In the morning Alex Five reminded the grown-ups that though they might step to measured, faraway music, his own drummer was a noisy sort who came on duty promptly at six o’clock. Mo let him cry for a while and then finally gave in, laboriously struggling out of bed and picking him up, changing him and feeding him and trying to keep him quiet, all the while moving like a somnambulist.
From where he lay on the couch, hung over and still exhausted himself, Bone could feel some of her misery. But he did not move or get up until after the baby was fed and dry, toddling around the living room and jabbering and occasionally sticking his finger in Bone’s eyes or exploring one of his ears. By then Mo had finished trying to regenerate herself in the bathroom, and now Bone followed her example, relying as always on a cold shower to bring him back to a semblance of life.
When he came out, Mo had already prepared his breakfast, scrambling some of the eggs he had bought the previous afternoon, and serving them with stale doughnuts and the usual instant coffee. He would have given his last dollar for a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, but of course in the Cutter household any such transaction was out of the question—one did not mess around with fresh fruit and vegetables. And even now, before eight o’clock in the morning, Bone could see the basic reason for this in Mo’s eyes, the soft glaze spreading in them and the lids growing heavier as she sipped her coffee, eating nothing, not wanting to weaken the effects of the methaqualone or whatever other downer she had ingested since taking care of the baby. Bone was not much of a drug man himself so he did not really understand the intricacies of her habit. Downers in the morning struck him as a totally illogical choice, like piling torpor on top of exhaustion, but according to Cutter that was all Mo ever took, morning, day, or night, only downers, and not too many of them, either, just enough to soften the ragged cutting edges. And for all Bone knew, maybe the pills did accomplish this. But in the bargain they also aged her. Though she was no more than twenty-five, she looked a weary, beaten thirty. And another five years the way she was going—he would not care to see her then. The bone structure would still be there of course, and the finely crafted eyes. She would be beautiful still, maybe, but not very pretty.
“I don’t think he’ll be up before you leave,” she was saying.
“That’s all right. Let him sleep. I like it better with just us anyway.”
“You do, huh?”
“Naturally.”
“It’s a shame I’m not more highly sexed.”
“Isn’t it.”
“But he’s your friend, Rich. Your host. You wouldn’t betray a friend and host, would you?”
“Not normally.”
“Abnormally then?”
“I don’t think that’s what I meant.”
“You’re a friend indeed.”
Bone lit a cigarette. “Now you’ve finally got it. You’re finally on track. I’m a friend in need.”
“Sure you are. You need it about like Heinz needs ketchup.”
“I didn’t say anything about it.”
“What then?” As she said this, she tried to maintain the same touch of easy raillery. But he did not answer, just sat there at the kitchen table watching her, and finally, looking flushed and somehow guilty, she lowered her eyes.
“You want me to call George for you?” she asked, starting to get up.
Bone had already taken her by the wrist, holding her there. “I’ll call him,” he said.
“I’m sorry I can’t take you myself. But that shift in the Packard, you know what it’s like. I just can’t—”
“Mo.” Bone was standing now too, and he had taken her by the shoulders. But she refused to look at him, had turned her face away.
“Mo.”
“Don’t,” she asked. “Please, Rich.”
He let go of her then. He watched as she went over to the windows and stood there looking out, hugging her shoulders as if the bright morning sun somehow made her cold.
“At least, do me a favor,” he said.
“What?”
“See a doctor. Have a checkup. And do what he tells you. Start taking care of yourself.”
“Like eat right, get plenty of rest, and take Geritol every day?”
“Might be a good idea.”
She turned now, smiling wearily. “You’d make someone a good Jewish mother.”
“Maybe you could use one.”
“I’ll keep you in mind.”
“And a gentile lover? How about one of those?”
“I’ve already got one.”
“I keep forgetting.”
After calling Swanson and asking if he could drive him to Montecito—which of course he could, George never being loath to get out from behind his desk—Bone packed his few belongings and, carrying them out to the front porch, sat down to wait and smoke a cigarette. Cutter was still in bed and Mo had gone back into the bathroom, to get away from him, Bone suspected. But when he finally heard Swanson’s Jag snarling up the long hill, he went back into the house and tapped on the bathroom door, and Mo opened it immediately, as if she had been standing on the other side, waiting for him. Her eyes were red and her hand trembled at her throat, fussing with the open top of her kimono, which hung sacklike on her body except for the points of her breasts.
“George is here,” he told her. “I’ll be off.”
She said nothing.
“I’ll drop by later in the week.”
All she did was nod. And Bone was about to turn away and leave her when he realized how unnatural that would have been, how much in violation of the moment. So he reached out and took her by the arms. And he kissed her, chastely at first, just on the cheek, but because there was no stiffening in her, none of the resistance he had expected, he moved to her mouth, kissing her deeply, gathering her body to his. And only then did it come, the pulling away, the convulsive turning of her face, as if he had slapped her hard.
“Get out of here,” she said. “Please, Rich. Go.”
He left then, almost stumbling over the baby, who was sitting on the floor happily playing with the empty vodka bottle from the night before.
According to Cutter, Swanson had missed out on the Vietnam War because he was busy trying to keep his pipe lit. And he would miss the impending Great California Earthquake for the same reason. Further, he was the only living American still seriously looking for the Lost Generation. Physically, he reminded Cutter variously of an Armenian rug merchant, the chief procurer for King Farouk, or John Wilkes Booth, wethead. In short, there was seldom a time when Cutter did not consider it open season on Swanson. Yet if his friend minded, he never let it show. Still in his early thirties, Swanson could have passed for a decade older, having already achieved a comfortable middle-aged spread and an attitude of almost comatose aplomb, none of which kept him from playing a competent game of tennis or from forming troublesome alliances with attractive young married women about town. As Cutter’s descriptions indicated, he had a distinctly Arabic look about him, slicked-down black hair and pencil-line mustache and saturnine hawk face, a classic villain physiognomy in fact, which made all the more surprising his easy unassuming good nature, the small still eye of sanity he maintained amid the storms that occasionally whirled about him, whether marital or Cutter-inspired.
Like Alex, he had once wanted to be a writer, in fact had spent a couple of years in Europe watching bullfights and fishing the old Hemingway streams and even renting rooms high in a Rhine castle tower, there to write cryptic little stories about disenchanted postwar youth. Now, tending to his realty company and gift shop, all that was behind him but definitely not over, not forgotten. There were few conversations he would not somewhere along the line try to bend to the subject of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the other lost ones. Cutter in fact insisted that Swanson’s first marriage had broken up because he could not keep from crying Zelda! during orgasm.
Bone did not care about any of that, however. He did not dislike the man so much as find him a touch unreal. He sometimes wondered if a day would not arrive when Swanson would take up an ax and give the nearest living thing the required forty whacks. But then Bone knew that was ungenerous of him. He was so used to his own unflagging nastiness, and now Cutter’s, that he was afraid he had reached the point where he found its absence in another man suspect.
“So you’ve flown the coop,” Swanson said, as they drove away.
“Two weeks is enough.”
“Above and beyond the call of duty, huh?”
“I guess. But when I needed him, he was there. No questions.”
“That’s Alex, all right. He still in bed?”
Bone nodded. “Where I should be too.”
“Rough night, huh?”
In his mind, Bone saw the tanklike Packard smashing into the Toyota, backing up, smashing it again. Grinning, he said, “Unusual anyway. Even for Cutter.”
“Why? What happened?”
Bone told him, hitting just the high points. And Swanson laughed helplessly. “Oh God, I wish I’d been there,” he said, eyes streaming. “He’s an original, Alex is, no doubt about that.”
“None,” Bone agreed.
Frowning now, Swanson shook his head. “I don’t know about him lately though, Rich. It’s funny and all, but it’s more than that—it’s sick. I’m really worried about him. You know what he said to me last week? He said he’d sell me the next five years of his life—you believe that? Ten thousand a year, he said. And in return he’d promise not to ‘harm my merchandise,’ that’s how he put it, can you beat that? Harm the merchandise. I told him he was crazy. Fifty thousand? Where could I get that kind of money? And for what? What would you call it? Reverse blackmail?”
“That’s about it.”
Again Swanson wagged his head. “God, what a character. Tell me, you ever seen a picture of him before Vietnam, the way he used to be?”
“No.”
“Give you an idea what he lost. He wasn’t, you know, what you’d call pretty-boy handsome. But he was good looking, all right, and he had this kind of magnetism-still does, for that matter. Anyway, I often think what he could’ve been if things had been different, you know? If his old man hadn’t squandered their money, and if both parents hadn’t died the way they did, and if there hadn’t been any Vietnam—”
“A lot of ifs.”
Swanson shrugged. “Yeah, I know. But they’re what he must think about himself, you know? A guy’d have to. Jesus, I wish I could help him. And Mo too. She’s really down lately.”
Bone told him to turn at the next corner, and Swanson turned. He also changed the subject.
“Anything new on the killing? Police been in touch with you anymore?”
Bone said no, he hadn’t heard anything. Which did not surprise Swanson at all—the goddamn police were too busy handing out speeding tickets to law-abiding taxpayers like himself to pay any attention to murderers, especially one who pitches cheerleaders into trashcans. Had Bone heard the one about the guy being an ecofreak, that he stashed the girl because he was against littering? No, Bone hadn’t heard that one.
“Rock musicians,” Swanson said, “they’re the ones the police are coming down on, from what I hear. Probably one of them did it, that’s what everybody says.”
“The police ought to know.”
“You think it was someone else?”
“I have no idea.”
Swanson looked over at him quizzically, as if he hoped to be let in on a secret. “You really didn’t see the guy then?”
“Not his face, no.”
They were nearing Mrs. Little’s house now.
“Next place on the right,” Bone said.
“Nice,” Swanson observed. “Uh, what kind of work you be doing here?”
“Handyman.”
Swanson looked impressed. “Handyman—Jesus. Tell me, Rich, you ever going back? I mean, get a regular job again? Get married and sink into debt like the rest of us?”
“If I can.”
“Well, why not? What’s to stop you?”
“There’s always something.”
“Maybe I could find you a spot.”
“I’d only blow it.”
“Well, with that attitude, sure.”
Bone shrugged. “That’s what I mean. There’s always something.”
At Mrs. Little’s the maid was the only one at home, and the reception she gave Bone was no warmer than it had been two days before.
“Mrs. Leetle in San Francisco with her husband,” she explained. “She say you just move in and wait, do what you want. She be back two days. Food in the kitchen.”
Bone tried to thank her but once again she gave him her back. Humbled, he picked up his few bags and moved into the garage apartment. The bed looked enormously inviting—the prospect of a long day and night of sleep temporarily more seductive to him than any woman could have been—but he knew that would only deepen the maid’s hostility, and he wanted to make a good beginning here, he wanted things to go well, there were not all that many alternatives left to him. So he got out the lawn mower and cut the grass around the house, even though it did not really need it. Then he spaded the ground around the shrubbery inside the stone fence, hard steady work that made his body slick with sweat. Time and again he caught the maid peering out at him from behind one curtain or another, but he did not let on that he had seen her. Finally she came out of the house, somberly waddling across the lawn to him.
“You not eat today?” she said. “Why you not stop?”
He smiled. “Why not?”
In the kitchen she served him cold roast beef on rye bread, some highly spiced potato salad, and Chianti. Her name was Teresa, she said. Teresa Chavez. And she did not understand why he worked so hard, since “thee woman” was away, why should he bother? He told her that he liked yard work, and that he figured she was in the house working, so why shouldn’t he do the same, outside. She laughed at that.
“Work? What work is here? A house like this, one woman, no kids, and husband almost never home—I could keep it clean about two hours a week, all it take. Biggest job is find work, you know? Look busy. And I guess maybe that why she pay so bad. I could make more money at welfare.”
“Couldn’t we all?”
“What you say?”
“I could use a little welfare too.”
She gave him an appraising look. “Other times she have boys here, for your job. College kids, you know? Bums. But you look like a man could make big money. Could be a boss. A big shot.”
“I’m working my way up,” he said.
For a moment she was not sure of his irony, then at his smile she shook her head.
“Oh, I think I know you now. You a macho, that what. Thee woman, she better watch out, huh?”
“I’ll be gentle,” he said.
And Teresa, his new friend, shook with laughter.
In the afternoon he slept for almost two hours and then wandered back to the house and joined Teresa, who was having a few drinks in preparation for her journey home to Santa Barbara’s “mesa” and the small rented house where seven children and a beat postman were lying in wait for her. The prospect did not seem to cheer her and she compensated by having “one more for thee roads”—straight Red Label scotch—then finally drove off, in an early-1960s Cadillac that laid down a smoke screen heavier and darker than Bone’s old MG had ever managed. Alone, Bone toured the house and found it even more luxurious than he had first thought. The furniture alone had to have a value of thirty or forty thousand, for only the six rooms. And he found the kitchen just as lavishly stocked. The refrigerator and freezer and pantry were loaded with so much fine food he had a hard time choosing, but finally settled for a thick porterhouse steak, mushrooms, and an enormous salad tossed together from every fresh vegetable he could find in the refrigerator. He washed it all down with champagne and then repaired to the game room, where he watched a Celtics-Bullets playoff game on television and read the latest issue of Time.
So when he went to bed at eleven o’clock, tired and comfortably high, he expected to fall asleep quickly and deeply. Instead he set out upon a flat dead sea of wakefulness, long hours in which his mind seemed to take on a life independent of his will, so that he found himself thinking about the one thing he did not want to think about. In the darkness of his room it took no effort to see the night street again, the big car braking and pulling into the apartment complex alley, the huddled figure moving against the headlight-illuminated background, going around the car and out of sight for a few moments and then back into it almost immediately and laying down rubber again, fishtailing the car through the complex and disappearing. A silhouette still, that was all the man was, there was no doubt about that. And yet the newspaper photograph, old country boy J. J. Wolfe grinning benignly over the burned-out shell of his rented LTD, there was no doubt about that either, no question that the picture had come up off the page at Bone like a fist, and no question that it lay in his mind still, a thing imperfectly seen and understood, a palimpsest, something he could not quite make out under all the other random scribbling and yet which he somehow recognized, had seen before. But in the apartment house alley? No, he could not be sure about that, not ever. And that was why Cutter’s sudden enthusiasm, the “It’s him” he apparently accepted as gospel, cut through Bone like salt spray in winter. For he knew better than he cared to the lineaments of Cutter’s character, that his friend could no more leave the thing as it was than he could leave unopened a ticking box. But it was not avarice he feared in Alex so much as death, the recklessness unto death, the love of death that came off him like the reek of putrescent flesh.
Sleep brought release, however, and he dreamed of Mo and the baby in the park with him, along with the tourists and the Frisbee throwers and their dogs. The one different thing was in the rose garden, where someone had placed a pair of trashcans with golf clubs sticking out of them. And far in the distance there was the sound of crying, a man crying. Cutter? he wondered.
When he woke the next morning, he heard Teresa already at work, scrubbing the walk between the house and the swimming pool. So he got out of bed and dressed, preparing to join her in another day of make-work at the Littles. Unexpectedly, he found her almost as cold and surly as she had been the day of his interview, but after he went into the kitchen and made his own breakfast she warmed noticeably, joining him for coffee and cigarettes. She had had a very bad night, she told him. Her husband had found marijuana in their oldest daughter’s purse—he had been looking for money to go bowling with, she said—and naturally he had beaten the girl. He had locked her in her room but she had climbed through the window and been gone all night. Meanwhile the husband had gotten drunk and accidentally gashed himself on a war surplus machete that he liked to threaten them with whenever he was “stinko.” Someday she would kill him with “thee goddamn machete,” she vowed. Bone would read about it in the newspaper—TERESA CHAVEZ CUTS HUSBAND INTO LITTLE PIECES. He suggested instead that she merely separate him from his cojones, because it was a less serious crime and yet would be almost as effective, and the idea so pleased her that she laughed until tears ran down her face.
After breakfast Bone resumed the job of spading up the ground inside the stone fence, and when he finished over two hours later he took a shower and put on his swimming trunks and lay out in the sun on a redwood chaise next to the swimming pool. For ten or fifteen minutes he lay there, trying not to think about anything except the feel of the sun on his body. And then a shadow fell across him, a shadow with Cutter’s voice.
“Hey, fella, can I sit on your face?”
Bone squinted against the sunlight at the grinning specter above him. Then he saw the girl standing back a short distance, watching them, not smiling. Even in the brightness Bone could not miss the weary cool of her eyes, the tough and honest face. He looked back at Cutter.
“You had to do it, didn’t you? You couldn’t leave it alone.”
“It wouldn’t leave us alone.”
“You bullshitter, Alex.” As Bone got up from the chair, the girl came forward.
“I believe you two have met,” Cutter said.
Valerie Durant smiled hesitantly. “I guess you could call it that.”
“How are you?” For the moment Bone was unable to think of a less stupid greeting on this second day after she had buried her sister.
“Okay,” she shrugged. “Alex is keeping me busy.”
“He has a gift for that.”
Cutter meanwhile was making a big thing out of his new surroundings, gaping at the Littles’ sprawling house, the barbered grounds, the pool. “Land sakes, boy,” he drawled. “You shore have a way of making out.”
Bone slipped into his old terry robe. “Sure. Twenty minutes ago I was spading the front yard.”
“Just think of that,” Cutter marveled. “A common laborer just twenty minutes ago. And now here he is, lounging beside the pool. Which just proves a man can still make it if he’s got pluck and grit.”
“Let’s sit down.” Bone moved toward the umbrella table at the end of the pool.
“This old fox who hired you,” Cutter asked, “just what you got on her anyway? You catch her being faithful to her old man, was that it?”
“Something like that.”
“Way to go.”
As he was about to sit down Bone realized that Valerie had not moved. Turning, he followed her gaze to the back of the house, where he saw Teresa standing just inside the screen door, staring out at the three of them.
“Is there some other place we could talk?” the girl asked. “Someplace private?”
Bone wanted to tell her there was no reason for privacy, that what little he had to say could be said right where they were. But her look, the steady open gaze, did not invite hostility.
“Sure,” he said. “Come on.”
They followed him into his room at the end of the garage, where he got out a bottle of scotch he had appropriated from the house. As he poured drinks for the three of them, Cutter again went into his cornpone wonderment act at Bone’s rapid rise in the world.
“Red Label yet,” he clucked. “Didn’t I tell you, Val—we follow this cat and we shall wear diamonds.”
“Diamonds I’m not interested in,” she said. “That’s not why I’m here.”
Bone heard in that a clear suggestion they cut the small talk and get down to business. But Cutter apparently was not ready yet.
“So you think all this is better than our davenport,” he said to Bone.
“All it lacks is Mo.”
“Is the rent as reasonable, though?”
“About the same.”
Alex grinned. “Sure. And God is love.”
Bone looked over at Valerie, who had sat down in the room’s only easy chair. Still very cool and controlled, she had taken out a cigarette, tapped it firm, lit it. And for some reason Bone found it irritating that there was not one thing about the girl, not her manner or her clear hard eyes or even her attire—the casual tan flare slacks and white cableknit sweater—nothing that hinted at loss or bereavement. She could have been a job applicant.
“I guess you know why I came here with Alex,” she said now.
“I’ve got a fair idea.”
“I was wondering if you’d changed your mind. I mean about what you saw that night.”
Bone shook his head. “No. No change.”
“Specifically I was wondering if you’d decided this man Wolfe was the one you saw.”
“J. J. Wolfe, you mean? The tycoon?”
“Yes.”
Smiling, Bone looked over at Cutter. “Now where could she have gotten an idea like that?”
Cutter shrugged innocently.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bone,” the girl kept on, “but none of this is a joke to me. It’s very serious.”
Bone did not feel like apologizing. “I never thought otherwise,” he said.
“It’s just his way,” Cutter put in. “He can’t help himself. He doesn’t have normal human feelings like the rest of us.”
“The truth is I can’t see any reason for putting you through all this,” Bone told her. “It’s a dead end. And Alex knows it.”
“He said you’d say that.”
“Oh? And what else did he tell you?”
“How it happened. I mean what you said. And then how you changed what you said.”
“You’re talking about the picture now?”
“Yes.”
Bone said that was not quite accurate. “Actually it was an offhand kind of thing,” he explained. “When I saw the picture in the paper I guess I said something about it looking like the man—the silhouette—in the alley. But then, when I noticed my friend here about to have a coronary, I backed up and tried to tell him exactly what I meant. Which is what I told you in the police station, and what I’ll tell you now—I don’t know who killed your sister. I didn’t see the man’s face.”
For a time Valerie sat there looking at him. And her expression made it very clear that none of this surprised her, just as none of it convinced her.
“So you didn’t mean it,” she said finally. “When you said It’s him—it was only an offhand thing?”
“I don’t think I even said It’s him,” Bone corrected. “What I said was It could be him, something like that.”
Valerie looked over at Cutter, who was shaking his head.
“I take it you prefer his version,” Bone said to the girl.
She did not answer.
“Well, you can believe what you want, of course.”
“I’d like to believe you.”
“I’d like that too.”
Valerie crushed out her cigarette. “Let me ask you this, then—could you accept it that you might have been right without knowing it?”
Bone said he didn’t follow her.
“I mean if what Alex and I have learned about this Wolfe makes it seem he actually was the man—then would you change your mind?”
“About what I saw?”
His emphasis on the verb must have been answer enough for her, for she shook her head now even before he did. And she turned to Cutter, her gaze inquiring, bleak.
“I told you, kiddo,” he said to her. “You can’t get blood out of a cadaver.”
Bone raised his middle finger to him in silent reply.
Valerie meanwhile had decided on a different approach. “I’d still like you to hear what we’ve found out about Wolfe. That couldn’t hurt anything, could it?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Evidently he did not, for she barely paused for breath.
“Well, in the first place, I guess you know Alex contacted me a couple of days ago, before the funeral, and I told him I was interested but of course we had to wait.”
“Till after you got her in the ground.” Bone immediately regretted saying it, even though what he saw in her eyes was not pain or anger so much as impatience.
“Till we buried my sister, yes. Anyway, yesterday at the library we got everything we could on Wolfe—the Time article and Who’s Who, they were the main things. We Xeroxed them so you can go over them too.”
“Fine. Thank you. I look forward to reading it.”
“The Time article for instance tells how Wolfe likes to go into working-class bars alone and talk with what he calls ‘the real people,’ people different from the Harvard Business School types he hires to help run his conglomerate. And then—the important part for us—the article says he also makes it a habit to pick up hitchhikers, especially kids, because he likes their inputs—a favorite word of his.”
“I see,” Bone said. “Well, then of course he’s guilty.” He wanted to be straight with her, but raillery seemed his only defense.
She went on as before. “And Alex already told you about Wolfe being at the cocktail party across from the Stone Sponge, where my sister was earlier in the evening. If she left alone she would have hitchhiked.”
“I see the connection.”
“Later yesterday Alex and I checked gas stations between the apartments where he left my sister’s body and the Biltmore. At a Union 76 just off the freeway one of the employees remembers selling a man two gallon gas cans and filling them with gas—around midnight, on the night it happened. Alex showed him Wolfe’s picture from Time—just the picture, we didn’t tell him Wolfe’s name—but he wasn’t sure. He said all he remembered about the man was that he had on a golf cap and sunglasses even though it was night.”
Now Cutter joined in. “You dig the sequence, Richard? Let’s say you are Wolfe. You’ve been to a cocktail party, you’d got five or six drinks under your belt. And because it is your habit, you pick up this teenage hitchhiker. You kill her and dump her body for God knows what reason—an accident maybe—but no matter, whatever the reason, it’s unimportant now. The important thing is you have this rented car, with blood in it. And you don’t know if someone has seen you with the girl, either when she was alive or when you were getting rid of her body. So what do you do? Do you run into your motel room and get a wet rag and tidy up the car? Do you fold your hands and hope for the best? Not if you’re slick enough to turn an Ozark chicken farm into an empire. No you simply get a couple of cans of gas and soak the car with one of them, open the other and toss a match in the window. And then you cry militant. You claim some ecofreak like Erickson is out to get you, scare you. And of course the police and FBI and the media—everybody believes. Because you’ve got the bread. You’ve got the power and the glory, the God-given proof of your righteousness forever and ever amen.”
Bone shook his head in wonderment. “You have been busy, Alex.”
“You know it.”
Bone got up and poured himself another drink, lit a cigarette. As he did so, he was not unaware of how Valerie was watching him, almost as if he were about to pass sentence on her. And it angered him, because this whole ridiculous affair was not his doing but Cutter’s, and he felt Cutter should have been the one held responsible for any pain or disappointment that grew out of it. So for the moment Bone decided to play along, to let the thing die a natural death instead of killing it outright.
“Okay,” he said, “so you have this new information, and this fine logical hypothesis. What next? What do you do with it? Where does it lead?”
Valerie looked questioningly at Cutter, as if for permission, and he shrugged assent.
“Blackmail,” she said.
Bone laughed out loud.
“We pretend blackmail, that’s all,” Valerie corrected. “If Wolfe pays, then we have him. We can go to the police.”
For a time Bone said nothing. He sat on the corner of his bed studying the two of them, Valerie all straightness and solemnity while Cutter predictably took the opposite ground, his canted smile suggesting the usual Chinese box of irony, appearance inside deception inside illusion.
Bone asked Valerie if she thought Cutter would be with her. “You think he’s pushing this thing just to see a man brought to justice?” he added.
But Valerie had an answer for that too. “If it turns out Wolfe did do it, and if he does pay, Alex admitted he’d probably try to talk us into keeping the money and leaving everything just as it is, no police or anything. But he also said it would be up to me finally, she was my sister, it would be my decision. And frankly, Mr. Bone, I don’t know which way I’d go. I’m not sure which would be truer justice—that the state get a conviction or my mother and I get some money. We had to borrow for the funeral. We’re broke. And she’s sick. So I admit I don’t know what I’d do finally. All I know is, if there’s any chance this is the man who did what was done to my sister—I want him to pay. He has to pay. And I don’t much care who he pays—us or society.”
Bone drained the last of his drink. He was still angry but in a different way now, not at Cutter so much as at himself, that the girl made him feel personally guilty, as if he were failing her somehow.
“If I were to join this thing, it’d be to help you,” he said. “I’d like that. But I’ve got this problem. I can’t see committing perjury so your new buddy here can goof off on Ibiza.”
Cutter laughed at that, a flat mirthless laugh.
“You sanctimonious prick, Bone,” he said. “Where do you get off thinking I got to justify myself to you? Who the hell are you anyway? The fastest dick on the beach? Big deal. That really qualifies you to go around moralizing, doesn’t it. In a pig’s ass.”
The only difference between Cutter angry and Cutter joking were the words he used; his voice and expression remained the same. And Bone always figured this was because the man lived so consistently at the edge of rage that a hairline closer made no noticeable difference in him. But if Bone had seen and heard it all before, Valerie had not, and she stared at Cutter in open shock as he loped up and down the small room, grinning and murmuring in rage.
“But let me tell you, my friend. Just this once, just for the hell of it, for my own amusement, I think maybe I’ll let you into the holy of holies for a moment or two and give you a taste of truth for a change, my truth, Richie, and it is simply this—I don’t like this motherfucker Wolfe and all the motherfuckers like him, all the movers and shakers of this world, kiddo, because I saw them too many times, and I saw the people they moved and shook. I saw the soft white motherfuckers in their civvies and flak jackets come slicking in from Long Binh to look us over out in the boonies, see that everything was going sweet and smooth, the killing and the cutting and the sewing up, and then they’d grunt and fart and squeeze their way back into their choppers and slick on back to Washington or Wall Street or Peoria and say on with the show, America, a few more bombs will do it, a few more arms and legs. And I don’t care if they were as smooth as the Bundys or as cornpone as Senator Eastland or this cat Wolfe, one fact was always the same, is always the same—it’s never their ass they lay on the line, man, never theirs, but ours, mine.”
He paused a few moments for breath, stood over Bone smiling still, trembling.
“So don’t judge me, baby, okay? Don’t put me down for a money-grubber altogether. Ninety percent maybe. But there’s still the rest, this little tithe of rage I got, this ten cents of gut hate.”
Bone did not apologize. With an actor as consummate as Cutter, one could not be sure of anything. There was also the little matter of last night’s eery bedside confessional; it had presented a quite different rationale for blackmail.
“So you just pick out one of them,” Bone said. “You pick him out and blackmail him.”
“You picked him out!” Cutter shot back.
Lighting another cigarette, Bone got up and walked over to the open door. Across the yard, in the house, he saw Teresa again, this time busily cleaning one of the dining room windows, which afforded her an unobstructed view of his apartment. He almost waved to her, then thought better of it. Turning back to his guests, he decided it was time to put an end to their fantasy.
“It won’t work,” he said. “It can’t work.”
“Hell it can’t,” Cutter persisted.
“Let’s say it turns out our Wolfe is innocent. Naturally he goes straight to the police. What happens then?”
“We tell them the truth,” Valerie said. “The whole thing was just a way of flushing him, that’s all. An attempt to find out if he was the one.”
“It’s still attempted blackmail, a felony.”
“But the police would see why we did it, I mean, especially in my case. She was my sister. And we couldn’t go to them with our suspicions, since you don’t know, you aren’t sure, you can’t testify you saw him.”
“And they just forgive and forget, huh? Drop the charges, wipe the slate clean?”
“So they wouldn’t, so what?” Cutter said.
“But the other side’s no better,” Bone went on. “I mean if your hundred-to-one chance proves out, and Wolfe actually is the one. Well, he’s no dummy. As you said, he built a two-by-four chicken farm up into a conglomerate, so it’s safe to assume he knows his way around. Now, as the guilty party, one thing he’d know for sure is that I’ve already signed a statement I didn’t see anything but a silhouette that night. No one’s face. Not his, not anybody’s. So how do I change my testimony, I mean change it and get anyone to believe it? No way. The dumbest thing Wolfe could do would be to pay up. It would be an admission of guilt—an admission he doesn’t have to make.”
For the first time Valerie looked doubtful, and she turned to Cutter, who of course had an answer.
“Sure, it would be dumb,” he said. “Which makes it almost foolproof. Because that’s just what scared people do—they do dumb things. I’ve seen kids pick up Cong hardware they knew was probably booby-trapped, yet they picked it up anyway, and got zapped for their trouble. So don’t give us logic, man. If Wolfe is our boy, he’s already proved how dumb he is, how sick. We come after him, he’ll cave in. Believe me.”
Bone said nothing more for a time. He sat back on the bed, practically sagged onto it, almost as if he were giving in, preparing to settle back and start making plans with his guests. Instead he slipped sideways and disappeared.
“Okay, then. You two are that sure, go ahead. You don’t need me. Just tell him I saw him—that should do the trick. And that way you’ll only have to split the money two ways.”
Cutter snorted with contempt. “Come on, Val,” he said, moving toward the door. “It’s like trying to seduce a eunuch.”
At the doorway, Valerie looked back at Bone. “Think about it though, won’t you?” And then offhand, apparently as an afterthought, she said, “Did they show you her body?”
Bone shook his head. “There was no reason to.”
“I was just wondering, that’s all. Because if they had, I think maybe you’d be with us.”
“Could be.”
Mr. and Mrs. Little returned home that evening, pulling in just after seven o’clock in a Mark IV Continental. From his room at the end of the garage, where he had been lying in bed reading among other things the Xeroxes of the Time magazine article and the Who’s Who entry on J. J. Wolfe, Bone was able to observe the couple as they alighted from the big maroon car, and separately, not speaking, crossed the driveway and entered their house, which was empty now, Teresa having once more abandoned these shores of Anglo tranquillity for the troubled seas of home. Mr. Little surprised Bone somewhat, looking more like a fiftyish male model than the fragile egghead types who in Bone’s business experience normally turned up in computer services work. Little however was tall and lean, with a deep tan and close-cropped gray hair and that just-so look of hairy masculinity, authority, and success one found pushing expensive whiskeys and big cars in the pages of the national magazines.
Bone considered going over to the house and introducing himself to his new boss, and in the process letting Mrs. Little know that he was here and on the job. But he thought better of it. If Mrs. Little wanted to introduce him, all she had to do was come out and get him.
And minutes later that was exactly what she appeared to be doing. She came walking hurriedly across the yard, knocked once on the door, and entered.
“Good,” she said. “You’re still here.”
“Still?”
“I talked with Teresa yesterday. Long distance.”
“She didn’t mention it.” He had gotten out of bed now and was thinking of asking her to sit down, but her manner—breathless and excited—put him off.
“My husband’s in the shower,” she said, “so I rushed out here to tell you—I’d just as soon he didn’t meet you yet. I told him I’d hired a new grounds boy.”
Bone could not help smiling. “You don’t want me to wander around outside, then.”
“Not for a while, okay? An hour at the most. He’ll be leaving by then—he’s got a meeting in L.A. in the morning.”
“No problem.”
“After he’s gone, though, you come on over. If you want, I mean. Naturally you’re free to come and go as you please.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good. I’ll tell you what—why don’t we go out for dinner? I’m famished myself. How about you?”
“Most of the time.”
“Well, fine then. And, uh—you do have a jacket? A sport coat?”
“Two. And shoes even.”
She laughed at that, too eagerly. “Fine. I’ll see you soon.”
Alone again, and with nothing better to do, Bone once more went over the Xeroxed material on Wolfe. The Who’s Who entry was spare to the point of brutality:
WOLFE, J. JAMES corp. exec.: b. Rockhill, Mo., Aug. 5, 1929; s. Oral and Sarah (Russell) W.; m. Olive Field Hawley, Dec. 15, 1949; children: J. James Jr., Oral C., Virginia F., and Harlan J. Founder & pres. Ozark Poultry Co-op. 1949-55; founder & pres. Ozark Markets, Inc. 1953-58; founder, pres., chrmn. Wolfe Enterprises, Inc. 1959-. Mem. Am. Soc. Sales Execs., American Angus Assoc., Kiwanis Club. Home: RFD Rockhill, Mo. Offices: Rockhill, Mo. 64840; 109 E. 42nd St., N.Y. 10017; 407 Unicorn Drive, Hollywood, Calif. 90028.
That terse, orderly listing bore about as much relation to the J. J. Wolfe in Time as a coach’s blackboard diagram did to the blood and thunder of an actual football game. The story was not so much about Wolfe personally as about the general new breed of “conglomerateurs,” as the magazine dubbed them. Wolfe was simply one of the group, and a smallish one at that, certainly no Perrot or Ling or Vesco. But he made for pretty good copy and thus earned himself star billing, the cover portrait and the full-page “box” inside, in which Wolfe the person—the husband and father, the cattleman and aviator, the cornpone maverick—was limned with Time’s customary slickness.
Essentially the story presented in the article and the “box” was a simple one, a cliché in fact. Wolfe had been born in southwestern Missouri, the fifth generation of dirt-poor hillbillies who believed in the trinity of hard liquor, a jealous God, and above all “kin,” a concept whose corollary was instant mistrust and hatred of those who were not kin. The men were loggers and chicken farmers and hunters; the women were pregnant; the children, like Wolfe himself, seldom went past the eighth grade in school, dropping out to join their parents in chicken raising and pregnancy.
But from the beginning J. J. Wolfe had been different, almost different in kind, a veritable mutant. While his father and brothers and uncles hunted and drank and dreamed, he built the first automated pullet-raising and egg-laying houses in the country, then showed other poultrymen in the area how to do the same thing, and ultimately organized them into a marketing cooperative that rapidly extended down into Arkansas and west into Oklahoma. At twenty years of age, as president of the 400-member Ozark Poultry Cooperative, he borrowed money and started a feed company intended in theory to supply cheaper feed to the co-op’s members, but which in fact ended up binding them to contracts that put Wolfe in virtual control of every member’s operation, dictating not only the feed they were to buy and what price but also where and when and at what profit they could market their eggs and fryers. Thus by his mid-twenties he had a large chunk of national poultry production in his pocket, and he quickly used it to gain control of a small supermarket chain, then a larger one, then moved on into discount stores and other fields entirely.
By the age of thirty he had holdings sufficiently diversified to warrant his setting up Wolfe Enterprises, Incorporated, the holding company that Time reported was now a significant factor in almost every segment of the national economy. Wolfe was the nation’s single largest producer of poultry and poultry products; he was the second largest cattle feeder; his holdings in supermarket and discount chains accounted for almost four percent of all retail business; and as the article reported, he was also “into” banking and forest products and energy and communications. He was in short a conglomerate. And somehow, reading between the lines of the article, Bone got the feeling that it was a conglomerate held together by paper, a leaning tower of debt.
To Bone, the personal J. J. Wolfe did not sound much more interesting than the corporate one. Time tried to make him out as a dedicated family man, but the article also mentioned that he lived away from home much of the time, a good part of it in New York and Hollywood. The article made a big thing of his “folksiness,” the fact that he went tieless most of the time and ate hamburgers for lunch and bought suits off the rack at his discount houses. And it mentioned his habit of going into working-class bars and picking up hitchhikers because he could “learn a damn sight more about people when they think you’re just a dumb redneck—which I guess is what I am anyway.” There were photographs of him with his family on his three-thousand-acre cattle ranch near his Missouri hometown, and there was another photo of him in a hardhat inspecting a new factory. But neither rang any bells for Bone. What he saw was just another tycoon enjoying his spoils. And oddly he did not seem to relate any more closely to the man in the Santa Barbara newspaper photograph than to the figure Bone had seen in the alley. They all seemed like strangers, to each other as well as to him.
Like his slacks, both of Bone’s sport coats were holdovers from his marketing v.p. days in Milwaukee, expensive doubleknit jobs he had bought at MacNeil and Moore’s in the Pfister Hotel building. Neither was altogether unpresentable, merely baggy, dirty, and worn at the elbows, a combination that more and more dictated he choose the darker one, the blue blazer, which in turn dictated the gray Farahs and his trusty peppermint-stripe shirt. So he was not feeling exactly spiffy as he waited in the Littles’ game room working on a martini and watching M*A*S*H on the sarcophagus-sized television set, while Mrs. Little was somewhere else in the house putting the final touches on her disguise.
And minutes later, as she came down from upstairs, he saw what a successful disguise it was. From a distance she looked a smashing thirty-five, all lustrous black hair and long-lashed eyes and gleaming lips, the total effect an almost gooey Latin sexiness if anything heightened by her muted tan evening suit. In her smile, however, there was no hint of disguise. She looked happy and excited, and he could only wonder at her prodigious capacity for self-deception.
“You ready?” she sang.
“Sure.”
“Anyplace special you’d like to go? Talk of the Town?”
“It’s up to you.”
“How about something out of the way?”
“Fine.”
“There’s one down the coast,” she said, as they went out the back door. “Just past Carpinteria. It’s new and small, and the food—well, let’s just say the drinks are big.”
“Sounds good.”
At the garage, she tossed him the car keys. “You can drive, all right? Martinis, you know—I kind of got a jump on the evening.”
“Sure.”
The car, a late-model Buick Century, seemed to have every possible piece of optional equipment, including power seats, which Mrs. Little put to immediate use, stretching out almost supine as Bone backed around and drove off.
“I’m so happy,” she said. “I’m so glad that motherfucking asshole is gone.”
The “new small” place turned out to be only that, with drinks no larger or stronger than those served in other restaurants in the area. But Bone judged that what it did offer was safety from exposure, its resounding lack of cachet an almost certifiable guarantee that Mrs. Little would not run into anyone she did not want to run into. And Bone was fairly certain this did not include neighbors or friends so much as her husband’s customers and business contacts, that vital group without whom she might not have been able to hire grounds boys. But if she was careful not to harm the man’s business affairs, she had no such regard for his personal reputation, and right after drinks were served and the two of them had straightened out the name problem—he was to call her Beth, not Mrs. Little, and she in turn could call him Rich or Richard, not Dick, which he detested—she quickly picked up where she had left off in the car.
Jack Little was an insufferable bastard, pure and simple. Three days in San Francisco with the man, she said, and they had not even kissed, could Bone believe that? When Little took her out for dinner all the creep did was sit there and knead his earlobe and mentally strip and hump every girl in the room, while all she did was drink—too much, she admitted. Like tonight. Only this was fun drinking, drinking because she felt good, not bad, and that was all the difference.
“The man is totally business,” she complained. “Nothing but business from the top of his woolly head to his pedicured feet. Even in sex he’s business. Doesn’t want any messy, time-consuming affairs, he says, so he confines himself to whores, would you believe that? It’s true. He brags about it in fact—the very best call girls, he says, age twenty to twenty-five, professional, efficient, clean. Hundred to hundred-fifty a throw. Bang-bang, he’s in and out and done—and back to business.”
Like Mrs. Little, Bone was drinking steadily, and martinis at that. This night he figured he would need them.
“He talks to you about it, though? Straight out?”
“His sex life? Oh sure. He’s proud of it.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Yeah—real togetherness.”
“And there’s nothing else? No children?”
She hit her martini again and looked away. He evidently had touched a nerve.
“Two,” she said. “A boy and a girl.”
“Where are they?”
“Boy’s in college.” And now in her glop-rimmed eyes the pain was raw, exposed. “The girl’s married,” she said. “And got two children of her own, which I believe makes me a grandmother, doesn’t it?”
“Big deal.”
“Well, isn’t it?”
“Liz Taylor’s a grandmother.”
“That’s hardly an answer.”
“Put it this way, then—there are grandmothers, and there are grandmothers.”
“This doesn’t bother you then? You don’t find it ridiculous?”
“What?”
“You, me—our age difference. And together like this.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Not really.”
“Then why should it me? If anyone doesn’t like, the hell with them.”
She was smiling again. “My God, you’re attractive, you know that? And nice.”
“Of course.”
“I’m awfully glad you dropped out or whatever you call it now. Maybe it hasn’t been good for you, I don’t know. But for me, tonight—” She shrugged in embarrassment. “I guess I’m a little smashed.”
“That’s what it’s for.”
The waitress came and served their food, a filet mignon for Bone, lobster for Mrs. Little. As soon as they were alone again, she suggested they eat hurriedly.
“I want to go home,” she added. “I want us to go home.”
Bone looked at her, the moist avid eyes, the anxiety quivering at the corners of her smile. “Sure,” he said. “But everything in its season, you know. First, food.”
“And then?”
He could not quite meet her eyes. “Home?”
“Yes.” She said it as if it were a nuptial vow.
Less than an hour later Bone found himself in the Littles’ game room again, only now trying to get a fire going in the huge fieldstone fireplace. It was Mrs. Little’s idea: “A cool night, and just the two of us, perfect for a fire.” But she had not reckoned with his hands, which five martinis and a B&B had turned into catcher’s mitts. The logs, however, were like those he had bought for Mo, pressed paper that burned in “a rainbow of colors.” They also were easier to ignite, so he finally accomplished his mission and then made it back across the room to the bar, there to slosh some vodka and ice into a tumbler and carefully guide the libation to his lips. Laughing to himself, he reflected that this was one night he would not, as the schoolteacher put it, rise to the occasion. No, he would just have to be an old softie, and blame it on the booze. If the lady bitched and moaned—so be it. He wouldn’t starve. He could always fall back on Cutter, couldn’t he? Cutter and J. J. Wolfe. Again he laughed.
And it was then Mrs. Little made her second entrance of the evening, this time bumpily gliding down the stairs in bright red semi-see-through lounging pajamas that made Bone remember a Lenny Bruce record from his high school days, Lenny commenting on some old woman with “the kind of blouse you could see through—and you didn’t want to.”
Like Bone, Mrs. Little apparently needed one more sip of courage, for she swept to the bar and poured herself some brandy, all the while giving her new grounds boy a look of almost gloomy erotic anticipation. Taking a quick slug, she dropped the glass onto the bar and began her advance, weaving toward him across the broad shag carpet. Halfway there, however, her stride tightened into a little stutter step, like that of a Japanese serving girl. And then she was not moving at all, was just standing there in the middle of the room, her lacquered face suddenly the color of wood ash. Abruptly she turned and lunged back across the room and into the downstairs bath, where she began to vomit what sounded like a seven-course dinner. Bone knew he should have welcomed the clamor, that it amounted to a saving bell for him. But all he felt was aversion.
In a cool and deliberate expression of what he felt, he took three quick steps over to one of the lady’s sculptures, an apparent bicycle chain welded rigid and sprouting a series of clockworks, and he kicked both it and its pedestal across the room, where it chipped a sizable corner off the television set.
Feeling better after that, he wandered over to the bathroom and looked in upon his unfortunate employer. She was standing back from the toilet, as if frightened by the great pool of filth she had spawned. And she was moaning.
Bone did not know what to say to her. “Not feeling too good, huh?” he tried.
But that only made her moan louder.
“It’s a damn shame, all right,” he allowed, waffling back from the door, preparing to leave. “Well, take care. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You can’t go now!”
“Oh? Why not?”
“My nightie’s wet!”
“So take it off.”
“My robe. Get my robe upstairs.”
“Sure thing.”
In her room the only robe in view was a man’s—heavy, opaque, one Bone would not be able to see through—so he looked no further. Coming back downstairs he found Mrs. Little hiding behind the bathroom door, with just her hand visible, reaching for the robe. Her Frederick’s of Hollywood outfit lay in a heap in the tub.
“You’ll be all right now,” he said, hopefully turning away again.
But she disagreed. “No. You help me upstairs.”
He saw no reason why she could not have made it on her own, but since he had no desire to be out on the street again tomorrow he muttered another “Sure thing” and helped the lady upstairs to her room, where she fell snuffling into bed, alternately begging him to forgive her and playing the grande dame totally aghast at her gaucherie: “I can’t imagine what happened—it’s never happened to me before. Never in my life.” And then she made a clumsy grab for him, which he wearily eluded.
“You still smell of puke,” he explained, in his best bedside manner.
“Then get the hell out of here,” she whined. “Go play with yourself.”
Bone started to leave, but she grabbed his coat sleeve and held on.
“No, you just shit here, Joe,” she said, slurring her words. “Shit here and hold my hand.”
Bone was sober enough to know he was not Joe, but he sat down on the edge of the bed anyway and took her hand. And suddenly he began to feel an enormous exhaustion. He wanted nothing in the world so much as to stretch out beside her and sleep, but he was not about to put himself in a position that could lead to a sexual showdown.
“Bet you think I’m ashamed,” she said. “Bet you think I’m a mesh.”
“Not at all.”
“Not at all, your ash, Joe. Course I’m a mesh—I know that. But not always, lemme tell you. You know who you’re lookin’ at, Joe? You got any idea?”
“No idea.”
“The Queen, thash who. Monmouth College Homecoming Queen, nineteen hunder and for—” She giggled at her ridiculous mistake. “And fifty-five. Thash old nuff, huh?”
“Congratulations,” Bone said.
“Old hot lips, that was me, Joe.”
“Hot lips, huh?”
“Body that wouldn’t quit, let me tell you.”
“And still hasn’t.”
“You bet your ash.” And now she smiled reflectively. “Them Tekes, though—what a buncha hornies they were, huh? They had this auction, ya know. To raise money for some damn thing or other—I can’t remember—and you know what they got me to do?”
“No.”
“Shtrip, thash what! But just down to my unnerwear, course. We wasn’t so fuckin’ filthy back then.”
“The good old days.”
“You bet your ash.”
“Again.”
Bone said as little as possible from then on, and in time Mrs. Little’s fond memories faded and her eyes began to flutter closed, probably unable to support any longer the weight of her half-inch false lashes. Finally Bone gave her a comradely pat on the arm and tiptoed out of the room. He was just starting down the stairs when her voice came after him again, like a harpoon.
“We try it again tomorrow night, okay? I won’t drink sho much.”
At that Bone raised his eyes to the ceiling in unthinking comic dismay, and immediately realized his mistake—a drunk’s mistake—as his right foot missed the next step and he went tumbling the rest of the way down the carpeted stairs and rapped his head vigorously on the bottom baluster. For what seemed like minutes he lay there trying to decide whether to open his mouth and yell or run back upstairs and beat his new employer to death with one of her sculptures. Instead he got to his feet and went into the kitchen, where he picked up the wall phone and dialed.
For a change it was Cutter himself who answered, yawning and grumbling.
“This is Rich,” Bone told him. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“About what?”
“Wolfe.”
“It’s too late, man.”
“Why?”
“I just slashed my wrists.”
“Tape them,” Bone said.