Skin Deep sg-3

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Jesus," I said. "The people I see all day ask me about you. Then I see you, and you ask me about Toby."

  "How come nobody ever asks you about you?" she said.

  "My point exactly. I used to be interesting."

  She looked around the restaurant. "You're still interesting," she said in the tone she would have used to calm a querulous four-year-old. A well-dressed, upwardly mobile young couple seated themselves gracefully at the table next to us. Something on the woman's wrist sparkled discreetly. The man smiled. He looked like a commercial for a credit dentist.

  "If I'm so interesting, how come you're looking at them?"

  The man glanced over at her, and his smile broadened. I wouldn't have thought it was possible. Its corners were already crowding his ears. Eleanor gave him the merest ghost of a smile, a dimpling at the corners of her mouth that was a specialty of hers, in return. "Good to know I haven't lost it completely," she said complacently.

  "I think you've got another fifty years."

  Eleanor put her chin on her hand and glowed at me. "You are interesting," she said. "Interest me some more. For instance, tell me about Toby Vane."

  "Oh, apes and monkeys. Don't tell me you watch the show, too."

  "It takes a lot of people to make a rating point. I'm not too proud to be one of them. Anyway, he's a hunk."

  "A hunk of what is the question."

  She picked up a fork. "Is this the right one?"

  "For what? There isn't any food yet."

  "I thought I might stick it through your tongue."

  "That one's not on the table. Waiter." I raised my hand.

  "I hope it's dull," she said.

  "I could arrange for you to meet him. He likes bouncing Oriental women around."

  "Ah," she said, looking with great interest at her left forearm. "Is there one of those on the horizon?"

  "Yes," I said, kicking myself under the table. "Half of one, anyway." The waiter appeared at my shoulder. "Do you want anything else to drink?" I asked Eleanor.

  "Another 7-Up."

  "And a white wine for me," I said. The waiter beamed at Eleanor as though she'd ordered a magnum of Dom Perignon, ignored me completely, and left.

  "Is she pretty?" Eleanor said. "And don't ask me who."

  "I suppose she is."

  "You forgot to ask for the fork."

  "So I did."

  "What's her name?"

  "She's got a lot of names."

  "Not the best character reference, is it?"

  "Eleanor, I'm not checking her out for a security clearance. She's a girl, that's all."

  "Ten years old? Twelve?"

  "All right, a young woman."

  "How young? And what do you mean, half of one?"

  "How's what's-his-name?" I said.

  "Don't start," Eleanor said. "You know perfectly well what his name is."

  The salad arrived in the nick of time. We both chewed. It seemed safer than talking. While she was using her bread to mop up the plate, I said, "So. You watch the show."

  "Sure. Who doesn't?"

  "I don't, for one. What's it about?"

  "The usual bang-bang. Screeching tires and breaking glass, ladies in distress, dope dealers, and Central American dictators. The same guest stars as every other show on the air. Stupid dialogue. Lots of commercials telling us what we're missing in life."

  "And you give it an hour of your time every week."

  "It's my time," she observed. "And that Toby's really something."

  "The premise," I said. "Swallow once or twice so you don't drool on your blouse and tell me the premise."

  She looked down. "You gave me this blouse."

  "I know." I'd felt a pang in my heart when I saw that she was wearing it. "It goes with your skirt," I said. I hadn't given her the skirt.

  She glanced at the skirt. "His name, as you know perfectly well, is Bart." She sipped her 7-Up. "You really haven't seen it? Not even one show?"

  "Not even the credits."

  She pushed her salad plate to one side. "Well," she said, "it's not easy if you haven't seen it. It's like Toby's not really human."

  "You're telling me."

  "No, listen. He's a machine, and so is this big black car he drives. It sounds terrible, and I'm sure it is, but Toby gets his strength from the car. Neither of them can do much of anything if the other isn't around."

  "Who?" I was getting confused.

  "Toby and the car. It's like Hercules and Antaeus. Remember Antaeus?"

  "Sure. He had to keep his feet on the ground. Hercules totaled him by lifting him first. A little like sumo wrestling."

  "Well, that's like Toby in the show. In the car or around it, he's invincible. But get him away from it and he's just normal. And if you keep him away from it long enough, he begins to get very weak."

  "Weak barely describes it." The waiter delivered the entrees with a flourish: lamb for me and something that was all vegetables for Eleanor.

  "A lot of people watch it." She used her salad fork experimentally to pick up something long and green.

  "A lot of people eat zucchini, too," I said. "That doesn't make it any good."

  She chewed a minuscule amount. Eleanor believed in tiny bites, spaced far apart. Something to do with the digestive juices that she'd attempted to explain to me over a number of meals. It had taken months to make her understand that thinking about my digestive juices actually slowed their work.

  "If High Velocity were a vegetable," she said a trifle maliciously, "it would be a zucchini. A long, racy, highly phallic zucchini with metallic pinstripes."

  "That's very enlightening." My lamb tasted like plywood. It had to be me. The Black Forest Inn's lamb is good enough to make you feel that sheep are superfluous.

  "So," Eleanor said, "who's the girl?"

  I put down my utensils. "Is this why we're here? So you can conduct a pop quiz on my personal life?"

  "You're the one who brought her up," Eleanor said. She exhaled slowly and laid down her fork. "No," she said. "We're here because I wanted to see you."

  "A girl got killed," I said. "No, not that girl, another girl. She got beaten to death. And she was a friend of Toby's."

  "Friend. That sounds like a euphemism. And what about the other one?"

  "She's a euphemism, too. It's the career of the nineties. Professional euphemism. You can get a degree in it now."

  "Dispensing with my jealousy for the moment, you're saying that you think Toby might be involved."

  "I guess. I don't know. Do I look like I know? Toby's complicated."

  "He's an actor," she said as if that explained everything. Maybe it did.

  "He's a white-knuckle sadist."

  "Gosh," Eleanor said. She never swore. "And he looks so sweet."

  "I wanted to see you, too," I said.

  She waved it away. "Simeon, do you ever wonder whether this is a healthy profession?"

  "You mean as in I could get killed?"

  "As in you have to hang around with so much scum. You can't touch pitch without getting dirty, or something like that."

  "It's not exactly like that."

  "But you know what I mean, and anyway it's the Bible."

  The waiter arrived. He laid a third 7-Up in front of Eleanor as if the glass containing it were the Holy Grail, plunked my white wine down with a blunt thud, and retired. Every table in the restaurant fell quiet, the way a room full of people will sometimes. Eleanor occupied the silence by lining up her silverware in more precisely parallel lines. They were already as parallel as a railroad track.

  "I'll bet you were a champion at dodge ball in elementary school," she said. "Do you know how long we've known each other?"

  "Eight years, seven months."

  "And twelve days. And you still duck the issues."

  "What's the issue?"

  "See?"

  "Swell. The issue of the moment is whether I can do my job without being corrupted. Maybe not. And then, maybe I'm corrupt already."
r />   "We're all corrupt. That's the point we're supposed to work backward from."

  "Eleanor, you sound like John Calvin."

  "The average kid sees twelve thousand murders on TV by the time he's ten."

  "He?"

  "Or she." Eleanor shook her head impatiently. "If nits were a cash crop, you'd get rich picking them. Simeon, we're too old to waltz."

  "And if that metaphor were any more mixed, it'd be an omelet. Cognac?"

  "Oh, bull," she said, startling me. "I've never heard so much hot air."

  "There we are," I said. "So that's why they call it the Windy City."

  "Fine. Get some cognac. Get a whole bottle."

  "What do you want from me, Eleanor? Somebody's dead."

  "A lot of people are dead."

  "Here," I said, holding out my bread plate. "Have a nit."

  "Simeon." She put her hand on mine. "Why does it have to be you?"

  "It doesn't. Somebody will do it, maybe. But I saw her." I gently bent Eleanor's index finger back. "All her fingers were broken. Three times."

  "Maybe you think your fingers won't break," she said, giving mine a jerk upward. "Maybe you think you can't lose blood."

  "We are talking about me getting killed?"

  She knocked her precise silverware arrangement cockeyed. "You idiot," she said. "Of course we are."

  "I love you, too." I reached over and straightened the two remaining forks. The upwardly mobile woman at the next table laughed tinnily.

  "How come men can laugh boom-boom-boom and women sound like goats?" Eleanor said. "How come men can chew gum and women look like cows when they do it? How come it's okay for men to get wasted and throw up, but a drunk woman embarrasses everybody?"

  "I love you, too," I said again.

  "Maybe people have a higher expectation for women," she said, looking everywhere in the restaurant except at me. "What a pain in the rear."

  I didn't say anything.

  Eleanor lifted an edge of her plate and let it drop onto the immaculate white tablecloth. The delicate muscles of her jaw worked, once and then again. "What a total, unadulterated, one-hundred-percent pain in the ass," she said.

  12

  Saffron in the Morning

  It may have been one p.m. to the rest of the world, but to Saffron it was early morning.

  She lived in the kind of neighborhood where they park on the lawn. The dry swimming pool was half-full of trash. I'd had to knock four times before a thick moan of protest announced that she was coming to the door. There was a prolonged fumbling with multiple chains and latches inside, a muttered expletive or two, and then the door swung open four inches, and Saffron peered out into the sunlight. Her chin rested on the taut chain.

  "I paid the rent," she said. Then she focused. "Oh, shit. It's you." She pushed at the door, but it wouldn't close.

  "The old foot in the door," I said. "It's amazing how many people still let you get a foot in the door."

  "Listen, I just went to bed. How about you get out of here and come back next week? Or maybe Labor Day." She gave the door an exploratory shove.

  The apartment behind her was dark, and I could hear the hum of a window air conditioner, part of a night person's standard insulation against the day. A door closed behind me, and a youngish man with vivid pimples decorating a pasty complexion beneath slicked-back black hair walked quickly across the courtyard and toward the street. He gave me a nervous glance. It seemed like a pretty furtive apartment house, all things considered.

  "Saffron, I'm coming in, and you're going to talk to me."

  "Fuck off," she said, shoving again at the door. It didn't budge. Her puffy face suddenly arranged itself into the expression of a four-year-old headed for a tantrum. It wasn't pretty.

  "I could knock this door in with one hand," I said. "Then you'd have to talk to me, and you'd have to get your door fixed, too. Why don't you do it the easy way?"

  "You push this door in and I'll call the cops."

  "Oh, no, you won't."

  She stamped her foot. She was wearing little white ankle socks and a short nightgown. Her chin trembled, and I thought for a moment she was going to cry. I wondered what wretched drugs she was on.

  "Open the door," I said as gently as I could. "Please?"

  She stared up at me through petulant eyes that looked like black-and-blue marks. "You'll have to move your foot," she said in an angry little-girl voice. "I can't undo the chain if you don't."

  "Lock it and I'll come in through the window."

  "I'm not going to lock it."

  "Oh, good," I said. "My first opportunity to trust you."

  I pulled my foot back, putting both palms against the door as a precaution. I needn't have bothered. She didn't close it all the way, just slid the lock off the catch and retreated back into the gloom. The door slowly swung open. It was cheap, hollow fiberboard. I probably could have walked through it.

  "Let yourself in," she said.

  I followed her into the darkness. The apartment was in total disorder. Saffron had more shoes than Imelda Marcos, but nowhere near the closet space. They were everywhere, on the floor, on the table and couch, even on the messy single bed that Saffron had just vacated. They fought for space with dresses, pants, blouses, slips, underwear. Saffron obviously belonged to the drop-it-where-you-take-it-off school of undressing. Blankets masked the light from the windows, so I left the door standing open.

  Ashtrays overflowed with cigarettes. Most of them had half the filter torn out; white, fibrous little piles of whatever they make filters out of were everywhere. Saffron was smoking a lot of cocaine.

  She sat on the bed, reached over to the table for one of her coco-puffs, and lit it. Sweet smoke curled toward me. Over the bed was a Day-Glo poster of Jimi Hendrix from the halcyon days of the Fillmore West. I revised my estimate of her age upward.

  "Nice place," I said conversationally.

  She took a deep hit. "Yours ain't exactly Camelot. What do you want?" One foot was curled beneath her, and it jiggled up and down nervously. Her shin needed shaving. Probably both of them did.

  "Just a talk. Can you sleep after you smoke one of those?"

  "I can sleep after a dozen. That what you want to talk about?"

  "I want to talk about Amber."

  "We've already done this scene. There was no payoff. Like I said before, go away."

  "And Toby."

  She inhaled again, held it for a second, and yawned out a plume of smoke. "Fuck Toby. Fuck you, too. I'm sorry I ever met him."

  "Why?"

  "Why not? Who needs the All-American boy when his idea of a sex toy is a Louisville Slugger?" She tried a laugh, but it didn't work. "It's enough to make you wish you liked girls." One strap of her nightgown fell loose over her shoulder. She left it there.

  I leaned over and straightened it. She pulled away from me, regarded me darkly for a second, and then went back to work on the cigarette.

  "Did he rough you up?"

  She exhaled vehemently and coughed, doubling over on the bed. "Toby can't say hello without sticking his elbow in your eye," she said when she'd caught her breath. "It's like a character flaw."

  "It's a blemish the size of Van Nuys. You're an actress?"

  She looked surprised. "Sure," she said. "I'm really Meryl Streep." She waved her cigarette around to indicate the apartment. "All this is just part of getting into character."

  "But you came here-to Hollywood, I mean-to be an actress."

  "Who says?" She sounded suspicious.

  "You. You said we'd already done this scene. No payoff, you said. Real people don't talk like that. What do the folks back home think you're doing?"

  Saffron started to stub out her cigarette and then thought better of it. She used it to light another and dropped the butt into an already overloaded ashtray. She sucked up the smoke from the new one. Wrinkles creased the area around her mouth.

  Closing her eyes to get away from me, she exhaled. "They think I wait tables," she
said after a moment.

  "Well, you do, in a way."

  "Yeah, and the pope's a Protestant. Stop sucking around and get to the point."

  "Did Toby tell you he'd help you?"

  Something that might have had a smile as a distant ancestor flitted across her tired face. "Well, he really did help, you know? That's the worst thing about Toby. We all know he's an asshole, but sometimes he comes through. He actually got me a part on High Velocity. Two parts, in fact, but they cut one of them out. Anyway, that was before."

  "Before what?"

  "Before he got what he wanted."

  "And what was that?"

  The smile was gone. "Never you fucking mind what he wanted. It's not anything I like to talk about. And don't play shrink with me."

  "So he got you a couple of parts."

  "The only ones in fourteen years. You know, after a while a girl begins to wonder whether she's got any talent, aside from what she can do with her feet pointed at the ceiling." She took another deep drag. "I wanted to be Julie Harris," she said, looking embarrassed. "You know, not a big star or anything, but someone who did good work. Trouble is, I've got the wrong equipment. All knockers and no brains. Why am I talking about this?"

  "You're talking."

  "It's the coke talking. And you're not my friend. You're just somebody who wants to keep Mr. Teen-cream from getting what's coming to him." She worried one of her long fingernails with her teeth, making a gritty little chewing noise.

  It was time to let her think, so I got up and navigated the landscape of clothing until I reached a corner that I'd been glancing at since I first came in. It looked like a corner from another apartment entirely that had been grafted surgically onto Saffron's space. Stones from the seaside, rubbed smooth by the waves, had been piled carefully to create a kind of shrine. Plants grew from the center of the pile and cascaded down its sides. Above the plants, on the wall, was a vertical Zen garden: flat, vaguely rectangular stones with holes worn through them. Nails had been driven through the holes to hold the stones in place. They hung in an apparently random arrangement that nevertheless had a kind of finality about it. You couldn't have moved one without ruining the effect.

  "Who did this?"

  "Who do you think? Nobody here but us chickens."