Cutter and Bone (18 page)

If and when the meeting did take place, Bone’s first move would be to make clear that he was not alone in the undertaking, thus discouraging any violence Wolfe might contemplate. He was to show Wolfe a Polaroid shot of himself, Cutter, and Valerie holding up copies of that issue of the Santa Barbara newspaper which reported the news of Pamela’s murder and the firebombing of Wolfe’s car. Cutter’s and Valerie’s faces would be cut out of the photo. Thus Wolfe would know that the threat to him extended beyond Bone, but he would not know where, or to whom.

Bone would then proceed to make his nonnegotiable demand. He and his colleagues would remain silent about Wolfe’s crime in return for payment of $150,000 yearly, which would be paid as a retainer to a dummy marketing consultant firm Bone would set up. Payment could thus be charged to Wolfe’s corporation and not to him personally, since Bone and his colleagues had no desire to kill a goose that laid golden eggs. Payment would be made quarterly, beginning with $37,500 due one week from the day of their initial meeting.

Cutter and Valerie would go down to Los Angeles with Bone and stay in the same hotel with him in the event any emergencies arose, anything that might require discussion or action on their part as well as on his. Any differences of opinion would be settled by majority vote. And any of them that wanted out, at any time, would be free to go. But at the outset all had to agree to keep the matter strictly between the three of them—no present or future “lovers, spouses, or whatnot” were to be informed as to what the three of them had done, or what was the source of their income.

As he finished, Bone looked up at Cutter. “This last point here,” he said. “That include Mo?”

Cutter shrugged indifferently. “It includes Mo.”

Bone smiled. “Going to be a little hard, isn’t it, to explain your sudden affluence?”

“Maybe I won’t have to.”

For five or six seconds Bone sat there looking at Cutter, waiting for him to explain this. But he offered nothing.

“What about the rest of the plan?” Valerie broke in. “Do you approve?”

Bone lit another cigarette. “I’m not sure. Kind of puts me out there all alone, doesn’t it.”

“On point,” Cutter said. “Which is the place to be, Rich. Purple Heartland, we used to call it. The ideal place to learn all about yourself.”

“You’re the logical choice,” Valerie added. “Wolfe undoubtedly already knows that you were there and saw him, or at least his silhouette. You’ll be believable in a way we couldn’t be.”

Bone did not argue the point. “How will we know when Wolfe’s in L.A.?”

“We already knows, cap’n,” Cutter said. “Duh big white bossman, he be flyin’ in tomorrow afternoon. And dat’s when we gwine be dere too.”

“How’d you find out?”

“Another one of his impressions,” Valerie said, smiling. “Ozark hillbilly.”

Cutter corrected her. “Not hillbilly really. Just a good ole boy, southern fried. I called his Hollywood office yesterday on the off chance someone might be on the switchboard, and lo and behold, this sweet young thing answers. Wolfe Enterprises Incorporated, she say. Well, I jist told her my name was Tommy Joe Didwell and that me and J.J. used to fish together when we was kids and I jist moved here to Los Angeles from Muskogee and jist wanted to give old J.J. a call when he was in town and shoot the shit with him a little, you know how it is, and that if old J.J. was anything like he used to be, he’d be madder’n a wet hornet with a cob up his ass sideways if he ever heard old Tommy Joe tried to get in touch with him and couldn’t—jist cuz some intelligent, sweet-soundin’ little filly like yourself wanted to be contrary.” Cutter finished off his glass of beer. “Well, to make a short story shorter, she allowed as how my old friend J.J. was flying in Monday morning for three days of conferences before returning home to Missouri.”

Cutter poured the last of his bottle of beer into his glass and then appropriated Valerie’s bottle for the same purpose, and Bone found himself wondering how much beer Alex had had so far. It was still early afternoon and Bone did not look forward to spending the rest of the day with him in a thirsty mood, which usually meant a hassle of one kind of other.

Bone got his answer only minutes later, when a pair of motorcycle freaks came swaggering out of the tavern and took a table near theirs, took it as if they were raping and stomping the thing, slamming their beer bottles down onto it, kicking chairs out of the way, collapsing into others, banging their booted feet onto the top of the table. One of them was sloppy fat, with a short ratty beard and a fringe of long, equally ratty hair falling from a prematurely bald pate. The other was thin as a ferret and commensurately ugly, with a sullen chinless face the color of dirty flour and a greased-down mane of blackish hair gathered into a ponytail at the back. Their costumes were alike only in their general raunchiness and in the black leather vests each of them was wearing and which bore a tiny emblem identifying them as
OUTSIDERS
, a totally superfluous designation as far as Bone was concerned. The other patrons meanwhile were working hard at pretending nothing had changed—all except Cutter From the beginning he sat staring at the pair, particularly at the ferret-faced one, who for a time seemed unable or at least unwilling to believe such a sacrilege could take place, here, out in public, in the land of the straights. He would look away from Cutter for a few moments, pretending interest in something else, scratch the tattoos on his belly, spit, contemplate his cigarillo, his stubby fingers and hagiographic rings, then inevitably he would look back at Cutter—and the Eye would still be on him,
laughing
at him.

Bone and Valerie meanwhile were trying to keep to the subject, discussing such problems as operating funds—to come from her, she said, money she was in the process of borrowing on her car, a three-year-old Pinto which she had just recently finished paying for. But almost immediately the ferret and his friend got to their feet, just as they had seen it done a thousand times before in
Gunsmokes
and John Wayne westerns and the bike flicks of their own adolescence, both of them rising slowly, almost wearily, with the proper touch of macho resignation, knocking over a chair in the process, and then ponderously setting out across the no-man’s land between them and the
enemy
, this freaky-looking one-eyed fag who for some incredible reason actually thought he could stare at them and get away with it.

As they reached the table Bone reflexively got up himself—he had to intention of having his head opened with a beer bottle—and he was relieved somewhat to see that he was bigger than either of them, though not as heavy as the fat one.

“Who the fuck you staring at?” the ferret demanded of Cutter.

Alex thought about it. “Let me guess. Ann-Margret?”

That seemed to cost the ferret his voice. For a few moments he just stood there gulping air and staring at Cutter. Then he turned to Bone.

“Look, what is it with this character, huh? He wanta get hurt, is that it? He wanta lose his other eye?”

Bone tried to appear calm, a shrink at a group therapy session of psychopaths. “Just take it easy,” he said. “Don’t waste your time on him. Come on, let’s go over there. Maybe I can explain.” He gestured toward the far end of the patio.

But Cutter would not quit. “Liberace? Roy Rogers?”

Valerie pleaded with him to shut up.

“That good advice, mama,” the fat biker said.

Bone had started across the patio. “Come on, hear me out anyway,” he said. “What can you lose? He ain’t going anywhere.”

The fat one, shrugging, started after Bone. And then the other followed, through tables that were largely empty now, most of the patrons having scurried inside at the first sign of trouble.

“Tiny Tim?” Cutter called over.

The ferret started to turn back, but his friend pulled him on.

“What can I tell you?” Bone told them. “He’s just what he seems. He’s bananas. And he’s been that way ever since Vietnam. In one hospital or another all this time. He’s out on a kind of leave right now, for just a week. I got to watch him like a hawk. He’s always trying to kill himself.”

“Well, he better be careful,” the fat biker said. “Someone else do it for him.”

“He wouldn’t mind, believe me.” Bone looked back at the table, where Cutter sat smiling pleasantly at them. “You notice the cane,” he went on. “His legs are gone too. And he’s got no control over his bowels or bladder. A one-eyed paraplegic who wants to kill himself—that’s my brother, fellas. Or what’s left of him anyway. What they gave back to us.”

The ferret suddenly brought his fist crashing down on a table. “That fucking war!” he cried. “That dirty fucking war!”

The fat biker gave Bone a comradely slap on the arm. “No hassle, man,” he said. “No sweat. We go inside.”

“Thanks,” Bone told him. “
I
appreciate it.”

“Don’t mention it.”

After they had taken their drinks inside, Bone went back to the table and sat down.

“That was real cute,” he said to Cutter. “In fact it was so cute, my friend, you just lost your point.”

Through the rest of the afternoon Bone held to his decision to pull out of the Wolfe affair. He told Cutter that the thing was dangerous enough in itself without having to undertake it with a suicidal prankster as a partner. Cutter of course argued the matter with him, alternating between amused scorn and old-buddy cajolery, insisting that Bone was comparing apples with oranges, that the situations were entirely different. Just because Cutter might want to put on a couple of half-assed bike freaks here, now, in Santa Barbara,
before
the project began—well, that certainly didn’t mean he would pull a similar stunt later, in L.A., when it counted, when the whistle had sounded and the game was on. Certainly Bone could see that, couldn’t he?

As a matter of fact, he could not. In fact Bone had no trouble at all believing that someone who would pull the kind of stunt Cutter just had, on the weekend
before
going to L.A., with all their plans neatly spread out on a table before them—that kind of character, Bone said, would do just about anything, anytime, anywhere, just so long as it tickled his funnybone.

Valerie stayed out of it for the most part, probably because she found herself stranded somewhere between the two of them. She undoubtedly wanted to go ahead with the project, yet at the same time Bone felt she must have shared some of his doubts about Cutter’s fitness for it. When Bone returned to the table, she almost had been in tears. And when the three of them left the tavern she was very quiet, reluctantly going with Cutter in the Packard, probably anticipating what a harrowing ride down the mountains it would be, a tossup between Cutter’s heavy foot and the car’s unreliable brakes, steering, and just about everything else. Bone, following in the pickup, three times watched them go off the twisting mountain road and then swerve back on so sharply that they went over the center line, and he could feel in his own body some of the tension Valerie had to be experiencing.

They finally made it, however, and Bone followed Cutter through town to the beach, where the three of them walked out to the end of the breakwater and skipped stones across the water toward the hundreds of small boats and yachts in the harbor. Then they went to Murdock’s for a few more drinks, these at Bone’s expense since Cutter claimed to have reached bottom again, already having gone through Swanson’s “loan.” The question of Bone’s participation in the project came up only now and then, as Cutter would happen upon some new line of argument, and then when it would fail they would turn to other subjects, or even better, just sit back and listen to records, the pop stuff Cutter had ridiculed with Erickson and the black girl less than a week before. In essence then it was just another Alexander Cutter afternoon, a Whitewater float with occasional stretches of calm. And along the way Bone learned a good deal more about Valerie.

Her father had “pulled a Boner,” as Alex put it, running out on her mother when Valerie was still in grade school. For a time the mother had coped, working as a waitress at the Biltmore and doing what she could to find another husband, but as she pushed over forty and her looks began to go, she had turned more and more to liquor, and by sixteen Valerie found herself pretty much in charge of things, caring for her mother and keeping house and cooking and trying to raise her little sister, all while she was still going to high school. When she graduated, at seventeen, she was made pregnant by a handsome young Levi pants salesman, who graciously introduced her to the same abortionist who would later serve her sister. Soon after, her mother had her first nervous breakdown, requiring hospitalization and extensive psychotherapy, which in turn was followed by the loss of their home.

Meanwhile Valerie had begun her career with Coastal Insurance, working her way up to her present position as a customer service representative earning the princely sum of four hundred dollars a month, which did not begin to cover her family’s living and medical expenses. And since her mother refused to apply for welfare—the “nigger-spic dole,” as she called it—Valerie had to find added funds elsewhere. For a time she stole small amounts from the office-party kitty. But that of course was a doomed operation as well as petty. So one desperate Saturday night she put on her sexiest dress and drove down the coast to Oxnard, to a beach hotel-marina complex, where she sought out the poshest bar she could find and there settled over martinis, alone. She made her first score within a half hour, an all-night trick that netted her as much as she earned all week at the insurance company. That was the first of many weekend trips, some to Los Angeles and even to San Francisco, but most of them to the same Oxnard bar. And always when she came home she would wind up asking herself the same question: “Why not full time? Why not make it while you can?”

The answer, she told them, was always the same:

“I couldn’t bear to be a whore.”

She laughed at that, a small dry laugh more like a cough than any show of merriment.

“Did your sister know?” Bone asked.