Tough Guys Don't Dance

  All the while that Wardley was telling me this, he kept the gun barrel pointed in my direction like a forefinger.

  “Where did he get the .22 with the silencer?” I asked.

  “He always carried one. Years ago I bought a rare set of three—I don’t believe there are a hundred such sets in the world—and I gave one to Patty Lareine and another to Lonnie. But that’s another story. There was a time, believe it or not, when I was very much in love with Lonnie.”

  “I don’t understand why he was carrying a gun on Friday night.”

  “He always carried that gun. It made him feel like a man, Tim.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Never occurred to you?”

  “If he was so bothered by what I was doing with Jessica, why didn’t he plug me?”

  “You don’t carry a gun,” said Wardley, “because you would use it. He couldn’t. Oh, I know Lonnie. His fury wished to reach cataclysmic proportions. Kill you, kill Laurel—but, of course, he could do neither. He was queer, dear.”

  “So he killed himself?”

  “I want to be truthful. It isn’t all your fault. He was also in terrible financial trouble. Facing a stiff sentence. He threw himself on my mercy just a month ago. Begged me to help. I told him I would try. But, do you know, as much money as I have, it would have made too big a dent. He sensed I wasn’t going to come through.”

  I was beginning to shiver once more. It was as much from fatigue as anything else, but my shoes and the bottoms of my trousers were wet.

  “Would you like to make a fire?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He debated it. “No,” he said at last, “I’m afraid it would be too hard to start. Everything is damp.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate smoke.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  My hands were playing with the sand. Suddenly he fired a shot. Like that. Pop. It dug in one inch below the heel of my shoe.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “Don’t try to blind me with a handful of dust.”

  “You’re a good shot.”

  “I’ve practiced.”

  “I can see.”

  “It didn’t come naturally. Nothing graceful has ever come naturally to me. Do you think that’s unfair?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s enough to solicit the devil.”

  We were silent. I tried not to shiver. It seemed to me that such shivering might irritate him, and then what would he do?

  “You didn’t tell me the rest,” I said. “What did you do when Jessica called?”

  “I tried to calm her down. I wasn’t so calm myself. Lonnie dead! Finally I told her to wait in the car. I’d pick her up.”

  “What were you planning?”

  “I hadn’t begun to think. At times like that, all you tell yourself is, ‘What a mess.’ I didn’t have a clue how to handle it, but all the same, I set out for Race Point. However, the directions given me were treacherous. I found myself in North Truro and all turned around. By the time I located Race Point, Laurel was gone and so was the car. I went back to Beach Point to tell Patty Lareine what I thought of her directions, and she, too, was gone. She didn’t come back all night. And I never saw Jessica’s face again.”

  “Patty Lareine was living with you?”

  “We’ll get to that.”

  “I’d like to.”

  “First tell me: Did Patty go to your house?” Wardley asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You can’t remember?”

  “I was too drunk. It’s possible she passed through the house.”

  “Do you know,” asked Wardley, “what Patty Lareine used to say about your forgetful spells?”

  “No.”

  “She’d say, ‘There’s the asshole flying up his asshole again.’ ”

  “She would say that.”

  “She always spoke of you as an asshole,” said Wardley. “When you were our chauffeur in Tampa, she used to refer to you that way when she was alone with me. Last month, she still spoke of you that way. Asshole. Why would she call you that?”

  “Maybe it was her word for jerk.”

  “Patty hated you intensely.”

  “I don’t know why,” I said.

  “I think I do,” said Wardley. “Certain men indulge the female component in themselves by encouraging their women to practice special oral sex.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said.

  “Did you and Patty ever have anything of the sort?”

  “Wardley, I don’t care to talk about it.”

  “Heteros are uptight about such matters.” He sighed. He rolled his eyes. “I wish we did have a fire. It would be sexier.”

  “It would certainly be cozier.”

  “Well, we can’t.” To my amazement, he yawned. Then I realized he did it like a cat. He was casting off tension. “Patty Lareine used to do it for me,” he said. “In fact, that’s how she got me to marry her. I’d never had it practiced so well before. Then, after we were married, she stopped. Cold turkey. When I indicated that I’d like our little practice to continue, she said, ‘Wardley, I can’t. Every time I see your face now, it reminds me of your rear end.’ That’s why I didn’t like it at all when she called you ‘asshole.’ Tim, did she ever do it with you?”

  “I’m not going to reply,” I said.

  He fired the pistol. From where he sat. He didn’t aim. Just pointed it, and pressed the trigger. Only the best shots can do that. I was wearing baggy pants and the bullet went through a billow in the trousers above the knee.

  “Next time,” he said, “I’m going to shatter your thigh. So please answer my question.”

  He had gotten to me. No question of that. My courage was now down to the reserve tank. It seemed enough under these conditions to keep a semblance of poise.

  “Yes,” I said, “I asked her to do it once.”

  “Asked her or made her?”

  “She was ready. She was young and it was a novelty to her. I would say she had never done it before.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “The first time Patty Lareine and I went to bed.”

  “In Tampa?”

  “No,” I said. “She never told you?”

  “Tell me, and I’ll tell you.”

  “I took a trip with a girl to North Carolina. A girl I had been living with for two years. We answered an ad and went down to North Carolina to meet a couple who wanted to swap partners for a night. On our arrival, there was this big old boy and his young bride, Patty Lareine.”

  “Was that when she was called Patty Erlene?”

  “Yes,” I said, “Patty Erlene. She was married to one of the local preachers. He doubled as the high school football coach and was the town chiropractor as well. In his ad, he had said he was a gynecologist. As he soon told me, ‘It’s a decoy. No Yankee girl can resist a swap if she thinks she’s getting an obstetrician.’ He was one big gangling old boy, bald, and bountiful down below, at least from what my girl later told me. To my surprise, they hit it off. On the other hand, Patty Erlene was excited that I was a real bartender from New York.” I stopped. I had the uneasiness of having talked too much. I had certainly lost my feeling for his attention.

  “And that first night, she actually did it with you?”

  I shouldn’t have been wondering about his attention.

  “Yes,” I said, “that night was like no other we had. We seemed made for each other.” Let him live with that, I thought, after I’m gone.

  “She did everything?”

  “More or less.”

  “More?”

  “Put it that way.”

  “Did she ever go as far again in Tampa?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  I didn’t want him to fire the gun. It came to me that his good father Meeks must often have struck Wardley without warning.

  “Can you take the tr
uth?” I asked.

  “Rich people are always lied to,” he said. “So it’s my pride that I will live with the truth no matter how unpalatable.”

  “All right,” I said, “in Tampa it did happen.”

  “When?” he asked. “On what occasions?”

  “When she wanted me to kill you.”

  It was the largest gamble I had yet taken. But Wardley was a man of his word. He nodded at the truth of what I had said. “I always thought so,” he said. “Yes, of course,” he went on, “that’s why she spoke of you that way.”

  I did not tell him that after our night in North Carolina, Patty Lareine used to write to me for a while. It was as if once I was back in New York, so did our night back up on her too. She had to keep wiping the memory of it off her mouth. “Asshole,” she kept calling me in the letters she wrote. “Dear asshole,” she would begin, or “Listen, asshole.” It never stopped until the letters did. Which was about the time I’d had a year in prison. In the slammer, I did not take to being called such words and didn’t answer, and she stopped writing. We were out of touch. Then, a few years later, standing one evening in a bar in Tampa, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and when I turned, saw a beautiful blonde, very well dressed, who said, “Hello, asshole.” I was gazing upon the powerful signature of coincidence.

  “I guess she really wanted to kill me,” Wardley said.

  “You have to face it.”

  He began to weep. He had been holding it for a long time and it came out. To my surprise, I was moved, but that was only half of me. The other part was locked tight—it had never seemed so dangerous to make a move.

  After a few minutes he said, “This is the first time I’ve cried since my last day at Exeter.”

  “Is that true?” I said. “I cry from time to time.”

  “You can afford to,” he said. “You have something manly to come back to. I’m more or less self-created.”

  I let that stand.

  “How did you and Patty get together again?” I asked.

  “She wrote a letter to me. It was a couple of years after our divorce. I had every right to hate her, she said in this letter, but she did miss me. I told myself, ‘She’s short of money.’ I threw her letter away.”

  “Wasn’t Patty awarded a chunk for the divorce?”

  “She had to settle for less. My lawyers would have appealed her to death. She couldn’t afford to wait. She never told you?”

  “We didn’t talk about finances.”

  “She just paid your way?”

  “I wanted to be a writer. I made my contract.”

  “Did you write well?”

  “She kept my thoughts too occupied to write as well as I hoped.”

  “Maybe you’re a bartender,” said Wardley.

  “Maybe I am.”

  “You don’t know anything of her finances?”

  “Are you saying she was broke?”

  “She had no instinct for investments. Too much of a redneck to trust good advice. I think she began to see that some mean economic years lay ahead.”

  “So she started writing to you.”

  “I held off as long as I could. Then I answered. Did you know she kept another post office box in Truro?” Wardley asked.

  “I had no idea.”

  “We corresponded. After a while she revealed her interest. It was to buy the Paramessides estate. I think it must have reminded her of all she’d lost in Tampa.”

  “And you played with her desire?”

  “I wanted to scourge each of the four chambers of her heart. Of course I played with her. For two years I brought her hopes up and then I took them down again.”

  “And all the while I used to think her hideous moods were my fault.”

  “Vanity is your vice,” said Wardley. “It’s not mine. I kept telling myself that to return to her was to go back to the devil. But I missed her. I kept hoping that I might yet be truly attractive to her.” He patted the sand by his feet. “Does that surprise you?”

  “She never said anything good about you.”

  “Nor about you. The most unpleasant aspect of Patty’s character is that she had to badmouth everybody. If you want to find true lack of compassion, give me a good Christian every time.”

  “Maybe it’s because she gave such good measure other ways.”

  “Of course,” said Wardley. He coughed from the cold. “Do you know I used to fuck her good?”

  “No,” I said. “She never told me.”

  “Well, I did. No dyke could have done her better. There were times when I felt sensational around her.”

  “What happened when she turned up in Tampa with Bolo Green?”

  “I didn’t mind,” said Wardley. “I thought that was clever of her. If she’d appeared on my doorstep by herself after all those years, I would have been suspicious as hell. This way, we had fun. Bolo swings in both directions. We had three-way scenes.”

  “It didn’t bother you watching Patty with another man?”

  “I always say, for sexual naïveté, call on the Irish. How could it bother me? While I was in Patty, Bolo was in me. You haven’t lived till you feel that little thrill.”

  “It didn’t bother you?” I repeated. “Patty used to describe you as very jealous.”

  “That was because I was trying to be a husband. There is no way to feel more vulnerable. But now I was playing Mr. Bountiful. I enjoyed it so much that I finally gave the word to Laurel. Go East, dear woman, and bid on the Paramessides estate. She did. Unfortunately, it all got complicated by her greed. Lonnie Pangborn was talking to me on the phone and happened to mention that Oakwode was back in Santa Barbara. I didn’t like that. She was supposed to be dickering with the lawyer in Boston. So I had to wonder if she was calling on some rich California friends to help her buy the estate herself. That way, she could really hold me up. By now, I confess, I wanted it. Patty Lareine needed a castle to play the queen, but I wanted her in position to need me altogether. That’s not so exceptional, is it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Laurel’s presence in Santa Barbara, therefore, disturbed me. I proposed to Patty that we pay a surprise visit to the Coast. It was, incidentally, a good opportunity to get rid of Bolo. He was taking up too much time.”

  Wardley’s voice had gone dry. It was as if he had determined to tell the tale no matter how his throat might protest. For the first time I recognized that he was even more weary than myself. Was the muzzle of his handgun pointing just a hair toward the ground?

  “Laurel couldn’t have tried harder at the dinner in Santa Barbara. Told Patty all sorts of fabulous stuff. What a splendiferous personality Patty had, and so forth. When it was over, I told Pangborn, ‘I don’t trust your woman. Find some business in Boston and stick with Laurel. Keep an eye on her.’ After all, he had recommended her. How could I know I was sending him to his suicide?”

  I lit a cigarette. “And you and Patty also came East?”

  “Yes. That was when I got the place out at Beach Point. Hadn’t been here twelve hours when Lonnie did himself in. And the next time I saw Laurel was when Spider Nissen took me out to his shack to visit her body. Did you ever see headless remains? It looks like a statue when they pull the torso out of the lime.”

  “Where did this take place?”

  “In Stoodie’s backyard. He had Laurel in a stout metal garbage can. The old-fashioned kind they used to make before plastic got into everything.”

  “Were you ill?”

  “I was aghast. Think of staring upon such a sight in the company of people as awful as Spider and Stoodie.”

  “But how did you know them in the first place?”

  “Through Bolo Green. I have to tell you. The night after Patty disappeared I decided to look for her in the bars on Commercial Street, and there was Bolo. It took a bit of convincing to get him to believe I no longer knew where Patty was.”

  “And through him you got to know Spider?”

  “No, Spider I met by way of Stoodie
. It was Bolo who introduced me to Stoodie. That same night. Bolo and Stoodie, it seems, spent last summer dealing drugs together. That’s got to be karma.”

  He sounded distracted. Now I feared that I had been encouraging him to talk for too long. If he started going in too many directions, the pistol might go off in one.

  It was not yet time to fear him, however. He still wanted to get the story out. “Yes, Spider came on quickly. Almost as soon as we met. He had heard about me, he said, and he was all for getting into the largest operations immediately. I was ready to shun him except that Spider was making the most incredible presentation. He said he could control the top narcotics officer in town! If I would be forthcoming with the bread, he was ready to run a prodigious drug operation for me. Yes, he said, the Acting Chief of Police was now under his thumb. You may be certain I asked him how he could prove it. That was when he and Stoodie took me out to Stoodie’s place, and brought Laurel forth from the lime.”

  “How’d you know it was Laurel?”

  “The silver nail polish. And the tits. You did notice Laurel’s tits?”

  “What did you say to Spider’s proposition?”

  “I didn’t say no. I was intrigued. I thought: This peculiar town! How extraordinary to be proprietor of a fabulous hotel, and control a mountain of drugs. I’ll be equal to a Renaissance prince.”