Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [415]
Chapter 33
GILMORE'S LAST TAPE
About one o'clock in the morning, with everybody half asleep, Gary moved into Lieutenant Fagan's office and got a call out to Larry Schiller at the TraveLodge Motel. Schiller, who had been waiting by the phone, seized it with all the questions of the last month in his throat. "How are you, champ?" were his first words.
"All right," said Gilmore, "What do you want to ask me. What do you want to know?"
"I'd like to go over a couple of things."
"May I tell you something personally?"
"Yeah, I'd like you to tell me something personally."
"You offended my brother," said Gary, "and I don't like it."
"Yeah, I heard that on the tape," Schiller told him.
"Well, I wanted to tell you personally. I didn't like that."
Schiller thought, "He doesn't sound that mad. He's really saying, 'Let's get on with it.' "
Larry cleared his throat. "Okay, I can take it from there, okay?"
"Go ahead."
He got to the subject fast. "At this point, Gary, at one in the morning . . ."
"Pardon," said Gilmore.
"At one in the morning," Larry continued, reading off a card, "do you think you still have to hide anything about your life?"
"Like what?"
"I'm not asking you to tell me what it is, you see? I'm just asking if there's the feeling that you want to hold back something."
Gilmore sighed. "Do you have anything specific?" he asked.
"Well, let's say," said Schiller, "did you ever kill anybody besides Jensen and Bushnell?"
Maybe it was more of his romanticism, but he had the idea that if a man was about to die, he would be ready to reveal himself, and Schiller really wanted to know if Gilmore had ever killed anyone before.
"Did you?" repeated Schiller.
"No," said Gilmore.
"No," repeated Schiller. One more frustration. There was a silence.
No way to continue. He had to try another line of inquiry.
"Is there anything about your relationship with your mother or father," he asked, "that is so personal to you, that even at the moment of death you'd rather not talk?" What kind of relationship could a mother have, he was thinking, that she would not come to see her son? Even if she had to arrive by stretcher! Schiller couldn't comprehend it. There had to be some buried animosity-something Gary had done to her, or she to him. If he could only get a clue to that. But nobody got to Bessie Gilmore. Dave Johnston had gone up to Portland on his own for the L.A. Times and couldn't speak to her. When Johnston failed, you had a woman not ready to talk.
"Goddammit," said Gilmore over the phone, "I'm getting pissed off at that kind of question. I don't give a damn what anybody else has said. I've told you the fucking truth. Man, my mother's a hell of a woman. She has suffered with rheumatoid arthritis for about years and she's never bitched about it at all. Now, does that tell anything?"
"That tells me a fucking lot, right now," said Schiller hoarsely.
"My dad got thrown a lot in jail, when we was kids," said more. "He was a rounder. My mother would say, 'Well, he walked out,' and she let it go at that. She did the very goddamned best could, and man, she was always there, we always had something eat, we always had somebody to tuck us in."
"Okay," said Schiller, "I believe you."
"What about your mother?" asked Gilmore.
"My mother," said Schiller, "was a rough, hard woman. She worked every day. She used to put me in the movies with my brother. We'd watch movies every day while she scrubbed floors for my dad."
Much of human motivation, he had decided for himself in later years, came from the idea of behavior that movie plots laid into your head.
When you could make remarks that brought back those movie plots, people acted on them. So the story he told Gilmore was something of a film scene. In actuality, his family had been in financial straits for only a few years, and in that period, his mother had to scrub floors at times, but the idea of a life spent