Cutter and Bone (13 page)

“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.

“My husband’s in the shower,” she said, “so I rushed out here to tell you—I’d just as soon he didn’t meet you yet. I told him I’d hired a new grounds
boy
.”

Bone could not help smiling. “You don’t want me to wander around outside, then.”

“Not for a while, okay? An hour at the most. He’ll be leaving by then—he’s got a meeting in L.A. in the morning.”

“No problem.”

“After he’s gone, though, you come on over. If you want, I mean. Naturally you’re free to come and go as you please.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good. I’ll tell you what—why don’t we go out for dinner? I’m famished myself. How about you?”

“Most of the time.”

“Well, fine then. And, uh—you do have a jacket? A sport coat?”

“Two. And shoes even.”

She laughed at that, too eagerly. “Fine. I’ll see you soon.”

Alone again, and with nothing better to do, Bone once more went over the Xeroxed material on Wolfe. The
Who’s Who
entry was spare to the point of brutality:

WOLFE, J. JAMES corp. exec.: b. Rockhill, Mo., Aug. 5, 1929; s. Oral and Sarah (Russell) W.; m. Olive Field Hawley, Dec. 15, 1949; children: J. James Jr., Oral C., Virginia F., and Harlan J. Founder & pres. Ozark Poultry Co-op. 1949-55; founder & pres. Ozark Markets, Inc. 1953-58; founder, pres., chrmn. Wolfe Enterprises, Inc. 1959-. Mem. Am. Soc. Sales Execs., American Angus Assoc., Kiwanis Club. Home: RFD Rockhill, Mo. Offices: Rockhill, Mo. 64840; 109 E. 42nd St., N.Y. 10017; 407 Unicorn Drive, Hollywood, Calif. 90028.

That terse, orderly listing bore about as much relation to the J. J. Wolfe in
Time
as a coach’s blackboard diagram did to the blood and thunder of an actual football game. The story was not so much about Wolfe personally as about the general new breed of “conglomerateurs,” as the magazine dubbed them. Wolfe was simply one of the group, and a smallish one at that, certainly no Perrot or Ling or Vesco. But he made for pretty good copy and thus earned himself star billing, the cover portrait and the full-page “box” inside, in which Wolfe the person—the husband and father, the cattleman and aviator, the cornpone maverick—was limned with
Time’s
customary slickness.

Essentially the story presented in the article and the “box” was a simple one, a cliché in fact. Wolfe had been born in southwestern Missouri, the fifth generation of dirt-poor hillbillies who believed in the trinity of hard liquor, a jealous God, and above all “kin,” a concept whose corollary was instant mistrust and hatred of those who were not kin. The men were loggers and chicken farmers and hunters; the women were pregnant; the children, like Wolfe himself, seldom went past the eighth grade in school, dropping out to join their parents in chicken raising and pregnancy.

But from the beginning J. J. Wolfe had been different, almost different in
kind
, a veritable mutant. While his father and brothers and uncles hunted and drank and dreamed, he built the first automated pullet-raising and egg-laying houses in the country, then showed other poultrymen in the area how to do the same thing, and ultimately organized them into a marketing cooperative that rapidly extended down into Arkansas and west into Oklahoma. At twenty years of age, as president of the 400-member Ozark Poultry Cooperative, he borrowed money and started a feed company intended in theory to supply cheaper feed to the co-op’s members, but which in fact ended up binding them to contracts that put Wolfe in virtual control of every member’s operation, dictating not only the feed they were to buy and what price but also where and when and at what profit they could market their eggs and fryers. Thus by his mid-twenties he had a large chunk of national poultry production in his pocket, and he quickly used it to gain control of a small supermarket chain, then a larger one, then moved on into discount stores and other fields entirely.

By the age of thirty he had holdings sufficiently diversified to warrant his setting up Wolfe Enterprises, Incorporated, the holding company that
Time
reported was now a significant factor in almost every segment of the national economy. Wolfe was the nation’s single largest producer of poultry and poultry products; he was the second largest cattle feeder; his holdings in supermarket and discount chains accounted for almost four percent of
all
retail business; and as the article reported, he was also “into” banking and forest products and energy and communications. He was in short a conglomerate. And somehow, reading between the lines of the article, Bone got the feeling that it was a conglomerate held together by paper, a leaning tower of debt.

To Bone, the personal J. J. Wolfe did not sound much more interesting than the corporate one.
Time
tried to make him out as a dedicated family man, but the article also mentioned that he lived away from home much of the time, a good part of it in New York and Hollywood. The article made a big thing of his “folksiness,” the fact that he went tieless most of the time and ate hamburgers for lunch and bought suits off the rack at his discount houses. And it mentioned his habit of going into working-class bars and picking up hitchhikers because he could “learn a damn sight more about people when they think you’re just a dumb redneck—which I guess is what I am anyway.” There were photographs of him with his family on his three-thousand-acre cattle ranch near his Missouri hometown, and there was another photo of him in a hardhat inspecting a new factory. But neither rang any bells for Bone. What he saw was just another tycoon enjoying his spoils. And oddly he did not seem to relate any more closely to the man in the Santa Barbara newspaper photograph than to the figure Bone had seen in the alley. They all seemed like strangers, to each other as well as to him.

Like his slacks, both of Bone’s sport coats were holdovers from his marketing v.p. days in Milwaukee, expensive doubleknit jobs he had bought at MacNeil and Moore’s in the Pfister Hotel building. Neither was altogether unpresentable, merely baggy, dirty, and worn at the elbows, a combination that more and more dictated he choose the darker one, the blue blazer, which in turn dictated the gray Farahs and his trusty peppermint-stripe shirt. So he was not feeling exactly spiffy as he waited in the Littles’ game room working on a martini and watching
M*A*S*H
on the sarcophagus-sized television set, while Mrs. Little was somewhere else in the house putting the final touches on her disguise.

And minutes later, as she came down from upstairs, he saw what a successful disguise it was. From a distance she looked a smashing thirty-five, all lustrous black hair and long-lashed eyes and gleaming lips, the total effect an almost gooey Latin sexiness if anything heightened by her muted tan evening suit. In her smile, however, there was no hint of disguise. She looked happy and excited, and he could only wonder at her prodigious capacity for self-deception.