The Bone Polisher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Konnichiwa,” Wyl said without breaking stride.

  “Konnichiwa,” all seventeen said politely. They waited for the next step in the conversation.

  “Look, look,” Wyl called, giving up on Japanese and waving his hands in the general direction of the books. “Number one store, ichiban in Hollywood.”

  “Hai,” said the oldest of the Japanese. “Famous store.”

  “Domo arigato gozaimashta,” Wyl pronounced. He sounded as though he’d learned it through Hooked on Phonics. “Look around. Buy something.” He turned to me. “If we’re going to be conquered, it might as well be by somebody polite. God, imagine if it were the French. Rick’s in here.” He started rifling through a box full of glossies, each encased in a transparent sleeve. Faces I hadn’t seen or thought of in years flipped past: Bob Cummings, Dennis Day, Red Skelton, Robert Horton, Hugh O’Brian, Faye Emerson, Ida Lupino.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “It’s farther back.”

  “Just a second. I like Ida Lupino.”

  “You do have a frame of reference,” he said. Ida Lupino gazed up at us, tough and broken at the same time, wearing the face of someone too intelligent for the game she’d allowed herself to be trapped in.

  “I’ll take this,” I said, pulling Ida out.

  “You’re a romantic,” Wyl said, suppressing a smile.

  “That’s what Max told me. A disillusioned one.”

  “Poor Max.” Wyl used a single fingernail to separate the photos and then withdrew one. “Here.”

  Rick Hawke had been splendidly handsome. All the conventions of the photo—the dramatic lighting, the pancake makeup, the too-slick hair—couldn’t mute the individuality of the human being peering out through the angular face, the person sporting the silly western-style shirt and the kerchief tied around his neck. He looked faintly ill at ease, but he also seemed privately to be enjoying the joke. My memory stirred, and I realized that I recognized Max’s younger face from my childhood.

  “That’s a good one,” Wyl said, eyeing it critically. “That’s what made him a star. That sense that he was laughing at himself. That bodybuilder with the impossible name has the same quality.”

  I picked up the photo. “What’s this from?”

  “His show,” Wyl said, masking astonishment at my ignorance. “Tarnished Star. He played a sheriff who was really an escaped murderer. Self-defense, of course.”

  “Slow down,” I said. “That was the story?”

  “Imagine the conflict.” Wyl closed his eyes, looking dreamy. “There he is in this dusty little husk of a town with a badge on his shirt and this vast secret in his past, and every week someone came into town who knew who he really was. Everybody in the world came through that town. Sometimes good guys, sometimes bad guys. Once it was Oscar Wilde, if you can believe that, and Oscar Wilde knew. And, of course, he can’t just kill them, because he’s not a murderer at heart, so he has to—”

  “Excuse?” the oldest Japanese said.

  “Yes?” Wyl said, shaking his head free of memories. “I mean, Hai?”

  “Dirty book about Madonna?” the Japanese man said.

  “Over there,” Wyl said dismissively. “With the soft porn.”

  “Excuse?” The Japanese man looked confused.

  “Poruno,” Wyl said impatiently. “Pinkku. There.”

  “Hai, arigato,” the man said, trundling off in the direction Wyl had indicated.

  I was examining Rick Hawke’s two-dimensional face. “I remember him,” I said. “It was a pretty good show.” I’d seen it in reruns as a little kid.

  “It was a smash.” Wyl stared over my shoulder at the street. “Could have run for years.”

  “And you say he quit.”

  “In the middle of the third season.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe 1957, ’58. Went to Hawaii, as I told you, and then to India.”

  “Why?”

  “Why’d he quit?” He drew in the corners of his mouth, sorting out his answer. It gave him a judicial air. “None of this is from the horse’s mouth, you understand.”

  “He never talked to you about it.”

  “Exactly. The trades said at the time it was a salary dispute. Later, people told me that it was because of the Black Widow.”

  He seemed disinclined to go further, so I said, “The Black Widow.”

  “You know,” he said reluctantly, “like the spider. His agent. He had the same agent as all those fifties actors whose names sounded like laundry detergents. Zip and Punch and Coit, and, oh, I don’t know, Tweak. The agent’s name was Ferris Hanks. He was a very bad man.”

  “How was he bad?” A cluster of Japanese had formed around a large book that bore the bald title SEX.

  “Manipulative, power-hungry, sick.” Wyl blinked the lined eyelids and opened his mouth to draw air. “Power and pain.”

  “Ah,” I said. “And he made Max quit?”

  Wyl shook his head. “No. He wanted Max to continue, I’m sure. Max—Rick—was a big star then. But the contracts back then were ironclad. If Max wanted to keep working, he had to keep working for Ferris. And Max wasn’t willing to have ten percent of his salary go for whips and bludgeons and star-struck boys for Ferris. So he quit. Heavens, but Ferris was mad.”

  “I’ll bet he was.”

  He seemed to get taller. “Are you going to continue making pointless interjections, or are you going to let me tell the story?”

  I thought about it. “Should I say something?”

  “A polite expression of interest wouldn’t be unwelcome.”

  “Please, Wyl,” I said, “oh, please tell me the rest of the story.”

  “Ferris went after him publicly.” His eyebrows chased each other toward his hairline. “Publicly, can you imagine? In the fifties?”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “Perhaps that’s because you’re trying to lead,” he said. “Six months after Max quit, a story appeared in one of the scandal magazines of the day, implying quite clearly that Max—Rick—was gay. They didn’t say gay, of course. No one said ‘gay’ in the fifties. They simply suggested, quite openly in kind of a sneaking way, that Max preferred men to women, which was quite enough back then. Some of us, of course, were thrilled. I’m sure champagne corks popped all over the country. But a story like that would have finished Max, if he hadn’t been finished already. Everyone said later that Ferris had planted the story, even though it would have been suicide for him to do it.” He wound down, putting a hand over his heart as if to slow his breathing.

  “Why suicide?”

  “Because all of Ferris’s clients were gay. He was playing with fire, so to speak. The bad apple and all that. Contagion. Hollywood was absolutely gripped with paranoia at the time. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood Ten and all.”

  “That was communism.”

  “That was rampant stupidity,” Wyl corrected, “seasoned with the most pernicious kind of cowardice. But if they can investigate one thing, they can investigate another. It was very dangerous for Ferris to have leaked that story. He must have been beside himself.”

  “Why would he have done it?”

  Wyl gave me a sidelong glance, Bette Davis at her most mysterious. “Wounded pride, perhaps. Hell hath no fury, and so forth.”

  “Is Ferris still alive?” A boisterous laugh went up from the group of Japanese, crowded around the book.

  “He couldn’t be,” Wyl said, glancing at his customers. “He’d be in his nineties.”

  “I’ll let you get to them in a second. Wyl, do you know anything about Max having a new boy, just before he died?”

  Wyl gave me the age-old gaze of the innocent. “How could he have? He loved Christy.”

  The newspapers had taken note of Max’s death, but just barely. WEST HOLLYWOOD MAN KILLED read the headline on the third page of the Metro section of the Times. So they hadn’t yet figured out who Max had been, not too surprising when the call reporting his death came in
so late. As I’d assumed they would, the cops had sat on the details of the mutilation.

  I had a notebook page full of names and numbers from Christopher, and I used Wyl’s phone to call the first on the list, Marta Aguirre, his housekeeper, an illegal from San Salvador whom Christopher loathed with unconcealed intensity. A snoop and an eavesdropper and a petty thief, he called her. Everything stuck to her fingers. She sounded like just what I needed.

  Unfortunately, she wasn’t home. I got an older woman who told me, in Spanish, that she was tired of people calling up and asking for Marta. I asked what time she’d be back and got hung up on.

  Wyl was seated at the cash register, ringing up his entire stock of Madonna memorabilia—which included an aluminum brassiere of dubious provenance—as I tried the second number. “Shaw, Barton, and Jenks,” a woman said brightly, as though she’d thought of it herself.

  “Mr. Jenks, please.” Holding the phone between ear and shoulder, I put both hands in the small of my back and arched backward. The ache in my kidney eased slightly.

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  I bent forward, provoking a dry chuckle from Wyl, who enjoys seeing the aging process at work in other people. “Lysander Atwill, regarding Max Grover.”

  I listened to two verses of “Under My Thumb” played pizzicato on what sounded like a pocket comb. The revolution was definitely over.

  “Jenks,” said a man with an ersatz deep voice, sort of a near-beer bass. I had a feeling Mr. Jenks was a very small man.

  “Lysander Atwill here,” I said, “calling from Boulder?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m a partner in Atwill, Grey, and Gorgonzola. We handle affairs for Mr. Grover’s sister, Helen.” According to Christopher, Helen was the sole surviving member of Max’s family, the last Grover left back in Boulder.

  “Terrible thing,” Mr. Jenks said, letting his voice ease up half an octave.

  “We’re all shocked here in Boulder, of course.”

  A lawyer’s pause. “How can I help you, Mr. Atwill?”

  “Well, I know this sounds a bit quick off the mark, but I have a question about Mr. Grover’s will, which I understand you prepared.”

  “I can’t discuss the terms—”

  “Of course not. We know them anyway. We know that, um, Christopher Nordine is the primary legatee and that Miss Grover stands to inherit only certain memorabilia of a sentimental nature, plus twelve acres of undeveloped land outside of Boulder.”

  “And the question, Mr. Atwill?”

  “My client was just wondering whether the will had been altered in any way in the last year. There’s no need to discuss specifics.”

  “I should hope not,” he said primly.

  “Please understand, Mr. Jenks. My client is an elderly woman of uncertain means who is devastated by her brother’s death. She’s seizing on this issue because she doesn’t want to confront her loss. She’s not, if you understand me, being reasonable.”

  “I see.” He made mouth noises into the phone, mulling it over. Finally, he said, “Negative.”

  “Negative what?”

  “Negative to the question you asked me. Nothing of the kind.”

  “All provisions remain intact?”

  “I just told you that the answer to the question you asked was negative.” No one was going to trick Mr. Jenks into speaking English.

  “Are you positive?” I asked. I couldn’t help it.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Atwill.” He hung up.

  “People do hang up on one,” I said to Wyl, who was counting a wad of gaily colored Japanese traveler’s checks.

  “The world’s rife with it, Mr. Atwill,” Wyl said blithely. “Full of people who don’t give their right names, too.”

  “It’s a scourge,” I said, getting up.

  “Be careful with that back,” Wyl called after me. “A man your age can’t take his spine for granted.”

  Max Grover’s dry cleaner was a large, fierce-looking Korean man in a little shop dead center in a minimall on Sunset Boulevard, just east of Sunset Plaza, a mall he shared with an Arab yogurt parlor, a Vietnamese nail salon, and a Thai restaurant. He regarded me darkly, as though he were wondering whether it would be simpler to comply with my request, or just fold me into equal threes and throw me through the window. “Mr. Grover not come himself?” he asked suspiciously.

  So he didn’t read the English-language newspapers. Or maybe, like so many Koreans, he started work before they were delivered.

  “Mr. Grover died,” I said. He was going to learn about it sooner or later, and I didn’t want him to call the cops when he did.

  “Hah?” he said, blinking at me.

  “He’s dead,” I said. “Somebody killed him.”

  He was taken aback. Literally. A full step. “Mr. Grover? He dead?”

  “I’m afraid so. Mr. Nordine sent me to pick up his things.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, nononono.” His voice was shaking.

  “I can pay the bill,” I said stupidly.

  “Bill? I don’t care bill.” He balled up a fist and brought it down on top of the Formica counter. The entire shop shook. “You think I care bill? Bill, hell to it. Mr. Grover good man.”

  “He was,” I said. “He was a very good—”

  “He give me money my sister,” the Korean said. His face was scarlet. “Money bring her from Korea.” He wiped a callused palm roughly across his eyes. “She problem,” he said, “he pay bring her from Korea.”

  “Well,” I said, seeing Max in an ocean of blood, seeing Max’s chopped right wrist.

  “I pay back.” The man was crying openly now. “One year, pay everything back. Try pay interest, Mr. Grover say no, no interest. Want my sister make him one dinner, bulgogi. Mr. Grover love bulgogi. Mr. Grover love everybody.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Ayyyyyy,” he said, a prolonged Asian syllable of unadulterated grief. “You wait.” He shuffled toward the back of the shop. “We make bulgogi,” he said without looking back. “We make bulgogi enough for one year.” He went into a room at the back of the shop and slammed the door. A moment later I heard him blow his nose with a sound like a tuba tuning up, and he reemerged. He’d washed his face, and his hair was spiky and wet.

  “Mr. Grover cleaning,” he said, gathering plastic-wrapped clothes from the track that snaked around the ceiling of the shop. He bundled them against his chest like he was afraid someone might snatch them from him. “And for Mr. Nordine, too.” He lowered them to the counter and wiped his nose.

  My antenna went up. “When did Mr. Nordine bring these in?”

  He looked at the tag, blinking rapidly to clear his eyes. “Two days. Mr. Grover bring.”

  I looked down at the pile, mostly long, loose-fitting shirts on hangers, shirts like the one I’d seen Max wearing. “Nothing else?”

  “Eigo,” he said. “Yes. Always. Mr. Grover never empty pockets.”

  “Most people don’t.” I hoped I sounded calm.

  “Not same Mr. Grover.” He fished around below the counter and came up with a package wrapped in blue paper. “Key, money, papers, rings, everything.”

  I picked up the blue package and began to grapple with the things on hangers. He put out a hand to stop me.

  “I carry clothes,” he demanded fiercely.

  “That’s not necessary.” I didn’t want him to get a look at my car.

  “I do, I do.”

  “I’m parked a block away,” I said, which was true. “You can’t leave the shop that long.”

  “I close anyway,” he insisted. “Today I go drink for Mr. Grover. Make remember for Mr. Grover.”

  “Never mind,” I said, scooping up the clothes. “Have a drink for me.”

  “Remember for you, too.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Go now,” he said, blinking again. “Say hello Mr. Nordine. Tell him sorry, very sorry. Tell him I make farewell service for Mr. Gr
over.”

  “I will.”

  “Good-bye.” He turned his back on me and started banging things around: a clothes press, a big trashcan full of hangers. I left.

  In the car, I opened the blue package. It contained thirty-two well-laundered dollars—two tens, two fives, and two ones—a heavy turquoise ring with white tape wrapped around it to make it smaller, a credit card receipt for a restaurant called The Fig Tree, dated three days ago, and a piece of newsprint, tightly folded. When I had it open, I was looking at perhaps a quarter of a page from a tabloid, carefully scissored around a block of four ads.

  It was evidently a specialty paper. The advertisements were for a gay dating service called First-Class Male, an “adult” telephone line that identified itself as the Long John Connection, a bookstore named A Different Slant, and a bar called The Zipper. The other side was taken up with part of a classified section, maybe forty short notices, mostly along the lines of hard jock seeks same. Max had paid no attention to the borders of the classifieds; the ones at the borders were cut into fragments. Written in the bottom margin on the classified side, in pencil, was a string of digits: 237/10/21/6:2.

  I wrote down the numbers on a pad I keep on Alice’s dashboard and turned the page over again. There was no way I could check forty classifieds. It was only eleven-thirty, and The Fig Tree probably hadn’t opened yet. I drew and then let out a long breath and headed for The Zipper.

  7 ~ Cereal Killer

  The Zipper—I’m sorry—was open.

  I’d never been in a darker room. Heavy, wide strips of black plastic, like the ones used to keep warmth out of a supermarket meat locker, hung in the front door to hold October at bay. When they flapped shut behind me, I found myself completely blind. Since my eyes weren’t doing me any good anyway, I closed them.

  When I reopened them, a world appeared. A bar, lighted by seven or eight flickering Christmas bulbs, was to my immediate right. The man standing behind it wore a motorcycle jacket and an LAPD cap, complete with badge. He regarded me as though he was afraid I’d come in to sell him a vacuum cleaner. “You’re new.”