The Bone Polisher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “You’re First-Class Male, too?” I asked.

  He nodded. “And we’re a computer bulletin board. Something Fine Online.” He looked dissatisfied. “Got to work on that name,” he said.

  “So tell me about this,” I said. I licked the basil from my fingertips and pulled the folded newspaper from my pocket. Jack peered across the kitchen at it.

  “Our ads,” he said, sounding satisfied. He got up and held out a hand, and I passed the page to him. “Designed them myself on the computer. That’s the Nite Line. Comes out once a week, on Monday. It’s a bar rag. Lots of little ads.” He turned the page over and ran a thumb over the classifieds. “Like these. All these beautiful, sensitive, lonely young men, desperately seeking a soulmate. Preferably a soulmate with many credit cards.”

  “Not on the level,” I said.

  “About as much as the sex ads in the straight papers. Hustlers, mostly, or old fatties pretending to be twenty-four and buffed up. Sad stuff. Where’d you get this?”

  “It was Max’s. It’s what brought me here.”

  Jack’s eyes widened briefly. “Max? Max had this?”

  “Not what you’d expect?”

  “Not bloody hardly. Max found his kids on the street, where he could see they were desperation cases. Plenty of kids on the pavement these days. One side of the economy the Times rarely sees fit to cover.”

  “So why would he have the paper?”

  He refolded it along the sharp creases, looking at me. “God knows. He had his hands full as it was, between his lost kids, Christy, and the service.”

  I was getting confused. “Which service?”

  “The computer service. Something Fine Online. I thought that’s why you were here.”

  “I’m just blundering around,” I said, “chasing lines in the Nite Line.”

  Jack jerked his head over his shoulder. “Come on. So your day shouldn’t be a complete loss. I’ll show you a new side of Max.”

  We went through the living room, where angel’s flight seemed to have struck: All the phones were silent, and the young men sat staring into the middle distance, gathering their energies for the next erotically charged encounter. One of them was doing a crossword puzzle. Jack led me down a hallway hung with a few small and unconvincing Dali lithographs, mostly watches that seemed to have collided with pizzas, and into a bedroom where a tower-model desktop computer hummed away on a huge desk made from two tables placed end to end. The setup covered an entire wall. Multiple-tiered in and out baskets screwed to the wall held stacks of modems, their red lights blinking like the eyes of animals in a Disney forest. Four screens were filled with flying text, scrolling almost too rapidly to be read.

  “About thirty online at the moment,” Jack said, eyeing the modems. “What do you know about how this works?”

  I’d come up against a bulletin board before, a particularly vile heterosexual meat market where children were the merchandise. “People call in on their computers and talk to each other in real time, using their keyboards, or leave messages for each other.” It didn’t sound very expert. “I guess all boards are different, though.”

  “All boards are exactly the same, at least as far as the hardware and software go,” Jack said. “It’s the wetware that makes them different.”

  “Wetware.”

  “The people.” He gestured at the screen, at the ribbon of words. “Boards are neutral, just like a TV set or a telephone line, until you add in the human factor. This is a gay board. Most everybody on it is gay, they live in the local calling area, and they give it its distinguishing characteristics, which is to say they make it a West Hollywood gay board, lots of jokes, lots of industry talk, lots of jokey, horny e-mail. And, naturally, a psychic flavor, since this is probably the only city in America where psychics outnumber real people.”

  “And that’s where Max—”

  “Not entirely. Close, though.” He seated himself at the computer and did something fast and practiced. “Look here,” he said.

  TALK TO THE THERAPIST glowed in the middle of the largest screen.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Max?”

  “Therapist and psychic,” Jack said. “All-around emotional handyman. Some of the strangest questions you ever read. That was one of the things I loved about him: Nothing struck him as weird. If someone said to him that he needed his aura fluffed, Max would have figured out a way to fluff the man’s aura. He dealt with some pretty disgusting stuff here, too, but Max never got disgusted.”

  “Nothing human disgusts me,” I said.

  Jack gave me a skeptical glance. “Or Max.”

  “That’s a Tennessee Williams line,” I said. “Actually, I disgust fairly easily.”

  On the screen, I read:

  I’m thirty-eight years old, and lately I’ve been fantasizing sex with women. My dreams are totally peculiar, but I wake up with a big woody anyway. My lover is beginning to suspect something is wrong. Do you think you can help?

  Beneath it was the Therapist’s—Max’s—reply:

  You lucky boy. It’s a new world. Don’t be afraid of facing it. Look at it this way: It doubles the number of possibles. Anyway, it may only be a phase. I’d suggest that you talk to your lover about it. He might actually like it if you suggested he run down to Victoria’s Secret and buy a little—

  Beside me, Jack gave a kind of gasp, like someone exhaling a knot.

  —peignoir or something. Of course—

  “Holy Jesus,” Jack said, and I swiveled to look at the screen in front of him. Words were scrolling past, black on the white display. Jack turned wide eyes to me and put a hand over the screen as though it were emitting heat.

  “It’s from Max,” he said.

  8 ~ Eat at Mom’s

  There’s a lot of money in Boys’ Town.

  The recently incorporated city of West Hollywood nestles up against the southern base of the Hollywood Hills, where tidy little hillside chateaus begin around $750,000 and climb into the double-digit millions. Lots of people from the entertainment industry—agents, directors, actors, writers, producers, poseurs, parasites, Picassos of the pitch—drive down the hills in the morning and up them again in the evening, where they join their new Iranian neighbors in worrying about fire all summer and mudslides all winter.

  The north-south streets, streets like Miller Drive and Sunset Plaza Drive, empty into the Sunset Strip. If you think of Boys’ Town as a sort of cultural toupee planted cosmetically onto the map of Los Angeles, the Strip would be the part in the hair, dividing the hills from the flatland. It’s the thoroughfare the white people from Beverly Hills use to go east in the morning in their Rolls-Royces and Mercedes, passing the brown people from Central America going west on the bus to clean houses and tend other people’s children.

  The shops along this section of Sunset are small and precious, selling imported flowers, new furniture that’s been artfully slammed with chains to make it look old, designer outfits with exotic sequins, designer shoes, designer sound equipment, and designer everything else. Alternating with the shops are a great many sidewalk cafes that cater to young, slender, aggressively attractive types who toss their hair back a lot. People who spend several hundred dollars a month on their hair want it to glimmer, and it’s hard to make hair glimmer when the sunlight striking it seems to have passed through an ocean of iced tea. So they sit there in the beige sunshine and toy with their Caesar salads and toss their hair back whenever they sense a stray sunbeam. Or, at night, a headlight.

  Below Sunset, in the apartment complexes and small houses that stretch south on the flats to Santa Monica Boulevard and beyond, is the workaday Boys’ Town. The classic old apartments, high-ceilinged and spacious, that housed the stars of the thirties and forties, and the postmodern concrete steamships disguised as condominiums house a politically significant community of gays and lesbians who haul themselves out of bed every day to face the same kinds of jobs that wear people out in Dubuque, Medicine Hat, and Little Rock. They cou
nt other people’s change in stores, cash other people’s checks in banks, sell ugly shoes for other people’s feet, deal in second trust deeds on other people’s property, fix watches, clean teeth, and dispense medicine. And when the day is done, many of them go home and dispense care and love to people who need them. People who are sick or dying.

  In the past I’d attended community meetings here, I’d hauled friends to Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous meetings here. I’d seen gatherings delayed for moments of silence in remembrance of the just dead. I’d seen guys who looked like the Masters of the Universe come into rooms supporting men who were almost transparent with illness. I’d seen those transparent men rise to give love and support to the healthy-looking ones as they wrestled with their addictions, and I’d come back months later to see the healthy ones weep over the transparent ones who were no longer there. I’d seen courage and heroism.

  To the casual glance, West Hollywood looked prosperous and happy, and it was happy, most of the time, for most of the men who lived there. They’d fled communities in the heartland, in the wheat belt, in the Bible Belt, in other belts less appealing than the thirty-one-inch variety that seemed to circle most of the waists in Boys’ Town. They’d established the City of Gratified Desire, a place where they could lead the lives they wanted to lead. Like everyone else did.

  The Fig Tree fronted on Sunset, looking out onto the street through plate-glass windows etched with trailing branches and leaves. The clientele, visible through the frosty foliage, was almost exclusively male, almost exclusively young.

  Two days ago—the day Christopher Nordine had first come to my house—Max had taken the Farm Boy into The Zipper. The receipt from The Fig Tree was dated two days ago. The kid had been described as a “tourist,” and I was willing to bet that Max had been giving him a guided tour of West Hollywood’s hot spots.

  As much as I wanted to go into The Fig Tree, it wasn’t a sound idea. Spurrier’s men would have accessed Max’s credit-card records first thing, and if the Sheriffs hadn’t already been here, they would be soon. Spurrier had been very convincing about not wanting me anywhere near the case.

  So I sat at the curb, letting Alice idle for fifteen minutes or so, pushing my sore back into the upholstery and thinking about Christy. Spurrier again, and thanks for the thought, Ike. He’d chosen Christy as the Boy Most Likely, and it would have made a lot of sense to someone who hadn’t met him. The heir threatened by a new affection, the long-term planner hiring someone to establish in advance his fear that Max’s life was in danger. He’d shown up at my house with a gun in his hand the night following Max’s death: second thoughts? Panic? Get rid of a potential witness?

  Against all that, I had my conviction that his grief for Max had been real.

  But there was also the fact that someone had been in Max’s house when I was there, someone Max hadn’t wanted me to see. Not Christy: He wouldn’t have been there when I was coming, not if he was afraid to talk to Max about the Farm Boy himself. He would have waited a few hours to give Max some time to absorb it all.

  Since there was a reasonably hygienic phone booth on the corner, I left Alice to the mercies of the parking patrol and called Marta Aguirre, the housekeeper, again. I got the same indignant lady, with the same indignant mix of Spanish and English. Marta wasn’t around and wasn’t ever likely to be around, and why didn’t I get a job or something and stop bothering people in the middle of the day?

  Max’s message—another therapist’s column, sent over the phone lines to Jack’s computer more than twenty-four hours after his death—needed attention, but that would be better left until dark. Ike Spurrier was the type who might get touchy about people wandering around in sealed crime scenes.

  That left Mom.

  I don’t know when my parents got old. It seems to me that they’d been vital and vigorous, kicking and carping their way through advanced middle age, until one Saturday morning when the light slanted just wrong through their living-room windows and I found myself staring, almost open-mouthed, at two senior citizens. Since then I’d listened to the commonplace complaints, watched the hearing aids appear, picked up prescriptions, chafed impatiently as my father drove more and more slowly, until the car began to go unused for months at a time, and come to realize for the first time in a largely optimistic life that things don’t always get better. The houses—we’d lived in what seemed like dozens—had dwindled to a small apartment in Santa Monica, and the luggage they’d hauled all around the world had become furniture, stacked in the living room with a thick piece of glass over it to serve as a coffee table.

  My mother was sitting in the chair in which she’s spent much of her adult life, a high-backed, regal affair that is continually being reupholstered in a shade of blue indistinguishable to me from any of the previous blues. My mother, though, is capable of distinguishing among blues in much the same way Eskimos are said to be able to do with snow, and the current shade, she assures all who ask, is the most pleasing yet. Since it was early in the day by her standards—only three-fifteen—she had the Los Angeles Times spread out at her feet and about twenty of her daily sixty cigarettes pronged down and lipsticked in the cut-glass ashtray at her side.

  “You’re late,” she said, leaning forward and scanning the obituaries. “Cripes, but people are dying young these days.”

  “I made a few stops,” I said, “trying to squeeze in as much life as I can before the ax falls.”

  “You lack focus.” She peered down at a particularly large obituary, ornamented by a photograph of a woman who had probably planted a great many fringed geraniums in her all-too-brief day. “You run around like a chicken with its head cut off. It’s the family curse.”

  “I thought the family curse was drink.” She obviously wasn’t going to slip into maternal mode anytime soon, so I took the initiative and kissed her cheek. Bending over brought both the bullshot and the sore back into play. “Coffee on?”

  “I made an upside-down cake.” She flicked the newspaper noisily with her index finger and made a clucking noise. “Only sixty-three.”

  I crossed the small living room to the kitchen. “What the hell is this, hot water?”

  “Caffeine’s bad for you,” she said complacently. “Especially if you lack focus. The Chinese drink lots of hot water. Ask Eleanor.”

  “I’m going to close my eyes and name the presidents, and when I get to Madison there’ll be real coffee in this pot.”

  She heaved a sigh, preparatory to getting up. “I spoiled you,” she said.

  “It was the piano lessons,” I said, sticking my finger into the upside-down cake.

  “I never gave you piano lessons. Take your finger out of there this minute.”

  “That’s what I mean.” My finger was sticky, brown, and sweet with caramelized sugar, a taste that took me back to a time when I had barely been able to reach the counter. “If you’d forced me to take piano lessons, I might have developed some character.”

  “Actually, I wanted you to take lessons. Your father said no. Said the scales would drive him stark staring mad.”

  “And then there was the piano.” I put my finger back into the cake as she ladled a tablespoon of instant espresso into a cup and then added some more, direct from the jar. My mother’s coffee was a cardiologist’s nightmare.

  “What piano?” She sloshed water into the cup, getting most of it on the counter. “Hell’s bells,” she said.

  “The one we didn’t have.”

  “That was your father, too,” my mother said. She leaned against the sink and took an absentminded sip of my coffee. “ ‘If the boy wants to play something,’ he said, ‘get him a harmonica. At least we’ll have someplace to put it.’”

  I took the cup from her hand. “You could have talked him into it.”

  “He’s a stubborn man. I tried. Got him up to a ukelele before he dug his heels in. Is that strong enough?”

  “It’d raise the dead.”

  “Sweet words from my s
weet son.” She patted me on the cheek in a brisk, businesslike fashion and scanned the counter. “Did I have a cigarette?”

  “Since I came in, you mean?”

  “I’ve taken to putting them down and walking away. It worries your father.”

  “And so it might. Where is he?”

  “At the golf course.”

  “Dad doesn’t play golf.”

  “He likes to laugh at their trousers. Why is it that old men become such fools?”

  “Ask me in a few years.”

  She started to roll her eyes, thought better of it, and blinked. “You have to mature before you get old.”

  “Ah. We’re getting to it, are we?”

  She sat in her chair and pushed the newspaper aside with her foot. “Of course,” she said, putting a cigarette to her lips and lighting it, “you may have matured since I saw you last.”

  “I was here last week.”

  “I sometimes ask myself what I did wrong. Other women don’t need to make an appointment to see their sons.” She reached out and folded the paper, signaling that I had her full attention. “Do you still see that nice Peggy whatshername?”

  I sat on the couch and blew on my coffee. “The last time I saw Peggy, I was sixteen.”

  “Such a pretty girl.”

  “As I recall, you said she reminded you of Secretariat.”

  She didn’t even blink. “Horsy women,” she said, “breed well.”

  There was absolutely no point in trying to hurry her, so I took a sip of coffee and felt my throat close involuntarily against the strength of it.

  “And Eleanor. Is she still putting up with you?”

  The coffee was as bitter as aloes, whatever they are. “Not very well.”

  My mother shook her head. “We’re not a very communicative family, are we? And most Irish talk so.”

  “So what about Eleanor?”