SIX

After 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?”

Well, in winter it was still crowded, but you could sit down and take a taste of the marrow of the mood of what was coming down in the town that day. A lot of commercial fishing boats would return by afternoon and the crews would be drinking. The carpenters and the dope dealers and the narcs and some of the handymen for summer cottages, and unwed young mothers on Fridays with their welfare checks, and others generally scuffling for bread or looking for a friend to buy them a glass were also downing our good urine. I knew most of these people in varying degree and would speak of them if they figured in what was happening to me now, since they were all most individual no matter how much they looked alike, but in winter, as I say, we looked alike. We were sallow, and everybody dressed in Army surplus clothes.

Let one story suffice. I live in a Portuguese town, after all, and have no natives in my story but Stoodie, who is a disgrace to the Portuguese. One afternoon in winter when The Brig was unnaturally empty, a Portuguese fisherman about eighty years old was sitting at the bar. He was as bent over and twisted from a life of work as a cypress growing out of a boulder on a rocky coast. Into the bar walked another fisherman as arthritic as himself. They had grown up together, played football together, graduated from high school together, worked on fishing boats together, got drunk together, probably seduced each other’s wives, and now at eighty didn’t like each other any more than when they used to have fist fights in recess. The first, nonetheless, got off his stool, stood up, and bellowed across the bar in a voice as hoarse as the March wind, “I thought you was dead!” The other stopped, glared back, and out of a larynx shrill as a gull, replied, “Dead? I’ll go to your funeral.” They had a beer together. It was merely another exercise in dispelling the spirits. The Portuguese know how to bark when they speak.

We imitate them. In other places, they measure the acid rain, or the index of air pollution, or the amount of dioxin in the soil. Here, where we have no industries but fishing, and room renting, and no farming, the air and sand are clean, but it is a rare day when you cannot feel the weight of spirits in a bar, and when I walked in full of my sleepless nights with the wraiths of Hell-Town, I could feel everybody’s awareness of me. I might just as well have been a spill of ink in a pool. I was about as welcome as a sullen log on a slow smoldering fire.

All the same, each bar, like each hearth, had, as I had observed through working a few, something like the same hitches to their habits. The log that smokes up one fireplace gets another ablaze, and the mixture of my depression, my good store of adrenaline at being followed, plus the company of manic, anxious haunts I doubtless carried in my hair soon put The Brig in a roaring mood. People who had been expiring at their own tables got up and moved to others. Dudes and their old ladies who had hardly been speaking began to feel the rosy itch. And I, who in this hour may have been closeted with horror more than anyone there—winters in Provincetown can be named by whose year it is for that—took the credit to myself for such kindling, although I did no more than nod to a face in my path and take up an insular position by the bar.

Pete the Polack was the first to approach, and we had a short conversation that came near to twisting my neck on its bearings. “Hey,” he began, “I been talking to your wife.”

“Today?”

He took a while replying. My dry throat had a little difficulty managing to ask the question, and by then he was in the middle of slugging down his beer. Besides, his mind had already disconnected as well. That happened often in The Brig. People would start conversations, and their brains, particularly on beer and speed, would veer off like waterbugs.

“Today,” said Pete, “no. Couple of days ago.”

“When?”

He waved his hand. “Couple of days.” He could as well have said, “A couple of weeks ago.” I had noticed that winter people kept constant intervals for time. Something could have happened two weeks ago, or two nights ago, but if it was your habit to say, “Five days ago,” then that was how you would remember it. So I pushed him no further. Instead I returned to the topic.

“What did Patty want to talk to you about?”

“Oh, yeah. Hey. She wants me to look after the big house on the hill in the West End.”

“The one she’s thinking of buying?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Wants you to look after it?”

“Well, me and my brother.”

It made sense. The brother was a good carpenter. In effect, Pete was saying that his brother would take care of the place. Patty might have asked Pete to contact him.

I knew it was stupid, but I had to ask. “Can you remember if you talked to her before or after the Patriots game?”

“Oh, yeah, that game.” He nodded profoundly. The speed was taking him somewhere deep. He pondered—whatever it was—the game, the date, the money in his back pocket, then he shook his head. “About two days ago.”

“Yeah,” I said, “figures.”

Beth Nissen slipped up to us. She was drunk, which was rare for her, and she was animated, which was even more unusual.

“What did you do to Spider?” she asked me.

“Hey, honey,” Pete said, “old hassles is old hassles. I got to move on.” He bent over, kissed her sweater where her nipple ought to have been and took his beer down the road to a table.

“Is Spider truly hassled?” I asked.

“Who knows?” Her eyes turned starry. “Spider is crazy.”

“Well, we all are,” I said.

“Don’t you believe that you and I are crazy in a special way?” she said.

“How?”

“We’ve never fucked each other.”

That was par for winter. I made a point of laughing and put my arm around her waist, and her pale eyes stared out from behind her eyeglasses with a far-gone electric glow.

“Spider lost his knife,” said Beth, “and claims you stole it.” She giggled as if Spider without his knife was like another man without his pants. “He lost his motorcycle, too,” she said. “Did you tell him the Patriots were going to win?”

“At half time.”

“Well, they did win,” said Beth. “But at half time, he decided to reverse his bet. Said he was going against you. Now he says it’s your fault he lost his motorcycle.”

“Tell Spider to stick it up his giggie.”

She giggled. “In the Midwest,” she said, “we used to say ‘giggie.’ I think I’ll send a letter to my parents and tell them their daughter can no longer distinguish her pussy from her giggie.” She hiccuped. “I’m not going to tell Spider anything,” she said. “He’s in a terrible mood. After all, why not?” she asked. “The worst are filled with a passionate intensity,’ right?” She gave me an outsize lewd look.

“How’s Stoodie?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “watch out for Stoodie.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “I tell everybody to watch out for Stoodie.”

I could not decide whether it was due to the constant flashes I kept having of a blonde head in a dark plastic bag, but every word I heard seemed connected to my own situation. Was there a real fever in the air? No one but myself and—I must pray—someone else knew what had been buried in my marijuana patch, yet this thought was all but shrieking out of every cry for beer from every table. I suppose the spirits were tugging at the beer-drenched sponge of whatever collective mind was here.

Beth saw my look wander away from her. “Is Patty Lareine still split?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I hear she’s been around.”

“I think she is. Bolo is back in town.”

“You saw him?” Bolo was Mr. Black, although indeed his name was Green. Joseph “Bolo” Green. He got the name Bob on the first day he walked into a bar here. “There are bad niggers,” he announced to a table of ten of us, “but I am baaaaad,” and everybody was silent for a moment as if paying respect to the dead he had left behind—we are the Wild West of the East!—but Patty Lareine began to laugh and said, “Stop waving your bolo. Nobody is going to steal your black.” By the look of pure happiness in her eyes, I could see that the next Mr. Black had just been anointed.

“Yes,” said Beth, bringing me back to her—I, too, had a mind that could veer like a water-bug—“Bolo is certainly back in town. He was in and out of The Brig ten minutes ago.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“He propositioned me.”

I would have been certain she was lying if she had not looked so happy.

Now the bartender was signaling as well. He pointed to the phone behind his service sink.

My extrasensory attainments failed me on this occasion. I thought I was going to hear Patty’s voice, but it was Harpo.

“Mac,” he said, “I’ve been trying to get you. I had to force myself to call you.”

“Why?”

“Because I betrayed you.”

“How could you do that?”

“I lost my nerve. I want to warn you.”

Harpo’s speech had a metallic anxiety. He sounded as if he were speaking out of a mechanical diaphragm. I tried to decide what he might be on, but there must have been many chemicals in his brain.

“It’s Laurel,” he now said.

“The tattoo?”

“The woman. Laurel. I called up Police Chief Regency and told him about her and the tattoo.”

That could have no significance for Regency, I decided. Not unless Patty Lareine, when in his company, spoke of Madeleine as Laurel.

“Great,” I said, “Alvin now knows I have a tattoo. Where’s the treachery?”

“I told him that Laurel was waiting for you in the car downstairs.”

“But why do you think the name is Laurel?”

“You spoke to her. Through my window.”

“I did?”

“That’s what you shouted. ‘I’m going to win this bet, Laurel.’ That’s what you said.”

“I may have said Lonnie. I think I was yelling to a man.”

“No, it was Laurel. I heard the name. I believe that Laurel is dead.”

“Who told you?”

“I was up on the roof. I heard it. That’s why I called the Chief. I knew I shouldn’t have given you the tattoo. People do terrible things after a tattoo.”

“What else did you tell Regency?”

“I said I thought you killed Laurel.” He began to cry.

“How can you believe that?” I asked.

“I saw Laurel dead. When I stood on the roof last night, I saw her on the horizon. She said you did it.” I heard him blowing his nose at the other end of the phone. “I wrestled with my conscience. Then I called Regency. It was the wrong thing to do. I should have spoken to you first.”

“What did Regency say?”

“He’s an asshole! He’s a bureaucrat. He said he wanted to take it under consideration. Mac, I don’t trust him.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s me you trust.”

“Well, I realized you didn’t do anything. I could tell by the sound of Regency’s voice. It wasn’t right.”

“I’m happy to hear that.”

His breathing got heavy. Over the wire, I could feel his senses rattling. “I may not have the right to say who killed her,” he added, “but now I know.”

“It’s Nissen,” I said.

“I hate Spider’s knife,” said Harpo. “A vicious instrument.” With that, he hung up.

A hand was tapping me on the shoulder. I turned around to stare into Bolo’s golden-brown eyes blazing into mine with all the light of a lion. He was deep-black in color, purple-black like an African, so his eyes were disconcertingly golden. I had known from the moment I first saw him that he was going to be no good news for my marriage. I was right. There had been three earlier models, but Mr. Green proved to be the definitive Mr. Black. After all, Patty Lareine had never left me before.

The worst was that now I could not feel any hatred for him, not even some rage at my drear and cuckolded state. The proof was that he could come up to me while I was on the phone, even lay his hand on me, and I, in reply, merely gave a nod.

Of course, I might as well have been lifted by a helicopter from the summit of one peak to the next. I had none of the bother of descending through the scree to the canyon floor and up the other ridge, no, I had gone directly from a number of remarks by Harpo (each capable of blasting me off my mind) to the lights in Bolo’s eyes, and by now I might as well have been stuffed with Novocaine, just so far did I feel removed from this overabundance of stimulations—yes, it had all caught up, and I was one candidate who could call himself Mr. Marble Eyes, totally zonked and zombied by the quick turns of the race course this evening, except that at this moment Mr. Green put his hand on my shoulder again and dug his fingers in—viciously, I tell you—and said, “Where the fuck is Patty Lareine?,” all of his fury passing into me. With that, I woke up and shook off his hand with an equally violent move, and replied, “Get your filthy lunch hooks off of me,” words that came right out of an old high school fracas. But for the first time, I was not afraid of him. I didn’t care if we went out to the street and had a fight. The thought of being knocked cold was an anodyne dear as nepenthe.

Let me say there was little doubt in my mind what he could do to me. If you have ever been in an interesting penitentiary, you come to know that there are blacks and blacks, and a few you never mess with. Mr. Green was not on that high shelf, or I would have been dead. But he could fit on the second level: mess with him under few circumstances. Now his eyes glared into mine and I looked back, and the light in the room turned red between us—I mean it literally—I do not know if his rage on meeting mine was so intense that the nerves which reflect color to the brain were strained by the voltage passed through or if all the firebrands of Hell-Town raced toward us, but I had to stand in the considerable wrath of all that had happened to him over his last twenty-five years (from the first cuff in the cradle) and he stood in the maniacal disproportion of all that had been happening to me. I think it was dazzling to both of us to endure for even a little while in such a hellish red light. Indeed, we both stood there looking at each other for so long that I had time to remember the sad tale of his life as he told it to Patty Lareine and me on the night we met: it was how he lost his boxing career.

If it strains belief that I could think of such a story while the steam of his madness was scalding my eyes—well, I can hardly believe it myself. Maybe I was not as brave as I pretended and clung to his tale in the hope that it would mollify his rage. You cannot strike a man who is filled with compassion for you.

This was the story: He was illegitimate, and his mother claimed he wasn’t hers. Said they messed up the name tags in the hospital. She used to beat him every day. When he got older, he beat everybody he faced in the Golden Gloves. He was in line to make the U.S. team for the Pan-American games, but he went down to Georgia to look for his father. Never found him. Went into a white bar dead drunk. They wouldn’t serve him. They called the State Troopers. Two came in, and asked him to leave.

“You got no alternative,” he informed them. “Serve me, or piss on you.”

One of the troopers hit him so hard with a billy club that he began to lose the Pan-American games right there. But he didn’t know it yet. Just felt a great happiness. Because he was bleeding as if he had been butchered, but he wasn’t shook. In fact, he was wide awake. He proceeded to injure both cops and it took the entire bar to subdue him. They brought him in restraints to the jail house. Among other things, his skull was fractured. He could box no more.

That was the sad tale he told. He related it as an example of his stupidity, not his valor (although it had the opposite effect on Patty) and when we came to know him better, he proved to be a funny man. He used to do imitations of black whores to make us laugh. We saw a lot of Mr. Green, and I would lend him money.

Will it give you an idea of how close I felt to annihilation, and how comfortable this idea had become (after all the rat-scurry of keeping myself alive) that I could now recognize that Bolo had not treated me so badly as I had treated Wardley. The remains of my rage began to fade and a peace came in to replace it. I do not know what Mr. Green was thinking of, but even as my anger departed, so did his. “Well,” I said, making my offering to the silence, “what do you say, motherfucker?”

“I never had a mother to fuck,” he replied. Sadly, he held out his hand for five. Sadly, I tapped it.

“I don’t know where Patty Lareine is,” I said.

“You aren’t looking for her?”

“No.”

“I’m looking for her, and I can’t find her.”

“When did she leave you?”

He frowned. “We had it on together for three weeks. Then she got restless. Took off.”

“Where were you?”

“In Tampa.”

“Did you see her ex-husband?”

“Wardley, is that the guy?”

I nodded.

“We saw him. He took us out to dinner one night. Then she went to see him alone. That was cool. He was no threat. I figured she was hitting on him for something good. But the next day she took off.” He looked like he was about to cry. “She treated me decent. She was the only bitch ever treated me that decent.” He looked very sad. “I just ran out of things to talk to her about. Used them up.” His eyes studied mine. “You know where she is? I got to find her.”

“She may be around.”

“She is.”

“How do you know?”

“A guy called me. The guy said Patty Lareine told him to call. She wanted me to know. She was back here in P-town with Wardley. She missed me, the fellow said.”

“Who was the fellow?”

“Didn’t give his name. He gave it, but there’s nobody by that name. I knew it was no good when he gave it. He was talking with a handkerchief over the phone.”

“What was the name?”

“Healey. Austin Healey.”

A mote of town lore came back. A couple of years ago a few of us, tired of the sound of Stoodie, began to speak of him as Austin Healey. That went on for a little while. But Stoodie was not told our name for him. It had to be Spider who called.

“This Healey said Patty L. was at the Provincetown Inn,” Bolo said. “I called there. Shit, she wasn’t nowhere near a place like that.”

“When did you get back?”

“Three days ago.”

“When did she leave you?”

“One week ago, about.”

“Seven days for sure?”

“Eight. I counted them.”

Yes, he was counting his days. I was counting mine.

“I could kill her,” he said, “for leaving me.”

“There’s no man she won’t leave,” I said. “She comes from a narrow background. It’s sin to her.”

“I’m just as narrow as she is,” he said, “and I’m going to take a big hit on something when I see her.” He looked at me from an angle as if to say, “You can hustle others, but, baby, get trustworthy with me.” Then he put his doubts away. He would tell. “Austin Healey said Patty Lareine was seeing you again. When I heard that, I figured I would have to treat you to a welcome.” He paused to let me feel the weight of the thought. “But I knew I couldn’t do it to you.”

“Why?”

“Because you treated me like a gentleman.”

He measured the truth of this and seemed to agree with himself. “Moreover,” he said, “Patty Lareine don’t like you anymore.”

“Probably not.”

“She said you trapped her into marriage.”

I began to laugh.

“What are you laughing about, honkie?”

“Mr. Green, there’s an old Jewish saying: ‘A life, a wife!’ ”

He, too, began to laugh.

We went on long enough to draw attention to ourselves. History was being made in The Brig tonight. The cuckold and the black lover were having a big time together.

“Joseph, I’ll see you around,” I said to Bolo Green.

“Keep the peace.”

I had to take a long walk. More had come into my head than I could put in order.

It was drizzling, and I was walking down Commercial Street with my hands in my pockets and my head so withdrawn into my parka hood that I did not become aware that a car was following me until the headlights on my back could no longer be ignored. I turned. Behind me was a police cruiser with one man in it. He opened the door. “Get in,” he said. Regency, at my service.

We had not driven fifty feet before he began to talk. “Got a make on your woman, Jessica,” he said. He pointed to a piece of paper on the front seat. “Take a look,” he told me and handed over a pencil flashlight that he drew from his breast pocket.

I studied a photostat of a photograph sent by wire. It was Jessica clearly enough. “I’d say that’s her.”

“Well, we don’t need you to inform us, pal. There’s no doubt. The waitress and the proprietor at The Widow’s Walk have both confirmed.”

“Good work,” I said. “How did you track her down?”

“No big deal. We contacted Pangborn’s office in Santa Barbara and there were a couple of blondes he associated with socially or business-wise. We were looking into that when her son called. He knew she was in Provincetown with Pangborn—as you might guess from Don Lon’s little billet-doux.”

“You’re speaking of the son who was Lonnie’s lover?”

“Correct,” said Regency. “The kid with the cordless razor.” He opened his window and hawked a throaty yield. “I think I’ll never watch a commercial again.”

“You may not.”

“Now, here, Madden, is where the soup starts to stick to the spoon. It seems her name isn’t Jessica.”

“What is the real name?”

“Laurel Oakwode. It’s a fancy spelling: w-o-d-e for ‘wood.’ ”

Recollection came back to me of what I had said to Harpo before the séance that ended with Nissen’s scream. “Harpo,” I had said, “tell everybody we’re trying to reach Mary Hardwood, who is my mother’s cousin. But the woman I really want to talk to is named Laurel.”

Such a coincidence could not have been produced by a beeper. Despite myself, I began to shiver. Sitting beside Regency in the police car, cruising fifteen miles an hour down Commercial Street, I began to shiver visibly.

“You need a drink,” said Alvin Luther.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Maybe you’d be in better shape,” he suggested, “if the tattoo on your arm didn’t say ‘Laurel.’ ”

“Do you want to stop the car?”

“No objection at all.”

We were at the end of Commercial Street. We had come to the place where the Pilgrims once landed, but in the drizzle, I could see nothing.

“Okay,” he said, “get out.”

My panic had subsided. The thought of walking two and a half miles home with no more than this amputated encounter for company encouraged me to take a chance.

“I don’t know what point you’re trying to make,” I said, “but it’s no big deal to me. I got shit-face and drove out to see Harpo, and had him put on a tattoo. Maybe Jessica told me that her real name was Laurel, but I don’t remember.”

“Was she with you?”

I had to make a decision. “Harpo says she was.”

“You’re saying you can’t remember?”

“Not clearly.”

“So you could have knocked her off, and forgotten it?”

“Are you accusing me?”

“Let us say that I am working on the outline of the first scenario. In my way, I’m a writer too.” He could not restrain himself. The wild stallion gave his great neigh and whinny.

“I don’t like the way you’re talking.”

“Hey, pal,” said Regency, “kidding is kidding, but get your ass off my pillow. I could take you in right now.”

“On what? There’s no crime. The lady might be on her way back to Santa Barbara. You’re not about to hurt your record with a false arrest.”

“Let me rephrase myself,” he said. “I could take you in right now as a suspect in the possible murder of Leonard Pangborn.”

“You said it was a suicide.”

“So I thought. But the forensics have taken a look. They came in on a special from Boston at our request. The supercoroners, they like to be called, but my private tag for them is: the super-coronaries.” Once again he laughed at his own joke. “They mess up your heartbeat considerably with what they find.”

“What did they find?”

“I’ll tell you. It’s going to be no secret very soon. Pangborn may have killed himself, but if he did, who drove the car?”

“You told me that he got into the trunk and closed the lid on himself before he fired the shot.”

“The congealed blood on the floor of the trunk has a shirred movement as if, soon after it began to coagulate, the car was driven, from wherever the event occurred, to The Widow’s Walk.”

“Wouldn’t the staff at the restaurant have heard the car come back?”

“Not if it was three in the morning. They wouldn’t be around. Look, let’s not argue. The car was moved. The patterns of the blood show that it was.” He shrugged. “What it comes down to, Madden, is that somebody drove this vehicle back to The Widow’s Walk after Lonnie committed suicide.”

“Could Jessica have done that?”

“Yes, Laurel Oakwode certainly could. Let me ask: Did you bang her?”

“I believe I did.”

He whistled. “God, is your head a mess. You can’t even remember that?”

“What bothers me is I believe I did it in front of Lonnie Pangborn.”

“I hate to quote a nigger, but Cassius Clay said it: ‘You ain’t as dumb as you look.’ ”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t let my praise linger in your mouth.” He lit a cigar and puffed on it like it was a Bangalore Torpedo. “Madden, you have just given me your scenario. One: You bang Jessica in front of Lonnie. Two: You wipe your cock and walk off. Three: Jessica comforts Lonnie. Four: He starts to complain: ‘Us faggots are not built for such competition.’ He hides in the trunk. Bang! He’s left her a gift—his body. These gay people can be spiteful. Well, she’s a respectable cunt and doesn’t want publicity. So she drives back to The Widow’s Walk, leaves the car and starts home to Santa Barbara.” He nodded his head. “It holds up beautifully if—One: You can find where she slept that night, although I’ll tell you in advance to save part of your lawyers’ fees that you can always claim she walked back to your house and slept in tears on your sofa. Unless you gave her your bed.” He opened his window and threw the cigar away. “Two: She must, when she shows up, be alive, and corroborate your story. You have to pray she doesn’t come back to us as a corpse in these dunes and woods.”

“You’ve done some thinking on this.”

I had hoped to stroke him. He merely nodded. “Let me give you another scenario. You and she and Pangborn go out to Wellfleet in your car. On the way back Lonnie can’t stand losing her, so he waves his pistol at you. You stop the car and wrestle his shooter away. In the fracas, she gets shot. Mortally. You leave her in the woods and drive him to his car, make him get into the trunk—he’s limp as a worm by now. Then you drive away to a quiet place, open the trunk, lay the barrel in his throat, say sweetly, ‘I’ll never hurt you, Lonnie, this is only fun and games. This is how I get my kinks out. Kiss the barrel for me, Lonnie.’ Then you pull the trigger, do a little wiping and leave his finger on it. Next, you drive the car back to The Widow’s Walk, get back in your car, go to the woods again and dispose of her body. Son, you do it all except you forget to wipe your front seat. As my wife says, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ Neither am I. I let you get away with blood on the front seat. I’m a hick and trust my friends. Yes,” he said, “you better hope and pray her body doesn’t show up. I’ll be the first one after you because I bought the story about the nose bleed.”

“Well,” I said, “why don’t you take me in now?”

“Figure it out.”

“You have no case. If she was shot at close quarters in my car, her blood would have been all over his clothing.”

“Maybe you’re right. Let’s have a drink.”

Nothing could have been more unsatisfactory. The last thing I wanted was to drink with him. But he started up the car, began to whistle “Stardust” and took off in a spray of road sand and rubber.

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.

I blundered down the trail holding a flashlight, and the mist was so heavy, my face felt washed in froth. The dog kept his shoulder against my thigh until the last few yards before the twisted dwarf pine, whereupon he began to run ahead, his voice now raised in a mixture of elation and fright as if, like us, he could call upon two deep and divided halves of himself. Indeed, he never sounded more human than with his throat coming forth in these cries of pleasure and wheezes of panic. I had to hold him back, or he would have scraped the moss from the stone at the burrow.

Yet when I drew the rock away, he gave a little moan. It was equal to the sound I might have made, for I did not wish to look. Then I could bear it no longer. The flashlight revealed a black and slimy plastic bag over which bugs crawled, and in a lathering of my own sweat, with fingers that shook as if they were being touched by spirits, I invaded the domain of the burrow—so it felt!—reached in, pulled out the bag. It was heavier than expected. I will spare you how long it took me to untie the knot, but I did not dare to rip my way inside, as if the rivulets of Hell-Town might well forth from such a tear.

At last the knot came apart. I lifted the flashlight and looked at the face of my wife. A pistol might as well have fired through the fabric of a thousand nights of sleep. My wife bore a look of consternation on her face, and showed a red jungle at the base of her neck. I took one look, could not take another, closed the bag. I knew in that instant that I had a soul. I felt it turn in my heart even as my fingers retied the knot at the top of the bag.

I stood up to leave then, swaying on one foot, then the other. I did not know if I could move. Nor could I decide whether to take her with me or whether I was obliged to let her rest in this foul place. As the swoon of my will continued, the dog ceased whimpering, stirred about, and began to push his head and shoulders into the burrow, pushed farther, and, on an instant, all of his movements reversed and he came out backward, dragging the end of a green plastic bag in his mouth. Now I saw the face of Jessica Pond. I could not call her Laurel Oakwode.

Will it sound strange to you that I picked up both heads and carried them back to the car? One bag was in each hand, and I laid them in the trunk with some care not to confound whatever veils of death still adhered—how poor a shroud is a plastic bag! The dog walked with me like a mourner, and the trees on either side of the trail offered silence. The sound of the Porsche motor starting up was as loud as an explosion in that pall.

We drove out. Since I did not know what I was doing, will it make any more sense to you that I stopped to get the beeper, and when I did, Stoodie and Nissen came up to attack?

Later, when I could puzzle it through, I decided that they must have been following my car until the moment when I detached their instrument. Then they must have waited for a while. Then they must have driven to where they thought I was parked but found no car, no house, only the sound of the beeper tantalizing them. It was off the road, but where they could not quite determine. So they parked, and waited.

I only saw them coming after I stood up in the trench by the milestone marker with the beeper in my hand. By then they were moving toward me on a run. I remember thinking that they wanted to recover what I had stolen from the burrow—that is the indication of where my mind had gone. There is this to be said for madness: your blood can pass from one transcendental moment to another without fear. I think, now that I consider it, they were befouled with rage after all the frustration of waiting for their beeper through thirty rain-filled fucked-up minutes. So they were ready to waste me for so misusing their fine technique.

They came down on the dog and me, and Nissen had a knife in his hand and Stoodie a tire iron. The animal and I had never been bound in that compact of dog and man that vows you will die together, but he was with me then.

I could not name the strength that came to us. I had the heads of two blonde ladies to guard in the trunk of my car. Those heads, if I were found with them, had to be worth two hundred years of incarceration, and that gave the strength to fight. My lunacy gave more. For by the exaltation of its logic, I was transporting my ladies from a foul grave to a finer one.

So my rage was near to maniacal. It had packed itself like gunpowder these last five days into my head and limbs. The sight of Spider and Stoodie approaching with menace was as good as cocking a trigger. I remember how the dog stood at attention beside me, his fur stiff like steel nails. Then it all happened and was over for him. I do not know if it took even ten seconds, but the dog sprang at Nissen and caught Spider’s face and throat in his jaws. He also caught the point of Spider’s knife in his heart and died on top of Spider, who shrieked and ran away, holding his face. Stoodie and I took longer.

He circled, looking to swing his iron, and I kept away, ready to hurl my beeper—it was my beeper now—at his head, but the instrument weighed no more than a small rock.

Rage or no, I wasn’t in shape to fight. My heart was burning already, and I could never match the tire iron. I had to catch him one perfect right shot to the jaw—my left would never be good enough—and for that I had to wait until he swung the iron. There is no other course when fighting a tire iron but to get the opponent to commit himself. You can only strike after the weapon goes by. Stoodie knew this. He lashed the iron back and forth and committed himself to no full swings. He would wait. Let me come undone from the tension. Stoodie waited, and we circled, and I could hear my breathing louder than his. Then I hurled the beeper and it struck him on the head. I threw my right after it, but only caught his nose, not his chin, and he brought the iron down on my left arm. He was off-balance, and so it was not with whole force, but my arm was dead and I was in such pain I barely dodged his next swing. Now he lashed the air again as the blood from his nose went into his mouth, and bones in his face, it came to him, were broken.

He swung again. I ducked, grabbed two handfuls of roadside pebbles and threw them in his face. Blinded, he brought one huge swing down on me, and I skipped to the side and threw my right as hard as I ever hit anything, a thunderbolt went down my arm, and he and his iron fell together. Then I made the mistake of kicking him in the head. That broke my big toe. Be it said for the new pain that it kept me from beating on his skull with the tire iron. Picking that up, I hobbled down the road to the van. Spider was leaning against it, his head in his hands, moaning, and I knew the joys of going berserk. With the tire iron I smashed in his windows, his headlights, his taillights, and then, not content, tried to pry one of the doors off, but failing that, sprung the hinge at least.

Spider watched, and said at the finish, “Hey, man, have a heart. I need medical attention.”

“Why did you say I stole your knife?” I answered him.

“Somebody did. I got a new one that’s no fucking good.”

“It’s in my dog.”

“I’m sorry, man. I got nothing against your dog.”

It was as fractured as that. I left him by the van, walked carefully around Stoodie so that I would not turn the iron on him, knelt by Stunts, who had died near the Porsche, his favorite chariot, and managed with my good arm to get him into the front seat.

Then I drove home.

Shall I tell you the virtues of such a war? I held myself together long enough to take both plastic bags down to the basement, where I laid them in a carton. (I have not yet spoken of this, but their odor in another twenty-four hours would be a disaster.) Then I dug a grave in the yard for my dog and buried him, doing it all with one good arm and one good foot—the ground in this mist was soft—and then I took a shower and went to bed. If not for the war by the side of the road, I could never have slept and would have been ready for a mental home by morning. As it was, I slumbered as well as any of those who were dead and awoke in the morning to find my father in the house.