Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Who, Simeon?" Toby said, his face as open as a freshly washed window. "He's a friend. We're going out together after we wrap today."

  "He's not a PR man, is he? Dixie's more than enough PR for now." Dixie shrugged philosophically. He looked as if he were trying to get his suit high enough to hide him completely.

  "Does he look like a PR man?" Toby asked in his most reasonable voice.

  "No," she said. "He looks like something the hippies left behind." She had one of those decayed little-girl faces that always made me think of Shirley Temple on cortisone.

  Dixie laughed despairingly. "Joanna," he said, "you're priceless."

  "By which you mean unbuyable, I assume."

  "How do you type with those fingernails?" I asked.

  "Oh, we've heard from Toby's friend," she said, flexing her fingers. "These aren't nails, they're talons." Over her shoulder, Dixie waved frantically. She looked up at me and narrowed her puffy eyes. "At least that proves you aren't PR," she said. "No one in PR thinks I type my own stories."

  "Simeon Grist, Joanna Link," Dixie said with more than a trace of desperation in his voice. "Joanna, Simeon."

  Joanna Link turned her back on me. I might as well have been a heating vent. "So what about this girl, Toby?" she said.

  Dixie's face slammed shut like the gates of heaven before Attila the Hun. Toby was better. "Girl?" he said. "What girl?"

  "The stripper who was killed a few nights ago. This Amber something or other."

  "Stackheimer," I said, volunteering the name Nana had given me. "Amber Stackheimer."

  Now Dixie looked truly frantic. Even Toby's composure slipped a notch. Link turned slowly to face me.

  "I'm talking to Toby," she said. She chewed her lower lip, leaving a scarlet smear of lipstick on her teeth. "You knew her?" she asked after a moment, scratching at the inside of her left arm with the claws on her right hand.

  "We were dating," I said. "Terrible thing. She was just about to get her life in order. There are so many lost souls out there." I made a gesture in the general direction of East. "In L.A., you know."

  Joanna Link looked from me to Toby and then back to me again. "Wait," she said. "We all know about Toby's little problem, even if we haven't written about it yet."

  "And that's a good idea," Dixie put in, "unless we've got proof. And lots of very good insurance."

  "Shut up," Joanna Link said absently. She chewed at the inside of her cheek. The woman was clearly orally fixated, probably an ex-smoker. "You were her date? You weren't in the pictures."

  I shrugged. "I'm not a star."

  "No," she said, "you're not. But how do I know you're not a liar?"

  "That's an insulting question," I said. "Aren't journalists supposed to have manners?"

  Her eyebrows rose until they almost disappeared into her hairline. "Dixie," she said, "am I supposed to have manners?"

  Dixie managed a strangled consonant or two before I cut him off.

  "We're all supposed to have manners," I said. "That's what they tell us differentiates us from the apes. Or maybe just from newspaper writers."

  Joanna Link looked at me while Dixie made a suffocating sound. Then she tilted her head back a degree or two and laughed. It wasn't really a laugh, more a hog-tied chuckle. "Honey," she said, "just hope you're never a star. I'll barbecue you."

  There was a moment of silence. Then Joanna Link leaned over and shut off her tape recorder. "You know I've got nothing," she said to Dixie. "It's a shame, really. I've got a great picture of Toby to go with my lead item, but I haven't got a lead item."

  "Maybe next time," Dixie said.

  "Next time," Joanna Link said, "if there is a next time, your boy could be in the jug. Nothing personal, Toby." She patted Toby's hand. His grin was as permanent as the smirk on the Apollo Belvedere. "And then I probably won't have an exclusive. Will I?"

  Toby leaned in to her. "Joanna," he said, "if I commit murder, I promise I'll call you first." He kissed the air in her general direction.

  After a beat or two, she blew a kiss back.

  13 - The Wake

  At seven p.m. it was still hot; July had finally dug in its heels. Waning sunlight angled through a few scraggly eucalyptus trees and threw the trash in the parking lot into a sharp, melancholic relief. A crow coughed overhead. Out on Santa Monica Boulevard the rush-hour traffic was finally beginning to peter out.

  The chain across the driveway to the Spice Rack dangled a bright yellow sign that said closed, private party. Below that someone—Tiny, I guessed—had taped a piece of cardboard that said until 8:30. At eight-thirty, life, or what passed for life inside the Spice Rack, was scheduled to resume.

  Toby and I had come in separate cars. He had driven his Maserati, with Dolly presumably clinging for dear life to the dashboard, and I had brought Alice. This way, at least, he couldn't leave us without wheels.

  The parking lot, which we'd had to enter from the side street, was almost full. That was a surprise: Amber had some mourners. Nana's car wasn't there, and that caused me an involuntary twinge of worry. I did see Tiny's filthy white Continental, squatting in a double-size space that said reserved in big pink letters.

  After I parked Alice I locked the doors against the unlikely eventuality of someone actually wanting her. I was straightening up and wondering what the hell I was doing there when Toby hailed me.

  "Banzai" he yelled, raising a clenched fist in the air. Dolly shambled along behind him, dressed for the occasion in an ancient rock and roll T-shirt that said SWEATHOGS on it and a pair of bulging aviator's pants. She'd twisted an industrial-strength rubber band around her short hair, creating a pony tail that stood straight up from the top of her head like a little eruption. Despite her tone on the phone, she wasn't completely indifferent to Toby's charm; she was wearing lipstick, the first I'd seen on her since the day her last divorce became final. Dolly got married the way some women went shopping.

  "See this fist?" Toby called, brandishing his right in the air. "This fist is a power salute to the man who made Joanna Link eat her eyeliner."

  Dolly tittered, a bad sign. Maybe a man would have been a better idea, even though I knew how Dolly hated woman beaters. Finding them was one of her specialties.

  "Toby," I said, "I have several acres of rear end exposed on your account at the moment, not only with the police, but with the press as well. Play straight, or it'll be your rear end instead."

  "Champ," Toby said, punching me lightly on the upper arm, "are those the proper sentiments for the occasion? Let's go in and pay our last respects."

  This time we went in through the front door. Toby sent Dolly ahead to make sure there weren't any photographers lurking about. When she came back to report in the negative, the three of us hurried up the driveway from the parking lot and across the sidewalk. Toby went first, anxious to minimize his exposure. The entrance was masked by a heavy red velvet curtain, which Toby dropped in Dolly's face.

  "He's nervous," Dolly explained apologetically.

  "We're all nervous," I said, and, in fact, I was. Where the hell was Nana? "Dolly," I said, grabbing her arm, "don't let him bamboozle you."

  She looked me straight in the eyes—she was as tall as I was—then dropped her gaze. A second later, she nodded. "Damn," she said, looking back at me, "but he sure is decorative."

  Nana wasn't inside, either. The Spice Rack was more crowded than it had been the last time I was there. All the stageside chairs were full, and people who hadn't gotten seats were leaning against the walls. I saw Pepper, Clove, Saffron, a beautiful Hispanic called (naturally) Chili, and a couple of other girls I'd seen dancing but didn't know. Saffron glanced anxiously at Toby as we came in. Toby didn't even nod to her. He was supremely indifferent to the whole scene: in his mind, he was the star. Everyone else was an extra.

  I went to work on the other men in attendance. Six or eight were customers, and Ahmed, the Middle Easterner with the disappearing dollar bills, was among them. The remaining regulars were res
olutely invisible, slumped in their ugly chairs with their eyes downcast and their arms folded, presenting the smallest possible identifiable surface area to the world. The other men in the room, five that I could count for sure, were with the girls.

  There was some quality that cut across all of them despite their superficial differences. Two were white, two were black, and one was Asian, possibly Chinese. They were the only males who looked unapologetic. Their eyes took in the club as if it were a golf course and they were tournament pros.

  Toby saw me looking at them. "Scuzz," he said. "One step up from pimps. Is there anything worse?"

  "You tell me. Where's Nana?"

  "Who gives a shit? Champ, she's just the same as the rest of them."

  "Shut the fuck up, Toby." It came out more vehemently than I had intended it to.

  Toby squeezed my arm, and I pulled it away. "And cut," he said. "We're getting a little bit jumpy here. Anyway, time for the main attraction."

  The speakers suddenly spouted music that the snob in me recognized and condemned as the love theme from Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, and the garish stage lights slowly came on. Tiny had made his way into the club from his office— the door, I saw, was still broken—and now he moved toward the main stage. There, laid out in what I hoped was an unconscious parody of the dead Amber, were her dancing costumes: feather boas, wrinkled blouses, slit T-shirts, shorts, G-strings, boots. Only the girl inside was missing.

  Tiny climbed ponderously onto the stage, dressed in his standard white. He held a tattered paperbound book to his chest. The girl called Pepper climbed up behind him. Tiny looked biblically grave.

  He raised a fat hand, and the music faded away. He started to speak, failed, and cleared his throat. Pepper put a hand on his shoulder. He reached over and patted it once, looked at the faces of the people in the room, and began again.

  "This is the worst day of my life," he said. "I'd be in bed now, but Amber asked me not to be. Amber asked—" He cleared his throat again and blinked quickly several times. "Amber asked me to be here."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Toby whispered. He sounded apprehensive.

  "All of you, most of you, I mean, are here because she wanted you to be. You all had a place in her heart. Amber's heart was the biggest thing about her. There was room for a lot of people in it."

  "Her heart was okay," Toby said in my ear. "It was her veins that were the problem."

  Dolly tapped him on the shoulder and shook her head disapprovingly. Toby instantly arranged his features into a passable semblance of melancholy. It was like watching a Polaroid develop in a tenth of a second.

  "Amber knew she was going to die," Tiny rumbled on. "She knew it a long time ago. I'm not being mystical. I don't mean she knew some bastard was going to beat her to death." He swallowed twice and then shook his head to clear it. He took a step back as though the stage had tilted suddenly beneath him.

  "I'll tell them," Pepper said.

  Tiny nodded and moved aside, staring at the wall opposite. Pepper, a seasoned performer, found the brightest light and then reached out a hand to Tiny. Slowly, he handed her the creased book. It had a unicorn on the cover.

  "I guess a lot of you know that Amber stayed with me sometimes," Pepper said. Until that moment I'd only heard her shouting over the music in the club. Her voice now, in the silence, was unexpectedly musical. "When she didn't have any place to stay, or when one of her men treated her bad, she came to me. So she had a lot of stuff at my place, and one of the things she had there was her book."

  She opened it and leafed through a couple of pages. "It's all here," she said. "Everything." Toby shifted from foot to foot, looking uneasy. "There are two pages here that are headed 'When I Die.' Not 'If I Die,' but 'When I Die.'

  "She wanted you all to come here. 'I want my service to be at the club,' she wrote. 'My friends are at the club.' " Pepper's voice broke slightly. "Her friends. That's us. Her closest friends in the world." Tiny wiped at his nose with his sleeve. "Her wonderful friends," Pepper said.

  She took a breath. "The things on the stage were hers. She's given them all to you. Every girl in the club gets something. It's all written down in the book. She even chose the music. It was her favorite song." She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand. "She was such a sap," she said. Her eyes were very bright. After a long moment she went on.

  "Amber made four requests. The first was that you should come here. She'd be happy to see you all here now. The second was that we should give her things away. We're going to do that in a little while. The third had to do with the money she'd saved, and Tiny will tell you about that. These aren't in any order," she said suddenly. "I've gotten them all mixed up."

  "She wouldn't care," a girl said from somewhere in the room. "She loved you, Pepper." It was Nana's voice. I turned and saw her standing next to the door. She was dressed all in black, and her eyes were puffy and red.

  Pepper nodded. "I guess the fourth thing comes first. She wanted Tiny to read a page to you. It was something she wrote a couple of months ago. Tiny read it for the first time today."

  She turned to him and held out the book. "Can you?" she asked. At first I thought he couldn't. He hesitated for a long time and then grasped it. It took an act of will for him to force his eyes down to the open page.

  "This is really for the girls," he said. "The rest of you can listen, but this is for the girls." He put a finger on the margin, squinted at the words, and breathed heavily before he began to read.

  " 'Wednesday, May 8. I don't know how to write this, but why should I? I don't know how to do anything anymore. I think I used to know how to do things.' "

  The thick index finger moved down the edge of the page. It was shaking. " 'I don't even know how to go home,' " he read. " 'Where is home now? Where is the place that makes me feel safe? Nobody took it away from me, I can't blame anybody else. I must have thrown it away. How do I get it back? Everywhere I go I take the dragons with me. When I close the door they're already inside.

  " 'Tiny tried to help . . .' " His voice trembled. " 'But I wouldn't let him. Nana is good to me. Sarah—' " He looked up. "That's Pepper," he said. " 'Sarah is good to me. I have so many friends. But it's like they're on the other side of a window. I can see them, I can hear them, but I can't touch them. There's the window. And I'm outside looking in, and outside is nothing but me and the dark and the dragons.

  " 'I know I should stop doing dope. I know the dope is killing me. I used to think life would come to a standstill without me. Now I don't. I lost my place in life a long time ago. I won't even be missed.' "

  Someone snuffled. It sounded like Nana.

  " 'I don't know where home is. I don't know how to get to my friends on the other side of the glass. My life is just someplace I lost the map to. And the one I lost was the only copy.' "

  He looked up. There were tears streaming down his face. "She wanted you to hear that," he said. "She wanted you to hear that after she died. I guess maybe she thought some of us could learn something."

  There was a long silence. The music had ended. Even Toby looked somber. I felt someone slip fingers under my arm and looked down at Nana. She pressed her forehead against my shoulder. She felt burning hot, even through my shirt and jacket.

  In the silence, a few people began to whisper and then to talk. It was a kind of release, and it spread through the room. Someone even laughed.

  "That's right," Pepper said, taking the book back. "She wanted you to hear it, she thought it might help you, but she didn't want to bum you out. Here are some presents. 'The boots are for Nana,' " she read, " 'who helped me buy them one day when I was too wasted to make up my mind. The T-shirts are for Saffron, who has more to fill them with.' " She turned a page. " 'Chili gets my belts because she's the only one they'll fit. Sarah,' " she stammered, " 'Sarah gets this book, with the love I tried to express on page forty-three.' " She looked up, on the verge of tears. "I'm not going to read that," she said.

  One by one, t
he girls went up to the stage and took Amber's gifts. The litany went on until everything on the stage was gone. When it was over and the stage was empty, Tiny waved for silence.

  "When Amber died, when she got killed, I mean, she had two hundred and eighty-four dollars in the bank. She left her bankbook inside her journal. Two hundred and eighty-four dollars isn't much after four years of stripping. But you know what happened. She gave money to some of you, and she spent the rest on dope. She spent too much on dope," the man who dealt loads said. There was no question that he meant it.

  He seemed to regain his strength as he talked. "She didn't know how much she'd have when she died, but this is what she wrote: 'Please use fifty dollars to buy drinks for everyone. Real drinks, private stock, make sure Tiny knows that. No Cragmont Cola at my wake, Tiny.' " A couple of people laughed. Nana, with Amber's boots clenched in her hand, shook her head fiercely.

  "That leaves two hundred and thirty-four dollars," Tiny said. "What Amber hoped is that the girls in the club would donate enough money to bring it up to the next hundred. That's three hundred bucks. She wanted that money given to an organization, and if anyone laughs, I'll kill you. She wanted it given to the Just Say No Foundation to keep little kids off drugs. Anybody think that's funny?"

  Nobody even smiled. "I've got fifty bucks," Nana said.

  "Me, too," said Pepper.

  All around the room, the women dug into their purses and volunteered sums of money. Saffron put up a hundred. Women who probably hadn't had a straight day in months went to the stage and put their money down.

  "That's six hundred and twenty-four dollars, counting Amber's," Tiny said after he counted it. "It'll be a bequest in her name. I'll put in a thousand for the club."

  As he said it, he looked around. There must have been something in my face, because he paused as he looked at me, and a tiny line of concentration creased the skin between his eyebrows. Our eyes locked for a moment.

  "Me, too," Toby said suddenly. "A thousand and whatever it takes to bring it up to three thousand even." Tiny's eyes flicked to him, and Toby smiled apologetically. "I was never any good at math," he said.