The Bone Polisher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “You threw a chair over the roof?”

  “It’s not a very big house.”

  “No,” he said, giving it an unaffectionate eye, “it isn’t. It’s not very nice, either.”

  “Did you kill him, Christopher?”

  “Do you honestly think I could kill Max?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

  “Max was the best human being I ever met.” He sounded like he was about to cry.

  “So somebody else killed him.”

  “Well, of course they did. One of those walking trash heaps he was always picking up on the street.”

  “Okay,” I said, popping the clip out of the gun and emptying it: seven rounds. I pocketed the bullets and held the gun out to him. “Get out of here.”

  He gazed at the gun without taking it. “But wait. You have to help me.”

  “Why do I have to do that?”

  “Because they’re looking for me.”

  “You should have called them in the first place.”

  “No,” he said. “I couldn’t.” He shook his head, and the joints in his neck popped. “Absolutely not.”

  “It’s just made it worse for you.”

  “That means you told them about me.”

  “Christopher,” I said, as though to a five-year-old, “I had to explain why I was there.”

  He stared up at me, white completely surrounding the irises of his sunken eyes. “You told them everything?”

  “I didn’t tell them about the will. I didn’t tell them what you said about the voice-print.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” he said. “They’ll find out about the will in fifteen minutes, and that’ll be it. Do you know what those guys are like? About gay people, I mean? They’ll treat me like I’m Typhoid Mary. Gloves and masks and I don’t know what all.”

  The kidney Spurrier had slammed sent off a little skyrocket of pain. With the pain came a sudden, overpowering conviction that I was sick and tired of other people’s lives. “I’ve got to sit down,” I said.

  “It’s your house.” He was back to a sulk.

  “Do you want some water?”

  “I already took some.” He leaned over the edge of the couch, and I started fumbling in my pocket for the bullets, but all he came up with was a half-drained bottle of Evian.

  “Good,” I said, sitting in the only other chair in the room. “But don’t do that again.”

  “Do what?”

  “Bend over and pick up anything I can’t see.”

  He put a hand to his chest. “Oh, my God, you still think it was me.”

  “I.” It was involuntary.

  “You? Oh, I see. You’re correcting my grammar. How—”

  “Old-fashioned,” I suggested.

  “I was going to say how anal-retentive.”

  “I’m almost as tired of that,” I said, “as I am about hearing people talk about love.”

  “You really must be hurting,” he said, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of Evian. “Oh, I remember. ‘The fondness comes and goes.’ Gone at the moment?”

  I was tired, and my left kidney was sending out painful little pulses, blasts of cold air aimed at my back. “Leave me alone. When I want analysis, I’ll pay for it.”

  He drank. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to be detached when you’re peeling off the bucks to a shrink. That’s half the problem with psychiatry, the money.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “It doesn’t work.”

  “There’s that,” I acknowledged.

  He sat back, wedging the bottle between his legs. “I had analysts all over the South. Max was the only one who ever helped me, even a little.”

  “Throw me the water.” He tightened the cap and tossed it to me underhand, like a softball, and I drank half of what was left. It tasted like warm plastic. “Okay,” I said. “Tell me how Max helped you.”

  He grimaced. “Is this necessary?”

  “No. You could just leave.”

  The deep eyes fastened on mine and then cruised the room, settling on one of the darkened windows, and he sighed. “We always want to be the hero,” he said.

  “We want a lot of things,” I said.

  He gathered his lips together and let out another sigh, one with a big P at the beginning of it. “I was just a total waste,” he said. “A mess. I hurt people and stole from them. I told lies day and night. I lied about who I was and what I’d done and when I’d gone to the bathroom last and how tall I was. It didn’t matter what, I lied about it.”

  Outside a coyote yowled protest at the heat, and Christopher Nordine sat bolt upright at the sound. “Why?” I asked.

  His eyes remained fixed on the window. “Why does anybody lie? Because the truth isn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. I was a nobody. I hadn’t done anything, and I didn’t think I ever would. I was a little ball of fear with legs and arms, so I lied to everybody. Some of them believed me, or wanted to, so I despised them for believing me, and that made it all right to steal from them. And when they caught me stealing, I lied some more, and they believed me again.”

  The nakedness of it unsettled me, and I got up and opened the door to the deck. The moon hung white and remote across the canyon, cold and alone and proud of it. “They were lonely,” I suggested.

  He shrugged. “They were old.”

  I turned to face him. “Max was old, too.”

  “Max has been the same age all his life. Max is ageless.” He stopped and put the pale fingers to his eyelids. They shook. “Was. Was ageless.”

  “Did you lie to Max?”

  “Of course I did. I gave him all the best stuff, right off the bat. He laughed at me. He said it was up to me, I could tell him lies and he could pretend to believe me if I wanted him to, or he could help me lose the fear. Up to me.”

  “And you?”

  He crossed a leg and then uncrossed it. “You have to understand, this was in the first fifteen minutes we knew each other. We were at some stupid party in the hills, and there we were, standing in a corner, and he’s saying all this stuff to me. So I hesitated, really just trying to think of something plausible, and he laughed and said he’d pretend to believe me on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays we’d work on the fear.”

  I caught myself starting to grin: “What about weekends?”

  He saw my smile and the corners of his mouth went down, but then he relaxed and smiled back. It was a sweet smile, a slightly awkward smile that didn’t look like it had gotten much use. “I asked the same question. He said he read on weekends, and I could go lie to someone else if I liked. To keep in practice.”

  “And did he? Read a lot?”

  “All weekend long, fourteen hours a day. He’d get up around five and meditate for an hour, and then drink some tea, and the books would come out. Max learned to meditate in India. He went in the early sixties, years before anyone else did.”

  “And you decided to let Max work on the fear.”

  “No.” He looked around the room, not really seeing it. “I decided to pretend to work on the fear, to let him think I was—” He cleared his throat, and I threw him the bottle of water. He caught it with both hands but didn’t open it. “I said something like when do we start, and he said, ‘Right now.’ And then he whispered in my ear, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. I killed a man. Do you want to come home with me?’”

  For some reason, Max Grover’s long slender hand, clutching a lemon, popped into my mind’s eye. “Max killed someone?”

  “In India. It was self-defense, a French guy who was going to murder him and take his money. Max had a lot of money in those days. He got away with it, he literally got away with murder. And he told me about it, fifteen minutes after we met. A stranger, and he told me. So we went home, and we talked until two the next afternoon. Except for crying breaks. At the end, I couldn’t stop crying long enough to breathe, and he put his arms around me and held me until I went to sle
ep. I slept until it was dark again, and when I woke up he was still awake, still holding me. ‘Good start, Christy,’ he said. By then it was almost nine, I mean nine the next evening, and he went into the kitchen and made dinner.” His voice hadn’t changed, but tears were rolling down his cheeks. “And before we went to sleep again, he told me he’d take me in the morning to get an HIV test.”

  “And you tested positive.”

  “He knew I would. He’d felt it inside me.” He pushed himself to his feet slowly, putting a hand against the wall for support, and started toward the front door. “When I got the results, I went wild, just totally insane. I thought I’d be dead in days or something.” He got to the door, opened it, and closed it again, moving just to move. “Max drove me to the clinic to get the report. He took me back to his place—I’ll never forget that car ride, all those people on the streets who were going to live forever—and when we got home I started screaming and breaking things. He just handed me new things to throw until there wasn’t anything left in the living room small enough for me to break, and then he took me by the hand and led me into the kitchen so I could start on the dishes. I guess I broke a few, and then I passed out.” He turned toward the open door. “Did you say that was a deck?”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Let’s go out.”

  We climbed out onto the deck. Christopher’s eyes went to the moon, four-fifths full, hanging over the mountains to the west with a high thin line of cloud above it. Below us in the canyon people’s lights were on.

  “This is why you live here,” he said, taking it in.

  “It’s one reason.”

  “Did your girlfriend live here with you?”

  “She found it.”

  “So that’s another reason.” He looked around the deck and spotted the remaining canvas chair. “I guess the other chair’s out near the front door.”

  “Sit. I usually let my legs hang over the edge anyway.”

  “Long way down.”

  “Somebody once injected me with vodka so he could throw me off it and it’d look like I’d been drunk.”

  “That’d do the job,” he said, easing himself into the chair. “What happened?”

  “I killed him.”

  “My, my.” He leaned back and stared up at the moon. “All those pockmarks,” he said. “I never thought the moon was romantic.”

  “It’s okay at a distance.”

  He started to move his feet, preparing to get up. “I forgot the water.”

  “It’s almost gone anyway. I’ll get a new bottle.”

  In the kitchen, I realized he was talking.

  “…after I’d burned out on the terror, Max started talking to me about what I should do with the rest of my life. Nothing was different, he said, except now we had a deadline. I don’t think I’d ever really heard that word before. And I, I was just amazed. Because, you see, I’d assumed he’d throw me out.”

  I stayed where I was, holding the bottle of water like a chalice of some kind.

  “So he said we had to start making time count. We had to build my strength and work on my spirit. My spirit, Jesus, no one ever talked to me about my spirit before. I figured I had a spirit like some people have lint in their pockets, no more important than that, and I tuned him out and interrupted him with something I thought was really important, like whether he was actually going to let me stay. And he said to me, ‘Where else would you go?’

  “And then he put his hand in the center of my chest, his palm to my chest, and held it there, and I felt a kind of warmth come into me, and the warmth turned into a tingle and flowed into my arms and legs. ‘What is that?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘That’s your spirit.’” Nordine stopped talking for a long time, but I didn’t move. “So we went to work on my spirit,” he said at last.

  I waited a moment and then took the water out onto the deck. Christopher was slumped in the chair, his head down and his hands folded in his lap. I unscrewed the top on the water and sat next to him. “Two days later,” he said without moving, “Max told me about the house, that he’d willed it to me.” He reached over, and I gave him the bottle. “I didn’t kill him,” he said. Then he drank.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And I have maybe two years left, if that, and I am not going to spend even one day in a jail cell.”

  “Okay,” I said again, thinking about how Spurrier would treat him, remembering the latex gloves he’d put on before he hit me.

  Christopher coughed, then cleared his throat of something with a sound that reached all the way down into his midsection.

  “I’ll need information,” I said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. It was very light.

  “You’ll have to move fast,” he said. “When the publicity hits, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the cops to find someone, and I’m the one they’re going to try to find.”

  “I don’t think there’ll be that much publicity,” I said. “They’ll keep quiet about most of, um, what was done to Max. They always do. And anyway, it’s just another gay murder as far as they’re concerned.”

  He turned to me and gave me the smile again. “There’ll be tons of publicity,” he said. “All over the country. Max used to be famous.”

  6 ~ Tarnished Star

  “He was Rick Hawke,” Wyl Will exclaimed, wide-eyed. A couple of years ago, after his mother died, he’d had his eyelids tattooed to spare himself the necessity of putting on makeup every day, and the combination of the heavily lined eyelids and the wide eyes made him look something like the latter-day Bette Davis.

  “Humor me,” I said. “I’m a little young for Rick Hawke.”

  It was ten a.m., and busloads of tourists in short sleeves were already sweltering up and down Hollywood Boulevard, reading the names in the brass and terrazzo stars on the sidewalks and stepping over the bums who keep the stars company on the concrete. Only in Hollywood can a penniless wino sleep on top of a star.

  “I knew you’d say that,” Wyl said peevishly. He’d gotten to the point where he took youth as a personal insult. “But there’s cable, you know. Everything’s on cable now. I flipped on the set last night and saw I Married Joan, of all things. Do you remember how she died?”

  “Who?” I was facing the window, watching a sleek, well-dressed Arab shepherd a flock of heavily robed women up the sidewalk. They may have been wrapped to their eyebrows, but the heat didn’t seem to be bothering them. The other tourists, the ones in shorts and T-shirts, were red and wet.

  “Joan Davis.” He blinked fast, either tears or something in his blue contacts. “Burned to death, poor thing. Just like Gene Tierney.”

  “Who?” I said again. “Oh, yeah. Gene Tierney.”

  “Played a Chinese in one movie.” Wyl clasped his hands prayerfully in front of his chest. “Lord, she was beautiful.”

  The Arabs passed from view, followed by two heavyset cholos in plaid wool shirts and wide black pants who looked very interested in them. The ear Spurrier had slapped had been ringing all morning, and my lower back hurt. “Rick Hawke, Wyl.”

  “Well, he was beautiful, too. I saw him on TV in 1957 and thought, Well, California, don’t you know. We were about the same age, but he looked younger. I wrote him a fan letter and got a signed photo back, not that he signed it himself, I’m sure, but they did things right in those days. Imagine getting a reply to a fan letter to Madonna.”

  “And then you came out here and met him.” I was the only customer in Wyl’s store, and he was seated behind the counter that ran along the left-hand side of the shop. Between me and the window, shelves housed thousands of books about show business, and tables and glass cabinets offered up boxes full of old posters and glossy studio stills.

  “Decades later,” Wyl said. “The early eighties, I guess. Have you had coffee?”

  “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing up. How did you meet him?”

  “Circles,” Wyl said airily, making a vaguely circular gesture with his right hand.
r />   I massaged my bruised kidney. “That must have been nice, traveling in the same circles as one of your favorite stars.”

  “Oh, I had no idea who he was. He’d stopped being Rick Hawke twenty-five years before that. He’d operated a charter yacht service in Hawaii and gone to India to wash some holy man’s feet or something, and he’d grown that beard and let it go all white, and he never ever talked about his career in television. No, he was just this courtly gentleman who wore too many rings and always seemed to have some odd boy in tow.”

  “Odd in what way?”

  Wyl dipped a finger into a mug of coffee to test its temperature, licked off the drops, and drank. “Glum,” he said eventually. “They were all glum. Monosyllabic, like two syllables might prove to be unbearable. And knobbly, not smooth and symmetrical. Some of them didn’t smell very good. Either cheap cologne or no baths, it was hard to say which was worse. They didn’t seem to have pasts.”

  “A lot like Christopher,” I ventured.

  Wyl blushed crimson. “Christopher is good-looking. And he can talk.”

  I tried not to grin. “How many of your antiques did he take?”

  “Scads,” Wyl said, his color deepening. “But, you know, they were all old.”

  “Antiques generally are.”

  He gave me a sharp glance with the heavily lined eyes. “You’re very clever this morning. You might at least have waited until I finished my coffee, so I could be clever back.”

  “You introduced him to Max.”

  He sipped again and put the cup down. “By then I knew that Max wasn’t just chasing rough trade. He saw himself as the stairway out of the gutter. Christopher seemed to be headed for the gutter, so I referred him to Max. I would have tried to help him myself, but I was running out of antiques.”

  The grin won, and I turned and looked out the window to hide it. “Tell me about Rick Hawke.”

  Wyl sighed: This was easier ground. “I’ve got an eight-by-ten on table five.” He rose from his stool, a slender man in his youthful seventies with silver-blue hair and a dancer’s narrow waist, set off by pleated trousers into which he’d tucked a yellow silk shirt. As I followed him to table five, the bell over the door rang and about seventeen Japanese came in, all dressed formally, as though they were about to have their photos taken, which I supposed they were.