Skinflick

by Joseph Hansen

  Delgado made a sound and knocked the cup across the room. Coffee splashed the cabinets and ran down. The cup was tough. It didn’t break. Delgado lurched off the stool and stumbled out the door. On hands and knees, he vomited. The sounds he made were loud and miserable. Dave stood in the doorway trying to see in the poor light from the kitchen and from the building across the way whether a garden hose was coiled somewhere among the broken hibachis, splintered surfboards, and bent lawn furniture beneath the hanging vines. Delgado’s stomach spasms eased off. He wiped a sleeve across his mouth.

  “I warned you,” he groaned. “You had to feed me. You just had to feed me.”

  “Come get some coffee,” Dave said.

  “You think I’d take anything from you now?” Delgado staggered to his feet. He spat. “Knowing what you think?”

  “Is what I think any uglier than what you think? Come on. Forget it.” He led Delgado back into the kitchen. He stood him at the sink. “Wash your face.” Delgado splashed water with hands that hadn’t seen any for a long time. Dave handed him a supermarket dishtowel. He picked up the fallen mug and poured coffee into it again. “Drink this. Take the shower. Sleep it off.”

  Silently, sullenly, Delgado did as he was told. Dave led him across to the room with the fencing masks. He lifted folded jeans and the promised sweatshirt out of a carton on the floor. He steered Delgado to the bathroom where grit crunched on the white tiles. He shut the door on Delgado, and while the shower splashed, he set up the steel frame, lowered onto it the box spring that had been leaning against the wall, the mattress. He lifted sheets and blankets from other cartons and made up the bed. The shower ceased.

  “Don’t try to shave tonight,” Dave said. “Tomorrow.”

  He took a blanket for himself, left the building, closed the door behind him. He unlocked the big front building, threw the blanket inside, clicked light switches until somewhere outdoors around a corner a glow came from untrimmed brush. He went out again. Someplace he’d seen a garden hose. He went toward the light, shoes crackling dried oak leaves and eucalyptus seed pods. The smell of the eucalyptus was strong in the night heat. He found the hose. He prowled for a connection. He screwed the hose to it and turned the tap handle and got a lot of hard spray in his face. He dragged the hose around the house corner and reached the mess Delgado had made and, using his thumb to increase the force of the water, washed the vomit off the tiles into the Uttered earth under the shrubs.

  “The midnight gardener,” somebody said.

  Dave turned. He knew the figure—slight, trim, the overgrown grounds-light behind him haloing gray hair. It was Doug, whom he’d lived with for three years and didn’t live with anymore. “Right around to your left,” he said, “is the turn-off. Turn it off for me?”

  Doug stepped into shadow. He gave a yelp that said the leaky connection had doused him. The hose quit running and Dave dropped it Doug came to him. He wore a safari jacket of crash linen with the cuffs turned back. He was brushing water off it. Dave asked, “What brings you here? Did Christian fling himself into a volcano?”

  “I wanted to see if you were all right,” Doug said.

  The door of the building where the fencing masks hung opened. Delgado stood there in the fresh clothes. The light behind him shone off his wet hair. “Listen,” he said, “I want to thank you. I feel a hell of a lot better.”

  “You sound better,” Dave said. “There’s a carton of medicine-chest stuff on the bathroom floor. Take some aspirin. It might ward off a headache in the morning.”

  “I hate taking your bed.” Delgado saw Doug and jerked. “Oh, hell. Who’s that?”

  “Never mind me,” Doug said. “Just carry on as if I hadn’t come. Obviously, I shouldn’t have.”

  “Ah, Christ,” Delgado said. “Dave, I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” Dave said. “Sleep well.”

  Delgado hesitated, then turned, slump-shouldered, went back inside, and shut the door.

  “You can still surprise me,” Doug said.

  “You want some coffee?” Dave said.

  9

  TAPPING WOKE HIM. HE flinched at the brightness of the big empty room and thought extra windows might be a mistake. Groaning, he rolled onto his back on the creaky chaise he’d dragged in from the courtyard—webbing slack on a frame of aluminum tubing, the stuffing lumpy in the gaudy flower-print plastic pallet. He clutched the blanket around his nakedness and sat up. Tap-tap-tap. He squinted at the French doors. Where Amanda had made the circle on the dusty pane yesterday, she was smiling in at him. He lifted to her a hand that felt as if it belonged to someone else. It was early to smile, but he worked at it.

  “You’ll have to clear out,” she called. “All sorts of physical types are coming with crowbars.”

  He pointed to the door, tottered into pants, and went barefoot to let her in. He raked fingers through his hair. His mouth tasted sour. He and Doug had drunk Dos Equis and munched tortilla chips until late—how late he didn’t know. The talk had been guarded, mannerly, but he hoped Doug wouldn’t keep coming back. What you used to have was only that. And what they used to have was flawed from the start. He’d lost Rod to cancer, Doug had lost Jean-Paul in a car smash. They’d tried to make the losses up to each other. Life didn’t work that way. Love didn’t work that way—if love worked any way. What did they coat those tortilla chips with? Rust-color dust. Garlic was what he tasted. He ran his tongue over his teeth and opened the door to Amanda. Her T-shirt read HIS TOO. She was in ninety-dollar jeans. She was ready for work.

  “Someone’s in your kitchen,” she said. “A lovely, haggard Mediterranean type with long black eyelashes. He offered me coffee in a sultry voice. I was cagey. It could be doped. I could end up in a brothel in Turin.”

  “Or a motel in Santa Monica,” Dave said, “which is worse. Go help him with the bacon and eggs. If he makes any false moves, holler, and I’ll come running. Soapy and stark naked but running.”

  “Promises,” she said, and went to the cookhouse.

  Dave hobbled and hopped to the fencing studio. Getting there barefoot was painful. A countertenor was having to do with Monteverdi when he switched on the radio. He rifled cartons for clothes and went into the bathroom. When he came out, showered and shaved, the music was piano and violin, something twentieth-century. Delgado and Amanda sat on the side of the bed and ate from plates on their knees. Mugs of coffee steamed at their feet. Delgado started to get up but Dave went to the cookhouse, got his own plate from the oven where it was keeping warm, poured himself a mug of coffee, and went back with them. He sat on the other side of the bed, drank some coffee to wash out the mint taste of the tooth powder, and swallowed some eggs.

  “The car is full of catalogues for you to look at,” Amanda said. “Sample books. Fabrics. Carpet. Furniture. I hope you haven’t got a big day’s work planned.”

  “I can work for him,” Delgado said. He looked over his shoulder at Dave. “Who should I talk to?”

  “Spence Odum. Maybe he knows where Charleen Sims is. Only you have to find him first. I’ve checked the directories. He doesn’t have a business address. He doesn’t even have a home address. He makes skinflicks.”

  “I’ll find him for you,” Delgado said. “What do you want with Charleen what’s-her-name?”

  “I think it’s possible she witnessed a murder.”

  Delgado was making Dave feel guilty about having checked the liquor bottles in the kitchen. He knew drunks. Delgado must have awakened feeling rotten. The remedy for that was to jolt down alcohol as soon as possible. To stop the shaking, the panic. The gin bottle was the only one Dave had opened himself. It didn’t seem any emptier than when he’d made his martini. The seals on the Jack Daniels and the Glenlivet were intact. He said, “You don’t have to do it.”

  “I’d like to,” Delgado said. “Maybe if I do it right, you’ll put in a word for me at Sequoia.”

  “You’ll do it right,” Dave said. “Maybe she didn’t call herself Sims
. Maybe it was Dawson. For what my advice is worth—I doubt that Odum belongs to any guilds. I doubt that he belongs to the Motion Picture Academy.”

  “I don’t doubt that he drives a car,” Delgado said.

  “Two hundred a day and expenses,” Dave said.

  “No way.” Delgado gulped the last of his coffee. “Twenty bucks for gas and lunch. And I wouldn’t take that if I wasn’t broke.” He set the mug on the plate and stood. “I’ll wash the dishes and get going.”

  “You’re locked out of your motel,” Dave reminded him.

  “That’s not your problem.” Delgado took Amanda’s mug and plate and started for the door. “Maybe I tried to make it your problem last night, but it’s not.”

  “Don’t worry about the dishes,” Dave said. “You cooked the breakfast. My wallet’s in the front building on the floor by the thing I slept on. Better take fifty. It gets expensive out there. You don’t want to run short.”

  “Let me have those.” Amanda took the plates out of Delgado’s hands and went out into the leaf-speckled sunlight with them. Halfway across the courtyard she called back, “And good luck.” She went into the cookhouse and water began splashing there.

  Dave sat and finished his breakfast. He heard the door of the front building close and the crunch of Delgado’s steps rounding the house and fading toward his car. But there was no noise of the car starting. Swallowing the last of his eggs, he got to his feet. He left the plate with Amanda at the sink and carried his coffee out to the front. Delgado leaned in under the raised hood of an old Pontiac with a smashed-out taillight. A pocketknife was in his hand. He was trying to make it serve as a screwdriver to fasten some wires. He saw Dave and straightened up, banging his head. He rubbed his head, wincing. But it didn’t hide the guilt in his eyes.

  “Relax,” Dave said. “You fixed it so you could stamp off mad at me, or go off rejected and dejected, or however the scene played itself, and you wouldn’t be able to get your car started. You’d have to stay. I’ve had it done to me before.”

  Delgado stared, making up his mind about whether or not to get sore. He bent back under the hood and worked with the wires again. “There’s something you don’t know about people,” he said. “There has to be. It stands to reason.” He grunted with the effort of what he was doing. “There.” He got out from under the hood and slammed it shut. He folded up the jackknife and dropped it into the pocket of the jeans Dave had lent him.

  Dave said, “When people run out of probable things to do, they do improbable things. That’s all. Nothing so wonderful about that.”

  Delgado opened the door on the driver’s side and got into the car. The door squeaked. Cotton wadding stuck out of a worn place in the seat. He started the engine and shut the door. “Only you don’t get surprised,” he said.

  “Once or twice,” Dave said. “It’s dangerous. I don’t like it. But I know it’s going to happen again. The odds are like that. I haven’t met everybody in the world, yet. It only feels that way.”

  Delgado had made a bundle of his dirty clothes. It lay on the seat beside him. He must have put it there when he got up. He said, “I know what you mean.”

  “The trick is to remember that they only seem the same,” Dave said. “They’re not the same. And one of them is waiting to surprise the hell out of me.”

  “I hope it isn’t me,” Delgado said.

  Dave slapped the window ledge and stepped back. “Good luck,” he said. “Call me when you locate Spence Odum. Wait, I didn’t give you my number.”

  Delgado grinned. “I swiped a card out of your wallet.” He backed the car. Dust huffed from under the worn tires. The old engine rattled a lot at the effort it had to make getting up the rutted drive to the trail. Delgado raised a hand and let the Pontiac roll down the potholed blacktop. It backfired a couple of times. Dave didn’t let himself think about how many drinks fifty dollars would buy. He went back to the cookhouse and helped Amanda with the dishes.

  After that they sat cross-legged on the floor in the big room and looked at shiny pictures of objects to sit on and to eat off of, they ran their hands on carpet samples, fingered swatches of fabric meant to cover chairs and hang at windows. A gnarled man with one arm and two big, speechless sons arrived in a ranchero wagon and tramped around scowling at the work to be done. A lot of adding up took place on the backs of envelopes—brick, lumber, masonry, manhours, sheet metal, wiring, tile. A rattly pickup truck with board sides jolted into the yard and an old Japanese couple hauled gardening tools out of it. A chain saw began to snarl. When the brown old woman in man’s hat and shoes shut it off for a minute, Dave heard the telephone. It was in the fencing room. He ran for it.

  “This is Midnight,” the voice at the other end said.

  “Noon,” Dave said. He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes to one, as a matter of fact.”

  “No, man—Richie Midnight.” Restaurant noises were behind the voice. “Back in Wisconsin it’s still Mittelnacht, but how do you expect a deejay to pronounce that? How do you expect to put that on an album cover?”

  “There’s Engelbert Humperdinck,” Dave said. “But let it pass. You found Charleen, right? What did she do, come in to dance again?”

  “She didn’t come in. I didn’t find her. But I sure as hell went looking for her. She’s dead, man. She’s got to be. Disappeared when Dawson got killed, that joker she was with? Nobody’s seen her. I mean, she was visible, audible, right? Everybody on the Strip knew her. Only way somebody like that could disappear is they’re dead.”

  “Your friend Priss estimates LA at nine million souls,” Dave said. “It’s more likely she’s just mislaid.”

  “That’s not in very good taste,” Mittelnacht said.

  “Don’t be so eager to cry,” Dave said. “I don’t know how much death you’ve seen, but it’s not romantic.”

  “I was in Nam,” Mittelnacht said.

  “Did they teach you how to break necks?” Dave asked.

  “They taught me how to mainline horse. And not to bitch at all the lousy pianos they gave me to play.”

  “None of this is what you called about,” Dave said. “What did you call about?”

  “There’s this jock I ran into. He’s around the Strip a lot. I mean, I don’t know him. I know him. You know what I mean? He’s not a close friend, just a dude. An actor. Only there’s just one reason he ever gets cast. He’s got this tremendous organ of procreation, right? And—”

  “So he worked for Spence Odum,” Dave said.

  “You got it. And he knows where Odum’s shooting.”

  “Tell me,” Dave said.

  10

  THE BUILDING WITH THE number Mittelnacht had given him faced the Strip and looked all wrong. The facade was colonial—white pillars, green shutters. A sign claimed real estate was sold behind the green door with the shiny brass knocker. Dave waited for a break in traffic, then skidded the Triumph around a corner where the side street dropped sharply. There was an alley. He nipped into it. Spaces for cars backed on the rear walls of shops, trash barrels, broken crates. The barred, employees-only doors were mostly unnumbered. But a number matching that on the real-estate office was lettered in runny white paint on a plywood door where a tall girl in noticeable makeup and a costume of pink, red, and orange skirts, scarves, and sashes smoked a cigarette under a yellow turban with a cerise plume. He pulled the Triumph in beside a white van without lettering that somehow didn’t look like anybody’s vacation vehicle—it looked like business, anonymous business. The girl wore big fake-gold hoop earrings and had a husky voice. She looked Dave up and down hungrily and said with a regretful smile: “Sorry. Nobody gets in.”

  The door opened. A college-age boy in glasses and with a prominent Adam’s apple said, “Okay, he wants you.”

  “Excuse me,” the tall girl said, “it’s the big moment in the torture chamber.” She dropped the cigarette, stepped on it with a gold sandal that showed toenails glued with glitter, and went inside. Dave went inside aft
er her.

  Before the door fell shut, daylight showed him washrooms littered with wigs, greasepaint tubes, boxes of tan powder, crumpled tissues stained with lipstick. NO SMOKING, a sign said. Then the door closed and the only light was out in a big brick room where it struck hard at a naked teenage girl struggling inside a gilt-and-crimson papier-mâché mummy case that stood upright. Shiny manacles held the girl’s ankles and wrists, chains looping from them to cleats inside the case. The case had a split lid, the curved halves open. The tall girl stood to one side of the coffin, another dressed like her to the other side. Silhouetted against the light, a pair of men flanked a camera on a tripod. The only sound was the whirr of the camera motor. The girl screamed silently and writhed without conviction in the very loose chains, while the gaudy attendants slowly closed the lethal halves of the door. Thirty percent shut. Eighty percent.

  “Freeze it there.” The man who spoke had golliwog hair. He was big, barrel-shaped, soft. He moved out into the dazzling light—black suit, black cape, pasted-on mandarin moustache. He undid the manacles. The naked girl stepped out of the mummy case. Her hair was tawny, her skin tawny, flawless over a layer of puppy fat. She went away into the shadows. The gaudily rigged girls stood deathly still. The fuzzy-haired man returned to the camera. “All right.” He ducked his head, did something to his face. “One second for makeup. Now! Camera? Action!” The motor whirred again. The gaudy girls went back to shutting the mummy case.

  At the last moment, cape flying, a slouch hat hiding his mad hair, the man rushed into the light. He flung himself against the doors, jamming them shut. He swung to face the camera. He’d put on a domino mask. He raised a fist at the camera, threw back his head and laughed in demented triumph. He’d fitted himself with joke-store Dracula teeth. He held the pose. He held the pose. Sweat trickled from under the mask. He held the pose. He broke the pose.