Awash in my thoughts, I drove through all of town before I came to the simple conclusion that the machete ought to be transferred to my trunk rather than kept beside me in the front seat. I happened to be then at the circle at the end of Commercial Street where the Pilgrims landed and the breakwater now crosses the marsh. There I stopped, lifted my front lid and laid the machete in—its blade was nicked, I noticed—closed the trunk and saw a car stopping behind me.
Wardley got out. He must have put a new beeper on my rear bumper. God, I had not even checked my car.
Now he came toward me. We were all alone by the breakwater and there was just enough moon to see.
“I’d like to talk to you,” he said. He had a gun in his hand. It most certainly had a silencer on its muzzle. And, yes, it looked just like my .22. It took little creative visualization to conceive of the head of the soft-nosed bullet resting in its chamber.
EIGHT
“Wardley,” I said, “you look a mess.” My voice, however, quivered enough to spoil the suggestion that I was feeling no large respect for his firearm.
“I’ve been,” he said, “on a burial detail.”
Even by the uncertain gleam of the moon taking its wan trip through the scud, I could see that he was covered with wet sand up to his hair and eyeglasses.
“Let’s take a walk along the rocks,” he suggested.
“It’ll be difficult,” I told him. “I hurt my foot kicking Stoodie.”
“Yes,” Wardley answered, “he thought you kicked him. He was angry about that.”
“I expected him to come over today.”
“We won’t see Stoodie anymore,” said Wardley.
He made a delicate move with the muzzle of his gun as if pointing me to the most comfortable chair in the room. I set out a few steps in front of him.
It was not easy walking. The breakwater extended for a mile across the sand flats, the marshes and the bay, and you had to pick your route over the jetty boulders. They were level enough on top to form a sort of rough path for much of the way, but now and again you had to leap a four- or five-foot gap, or else go down the angle of one big rock and up another. In the dark, with my injuries, we made slow progress. He did not seem to mind. Behind us, a car would occasionally come along Commercial Street on its way to the circle, and either turn in at the Provincetown Inn or continue past the marshes out to where the highway began, but after we had traversed a few hundred feet of the breakwater, these cars might as well have been a good distance away. Their headlights seemed as removed from us as a ship’s running lamps at sea.
The tide had been high but was going out, and so the tops of the boulders were some eight or ten feet above the water. Beneath was the sound of the sea coming out of the marshes and passing through the jetty. Maybe it was the pain in my foot and the heavy throb of my shoulder, but I was resigned. If my life were to end on this endless breakwater, well, there were worse places, and I listened to the unrest of the gulls, cawing at our nocturnal passage. How loud were these transactions at night! I felt as if I could even hear the eelgrass stirring in the inlets and the sponge eating at the oyster shells. The wrack and sea lace began to breathe on the rocks as the swells undulated from our jetty. It was a windless night which, if not for the chill of November, was reminiscent of summer, given the placidity of the water, but no, a late-fall night it had to be: a northern chill lay upon the calm, telling us of those eternities where the realms of magnetism are icy and still.
“Tired?” he asked.
“Are you planning to go all the way across?”
“Yes,” he said, “and I warn you, after we cross this, you’ve got another half mile along the beach.” He pointed to our left, perhaps midway between where the breakwater ended and the lighthouse at the point a mile farther to the left out at the tip of the long barrier beach of Cape Cod. For all of that mile of beach to the lighthouse there would be no dwelling and no roads, nothing but sand trails for four-wheel vehicles. They would hardly be stirring on a November night.
Hell-Town had once thrived out there.
“It’s quite a walk,” I said.
“See if you can make it,” he replied.
He was keeping a good number of yards behind me in order not to have to carry his gun in his hand, and whenever I came to a difficult passage (and there were one or two descents where the rocks had settled and were slippery from the outgoing tide) he merely waited until I found my way across, then took it himself.
After a time I felt cheered. Local news is most important in catastrophic times, and my toe, broken or not, nonetheless seemed to be flexing a little better, and my bad left arm was finding a few more movements it could make without pain. Besides, I did not feel totally afraid. Despite what I knew of him in prison, I could not always take Wardley seriously. I had, after all, seen him cry on the day we were kicked out of school. On the other hand, I did not wish to stimulate his trigger finger by any rude act. Old boyhood certainties could prove dangerous.
More than halfway across, I asked for a break. He nodded and sat about ten feet away from me, near enough so that we could talk. Now he held the gun. It was here that he filled me in quickly on some details. He wanted to talk.
In brief: Nissen was dead. Stoodie was dead. Beth had left town with Bolo Green.
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“I saw Bolo kill Stoodie. And I certainly saw Beth and Bolo off on their trip. Why, I gave them the money. They left in the van you damaged. It’s hers.”
“Where are they going?”
“Beth was thinking of a visit to her mother and father in Michigan. Apparently they’re retired and live in Charlevoix.”
“Bolo ought to make a considerable impression on Charlevoix.”
“Personable blacks have entrée everywhere but Newport,” he answered me solemnly.
“Wasn’t Beth concerned about Spider?”
“I told her that he had decamped. She didn’t seem too perturbed. She said she would sell their house. I think she’s been missing Michigan.”
“Does she know that Stoodie is dead?”
“Of course not. Who would inform her?”
I tried to ask the next question with tact. It was as if I had been talking to a stranger and had just told a Polish joke. Now I had to ask, “Are you by any chance Polish?” So with considerable modesty of voice, I inquired, “Do you know who killed Spider?”
“Well, if you want to know, I did.”
“You did?”
“It’s sordid,” said Wardley.
“Was he holding you up for money?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask why?”
“Tim, I would think you’ve been concerned lately about heads. Chez moi, it’s been bodies. You see, Spider and Stoodie were on the burial detail.”
I hazarded a guess. “They buried the bodies?” I asked.
“Both women.”
“Where? I would like to know.”
“Right where we’re going.”
“Terrific.”
We were silent.
“Right in Hell-Town,” I said.
He nodded.
“You know about Hell-Town?” I asked.
“Of course. Patty Lareine told me. She’s fixed on Hell-Town. It’s a pity her remains are so separated.”
“From her point of view, yes.”
“Where’s the head?” asked Wardley.
“At the bottom of the sea. I don’t know enough to tell you more than that. I wasn’t along.”
“I don’t think that I’d want to do her such a great favor, anyway,” he said, “as to restore her parts.”
No reply came to me easily.
“Where are Stoodie and Spider buried?” I asked.
“Close-by. I have them all together. The two women and the two men. They’re near enough so they can have a dansant should the spirit arise.” He was taken by a small convulsion of mirth, but since it came forth soundlessly, I cannot say that either of us expected me
to laugh along with him.
Then he raised his pistol and fired a shot in the air. It made the pop I expected—like a small inflated paper bag suddenly broken, no great event.
“Why do that?” I asked.
“Exuberance,” he said.
“Oh.”
“I’m feeling good. I finished my burials. It was a good piece of work.”
“Didn’t Bolo help you?”
“Of course not. I sent him off, as I told you, with Beth. He was much too hyper to keep around in the state he was in. I always knew he was strong, but he killed Stoodie with his hands. Just strangled him.”
“Where?”
A perverse look seemed to come on his face. I say seemed because I could not see too clearly by the moon we had, but I did have the impression that he chose not to answer this question for the pure pleasure of failing to reply.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked at last.
“Curiosity.”
“The desire to know is so powerful,” he said. “Do you think that if I do kill you, and I’m not saying I will or I won’t—to tell the truth, I don’t have a clue—do you believe you’ll go out into that dark dominion better armed if a few of your questions are satisfied?”
“Yes, I think I do feel that.”
“Good. So do I.” He gave a sly smile. “It all happened in the Provincetown woods. Stoodie had a little shack off the highway. Just as well it’s by itself. We made a racket.”
“And you left both men lying there and took Bolo over to visit Beth?”
“Yes.”
“And he and she took off. Like that?”
“Well, they began something last night. Apparently she had quite a time with him after you left The Brig. So I encouraged them to travel together.”
“But why did Bolo kill Stoodie?”
“Because I primed him.” Wardley nodded. “I said that Stoodie had killed Patty Lareine and disposed of her body by feeding it to his dogs.”
“Good Lord.”
“Stoodie didn’t even have a dog,” said Wardley, “as far as I know. But you’d think he would. He’s the kind of cur should have a beast.”
“Poor Stoodie. Did he kill Patty Lareine?”
“No.”
“Who did?”
“I’ll tell you in a while, perhaps.” He became so thoughtful that I started to think the muzzle of his gun might be lowering, but no, it wasn’t. It kept pointing at me. I would say it was as powerful in its effect as a bright light in one’s eyes during interrogation.
“Well,” I muttered at last, “let’s get going.”
“Yes,” he said, and stood up.
We began walking.
“Can I ask another question?”
“Of course.”
“How did you ever get both men all the way out to Hell-Town?”
“I just put them in the trunk of my car and drove them over to the house I’m renting. It’s at Beach Point, by the way. There’s no one there now. So it was no great trick to transfer the bodies onto my boat. Not in the dark.”
“Weren’t they heavy?”
“I’m a little stronger than I look.”
“You didn’t used to be.”
“Tim, I work out now.”
“I ought to.”
“Perhaps you should.”
“You took the bodies out by water to Hell-Town and buried them there?”
“Just the men’s bodies. Actually, I should have done all the burials from the beginning. If I hadn’t delegated that little task, Spider and Stoodie would never have gained such leverage on me.”
“But in any event, after this last burial, you returned in your boat to your house at Beach Point?”
“Yes.”
“And the beeper led you to me?”
“No, you threw my beeper away.” He gave his shy smile once more. “I just wandered into you.”
“That’s awesome.”
“I love design,” he said. “That may be what it’s all about.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you possess much faculty of déjà vu?” he asked. “I live with it all the time. I wonder if we don’t inhabit the same situation more than once. Perhaps we’re supposed to do better the second time.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
We kept walking. “I have to admit I was looking for your car,” he said. “I just drove around until I saw the Porsche.”
“I can’t say if that makes me feel better or worse,” I replied. Maybe it was the pain, but I felt compelled to exhibit the cheerful wit of a patient being wheeled by his surgeon to the hour of his operation.
We walked in silence. Below us was a great deal of phosphorescence in the water, and I pondered the luminous activity of the plankton but cannot say I had a new thought. We had come to the deepest cleft in the walk, and since I could hardly jump across, I had to take a series of lower boulders on the flank of the cut, and thereby got a mean scrape on my hand from barnacles. When I swore, he sympathized. “It’s cruel to march you this far,” he said, “but it’s essential.”
We continued. It took on at last that rhythm which speaks of movement without beginning or end, and so I hardly noticed when we came to the other shore a mile from where we had begun. Now we left the breakwater and trudged along the last arm of the bay beach. It was icy on one’s feet to walk down in the moist sand, but slow going where the strand was dry. In the dark, for the moon was now behind a cloud, one had to watch each step. Old boat timbers, stout as bodies, and as silver as the light of lunacy itself, were at every odd place in the sand. One could hear the ebbing of the tide. Every chirp of a sandpiper stirred by us, every scuttling of crabs and whistle of field mice was audible. Our feet crunched upon oyster shells and razor-clam shells, empty quahogs and mussels and whelks—how many sounds could calcium offer when cracking? All the dry kelp and sargassum weed scrunched like peanut shells beneath our feet, and the mourning of the harbor buoy came back to us on the slow expiring of the tide.
Maybe we walked for half an hour. By the water’s edge, pink jellyfish and moon jellies lolled in the moonlight like fat ladies in the sun, and the seaweed that is spoken of as mermaid’s tresses washed ashore. I lived in the wet phosphorescence of the tide’s edge as if the last lights of my life might pass into these cold flashes.
We came at last to our destination. It was a strip of sand, no less and no more remarkable than any other, and he pointed me up a shallow dune through long grass to a beach hollow. If you sat down, you could no longer view the bay. I tried to tell myself that I was on the sands of Hell-Town but I doubted if spirits nested here. There was only a pall upon us. The winds must be astringent on this barrier beach. Spirits, I thought, would prefer to cluster by the sheds floated over a century ago to Commercial Street.
“Patty’s body is here?” I said at last.
He nodded. “You can’t see where I buried them, can you?”
“Not in this light.”
“Not in broad daylight either.”
“How do you know where they are?”
“By their relation to these shrubs,” he said, pointing to a plant or two on the perimeter of the sunken bowl.
“Seems vague.”
“Do you see that horseshoe-crab shell on its back?”
I nodded.
“Take a better look. There’s a stone I put in it so it wouldn’t shift.”
I could not really see the stone in this light, but pretended I did.
“Patty Lareine,” said Wardley, “is buried beneath that shell, Jessica is four feet to the right, and Spider four feet to the left. Stoodie is still another four feet to the left.”
“Do you have a place picked for me?” was what I wished to say—the élan of the brave patient demanded no less—but I did not trust my voice. I was feeling some huskiness of throat. It is absurd, but now, at such proximity to my death, I felt no more terror than before the kickoff of my first high school football game. Certainly I felt less than before my one a
nd only bout in the Golden Gloves. Had life ground my heart down to the manageable emotions? Or was I still on the alert to snatch his pistol?
“Why did you kill Patty Lareine?” I asked.
“Don’t be certain it was I,” he replied.
“What about Jessica?”
“Oh, no. Laurel had some serious flaws in her character, but I wouldn’t kill her.” With the hand that did not hold the pistol, he passed sand through his fingers, as if debating the run of his next remarks. “There,” he said, “I think I’m going to tell you.”
“I wish you would.”
“What difference does it make?”
“As I say, I think it does.”
“How interesting if your instinct is well-founded.”
“Please tell me,” I said, as though speaking to an older relative.
He liked this. I don’t believe he had heard such a tone in my voice before. “Do you know what a hog you are?” Wardley answered.
“We don’t always see that in ourselves,” I told him.
“Well, you’re a fearfully covetous person.”
“I have to admit I don’t know why you say that.”
“My friend Leonard Pangborn was a silly man in a lot of ways. He claimed to gallivant through many a gay world that in fact he never went near. He was a creature of the closet. How he suffered his homosexuality! It was agonizing for him. He wanted so much to be hetero. He was incredibly pleased that Laurel Oakwode had that affair with him. Did you think of any of that? No. You had to have sex with her right in front of him.”
“How do you know all that?”
“Because Jessica, as you call her, told me.”
“What are you saying?”
“Yes, darling, she phoned me late that night, Friday night—six nights ago.”
“Were you already in Provincetown?”
“Of course.”
“What did Jessica say?”
“She was in a total state. After putting them both through all that show business—they’re simple people!—you had the gall to drop them back at their own car. ‘Get lost,’ you snarled at them, ‘you’re pigs.’ How’s that for bartender’s rectitude, Madden? Scratch one of your kind and out comes a lout. What could they do to answer? They went off by themselves and had a terrible fight. Lonnie reverted. Just like a little boy in a tantrum. I mean, they had this godawful end-of-the-earth fight. He told her that she was a slut. She called him an old aunty. That’s got to be the worst word. Poor Lonnie. He gets out of the car, slams the trunk lid and walks away. So she thinks. She waits. She doesn’t even hear the pop until it comes through to her that she did hear something. There has definitely been a pop. Like a champagne bottle. She’s sitting by herself in the car out near the beach parking lot at Race Point totally deserted and has just been called a slut, and she hears someone opening a champagne bottle. Is Lonnie making a conciliatory gesture? She waits, then she gets out and looks. No Lonnie in sight. Boy, oh boy. On impulse, she lifts the trunk. There he is, dead, the gun in his mouth. The perfect death for one of my ilk. ‘Dear friend,’ he might as well have said, ‘I’d rather have a cock in my mouth, but if one must go out cold tit, then cold tit it will be.’ ”