The Bone Polisher

by Timothy Hallinan

  She blew smoke at me. “Such a pretty girl.”

  “I thought that was Peggy.”

  “Peggy looked like a horse,” she said. “And not a very attractive horse, at that.”

  “I’ll just bet,” I said, “that you sent Dad to the golf course.”

  She tapped ash into the crystal. “Why don’t you marry Eleanor?”

  I lifted the lethal cup from the saucer, but it didn’t get to my lips. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “It’s you.”

  My mother examined her cigarette as though she suspected it might have a tear in it. “Don’t swear. What’s me?”

  “My mail. All that junk aimed at people who are tying the knot, as you usually say. All those phone calls.”

  “You’re confusing me. Are we talking about mail, or—”

  “You know perfectly well what we’re talking about. How did you do it?” I didn’t have much hope of getting a straight answer; my mother regards the truth as something you tell when you can’t think of anything more entertaining, but she surprised me.

  “I went to Bullock’s,” she said. “I registered you for china and silver. They sell their mailing lists, you know.”

  “What in the world motivated—”

  She squinted at me through the smoke. “You’re not as young as you used to be, you know.”

  I made the cup clatter against the saucer. “My God. That had never occurred to me.”

  “Good Lord, if anyone had told me twenty years ago that I’d be asking my son to marry a Chinese girl, I’d have slit my throat and danced in my own blood.”

  “Not on the carpet,” I said.

  “I’m serious, young man.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you have a highly sanguinary turn of phrase?”

  She tilted her head back and looked down her nose at me. “I’m serious.”

  “I know you are.” I was touched. Like most Wasps born in the thirties, my parents were garden-variety racists, and their desire for a daughter-in-law of “good family” had been a frequent theme when I was growing up. The equine Peggy, I recalled, had come from my parents’ idea of a good family. “Still, I don’t think the bells are going to ring real soon.”

  “Well, I tried,” she said. “But you’re going to die a disappointed man if you don’t marry that girl.”

  “It’s not a unilateral decision, you know.”

  “Bah. She’d marry you in a minute, if you stopped acting like such a simpleton.”

  “I wish it were that easy.”

  “Your generation,” she said impatiently, “complicates everything. Sometimes I think it has to do with physics. In the old days, in my days, I mean, things moved in a straight line unless something bent them. Now you’ve got all kinds of particles and whatnot, and something called the law of uncertainty. Well, I ask you. How can a law be a law if it’s uncertain? How can you be certain you’re obeying it? It’s like the speed limit, if the sign said ‘fifty-five or thereabouts.’ What’s ‘thereabouts’? It’s no wonder you’ve got, oh, punks and homosexuals everywhere.”

  “What do you think about homosexuals these days?”

  She put a hand over her heart. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Give me a break. Just because I haven’t married—”

  “Well, it would be a relief if you did. Whenever I tell people my son is single, I always wonder what they’re thinking. There’s that little pause.”

  “Gay people,” I prompted.

  “I liked it better when they were all decorators and actors. They were so good with flowers. Now you just never know. They’re even in the army.”

  “I guess they’ve finally been given the right to die for their country.”

  “I’m sure they’re as brave as the next man.”

  “Or woman.”

  “Please.” She pursed her lips and closed her eyes briefly. “If you’re suggesting that women… That’s something I can’t get used to. I mean, men, we all know they’ll sleep with anything, your father excepted, but women are supposed to have some sense.”

  I had memories of very loud late-night discussions between my parents when I was small, and the name Betty had figured prominently in many of them, but there had never been an appropriate time to bring it up. As my mother said, we weren’t a very communicative family. Still…

  “I guess old Dad always behaved himself.”

  She gave me a severe look. “He didn’t sleep with infants,” she said briskly.

  It took me a moment to realize we’d taken up the next item on my mother’s agenda. “You called Eleanor.”

  “Perhaps,” she said airily.

  “Or Eleanor called you.”

  “If you had an ounce of tact, you’d know I don’t intend to—”

  “It’s flattering to be discussed by two attractive women, but that’s hooey and you should know it. Infants indeed.”

  “At first I thought she was a boy. That peculiar name.”

  “This seems to be the theme of the day. Your Deviant Son.”

  “It gave me a turn, I can tell you.”

  “She’s not an infant, and what’s more important, we’re not sleeping together.”

  “I think you should tell that to Eleanor.”

  “I did. She didn’t believe me.”

  “I don’t blame her,” she said promptly. “Your life is entirely too irregular. You spread yourself all over the landscape. That was all right when you were a boy, but the time has come to steady yourself. Focus. Settle down. Have some cake.”

  “In that order?”

  She got up to cut the cake. “You’re a trying child. And you’re going to miss the best bet of your life. Eleanor, I mean.”

  “She’s too good for me.” I was only half kidding.

  “You’re my son,” my mother said, plopping a slice of cake onto a paper plate. “She loves you,” she told the plate.

  “Hell is almost getting what you want.”

  “That’s fatuous. You behave as though your life had nothing to do with you.”

  “I don’t feel as though I’ve got very much control over it,” I said, and Max flashed into my mind: Control is an illusion.

  “I’m an old woman,” my mother said with surprising bitterness. “Things are ceasing to work. That’s something that can’t be controlled. There’s nothing wrong with your life that couldn’t be fixed with a little common sense. Eleanor is a good, steady girl. Your children would be perfectly beautiful. Sometimes I wish I could just choke a little sense into you.”

  “Yeah, well, I love you, too.”

  She put the cake firmly on the sink, went to her chair, and leaned down and opened the paper. The audience was over. “I’ll say hello to your father for you.”

  The moon had risen earlier and brighter than I would have liked. It hung fat and full and pasty in the sky, skipping over a thin wisp of low-hanging clouds like a stone on ocean foam.

  Eight o’clock, and not a parking space in sight. The night was still hot. Alice’s windows admitted a stream of dry air as I circled the block, passing Max’s house, making a right onto Santa Monica and then another right—north again—on the next street. While Max’s street, Flores, was still slumbering peacefully in the 1920s, with rows of craftsmen’s bungalows lighted up on either side, apartment houses had taken root on the parallel street. Many of them had broken out in almost dermatological eruptions of architectural whimsy: portholes and ship’s railings, abstract neon compositions wired to the stucco, free-standing sculptures planted on the grass. Others rose blank and austere, Art Deco reincarnated.

  Max’s house, of course, was dark. I could make out the yellow crime-scene tape across the porch and the seals pasted to the door. A driveway, lined with bougainvillea, ran alongside the bungalow, and a row of Max’s roses gleamed healthily in the moonlight on the far side. He had dozens more, Christy had told me, in back.

  I didn’t want to park near the house anyway. Alice was far too distinctive. I might be ignori
ng Spurrier’s command, but that didn’t mean I didn’t take it seriously.

  Four blocks away, on the other side of the Boulevard, I eased Alice into a space and climbed out, my joints stiff and cranky from sitting still for so long. I loosened up as I hit the sidewalk, and by the time I’d reached the lights of the main street I was walking like a more or less upright primate. A pair of latex gloves, pulled from a box of fifty I’d bought on the way, bulged uncomfortably in my pocket.

  The restaurants and bars were full, men in jeans or shorts and T-shirts standing in line in front of the more popular places. I flowed with the current on the sidewalk, feeling anonymous and even confident. This was Sheriffs’ territory, though, and it took an effort not to glance at the occasional black-and-white, idling slowly by in the traffic. Some of the deputies, I noticed, wore their shades even at night. Never a good sign.

  Flores Street was dark and relatively deserted. Walking quickly, like someone who knew exactly where he was going, I turned up Max’s driveway and past the house, my heartbeat accelerating and the taste of my mother’s coffee sharp and sour in the back of my throat. I found the gate in the center of the shoulder-high chain-link fence, wincing as it squealed open. This was not something I would be able to explain if a patrol car spotted me.

  Roses lifted pale faces to the moon, and the breeze, a real fire breeze blown down from the desert, stirred the tendrils of the pepper tree that arched high above the yard. The tree soaked up the moon’s light, and I had to grapple in my pockets for the little medical flashlight, the size of a ballpoint pen, I’d taken from Alice’s dash compartment. Then I slipped into the latex gloves.

  The key to the back door, one of several Christy said Max had stowed around the property, was where he’d told me it would be, under the center cushion of a small vinyl-upholstered couch shoved up against the side of the sagging wooden garage. It faced a dry birdbath that contained a pyramid of spherical Christmas ornaments, a decorative touch that seemed uncharacteristically tacky for Max. Maybe it was meant to be funny.

  Out of curiosity I first tried the keys I’d gotten from Max’s dry cleaner, but none of them could be fitted into the lock. The one from the couch slipped in easily. I gave it a full turn and pushed against the door, but it didn’t budge.

  It took me longer to figure it out than it should have. I turned the key farther and pushed against the door again, and then I backed away from it as though it were red-hot.

  I hadn’t unlocked the door. I’d locked it.

  My shirt was suddenly wet beneath the arms. Leaving the key in the lock, I stepped away from the house, still walking backwards, until a rosebush poked its thorns into my back. I sidestepped and kept going backward, my eyes on the house, until I was pressed up against the rough trunk of the pepper tree.

  No lights showed in the house, no signs of movement. The pepper tree sighed and whispered, bumping against my back in time with the pounding in my chest.

  To the right, the fence joined the corner of the house. To the left, the driveway stretched on its way to the street, past more windows than I liked to think about. Behind me, on the other side of the pepper tree, loomed the blank wall of an apartment building, at least three stories high. My rosy bower was a cul-de-sac, as they like to call dead ends these days.

  The darkest part of the shade was just next to the pepper tree. I sat there in the warm dirt, my back against the apartment building, and waited.

  When the moonlight began to spill over me, maybe two hours later, I shifted to the other side of the tree. Nothing had stirred in the house, and although the breeze kept making a racket in the tree above me, I hadn’t heard anything else. When the light reached me a second time, the moon far to the west now, I got up and shook the kinks from my legs, my back creaking petulantly, turned away from the house, and shone the little penlight at my watch. I’d been there for more than four hours.

  The key was right where I’d left it. I turned it, to the left this time, listening to the tumblers’ reluctant click and fall, and slowly pushed the door open. Max’s kitchen lay in front of me, illuminated by a milky patch of moonlight on the littered linoleum floor. It wasn’t much light, but it was enough to show me the place had been ransacked. Drawers had been ripped from their housings, cupboards emptied. Silverware skittered away from my feet as I moved forward toward the pile of food in front of the refrigerator. I smelled sour milk and onions.

  The idea of leaving presented itself with some force. I was not looking at the aftermath of a police search.

  The kitchen opened into a small breakfast area, rounded and windowed to my left, and I remembered I’d passed a bay window in the driveway. This was a part of the house I hadn’t seen, so I paused a moment to get my bearings, trying to reconcile the rooms through which Max had led me and the side of the house as I’d seen it from outside. More data: Christy had said Max sometimes slept in his room and sometimes in his own, so there were at least two bedrooms. After a few minutes of silent visualization, I had a hypothetical floor plan: Behind me, the kitchen; the small dining room would be in front of me, opening into the living room, and beyond that, the front door. To the right would be the library where I’d talked to Max, a hallway, and the bedrooms.

  The moonlight through the bay windows showed me a wilderness of broken dishes and torn cookbooks, ripped open and flung to the floor. The cookbooks I could understand—lots of things can be hidden in books—but the dishes were frightening. They bespoke rage, pure and simple, rage so powerful that its owner hadn’t been able to contain it even though the sound of the shattering dishes must have been deafening in the small room. He would have known the neighbors might have heard them, but he had thrown and trampled them anyway.

  A more reassuring idea: He’d obviously come in through the back door and probably left the same way. I didn’t think he’d have risked going out through the front. Maybe he’d started his search at the far end of the house and worked his way backward, his fury mounting with every fruitless room until, with only the kitchen and the breakfast room left, he’d felt secure that he would be out of the house and blocks away before the sheriffs responded to a neighbor’s call. He’d been gone before I arrived.

  Maybe.

  Whatever he’d wanted had been small enough to hide in a book. What I wanted was Max’s computer, so I could move fast. It was a great relief to move fast.

  I barely glanced into the living room and the library. I’d seen them the day before—it seemed like a week ago—and I couldn’t have missed a computer. Both rooms had been tossed violently. Max’s books had been torn from their shelves, flung into piles that spilled into the hallway. Paintings had been slashed, their frames snapped. Stuffing bled out of the incisions in the deep chair.

  The hallway was completely interior, so no moonlight reached it. My penlight picked out details of destruction: a rug sliced into parallel strips three inches wide, the bright shards of a broken mirror scattering light on the walls as I passed.

  A small bedroom that opened to the left, toward the front of the house, was in total confusion, the mattress standing against the wall, the frame upended, and the box spring slit open from head to foot. The glass shower door in the adjoining bathroom had been shattered. It was not so much a search as an evisceration.

  The door at the far end of the bathroom was ajar, and I pushed it open with an extended hand, harder than I’d intended, and waited as it banged against the wall of a larger bedroom, Max’s bedroom, I guessed. The human bomb had gone off in here, too, but on a small desk across the room I saw a compact computer, intact.

  I’m not familiar with Macintoshes, but I expected at least to be able to turn one on. I found a switch that seemed to be in the right place and flipped it up. Nothing. Running my hands around the frame, I located no other switches, and I got down on my hands and knees, feeling the room yawning wide behind my unprotected back, and pointed my penlight along the power cord until I came to the socket into which it was plugged. Scratch the first hypothe
sis, always presented so helpfully in the manuals as a panacea when trouble is encountered: Make sure the system is plugged in.

  That left the unwelcome possibility that the outlet was controlled by a switch, probably just inside the door. Craftsmen’s bungalows, for all their strong points, are generally underwired, with few outlets. I guess people in the twenties just didn’t have so much stuff to plug in.

  There were only two lights in the room, one a lamp next to the bed and the other a ceiling fixture in the center of the room. I hauled the chair on which I’d been sitting across the floor until it was beneath the fixture and climbed up. The milk-glass covering pulled away with a shower of dust and a couple of dead moths, revealing a small bulb, touchingly pink. It unscrewed easily, and I tossed it into the center of the bed. Then I clambered down, yanked the plug on the bedside lamp, crossed to the door, and threw the switch.

  The Macintosh came to life with a startlingly loud whir. The screen glowed and then snapped alight to reveal the fabled user-friendly interface, full of little bugs, pictures that presumably launched programs. There we were: a tiny telephone icon and the legend modem. I highlighted it with the mouse and pushed the enter key, and the screen flickered again and came up with a dialogue box, full of buttons. One of them said Timed Send. It sounded right, so I pushed down on the mouse and the button on-screen turned into a box containing the words Timed Send: 10/26 14:00.

  At two o’clock I’d been sitting in Jack’s computer room, watching the text fly by: Max’s ghost message, dispatched by the clock in a machine.

  As long as I had the computer on, I figured, I might as well search Max’s hard drive. I kicked out of the communications program, located Mac Word, and booted it. It only took a few seconds to figure out how to access the list of document directories, and when I did I found that Max had obligingly named one of them Correspondence.

  There was quite a lot of correspondence, and absolutely none of it was personal. I found dozens of drafts of his “Therapist” replies and some stuff to his lawyers in Boulder, as well as a few hopeful notes to a publisher to whom Max had apparently submitted a book called The Map Within. Nothing else.