As always, Bone found the drive up to San Marcos Pass both tortuous and beautiful, with the distant ocean every now and then slipping into view as the road climbed into the mountains still green from the winter rains, almost a Wisconsin summer green, so soft and lush it struck him as incongruous here, a parody, for in his mind the true Southern California was the one of summer and fall, with its yellow hills and dull brown mountains and desiccated flats, a withered land, a home for condors.
He still had no idea why Cutter wanted to get together at Cold Spring Tavern. Not only was it out of the way but it was a tourist haunt as well, a one-time stagecoach stop on the old coastal highway as it crossed the Santa Ynez Mountains, a way station carefully restored and preserved to offer at least a semblance of its original state. As such, on this Sunday afternoon it would be peopled with the usual representation of California tourists, a gamut running from hairy armpits to old lace. Nevertheless it was where Cutter and he and Valerie would be and where Bone was to meet them. “Around noon,” he had instructed on the telephone. “If you can get away, that is. If the lady will let you dismount that long.”
Actually there had been neither mounting or dismounting the night before. When Bone had finally arrived home he apologized to Mrs. Little for having tied her truck up all day long, but he explained that a friend of his, an alcoholic, had fallen off the wagon and it had taken a good part of the day just to locate the poor stiff and get him home to his wife and kids. Mrs. Little said no explanations were necessary, that he could use the truck whenever he wanted because he worked for her, was after all her caretaker and handyman, and anyway she had her own car if she wanted to go anywhere. Then she insisted that he come in and have a bite to eat with her, cold barbecued chicken and imported Chablis. Afterwards they played straight pool in the game room, which smelled of Pine-Sol now instead of vomit. And they sat around drinking brandy and watching the fire in the fireplace, and in time Bone confessed his great problem to her, told her about the virulent case of gonorrhea he had contracted six months ago and how it had left him, how terrible it was to be impotent. Mrs. Little took the news like a real trooper, hardly batting her enormous eyelashes, and vowed that they would lick the problem together. She would get him the best psychiatric treatment in town. That was all it would take. Nothing could keep a good man down.
Knowing he had a source of food and shelter for the time being anyway, Bone felt a measure of confidence. But that confidence began to leave him the closer he got to his destination. And it was all but gone when he finally reached the tavern. Outside were a number of tourists’ cars, a phalanx of Capris and Venturas and Malibus set in gaudy confrontation with the weathered old wood building, which seemed as much a part of the small valley as the surrounding rock walls and great spreading sycamores that shaded it. The cars in fact seemed like America visiting its past, a failed wanton home for a nervous weekend. If there was any link between the two it was Cutter’s Packard, which sat off by itself in a spot predictably marked no parking, always a sure invitation to him.
Inside, the confrontation began to break down. Though the main room had a fieldstone fireplace and plank floors and large wood beams overhead, it also had a garish bar clock that bubbled the time in colors matching those of the room’s central feature, a leviathan jukebox that was blasting Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” to the bemused clientele, most of them blue-haired widows, fugitives from Orange County, Bone imagined.
Going out through a screened porch at one end of the room, he saw the two of them sitting at a small table next to a long fence beyond which the valley brook trickled toward Lake Cachuma. Cutter was massaging her neck, sitting very close to her and saying something out of the side of his mouth, while Valerie, eyes closed and smiling, looked as if she were about to come.
As he saw Bone now, Cutter raised his good leg and pushed a chair out for him. “Well, by Jove, if it ain’t his nibs right ’ere in the flesh,” he said. “Yessir, Richard Bone Esquire, that’s who—dildomaker to the queen, God’s gift to little boys.”
Valerie smiled easily, not at all embarrassed at how Bone had found them. “I’m glad you changed your mind,” she said.
Sitting, Bone lit a cigarette. “A moment of weakness,” he explained.
Cutter snorted. “A weakness well earned.”
“Yeah, I’ve been working pretty hard.”
“Serving his new mistress,” Cutter explained to Valerie.
“Spading her garden as a matter of fact.”
“And how did you find it, Richard? Just how does her garden grow?”
“Up your ass.”
“Then it grows without cockleshells, I can assure you.” Leaning back in his chair, Cutter began his single-handed cigarette lighting routine. “But seriously, Rich, how did you find the ground? Was it overworked?”
“Alex, I suggest you come out and have a look. You’ll find the ground—and by that I mean the same dark crumbly stuff that lives under your fingernails—you’ll find it spaded up around the whole goddamn house inside the fence. Spaded by hand.”
“Oh really—by hand? Not her instrument of choice, I would imagine.”
Valerie gave a pained laugh. “Oh come on. You two go on like this for hours?”
“Sometimes it seems more like days,” Bone said.
A waitress came to the table and Bone ordered a round of Coors—the other two were already drinking beer. When the girl left, he turned back to Valerie. “I was just trying to explain my being here,” he said. “My change of mind.”
“Your moment of weakness?”
“Something like that.”
“Sounds like maybe you haven’t changed your mind,” she said.
“If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
“For the money?” Valerie asked. “Or the other?”
Bone shrugged. “I’m like you. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“Well, you’ll come to it, old buddy,” Cutter assured him. “Believe me.”
“Why? You find out something new?”
“No need to. I just know, that’s all. I have this gut certainty—based on my undying faith in the integrity and accuracy of your instinctive reactions.”
Valerie smiled at that, or possibly at Bone’s look, which he imagined was close to that of a man whose child was kicking him in public.
“As a matter of fact though, I ain’t just been counting pubic hairs,” Cutter added. “Like yesterday, Rich. I didn’t tell you, but I was up early trying to find Wolfe’s car, the LTD. See if there might be anything of interest in it, bloodstains or something that survived the fire. But they’d already scrapped the crate. It’s probably a cube by now, headed for a blast furnace in one of Wolfe’s own companies. He’d see to that, old J. J.”
Bone put out his cigarette. For some reason he felt a need to play devil’s advocate. “Did a little checking of my own this morning,” he said. “The service stations off one-o-one, probably the same ones you two checked out. Know what I learned?”
Cutter blew out a stream of cigarette smoke. “They sell a lot of gas cans, right?”
“How’d you guess?”
“I’m psychic.”
“Yeah, they say there isn’t a day passes they don’t sell someone a can and fill it up for him too, usually some guy stranded on the freeway. Happens a lot more lately, they said, with so many stations closed at night.”
Cutter was unimpressed. “We know all that, man. And it’s irrelevant. The only important fact for us is that on the night in question this one particular man, a cat in a very hasty disguise, did willfully purchase not one but two cans of gasoline at a station conveniently situated between the apartment complex and the Biltmore.”
“You can make a firebomb out of one gallon,” Bone observed. “Or a quart, or a pint.”
“Granted. But a man like Wolfe, he doesn’t believe in doing things by half, old buddy. He believes in overkill. He buys two cans.”
“You’re positive about that?”
“Of course.”
“And what about the service station attendant? Wolfe has on sunglasses and a golf cap—big deal. I wear that, you wouldn’t recognize me?”
“Unfortunately I know you better than the man knew Wolfe.”
“Or whoever it was.”
Cutter lifted his glass of beer and drank, put the glass down, all the while watching Bone. “You with us or not?” he said finally. “Because if you just came out here to gnaw on my ass—”
“I already said I was with you.”
“Well, you’ll pardon me if I say you don’t much sound like it.”
“You need what we used to call negative inputs, Alex. Good generals listen to the bad as well as the good.”
Cutter shook his head. “One thing I ain’t, kid, is a good general.”
Valerie, reaching into her handbag, came up with two sheets of bond paper, neatly typewritten. “Shall we get on with it?” she said, placing them on the table.
“The girl’s a flaming genius,” Cutter told Bone. “Not only takes shorthand and types five thousand words a second, but dictates too. You better watch her—she gonna take over the world.”
Valerie pushed the typewritten sheets across the table to Bone. “We both worked on it yesterday. Sort of a rough plan. An outline of our thinking so far.”
“Outline, hell,” Cutter scoffed. “It’s a goddamn battle plan is what it is, just like in the boonies. Only here we’re the ones who decide how we’re gonna get zapped, not some ass-kissing motherfucker back at staff.”
Valerie gave him a rueful look. “Do you have to talk like that?”
Cutter commiserated. “Sometimes I wonder.”
Sitting back, Bone began to read through the two singlespaced pages. At first he considered it stupid and reckless, the whole idea of putting their plans down on paper. The sheets could be lost. There was no telling who might eventually read them and use them as evidence against the three of them, if it ever came to that. And while he did not completely abandon this criticism, he could see as he read further that there was value in putting it all down, spelling out the details of procedure, tactics, taboos.
The first rule of procedure was, rightly, that they deal only with Wolfe himself. They foresaw a problem in getting to him without first having to fight their way through protective layers of secretaries and vice-presidents and personal assistants, and being asked to reveal to them at least the nature if not the specifics of their business. But this of course was to be avoided at all costs. Absolute secrecy was implicit in any blackmail “contract”; without it, the victim would have no motive for being a victim. So they would have to be exceedingly careful in how they made contact with Wolfe. The best approach, they believed, would be for Bone to go in person to Wolfe’s Hollywood office and tell the highest person he could reach there that he had to get in touch with Wolfe to give him a personal message relating to the night his car was firebombed in Santa Barbara. It was a message of vital importance to Wolfe, Bone was to tell them, and therefore he could give the message only to him. He was to assure them it was a message Wolfe would be grateful to receive—but only this way, personally, from Bone. Hearing it any other way, from the police for instance, would make Wolfe very unhappy indeed.
Bone was to give them the number where he could be reached. Once contact was made and Bone was invited back to Wolfe’s office he was to pretend to go along, to meet Wolfe where and when the tycoon or one of his underlings specified. Face to face, however, Bone would improvise, move the “interview” to a place of his own choosing, like the sidewalk in front of the building or even the men’s room, some place not likely to be bugged. For there was always the outside chance that Wolfe might not be the girl’s murderer, and sensing some sort of blackmail attempt he might arrange to tape the meeting with Bone.
If and when the meeting did take place, Bone’s first move would be to make clear that he was not alone in the undertaking, thus discouraging any violence Wolfe might contemplate. He was to show Wolfe a Polaroid shot of himself, Cutter, and Valerie holding up copies of that issue of the Santa Barbara newspaper which reported the news of Pamela’s murder and the firebombing of Wolfe’s car. Cutter’s and Valerie’s faces would be cut out of the photo. Thus Wolfe would know that the threat to him extended beyond Bone, but he would not know where, or to whom.
Bone would then proceed to make his nonnegotiable demand. He and his colleagues would remain silent about Wolfe’s crime in return for payment of $150,000 yearly, which would be paid as a retainer to a dummy marketing consultant firm Bone would set up. Payment could thus be charged to Wolfe’s corporation and not to him personally, since Bone and his colleagues had no desire to kill a goose that laid golden eggs. Payment would be made quarterly, beginning with $37,500 due one week from the day of their initial meeting.
Cutter and Valerie would go down to Los Angeles with Bone and stay in the same hotel with him in the event any emergencies arose, anything that might require discussion or action on their part as well as on his. Any differences of opinion would be settled by majority vote. And any of them that wanted out, at any time, would be free to go. But at the outset all had to agree to keep the matter strictly between the three of them—no present or future “lovers, spouses, or whatnot” were to be informed as to what the three of them had done, or what was the source of their income.
As he finished, Bone looked up at Cutter. “This last point here,” he said. “That include Mo?”
Cutter shrugged indifferently. “It includes Mo.”
Bone smiled. “Going to be a little hard, isn’t it, to explain your sudden affluence?”
“Maybe I won’t have to.”
For five or six seconds Bone sat there looking at Cutter, waiting for him to explain this. But he offered nothing.
“What about the rest of the plan?” Valerie broke in. “Do you approve?”
Bone lit another cigarette. “I’m not sure. Kind of puts me out there all alone, doesn’t it.”
“On point,” Cutter said. “Which is the place to be, Rich. Purple Heartland, we used to call it. The ideal place to learn all about yourself.”
“You’re the logical choice,” Valerie added. “Wolfe undoubtedly already knows that you were there and saw him, or at least his silhouette. You’ll be believable in a way we couldn’t be.”
Bone did not argue the point. “How will we know when Wolfe’s in L.A.?”
“We already knows, cap’n,” Cutter said. “Duh big white bossman, he be flyin’ in tomorrow afternoon. And dat’s when we gwine be dere too.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Another one of his impressions,” Valerie said, smiling. “Ozark hillbilly.”
Cutter corrected her. “Not hillbilly really. Just a good ole boy, southern fried. I called his Hollywood office yesterday on the off chance someone might be on the switchboard, and lo and behold, this sweet young thing answers. Wolfe Enterprises Incorporated, she say. Well, I jist told her my name was Tommy Joe Didwell and that me and J.J. used to fish together when we was kids and I jist moved here to Los Angeles from Muskogee and jist wanted to give old J.J. a call when he was in town and shoot the shit with him a little, you know how it is, and that if old J.J. was anything like he used to be, he’d be madder’n a wet hornet with a cob up his ass sideways if he ever heard old Tommy Joe tried to get in touch with him and couldn’t—jist cuz some intelligent, sweet-soundin’ little filly like yourself wanted to be contrary.” Cutter finished off his glass of beer. “Well, to make a short story shorter, she allowed as how my old friend J.J. was flying in Monday morning for three days of conferences before returning home to Missouri.”
Cutter poured the last of his bottle of beer into his glass and then appropriated Valerie’s bottle for the same purpose, and Bone found himself wondering how much beer Alex had had so far. It was still early afternoon and Bone did not look forward to spending the rest of the day with him in a thirsty mood, which usually meant a hassle of one kind of other.
Bone got his answer only minutes later, when a pair of motorcycle freaks came swaggering out of the tavern and took a table near theirs, took it as if they were raping and stomping the thing, slamming their beer bottles down onto it, kicking chairs out of the way, collapsing into others, banging their booted feet onto the top of the table. One of them was sloppy fat, with a short ratty beard and a fringe of long, equally ratty hair falling from a prematurely bald pate. The other was thin as a ferret and commensurately ugly, with a sullen chinless face the color of dirty flour and a greased-down mane of blackish hair gathered into a ponytail at the back. Their costumes were alike only in their general raunchiness and in the black leather vests each of them was wearing and which bore a tiny emblem identifying them as OUTSIDERS, a totally superfluous designation as far as Bone was concerned. The other patrons meanwhile were working hard at pretending nothing had changed—all except Cutter From the beginning he sat staring at the pair, particularly at the ferret-faced one, who for a time seemed unable or at least unwilling to believe such a sacrilege could take place, here, out in public, in the land of the straights. He would look away from Cutter for a few moments, pretending interest in something else, scratch the tattoos on his belly, spit, contemplate his cigarillo, his stubby fingers and hagiographic rings, then inevitably he would look back at Cutter—and the Eye would still be on him, laughing at him.
Bone and Valerie meanwhile were trying to keep to the subject, discussing such problems as operating funds—to come from her, she said, money she was in the process of borrowing on her car, a three-year-old Pinto which she had just recently finished paying for. But almost immediately the ferret and his friend got to their feet, just as they had seen it done a thousand times before in Gunsmokes and John Wayne westerns and the bike flicks of their own adolescence, both of them rising slowly, almost wearily, with the proper touch of macho resignation, knocking over a chair in the process, and then ponderously setting out across the no-man’s land between them and the enemy, this freaky-looking one-eyed fag who for some incredible reason actually thought he could stare at them and get away with it.
As they reached the table Bone reflexively got up himself—he had to intention of having his head opened with a beer bottle—and he was relieved somewhat to see that he was bigger than either of them, though not as heavy as the fat one.
“Who the fuck you staring at?” the ferret demanded of Cutter.
Alex thought about it. “Let me guess. Ann-Margret?”
That seemed to cost the ferret his voice. For a few moments he just stood there gulping air and staring at Cutter. Then he turned to Bone.
“Look, what is it with this character, huh? He wanta get hurt, is that it? He wanta lose his other eye?”
Bone tried to appear calm, a shrink at a group therapy session of psychopaths. “Just take it easy,” he said. “Don’t waste your time on him. Come on, let’s go over there. Maybe I can explain.” He gestured toward the far end of the patio.
But Cutter would not quit. “Liberace? Roy Rogers?”
Valerie pleaded with him to shut up.
“That good advice, mama,” the fat biker said.
Bone had started across the patio. “Come on, hear me out anyway,” he said. “What can you lose? He ain’t going anywhere.”
The fat one, shrugging, started after Bone. And then the other followed, through tables that were largely empty now, most of the patrons having scurried inside at the first sign of trouble.
“Tiny Tim?” Cutter called over.
The ferret started to turn back, but his friend pulled him on.
“What can I tell you?” Bone told them. “He’s just what he seems. He’s bananas. And he’s been that way ever since Vietnam. In one hospital or another all this time. He’s out on a kind of leave right now, for just a week. I got to watch him like a hawk. He’s always trying to kill himself.”
“Well, he better be careful,” the fat biker said. “Someone else do it for him.”
“He wouldn’t mind, believe me.” Bone looked back at the table, where Cutter sat smiling pleasantly at them. “You notice the cane,” he went on. “His legs are gone too. And he’s got no control over his bowels or bladder. A one-eyed paraplegic who wants to kill himself—that’s my brother, fellas. Or what’s left of him anyway. What they gave back to us.”
The ferret suddenly brought his fist crashing down on a table. “That fucking war!” he cried. “That dirty fucking war!”
The fat biker gave Bone a comradely slap on the arm. “No hassle, man,” he said. “No sweat. We go inside.”
“Thanks,” Bone told him. “I appreciate it.”
“Don’t mention it.”
After they had taken their drinks inside, Bone went back to the table and sat down.
“That was real cute,” he said to Cutter. “In fact it was so cute, my friend, you just lost your point.”
Through the rest of the afternoon Bone held to his decision to pull out of the Wolfe affair. He told Cutter that the thing was dangerous enough in itself without having to undertake it with a suicidal prankster as a partner. Cutter of course argued the matter with him, alternating between amused scorn and old-buddy cajolery, insisting that Bone was comparing apples with oranges, that the situations were entirely different. Just because Cutter might want to put on a couple of half-assed bike freaks here, now, in Santa Barbara, before the project began—well, that certainly didn’t mean he would pull a similar stunt later, in L.A., when it counted, when the whistle had sounded and the game was on. Certainly Bone could see that, couldn’t he?
As a matter of fact, he could not. In fact Bone had no trouble at all believing that someone who would pull the kind of stunt Cutter just had, on the weekend before going to L.A., with all their plans neatly spread out on a table before them—that kind of character, Bone said, would do just about anything, anytime, anywhere, just so long as it tickled his funnybone.
Valerie stayed out of it for the most part, probably because she found herself stranded somewhere between the two of them. She undoubtedly wanted to go ahead with the project, yet at the same time Bone felt she must have shared some of his doubts about Cutter’s fitness for it. When Bone returned to the table, she almost had been in tears. And when the three of them left the tavern she was very quiet, reluctantly going with Cutter in the Packard, probably anticipating what a harrowing ride down the mountains it would be, a tossup between Cutter’s heavy foot and the car’s unreliable brakes, steering, and just about everything else. Bone, following in the pickup, three times watched them go off the twisting mountain road and then swerve back on so sharply that they went over the center line, and he could feel in his own body some of the tension Valerie had to be experiencing.
They finally made it, however, and Bone followed Cutter through town to the beach, where the three of them walked out to the end of the breakwater and skipped stones across the water toward the hundreds of small boats and yachts in the harbor. Then they went to Murdock’s for a few more drinks, these at Bone’s expense since Cutter claimed to have reached bottom again, already having gone through Swanson’s “loan.” The question of Bone’s participation in the project came up only now and then, as Cutter would happen upon some new line of argument, and then when it would fail they would turn to other subjects, or even better, just sit back and listen to records, the pop stuff Cutter had ridiculed with Erickson and the black girl less than a week before. In essence then it was just another Alexander Cutter afternoon, a Whitewater float with occasional stretches of calm. And along the way Bone learned a good deal more about Valerie.
Her father had “pulled a Boner,” as Alex put it, running out on her mother when Valerie was still in grade school. For a time the mother had coped, working as a waitress at the Biltmore and doing what she could to find another husband, but as she pushed over forty and her looks began to go, she had turned more and more to liquor, and by sixteen Valerie found herself pretty much in charge of things, caring for her mother and keeping house and cooking and trying to raise her little sister, all while she was still going to high school. When she graduated, at seventeen, she was made pregnant by a handsome young Levi pants salesman, who graciously introduced her to the same abortionist who would later serve her sister. Soon after, her mother had her first nervous breakdown, requiring hospitalization and extensive psychotherapy, which in turn was followed by the loss of their home.
Meanwhile Valerie had begun her career with Coastal Insurance, working her way up to her present position as a customer service representative earning the princely sum of four hundred dollars a month, which did not begin to cover her family’s living and medical expenses. And since her mother refused to apply for welfare—the “nigger-spic dole,” as she called it—Valerie had to find added funds elsewhere. For a time she stole small amounts from the office-party kitty. But that of course was a doomed operation as well as petty. So one desperate Saturday night she put on her sexiest dress and drove down the coast to Oxnard, to a beach hotel-marina complex, where she sought out the poshest bar she could find and there settled over martinis, alone. She made her first score within a half hour, an all-night trick that netted her as much as she earned all week at the insurance company. That was the first of many weekend trips, some to Los Angeles and even to San Francisco, but most of them to the same Oxnard bar. And always when she came home she would wind up asking herself the same question: “Why not full time? Why not make it while you can?”
The answer, she told them, was always the same:
“I couldn’t bear to be a whore.”
She laughed at that, a small dry laugh more like a cough than any show of merriment.
“Did your sister know?” Bone asked.
“I don’t think so. She was gone so much herself. I think she probably figured I had a boyfriend.”
“Which you did,” Cutter put in. “Boyfriends.”
“And such good friends they were too. Real salt of the earth.”
Bone finished his beer. “It explains a lot,” he said.
“What does?”
“This. Your avocation. I wondered how Alex reached you.”
“He didn’t know.”
“But he reached you nevertheless. And I wondered how. I mean, well, the girl was your sister. Most people in your position would’ve gone straight to the police with what he told you.”
“I thought about it,” she admitted. “But Alex said you’d never tell the police it was Wolfe. And if you did, they wouldn’t do anything against a man like that.”
“And then there was the money,” Bone said.
“Yes. Then there was the money.”
“It mattered.”
“Sure. Just like it did for you.”
Bone said nothing for a few moments. He already knew he was back in, probably had not even left in the first place, except as a ruse, a lesson for Cutter. “Does,” he said. “It still does—depending on Alex.”
Cutter gave him a questioning look. “On what?”
“On whether you do me a favor.”
A half hour later, after picking up a couple of pizzas on the way, the three of them arrived at Cutter’s house, where Alex was to meet Bone’s price for staying on the project.
“It’s not much,” Bone had told him. “I just want you to let Mo in on the thing, tell her what we’re doing and why.”
Cutter’s reaction had been a shrug. “Why not? I can tell you now, though, she won’t want any part of it. If bread mattered to her, all she’s gotta do is lift the phone and dial Mama down in Beverly Hills. But then she won’t interfere either, ’cause she is mah woman. What Alex wants, Alex gets.”
Bone did not expect her to join them either. In fact he would pull out if she did. But he did want her to know. He wanted to give her that anyway.
George Swanson’s Jaguar was parked out in front, so they expected to find him inside, though not in the kitchen wearing an apron and washing dishes while Mo sat watching him from the table, her feet propped on top of it while she nursed a jelly jar half filled with what appeared to be cold duck. Under the table the baby was contentedly banging a ladle against a saucepan.
With his usual grace, Cutter introduced Valerie. “This here’s Val. We just picked her up on the highway.” Then, opening the pizzas, he told George to sit down and have a bite with them but that he’d have to leave after that because they were going to have an orgy and that, as he well knew, five was a crowd. If the baby interested him, well then he might be able to stay, it was up to him, but Cutter couldn’t guarantee anything, as George could see, because the little fellow was already happily occupied with a six-inch spoon and might not want to fool around with anything half that size. Swanson came up with the required laugh and then begged off, saying that pizza and beer did not fit in with his diet and that he had to be leaving anyway, his wife expected him home for dinner, and that he had already gotten “everything I ever dared hope for.” With this last, he winked at Mo, who sat watching all of them with her usual torpid gaze and the light trace of smile, the imperfectly dissembled contempt. Swanson also said a few words about the night before, how sorry he was at what had happened and that his house was always open to Bone, and Bone slipped past it with a nod and smile, not wanting to blow the matter up large enough for Alex to take an interest in it.
Valerie meanwhile sat delicately eating her pizza, unsure of herself in this new milieu, with its damp firework display going on all about her. Even after Swanson had left and the four of them settled in to finish the pizza, the girl did not unbend. She was better dressed than Mo, wearing a white blouse and beads and checkered slacks in contrast to Mo’s chinos and sweatshirt. Yet she seemed tacky in comparison, and Bone wondered if this was simply in his own eye, the eye of a biased beholder, or whether it came from the girl herself, that she felt tacky confronted with Mo’s thoughtless ease, that Beverly Hills and eastern school background that somehow authorized her to sit where she was behind the table all this time, not bothering to move or welcome Valerie or even talk to her until now, and in a voice that only added to the effect, its clean heedless timbre in some way yet another badge of old privilege.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” she said. “It was a terrible thing to happen.”
Considering Cutter’s flip introduction of Valerie, Bone was surprised that Mo knew who the girl was. And apparently she also knew that Cutter had been spending most of his time with her, for there was a marked coolness in the way she sat looking at the girl, at all of them for that matter. So it was an awkward meal. While the three of them cleaned up the pizza, Mo just sat there sipping her cold duck and going through Pall Malls as if they were beads on a rosary. Finally Cutter started to tell her something but she cut him off, getting up from the table and saying it was time to feed the baby.
Cutter made a pot of his incredible coffee then—instant grind dumped unmeasured into warm tap water—and the three of them went into the living room and sat down around the boat hatch. There did not seem to be anything to say. Valerie picked up an old copy of Penthouse and sat looking at the nudes while Cutter and Bone waited for Mo.
When she came in finally, carrying a new glass of wine and a freshly lit cigarette, she asked what was going on. “Are we having a wake?”
Then, looking at Valerie, she caught herself. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Just putting my foot in my mouth as usual.”
“It’s all right,” Valerie said. “I didn’t even connect it.”
Cutter was giving them his pontifical gesture. “Peace, my children,” he said. “I have a duty to perform.”
“Not in here,” Mo suggested.
“Funny girl. No, sweetheart, this is for here. For you.”
Mo faked a shiver. “I’m so excited.”
“You remember our little talk the other night? With Rich about this Wolfe character and what I’d found out?”
“Vaguely. I do remember something about your parking the car that night, some difficulties you were having. And some conjugal complaints later.”
Cutter, going along with her, smiled pleasantly. “That’s the very night, my dear. Well, since then, you might say things have crystallized. Val and Rich are with me now. I mean we all figure it was Wolfe who killed Val’s sister. And we’re going to get in touch with him. We’re going to try to blackmail him. If he pays, then we’ve got him by the testes. We can go to the fuzz.”
Mo said nothing, just sat there looking at him as if his nose were turning into a carrot.
“Telling you was Rich’s idea,” Cutter went on. “I figured it’d be better to wait, tell you all about it afterward. Simplify things.”
“Oh, of course. Of course.” Mo smiled at Bone now. “But I do thank you for your consideration, Richard. You’re a gentleman and something else. I’m sure.”
“You’re welcome, Mo.”
And now she let it out, the laughter, about even parts amusement and scorn. “Now let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re all going to try to blackmail this J. J. Wolfe for killing her sister.” And she nodded at Valerie here, smiled as if they were all discussing Tupperware. “And if the man pays, then you’re going to turn him over to the law—along with the money.”
“That’s our plan, yes,” Valerie said.
“I see.” Smiling still, Mo turned to Cutter. “This is insulting, Alex. I mean, do you really expect me to buy such horseshit? You’re scraping bottom lately, you know that? You’re becoming a jerk. A pitiful jerk.”
Cutter shrugged. “If you say so.”
“I say so.”
Valerie broke in again. “It could work out just as he said. I know that’s what I want anyway—I mean, to turn the money in and convict Wolfe.”
Mo gave her a rueful look. “Oh, go take a flying leap, will you?”
Cutter clucked his tongue. “Now don’t get abusive, love.”
“Abusive!” Mo laughed again. “How in hell could anyone abuse the three of you—a kinky little band of would-be extortionists.”
Cutter shook his head in mock sadness, as if he were being put upon by some ill-mannered child. But Bone could see the anger rising in him.
“I think maybe you’re forgetting a few things,” Cutter said to Mo. “Valerie here just did happen to lose a sister, you recall that little fact? And if Wolfe is the one who killed her—which we got good reason to believe—then I say whatever we or anybody else does to him comes under the heading of justice, that’s all, pure and simple justice.”
But Mo would not back off. “Oh sure, Alex. You tell ’em, kid. Talk about newspeak—you’re becoming a real past master, you know that? Nixon could’ve used you in the White House. You and Ron Ziegler. By now all the old words would be inoperative. No only justice but truth too. And pride. Honor. You remember any of those?”
Cutter frowned. “I try, Mother. I really do.”
“And how about guts?”
“You know a lot about guts, do you?”
“You bet I do. Guts is sitting around this pigsty month after month waiting for you to find the nerve to start living again. And instead, here you are, planning some stupid crime.” She laughed bitterly. “God, I am some princess. I kiss a toad long enough, he turns into a snake.”
Cutter was pale with anger. He started to say something, but Valerie broke in.
“Well, I don’t see much purpose in any of this.” She got to her feet. “I think I’ll be leaving.”
“You’re one very cool customer, aren’t you?” Mo said to her. “Your sister is, what, two days in the ground? And here you are already trying to cash in.”
“We said we’re not going to keep the money,” Valerie told her. “We’re—”
“Oh, come off it. Give me that much credit anyway.”
Moving toward the door, Valerie shot Bone an urgent look. “It’s getting late,” she said.
“All this was Big Dick’s idea anyway,” Cutter was saying, turning to Bone now. “You’re the one wanted to tell mama all about it, right? So speak up, man. Defend the faith.”
Bone shook his head. “I’ve got nothing to say.”
Again Mo laughed, this time almost with enjoyment. “Of course not. And why should he? All this is pretty much in character for him. And I can buy that. At least he doesn’t go mooning around, crying over the great might-have-been. And neither does he mock and vilify every poor bastard who crosses his path.”
Cutter had already put his drink down. And very carefully now he limped over to Mo and slapped her hard in the face. Immediately Bone was on his feet and across the room, seizing Alex’s wrist before he could hit her again.
“I wouldn’t,” he told him.
Cutter was trembling. “Gets to you, does it?”
Bone ignored him. “You all right?” he asked Mo.
Her eyes were dry, furious. “Oh, beat it, will you? You think this is the first time?”
He turned to Cutter. “Make it the last, Alex.”
Cutter tried to pull his arm free. Failing, he smiled thinly. “Why not?” he said. “Why the fucking hell not?”
On the way back to Montecito, Bone dropped Valerie off at her home, a small rented bungalow near the freeway. Beyond giving him directions, she did not utter a word all the way there. But as he pulled up to the curb and she opened the truck door, preparing to get out, she turned back to him.
“It’ll work out,” she said. “I know it will.”
“Why?”
“Because it has to.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“I’m not joking—it will work out.”
“Because it has to.”
“Yes.”
Bone said he hoped she was right and she smiled then, a small bereft smile. He watched as she got out and hurried toward the tiny frame house.
Later, after he had quietly parked the pickup truck in Mrs. Little’s garage and then even more quietly walked to his room and entered, he found a new pair of men’s bikini swim trunks on his bed, with a gift card bearing a message written in lavender ink:
How about a midnight swim?
And Bone found himself almost convinced that Valerie was right. It would all work out. It had to.