Cutter and Bone (16 page)

Bone had heard it all before. “Yeah, I know,” he said.

“And it doesn’t help?” Cutter affected a look of disappointment and perplexity. “Well, may be the problem is purely theoretical. Maybe what you need is a few minutes in Herr Doktor Cutter’s Seminar in Rudimentary Philosophy Two-A.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Do you believe in God?” Cutter went on, not waiting for an answer. “Of course you don’t, you poor sinner. So let us examine this carefully. Since, according to you, there is no God, then it follows that our so-called moral law is man’s invention rather than God’s dispensation. It is an aspect of Rousseau’s social contract, that’s all, a convenient mechanism for greasing the gears of social intercourse, for doing business, for making trains run on time. Therefore it is relative. To shoot Yasir Arafat is one thing, to shoot Rodney Allen Rippey quite another.”

Bone put up his hand. “Enough, Alex, all right? I was just about to say that despite this feeling I have, I can still go ahead with the thing—if you’re serious.”

For a time Cutter sat there meeting Bone’s flat gaze. Then he looked down at the table, where his hand was absently trying to fit his now-dead cigar into an empty candleholder. “What can I say?” he tried finally. “What can I give you but my word? I am serious, Rich. I am totally serious. What is there beyond that? Do you want me to sign a contract? Do you want a blood oath?”

Bone heard the words but somehow they lacked the authority of the unconscious demonstration, the black cigar butt now standing obscenely in the candleholder. Bone tried to ignore the cigar’s clear message.

“I don’t want to go out on this particular limb with someone who’s clowning,” he said. “Or committing suicide—in his fashion. In other words, Alex, I don’t want to get caught. I don’t want to read about myself in the paper.”

Cutter was shaking his head. “You really got a high opinion of me, you know that?”

“You’re the one who told me about wanting to kill yourself.”

“This is my reprieve, man. My stay of execution. Can’t you see that? Can’t you get it through that cover-boy head of yours? This is my last shot, Rich.” And now for the first time Cutter’s voice took on an edge. “So, yeah, I’m serious. Dead serious. Is that good enough for you? Can you buy that?”

Though these were the very words Bone had come here for, somehow they changed nothing, left him feeling as uneasy as when he first sat down in the booth. But that, he knew, was his problem, not Cutter’s.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

They had only one drink to celebrate Bone’s decision. Cutter had to take Mo shopping, he said, and then later he and Valerie were going to get together and begin formulating plans, which he advised Bone to do too, so that when the three of them got together tomorrow—he would call Bone later and tell him where and when—they would have something to work with.

After Cutter left, Bone had a second drink at the bar and followed it with a corned beef sandwich, which he told Murdock he would not pay the full price for since the bread was stale and the meat had a pale green cast at the edges. But then he absentmindedly ate all of it, which seriously damaged his case. Murdock was feeling generous, however, and compromised by giving him a third drink on the house and a few thousand words of advice regarding his poor choice of friends and general lack of ambition. Bone told him not to worry because he was about to turn to crime and would soon be buying drinks for the house every time he deigned to darken its chintzy door, a development upon which Murdock volunteered not to hold his breath.

Bone drove to the library and tried to find some other material on Wolfe besides the
Time
article and the
Who’s Who
entry, but there was nothing more. He went into the periodical section then and settled down with recent issues of
Esquire
and
Harper’s
, only to discover that he was reading just words, comprehending nothing. So he left. He walked around the downtown area for a while and ended up in a State Street theater that was rerunning the old James Bond films
Goldfinger
and
Thunderball
, which he figured might be just what he needed, four hours of campy violence and improbable girls, enough gore and tits to keep his eyes occupied while his mind was free to seek other entertainments, like considerations of crime and punishment. But as he settled into the rococo dimness with a box of overbuttered popcorn, he found his mind snagging on a single aspect of the subject, and that was the impending debut of Richard Bone,
felon
. The designation, the whole idea, struck him as preposterous, about as believable as that the ravishing young girl sprawled across the screen—and about to sprawl into bed with Bond—was in reality a Russian superspy. The only difference was that his fantasy in time could prove out. All he had to do was keep moving in the direction he was going and Richard Bone, felon, might become all too real.

It was unsettling, this contemplation of one’s own criminality. For until now Bone had always considered himself a law-abiding sort, despite the sinister-sounding “record” Lieutenant Ross had reeled off for the captain Tuesday morning. The truth of the matter was that all his record amounted to was a kind of precocity on his part, his having reached the typical organization man’s phychological menopause about a decade earlier than was the custom. Suddenly at thirty years of age he had begun to think of himself as a kind of suited-up zoo animal pacing between the twin walls of home and job. Ruth for some reason had metamorphosed in those last few years into an utter and dowdy bore, a mother then infernally clucking over her two precious chicks and anything and everything that touched their antiseptic little lives, a cosmology that embraced vitamins and orthodontics and the PTA and not much more. Sex between the two of them had become basically an act of masturbation, with her letting him use her body every second or third night as a kind of receptacle, not a great deal different, he imagined, from one of those inflatable life-size sex dolls sold in porno shops, in fact probably not as good, since Bone always had the feeling that Ruth was mentally fashioning shopping lists as he humped away on her, passionless and angry, like a laborer watching the clock, waiting for the niggardly release that lay ahead.

And his job offered no reprieve. Suddenly he saw the plush office and envied position as a stairway leading not to bigger and better things but merely to another stairway, and one he would not like any better than the one he was already on. So he found himself slipping into an almost deliberate program of career destruction, ranging from open ridicule of his superiors down through the usual dreary gamut of absenteeism and drinking and, in his case, sex—intense, constant, almost institutionalized extramarital sex—as a kind of therapy, compensation for the loss of what he had once thought of as a goal in life.

And this was about all his so-called record amounted to. The rape charge in Milwaukee, for instance. The truth of the matter was that he and the lady involved, Sharon Hartley—
Mrs
. John J. Hartley—should both have been convicted on charges of committing felonious low comedy. He had been balling the lady for a period of months, in fact had a standing reservation for the two of them at a downtown Milwaukee hotel. On the night of the “crime,” however, they were comfortably quartered in her own house, John having been called away to Cleveland on business. But, feeling ill, he had returned home—to find the two of them committing sodomy in his very own king-size bed. Being a temperamental type, John rushed to his gun rack and proceeded to blow out two walls of the bedroom with a twelve-gauge shotgun, a demolition job he explained to the police as an attempt to apprehend the sex fiend who had just raped his wife. And a terrified Sharon had gone along with her husband. Yes, everything was just as John said. No, she didn’t know this Bone character at all. He’d come to the door, a stranger whose car had stalled and who wanted to use her phone. So she had let him in—to her everlasting regret. So Bone was arrested, charged, and held—until he was able the next morning to get one of the detectives to show a photo of Mrs. Hartley to the desk clerk at the hotel he and Sharon had favored.

The charge of grand theft here in Santa Barbara was on the same order. The woman, Sylvia Columbo, was the ex-wife of one of the county’s more successful contractors. In her late thirties, she was an attractive volatile woman given to alternating fits of impulsive generosity and neurotic possessiveness. Thus she thought no more of giving her new lover a Garand tape deck for Christmas than she did of having him arrested for stealing the goddamn machine the day after she was riding her Arabian gelding along Hope Ranch beach and came upon him and Mo lying alone on a large towel—Cutter was a few hundred feet away scuffing a gigantic HELP in the sand for the benefit of any air travelers passing overhead. So after a few days that charge too had been dropped. And as for the occasional nonsupport action by Ruth—well, Bone did not consider that very much in the way of criminality. Usually he was not even supporting himself at the time. So his record, if it could be called that, did not amount to much more than indiscretion, an embarrassing talent for getting caught with his pants down.

One thing was certain—there was nothing in it on the order of blackmail or extortion. But then neither was there murder. And for now that disparity, the difference between the
possible
murder and the
contemplated
extortion, would have to serve. Through all of history men had executed murderers. But here all the three of them would be doing was
charge
the murderer, let him pay for his crime in far lesser coin than his life. And if it turned out that the man was not guilty, and therefore not vulnerable, then he simply would not pay. Rather it would be
they
who paid. Looked at that way, the whole thing seemed an almost moral enterprise, like hunting lion with a spear. One could lose.

Bone was so lost in thought that he had barely noticed the three young girls who had taken the seats next to his, despite the fact that the theater was almost empty. But suddenly now he was aware of a pressure against his thigh, and looking down he saw its source, the long bare leg of a miniskirted girl in the seat next to him. Beyond her, two stout dark little teenagers—sisters, they appeared—were rocking and pounding their feet, about to explode with held-in laughter. It was only then Bone raised his eyes and looked into those of the girl next to him, she of the aggressive knee. She was long and blond, a tough tomboy type chewing a wad of gum and giving him the same look the super-spies kept giving Bond, a sneer that said, “It’s your move now, Buster.” She was no older than the others, he estimated, fourteen or fifteen, but obviously their leader, their captain in crime. As her knee rubbed against his again now, the other two girls could no longer hold in their laughter and it came sputtering and hissing out of them like air from loosened balloons. At the same time the near girl’s hand crawled onto Bone’s arm.

“Hi,” she said.

It could only be a dare, Bone decided, a kid’s game. He wondered what the other two had bet her. A Donnie Osmond record? The latest Jackson Five? He hated to let her chase him out of the theater, to give her such an easy victory. But she was jail bait, he reminded himself. All of them were. And they were three to one, able to cry masher or child molester and if not make it stick at least give him the kind of trouble he did not need, now or ever.

So he got up and left. And all the way up the aisle their laughter clattered after him, like a tail of tin cans.

For hours afterward Bone was coldly furious with himself, not so much for letting the girls drive him from the theater as for having
invited
the attack in the first place, simply by being what he was, a loser and drifter, and looking the part from the top of his messy curly hair to the paper-thin soles of his battered Hush Puppies. He told himself that if there had been anything to him at all—if he’d had one crummy scintilla of property or position or responsibility—the bare-legged one would not have singled him out, not even if he had been in sports clothes and bagged in the bargain, because the reality still would have been there, the weight, the subtle ambience of
substance
. But instead all there had been was this seedy, over-thirty stud moldering in the cavernous theater and dreaming vodka-tonic dreams of blackmail and affluence.

Through the late afternoon he sat in the dark of the Bay Tree Bar drinking more vodka and worrying the problem, and in time he began to realize what a laugh it all was, what a sad, sorry, barely audible laugh, not just the scheme itself but even more his own participation in it, the exquisite little psych job he had performed on himself in order to make it all seem everything it was not—possible, reasonable, acceptable-because that was what he had wanted to believe, almost what a man
had
to believe when he was the kind who unintentionally invited teenage abuse in public. After his fourth drink, he decided that he had to do something drastic about his life, and do it right away, tonight, before he sank any deeper into the quicksands of Cutter’s fantasies. He remembered that just the other day George Swanson had offered to help him find a straight job somewhere, and he saw no reason not to take him up on it now.

The matter seemed so urgent that he was soon out in Mrs. Little’s truck again, driving the short distance to Swanson’s place, a beautifully restored old house situated near the Mission, just a few blocks from Cutter’s ancestral home. It was the area of the old rich, Californios whose families went back almost as far as those of their servants.

Bone knew it was not the best evening to drop in at Swanson’s, since it was Saturday and George’s wife was socially ambitious. She and George would either be going out to a party or suffering the minor ignominy of dining with friends at some newly discovered roach-ridden dive, the in-place of the month. It was still early, however, not quite seven-thirty, so Bone figured he just might catch George before he and his wife set out. But as he parked the truck, Bone saw that he was already too late—the street and driveway looked like the lot of a Mercedes-Benz dealership. And beyond the broad lawn the house was brightly lit, noisy with a party. Bone hesitated for a few moments, lighting a cigarette, and then he decided, what the hell, he would get a free drink or two, wolf down some canapés, and have his talk with George if and when the opportunity presented itself. So he got out and went up the walk, surprised to hear as he got closer that the music coming from inside was live. And he was even more surprised as he reached the house and found Tonto, the Swansons’ gardener-chauffeur-handyman standing outside in a tuxedo. Tonto was Mexican, a short husky man with very black hair and very white teeth, which he bared now as Bone asked him if he was taking tickets.