At ten-thirty the next morning Bone found himself sitting—once again—outside the office of Lieutenant Milton Ross, a small, neatly attired man in his early forties, initially very polite and softspoken when he came on the job at eight o’clock and thought he would quickly get from Bone what lesser officers had not been able to manage in long hours of predawn questioning—the “truth” of what he had witnessed. But as Bone refused to change his story or add to it, the lieutenant’s composure had begun to crack and peel. And Bone’s popularity plunged. Suddenly he was a liar, a lousy goddamn anti-authoritarian deadbeat. He was a small-time con artist bucking for the big time, like say a hitch in prison for obstruction of justice. But Bone was not to worry; his story would change. Ross would see to that.
So Bone felt no great pleasure as the office door opened again now and the lieutenant motioned him inside.
“Sit there,” Ross commanded, indicating a straight-backed wooden chair placed almost in the center of the office and facing a row of glaring sunlit windows under which Sergeant Verdugo and another, older man stood waiting. Ignoring the chair, Bone walked over to a conference table that sat across the small room from Ross’s desk. Leaning back, he lit a cigarette, casually, determined not to let the little storm trooper intimidate him. Under the windows he thought he saw a trace of smile on Verdugo, one of the two detectives who had picked him up at Cutter’s house almost seven hours before. The older man was new to Bone, big and white-haired, with the scarlet nose of a heavy drinker. He was leaning back against a radiator, arms folded, softly wheezing authority.
Ross addressed him now:
“Captain, first let me give you a short make on our witness here. Name is Bone. Richard Kendall Bone.” Ross picked up a sheet of paper and began to read. “Age thirty-three. Born Chicago Plains, Illinois. Graduate University of Wisconsin nineteen sixty-four. No service record. Worked in sales and marketing, was marketing manager for a pretty large paper products company in Milwaukee at age twenty-eight. Wife and two kids, daughters. Suburban house, country club membership, etcetera. No record at all until three years ago. Then suddenly two busts for driving under the influence. License suspended. Then arrest on a charge of rape—which the woman then dropped. Lost his job and came here to the coast, alone. No steady job since. We got a Wisconsin warrant for desertion and nonsupport, then the wife dropped the charge. A year ago we brought him in on a grand theft charge, a fifteen-hundred-dollar tape recorder a local woman claimed he made off with. But she backed off too.”
The captain, who had taken out a fat cigar and lovingly unwrapped it, now puffed it into life. “Fascinating,” he wheezed.
Ross was undaunted. “And though there haven’t been any signed complaints on this yet, some of the men say he’s got a rep around the beach motels as a cocksman. Preys on women who—”
The captain laughed. “Preys?”
“That’s what I hear.”
“Still fascinating.”
“Well, it does bear on his statement, I think. It bespeaks a certain life orientation, I’d say.”
The captain waved his cigar in surrender. “All right, Milton. Jesus Christ, let’s get on with it.”
Nodding primly, the lieutenant returned to his paper. “Let’s take it from the top then. We’ve checked with the bartender, Murdock, and these people he’s staying with, the Cutters, and they all pretty much back up the time frame he’s given us. He left the bar at approximately eleven-forty. Ran out of gas on Anapamu and abandoned his car, which puts him on the scene at approximately eleven-fifty. And that coincides with the testimony of the tenants there—that’s when the body was dumped, when they heard all the racket. Bone then proceeded on foot to the Cutter place. The body was discovered—and we got our first call—at twelve-twenty. At one-forty-five we received the anonymous call regarding Bone.”
“Anonymous to you,” Bone put in.
Ross looked up from his sheet of paper. “The Cutters bear you out on that. Maybe it was this Erickson. But we haven’t been able to locate him yet.”
“Why bother?”
“What’s this?” the captain asked.
“A young friend of Cutter’s passing through town,” Ross explained. “He was at the Cutters’ house last night. Left after an altercation with Bone.”
The captain nodded vague comprehension. “Go on.”
“That’s about it. And you’ve got his statement.”
“So I have.” Sighing, the captain worked a sheet of paper out of his rumpled suit-coat pocket and unfolded it, scanned it. “Yeah, and it ain’t much, is it? A man in silhouette…heavy…large head…period.”
“That’s what I saw,” Bone said.
The captain looked up at him. “Oh, we understand that, Mr. Bone. And we’ve got no quarrel there, believe me. Last thing we need is inventive witnesses. No, that’s not the problem. It’s the other—your refusal to go through our mug file or view a lineup. You know, we keep pretty close tabs on sex offenders around here, and a case like this, well it’s no trouble to run ’em in front of a witness, no trouble at all. You never know, one of ’em just might ring a bell.”
“I didn’t see a face,” Bone said. “I can’t identify a face.”
“Just a silhouette, huh?”
“That’s right. A shape. A dark shape.”
The captain smiled coldly. “Maybe the Prince of Darkness.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Bone said.
“Don’t know the gent, huh?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Well, you are indeed fortunate.” The captain, apparently a realist, slowly stood erect. Putting away Bone’s statement, he added, “So be it, then. Just thought I’d put in my two cents. Because this thing’s really got folks all shook up. You wouldn’t believe the calls I got this morning already. People want this guy awful bad. And I think I know why. It’s the trashcan, I figure that’s what bugs them. Why not dump the body in a ditch somewhere or on the beach, huh? Or up in the foothills? No, not this guy. He chooses a trashcan. And I think it says something about him, something not very nice. Something people can’t accept.”
Bone said nothing.
At the door, the captain looked back at Ross. “You tell him about the autopsy?”
“Not yet.”
“Crushed trachea and fractured skull,” the captain told Bone. “Semen in the throat and on her face. Blood type O.” He shook his head slowly, in wonderment. “Seventeen years old too. A cheerleader. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Still Bone said nothing.
The old man lifted one hand slightly and let it drop as he went out, a gesture of futility or parting. Bone was not sure which. And he did not care. He had been patient up to now, very patient, considering that he had spent half the long night and morning trying to convince platoons of detectives that he was a witness to a body-dumping, that was all, not the murderer they at first thought him to be, hoped him to be, and then once they had accepted this, to have to battle through the rest of the morning to defend the integrity of what he had seen, or more accurately, not seen. So he figured he had been patient enough, had played that poor man’s game as long as he could.
Crushing out his cigarette, he moved toward the door. “I’m leaving now,” he said. “Either that or I call a lawyer.”
Ross lifted his phone, stabbed a button. “One minute, Bone. Just one minute more, I promise.” Into the phone, he said, “Send her in.”
Through the office door window, Bone saw one of the secretaries in the bullpen area nod to a young woman sitting next to her desk. The young woman got up and headed for Ross’s office. She was small and very trim, with eyes that looked incapable of surprise, expected anything from anybody.
“Who’s she?” Bone asked.
“The victim’s sister, Valerie. Supported the girl, I understand. The mother too, an invalid.”
“What’s this got to do with me?”
“Just tell her what you saw, that’s all.”
“Why not you?”
“I don’t think she’d believe it from me. She’d think we were snowing her, not doing our job, you know.”
“So you want me to do it for you.”
Ross shrugged. Finally he was enjoying himself. “It’s your story, not ours.”
After the girl came in, Ross curtly introduced her to Bone and then explained that Bone had been on the scene last night and had witnessed the “disposal” of the body, a word choice that did not seem to embarrass the lieutenant at all. Then he gave the floor to Bone, who told her exactly what he had told the police, not embellishing his story or apologizing for its inadequacy.
She turned back to Ross. “So you don’t really have anything yet. You don’t know who.”
“Not yet. No.”
She smiled slightly, brutally. “But you will, of course.”
Ross did not return her smile. “You can count on it,” he said.
“Sure.”
Bone liked the girl. He regretted not having more to give her. But he said nothing. His minute was up, his long night of patience. As he opened the door, Ross tried to get in a few last words:
“Don’t leave town. If you have to, get in touch with me or Verdugo. And try to remember. Try—”
But Bone had already closed the door behind him.
When he emerged from the police station he found Cutter waiting for him, stretched out like a lizard in the sun on one of the stone parapets bordering the front stairs. He knocked on Cutter’s false leg, and the one eye opened.
“I’m out,” Bone announced.
Cutter sat up, yawned. “So you are. Jesus, this sun feels great.” He struggled erect and started to cane his way down the stairs. “You know, if I’d had a tin cup here I could’ve made a fortune.”
“You’d only blow it.”
“Car’s down the street,” Cutter told him. “Mo and the kid too. Nobody’s slept worth a shit. You really screwed us up, you know that? I had to baby-sit out here while they grilled Mo and then vice versa.”
“What about Ronnie? They have her in too?”
“Wanted to, I guess. But she took off. Your little black piece is long gone.”
“Good.”
“Not all that great, huh?”
“Not worth this.”
“Amen to that.”
“What about my car?”
Cutter ignored the question. “The gendarmes had me in there almost two hours, can you believe that?”
“Why?”
“Who knows? Maybe because I got bored—I asked one of them if this was all they wanted me for, to find out about you.”
“Smart,” Bone said.
“Yeah, wasn’t it though?” Cutter grinned like a demented wolf. “First thing I knew there were three of them working on me, all with the same question: What else is there? So I broke down and confessed. Sodomy…double parking…”
His laughter rattled down the street.
Bone shook his head. “They’re gonna lock you up one of these days. They’re gonna eat the key.”
“But when, huh? You never tell me the important things.”
Bone tried to go back. “My car, Alex. You still haven’t told me.”
“Guess.”
“Twenty-five?”
“More.”
“How much?”
“Ten for parking on a thoroughfare. Thirty for towing. And four-fifty storage a day.”
Bone’s stomach knotted. “Oh, Christ no. That much?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
When they reached the car, they found Mo lying back on the front seat smoking a cigarette while the baby stood next to her crying and pulling her hair, trying to make himself heard over the radio, which was booming a Carly Simon number. Cutter, who ignored the infant almost entirely, simply opened the car door and stood waiting until Mo finally crawled into the back with the baby and started to change him.
“I was waiting until you got here,” she explained, as the men slid into the front. “One diaper left, and if we’re going out to lunch—”
“Damn!” Cutter was trying unsuccessfully to start the car. “I told you not to play the goddamn radio with the motor off!” he yelled.
Bone lit a cigarette and settled back, trying to loosen the knot in his stomach. His MG was bad enough, but at least it was a gift. He had not paid a dime for it. This, on the other hand, this grossly ugly 1948 Packard Clipper convertible, was Cutter’s by choice, something he had intentionally acquired and expensively restored for no better reason than that it was the same make and model his late father had once owned and made his rounds in, tooling back and forth between the country club and the yacht harbor and the family digs near the Mission, a huge old house now converted into a warren of apartments.
“They getting anywhere yet?” Mo asked Bone.
He shook his head. “Same as before. One blind eyewitness.”
“What did they say, you don’t look blind?”
“Something like that.”
“I imagine they’re—well, disappointed.”
“I guess.”
“And you really can’t blame them,” she said. “I mean, here’s this grown man, this nice clean-cut sort of establishment type, and he sees the culprit right across a little old side street dumping a body, practically eyeball-to-eyeball with the guy—and what can he tell them about it? Nothing. I’d be, uh, disappointed too.”
Cutter was still grinding his foot against the starter. “Get off his goddamn back, will you, Mo!”
“What do you mean, off his back?” she protested. “I’m not on your back, am I, Rich? My God, I come down here to testify for him. I clean up the floor after him and his little Afro friend. Why I even wash his come towels.”
Cutter was not listening. “Come on! Come on!” he yelled, as the engine turned over faster.
Bone, however, had heard her. Glancing back at her, he tried to read her look, weigh the pain or contempt hiding behind the slight smile of mockery. But she turned to the baby and began to nuzzle him. And just then the engine caught.
“Old Faithful!” Cutter gloated. “Well, let’s go get a sandwich. We got big bidness to discuss.”
They drove the few blocks to Ziggie’s, a new self-serve sidewalk café located close to that point on State Street where the smart shops and neat tree-lined brick walks of downtown Santa Barbara began to go sour, in fact became the local skid row or at least what had to pass for one in the absence of any truly rundown area. In most American towns, the strip probably would have been the high-rent district, which pointed up one of Cutter’s favorite themes, that the city was the victim of creeping affluence, or, as he expanded on the subject, Blockbusting Whitey Style. Every few days the bulldozers would press a little farther into the barrio, razing a few more Mexican shanties, which would then be replaced by some exquisitely designed orthodontists’ office building resembling the Ponderosa hacienda and costing about a million dollars a square foot. In time there would be no hovels left, Cutter would complain, no place at all for the Mexicans to live. Who then would cut the Anglo’s grass and clean his toilets? Who would raise his children? Obviously the time to act was now, before the burro was out of the barn.
They took a table in the sunshine and for a time the three of them barely spoke, all hungrily downing Ziggie’s doughy hamburgers and fries. The baby, however, standing in Mo’s lap, had much to say about his mother’s nose and eyes and lips, which he kept touching and squeezing and kissing. And Bone for some reason found himself unable to look away from the two of them, this blond handsome young woman sitting across the small table in the pale lemon light, with her fat year-old son jabbering happily in her lap. He tried to think of his own family, Ruth and the girls, but there was nothing there, nothing comparable. He had courted the girl and married her, had lived with her and slept with her for over seven years, and together they had made children, together had raised them, or at least begun the process. Yet when he tried to feel now what those years had been about, he could not come up with much of anything except possibly habit, that tedious old whore habit. Yes, he was afraid that pretty well covered their relationship. Ruth finally had been a habit, that was all, and probably the girls too, Janey and little Beth, somehow so like their mother, so cool and correct, so contained.
Whatever the reason, he could not remember feeling then what he felt now as he sat watching Mo and the baby.
For Cutter, however, they might as well not have been there. He had other problems.
“Money,” he said to Bone. “That’s what we got to talk about, kid. Bread. The staff of life.”
“What about it?”
Cutter took a bite of his hamburger. “Ain’t none,” he chewed.
You’re short, huh?”
“You might say that, yeah. No food stamps. Disability check two weeks away. Mo and I got about four bucks between us. And the cupboard is bare.”
“That’s short, all right.”
“I’m already into so many cats around town, people dive through windows when I hit a place. And Sister Venereal here won’t call home to her mama and beg, so where does that leave us?”
“You tell me.”
Cutter drained the last of his Coke. “With you, buddy.”
Bone laughed. “You sure you got the right man?”
“Yeah. But let me say first, Rich, this hasn’t got anything to do with your staying at the house, the few bucks of groceries you may cost us. Nobody’s keeping tabs, nobody cares. We’re happy to have you.”
“I thank you, sir. But I’ll be out in a day or two anyway.”
“No reason to. We like having you.”
Bone looked at Mo, and she smiled cryptically.
“I appreciate that,” he said to Cutter. “But you got a lousy davenport. I think I can do better.”
“Dreams of glory,” Cutter said. “But even if you could, it’s beside the point—which is we need a short-term loan. Enough so Mo can go do her thing at Alpha Beta.”
“Right. I understand. But where do I fit in?”
With his one hand Cutter had taken out a cigarette. Now he lit it deftly, in a swift flow of movement. “You is duh loaner,” he said. “We is duh loanees.”
“You’re out of your tree.”
“Yeah, I know—you’re flat too. But your old buddy’s been busy. Let me ask you—how you gonna get your car back?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You’ll try to hit somebody, right? Well, let me tell you, sweetheart—you won’t connect. Everybody’s really up against it lately, I don’t care how goddamn much money they’re making. It’s like asking for blood.”
Bone plucked the last french fry out of its paper tray, ate it. “What’re you getting at?”
“As I said, I’ve been busy.”
“And—”
“I’ve got a buyer for your car.”
“A buyer?”
“That’s right. He buys, you sell. Push-pull click-click, we’ve got some bread again. He’ll give you two hundred.”
Again Bone looked over at Mo, hoping to see her reaction to this bit of footwork. But she was inscrutable, as usual firmly in Cutter’s corner.
“Who says I want to sell my car?” he asked Cutter.
“What good is it in the city garage? And anyway it’s a mess, right? You can’t fix it. Well, this guy can. He’s got his own shop. Did most of the body work on the Packard.”
Bone shook his head in appreciation. “Beautiful, Alex. Just beautiful. I sell my wheels and give you the money.”
“Loan it.”
“Loan it then. Either way, how do I get around?”
“My car.”
“When it works.”
Cutter shrugged. “Well, it’s up to you, man. Think about it. Meanwhile you better eat slow. All we’ve got at home is Cocoa Krispies and booze.”
Bone said nothing for a time. He lit a cigarette and watched the thin parade of winos, hippies, and straights moving along the sidewalk. At the near corner a truck pulled up and its driver, a young black man, got out and loaded a stack of newspapers into a vending machine. Mo handed the baby to Cutter.
“I’ll get it,” she said, reaching for her purse. “I want to read it first.”
As she left the table Cutter pushed the baby out to the end of his knee.
“Jesus, I hope this ain’t my kid. What an anal character. He’s done it again. Old brown pants himself.”
Bone did not trust his voice for a few moments.
“What a prick you are, Alex,” he said finally.
“What a real first-class prick.”
Cutter forced a laugh. “What’s all this about, huh? What’s with you now?”
“You know goddamn well.”
“About selling your car?”
“About Mo, you prick. That’s your kid and you know it.”
For a time Cutter sat there pretending to be surprised and puzzled. Then the old look of amusement lit up his wounds again. He knew something you did not. Slowly he shook his head. “I don’t know any such thing, kiddo. I don’t know nothing about nobody. What do you think the girl is, some kind of tin saint? Man, she was in the life from her teens. Than that Jesus Freak commune bit and a rebound after. You think you go through all that and come out a vestal virgin?”
“I’m talking about now, the last two years. The kid’s a year old, isn’t he? So he’s yours.”
“Don’t ask me, ask her.”
Mo had just returned to the table. “Ask me what?”
“If I made the front page,” Bone said.
She handed him the paper. “Not by name. At least, I didn’t see it. The story mentions a witness, that’s all.”
It was not the headline story—the worsening economy still reigned there—but it did get second billing. And there were two photographs, one showing the trashcans and the driveway leading through the apartment complex, the other a school portrait of the girl, Pamela Durant. Next to the pictures was a deck headline:
LOCAL GIRL SLAIN
BODY FOUND IN TRASHCAN
The accompanying story had nothing in it Bone did not already know. A man walking on Alvarez Street was alleged to have seen the car turn in and stop, but it was reported that he saw the suspect only in silhouette. His statement and tire markings on the driveway indicated that the vehicle at the scene was a late-model, full-size car. Residents in the apartment houses reported hearing the vehicle brake sharply, and then moments later depart with tires screeching. The victim, pretty seventeen-year-old Pamela Durant, had been a cheerleader and homecoming queen candidate at Santa Barbara High School. She was described as very popular, an active student with a keen interest in ecology and contemporary music. She was survived by her mother Angela Durant and sister Valerie, twenty-three, an employee of Coastline Insurance.
Bone handed the paper to Cutter, who had already given the baby back to Mo. Now he scanned the front page rapidly and then turned inside, where something caught his interest. He seemed surprised for a moment. Then he recovered his customary look of amiable scorn.
“Hey, maybe our friend Erickson was even busier than we thought last night.” He handed the paper back to Bone to let him see the item.
Glancing at the third page, at a large newsphoto there, Bone suddenly felt the sidewalk opening under him. The photograph came at him from inside as much as out, negative and positive. And he heard himself mutter, “My God.”
Cutter looked at him in puzzlement. “Hey, I’m not serious, man. That cat couldn’t blow up a balloon.”
Bone barely heard him.
“Hey, what’s with you?” Cutter pressed.
“It’s him.”
Mo too was looking at Bone now as if he had taken leave of his senses.“Who?” she asked.
But Bone had caught himself by now, realized the absurdity of what he had said. “Like him,” he amended. “That’s all. It’s like the man.”
Cutter leaned across the table to get another look at the photograph. His voice soared. “You putting us on, man? J. J. Wolfe? The conglomerate? The man on Time?”
Mo, who still had no idea what they were talking about, unceremoniously snatched the paper from them and looked at the picture Bone still could not believe: a heavy large-headed man in his forties standing next to a burned-out car and smiling happily, as if he were displaying a prize bull. Above, a banner headline explained:
CAR OF J. J. WOLFE BLOWN UP
FBI CALLED IN ON FIREBOMBING OF VISITING TYCOON’S CAR
“He’s like the man,” Bone repeated. “Same size and build. Similar. That’s all I meant.”
Cutter was staring fixedly at him, almost squinting, as if there were small print all over Bone’s face. “Ain’t what you said at first,” he said.
I’m saying it now.”
Cutter affected a look of deep confoundment, and turned to Mo. “Now isn’t that weird. One second he eyeballs the picture and tells us It’s him, just like that. And the next second he takes it all back. That is passing weird, wouldn’t you say?”
But Mo was busy reading the story of the firebombing. “Happened at one-fifteen in the morning,” she reported. “He’d been driving around late, alone, in a rented Ford LTD. Got back to his motel about midnight, ran out of cigarettes, and went back to his car to get more. On the way—bang. He saw it go up. But that was all. Didn’t see anyone running or anything else. And he’s got no idea why anyone would want to do such a thing to him.” Mo smiled maliciously now. “I quote: All my companies work for America. They create jobs and opportunity and prosperity for thousands of people. We don’t take, we give. Unquote.” Mo bowed humbly, playing folksy tycoon herself for the moment. Then she returned to the paper. “So he knows this thing wasn’t intended for him. It was either a prank that got out of hand or someone simply got the wrong car. Nevertheless he appreciates the fine job the local police and the FBI are doing.”
“What a sweet guy,” Cutter said. “It say what he was doing out so late?”
Mo reported from the paper. “He admires our fair city so much he just drives around it any chance he can get, day or night.”
“He’s here for the energy conference, I take it?”
“That’s what it says.”
Cutter looked at Bone. “What do you say now, man? Driving at midnight, all by himself. In an LTD, which I believe qualifies as a full-size car.”
“Along with a few million others.”
Cutter shrugged. “All right, Rich. Okay. I agree. The odds against this cat being your trashcan freak are—well, astronomical. Because he’s here in town, and heavy-set, with a large head, and driving the right kind of car at the right time—I agree, it doesn’t mean anything. Must’ve been scores of other gentlemen around town—maybe hundreds—that would fit the same bill of particulars.” Cutter had begun to light another cigarette but forgot it now, let it dangle unlit. His eye narrowed conspiratorially. “But you know, I must admit two things about this do just bug hell out of me. First, why you said It’s him. Not it looks like him, not it’s similar to him or a double for him, but him period. And second, the firebombing of his car—not even ninety minutes after the girl was dumped. Now isn’t that strange? Doesn’t it intrigue you a little, Rich?”
Bone looked at his watch. It was past twelve o’clock and people on their lunch hour were beginning to crowd the sidewalk café. Many were standing in line, waiting for tables.
“We’re through eating,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“And my two problems?” Cutter asked. “No answers?”
“Your only problem, Alex, is your imagination.”
Driving back uptown, Bone found it hard to believe the amount of traffic they had to fight through. Even in his small MG the going was rarely swift, but it was decidedly slower with the one-armed Cutter maneuvering the 1948 Packard, which reminded Bone of a beached whale, a great bloated tin fish. With the traffic already this bad, he hated to think of summer and especially Fiesta week, when tourists would glut the city like starlings in a favored tree.
As they moved along, stopping, starting again, smoking and rattling past the handsome old fake-adobe structures along streets lined with palm trees and hibiscus and jacaranda, Bone could almost feel with Cutter the sick outrage of the native Santa Barbaran. For the town quite simply was perishing of its own spectacular beauty and climate, was on its back almost full time now, putting out for all kinds of pimps and promoters and developers, anyone with the price of a lay. Santa Condominia, Cutter called it, relishing how it too had betrayed him.
But Bone could not work up much of a sweat over the problem. In fact he could not even keep his mind on it. The photograph in the newspaper kept intruding. He had played the thing casually back at Ziggie’s, but the truth was he had no answer to Cutter’s question. He had no idea why he had blurted It’s him! And that uncertainty, he was sure, worried him even more than it did Cutter, for only he knew how immediate and thoughtless the connection had been. It was not the face, of course, for he had not seen the man’s face. Nor was it simply that both men had the same bearlike body and large head. No, it was something beyond that, an animus, an almost inhuman arrogance that flowed as equally from the dark shape dumping the body in the trashcan as from the face in the photo, the celebrated new conglomerateur grinning amiably next to the burned-out shell of his rented car. And for that matter, Cutter had a point there too, the car going up in flames within an hour of the dumping of the body—how many coincidences added up to noncoincidence?
But again Bone caught himself. Had he flipped or was it just exhaustion? As if to prove to himself the absurdity of his thoughts he picked up the paper now, which had been lying between him and Cutter in the front seat, and absently, almost carelessly, he opened it to the third page, expecting to find nothing there but a grinning stranger. Instead he found the same sick feeling as before. And Cutter did not miss it.
By the time they reached the house, Bone had begun to feel the need for both solitude and exercise, and he asked Cutter if he could take the car onto the beach. But Cutter crossed him.
“Great idea. I’ll join you. We can race.”
After Mo got out, taking the baby with her, Cutter drove off. On the way they went past the apartment building that once had been Cutter’s home, a huge three-story white stone structure sitting back amid the surviving palms and sycamores, its sprawling lawn all asphalt and parking places now, its porte cochere glassed in and modernized, a lobby. Behind the house rising young stockbrokers and communications specialists lived the chic life in converted stables and servants’ quarters and drank mai-tais around the same pool where Cutter’s mother, drunk, had fallen in and drowned a few years after his father, Alexander the Third no less, had met a similar fate, going down with his heavily mortgaged hundred-thousand-dollar yacht in a storm off Point Conception. By the time of the mother’s death the executors of the estate could scrape together only enough for Cutter to have a year at Stanford, and then it was all over, done, three generations of money and privilege canceled like a subscription. And Cutter moved on without a backward look, slipping easily into the mid-sixties, that golden age of cant, of bare feet and acid and Aquarius, followed by either disillusionment or boredom, Cutter was never sure which, except that it led to turnabout, metamorphosis into a marine of all things, a hardgutted grunt who reached Nam just in time for Tet of 1968, just in time to step on a claymore.
Most of this had come from Mo. What little Cutter ever revealed about himself was usually in the form of black humor, as when he referred to his parents as the aquatic branch of the family. Even now, driving past the old house, he did not glance its way. Nevertheless Bone could not forget the make and model of the car they were in, and he could only wonder what significance it held beyond the obvious, precisely how and where its psychic tendrils linked Cutter to the flesh and spirit of his past.
At Arroyo Burro they parked the car and made their way down over the huge winter boulders to the beach itself, where a ragtag school of scuba bums were preparing to go into the water, all looking to Bone infinitely weirder than anything they were likely to spear in the deep. Limping past them, Cutter asked one to keep a sharp eye out for his dog Checkers, a Labrador that liked to float out in the kelp beds for days at a time, especially at this time of year. Though the man looked dubious, he nodded.
“But be careful,” Cutter called back. “He bites.”
Bone walked on a short distance under the cliffs, to a boulder where he knew Cutter would wait for him. There he took off his shoes and jacket and started out, jogging at first, then slowly gathering speed as he ran toward the lowering sun, which was setting red fire to Isla Vista’s lonely Stonehenge of high-rise buildings. Out at sea, storm clouds moving in from the southwest had snagged on the channel islands like old newspapers blown against a fence row. For over a mile he ran, between the cliffs and the sea, past low-ride-uncovered rocks bristling with mussels and sea anemones. And then he started back, keeping up the same steady pace, until in time he could feel the cleanness coming into him as his body burned first its fuels and then its poisons too, all the tensions and angers and other gunk of this long day disappearing down the swollen river of his blood. And still he kept on, even after the cleanness had become only pain, an ax stuck in his side and sinking deeper with every step until finally it reached the point where he felt almost severed by it, and only then did he let up, slowing down for a time and then walking and jogging the last half mile to the boulder where Cutter sat staring out at the sea.
“Used to run here myself,” Cutter said. “But I guess I already told you that.”
Bone, still out of breath, did not respond.
“I’d have beaten you then, Rich. Because you coast, man. You glide. You don’t press. Me, I pressed.”
“I believe it.” Bone lit a cigarette and dragged, wondering whether it would undo whatever good the run had done for him.
“But back in your old v.p. days at twenty-eight, I don’t figure you did much coasting then, huh? No sir, I’ll bet you ate old men for lunch back then.”
“I don’t particularly care for the metaphor.”
Cutter laughed. “You got a point.”
Neither of them said anything for a time. A pretty teen-age girl walked past, leading an English bulldog on a leash, and Cutter gave her his customary greeting—“Want some candy, little girl?”—but it lacked all edge. Smiling, shaking her head, she walked on. And both men watched her, the long legs and small fine buttocks moving eloquently as she went on around the headland up the beach. When Cutter looked back, his eye had a strange bleakness in it. Nevertheless he grinned. He grinned crookedly and said, “Lately I been thinking of killing myself, Rich. You got any advice?”
Bone dragged on the cigarette, buying time. Out beyond the surf a pelican plunged into the sea. Bone shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“I figured not. Guy talks about it, naturally he’s not gonna do it, right? He’s just fishing. Dramatizing himself.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I would, in your place.”
“Then why tell anyone?”
“No good reason. Except it’s true.”
And Bone began to feel a breath of alarm now, like a breeze off the kelp, fetid, a touch ominous. “Why, Alex?” he said.
Cutter shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not the goddamn eye, or the arm and the leg—some list, huh? They don’t help, Christ knows. But they’re not it, not the real problem. No, that’s in here,” he said, tapping his head. “And I can’t fix it. Can’t change it.”
“What is it?”
Cutter flipped him a look, spare, flat. “Well, it goes kinda like this—you make me ill, Rich. I mean physically ill, a feeling like having to puke all the time, like having the goddamn flu or a hangover. You get the picture. And it isn’t just what you say or what you do. It’s what you are, what I know you are, inside.” He must have seen some of the resentment Bone was beginning to feel, for he raised his hand, signaling that there was more to come. “And the problem, kid, the big problem is you’re the best. Yeah, I guess I probably like you best—or despise you the least, I guess I should say. Less than all the others, less even than me. Probably just a matter of style, the low key, nothing important. It doesn’t change the fact that I get out of bed every day like it was Armageddon. I can’t stand the thought of looking at faces and listening to voices. I can’t stand communicating. I’d rather kiss Mo’s clit than her mouth. I’d rather bounce a ball than the goddamn kid. I don’t want to read anymore, I don’t want to see movies, I don’t want to sit here and look at the goddamn sea. Because it all makes me want to puke, Rich. It gives me the shakes. I guess the word is despair. And it’s become like my heart. I mean it pumps day and night, steady. I’m never without it. I’m sick all the time. So I think about death. I think I would as soon be dead.”
Cutter broke off there, not even looking at Bone for a reaction. Absently he scarred swastikas in the sand.
“I can’t say I understand,” Bone tried. “I feel depression myself, Alex. And fear too. But nothing like this. Mo, doesn’t she—?”
“She doesn’t figure in. She doesn’t matter. With her or without her, it’s all the same.”
“What about the VA?”
“You mean the shrinks again?” Cutter laughed at that. “No chance. A bunch of cripples in bathrobes sitting in a circle telling each other how they’ve copped out or how uptight and hostile everybody else is. And the shrink getting off on it all, sitting there with one hand stuck in his fly.” Cutter shook his head in disdain. “No thanks. Anyway I don’t figure I’m sick. I figure I’m well, one of the few. I figure I see life whole and honest, exactly as it is. And the only normal healthy response is what I have, this despair.”
Bone knew that with Cutter the possibility of a put-on was always present. But he went along anyway. “You’re serious, then?”
“About killing myself? In my head, yeah. I see no reason not to. But doing it, actually doing it, well I couldn’t say till afterwards, could I. After I’d brought it off. And then of course I couldn’t say anything. So I guess all I can say is yeah, I’m serious.”
Bone dropped his cigarette onto the sand, buried it with his foot. “At the beginning you asked for advice. Okay, I advise you to wait. You can’t lose. Things might change.”
“I’m already into that,” Cutter said. “I’ve been waiting for some time now.”
“Good. Keep waiting.”
Cutter shook his head matter-of-factly. “Not this way. Not with this setup. Mo and the kid and the food stamps. And this fucking boom town. It’s like living in the middle of a Jaycee parade.”
“What else then? Where?”
“Nothing very grand, Rich, believe me. First, money, of course. I’d need that. Enough for some decent surgery on the old physiognomy, tone down the scarface routine. The VA, they added scar tissue. I believe the surgeon was an orderly out of Watts, used an old switchblade. And no new ‘prosthetic devices’ either. The foot’s enough. I refuse to jack off with a steel claw. Unesthetic.” Cutter grinned disparagingly. “As for where, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to disillusion you, old buddy. Because what I want is truly square, really and truly square. Would you believe an exotic island somewhere, with ceiling fans and dusky natives? Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet and me, all sweating through our palm beaches. Say someplace like Ibiza, Clifford Irving and his freaky, decadent friends. Which after all is what I am, right? Freaky and decadent. I think maybe in a place like that, with people like that, I might lose this—nausea.”
Bone too had begun to smile now, for he was sure if the other had not been a put-on, this certainly was.
“Ibiza, huh?” he said.
“An Ibiza.”
“Good luck.”
“Take more than luck. It’ll take money.”
“Right. Well, let’s head back.” Bone was already on his feet, waiting for Cutter to join him, which he did now, slowly pushing off on his cane.
As they started up the beach, Cutter changed the subject, or at least for a brief time Bone thought he had.
“Back in the car I saw you look at the paper again. The picture. You still ain’t sure, are you?”
“About what?”
“J. J. Wolfe.”
“I keep repeating, Alex. I didn’t see a face. So how can I identify a face?”
“You tell me.”
“You talk in circles.”
But now the circles tightened. Picking up a stone, Cutter skipped it at the surf. “A rich man, J. J. Wolfe,” he mused.
And Bone laughed out loud. Next to him, Cutter limped along, smiling crookedly, culpably.
“So what’s funny? A rich man, that’s all I said. Which he is, right?”
“Which he is.”
“So what’s the big deal?”
“Come off it, Alex. Or rather, come out with it. Say it.”
“Say what?”
“First, all this shit about despair and your crying need for bread. Big bread. And now suddenly we segue neatly to J. J. Wolfe.”
Cutter was still grinning. “Blackmail, you mean? You think I’m suggesting blackmail?”
“The thought does cross the mind.”
“Bone, you been in too many police stations lately. Your brain’s going soft. What the hell do you think I am anyway, some half-assed mick toilet-paper salesman, some aging ever-ready beachboy who’d go down on a crocodile if the money was right?”
Bone smiled at the description. It was not all that wide of the mark. “If not blackmail, what then? Why this consuming interest in the man?”
“Why not, for Christ sake? What if it was him? Society’s got a right to know, hasn’t it? Got a right to protect itself.”
“You and Erickson—our junior crime fighters.”
“Rich, you are too cool, you know that? Ain’t you curious? Don’t you wonder if it really was Wolfe?”
They were walking past a fisherman, a heavy-set man in boots and a slicker standing in the surf, dejectedly watching his line moving slowly in upon him. In two years of running the beach Bone had yet to see a surf fisherman catch anything but minnows and kelp.
“Why not this character?” Bone asked Cutter. “He’s about the same shape. And maybe he drives a full-size car and was by himself last night, no alibi. Could be he’s the one. Why don’t we investigate him?”
“Oh bullshit.”
“Why bullshit? It makes as much sense.”
“Look, man, I know you. I was there, remember? The second you saw that picture, it was all over your mug—that first split second before you had time to think, to sickly the thing o’er with the pale cast of apathy.”
They were at the car now. “You talk funny, mister,” Bone said.
“Then laugh.”
“Ha ha.”
Cutter backed the car around and headed out of the lot, moving slowly, as if they were in a funeral cortege. “Are we gonna do anything about it?”
“Not me. What would a man like that be doing with a cheerleader?”
“What else?”
“Bullshit.”
Cutter nodded. “Of course it’s bullshit. It has to be bullshit. Except for one thing—you, friend. Mister Cool. Daddy Clear Eyes. I don’t know who I’d trust as a witness if not you. And what do you give us right out of the box? It’s him. You can’t explain that away, man. No way.”
Bone said nothing for a time. He was as much exhausted as indifferent. But finally he responded. “So what do you propose?”
Cutter shrugged. “We find out what we can. Check out his car. Check out where the girl was. Play it by ear.”
“You got too much time on your hands, Alex. You’re going bananas.”
“Maybe.”
“And anyway, what’s the connection? If not for blackmail, how does all this relate to your—despair?”
“I just want to know, that’s all. If it was him.”
“Why him?”
“’Cause I don’t like him, that’s why.”