Cutter and Bone Read online

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone else must’ve called,” Cutter said. “Some sinister force.” He had just finished combing his hair in front of the hall mirror, and now he went into the bathroom and came out with Mo’s bottle of Lavoris, which he proceeded to chugalug, gargling it and spitting it into a dead potted cactus Swanson had given them, “something harmonious with Alex’s character,” as he had put it.

  “Pigs probably be here in a minute,” Cutter explained. “Gonna do a number on them. A neat little number.”

  Mo asked him where he had been all day. “If I may ask,” she added.

  “Of course you may, love. Went driving, I did. Picked up this group on one-o-one, a nigger fag and two spic girls with a pet monkey. We went up to El Capitan and had an orgy. The guy was all right but that monkey, Jesus, did it ever bite.”

  Mo sipped at her drink. “What’s the use?” she said to Bone. “What’s the goddamn use?”

  Bone said nothing. Outside, the police had arrived. The flash of their red domelight washed over Cutter as he stood gargling in the middle of the room. Putting the bottle down finally, he passed his hand over his face, magically creating sobriety. Then he moved toward the door.

  “Come on with, old buddy,” he said to Bone. “I may need your support.”

  But he did not. Playing the role of humble wounded war veteran, he limped eloquently down the stairs and went over to the police car, where the officers were already listening to the schoolteacher’s complaint. Cutter waited patiently, and then politely answered all their questions. Gosh, he was awfully sorry about the whole darn thing. And a little confused too. He hadn’t even seen the car the first time he hit it, when he turned in—a passing car with its brights on had temporarily blinded him. And then when he tried to back up, after the first impact, the gearshift apparently slipped into first instead, and that was why there was a second crash. Of course he took full responsibility for the accident, and of course his insurance company would pay, the lady had nothing to worry about there. But he had no idea what all this other was about, his supposedly insulting her and using obscene language. He recalled asking her to come into his house, yes, but only to discuss the incident away from the crowd and to give her a chance to calm down, while he called the police and his insurance company. Was he aware that his license had expired? No, but he understood the officers had no choice except to issue him a citation for the oversight; they were just doing their duty, and duty was something he knew a little about. As he said this last, Bone halfway expected him to hike up his pants and show everyone his false leg, but all he did was modestly look down at the ground, affecting embarrassment and pain.

  And the officers reluctantly did their duty, giving him a citation for driving without a license. And that was all. The schoolteacher began yelling and spitting at them, calling them storm troopers and stinking fascist pigs, but they were used to that, in fact were smiling as they drove away. Cutter waved goodbye and then put a friendly hand on the teacher’s shoulder.

  “Forget about it,” he told her. “Toyota’s a shitty car anyway.”

  From that point on the night limped steadily downhill. Cutter vomited shrimp and half-shell oysters and other condiments he had gobbled at El Paseo’s free “cocktail hour” snack table. Then he settled his stomach with a Pepsi and followed that with vodka on the rocks. Nothing strong, he said. He did not want to puke again. Along the way he admitted that he had called Mo earlier and that he had indeed spent some time during the day with Valerie Durant, the sister of the murder victim. But she had not been able to come with him.

  “The goddamn funeral,” he explained. “Or what do they call it the day before—visitation?”

  Bone watched him with a tight, growing anger. “What’d you see her about?” he asked.

  “I needed some questions answered.”

  “About what?”

  Cutter grinned. “You sound uptight, Richard.”

  “What’d you see her about?”

  “Oh, nothing important. Just this little project of mine. This bump of curiosity, you might call it.”

  “Curiosity about J. J. Wolfe?”

  “You could say that, I guess.”

  “And how does Miss Durant fit in?”

  “Call her Val. A real nice girl, Val.”

  “Val, then.”

  For a time Cutter did not answer. He had finished making himself another drink, and now he limped back around the coffee table and sank onto the davenport, grunting like an old character actor, grimacing as he lifted his false leg above the boat hatch tabletop, held it there for a moment, and then dropped it like a bomb. Near the fire still, Mo was pretending a vast indifference to everything but her drink and the flames. But there was gray flint in her eyes, a look that had begun to form and harden at Cutter’s mention of “Val.”

  “Well, it goes something like this,” Cutter was saying. “I wake up this morning you might say still intrigued by your reaction to Wolfe’s picture—you know, the It’s him number you did for us. Somehow I just couldn’t expunge it from the old brain, you know? Kept going round and round, like a haunting refrain. So I decided, what’s to lose? Check the cat out and see where he was that night, and at what time, and so forth. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized none of it would do much good unless I also knew where Val’s sister was at the same time. You know, see if there were any star-crossed coincidences, any unexpected intersecting of Wolfe’s path and the girl’s. But to find out where she was—well, I couldn’t go to the police, could I, not without involving my old buddy Bone. Which of course I absolutely refused to do. So what choice did I have, except to go to Val?”

  “And tell her about the picture?”

  “Your reaction to it, you mean? Well, hell yes, man. That’s the whole bit, isn’t it? But don’t worry—I told her you backed off right away. I said you weren’t about to identify anyone to anybody, ever.”

  Bone was furious. “You bastard, Alex. You cocksucking bastard. She’s probably already called the cops.”

  “No chance.”

  “And of course you’re sure of that.”

  “Would I say I was if I wasn’t? Weren’t?”

  Bone, barely able to control himself, looked over at Mo, who seemed to have gone down into herself now, drifting with her vodka and quads. “Aren’t you interested in any of this, lady?” he asked. “This ‘bump’ your old man’s got, you’re not interested?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t you remember what he told you last night, that crap about a way out? Well this is it, kid. This is your escape hatch he’s talking about.”

  “I’m afraid you lost me,” Mo said.

  Bone turned to Cutter. “Tell her.”

  Alex grinned. “How can I? I don’t know what the hell you’re running on about anymore than she does.”

  “This great interest of yours in J. J. Wolfe, that’s what I’m running on about. Now tell us—tell her— what’s behind it.”

  “As I said, curiosity.”

  “Of course. And a keen sense of social consciousness.”

  “That too, yes.”

  Shaking his head, Bone got out a cigarette and lit it. “I give up,” he said. “You win, Alex. Go do your thing, whatever gives you pleasure. And if I wind up sweating out another day in the slam, so what, huh? It ain’t you.”

  “Aw, come on, man. I just told you. The girl understands. She’s not going to call the police. She knows you didn’t make a positive ID, and that this is just something of mine, that’s all, a wild hair, you know.”

  “Wonder why I can’t believe you?”

  Cutter shrugged. “Forget all that, huh? We got more important things. Don’t you want to know what I found out?”

  “From Val?” Mo said.

  “Among others. Let me tell you, I been busy.”

  And Cutter went on then, telling them what he had learned about the victim. All that in the newspapers about her being the typical high school teenager, t
he wholesome pretty cheerleader and so forth, was just a lot of bullshit. According to her sister she was virtually uncontrollable, especially by their mother, an alcoholic semi-invalid with high blood pressure and bad nerves. The girl came and went pretty much as she pleased, a seventeen-year-old free spirit dedicated to rock music and especially its performers, for whom she was a kind of local groupie, a welcoming committee of one, which meant of course that she was already into sex and drugs. A month before her death, her sister had given her three hundred dollars for an abortion that was performed in Los Angeles. Since then the girl had not returned to school. And she was almost never at home. Lastly, she was an inveterate, habitual hitchhiker—a fact Cutter’s voice underscored.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “night before last she was at the Stone Sponge, that new rock bar out in Goleta, real big with the kids. She went with a couple girlfriends, older girls. The police of course have hauled in these two plus everybody else they could, anybody who might’ve seen who she was with or left with. But from what I hear all they got so far is zilch.”

  Yawning, Mo poked at the dying fire. “You’re not going to tell us J. J. Wolfe was there,” she said.

  “That’s right, I’m not.”

  “Big surprise.”

  But Cutter was looking as if he had just dined on missionary. “He was across the street,” he said.

  “Across the street?”

  “At the Calif, that big motel they put up, that sprawling mess of orange offal out on Fairlane.”

  “Wolfe stayed there?” Mo said.

  Cutter gave her a pitying look. “The woman with total recall. If you’ll remember, Earthmother, the newspaper yesterday, the one you read to us. He was staying at the Biltmore then, right? Where his car went boom boom. Ring a bell?”

  Mo pretended to accept this abuse as her due, giving Cutter a mock humble bow of her head.

  “No, Wolfe was at a party there, at the Calif, a cocktail bash for the energy conference delegates. He left around ten or eleven.”

  Bone asked Cutter how he knew this.

  “The conference’s PR man, a cat out at the university. I told him I was doing a story for Sunset magazine. So naturally he broke his ass for me, told me all he could: Guy like Wolfe at your conference or your party, you want people to know.”

  “But he left early?” Bone said.

  “That’s what this fellow said, yeah. But Wolfe was there all right—right across the street from the Stone Sponge.”

  Getting up to mix himself another drink, Bone dropped a pair of ice cubes into his glass, an erstwhile jelly jar. In the silence, the crack of the ice sounded like a comment. Now he added to it.

  “That all you’ve got?”

  “All?”

  “Well, think about it. It doesn’t change what was in the paper, does it? The man is still alone. You don’t put him with the girl. You don’t know where he was around midnight any more now than you did before. And I still haven’t heard anything about a motive.”

  Cutter spit at the fire, and it hissed. “Christ, you don’t want much,” he said. “I spend half the day getting in touch with the girl’s sister and trying to get my story across to her, and still I got time to find out where Wolfe was last night. And what do you hand me? Is that all I’ve got?”

  “Big deal,” Bone said. “Listen, pal, before I sack in, and before Mo passes all the way through the looking glass, why don’t you tell us, just the two of us. Just come right out and tell us, in plain and simple English—” And now Bone almost shouted. “What the hell are you up to?”

  Mo looked up from the floor in bewilderment. But Cutter was unimpressed. Slowly he finished off the bottle of vodka. Then standing, swaying, he did a fair impression of John Wayne.

  “A man does what he’s got to do,” he said.

  He limped toward the bathroom, burlesquing Wayne’s rolling gait. Through the open door Bone heard him retching.

  All through the night the carnival went on. Bone was half asleep on the davenport when Cutter began yelling at Mo. He evidently wanted to make love or at least have her make him come, but she was already gone, stoned. So he did what he had to do. He jumped up and down on the bed and woke the baby and kicked a hole in the closet door. And he yelled all the while, spewing out a soliloquy of sexual frustration. Mo was not just frigid, he declaimed, she was dead, a cadaver with a welded womb and a cunt like a rathole, full of dust and bits of straw and feathers from old nests left undisturbed for generations. Her tits were going soft just like her brain, because she was dying, didn’t she know that? She was in the death grip of frigidity, in fact had a terminal case. But this was it for him, the last time he would ever try with her. Never again would he risk his balls this way, exposing them to such death and decay. No, from now on it would be whores for him, whores and little boys and sheep if he could find any, anything alive, anything but a cold rathole for him.

  In time Bone slept. But he was awakened later by the sound of the deck door opening, and when he finally rolled over to look he saw Cutter out on the deck, on the deck railing actually, teetering there as he urinated down the hill into the darkness, all the while singing “Jesus Loves Me” and whipping his penis back and forth like a small boy.

  And later still—how much later, Bone was not sure—he was shaken awake and looked up to find Cutter sitting next to him, on the boat hatch. Even in the darkness Bone could see the desperation in his eye.

  “I want to explain, Rich,” he said, in an urgent whisper. “I want to explain about this cat Wolfe, okay? When I was in Nam, I guess I’ve told you, we did pretty much what all the outfits there did. Not exactly My Lais, not that big anyway, but we did our part, everybody did his little part over there. To women and kids too, because we never knew, there was no way of knowing, all slants were VC far as we were concerned, and you just didn’t give a damn anyway. Not there, on the spot, not while you were doing it, it was nothing, you were a machine, nothing touched you, nothing mattered. But later—later, back here, when the My Lai thing broke—you remember those pictures in Life? The peasants? That one young woman with her old mother and her kid, and they’re all hugging each other and crying, waiting to be offed. And the next picture, there they all are in the ditch. Well back here, with time, you know, you had time to study them, those pictures. And that’s what I did. I studied them all right. I went to school at those pictures. And you know what I found out? I found out you have three reactions, Rich, only three. The first one is simple—I hate America. But then you study them some more, and you move up a notch. There is no God. But you know what you say finally, Rich, after you’ve studied them all you can? You say—I’m hungry.”

  He tried to smile as he said this, he tried to laugh, but his mouth twisted more in pain than anything else.

  “Sleep,” he said. “You sleep now, Rich. I just wanted you to know.”

  4

  In the morning Alex Five reminded the grown-ups that though they might step to measured, faraway music, his own drummer was a noisy sort who came on duty promptly at six o’clock. Mo let him cry for a while and then finally gave in, laboriously struggling out of bed and picking him up, changing him and feeding him and trying to keep him quiet, all the while moving like a somnambulist.

  From where he lay on the couch, hung over and still exhausted himself, Bone could feel some of her misery. But he did not move or get up until after the baby was fed and dry, toddling around the living room and jabbering and occasionally sticking his finger in Bone’s eyes or exploring one of his ears. By then Mo had finished trying to regenerate herself in the bathroom, and now Bone followed her example, relying as always on a cold shower to bring him back to a semblance of life.

  When he came out, Mo had already prepared his breakfast, scrambling some of the eggs he had bought the previous afternoon, and serving them with stale doughnuts and the usual instant coffee. He would have given his last dollar for a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, but of course in the Cutter household any such tr
ansaction was out of the question—one did not mess around with fresh fruit and vegetables. And even now, before eight o’clock in the morning, Bone could see the basic reason for this in Mo’s eyes, the soft glaze spreading in them and the lids growing heavier as she sipped her coffee, eating nothing, not wanting to weaken the effects of the methaqualone or whatever other downer she had ingested since taking care of the baby. Bone was not much of a drug man himself so he did not really understand the intricacies of her habit. Downers in the morning struck him as a totally illogical choice, like piling torpor on top of exhaustion, but according to Cutter that was all Mo ever took, morning, day, or night, only downers, and not too many of them, either, just enough to soften the ragged cutting edges. And for all Bone knew, maybe the pills did accomplish this. But in the bargain they also aged her. Though she was no more than twenty-five, she looked a weary, beaten thirty. And another five years the way she was going—he would not care to see her then. The bone structure would still be there of course, and the finely crafted eyes. She would be beautiful still, maybe, but not very pretty.

  “I don’t think he’ll be up before you leave,” she was saying.

  “That’s all right. Let him sleep. I like it better with just us anyway.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “Naturally.”

  “It’s a shame I’m not more highly sexed.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “But he’s your friend, Rich. Your host. You wouldn’t betray a friend and host, would you?”

  “Not normally.”

  “Abnormally then?”

  “I don’t think that’s what I meant.”

  “You’re a friend indeed.”

  Bone lit a cigarette. “Now you’ve finally got it. You’re finally on track. I’m a friend in need.”

  “Sure you are. You need it about like Heinz needs ketchup.”

  “I didn’t say anything about it.”

  “What then?” As she said this, she tried to maintain the same touch of easy raillery. But he did not answer, just sat there at the kitchen table watching her, and finally, looking flushed and somehow guilty, she lowered her eyes.