Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  I knelt down again. "Are you listening to me, Bobby?"

  No reaction. Alma leaned over and did something tiny and mean, and Toby yelped and opened his eyes. He looked like a man ready to die of fury.

  "Calm down," I said. "This won't take long. And if you behave yourself, no one will ever see any of these pictures. Do you understand?" He tried to nod, forgetting the restraint on his neck, and made a small choking sound. It didn't look like it improved his mood.

  "Here's what's happening. Don't nod, just raise an eyebrow. First, you're never going to lift your hand against another woman. If you do, and if I hear about it, these pictures are going to everybody from UPI to TV Guide. Got it?"

  He gave an infinitesimal nod. Maybe he didn't know how to raise one eyebrow.

  I took a piece of paper from my pocket. "This is a tax-deductible receipt. Earlier this week, acting at your request, of course, I donated twenty-five hundred dollars to the West Hollywood Woman's Hospice. WH squared, as they call themselves, maintain a home for battered women. Your donation, which will be repeated monthly for the next two years, will be used to rent five additional apartments for women who are trying to avoid husbands or boyfriends who enjoy breaking their faces. I rejected their suggestion that they issue a press release naming it the Toby Vane Wing. You agree that you'll keep the contribution coming on a monthly basis?" Someone behind me clapped.

  Toby nodded again.

  "Finally," I said, unfolding the receipt and taking a smaller piece of paper from its center, "this is the name and phone number of a Dr. Elena Gutierrez. Dr. Gutierrez was recommended by the people at WH squared as the best psychiatrist in Los Angeles for the treatment of men who batter women. You have an appointment with Dr. Gutierrez for Tuesday evening at seven, after filming finishes. That's your regular appointment from now on. I've told her nothing, only that you have a problem and that you want help. The rest is up to you. Are you going to see her?"

  This time he looked at me. Then he nodded again.

  "Great. Fine. Well, that's it, then." I stood up and turned to Betsi. "Take your pictures," I said. "I'll want them when you're finished."

  Betsi maneuvered into position, and Alma and Kareema went to work. A flashbulb popped. "Oh, golly," Janie Gordon whispered. It sounded like she'd learned something interesting. I didn't turn around to see what. Instead I went to Nana.

  "I'll take her, Dixie," I said.

  Dixie stepped aside, taking him closer to Chantra. She didn't move away. She looked over at him and then put her arm around his shoulders in a maternal gesture.

  Another bulb popped as I took the handles of Nana's chair. I started to turn her, and she said, "Wait. I want to see." Another flash. "Okay," she said. "Now we can go."

  I wheeled her out into the sunlight and up the driveway toward the van. I trundled her up the ramp and sat beside her.

  "You're going to be okay," I said.

  "Of course I am. I'm young." She sounded faintly impatient.

  "You may not be able to dance for a while."

  "I'll never dance again. Except with you, I mean. Whoops, I said I wouldn't do that. Except on a dance floor, with some nice man. And all my clothes on." She sobered. "Poor Tiny," she said. "He didn't mean to do it."

  I didn't say anything.

  "But didn't Toby look fantastic?" she asked.

  "I guess, all things considered. A little black and blue, but the boy really knows how to take a close-up."

  "You simp," she said. She leaned forward to kiss me, and said, "Ow." She fingered the livid yellow flesh around her mouth.

  "You don't understand, you simp," she said. "You didn't look."

  "I didn't want to look. He just looked like Toby."

  "That's what I mean," she said triumphantly. "After all this time, after all those big smiles. He finally looked exactly like Toby."

  Postscript

  Some of the characters in this book are based more directly than is usual, or legally advisable, on human beings. Others are based on carnivorous bipeds who pass, or passed, as humans.

  The girl who was the model for Nana quit dancing a few months before the book was finished and went back to computer school. Four months after that she died in Hollywood of an overdose of cocaine. Her heart just stopped beating.

  Janie Gordon is now an assistant director. Her credits feature a middle initial I didn't know she had.

  Alma married the dentist.

  The actor who inspired Toby still lives on the beach. Aside from an occasional appearance on Bowling for Dollars, he's not working, and he stays out of the papers.

  Los Angeles is still there. Bigger and more fun than ever.

  Other Books by Timothy Hallinan

  The Simeon Grist Series

  The Four Last Things (Simeon Grist #1)

  Simeon Grist knows the City of Angels inside and out--the sex for sale, the chic seductions, the clientele of every bar from downtown L.A. to Venice. So when he's hired by a Hollywood recording company to shadow one Sally Oldfield, suspected of embezzlement, Grist discovers she's heavily invested in something far more lucrative than CDs--namely the Church of the Eternal Moment--a million-dollar religious scam built around a 12-year-old channeler and the voice of a man who has been dead for a millennium. Though he tails Sally all the Way to a seedy motel and a date with a murderer, he's too late to save her. And now he knows snooping has gotten him in way too deep, for he's become the next target of a very flesh-and-blood entity waiting in the twisted back alleys of sin and salvation to give him a brutal look at the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell--revelations he could definitely live without...

  PRAISE FOR “THE FOUR LAST THINGS” AND THE SIMEON GRIST NOVELS

  “Terrific, well-crafted, thoroughly satisfying . . . updates Raymond Chandler's vision of life in Los Angeles through Grist's sardonic, often hilarious observations . . . leaves one looking forward to Hallinan's future endeavors.” (Los Angeles Herald-Tribune)

  “It's rare to find a first novel in the mystery genre that boasts a smoothly plotted story, crisp dialogue, and excellent characterizations . . . This exciting tale accomplishes all three . . . The book never falters, sustaining suspense and interest throughout . . . a sure winner.” (Booklist)

  “Hallinan has a genuine ability to write effective prose, engaging repartee, sharp and witty characterizations . . . this laudable first effort could become a notable series.” (The Washington Post Book World)

  “Wonderful . . . you gotta love a novel that starts with the hard-drinking private eye sighing about the dame he's been following.” (West Coast Review of Books)

  “Hallinan neatly maximizes his gift for offbeat characters and clever pacing . . . Simeon Grist, the sleuth he created, is in a class by himself.” (Inside Books)

  BUY The Four Last Things on Kindle by clicking here.

  * * *

  Everything But the Squeal (Simeon Grist #2)

  Simeon Grist is a private eye and Los Angeles is his city. It's Raymond Chandler country, especially the parts Grist sees – like the dank underbelly that lies between Santa Monica and Hollywood Boulevards, where all the California dreaming is a nightmare. But beggars and private eyes can't be too choosy, and Grist is on a new case – one that leads him down the streets of LA and into the dead, dark places of a killer's heart.

  It starts off on Hollywood Boulevard, a street filled with runaways who quickly lose their innocence and sometimes their lives. Missing is a thirteen-year-old from Kansas, Aimee Sorrell, a/k/a Dorothy Gale, who didn't find Oz over this rainbow. In fact, from the Polaroids her mother got in the mail, Aimee found nothing less than hell – drugs, pornography, and sexual slavery. It is the not-so-pretty pictures, and especially the marks on the girl's body, that convince Grist to take the Sorrell case and to begin his search among the castoffs and criminals of an all-night diner, a 24-hour magnet for the displaced.

  But the trail soon leads him to the city morgue, where the kid on the slab isn't Aimee, but another runawa
y with the same kind of marks. Grist knows that there's more than a pedophile at work here. There's a child sex-for-sale ring that's proof positive of the human race's downhill slide into immorality and perversion. Grist's problem is finding out who's running the ring – and getting Aimee back before she's the next corpse in a refrigerated drawer.

  His solution is to enlist the aid of another teen, a pretty, middle-class kid named Jessica, who thinks fun is flirting with a coke dealer ten years too old for her. Jessica needs a lesson in reality, but Grist doesn't anticipate that taking her along might jeopardize both their lives. For Grist and Jessica are going to find out what happens to the lost children of America when they go looking for love in all the wrong places.

  PRAISE FOR “EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL” AND THE SIMEON GRIST NOVELS

  “Squeal combines high-octane action, baroque violence, humor, and pathos in a self-assured manner that marks Mr. Hallinan as a capable practitioner of the private eye tale. (Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal)

  “. . . a grimly authentic portrait of L.A.'s sordid subculture.” (Robert Wade, The San Diego Union)

  “. . . a chilling portrait of what life holds for kids who lose their innocence too soon, and we couldn't have gotten through it if the author weren't so damned talented.” (Tom and Enid Schantz, The Purloined Letter)

  “There are two ways to explore the Hollywood underground: Drive over the hill and spend a few dangerous days walking Hollywood Boulevard, or read Everything But the Squeal, the second Simeon Grist novel by Timothy Hallinan. . . Grist bears watching: He may turn out to be a modern successor to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe.” (Kate Seago, Los Angeles Daily News)

  “Simeon Grist made his debut in The Four Last Things, and it was a smashing debut, as I reported in this space last August. There is apparently no sophomore jinx in the private eye trade, because Everything But the Squeal is even better than the first one.” (Dick Kleiner, The Desert Sun)

  “Get a copy of Everything But the Squeal, but be prepared to shut off the phone or fax machine; you won't want to brook any interruptions once you start it.” (Tom Hatten, KNX Radio, Los Angeles)

  “Everything But the Squeal is a riveting page-turner . . . the Simeon Grist books are something special.” (Jim Huang, The Drood Review)

  “. . . exciting and original . . . above all, a story with moral as well as mortal consequences. . . . They say that the second book in a suspense series is always the hardest to pull off, because a writer tends to use up all of his or her tricks bringing the characters to life. Hallinan, who seems to have a natural supply of imagination, is a remarkable exception.” (Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune)

  BUY Everything But The Squeal on Kindle by clicking here.

  * * *

  Skin Deep (Simeon Grist #3)

  For a fee so big he can't turn it down, LA private eye Simeon Grist is hired to watchdog the kind of guy he'd usually prefer to throw through the nearest window. Toby Vane is the golden boy of prime-time TV, whose gee-whiz smile and chiseled features are worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the lucrative syndication market. But Toby has a dark side that would take the shine off for his millions of adoring female fans: every now and then he beats up a woman, and almost any woman will do. When some of the women around Toby begin to turn up dead, Simeon has to figure out whether he's protecting a murderer – or whether one of Toby's multitude of enemies wants to put him away forever. And when Simeon meets the beautiful Nana, the whole situation becomes very personal, very fast.

  PRAISE FOR “SKIN DEEP” AND THE SIMEON GRIST NOVELS

  “Gutsy, vibrant . . . a sharp noir L.A. Portrait.” – Kirkus Reviews

  “Riveting, action-packed . . . Hallinan's best yet.” Library Journal

  “A genuine, hard-boiled whodunit with plenty of motives, cagey suspects, and secret past lives.” --Booklist

  A welcome visit from an old, tough friend . . . Hallinan does a great job . . . Excellent!” --Chicago Tribune

  “The third . . . Simeon Grist makes me eager to go back and catch up on the first two.” --The Indianapolis News

  “A modern successor to Raymond Chandler.” --Los Angeles Daily News

  * * *

  The Man With No Time (Simeon Grist #4)

  In The Man With No Time, the fourth Simeon Grist novel, the erudite Los Angeles private eye does a favor for the family of his sometimes-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, and goes looking for two children who vanished in Chinatown. He quickly learns that he's gone straight through the looking glass and into a world where grieving parents are afraid to contact the police, where fear is the teacher and power is the law, where helpless people are shipped from China to America like so many pairs of shoes and forced into lives of toil and submission. If Simeon is an avenging knight, he's perilously out of his element, drawn into a back-alley nightmare of tong wars, slavery, and murder – forced to play by rules he doesn't understand for the highest stakes of all.

  PRAISE FOR “THE MAN WITH NO TIME” AND THE SIMEON GRIST NOVELS

  “Some of the best mystery reading of the year. Hallinan's story is sheer genius, with a highly original plot, snappy dialogue . . . memorable characters . . . and enough chills and thrills to catch the attention of the most jaded reader.” – Booklist

  Timely, suspenseful, and exciting – Timothy Hallinan and Simeon Grist have done it again.” --Sidney Sheldon

  * * *

  * * *

  The Poke Rafferty Series

  A Nail Through the Heart (Poke Rafferty #1)

  The first of Timothy Hallinan's Bangkok thrillers introduces Bangkok-based Poke Rafferty, who went to Thailand to write a book and stayed to fall in love -- with the country and with the people, especially two of them. Now he's quit writing offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored, and instead is trying to assemble a new family with Rose, the former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and Miaow, the tiny, streetwise urchin he wants to adopt. But trouble in the guise of good intentions comes calling just when everything is beginning to work out. Poke agrees to take in another displaced child, Miaow’s troubled and terrifying friend from the gutter. Then he agrees to help locate a distraught Aussie woman’s missing uncle--and accepts a generous payment to find a blackmailing thief. No longer gliding carelessly across the surface of a culture he doesn’t really understand, suddenly Poke’s plodding through dark and unfamiliar terrain--and everything and everyone he loves is in terrible danger. Hallinan's first Bangkok thriller won raves both here and in Asia.

  PRAISE FOR “A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART” AND THE POKE RAFFERTY NOVELS

  “I *highly* recommend A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART, and anything else Hallinan has written.” - Charlaine Harris, Best-selling author of “True Blood.”

  From Publisher's Weekly: Brutal torture and equally brutal empathy define this excellent, if sometimes familiar, thriller from Hallinan (The Bone Polisher). Poke Rafferty, a travel writer turned detective, intends to settle down in Bangkok with his ex-prostitute girlfriend, Rose, and a young urchin, Miaow, when Miaow brings her troubled friend Superman into the household. While dealing with this intrusion, Rafferty takes on dual sleuthing assignments to help pay for adopting Miaow. The first case involves finding Australian Claus Ulrich, a hardcore bondage aficionado. When Rafferty meets the powerful and rich Madame Wing while investigating Ulrich's disappearance, she offers him $30,000 to find an envelope and the Cambodian man who took it. The only catch? If Rafferty opens the envelope, he'll learn information about Madame Wing that will force her to kill him. Rafferty stumbles through the clues like the foreigner he is, always on the outside looking in. Despite an overly leisurely ending, the rich depictions of Bangkok's seedy side recall John Burdett's visceral mysteries. (July)

  From Booklist:The author of the 1990s Simeon Grist series returns with a compelling new protagonist: American travel writer Poke Rafferty, who is out to right some serious wrongs on the predatory streets of Bangkok. While attempting to adopt a homeless girl, rescue a potentially murderous
urchin known as Superman, and build a lasting relationship with the former bar girl he loves, Poke is pulled into two brutal mysteries. One involves a notorious Khmer Rouge torturer, the other a series of child-porn photos. As he doggedly plumbs these ghastly depths, Rafferty matures from a play-it-as-it-lays layabout into a man willing to meet his lover's culture more than halfway and find his moral compass at a time when the victims can be as guilty as the murderers are innocent. The fact that the referenced pedophile photo series and Phnom Penh torture house both existed heightens the impact of a narrative that's already deeply felt. If this opens a new series, Hallinan is off to a surefooted start with a supporting cast (including Poke's precocious, pugnacious, almost-daughter Miaow) well worth getting to know.--Sennett, Frank

  Booksense.com (monthly pick): "This one of the best novels I have read in years, and it will be a true, long-lasting favorite."

  New York Times Bestselling author John Lescroart: "Don’t miss your chance to read A Nail Through the Heart before it starts winning all its awards….Every page shimmers with life and light. This is great stuff!”

  New York Times bestselling author T. Jefferson Parker: “A haunting novel…fast, bold, disturbing, and beautifully written. Hallinan is terrific.”