Cutter and Bone Read online

  “But be careful,” Cutter called back. “He bites.”

  Bone walked on a short distance under the cliffs, to a boulder where he knew Cutter would wait for him. There he took off his shoes and jacket and started out, jogging at first, then slowly gathering speed as he ran toward the lowering sun, which was setting red fire to Isla Vista’s lonely Stonehenge of high-rise buildings. Out at sea, storm clouds moving in from the southwest had snagged on the channel islands like old newspapers blown against a fence row. For over a mile he ran, between the cliffs and the sea, past low-ride-uncovered rocks bristling with mussels and sea anemones. And then he started back, keeping up the same steady pace, until in time he could feel the cleanness coming into him as his body burned first its fuels and then its poisons too, all the tensions and angers and other gunk of this long day disappearing down the swollen river of his blood. And still he kept on, even after the cleanness had become only pain, an ax stuck in his side and sinking deeper with every step until finally it reached the point where he felt almost severed by it, and only then did he let up, slowing down for a time and then walking and jogging the last half mile to the boulder where Cutter sat staring out at the sea.

  “Used to run here myself,” Cutter said. “But I guess I already told you that.”

  Bone, still out of breath, did not respond.

  “I’d have beaten you then, Rich. Because you coast, man. You glide. You don’t press. Me, I pressed.”

  “I believe it.” Bone lit a cigarette and dragged, wondering whether it would undo whatever good the run had done for him.

  “But back in your old v.p. days at twenty-eight, I don’t figure you did much coasting then, huh? No sir, I’ll bet you ate old men for lunch back then.”

  “I don’t particularly care for the metaphor.”

  Cutter laughed. “You got a point.”

  Neither of them said anything for a time. A pretty teen-age girl walked past, leading an English bulldog on a leash, and Cutter gave her his customary greeting—“Want some candy, little girl?”—but it lacked all edge. Smiling, shaking her head, she walked on. And both men watched her, the long legs and small fine buttocks moving eloquently as she went on around the headland up the beach. When Cutter looked back, his eye had a strange bleakness in it. Nevertheless he grinned. He grinned crookedly and said, “Lately I been thinking of killing myself, Rich. You got any advice?”

  Bone dragged on the cigarette, buying time. Out beyond the surf a pelican plunged into the sea. Bone shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  “I figured not. Guy talks about it, naturally he’s not gonna do it, right? He’s just fishing. Dramatizing himself.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I would, in your place.”

  “Then why tell anyone?”

  “No good reason. Except it’s true.”

  And Bone began to feel a breath of alarm now, like a breeze off the kelp, fetid, a touch ominous. “Why, Alex?” he said.

  Cutter shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not the goddamn eye, or the arm and the leg—some list, huh? They don’t help, Christ knows. But they’re not it, not the real problem. No, that’s in here,” he said, tapping his head. “And I can’t fix it. Can’t change it.”

  “What is it?”

  Cutter flipped him a look, spare, flat. “Well, it goes kinda like this—you make me ill, Rich. I mean physically ill, a feeling like having to puke all the time, like having the goddamn flu or a hangover. You get the picture. And it isn’t just what you say or what you do. It’s what you are, what I know you are, inside.” He must have seen some of the resentment Bone was beginning to feel, for he raised his hand, signaling that there was more to come. “And the problem, kid, the big problem is you’re the best. Yeah, I guess I probably like you best—or despise you the least, I guess I should say. Less than all the others, less even than me. Probably just a matter of style, the low key, nothing important. It doesn’t change the fact that I get out of bed every day like it was Armageddon. I can’t stand the thought of looking at faces and listening to voices. I can’t stand communicating. I’d rather kiss Mo’s clit than her mouth. I’d rather bounce a ball than the goddamn kid. I don’t want to read anymore, I don’t want to see movies, I don’t want to sit here and look at the goddamn sea. Because it all makes me want to puke, Rich. It gives me the shakes. I guess the word is despair. And it’s become like my heart. I mean it pumps day and night, steady. I’m never without it. I’m sick all the time. So I think about death. I think I would as soon be dead.”

  Cutter broke off there, not even looking at Bone for a reaction. Absently he scarred swastikas in the sand.

  “I can’t say I understand,” Bone tried. “I feel depression myself, Alex. And fear too. But nothing like this. Mo, doesn’t she—?”

  “She doesn’t figure in. She doesn’t matter. With her or without her, it’s all the same.”

  “What about the VA?”

  “You mean the shrinks again?” Cutter laughed at that. “No chance. A bunch of cripples in bathrobes sitting in a circle telling each other how they’ve copped out or how uptight and hostile everybody else is. And the shrink getting off on it all, sitting there with one hand stuck in his fly.” Cutter shook his head in disdain. “No thanks. Anyway I don’t figure I’m sick. I figure I’m well, one of the few. I figure I see life whole and honest, exactly as it is. And the only normal healthy response is what I have, this despair.”

  Bone knew that with Cutter the possibility of a put-on was always present. But he went along anyway. “You’re serious, then?”

  “About killing myself? In my head, yeah. I see no reason not to. But doing it, actually doing it, well I couldn’t say till afterwards, could I. After I’d brought it off. And then of course I couldn’t say anything. So I guess all I can say is yeah, I’m serious.”

  Bone dropped his cigarette onto the sand, buried it with his foot. “At the beginning you asked for advice. Okay, I advise you to wait. You can’t lose. Things might change.”

  “I’m already into that,” Cutter said. “I’ve been waiting for some time now.”

  “Good. Keep waiting.”

  Cutter shook his head matter-of-factly. “Not this way. Not with this setup. Mo and the kid and the food stamps. And this fucking boom town. It’s like living in the middle of a Jaycee parade.”

  “What else then? Where?”

  “Nothing very grand, Rich, believe me. First, money, of course. I’d need that. Enough for some decent surgery on the old physiognomy, tone down the scarface routine. The VA, they added scar tissue. I believe the surgeon was an orderly out of Watts, used an old switchblade. And no new ‘prosthetic devices’ either. The foot’s enough. I refuse to jack off with a steel claw. Unesthetic.” Cutter grinned disparagingly. “As for where, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to disillusion you, old buddy. Because what I want is truly square, really and truly square. Would you believe an exotic island somewhere, with ceiling fans and dusky natives? Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet and me, all sweating through our palm beaches. Say someplace like Ibiza, Clifford Irving and his freaky, decadent friends. Which after all is what I am, right? Freaky and decadent. I think maybe in a place like that, with people like that, I might lose this—nausea.”

  Bone too had begun to smile now, for he was sure if the other had not been a put-on, this certainly was.

  “Ibiza, huh?” he said.

  “An Ibiza.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Take more than luck. It’ll take money.”

  “Right. Well, let’s head back.” Bone was already on his feet, waiting for Cutter to join him, which he did now, slowly pushing off on his cane.

  As they started up the beach, Cutter changed the subject, or at least for a brief time Bone thought he had.

  “Back in the car I saw you look at the paper again. The picture. You still ain’t sure, are you?”

  “About what?”

  “J. J. Wolfe.”

  “I
keep repeating, Alex. I didn’t see a face. So how can I identify a face?”

  “You tell me.”

  “You talk in circles.”

  But now the circles tightened. Picking up a stone, Cutter skipped it at the surf. “A rich man, J. J. Wolfe,” he mused.

  And Bone laughed out loud. Next to him, Cutter limped along, smiling crookedly, culpably.

  “So what’s funny? A rich man, that’s all I said. Which he is, right?”

  “Which he is.”

  “So what’s the big deal?”

  “Come off it, Alex. Or rather, come out with it. Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “First, all this shit about despair and your crying need for bread. Big bread. And now suddenly we segue neatly to J. J. Wolfe.”

  Cutter was still grinning. “Blackmail, you mean? You think I’m suggesting blackmail?”

  “The thought does cross the mind.”

  “Bone, you been in too many police stations lately. Your brain’s going soft. What the hell do you think I am anyway, some half-assed mick toilet-paper salesman, some aging ever-ready beachboy who’d go down on a crocodile if the money was right?”

  Bone smiled at the description. It was not all that wide of the mark. “If not blackmail, what then? Why this consuming interest in the man?”

  “Why not, for Christ sake? What if it was him? Society’s got a right to know, hasn’t it? Got a right to protect itself.”

  “You and Erickson—our junior crime fighters.”

  “Rich, you are too cool, you know that? Ain’t you curious? Don’t you wonder if it really was Wolfe?”

  They were walking past a fisherman, a heavy-set man in boots and a slicker standing in the surf, dejectedly watching his line moving slowly in upon him. In two years of running the beach Bone had yet to see a surf fisherman catch anything but minnows and kelp.

  “Why not this character?” Bone asked Cutter. “He’s about the same shape. And maybe he drives a full-size car and was by himself last night, no alibi. Could be he’s the one. Why don’t we investigate him?”

  “Oh bullshit.”

  “Why bullshit? It makes as much sense.”

  “Look, man, I know you. I was there, remember? The second you saw that picture, it was all over your mug—that first split second before you had time to think, to sickly the thing o’er with the pale cast of apathy.”

  They were at the car now. “You talk funny, mister,” Bone said.

  “Then laugh.”

  “Ha ha.”

  Cutter backed the car around and headed out of the lot, moving slowly, as if they were in a funeral cortege. “Are we gonna do anything about it?”

  “Not me. What would a man like that be doing with a cheerleader?”

  “What else?”

  “Bullshit.”

  Cutter nodded. “Of course it’s bullshit. It has to be bullshit. Except for one thing—you, friend. Mister Cool. Daddy Clear Eyes. I don’t know who I’d trust as a witness if not you. And what do you give us right out of the box? It’s him. You can’t explain that away, man. No way.”

  Bone said nothing for a time. He was as much exhausted as indifferent. But finally he responded. “So what do you propose?”

  Cutter shrugged. “We find out what we can. Check out his car. Check out where the girl was. Play it by ear.”

  “You got too much time on your hands, Alex. You’re going bananas.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And anyway, what’s the connection? If not for blackmail, how does all this relate to your—despair?”

  “I just want to know, that’s all. If it was him.”

  “Why him?”

  “’Cause I don’t like him, that’s why.”

  3

  That evening Cutter’s old pal George Swanson came through for him as usual, dropping in at the house with a magnum of Mumm’s Champagne and a family-size bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Bone joined him and Cutter and Mo at the kitchen table but ate hurriedly, adding almost nothing to Alex’s long sardonic account of the events of the last twenty-four hours, an account that unexpectedly avoided any mention of J. J. Wolfe and Bone’s reaction to the picture in the newspaper. At the time, Bone did not give the matter thought, probably because he was too tired to think about much of anything. When he finished eating he took his sleeping bag out onto the deck and zippered himself into it, and the sleep that came to him almost immediately was dreamless and timeless, a deep black hole he did not begin to work his way out of until ten the next morning.

  By that time Cutter was up and gone and Mo was already coasting on her first downer of the day, lying on the living room floor playing with the baby while a broken Seals and Crofts record kept repeating the same cloying phrase over and over. In the kitchen Bone found milk and Pepsis and a large cellophane bag of powdered doughnuts that tasted like uncut sodium propionate. They meant that Cutter, the Great Nutritionist, had already been shopping, undoubtedly with money from Swanson.

  Bone would have taken some of the milk—unlike Cutter he was not an aficionado of cola for breakfast—but he knew the baby needed the stuff more than he did, so he settled for another doughnut and some reheated coffee. Then, after shaving and getting dressed, he called the man Cutter had told him about, the mechanic who wanted to buy his car. Yes, the man was still interested, but he would not go higher than two hundred dollars, less the cost of getting the car back from the city. Bone said okay, it was a deal—if he could use the car that afternoon, after they got it back. The man was not enthusiastic, but he finally came around. He even agreed to come by and pick Bone up.

  As he put the phone down, Mo finally made it to her feet. In her customary chinos and sweatshirt she meandered over to him.

  “My, aren’t we all business today,” she said.

  “An atavism, is it? Back to the halcyon days of paper pushing?”

  “I’m busy, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Necessity.”

  “What necessity?”

  “Food and shelter.”

  She smiled indifferently. “Oh yes, those.”

  Bone looked at the baby on the floor, dirty and happy, shaking a rattle. “How’s he doing?”

  “Baby’s doing fine. But Daddy’s not so hot.”

  “What’s his problem?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows? He was up half the night. With you most of the time, I think—out on the deck.”

  “I was asleep.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “Was it pain? His leg?”

  “Pain maybe. But more in the head, I’d say. He was very excited. Agitated. He kept saying something about ‘a way out.’ You know what he meant by that? A way out? Do they still have those?”

  “If I find one, I’ll let you know,” Bone said.

  By two o’clock he had his car back—temporarily—plus one hundred and sixty dollars in his wallet. And he was driving up into the Montecito foothills along serpentine blacktops past low-slung California homes hugging their little patches of hillside amid scraggly live oak and chaparral, all of it tinder eight months of the year, a torch waiting to be lit. The view explained: an often breathtaking vista of the sprawling redroofed city below, the harbor and channel islands, the dazzling sea. It was a view that did not come cheap. Lots sold for thirty and forty thousand dollars an acre, and the houses were not built on them so much as into them, expensively tethered, like craft meant for flight.

  So the socioeconomic range in the foothills was a small one, running from rich to richer. It was the sort of place where people ran the sort of ad Bone was answering now:

  WANTED—Young man for live-in, part-time yard and pool work. Nice room, meals, plus $50/mo.

  Call 969-2626.

  Bone had called after seeing the ad in the noon edition of the paper. The lady who ran the ad, a Mrs. Little, evidently had liked his voice or what he said on the phone, for she made a pretty big thing out of granting the interview—he was the first one she had gone that far w
ith, she explained, which of course brought Bone close to tears. He almost told the lady to go play with herself, but the position sounded too good not to look into, offering not only freedom from Cutter but a bed, food, and a few extra dollars in the bargain. Right now he would have put up with a good deal for all that.

  When he reached the address he was not surprised at the opulence of the house, all glass, redwood, and rock set behind a cut-stone fence that would have stopped a tank. At the door he had to wait quite a while before a stout little Mexican maid finally answered his ring. He started to tell her who he was and why he was there, but she turned and walked off, apparently knowing a handyman when she saw one. A few minutes later the lady of the house came in, smiling warmly, introduced herself, and asked him to join her in the sunroom. She was tall and black-haired, probably about fifty, though carefully reconstructed to resemble a thirty-year-old. The resemblance was poor.

  With a careless little-girl insouciance she dropped into a chair, threw out her legs, lit a cigarette. “I’ve been out in my studio welding,” she said, explaining her denim pants and jacket, her workboots. “I’m a sculptor.”

  “I thought maybe you’d been riding.”

  “Horses?” She laughed at that. “Not on your life. Montecito horsey set—now there’s a group for you. Weird. Really weird.”

  Bone said nothing for a moment and the woman just sat there looking up at him, appraising him, as if he were standing on a slave block. And he almost groaned out loud as it crossed his mind just what sort of handyman she might be looking for. He began to wonder if there was some kind of mark on him, a big red F advertising his wares, condemning him to their traffic.

  “Well sit down,” she said. “Take a load off.”

  He did as he was told.

  “You sure you’re interested in this job?” she asked.