Tough Guys Don't Dance (17 page)

“I have it on good authority you did.”

“Yes, it's Tim,” she said, “oh, my God!” as if now, the second time around, it was reaching her. Yes, Tim—on the phone—after all these years. “No, baby,” she said, “I didn't send you regards.”

“You're married, I hear.”

“Yes.”

We had a silence. There was a moment when I could feel the impulse mount in her to hang up, and perspiration started on my neck. All hope for the day would be smashed if she put the receiver down, yet my instinct was not to speak.

“Where are you living?” she asked at last.

“You mean you don't know?”

“Hey, friend,” she said, “is this Twenty Questions? I don't know.”

“Please, lady, don't be harsh.”

“Fuck off. I'm sitting here putting my head together”—that meant I had interrupted her first
toke of the morning—“and you ring up like you're the fellow from yesterday.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “you don't know that I'm living in Provincetown?”

“I don't know anybody there. And from what I hear, I'm not sure that I want to.”

“That's right,” I said. “Every time the clock chimes, your husband busts another one of your old dealer friends.”

“How about that?” she said. “Isn't it awful?”

“How could you marry fuzz?”

“Do you have another dime? Try calling collect.” She hung up.

I got into my car.

I had to see her. It was one thing to blow on the embers of an old romance, it was another to feel the promise of an answer. I had at that moment an insight into the root of obsession itself. No wonder we cannot bear questions whose answers are not available. They sit in the brain like the great holes that were dug for the foundations of buildings that never went up. Everything wet, rotten, and dead collects in them. Count the cavities in your teeth by the obsessions that send you back to drink. No question, therefore. I had to see her.

How quickly I took myself through the landscape. It was the day for me. Just outside Provincetown, a wan November sun gave a pale light to the dunes and they looked like the hills of heaven. The wind blew sand until the ridges were obscured by an angelic haze of light, and on the
other side of the highway, toward the bay, all the little white cabins for summer tourists were lined up as neatly as kennels on a pedigree-dog compound. Now, with their windows boarded, they had a mute, somewhat injured look, but then, the trees were bare as well and bore a hue as weathered as the hide of animals going through a long winter in a land without forage.

I took my chances and drove at a rate that would have put me in jail if a State Trooper had caught my vehicle on radar. Yet I did not make such fine time, after all, since it occurred to me in the middle of this high speed that Barnstable was a small enough town to notice a man in a Porsche asking directions to Regency's house, and I did not want a neighbor inquiring of Alvin Luther this evening who the friend might be who parked his sports car three hundred yards away from the door. In this part of the Cape, the winter people, mean and quick-sighted as birds, orderly as clerks, write down license numbers when they don't recognize your car. They anticipate interlopers. So I parked in Hyannis and rented an anonymous dun-colored blubber-boat, a Galaxy, or was it a Cutlass?—I think a Cutlass, it didn't matter, I was hyper enough to joke about the ubiquity of our American auto with the young airhead behind the Hertz counter. She must have thought I was on LSD. She certainly took a time checking my credit card and made me wait through one of those ten-minute ready-to-slay delay warps before she put down the phone and
gave the card back. That gave me opportunity to brood a bit over my financial condition. Patty Lareine had emptied our checking account when she left, and had cut off my Visa, my MasterCard and my American Express cards, all of which I discovered in the first week. But husbands of my ilk have resources even wives like Patty Lareine cannot eradicate entirely, and so my old Diners Club, which I would renew but never use, had been overlooked by her. Now its viability was keeping me in food, drink, gas, this rented car, and—well, it was near to a month—sooner or later Patty Lareine was going to get a few bills from the outpost. Then, after she cut me off, lack of money might become my preoccupation. I didn't care. I would sell off the furniture. Money was the game other people played that I tried to avoid by having just enough not to play it. No one ever trusts a man who makes such a claim, but do you know?—I believe myself.

All this is making an excursion from the point, except that the nearer I came to Barnstable, the more my mind was afraid to contemplate what I would do if Madeleine did not let me in. Such uneasiness was, however, soon replaced by the need to concentrate on getting there. That was no automatic deed in these parts. The environs of Barnstable had in the last decade become little more than freshly paved roads and newly erected developments slashed through the flat scrub pine that covered most of the land here. Even old-timers had often not heard of new streets two
miles from where they lived. So I took the precaution of stopping at a real estate office in Hyannis where they had a large up-to-date map of the county, and finally located Alvin Luther's little lane. As I had suspected, it looked, by the map, to be not more than a hundred yards long, one of six similar and parallel mini-streets all depending from a trunk road like six teats on a sow, or, would it be kinder to say, like one of six cylinders on an in-line engine designed for the kind of car I was now driving? Dependably, the short road to his house ended in a nipple the size of an asphalt turnaround. Around that dead-end circle were set out five identical highly modified Cape Cod—type wooden houses, each with a planted pine tree on the lawn, a set of plastic rain gutters, asbestos shingles, differently painted mailboxes, trash-can bins, tricycles on the grass—I parked just short of the circle.

It would certainly attract attention to be seen walking fifty needless steps to her door. I could hardly go up, ring her bell and later make it back to my car without being observed. Yet it would be worse to leave the car in front of another house and in consequence agitate the owner. What a loneliness hung over this enclave in the sorry scrub-pine woods! I thought of old Indian graves that once must have sat on these low brush-filled lands. Of course, Madeleine would accept a situation whose gloom matched her own worst moods—from that she could rise. But to live in a house like Patty's, where one could plummet
below the cheerfulness of the colors—well, not much, for Madeleine, could be worse.

I pressed the doorbell.

It wasn't until I heard her step that I dared to be certain she was in. She began to tremble as soon as she saw me. The intensity of her disturbance went through me as clearly as if she had spoken. She was delighted, she was furious, but she was not startled. She had put her make-up on, and thereby I knew (for usually she did not do anything to her face until evening) that she was expecting a visitor. Doubtless, it was me.

I received no great greeting, however. “You're a clod,” she said. “I'd expect you to do something like this.”

“Madeleine, if you didn't want me to come, you should not have hung up.”

“I called you back. There was no answer.”

“You discovered my name in the book?”

“I discovered
her
name.” She looked me over. “Being kept doesn't agree with you,” she told me at the end of this examination.

Madeleine had worked as a hostess for years in a good New York bar and restaurant and she did not like to have her poise nicked. Her trembling had most certainly stopped, but her voice was not where she would have placed it.

“Let me lay the facts of life on you,” she said. “You can stay in my house about five minutes before the neighbors will start phoning each other to find out who you are.” She glanced out the window. “Did you walk here?”

“My car is down the road.”

“Brilliant. I think you better go right away. You're just asking directions, right?”

“Who are your neighbors that they inspire such respect?”

“There's a State Trooper's family to the left, and a retired couple to the right, Mr. and Mrs. Snoop.”

“I thought maybe they were old friends from the Mafia.”

“Well, Madden,” she said, “ten years have gone by, but you still show no class.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Let's find a hotel room in Boston,” she said. It was her good way of telling me to go peddle a few papers.

“I'm still in love with you,” I said.

She began to cry. “You're such a bad guy,” she said. “You really are rotten.”

I wanted to embrace her. I wanted, if the truth be told, to go right back to bed with her, but it was not the hour. That much I had learned in ten years.

Her hand made a little gesture. “Come on in,” she said.

The living room went with the house. It had a cathedral ceiling, factory-prepared paneling, a rug of some synthetic material, and a lot of furniture that must have come from the shopping mall in Hyannis. There was nothing of herself. No surprise. She paid great attention to her body, her clothing, her make-up, her voice and the
expressions on her heart-shaped face. She could register with the subtlest turn of her fine mouth every shade of the sardonic, the contemptuous, the mysterious, the tender and the cognizant that she might need to express. She was her own work of brunette art. She presented herself as such. But her surroundings were another matter. When I first met Madeleine she was living in an apartment totally drab. I need only describe Nissen's place again. That was cool. I had a queen who was independent of her habitat. I can tell you that was one good reason I tired of her over a couple of years. An Italian queen was no easier to live with than a Jewish princess.

Now I said, “Alvin bought all this?”

“Is that your name for him? Alvin?”

“What do you call him?”

“Maybe I call him the winner,” she said.

“It was the winner who told me that you send regards.”

She was hardly quick enough to conceal the news. “I never spoke your name to him,” she said.

I was thinking that could be true. When I knew her she never talked about anyone before me.

“Well,” I said, “how did your husband find out I knew you?”

“Keep trying. You'll come up with the answer.”

“You think Patty Lareine told him?”

Madeleine shrugged.

“How do you know,” I asked, “that Patty Lareine knows him?”

“Oh, he told me how he met the two of you. Sometimes he tells me a lot. We're lonesome here.”

“Then you knew I was in Provincetown.”

“I managed to forget it.”

“Why are you lonesome?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You have two sons to take care of. That must keep you hopping.”

“What are you talking about?”

My instinct was sound. I did not think children lived in this house. “Your husband,” I said, “showed me a photograph of you with two little boys.”

“They're his brother's children. I don't have any. You know I can't.”

“Why would he lie to me?”

“He's a liar,” Madeleine said. “What's the big news? Most cops are.”

“You sound as if you don't like him.”

“He's a cruel, overbearing son of a bitch.”

“I see.”

“But I like him.”

“Oh.”

She began to laugh. Then she began to cry. “Excuse me,” she said and stepped into the bathroom that was off the entrance hall. I studied the living room some more. There were no prints or paintings, but on one wall hung about thirty framed photographs of Regency in various uniforms. Green Beret, State Trooper, others I did not recognize. He was shaking hands in some of them with political officials and men who looked
like bureaucrats, and there were two fellows that I would have cast for high FBI men. Sometimes Regency was receiving athletic or memorial cups, and sometimes he was giving them away. In the center was one large framed glossy of Madeleine in a velvet gown with deep cleavage. She looked beautiful.

On the facing wall was a gun rack. I do not know enough to say how fine a collection it might be, but there were three shotguns and ten rifles. To one side was a glass case with a steel-mesh front, and within was a pistol rack with two six-shot revolvers and three fat handguns that looked like Magnums to me.

When she still did not come out, I took a quick trip upstairs and passed through the master bedroom and the guest bedroom. There was more shopping-mall furniture. It was all neat. The beds were made. That was not quintessentially characteristic of Madeleine.

In the corner of the mirror was tucked a piece of paper. On it was written:

It was in her handwriting.

I moved downstairs just before she came out again.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked.

She nodded. She sat in one of the armchairs. I put myself in the other.

“Hello, Tim,” she said.

I didn't know whether to trust her. How much I needed to talk I was just beginning to realize, but if Madeleine did not prove to be the best person to whom to unburden myself, she would almost certainly be the worst.

I said, “Madeleine, I'm still in love with you.”

“Next case,” she said.

“Why did you marry Regency?”

It was wrong to use his last name. She stiffened as if I had touched her on the marriage itself, but I was already weary of speaking of him as the winner.

“It's your fault,” she said. “After all, you didn't have to introduce me to Big Stoop.”

Nor did she have to finish the thought. I knew the words she was inclined to say, and held back. However, she could not hold herself. Her voice came forth in a poor imitation of Patty Lareine. She was too angry. The mimicry was strained. “Yessir,” said Madeleine, “ever since Big Stoop, I've had a taste for good old boys with mammoth dicks.”