Mario Puzo - Fools die

I knelt beside her and covered her with the coat. I took off my jacket and folded it beneath her head. She was in pain, but there was no blood trickling out of her mouth or ears and there was not that deadly film over the eyes that long ago during the war I had recognized as a danger signal. Her face finally was calm and at peace with itself. I held her hand, it was warm, and she opened her eyes. “You’ll be OK,” I said. “An ambulance is coming. You’ll be OK.”

She opened her eyes and smiled at me. She looked very beautiful, and for the first time I understood Osano's being fascinated by her. She was in pain but actually grinning." I fixed that son of a bitch this time,” she said.

– -

When they got her to the hospital, they found that she had suffered a broken toe and a fracture of the shoulder clavicle. She was conscious enough to tell what had happened, and the cops went looking for Osano and took him away. I called Osano's lawyer. He told me to keep my mouth shut as much as I possibly could and that he would straighten everything out. He had known Osano and Wendy a long time and he understood the whole thing before I did. He told me to stay where I was until he called.

Needless to say, the party broke up after detectives questioned some of the people, including myself. I said I hadn’t seen anything except Wendy falling through the window. No, I hadn’t seen Osano near her, I told them. And they left it at that. Osano's ex-wife gave me a drink and sat next to me on the sofa. She had a funny little smile on her face. “I always knew this would happen,” she said.

It took almost three hours for the lawyer to call me. He said he had Osano out on bail but that it would be a good idea for someone to be with him a couple of days. Osano would be going to his studio apartment in the Village. Could I go down there to keep him company and keep him from talking to the press? I said I would. Then the lawyer briefed me. Osano had testified that Wendy had attacked him and that he had flung her away from him and she had lost her balance and went through the window. That was the story given to the newspapers. The lawyer was sure that he could get Wendy to go along with the story out of her own self-interest. If Osano went to jail, she would lose out on alimony and child support. It would all be smoothed over in a couple of days if Osano could be kept from saying something outrageous. Osano should be at his apartment in an hour, the lawyer would bring him there.

I left the brownstone and took a taxi down to the Village. I sat on the stoop of the apartment house until the lawyer’s chauffeured limo rolled up. Osano got out.

He looked dreadful. His eyes were bulging out of his head, and his skin was dead white with strain. He walked right past me, and I got into the elevator with him. He took his keys out, but his hands were shaking and I did it for him.

When we were in his tiny studio apartment, Osano flopped down on the couch that opened out into a bed. He still hadn’t said a word to me. He was lying there now, his face covering his hands out of weariness, not despair. I looked around the studio apartment and thought, here was Osano, one of the most famous writers in the world and he lived in this hole. But then I remembered that he rarely lived here. That he was usually living in his house in the Hamptons or up in Provincetown. Or with one of the rich divorced women he would have a love affair with for a few months.

I sat down in a dusty armchair and kicked a pile of books into a corner. “I told the cops I didn’t see anything,” I said to Osano.

Osano sat up and his hands were away from his face. To my amazement I could see that wild grin on his face.

“Jesus, how did you like the way she sailed through the air. I always said she was a fucking witch. I didn’t throw her that hard. She was flying on her own.”

I stared at him. “I think you’re going fucking crazy,” I said. “I think you’d better see a doctor.” My voice was cold. I couldn’t forget Wendy lying in the street.

“Shit, she’s going to be OK,” Osano said. “And you don’t ask why. Or do you think I throw all my ex-wives out the window?”

“There’s no excuse,” I said.

Osano grinned. “You don’t know Wendy. I’ll bet twenty bucks when I tell you what she said to me, you’ll agree you’d have done the same thing.”

“Bet,” I said. I went into the bathroom and wet a facecloth and threw it to him. He wiped his face and neck and sighed with pleasure as the cold water refreshed his skin.

Osano hunched forward on the couch. “She reminded me how she had written me letters the last two months begging for money for our kid. Of course, I didn’t send her any money, she’d spend it on herself. Then she said that she hadn’t wanted to bother me while I was busy in Hollywood but that our youngest boy had gotten sick with spinal meningitis and because she didn’t have enough money she had to put him in the charity ward in the city hospital, Bellevue no less. Can you imagine that fucking cunt? She didn’t call me that he was sick because she wanted to lay all that shit on me, all that guilt on me.”

I knew how Osano loved all his kids from his different wives. I was amazed at this capacity in him. He always sent them birthday presents and always had them with him for the summers. And he dropped in to see them sporadically to take them to the theater or to dinner or a ball game. I was astonished now that he didn’t seem worried about his kid being sick. He understood what I was feeling.

“The kid only had a high fever, some sort of respiratory infection. While you were being so gallant about Wendy, I was calling the hospital before the cops came. They told me there was nothing to worry about. I called my doctor and he’s having the kid taken to a private hospital. So everything’s OK.”

“Do you want me to hang around?” I asked him.

Osano shook his head. “I have to go see my kid and take care of the other kids now that I’ve deprived them of their mother. But she’ll be out tomorrow, that bitch.”

Before I left him, I asked Osano one question. “When you threw her out that window, did you remember that it was really only two stories above the street?”

He grinned at me again. “Sure,” he said. “And besides, I never figured she’d sail that far. I tell you she’s a witch.”

All the New York newspapers had front-page stories the next day. Osano was still famous enough for that kind of treatment. At least Osano didn’t go to jail because Wendy didn’t press charges. She said that maybe she had stumbled and gone through the window. But that was the next day and the damage had been done. Osano was made to resign gracefully from the review and I resigned with him. One columnist, trying to be funny, speculated that if Osano won the Nobel Prize, he would be the first one to win who had ever thrown his wife out of the window. But the truth was that everybody knew that this little comedy would end all Oscano's hopes in that direction. You couldn’t give the sober respectable Nobel to a sordid character like Osano. And Osano didn’t help matters much when a little later he wrote a satirical article on the ten best ways to murder your wife.

But right now we both had a problem. I had to earn a living free lance without a job. Osano had to lie low someplace where the press couldn’t keep hounding him. I could solve

Osano's problem. I called Cully in Las Vegas and explained what had happened. I asked Cully if he could stash Osano in the Landau Hotel for a couple of weeks. I knew nobody would be looking for him there. And Osano was agreeable. He had never been to Las Vegas.

With Osano safely stashed in Vegas I had to fix my other problem. I had no job, so I took on as much free-lance work as I could get. I did book reviews for Time magazine, the New York Times, and the new editor of the review gave me some work. But for me it was too nerve-racking. I never knew how much money was going to come in at any particular time. And so I decided that I would go all-out to finish my novel and hope that it would make a lot of money. For the next two years my life was very simple. I spent twelve to fifteen hours a day in my workroom. I went with my wife to the supermarket. I took my kids to Jones Beach in the summer, on Sundays, to give Valerie a rest. Sometimes at midnight I took Dexamyls to keep me awake so that I could work until three or four in the morning.