Tough Guys Don't Dance (23 page)

I thought we'd go to the VFW bar, for it was his favorite place to have a few, but instead he turned in at Town Hall and walked me down the basement corridor to his office where he pointed to a chair and took out a bottle of bourbon. I assumed we had come here to serve some of the recording equipment he kept in his desk.

“I figured I'd show you the amenities of this place,” Regency said, “before you have to use the jail.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

He grinned. “Name your topic.”

“Where's my wife?”

“I was hoping
you
could tell me.”

“I talked to the fellow she ran off with. She left him eight days ago. I believe his story.”

Regency said, “That checks.”

“With what?”

“According to Laurel Oakwode's son—his name, by the way, is also Leonard, but they call him Sonny, Sonny Oakwode—Patty Lareine was in Santa Barbara seven nights ago.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Yes, she was there with this fellow Wardley.”

I had never known exactly what was meant by the remark:
I could not part my lips
. Now I knew.

“Good bourbon?”

I gave one mute nod.

“Yes, she was in Santa Barbara with Wardley and they had dinner with Laurel Oakwode and Leonard Pangborn at Lonnie's beach club. All four of them at one table. Sonny joined them later for coffee.”

I still couldn't speak.

“Want to know what they talked about?”

I nodded.

“I need some input from you a little later.”

I nodded.

“Good. According to what I get from Sonny …” Here he stopped to remark, “By the way, on the phone Sonny doesn't sound like a cocksucker. Do you think Pangborn was lying in that letter?”

I drew a question mark with my finger.

“But Pangborn didn't seem gay to you?”

I shook my head.

“I can't believe how much of life,” he said, “is in the closet. God, you or I could be queer.”

“Whatever you say, dear,” I lisped.

He took that as a big laugh. I was glad to get my voice out under any auspices. Being speechless is a shock one does much to get out of.

We each took a sip of bourbon.

“Want some pot?” asked Regency.

“No.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

“Aren't you afraid of being caught in your office?”

“By whom? I'm trying to put a suspect at his ease, that's all.” Now, he did take out a stick of pot, and he did light it.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Yeah.” He exhaled. “There's a joke in every toke.”

“Yessir.”

“Madden, what I hear from Sonny is that Pangborn and Laurel were to fly to Boston, drive to P-town and pretend to be tourists in love with the Paramessides estate.”

“Is that the name of it?”

“Yeah. Some Greek fronting for Arabs bought it a few years ago. Now Wardley wanted to buy it for Patty. That's what they talked about at dinner.”

He took another toke.

“They were talking of getting married again,” he said.

“Immense.” I think I was contact-high from the smoke.

“Do you know why Patty wanted the place?” asked Regency.

“She never told me.”

“According to Sonny, she's had her eye on the estate for a year. Wardley wanted to buy it for her the way Richard Burton used to buy Elizabeth Taylor a diamond.”

“Isn't such news upsetting to you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Haven't you and Patty Lareine been getting your fingers in the jam together?”

If we had been boxers, I would have said to myself, This is the first punch he has to acknowledge. He blinked, and an aura of spacy rage came off him. That's the only way I can describe it—as if the cosmos had been poked and now was cranking up an electric storm.

“Hey, hey,” he said. “Tell you what, buster. Ask me no questions about your wife, and I won't ask about mine.”

The stick of marijuana was burning close to his knuckles. “I think I will have a toke,” I said.

“Nothing to hide, eh?”

“No more than you, maybe.”

He handed over the roach and I took a pull from the ember.

“Okay,” he said, “tell me what you and Wardley talked about this afternoon.”

“How do you know we met?”

“Can you begin to conceive how many informants
I have in town? This phone,” he bragged, tapping it, “is a marketplace.”

“What do you sell?” I asked.

“I sell the deletion of names from rap sheets,” he said. “I sell the quashing of petty indictments. Madden, go fuck yourself, and when you come all over your jockey shorts, get right down here with the real folks and tell your friend Alvin what Wardley said on the beach today.”

“Suppose I don't?”

“It will be worse than a society divorce in Tampa.”

“You figure you can beat me in a pissing contest?”

“I work harder.”

I found that I wanted to tell him. Not because I was afraid (you are too far gone, the marijuana was telling me, to fear any man) but because I was curious. I wanted to know what he would make of it. “Wardley,” I said, “told me that he and Patty Lareine were in competition to buy the house.”

Regency whistled. “Wardley is planning to double-cross Patty Lareine or you.” He weighed options at a great rate in his mind like a computer going zippity-click-dick-pick, and said, “Maybe he wants both of you.”

“He has cause.”

“Would you mind telling me why?”

“When we were all back in Tampa years ago, Patty Lareine wanted me to off him.”

“You don't say.”

“What are you coy about?” I asked. “Didn't she ever tell you?”

He had his weak spot. No question. He wasn't certain how to deal with remarks about Patty. “It's not clear what you're referring to,” he said at last.

“Pass,” I said.

That was a mistake. He picked up momentum immediately. “What else did you and Wardley talk about?”

I didn't know whether to tell him or not. It had occurred to me that Wardley might have tape-recorded our conversation on the beach. Cleverly edited, it could leave me looking as if I were up-for-sale on a murder job. “Wardley was concerned,” I said, “that Pangborn was dead, and he was curious why Jessica had disappeared. He kept saying that now he would have to bid on the house directly and that was going to drive up the price.”

“Did he indicate where Patty Lareine might be?”

“He wanted me to try to find her.”

“What did he offer?”

“Money.”

“How much?”

Why protect Wardley? I was wondering. Was it my vestigial family prejudice against talking to cops? Then I thought of the beeper. “Two million,” I said.

“Did you believe him?”

“No.”

“Was it an offer to kill her?”

“Yes.”

“Will you testify to that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I'm not sure he was serious. In any event, I didn't agree. As I found out in Tampa, when it comes to contracting for a hit, I'm a wet firecracker.”

“Where can I find Wardley?”

I smiled. “Why don't you ask a couple of your informants?”

“Which ones?”

“The ones in the brown van.”

He nodded as if I had made a good move in a chess game. “I'll tell you what,” he said, “they don't know. He just meets them here and there.”

“What is he driving?”

“He talks to them by CB radio. Then he meets them. He just walks up to them. Then he walks away.”

“You believe that?”

“Well, I haven't shaken them so hard that their teeth rattle.”

“Why not?”

“You get a bad reputation bruising informants. Besides, I believe them. Wardley
would
behave that way. He wants people to think he's a class act.”

“Maybe you're not very concerned to find out where Patty is.”

He made an elaborate to-do about showing his
cool. He took the roach and pinched it out with his thumb, rolled it into a small ball of paper and popped it into his throat. No evidence, said his smile. “I'm not hungry,” he said. “Your wife will show up intact.”

“Are you positive? I'm not.”

“We have to wait,” he said mildly.

I wondered how much he was lying about, and how deep were the lies. Nothing came off him but a hint of the void. I took another sip of the bourbon. It did not go with the marijuana.

He seemed to like the combination, however. He took out another stick and lit it. “Murders are damnable,” he said. “Once in a while you get a case that leaves its roots in you.”

I had no idea what he was up to. I took the marijuana he offered and pulled in some smoke, handed it back.

“There was one case,” he said, “of a good-looking bachelor who would pick up a girl and get her to go to a motel with him. He would make love to her, and convince her to spread her legs while he took Polaroids. Then he would kill her. Next, he'd take another photograph. Before and after. After which he would decamp, leaving the girl in the bed. You know how he got caught? He used to put his photographs into an album. A page for each lady. His mother was a jealous watchdog, so she broke the lock on the album. When she saw the contents, she fainted. When she came to, she called the authorities.”

“Why do you tell this story?”

“Because it turns me on. I'm a law enforcement officer and it turns me on. Every good psychiatrist has a touch of the psycho in him, and you can't be a good cop without sitting on a kettle of potential monstrosities in yourself. Does my story turn you on?”

“You didn't tell it well enough.”

“Ho, ho, wouldn't a good DA love to get you on the witness stand.”

“I want to go now,” I said.

“Can I drive you?”

“Thank you. I'll walk.”

“I didn't mean to upset you.”

“You didn't.”

“I have to tell you. That guy with the Polaroids interests me. There's something in the nitty-gritty that he is close to.”

“I'm sure,” I said.

“Sayonara,” said Regency.

On the street, I began to shiver all over again. Most of it was simple relief. For the last hour I might as well have been touching every word I uttered. They had all had to be put into position. It was natural to feel relief at getting out of his office. But I hated his intelligence. The story he told
had
turned me on. One tickle down at the core.

What had he been trying to communicate? I recollected nude Polaroids I had taken of Madeleine years ago and of Patty Lareine not so long ago. They were hidden somewhere in my study like fish nibbling on the reef. I felt a mean sense
of possession at the very thought of their existence. It was as if I held the key to some dungeons. I began to ask myself again: Was I the bloody dispatcher?

I cannot describe how much revulsion came to me then. I was physically ill. The marijuana magnified the spasms of my throat until they were near to orgasmic in the power of their heaves. Up from the esophagus came bile and bourbon and whatever little food had been in me, and I bent over a fence and left this misery on a neighbor's lawn. One could hope the rain would absolve me.

Yes, I had been like a man half crushed beneath a rock who by the most extraordinary exertion against the pain has just managed to extricate his body. Then the weight topples over on him again.

I knew why I had thrown up. I had to go back to the burrow. “Oh, no,” I whispered to myself, “it's empty!” But I did not know. Some instinct in myself, powerful as Hell-Town, told me to go back. If the killer, as we would have it, always returns to the scene of the crime, then some switch may have been thrown, for I was convinced that the only way I could demonstrate to myself for another night that I was not guilty of slaughter was to go back. If I did not return, I was guilty. Such was the logic, and it grew so powerful that by the time I reached my home it was for no more pressing purpose than to get the keys to my Porsche. I began to prepare, as I had before, all the mental concomitants of this trip: the highway, the country road, the humpbacked sand road—and
and I saw in advance the puddles that would be forming in the hollows with this rain, then the trail, the moss-covered stone by the burrow. I even saw, by way of my imagination, a plastic bag revealed by my flashlight. It was as far as I could go in my thoughts. Prepared, now, as well as I could make myself, I was about to depart, when the dog began to lick my fingers. It was his first sign of affection in four days. So I took him along. Practical reasons came to me with the flat thrust of his big tongue on my palm: he could certainly be of use. For if there was nothing in the burrow, who was to say that nothing was buried nearby? His nose could bring us to it.

Yet I confess that the old smelly reek of the dog so assailed my tender stomach that I had a second impulse not to take him. He was, however, already in the car, as solemn as a soldier going to the front, one big black Labrador. (His name, by the way, was Stunts, bestowed on him because he was too dumb to learn any.)

We set out. He sat beside me in the bucket seat, his nose pointed to the window, and with equal solemnity we drove. It was only when I was more than halfway to the turnoff in Truro that I remembered the beeper. The thought that I was still being followed stirred a rage in me. I pulled the car over to the highway shoulder, parked, removed the little box and laid it in a shallow trench at the foot of the mileage marker. Then we went on.

I see no need to describe the rest of the drive.
It became as hesitant as the ones before, and the closer I came over the last sandy road, the less of my foot I gave to the pedal, until I began to stall, first once, then twice. The last was in a puddle, and I had a fear, intimate as the passing of a ghost, that I could not start the car again. During Colonial times, there had been a gallows at a clearing in these woods, and through the drizzle, every overhanging branch looked to have a man dangling from it. I do not know who was more deranged by the effort, the dog or myself. He whimpered steadily in a dying plaint as if his paw were caught in a trap.