Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Nicky Blair's?" Stillman parroted. "Toby took this junkie to Nicky Blair's?" He put both hands over his face. "He's got a death wish."

  "Trouble is," I said, "she's the one who's dead. And she's not a junkie anymore."

  "Spare me the self-righteous posturing. I've got enough on my mind. So you stay on the payroll, is that settled?"

  "Not quite. I need an assistant."

  "What time is Link supposed to be there?" Stillman asked Cohen nervously. "An assistant for what?" he asked me.

  "Three o'clock," Cohen said. "We're on Stage Six tomorrow."

  Stillman looked at his nautical watch, as if counting the hours between Sunday morning and Monday afternoon. Maybe the watch had Monday on it. It was big enough. "Does Toby know?"

  "Not yet."

  "Has he got much to do?"

  "About twelve pages."

  "Dialogue or action?"

  "Dialogue. Including the scene with the little kid."

  "Twelve pages, the little kid, and Link? He'll plotz."

  "To watch Toby," I said.

  Stillman looked at me blankly. "What?"

  "To watch Toby. I need an assistant to watch Toby."

  "I've missed something," Stillman said. "Something's got past me here. You're supposed to be watching Toby."

  "Think, Mr. Stillman. How can I bird-dog Toby twenty-four hours a day and figure out who killed the girl? It's two different jobs, or at least you'd better hope it is. If it isn't, Joanna Link's going to have a very big story."

  "Joanna Link," Dixie echoed, a kind of lugubrious verbal knee jerk.

  "Dixie?" Stillman said doubtfully.

  "I think you've gotta let him try it, Norman. It's not that much more money, considering."

  "Exactly how much?" Stillman made a tent with his well-buffed fingers and regarded me through it. It was a gesture he'd put some work into.

  "Three fifty a day." The woman's asking price was one fifty, but she'd have to put up with Toby, and I didn't feel like saving Stillman money.

  "Jesus, I know agents I can get for that much."

  "Good. Get an agent."

  "Don't get huffy," Stillman said.

  "Agents." Dixie made it sound like a profanity.

  "Oh, damn it," I said, "don't nickel-and-dime me." I stood up. "We're lazing around here talking, and there are things I should be doing. Like it or not, the police are working their way toward Toby. Either you want to protect the goose who lays the golden eggs or you don't. Three fifty it is, and it's cheap at the price, considering the alternative."

  Stillman gave me something that would have passed for a soothing smile if the room had been a lot dimmer. "We're just haggling," he said. "Nothing personal. Call your man in. I'll leave a pass so he can get on the lot."

  "She'll come on the lot with Toby," I said. "She's been sitting on top of him since three yesterday afternoon."

  The smile scattered to the four winds. "She?" Stillman said. "You're putting a woman with Toby?"

  "She can handle him."

  Stillman pursed his lips and then nodded. "Good," he said. "No more haggling." He worked up the smile again. "But think ahead, okay? I like a man who thinks ahead."

  I smiled back. "And I like a man who likes a man who thinks ahead."

  "Done, then," Stillman said. He walked briskly out of the room.

  "Thank heaven," Dixie said. "That was getting disgusting." He picked up his oversize briefcase and gave it a tug to see if it had gained any weight during the conversation.

  "Dixie," I said, "what in the world are you doing here?"

  He looked surprised. "Earning my daily bread. Quite a lot of it, in fact."

  "You're too mournful to be a press agent."

  "I'm not a press agent." He drummed his fingers on the side of the case. "I'm a public relations consultant. Norman is my only client."

  "You're a schoolteacher," I said. "Héloïse and Abelard indeed. I know a teacher when I see one. That chronic expression of impending disaster can only be acquired in a classroom. And then there's all that corduroy."

  The closest thing I'd ever seen to a smile scudded briefly across Dixie's face. It was faster than the Roadrunner with the Coyote in full pursuit with his Acme rocket boosters on. "I'm an English teacher," he said. "Was an English teacher."

  "Allow me to repeat my question. What are you doing here?"

  He thought for a moment. "Othello," he said.

  "As in the Moor of Venice?"

  "That's the one. Good for you."

  "Well, it's not a very common name."

  "I don't think I'd like it," he said. "Othello Cohen."

  "Not much of a ring to it. You'd probably have to change it."

  "Othello Schwartz, maybe. That's a joke. Schwartz means black in German."

  "I know. Would you like to fill in the blanks?"

  "I was Norman's English teacher. He wasn't Norman then, which is to say that he was Norman, but he wasn't the Norman you've met."

  "And whom we all know and love."

  "Norman's all right. He really likes the shows he makes."

  "He'd have a lot on his conscience if he didn't."

  "Norman needed some polish back then. He's pretty slick now, don't you think?"

  "Slicker than an Olympic rink."

  "Well, twelve years ago, he was pure Jersey. That was before it was fashionable to be Jersey, if you're old enough to remember. If asked, he'd have requested a few of dese and a few of dose. He pronounced burger with an o and an i, heavy on the i. He'd just come out to L.A. and he was planning to be a big shot, and he was smart enough to know that he didn't sound smart. Plus you could have floated his frame of reference in a thimble."

  "So he went to school."

  "Cal State University out in Northridge. Far enough from Hollywood that he wouldn't run into anybody he might know or eventually want to know, but closer than, say, Tucson. He walked into my Intro to Lit class and stayed. The next semester he was in all three of my classes. I've never had such an avid student. He listened so hard he made me forget what I was saying. You know, most of the kids are just sitting there letting the teacher provide the background music while they tune up their hormones. The estrogen level in the average undergrad classroom is higher than Alpha Centauri."

  "I remember. I taught too, for about six weeks."

  "Then you know. Well, Norman was different. He was older, of course, but that wasn't it. He sat there and sucked in everything I said. I never saw anybody make so many notes. Later he showed them to me; he'd made up his own form of speedwriting, and he had me practically verbatim. Well, that's flattering to someone who's used to feeling like Muzak. His papers were appalling, but there was so much evident effort that I couldn't flunk him, and so I asked him to come see me during office hours."

  "Office hours," I said. "What a quaint concept."

  "Yeah. I remember them fondly. It meant there were hours that weren't office hours. So he came, and we talked, and I asked him what he wanted out of school. He'd never said much in class, and I almost laughed out loud when he told me he was there for 'culchuh.' It took me a minute to realize that he meant culture. Pretty snotty reaction for a kid who grew up in Brooklyn, but I hadn't spent much time in the real world then. It was all college, first learning and then teaching.

  "What he wanted was a sort of topographic map of the things a cultured person should know about. A Michelin guide to highbrow cocktail conversation, at least by Hollywood standards. I told him he was wasting his time shoveling through 'Piers Plowman' and the lyric poems of Leigh Hunt. L.A. cocktail glasses don't come that deep. Hell, they don't come that deep at Harvard."

  We were walking toward the front door now, down a high, vaulted entrance hall. To our left a Spanish archway about fourteen feet wide opened into a sunken living room with the most beautifully buffed oak floor I'd ever seen. Everything in the room was seashell pink except for a chest-high vase of birds of paradise, an enormous ersatz Impressionist portrait of Stillman, a matching pic
ture of a smashing blond lady I took to be Mrs. Stillman, and a wall lined from floor to ceiling with books. I had never been in such a silent house.

  "Your legacy?" I said, meaning the books.

  Dixie eyed them glumly. "He's read them all, too," he said. "He's like a terrier, just never lets go. We made out a list of about one hundred books and plays he had to read, and I loaned him a copy of H. G. Wells's Outline of History because it was short, so he could connect the dots. Norman went out and bought himself a roll of butcher paper, thirty feet long and five feet wide. He made a historical timeline on it as he read the Wells, and then he entered each of the hundred or so books and a few notes on its author. Damnedest thing you ever saw. In fact . . ."

  He stopped and turned toward the kitchen. "Vicenta," he called. "Vicenta, por favor?"

  After a moment the maid emerged. "Señor Cohen?" She gave him a warmer smile than she'd given Stillman.

  "La sala por trabajo," he said in highly inventive Spanish. "Es okay?"

  "Porquí no?" She shrugged and preceded us up the stairs.

  Upstairs the front of the house was standard millionaire's Mediterranean, four doors leading off a central hallway into bedrooms and guest rooms, presumably with connecting bathrooms. Set into the left-hand hallway wall, the one facing the backyard, was a single door, only a few feet from the top of the stairs. Other than that, the wall was blank. Vicenta knocked once and then opened the door.

  A single, enormous room ran the entire length of the house. The far wall was all window, looking out onto palm trees and a pale blue pool. Sprinklers spiraled sparkles across the grass.

  The other three walls were books from the floor to waist high. Above the books, five feet wide and running the entire length and width of the room, was an unbroken sheet of paper more than sixty feet long. Three broad stripes ran its length, one blue, one red, one black. There was writing everywhere.

  "This year's model," Cohen said. "He's never stopped. The red is history, the blue is science, and the black is the arts—you know, 'culchuh.' "

  "Son of a bitch," I said.

  "Norman's conquest of Western civilization. You've got to give it to him."

  "There should be an award."

  Dixie made a gesture that took in the room, house, yard, everything. "He hasn't exactly been stiffed."

  "What's that?" I pointed toward a large box about two-thirds of the way down the timeline. The writing was black, and the entry branched off the black line, but the sides of the box were drawn in thick gold lines. It was the only place where a fourth color had been used.

  "Take a look," Cohen said. I did. Othello, it said. "Tragedy (1603) in five acts by William Shakespeare (see entry). Themes: good, evil, trust, jealousy. Motorcycles."

  "Motorcycles?" I said.

  "That was the beginning of Norman Stillman," Dixie said. "Othello was the ninth or tenth thing I had him read. He turned it into a motorcycle movie. Black Angel, he called it. About the black leader of a motorcycle gang, his envious white second in command, and his white mama, if you'll excuse the expression. It was probably the last motorcycle movie to make any money, and it made a fortune. Norman never looked back. Three years later he came and offered me four times my teaching salary to work for him."

  "And you took it?"

  Cohen looked out the window. "Teaching is for losers," he said. "For losers who don't have to pay alimony and child support." It sounded like something he'd rehearsed.

  "It's a good job for the right person."

  "I was the wrong person."

  "So you've traded in the students for Joanna Link."

  Dixie shuddered and glanced once more around the room. "At my present rate of pay, if the interview lasts an hour, Joanna Link comes in at about thirty-five dollars a pound. Even veal doesn't cost that much. I can always sneak looks at her and decide how I want the butcher to cut her up."

  He closed the door on the world according to Norman Stillman and went back down the stairs. At the front door, he paused. "Where will you be tomorrow, if you're not going to be with us?"

  "Out and around. I'll come back at three to hand-hold Toby through the Link interview if you think it's a good idea."

  "All the help we can get," Cohen said. "And you're going to stay with him for the evening, or will your man do it?"

  "Woman," I said. "I'll stay with him. We've got an appointment at seven."

  "What kind of an appointment?"

  "You don't want to know."

  "Who says I don't?"

  I wiggled my eyebrows at him. "It's a wake."

  10 - Fan Fare

  Nana's keys worked just fine.

  I'd circled the block three times and strolled through the parking lot twice. Nana had told me that Tiny drove a big white dirty Lincoln Continental with dark windows and brass wire wheels. If it was anywhere within half a mile, I hadn't spotted it. Tiny didn't look like the kind of guy who walked more than a yard if he didn't have to.

  So he probably wasn't around. Unless he'd had someone drive him. Unless someone had stolen his car. Unless he'd hidden the car because he knew I was coming and wanted to catch me by surprise and break every bone in my body. I gave my imagination an hour off, hefted the tire iron I was carrying in my gloved right hand, and pushed the door open.

  A sour puff of air-conditioning and old cigarette smoke rolled out into the parking lot. It smelled like a year's worth of dry cleaning from a Holiday Inn. I leaned into the now familiar hallway, tapped the door politely with the tire iron, and called out cheerfully, "Hello? Anybody home?"

  If anybody was, he kept it to himself.

  The light switch did what it was supposed to do. The walls glistened at me like a giant throat. Going in, I felt like a tongue depressor.

  "Open sesame," I said to the door at the end of the hall. It seemed like an appropriate password for the Spice Rack. All it took was that and the second of Nana's keys. I was back at the scene of the crime.

  The lights for the main room were all the way across the room behind the bar, Nana had said, so I left the door open behind me until I found it. The first switch I hit turned on the overheads, rather than the dancers' spots. I went back and closed the door to the parking lot, locking it from inside.

  Without the pink stage lights, the Spice Rack looked like the kind of place they show high school kids in the films that teach them how to avoid syphilis. The lurid red paint on the walls was patched and peeling, the chairs tattooed with cigarette burns. A couple of county-fair prize five-ounce cockroaches scurried across the stage where Amber had been laid out on Friday night.

  I had no idea how long I might have. I gave only ten minutes to the main room; the cops had been over it pretty thoroughly. The bathrooms, which might have figured prominently in the same syphilis film, took about four minutes each. Except for a small packet of coke taped behind the toilet in the ladies' room—some blitzed-out dancer's forgotten stash—I found nothing of interest. I put the coke back; now that I'd seen the club in the daytime, I figured the poor girl would need it if she ever got her memory back.

  None of Nana's keys fit the lock on Tiny's private office, but then I hadn't figured they would. That was one of the reasons I'd brought the tire iron.

  It wasn't a particularly deft approach, but it didn't have to be. The locks were terrific, and Tiny had so much faith in them that he'd forgotten all about the door jamb. The wood was old and rotten, and the nails that held the boards to the loose plaster of the wall might as well have been staples. A couple of good pulls on the iron, and the door frame kissed the wall good-bye. It was a pretty rough kiss. It carried the door with it, back out into the corridor.

  I felt the odd thrill I always feel when I break into someone's inner sanctum. People have so many secrets, and they hide them so clumsily. I tried once to explain my reaction to Eleanor, and she said I should seek psychiatric help. Maybe someday I will. In the meantime I'll just grit my teeth and enjoy breaking and entering.

  The office wasn't much. A
computer sat on top of one of those old gray metal desks that people always think are secure, and the remainder of the decor consisted of a faded, greasy cloth couch that might once have been brown, a small rug, and a sliding door that I guessed led to Tiny's closet. The desk was locked and the closet wasn't, and I've always liked going through people's closets, so I started there.

  Tiny had lots of white clothes. They hung neatly, with four pairs of surprisingly small white shoes lined up beneath them. I started with the shoes: all empty. Wondering whether Tiny kept so many changes of clothing in the club because he was likely to get bled on in the course of an evening, I sank my arms up to the elbows in their white folds and looked for pockets. There were a great many pockets, so many that you would have thought Tiny kept things in them. He didn't. The closet was a total bust. I didn't even learn the name of Tiny's tailor.

  The part of the couch that wasn't dirt and grease was couch, pure and simple. It didn't do anything cute, like explode into a bed, and there was nothing underneath the cushions or in the folds beneath them. I pulled the whole thing out from the wall and winced. Tiny didn't have dust rats; he had dust giant sloths. The dust was just dust.

  The desk popped open as if it had yearned for years to be searched. In it I found my first two surprises.

  The first was a phone book. There were no names in it, only numbers, but I have a good memory for numbers. I found Nana's and Toby's. Then I got very interested because I was looking at mine. It was penciled in at the bottom of the last full page, obviously a recent addition. Just for the hell of it, I wrote down the other numbers in the book, using a pad on Tiny's desk that had a bright yellow butterfly at the top of it. I put the phone book back and tried the second drawer. It was double-locked, and it took me a good eight seconds to snap it open.

  There was surprise number two, a trove of porno magazines thicker than the Manhattan Yellow Pages, hanging in Pendaflex folders. Someone in Tiny's position, I would have thought, would have been as fascinated by pornography as a man on a low-cholesterol diet is by a nice piece of steamed fish. There they were, though, a prurient testament to the art of the four-color printer. As porno went, these were pretty innocent. No hard-core action, just an undergraduate gynecologist's primer on immature female genitalia, except that the mature girls featured in Teenage House Party and Young Whippersnappers had clearly lied about their age.