Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  Nana yanked her arm away and cranked her eyes around to look at me again, but I was too close and she couldn't focus. The tub of lard at the front door, the one who'd demanded seven dollars earlier in the evening, had put the mike down and was staring at us. It wasn't a sweet stare.

  "I'm not going anywhere. Not with you, anyway. Someone reminded me of a word for you about an hour ago. You're a louse. 'He's a louse,' he said, and I said, 'You're right.' " Her voice was thicker than maple syrup.

  "And you're loaded. In fact, you're loaded beyond any kind of civilized belief."

  "Get off my back," she said. "In fact, as you might say, college boy, get out of my sight. You're on that toadstool's side. Lips that touch toadstools shall never touch mine." She giggled halfheartedly and then hiccupped.

  "Honey," I said, "I don't mean to go all masculine on you, but if you don't get your ass in gear, I'm going to go up to that cretin over there and take his microphone away, and then I'm going to tell the crowd exactly where they can find Tiny's stash of loads. I might even tell them who gave me the key to this shithole."

  "You wouldn't," she said. She was having no trouble focusing now.

  "Watch," I said. I put down her drink and started around her. She made a feeble grab at my arm and missed. I was up the steps toward the door in two long strides, and Mr. Adipose was looking up in a dimly alarmed fashion when Nana finally caught up with me.

  "Okay," she hissed with a slight stagger as she tried to stop moving. "Let's go." The lump of animal fat on the stool looked at us suspiciously, and she added, "Darling." She rubbed her forehead on my arm, teetered precariously, and said to him, "Some men. You never know when they're going to show up."

  Fatso started to say something, but I shoved the curtain open and hauled Nana outside.

  Nana shuddered, and I started to laugh. Now that we were outside she was subdued. "You're crazy, you know that?" she said. "Tiny could take your head off."

  "It's time to be crazy. Nothing else will work now. Our whole problem is that we've been acting like we were dealing with sane people. If anybody on this case were sane, it wouldn't have happened in the first place. Get in." I held Alice's passenger door open.

  She did, a little more cautiously than usual, and then slumped onto the seat. She was silent until we were a couple of blocks up Santa Monica. Then she snickered. "Boy," she said, "I've been kidnapped. Right out from under Tiny's nose." The snicker turned into a laugh, and she leaned back and shook her head.

  "I'm glad you're amused. It may have cost you a job."

  "Who cares? There's other nude bars. I can always go back to the airport." She waved a loose hand in front of her face as though she were too warm. "Swept away," she said.

  "Or go back to computer school."

  "Oh, sure," she said. "DOS eight-point-oh or whatever it's up to now. It could be DOS thirty-six for all I know. Or care."

  "DOS thirty-eight sounds like your IQ this evening. In your case, DOS stands for Downers Over Sense."

  "You're not my mother. You're not even dead old dad." She stopped talking abruptly and swallowed. Eventually she said, "He was there tonight, by the way."

  "Who was?"

  "Dead old dad. Aren't you listening?"

  "What'd he want?"

  She squinted fuzzily through the windshield. "Where are we going?"

  "We're going home."

  "Whose home?"

  "What did your father want?"

  She tangled her fingers together and twisted her hands. "If I answer you, will you answer me?" It sounded like a kids' game.

  "Sure."

  "Promise?"

  I kept driving.

  "He had this great idea," she said. Her voice was very tight. "He thought maybe we should move to Hawaii. Just the two of us, just Daddy and Nana. He wants to buy a club there."

  "Club? What kind of club?"

  She made a strangled sound that was somewhere between laughing and crying. "Sherlock Holmes," she said. "What kind of club do you think? Honest to fucking Christ, what kind of club do you think? Oh, Jesus," she said, and then everything fell apart and she was crying full out, nothing cosmetic or dainty, the kind of crying that puffs up people's eyes and makes stuff dangle from their nose.

  I pulled Alice over to the curb and tried to get an arm around her. "No," I said. "He didn't mean that."

  She yanked herself away from me. "Don't you tell me what he meant, you middle-class white asshole. He meant a nude club. He meant a place where girls dance naked and be real sweet to the customers." She leaned against the door opposite me.

  "And what were you supposed to be?"

  "Me?" she said. "I'm supposed to be Miss Oriental Universe. That way he gets to make money and watch me at the same time."

  Traffic, L.A. traffic, whizzed by us as if it knew where it was going. The stoplight in front of us turned from green to red and then back again before I had any idea what to say.

  "Honey," I said at last, "you're an orphan. Shine him on, say good-bye. Give Daddy a good punt into the far, far end of the end zone where Toby lives and start over."

  She looked up at me, and her face, reflecting the bluish glow of the streetlights, was streaked with tears. "Right," she said. "Sure. Except you're talking about my father. When I was a little girl, you know? I mean, a real little girl, before . . . Oh, shit. Forget it."

  "Nana." I put my hand on her arm. "I'm not going to forget it. For God's sake, trust me. I deserve that much."

  "Why should I trust you all of a sudden? I haven't trusted anybody since I was twelve."

  "Then don't trust me. You're on your own anyway. You've known that for years."

  "I used to pray, you know? When I was eleven, twelve years old and he started coming into my room, I used to pray. I prayed real loud. I hoped Mom would hear me even if You Know Who didn't. Nobody heard me."

  "I hear you."

  "And who knows what you want? Why should you want anything different? I'm shit. I've always been shit." She lifted her knees and dropped her chin onto them, crumpling into a smaller space than I would have believed possible. "If I hadn't been shit, he'd have treated me like a good little girl. He wouldn't have wanted me."

  "He's shit," I said. "Toby's shit. Listen, everybody's shit sometimes. Everybody's crazy, and nobody wants to be. You never had a chance."

  She threw both arms over her face and wailed. I sat as far from her as I could get in the enclosed space of the car and concentrated on counting to twenty. There was nothing else to do. She had her face cradled in her arms.

  "Nana," I said into her sobs, "I can't fix anything. I can't make your life right, only you can do that. But you can do that. I'm not trying to sound like the Hour of Power or Ann Landers, but you can. And you already know it."

  No answer, but she was crying more softly. Maybe she was listening. Great. Now I had to say something.

  "I can't tell you anything you don't already know. Most of the time I don't even believe anybody can help anybody. But I do believe you've got to try."

  Nana was sitting up now, gazing out the windshield through swollen eyes. Tears dripped from her chin. "So what should I do?" she asked.

  I thought. "Eat out more often," I said.

  Her look was an eloquent reproach. "If that's supposed to be funny, it isn't."

  "I'm not a guru. I don't know what I'm talking about. But since you're acting as if I did, it seems to me that you're trapped inside your life, same as Amber was. She said she'd lost the map. What I think she meant was that she'd lost the map that would get her out."

  "Out of what?"

  "The track she knew. The track she'd worn down chasing herself around and around until it felt familiar because she was following her own footsteps. Go from home to the club. Go from the club to home. Stop on the way to score. She could have quit any time, but she didn't. It caused her pain, but the pain was familiar. She was like everybody else. She was used to the familiar pain and afraid of the pain that might be new. Maybe what she sho
uld have done was throw some cold water on her face and stop. Get up the next morning and do something new."

  "Amber was a junkie."

  "You're not."

  "Not yet, anyway."

  "You're not going to be a junkie. You won't let it happen. I won't let it happen."

  "You," she said. "You can't sit on my shoulder forever, telling me what's right and what's wrong. Life doesn't work that way."

  "I don't have to. You already know."

  "Tell me what I know."

  "You know you don't have to go back to the club, for one thing. Sex is what went wrong first in your life, and you're selling sex for a living. I mean, Jesus, if Daddy wants into your life-style, it's the wrong life-style."

  "I should learn from Daddy?" She shook her head again, and I could feel her withdraw.

  "Daddy's nothing, Daddy's less than nothing. Daddy's just litmus paper to tell you when you're wrong. When the people we should hate cheer up, we're doing something wrong. We should deprive them of that, if only for the simple pleasure of watching their faces fall."

  "That's all what I'm not supposed to do. What should I do?"

  "How the hell do I know? Go to the zoo. Grow a mustache. Go back to computer school. Become Florence Nightingale, work with lepers. Run for Congress. You speak Korean and English; become a simultaneous translator for the U.N. Eat out more often."

  "I can't do those things."

  "When your girlfriend, may her flesh rot from her bones, first suggested you should dance nude, did you think you could do it?"

  She lifted her knees and crossed her beautiful arms over them. Then she rested her chin on her arms. "No," she said. "I thought it would kill me."

  "Of course you did. It was unthinkable. But now it's the pain you're familiar with."

  After a full minute, she nodded. "Learn from it," she said.

  I leaned back. I felt like I'd run twenty miles.

  She looked over at me. "I'm not stupid," she said.

  "Nana. You're probably smarter than I am."

  Her eyes engaged mine and held them. "Probably," she said, "but you're sweet." She reached out and tried to circle my wrist with her fingers. Her hand was too small. "I'm through at the club anyway," she said. "They'll never take me back now. Let's go home."

  "Home it is." We eased out into traffic, and she busied herself with her face. When I turned onto Vista she sat back and said, "Thanks."

  "You're welcome," I said. "We're here." I pulled Alice into the curb.

  "Okay," Nana said with a final sniffle. "I'm welcome. Well, I've got a hidden agenda. I promise I won't hang around, I won't be embarrassing."

  "Nana," I reminded her, "we're home."

  "And you're not going to walk me to the door?" She cupped my chin in her hands and raised her face to kiss me. It was almost a chaste little kiss—not quite, but almost. Minus the tip of her tongue it would have qualified. When it was finished she sighed. "You're going to let me walk across the courtyard alone?"

  Miss Courtney's etiquette class surfaced. "No," I said, "of course not."

  I joined her on the sidewalk, and she slipped her hand into mine. When I took it she gave me a squeeze. "I'm afraid of the birds of paradise," she said. "I really hate birds of paradise. They look like they eat meat."

  I stopped without knowing why. An unseasonal breeze stirred the foliage, the birds of paradise cawed silently, and I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle. Then I saw the strip of light. "Nana," I said, "did you leave your door open?"

  "In your hat. In Hollywood? That's what locks are for, right? Why?"

  "Because it's open now."

  She looked, and her grip on my hand tightened. "No," she said in a whisper. "I locked it this morning, same as ever."

  "Stay here. I'll be back in a minute."

  "No way, no way in the world. I'm not standing here alone. Come on, Simeon, let's just leave."

  "Go to the car," I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. "Lock the doors and stay there."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going in."

  She swallowed noisily, and I fought the urge to hush her. "Then I'm going with you."

  It didn't seem like either the time or place for an argument. "Suit yourself," I said. "But stay a few steps back and keep quiet."

  I could feel her behind me as I moved toward the open door. My running shoes made no sound, and neither, surprisingly, did her high heels. At the door I paused for a moment and listened. Either no one was inside or whoever it was was listening too. I lifted my foot, kicked the door open, and jumped to one side, yanking Nana with me.

  "Lordy," she said on an indrawn breath.

  The place was a ruin.

  Keeping her hand in my left, I reached around with my right and pushed the door all the way open. It slammed against the wall and groaned back toward us a foot or so. At least nobody was standing behind it. I counted my blessings and got as high as one.

  "I'm going in." I squeezed her hand hard enough to make the joints pop. "You stay right here. If I say come in, come in. If I say anything else at all, run like hell. Get to a phone and call the cops. Got it?"

  She nodded, looking past me into the room. I patted her cheek and went inside, hoping that I looked braver than I felt.

  The living room was a clutter of junk, trashed objects that had once been possessions. The overhead lights were on, or there wouldn't have been any light at all; both lamps were strewn in fragments across the floor. Pictures had been ripped from the walls and their frames snapped over somebody's knee, probably the same knee that had shattered Amber's arms. Bright shards of light glittered from sharp pieces of glass and mirror. There wasn't a square foot of the floor visible.

  The door leading to the hallway was closed. Stepping over the wreckage on the floor as if the crown jewels of England were scattered there, I moved toward it. I put a hand on the knob, counted ten to slow the beating of my heart, and shoved it open.

  Blackness. I felt for a light switch. There wasn't one. Either the hallway was unlighted, which seemed unlikely, or the switch was at the other end, a typically dysfunctional example of Hollywood architecture. I was going to have to go in. The small amount of light that filtered in from the living room would be just enough to allow me to see my own blood. Closing my mind's eye tight, I went in.

  More junk littered the floor, but otherwise the hallway was empty. The bathroom door yawned open at its far end, and I snapped on the light inside. Nobody behind me, nobody in the bathroom. The destroyer hadn't missed much: even the mirror on the medicine cabinet had been broken. Aspirin, hairpins, and tampons were scattered across the tiles.

  That left the bedroom. The door was ajar, and I shoved it, hard. Lights were on, throwing the devastation into sharp, ugly relief.

  The bed had been eviscerated. A sharp knife had slit the mattress from top to bottom, and the stuffings had been thrown around the room. The contents of the open closet were strewn around like the random refuse of a tornado.

  Across one wall, written on a crooked diagonal in Nana's lipstick, were the words WHORES DIE.

  "I don't believe it," I said.

  I heard a sudden sound behind me and whirled, my hands drawn back and open to blind or kill. I was halfway into the air when I saw Nana. I grabbed the edge of the table to stop myself, and my feet tangled in a blanket and I fell. It was a heavy fall.

  "That wasn't your cue," I said from the floor. "If you heard that, you should be running by now."

  "And leave you here alone?" She reached down to help me up. All her attention was concentrated on me. She wasn't even looking at the room. If I hadn't been flat on my face and feeling like an idiot, I would have been flattered.

  "You're okay?" she asked.

  I waved away her offer of help and stood up. "Yeah, sure. I'm fine."

  "Jeez," she said, finally looking around. The words on the wall caught her eye. "Oh. That's really sick."

  I waited until my pulse had slowed to double speed
. "What do you need?"

  "For what?"

  "To leave, to be gone for a few days while we arrange to get this cleaned up. Find what you need and let's get out of here."

  "Why? Why should I go? Some dickhead trashed my place and probably took everything I own, but why should I leave?" Her jaw was as knobby as Lincoln's before he grew his beard. "Let's just straighten up a little, and I'll stay here."

  "You're leaving," I said. "I don't think anybody took anything. I think something's on the move and you're in its way. I don't know why, but you are. Get what you need. We're going."

  She took a steely look around. "I don't need anything. You got a toothbrush and shampoo, right? You got aspirin? We are going to your place, aren't we?"

  "Of course we are."

  "Oh, darling," she said. "I thought you'd never ask."

  The birds chirped at her when we let ourselves in. It had to be for her; they never did it for me. Nana moved to the birds' cage and made little kissing sounds at them. They both looked at her. Hansel, I think, cocked his head appealingly.

  She pushed a finger into the cage.

  "Careful," I said. "The little peckers peck."

  "Not me they don't," she said smugly. Hansel jumped up onto her finger and perched there, looking more proud of himself than anything with the brains God grudgingly doled out to a bird had any right to look. "He's sweet," Nana said.

  "I thought you hated birds."

  "Well, hell, I'd rather you had a Weimaraner trained to attack, especially after tonight. But women learn early to be satisfied."

  "Explain tonight."

  She coaxed her finger back through the bars, and Hansel leapt up onto the perch and let loose a volley of song. "Who knows?" she said, watching him. "Maybe it didn't have anything to do with anything. Maybe it was a bunch of skaggers who ran out of skag or some Jesus freaks who ran out of Jesus. Maybe they didn't even know who lived there."

  "Do you believe that?"

  "No." She turned to face me.

  "Me neither. Where murder is concerned, I don't believe in coincidence. I'm just glad you weren't there."