Cutter and Bone (8 page)

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.”

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 with, 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.

“Yes.”

“Mostly I’ve had students before. College boys. It kind of fit in with their needs. You know.”

“Sure.”

“You’re older.”

“I’m thirty-three.”

She smiled slightly, almost coyly. “And may I say you don’t look like the handyman type.”

“I’ve been other things.”

“Such as?”

“Business. Marketing and so forth.”

“A dropout?”

“You could call it that.”

“And what’d you leave behind? Wife and kids?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“Nothing’s just like that.”

“Where was it you dropped from?”

“Chicago.” He wondered why he did not tell her Milwaukee; it wouldn’t have mattered.

“And has it worked out for you—the dropping out?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, at least you’re honest.”

“At times.”

The smile had gone over the edge now, was openly ironic, knowing. “The work here’s simple enough. The yard and the pool, like I said in the ad. And then I have this truck I use for junk, stuff I pick up at junkyards, usually down the coast, Oxnard and around there. Stuff I use in my sculpture. You’d help me there too. Some of it’s pretty heavy.”

“No problem.”

“My husband’s got a computer service company. Software Systems Inc., he calls it. You know what software is?”

“Yes.”

“He has to travel a lot. He’s almost never here.”

“I see.”

She put out her cigarette now, carefully, and moved forward on her chair. For a moment he wondered if she was going to reach over and put her hand on his knee or just go straight for his fly. Close, she was all makeup, heavy eyeliner and false lashes and face color. Looking at the taut line of her jaw, the drum-tight skin, he could almost see the incisions above her hairline, the cunning face-lift scars running through the gray roots. And he felt his gut tighten. Could he bring it off? Would he be able to close his eyes and do his thing? Stoned, maybe. He would need grass, bales of it.

“One important thing,” she said. “And I hope you’ll be straight with me. I don’t want someone who just needs a place to crash, someone who’d be here a few days and then—” She threw her hand in the air. “Gone. Split.”

Bone assured her that was not his intention. “I think this is just what I’m looking for,” he added. “What I want.”

“Good.” Smiling, she stood up. “Come on then. Let me show you your room.”

When they reached it, a small efficiency apartment at one end of the three-car garage, she put her hand on his arm, just a friendly little gesture, nothing much, but sufficient to tell him what he had to know. He had not read her wrong.

“All right?” she asked.

Bone looked about him, at the tasteful expensive furniture, including a twin-size bed, a color TV, an air conditioner. “It’s fine,” he said.

“When can you start?”

He could have been back with his things in a few hours, but that was too soon for him. He was not ready for the job yet, not ready for her.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

She looked disappointed. But she smiled. “Tomorrow it is, then.”

When he got back to Cutter’s house Bone found it empty except for the baby, who was sobbing disconsolately in his crib. Bone picked him up and quieted him and then changed his diaper, an operation he had not performed in many years. Then he warmed a bottle of milk he found in the refrigerator and fed him most of it, all the while feeling not only ridiculous but angry too, disgusted at Mo for having left the kid alone. It was something Ruth would never have done. No, her problem was the reverse, that she had almost never let the girls out of her sight. Of the two, Bone was not sure which was worse. The kids undoubtedly knew. But they weren’t talking.

In time he decided that a little sunshine would not do the two of them any harm either, and after writing a note to Mo—“Baby’s with me. Think I’ve found a buyer for him. B.”—he put a cap and jacket on the kid and drove him the few blocks to the park across from the Mission.

Little Alex Five, as Swanson called him, was thirteen months old and just now beginning to toddle. So Bone carried him to a bench near the sprawling rose garden, which was not yet in bloom, and the baby immediately began to work his way around the bench, holding on most of the time but occasionally letting go and taking a few tentative steps out into the grass, where he would stop and do a little balancing act and then abruptly turn around and lunge back to the safety and support of the stone seat. Bone moved about ten feet away and sat down on the ground, trying to play his new role of superannuated baby-sitter as coolly as possible. If he were seen at it by someone he knew, so be it. But he did not particularly want to appear to
like
it; that would have been a touch precious, he thought, possibly even sick. A grown man alone with someone else’s baby—in modern America it was definitely a combustible situation. So he sat his distance and glanced over at the infant every now and then. And in time he realized that little Alex did not like the new gulf between them, in fact was about to challenge it. Twice he started out and then stopped, sat down and crawled back to the bench, where he immediately pulled himself up and resumed his enterprise, scowling over at Bone like a quarterback trying to read a new defense. Finally Bone offered him a little encouragement and the baby set out again, carefully stepping the first half of his journey and then falling the rest of the way, plunging into Bone’s hands. Bone told him he was pretty big stuff and the kid gurgled happily. But he wanted more. He crawled back to the bench, pulled himself up, and made another beeline for Bone. Then he kept doing it, over and over.