Cutter and Bone (12 page)

Sleep brought release, however, and he dreamed of Mo and the baby in the park with him, along with the tourists and the Frisbee throwers and their dogs. The one different thing was in the rose garden, where someone had placed a pair of trashcans with golf clubs sticking out of them. And far in the distance there was the sound of crying, a man crying. Cutter? he wondered.

When he woke the next morning, he heard Teresa already at work, scrubbing the walk between the house and the swimming pool. So he got out of bed and dressed, preparing to join her in another day of make-work at the Littles. Unexpectedly, he found her almost as cold and surly as she had been the day of his interview, but after he went into the kitchen and made his own breakfast she warmed noticeably, joining him for coffee and cigarettes. She had had a very bad night, she told him. Her husband had found marijuana in their oldest daughter’s purse—he had been looking for money to go bowling with, she said—and naturally he had beaten the girl. He had locked her in her room but she had climbed through the window and been gone all night. Meanwhile the husband had gotten drunk and accidentally gashed himself on a war surplus machete that he liked to threaten them with whenever he was “stinko.” Someday she would kill him with “thee goddamn machete,” she vowed. Bone would read about it in the newspaper—
TERESA CHAVEZ CUTS HUSBAND INTO LITTLE PIECES
. He suggested instead that she merely separate him from his
cojones
, because it was a less serious crime and yet would be almost as effective, and the idea so pleased her that she laughed until tears ran down her face.

After breakfast Bone resumed the job of spading up the ground inside the stone fence, and when he finished over two hours later he took a shower and put on his swimming trunks and lay out in the sun on a redwood chaise next to the swimming pool. For ten or fifteen minutes he lay there, trying not to think about anything except the feel of the sun on his body. And then a shadow fell across him, a shadow with Cutter’s voice.

“Hey, fella, can I sit on your face?”

Bone squinted against the sunlight at the grinning specter above him. Then he saw the girl standing back a short distance, watching them, not smiling. Even in the brightness Bone could not miss the weary cool of her eyes, the tough and honest face. He looked back at Cutter.

“You had to do it, didn’t you? You couldn’t leave it alone.”

“It wouldn’t leave
us
alone.”

“You bullshitter, Alex.” As Bone got up from the chair, the girl came forward.

“I believe you two have met,” Cutter said.

Valerie Durant smiled hesitantly. “I guess you could call it that.”

“How are you?” For the moment Bone was unable to think of a less stupid greeting on this second day after she had buried her sister.

“Okay,” she shrugged. “Alex is keeping me busy.”

“He has a gift for that.”

Cutter meanwhile was making a big thing out of his new surroundings, gaping at the Littles’ sprawling house, the barbered grounds, the pool. “Land sakes, boy,” he drawled. “You shore have a way of making out.”

Bone slipped into his old terry robe. “Sure. Twenty minutes ago I was spading the front yard.”

“Just think of that,” Cutter marveled. “A common laborer just twenty minutes ago. And now here he is, lounging beside the pool. Which just proves a man can still make it if he’s got pluck and grit.”

“Let’s sit down.” Bone moved toward the umbrella table at the end of the pool.

“This old fox who hired you,” Cutter asked, “just what you got on her anyway? You catch her being faithful to her old man, was that it?”

“Something like that.”

“Way to go.”

As he was about to sit down Bone realized that Valerie had not moved. Turning, he followed her gaze to the back of the house, where he saw Teresa standing just inside the screen door, staring out at the three of them.

“Is there some other place we could talk?” the girl asked. “Someplace private?”

Bone wanted to tell her there was no reason for privacy, that what little he had to say could be said right where they were. But her look, the steady open gaze, did not invite hostility.

“Sure,” he said. “Come on.”

They followed him into his room at the end of the garage, where he got out a bottle of scotch he had appropriated from the house. As he poured drinks for the three of them, Cutter again went into his cornpone wonderment act at Bone’s rapid rise in the world.

“Red Label yet,” he clucked. “Didn’t I tell you, Val—we follow this cat and we shall wear diamonds.”

“Diamonds I’m not interested in,” she said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

Bone heard in that a clear suggestion they cut the small talk and get down to business. But Cutter apparently was not ready yet.

“So you think all this is better than our davenport,” he said to Bone.

“All it lacks is Mo.”

“Is the rent as reasonable, though?”

“About the same.”

Alex grinned. “Sure. And God is love.”

Bone looked over at Valerie, who had sat down in the room’s only easy chair. Still very cool and controlled, she had taken out a cigarette, tapped it firm, lit it. And for some reason Bone found it irritating that there was not one thing about the girl, not her manner or her clear hard eyes or even her attire—the casual tan flare slacks and white cableknit sweater—nothing that hinted at loss or bereavement. She could have been a job applicant.

“I guess you know why I came here with Alex,” she said now.

“I’ve got a fair idea.”

“I was wondering if you’d changed your mind. I mean about what you saw that night.”

Bone shook his head. “No. No change.”

“Specifically I was wondering if you’d decided this man Wolfe was the one you saw.”

“J. J. Wolfe, you mean? The tycoon?”

“Yes.”

Smiling, Bone looked over at Cutter. “Now where could she have gotten an idea like that?”

Cutter shrugged innocently.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bone,” the girl kept on, “but none of this is a joke to me. It’s very serious.”

Bone did not feel like apologizing. “I never thought otherwise,” he said.

“It’s just his way,” Cutter put in. “He can’t help himself. He doesn’t have normal human feelings like the rest of us.”

“The truth is I can’t see any reason for putting you through all this,” Bone told her. “It’s a dead end. And Alex knows it.”

“He said you’d say that.”

“Oh? And what else did he tell you?”

“How it happened. I mean what you said. And then how you changed what you said.”

“You’re talking about the picture now?”

“Yes.”

Bone said that was not quite accurate. “Actually it was an offhand kind of thing,” he explained. “When I saw the picture in the paper I guess I said something about it looking like the man—the silhouette—in the alley. But then, when I noticed my friend here about to have a coronary, I backed up and tried to tell him exactly what I meant. Which is what I told you in the police station, and what I’ll tell you now—I don’t know who killed your sister. I didn’t see the man’s face.”

For a time Valerie sat there looking at him. And her expression made it very clear that none of this surprised her, just as none of it convinced her.

“So you didn’t mean it,” she said finally. “When you said
It’s him
—it was only an offhand thing?”

“I don’t think I even said
It’s him,”
Bone corrected. “What I said was
It could be him
, something like that.”

Valerie looked over at Cutter, who was shaking his head.

“I take it you prefer his version,” Bone said to the girl.

She did not answer.

“Well, you can believe what you want, of course.”

“I’d like to believe
you
.”

“I’d like that too.”

Valerie crushed out her cigarette. “Let me ask you this, then—could you accept it that you might have been right without knowing it?”

Bone said he didn’t follow her.

“I mean if what Alex and I have learned about this Wolfe makes it seem he actually
was
the man—then would you change your mind?”

“About what I
saw?”

His emphasis on the verb must have been answer enough for her, for she shook her head now even before he did. And she turned to Cutter, her gaze inquiring, bleak.

“I told you, kiddo,” he said to her. “You can’t get blood out of a cadaver.”

Bone raised his middle finger to him in silent reply.

Valerie meanwhile had decided on a different approach. “I’d still like you to hear what we’ve found out about Wolfe. That couldn’t hurt anything, could it?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Evidently he did not, for she barely paused for breath.

“Well, in the first place, I guess you know Alex contacted me a couple of days ago, before the funeral, and I told him I was interested but of course we had to wait.”

“Till after you got her in the ground.” Bone immediately regretted saying it, even though what he saw in her eyes was not pain or anger so much as impatience.

“Till we buried my sister, yes. Anyway, yesterday at the library we got everything we could on Wolfe—the
Time
article and
Who’s Who
, they were the main things. We Xeroxed them so you can go over them too.”

“Fine. Thank you. I look forward to reading it.”

“The
Time
article for instance tells how Wolfe likes to go into working-class bars alone and talk with what he calls ‘the real people,’ people different from the Harvard Business School types he hires to help run his conglomerate. And then—the important part for us—the article says he also makes it a habit to pick up hitchhikers, especially kids, because he likes their
inputs
—a favorite word of his.”

“I see,” Bone said. “Well, then of course he’s guilty.” He wanted to be straight with her, but raillery seemed his only defense.

She went on as before. “And Alex already told you about Wolfe being at the cocktail party across from the Stone Sponge, where my sister was earlier in the evening. If she left alone she would have hitchhiked.”

“I see the connection.”

“Later yesterday Alex and I checked gas stations between the apartments where he left my sister’s body and the Biltmore. At a Union 76 just off the freeway one of the employees remembers selling a man two gallon gas cans and filling them with gas—around midnight, on the night it happened. Alex showed him Wolfe’s picture from
Time
—just the picture, we didn’t tell him Wolfe’s name—but he wasn’t sure. He said all he remembered about the man was that he had on a golf cap and sunglasses even though it was night.”

Now Cutter joined in. “You dig the sequence, Richard? Let’s say you are Wolfe. You’ve been to a cocktail party, you’d got five or six drinks under your belt. And because it is your habit, you pick up this teenage hitchhiker. You kill her and dump her body for God knows what reason—an accident maybe—but no matter, whatever the reason, it’s unimportant now. The important thing is you have this rented car, with blood in it. And you don’t know if someone has seen you with the girl, either when she was alive or when you were getting rid of her body. So what do you do? Do you run into your motel room and get a wet rag and tidy up the car? Do you fold your hands and hope for the best? Not if you’re slick enough to turn an Ozark chicken farm into an empire. No you simply get a couple of cans of gas and soak the car with one of them, open the other and toss a match in the window. And then you cry militant. You claim some ecofreak like Erickson is out to get you, scare you. And of course the police and FBI and the media—everybody believes. Because you’ve got the bread. You’ve got the power and the glory, the God-given proof of your righteousness forever and ever amen.”

Bone shook his head in wonderment. “You
have
been busy, Alex.”

“You know it.”

Bone got up and poured himself another drink, lit a cigarette. As he did so, he was not unaware of how Valerie was watching him, almost as if he were about to pass sentence on her. And it angered him, because this whole ridiculous affair was not his doing but Cutter’s, and he felt Cutter should have been the one held responsible for any pain or disappointment that grew out of it. So for the moment Bone decided to play along, to let the thing die a natural death instead of killing it outright.

“Okay,” he said, “so you have this new information, and this fine logical hypothesis. What next? What do you do with it? Where does it lead?”

Valerie looked questioningly at Cutter, as if for permission, and he shrugged assent.

“Blackmail,” she said.

Bone laughed out loud.

“We
pretend
blackmail, that’s all,” Valerie corrected. “If Wolfe pays, then we have him. We can go to the police.”

For a time Bone said nothing. He sat on the corner of his bed studying the two of them, Valerie all straightness and solemnity while Cutter predictably took the opposite ground, his canted smile suggesting the usual Chinese box of irony, appearance inside deception inside illusion.

Bone asked Valerie if she thought Cutter would be with her. “You think he’s pushing this thing just to see a man brought to justice?” he added.

But Valerie had an answer for that too. “If it turns out Wolfe did do it, and if he does pay, Alex admitted he’d probably try to talk us into keeping the money and leaving everything just as it is, no police or anything. But he also said it would be up to me finally, she was my sister, it would be my decision. And frankly, Mr. Bone, I don’t know which way I’d go. I’m not sure which would be truer justice—that the state get a conviction or my mother and I get some money. We had to borrow for the funeral. We’re broke. And she’s sick. So I admit I don’t know what I’d do finally. All I know is, if there’s any chance this is the man who did what was done to my sister—I want him to pay. He
has to
pay. And I don’t much care who he pays—us or society.”

Bone drained the last of his drink. He was still angry but in a different way now, not at Cutter so much as at himself, that the girl made him feel personally guilty, as if he were failing her somehow.