-eight and seventy-eight was my best guess.

“You can’t do that, Mal,” I said, taking a stool.

“Can’t do what?” he growled, not looking up from his cards.

“Put a black eight on a black nine. It’s against the rules.”

“Says who?”

“Hoyle, for one.”

“Who’s playing this game, Hoyle or me?” he demanded, glancing up at me. His round face immediately broke into a smile. That was his usual expression. Malachi had to be the most cheerful man on the planet. “How the hell are you, Hoagy?”

“Older and dumber.”

“What it’s all about, m’boy.”

“So I’ve come to realize. And you, Mal? How are you?”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” he replied, beaming at me.

“That’s what I was waiting to hear.” It was his trademark reply. I had never known him to say anything else. “Just between you and me, Mal, do you ever have a shitty day? Do you ever feel like saying life just plain sucks?”

“Well, sure,” he replied. “But who wants to hear that? Besides, if I put a smile on somebody’s face while they’re in here, maybe they’ll go put a smile on somebody else’s face when they leave. It’s contagious. What you call a random act of kindness.”

I froze. “A what?”

“A random act of—”

“Did you make that phrase up?”

“Hell, no. Some shrink did. Heard it on
Oprah.”
He peered across the bar at me, his brow furrowing. “You okay, Hoagy? You look like shit.”

“It’s nothing. I should be fine by the beginning of the century.”

“You feel chilled to the bone? Hot head, cold feet?”

“Well, yes, now that you mention it.”

He nodded. “Whole lot of that going around. Rangers’ team doctor was in here last night. They all got it.” He waggled a stubby finger at me. “Got just the cure.” He went waddling back through the kitchen doors. My eyes followed him, roaming over to the closed door next to the pay phone, the one that was marked “Private.” “Here you be, my friend,” he said, returning after a moment with a steaming mug. He placed it before me on the bar. “Homemade chicken broth with eight garlic cloves in it. Drink that down as fast as you can, then chase it with a brandy. You’ll feel like a new man.”

“I’ll certainly smell like one.”

“Old country remedy,” he insisted.

“Oh, really? Which old country is that, Mal?” No one had ever been able to figure out Malachi’s ethnic origin. It was a subject of keen debate. Lupica of the
Daily News
had cast his vote for Lithuanian Druid.

“You wearing wool socks?” he asked, instead of answering me.

I sipped the broth. It was scalding. “Why, are you selling socks now?”

He reached for a brandy snifter. “No, but a lot of people forget and wear cotton. If your feet are cold, you’re cold.”

“They’re cashmere. And make it a Macallan.”

“The twelve-year-old or the eighteen?” He clapped himself on the forehead. “Forgive me. I forgot who I was talking to—don’t sip that,
drink
it!”

I drank it, Lulu grunting at me unhappily from the floor. She hates the smell of garlic.

One of the crack pool players came up to the bar for a refill. Between the two of them they still hadn’t cleared the table. Malachi drew a New Amsterdam for him and sent him on his way. Then he poured my scotch and set the snifter before me, looking Lulu over from nose to tail with keen interest. “What did she used to be, anyway?”

I downed some of the Macallan, feeling the warmth of it spread throughout my body. “She’s always been a basset hound, as far as I know.”

“No, no. I mean her breed. Before they were domesticated.”

“She hunted down bunny wabbits. Why?”

“We got us a little problem down in the cellar. Thought maybe she was a ratter and could help me out.”

Lulu’s response was to let out a strangled yelp and to scramble up onto my lap and then onto the bar, where she crouched low, front paws close together, her eyes nervously scanning the floor. I patted her. She was shaking.

Malachi watched her. “I guess that answers my question, huh?”

“I guess it does,” I said, grinning at him. His cure was working. I was already starting to feel better.

“You should do that more often, Hoagy.”

“Do what, Mal?”

“Smile. You have a very nice smile.”

“I had them bleached.”

“No kidding. Who did it?”

“My dentist, why?”

“I know a guy out in Pelham Bay Park could have done you the mold at cost. Next time you run out of gel, let me know.”

Suddenly, it was quiet in there, except for the hissing of the logs on the fire and the sound of the billiard balls clicking against each other.

My eyes were on the closed door again. “Is he here, Mal?”

“He’s here,” Malachi answered evenly, his eyes revealing nothing.

“How is he?”

Mal poured me a little more Macallan, plus a short one for himself. He took a sip, smacking his lips. “He’s circling the drain, that’s how he is.”

I drank down my scotch, eased up off my stool and started back there toward the door.

“Hey, Hoagy?” Malachi Medvedev called after me.

“Yes, Mal?”

“Watch out or he’ll stab you in the front.”

I knocked and went in. Tuttle Cash was seated behind his desk wearing a coat and tie. He was the only person left in New York besides me who always wore a tie. But Malachi was wrong—Tuttle wasn’t going to stab me. Why, the man didn’t even have a knife in his hand. That was a gun he was clutching. Besides which, he wasn’t even pointing it at me.

He was pointing it down his own mouth.

“I
F YOU’RE SERIOUS
ABOUT
eating that,” I said, leaning against the doorframe with my arms crossed, “I’d try some piccalilli or chow-chow on it. It’ll go down a lot easier.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes were off somewhere else. Way gone. Good-bye gone.

My eyes were on his finger, the one that was squeezing the trigger. It was trembling, the knuckle white. Until, suddenly, it spasmed. And relaxed. And then, slowly, his eyes came back. All the way back to the room we were in.

It was a bare, drab little office. Just enough room for a desk, a filing cabinet, a couple of chairs and an exposed hot water pipe, which clanked. The rug was worn. The paint was peeling. The restaurant business is no different than show business—the show is all out front.

Tuttle blinked several times, started to say something but couldn’t. Not with that gun barrel in his mouth. He removed it. “Hey, Doof,” he said hoarsely. “Still picking those feet up?”

“Every chance I get.” My eyes stayed on the gun. He was caressing his temple with it, almost lovingly. “Say, you’re not actually going to use that thing, are you?”

He grinned at me mischievously. He often grinned that way when he was with me. It was as if we two shared a joke no one else was in on. “You know what they say—no brain, no pain.” He lowered it, then stared at it there in his palm. It almost looked like a toy in his big hand. It was not a toy. It was a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. “Tell me, Doof. Do you still believe in death after life?”