“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 insi
de, 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.
Cutter and Bone Page 15