Cutter and Bone

by Newton Thornburg

  “Look, the cat pick me up two days ago down in Hollywood, at some creep fag party, it turned out to be. I was broke just like now, no place to go. So when he offered, I took him up.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And he nothing to me, man. No more than you could be.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, how about it?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t what me. You know what I’m talking.”

  Bone considered the offer. It was late and he was tired, and the two days with the Dakota schoolteacher had left him feeling about as erotic as a steer. Then he thought of Mo, the fact that she would have to lie in her room with Cutter and listen to him, Bone, for a change, rather than the other way around. And for some reason the prospect gave him pleasure. But at bottom he knew his real reason would be the same as ever, the faithful old juices already beginning to rise in him.

  “What about your friend?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Well, he do kinda like this li’l old black ass.”

  “But not enough.”

  The girl laughed. “You know, I think you right.”

  He took hold of her shoulders then and kissed her, lightly at first, almost exploratory, as if in token homage to their racial difference, and then more deeply finally, open-mouthed, discovering a faint trace of grass on her breath.

  When they went back inside, Erickson verified that he indeed did not like his black ass anywhere near enough. Bone told him that the only way he could stay the night was alone out on the deck in his sleeping bag, and the youth fussed and fumed for the five or ten minutes it took him to gather up his things and get his backpack in order. But not once during that time did he direct a critical word at Bone. No, Ronnie was the only one at fault, Ronnie the cheap opportunistic little slut if ever he found one, in fact a no-good nigger bitch that was what she was, yeah, nigger, they’d heard him right, and if he hadn’t ever used the word before it was only because he’d never run into one before.

  When he left, there was not much said. Cutter, shaking his head in mock sorrow, told Bone and Ronnie to miscegenate if they must, but to please be quiet in the process because he needed his sleep, he planned to meditate all the next day. He and Mo went into their bedroom then, where the baby was still sleeping, and closed the door.

  While Ronnie was in the bathroom, Bone got the cushions off the davenport and arranged them on the floor in front of the fireplace and then he pulled one of the Salvation Army chairs over to the foot of the makeshift bed, knowing Cutter would be up a few times during the night to go to the bathroom or limp out onto the deck to smoke and brood.

  Finally Ronnie came out of the bathroom, naked and very handsome, her lean brown body lifted from some Egyptian frieze, a royal harlot.

  Their lovemaking was about as he had expected it to be, loveless and humorless and yet better than he had had it for a long time, actually more like combat than any act of love, a silent and brutal plundering of each other there in front of the dead ash-filled fireplace. Even before they were finished, Bone began to wonder if she despised him as absolutely as he did her. For her sake, he hoped she did, had at least that much pride.

  Afterward Bone fell asleep almost immediately, but not so deeply he could not hear sounds from time to time, the baby crying and doors opening and pans banging in the kitchen and finally a harsh bell ringing somewhere, a sound that cut through him like rough steel and pinned him wriggling to the past, all the hated risings day after day to shave and shower and dress and hurry, hurry nowhere, hurry to the one place in all the world where he wanted least to go.

  Then suddenly he was aware of pressure on his elbow. Waking, he saw Mo standing over him, wearing the kimono again. Her bare foot was nudging his arm.

  “Wake up, Rich,” she said. “It’s the police.”

  Beyond her he saw them, two men in business suits looking down at him and the black girl as if they had been scraped onto a microscope slide.

  “You Richard Bone?” one of them asked.

  Bone did not answer.

  “Get dressed,” the other said. “We’re going downtown.”

  2

  At ten-thirty the next morning Bone found himself sitting—once again—outside the office of Lieutenant Milton Ross, a small, neatly attired man in his early forties, initially very polite and softspoken when he came on the job at eight o’clock and thought he would quickly get from Bone what lesser officers had not been able to manage in long hours of predawn questioning—the “truth” of what he had witnessed. But as Bone refused to change his story or add to it, the lieutenant’s composure had begun to crack and peel. And Bone’s popularity plunged. Suddenly he was a liar, a lousy goddamn anti-authoritarian deadbeat. He was a small-time con artist bucking for the big time, like say a hitch in prison for obstruction of justice. But Bone was not to worry; his story would change. Ross would see to that.

  So Bone felt no great pleasure as the office door opened again now and the lieutenant motioned him inside.

  “Sit there,” Ross commanded, indicating a straight-backed wooden chair placed almost in the center of the office and facing a row of glaring sunlit windows under which Sergeant Verdugo and another, older man stood waiting. Ignoring the chair, Bone walked over to a conference table that sat across the small room from Ross’s desk. Leaning back, he lit a cigarette, casually, determined not to let the little storm trooper intimidate him. Under the windows he thought he saw a trace of smile on Verdugo, one of the two detectives who had picked him up at Cutter’s house almost seven hours before. The older man was new to Bone, big and white-haired, with the scarlet nose of a heavy drinker. He was leaning back against a radiator, arms folded, softly wheezing authority.

  Ross addressed him now:

  “Captain, first let me give you a short make on our witness here. Name is Bone. Richard Kendall Bone.” Ross picked up a sheet of paper and began to read. “Age thirty-three. Born Chicago Plains, Illinois. Graduate University of Wisconsin nineteen sixty-four. No service record. Worked in sales and marketing, was marketing manager for a pretty large paper products company in Milwaukee at age twenty-eight. Wife and two kids, daughters. Suburban house, country club membership, etcetera. No record at all until three years ago. Then suddenly two busts for driving under the influence. License suspended. Then arrest on a charge of rape—which the woman then dropped. Lost his job and came here to the coast, alone. No steady job since. We got a Wisconsin warrant for desertion and nonsupport, then the wife dropped the charge. A year ago we brought him in on a grand theft charge, a fifteen-hundred-dollar tape recorder a local woman claimed he made off with. But she backed off too.”

  The captain, who had taken out a fat cigar and lovingly unwrapped it, now puffed it into life. “Fascinating,” he wheezed.

  Ross was undaunted. “And though there haven’t been any signed complaints on this yet, some of the men say he’s got a rep around the beach motels as a cocksman. Preys on women who—”

  The captain laughed. “Preys?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Still fascinating.”

  “Well, it does bear on his statement, I think. It bespeaks a certain life orientation, I’d say.”

  The captain waved his cigar in surrender. “All right, Milton. Jesus Christ, let’s get on with it.”

  Nodding primly, the lieutenant returned to his paper. “Let’s take it from the top then. We’ve checked with the bartender, Murdock, and these people he’s staying with, the Cutters, and they all pretty much back up the time frame he’s given us. He left the bar at approximately eleven-forty. Ran out of gas on Anapamu and abandoned his car, which puts him on the scene at approximately eleven-fifty. And that coincides with the testimony of the tenants there—that’s when the body was dumped, when they heard all the racket. Bone then proceeded on foot to the Cutter place. The body was discovered—and we got our first call—at twelve
-twenty. At one-forty-five we received the anonymous call regarding Bone.”

  “Anonymous to you,” Bone put in.

  Ross looked up from his sheet of paper. “The Cutters bear you out on that. Maybe it was this Erickson. But we haven’t been able to locate him yet.”

  “Why bother?”

  “What’s this?” the captain asked.

  “A young friend of Cutter’s passing through town,” Ross explained. “He was at the Cutters’ house last night. Left after an altercation with Bone.”

  The captain nodded vague comprehension. “Go on.”

  “That’s about it. And you’ve got his statement.”

  “So I have.” Sighing, the captain worked a sheet of paper out of his rumpled suit-coat pocket and unfolded it, scanned it. “Yeah, and it ain’t much, is it? A man in silhouette…heavy…large head…period.”

  “That’s what I saw,” Bone said.

  The captain looked up at him. “Oh, we understand that, Mr. Bone. And we’ve got no quarrel there, believe me. Last thing we need is inventive witnesses. No, that’s not the problem. It’s the other—your refusal to go through our mug file or view a lineup. You know, we keep pretty close tabs on sex offenders around here, and a case like this, well it’s no trouble to run ’em in front of a witness, no trouble at all. You never know, one of ’em just might ring a bell.”

  “I didn’t see a face,” Bone said. “I can’t identify a face.”

  “Just a silhouette, huh?”

  “That’s right. A shape. A dark shape.”

  The captain smiled coldly. “Maybe the Prince of Darkness.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Bone said.

  “Don’t know the gent, huh?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Well, you are indeed fortunate.” The captain, apparently a realist, slowly stood erect. Putting away Bone’s statement, he added, “So be it, then. Just thought I’d put in my two cents. Because this thing’s really got folks all shook up. You wouldn’t believe the calls I got this morning already. People want this guy awful bad. And I think I know why. It’s the trashcan, I figure that’s what bugs them. Why not dump the body in a ditch somewhere or on the beach, huh? Or up in the foothills? No, not this guy. He chooses a trashcan. And I think it says something about him, something not very nice. Something people can’t accept.”

  Bone said nothing.

  At the door, the captain looked back at Ross. “You tell him about the autopsy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Crushed trachea and fractured skull,” the captain told Bone. “Semen in the throat and on her face. Blood type O.” He shook his head slowly, in wonderment. “Seventeen years old too. A cheerleader. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Still Bone said nothing.

  The old man lifted one hand slightly and let it drop as he went out, a gesture of futility or parting. Bone was not sure which. And he did not care. He had been patient up to now, very patient, considering that he had spent half the long night and morning trying to convince platoons of detectives that he was a witness to a body-dumping, that was all, not the murderer they at first thought him to be, hoped him to be, and then once they had accepted this, to have to battle through the rest of the morning to defend the integrity of what he had seen, or more accurately, not seen. So he figured he had been patient enough, had played that poor man’s game as long as he could.

  Crushing out his cigarette, he moved toward the door. “I’m leaving now,” he said. “Either that or I call a lawyer.”

  Ross lifted his phone, stabbed a button. “One minute, Bone. Just one minute more, I promise.” Into the phone, he said, “Send her in.”

  Through the office door window, Bone saw one of the secretaries in the bullpen area nod to a young woman sitting next to her desk. The young woman got up and headed for Ross’s office. She was small and very trim, with eyes that looked incapable of surprise, expected anything from anybody.

  “Who’s she?” Bone asked.

  “The victim’s sister, Valerie. Supported the girl, I understand. The mother too, an invalid.”

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “Just tell her what you saw, that’s all.”

  “Why not you?”

  “I don’t think she’d believe it from me. She’d think we were snowing her, not doing our job, you know.”

  “So you want me to do it for you.”

  Ross shrugged. Finally he was enjoying himself. “It’s your story, not ours.”

  After the girl came in, Ross curtly introduced her to Bone and then explained that Bone had been on the scene last night and had witnessed the “disposal” of the body, a word choice that did not seem to embarrass the lieutenant at all. Then he gave the floor to Bone, who told her exactly what he had told the police, not embellishing his story or apologizing for its inadequacy.

  She turned back to Ross. “So you don’t really have anything yet. You don’t know who.”

  “Not yet. No.”

  She smiled slightly, brutally. “But you will, of course.”

  Ross did not return her smile. “You can count on it,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  Bone liked the girl. He regretted not having more to give her. But he said nothing. His minute was up, his long night of patience. As he opened the door, Ross tried to get in a few last words:

  “Don’t leave town. If you have to, get in touch with me or Verdugo. And try to remember. Try—”

  But Bone had already closed the door behind him.

  When he emerged from the police station he found Cutter waiting for him, stretched out like a lizard in the sun on one of the stone parapets bordering the front stairs. He knocked on Cutter’s false leg, and the one eye opened.

  “I’m out,” Bone announced.

  Cutter sat up, yawned. “So you are. Jesus, this sun feels great.” He struggled erect and started to cane his way down the stairs. “You know, if I’d had a tin cup here I could’ve made a fortune.”

  “You’d only blow it.”

  “Car’s down the street,” Cutter told him. “Mo and the kid too. Nobody’s slept worth a shit. You really screwed us up, you know that? I had to baby-sit out here while they grilled Mo and then vice versa.”

  “What about Ronnie? They have her in too?”

  “Wanted to, I guess. But she took off. Your little black piece is long gone.”

  “Good.”

  “Not all that great, huh?”

  “Not worth this.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “What about my car?”

  Cutter ignored the question. “The gendarmes had me in there almost two hours, can you believe that?”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? Maybe because I got bored—I asked one of them if this was all they wanted me for, to find out about you.”

  “Smart,” Bone said.

  “Yeah, wasn’t it though?” Cutter grinned like a demented wolf. “First thing I knew there were three of them working on me, all with the same question: What else is there? So I broke down and confessed. Sodomy…double parking…”

  His laughter rattled down the street.

  Bone shook his head. “They’re gonna lock you up one of these days. They’re gonna eat the key.”

  “But when, huh? You never tell me the important things.”

  Bone tried to go back. “My car, Alex. You still haven’t told me.”

  “Guess.”

  “Twenty-five?”

  “More.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten for parking on a thoroughfare. Thirty for towing. And four-fifty storage a day.”

  Bone’s stomach knotted. “Oh, Christ no. That much?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  When they reached the car, they found Mo lying back on the front seat smoking a cigarette while the baby stood next to her crying and pulling her hair, trying to make himself heard over the radio, which was booming a Carly Simon number. Cutter, who ignored the infan
t almost entirely, simply opened the car door and stood waiting until Mo finally crawled into the back with the baby and started to change him.

  “I was waiting until you got here,” she explained, as the men slid into the front. “One diaper left, and if we’re going out to lunch—”

  “Damn!” Cutter was trying unsuccessfully to start the car. “I told you not to play the goddamn radio with the motor off!” he yelled.

  Bone lit a cigarette and settled back, trying to loosen the knot in his stomach. His MG was bad enough, but at least it was a gift. He had not paid a dime for it. This, on the other hand, this grossly ugly 1948 Packard Clipper convertible, was Cutter’s by choice, something he had intentionally acquired and expensively restored for no better reason than that it was the same make and model his late father had once owned and made his rounds in, tooling back and forth between the country club and the yacht harbor and the family digs near the Mission, a huge old house now converted into a warren of apartments.

  “They getting anywhere yet?” Mo asked Bone.

  He shook his head. “Same as before. One blind eyewitness.”

  “What did they say, you don’t look blind?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I imagine they’re—well, disappointed.”

  “I guess.”

  “And you really can’t blame them,” she said. “I mean, here’s this grown man, this nice clean-cut sort of establishment type, and he sees the culprit right across a little old side street dumping a body, practically eyeball-to-eyeball with the guy—and what can he tell them about it? Nothing. I’d be, uh, disappointed too.”

  Cutter was still grinding his foot against the starter. “Get off his goddamn back, will you, Mo!”

  “What do you mean, off his back?” she protested. “I’m not on your back, am I, Rich? My God, I come down here to testify for him. I clean up the floor after him and his little Afro friend. Why I even wash his come towels.”

  Cutter was not listening. “Come on! Come on!” he yelled, as the engine turned over faster.

  Bone, however, had heard her. Glancing back at her, he tried to read her look, weigh the pain or contempt hiding behind the slight smile of mockery. But she turned to the baby and began to nuzzle him. And just then the engine caught.