The Bone Polisher sg-6

by Timothy Hallinan

  “And?”

  “You made a joke in the dream, which is pretty unusual in itself. A pun, a reversal of meaning. I’d say you know something that you’re not acknowledging. Something you’ve put behind a wall, and when you raise or lower the wall, some of the people in the landscape surrounding Max aren’t going to be who you think they are.” She passed both hands, cupped, through the moonlight as though she could scoop some up and drink it. “That’s pretty literal, but it’s the best I can do.”

  I put my arms around her. “You could soothe me,” I said.

  I woke at eleven in Eleanor’s bright bedroom, feeling rested for the first time in days. A note had been neatly safety-pinned to the pillow beside me.

  At the library until 2. Coffee’s ready — just pour water into the thing at the top of the maker.

  What are you going to wear to the party?

  The coffee maker, an Insta-Brew, had been named by someone who apparently didn’t own a watch. By the time the coffee was finally ready I’d showered with lime-scented soap and Japanese camellia shampoo-a combination of smells that brought more memories than there was room for in the shower stall-and slipped into my jeans from the previous evening, rancid with Typhoon’s cooking oil, plus a clean T-shirt Eleanor had laid out at the foot of the bed. I padded barefoot into the bright little kitchen and poured a cup to the brim and carried it carefully into the living room, full of furniture I’d once lived with, and settled into a chair that knew me well.

  I’d never been alone in Eleanor’s house before, and it was a peculiar feeling, both familiar and new. Things I recognized from our time together stood out here and there: a vase, a small painting we’d bought in San Francisco, the lacquer and mother-of-pearl end tables her mother had hauled all the way from China. Most of the objects in the room, though, had come into Eleanor’s life after we’d parted company. I had a sudden pang of-of what? loneliness? regret? — imagining her bringing these new things home, finding the right place for them. To a stranger they would have been indistinguishable from the things I’d bought her, the things we’d chosen together.

  Next to the window on the opposite wall, framed in sober black, hung Eleanor’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees. I didn’t have the faintest idea where mine were, but Eleanor’s were on display. For years she’d deprecated their value, the value of her own achievement, hanging the degrees on the wall only when her mother came to visit. Her mother, like most Chinese parents, was fierce about her children’s education, and if the degrees weren’t in full sight when she came for dinner she embarked on a long harangue in Cantonese. Five minutes after she left, the diplomas came down again.

  At some point, though, Eleanor had apparently decided to leave them up, and I’d missed the change. One of hundreds I’d missed, probably, over the years. She’d pointed out during our interrupted chat that I’d changed and, with her usual tact, hadn’t mentioned herself, but she wasn’t preserved in amber, as much as I might like to think she was. She wasn’t the woman who’d earned those degrees, any more than I was the puzzled kid with all the scholarly initials after his name who hadn’t a clue what to do with his life. She’d undergone her own changes. So far, she still kept a place of some kind for me in her life, but there were no guarantees. She’d had relationships with other men, and I’d handled them in the stolid, approved American-male fashion, hiding both the pain I felt when they began and the relief that had flooded over me when they ended. There wasn’t anything decisive I could do; I’d waived my rights in that area when I’d let her walk down my driveway on the last day we lived together. Let her go because marriage would disrupt my life.

  And what was so swell about my life, anyway? I was moving in patterns that had once had meaning, had given me pleasure, but now they were just habits most of the time, like a role in a play that has been running for years. Show up, do the old stunts, collect the money or applause or thanks, go home. A week later I didn’t know what I’d done on any particular day. I drank too much, I didn’t talk enough. I was lonely. Like most people faced with the challenge of getting through a life, I’d developed a bag of tricks that took care of my needs on a few levels and left me unsatisfied on all the others. And when the time came to learn some new ones, I screamed and dug in my heels and hung on for dear life to all the things that didn’t satisfy me.

  So what was I protecting against all that love?

  The answer presented itself with that peculiar clarity that unwelcome answers usually have. Nothing.

  Schultz was right. I should see a shrink, if only to force me to focus on the walls I’d built in my head.

  A wall lifting or being lowered, horses thundering through the space where it had been.

  I realized I’d been looking at the bright square of a window for long minutes. When I refocused on the room, a dark square floated in front of me. Retinal memory, real-seeming but false, an image from the past persisting until the nerves recharged themselves, a neural version of the emotional images of people we carry until circumstances force us to realize that they’ve changed. Or that they’re no longer there.

  On the table in front of the couch were some familiar-looking brochures, full of bright colors and images of wedded bliss. My mother, the emotional guerrilla.

  I went to the phone.

  It took three tries before I got the right post office. Kearney was apparently riddled with post offices. The woman on the other end sounded thrilled to talk to me, like no one had called in years.

  “I sent some money-a cashier’s check, actually-to Phillip Crenshaw, two l ’s in Phillip, care of box three thirty-two at your office. He never received it.”

  “Hmmm,” she said happily. “Did you put a return address on the envelope?”

  “Sure. As I say, there was money in it.”

  “Oh, dear. How long ago?”

  “Little more than three weeks.”

  She made a tsk-tsk sound. “That’s far too long. Something must have happened to it.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Sent from where?”

  “Los Angeles,” I said.

  “Well, what can you expect?” she said, as though that explained everything. “Los Angeles.”

  “I took it to the post office myself.”

  “I’ll give it a check. Can you hold on?”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking, This is a civil servant?

  “Don’t go away,” she said, laughing gaily.

  “I’m glued to my chair,” I said truthfully.

  Five minutes later she was back. I heard her humming before she picked up the phone.

  “Sent it here?” she asked.

  I gave her the box number again.

  “I just asked,” she said, “because that’s a forwarding box.”

  “To where?”

  “That’s what’s so funny,” she said. “Los Angeles.”

  20 ~ McCarvey

  With only two days to create the world between the time Nite Line came out and the wake for Max, Ferris Hanks had swung into a frenzy of activity. When I checked my answering machine from the comfort of Eleanor’s living room, I found no fewer than six messages, each pitched at a higher level of urgency. At the conclusion of the sixth, Henry took the phone away from him, leaving him piping orders in the distance.

  “Call the man,” Henry said. “Else, I’m going to have to give him a cigar to calm him down.” The next message was from Spurrier, demanding to know if I had anything to do with the ad in the paper. He left a home number, sounding significantly irritated. I called Joel Farfman instead.

  “More than a hundred calls,” he said. “And that’s not counting the ones from Hanks. In, what? Four hours? You’re going to have some party.”

  “You going to be there?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it. I’m coming as the Lone Ranger.”

  “Think you’ll be the only one?”

  “I’ll be the only one with a faithful Indian companion. Wait until you see Tonto. But keep your dist
ance.”

  Everybody seemed to assume I was gay. “How hard would it be for you to dig out everything you’ve run on the guy who killed Max?”

  A brief silence. “Not hard. That’s what interns are for.”

  “Can you meet me at the Paragon Ballroom in a couple of hours with some photocopies?”

  “What for?”

  “I just need to get my bearings.”

  “Will you give me an interview?”

  “This is a trade?”

  “Call it that.”

  “Okay. But you can’t use my name.”

  “Screw that to the wall and hang a picture on it,” he said pleasantly. “Remember who, what, where, when? You’re ‘who.’ ”

  Nite Line, after all, was a weekly. With any luck, this would all be over by the time the next edition came out. And if it wasn’t, I’d probably be safe in jail. “Okay. But the Times is on this, too.”

  He laughed, a pinched, wheezy sound like a squeeze bottle being emptied. “The Times,” he said. “I can imagine their angle. ‘The Gay Ripper’ or something like that.”

  “I don’t think he’s gay.”

  “When did that ever stop them? By the way, Max is in the new People. There’s no press agent like death.”

  “You could do me another favor,” I said.

  “Yeah?” The tone was noncommittal; like Ferris Hanks, Farfman saw favors as a form of currency.

  “I want to know who placed a personal.”

  “No can do,” he said promptly. “Everything they want you to know is in their ad.”

  “This has to do with Max.”

  “Oh.” He barked something to someone else, covering the mouthpiece, and came back. “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

  “Sorry. It looks like Max met his killer through your paper.”

  I heard a small squealing sound: Farfman sucking breath between his teeth. “You’re sure?”

  “As sure as I am of anything at this point.”

  “Ah, shit,” he said. “I really hate…” He blew into the mouthpiece of the phone. “Balls,” he said. “Read it to me.”

  I unfolded the torn page, which was beginning to fall apart along the fold lines, and read it to him. “Who placed it, when it was placed, how he paid. Anything else you can think of.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” There was something new in his voice, an edge that hadn’t been there before. “You got it. See you at the Paragon.”

  After all that unaccustomed sleep the second cup of coffee gave me a mild case of the jitters, so I poured the last chill inch or so into the sink and cleaned up. I actually dried the counter. The new Simeon, preparing for domesticity. Then I went out blinking into the flawless sunshine of Venice and drove home.

  I avoided the driveway and came up to the house from the side, hiking through tangles of chaparral and surprising a toad the size of one of Ferris’s Yorkies as I hoisted myself up onto the deck. The place was just as I’d left it. No Ed Pfester, or Phillip Crenshaw, or whatever his name was, waiting in the living room and slicing up my carpets for practice. No new messages on the machine. No word from Schultz. A wind had kicked up, and the house was creaking like someone was practicing dance steps on the roof. I set the new world record for changing my trousers and took Topanga into the hot Valley to avoid the beach traffic, heading for West Hollywood.

  I’d hit the Monday lull, lunchtime over and all the folks who keep civilization plodding along back in their offices until six, and the traffic on the freeway slipped between the lane lines like it had been greased. I turned on the radio and got the midday disk jockeys. There must be something about sitting alone in a little room with a microphone for hours that is fatal to the soul. The only things that sounded live were the commercials, which were recorded, and the music, some of which was made by people who were dead.

  The Paragon Ballroom was a building I’d passed dozens of times without ever noticing it, a two-story red brick barn, liberally enlivened by graffiti, that occupied half a city block on a treesy side street just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. The doorway was arched, double wide, and open, the windows above it blocked with dirty plywood. The hand-painted sign hanging crooked to the left of the door advised all and sundry that Hollywood’s most glamorous venue was available for very special events or, on a more mundane level, as a rehearsal hall. Four cars were scattered, isolated and looking lonely, around the big parking lot.

  Inside, the Paragon was one enormous room with a gleaming hardwood floor that must have been sixty years old, blistered and peeling floral wallpaper, and three sets of metal stairs leading to a catwalk that ran along the upper half of the building: a vantage point for the tangle-footed who wanted to watch the dancers. A bandstand, bare plywood set on metal risers, stood against the far wall. The place smelled as though the doors hadn’t been opened in years, a clogged, generic odor of disuse, like damp newsprint or pressed flowers. Three carpenters wearing T-shirts, cutoffs, and bandannas, as though they’d been costumed by the contractor, purposefully banged hammers against the plywood of the stage, and a man with an apron full of tools stood on a rickety, wheeled metal tower in the center of the floor, hanging lights from the beams below the ceiling. The most glamorous venue in Hollywood it wasn’t.

  “The man hisself.” It was Henry, dressed to spar with Sylvester Stallone in gold boxing trunks and a sky-blue sleeveless formfit T-shirt that made him look even blacker. He had a pen tucked into the hair above his ear. “Ferris been pulling his hair out with both hands.”

  “Anxiety’s good for him. It raises the pulse rate.”

  “He thinks the fountain might oughta go over there,” Henry said, pointing to the corner of the room directly right of the stage.

  Ferris’s holy water. “Up to him.”

  “And close off the gallery up there. Keep everybody down on the floor. Put a couple of our helpers on the catwalk to keep an eye on folks.”

  “How many helpers have we got?”

  “Many as you want.”

  “Two should do it up there. No need to be conspicuous. Where is he?”

  “I sent him home. He was driving everybody crazy. We moved the stage three times already.”

  “So walk me through it.”

  He wrapped a big hand around my arm, making me feel like a toddler, and towed me to the door. “People come in here, which I’m sure is no surprise. Two guys here, handing out tickets for the drawing and identifying everybody they can. Valet parking outside-Ferris wants to control the cars. Hell, Ferris wants to control everything. He was all upset this morning that daylight savings was over, wondering who he could call about it. He’s trying to get the street turned one-way for the evening. Okay, they come into the room and head for the bar-”

  “Where?”

  “Left wall. It’s got the plumbing outlets. Bar’ll go in this afternoon. Four bartenders, white wine, five kinds of bubble water, fruit juice for the fanatics. Eight of Ferris’s actors dressed like Roman slaves, whatever that means, moving around with trays of what Ferris calls finger foods, fried fingers or something. There’s a kitchen in the back, but it’s pretty dire, just pounds of rat shit in the ovens. Food’s being brought in already cooked from Hugo’s Hankerings. We’ll scrub down the counters, nuke ’em good and cover them with butcher paper, just use them to hold the food before it goes on the trays. Four people there, shoveling the stuff whenever the slaves run out. They going to be costumed like French maids.”

  “A touch of class.”

  “You say so. One monitor-good word, huh? — over by that door to keep an eye on the bathroom, like you wanted. Make sure everyone who goes in comes back out.”

  “That’s twenty-one so far, not counting the parking attendants.”

  “They stay outside.”

  “You know all these people by sight?”

  “Ferris does. Like I say, a lot of them are going to be his boys. Then there’s the band, the Silverlake Flyers.”

  “Bar band?”

  “Old hit
s.” Henry grimaced. “Disco, Jay and the Americans, Barry Manilow. The neighbors got any taste, we’re in trouble.”

  “Invite them.”

  He pulled a small pad of paper from the elastic waistband of his trunks, retrieved the pen, and made a note. “I’ll photocopy the ad, put it under doors and stuff.”

  “You’re good at this, Henry.”

  “What’s to be good at? You and Ferris thought of everything already. I just run around and check shit off.”

  “Other exits?”

  He lifted his chin in the direction of the door leading to the bathrooms. “Fire door back there. We’ll have a walkie-talkie outside.”

  “That makes twenty-two, not counting the stage crew. Good thing Ferris is rich.”

  “Ho.” Henry’s voice was flat. “Also, scoff, scoff. He’s promoting the food and all the drinks except the wine. The waiters are working for free. Ballroom cost six fifty, band goes for scale. He’s got a source in Lourdes for the holy water. He says. Maybe a couple thou all together. Don’t you know about rich folks? They never spend money.”

  “The dog tags.”

  “Yeah, well-” Henry leaned toward me. “They going to be plated. Ferris is really pissed at-” He looked past me, toward the door. “Speak of the devil.”

  “Henry,” Joel Farfman said. “Simeon.” He gazed darkly around the room. The eye with the punctured pupil lazily followed the good one. “To quote Bette Davis, ‘What a dump.’ ”

  “Little glitter,” Henry said impassively, “some bunting, turn down the lights and fill it with people. Gonna look great.”

  “You have a genuinely fervid imagination,” Farfman said. “Where’s John Beresford Tipton?”

  “Having his nap,” Henry said. “He got up early this morning, maybe ten. Hard on an old man, specially when he don’t go to sleep until nine.”

  “I should have half his energy,” Farfman said. “You can’t believe the number of times he’s called today.”

  “You have no idea what I’d believe,” Henry said. “I live with the man.”

  “And you seem so untouched.” Farfman held up a manila folder and waved it in my direction. “Here’s your stuff.”