I could not decide whether it was due to the constant flashes I kept having of a blonde head in a dark plastic bag, but every word I heard seemed connected to my own situation. Was there a real fever in the air? No one but myself and—I must pray—someone else knew what had been buried in my marijuana patch, yet this thought was all but shrieking out of every cry for beer from every table. I suppose the spirits were tugging at the beer-drenched sponge of whatever collective mind was here.
Beth saw my look wander away from her. “Is Patty Lareine still split?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I hear she’s been around.”
“I think she is. Bolo is back in town.”
“You saw him?” Bolo was Mr. Black, although indeed his name was Green. Joseph “Bolo” Green. He got the name Bob on the first day he walked into a bar here. “There are bad niggers,” he announced to a table of ten of us, “but I am baaaaad,” and everybody was silent for a moment as if paying respect to the dead he had left behind—we are the Wild West of the East!—but Patty Lareine began to laugh and said, “Stop waving your bolo. Nobody is going to steal your black.” By the look of pure happiness in her eyes, I could see that the next Mr. Black had just been anointed.
“Yes,” said Beth, bringing me back to her—I, too, had a mind that could veer like a water-bug—“Bolo is certainly back in town. He was in and out of The Brig ten minutes ago.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“He propositioned me.”
I would have been certain she was lying if she had not looked so happy.
Now the bartender was signaling as well. He pointed to the phone behind his service sink.
My extrasensory attainments failed me on this occasion. I thought I was going to hear Patty’s voice, but it was Harpo.
“Mac,” he said, “I’ve been trying to get you. I had to force myself to call you.”
“Why?”
“Because I betrayed you.”
“How could you do that?”
“I lost my nerve. I want to warn you.”
Harpo’s speech had a metallic anxiety. He sounded as if he were speaking out of a mechanical diaphragm. I tried to decide what he might be on, but there must have been many chemicals in his brain.
“It’s Laurel,” he now said.
“The tattoo?”
“The woman. Laurel. I called up Police Chief Regency and told him about her and the tattoo.”
That could have no significance for Regency, I decided. Not unless Patty Lareine, when in his company, spoke of Madeleine as Laurel.
“Great,” I said, “Alvin now knows I have a tattoo. Where’s the treachery?”
“I told him that Laurel was waiting for you in the car downstairs.”
“But why do you think the name is Laurel?”
“You spoke to her. Through my window.”
“I did?”
“That’s what you shouted. ‘I’m going to win this bet, Laurel.’ That’s what you said.”
“I may have said Lonnie. I think I was yelling to a man.”
“No, it was Laurel. I heard the name. I believe that Laurel is dead.”
“Who told you?”
“I was up on the roof. I heard it. That’s why I called the Chief. I knew I shouldn’t have given you the tattoo. People do terrible things after a tattoo.”
“What else did you tell Regency?”
“I said I thought you killed Laurel.” He began to cry.
“How can you believe that?” I asked.
“I saw Laurel dead. When I stood on the roof last night, I saw her on the horizon. She said you did it.” I heard him blowing his nose at the other end of the phone. “I wrestled with my conscience. Then I called Regency. It was the wrong thing to do. I should have spoken to you first.”
“What did Regency say?”
“He’s an asshole! He’s a bureaucrat. He said he wanted to take it under consideration. Mac, I don’t trust him.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s me you trust.”
“Well, I realized you didn’t do anything. I could tell by the sound of Regency’s voice. It wasn’t right.”
“I’m happy to hear that.”
His breathing got heavy. Over the wire, I could feel his senses rattling. “I may not have the right to say who killed her,” he added, “but now I know.”
“It’s Nissen,” I said.
“I hate Spider’s knife,” said Harpo. “A vicious instrument.” With that, he hung up.
A hand was tapping me on the shoulder. I turned around to stare into Bolo’s golden-brown eyes blazing into mine with all the light of a lion. He was deep-black in color, purple-black like an African, so his eyes were disconcertingly golden. I had known from the moment I first saw him that he was going to be no good news for my marriage. I was right. There had been three earlier models, but Mr. Green proved to be the definitive Mr. Black. After all, Patty Lareine had never left me before.
The worst was that now I could not feel any hatred for him, not even some rage at my drear and cuckolded state. The proof was that he could come up to me while I was on the phone, even lay his hand on me, and I, in reply, merely gave a nod.
Of course, I might as well have been lifted by a helicopter from the summit of one peak to the next. I had none of the bother of descending through the scree to the canyon floor and up the other ridge, no, I had gone directly from a number of remarks by Harpo (each capable of blasting me off my mind) to the lights in Bolo’s eyes, and by now I might as well have been stuffed with Novocaine, just so far did I feel removed from this overabundance of stimulations—yes, it had all caught up, and I was one candidate who could call himself Mr. Marble Eyes, totally zonked and zombied by the quick turns of the race course this evening, except that at this moment Mr. Green put his hand on my shoulder again and dug his fingers in—viciously, I tell you—and said, “Where the fuck is Patty Lareine?,” all of his fury passing into me. With that, I woke up and shook off his hand with an equally violent move, and replied, “Get your filthy lunch hooks off of me,” words that came right out of an old high school fracas. But for the first time, I was not afraid of him. I didn’t care if we went out to the street and had a fight. The thought of being knocked cold was an anodyne dear as nepenthe.
Let me say there was little doubt in my mind what he could do to me. If you have ever been in an interesting penitentiary, you come to know that there are blacks and blacks, and a few you never mess with. Mr. Green was not on that high shelf, or I would have been dead. But he could fit on the second level: mess with him under few circumstances. Now his eyes glared into mine and I looked back, and the light in the room turned red between us—I mean it literally—I do not know if his rage on meeting mine was so intense that the nerves which reflect color to the brain were strained by the voltage passed through or if all the firebrands of Hell-Town raced toward us, but I had to stand in the considerable wrath of all that had happened to him over his last twenty-five years (from the first cuff in the cradle) and he stood in the maniacal disproportion of all that had been happening to me. I think it was dazzling to both of us to endure for even a little while in such a hellish red light. Indeed, we both stood there looking at each other for so long that I had time to remember the sad tale of his life as he told it to Patty Lareine and me on the night we met: it was how he lost his boxing career.
If it strains belief that I could think of such a story while the steam of his madness was scalding my eyes—well, I can hardly believe it myself. Maybe I was not as brave as I pretended and clung to his tale in the hope that it would mollify his rage. You cannot strike a man who is filled with compassion for you.
This was the story: He was illegitimate, and his mother claimed he wasn’t hers. Said they messed up the name tags in the hospital. She used to beat him every day. When he got older, he beat everybody he faced in the Golden Gloves. He was in line to make the U.S. team for the Pan-American games, but he went down to Georgia to look for his father. Never found him. Went into a w
hite bar dead drunk. They wouldn’t serve him. They called the State Troopers. Two came in, and asked him to leave.
“You got no alternative,” he informed them. “Serve me, or piss on you.”
One of the troopers hit him so hard with a billy club that he began to lose the Pan-American games right there. But he didn’t know it yet. Just felt a great happiness. Because he was bleeding as if he had been butchered, but he wasn’t shook. In fact, he was wide awake. He proceeded to injure both cops and it took the entire bar to subdue him. They brought him in restraints to the jail house. Among other things, his skull was fractured. He could box no more.
That was the sad tale he told. He related it as an example of his stupidity, not his valor (although it had the opposite effect on Patty) and when we came to know him better, he proved to be a funny man. He used to do imitations of black whores to make us laugh. We saw a lot of Mr. Green, and I would lend him money.
Will it give you an idea of how close I felt to annihilation, and how comfortable this idea had become (after all the rat-scurry of keeping myself alive) that I could now recognize that Bolo had not treated me so badly as I had treated Wardley. The remains of my rage began to fade and a peace came in to replace it. I do not know what Mr. Green was thinking of, but even as my anger departed, so did his. “Well,” I said, making my offering to the silence, “what do you say, motherfucker?”
“I never had a mother to fuck,” he replied. Sadly, he held out his hand for five. Sadly, I tapped it.
“I don’t know where Patty Lareine is,” I said.
“You aren’t looking for her?”
“No.”
“I’m looking for her, and I can’t find her.”
“When did she leave you?”
He frowned. “We had it on together for three weeks. Then she got restless. Took off.”
“Where were you?”
“In Tampa.”
“Did you see her ex-husband?”
“Wardley, is that the guy?”
I nodded.
“We saw him. He took us out to dinner one night. Then she went to see him alone. That was cool. He was no threat. I figured she was hitting on him for something good. But the next day she took off.” He looked like he was about to cry. “She treated me decent. She was the only bitch ever treated me that decent.” He looked very sad. “I just ran out of things to talk to her about. Used them up.” His eyes studied mine. “You know where she is? I got to find her.”
“She may be around.”
“She is.”
“How do you know?”
“A guy called me. The guy said Patty Lareine told him to call. She wanted me to know. She was back here in P-town with Wardley. She missed me, the fellow said.”
“Who was the fellow?”
“Didn’t give his name. He gave it, but there’s nobody by that name. I knew it was no good when he gave it. He was talking with a handkerchief over the phone.”
“What was the name?”
“Healey. Austin Healey.”
A mote of town lore came back. A couple of years ago a few of us, tired of the sound of Stoodie, began to speak of him as Austin Healey. That went on for a little while. But Stoodie was not told our name for him. It had to be Spider who called.
“This Healey said Patty L. was at the Provincetown Inn,” Bolo said. “I called there. Shit, she wasn’t nowhere near a place like that.”
“When did you get back?”
“Three days ago.”
“When did she leave you?”
“One week ago, about.”
“Seven days for sure?”
“Eight. I counted them.”
Yes, he was counting his days. I was counting mine.
“I could kill her,” he said, “for leaving me.”
“There’s no man she won’t leave,” I said. “She comes from a narrow background. It’s sin to her.”
“I’m just as narrow as she is,” he said, “and I’m going to take a big hit on something when I see her.” He looked at me from an angle as if to say, “You can hustle others, but, baby, get trustworthy with me.” Then he put his doubts away. He would tell. “Austin Healey said Patty Lareine was seeing you again. When I heard that, I figured I would have to treat you to a welcome.” He paused to let me feel the weight of the thought. “But I knew I couldn’t do it to you.”
“Why?”
“Because you treated me like a gentleman.”
He measured the truth of this and seemed to agree with himself. “Moreover,” he said, “Patty Lareine don’t like you anymore.”
“Probably not.”
“She said you trapped her into marriage.”
I began to laugh.
“What are you laughing about, honkie?”
“Mr. Green, there’s an old Jewish saying: ‘A life, a wife!’ ”
He, too, began to laugh.
We went on long enough to draw attention to ourselves. History was being made in The Brig tonight. The cuckold and the black lover were having a big time together.
“Joseph, I’ll see you around,” I said to Bolo Green.
“Keep the peace.”
I had to take a long walk. More had come into my head than I could put in order.
It was drizzling, and I was walking down Commercial Street with my hands in my pockets and my head so withdrawn into my parka hood that I did not become aware that a car was following me until the headlights on my back could no longer be ignored. I turned. Behind me was a police cruiser with one man in it. He opened the door. “Get in,” he said. Regency, at my service.
We had not driven fifty feet before he began to talk. “Got a make on your woman, Jessica,” he said. He pointed to a piece of paper on the front seat. “Take a look,” he told me and handed over a pencil flashlight that he drew from his breast pocket.
I studied a photostat of a photograph sent by wire. It was Jessica clearly enough. “I’d say that’s her.”
“Well, we don’t need you to inform us, pal. There’s no doubt. The waitress and the proprietor at The Widow’s Walk have both confirmed.”
“Good work,” I said. “How did you track her down?”
“No big deal. We contacted Pangborn’s office in Santa Barbara and there were a couple of blondes he associated with socially or business-wise. We were looking into that when her son called. He knew she was in Provincetown with Pangborn—as you might guess from Don Lon’s little billet-doux.”
“You’re speaking of the son who was Lonnie’s lover?”
“Correct,” said Regency. “The kid with the cordless razor.” He opened his window and hawked a throaty yield. “I think I’ll never watch a commercial again.”
“You may not.”
“Now, here, Madden, is where the soup starts to stick to the spoon. It seems her name isn’t Jessica.”
“What is the real name?”
“Laurel Oakwode. It’s a fancy spelling: w-o-d-e for ‘wood.’ ”
Recollection came back to me of what I had said to Harpo before the séance that ended with Nissen’s scream. “Harpo,” I had said, “tell everybody we’re trying to reach Mary Hardwood, who is my mother’s cousin. But the woman I really want to talk to is named Laurel.”
Such a coincidence could not have been produced by a beeper. Despite myself, I began to shiver. Sitting beside Regency in the police car, cruising fifteen miles an hour down Commercial Street, I began to shiver visibly.
“You need a drink,” said Alvin Luther.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Maybe you’d be in better shape,” he suggested, “if the tattoo on your arm didn’t say ‘Laurel.’ ”
“Do you want to stop the car?”
“No objection at all.”
We were at the end of Commercial Street. We had come to the place where the Pilgrims once landed, but in the drizzle, I could see nothing.
“Okay,” he said, “get out.”
My panic had subsided. The thought of walking two and a half m
iles home with no more than this amputated encounter for company encouraged me to take a chance.
“I don’t know what point you’re trying to make,” I said, “but it’s no big deal to me. I got shit-face and drove out to see Harpo, and had him put on a tattoo. Maybe Jessica told me that her real name was Laurel, but I don’t remember.”
“Was she with you?”
I had to make a decision. “Harpo says she was.”
“You’re saying you can’t remember?”
“Not clearly.”
“So you could have knocked her off, and forgotten it?”
“Are you accusing me?”
“Let us say that I am working on the outline of the first scenario. In my way, I’m a writer too.” He could not restrain himself. The wild stallion gave his great neigh and whinny.
“I don’t like the way you’re talking.”
“Hey, pal,” said Regency, “kidding is kidding, but get your ass off my pillow. I could take you in right now.”
“On what? There’s no crime. The lady might be on her way back to Santa Barbara. You’re not about to hurt your record with a false arrest.”
“Let me rephrase myself,” he said. “I could take you in right now as a suspect in the possible murder of Leonard Pangborn.”
“You said it was a suicide.”
“So I thought. But the forensics have taken a look. They came in on a special from Boston at our request. The supercoroners, they like to be called, but my private tag for them is: the super-coronaries.” Once again he laughed at his own joke. “They mess up your heartbeat considerably with what they find.”
“What did they find?”
“I’ll tell you. It’s going to be no secret very soon. Pangborn may have killed himself, but if he did, who drove the car?”
“You told me that he got into the trunk and closed the lid on himself before he fired the shot.”
“The congealed blood on the floor of the trunk has a shirred movement as if, soon after it began to coagulate, the car was driven, from wherever the event occurred, to The Widow’s Walk.”
“Wouldn’t the staff at the restaurant have heard the car come back?”
“Not if it was three in the morning. They wouldn’t be around. Look, let’s not argue. The car was moved. The patterns of the blood show that it was.” He shrugged. “What it comes down to, Madden, is that somebody drove this vehicle back to The Widow’s Walk after Lonnie committed suicide.”