Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  No wonder Tiny was so sweet to the girls, I thought. What he really liked was pictures. A "voyer," Saffron would call him. And no wonder he'd fastened on Amber. Before the drugs raddled her body and fried her eyes, she could have made the cover of Young Whippersnappers.

  And so what? I wasn't checking into Tiny's sexual predilections. Or, if I was, it was only a peripheral concern. And while I was certainly interested in Amber, I wasn't betting that any long-ago porno photographer had killed her. Nor did I think that sex had been involved in any way. The Saturday papers had said that the preliminary autopsy showed no evidence of sexual molestation, only extreme physical violence with massive trauma to the head. Amber's murder was hatred pure and simple. The only lust involved was bloodlust.

  I sat on the couch and thought. I was missing something, and I knew it. Even given the porn, Tiny couldn't be this clean. I rifled the calendar on the wall and flipped through the papers on the desk. Nothing. I could barely work my own computer, so I certainly couldn't pry into Tiny's. Nevertheless, all my instincts told me I'd missed something. I listened to my watch tick.

  "Well, stupid," I said out loud. "You haven't looked under the rug."

  I peeled it back and found myself staring at the same dreary 1950s linoleum that covered the floor of the Spice Rack. Talk about wax buildup. It was thicker than Amber's mascara had been. Except for one perfect square, three tiles long on each side. The wax outlining that square was chipped and broken.

  I got onto my hands and knees. To one side of the square, halfway down, was a tiny slit about a quarter of an inch long, wider at the bottom than at the top. It went right down through the linoleum. It looked a hell of a lot like a keyhole.

  So, okay. The key, whatever it was, was either on Tiny or it was here. If Tiny had it, there was nothing I could do, so I chose to believe it was here. If it was here, it wasn't very big.

  First I reopened the closet and went through the shoes again, shaking each one to check for a false heel. Nobody really has false heels, and Tiny was no exception. Then I ran my hands down the seams and linings of his clothes. No deal. Then I took the desk apart a second time. When I'd finished that, I spread the couch all over the office and put it back together again.

  I looked down at it. For all its grease, it looked inviting. It was just the spot for a bout of concentration. I sank back into it and thought about hiding places. My watch told me I'd been in the club for forty-three minutes. I'd allowed myself forty-five.

  The best hiding places are in plain sight. In a famous short story someone hides a diamond in a glass of water, where it would disappear. Trouble was, something long and thin could disappear almost anywhere. And I'd been almost everywhere in that office. Correction. I'd been everywhere.

  Which meant it was someplace I'd already been.

  Clothes hangers? No, too thick. Nails? Same problem.

  Well, then, the next rule was to hide it where people were afraid to look. And then I remembered my friend Carl.

  Carl made a living smuggling. Specifically, he smuggled religious pictures, and even more specifically, he smuggled them out of Asia and into the United States. He didn't make much money, but he liked Asia and the smuggling paid for his tickets. Getting his smuggled artworks into the United States was no problem because U.S. customs exempt art and antiques from duty. The problem was getting them out of Asia. Many Asian countries require a special duty charge to take antiques out, and others make it almost impossible to export a likeness of the Buddha. Asian art and Asian religions being what they were, antique likenesses of the Buddha are at the top of any small-time smuggler's shopping list. The solution, Carl discovered, lay in the intrinsic male-to-male sensitivity of the Asian customs inspector.

  He'd buy a couple of copies of an inoffensive Asian skin magazine, say the heavily censored Singapore edition of Playboy, and he'd fold up his pictures and place them between the pages. Then he'd take a glue stick and run it around the edges of the pages and paste them together so the pictures were sealed from sight. When they dried he'd iron them to get rid of any telltale ripples and then hide them in his luggage as carefully as he would have if they'd been a kilo of heroin. When the inspectors found them, as they very frequently did, he'd blush scarlet and muster his most embarrassed smile. It worked every time except the last time; up until then, the customs inspector had always smiled back, one guy to another, and helped him hide the magazines so the women in line behind him didn't see them. The last time, unfortunately for Carl, the inspector was a woman.

  The porno was in the double-locked drawer, hanging in Pendaflex folders. There was nothing in the magazines or at the bottom of the folders. Pendaflex folders hang in the file drawer courtesy of metal rods that run the width of the drawer and hook into steel runners on the upper inside walls of the drawers. Long thin metal rods.

  The one I wanted was in the fifth folder back. At one end the rod was hooked, just like all the others, but the other end had been filed into an irregular serrated pattern. Despite the clumsiness of the gloves, I managed to pull it out of the folder and slip it into the crack in the linoleum. The square popped open. I was looking at surprise number three: six large brown glass jars.

  Two of them held the smaller pills that Toby had identified as codeine, and the other four were full to the brim with Doriden. Good old paternal Tiny was dealing loads.

  I'd been there more than an hour, and it was time to move. The linoleum square locked with Japanese precision, and the key slipped back into the folder. I didn't want Tiny to know that anyone had discovered his stash, even if his office and the desk had been broken into.

  On the way out I used the tire iron to break open both doors, the one into the main room and the one leading from the parking lot into the hallway. Then I closed them as best I could. It wasn't perfect, but I didn't want it to be. At least no one would suspect that a key had been used.

  Squinting in the sunlight of a bright, peaceful Sunday afternoon, I pointed Alice toward Fan Fare.

  There isn't much of Hollywood left on Hollywood Boulevard, but Hollywood Boulevard was the only place Fan Fare could possibly have been. Fan Fare is the Smithsonian Institution of motion picture ephemera. Its proprietor, Wyl Will (born William Williams), is an aging, blue-haired gentleman who, had he had his druthers and been born a respectable middle-class lady, would have been the pride of any small-town library in America. Small towns in the fifties, however, were not a comfortable place for someone like Wyl, and he'd had the sense to head for California, where he became a librarian of a different kind. If anything's been written about Hollywood, Wyl knows where to find it.

  Sunday is a big tourist day on Hollywood Boulevard. People from Ohio and Illinois rub sunburned shoulders with Japanese tourists, ogling the chewing gum that splatters the stars on the Walk of Fame and kicking the bags from McDonald's out of the way to force their big feet into Joan Crawford's tiny concrete footprints in the courtyard of what used to be Grauman's Chinese Theater.

  Outside Fan Fare, a bunch of Hell's Angels from Central Casting straddled their bikes possessively and made derogatory remarks about the tourists. The dope of the day seemed to be downers mixed with French fries from Jack's Triple Burger. Jack's, long the BankAmerica of chemical ecstasy, had been taken over by Iranians. The Angels were still there, so I supposed the dope was, too.

  When I opened the door to Fan Fare, an electronic doorbell played the first four bars of "Tara's Theme" from Gone With the Wind. The cotton fields that shimmered into my mind's eye were no match for the real vista of what seemed like miles of books and magazines, stacked neatly onto shelves and piled haphazardly onto tables, according to their worth. I knew Wyl made a tidy living from Fan Fare, but every time I went there I seemed to be the only customer in the world. With the exception of a pimpled youth in a long black cape who was transfixed by the section on Dracula, it was true that day as well.

  "Wyl," I called out. "John Beresford Tipton has sent me to make you a millionaire."

 
"Again?" Wyl's voice floated from the back of the store. "I'll have to buy a king-size bed. My mattress is absolutely stuffed."

  I headed for the main counter, but Wyl intercepted me. He can do that: he's the only man I ever met who can actually materialize. "Dear Simeon," he said. "How's Eleanor?"

  "I'll tell you tomorrow. I'm having dinner with her tonight."

  "But things are still . . ." He hesitated. "Fait accompli?" He gave his hand a small loose-wristed shake, a gesture that means "no way" all over the world.

  "As far as she's concerned. I'm still working on it."

  He patted my arm. "Faint heart ne'er won fair lady," he said.

  "Yo," I said to aggravate him. "No guts, no glory. If you want it, go for it."

  "You make her sound like a strike in bowling. Altogether too blue-collar. Nothing against the huddled masses, of course. God knows my heart is with them." It was, too. Wyl was a socialist from way back.

  "Wyl," I said, "what have you done to your eyes?"

  He closed them halfway. "You tell me."

  "They're, um, different. Not that they don't look nice."

  "Please. We both know they look like Joan Collins at four a.m. Not that that doesn't have something to recommend it."

  "To whom?"

  "To Dr. Alfred Nesbit, for one. He's the one who did it. At my urging, of course, and at considerable cost."

  "You have a doctor doing your eyes?"

  "Well, only once, silly. Who could afford one every day? They're tattooed."

  "Tattooed? But that means—"

  "Exactly. That I can't take them off. But I forgot. Of course, you don't know, do you? Mother died."

  "Oh, Wyl," I said. "I'm sorry."

  He patted my hand. "That's sweet of you. But it was a mercy, really. She'd got to the point where she thought she was still in Shaker Heights. She didn't even know she was old anymore. Not a bad way to go, really."

  "So you had your eyes tattooed?"

  "Certainly. No more reason to take them off every night. God, it was such a bother to put them on again. When I was younger I enjoyed it, all those hours in front of the mirror to look simply killing in case fate decided to deal one an ace out of the clear blue sky. After one reaches a certain age, though, one becomes satisfied with kings, and, if one wishes to avoid queens, one learns to settle for jacks or even the occasional ten, and the tens don't usually care if one's eyes are perfect. But I know, don't I? This way, they're always fine."

  "Like having your hair starched."

  He mused for a moment. "I hadn't thought of that, actually. Might make sleeping difficult."

  "Wyl," I said. "Toby Vane."

  "Oooh," he said. "That terrible television show. Which I watch religiously every week, of course. What about him?"

  "I want everything you've got."

  Wyl narrowed his eyes in an attempt to look shrewd. "For reading or for buying?"

  "For buying. And I'll make you a deal. After I've finished with it, I'll give it back to you and you can sell it all over again, assuming anyone is dumb enough to want it."

  "Why would you do that?"

  "Why not? I'm not out to create a permanent collection. You don't have to bind the stuff."

  "I have some lovely vinyl."

  "Bind it to death, then, if it'll make it easier for you to sell when I'm through with it."

  "You must have some expense account. Do you know him?"

  I thought about it. "In a manner of speaking."

  "Is it true what they say about him?"

  "That depends on what they say about him, doesn't it?"

  "That he beats up a girl every morning just to work up an appetite for breakfast."

  "Something like that."

  "Honey," Wyl said, "the poor lad obviously hasn't admitted something to himself. Do you think it's ever occurred to him that he might prefer boys?"

  "That's an interesting idea. But I'm sure it hasn't."

  "Just as well," Wyl said thoughtfully. "He'd probably wind up punching them, too."

  "Have you got much on him?"

  "Scads, and all of it recent, naturally. Not difficult to find. Do you really want to give it back after you read it?"

  "Sure, but there's a catch."

  "Goes without saying. You're going to dog-ear it or something."

  "No. Because you're going to do it for me. Every page that's got anything to do with Toby."

  "Dog-earing is barbaric. Haven't you got any respect for the printed word?"

  "But you'll do it."

  "No, I won't. No dog-earing, no paper clips. Tell you what. I'll use those cute little yellow sticky things. You can just peel them off as you go."

  "Buy some extras," I said, "and save the receipts."

  "Honey, no need. My whole life is arranged around stick-its. One entire wall of my kitchen is literally papered with them. I use them for taxes, inventory, shopping lists, reminders, phone messages, calendars, everything. I even used one on a cut finger once. And, do you know, I'm so much a creature of habit that I wrote 'Cut' on it before I put it on my finger? That reminds me, did I ever tell you about the time I saw Lee J. Cobb?"

  "Lee J. Cobb? No, I don't think you did."

  Wyl took a long breath. "In the market, of all places, actually doing his shopping. Of course this was some time ago, almost before there was smog. He had such a mean mouth, you could tell he'd suffered. There I was in the checkout line, reading TV Guide, it was so little in those days and Lucy was always on the cover, and I looked up when someone bumped my derriere with a shopping cart, and ohmygod it was Lee J. Cobb. I had this whole cart just piled with stuff—Mother always saved coupons, and I did my shopping for weeks at a time, more stuff than they put with the pharaoh into the Great Pyramid—and he only had some celery and a chicken breast, poor man must have been trying to lose weight, and I know how that is, so naturally I let him go first. He grunted at me."

  "Grunted?"

  "I knew it meant thanks. Well, I went home in an absolute daze and put everything away, labeling it first like I always do, but this was before stick-its, so I just wrote on the paper with a crayon, humming to myself and thinking about Death of a Salesman and that adorable Kevin McCarthy. And you know, about a week later when I was having some friends over for dinner, I went to the freezer to find the leg of lamb I'd bought that day, and when I pulled it out it had a great big LEE J. COBB written on it. Is it any wonder I'm in this business?"

  "Everything on Toby," I said. "Okay?"

  "I thought we'd already settled that."

  "The stick-its are fine."

  "Don't you ever use them? They'd be perfect for you, you could take notes on them. Come to think of it, I've never seen you take any notes. Sometimes I don't actually believe you're a detective."

  "Let me use your phone, then. You can listen in, and then you'll know."

  "Of course. You know where it is by now. Just write down the numbers of any toll calls on the stick-its next to the phone and put them on the wall. Listen, I think Dracula over there needs some help. Do you mind?"

  "Not at all. But I thought you wanted to prove to yourself that I'm a private investigator."

  "Honey, Draculas never take very long."

  The phone was an old black number with a dial. It weighed about fifteen pounds. My first call was to Bernie Siegel, a professional graduate student who had abandoned his will to the siren call of UCLA and was there, apparently, for life. Bernie had more degrees than I did. He was the aging top gun of research, always waiting for some punk kid with thicker glasses to come along and prove he was faster with an index card.

  He answered on the first ring; he was probably curled up next to the phone reading Heidegger or Swedenborg for a nice, relaxing afternoon.

  "Bernie," I said, "fifteen dollars an hour."

  "There are people I won't hurt, Simeon," he said. "Give me a minute and I'll think of some."

  I gave him a minute. Then I gave him another one.

  "Okay," he said. "Who i
s it?"

  "Everybody in South Dakota named Sprunk. Only, you don't have to beat them up. You just have to get me their addresses and telephone numbers."

  "That sounds more than fairly boring."

  "That's why it's fifteen dollars an hour."

  "How about North Dakota? They're the same except for a couple of letters."

  Toby always said South Dakota. Would he have lied? After a moment, I realized that Toby probably couldn't spell a name for the Information operator without changing a few letters for fun. "Sure. Also the other states that border it."

  "Canada borders it, too, if I have my geography right. No, I don't. But at least it borders North Dakota. Honest to Christ, why don't they just make it one big state and forget it?"

  "This guy's not Canadian," I said with more assurance than I felt. "Just stick to that area of the USA, okay?"

  "Sprunk? S-p-r-u-n-k?"

  "How else would you spell Sprunk, Bernie?"

  "Maybe he's French. Maybe it's with a q-u-e instead."

  "Sprunque? That's not possible."

  "Or German. Sprunch, with a hard ch."

  "Sprunk," I said, "the easy way. South Dakota and environs."

  "Just making sure," he said. "How's Eleanor?"

  "Why does everybody ask me how Eleanor is? Why don't you just ask Eleanor?"

  "I don't have her phone number." Bernie had once been sweet on Eleanor in an appealingly sublimated way. He had taught her everything there was to know about the Chicago School of Architecture while working up the nerve to ask her out. By the time I met her she knew all about the infrastructure of skyscrapers, but she'd still never had a date with Bernie.

  "And I'm not going to give it to you, either. Anyway, you've got all these Sprunks to keep you busy."