3

That evening Cutter’s old pal George Swanson came through for him as usual, dropping in at the house with a magnum of Mumm’s Champagne and a family-size bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Bone joined him and Cutter and Mo at the kitchen table but ate hurriedly, adding almost nothing to Alex’s long sardonic account of the events of the last twenty-four hours, an account that unexpectedly avoided any mention of J. J. Wolfe and Bone’s reaction to the picture in the newspaper. At the time, Bone did not give the matter thought, probably because he was too tired to think about much of anything. When he finished eating he took his sleeping bag out onto the deck and zippered himself into it, and the sleep that came to him almost immediately was dreamless and timeless, a deep black hole he did not begin to work his way out of until ten the next morning.

By that time Cutter was up and gone and Mo was already coasting on her first downer of the day, lying on the living room floor playing with the baby while a broken Seals and Crofts record kept repeating the same cloying phrase over and over. In the kitchen Bone found milk and Pepsis and a large cellophane bag of powdered doughnuts that tasted like uncut sodium propionate. They meant that Cutter, the Great Nutritionist, had already been shopping, undoubtedly with money from Swanson.

Bone would have taken some of the milk—unlike Cutter he was not an aficionado of cola for breakfast—but he knew the baby needed the stuff more than he did, so he settled for another doughnut and some reheated coffee. Then, after shaving and getting dressed, he called the man Cutter had told him about, the mechanic who wanted to buy his car. Yes, the man was still interested, but he would not go higher than two hundred dollars, less the cost of getting the car back from the city. Bone said okay, it was a deal—if he could use the car that afternoon, after they got it back. The man was not enthusiastic, but he finally came around. He even agreed to come by and pick Bone up.

As he put the phone down, Mo finally made it to her feet. In her customary chinos and sweatshirt she meandered over to him.

“My, aren’t we all business today,” she said.

“An atavism, is it? Back to the halcyon days of paper pushing?”

“I’m busy, yes.”

“Why?”

“Necessity.”

“What necessity?”

“Food and shelter.”

She smiled indifferently. “Oh yes, those.”

Bone looked at the baby on the floor, dirty and happy, shaking a rattle. “How’s he doing?”

“Baby’s doing fine. But Daddy’s not so hot.”

“What’s his problem?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? He was up half the night. With you most of the time, I think—out on the deck.”

“I was asleep.”

“So I gathered.”

“Was it pain? His leg?”

“Pain maybe. But more in the head, I’d say. He was very excited. Agitated. He kept saying something about ‘a way out.’ You know what he meant by that? A way out? Do they still have those?”

“If I find one, I’ll let you know,” Bone said.

By two o’clock he had his car back—temporarily—plus one hundred and sixty dollars in his wallet. And he was driving up into the Montecito foothills along serpentine blacktops past low-slung California homes hugging their little patches of hillside amid scraggly live oak and chaparral, all of it tinder eight months of the year, a torch waiting to be lit. The view explained: an often breathtaking vista of the sprawling redroofed city below, the harbor and channel islands, the dazzling sea. It was a view that did not come cheap. Lots sold for thirty and forty thousand dollars an acre, and the houses were not built on them so much as into them, expensively tethered, like craft meant for flight.

So the socioeconomic range in the foothills was a small one, running from rich to richer. It was the sort of place where people ran the sort of ad Bone was answering now:

WANTED—Young man for live-in, part-time yard and pool work. Nice room, meals, plus $50/mo.
Call 969-2626.

Bone had called after seeing the ad in the noon edition of the paper. The lady who ran the ad, a Mrs. Little, evidently had liked his voice or what he said on the phone, for she made a pretty big thing out of granting the interview—he was the first one she had gone that far with, she explained, which of course brought Bone close to tears. He almost told the lady to go play with herself, but the position sounded too good not to look into, offering not only freedom from Cutter but a bed, food, and a few extra dollars in the bargain. Right now he would have put up with a good deal for all that.

When he reached the address he was not surprised at the opulence of the house, all glass, redwood, and rock set behind a cut-stone fence that would have stopped a tank. At the door he had to wait quite a while before a stout little Mexican maid finally answered his ring. He started to tell her who he was and why he was there, but she turned and walked off, apparently knowing a handyman when she saw one. A few minutes later the lady of the house came in, smiling warmly, introduced herself, and asked him to join her in the sunroom. She was tall and black-haired, probably about fifty, though carefully reconstructed to resemble a thirty-year-old. The resemblance was poor.

With a careless little-girl insouciance she dropped into a chair, threw out her legs, lit a cigarette. “I’ve been out in my studio welding,” she said, explaining her denim pants and jacket, her workboots. “I’m a sculptor.”

“I thought maybe you’d been riding.”

“Horses?” She laughed at that. “Not on your life. Montecito horsey set—now there’s a group for you. Weird. Really weird.”

Bone said nothing for a moment and the woman just sat there looking up at him, appraising him, as if he were standing on a slave block. And he almost groaned out loud as it crossed his mind just what sort of handyman she might be looking for. He began to wonder if there was some kind of mark on him, a big red F advertising his wares, condemning him to their traffic.

“Well sit down,” she said. “Take a load off.”

He did as he was told.

“You sure you’re interested in this job?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Mostly I’ve had students before. College boys. It kind of fit in with their needs. You know.”

“Sure.”

“You’re older.”

“I’m thirty-three.”

She smiled slightly, almost coyly. “And may I say you don’t look like the handyman type.”

“I’ve been other things.”

“Such as?”

“Business. Marketing and so forth.”

“A dropout?”

“You could call it that.”

“And what’d you leave behind? Wife and kids?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“Nothing’s just like that.”

“Where was it you dropped from?”

“Chicago.” He wondered why he did not tell her Milwaukee; it wouldn’t have mattered.

“And has it worked out for you—the dropping out?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, at least you’re honest.”

“At times.”

The smile had gone over the edge now, was openly ironic, knowing. “The work here’s simple enough. The yard and the pool, like I said in the ad. And then I have this truck I use for junk, stuff I pick up at junkyards, usually down the coast, Oxnard and around there. Stuff I use in my sculpture. You’d help me there too. Some of it’s pretty heavy.”

“No problem.”

“My husband’s got a computer service company. Software Systems Inc., he calls it. You know what software is?”

“Yes.”

“He has to travel a lot. He’s almost never here.”

“I see.”

She put out her cigarette now, carefully, and moved forward on her chair. For a moment he wondered if she was going to reach over and put her hand on his knee or just go straight for his fly. Close, she was all makeup, heavy eyeliner and false lashes and face color. Looking at the taut line of her jaw, the drum-tight skin, he could almost see the incisions above her hairline, the cunning face-lift scars running through the gray roots. And he felt his gut tighten. Could he bring it off? Would he be able to close his eyes and do his thing? Stoned, maybe. He would need grass, bales of it.

“One important thing,” she said. “And I hope you’ll be straight with me. I don’t want someone who just needs a place to crash, someone who’d be here a few days and then—” She threw her hand in the air. “Gone. Split.”

Bone assured her that was not his intention. “I think this is just what I’m looking for,” he added. “What I want.”

“Good.” Smiling, she stood up. “Come on then. Let me show you your room.”

When they reached it, a small efficiency apartment at one end of the three-car garage, she put her hand on his arm, just a friendly little gesture, nothing much, but sufficient to tell him what he had to know. He had not read her wrong.

“All right?” she asked.

Bone looked about him, at the tasteful expensive furniture, including a twin-size bed, a color TV, an air conditioner. “It’s fine,” he said.

“When can you start?”

He could have been back with his things in a few hours, but that was too soon for him. He was not ready for the job yet, not ready for her.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

She looked disappointed. But she smiled. “Tomorrow it is, then.”

When he got back to Cutter’s house Bone found it empty except for the baby, who was sobbing disconsolately in his crib. Bone picked him up and quieted him and then changed his diaper, an operation he had not performed in many years. Then he warmed a bottle of milk he found in the refrigerator and fed him most of it, all the while feeling not only ridiculous but angry too, disgusted at Mo for having left the kid alone. It was something Ruth would never have done. No, her problem was the reverse, that she had almost never let the girls out of her sight. Of the two, Bone was not sure which was worse. The kids undoubtedly knew. But they weren’t talking.

In time he decided that a little sunshine would not do the two of them any harm either, and after writing a note to Mo—“Baby’s with me. Think I’ve found a buyer for him. B.”—he put a cap and jacket on the kid and drove him the few blocks to the park across from the Mission.

Little Alex Five, as Swanson called him, was thirteen months old and just now beginning to toddle. So Bone carried him to a bench near the sprawling rose garden, which was not yet in bloom, and the baby immediately began to work his way around the bench, holding on most of the time but occasionally letting go and taking a few tentative steps out into the grass, where he would stop and do a little balancing act and then abruptly turn around and lunge back to the safety and support of the stone seat. Bone moved about ten feet away and sat down on the ground, trying to play his new role of superannuated baby-sitter as coolly as possible. If he were seen at it by someone he knew, so be it. But he did not particularly want to appear to like it; that would have been a touch precious, he thought, possibly even sick. A grown man alone with someone else’s baby—in modern America it was definitely a combustible situation. So he sat his distance and glanced over at the infant every now and then. And in time he realized that little Alex did not like the new gulf between them, in fact was about to challenge it. Twice he started out and then stopped, sat down and crawled back to the bench, where he immediately pulled himself up and resumed his enterprise, scowling over at Bone like a quarterback trying to read a new defense. Finally Bone offered him a little encouragement and the baby set out again, carefully stepping the first half of his journey and then falling the rest of the way, plunging into Bone’s hands. Bone told him he was pretty big stuff and the kid gurgled happily. But he wanted more. He crawled back to the bench, pulled himself up, and made another beeline for Bone. Then he kept doing it, over and over.

Still Bone had time to sit and smoke and observe the park scene. As usual there was the Frisbee set, young hippie types who had piled out of their minibuses to spend a fruitful afternoon sailing Frisbees back and forth, to each other as well as to their dogs, the inevitable pack of mangy Dobermans and German shepherds and other kindred gentle breeds they seldom went anywhere without. When Bone thought of his own young stud days, the college years and after, he could not conceive of having to drag a dog through all that. To his way of thinking, young men needed dogs about as badly as they needed clap. Yet these characters clung devotedly to their canines. And about the only reason he could see was the species’ unselective capacity for instant adoration. To feed a dog was to become a god of sorts. Maybe not to Mom or Dad or to the creeps back in school, or to the pigs and straights of the world, but to your dog, oh yes, you were a winner, you were bright and beautiful, you were loved.

But then Bone had to admit the syndrome was hardly confined to raunchy kids in minibuses, especially not in Santa Barbara. Downtown or on the beach or here in the parks, or for that matter along any residential sidewalk, the story was pretty much the same—dogshit. Or as Cutter put it, “Pedigreed dogshit. You can always tell by the slight royal purple cast it leaves on your sneakers.”

“It was not the sort of day, however, to sit and ponder dogs and their waste. The afternoon sun, warm and brilliant, lay like a coat of fresh paint on the adobe façade of the Mission. On the stone steps in front, a number of tourists sat in shirtsleeves while others wandered the colonnade or snapped the mandatory snapshots around the old Moorish fountain. And closer, beyond the rose garden, the Frisbee throwers and a few strollers and huddled groups of teenagers were scattered across the wide greensward, which rose gently to the queen palms and great shaggy eucalyptus at the far edge of the park. So for the moment the world did not seem such a bad place after all. Alex Five certainly was enjoying it. He had just teetered across the chasm again and into Bone’s hands. And as Bone got up now, carrying the baby back to the bench, he picked up a strong new odor that reminded him of Cutter’s monicker for the kid, old Brown Pants. Yet Bone felt no revulsion toward him. He was such a happy uncomplicated little bugger. At the same time Bone was unable to take any real pleasure in the child. The plump pink skin, the almost hairless head, the sweet breath and clear, clear eyes—for some reason they reminded him all too vividly of Mrs. Little’s painted and butchered flesh, the dead black hair and glop-rimmed eyes, the desperation that oozed from her, like yet another cosmetic. For the baby was on his way too now, just a few steps behind. It was only a matter of time before blood would appear in the old brown pants or the sweet lips would begin to exhale the sour deaths of lungs and stomach, and the pink skin would run to white ash as the heart began to tire. Mrs. Little or the kid, it was not much of a choice really, just a matter of time.

“How touching,” a voice purred. “How too, too sweet.”

Turning, Bone found himself looking up at Mo, half hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses. “Well the mother of the year,” he said.

“If only I had a Polaroid,” she came back. “Ladies’ Home Journal, certainly they’d buy a print. And then I could give one to Alex, show him what fatherhood is all about.”

Bone smiled wearily, watching as she sat down on the other side of the baby, took him onto her lap.

“He didn’t give me much choice,” he explained. “He was yelling his guts out.”

“Oh, I can imagine. Mother takes a five-minute walk around the block and—”

“An hour’s more like it,” Bone cut in. “I changed him at the house. I gave him a bottle. And we’ve been here—”

But Mo was already laughing. “Changed him! Fed him! Oh that’s just too much, Rich. Now if he was a little girl I think I’d understand. I mean, knowing your proclivities.”

“You get more like Alex every day.”

“Honest, you mean.”

“Sick, I mean.”

Lighting a cigarette, she shrugged indifferently. “Okay, I plead guilty. I guess it was longer than I thought. But it was so nice out, you know? And he was sleeping. I thought I’d just get a little air, and then once I started walking—” She gestured helplessly at the park, the glorious day.

“That’s why the rent’s so high.”

“I guess. How’d your job interview go?”

“I’ll be out of your place tomorrow.”

She smiled again. “My two Alexes will miss you.”

And as usual Bone played her game. “I’ll come around still. Don’t worry.”

“Oh good.” Taking off her glasses, she looked straight at Bone for a change. “Now, why do I do that, huh? I mean always coming on so bitchy with you. I don’t mean anything by it, Rich, I really don’t. For some reason you just bring it out in me.”

“My natural vulnerability. It invites attack.”

“Oh sure. Maybe it’s just your looks, you think? I mean, loving Alex, maybe I just naturally resent a handsome bastard like you. And yet I don’t really, I mean resent you. I—”

“Drop it, okay?”

“Gladly.”

The baby had taken hold of her ear and she shook herself free, nuzzled him in the neck and he giggled. And as she looked up Bone saw that her eyes had filled with tears. Because she did not try to hide them he asked her if anything was wrong.

“I don’t know.”

“You and Alex?”

She did not bother to nod. “Has he said anything to you?”

“About what?”

“Anything. Everything. Me, the baby, the whole setup.”

“No. Nothing special.”

“I don’t believe you. I can’t. But if he was splitting, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“Wouldn’t he?”

“Please, Rich. Help me. Tell me if he’s said anything.”

“I have. He’s said nothing.”

She sat there looking at him. “God, I despise the lot of you. You’re like birds of prey, you know that? Above it all except when it’s time to eat or screw.”

Bone shrugged. “I’m sorry, kid. You asked.”

“And a fat lot of good it did.”

“What makes you think something’s wrong at home?”

“You were married. You live with someone, you can tell. It’s just different lately. He looks right through me.”

“Money problems. It’s usually money, Mo. You ought to know that. Once he gets his next government check—”

“Oh sure. Everything will be roses.”

Suddenly she got to her feet and picked up the baby. “You take us home?”

“Of course.”

As they walked to the car she told him that Cutter had phoned home earlier. “He said he’s bringing a guest for dinner,” she added. “How about that, huh? Dinner at the Cutters’. Or Alex and Mo’s, I guess I should say. Anyway, he asked me to ask you to be there?”

“Who’s he bringing?”

“The victim’s sister.”

Bone did not miss a step, but the news hit him like a small stone thrown hard. “The girl last night?”

“The cheerleader, yes. Her sister.”

“Goddamn him.”

“Alex? Why? What’s he up to?”

Bone put her off. “I’d rather not know.”

Cutter did not make it home until almost nine o’clock that evening, hours after Mo’s small roast had turned black in the oven and she had calmly abandoned it in favor of martinis in front of the fire with Bone, who was responsible for both, having that afternoon cleaned out the fireplace and bought some ersatz logs and real booze at the supermarket. While he liked the fire too, and the drinks, he did not share Mo’s indifference to food, and had first raided the kitchen, cutting off an end of the burnt roast and downing it along with a rocklike baked potato and some scattered greens, the makings of a salad that never did get tossed.

So he was feeling fairly comfortable in front of the fire now, his stomach full, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other and a good-looking girl to share it all with. The only problem was the girl—for her, he might as well not have been there. One moment she would be goddamning Cutter, shaking her head in futility and bitterness, and the next she would give in with a wistful smile and say something inane, like it was good she and Cutter weren’t married, because this sort of thing would really piss her off then. She might think she owned him then, you see. But of course no one owned anybody else, and anyone worth his salt would not let himself be owned. So of course all she had a right to do was wonder where he was and what he was doing, and for that matter admire him too, precisely for this, for pissing her off, because it meant he was his own man, he was free, he was worthy of her. Bone, listening to her run on, occasionally lifted his glass in a toast. White woman speak with dumb tongue, he said. White woman full of shit.

But she was not listening.

And finally they heard Cutter arriving home, the Packard’s old engine laboring up the hill. Bone absently went over to the window, in time to see Alex bring the car to a stop out in front, unable to pull in because of a Toyota that blocked half the driveway. But he was not stymied. Abruptly he threw the Packard into gear and roared ahead, slamming into the Toyota and driving it backward a few feet. At the crash, Mo got up and came running over to the window, just as Cutter finished backing up a short distance and now took another crack at the tiny foreign car, this time smashing the front end over the curb onto the grass, totally clearing the driveway, which he calmly entered now and parked. If there was a scratch on the Packard, Bone could not see it. The Toyota, however, looked as if it had been in a head-on collision.

In the driveway, Cutter got out of his car, alone, grinning.

“He’s drunk,” Mo said, opening the front door.

Bone laughed. “What makes you say that?”

Across the street and next door people were beginning to come out of their houses and apartments Among them was a thirtyish elementary school teacher, the owner of the Toyota. She ran to her car and examined it as if it were bleeding to death and there might be a chance of saving it. Then she turned on Cutter.

“You maniac!” she cried. “You drunken maniac!”

“It was in the driveway,” he said. “I didn’t even see the goddamn thing.”

“You lying bastard. You dirty rotten cripple.”

Cutter shook his head at that, like an adult reproving a youngster. “Peace, my child. Listen, why don’t you come in the house with me and we can talk it over, okay? I tell you what, you come in and I’ll let you see my thing and maybe even play with it, and we’ll call everything square. That sound all right to you?”

“Oh God, he’s flying tonight,” Mo said.

The woman was crying now and her apartment neighbors were telling her to go back inside and call the police and her insurance company, because he wasn’t going anywhere, she didn’t have to worry about that, and they would back up her story.

One man, a Negro across the street, gave Cutter the black power salute. “Right on, brother,” he yelled. “They block my driveway too.”

Cutter returned the salute with his left arm, the stump. “Power to duh people,” he said, and the black man grinned.

Cutter came on in.

“That was beautiful,” Mo told him. “Absolutely beautiful. You know our insurance has lapsed?”

“That’s her tough luck.”

“And if you lose your driver’s license?”

He had gone into the bathroom to urinate, leaving the door open behind him. “It’s already expired,” he said over the splashing. “And anyway, Where’s it written you got to have a license to drive a car? Mine runs just fine without one.”

Mo made herself another drink and resumed her vigil in front of the fire. As Cutter came back out, Bone asked him where his guest was.

“What guest?”

Bone looked over at Mo.

“The Durant girl’s sister, remember?” Mo said. “That ‘real dinner’ you told me to make for her. ‘Not our usual slop’—I believe that’s how you put it.”

“You two are hallucinating, you know that? Acid heads, that’s what you are.”

“You didn’t call me, is that what you’re saying? You didn’t say you were bringing this girl home, and that you wanted Rich here too?”

Frowning, Cutter looked from Mo to Bone. “You part of this put-on?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Someone else must’ve called,” Cutter said. “Some sinister force.” He had just finished combing his hair in front of the hall mirror, and now he went into the bathroom and came out with Mo’s bottle of Lavoris, which he proceeded to chugalug, gargling it and spitting it into a dead potted cactus Swanson had given them, “something harmonious with Alex’s character,” as he had put it.

“Pigs probably be here in a minute,” Cutter explained. “Gonna do a number on them. A neat little number.”

Mo asked him where he had been all day. “If I may ask,” she added.

“Of course you may, love. Went driving, I did. Picked up this group on one-o-one, a nigger fag and two spic girls with a pet monkey. We went up to El Capitan and had an orgy. The guy was all right but that monkey, Jesus, did it ever bite.”

Mo sipped at her drink. “What’s the use?” she said to Bone. “What’s the goddamn use?”

Bone said nothing. Outside, the police had arrived. The flash of their red domelight washed over Cutter as he stood gargling in the middle of the room. Putting the bottle down finally, he passed his hand over his face, magically creating sobriety. Then he moved toward the door.

“Come on with, old buddy,” he said to Bone. “I may need your support.”

But he did not. Playing the role of humble wounded war veteran, he limped eloquently down the stairs and went over to the police car, where the officers were already listening to the schoolteacher’s complaint. Cutter waited patiently, and then politely answered all their questions. Gosh, he was awfully sorry about the whole darn thing. And a little confused too. He hadn’t even seen the car the first time he hit it, when he turned in—a passing car with its brights on had temporarily blinded him. And then when he tried to back up, after the first impact, the gearshift apparently slipped into first instead, and that was why there was a second crash. Of course he took full responsibility for the accident, and of course his insurance company would pay, the lady had nothing to worry about there. But he had no idea what all this other was about, his supposedly insulting her and using obscene language. He recalled asking her to come into his house, yes, but only to discuss the incident away from the crowd and to give her a chance to calm down, while he called the police and his insurance company. Was he aware that his license had expired? No, but he understood the officers had no choice except to issue him a citation for the oversight; they were just doing their duty, and duty was something he knew a little about. As he said this last, Bone halfway expected him to hike up his pants and show everyone his false leg, but all he did was modestly look down at the ground, affecting embarrassment and pain.

And the officers reluctantly did their duty, giving him a citation for driving without a license. And that was all. The schoolteacher began yelling and spitting at them, calling them storm troopers and stinking fascist pigs, but they were used to that, in fact were smiling as they drove away. Cutter waved goodbye and then put a friendly hand on the teacher’s shoulder.

“Forget about it,” he told her. “Toyota’s a shitty car anyway.”

From that point on the night limped steadily downhill. Cutter vomited shrimp and half-shell oysters and other condiments he had gobbled at El Paseo’s free “cocktail hour” snack table. Then he settled his stomach with a Pepsi and followed that with vodka on the rocks. Nothing strong, he said. He did not want to puke again. Along the way he admitted that he had called Mo earlier and that he had indeed spent some time during the day with Valerie Durant, the sister of the murder victim. But she had not been able to come with him.

“The goddamn funeral,” he explained. “Or what do they call it the day before—visitation?”

Bone watched him with a tight, growing anger. “What’d you see her about?” he asked.

“I needed some questions answered.”

“About what?”

Cutter grinned. “You sound uptight, Richard.”

“What’d you see her about?”

“Oh, nothing important. Just this little project of mine. This bump of curiosity, you might call it.”

“Curiosity about J. J. Wolfe?”

“You could say that, I guess.”

“And how does Miss Durant fit in?”

“Call her Val. A real nice girl, Val.”

“Val, then.”

For a time Cutter did not answer. He had finished making himself another drink, and now he limped back around the coffee table and sank onto the davenport, grunting like an old character actor, grimacing as he lifted his false leg above the boat hatch tabletop, held it there for a moment, and then dropped it like a bomb. Near the fire still, Mo was pretending a vast indifference to everything but her drink and the flames. But there was gray flint in her eyes, a look that had begun to form and harden at Cutter’s mention of “Val.”

“Well, it goes something like this,” Cutter was saying. “I wake up this morning you might say still intrigued by your reaction to Wolfe’s picture—you know, the It’s him number you did for us. Somehow I just couldn’t expunge it from the old brain, you know? Kept going round and round, like a haunting refrain. So I decided, what’s to lose? Check the cat out and see where he was that night, and at what time, and so forth. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized none of it would do much good unless I also knew where Val’s sister was at the same time. You know, see if there were any star-crossed coincidences, any unexpected intersecting of Wolfe’s path and the girl’s. But to find out where she was—well, I couldn’t go to the police, could I, not without involving my old buddy Bone. Which of course I absolutely refused to do. So what choice did I have, except to go to Val?”

“And tell her about the picture?”

“Your reaction to it, you mean? Well, hell yes, man. That’s the whole bit, isn’t it? But don’t worry—I told her you backed off right away. I said you weren’t about to identify anyone to anybody, ever.”

Bone was furious. “You bastard, Alex. You cocksucking bastard. She’s probably already called the cops.”

“No chance.”

“And of course you’re sure of that.”

“Would I say I was if I wasn’t? Weren’t?”

Bone, barely able to control himself, looked over at Mo, who seemed to have gone down into herself now, drifting with her vodka and quads. “Aren’t you interested in any of this, lady?” he asked. “This ‘bump’ your old man’s got, you’re not interested?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t you remember what he told you last night, that crap about a way out? Well this is it, kid. This is your escape hatch he’s talking about.”

“I’m afraid you lost me,” Mo said.

Bone turned to Cutter. “Tell her.”

Alex grinned. “How can I? I don’t know what the hell you’re running on about anymore than she does.”

“This great interest of yours in J. J. Wolfe, that’s what I’m running on about. Now tell us—tell her— what’s behind it.”

“As I said, curiosity.”

“Of course. And a keen sense of social consciousness.”

“That too, yes.”

Shaking his head, Bone got out a cigarette and lit it. “I give up,” he said. “You win, Alex. Go do your thing, whatever gives you pleasure. And if I wind up sweating out another day in the slam, so what, huh? It ain’t you.”

“Aw, come on, man. I just told you. The girl understands. She’s not going to call the police. She knows you didn’t make a positive ID, and that this is just something of mine, that’s all, a wild hair, you know.”

“Wonder why I can’t believe you?”

Cutter shrugged. “Forget all that, huh? We got more important things. Don’t you want to know what I found out?”

“From Val?” Mo said.

“Among others. Let me tell you, I been busy.”

And Cutter went on then, telling them what he had learned about the victim. All that in the newspapers about her being the typical high school teenager, the wholesome pretty cheerleader and so forth, was just a lot of bullshit. According to her sister she was virtually uncontrollable, especially by their mother, an alcoholic semi-invalid with high blood pressure and bad nerves. The girl came and went pretty much as she pleased, a seventeen-year-old free spirit dedicated to rock music and especially its performers, for whom she was a kind of local groupie, a welcoming committee of one, which meant of course that she was already into sex and drugs. A month before her death, her sister had given her three hundred dollars for an abortion that was performed in Los Angeles. Since then the girl had not returned to school. And she was almost never at home. Lastly, she was an inveterate, habitual hitchhiker—a fact Cutter’s voice underscored.

“Anyway,” he went on, “night before last she was at the Stone Sponge, that new rock bar out in Goleta, real big with the kids. She went with a couple girlfriends, older girls. The police of course have hauled in these two plus everybody else they could, anybody who might’ve seen who she was with or left with. But from what I hear all they got so far is zilch.”

Yawning, Mo poked at the dying fire. “You’re not going to tell us J. J. Wolfe was there,” she said.

“That’s right, I’m not.”

“Big surprise.”

But Cutter was looking as if he had just dined on missionary. “He was across the street,” he said.

“Across the street?”

“At the Calif, that big motel they put up, that sprawling mess of orange offal out on Fairlane.”

“Wolfe stayed there?” Mo said.

Cutter gave her a pitying look. “The woman with total recall. If you’ll remember, Earthmother, the newspaper yesterday, the one you read to us. He was staying at the Biltmore then, right? Where his car went boom boom. Ring a bell?”

Mo pretended to accept this abuse as her due, giving Cutter a mock humble bow of her head.

“No, Wolfe was at a party there, at the Calif, a cocktail bash for the energy conference delegates. He left around ten or eleven.”

Bone asked Cutter how he knew this.

“The conference’s PR man, a cat out at the university. I told him I was doing a story for Sunset magazine. So naturally he broke his ass for me, told me all he could: Guy like Wolfe at your conference or your party, you want people to know.”

“But he left early?” Bone said.

“That’s what this fellow said, yeah. But Wolfe was there all right—right across the street from the Stone Sponge.”

Getting up to mix himself another drink, Bone dropped a pair of ice cubes into his glass, an erstwhile jelly jar. In the silence, the crack of the ice sounded like a comment. Now he added to it.

“That all you’ve got?”

“All?”

“Well, think about it. It doesn’t change what was in the paper, does it? The man is still alone. You don’t put him with the girl. You don’t know where he was around midnight any more now than you did before. And I still haven’t heard anything about a motive.”

Cutter spit at the fire, and it hissed. “Christ, you don’t want much,” he said. “I spend half the day getting in touch with the girl’s sister and trying to get my story across to her, and still I got time to find out where Wolfe was last night. And what do you hand me? Is that all I’ve got?”

“Big deal,” Bone said. “Listen, pal, before I sack in, and before Mo passes all the way through the looking glass, why don’t you tell us, just the two of us. Just come right out and tell us, in plain and simple English—” And now Bone almost shouted. “What the hell are you up to?”

Mo looked up from the floor in bewilderment. But Cutter was unimpressed. Slowly he finished off the bottle of vodka. Then standing, swaying, he did a fair impression of John Wayne.

“A man does what he’s got to do,” he said.

He limped toward the bathroom, burlesquing Wayne’s rolling gait. Through the open door Bone heard him retching.

All through the night the carnival went on. Bone was half asleep on the davenport when Cutter began yelling at Mo. He evidently wanted to make love or at least have her make him come, but she was already gone, stoned. So he did what he had to do. He jumped up and down on the bed and woke the baby and kicked a hole in the closet door. And he yelled all the while, spewing out a soliloquy of sexual frustration. Mo was not just frigid, he declaimed, she was dead, a cadaver with a welded womb and a cunt like a rathole, full of dust and bits of straw and feathers from old nests left undisturbed for generations. Her tits were going soft just like her brain, because she was dying, didn’t she know that? She was in the death grip of frigidity, in fact had a terminal case. But this was it for him, the last time he would ever try with her. Never again would he risk his balls this way, exposing them to such death and decay. No, from now on it would be whores for him, whores and little boys and sheep if he could find any, anything alive, anything but a cold rathole for him.

In time Bone slept. But he was awakened later by the sound of the deck door opening, and when he finally rolled over to look he saw Cutter out on the deck, on the deck railing actually, teetering there as he urinated down the hill into the darkness, all the while singing “Jesus Loves Me” and whipping his penis back and forth like a small boy.

And later still—how much later, Bone was not sure—he was shaken awake and looked up to find Cutter sitting next to him, on the boat hatch. Even in the darkness Bone could see the desperation in his eye.

“I want to explain, Rich,” he said, in an urgent whisper. “I want to explain about this cat Wolfe, okay? When I was in Nam, I guess I’ve told you, we did pretty much what all the outfits there did. Not exactly My Lais, not that big anyway, but we did our part, everybody did his little part over there. To women and kids too, because we never knew, there was no way of knowing, all slants were VC far as we were concerned, and you just didn’t give a damn anyway. Not there, on the spot, not while you were doing it, it was nothing, you were a machine, nothing touched you, nothing mattered. But later—later, back here, when the My Lai thing broke—you remember those pictures in Life? The peasants? That one young woman with her old mother and her kid, and they’re all hugging each other and crying, waiting to be offed. And the next picture, there they all are in the ditch. Well back here, with time, you know, you had time to study them, those pictures. And that’s what I did. I studied them all right. I went to school at those pictures. And you know what I found out? I found out you have three reactions, Rich, only three. The first one is simple—I hate America. But then you study them some more, and you move up a notch. There is no God. But you know what you say finally, Rich, after you’ve studied them all you can? You say—I’m hungry.”

He tried to smile as he said this, he tried to laugh, but his mouth twisted more in pain than anything else.

“Sleep,” he said. “You sleep now, Rich. I just wanted you to know.”