Skinflick

by Joseph Hansen

  Nobody much was in the drugstore. There were long shiny aisles of toys and cosmetics, headache remedies and cold medicines, paperback books and bath towels, drinking glasses and electric can openers. A box of wax crayons lay in the aisle he took, broken open, strewn. With a red one a little fist had traced FUK on the glossy floor covering. Bernard Shaw would have liked the spelling. Dave crouched and dropped the crayons back into the box, shut the box, laid it back with the dozen yellow-orange boxes just like it

  The next section of the aisle was lined on one side with rakes, hoes, trowels, with flower pots plain and glazed, with bright little growing plants in green metal racks, and on the other with bags of plant food and fertilizer and peat moss. Motor-oil cans were stacked at the end of the aisle. And he was facing a white counter with a sign above it in gold cutout letters—PRESCRIPTIONS. A gray-haired man bent his head over something beyond glass panes. Dave tapped a bell on the counter and the man came out in a white jacket with a yellow SMILE button pinned to it. He was Japanese, with baggy eyes and horn-rim glasses. They were bifocals, and he tilted his head back to read the license Dave showed him.

  Dave said, “I’m investigating the death of Gerald Dawson. For Sequoia, the company that insured his life. He picked up a prescription in here.” Dave named the date.

  “I can’t reveal anything about prescriptions.” The pharmacist handed back Dave’s wallet. “You know that.”

  “You don’t have to. It was for birth-control pills. Dawson picked it up for his wife. All I want to know is, did you ever see his wife?”

  “Hundreds of people get prescriptions filled here,” the pharmacist said. “You said he picked it up. You want to know what his wife looked like. Does that make sense to you? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  A young man who had to be the pharmacist’s son came rattling down a set of steps at the back of the glassed-in room. He came out to the counter with a carton marked UPJOHN in his hands. “I remember him,” he told Dave, “because the next morning they had it on TV he was murdered.”

  “I’m making up a prescription,” his father said, and went back to bend his head over his work again.

  “They had his picture.” The boy worked the latch of a white gate that broke the counter and came out with the box. He set it on the floor, tore it open, began taking bottles out of it and arranging them on a low shelf. “It said he was a churchgoer, a pillar of his church, right?”

  “That’s the man,” Dave said.

  “Maybe,” the boy said. “But not his wife. No way.”

  “A woman about sixty,” Dave said. “Paralyzed on one side. Drags her foot.”

  “That’s what’s wrong,” the pharmacist’s son said. “She’s about fifteen years old. And I mean, she is wild. Did you see the ice-cream counter? Up front by the check stands? You know what she made him do while he waited to get the prescription, right here where you’re standing? She made him buy her three ice-cream cones. At once. And there’s a record counter over there.” He pointed. “There’s nothing to play them on. I mean, they’re junk. Boxcar-sale stuff. If you listened to them you wouldn’t buy them, okay? So what does she do? She goes to the kiddies’ toys. And there’s these little ten-dollar players, plastic, made to look like bugs and panda bears and that. And she takes and finds a floor plug in the lamps and she sits down and. plays the record. Loud? I mean, loud-loud! And the poor man is standing here turning redder and redder, right? And she’s sitting there on the floor in her little shorts and tank top and licking first one flavor ice-cream cone and then another flavor and then another one and dripping it all over the rug, right? I remember her.”

  “Who’s Doctor Encey?” Dave asked.

  “One of the happiness boys,” the pharmacist’s son said. “The tall glass building two blocks thataway.”

  “You mean he sells prescriptions,” Dave said.

  “They’re usually to put actors to sleep or to wake writers up or keep directors calm. Or people who call themselves those things. But they can be almost anything.”

  “You fill the prescriptions?” Dave asked.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” the boy said. He put the last bottle on the shelf, poked the flaps of the empty carton down into it, and stood up. “Encey’s still got his license. It’s no secret what he’s doing. Nobody in charge seems to want to stop him. What did Dawson get that night? Birth-control pills? That’s not such a big deal.”

  “You’re sure the girl was with him?” Dave said.

  “They were in together before. She points. ‘Buy me this, buy me that.’ He falls all over himself to buy it. She’s not very bright. I mean”—he edged past Dave with the empty carton, back behind the counter, clicking the lock shut on the white gate—“she used poor English. I think she’s a high-school dropout, one of those runaways. I’m going to be in the movies, I’m going to be on TV, you know? Come to Hollywood. I don’t know where a man like that found her. I mean—he looked like what they said he was on the news—somebody who passes the collection plate in church Sunday mornings. Typecasting.”

  “She impressed you,” Dave said. “Is she pretty?”

  “Too young. Flat-chested, hips like a Little League pitcher.” He frowned to himself, blinking. “I don’t know. There’s hundreds of them along this street. But, yeah—she was different. They’ve all got Farrah Fawcett hair, you know? Looks like they borrowed it?”

  “Blond and abundant,” Dave said.

  “Howard?” the gray-haired man called.

  “Have you seen her in the last week?” Dave asked.

  “I don’t think so,” the boy said. “Excuse me?”

  Outside in the heat, the black boy had got up off the curb and was acting. He was waving clenched fists, popping his eyes, and mouthing angry words without sound. Two sweat-shiny college boys jogged past in red track shorts. They didn’t even turn their heads. The black boy seemed to be looking at Dave but he wasn’t. What he saw was inside his skull. A shiny green moped buzzed around the corner. A girl in a bikini rode it. Flat-chested. Quantities of yellow hair. Dark glasses. Had Jerry Dawson bought her a motorbike? It purred on past.

  No one had slashed the cloth top of the Triumph. It whipped out of the parking lot. It seemed to have only two speeds—motionless and breakneck. As he steered it out Sunset, the speedometer kept jumping from zero to sixty. The street off the Strip where Sylvia Katzman’s sand-color boxes of apartment units climbed the hill rose in sharp bends. The Triumph zipped up them with brisk little shrieks from the new tires. The address was in big wooden cutout numbers that stuck out on tin struts from the stucco. Dave ducked the car under the place and into a tenant’s empty parking slot. The door at the top of inside stairs was locked. He went up the ramp to the sidewalk and climbed for the front doors among plantings. He’d warned her by phone from the expensive cowhide-smelling Jaguar-Triumph agency that he was coming, and she was waiting for him in the lobby in a green-and-yellow striped tank top and yellow shorts, harlequin glasses set with rhinestones, and yellow platform sandals. Her hair was brassy piled-up ringlets. She was five feet tall and twenty pounds overweight. She unlocked the glass door for him.

  “I don’t understand what it’s about,” she said. “Insurance, did you say? A tenant of mine?”

  “Gerald Dawson. I don’t know whether he was a tenant or not. I only know be made out two checks to you in the past eight weeks.”

  “He didn’t live here,” she said. “It was for his daughter. Charleen. She’d married somebody and they split up and her mother wouldn’t have her back and her father felt different about it and he got this place for her. On the quiet, you understand. Is there something wrong or something?”

  “He’s dead,” Dave said. “Is his daughter here?”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, that’s too bad. The poor man. He wasn’t even old. What happened?”

  “Somebody broke his neck on a dark street,” Dave said. “Or that’s how it looks.”

  “Listen,” she said, “
it happens every day. What do you think I pay for security for around here? I light the front of this place like a—you should excuse the expression—Christmas tree. Do you know what’s down there? On that Sunset Strip? People out of a nightmare, that’s what. I keep that garage lighted. I have a man down there at night in a uniform with a gun. He’d probably shoot himself in the foot if he had to use it, but maybe he’ll scare the muggers and the rapists, you know? What can you do?”

  “What about Dawson’s daughter?” Dave asked.

  “She must be on a trip,” Sylvia Katzman said. “I haven’t seen her for days.”

  “It’s a big place,” Dave said. “You could have missed her. You don’t play concierge, do you?”

  “I play pan,” she said, “three nights a week. If you mean, do I watch the tenants going in and out—no, of course not. Everybody has their own life. They’re entitled to be free. This isn’t Europe, thank God. This isn’t Russia. Where they go and when they come back is their business.”

  “What’s her apartment number?” Dave asked.

  “Thirty-six. On the third level. With a view.”

  “Who came to see her?” Dave asked. “Anybody besides Gerald Dawson? Part of your security system involves tenants having to come down here in person to let their visitors in, right?”

  “Unless they lend their key,” she said. “They’re not supposed to, but who can predict what people will do? Could I see your identification?”

  He let his wallet fall open so she could read his investigator’s license. “She ought to be told her father is dead,” he said. “The funeral is tomorrow. No one else in the family knew she was here.”

  “She won’t go to the funeral,” Sylvia Katzman said. “She won’t even care that he’s dead. Except he won’t be here to pay her rent anymore. He was very good to her, and she treated him like dirt. Listen, mothers know girls. Fathers can be fooled. Her mother was right.”

  Somewhere distant a telephone rang. Sylvia Katzman waggled pudgy, ringed fingers toward carpeted stairs. “Go, maybe she’s home.” She hurried off in the direction of the ringing phone, buttocks wobbling inside the tight shorts. “You’re a nice man to come and tell her. But you’re wasting your—” A door closed, cutting off the last word. If with Sylvia Katzman there ever was a last word.

  Dave climbed in air-conditioned silence to the third level and went along a gallery past five glass fronts to the glass front of thirty-six. She was right. The view was good. It would be better without the brown haze. But below, Los Angeles sloped off for miles toward the sea. On a clear night there would be a carpet of lights, on a clear day treetops. The curtains were drawn on thirty-six. He pressed a button. A buzzer went off inside but no one came to the door. Somebody had scraped with a thumbnail at a United Fund Drive sticker inside the glass. The traffic down on Sunset made surf noises. A blue jay squawked. Dave poked the buzzer again. Again no one came. He snapped open a leather key case and slipped a small blade into the lock. It turned.

  The walls were bare and painted melon color. He stood on brown shag carpet. Brown velour couches made an open-sided square around a coffee table where flowers were dead in a brown pottery bowl. He smelled decayed food. Two TV dinners in aluminum trays lay on a brown Formica counter with melon-color stools. Mold grew on the food, and soft drinks evaporated in glasses. Beside an incongruously clean stainless steel sink were stacked unwashed dishes. When he opened doors under the sink, soft drink cans, Colonel Sanders boxes, taco wrappers tumbled onto a spotlessly clean, glossily waxed floor. Incongruous again. He opened the window over the sink to let the garbage smell out if it would go. Almost near enough the window to reach out and touch, an embankment, propped at its foot by cement blocks, rose very steeply twelve, fifteen feet to a curved street. On the near side of the street, a chain-link fence had been cut into at the bottom, the corners of the cut folded back. The refrigerator hummed.

  In the bedroom, the piece of furniture meant to be slept on was round. The sheets were satin or some wonders-of-modern-science substitute. They were melon-color and half off the bed that looked as if wrestling had taken place there. A pillow half out of its melon satin cover lay in a corner. He opened closet doors that ran on rollers. Not much hung there, and what did smelled of stale sweat. Dresser drawers held blue jeans and T-shirts and pullover sweaters with the kind of turtleneck that droops. There were pantyhose, little clean underpants, little clean socks. He shut the drawers. In the bathroom, the medicine chest held aspirin, cold medicine, deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, disposable razor. Hair had been cut in here. Dark tufts lay in corners of the coral tile floor. It clogged the basin drain.

  He went back into the bedroom and frowned around at it. What was missing was a jacket to keep her warm nights. The closet had showed him caps, hats, a couple of flimsy scarves and a tumble of shoes. He blinked. A poster was Scotch-taped to the wall over the bed. A naked young man knelt, face pressed into the belly of a standing girl whose head was thrown back, lips parted, eyes closed. She was naked too. His hands gripped her buttocks. The background was black. The lettering was red. ALL THE WAY DOWN. That was at the top. At the foot was A SPENCE ODUM PRODUCTION. The girl had big breasts and didn’t appear to be blond.

  Out in the room with the view, he looked again at the glasses on the breakfast bar. Each of the abandoned soft drinks had a plastic swizzle stick angling down into it. One was a sickly yellow, the other a sickly blue. He bent close but the light was bad. He found a switch and bulbs went on inside brown, hard-finish lamp shades over pottery bases around the room. They gave feeble light but it was enough. Lettering was stamped into the sticks. He put on his glasses and bent close again, trying not to breathe the stink of the decayed food. The lettering read THE STRIP JOINT and gave an address on Sunset.

  He tucked his glasses away, rubbed at the aluminum plate around the door lock with a handkerchief, and rolled the door shut with the handkerchief covering his fingers. The lock clicked. He pushed the handkerchief away in a pocket and pressed the button at thirty-five. No one came. No one came when he pressed the other buttons down the line. All the units on this level watched the soiled and poisonous air blind, deaf, and lifeless. It didn’t matter. He already had too many answers. What he needed now were the questions to go with them.

  7

  CINZANO WAS STENCILED LARGE on the red-and-blue umbrellas over the tables in front of the Strip Joint. At the tables, youngsters in bikinis and surfer trunks, ragged straw hats and armless shirts, breathed the exhaust fumes of the close-packed homebound traffic on the street, and washed down avocado-burgers with Cokes, Seven-Ups, Perrier water. Scuba-diving goggles set in black rubber rested on top of the long wet golden hair of a suntanned youth. Edging between the crowded tables, Dave stumbled over swim fins. There was the cocoa-butter smell of Skol.

  Inside, the smell was of bourbon and smoke—not all of it tobacco smoke. The lights, if there were any, hadn’t been turned on. If you wanted to see, you saw by what filtered in from the dying day outside through bamboo-blinded plate glass. The crowd in here appeared older, and Peter Frampton wasn’t blaring from loudspeakers as he was outside. Dave sat on a bamboo stool beside a plump, chattering man in a checked linen jacket, and told a vague shape in skin-tight coveralls behind the bar that he wanted a gin and tonic. In the gloom at the room’s end, a pair of angular lads in black, not-very-crisp shirts and jeans was puttering with microphones, amplifiers, speakers, on a small platform. Feedback screamed. Everyone looked at the corner. The feedback stopped. The bartender set the gin and tonic in front of Dave but didn’t go away. He stood leaning with his hands on the bar.

  “You want something else?”

  “What more could I possibly want?”

  “It’s always something,” the bartender said. “What is it this time? Who’s supposed to be dealing in here now? Who’s supposed to be snorting in the men’s room?”

  “I’m not a cop,” Dave told him.

  “You’re something like that,” the bartender s
aid. He had a drooping, corn-color moustache and his hair was going thin, but his skin had a youthful sheen to it and his eyes were clear and healthy. They blinked, speculative. “Maybe you’re a deprogrammer, except I can’t smell greed on you. You can’t be a private eye. They don’t have those anymore. And when they had them, they didn’t look like you.”

  “Insurance,” Dave said. “Have you seen a thin girl child named Charleen? Blond, about five-four, no breasts to speak of, no hips to speak of, maybe in company with a small, dark, intense church-deacon type in his forties?”

  “The kids can’t come inside during the day,” the bartender said, “and that’s when I work so I wouldn’t see a kid.” He looked past Dave. He called, “Priss?”

  The young woman who came wore the same sort of baby-blue bib coveralls as the bartender, except the legs of hers were cut very short and with little splits at the sides. She had loose poodle hair like the secretary at Superstar Rentals. Her smile was bright, brisk, professional. The bartender asked her about Charleen.

  “She came here,” Dave said. “She had swizzle sticks with the name of this place on them.”

  “Oh, honey.” The girl laid a hand with open fingers on her forehead. “They come by the gross. Is that all you’ve got? Haven’t you got a picture?”

  “They were an odd couple,” Dave said. He described Dawson again.

  “What’s odd?” Priss wagged her head with a wan smile. “Sweetheart, a girl could come here with a two-toed sloth and nobody would notice.”

  “The kids do come in here at night, right?” Dave said to the bartender. “You’ve got a band. Not for us tone-deaf old drunks, surely. So they must dance, no?”

  “That wall slides back. On the other side. Soft drinks only. Eight-thirty. Also junk food, okay?”

  “That all?” Priss wondered.

  Dave lifted his glass to her. “Remember me to the two-toed sloths.”