Skin Deep sg-3

by Timothy Hallinan

  She tangled her fingers together and twisted her hands. "If I answer you, will you answer me?" It sounded like a kids' game.

  "Sure."

  "Promise?"

  I kept driving.

  "He had this great idea," she said. Her voice was very tight. "He thought maybe we should move to Hawaii. Just the two of us, just Daddy and Nana. He wants to buy a club there."

  "Club? What kind of club?"

  She made a strangled sound that was somewhere between laughing and crying. "Sherlock Holmes," she said. "What kind of club do you think? Honest to fucking Christ, what kind of club do you think? Oh, Jesus," she said, and then everything fell apart and she was crying full out, nothing cosmetic or dainty, the kind of crying that puffs up people's eyes and makes stuff dangle from their nose.

  I pulled Alice over to the curb and tried to get an arm around her. "No," I said. "He didn't mean that."

  She yanked herself away from me. "Don't you tell me what he meant, you middle-class white asshole. He meant a nude club. He meant a place where girls dance naked and be real sweet to the customers." She leaned against the door opposite me.

  "And what were you supposed to be?"

  "Me?" she said. "I'm supposed to be Miss Oriental Universe. That way he gets to make money and watch me at the same time."

  Traffic, L.A. traffic, whizzed by us as if it knew where it was going. The stoplight in front of us turned from green to red and then back again before I had any idea what to say.

  "Honey," I said at last, "you're an orphan. Shine him on, say good-bye. Give Daddy a good punt into the far, far end of the end zone where Toby lives and start over."

  She looked up at me, and her face, reflecting the bluish glow of the streetlights, was streaked with tears. "Right," she said. "Sure. Except you're talking about my father. When I was a little girl, you know? I mean, a real little girl, before. . Oh, shit. Forget it."

  "Nana." I put my hand on her arm. "I'm not going to forget it. For God's sake, trust me. I deserve that much."

  "Why should I trust you all of a sudden? I haven't trusted anybody since I was twelve."

  "Then don't trust me. You're on your own anyway. You've known that for years."

  "I used to pray, you know? When I was eleven, twelve years old and he started coming into my room, I used to pray. I prayed real loud. I hoped Mom would hear me even if You Know Who didn't. Nobody heard me."

  "I hear you."

  "And who knows what you want? Why should you want anything different? I'm shit. I've always been shit." She lifted her knees and dropped her chin onto them, crumpling into a smaller space than I would have believed possible. "If I hadn't been shit, he'd have treated me like a good little girl. He wouldn't have wanted me."

  "He's shit," I said. "Toby's shit. Listen, everybody's shit sometimes. Everybody's crazy, and nobody wants to be. You never had a chance."

  She threw both arms over her face and wailed. I sat as far from her as I could get in the enclosed space of the car and concentrated on counting to twenty. There was nothing else to do. She had her face cradled in her arms.

  "Nana," I said into her sobs, "I can't fix anything. I can't make your life right, only you can do that. But you can do that. I'm not trying to sound like the Hour of Power or Ann Landers, but you can. And you already know it."

  No answer, but she was crying more softly. Maybe she was listening. Great. Now I had to say something.

  "I can't tell you anything you don't already know. Most of the time I don't even believe anybody can help anybody. But I do believe you've got to try."

  Nana was sitting up now, gazing out the windshield through swollen eyes. Tears dripped from her chin. "So what should I do?" she asked.

  I thought. "Eat out more often," I said.

  Her look was an eloquent reproach. "If that's supposed to be funny, it isn't."

  "I'm not a guru. I don't know what I'm talking about. But since you're acting as if I did, it seems to me that you're trapped inside your life, same as Amber was. She said she'd lost the map. What I think she meant was that she'd lost the map that would get her out."

  "Out of what?"

  "The track she knew. The track she'd worn down chasing herself around and around until it felt familiar because she was following her own footsteps. Go from home to the club. Go from the club to home. Stop on the way to score. She could have quit any time, but she didn't. It caused her pain, but the pain was familiar. She was like everybody else. She was used to the familiar pain and afraid of the pain that might be new. Maybe what she should have done was throw some cold water on her face and stop. Get up the next morning and do something new."

  "Amber was a junkie."

  "You're not."

  "Not yet, anyway."

  "You're not going to be a junkie. You won't let it happen. I won't let it happen."

  "You," she said. "You can't sit on my shoulder forever, telling me what's right and what's wrong. Life doesn't work that way."

  "I don't have to. You already know."

  "Tell me what I know."

  "You know you don't have to go back to the club, for one thing. Sex is what went wrong first in your life, and you're selling sex for a living. I mean, Jesus, if Daddy wants into your life-style, it's the wrong life-style."

  "I should learn from Daddy?" She shook her head again, and I could feel her withdraw.

  "Daddy's nothing, Daddy's less than nothing. Daddy's just litmus paper to tell you when you're wrong. When the people we should hate cheer up, we're doing something wrong. We should deprive them of that, if only for the simple pleasure of watching their faces fall."

  "That's all what I'm not supposed to do. What should I do?"

  "How the hell do I know? Go to the zoo. Grow a mustache. Go back to computer school. Become Florence Nightingale, work with lepers. Run for Congress. You speak Korean and English; become a simultaneous translator for the U.N. Eat out more often."

  "I can't do those things."

  "When your girlfriend, may her flesh rot from her bones, first suggested you should dance nude, did you think you could do it?"

  She lifted her knees and crossed her beautiful arms over them. Then she rested her chin on her arms. "No," she said. "I thought it would kill me."

  "Of course you did. It was unthinkable. But now it's the pain you're familiar with."

  After a full minute, she nodded. "Learn from it," she said.

  I leaned back. I felt like I'd run twenty miles.

  She looked over at me. "I'm not stupid," she said.

  "Nana. You're probably smarter than I am."

  Her eyes engaged mine and held them. "Probably," she said, "but you're sweet." She reached out and tried to circle my wrist with her fingers. Her hand was too small. "I'm through at the club anyway," she said. "They'll never take me back now. Let's go home."

  "Home it is." We eased out into traffic, and she busied herself with her face. When I turned onto Vista she sat back and said, "Thanks."

  "You're welcome," I said. "We're here." I pulled Alice into the curb.

  "Okay," Nana said with a final sniffle. "I'm welcome. Well, I've got a hidden agenda. I promise I won't hang around, I won't be embarrassing."

  "Nana," I reminded her, "we're home."

  "And you're not going to walk me to the door?" She cupped my chin in her hands and raised her face to kiss me. It was almost a chaste little kiss-not quite, but almost. Minus the tip of her tongue it would have qualified. When it was finished she sighed. "You're going to let me walk across the courtyard alone?"

  Miss Courtney's etiquette class surfaced. "No," I said, "of course not."

  I joined her on the sidewalk, and she slipped her hand into mine. When I took it she gave me a squeeze. "I'm afraid of the birds of paradise," she said. "I really hate birds of paradise. They look like they eat meat."

  I stopped without knowing why. An unseasonal breeze stirred the foliage, the birds of paradise cawed silently, and I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle. Then I s
aw the strip of light. "Nana," I said, "did you leave your door open?"

  "In your hat. In Hollywood? That's what locks are for, right? Why?"

  "Because it's open now."

  She looked, and her grip on my hand tightened. "No," she said in a whisper. "I locked it this morning, same as ever."

  "Stay here. I'll be back in a minute."

  "No way, no way in the world. I'm not standing here alone. Come on, Simeon, let's just leave."

  "Go to the car," I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. "Lock the doors and stay there."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going in."

  She swallowed noisily, and I fought the urge to hush her. "Then I'm going with you."

  It didn't seem like either the time or place for an argument. "Suit yourself," I said. "But stay a few steps back and keep quiet."

  I could feel her behind me as I moved toward the open door. My running shoes made no sound, and neither, surprisingly, did her high heels. At the door I paused for a moment and listened. Either no one was inside or whoever it was was listening too. I lifted my foot, kicked the door open, and jumped to one side, yanking Nana with me.

  "Lordy," she said on an indrawn breath.

  The place was a ruin.

  Keeping her hand in my left, I reached around with my right and pushed the door all the way open. It slammed against the wall and groaned back toward us a foot or so. At least nobody was standing behind it. I counted my blessings and got as high as one.

  "I'm going in." I squeezed her hand hard enough to make the joints pop. "You stay right here. If I say come in, come in. If I say anything else at all, run like hell. Get to a phone and call the cops. Got it?"

  She nodded, looking past me into the room. I patted her cheek and went inside, hoping that I looked braver than I felt.

  The living room was a clutter of junk, trashed objects that had once been possessions. The overhead lights were on, or there wouldn't have been any light at all; both lamps were strewn in fragments across the floor. Pictures had been ripped from the walls and their frames snapped over somebody's knee, probably the same knee that had shattered Amber's arms. Bright shards of light glittered from sharp pieces of glass and mirror. There wasn't a square foot of the floor visible.

  The door leading to the hallway was closed. Stepping over the wreckage on the floor as if the crown jewels of England were scattered there, I moved toward it. I put a hand on the knob, counted ten to slow the beating of my heart, and shoved it open.

  Blackness. I felt for a light switch. There wasn't one. Either the hallway was unlighted, which seemed unlikely, or the switch was at the other end, a typically dysfunctional example of Hollywood architecture. I was going to have to go in. The small amount of light that filtered in from the living room would be just enough to allow me to see my own blood. Closing my mind's eye tight, I went in.

  More junk littered the floor, but otherwise the hallway was empty. The bathroom door yawned open at its far end, and I snapped on the light inside. Nobody behind me, nobody in the bathroom. The destroyer hadn't missed much: even the mirror on the medicine cabinet had been broken. Aspirin, hairpins, and tampons were scattered across the tiles.

  That left the bedroom. The door was ajar, and I shoved it, hard. Lights were on, throwing the devastation into sharp, ugly relief.

  The bed had been eviscerated. A sharp knife had slit the mattress from top to bottom, and the stuffings had been thrown around the room. The contents of the open closet were strewn around like the random refuse of a tornado.

  Across one wall, written on a crooked diagonal in Nana's lipstick, were the words WHORES DIE.

  "I don't believe it," I said.

  I heard a sudden sound behind me and whirled, my hands drawn back and open to blind or kill. I was halfway into the air when I saw Nana. I grabbed the edge of the table to stop myself, and my feet tangled in a blanket and I fell. It was a heavy fall.

  "That wasn't your cue," I said from the floor. "If you heard that, you should be running by now."

  "And leave you here alone?" She reached down to help me up. All her attention was concentrated on me. She wasn't even looking at the room. If I hadn't been flat on my face and feeling like an idiot, I would have been flattered.

  "You're okay?" she asked.

  I waved away her offer of help and stood up. "Yeah, sure. I'm fine."

  "Jeez," she said, finally looking around. The words on the wall caught her eye. "Oh. That's really sick."

  I waited until my pulse had slowed to double speed. "What do you need?"

  "For what?"

  "To leave, to be gone for a few days while we arrange to get this cleaned up. Find what you need and let's get out of here."

  "Why? Why should I go? Some dickhead trashed my place and probably took everything I own, but why should I leave?" Her jaw was as knobby as Lincoln's before he grew his beard. "Let's just straighten up a little, and I'll stay here."

  "You're leaving," I said. "I don't think anybody took anything. I think something's on the move and you're in its way. I don't know why, but you are. Get what you need. We're going."

  She took a steely look around. "I don't need anything. You got a toothbrush and shampoo, right? You got aspirin? We are going to your place, aren't we?"

  "Of course we are."

  "Oh, darling," she said. "I thought you'd never ask."

  The birds chirped at her when we let ourselves in. It had to be for her; they never did it for me. Nana moved to the birds' cage and made little kissing sounds at them. They both looked at her. Hansel, I think, cocked his head appealingly.

  She pushed a finger into the cage.

  "Careful," I said. "The little peckers peck."

  "Not me they don't," she said smugly. Hansel jumped up onto her finger and perched there, looking more proud of himself than anything with the brains God grudgingly doled out to a bird had any right to look. "He's sweet," Nana said.

  "I thought you hated birds."

  "Well, hell, I'd rather you had a Weimaraner trained to attack, especially after tonight. But women learn early to be satisfied."

  "Explain tonight."

  She coaxed her finger back through the bars, and Hansel leapt up onto the perch and let loose a volley of song. "Who knows?" she said, watching him. "Maybe it didn't have anything to do with anything. Maybe it was a bunch of skaggers who ran out of skag or some Jesus freaks who ran out of Jesus. Maybe they didn't even know who lived there."

  "Do you believe that?"

  "No." She turned to face me.

  "Me neither. Where murder is concerned, I don't believe in coincidence. I'm just glad you weren't there."

  She looked away and then back to me. "Me, too," she said.

  "Nana, do you have any idea what's going on? Any idea at all?"

  "Somebody hates somebody," she said. "More than I've ever hated anybody, more than I hate snakes. It's somebody who hates even better than me. Somebody like Toby."

  "Toby didn't kill Amber."

  "Because Saffron says so? Little Miss Saffron?" She almost laughed. "Saffron could lie to a Senate subcommittee with her left hand while her right was dealing blackjack. And winning. She lies for the sheer fun of it."

  "It's not just Saffron," I said. "Let's go to sleep."

  "No." She crossed the room and took both my hands in hers. "Let's go to bed. I don't want to sleep alone. Come on, Texas Ranger, even your heart can't be that pure."

  It wasn't. After her shower and my shower and some meaningless small talk, I smelled the warm yeasty fragrance of her skin and passed my tongue over its impossible smoothness. She laughed when it tickled and reached down to caress me, and I said, "No, don't. This is a one-man show."

  "Don't be silly," she said, grasping me, and our arms and legs tangled into the ancient knot, and after a while we achieved the ancient release. As I dropped into sleep I heard her voice, lazy and contented.

  "I promise," she said. "I won't be a bother."

  III
<
br />   BLOOD AND BONE

  18

  Polaroids

  So Saffron was a liar. It wasn't the first time I'd heard it, and it didn't mean as much as it would have if I hadn't talked to the Peeper, but it put her ahead of Pepper on my list of people to bother. The best time to catch all the ladies with their guards down was in the morning, so I woke Nana with a hot cup of coffee and a boatload of good intentions at six-thirty. The coffee went down quickly, and the good intentions hoisted anchor and set sail when she shrugged the sheet from her shoulders, placed the hot cup between her breasts for a moment, and then removed it and invited me to warm my unacceptable nose. "No gentleman has a cold nose," she said.

  Following the dictates of etiquette, I warmed my nose.

  It was nine-twenty, and we were both sporting satisfied Toby-class grins by the time we coasted down Topanga Canyon Boulevard toward the sea. As we hit the Pacific Coast Highway an offshore breeze kicked up, right on cue, fracturing the sunlit ocean skin into a tangled riot of scattered light. Two surfers slid gracefully down the smooth slope of a single wave.

  The PCH was clogged with the usual rush-hour glut, a ten-mile-long line of cars two abreast, their drivers staring straight ahead at the rear end of the car in front, ignoring the hypnotic blue expanse of the Pacific, minds full of columns of figures, morning meetings, and the possibility of a pink slip at the end of the day.

  "Where are they all going?" Nana said, surveying the traffic. "Why don't they just stay here? Why don't we just stay here?"

  "They've got things to do," I said as the light changed and I eased Alice out into the left-hand lane heading south. "Money to make, promises to keep. Miles to go before they sleep."

  "I know that one," she said. "That poet with all the white hair."

  "Kris Kringle?"

  "Something like that, something about winter." She was wearing white shorts that had miraculously materialized from her purse and one of my shirts, so big on her that its shoulders hung to her elbows. Her hipbones jutted beneath the belt loops of the shorts. A wisp of black hair, still damp from her, or our, shower, was plastered to her cheek, nestled into the curved shadow below her cheekbone. I reached over and gently lifted it loose. It promptly fell back into precisely the same place. It knew where it belonged.