“Let’s slow up,” said Regency. “I’ll tell you what you want to know, provided you inform me about what I want to know. Quid pro quo.”
“It won’t work,” I said. “You have to trust me.”
“Where’s your stack of Bibles?” he asked.
“It won’t work,” I repeated. “Every time I tell you something, you’re going to ask another question. After I tell it all, there won’t be any reason for you to give anything back.”
“Turn it around,” he said. “If I talk first, what’s in it for you to tell me?”
“Your Magnum,” I said.
“You think I’d off you in cold blood?”
“No,” I said, “I think you’d lose your temper.”
My father nodded. “That’s logical,” he murmured.
“All right,” Regency said. “But, go first. Give me one piece of news I don’t have.”
“Stoodie is dead.”
“Who did it?”
“Wardley.”
“Where is Wardley?”
“You have a reflex,” I said. “You ask questions. I’ll tell you when the time comes. Keep your part of the bargain.”
“I’d like to meet this Wardley,” said Regency. “Every time I take a step, he’s underfoot.”
“You’ll meet him,” I said. Only after the words were out of my mouth did I realize how spooked they were.
“I’d like to. I’d give him a fistful of teeth.”
I began to laugh. I couldn’t help it. That may, however, have been the best reaction. Regency poured himself a drink and swallowed it. I realized it was the first liquor he had tasted since I mentioned the machete.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you my story. It’s a good one.” He looked at my father. “Dougy,” he said, “I don’t respect many people. I respect you. From the moment I came in here. The last guy I met who was your equal was my colonel in the Green Berets.”
“Make it a general,” said Dougy.
“We’ll get there,” said Regency. “But I want to make it clear. There’s rough stuff ahead.”
“I would think so,” said Dougy.
“You’re going to lose sympathy with me.”
“Because you hated my son?”
“Hated. That’s past tense.”
My father shrugged. “You seem to respect him now.”
“I don’t. I half respect him. I used to think he was dirt. Now I don’t.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I’ll tell it my way,” he said.
“All right.”
“Get it straight. I did a lot. Tim, I was trying to drive you off your nut.”
“You nearly succeeded.”
“I had a right to.”
“Why?” asked Dougy.
“My wife, Madeleine, when I first met her, was a rescue case. Your son drove her into depravity. She was a cokehead. I could have arrested her. Your son put her in orgies, cracked her up in his car, destroyed her womb and took off on her a year later. I inherited a woman who had such a habit she was obliged to deal for the stuff in order to feed her own nose. You try living with a female who can’t have your son. So, get it straight, Madden, I hated your guts.”
“Well, you stole my wife in turn,” I said quietly.
“I tried to. Maybe she stole me. I got caught between two women, your wife and mine.”
“Jessica, too,” I said.
“I make no apologies. When your wife took off, she was not only leaving you, she was leaving me, buster. I got my habit. Love has nothing to do with it. I tool two women a night. I’ve even made it with some of Stoodie’s disease-bags—to give you an idea of the force of the principle,” he said with some verbal pride. “Jessica was a surrogate for Patty, no more.”
“Then you and Madeleine … every night you went home?”
“Of course.” He belted more bourbon. “It’s simple. Let’s not get side-tracked. What I want to say is that I hated you, and I have a simple mentality. So I took Jessica’s head and put it next to your marijuana. Then I told you to go to your stash.”
“Didn’t you think I might associate you?”
“I figured it would open your ass. I thought you would die in your own shit. That’s the word.”
“Did you put the blood on the front seat of my car?”
“I did.”
“Whose was it?”
He didn’t reply.
“Jessica’s?”
“Yes.”
I was about to ask, “How did you do it?” but I could see his eyes going in and out of focus as if the scene were still thrusting itself upon his mind and he kept forcing it back. I wondered if he had used her head for such a purpose but I put the thought away before I could start to visualize it.
“Why,” asked my father, “didn’t you do a test next day for the blood on the seat of the car?”
Regency smiled like a cat. “Nobody would ever believe,” he said, “that I put the blood there if I was too dumb to test it, and let you wash it off. How could they ever accuse me of entrapment then?” He nodded. “I woke up that morning worried that I would be accused of entrapping you. It sounds stupid now, but that’s how I was thinking then.”
“You were losing the best part of your case against Tim.”
“I didn’t want to arrest him. I wanted to drive him nuts.”
“Did you kill Jessica?” I asked. “Or did Patty?”
“We’ll come to that. It’s not the point. The point is that I was crazy about Patty, but all she’d talk about is you, and how much she hated you, and how you used up her life. All I could see is that you had half her guts, so what was she bellyaching about? Then I got it. She fucking well had to destroy a man. Because when I wouldn’t lift a finger against you, she almost destroyed me. She took off. So I got the picture then. I was supposed to do a job on you. Forsake my police vows and do a job.”
“It wasn’t a small one,” said Dougy.
“Fucking aye. It was brilliant.” He shook his head. “The details were brilliant. I told Patty to take the gun that was used on Jessica and put it back in its case uncleaned. The smell alone should have given you a heart attack. There you were, all passed out, and she stopped by the bed and put the gun away.”
“How did you ever find my Polaroids that night? Patty didn’t know where they were.”
He looked blank.
“What kind of Polaroids?” he asked.
I believed him. My heart fell into a small hole lined with cold lead. “I found some Polaroids with the heads cut off—” I started to tell him.
“Patty says you do crazy things when you’re drunk. Maybe you sliced those heads off yourself.”
I didn’t wish to live with the thought, but how could I confute him?
“Well, if you were to cut up a photo,” I asked, “why would you do it?”
“I wouldn’t. Only a creep would do that.”
“But you did. You cut up Jessica’s photos.”
He took a little more bourbon. A paroxysm seized his throat. He spat forth the bourbon.
“It’s true,” he said. “I cut up Jessica’s photos.”
“When?” I asked.
“Yesterday.”
“Why?”
I thought he was going to have a fit. “So I would stop seeing her last expression,” he managed to say. “I want to get her last expression out of my system.”
His jaws were grinding, his eyes bulged and his neck muscles knotted. But he pushed out the question, “How did Patty die?”
Before I could answer he gave a fearful groan, stood up, went over to the door and began to butt his head against the doorjamb. I could feel the kitchen shake.
My father approached from behind, seized him around the chest and tried to pull him away. He threw my father off. My father was seventy. Nonetheless, I could not believe it.
It calmed Regency, however. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“So be it,” said my father, giving farewell to some last illusion th
at strength remains intact.
I was afraid of Regency again. As if I were the accused and he the aggrieved husband of the victim, I said softly, “I had nothing to do with Patty’s death.”
“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.
COMEDY:
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.
TRAGEDY:
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.
EPILOGUE
Regency 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.
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