Cutter and Bone (15 page)

“I just told ya—I didn’t get a good look at the cat.” The kid shook his head in exasperation. “Jeez, everybody wants to know about him. Yesterday this freaky cripple, and now you.”

“Things are tough all over,” Bone said.

From the service station he drove on to Cabrillo Boulevard. He parked the truck again and headed out across the broad beach toward the water’s edge, where the sand would be hard enough for easier walking. And he felt he had to walk. He had to think; he had to get some good clean oxygen into his blood to combat the poisons last night’s drinking had dumped there. The thought of his own hangover led him inevitably to think of poor Mrs. Little back in her bed of pain in Montecito. He had gone up to her room earlier to ask if he could use the truck for some personal errands, but she had had other things on her mind.

“My head! My stomach! My legs!” she bawled.

Bone had offered to get her something—scrambled eggs, he suggested—but that had only made her moan all the louder. In the interstices of her agony, however, she did manage to answer his petition—yes, he could take the goddamn truck if he wanted it. He could sell it, junk it, shove it, she didn’t care.

As he moved along the beach he tried to get it straight, in his mind, what he had done and for what reason. Even drunk last night, after making the call to Cutter, he had expected that when he woke this morning, he would quickly take it all back, call Cutter again and explain that it had just been a joke, an inebriate’s midnight inspiration,

But he had not called, not changed his mind about seeing Cutter this morning. Hangover and all, he found that for the first time in ages the day ahead of him was not just something to be got through but a terrain that actually interested him, A field of unknown and intriguing possibility. And when he analyzed the phenomenon he could find no better reason for it than that he did not believe his own eyes. Because he still recalled seeing nothing that night except a dark shape. Yet he knew that if he had to bet on whom that shape belonged to, he would not have been reluctant to give odds that its possessor was J. J. Wolfe. So he could only assume that what his conscious mind had missed that night, his unconscious had not. There must have been something, a sight message, a visualization so swift and subtle he had not picked up on it except in his unconscious. What it came down to then was he
felt
he had seen Wolfe that night. That was all. But it was enough.

Beyond that he had no sure idea where he was headed or even where he wanted to go. Money was the essential thing of course, the carrot. Not for a second could he buy Valerie’s hard-eyed protestations about bringing the guilty to justice. No, he was certain she was in the thing for the same reason Cutter was, and now maybe he would be, to ease the burden of living poor in this sunny sink of affluence. The stock market had been bumping along the bottom for some time now, unemployment was high, and every bar he went into, every straight and kinky party had its Jeremiahs predicting catastrophes ahead, depression and famine and political breakdown. And even if only a fraction of it proved true, Bone did not look forward to muddling through it as an aging beachboy in Salvation Army castoffs. No, like everyone else, he was going to need a shelter of his own, and it did not appear he was about to achieve it through any of the usual channels, like holding down a job. So maybe he would just have to turn to J. J. Wolfe for help. Like the survivors at Donner Pass, maybe he would have to stop thinking about himself in a certain way, and do what had to be done, survive however he could.

Bone of course realized that all this rested on two less-than-concrete assumptions—the first that Wolfe was guilty and the second that the man was sane, rational enough to give in to extortion rather than try to destroy its source or break before it, go to the police, and confess his crime. There was no way of knowing the first part of course; Wolfe himself would have to supply the answer there. But as for the second, the possibility that if he were guilty he might also be rational, Bone saw no reason why it could not be so, despite the brutality of the crime. For that matter, Bone saw no reason why the murder itself could not be interpreted as simply an accident instead of the purposeful act of a psychopath as everyone seemed to think it was. The semen in the girl’s throat certainly was no basis for the psychopath theory. Over the years Bone himself had picked up numerous young female hitchhikers who turned out not to be traveling anywhere so much as reporting for work, ready to earn a fast ten or twenty dollars wherever he might have chosen to turn off and park. So the fact that Valerie’s sister had semen in her throat meant nothing really; in fact Bone would have bet that in the last year the girl had ingested more of it than she had ice cream.

No, it was the other that unsettled—the fractured skulk, the crushed windpipe. And yet even these Bone could see as part of a normal scenario, things that grew out of the circumstances themselves rather than the compulsions of a psychopath. Wolfe—or whoever—picks up the girl, drives her around, talks, finally either makes out with her or buys her services. And as is so often the case, alcohol enters the picture, perhaps diminishing the man’s capacity at the same time it exaggerates the girl’s contempt for him, not only his performance but his very being, his age and appearance, his accent, his crewcut if nothing else. And, laughing, choking, she spits most of his meager production back at him, in his face or on his clothes—Bone could almost see the thing happening, the careless laughing girl, happy stoned, flying on her meth and beer while the man sits there in his middle-aged fat-sweat and stink, his outraged pride and shame congealing as the laughter washes over him, this child’s scalding laughter. And he lashed out a hard beefy plowboy’s hand straight into her face, into the laughter, again and again, and finally, when he is done, a gesture of contempt more than anything else, he shoves it away from him, this piece of poor spaced-out California child gash, he shoves it brutally away from him and the head strikes the windshield or cornerpost, something harder than bone anyway, harder than skull. And it is all over, canceled, twenty-five years of blood-sweat and thievery apparently undone in a matter of seconds.

But then it all must have come surging back to him, Bone figured, like adrenaline to an athlete, the old hillbilly obduracy and cunning. And he had dumped the girl’s body. He had firebombed his own car. He had done this thing with the locals, whipping out the old aw-shucks routine as the visiting hayseed tycoon, a little surprised and puzzled at this weird bit of violence directed at him of all people, but at the same time not all that hot and bothered about it either, no sirree, not so put-out he couldn’t hang in there grinning and pressing the flesh like any other good ole boy with a li’l dinky empire to husband. In other words, Wolfe had quickly reverted to character, the character of a man who would go belly up for the police at about the same time jackals turned herbivorous or the Ozarks voted communist.

All of which brought to Bone’s mind an interesting corollary—would Wolfe then be likely to roll over for a trio of amateur extortionists? And about the only acceptable answer he could think of was
possibly—if
their demands were reasonable and if they covered themselves carefully enough. That was one of the reasons he was glad Cutter had brought Valerie into the thing—he considered three a neat, almost optimum conspiracy, too large for someone like Wolfe to handle easily and yet not so inclusive as to be unmanageable. Then too, as she had pointed out yesterday at Mrs. Little’s, Valerie did in a sense legitimize the undertaking—if it ever began to come apart and Wolfe did go to the police, Valerie as the victim’s sister would be able to cast doubt on their culpability. Who could prove the three of them were not simply trying to smoke Wolfe out? It would be a hard case to make, hard to prosecute.

So there were good reasons for including her, for giving her a share of Cutter’s pie in the sky. Nevertheless Bone had his doubts that those reasons had been Cutter’s—they were just too simple, too practical to have made it through the exotic plumbing of his friend’s mind. Nor for a second could Bone believe that sympathy or generosity had been Cutter’s motive. No, he imagined Alex had brought her in on impulse more than anything else, perhaps only because his prodigious ego required a larger and more appreciative audience than Bone alone. But that was not something to sweat over now, Bone reminded himself as he started back for the truck. That would have to wait, along with such other matters as to how to plan and set up the operation and how much money to ask for. Above all, there was one simple question that needed answering. And there was only one person who could answer it.

It was almost noon when Bone entered Murdock’s, expecting to sit at the bar and have a sandwich and maybe a free drink or two while he waited for Cutter. But surprisingly Alex was already there, sitting alone in a booth at the rear of the room. Besides him there were only two other patrons, a seedy pair of old men nursing draft beers at the bar, behind which Murdock was busy readying his supply of liquor, mixes, and glasses for the long day ahead. Still he took the time to give Bone a despairing look.

“Your buddy’s here,” he said.

Bone lit a cigarette. “So I see.”

“You never learn, do you?”

“Probably not. But I did get out of his house, just like you instructed, father.”

“Smart boy.”

“You got any coffee?”

Murdock turned to the old men for commiseration. “You hear that? Coffee. Jesus, between the two of ’em I’m really gonna prosper today.”

“That’s what he’s drinking?” Bone asked.

“Yeah—but lacing it with wood alcohol, I bet. Or bat blood.”

“You do carry on.” Bone waited at the bar for his coffee, then took it back to the booth and sat down. For a time Cutter did not acknowledge his arrival, just sat there lying back against the booth seat puffing on a cigar, blowing out an impressive chain of smoke rings.

“Something terrible’s happened, right?” Bone said. “Something horrendous.”

“Because I’m on time?”

“More—you’re early.”

“It’s the new me, Rich. Why, I’ve turned over so many new leaves this past week I’m practically through the whole damn book.”

“Is that what that means—the leaves of a book?”

“What’d you think, a fig leaf?”

“I didn’t think. I try not to.”

Cutter said he could understand that, just as he himself tried not to run whenever possible. “Of course there’s also the theory of compensation,” he went on. “According to which you should be a world-renowned philosopher and I a wide receiver for the Rams.”

“You’ll make it first.”

“You’re probably right.”

Bone sipped at his coffee and, finding it bitter, added sugar. All the while Cutter sat there studying him, the single bloodshot eye carefully working him over.

“Well, out with it,” he said finally. “Last night you said there was still a problem, something bugging you.”

“That’s right. Before I sign on, I need this one answer.”

“About what?”

“You.”

Cutter grinned. “Now why didn’t I think of that?
Me
. And here I thought it was Valerie. I figured you didn’t want a girl in on it.”

“No, there’s no problem there.”

“But there is with me, huh?” Cutter frowned deeply, burlesquing his puzzlement and concern. “Now what could it be? Let me think—you suspect my motives, right?”

Bone put out his cigarette. “Screw your motives. No, it’s simply you, old buddy. Your sterling character. What I have to know is if you’re serious about this thing, if you’re on the level. Or if you’re just playing the same old games, putting us peasants on just for the hell of it.”

Cutter was aggrieved. “Have I ever put you on?”

“Many times.”

“But not in something like this, Rich. Not when the stakes are this high. Not when it’s important.”

Bone thought of young Erickson and his holy war against polluters, and how Cutter had squashed him. And he thought of the first time he had ever seen Alex, at an election night party for a clean-cut local young professor who had just won his party’s nomination for assemblyman, and how amid all the bubbly and pandemonium this one-eyed cripple in an apache dancer’s outfit had scrambled up on a table and outshouted everyone. “A toast!” he yelled. “A toast to the only politician I ever met with guts enough to face the truth about himself—to insist that a man’s sex life is his own business, no matter how queer it may seem to someone else! So here’s to him—your candidate and mine—Ralph Herman!” It had been typical Cutter—in fact Alex had not even gotten the man’s first name right. Nevertheless a funereal silence had fallen briefly on the room, and the nervous laughter that trailed after it somehow failed to reestablish the original festive mood. And though undoubtedly for other reasons, “Ralph” Herman never made it to Sacramento.

So Bone could not attach much weight to Cutter’s disclaimer. In fact it was his experience that the more “important” something was, the more likely Cutter was to deflate it.

“The whole idea,” Bone said now. “It’s pretty far out.”

Cutter shrugged. “Life is far out.”

“We could wind up in jail.”

“I’ve been worse places.”

“I haven’t.”

“Well, it’s up to you, man. It’s a question of priorities—how much you’re willing to risk.”

“What about the moral problem?”

“What moral problem?’

“Extortion is a crime.”

“So’s murder.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“May I quote you on that?”

“The thing bothers me. I can’t help it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.”

“In this world!” Cutter’s grin did not believe. “This hellish planet. This jailhouse. This sinkhole of piss and misery. And you think it’s immoral—prying a little bread loose from a murdering redneck creep like Wolfe? You actually think that?”

“For some reason, yeah,” Bone admitted. “Maybe my Midwest puritan upbringing, I don’t know.”

Cutter nodded sagely. “I think I know what the problem is—our cause just doesn’t sound noble enough. Which is all-important these days. Like if your thing is to liberate someone—Palestinians, gooks, leprechauns—then anything goes. You got carte blanche. You can slaughter the very people you’re liberating, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is not the end, but the means.”