“It wouldn’t have worked.”
“Well, it wouldn’t, but I played with him. After all, I was half out of my mind. Lonnie’s dead, Laurel’s dismembered, Patty is missing, and these disreputable sleazos have the body in their possession. So I took Spider seriously enough to ask how the headless lady came to him. He was on pot sufficiently to inform me. I can’t believe how trusting certain criminal types are. Spider tells me the narc left the body with him, but was reserving the head for himself.”
“Regency?” I asked.
“That’s the name.”
“Did Regency kill Jessica?”
“I don’t know. He certainly wanted her body disposed of. How arrogant these drug enforcement people are. I’m sure he had eighteen ways to incriminate Spider, so he assumed he could use him.”
“Why not? If the body were produced, Regency could say that Spider and Stoodie had done it. They had no true leverage over him.”
“Of course,” said Wardley. “Gall backed up by powers. But I couldn’t think properly. Being without Patty had me too disturbed. Yet when I got back to Beach Point after this dreadful visit to Stoodie’s shack, there was Patty Lareine. Waiting for me. Not a word about where she’d been.”
Again he began to cry. It caught me by surprise. He worked, however, to choke down his misery. Like a child forbidden to whimper, he said, “She no longer wanted the Paramessides estate. Now that Lonnie was a suicide, she had decided the deal was spooked. Besides, she was in love. She had decided to tell me the real truth, she said. She wanted to go away with a man. She had been in love with him for months. He wanted to live with her, but had remained loyal to his wife. Now at last he was ready to take off. Did she mind, I asked, telling me who it was? A good man, she said, a strong man, a man without money. What about myself, I asked her. What about Bolo? Was it Bolo? No, she told me, Bolo had been a sad mistake. She had only been trying to drive this other man out of her heart, but she had failed. How do you think I felt?” Wardley asked me now.
“Ashes.”
“Ashes. I had not been playing the game I thought I was playing. I realized all over again that I adored her so much I was ready to take whatever she would offer. Even if it was no more than her big toe.” He began inhaling very rapidly, as if there was no time to take a deep breath.
“All right,’ I said to her, ‘go out of my life.’ I was hoping to clutch some dignity. I felt like a nude standing before a mad artist. ‘Just go,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not all right. I need money.’ Tim, she named a sum on the order of magnitude of what I would have paid for renovations on the Paramessides estate. ‘Don’t be insane,’ I told her. ‘I won’t give you a cent.’ ‘Wardley,’ she said, ‘I reckon you owe me two million and change.’
“I couldn’t believe how hideous it was. You know, when I first met her, she was only a stewardess and not at all polished. You have no idea how she developed under my tutelage. She was so bright. She seized so many of the little tricks of making her way in my world. I thought she’d be wild to have a hotel for her palace. She certainly encouraged me all the while to think so. But do you know, au fond, she didn’t give two spits for high society. Boy, she let me have it. She told me that the two million I was ready to allot to fix up the Paramessides estate had to be squirreled off now into other ventures. With that mysterious friend of hers! She would have had me investing in the cocaine trade.”
“She informed you of all that?”
“No, but she said enough. I could see the rest. At the end she said, ‘Wardley, I warn you. Just give me the money. Or, this time, you will get killed. I have the man to do it now. All the worms will run out of you.’ ”
He rubbed his face. His nose must have felt as harsh as a salt mine. “ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll write a check,’ and I went into the bedroom. I took out my .22, popped on the silencer, walked back into the living room and shot her. It was the calmest thing I ever did in my life. I picked up the phone to call the police. I was going to turn myself in. But some spirit of survival must have come right out of Patty and into me. I bundled her up, put her in the car, called Spider to meet me at Stoodie’s, and asked them to bury her and Laurel. I would pay them well, I said. What do you think Spider replied?”
“What?”
“Take off,’ he said, ‘and leave the details to me.’ ”
“The rest is a nightmare?” I asked.
“All of it.”
“Why did you tell me you wanted the head of Patty Lareine?”
“Because that was the day I found out that Spider had already performed the act of decapitating her. He buried the body, but he told me he was keeping the head. He giggled when he told me. Spider said he was ready to take a photograph of me holding her head. I could see where Spider’s mind was moving. Right into the Hilby millions. They think my money is there to make raids on. As if it were not part of me. I think you can see now why I shot him. What substance do I have other than my money?” He laid the gun on the ground beside him.
“Then, just at this moment, Stoodie had the bad luck to come back with Bolo. I was still standing over Spider’s body. Thank God I managed to convince Bolo that Stoodie was the fellow he’d been looking for.”
Wardley put his face in his hands. The gun was on the sand beside him, but some instinct told me not to move. When Wardley looked up, his expression—at least as I could see it—was far away.
“You may not believe this,” he said, “but Patty was my romantic hope. I don’t mean for me. If she’d found true love, I would have been best man at the nuptials. She had such possibilities. I adored the idea that she and I would create this extraordinary place on the very tip of Cape Cod where only the most insanely special people could get reservations. Just the most perfect mix of true celebrity and true society. Oh, how they’d have gone for Patty and me as co-hosts.” He gave the weariest sigh. “She never took it seriously. She gulled me. Planning all the time to make her fortune in cocaine. Tim, she was crass. And I had no acumen. People like me are a trial to the world if they lose their acumen.”
Now he picked up his gun. “I came here thinking I would shoot you. There’s a peculiar pleasure in shooting people. It’s much more intoxicating than you’d think. So I’ve been trying to find a good reason to off you. But I’m not certain I can. I can’t get angry enough.” He sighed. “Maybe I should turn myself in.”
“Should you?”
“No,” he said, “that’s not a viable alternative. During my divorce trial, I suffered abominably. I couldn’t live through such ridicule again.”
“Yes,” I said.
He lay on his side, curled up, brought the gun barrel near his mouth and said, “I guess you’re in luck.” He put the muzzle in his mouth.
But I think he now felt how vulnerable it would be to lie out here exposed.
“Will you cover me with sand,” he asked, “afterward?”
“Yes.”
I cannot explain what I did next, but I stood up and came near. Whereupon he took the gun out of his mouth and pointed it at me.
“Trick or treat,” he said.
Then he lowered the barrel. “Sit beside me,” he said.
I did.
“Put your arm around me,” he said.
I obeyed.
“Do you like me a little?”
“Wardley, I do like you a little.”
“I hope so,” he said, and put the gun to his head and fired into his mind.
For a weapon with a silencer, it made a loud sound. Maybe a door to his spirit was blown ajar.
We sat together for a long time. There would never be another classmate I would mourn so well.
When the chill became intolerable, I rose at last and tried to dig a grave, but the shingle was too cold for my fingers. I could do no more than leave him in a shallow trench covered by a few inches of sand. Then I made a vow to come back with a shovel tomorrow, and started down the beach for the walk to the jetty.
&nbs
p; Once I came to the rocks, it took longer. My foot, for all its earlier flexibility, now ached as badly as an exposed tooth, and my shoulder gave the most startling twinges on each mean twist of an unsuspecting nerve.
Yet pain provides its own palliative. Battered by a hundred experiences too large for me, I felt calm, and began at last to think of the death of Patty with something like a commencement of grief. Yes, that might be the antidote to pain—sorrow itself.
I had lost a wife I never comprehended, and with her had departed the vitality of her invincible confidence and the horrid equations of her unfathomable mind.
I began to think of the day before Patty left me—was it now twenty-nine or thirty days ago? We had gone on a drive to look for October foliage that would be prettier than our own scrub pines. There were hardwood trees still in abundance around Orleans at the elbow of the bent arm of the Cape. Coming around a turn, I saw a maple with orange-red plumage against a full blue sky, the leaves quivering and ready, tipped between their last red and the later shadows of the brown oncoming fall. Looking at the tree, I murmured, “Oh, you sweet bitch,” and do not know what I meant, but Patty, sitting beside me, said, “I’m going to leave you someday.” (It was the only warning she gave.)
“I don’t know that it matters,” I said. “I don’t feel near anymore. It’s as if I don’t even have half a half of you.”
She nodded.
There was always a touch of hyena in her catlike sumptuousness—a hard, untouchable calculation of the will at the corners of her mouth. No matter her strength, she was always full of pity for herself, and now she whispered to me, “I feel so trapped. I’m so terribly trapped.”
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s always out of my reach.” And then, in the limited degree to which she could feel sympathy for others, she touched my hand. “Once, I thought I had it,” she said, and I squeezed her hand back. For even as I had told Wardley, we had our romantic point of reference. It was the night we met and fornicated like fire dancers and copulated into cornucopias of each other, one night—yes—when we were as happy as Christopher Columbus, for we each discovered America, our country forever divided into two halves. We danced in the pleasure of our complementary charms, and slept as sweetly as two sugar tits nestled side by side.
In the morning Big Stoop, her husband, put on one of his other hats, and we all went to church, Madeleine and Patty, Big Stoop and I. He conducted the service. He was one of our fundamental American madmen: he could orgy on Saturday and baptize on Sunday. Our Father’s House has many mansions but I’m sure Big Stoop saw Saturday night as the outhouse. I never understood their marriage. He was the football coach and she was the cheerleader, and he got her in trouble and they married. The baby came out stillborn. That was her last attempt at procreation. By the time we met, they had had several returns on their ad. (“No golden showers … must be married.”) Yes, with talent enough, I could write a book about Big Stoop and the compartments of his American mind, but in this year I will not try to describe him further except to tell you of the sermon, for that I do remember, and had a recollection here, making my way across the rocks, of sitting in a plain white church, no larger than a one-room schoolhouse and no grander than a Hell-Town shed. His voice was near me now that Patty was gone.
“Last night I had a dream,” he said, and Patty, sitting on the other side of Madeleine from me, squeezed my hand and whispered up my ear like a high school girl, “Your wife—that was his dream,” but Big Stoop never felt her presence. He went on: “Brethren, it was more than a dream, it was a vision of the end of time. The skies rolled back and Jesus came again on the clouds of glory to gather His children to Him. And it was awful to see, Brethren, the sinners that screamed and cried and begged for mercy, falling on their faces before Him. The Bible says that there will be two women grinding corn—one will be taken and one will be left. There will be two in the bed”—Patty Erlene gave me a stiff jolt to the ribs with her elbow—“one will be taken and one left. Mothers will wail as their babies are lifted from their breast to be with Jesus and they are left behind because they would not give up their sins.” Patty Erlene’s fingernails were cutting into my palm but I did not know if it was to suppress her giggling or from a pinch of childish fright.
“The Bible says,” said Big Stoop, “that there will not be one sin allowed in heaven. You can’t be a Christian sitting in the Church on Sunday morning and then stay out of Church on Sunday night because you want to go fishing. Brethren, the Devil wants you to say, ‘Well, it won’t hurt to miss this one night.’ ”
“It sure didn’t,” whispered Patty Erlene with her breath in my ear, while Madeleine, offended to her core by such carrying-on, sat in disapproval, cold as congealed grease, on my other side.
“The next thing you know,” said his voice, “you’re going to the movie houses, and then you’re taking a drink, and then you are on your way to Hellfire and damnation—where the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not.”
“You’re a hell-cat,” whispered Patty Erlene, “and so am I.”
“Come, Brethren,” said Big Stoop, “before the clouds roll back and it’s too late to call for mercy. Come to Jesus tonight. Give up your sins. Give your heart to Jesus. Come and kneel. Patty Erlene, come to the piano. Sing number 256 with us, and let Jesus speak to your heart.”
Patty Erlene played the piano in bang-it-out style, and the congregation sang:
Just as I am without a plea
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou biddest come to Thee,
Oh, Lamb of God, I come—I come.
Afterward we went back to Big Stoop’s house for the Sunday dinner his spinster sister had cooked. It was pot roast done to a gray dead turn, and potatoes, rescued cold and early from the boiling, served with wilted turnip greens. I had rarely met people who had so much vitality on Saturday night as Big Stoop and Patty Erlene, but that Sunday dinner was the other side of the moon. We ate in silence, and all shook hands when we left. A couple of hours later came the automobile accident with Madeleine. It was almost five years before I was to see Patty Erlene again and that was in Tampa where she, after a divorce from Big Stoop, and her stint as an airline stewardess, had met Wardley on a flight and become Mrs. Meeks Wardley Hilby III.
The power of recollection can lift you above pain, and so I concluded my walk on the jetty in no worse condition than when I began. The tide was out and the sand flats carried the smell of the marsh. Under the moon, Irish moss and sea colander waved in tidal pools gifted with silver. I was surprised to find my Porsche where I had left it. Death might be in one universe, but parked automobiles were in another.
Only as I was turning the key in the ignition did it occur to me that the four to five hours I had allowed for Madeleine to arrive must certainly have expired by now. If not for that, I do not know if I would have gone back to my house (Patty’s house) to face Regency—no, I might have stopped at The Widow’s Walk where it all began and become so drunk I would remember nothing by morning. Instead, I lit another cigarette, set the car down Bradford Street for home and was back before the fag had to be dinched in the ashtray.
Across the street from my door, a police cruiser was parked behind my father’s car. It was Regency’s. That I was ready to expect, but Madeleine had not arrived.
I didn’t know what to do. It seemed crucial to see her first, to arm myself indeed with those mutilated photographs she had found in the locked box, but then it occurred to me that I had not even told her to bring them. Of course she would, but would she? It was not her gift nor her vice to exploit her horrors and woes for practical purposes.
In Madeleine’s absence, however, I thought I might as well make certain that my father was all right (although I certainly expected he was), so I walked as silently as I could around the house to the kitchen window and there, on either side of the table, Dougy and Alvin Luther were visible, each appearing to be qu
ite comfortable with a drink in his hand. Indeed, Regency’s holster and gun were slung on another chair. I would have sworn by his composure that he had not yet discovered the loss of the machete. But then, it was also possible that he had had no occasion to open his trunk lid.
As I watched they began to laugh, and curiosity overcame me. I thought I would take the chance that Madeleine, not having arrived for five hours, would not get here in the next five minutes. (Although my heart began to race in rebellion against such a gamble.) Nevertheless, I went around the house again, let myself in by the trap door to the cellar and walked to the area beneath the kitchen. It had become my retreat at many a party when I became too bored with guests lapping at my booze (Patty’s booze). Thereby I knew that you could hear below all that was said in the kitchen above.
Regency was talking. He was reminiscing, no less, about old days on narcotics in Chicago and told my father of a tough partner he had, a black man named Randy Reagan. “Do you believe the name?” I heard Regency say. “Of course everybody called him Ronnie Reagan. The real Ronnie was only governor in California then, but everybody had heard his name. So Ronnie Reagan became my partner.”
“I once had a waiter worked in my bar named Humphrey Hoover,” said my father. “He used to say, ‘Count the salt shakers that’s missing, and multiply by five hundred. That’s the receipts for the night.’ ”
They laughed. Humphrey Hoover! Another of my father’s arts. He could keep a man like Regency in his chair for an evening. Now Alvin Luther went on with his story. Ronnie Reagan, it seems, had set up a cocaine bust. But the accomplice was a rat, and when Ronnie came through the door, he received for his pains a sawed-off shotgun blast in his face. They gave him operations to restore the missing half of his physiognomy. “I was feeling sorry for the son of a bitch,” said Regency, “so I brought a pup bulldog up to the hospital. But when I got to the room, the doctor was there putting in this plastic fucking eye.”
“Oh, no,” said my father.