Tough Guys Don't Dance

  “You want to buy the estate in order to keep Patty Lareine from getting it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What would you do with it?”

  “I would take great pleasure in hiring a caretaker to watch over its empty glories. Calculated to put dry rot into every one of Patty Lareine’s apertures.”

  “But what better can she do, if she gets it?”

  He held up a white plump hand. “This is just my speculation.”

  “Yes.”

  “Newport is Newport, and you can leave it where it is. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket have become no better than real estate. The Hamptons are a disaster! Le Frak City is more attractive on Sunday.”

  “Provincetown is jammed worse than any of them.”

  “Yes, in summer it’s hopeless, but then, so are all the other spots on the Eastern seaboard. The point is, Provincetown has natural beauty. The others are nature’s culls. And for fall, winter and spring, nothing is superior to little old P-town. I suspect that Patty Lareine wants to start a chic hotel right there on that estate. Done properly, it could, in a few years, have more cachet than anything around. In the off-season, once in, it could sweep all before it. That’s how Patty is thinking, I reckon. And, with proper assistants, she would make a fabulous hotelier. Tim, whether I’m right or wrong, I know this. She’s got her heart set on the place.” He sighed. “Now that Lonnie’s packed it in and the blonde has disappeared, I’ve got to find a representative in a hurry or go speak for myself. That will kick the price way up.”

  I began to laugh. “You’ve convinced me,” I said. “You’d rather screw Patty on a piece of real estate than kill her.”

  “You bet.” He made his point of laughing with me. I didn’t know what to believe. His story sounded wrong.

  We watched the waves for a while.

  “I adored Patty Lareine,” he said. “I don’t want to bring out the crying towel, but for a little while, she made me feel like a man. I always say that if you’re AC-DC, it’s nice to have power in both lines.”

  I smiled.

  “Well, it was no laughing matter. All my life, I would remind you, I’ve been trying to regain property rights to my rectum.”

  “Given up?”

  “I’m the only one who would care what the answer is by now.”

  “Back in my chauffeuring days, Patty Lareine used to harangue me on how we had to off you, Wardley. She would say that there would be no peace until you were dead. That if we didn’t kill you, you would certainly kill us. She said she’d known some evil types in her day, but you were the most vindictive. You had, she said, so much time to plot and scheme.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “No, not really. I kept thinking of the day we got kicked out of school together.”

  “Is that why you didn’t try to terminate me? I always wondered. Because, you know, I didn’t suspect a thing. I always trusted you.”

  “Wardley, you have to see my situation. I was broke. I had a police record and couldn’t work any good places as a bartender, and the wealthiest woman I ever knew acted as if she was mad about me, and promised me all the drugs and booze and toys that money could buy. I did get pretty serious about how I was going to total you. Psyched myself up. But I couldn’t get that heavy shit to flush. Know why?”

  “Of course not. I’m asking.”

  “Because, Wardley, I kept thinking of the time you got your moxie together and inched out along a third-floor ledge to get into your father’s room. That story moved me. You were one wimp who got his nerve up. Finally, I had to call it off. You can choose not to believe me.”

  He laughed, and then he laughed again. The sound of his humor as it cawed through his bends brought a flight of sea gulls near, much as if he were the lead bird crying out, “Here’s food, here’s food!”

  “That’s marvelous,” he said. “Patty Lareine’s plans gone kerflooie because you didn’t have the heart to kill the little boy on the ledge. Well, I’ve enjoyed this talk and am delighted that as old classmates we are finally getting to know one another. Let me fill you in on what a liar I used to be. I never inched out along that ledge. I made up the tale. Everybody has to have a war story in prison, so that became mine. I wanted people to recognize that I was too desperate to fool around with. But the truth is that I gained entry to my father’s private library by way of the butler—who was also the photographer, remember? He just took out his key and let me in. And all for no more than the promise that I would unbutton his fly—old-fashioned buttons for the butler, not zippers!—and go gooey-gooey down there. Which I did. I always pay my debts. Paris is well worth a Mass!”

  With that he stood up, lifted his shoes on high as if he were the Statue of Liberty, and started off. When he was ten feet away, he turned around and said, “Who knows when Patty Lareine may pop in on you? If you get the impulse, off her. Her head, since we have to put a figure on it, is worth two million and change.” Then he lowered the arm that was carrying the shoes and pranced off on stiff cold feet.

  He was not out of earshot before I told myself that if I could find the blonde head that had now disappeared, that very blonde head which probably belonged to Jessica Pond, it might, by now, be sufficiently decomposed to be successfully presented as the remains of Patty Lareine. I might be the lucky inheritor of a high-powered scam. Tricky as hell, but worth two million.

  Then I told myself: Anyone who is capable of thinking this way is capable of homicide.

  Then I told myself: Thought is cheap. The best guide to my innocence is that the idea of such a scam hardly stirs me.

  I waited until Meeks Wardley Hilby III was a distance down the beach before I went back to my Porsche, and left Marconi Beach for the drive to Provincetown.

  On the way home I learned a little more about the tarnished nature, on occasion, of coincidence.

  It seemed to me that I was being followed. I could not swear to this because I could not locate a car behind me. When I would speed, no vehicle came rushing up to keep me in sight. Even as I might sometimes sense, however, who was on the telephone before I picked it up, so now I could not relinquish the conviction that somebody was on my tail. They might be keeping a good distance, but they were following. Had a beeper been put on my Porsche?

  I turned right down a side road for a hundred yards and parked. No other car came along. I got out and looked in the front trunk, and at the motor in the rear. Under the back bumper I found a small black box, half the size of a pack of cigarettes, held in place by a magnet.

  The black box made no noise and offered no ticking. It felt inert in my hand. I could not be certain what it was. I replaced it, therefore, on the bumper, went back to Route 6, and drove for another mile. Then I parked at the summit of a long straightaway. I kept a pair of field glasses in the side pocket for watching gulls and I scanned the highway with them. There, behind me, just within the useful range of these binoculars, was a brown van also parked on the shoulder. Had they stopped when I did? Were they waiting for me to start up again? I kept driving until I came to Pamet Road in Truro, which went east from the highway for a mile, then north for a mile, then back west to join the four-lane. Three quarters of the way around I stopped at a turn where I could see much of the southern arm of Pamet Road on the other side of the Pamet River Valley, and again the brown vehicle had halted. I had seen this closed brown van before, I knew it!

  I parked my car by a house and stepped back into the woods. Whoever was in the van waited another ten minutes but then must have concluded that I was visiting someone, so they drove by to look at the house before which my Porsche was parked, then turned around to go back from where they had come. I listened to the motor, which was not hard to follow. Our roads are empty in winter. It was the only sound in the valley.

  Now they stopped again, perhaps three hundred yards away. They would wait for me to start up. The beeper would tell them when I began to move.

  I was inclined, what with all natural sense of outrage, t
o throw their gadget right into the woods—or, better, leave it on some parked car and oblige my followers to wait on Pamet Road for the rest of the night. But I was too furious for that. It offended me that the exceptional meeting of Wardley and myself on Marconi Beach came down to no more than using a beeper to follow my Porsche. Apparently the first precept to recollect was that not all coincidence was diabolical or divine. I was back with the common people!

  After all, it was not Wardley I had seen behind the wheel of the van, but Spider Nissen, and Stoodie was in the bucket seat beside him. Wardley was doubtless reading Ronald Firbank in some country inn with a CB radio at his side waiting for Spider and Stoodie to send the word.

  Yes, I would keep the beeper, I told myself. Maybe I could use it to good purpose when the opportunity arose. That, however, was only a small satisfaction, considering how much unrest this little machine aroused in my blood, but I could now recognize that the more events began to impinge on me, the closer I could come to the first cause.

  SIX

  After all these maneuvers on the highway, I was angry, I was curious, I was thirsty, and it occurred to me I had not been in a bar since the night at The Widow’s Walk. Ergo, so soon as I came back to my house, I parked and walked down to the town wharf. We have good bars in the center of town: The Bay State (which we call The Brig), The Poop Deck and The Fish and Bait (unofficially renamed The Bucket of Blood to honor the number of fights that take place in there), good bars, but you would not call them great, for they have none of the working-class panache that bartenders like my father bring to a place. Still, they are dark, and just dirty enough to make you comfortable. One can hunker down to drinking as comfortably as an unborn babe in a good dependable womb. Few fluorescent tubes will be overhead and the old jukebox is too feeble to blast your ears. In summer, of course, a bar like The Brig would be more crowded than a New York subway at rush hour, and the story is told—I believe it—that one summer some PR men at Budweiser or Schaefer or one of those warm-urine brews decided to run a contest for the bar-and-restaurant that sold the most beer in the state of Massachusetts. Well, a place in Provincetown called the Bay State showed the greatest volume of beer sales for July. So, on a weekday morning in August, some high executives in lightweight summer suits flew over, accompanied by a television crew, to film the presentation of the award, expecting no doubt to drop in on one of those lobster cum fish-and-chips places, large as an armory, that you can find around Hyannis, and instead encountered our dark, funky Brig with no customers rich enough to buy anything better than ale, but two hundred beer drinkers packed in standing up. Maybe The Brig was the length of a boxcar from the front door to the stinking garbage cans in the rear, and for food, you could get a submarine with ham and cheese or linguiça sausage. The TV cameras rolled and the freaks stood up and said, “Yeah, that’s the beer. Stinks. What you got that red light on your TV camera for? I’m talking too much, right? Stop! Right?”

  Well, in winter it was still crowded, but you could sit down and take a taste of the marrow of the mood of what was coming down in the town that day. A lot of commercial fishing boats would return by afternoon and the crews would be drinking. The carpenters and the dope dealers and the narcs and some of the handymen for summer cottages, and unwed young mothers on Fridays with their welfare checks, and others generally scuffling for bread or looking for a friend to buy them a glass were also downing our good urine. I knew most of these people in varying degree and would speak of them if they figured in what was happening to me now, since they were all most individual no matter how much they looked alike, but in winter, as I say, we looked alike. We were sallow, and everybody dressed in Army surplus clothes.

  Let one story suffice. I live in a Portuguese town, after all, and have no natives in my story but Stoodie, who is a disgrace to the Portuguese. One afternoon in winter when The Brig was unnaturally empty, a Portuguese fisherman about eighty years old was sitting at the bar. He was as bent over and twisted from a life of work as a cypress growing out of a boulder on a rocky coast. Into the bar walked another fisherman as arthritic as himself. They had grown up together, played football together, graduated from high school together, worked on fishing boats together, got drunk together, probably seduced each other’s wives, and now at eighty didn’t like each other any more than when they used to have fist fights in recess. The first, nonetheless, got off his stool, stood up, and bellowed across the bar in a voice as hoarse as the March wind, “I thought you was dead!” The other stopped, glared back, and out of a larynx shrill as a gull, replied, “Dead? I’ll go to your funeral.” They had a beer together. It was merely another exercise in dispelling the spirits. The Portuguese know how to bark when they speak.

  We imitate them. In other places, they measure the acid rain, or the index of air pollution, or the amount of dioxin in the soil. Here, where we have no industries but fishing, and room renting, and no farming, the air and sand are clean, but it is a rare day when you cannot feel the weight of spirits in a bar, and when I walked in full of my sleepless nights with the wraiths of Hell-Town, I could feel everybody’s awareness of me. I might just as well have been a spill of ink in a pool. I was about as welcome as a sullen log on a slow smoldering fire.

  All the same, each bar, like each hearth, had, as I had observed through working a few, something like the same hitches to their habits. The log that smokes up one fireplace gets another ablaze, and the mixture of my depression, my good store of adrenaline at being followed, plus the company of manic, anxious haunts I doubtless carried in my hair soon put The Brig in a roaring mood. People who had been expiring at their own tables got up and moved to others. Dudes and their old ladies who had hardly been speaking began to feel the rosy itch. And I, who in this hour may have been closeted with horror more than anyone there—winters in Provincetown can be named by whose year it is for that—took the credit to myself for such kindling, although I did no more than nod to a face in my path and take up an insular position by the bar.

  Pete the Polack was the first to approach, and we had a short conversation that came near to twisting my neck on its bearings. “Hey,” he began, “I been talking to your wife.”

  “Today?”

  He took a while replying. My dry throat had a little difficulty managing to ask the question, and by then he was in the middle of slugging down his beer. Besides, his mind had already disconnected as well. That happened often in The Brig. People would start conversations, and their brains, particularly on beer and speed, would veer off like waterbugs.

  “Today,” said Pete, “no. Couple of days ago.”

  “When?”

  He waved his hand. “Couple of days.” He could as well have said, “A couple of weeks ago.” I had noticed that winter people kept constant intervals for time. Something could have happened two weeks ago, or two nights ago, but if it was your habit to say, “Five days ago,” then that was how you would remember it. So I pushed him no further. Instead I returned to the topic.

  “What did Patty want to talk to you about?”

  “Oh, yeah. Hey. She wants me to look after the big house on the hill in the West End.”

  “The one she’s thinking of buying?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Wants you to look after it?”

  “Well, me and my brother.”

  It made sense. The brother was a good carpenter. In effect, Pete was saying that his brother would take care of the place. Patty might have asked Pete to contact him.

  I knew it was stupid, but I had to ask. “Can you remember if you talked to her before or after the Patriots game?”

  “Oh, yeah, that game.” He nodded profoundly. The speed was taking him somewhere deep. He pondered—whatever it was—the game, the date, the money in his back pocket, then he shook his head. “About two days ago.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “figures.”

  Beth Nissen slipped up to us. She was drunk, which was rare for her, and she was animated, which was even more unus
ual.

  “What did you do to Spider?” she asked me.

  “Hey, honey,” Pete said, “old hassles is old hassles. I got to move on.” He bent over, kissed her sweater where her nipple ought to have been and took his beer down the road to a table.

  “Is Spider truly hassled?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Her eyes turned starry. “Spider is crazy.”

  “Well, we all are,” I said.

  “Don’t you believe that you and I are crazy in a special way?” she said.

  “How?”

  “We’ve never fucked each other.”

  That was par for winter. I made a point of laughing and put my arm around her waist, and her pale eyes stared out from behind her eyeglasses with a far-gone electric glow.

  “Spider lost his knife,” said Beth, “and claims you stole it.” She giggled as if Spider without his knife was like another man without his pants. “He lost his motorcycle, too,” she said. “Did you tell him the Patriots were going to win?”

  “At half time.”

  “Well, they did win,” said Beth. “But at half time, he decided to reverse his bet. Said he was going against you. Now he says it’s your fault he lost his motorcycle.”

  “Tell Spider to stick it up his giggie.”

  She giggled. “In the Midwest,” she said, “we used to say ‘giggie.’ I think I’ll send a letter to my parents and tell them their daughter can no longer distinguish her pussy from her giggie.” She hiccuped. “I’m not going to tell Spider anything,” she said. “He’s in a terrible mood. After all, why not?” she asked. “The worst are filled with a passionate intensity,’ right?” She gave me an outsize lewd look.

  “How’s Stoodie?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, “watch out for Stoodie.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, “I tell everybody to watch out for Stoodie.”