Tough Guys Don't Dance (20 page)

I would have been less inclined to take him seriously if, in prison, he had not had a man killed who was threatening him. I was present when he
bought the killer's services, and he had not sounded all that different from now. Convicts would laugh at him, but not to his face.

“Tell me about the real estate deal,” I said.

“Since your wife and I have an eye on the same place, I'm not certain I should tell you. One never knows when Patty Lareine will come back and wrap her arms around you.”

“Yes,” I said, “I could be vulnerable,” and wondered how Patty would reek of Acting Police Chief Regency.

“I shouldn't tell you.” He paused, then he said, “On impulse, however, I will.”

I had to look now into those abominably large, searching eyes. “I don't want to roil your feelings, Tim, but I'm not certain you truly understood Patty Lareine. She pretends that she couldn't care less what the world thinks of her, but I will tell you that she's really the stuff from which the world's flagships are made. It's just that she's too proud to work her way up the daily rungs. So she pretends no interest.”

I was thinking of the first gathering to which I had taken Patty Lareine when we came to Provincetown five years ago. Some friends of mine brought their wineskins out to the dunes for a party, and the women contributed tea-cakes and Acapulco Gold, Jamaica Prime, and even a few Thai sticks. We had a moon blast. Patty had actually been nervous before it began—I was to learn that she was always nervous before a party—which might have been hard to comprehend considering
how good she was at giving them, but then, Dylan Thomas, they say, used to throw up just before going out to give an unforgettable poetry reading. So had Patty taken them for a great ride on this first party, and before the end, even bent over to play a bugle between her legs. Yes, she had been the life of that party and many another.

All the same, I knew what he meant. She gave so much for so little. Often I felt the wistful note of a good artist painting ashtrays to make Christmas gifts. So I did not ignore what he said; indeed, I considered whether he could be right. Her unrest at living in Provincetown had become considerable of late.

“The secret to Patty Lareine,” Wardley said, “is that she sees herself as a sinner. Hopelessly lost. No return. What can a girl do next?”

“Drink herself to death.”

“Only if she's a fool. I would say the practical answer for Patty Lareine is to build great works to the devil.”

His wait was portentous, as if to allow endless space for this to sink in. “I've kept my eye on her,” he said. “There is little she has done in the last five years I haven't heard about.”

“You have friends in town?”

He made a gesture with his hands.

Of course he did. With half the winter population on welfare, he would not have to pay a great deal for information.

“I've kept in touch,” he said, “with real estate
agents. Haunted the tip of the Cape in my own way. Provincetown impresses me. It's the most attractive fishing village on the Eastern seaboard, and if not for the Portuguese, bless them, it would have been ruined long ago.”

“Are you saying Patty Lareine wants to get into real estate?”

“Not at all. She wants to pull off a coup. She has her eye on a fabulous house on a hill in the West End.”

“I think I know the place you mean.”

“Of course you do. Don't I know that! Those people you had drinks with at The Widow's Walk were my surrogates. They were planning to step into the agent's office next day to get that house you were already kind enough to put me in.” He whistled. “Provincetown is haunted. I'm convinced of it. How else could you come up with my name while speaking to them.”

“It is remarkable.”

“It is directly spooky.”

I nodded. My scalp felt alert. Did Patty Lareine tune the orchestra in Hell-Town? While blowing her bugle at the moon?

“Do you realize,” said Wardley, “that poor Lonnie Pangborn got up the same night in the middle of dinner with his blonde lalapalooza, and phoned me? He was half convinced I was double-dealing. How, he asked, could he keep a low profile as the purchaser when my name was being bruited about?”

“Well, chalk one up,” I said.

“That always happens with master plans,” said Wardley. “The better the plan, the more you may count on something unforeseen getting in to bend the works. Someday I'll tell you the real story of how Jack Kennedy got killed. It was supposed to be a miss! What a set of accidents! The CIA didn't know anus from appetite that day.”

“You want to buy the estate in order to keep Patty Lareine from getting it?”

“Exactly.”

“What would you do with it?”

“I would take great pleasure in hiring a caretaker to watch over its empty glories. Calculated to put dry rot into every one of Patty Lareine's apertures.”

“But what better can she do, if she gets it?”

He held up a white plump hand. “This is just my speculation.”

“Yes.”

“Newport is Newport, and you can leave it where it is. Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket have become no better than real estate. The Hamptons are a disaster! Le Frak City is more attractive on Sunday.”

“Provincetown is jammed worse than any of them.”

“Yes, in summer it's hopeless, but then, so are all the other spots on the Eastern seaboard. The point is, Provincetown has natural beauty. The others are nature's culls. And for fall, winter and spring, nothing is superior to little old P-town. I suspect that Patty Lareine wants to start a chic
hotel right there on that estate. Done properly, it could, in a few years, have more cachet than anything around. In the off-season, once in, it could sweep all before it. That's how Patty is thinking, I reckon. And, with proper assistants, she would make a fabulous hotelier. Tim, whether I'm right or wrong, I know this. She's got her heart set on the place.” He sighed. “Now that Lonnie's packed it in and the blonde has disappeared, I've got to find a representative in a hurry or go speak for myself. That will kick the price way up.”

I began to laugh. “You've convinced me,” I said. “You'd rather screw Patty on a piece of real estate than kill her.”

“You bet.” He made his point of laughing with me. I didn't know what to believe. His story sounded wrong.

We watched the waves for a while.

“I adored Patty Lareine,” he said. “I don't want to bring out the crying towel, but for a little while, she made me feel like a man. I always say that if you're AC-DC, it's nice to have power in both lines.”

I smiled.

“Well, it was no laughing matter. All my life, I would remind you, I've been trying to regain property rights to my rectum.”

“Given up?”

“I'm the only one who would care what the answer is by now.”

“Back in my chauffeuring days, Patty Lareine
used to harangue me on how we had to off you, Wardley. She would say that there would be no peace until you were dead. That if we didn't kill you, you would certainly kill us. She said she'd known some evil types in her day, but you were the most vindictive. You had, she said, so much time to plot and scheme.”

“Did you believe her?”

“No, not really. I kept thinking of the day we got kicked out of school together.”

“Is that why you didn't try to terminate me? I always wondered. Because, you know, I didn't suspect a thing. I always trusted you.”

“Wardley, you have to see my situation. I was broke. I had a police record and couldn't work any good places as a bartender, and the wealthiest woman I ever knew acted as if she was mad about me, and promised me all the drugs and booze and toys that money could buy. I did get pretty serious about how I was going to total you. Psyched myself up. But I couldn't get that heavy shit to flush. Know why?”

“Of course not. I'm asking.”

“Because, Wardley, I kept thinking of the time you got your moxie together and inched out along a third-floor ledge to get into your father's room. That story moved me. You were one wimp who got his nerve up. Finally, I had to call it off. You can choose not to believe me.”

He laughed, and then he laughed again. The sound of his humor as it cawed through his bends brought a flight of sea gulls near, much as if he
were the lead bird crying out, “Here's food, here's food!”

“That's marvelous,” he said. “Patty Lareine's plans gone kerflooie because you didn't have the heart to kill the little boy on the ledge. Well, I've enjoyed this talk and am delighted that as old classmates we are finally getting to know one another. Let me fill you in on what a liar I used to be. I never
inched
out along that ledge. I made up the tale. Everybody has to have a war story in prison, so that became mine. I wanted people to recognize that I was too desperate to fool around with. But the truth is that I gained entry to my father's private library by way of the butler—who was also the photographer, remember? He just took out his key and let me in. And all for no more than the promise that I would unbutton his fly—old-fashioned buttons for the butler, not zippers!—and go gooey-gooey down there. Which I did. I always pay my debts. Paris is well worth a Mass!”

With that he stood up, lifted his shoes on high as if he were the Statue of Liberty, and started off. When he was ten feet away, he turned around and said, “Who knows when Patty Lareine may pop in on you? If you get the impulse, off her. Her head, since we have to put a figure on it, is worth two million and change.” Then he lowered the arm that was carrying the shoes and pranced off on stiff cold feet.

He was not out of earshot before I told myself that if I could find the blonde head that had now
disappeared, that very blonde head which probably belonged to Jessica Pond, it might, by now, be sufficiently decomposed to be successfully presented as the remains of Patty Lareine. I might be the lucky inheritor of a high-powered scam. Tricky as hell, but worth two million.

Then I told myself: Anyone who is capable of thinking this way is capable of homicide.

Then I told myself: Thought is cheap. The best guide to my innocence is that the idea of such a scam hardly stirs me.

I waited until Meeks Wardley Hilby III was a distance down the beach before I went back to my Porsche, and left Marconi Beach for the drive to Provincetown.

On the way home I learned a little more about the tarnished nature, on occasion, of coincidence.

It seemed to me that I was being followed. I could not swear to this because I could not locate a car behind me. When I would speed, no vehicle came rushing up to keep me in sight. Even as I might sometimes sense, however, who was on the telephone before I picked it up, so now I could not relinquish the conviction that somebody was on my tail. They might be keeping a good distance, but they were following. Had a beeper been put on my Porsche?

I turned right down a side road for a hundred yards and parked. No other car came along. I got out and looked in the front trunk, and at the motor in the rear. Under the back bumper I found
a small black box, half the size of a pack of cigarettes, held in place by a magnet.

The black box made no noise and offered no ticking. It felt inert in my hand. I could not be certain what it was. I replaced it, therefore, on the bumper, went back to Route 6, and drove for another mile. Then I parked at the summit of a long straightaway. I kept a pair of field glasses in the side pocket for watching gulls and I scanned the highway with them. There, behind me, just within the useful range of these binoculars, was a brown van also parked on the shoulder. Had they stopped when I did? Were they waiting for me to start up again? I kept driving until I came to Pamet Road in Truro, which went east from the highway for a mile, then north for a mile, then back west to join the four-lane. Three quarters of the way around I stopped at a turn where I could see much of the southern arm of Pamet Road on the other side of the Pamet River Valley, and again the brown vehicle had halted. I had seen this closed brown van before, I knew it!

I parked my car by a house and stepped back into the woods. Whoever was in the van waited another ten minutes but then must have concluded that I was visiting someone, so they drove by to look at the house before which my Porsche was parked, then turned around to go back from where they had come. I listened to the motor, which was not hard to follow. Our roads are empty in winter. It was the only sound in the valley.

Now they stopped again, perhaps three hundred
yards away. They would wait for me to start up. The beeper would tell them when I began to move.

I was inclined, what with all natural sense of outrage, to throw their gadget right into the woods—or, better, leave it on some parked car and oblige my followers to wait on Pamet Road for the rest of the night. But I was too furious for that. It offended me that the exceptional meeting of Wardley and myself on Marconi Beach came down to no more than using a beeper to follow my Porsche. Apparently the first precept to recollect was that not all coincidence was diabolical or divine. I was back with the common people!

After all, it was not Wardley I had seen behind the wheel of the van, but Spider Nissen, and Stoodie was in the bucket seat beside him. Wardley was doubtless reading Ronald Firbank in some country inn with a CB radio at his side waiting for Spider and Stoodie to send the word.

Yes, I would keep the beeper, I told myself. Maybe I could use it to good purpose when the opportunity arose. That, however, was only a small satisfaction, considering how much unrest this little machine aroused in my blood, but I could now recognize that the more events began to impinge on me, the closer I could come to the first cause.

A
fter all these maneuvers on the highway, I was angry, I was curious, I was thirsty, and it occurred to me I had not been in a bar since the night at The Widow's Walk. Ergo, so soon as I came back to my house, I parked and walked down to the town wharf. We have good bars in the center of town: The Bay State (which we call The Brig), The Poop Deck and The Fish and Bait (unofficially renamed The Bucket of Blood to honor the number of fights that take place in there), good bars, but you would not call them great, for they have none of the working-class panache that bartenders like my father bring to a place. Still, they are dark, and just dirty enough to make you comfortable. One can hunker down to drinking as comfortably as an unborn babe in a good dependable womb. Few
fluorescent tubes will be overhead and the old jukebox is too feeble to blast your ears. In summer, of course, a bar like The Brig would be more crowded than a New York subway at rush hour, and the story is told—I believe it—that one summer some PR men at Budweiser or Schaefer or one of those warm-urine brews decided to run a contest for the bar-and-restaurant that sold the most beer in the state of Massachusetts. Well, a place in Provincetown called the Bay State showed the greatest volume of beer sales for July. So, on a weekday morning in August, some high executives in lightweight summer suits flew over, accompanied by a television crew, to film the presentation of the award, expecting no doubt to drop in on one of those lobster cum fish-and-chips places, large as an armory, that you can find around Hyannis, and instead encountered our dark, funky Brig with no customers rich enough to buy anything better than ale, but two hundred beer drinkers packed in standing up. Maybe The Brig was the length of a boxcar from the front door to the stinking garbage cans in the rear, and for food, you could get a submarine with ham and cheese or linguiça sausage. The TV cameras rolled and the freaks stood up and said, “Yeah, that's the beer. Stinks. What you got that red light on your TV camera for? I'm talking too much, right? Stop! Right?”