Tough Guys Don't Dance (35 page)

“I will pull you apart with my hands,” he said, “if you are telling a lie.”

“I didn't know she was dead until I saw her head in the burrow.”

“I didn't either,” he said, and began to weep.

He must not have cried since he was ten years old. The sounds that came out were like the pounding of a machine when one of the legs comes loose from the floor. I felt like a towel boy in a whorehouse comparing my grief to his. How he had loved my wife!

Yet I knew I could ask him anything now. Weeping, he was helpless. He had lost his rudder. He would wallow in questions.

“Did you remove Jessica's head from the burrow?”

He rolled his eyes. No.

I had an inspiration. “Did Patty?”

He nodded.

I was going to ask why, but he could hardly speak. I didn't know how to continue.

My father stepped in. “Did Patty think,” he asked, “that no matter what my son deserved, you couldn't drop the head on him?”

Regency hesitated. Then he nodded.

How would I ever know if that was the reason
or whether she had removed it to confuse me further? His nod did not convince me. In any case, he nodded. I also wondered if Patty had some notion of blackmailing Wardley with the head, but I would never find out.

“Patty asked you to keep the head?” my father went on.

He nodded.

“You hid it for her?”

He nodded.

“And then Patty left you?”

He nodded. “Gone,” he managed to say. “She left me with the head.”

“So you decided to put that back where it had been?”

Regency nodded.

“And now you also found,” said my father in a most gentle voice, “Patty's head. It had been placed there too.”

Regency put his hands to the back of his head and used them to bend his neck. He nodded.

“Was that the most terrible sight you ever saw?”

“Yes.”

“How did you keep yourself together?”

“I did,” said Regency, “until now.” He began to weep again. He made a sound like a horse screaming.

I thought of the time when we smoked marijuana in his office. He could only have discovered Patty's head a few hours before, yet he had concealed his agitation. Such prodigies of will were
not easy to watch as they came apart now. Was this how a man looked just before he had a stroke?

My father said, “Do you know who put Patty next to Jessica?”

He nodded.

“Was it Nissen?”

He nodded. He shrugged. Maybe he didn't know.

“Yes, it had to be,” said my father.

I agreed. It had to be Spider. I had only to contemplate how implicated Spider must have felt himself. Of course, he would have wanted to implicate me. Yes, he and Stoodie had wanted to catch me with the heads. Who would believe I was innocent if I was found with two heads?

“Did you kill Jessica?” I asked Regency.

He shrugged.

“It was Patty?”

He shook his head. Then he nodded.

“It was Patty?”

He nodded.

I wondered if I did not know the story. Of this much I could be certain: Patty and Regency, not Wardley, had been there to meet Jessica at Race Point, and probably it was Patty who drove the car with Lonnie's body back to The Widow's Walk. Then all three must have gone off together in the police cruiser. Somewhere in the woods they stopped and there Patty shot Jessica. Patty shot Jessica.

I could not say why so much as that she had her reasons. Who could measure Patty's rage when
it came to reasons? Jessica had tried to purchase the Paramessides estate for herself. Jessica had had a fling with Alvin Luther. In extreme circumstances it would take no more than one reason to violate Patty's temper. Yes, I could see her jamming a gun barrel into Jessica's mendacious lips. And if Ms. Pond had chosen at that moment to appeal for help to Regency and if Regency had made a move to take the gun away, yes, that would have been enough to kick a trigger. Patty, like me, had lived for years on such an edge. With anger such as ours, murder—most terrifying to say—could prove the cure for all the rest.

Regency sat in his chair the way a fighter sits in his corner after he has taken a terrible beating in the last round.

“Why did you sever Jessica's head?” I asked, but having asked, was obliged to pay the price: in my mind, I saw the sweep of the machete blade.

He made a gurgling sound in his throat. His mouth was distended at the corner. I began to think that indeed he was having a stroke. Then his voice came out hoarse and full of reverence. “I wanted,” he said, “to finalize Patty's fate with mine.”

He fell off his chair onto the floor. His limbs began to thrash.

Madeleine came into the kitchen. She was holding the Derringer in her hand but I do not think she was aware of that. I suppose she had held it all the while she was up in the study.

She looked older and more Italian than before. Her face showed something of the mute fright a stone wall may feel when it is about to be pulled down. She was further away than any of us from the promise of tears. “I can't leave him,” she said to me. “He's ill, and I think he may die.”

Regency's fit was finished now but for his right heel. It beat against the floor in an ongoing convulsion, a lashing of that tail he did not have.

It took all of my father and myself to carry him upstairs, and then it was a near thing. We almost toppled more than once. I laid him on the king-size bed that Patty and I had occupied upon a time. What the devil, he had been ready to die for her, not I.

C
OMEDY
:

bad people and things, marriages, drinking parties, gaming, swindling, and mischievous servants, braggart squires, intrigues, youthful indiscretion, stingy old age, procuring, and the like as they occur daily among the common people.

T
RAGEDY
:

death-blows, desperations, infanticide and parricide, fire, incest, war, insurrection, wailing, howling, sighing.

—
MARTIN OPITZ VON BOBERFELD
(1597–1639)

While Provincetown is a real place, and is most certainly located on Cape Cod, a few names and places have been changed and a couple of houses are invented, as well as one important job. There is not now, and so far as I know, has never been an Acting Chief of Police in Provincetown. The police force in my novel bears, incidentally, no relation to the real one in town. This is in preface to remarking that all the characters are products of my imagination and all the situations are fictional. Any resemblance to living people is entirely coincidental.

I'd like to acknowledge John Updike's gracious permission to reprint the excerpt from his “One's Neighbor's Wife” in
People One Knows
, Lord John Press, California, 1980. Its use in the novel is, of necessity, anachronistic. In addition, I'd like to thank my old friend Roger Donoghue, who first told me the anecdote from which the title is taken.

N.M.

R
egency lay there day after day and Madeleine nursed him as if he were a dying god. It is incredible what you can get away with in Provincetown. She called the police station in the morning to tell them that he had had a breakdown and she was taking him on a long trip. Would they arrange the papers for a leave of absence? Since I had found the wit to wash the trunk of his cruiser before dawn and park it at Town Hall with the keys under the seat, there was nothing to connect my house to his absence. Madeleine made a point of calling his office each day for four days and chatted with the Sergeant about his condition and the poor weather in Barnstable, and how she had had the phone turned off so he wouldn't be disturbed. Indeed, she did have her phone service disconnected. Then, on
the fifth day, Regency made the mistake of recovering to a degree, and we had some horrible scenes.

He lay in bed and cursed us all. He spoke of how he would bust us. He would have me taken down for my marijuana patch. He was also going to accuse me of the murder of Jessica. My father, he declared, was a closet sodomite. He, Regency, was leaving for Africa. He would be a professional soldier. He was also stopping in El Salvador. He would send me a postcard. It would be a photo of himself holding a machete. Ha, ha. He sat there in bed, his muscles bulging out of his T-shirt, his mouth twisted from the stroke, his voice coming to him by way of new arrangements in his brain, and he picked up the phone and slammed it down when he discovered the line was dead. (I had been quick to cut it.) We gave him tranquilizers and he went through the pills like a bull breaks a fence.

Only Madeleine could control him. I saw a side of her I had never witnessed before. She would soothe him, she would lay a hand on his forehead and calm him, and when all else failed, she would upbraid him into silence. “Keep quiet,” she would say, “you are paying for your sins.”

“Are you going to stay with me?” he would ask.

“I will stay with you.”

“I hate you,” he told her.

“I know that.”

“You're a filthy brunette. Do you know how dirty brunettes are?”

“You need a bath yourself.”

“You disgust me.”

“Take this pill and be silent.”

“It's designed to injure my testicles.”

“Good for you.”

“I haven't had a hard-on in three days. Maybe I'll never have one again.”

“Never fear.”

“Where's Madden?”

“I'm here,” I said. I was always there. She tended him alone at night, but my father or I was always on guard in the hall holding his Magnum.

Very few calls came on the downstairs phone. No one who was left connected me to much. Regency, as far as anyone knew, was on the road. Beth was gone, and Spider as well, so people, it they thought of them, assumed they were on a trip. After all, the van was also gone. Stoodie's family, being afraid of him, were probably happy not to hear. No one I knew missed Bolo, and Patty was assumed to be traveling in some part or another of the wide world. So was Wardley. In a few months Wardley's relatives might consider how long he had been away without a word and declare him a missing person: after seven years, the nearest of kin, just in case, could pick up his estate. In a few months I might declare Patty missing, or then again, not open my mouth. I thought I would let events decide that for me.

Jessica Pond's son, Lonnie Oakwode, could yet
prove to be a problem. But then, how could he connect me to her? I did worry about my tattoo and Harpo, but not too much. Having informed on me once, he would not do it again, and the tattoo I would alter as soon as I could.

It was Regency. If our security depended on Alvin Luther, then we had none. He inhabited every crossroads. Nor did I like the way he kept to his bed. It indicated to me no more than that he was waiting until he could find a story for himself. In any event, he did not leave his bed.

Within it, however, he had a fearful mouth. To Madeleine, in our hearing, he said, “I made you come sixteen times in one night.”

“Yes,” she said, “and none were any good.”

“That,” he said hopefully, “is because you got no womb.”

She shot him that afternoon. Any one of us could have done it, but it happened to be Madeleine. My father and I had already discussed it in the hallway. “There's no way out,” Dougy said. “It has to be done.”

“He's sick,” I said.

“He may be sick, but he's no victim.” Dougy looked at me. “I have to do it. I understand him. He's my kind of guy.”

“If you change your mind,” I said, “I can manage it.” I could. My damnable faculty of being able to visualize what I might soon see was becoming more palpable. In my mind, I discharged Regency's Magnum into his chest. My arm flew up in the air from the kick of the handgun.
His face contorted. I saw the maniac. Regency looked like a wild boar. Then he died, and as he did, his face took on an austere look, and his chin became as wooden and set as the good jaw of George Washington.

Do you know, that was the last expression he offered before he died? I came in after the double blast of Madeleine's little Derringer, and he was expiring on what had been my marriage bed. It seems the last thing he said before she pulled the trigger was “I liked Patty Lareine. She was big time and I belong there.”

“Good luck,” said Madeleine.

“I thought you were big time when I met you,” he said, “but you were small potatoes.”

“Bet on it,” said Madeleine and pulled the trigger.

It was nothing remarkable to go out on, but she had come to her own conclusion that he must be executed. Crazy people in serious places had to be executed. That much you learned with your Mafia milk.

A year later, when she would talk about it, she told me, “I just waited for him to say the word that would get my blood to rise.” Do not call an Italian queen small potatoes.

His body was taken out to sea by my father that night. Regency was buried with a cement block tied by separate wires to his waist, his armpits and his knees. By now, of course, my father was practiced at such a course. On the first morning after Alvin Luther had his attack and lay
unconscious, Dougy insisted on being taken out in my boat to Wardley's cemetery on Hell-Town beach, and there had me find the graves. I did. That night while I kept guard over our fallen narc, my father put in six hours of the most sordid labor. Near the dawn, on the rising of the tide, he took out all five bodies to the deep water and sank them well. Doubtless I am in danger of writing an Irish comedy, so I will not describe the gusto with which Dougy now made his preparations to take Alvin Luther to the watery rest, except to say his comment when done was “Maybe I been in the wrong occupation all this time.” Maybe he was.

Madeleine and I went out to Colorado for a while, and now we inhabit Key West. I try to write, and we live on the money that comes from her work as a hostess in a local restaurant and mine as a part-time bartender in a hole across the street from her place. Once in a while we wait for a knock on the door, but I am not so sure it will ever come. There was a flurry about the disappearance of Laurel Oakwode and pictures of her son in the papers. He said he would not rest until he found his mother, but his face in the photographs lacked, I thought, the kind of character you need for such a search, and the feature story hinted that the local people in Santa Barbara were ready to assume that Laurel, sharing a financial peccadillo or two with Lonnie Pangborn, might have found a wealthy Singapore businessman or someone of that ilk. Despite the shirred
blood in the car trunk, Pangborn's end was officially called a suicide.