Cutter and Bone (26 page)

After a while Bone suggested they go back inside, and she went along as indifferently as he had gone out in the first place. She was still shivering, however, so he got a blanket out of the bedroom and spread it over her on the davenport. And then he lay down next to her, behind her, holding one arm around her, over her breasts. And the position must have made her feel better and more secure, for she laughed suddenly, a soft wry laugh muffled against the stuffing of the old davenport.

“I kind of had you going back there, didn’t I,” she said.

“Where?”

“The bedroom.”

“You still have.”

“Not the sex part, dummy. What I said, I mean—all that gunk about love and security, getting me a shield and protector.”

“I knew you didn’t mean it,” Bone said, and wondered whether he would have tried it looking her in the eye. “I know you better than that,” he added.

“Of course you do. And in the biblical sense now too, isn’t that sweet? I am known by Richard Bone—why it’s a regular lyric.” She laughed and then repeated the phrase, almost sang it. “I am known by Richard Bone.”

Bone squeezed her breasts. “And it’s been nice knowing you.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

Bone told her to shut up and go to sleep and for a while she did not say anything more, just lay there against his body breathing shallowly. And then, as the rhythm of her breathing changed, he realized she was weeping.

“You’d better leave now, Rich,” she said finally.

“Soon.”

“No, now. I don’t want to fall asleep…this way. And then wake…alone.”

“I’ll stay.”

“No, you won’t. When I’m asleep, you’ll get up and leave. You’ll sneak off carrying your shoes. I know you.”

“I told you to go to sleep,” he said. “Now do it. Relax. Give up the fight a few minutes, okay?”

And in time she seemed to drop off occasionally, going down into sleep like a tiring swimmer into the sea. But then she would come up out of it again and laboriously push on.

“I didn’t expect anything from you, Rich,” she said finally.

“There was no reason to.”

“Of course not. I mean it’s not as if you were the first in line.” She had begun slurring her words now, and she spoke so softly Bone could barely hear her. “Course the line, it goes way back—back to Daddy, I guess. Old numero uno. And then a teacher was next, a woman, so brilliant and pretty, my idol, my secret love. And then a whole marching band of boys, one at a time, and one just like another. And then the drugs, and Jesus. And now Alex—Alex and you and the baby.”

Bone snored softly, pretending sleep. But it made no difference.

“When you’re gone,” she went on, “I’ll wake up alone. In the middle of the night I’ll wake up and I’ll probably run in there to see if he’s still there. I’ll look at him sleeping, my little monster, my jailer. I’ll look at him and I’ll tell myself, oh you love him now, now when you’re the Big Enchilada and he needs you every hour of the day. But later? Later, when he won’t need me either? ’Cause, really, who needs old ladies, huh, Rich? Who wants them?”

“Right,” Bone said. “He’ll reject you too, just like everyone else. No one likes you, Mo. No one ever has. No one ever will.”

If she heard him, she gave no sign of it. “Oh, I could go home, I guess. I could sit around the pool with my mother and drink margaritas. I could swim and get a good tan again and we could talk about face lifts and clothes and new places to eat. But I won’t do it.”

“You won’t do it.”

She turned in his arm, unthinkingly thrusting her buttocks tighter against his erection. “You know how I always see myself?” she said. “How I always picture myself? And I can’t stop. I mean, I try. I really do. But I even dream it. It’s like a kind of precognition. I’m, oh I don’t know, forty or fifty, and even skinnier than now and pale as death and my face is just a kind of blank, you know? I’m sitting alone on this bench outside somewhere, on the grounds of some kind of institution or hospital, it seems. And I never smile. I never cry. I just sit there. And I wait.”

Again Bone told her to sleep, told her that he would stay.

She tried to laugh then, at least made a kind of derisive sound, an expulsion of air. But she ended up crying again, with her body if nothing else. Holding her tightly, Bone waited, and after a while she stopped trembling and seemed to slip under the surface of her consciousness again, but only to rise out of it moments later.

“Will you stay, Rich?” she asked. “When I wake, will you be here?”

He said nothing for a time, hoping she would fall asleep again. But she persisted.

“Will you be here, Rich?”

He squeezed her body reassuringly. “Sure,” he said. “So go to sleep now, Mo. Rest.”

And he could almost feel her descending into it for good now, filling her lungs with air and arching her body and letting go, plunging steeply into the stillness.

Bone did not get up until he was sure she was sound asleep, then he moved quickly, getting the keys to the Packard off the mantel, where Cutter invariably threw them, though occasionally missing and depositing them in the fireplace instead, and a few times even in the fire. Bone quietly went out the front door then and locked it behind him. He slipped into the Packard, choked it lavishly, and got it started on the first try.

Ten minutes later he parked the car a half block from the Littles’. He took off his shoes and walked gingerly around the sprawling structure toward his room, all the way fearing that the lady of the house would somehow sense his arrival and come running at him with her hair up in rollers and her eyes taped back and her face mudpacked and chin-strapped for the night. He made it in safely, however, locking the door behind him and quickly undressing and slipping into bed.

He almost felt guilty admitting it to himself, but he was feeling pretty good about how things had turned out. He was not very proud of having to run out on Mo like that, but then she had not left him much choice, coming on the way she had, like some poor knocked-up teenager, all tears and need and self-pity. That simply was not the Mo he knew. It was an impostor, some weird mime doing a one-night stand. Tomorrow she would be herself again, he was sure of that, and she would understand. Certainly she knew that in this world you saved yourself. Either you did it, or no one did.

But beyond that, his disappointment in her, he felt a kind of relief too, because he no longer felt vulnerable where she was concerned. It was as if he had got all his markers back. He was his own man again, all his emotions once more in fairly good shape, a trifle hard maybe, overtrained, but durable, good for the longer distances. So there was really nothing much to think about, nothing to keep him awake.

And nothing did. He slept until a banging sound woke him at dawn. Getting up, he saw George Swanson standing outside his door in the soft mauve light. George was wearing a raincoat over denim pants and what appeared to be a pajama top, and for once his hair was not combed, his face was not shaved.

Bone opened the door.

“You know where Alex is?” Swanson asked.

“In L.A.—why?”

Swanson’s eyes filmed over. “Mo and the baby—I guess you haven’t heard.”

“Heard what?” Bone felt oddly foolish saying it, like a man already struck by lightning but waiting around for the report, the thunder that would announce his own demise. “
Heard what?
” he repeated.

“There was a fire,” Swanson said. “They’re both dead.”

Bone and Swanson, who had already given their statements to the police, were waiting on the front steps of the station house when Cutter finally emerged, at almost ten in the morning. Bone gave him a cigarette, lit it, waited. And Swanson too said nothing, apparently expecting the same explosion. But it never came.

“Not much to it,” Cutter said finally.

“Not much,” Bone agreed.

“Here today, gone tomorrow.” Cutter grinned crookedly through the cigarette smoke.

Swanson’s eyes suddenly filled. “Let’s go to my house now, Alex. You’re staying with us, okay?”

Cutter ignored him. “Win a few, lose a few.”

“Long as you want,” Swanson said.

“The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”

Bone dragged on his cigarette, looked down at the steps.

“Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Cutter had started moving now, limping slowly down the sidewalk. Bone and Swanson followed.

“Wasn’t anything to it,” Cutter said. “The police were just beautiful. Hardly any red tape at all. Just sign here, please. No sweat, no hassle.”

Swanson explained. “Well, you weren’t here, Alex, when it happened. And since you and Mo weren’t married, her parents are still next of kin. So I guess they’re the ones to handle everything, identify the bodies and all.”

Cutter shook his head. “Mr. and Mrs. Harris Johnston. Two of my staunchest fans.”

“Well, they can’t blame you,” Swanson said. “You weren’t even here.”

Bone expected Cutter to turn on him then, with the same bent smile. ‘No,
I
wasn’t here.’ But he said nothing.

And they had reached Swanson’s car now, the small two-seat Jaguar, one of the reasons Bone had brought Mrs. Little’s pickup downtown.

“Valerie coming back for you?” he asked Cutter.

Cutter shook his head. “Not likely.”

A half hour earlier, after letting him out, she had driven off like a panicked drag racer, burning rubber right in front of the police station.

“You can come with me, then,” Swanson said. “Rich can follow in his truck. We got plenty of room at our house. And you can stay as long as you like.”

Cutter did not move. “My benefactor.”

“You can use one,” Bone told him.

“Bowman Brothers,” Cutter said. “I hear that’s where the bodies are.”

Swanson nodded.

“We’re gonna stop there on the way. I want to see them.”

Swanson asked him if he was sure. “It was a terrible fire,” he said. “Terrible.”

But Cutter was already moving toward the pickup parked down the street.

“We’ll see you there, George,” he said.

In the truck, Bone could not think of anything to say, and Cutter evidently did not feel the need of words, for he sat slumped in the corner of the cab, squinting against the smoke that curled up from the stump of his cigarette. Bone was sure that Cutter knew the whole story—there was no reason for the police not to have told him everything—and yet if he did know, it beggared belief that he could sit beside Bone now, saying nothing, asking nothing.

The fire, which had started with a gas explosion, had burned the house to the ground, consuming everything except the plumbing and sinks and a few major appliances including the kitchen range—which was discovered to have one of its gas jets turned on. The investigators also turned up a melted medicine vial next to the bodies of Mo and the baby, which were found lying together in what was left of Mo’s bed. The evidence thus pointed to the likelihood of murder-suicide, that Mo had turned on the gas jet herself, had ingested a quantity of downers, and then had taken the baby to bed with her—there to await the painless death of carbon monoxide poisoning. The explosion and fire had been an accident, it was theorized, an oversight of Mo’s drugged mind. Unfortunately—from the standpoint of the police—none of this was provable. The bodies were too far destroyed for any accurate post-mortem testing. The medical examiner therefore would probably have to rule that the deaths were accidental.

So as far as Bone was concerned there was still much to talk about, much between him and Cutter that needed airing.

“I was with her yesterday, Alex,” he tried now. “You remember that.”

“So?”

“So I’d think you’d want to know how she was.”

“Okay, how was she?”

Bone found himself almost stammering. “Well, she was down, all right. But not unusually so, I didn’t think. Not—”

“Suicidal?” Cutter almost sneered as he said it.

“Of course not. I wouldn’t have left her if I’d thought she was.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“Well, the police—they must have told you about the gas jet being on. And the empty pill bottle.”

“Yeah. I heard their theory.”

“You don’t believe it?”

Cutter laughed softly, scornfully.
“Mo?
Mo kill that kid?
Never.”

And Bone felt a swift rush of relief and gratitude. “That’s what I think,” he got out. “It was an accident, Alex. It had to be. I figure she was stoned on quads and turned the jet on to heat coffee or something. And the baby must have cried and she went to get him and forgot all about the gas being on. The pilot must have been off, and she didn’t notice. She just went straight to the baby and took him to be with her. And—”

But Bone could not go on. His voice was strangling and his eyes had filled. Next to him, Cutter was nodding. But his sardonic look did not agree.

“Yeah, that
could
have been,” he said. “It’s as good a theory as the other.”

“What else is there?”

“Maybe someone sent me a message.”

Bone, just then pulling into the parking lot behind the mortuary, was not able to look at Cutter until he had parked the truck. And when he did, he could not believe what he saw. The man’s face was void of irony.

“Who?” Bone asked, though he already knew.

“I told you on the phone.”

Bone tried to smile. “You can’t be serious.”

“I can’t?”

“It doesn’t make sense, Alex.”

Cutter got out of the truck. “We’ll see,” he said.

After Swanson arrived, the three of them went around to the front of the building, cutting across the barbered lawn. When they entered the reception room they found Bone’s old inquisitor, tiny Lieutenant Ross, talking softly with an elderly well-dressed couple and another man whose gray pinstripe suit and unctuously deferential manner suggested he was the proprietor of the establishment. It was the couple, however, who commanded Bone’s attention, for on seeing Cutter they reacted as if some monstrous serpent had come gliding into the room.

“Him!” the woman cried. “Why couldn’t it have been him—that animal—instead of our baby, our Maureen?”

Her husband took her by the shoulder and turned her away. “Don’t bother about him,” he said. “He doesn’t matter anymore. He’s nothing now.”