“It happens,” Hammond said. Sonia said something interrogative, and Hammond said, “Killer return to the scene of the crime.” I heard Sonia’s voice again, and Hammond said grudgingly, “But not much.”
“If we could hear him thinking,” Schultz said, “I’m pretty sure we’d hear two voices: the voice of the original human being, urging caution and common sense, and the voice of, oh, I don’t know, the cat, arguing every point. Something like, ‘I’d better get out of here.’ ” He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “ ‘But everyone will be wearing a costume.’ ‘It’s got to be a trap.’ ‘I’ll have to cover my hair.’ ‘Should I take a chance on an airplane, or take the bus?’ ‘I could dye it and leave it exposed.’ ‘I’d never get my hands on the tags anyway.’ ‘I’ll never know unless I go. If I don’t go, I’ll never see them again.’ ‘I’ll never get away with it.’ ‘Of course I will, I’ll just be one more faggot in a costume.’ Sorry about the, um, terminology,” Schultz said in his normal voice. “I’m projecting here.”
“Short answer,” Hammond said, “he’ll be there.”
Schultz tightened the knot in his legs, hiking his trousers to expose a stretch of bony white calf with little ginger-colored hairs scattered irregularly over it, an unfortunate afterthought in the design. “He’ll come,” he said, rocking back in the chair. “He may take one look around and hop a cab to LAX, but he’ll come.”
“You think,” Hammond said.
“Of course I think.” Schultz, stranded by his enthusiasm, was blinking distress semaphores. “I don’t have a pipeline to the man’s soul.”
“Wish I could be there.” Hammond said something muffled to Sonia.
“Sheriffs territory, Al,” I reminded him.
“Look who’s talking,” Hammond said. “I’d be unofficial, of course. I’m on my honeymoon.”
“I’m sure you’ll fit right in. You hardly look like a cop at all.”
“Might be hard to explain,” Hammond mused. “Me and the little woman- ow — me and Sonia, I mean, at a fruit’s-sorry, a homosexual’s-wake.”
“I don’t know. It might lead to some interesting invitations.”
“Anyway,” Hammond said, retreating, “we’re in Hawaii.”
“And having a wonderful time, from the sound of it.”
“It’s okay,” Hammond said fondly. “I’m with my little love-turtle.” Sonia squealed in protest.
“Oh, Al,” I said, “that’s so sweet. Wait’ll I tell-”
“You tend to refer to your wife in diminutives,” Schultz said, a faceful of liquid nitrogen. “That’s interesting.”
“What do you call yours?” Hammond snapped. “ ‘Boss’?”
“We’re sort of straying here,” I said. “I want to call Sergeant McCarvey.”
“Hold on. Let me talk to Sonia.” The two of them conferred as I watched Schultz try, without success, to get his foot out of the armrest. He was taking off his shoe when Hammond came back on the line.
“I didn’t say this to you. No cop said this to you.”
“Got it. You’re in Hawaii.”
“If this balls up the investigation, you’re going to be unemployed, as in no license. Just don’t turn it into a felony. Use your real name. Tell the truth as much as you can. Don’t even hint that you’re a police officer, or you’ll be looking at Spurrier up real close. Better still, don’t make the call.”
“I’m doing it. They’re my goddamn dog tags.”
“Okay. A bonehead’s a bonehead. But you got the rules, right?”
“Right. Thanks.” Schultz had twisted his left foot into a position that would have startled a yogi. “What are you going to do now?”
“Me?” Hammond was all innocence. “I’m going to roll my little love-turtle on her back and see what happens. Hey, Norbert, you want to listen in? You might learn something.”
“Whoops,” Schultz said, grabbing the edge of the metal desk.
“He’s busy,” I said. “Have fun.”
“Sonia, I can’t believe this is legal,” Hammond said. He hung up.
Schultz was balanced on one wheel, most of his left leg protruding through the armrest, as though he’d decided to slide out that way. I got him back to earth and helped him work his leg free while he sputtered and protested and hung on to the desk. The moment he had both feet on the ground, he lit up.
“Hard to see you two as friends,” he said from the center of a cumulus cloud of smoke.
“What do you call your wife?” I asked.
“Evelyn,” he said with dignity.
“Well, she’s a lucky woman,” I said. “Having a man who steers clear of diminutives and all.”
“And you,” he said with the air of a man used to having the last word, “steer clear of intimate relationships.”
“You’re right, I do. And I’m thinking about it. Should I use the speakerphone?”
He was putting his shoe back on, trying to see his foot through the fumes. “For what?”
“For McCarvey.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said promptly.
“All brains and no guts.” I punched the button on top of the speaker to shut it off, picked up the phone, and dialed.
The recording told me in a chipper tone that the number I had dialed had been changed. The new number followed, spliced together to create a mechanically musical effect, like Chinese spoken by an android. I wrote it on my palm with Schultz’s ballpoint, which said PROPERTY OF ARLO’S HAPPY LIQUORS on the side.
“New number,” I explained, holding up my hand. Schultz, radiating disapproval, closed his eyes and puffed away.
Four rings, then: “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice, low, slow, and possibly drunk.
“Is Sergeant McCarvey there?”
A long pause. “Who is this?” She sounded like she’d been snakebit on the tongue.
Tell the truth. “My name is Simeon Grist. I’m in the office of Dr. Norbert Schultz, in Los Angeles.” Schultz’s eyes flew open but, hell, it was true.
“And you want to talk to Jace?”
“Well,” I said, choosing words, “we know that Sergeant McCarvey was under VA care for a while. This is just an informational call.”
The woman laughed. It sounded like her very first. “Fucking government,” she said.
Spurrier, wearing his latex gloves, breathed down the back of my neck. “This isn’t actually official government business-”
“My husband’s dead. He’s been dead two years and four months. Typical.” She laughed again, getting the knack, dark and loose and slurred. “You jackass,” she said.
“I’m sorry. Was his death service-related?” At the word “death,” Schultz got up and started to pace the room, trailing smoke like the little engine that could.
“Go to hell,” Mrs. McCarvey said. “Fucking bureaucrats. Jace was murdered. Eight years he gave you clowns, and you don’t even talk to each other.”
“This is very embarrassing,” I said. “Did they catch his, um, his murderer?” Schultz pushed the button on the speaker in time to hear her snort.
“Fat chance. Cops are no better than you are. Hey, wait a minute. You got anything to do with pensions?”
“Pensions?” Schultz waved his hand at me, trying for my attention.
“My pension. Jace’s pension. You listening, or what? Can you help me get it? I’ve been down there more times ’n I can count. I’ve sent letters-”
“I’m sure,” I said, looking at Schultz, “that if you’ve got all of Sergeant McCarvey’s papers-” Schultz nodded encouragingly.
“Course I got ’em. Jesus. Who else would have them?”
I covered the mouthpiece and drew a breath. So did Schultz. “And his dog tags,” I said. “They might want to see his dog tags.”
Silence. No, not quite. I could hear her breathing, and a television made meaningless happy noise in the background.
“Mrs. McCarvey?” I said.
“Don’t you dare come around here, Da
rryl,” she said at last. “Don’t you dare. I’ll cut your fucking head off.”
She hung up.
Schultz was staring at the speaker as though he expected Mrs. McCarvey to burst through it, knife in hand. “She thought you were him,” he said.
“And,” I said, “she knows who he is. Darryl.”
Schultz straightened the speaker on the desk and dropped into his chair. “You’re going to have to-”
“I know,” I said. I picked up the phone and called Ike Spurrier.
That night I stopped at the Paragon Ballroom on the way home. The only work in progress was being done by a very old man with an electric floor polisher who was buffing the hardwood in long slow straight sweeps, like someone cutting furrows into garden soil. The old man wore a loose, drab gray workshirt and baggy checked trousers, and he was bent forward in a position that looked painfully permanent, his shoulders hunched forward, rounded as a drawn bow. He never took his eyes from the floor.
Mickey Snell, who apparently never went home and never stopped talking, followed several steps behind, downloading information about the grain of the wood and the hardwood pegs that held the floor in place. The old man ignored him, wrapped in a cone of concentration and the hum of his machine.
The bar was in place against the wall, dark wood gleaming. Brass spigots spouted from its surface. On the other side of the room stood a gaudy vertical arrangement of three large glass seashells above a white porcelain basin: Ferris’s fountain for the holy water, dry for now, and surrounded by dozens of spiky orchid plants.
When I stepped further into the room, the bandstand sparkled. Foil stars had been pinned to the deep blue drape, and more stars, made out of cut glass and silver wire, hung overhead from lengths of nylon filament. Clouds of cotton blossomed above the stars. High above it all was a pale crescent moon of old-fashioned milk glass, lighted from within. Max’s heaven.
With the hum of the old man’s buffer and the squeak of Mickey’s voice for company, I walked through the building. The kitchen was, as Henry had promised, dire, but it was spacious and I couldn’t see the food handlers having any problems, and the ovens were too small for anyone to hide in. The bathrooms had been scrubbed until some of the tiles had fallen out. A room beyond the bathrooms was locked, and I figured it had to be Mickey Snell’s office. The rear door was made of iron and was bolted shut. It would be open for the wake, but we’d have a man outside.
The conversation with Spurrier had been loud and long, and neither he nor Schultz had been happy when I put it on the speaker to give myself a witness. I’d handed Spurrier Mrs. McCarvey’s phone number and told him how the dog tags had led me to her, but I hadn’t given him the news that Henry and I had been the ones who found the Farm Boy’s apartment. He’d figure it out sooner or later anyway.
It had taken some doing, but I’d declined an invitation to the Sheriffs’ substation to discuss matters further. If Spurrier wanted to talk to me in person, I told him, he could do it tomorrow night, at the wake. Like Hammond, Spurrier had discounted the possibility that the Farm Boy would show, but we agreed to some commonsense rules that would allow him to put himself and three men on the scene without attracting attention. Spurrier was too experienced a public servant to risk missing the action if anything actually happened.
I sat on the edge of the stage and watched the old man work as Mickey chattered. He looked like one of Millet’s potato farmers, like someone who hadn’t lifted his eyes from the ground in years. Still, I thought, he’d managed to get old. That was more than most of the Farm Boy’s victims had done. Getting old may be no bargain, as my father never tired of saying, but all in all I thought I’d prefer it to the alternative.
I wouldn’t mind getting old the way that Max had. I’d want company, though.
Staying on the unpolished part of the floor and dodging the ghosts of dancers from the thirties, I said goodnight, and then I pointed Alice west on Santa Monica Boulevard for the long drive home. Twenty minutes later, at Twenty-sixth Street, persuading myself that all I was doing was avoiding a surprise visit from Spurrier, I turned left and went to Eleanor’s.
22 ~ Calligraphy
The door opened four inches and snagged on the inside chain, and Robert peered out, looking grim. When he saw me his face cleared.
“It’s your detective,” he called over his shoulder. Then he closed the door and slipped the chain, and when it opened again I saw Alan a foot behind him. Alan had a gun in his hand. It looked heavy and incongruous.
“Hi to you, too,” I said.
Alan glanced down at the gun and his mouth twisted wryly. “It’s been quite a morning,” he said. “Come in. Have some coffee?”
It was just past eleven, and the caffeine from Eleanor’s special brew was still rampaging through my bloodstream. Too much coffee can elevate you unnaturally, scramble your judgment, create a kind of false euphoria. “Sure,” I said.
“It’s fresh.” He stepped aside to make room for me. “God knows we need it.”
Close up, I could see a swelling under Robert’s left eye. Alan had a fat lower lip. “What happened?”
“Thugs,” Alan said. “Swine. Swine run in herds, don’t they?”
“I don’t think swine run at all,” Robert said. “I think that’s the point of being swine.”
“ These swine drove,” Alan said, tucking the gun into the belt holding up his Ivy League chinos. “Six of them, all scraped bald like medieval executioners. They got us outside the bank.”
“The two of you?” I asked.
“And Christy,” Robert said. He looked at Alan’s face and shook his head, and his ponytail did a little hula. “I’ll get the coffee.”
“Christy’s in the den,” Alan said, turning away from the Early American living room as though to guide me.
“Did they hurt him?”
“They would have,” Alan said. “We were in the parking lot when they came around the end of the row and drove toward us, as though they meant to run us over. You know, you see things like that in the movies, and the hero always jumps free at the last minute, but of course he knows it’s coming, he’s rehearsed it a hundred times and there are probably mattresses everywhere to catch him when he lands-” He broke off, listening to himself, and put three fingers over his mouth and then drew a deep breath. “Anyway, they stopped in time, and got out of the car. The driver was screaming, ‘Look where you’re going, faggot,’ and I saw that two of them had baseball bats in their hands.”
“Jesus.”
“Well Christy just jumped into the middle of them. He poked his fingers straight into one man’s eyes and banged his head into another one’s face, and then one of them lifted his bat and I got to him somehow and grabbed the end and kept pulling it around behind him, and he fell down. And then I had the bat, by the fat end, you know? and someone punched me and I hit him with the bat on the forehead and it started bleeding, and then all of a sudden the Sheriffs were there. Three of them, two men and a woman. One of them hit Robert, by mistake, I think.”
Spurrier, never far from center stage in my imagination, pirouetted into the spotlight in his yellow tweed sport coat. “Had the Sheriffs been watching Christy?”
“No.” He smiled and immediately regretted it. A knuckle touched the swollen lip. “They were staking out the bank. They had a tip it was going to be robbed.”
“So this is it? Your lip and Robert’s eye? No other damage?”
“Our confidence has a few wrinkles in it. On the other hand, our self-esteem is absolutely flowering. Six skinheads and three of us, and we walked away. Of course, they claimed we’d started it. Claimed I’d commented on their haircuts, if you can believe that.”
“Did the deputies?”
“No. These guys have been around for a while. They beat up a friend of ours a week ago behind Pavilions, you know, the market on Santa Monica?”
“Are the clowns in jail?”
“If they’re not out already. One phone call to Mommy or Thug Ce
ntral and they’ll skate.”
“Are you still out here?” Robert asked, emerging from the kitchen with a tray full of coffee things. “Is there an invisible barrier blocking the door to the den?”
“Christy came out of this thing okay?” I asked again. “No trauma or anything?”
“Christy?” Alan sounded surprised. “Right now I’d say Christy is the least traumatized person I know.”
“Simeon doesn’t know about it,” Robert said. A look passed between them.
I watched them look at each other. “Know about what?”
“We’ll let Christy tell you,” Robert said. “He could have told you hours ago if Alan hadn’t lulled you to sleep in the hall.”
Neither of them gave any indication of being ready to move. “Well, let’s go give Christy his chance,” I said.
“Take your coffee,” Robert said, holding out the tray. “We’ll be in the living room.”
I chose a cup from Robert’s tray, grabbed two sugar cookies to go with it, and then stood stymied in front of the closed door, coffee in one hand and cookies in the other. Alan reached around me and turned the knob, looking vindicated.
“What would people do without lawyers?” Robert asked behind me.
The den was still crowded with throw rugs, lap robes, pillows, and plants. In the middle of the clutter, behind a card table littered with Alan’s yellow legal pads, Christy looked up at me. He had a pencil in one hand and another behind his ear, and he looked five years younger than he had when I’d seen him last.
“Simeon. Perfect,” he said, standing. He caught his knees on the underside of the table and it began to tilt foward, the pads sliding over its surface toward me. I stood there, juggling coffee and cookies, but Christy leaned forward nimbly and caught the table in both hands. I’d never seen him move so fast.
“What do you think?” he asked, picking up one of the pads and holding it out. Penciled on the top page, in large, dark letters I read: TO THE MAX. He lifted the page and folded it back, and on the page underneath I saw the words,
THE MAX GROVER FOUNDATION FOR RECLAIMING LIVES.
“Sounds great. What is it?”
The Bone Polisher sg-6 Page 23
