Cutter and Bone (22 page)

The more he thought about it, however, he could not see any real problem beyond that of the telephone call, making sure Cutter could not overhear what was said at the other end of the line. So Bone would have to resist any last-minute recklessness on Cutter’s part, any suggestion that they call from their room instead of from a pay phone and thus enable him and possibly Valerie too to crowd in close and try to hear what was being said at the other end. Bone would have to insist that they stick to their plan and call from a pay phone, ostensibly to keep anyone from tracing the call to them. The phone booths in the hotel lobby would be a logical choice. Bone could not see even Cutter wanting to crowd into one of those with him, not with scores of people looking on. And if he tried—well, Bone would simply push him out. The call was his to make. He after all was the “contact,” the man out there alone on point.

As for what he would say to Wolfe’s switchboard operator, that was no problem. He would not even listen to her, just go on with his side of the conversation, give Cutter at least that much to overhear. He considered dailing the time or the weather but decided it would not be worth the risk. If Alex caught on, everything would hit the fan.

As he lay there thinking, Bone could feel the sun slipping through the trees. Once Cutter got up and went into the bar for a refill and Valerie immediately turned her head toward Bone, as if she were going to say something. But he did not look at her and after a few seconds she settled back again. Cutter returned and worked on his new drink for a time. Then he pushed back his chair and got up.

“Fourteen-thirty hours, kiddies,” he said. “Two toity to youse. Zero hour draws nigh.”

Squinting, Bone stood up. “So it does.”

A half hour later they were dressed and in the lobby. Valerie, looking ill with anxiety, sank rigidly onto a davenport and sat watching Bone and Cutter as they crossed over to the row of telephone booths, only one of which was occupied. Entering the last booth in the row, Bone got out a dime, inserted it, and dialed the number of Wolfe Enterprises, Incorporated—while Cutter stood not two feet away, leaning against the open folding door, his lesioned face drawn with tension.

Bone was relieved to hear the voice that answered the phone now, a woman’s voice, but not that of the receptionist he had spoken with earlier.

“My name is Richard Bone,” he said. “Mr. Wolfe is expecting a call from me.”

The voice said “One moment please,” and he was switched to another line, another female voice, this one announcing, “Mr. Wolfe’s office.”

And for the second time that day Bone felt sweat slicking down his spine. He repeated his message. The woman said she had no record of the expected call. Mr. Wolfe was in conference.

“I spoke with a Mr. Price this morning,” Bone told her. “I gave him an urgent message for Mr. Wolfe. And he said—”

The woman interrupted: she did not know of any Mr. Price. But Bone pushed on, as if he had not heard her.

“Yes—Mr. Price. He assured me the message would be given to Mr. Wolfe and that—”

Again the woman interrupted, her voice clipped now, cold. There was no Mr. Price, no one in the building by that name.

“All right, I’ll wait,” Bone put in. “Yeah, check with him. Do that.” He covered the mouthpiece of the phone.

“Wolfe’s secretary,” he said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t know anything about me calling. Wolfe didn’t tell her a goddamn thing. She’s checking with Price now.”

Cutter had begun to pound his fist helplessly against the door frame. “I knew it!” he moaned. “I knew it! I knew it!”

Hearing the phone go dead, Bone took his hand off the mouthpiece and he began to nod grimly, as if he were listening to someone.

“He did, huh?” he said finally. “He did give Mr. Wolfe my message, then? All right, I see. Yes. Thank you.”

He hung up then, angrily. “No dice,” he said. “The man got the message. Price gave it to him personally. And that’s all there is. No response. Nothing.”

Cutter looked ill. “The bastard,” he muttered. “The murdering bastard.”

Bone put his hand on Cutter’s shoulder, but Alex shook it off.

“You believe him?” Cutter snapped. “You believe this fairy Price actually delivered the note?”

Bone shrugged. “He struck me as too scared not to.”

By now they had crossed to where Valerie sat waiting for them.

“No sale,” Bone told her. “He didn’t bite.”

“So I gathered.” She got up.

Cutter stared at both of them as if he expected them to do something, anything—start screaming or join him in tearing apart the hotel lobby—and when they did nothing but stand there and look back at him he turned on his heels and, loping over to the bank of elevators, charged into one that had just opened and which guests were still trying to get out of. One of those he jostled, a frail old woman, gave him a reproachful look and he in turn gave her the finger. Then the doors closed and he was gone.

“We better stay with him,” Bone said. “He’s pretty shook.”

Valerie coolly regarded Bone. “Unlike you.”

“Yeah—unlike me.”

In the elevator, alone together, she kept at him. “Admit it—this is kind of what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Failure? Sure, it’s my bag.”

“I’m serious.”

Bone met her snowy gaze for three or four floors. “Could be,” he said finally. “Anyway, this way we stay out of jail.”

“Did you really deliver it?”

“What?”

“The message, of course. The note.”

“No, I ate it.”

“The truth,” she demanded. “Please, Rich.”

“It tasted kind of dry,” he told her.

When they reached their room Cutter went into the bathroom and locked the door. After a few minutes of ominous silence he came out again and told Valerie to give him some more money.

“Twenty anyway,” he said. And when she hesitated a moment he shouted at her. “Come on, goddamn it! It’s
our
bread, remember!
Our
gig, sweetheart. So
give!
”

Valerie gave. And Cutter, stuffing the bills into his pocket, left the room.

“Where’s he going?” Valerie asked.

“The bar.”

“You said we should stick with him.”

“Up here, yeah. But he can’t jump out of the bar. Ground floor, remember?”

“I still think we should be with him.”

“Whatever you say.”

That was not enough for her. “You know how he is.”

“I know how he is.”

Her look now was not unlike that of the Dakota schoolteacher, resentful and aggrieved. Saying she had to freshen up first, she went into the bathroom.

Bone lit a cigarette and walked out onto the balcony to watch the Los Angelenos on the freeway below, hundreds of them pouring past every minute, a cataract of steel and plastic and humanoid hate-sweat roaring down the poisoned air. And he found it singularly appropriate that just last night Valerie—this day’s new enemy—had offered him a kind of love or at least what had come to pass for love, here, just a few feet above it all, this modern Inferno, this better hell built by man. As always, just the sight of it somehow fortified Bone’s cynicism, gave second wind to his enduring despair. He knew it all really was not worth thinking about anymore, had become a kind of catechism at best. Life was brutal and ugly and one endured it alone and any love or beauty he found along the way was purely accidental and usually short-lived. Nothing in and of itself had value. There was no gold standard in life. The currency was paper, a constantly devaluing paper. Of course. And what else was new?

Valerie finally emerged from the bathroom, looking no different as far as Bone could see. In silence the two of them took the elevator down to the lower lobby and the cocktail lounge situated at the end of the pool. It was large and sunlit, hardly the sort of place Bone would have preferred for an afternoon of drinking, especially with Cutter in the mood he was in. But then the choice as usual was not his to make. Alex had taken a table almost in the center of the room and he was leaning back in his chair against a pillar while his right leg, the steel-and-plastic one, was propped on a corner of the table, close to a double martini. And he was smoking a cigar, a panatella with a silver band still on it. Seeing Bone and Valerie, he waved them in like a Mafia don granting an audience.

After they had ordered drinks, Cutter pounded the table. “Now isn’t this just goodsie fudgie,” he said. “The three of us here together again, old palsies having a few drinks, saying a few words over the body.”

“Oh, come on,” Valerie protested. “I don’t see why we’re so down. We can still keep trying to reach the man. What difference will a couple of days make?”

Bone explained. “The note said it all. And if that didn’t bring him around, what will? We keep trying to reach him, he’ll call in the police. It’s that simple.”

“Maybe he didn’t get the note,” Valerie said.

Bone looked at her. “He got it.”

“Then I say write another. Keep trying.”

Cutter buried her in cigar smoke. “Aw, come off it,” he told her.

“Off what?”

“Face it, lady. We bombed.”

“I can’t see why it’s so final. We can’t just give up so easy. We’ve got to keep trying.”

“Pollyanna want a cracker?” Cutter offered her one of the pretzel sticks the waitress had just served, along with a round of drinks.

Valerie ignored the offering.

And Cutter snorted derisively. “Jesus, I am some winner, huh? Ain’t this some beautiful streak I got going? You know what I am, kiddos—a modern Midas. A reverse Midas. Everything I touch turns to shit.”

Bone drank to that. “Bravo Alex—that’s the attitude. No sense just accepting it, that Wolfe isn’t our man. Let’s wallow in self-pity instead. Let’s cover ourselves with crap.”

Cutter nodded in solemn mockery. “I’m with you, Rich. As always. My captain.”

Valerie asked them what would happen next, what would they do, and Cutter told her they were already doing it.

“You mean all night?” she asked. “The three of us, in this town, and on my money?”

“Why not?”

“I’ll go home broke.”

Cutter shrugged. “So what? You’ve always got your avocation to fall back on, if you’ll pardon the pun. As Swanson would say—as Hemingway said, you will have found your profession. All you have to do is give in to it. Relax. Why sheeitt, I could even be your man, baby. A player, as they say. All I’d have to do is get me some satin threads and one of those wide-brim floppy hats and a chartreuse Caddie with a watermelon radiator cap, and we be in bidness, me and my woman, my own private ho. How’s that sound, huh? Just you and me, babe—against the world.”

“I don’t think I’m gonna like tonight,” Valerie said.

And Bone found he did not much like it either. They had a second round of drinks and then a third and fourth, and the bar gradually began to fill, not with tourists so much as salesmen and a few show business types including some unusually beautiful girls, probably starlets from the nearby Universal Studios. And as the crowd grew larger, so did Cutter grow louder and more verbal.

One of his great strengths, he said, was his ability to objectify his own experience, to see it clear and dispassionate, a trick he’d used in Vietnam in order to keep his sanity. “You just sort of rise up out of yourself, you know, like a chopper, lifting right up out of there, so you can look down all cool and unafraid and say, ‘My, my, look at that poor grunt about to get his ass zapped, yes it sure is a crying shame about him, isn’t it, the little creep down there locked in time and place, an
object
really, nothing more.’ But not me, kiddos, I mean this other me—up there above it all, above all this shit, this sea to grimy sea. I just float free.”

“So you feel no pain?” Bone said. “No disappointment?”

Cutter made a face, judicious, contemplative. “Well, I must admit that right now maybe I do feel something. Let’s say I mourn to a degree for that gimpy fellow down there at that table being indulged, nay mocked, by his bonny unmarked friend.”

Bone told him no one was mocking him.

“Does it matter? No, I was just saying I objectify that poor fellow’s pain. I feel it not. I do wish him well, however. In fact it has always been my ferventest prayer and dearest wish that he might one day strike it rich—and by that I don’t mean some squalid financial score like the one that has just fizzled for him—and of course for his attractive friends too. No, I mean a real score—some spiritual or philosophic or maybe even political coup, like say that neat little job Saul of Tarsus brought off on the road to Damascus. Something like that, you know? A blinding light, and yea, maybe even a time of darkness too, preparation. But for what, huh? Epiphany? Apotheosis?”

Bone looked over at Valerie and it was obvious she had not heard Cutter carry on like this before, had not known just how high he could fly when the mood struck him, and she looked almost awed. But Bone had been here before, had gone this route many times, so he just sat back and drank and ate pretzels and listened.

“You see what I mean, don’t you, Val? A gift from above, you know? Sort of like Erickson’s or Wolfe’s. You wake up one day and lo and behold, there it is—the Way, the Truth and the Life. Now it doesn’t matter if it’s setting fire to rich folk’s property or marketing cheaper eggs or for that matter being a together dude pimp—the important thing is the way of it, the truth and the life of it, it’s got to reach you down in here—” And at this point he touched his stomach, and frowning, feigning consternation, moved on to his chest and shoulder. “—or here, or well, the right place, you know?”

A waitress happened to be passing their table just then and Cutter seized her by the arm and poured out the rest of his story.

“But it’s never happened, would you believe that? The gods have denied me. Indeed, they have pissed upon me, they have shat upon me. They have used me as a toilet bowl. Now I ask you, is that fair? Is that any way for gods to carry on?”

The girl, looking both bewildered and frightened, pulled her arm free and began to back away, all the while staring at Cutter as if he had crawled out of a grave. But was smiling benignly. He raised his hand and gave her one of his papal blessings.