The Bones (38 page)

Early in the morning, Lloyd drives them to the studios of WKNS, a local television station where Frank is going to sit alone
in a studio and do the
AM America
interview with Patty Sullivan, who will be ensconced behind her desk in New York. Lloyd, who has parked the gun in the trunk
of his car, watches from behind a pair of recently purchased Ray-Ban sunglasses as Frank sweeps into the station with Mercy
at his side, shaking hands and signing autographs. In the studio a technician attaches a lavalier microphone to Frank's lapel.
Frank motions for Mercy to stand next to the monitor, and she obediently slides over while Lloyd settles himself at the side
of the studio, writing furiously in his notebook.

At 8:32 A.M. Patty Sullivan, whose seriousness of purpose is continually upstaged by her pageboy haircut, endless legs, and
a perky smile that won't stay down, announces, "They call him the comedians' comedian, but now the state of Oklahoma calls
him a killer. Frank Bones is with us today, live, to tell us his side of the story . . ."

The red light on the camera facing Frank illuminates and he smiles easily. "Good morning, Patty," he says, looking at Mercy,
who smiles back.

"How're you feeling today, Frank?"

"I don't usually do the breakfast shows so now I'm a cereal killer," Frank banters as his interlocutor's hand flies to her
mouth choking back a laugh, no slouch at grokking the shtick, Patty a Georgetown University graduate and former White House
correspondent, "which is actually something that would work better in print since it's cereal with a
c
for the viewers staring at your million-dollar gams instead of hanging on my every ejaculation, and by
ejaculation
I mean the verbal kind with the words."

Mercy is enjoying herself greatly as Patty giggles in appreciation of Frank's double anatomical reference and says, "So you're
comfortable joking about it?"

"Hey, I'm not O.J., I'm a comedian. If I didn't joke about it, I'd look guilty."

For the next two minutes and thirty seconds he is allotted, Frank is so charming and entertaining, the viewing audience could
be forgiven for thinking he was there to promote a new television show rather than assert his innocence of a capital crime,
and at the end of the interview he tells Patty he'll be happy to come back on the show when he is acquitted and tell her all
about how he got off, still making with the double entendres. The red light vanishes, indicating Frank is no longer on camera,
and after the soundman removes the lavalier, Frank walks up to Mercy and kisses her on the mouth as Lloyd writes it all down.

Then Lloyd drives them to the police station so Mercy can pay her parking tickets. Frank, having had enough of the police
lately, waits in the car while Lloyd accompanies Mercy inside. In their morning together she had casually mentioned the amount
in her checking account did not begin to cover what she owed the city of Tulsa for parking violations, and Lloyd, eager to
be helpful, has offered to give her the money. She takes it reluctantly and only after insisting he understands it's a loan.
While Lloyd was off getting a drink of water at the television station, Mercy mentioned his generosity to Frank and this served
to soften Frank's stance toward him.

***

"What do you think?" Robert Hyler says to Jolly De Meo. The two men are seated on a white leather sofa in Jolly's office where
they have just finished watching a tape of Frank's performance on
AM America.

"Guy's a complete
gavone,"
Jolly says, employing the word Italians use to describe their low-rent brethren, never mind Frank isn't Italian. Jolly would
have preferred Robert drop Frank long ago.

"Come on, man. Give him a break. He's not crazy." Robert considers what he's just said and continues, "Okay, maybe he is crazy.
But I don't think he could kill anyone."

"I don't know how a guy in his situation can look so relaxed, like he had a Valium enema or something," Jolly observes. "If
he was that good in
Kirkuk,
Harvey would have picked up the show."

"Frank's a very charismatic guy," Robert remarks, his mind now elsewhere. He's thinking of how Frank summarily rejected the
services of the high-powered lawyer Nada had arranged for him. Did this indicate a crack in his loyalty to the company? He
had rarely questioned a decision of Robert's before, and never before had Robert made a decision with such far-reaching implications.
If Frank didn't trust his judgment any longer . . .

"How's his CD doing?" Jolly asks, stroking his beard contemplatively.

"Sales tripled since the indictment."

Tessa sticks her head in the door, interrupting their discussion. "Quentin Tarantino is on the phone. It's about Frank."

"Relax, Frank."

"If I was any more relaxed, we'd be dancing," he says to Jane Lee, the
Rolling Stone
photographer. Frank stands against a white backdrop in a rented studio in the warehouse district of Tulsa as this itinerant
chronicler of contempo cool points a Nikon with a lens the size of a cucumber at him and snaps viciously. Jane is dressed
head to toe in black, her spiked hair chopped short. Between shots, Hiro, the young, male Japanese assistant, flutters around
behind her adjusting the silver umbrella-like reflector they've set up, Frank tricky to light since he's wearing the traditional
all-black as well, and if not photographed correctly it will appear as if he's clad in a finger-painted charcoal glob. Seated
in adjacent folding chairs off to the side are Otis and the newly strapped Lloyd, who has actually produced more sperm cells
in the past twenty-four hours than he has in the last week.

"This might go on the cover, so make it good," Jane says. "Give me something . . . I don't know . . . show me some killer."

Frank is a little surprised by the directness of her request but wants to be game, so he tries to subtly coax his features
into something suggestive of sexy homicide, feeling not a little absurd at doing so.

"Yeah, yeah, that's right, good," Jane says, her Nikon spraying shots like a drive-by.

Lloyd is watching the two of them, committing every detail of their interaction to memory and feeling the weight of his gun
against the side of his chest. Actually, to say Lloyd was simply
feeling
the weight would be understating things. More accurately, he is savoring it, relishing it, delighting in the sense of indescribable
heft the weapon provides his battered psyche. The man whose wife had given away his entire wardrobe against his will, and
who could only respond by leaving the house in a fit of inarticulate pique, now sits confidently with a piece of death-delivering
metal nestled against the curve of his lean chest. Liberated from Los Angeles with its constraints and expectations, he doesn't
feel at all ridiculous about it.

After tossing off fifty exposures, Jane stops suddenly and turns to Hiro. "Could you touch up his hair?"

Hiro pulls out a brush and gently coifs the alleged killer as Otis asks, "How much do you charge for a shoot?"

Looking up from her camera where she has been adjusting a setting, Jane fixes him with a bemused gaze. "This is free," she
says. "The magazine pays."

Otis, Equally bemused, responds, "No, no, no, baby. I mean for me."

***

That night at the Trade Winds Motel, Frank and Mercy are slow-dancing to a Lucinda Williams CD she bought for him earlier
in the day. They're each holding glasses of Jack Daniel's, the bottle in Frank's hand for convenient refills. Frank kisses
her, then puts his glass and bottle down on the dresser. Taking Mercy's glass, he puts it next to his. Then he pushes her
down on the bed. She lies on her back and puts her hands behind her head, and Frank unzips her jeans and pulls them down over
her ankles, tossing them to the floor. He removes her white cotton thong and places a hand beneath the small of her back.
Leaning over, he slips his tongue between her legs, and as she groans with fresh pleasure, he quickly brings her to orgasm.
Grabbing her by the hips, he turns her over. She pushes herself onto her elbows and knees, and Frank enters her from behind.
As he is making love to her, his face buried between her soft hair and lightly freckled shoulder, he realizes he wants her
to come to Mexico, to live with him down there, make some kind of new life. His orgasm arrives in shuddering spurts, and pressing
hard against her pelvic bone one last time, he heaves off her, lying on his back. Mercy roils over on her side, facing him.
They stare into each other's eyes, and Frank, his mind clearing, knows it's a ridiculous idea. Despite this, he says, "I could
love you."

"You better not," she murmurs. "I'm not the sentimental type," and he inches further in that direction.

Mercy watches Frank getting dressed as she climbs back into her own clothes. She's doing what she swore she wouldn't do with
this guy. Reaching into the pocket of her jeans, Mercy pulls out the knife she was waving at Tino when Frank walked into her
life. She flicks it open and he doesn't speak or flinch when she lightly traces the blade from his groin to his stomach, past
his nipple, over his chest, and to his throat. She rests it there, says, "I want you to have this." Then she closes it with
a snap of her wrist and hands it to him.

"You
are
sentimental." Accepting the offering, the onyx handle, the pearl inlay. "It's a wonderful knife," he says, and the ghost of
Frank Capra feels it slipping through his ribs.

"Think of me whenever you stick it in someone," she says.

He knows he'll miss this woman more than the rest of them put together.

While this is going on, Lloyd stands in his room holding a bottle of tequila and yelling into his cell phone, "Because I don't
know when I'm coming back, okay? That's why!" He is communicating with Stacy for the first time since he'd left Los Angeles
three days earlier and he is distracted by the College Christians, who have once again colonized the pool area and are having
a party featuring a plethora of young, lithe, unpierced bodies and barrels of soda. Someone has set up a boom box and the
sound of Christian rap floods the area, bouncing hard off the poolside concrete and into Lloyd's open window.

Ordinarily, when he was on the road, he and Stacy would talk several times a day and their conversations would essentially
be a competition as to who was suffering more. If he said he had had a bad day because he'd missed a plane connection and
had to sit for five hours in the Minneapolis airport, she would say, "
You 're
having a bad day? Let me tell you about the day
I'm
having," and regale him with the story of how their son had had a meltdown that began in the frozen foods section of Gelson's
Supermarket and lasted a full hour, causing her to miss her appointment with the manicurist, and now she thought there was
a gas leak in the house. "So don't tell me about
your bad
day." That is how their conversations usually went. This conversation is not going like that.

Tonight, when Stacy says, "So I'm just supposed to wait here while you pal around with the guy who destroyed our house?" Lloyd's
response is "No, you don't have to wait around. Get a facial, get your legs waxed; plan a benefit with Daryl. I don't really
care what you do." He says this walking around the room and periodically looking at himself in the mirror, his jacket off,
the gun in the shoulder holster. He takes another swig from the bottle. He would have said the same things to Stacy even if
he had not been drunk. Being drunk simply allows him to enjoy saying them.

"Lloyd . . . " is all Stacy can manage at this point, unaccustomed to full-frontal hostility, so deft had he become at concealing
it. The great reserves of antagonism Lloyd had accrued while married to Stacy remained in storage largely due to his fear
of her own withering anger. He would inwardly cringe at the thought of her simmering rage being unleashed and so took great
pains not to provoke it. But the idea of Stacy is receding now, along with the
Happy Endings
experience and the rest of his Los Angeles life, so the sting of her nettles, particularly at a distance of over a thousand
miles, has dissipated and is unable to produce its former effect. Stacy senses this and, realizing she will get a lot more
in the divorce if Lloyd returns home and serves out the rest of his contract, modulates her tone. "Everyone at Lynx has been
calling you. Harvey Gornish, Pam Penner . . . Bart Pimento called here, Lloyd." She's trying to plead without sounding as
if she's pleading.

"Okay."

"Okay?
All you're going to say is
okay?"

"What I really want to say is, they can all go fuck themselves, but that would be gratuitous."

Outside the room the loud report of a string of firecrackers sounds pop
pop pop pop pop.

"Lloyd! What is that, gunfire there?"

"Some college kids are having a party. Those are firecrackers."

"It sounds like you're in a battle zone. Listen, it's not okay, what you're doing."

"What else do you want me to say?"

"You walked off your own show. It's very bad. Your lawyer called and he says Lynx is going to sue you, so it's not really
okay at all." Realizing this sounds judgmental rather than seductive, she adjusts her approach. "You have to get back to L.A.
and apologize to everyone."

"You think I'm going to crawl into Lynx on my hands and knees and beg them to let me back? They're replacing Dede Green with
Honey Call!"

"So what?"

"You hate her! You said she was no better than a hooker!"

"Our mortgage is eight thousand dollars a month, Lloyd!"

"They're not letting me do my show!"

Stacy finds it unbearable now that Lloyd has started to climb on the art horse. It is with the greatest concentration that
she remains calm and intones, "You signed a contract. You can write your book when it's over. Right now you have to come home
and get back to work, hon." It kills her to call him hon and she grits her teeth while doing it, but she knows if she is to
lure him back, it will take Circean wiles.