Tough Guys Don't Dance (33 page)

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.

“Yeah,” said Regency, “a plastic fucking eye. I had to wait while he installed it. Then, the moment I'm alone with Ronnie I drop the bull pup right on the bed. A tear comes into his real eye. Ronnie says—the poor bastard—he says, ‘Will I scare the pup?'

“ ‘No,' I tell him, ‘the pup loves you already.' If peeing all over the blankets is love, the pup loves him already.

“ ‘How do you think I look?' asks Ronnie Reagan. ‘I want the truth.' The poor bastard! His ear is also gone.

“ ‘Well,' I says, ‘it's all right. You never was an orchid.' ”

They laughed. They would go on, story for story, until I came in. So I left the cellar to return outside, and encountered Madeleine at the front door. She had been registering her nerve to ring the bell.

I made no effort to kiss her. It would have been a mistake.

She clutched me instead, and laid her head on my shoulder until the quivering stilled. “I'm sorry I took so long,” she said. “I turned back twice.”

“It's all right.”

“I brought the pictures,” she said.

“Let's go to my car. I have a flashlight there.”

By its light, I had one more surprise. The photos were no more or less obscene than my Polaroids,
but they were not of Patty Lareine. It was Jessica's head that the scissors had cut from the body. I looked again. No, Madeleine could not tell the difference. Jessica's body looked young, and her face was blurred. It was a natural error. But it offered further light on Alvin Luther Regency. It was one thing to take a beaver shot of one's wife or steady girl, but quite another to convince a lady who had been in your bed for no more than a week. Prowess is prowess, I thought glumly, and debated whether to tell Madeleine who the model was. I did not wish, however, to disturb her further so I kept silent. I could not decide whether the introduction of another woman in her husband's love life would halve her disruption or double it.

She quivered again. I made the decision to take her inside.

“We'll have to be quiet,” I said. “He's here.”

“Then I can't go in.”

“He won't know. I'll put you in my room and you can lock the door.”

“It's her room too, isn't it?”

“I'll take you to my study.”

We managed to ascend the stairs silently. After we were on the third floor, I guided her to a chair by the window. “Do you want a light?” I asked.

“I'd rather sit in the dark. The view is beautiful through the window.” I suppose it was the first time she had ever seen the sand flats of the bay when the moon was on them.

“What are you going to do down there?” she asked.

“I don't know. I've got to have it out with him.”

“That's crazy.”

“Not with my father present. It's our advantage, really.”

“Tim, let's just go away.”

“Maybe we will. But I need the answers to a couple of questions first.”

“For peace of mind?”

“To keep from going crazy,” I nearly said aloud.

“Hold my hands,” she said. “Let's just sit here for a moment.”

We did. I think her thoughts may have passed into me on the intertwining of our fingers, for I found myself remembering the early days when we met, I, a bartender much in demand (for in New York, good young bartenders build a reputation among restaurant proprietors not unanalogous to good young professional athletes) and she, a saucy hostess, in a Mafia midtown restaurant. Her uncle, a man much respected, got her the job, but she made it her own—how many sports and dudes passing through her purlieu tried to get a piece of her, but we had a perfect romance for a year. She was Italian and a one-man girl and I adored her. She loved silences. She loved sitting in a dim room for hours while the velvets of her loving heart passed over to me. I might have stayed with her forever, but I was young and got bored. She rarely read a book. She knew the name of every famous author who had ever
lived but she rarely read a book. She was as smart and shiny as satin, but we never went anywhere except into each other, and that was enough for her, but not for me.

Now I might be going back to Madeleine, and my heart lifted like a wave. A wave at night, be it said. Patty Lareine at her best used to give me emotions that were close to sunlight, but I was approaching forty, and the moon and the mist were nearer to my sentiments.

I relinquished her hands and kissed Madeleine lightly on the lips. It brought back how nice was her mouth and how much like a rose. A faint sound, husky and sensual as the earth itself, stirred in her throat. It was marvelous, or would be so soon as I was not full of thinking of what awaited me below.

“I'll leave you a gun. Just in case,” I said, and took Wardley's .22 from my pocket.

“I have one,” she said. “I brought my own,” and from the flap of her coat she withdrew a little over-and-under Derringer. Two shots. Two .32 holes. Then I thought of Regency's Magnum.

“We're an arsenal,” I said, and there was enough light in the room to see her smile. A good line, well delivered, was half, I sometimes thought, of what you needed to keep her happy.

So I went downstairs with a piece, after all.

I did not like the idea, however, of talking to Regency with the bulges of the handgun poking out of my pants or shirt—there was really no place to conceal it. I compromised by leaving it
on a shelf above the telephone within easy reach of the kitchen door. Then I strolled in on both men.

“Hey, we never heard you open the outside door,” said my father.

Regency and I said hello with eyes averted, and I made myself a drink to coat the double barrels of my fatigue. I threw the first bourbon down neat and poured another before I put the ice in the glass.

“Which leg are you filling?” asked Regency. He was drunk, and when I finally did reach his eyes I could see that he was not nearly so calm as he had appeared by his posture when seen through the kitchen window, or as I had supposed by the sound of his voice heard through the kitchen floor—no, he had the ability of many a big powerful man to stow whole packets of unrest in various parts of his body. He could sit unmoving like a big beast in a chair, but if he had had a tail, it would have been whipping the rungs. Only his eyes, glazed by the last hundred hours of lurid unmanageables and preternaturally bright, gave any clue to what he was sitting on.

“Madden,” he said, “your father is a prince.”

“Ho, ho,” said my father, “you'd think we were getting along.”

“Dougy, you're the best,” said Regency. “I'll flatten anyone who disagrees. What do you say, Tim?”

“Well,” I said, tipping my glass, “cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Regency, tipping his.

There was a pause. He said, “I told your father. I'm in need of a long vacation.”

“Are we drinking to your retirement?”

“I'm resigning,” he said. “This town brings out everything that's worst in me.”

“They should never have assigned you here.”

“Right.”

“Florida is where you belong,” I said. “Miami.”

“Who,” said Regency, “put the hair up your ass?”

“All the tongues in town,” I told him. “It's common knowledge you're a narc.”

His eyelids fell heavily. I do not wish to exaggerate, but it is as if he had to turn a mattress over. “That obvious, huh?” he asked.

“There's a job profile to being a narc,” said my father equably. “You can't conceal it.”

“I told those chowderheads who appointed me, it was bad enough pretending to be a State Trooper, but this was the pits. Portuguese are stupid, stubborn people except for one thing. You can't bullshit them. Acting Chief of Police!” If there had been a cuspidor, he would have spit into it. “Yeah, I'm going,” he said, “and, Madden, don't say ‘Three cheers.' ” He burped and said “Excuse me” to my father for the indelicacy, then looked morose. “I've got an ex-Marine over me,” he said. “Can you imagine a Green Beret in a chain of command under a Marine? It's like putting the steak on the fire and the skillet on top of the steak.”

My father thought that was funny. Maybe he laughed to ameliorate everyone's mood, but it did tickle him.

“I got one regret, Madden,” said Regency, “it's that we never did get to talk a little about our philosophies. It would have been good to get shit-face.”

“You're practically there right now,” I said.

“Never. Do you know how much I can drink? Tell him, Dougy.”

“He says he's halfway through his second fifth,” said my father.

“And if you put a Mickey in my glass, I'd drink right through that too. I burn the stuff faster than it can touch me.”

“You have a lot to burn,” I said.

“Philosophy,” he said. “I'll give you a sample. You think I'm a crude, unlettered son of a bitch. Well, I am, and proud of it. You know why? A cop is a human creature born stupid and raised in stupidity. But he desires to become bright. You know why? It is God's wish. Every time a stupid guy gets a little intelligence, the devil's in shock.”

“I always thought,” I said, “that a man becomes a cop to be shielded from his own criminality.”

The remark was too smart-ass for the occasion. I knew it as it left my lips.

“Fuck you,” said Regency.

“Hey …” I said.

“Fuck you. I'm trying to talk philosophy and you make quips.”

“That's twice,” I said, holding up a finger. He
was about to say it again and restrained himself. My father's mouth, however, was tight. He was not pleased with me. I could see where it would be a disadvantage to have him there. Regency would not be divided so much as myself. Alone with Alvin, I would not have cared if he said “Fuck you” all night long.

“What is the power of a dirty soul?” asked Regency.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Do you believe in karma?”

“Yes,” I said. “Most of the time.”

“So do I,” he said. He reached across and shook my hand. For a moment I think he debated whether to crunch my fingers, and then gave me the charity of releasing them. “So do I,” he repeated. “It's an Asian idea, but what the hell, there's cross-fertilization in war, right? There ought to be. All that slaughter. At least, let's get a couple of new cards in the deck, right?”

“What's your logic?”

“I got one,” he said. “It's as big as a battering ram. If a lot of people die unnecessarily in a war, a lot of innocent American kids”—he held up a hand to forestall any argument—“and a lot of innocent Vietnamese, I'll give you that, the question becomes: What's their redress? What's their redress in the scheme of things?”

“Karma,” said my father, beating him to the punch. If my father didn't know how to wear a drunk down, who did?

“That's right. Karma,” he said. “You see, I am not an ordinary cop.”

“What are you,” I asked, “a social butterfly?”

My father happened to like that one. We all laughed, Regency the least.

“The average cop puts down cheap hoods,” he said. “I don't. I respect them.”

“For what?” asked my father.

“For having the moxie to get born. Contemplate my argument: Think about it. The strength of a rotten, dirty soul is that no matter how foul it is, it has succeeded in being reborn. Answer that one.”

“What about gay people being reborn?” I asked.

I had him there. His prejudices had to bow to his logic. “Them, too,” he said, but it wearied him of the argument.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at his tumbler, “I've decided to resign. In fact, I have. I left them a note. I'm taking a long leave of absence for personal reasons. They'll read it and send it to the Marine in Washington. The grunt who's over me. They took this grunt and ran him through a computer. Now he thinks only in BASIC! What do you think he'll say?”

“He'll say your personal reasons translate into psychological reasons,” I said.

“Fucking aye. Up his Mrs. Grundy, I say.”

“When are you leaving?”