Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  " 'Cause," the Korean girl said, sitting back slightly. I must have looked pretty fierce myself. " 'Cause it's not his fault, dammit."

  "Then whose fault is it?"

  She passed a forefinger over her front teeth, checking to see that they were still there, and then cranked out a smile. A very small smile. "He's not usually like this. He's just drunk."

  "So am I," I said. "And I've wanted to kill somebody all day." I ground my foot into his throat. "Yum, yum," I said.

  A circle of people had gathered around us, watching as passively as if we were the film at eleven on the evening news. "Hey," the Korean girl called to the room at large, "isn't anybody gonna do anything?" Most everybody in the circle looked away, unwilling to get involved, but one zealous-looking jerk in a frontier-style plaid shirt shouldered through the folks around him and sprinted for the pay phone. "Do something," the Korean girl pleaded. "Jesus, something terrible could happen."

  "If something terrible hasn't already happened, I'd like to read your datebook," I said. The bar had hushed except for the sound of the plaid shirt punching buttons on the telephone. I felt some of the adrenaline wane, and I looked down at Mr. Beautiful. His face was very red and the veins on both sides of his forehead were throbbing. With some reluctance, I lifted my foot. He rolled his head from side to side, gasping for breath and trying to spit out the blood in his mouth.

  "Toby," the Korean girl was saying in thick Texan, "Toby, honey, I'm sorry." If I live until the third millennium, I'll never understand women.

  I bent down. "I can either rearrange the rest of your facial furniture, or not," I said. "It's up to you."

  "I'm through," he said.

  "Toby," the girl said, bending over him. "Sweetie, you okay?"

  He brought one hand up to his throat. "Do I look okay, you fucking idiot?" he said. I stepped on his throat again, hand and all, just to refresh his etiquette. He gagged, and the girl grabbed ineffectually at my ankle. As her fingers scraped at my skin I could hear the plaid shirt talking on the phone. I raised my shoe and inspected it. Mr. Beautiful hadn't bled on my laces.

  He coughed. "Is he calling the cops?" he rasped, staring wildly at Mr. Zealous.

  "I certainly hope so," I said.

  "Jesus. Get me out of here. Now, get me out of here right now." He was talking to the circle, and he looked panicked. A buzz arose from the circle as its members began to discuss what they'd just seen as though it had happened on the other side of a television screen. "I can't have the cops," he said desperately. No one looked at him.

  "Why?" I said. "The cops are a good deal compared to me. If it weren't for the sweetheart of the rodeo here, you'd be the Fourth of July dinner special. Asshole on the half shell."

  "You don't understand," he said. "You," he added vehemently. I was the only one making eye contact; all the others were melting away toward their tables, figuring out what they'd say tomorrow when they told the story. The music kicked in again, still Led Zeppelin, and he raised his voice. "You've got to get me out of here. If you don't, I'm finished." I looked over my shoulder, but there was no doubt about it. He was talking to me.

  "Why in the world," I said, "would I help you?"

  "Five hundred dollars," he said. "I'll pay you five hundred dollars to get me home."

  Five hundred dollars sounded pretty good. It even made one or two of the chickens glance back. The plaid shirt had hung up the phone. In some corner of my subconscious my bankbook gave out a starved squeal. "Cash?" I said.

  "Cash."

  "Seven fifty," I said.

  "Fine, fine, whatever. Just get me home."

  "Why can't you get out of here yourself?"

  "We got rid of the limo," he said, rubbing at his throat. "The asshole driver wanted to watch the fireworks."

  "What about her?" I gestured toward the Korean girl.

  His eyes rolled. "Who cares?"

  I lifted my foot again. The muscles in my leg twitched rebelliously. "What about her?"

  "Send her home in a cab," he said sullenly.

  "Toby," the girl said in an anguished squeal. "You got to be kidding."

  "Just get her away from me," said the hero on the floor.

  "That's the nicest thing you could do for her," I said, "but it costs."

  "In my pocket."

  "You can't," the Korean girl said. "I'm not old enough to drink, Toby. Cripes, you know about the ABC and the Spice Rack. I'll lose my job."

  "Tough shit," he said.

  Something dropped into place behind the beautiful face, a cold front that turned her dark eyes into holes I wouldn't have wanted to fall into. "Listen," she said in a tone of voice that could have sliced ripe tomatoes, "you can't shovel it at anyone forever. Sooner or later, you have to be nice."

  "Hey," he said, glaring at her, "do you know how to spell 'fuck you'?"

  I shoved my hand into the right front pocket of the hero's leather pants and came up with a wad of bills, mostly of the impressive denominations you see in ads for the California lottery. "Where do you live?" I asked her.

  "Hollywood." She looked at Mr. Beautiful as though he were something that someone gravely ill had spit onto the floor. "You're going to be sorry, Toby," she said.

  I gave her a fifty. "He's pretty sorry already," I said. "This is for the cab." I handed her a hundred. "And this is for your dry cleaning."

  She looked from me down to him, the dregs of his drink dripping from her flowing hair. She still looked good. "Yeah? Who's going to clean me? Sooner or later he's going to come back and make smooches, and I'm going to brain him with a flower pot, and when I do he'll kill me. You don't know him."

  "Honey, if he gives you any kind of trouble, even constructive criticism, I'll scramble him into an omelet and have him for breakfast." I leaned down to pick him up.

  "Simeon," Roxanne said from behind the bar, "you're not going to help him?"

  "It's better for everybody," I said, pulling Loverboy to his feet. "Otherwise, she's going to have to go to the police station, too."

  "No way in the world," the Korean girl said. "Not as long as I can still run."

  "But he's such scum," Roxanne said plaintively. "And he's got it coming."

  I heard a siren in the distance. Loverboy tugged at me, looking trapped and terrified. I shrugged it off.

  "When the cops get here, tell them he's already left. Tell them his horse showed up. I promise you, if he screws around with her again, I'll make sure he eats the whole deck, okay?" I turned to the Korean girl and fished a crumpled card from my pocket. "There's a phone number here. Use it if he gives you a problem. You can call it anytime, day or night." I looked up at Roxanne. "You going to help out or not?"

  She shrugged. "I guess. I'll get her a cab."

  "Get her two if she wants them, they're on Prince Valiant here. Are you going to be here when I get back?" The siren was louder now.

  Roxanne gave me a dubious look and then a small shrug. "What the hell," she said.

  "See you then," I said. I put my arm around the hero's shoulders. "Come on, beautiful," I told him, "this is your exit."

  For the first twenty minutes or so after he told me to turn right—north, up toward the Malibu Colony—we shared your basic sullen silence. His fringe flapped in the breeze through the open window, and he sucked at his mangled tongue and fingered his jaw once in a while, but other than that he kept his conversational skills to himself.

  That was fine with me.

  Traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway was light in both directions. The fireworks were about to start, and most people were staying put. Sweet Alice, the low-rider's special I'd won at cards from a glue-sodden card player named Jaime on a night of which I had only fragmentary memories because of Jaime's generosity with his glue, was chugging along in an exemplary fashion. She was in temporary remission from the tubercular cough that had plagued her recently. Maybe it was the carburetor, whatever that was.

  At any rate, that was the limit of my mechanical sophistication, a s
tate I'd long considered remedying. My long-ago graduate adviser when I was taking my doctorate in English, a waspish and perfectly dressed Ph.D. named Miles Brand, maintained that there were people who were put on earth solely to tend to the health of carburetors, and that any attempt by the rest of us to penetrate those mysteries was nothing more or less than irresponsible monkeying with God's master plan. Miles's comfortable faith in the secure future of the upper classes was much greater than mine, probably a result of his lifelong love for Victorian novelists. Trollope, Dickens, Gissing, and Thackeray in the nineteenth century—and, for that matter, Miles in the twentieth—didn't seem to worry as much about gravity as I did. What happens to the top of the social pyramid when you pull out the bottom three or four layers? In all, it seemed to me that the people who understood carburetors could get along much better without the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray than the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray could get along without the people who understood carburetors.

  About twelve miles up the road, Mr. Beautiful stirred. He dabbed once or twice at his lip and then reached into his leather pocket and pulled out a small wad of tissue. "Don't hit any bumps," he said sulkily.

  I aimed for something that could have been a large tortoise or a small land mine and hit it. Alice bounced. "Anything else?" I said. Roxanne had given us some paper towels as we left, and he'd wadded a couple around his cut palm. They got in his way as he tried to unwrap the tissues. He swore sharply and pulled the paper towels loose from his hand, tossed them to the floor, and peeled open the tissue. In it were six white pills, four small ones and two that were larger.

  I've always had an active pharmaceutical curiosity, a vestige of several years of frequently terrifying experimentation. Against my will, I said, "What's that?"

  "A load," he said. "Hey, don't make me talk, I've got to get some spit together." He worked his mouth for a moment, then threw his head back and tossed down all six at once. They went down as though he'd oiled his throat. "One perfect world coming up," he said.

  "What's a load?" I'd never heard of it.

  "Four codeine—four grams each—and two Doriden. I don't like you very much right now, but I could be crazy about you in a few minutes."

  He swallowed hard a couple of times and leaned back. A mile glided by in the thickening dark. To our left, on the beach, one premature rocket slithered its lonely way into the heavens and then blew itself to smithereens, making a bright silver spider in the sky. "Have you got a mirror?" he asked.

  I swiveled the rearview toward him without speaking.

  He adjusted it and then looked at himself critically. First he extended the nipped tongue and regarded it. Then he took his nose, which I didn't remember having hit, between thumb and forefinger and bent it gently, once to the right and two or three times to the left. He touched a swollen lip and let out a whoosh of breath. "You messed me up pretty good," he said conversationally. "They'll have a shit fit tomorrow."

  "What's tomorrow?"

  "The usual, only earlier. I've got a six o'clock call."

  "For what?"

  He returned the mirror to something approximating its original position. "For what?" he repeated. "You're telling me you don't know who I am?"

  "I haven't got the faintest idea who you are or who you're supposed to be. All I know is that you pick on people who can't pick back."

  "Damsels in distress, is that the bit?" He whistled slowly and tunelessly between his teeth for a moment. "Damsel, that's a corruption of 'mademoiselle,' did you know that?" His voice was beginning to sound a little dreamy.

  "Yes," I said.

  "There are so many words," he said slowly. "Eskimos are supposed to have a hundred words for snow because it's so important to them. Not because they like it, but because it's important. Do you know how many words we have for chicks?"

  "Well, chicks," I said. "That's already a bad beginning."

  "Oh, spare me. I am so tired of men who are sensitive to women. That little girl tonight, Nana, now that's a chick. You know what's her favorite art form? MTV. What does she read on a cold winter's night? The Enquirer. When she wants a challenge, People magazine. That's why she likes me. Oh, J forgot. You're not supposed to know who I am."

  "I don't know who you are, and I'm losing interest rapidly."

  "But Nana's interested. Nana's more than just interested. Nana's going to put up with anything I do because I'm supposed to be somebody special. Anything I want to do, that's okay with Nana. I mean, she's pretty enough to look at twice, but she's just another brainless chick. One out of a hundred and fifty million." He swallowed again and closed his eyes. "Oooh, here it comes," he said. Whatever was coming, it arrived quietly. He sat with his head thrown back. His eyelids twitched. There was a half smile on his face, slack and unmuscled, that robbed his features of the malicious intelligence that had animated them so far. Up close he looked older, and I revised my estimate of his age upward: thirty-four, maybe, holding for dear life on to twenty-nine. Getting a little pouchy here and there, but preserved from ruin by his matinee-idol bone structure. Not for long, though.

  It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. Almost, but not quite. If there's anything I've learned in my work, it's this: You can always find reasons to feel sorry for shitheads. And when you're finished, they're still shitheads.

  He moaned. It sounded like a moan of pleasure. Then, slowly, he pulled himself upright and squinted through the windshield as if he were trying to figure out how far we'd come.

  "We keep starting conversations," he said. He was talking very slowly now, as if he had to fish the words out of oily water. "But we never finish them. Nobody ever finishes them. How many conversations have you ever really finished?"

  "I'll finish this one. As soon as you get out of the car."

  "Every time I try to talk to you, you give me a one-liner."

  "This is talking? I thought we were just passing the time until we got to where you could put some ice on your lip. There. That's a two-liner."

  "Hey," he said. "You're a person. I'm a person, too. You don't know what was going on. You don't know why I punched her. You came into the scene after the exposition was over. You were just changing channels."

  "I didn't like the show."

  "What, you put your fist through the screen every time you don't like a program?"

  "This wasn't a program. And I don't watch TV. I shot my last one when I was a kid and Nixon was telling me he wasn't a crook."

  "Well, hell. At least I didn't use a gun."

  "Nixon didn't feel the bullet. Now he's walking around acting like an elder statesman. Even his hairline looks better. Anyway, shooting a television set is one thing. Hitting a woman is another."

  "The impulse is the same."

  "Impulses are what civilization was created to protect us from."

  "Dead wrong." He swallowed thickly. "Civilization was set up to allow the largest number of people to gratify the largest number of impulses and get away with it." His head lolled forward for a moment, and then he snapped it upright. "Money, for example. Civilization's proudest product."

  "I thought it was room service."

  "Without civilization, Nana's family could kill me. With civilization, money can make it okay. Money is civilization's way of saying you're sorry. Do you really think she wouldn't let me hit her again if there was enough money involved?"

  "I think you're full of shit," I said. "Why don't you just sit there and nurse your cuts? Why should you want a conversation with me?"

  "It's just the dope," he said after a moment. "Loads make you want to talk to everybody. You want one?"

  "No, thanks," I said. "I don't want to talk to everybody."

  We rode in silence for a moment. Then he began to laugh. "You really don't like me, do you? I'm Toby Vane."

  "Simeon Grist," I said grudgingly. Manners are manners.

  "Look," he said. "I'm sorry, okay? I've had a crappy day, a crappy week, in fact, and I was loaded on the
wrong stuff. My momma always told me not to drink."

  "I'm not the one you should apologize to."

  "I'll call her, with you right there, when we get home. I'll go down on my knees. I'll weep and wail. I'll send her a fur coat. I think I've got one around someplace." He laughed again. "It's been a long time since anyone told me I was full of shit."

  "Maybe that's your problem. Where do I turn, anyway? We're halfway to Oxnard."

  "It's past Zuma. Encinal Canyon, do you know it?"

  "I'll find it."

  "Ooohh, ooohh, ooohh. Heading into the zone."

  "What zone?" I started looking for a speed trap.

  "The load zone. Loading zone. I don't know, whatever rarefied zone a load puts me into." He twisted the mirror back toward him and looked into it. "I'm a mess. I'm going to have to wear more makeup tomorrow than Joan Crawford. What do you do for a living?"

  "I'm an investigator."

  "But you're not a cop." There was some alarm in his voice.

  "If I were a cop, you'd have ink all over your fingers, wouldn't you?"

  "I put my footprints into cement once." He made a snorting sound, halfway between a wheeze and a laugh. "That's supposed to be a big deal."

  "Okay," I said. "You're an actor. You don't need to wear yourself out with oblique references. Here's Zuma."

  "It's a few miles farther. Hey, you, ease up. I'm not entirely hopeless."

  "You conceal it well."

  "You're not still pissed off," he said, turning his head slowly from side to side. "You're just trying to make a point. You made it already, so why don't you lighten up?"

  It was true. I wasn't still pissed off. My blues and my drunk were long gone. If anything, I was probably grateful. Toby Vane was not likely ever to become my favorite human being. Still, he was working hard to be liked, and he'd given me a chance to work off several weeks' worth of accumulated disgruntlement by slugging him, and to look like a hero in front of Roxanne while I was doing it.

  "What's it like being a detective?" Toby Vane said.

  "It's like permanently wondering where you left your car keys. What's it like being an actor?"

  "You get up early. You drive or get driven to wherever you're working. You sit in a makeup chair while somebody makes you look like a Singapore transvestite. Then you stand around all day waiting to say something that doesn't sound like anything anyone's ever said in all the time since they invented verbs. Then, if you're very lucky, a man hands you a check for a ridiculous amount of money and you go back home. You get to say things like, ‘That's not where I'm coming from, Loretta.' Or 'I live for the highs, baby. That way the lows are just places to visit.' I had to say both of those sentences yesterday. In front of millions of people, eventually."