Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  Then I ran back down the driveway, leaving the broken door sagging open behind me, to check out the only remotely likely guess I had.

  I coaxed extra speed out of Alice down the winding roads of the canyon, keeping my mind blank and my breathing even. Halfway to the coast I got stuck behind a necking couple with more eyes for the moon and each other than for the road. I hit the horn twice and got an aggressive slowdown from the lovesick creep at the wheel, a display of automotive macho for the little lady. I waited for a right-hand curve, gunned Alice, and slammed into the driver's side of the creep's rear bumper. He fishtailed off to the right, and I passed him on a blind curve and left him stalled out most of the way onto the shoulder.

  By the time I ran the red light on the PCH and headed north at seventy miles per hour, fourteen minutes had elapsed since I left the house.

  Try as I might, I couldn't keep my mind from working. I was doing the only thing I could think to do, but there was a tickle in the back of my head that I couldn't ignore.

  I knew Toby hadn't killed Saffron.

  I had bet Nana's safety on the assumption that he hadn't killed, or at least intended to kill, Amber, that he wasn't a cold-blooded murderer. And, except for Nana, Toby was the only person involved who knew where I lived. Even Dixie only had my phone number.

  And then, as Malibu Canyon receded behind me, that particular security blanket ripped right down the middle.

  Saffron had known. She'd been there.

  Whoever killed Saffron had played with her for a long time.

  I tried to accelerate, but my foot was already pushed to the floor. To the left the Pacific rolled in as black as blood. Something like drowsiness kept slipping over my consciousness, and it took too long for me to identify it as defeat. The minute I'd found Saffron dead I should have known I couldn't take Nana home.

  You've killed her, a voice said in my ear.

  I shook my head and shoved vainly at the accelerator.

  There was so much blood, the voice said. Hansel's headless body popped into my mind's eye. She's dead, the voice said.

  "Fuck you," I said to the voice, and turned left into Encinal Canyon. The turn had caught me unaware, and Alice almost spun out. It had been more than thirty minutes.

  I parked partway down and ran the rest of the way to the house. From the driveway the house looked dark, but there was enough moonlight to show me that Toby's car wasn't there. There was a car there, though, pulled crookedly into the drive with both its front doors open.

  I knew whose car it was.

  The tide was out, so I went around to the beach side of the house, climbing over slippery, still wet rocks, falling once before I got to the picture windows. The curtains were drawn, but lights burned inside. Then there was a flash, like small-scale lightning. But from inside. Then another.

  He was taking pictures.

  A surge of pure adrenaline joined forces with another flashbulb to carry me through knee-deep water and up onto the beach to the front door. It was open.

  It would be. She couldn't walk, not after all that blood. He'd had to carry her inside. He didn't plan to stay long.

  I listened: not a sound. No more flashes. Then I heard footsteps across a hardwood floor, and a door opened somewhere in the house.

  Now.

  My wet running shoes made squelching rubbery sounds as I moved across the dark entrance hall toward the pale rectangle of light that fell from the archway leading into the living room. The room was empty and not empty.

  No one was standing there, but what looked like a heap of clothing was crumpled in the corner between the bookcases. Multiple images of Toby's face grinned down from the wall at what was left of Nana. Black hair and red blood. One slender arm was outthrown. It was broken midway between the elbow and the wrist.

  The next thing I remember, I had gathered her in my arms and was picking her up. I had carried her before, but now she was horribly light. I wondered how much all that blood weighed. Her head lolled back, and a savaged face caught the light. It was impossible to tell if she was alive or dead. Her eyes were swollen and open and empty. She looked like she could see through walls. I took two steps toward the front door.

  "Put her down," said a voice from behind me.

  A tremor ran through me, and I turned with her dangling from my arms. The door to the beach was open, and Tiny stood in it. He bloomed there, gigantic in white, framed by the darkness. A little nickel-plated gun gleamed in his hand.

  "I got your clue," I said in the most level voice I could manage. "Nice touch." The front of his white shirt was stained brown. Butcher brown.

  "Give her the credit. She'd already written my name on the screen when I knocked the door down. All I had to do was change two letters. But I never figured you'd get home so early, much less turn up here before I was gone. Now what am I going to do with you?"

  "Is she dead?" Nana hadn't stirred.

  "She wasn't supposed to be. She was supposed to call the cops and tell them to come here and then be dead." He gave me a grimace that he thought was a smile. "Downers," he said, giving his head a ponderous shake. "Bad dope. Get you out of control sometimes."

  His pupils were enormous, and his fat face was sheened over with sweat.

  "Like at her apartment?" I said.

  "She was supposed to be there," he said in a reasonable tone. "I guess I just got pissed off. Put her down now." He wiggled the little gun. "I don't want to confuse things," he said. "No prints but Toby's, nobody but Toby. That was the idea."

  "Tiny. The idea's already gone wrong."

  "Why? Because of you? Just stay where you are, I'll figure you out. You'll be as dead as she is as soon as I work out where to put you."

  "That doesn't give me much incentive to cooperate."

  "You will, though. As long as you figure you've got a chance to stay alive, like maybe you can outsmart me, get the gun or something, you'll do anything I tell you. I would, in your shoes. And now you're going to put her down, right where you found her."

  I looked into his flat black eyes for a long moment. There was nobody inside. I knelt slowly.

  "You can drop her," he said in the same calm, toneless voice. "She won't feel it. Drop her on her head if you like."

  I laid her down as gently as I could. Her limbs splayed out gracelessly, angular and lifeless. Matted hair masked her face.

  "Why her?" I said, standing up again. "I know why you killed Saffron, but why her? What the fuck did she ever do to you? She liked you."

  "It wasn't me she did it to," he said. "I wouldn't kill anyone who hurt me. I don't matter that much. I never really mattered." A furrow appeared between his brows as he replayed what I'd said. "Hold on. Stop. You know why I killed Saffron?"

  "Sure. Because she and Toby killed Amber."

  His face twisted and hardened. "You knew that? You knew that, and you were still on their side?" His mouth worked convulsively for a second, and then he spat on the floor. "That makes it easier," he said. "It wasn't going to be hard anyway, but that makes it even easier."

  "I didn't know it until tonight," I said. "They didn't mean to."

  "You think that makes any difference to Amber?"

  "Tell me what happened."

  His eyes filled with laborious cunning. "I thought you knew," he said slowly.

  "The swimming pool, Saffron's swimming pool. It happened in the swimming pool."

  The fat little eyes became alarming—still empty, but alarming. All force, no intellect: he looked like a one-man holy war. "Who told you? Toby?"

  "Nobody told me. I guessed part of it from the way Saffron behaved, but I didn't figure it out until tonight, when I went to Saffron's apartment house and saw the bottom of the pool."

  "They played a game with her," he said dreamily. The gun sagged in his hand. "Toby bought a bunch of loads at the Rack, and they had a make-believe contest, you know? Who could take the most loads. Except they only pretended to take theirs, they pretended to take the same loads over and over.
It must have been real funny. Amber, she took four or five. And she was already pretty fucked up."

  "From junk," I said, measuring the distance between us. The gun was pointed at the floor. Tiny swayed.

  "Junk," he said. "I hate junk. Oh, you don't know. You don't know how many times I tried to get her to quit. I even cried." He closed his eyes, but before I could move he pulled them open again. "That's not easy for a Lebanese, crying in front of a woman, but I cried. I begged her to quit. I even hit her a few times, but that just made it worse. She started using it as an anesthetic."

  "You tried," I said.

  "I never tried anything harder in my life." He shrugged his massive shoulders. "I loved her."

  "But you set her up with Toby that night."

  "That was different. That was business. She understood the business. Toby was an important customer. Customers were customers. I was, I was supposed to be, something else. Something different." He swayed again. The gun hung limp from his hand.

  "And they killed her," he said conversationally. "After they got her so stoned she couldn't walk, they played a game. You know Simon says? Little kids' game. They played Simon says. First she had to close her eyes and touch her nose. Then she had to stand on one leg. Well, she fell, of course. She fell on that whore's floor, and they both laughed."

  "Then they went outside," I said.

  "First the sidewalk, then the gate to the apartment house. She fell again, off the gate. Then the diving board."

  "And she fell off the diving board."

  "Sure. Who do you think she was, some Olympic gold medalist? She was a little girl fucked up on twelve kinds of dope. You know how much she weighed?"

  "About the same as she does now." I indicated Nana.

  He shook his head. "Even less. Even less."

  "And she fell."

  "Nine feet, I think. She fell on her head."

  "But she wasn't dead."

  "They didn't know that. Not any more than you know whether that one is dead." He pointed the gun at Nana, and I took a step toward him. His hand tightened on the gun. He closed his left eye to sight. I moved between them, trying to think of something to say.

  "So they took her to the Spice Rack, right? I haven't figured that out. Why the Spice Rack? Why not home? Why not someplace else?"

  He opened the eye and looked at me. "Oh, they took her home," he said in a sulfurous voice. "Saffron sat on her lap, you hear me? Saffron sat on her lap in that little shit car and then got out and walked like a drunk to the door so that old pervert upstairs would see her. You're telling me they didn't mean to kill her?" He spat on the floor. "She sat on Amber's lap so the guy upstairs would see a girl in the passenger seat when Toby drove away. She acted loaded, imitating Amber. Then she used Amber's keys to get in and waited, and then she left and Toby picked her up around the block, and she sat in Amber's lap again until they got to the Spice Rack. Then they dumped her, just shoved her out of the car. They made the mistake of taking her where I was. They didn't know I was there. They didn't know I was inside, counting the receipts. Usually I don't. Usually I do that at home." His eyelids clamped closed, and he gulped a gallon of air.

  "And they didn't know she was alive," I said, just to say something.

  He arched a four-pound eyebrow. It looked like it cost him a lot of effort. "I already said that. I already told you that. They thought they could just dump her in the parking lot like garbage and then go home and finish their party. Like garbage. They figured the cops would think someone got her between home and the club."

  "But you came out and found her."

  He made the grimace again. "She found me. Somehow she crawled to the back door and made some noise." His eyes strayed to a point over my shoulder and focused there. They seemed to move independently of each other. "She had a lot of guts," he said.

  A wave broke outside, thundering onto the sand. I had a prickly feeling that if I turned my head, I'd see Amber standing behind me, looking into Tiny's eyes.

  "She wouldn't have wanted this," I said.

  "She was too soft. Toby has to pay."

  "And that was why you broke her arms and legs?"

  He forced his eyes back down to me. "One arm was already broken. That's why I started with an arm on this one and Saffron. I carried her to the stage and put her on it, and her arm was all wrong. I tried to put it back, but I couldn't make it look right again. Then." He stopped for a moment, looking suddenly smaller somehow. "Then she died," he said. "She caught a big breath like she was going to say something, and when she let it out something rattled, and then she went away."

  "Wait. Wait a minute. She didn't tell you anything?"

  "I knew where she'd been. I knew who she was with. I knew about Toby, what Toby was, what Toby likes to do to women. I'd seen her"—he jerked the gun toward Nana— "when Toby was finished with her. She gave me some bullshit story, but I knew Toby. I told him then if he ever touched another one of my girls in the wrong way, I'd hurt him. But for Amber, for hurting Amber, I'd kill him."

  "You brutalized her. And you didn't even know for sure what had happened."

  "She was dead. I stood over her, crying like a big baby, and broke whatever I could break. I did it one bone at a time, thinking about Toby. You see, he's not just going to die. The whole world is going to know what he is before the law kills him. They're going to know what filth he is. They're going to hate him as much as I hate him. That means he'll die twice. I wish I could figure a way to make him die three times."

  "Why didn't you just turn him in?" I was hoping he'd let the gun droop again.

  "And let Saffron go? She had to die, too."

  "Saffron told you what happened that night," I said.

  "Saffron told me a lot of things. Saffron told me everything I could possibly want to know. She was dying to tell me." He made a choking sort of sound that eventually turned into a laugh. "That's a joke," he said. "She was dying to tell me. It only took one arm and a couple of cuts, little cuts, and she was dying to tell me."

  "What about the clothesline? How'd you know about the clothesline?"

  "That one," he said, gesturing toward Nana. "That tramp on the floor there. She told Amber all about poor little Toby. You're the big detective, you should have figured that out. There was clothesline strung in the girls' dressing room. They use it to dry their costumes between sets. I just put up a new rope the next morning."

  "Congratulations, Tiny," I said. "You figured it all out. It's a shame it's not going to work."

  He gave me a loose-lipped smile. "It's gonna work," he said. "There's no reason, not a reason on the world, I'd kill these girls. But everybody who matters knows about Toby, even the cops. And they're going to find her here, and there's gonna be three Polaroids in Toby's little album over there."

  "That's the problem," I improvised. "The Polaroids."

  The little gun came up and pointed directly at my chin. "Explain," he said.

  "The cops have the picture of Amber. Someone was with Toby when he got it in the mail. She made him take it to the cops. I was the one who found Saffron, and I gave them both of the pictures you left there. Toby's got an alibi for Saffron." I licked my lips. They felt like sandpaper. "Toby's with the cops now," I said.

  "You asshole," Tiny said in a tight little voice. "That's why I killed Nana, because she was working with you." He blinked, the heaviest blinks since Charles Laughton, two or three times. "Okay," he said. "First we kill you, and then we wait for Toby. I'll worry about me after I kill Toby."

  He extended his arm and cocked the gun.

  I'd run out of things to say.

  Toby's front door slammed shut.

  The hand with the gun in it wavered. "Sit down," he whispered, "or I'll blow your brains out right now."

  I remained standing, watching the little pig eyes shift toward the hallway as boots sounded on the wooden floor. The hall light came on. Tiny kept the gun on me but swiveled his eyes to the archway between the hall and the living room.

>   Big John, AKA Jack Sprunk, stood in the doorway. Tiny looked bewildered and shifted the gun to a point halfway between us. "Stay where you are," he said to John.

  John looked at me and smiled. "Hello," he said. Then he started to walk toward Tiny. Even compared with Tiny, he looked big. The smile stayed on his face. He looked from one of us to the other, as calm as a postulant taking communion. I gathered myself for a leap.

  A door somewhere on the other side of the kitchen opened and closed.

  Tiny looked at me and then toward the kitchen. John kept walking. Tiny swallowed and pivoted toward the kitchen door.

  But he shot John first.

  The gun made a bright, hard spang sound: small caliber. Tiny was already facing the kitchen when he realized that John was still coming at him and turned to fire again. The second shot caught John in the collarbone and threw him to the floor. Dolly appeared in the kitchen door, and Tiny aimed the gun at her.

  At the same moment, Toby flew through the door leading to the beach and jumped onto Tiny's back, grabbing Tiny's gun hand. Dolly let out a yell I didn't know she had in her and leapt toward Tiny and Toby, now tangled together into a furious, whirling knot. A shot reverberated through the room. Three. Tiny looked like a boar attacked by dogs, trying to toss them off through sheer force of weight.

  Acting on automatic pilot, I bent down and picked up Nana. I carried her through the kitchen door and put her on the floor, protected by the wall from stray bullets.

  As I put her down she moaned.

  I touched her throat. The echoes of another shot slammed back and forth between floor and walls. Four. A pulse was beating there, slow and erratic, but a pulse, goddammit, a pulse.

  It was no time for sentiment. I headed for the living room.

  And got there just in time to see Dolly land on the floor near the door to the beach, next to Toby. Tiny stood a few feet away, heaving with the effort, pointing the gun at them.

  "Stay where you are, on the floor," he said. He turned his head toward me. "You. Get over there. Move wrong and I'll kill you. I'll kill all of you."