Cutter and Bone

by Newton Thornburg

“Something like that.”

  “Way to go.”

  As he was about to sit down Bone realized that Valerie had not moved. Turning, he followed her gaze to the back of the house, where he saw Teresa standing just inside the screen door, staring out at the three of them.

  “Is there some other place we could talk?” the girl asked. “Someplace private?”

  Bone wanted to tell her there was no reason for privacy, that what little he had to say could be said right where they were. But her look, the steady open gaze, did not invite hostility.

  “Sure,” he said. “Come on.”

  They followed him into his room at the end of the garage, where he got out a bottle of scotch he had appropriated from the house. As he poured drinks for the three of them, Cutter again went into his cornpone wonderment act at Bone’s rapid rise in the world.

  “Red Label yet,” he clucked. “Didn’t I tell you, Val—we follow this cat and we shall wear diamonds.”

  “Diamonds I’m not interested in,” she said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  Bone heard in that a clear suggestion they cut the small talk and get down to business. But Cutter apparently was not ready yet.

  “So you think all this is better than our davenport,” he said to Bone.

  “All it lacks is Mo.”

  “Is the rent as reasonable, though?”

  “About the same.”

  Alex grinned. “Sure. And God is love.”

  Bone looked over at Valerie, who had sat down in the room’s only easy chair. Still very cool and controlled, she had taken out a cigarette, tapped it firm, lit it. And for some reason Bone found it irritating that there was not one thing about the girl, not her manner or her clear hard eyes or even her attire—the casual tan flare slacks and white cableknit sweater—nothing that hinted at loss or bereavement. She could have been a job applicant.

  “I guess you know why I came here with Alex,” she said now.

  “I’ve got a fair idea.”

  “I was wondering if you’d changed your mind. I mean about what you saw that night.”

  Bone shook his head. “No. No change.”

  “Specifically I was wondering if you’d decided this man Wolfe was the one you saw.”

  “J. J. Wolfe, you mean? The tycoon?”

  “Yes.”

  Smiling, Bone looked over at Cutter. “Now where could she have gotten an idea like that?”

  Cutter shrugged innocently.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bone,” the girl kept on, “but none of this is a joke to me. It’s very serious.”

  Bone did not feel like apologizing. “I never thought otherwise,” he said.

  “It’s just his way,” Cutter put in. “He can’t help himself. He doesn’t have normal human feelings like the rest of us.”

  “The truth is I can’t see any reason for putting you through all this,” Bone told her. “It’s a dead end. And Alex knows it.”

  “He said you’d say that.”

  “Oh? And what else did he tell you?”

  “How it happened. I mean what you said. And then how you changed what you said.”

  “You’re talking about the picture now?”

  “Yes.”

  Bone said that was not quite accurate. “Actually it was an offhand kind of thing,” he explained. “When I saw the picture in the paper I guess I said something about it looking like the man—the silhouette—in the alley. But then, when I noticed my friend here about to have a coronary, I backed up and tried to tell him exactly what I meant. Which is what I told you in the police station, and what I’ll tell you now—I don’t know who killed your sister. I didn’t see the man’s face.”

  For a time Valerie sat there looking at him. And her expression made it very clear that none of this surprised her, just as none of it convinced her.

  “So you didn’t mean it,” she said finally. “When you said It’s him—it was only an offhand thing?”

  “I don’t think I even said It’s him,” Bone corrected. “What I said was It could be him, something like that.”

  Valerie looked over at Cutter, who was shaking his head.

  “I take it you prefer his version,” Bone said to the girl.

  She did not answer.

  “Well, you can believe what you want, of course.”

  “I’d like to believe you.”

  “I’d like that too.”

  Valerie crushed out her cigarette. “Let me ask you this, then—could you accept it that you might have been right without knowing it?”

  Bone said he didn’t follow her.

  “I mean if what Alex and I have learned about this Wolfe makes it seem he actually was the man—then would you change your mind?”

  “About what I saw?”

  His emphasis on the verb must have been answer enough for her, for she shook her head now even before he did. And she turned to Cutter, her gaze inquiring, bleak.

  “I told you, kiddo,” he said to her. “You can’t get blood out of a cadaver.”

  Bone raised his middle finger to him in silent reply.

  Valerie meanwhile had decided on a different approach. “I’d still like you to hear what we’ve found out about Wolfe. That couldn’t hurt anything, could it?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Evidently he did not, for she barely paused for breath.

  “Well, in the first place, I guess you know Alex contacted me a couple of days ago, before the funeral, and I told him I was interested but of course we had to wait.”

  “Till after you got her in the ground.” Bone immediately regretted saying it, even though what he saw in her eyes was not pain or anger so much as impatience.

  “Till we buried my sister, yes. Anyway, yesterday at the library we got everything we could on Wolfe—the Time article and Who’s Who, they were the main things. We Xeroxed them so you can go over them too.”

  “Fine. Thank you. I look forward to reading it.”

  “The Time article for instance tells how Wolfe likes to go into working-class bars alone and talk with what he calls ‘the real people,’ people different from the Harvard Business School types he hires to help run his conglomerate. And then—the important part for us—the article says he also makes it a habit to pick up hitchhikers, especially kids, because he likes their inputs—a favorite word of his.”

  “I see,” Bone said. “Well, then of course he’s guilty.” He wanted to be straight with her, but raillery seemed his only defense.

  She went on as before. “And Alex already told you about Wolfe being at the cocktail party across from the Stone Sponge, where my sister was earlier in the evening. If she left alone she would have hitchhiked.”

  “I see the connection.”

  “Later yesterday Alex and I checked gas stations between the apartments where he left my sister’s body and the Biltmore. At a Union 76 just off the freeway one of the employees remembers selling a man two gallon gas cans and filling them with gas—around midnight, on the night it happened. Alex showed him Wolfe’s picture from Time—just the picture, we didn’t tell him Wolfe’s name—but he wasn’t sure. He said all he remembered about the man was that he had on a golf cap and sunglasses even though it was night.”

  Now Cutter joined in. “You dig the sequence, Richard? Let’s say you are Wolfe. You’ve been to a cocktail party, you’d got five or six drinks under your belt. And because it is your habit, you pick up this teenage hitchhiker. You kill her and dump her body for God knows what reason—an accident maybe—but no matter, whatever the reason, it’s unimportant now. The important thing is you have this rented car, with blood in it. And you don’t know if someone has seen you with the girl, either when she was alive or when you were getting rid of her body. So what do you do? Do you run into your motel room and get a wet rag and tidy up the car? Do you fold your hands and hope for the best? Not if you’re slick enough to turn an Ozark chicken farm into an empire. No you simply get a couple of cans of gas and soak the car with one of them, op
en the other and toss a match in the window. And then you cry militant. You claim some ecofreak like Erickson is out to get you, scare you. And of course the police and FBI and the media—everybody believes. Because you’ve got the bread. You’ve got the power and the glory, the God-given proof of your righteousness forever and ever amen.”

  Bone shook his head in wonderment. “You have been busy, Alex.”

  “You know it.”

  Bone got up and poured himself another drink, lit a cigarette. As he did so, he was not unaware of how Valerie was watching him, almost as if he were about to pass sentence on her. And it angered him, because this whole ridiculous affair was not his doing but Cutter’s, and he felt Cutter should have been the one held responsible for any pain or disappointment that grew out of it. So for the moment Bone decided to play along, to let the thing die a natural death instead of killing it outright.

  “Okay,” he said, “so you have this new information, and this fine logical hypothesis. What next? What do you do with it? Where does it lead?”

  Valerie looked questioningly at Cutter, as if for permission, and he shrugged assent.

  “Blackmail,” she said.

  Bone laughed out loud.

  “We pretend blackmail, that’s all,” Valerie corrected. “If Wolfe pays, then we have him. We can go to the police.”

  For a time Bone said nothing. He sat on the corner of his bed studying the two of them, Valerie all straightness and solemnity while Cutter predictably took the opposite ground, his canted smile suggesting the usual Chinese box of irony, appearance inside deception inside illusion.

  Bone asked Valerie if she thought Cutter would be with her. “You think he’s pushing this thing just to see a man brought to justice?” he added.

  But Valerie had an answer for that too. “If it turns out Wolfe did do it, and if he does pay, Alex admitted he’d probably try to talk us into keeping the money and leaving everything just as it is, no police or anything. But he also said it would be up to me finally, she was my sister, it would be my decision. And frankly, Mr. Bone, I don’t know which way I’d go. I’m not sure which would be truer justice—that the state get a conviction or my mother and I get some money. We had to borrow for the funeral. We’re broke. And she’s sick. So I admit I don’t know what I’d do finally. All I know is, if there’s any chance this is the man who did what was done to my sister—I want him to pay. He has to pay. And I don’t much care who he pays—us or society.”

  Bone drained the last of his drink. He was still angry but in a different way now, not at Cutter so much as at himself, that the girl made him feel personally guilty, as if he were failing her somehow.

  “If I were to join this thing, it’d be to help you,” he said. “I’d like that. But I’ve got this problem. I can’t see committing perjury so your new buddy here can goof off on Ibiza.”

  Cutter laughed at that, a flat mirthless laugh.

  “You sanctimonious prick, Bone,” he said. “Where do you get off thinking I got to justify myself to you? Who the hell are you anyway? The fastest dick on the beach? Big deal. That really qualifies you to go around moralizing, doesn’t it. In a pig’s ass.”

  The only difference between Cutter angry and Cutter joking were the words he used; his voice and expression remained the same. And Bone always figured this was because the man lived so consistently at the edge of rage that a hairline closer made no noticeable difference in him. But if Bone had seen and heard it all before, Valerie had not, and she stared at Cutter in open shock as he loped up and down the small room, grinning and murmuring in rage.

  “But let me tell you, my friend. Just this once, just for the hell of it, for my own amusement, I think maybe I’ll let you into the holy of holies for a moment or two and give you a taste of truth for a change, my truth, Richie, and it is simply this—I don’t like this motherfucker Wolfe and all the motherfuckers like him, all the movers and shakers of this world, kiddo, because I saw them too many times, and I saw the people they moved and shook. I saw the soft white motherfuckers in their civvies and flak jackets come slicking in from Long Binh to look us over out in the boonies, see that everything was going sweet and smooth, the killing and the cutting and the sewing up, and then they’d grunt and fart and squeeze their way back into their choppers and slick on back to Washington or Wall Street or Peoria and say on with the show, America, a few more bombs will do it, a few more arms and legs. And I don’t care if they were as smooth as the Bundys or as cornpone as Senator Eastland or this cat Wolfe, one fact was always the same, is always the same—it’s never their ass they lay on the line, man, never theirs, but ours, mine.”

  He paused a few moments for breath, stood over Bone smiling still, trembling.

  “So don’t judge me, baby, okay? Don’t put me down for a money-grubber altogether. Ninety percent maybe. But there’s still the rest, this little tithe of rage I got, this ten cents of gut hate.”

  Bone did not apologize. With an actor as consummate as Cutter, one could not be sure of anything. There was also the little matter of last night’s eery bedside confessional; it had presented a quite different rationale for blackmail.

  “So you just pick out one of them,” Bone said. “You pick him out and blackmail him.”

  “You picked him out!” Cutter shot back.

  Lighting another cigarette, Bone got up and walked over to the open door. Across the yard, in the house, he saw Teresa again, this time busily cleaning one of the dining room windows, which afforded her an unobstructed view of his apartment. He almost waved to her, then thought better of it. Turning back to his guests, he decided it was time to put an end to their fantasy.

  “It won’t work,” he said. “It can’t work.”

  “Hell it can’t,” Cutter persisted.

  “Let’s say it turns out our Wolfe is innocent. Naturally he goes straight to the police. What happens then?”

  “We tell them the truth,” Valerie said. “The whole thing was just a way of flushing him, that’s all. An attempt to find out if he was the one.”

  “It’s still attempted blackmail, a felony.”

  “But the police would see why we did it, I mean, especially in my case. She was my sister. And we couldn’t go to them with our suspicions, since you don’t know, you aren’t sure, you can’t testify you saw him.”

  “And they just forgive and forget, huh? Drop the charges, wipe the slate clean?”

  “So they wouldn’t, so what?” Cutter said.

  “But the other side’s no better,” Bone went on. “I mean if your hundred-to-one chance proves out, and Wolfe actually is the one. Well, he’s no dummy. As you said, he built a two-by-four chicken farm up into a conglomerate, so it’s safe to assume he knows his way around. Now, as the guilty party, one thing he’d know for sure is that I’ve already signed a statement I didn’t see anything but a silhouette that night. No one’s face. Not his, not anybody’s. So how do I change my testimony, I mean change it and get anyone to believe it? No way. The dumbest thing Wolfe could do would be to pay up. It would be an admission of guilt—an admission he doesn’t have to make.”

  For the first time Valerie looked doubtful, and she turned to Cutter, who of course had an answer.

  “Sure, it would be dumb,” he said. “Which makes it almost foolproof. Because that’s just what scared people do—they do dumb things. I’ve seen kids pick up Cong hardware they knew was probably booby-trapped, yet they picked it up anyway, and got zapped for their trouble. So don’t give us logic, man. If Wolfe is our boy, he’s already proved how dumb he is, how sick. We come after him, he’ll cave in. Believe me.”

  Bone said nothing more for a time. He sat back on the bed, practically sagged onto it, almost as if he were giving in, preparing to settle back and start making plans with his guests. Instead he slipped sideways and disappeared.

  “Okay, then. You two are that sure, go ahead. You don’t need me. Just tell him I saw him—that should do the trick. And that way you’ll only have to split
the money two ways.”

  Cutter snorted with contempt. “Come on, Val,” he said, moving toward the door. “It’s like trying to seduce a eunuch.”

  At the doorway, Valerie looked back at Bone. “Think about it though, won’t you?” And then offhand, apparently as an afterthought, she said, “Did they show you her body?”

  Bone shook his head. “There was no reason to.”

  “I was just wondering, that’s all. Because if they had, I think maybe you’d be with us.”

  “Could be.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Little returned home that evening, pulling in just after seven o’clock in a Mark IV Continental. From his room at the end of the garage, where he had been lying in bed reading among other things the Xeroxes of the Time magazine article and the Who’s Who entry on J. J. Wolfe, Bone was able to observe the couple as they alighted from the big maroon car, and separately, not speaking, crossed the driveway and entered their house, which was empty now, Teresa having once more abandoned these shores of Anglo tranquillity for the troubled seas of home. Mr. Little surprised Bone somewhat, looking more like a fiftyish male model than the fragile egghead types who in Bone’s business experience normally turned up in computer services work. Little however was tall and lean, with a deep tan and close-cropped gray hair and that just-so look of hairy masculinity, authority, and success one found pushing expensive whiskeys and big cars in the pages of the national magazines.

  Bone considered going over to the house and introducing himself to his new boss, and in the process letting Mrs. Little know that he was here and on the job. But he thought better of it. If Mrs. Little wanted to introduce him, all she had to do was come out and get him.

  And minutes later that was exactly what she appeared to be doing. She came walking hurriedly across the yard, knocked once on the door, and entered.

  “Good,” she said. “You’re still here.”

  “Still?”

  “I talked with Teresa yesterday. Long distance.”

  “She didn’t mention it.” He had gotten out of bed now and was thinking of asking her to sit down, but her manner—breathless and excited—put him off.