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 protectiv
e 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.”
Cutter and Bone Page 14