Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Still," I said.

  "Oh, sure. It pays a shitload. We're not really talking about relative values here. Take the right coming up. It gets a little steep going down." He swallowed again. "If the social value of what we do had anything to do with how much we get paid, I'd be standing in line for a bowl of soup. But think about disk jockeys. If the world were right, or anything like it, they'd get paid by having an inch sliced off their bodies for every hour they're on the air. Instead, they rake it in. Think about the members of the National Security Council."

  "Court psychiatrists," I said.

  "Network executives. The guys who market toys. Fashion designers." He was rolling. "Here it is, this driveway. Hang a right around that bush." I did, and we were there.

  There was pretty impressive. The house was a free-form assemblage of timber and glass, framed by tall, undulating cypresses transplanted from a Van Gogh painting. When I cut Alice's engine I could hear the surf booming. "You live here alone?" I asked.

  "Just me . . . and my shadow," he sang. "Actually, I have a lot of shadows," he added as he reached for the door handle. "It can get pretty crowded." He pushed the door open and then peered over at me, focusing through the drugs. "So come in," he said.

  I looked at Alice's clock, the only thing about her that always worked. The drive had taken an hour. "I've got to get back," I said.

  "The bartender? She's cute, but she'll wait. It's not even nine yet. Anyway, I don't have all your money on me. You've got to come in to get the rest of it." I must have hesitated for a moment, because he said, "Please. Please come in. I don't want to go in alone."

  "Okay," I said. "But only for a minute."

  "Good. I've never met a detective before."

  He climbed out with some difficulty and closed the door. I followed. Midway to the house he stumbled, and I had to grab his arm to keep him from falling. "No photographers around, right?" he said. "That's what I need, a headline: boy next door overdoses." He used his hands to block out the words in the air. The effort made him tangle his feet again, and I had to hold him upright. "Heeere's Toby," he said to the night sky.

  The front door was about twelve feet high. It was made of redwood, studded with massive iron nails that had rusted in the moist ocean air, trailing long dark lines of oxidation into the grain of the wood below them. "That's on purpose, all that rust, can you believe it?" Toby Vane mumbled as he fished for a key. "Looks like shit and you pay extra for it. Typical." He turned the key, and the door creaked inward. "Come in and get paid," he said over his shoulder.

  I followed him down an arched hallway and through a triple-size door. Lights came on. I found myself in a bright, spacious room with a cathedral ceiling, white walls, and a bleached oak floor. There was almost no furniture: one small couch with a glass table in front of it, pastel pillows scattered here and there, an eviscerated polar bear spread facedown on the floor, and a long, low bookcase along one wall. Most of the opposite wall was glass. Toby Vane stooped down and did something to a polished brass knob set into the floor, and lights blazed up on the other side of the glass. The Pacific surged and churned, hurling itself with patient, unwearying violence at two low, black, barnacle-covered rocks just a few yards from the glass.

  "Very nice," I said.

  "Want a toot?" He twisted another knob, and a spotlight struck the glass table in front of the small white couch. The light was focused on something that looked like a silver finger bowl, except that it was heaped to overflowing with a fine pinkish powder. The side of me that wishes I still got loaded all the time pricked up its ears and let its tongue loll in an unappealing fashion. The phone began to ring, but he ignored it.

  "McDonald's makes the best straws," he said conversationally. "They're good sturdy plastic, and they're just the right diameter." He sat down on the couch and unrolled a brightly colored plastic straw from a sheet of tissue. The phone continued to ring. "All you've got to do to make them perfect is slice off the tip at a forty-five-degree angle with a razor blade.*' He scooped some of the powder from the bowl with a little spoon and made two tiny mountains on the table. "Want some?"

  "No," I said without conviction.

  "It's terrific. Pink, see? Very smooth, no jangles, no dental bills from uncontrollable teeth clenching. Excuse me." He leaned over and snorted the mountains. The phone stopped ringing. He ladled out two more little Mount Fujis and looked up at me, his eyes suddenly a lot clearer.

  "What's the hardest part of being a detective?"

  "Failure." The coke glistened malevolently at me.

  "Does that happen?" He shoved a smidgen of coke into line.

  "Once in a while." I sat on the floor on the other side of the table. I'd always wanted to climb Mount Fuji. "When the person you're after is a lot smarter than you are, or else so dumb that there's no way to figure out what he's done or why he's done it. Then you let somebody down and you feel terrible about it."

  "You really do, don't you?" He started down toward the mountains but then stopped and lowered the straw. "I mean, you really care about the people you work for."

  "Sure," I said, feeling uncomfortable. The phone began to ring again. "Oh, hell," I said. "Give me the straw."

  He did, and I destroyed the tiny white landscape in front of me. He continued to regard me as if I were an exotic form of plant life as he scooped out some more cocaine. "And you hit me on the neck," he said admiringly, rubbing it with his free hand, "because you didn't want to mark me." The phone jangled on unheeded.

  "No," I said. "I hit you on the neck so I wouldn't break my hand." He shook his head as though that were just what he'd expect someone as terrific as me to say. "What's the hard part about being an actor?" I said to change the subject.

  "Acting, at least acting on television, is the art of failure." I felt the cocaine begin to buzz in my forebrain while Toby Vane vacuumed the tabletop with his nose. He looked up at me. "You fail as little as you can, that's all. And it has nothing to do with talent. It's electricity." The phone stopped ringing and instantly started in again. "TV is an electric medium. It's got a little tiny screen. Most of the sets are no good. In half the houses of America, I've got a green face. Reception is bad in some areas. You've got to find some electricity, some kind of juice, to cut through all that interference. If you don't, you're just another little pattern of dots in the corner of somebody's living room." He gave me an embarrassed grin. "It sounds immodest, but I suppose it's being able to turn on an electric personality."

  The phone, thank God, had stopped. The only ringing now was the cocaine in my bloodstream. "So why do you hit women?" I said.

  The grin disappeared. "Champ, I told you. That's not really me. I was drunk and down. She was bitching at me. Do you want me to phone her? I'll do it now." His tone was painfully earnest.

  "That's up to you. It's your relationship."

  "Relationship," he said. "My favorite word." His eyes went down to the table for a moment and then flicked back up to me. "I'll do it, but let me wash up first and get some ice. My tongue feels like a beanbag chair." He got up and headed for what I guessed was the kitchen. He stopped and turned back to me. "Want a beer or anything? More coke?"

  "No, thanks. I passed my limit when I did the first one."

  "Well, make yourself at home. I'll be a couple of minutes, and then we'll phone Nana." He disappeared.

  Hearing its name, the phone began to ring again. I wondered how he stood it. Mine rang only once or twice a day. I wondered how I stood it. I looked at the coke for a moment and then got up quickly and walked to the other end of the room.

  Above the bookcase the wall was hung with a series of bright, four-color magazine covers, maybe twenty in all. Toby's face was on every one of them.

  He had a beaming, ingenuous, boyish smile. His expression was open, healthy, friendly. He looked about twenty-seven in most of the photographs.

  TV Guide was the only one I recognized. The others all had names like Fab and Rave and For Teens Only, TOBY VANE OF “HIG
H VELOCITY”—HIS SECRET SORROW, one shouted. WIN A DATE WITH “HIGH VELOCITY'S” TOBY VANE shrilled another. TOBY VANE TELLS ALL; TOBY VANE'S WEDDING WISH LIST; THE FAN TOBY VANE WILL NEVER FORGET; "WHY ME?" TOBY VANE CRIES.

  Other magazines lay heaped on top of the bookcase. Toby's picture graced these, too, but he'd either gotten tired of cutting them out or he hadn't gotten around to it yet. I picked up one on which he looked particularly boyish and turned to page 28, which promised to tell me 100 THINGS TOBY DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT HIM.

  Toby apparently didn't want much known about him. Among the riveting nuggets the magazine's crackerjack investigative team had unearthed were the facts that his favorite color was blue, that he cried at sad movies, that he'd had a German shepherd named Sam when he was a boy, and that his ideal girl was one with a lot of self-respect.

  I was mulling that last one over when he called from the kitchen. "Simeon? Are you sure you don't want a beer?"

  I dropped the magazine guiltily. "I'm fine," I said. "Just looking around." I partially straightened the stack of magazines, which was leaning forward alarmingly. "Is blue really your favorite color?" I shouted.

  "What?"

  I went to the kitchen door and leaned against it. He was leaning over a sink, holding a washcloth against his mouth. The washcloth was wrapped around something that might have been an ice cube. "Do you really cry at sad movies?"

  He started to grin, and then he winced. "Don't," he said. "Don't make me laugh. They just make that stuff up. All I do is pose for the pictures."

  "That's a fictitious character, the Toby Vane in those magazines?"

  "All the Toby Vanes are fictitious characters. My real name is Jack Sprunk."

  "What a peculiar way to live."

  "I couldn't agree more. Now go away and let me work on my wounds."

  I went back into the living room and straight to the magazines. They had a kind of horrid fascination. The one I picked up this time had a sincere-looking Toby on the cover and the headline TOBY VANE'S NEW YEAR WISHES FOR YOU. I decided I wasn't up to it and dropped the magazine onto the top of the tilting stack, and the whole slippery batch of them slid forward lazily and fell to the floor.

  Beneath them was a cheap satin-covered photo album on which was written, in flowery script, "Precious Memories." Beneath that was another, inscribed "Loved Ones."

  "Give me another minute," Toby shouted. "Then we can call Nana. Maybe we'll even go get her, if she's forgiven me." Even though I knew he was loaded to the gills on at least two kinds of dope, he sounded healthy and happy.

  I opened the top album.

  At first the shapes didn't make sense to me: they were just abstract patches of color and shadow. Then I realized what I was seeing. They were pictures, the kind of pictures you normally see only in magazines with names like Pain and Punishment or Whipcrack. But these hadn't been cut out of magazines.

  They were Polaroids.

  Many of them had been taken in the room I was in.

  Women were tied into impossible positions. Women were gagged and handcuffed. A woman lay naked on her back with the photographer's shoe pressing into her chest. A very young girl, no more than sixteen, was covered with broken eggs. An even younger girl had mean-looking electrical clips dangling from her nipples. Then an entire page of close-ups of a woman with two closed, swollen eyes and a split lip.

  It was Nana.

  "Maybe we could all go out together," Toby was saying cheerfully in the kitchen. "Me and Nana and you and your bartender. Go to a movie or a late dinner or something. How does that sound?"

  I closed the album and put the fan magazines back on top of it. I went to the door and through it, without slowing down, without trying to collect the rest of my seven hundred and fifty dollars. I didn't need it any more.

  And I certainly didn't need Toby Vane. I didn't need anybody whose idea of an electric personality was an alternating current between Jack Armstrong and Vlad the Impaler. Smile or no smile, he was a sick boy.

  I lost my way twice trying to get out of the canyon and up to the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time I finally reached it, it was ten o'clock. I drove south like Mario Andretti, but the holiday traffic was a series of Gordian knots and it was after eleven when I finally got to McGinty's of Malibu. Roxanne was gone.

  I'd missed the fireworks, too.

  2 - Syndication

  The fifth of July had a delayed case of the June glooms: dull and flat and gray, courtesy of low-hanging clouds that had slid in overnight to lower the ceiling and the spirits of everyone stuck under it. At eight-thirty in the morning the day looked as bright as it was likely to get. I was sitting with my chin on one hand, muffled and depressed from Toby Vane's cocaine, staring at a dark screen that had nothing on it but two characters that blinked in a bright, bilious green. This is what it said:

  A>.

  I'd been looking at A> for what seemed like months, wondering what was supposed to come next. So far, what had come next was frustration, surfing a wave of nostalgia for the user-chummy old Apple I'd given away.

  A stack of fat books stood next to the computer. They were written in a language somewhere between beginning English and advanced Dada. The index to the one on top, the open one, said that the chapter called "Getting Started" began on page 92. I slapped it shut and hit one of the computer's keys at random, and the damn thing beeped at me. My blood pressure tripled. I found myself standing up with my fists clenched, took two breaths, and wandered over to say good morning to Hansel and Gretel, my parakeets. They ignored me. I ignored me too and climbed out onto the sundeck.

  Topanga Canyon folded itself away toward the horizon.

  In front of me, hidden by the hills to the northwest, was the Pacific; to the southeast was L.A. Below me was the thinnest of thin air. Someday, probably while I'm sleeping, the house I live in will fall into the canyon, where I fervently hope it will crush the heavy-metal drummer who pounds away, day and night, some six hundred feet below. Until then, the house just leans over the edge, a creaking testimonial to the resilience of seventy-year-old wood.

  Mine is probably the oldest and certainly the worst-built house in the canyon. At one time, it was also the most remote. It was so remote that the death of its original owner, an unskilled hermit who'd slapped it together in the century's teens out of odds and ends and sheer hermetic rage, wasn't discovered until his mummified body was found hanging from the living room rafter almost a decade after he'd tied the knot in his final necktie. As far as anyone knew, he'd been driven to toss his good-bye kiss at the world by nothing more profound than the sight of Old Topanga Canyon Boulevard being paved beneath him.

  Beneath the diluted daylight on the deck, I stretched. Joints popped. Kids' joints didn't pop. I guessed I wasn't a kid any more.

  A hungry hawk sliced through the sky above me, and I realized I was lying down. It felt too early to lie down. It also felt too late to get up. Given the fact that I had a mild case of the post-coke heebie-jeebies, my first in years, I hadn't expected to be comfortable so soon. My eyes called for a vote. It came out two to one, with me on the losing side, and the eyes closed.

  At the moment that my eyelashes converged, the phone rang. This was no tired, cranky, irritated ring like Toby Vane's phone had produced. It was a coloratura soprano trilling, full of hope and spring, the lighter-than-air notes of a diva who's finally been told she can sing after weeks of laryngitis. The phone had rung so rarely of late that I'd taken to waxing it.

  On the seventh ring, I made my first big mistake of the day. I got up to answer it. First, though, I had to find it. I had a vague, watery memory of having tried to get Roxanne's number from information the night before, and of having dialed Eleanor when that attempt failed. I remembered turning off my own answering machine in petty revenge when Eleanor's machine had answered. What I didn't remember was where I'd put the phone.

  It continued to trill merrily away while I began at the wall outlet and painstakingly traced the cord through many a
loop and circumnavigation of my cluttered living room. Finally I lost patience, took the cord in both hands, and gave a sharp pull. The telephone emerged abruptly from one of the bookcases and clattered to the floor, taking Frederick B. Artz's The Mind of the Middle Ages with it. I slapped the book into place while the phone squawked at the floor, then picked up the receiver.

  "So?" My voice sounded grumpy even to me.

  "Hello?" someone said in a bright and friendly fashion. "Is Simeon Grist there?"

  I weighed the pros and cons. "Depends."

  "This is Norman Stillman's office calling."

  "Mr. Stillman has a talking office?"

  "Well, of course not." She sounded vaguely affronted. "I'm a secretary. Mr. Stillman would like to see you."

  "About what?"

  "I'm afraid I don't know."

  "Mr. Stillman can talk, right? Even if his office can't."

  "Well, of course."

  "Then let him talk."

  "He's very busy at the moment."

  I gave half a weary eye to the computer screen. A> blinked at me. "So am I," I said. "I've got someone winking at me right now." She paused, and when she spoke again she'd given up on friendly. "I'll see if Mr. Stillman can come to the phone."

  "Take the phone to him," I suggested. "It's not heavy."

  I knew Norman Stillman, sort of. Everyone in Los Angeles did. A case I'd been working on had required my presence at the "launch" of one of the many television series let loose upon an unsuspecting world by Norman Stillman Productions. I remembered him as a slender, balding man in a nautical blazer who was fond of misquoting the classics. A very rich slender, balding man in a nautical blazer.