Cutter and Bone (17 page)

“Mrs. Swanson’s idea,” the servant explained. “Black tie, she say. Ballet from San Francisco in town tonight. Big time, I guess. Everything real fancy.”

Bone smiled. “Well, maybe it
was,”
he said, indicating himself as he started to move past. But the little man stepped in front of him.

“Sorry, you can’t go in,” Tonto said. “Only invited guests, she say. Only black tie.”

For a moment Bone could not believe the man was serious, moving in front of him this way,
blocking
him, as if Bone were some kind of untouchable. But his shock was short-lived, disappearing almost immediately under a sudden wave of anger, the kind of blind sweet surging rage he almost never felt, never even had to try to control; and which he did not control now as Tonto’s chubby hand came up and touched him lightly on the chest, not a shove exactly, more an indication of the direction he wanted Bone to follow. But its effect was the reverse of that, and Bone shoved the little man sharply backward over a potted palm and into a French door that collapsed in a shower of glass. Immediately the music inside stopped—the schmaltzy four-piece rendition of
Aquarius
breaking in midbeat—and a number of men and women in evening dress and holding cocktails began pouring into the foyer. A few of them came out onto the front porch and then parted, making way for George’s wife, who looked as if she were wearing all seven of Salomé’s veils, and all brightly colored. Only her face was white.

“What is this?” she demanded. “What in the motherfucking hell is going on?”

Tonto was on his feet now, looking apologetic as he picked shards of glass out of his hair.

“He fell,” Bone offered. “I pushed him and he fell. Send the bill to my attorneys.” He was already walking away from them, heading down the sidewalk toward the street. Before he reached it there were footfalls behind him and then George was next to him, taking him by the arm, trying to get him to stop.

“Hey, what is it, Rich? What the hell happened anyway?”

Bone pulled his arm free and went on, not stopping until he reached the truck.

“Come on, Rich,” George persisted. “I got to know what happened. I just can’t figure it.”

“Nothing,” Bone told him now. “Nothing happened. Your doorman was just doing his job, that’s all.”

George shook his head mournfully. “Jesus, I’m sorry, man. It was just a mistake, that’s all. You should have told him who you were.”

Finally Bone had something to laugh at.

As always, Bone found the drive up to San Marcos Pass both tortuous and beautiful, with the distant ocean every now and then slipping into view as the road climbed into the mountains still green from the winter rains, almost a Wisconsin summer green, so soft and lush it struck him as incongruous here, a parody, for in his mind the true Southern California was the one of summer and fall, with its yellow hills and dull brown mountains and desiccated flats, a withered land, a home for condors.

He still had no idea why Cutter wanted to get together at Cold Spring Tavern. Not only was it out of the way but it was a tourist haunt as well, a one-time stagecoach stop on the old coastal highway as it crossed the Santa Ynez Mountains, a way station carefully restored and preserved to offer at least a semblance of its original state. As such, on this Sunday afternoon it would be peopled with the usual representation of California tourists, a gamut running from hairy armpits to old lace. Nevertheless it was where Cutter and he and Valerie would be and where Bone was to meet them. “Around noon,” he had instructed on the telephone. “If you can get away, that is. If the lady will let you dismount that long.”

Actually there had been neither mounting or dismounting the night before. When Bone had finally arrived home he apologized to Mrs. Little for having tied her truck up all day long, but he explained that a friend of his, an alcoholic, had fallen off the wagon and it had taken a good part of the day just to locate the poor stiff and get him home to his wife and kids. Mrs. Little said no explanations were necessary, that he could use the truck whenever he wanted because he worked for her, was after all her caretaker and handyman, and anyway she had her own car if she wanted to go anywhere. Then she insisted that he come in and have a bite to eat with her, cold barbecued chicken and imported Chablis. Afterwards they played straight pool in the game room, which smelled of Pine-Sol now instead of vomit. And they sat around drinking brandy and watching the fire in the fireplace, and in time Bone confessed his great problem to her, told her about the virulent case of gonorrhea he had contracted six months ago and how it had left him, how terrible it was to be impotent. Mrs. Little took the news like a real trooper, hardly batting her enormous eyelashes, and vowed that they would lick the problem together. She would get him the best psychiatric treatment in town. That was all it would take. Nothing could keep a good man down.

Knowing he had a source of food and shelter for the time being anyway, Bone felt a measure of confidence. But that confidence began to leave him the closer he got to his destination. And it was all but gone when he finally reached the tavern. Outside were a number of tourists’ cars, a phalanx of Capris and Venturas and Malibus set in gaudy confrontation with the weathered old wood building, which seemed as much a part of the small valley as the surrounding rock walls and great spreading sycamores that shaded it. The cars in fact seemed like America visiting its past, a failed wanton home for a nervous weekend. If there was any link between the two it was Cutter’s Packard, which sat off by itself in a spot predictably marked no parking, always a sure invitation to him.

Inside, the confrontation began to break down. Though the main room had a fieldstone fireplace and plank floors and large wood beams overhead, it also had a garish bar clock that bubbled the time in colors matching those of the room’s central feature, a leviathan jukebox that was blasting Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” to the bemused clientele, most of them blue-haired widows, fugitives from Orange County, Bone imagined.

Going out through a screened porch at one end of the room, he saw the two of them sitting at a small table next to a long fence beyond which the valley brook trickled toward Lake Cachuma. Cutter was massaging her neck, sitting very close to her and saying something out of the side of his mouth, while Valerie, eyes closed and smiling, looked as if she were about to come.

As he saw Bone now, Cutter raised his good leg and pushed a chair out for him. “Well, by Jove, if it ain’t his nibs right ’ere in the flesh,” he said. “Yessir, Richard Bone Esquire, that’s who—dildomaker to the queen, God’s gift to little boys.”

Valerie smiled easily, not at all embarrassed at how Bone had found them. “I’m glad you changed your mind,” she said.

Sitting, Bone lit a cigarette. “A moment of weakness,” he explained.

Cutter snorted. “A weakness well earned.”

“Yeah, I’ve been working pretty hard.”

“Serving his new mistress,” Cutter explained to Valerie.

“Spading her garden as a matter of fact.”

“And how did you find it, Richard? Just how
does
her garden grow?”

“Up your ass.”

“Then it grows without cockleshells, I can assure you.” Leaning back in his chair, Cutter began his single-handed cigarette lighting routine. “But seriously, Rich, how did you find the ground? Was it overworked?”

“Alex, I suggest you come out and have a look. You’ll find the ground—and by that I mean the same dark crumbly stuff that lives under your fingernails—you’ll find it spaded up around the whole goddamn house inside the fence. Spaded by hand.”

“Oh really—by
hand?
Not her instrument of choice, I would imagine.”

Valerie gave a pained laugh. “Oh come on. You two go on like this for hours?”

“Sometimes it seems more like days,” Bone said.

A waitress came to the table and Bone ordered a round of Coors—the other two were already drinking beer. When the girl left, he turned back to Valerie. “I was just trying to explain my being here,” he said. “My change of mind.”

“Your moment of weakness?”

“Something like that.”

“Sounds like maybe you haven’t changed your mind,” she said.

“If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

“For the money?” Valerie asked. “Or the other?”

Bone shrugged. “I’m like you. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“Well, you’ll come to it, old buddy,” Cutter assured him. “Believe me.”

“Why? You find out something new?”

“No need to. I just know, that’s all. I have this gut certainty—based on my undying faith in the integrity and accuracy of your instinctive reactions.”

Valerie smiled at that, or possibly at Bone’s look, which he imagined was close to that of a man whose child was kicking him in public.

“As a matter of fact though, I ain’t just been counting pubic hairs,” Cutter added. “Like yesterday, Rich. I didn’t tell you, but I was up early trying to find Wolfe’s car, the LTD. See if there might be anything of interest in it, bloodstains or something that survived the fire. But they’d already scrapped the crate. It’s probably a cube by now, headed for a blast furnace in one of Wolfe’s own companies. He’d see to that, old J. J.”

Bone put out his cigarette. For some reason he felt a need to play devil’s advocate. “Did a little checking of my own this morning,” he said. “The service stations off one-o-one, probably the same ones you two checked out. Know what I learned?”

Cutter blew out a stream of cigarette smoke. “They sell a lot of gas cans, right?”

“How’d you guess?”

“I’m psychic.”

“Yeah, they say there isn’t a day passes they don’t sell someone a can and fill it up for him too, usually some guy stranded on the freeway. Happens a lot more lately, they said, with so many stations closed at night.”

Cutter was unimpressed. “We know all that, man. And it’s irrelevant. The only important fact for us is that on the night in question this one particular man, a cat in a very hasty disguise, did willfully purchase not one but two cans of gasoline at a station conveniently situated between the apartment complex and the Biltmore.”

“You can make a firebomb out of
one
gallon,” Bone observed. “Or a quart, or a pint.”

“Granted. But a man like Wolfe, he doesn’t believe in doing things by half, old buddy. He believes in overkill. He buys
two
cans.”

“You’re positive about that?”

“Of course.”

“And what about the service station attendant? Wolfe has on sunglasses and a golf cap—big deal. I wear that, you wouldn’t recognize me?”

“Unfortunately I know you better than the man knew Wolfe.”

“Or whoever it was.”

Cutter lifted his glass of beer and drank, put the glass down, all the while watching Bone. “You with us or not?” he said finally. “Because if you just came out here to gnaw on my ass—”

“I already said I was with you.”

“Well, you’ll pardon me if I say you don’t much sound like it.”

“You need what we used to call negative inputs, Alex. Good generals listen to the bad as well as the good.”

Cutter shook his head. “One thing I ain’t, kid, is a good general.”

Valerie, reaching into her handbag, came up with two sheets of bond paper, neatly typewritten. “Shall we get on with it?” she said, placing them on the table.

“The girl’s a flaming genius,” Cutter told Bone. “Not only takes shorthand and types five thousand words a second, but dictates too. You better watch her—she gonna take over the world.”

Valerie pushed the typewritten sheets across the table to Bone. “We both worked on it yesterday. Sort of a rough plan. An outline of our thinking so far.”

“Outline, hell,” Cutter scoffed. “It’s a goddamn battle plan is what it is, just like in the boonies. Only here we’re the ones who decide how we’re gonna get zapped, not some ass-kissing motherfucker back at staff.”

Valerie gave him a rueful look. “Do you have to talk like that?”

Cutter commiserated. “Sometimes I wonder.”

Sitting back, Bone began to read through the two singlespaced pages. At first he considered it stupid and reckless, the whole idea of putting their plans down on paper. The sheets could be lost. There was no telling who might eventually read them and use them as evidence against the three of them, if it ever came to that. And while he did not completely abandon this criticism, he could see as he read further that there was value in putting it all down, spelling out the details of procedure, tactics, taboos.

The first rule of procedure was, rightly, that they deal only with Wolfe himself. They foresaw a problem in getting to him without first having to fight their way through protective layers of secretaries and vice-presidents and personal assistants, and being asked to reveal to them at least the nature if not the specifics of their business. But this of course was to be avoided at all costs. Absolute secrecy was implicit in any blackmail “contract”; without it, the victim would have no motive for being a victim. So they would have to be exceedingly careful in how they made contact with Wolfe. The best approach, they believed, would be for Bone to go in person to Wolfe’s Hollywood office and tell the highest person he could reach there that he had to get in touch with Wolfe to give him a personal message relating to the night his car was firebombed in Santa Barbara. It was a message of vital importance to Wolfe, Bone was to tell them, and therefore he could give the message only to him. He was to assure them it was a message Wolfe would be grateful to receive—but only this way, personally, from Bone. Hearing it any other way, from the police for instance, would make Wolfe very unhappy indeed.

Bone was to give them the number where he could be reached. Once contact was made and Bone was invited back to Wolfe’s office he was to pretend to go along, to meet Wolfe where and when the tycoon or one of his underlings specified. Face to face, however, Bone would improvise, move the “interview” to a place of his own choosing, like the sidewalk in front of the building or even the men’s room, some place not likely to be bugged. For there was always the outside chance that Wolfe might not be the girl’s murderer, and sensing some sort of blackmail attempt he might arrange to tape the meeting with Bone.