The Bone Polisher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  He passed a hand over his forehead. “I don’t remember the last time I laughed.”

  “Ferris,” I said reprovingly, “you laughed when your dogs attacked me.”

  “Heek,” he said, and both eyes disappeared. “You looked like you had wet your pants.”

  It was a smile, sort of. As much of one as I was likely to get. “I need your help,” I said.

  He got comfortable, a man in his milieu. “Of course you do. Why else would you have climbed my fence?”

  “I want you to throw a wake for Max.”

  Whatever he’d expected, that wasn’t it. “A wake? Whatever for?”

  I’d expected a refusal, but not a question. “That’s not how I work,” I said. “I have ideas first and then figure out why I had them.”

  “How haphazard.”

  “I prefer to think of it as instinctive.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he said. “What makes you think I’d consider such a thing?”

  “We’ve already covered that. For Max.”

  “For years,” he said, “I thought it was a question: ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot?’ My answer was always yes. As quickly as possible.”

  “But you didn’t forget.”

  “Not for lack of trying. Lord, how I tried.” He toyed with the brass box and then looked up. At Henry.

  “Why not?” Henry said.

  “An excellent question,” Hanks said promptly, “and one that isn’t asked often enough. I knew a prostitute once, a woman of almost inexhaustible willingness, and that was her credo. Anything anyone asked her to do, she replied, ‘Why not?’ Wound up owning half of North Hollywood. Ever wondered why they call it North Hollywood?”

  “Because it’s north of Hollywood.”

  “You lack poetry,” Hanks said. “You should spend time with Henry.” He fondled the ears of the nearest dog. “Why me? And don’t give me sentimentalism.”

  “You can afford it,” I said. “And it would amuse you.”

  He closed both eyes. “It might at that.”

  “You haven’t laughed in years,” I pointed out.

  “I ain’t never heard him laugh,” Henry said solemnly.

  Hanks still had his eyes closed, but the left corner of his mouth went up. “Halloween’s around the corner.”

  “Great,” I said. “A theme.”

  “I don’t entertain at home,” he said, opening his eyes.

  “And I wouldn’t ask you to. I want it in West Hollywood.”

  “The dreariest of venues.”

  “It’s your chance,” I said, “to show them how it should be done.”

  The right corner of his mouth went up, too. It made him look almost pleasant. “If I do it,” he said, “I’ll give them an evening they’ll never forget.”

  “Anything you want, as long as it’s legal.”

  “Where have you been? Everything’s legal these days.”

  “You’ll do it, then.”

  He lifted the paws of the dog nearest him and clapped them together lightly in applause. “I’ll think about it. Call Henry at six tomorrow evening.”

  “You’re not as bad as they say you are.”

  “No one’s as bad as they say he is. I used to come pretty close, though.” His eyes widened. “I thought you didn’t know anything about me.”

  “I lied.”

  “We’ll have lots of time to talk about me while we plan this thing.” He waved the words away like smoke. “If I do it. It’ll broaden your frame of reference.” He picked up the ivory box and slammed it onto the tabletop. “Henry,” he said, “it’s midnight. I’ve practically promised this man a favor. Now can I have a fucking cigar?”

  Henry stirred from his spot by the wall. “You got to say please,” he said.

  15 ~ Back Fence

  My answering machine had kept itself busy in my absence. Eleanor had called to say she’d talked to Alan and Christy and that she’d be going to the station with them in the morning in her capacity as a reporter. My mother had checked in with a joke about an old man who found a frog that claimed to be a princess; all he had to do was kiss her to change her back again, with unspeakable delights, unendurably prolonged, as a fringe benefit. At ninety, the old man finally said, he’d just as soon have a talking frog. I wondered what Ferris Hanks would have said. Hammond called from Maui. He and Sonia had met cops of many races, and did I know that Hawaiians ate paste? Three extremely hearty people in the marital line had called to offer me and the little missus a variety of things I’d never heard of and couldn’t do without. Someone with the unlikely name of Ed Pfester—the P was silent, but he’d spelled it—had called, saying he was with Back Fence magazine, and I could call him back at anytime. He was on deadline, he said. In fact, he’d said it twice, both times he called.

  Twelve forty-two a.m. qualified as “anytime,” but I didn’t feel an irresistible urge to talk to Back Fence. Think about People, printed badly and dumbed down to a roughly amphibian level, and you’ve got Back Fence. I could imagine the story they’d do on Max—The Secret Life of an American Icon or something—and I couldn’t see any angle in helping them out.

  There were a lot of things I couldn’t see any angle in.

  I’d brought Max’s piece of Nite Line up the driveway, and I fetched a beer from the refrigerator and smoothed the clip out on the coffee table. Bearded Jack, at the dating service, had been surprised Max would carry something like that around, but it was all I had, and I’d been postponing working through the classifieds on the back of the page. Forty-three of them had been left whole by Max’s scissors and another twelve had been cut through, leaving uninformative fragments.

  Let’s say Max met the Farm Boy through the classifieds. Let’s say the Farm Boy worked his lethal scam from out of town, which made a certain amount of sense; he could probably subscribe to gay papers from all over the place, have them delivered to wherever he holed up between destructive forays into other men’s lives.

  A comparison of the out-of-town subscription lists of the major-city gay papers might have proved informative. It might also have proved informative to roll back time and watch while Max was assaulted, but I couldn’t do that, either.

  About a third of the ads provided phone numbers, all local. On a second look, several of them provided the same phone number, or numbers that differed only by a digit or two. The pros Jack had talked about, all claiming to be handsome, healthy, hankering, and hung. I crossed them out with a red marker, feeling decisive. There. A start.

  Most of the others offered post-office boxes, and nineteen of them were out of town. I marked out the ones in L.A. and looked down at the page. Nineteen was too many by about fifteen. Okay, I thought, which ones would Max be likely to answer?

  The parameters: troubled tone, low self-esteem, pleas for help. That meant I had to read the damn things. It was enough to make me get another beer.

  Older “brother” needed, one said. Whom can I turn to? asked another, a little pedantically. More to the point, Me: Young and inexperienced. You: Strong and caring. Feeling young and inexperienced for the first time in years, I made a note of the P.O. box and the state. A little farther down, Country mouse seeks city mouse. Against the opposite margin, Come and Get me. At the top, New life needed. Next to that, New and adventuresome, right above Mature Daddy wanted.

  The third beer went down more quickly than the first two. I was getting a fourth when the phone rang.

  “Mr. Grist,” Ed Pfester’s voice said to the machine, “this is Ed Pfester again from Back Fence. I’m up against a heck of a deadline here. Please give me a ring whenever you get in.” He gave the number again, as though I were a genie who could be prodded into action only by repeating the magic formula three times. I wrote it down out of habit.

  Below Ed Pfester’s number, this is what I had on my pad:

  Older brother: Albuquerque, NM

  A cry in the dark: Boise, ID

  Country mouse: Ke
arney, NE

  Me: young: Wheeling, WV

  New life: Fresno, CA

  Mature Daddy: Decatur, IL

  Near Chicago, I thought. And then I thought, So what?

  Come and Get: Colorado Springs, CO

  New and: Provo, Utah

  An atlas of sorts, an atlas of real or feigned small-town desperation. I was very happy I wasn’t a closeted gay in Provo, Utah, or anyplace else where the cops all went to church. Or, for that matter, in Ike Spurrier’s territory.

  Now what? Write eight letters? I knew the profile that might bring the Farm Boy through the mirror, carpet cutter in hand: older, prosperous, avuncular, roots in a smaller town. But the Farm Boy, according to Schultz’s printouts, planned his joyrides in pairs, two to a city. Keeping his travel expenses down, maybe. It seemed likely that he had both victims identified, had his correspondence or whatever it was well in progress by the time he packed his innocent expression and picked up his boarding pass.

  How did he swing it once he got to his destination? Did he work them one at a time or simultaneously? Christy had said no one had been sleeping at Max’s house, so he obviously slept elsewhere. In a hotel? At the home of the man in line to become Finger Number Two?

  The penciled numbers on the margin of the page: 237/10/23/6:2. Ten twenty-three was probably October 23, two days before Max was killed. What was 6:2? A Bible verse? What other numerical format demanded a colon? Time, stupid. 6:2. Max being cryptic. 6:20. That left me 237 on October 23 at 6:20, either a.m. or p.m. Two thirty-seven could have been an address, a hotel room, an office suite, a gym locker, a self-storage compartment, a numerical code of some kind. I was willing to bet it was a flight number.

  Approximately ninety airlines fly into, and out of, Los Angeles International Airport, a total of more than eighteen hundred flights a day. The Official Airlines Guide lists all of them by city of origin, arranged alphabetically by destination and chronologically from earliest arrival to latest. It’s a peculiarly infuriating publication, printed in a type that gets smaller every year, and I buy a new one every three months, on the off chance that I’ll be presented with a reason to squint at it.

  The twenty-third was a Sunday, so I could eliminate all the 6:20 flights numbered 237 with the notation “X7,” meaning except Sunday. That would have been helpful if there had been any. There weren’t. A beer and a half later, with my eyes watering, I’d learned that there weren’t any flights from anywhere that had landed at LAX at 6:20 a.m. or p.m. on Sunday the twenty-third. Two veritable holes in the schedule of one of the world’s busiest airports.

  So maybe it was an address, after all. Or someone’s waist size for that matter. Maybe Max had been murdered by someone with a 237-inch waist.

  The phone rang, and I was exasperated enough to pick it up.

  “Boy,” said Ed Pfester, “am I happy to get you.”

  I wasn’t happy. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Really, really late,” Ed Pfester said cheerfully. “Did I explain that I’m on deadline?”

  “Over and over again.”

  “And that I’m doing a piece for—”

  “Back Fence,” I said. “And I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “You don’t?” He seemed unable to believe it.

  “I don’t like Back Fence,” I said. “It’s written for people who put most of their mental effort into growing their fingernails.”

  “That’s pretty strong,” he said. “But, listen, this is important to me. It’s sort of my big break.”

  “I don’t really—”

  “Oh, come on. Please? I only need a couple of minutes. Help the kid out.”

  Burbank, I suddenly thought. I may have slapped my forehead.

  “Ed,” I said, “I’ll give you ten minutes. Call me back in five.”

  “Promise?”

  “Just dial the number.” I hung up and went back to the small print.

  One plane into Burbank Airport at 6:20 P.M. on Sunday the twenty-third. Western Air from Denver’s Stapleton Airport. Flight 237.

  Not good. Stapleton is a hub, a stop-off point for half the air travelers in America. If you’re coming to L.A. and you don’t have a direct flight, chances are pretty good you’re going to hike through Stapleton to change planes. Still, it eliminated Fresno, and probably Wheeling. A Wheeling-based one-stop was much more likely to touch down at O’Hare in Chicago.

  That left six, down from forty-three. It cheered me enough to make me pick up the phone and dial.

  “Scribbling Ed Pfester.” God, he was happy.

  “Ed,” I said, “have you ever thought about changing your name?”

  “Every day of my life,” he said. “But it’d break my mother’s heart.”

  “Something like Brick or Dirk,” I said, with Ferris Hanks’s stable of names in mind. “It’d get rid of the assonance, at least.”

  “Brick?” he said. “Brick Pfester?”

  “You’d probably want to do something about the Pfester, too.”

  “I’ll think about it. Does this count toward my ten minutes?”

  “No, this is on me. How’d you get my name?”

  “One of the other people I talked to. Are you going to let me get away with that?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. Well, it was a sheriff’s deputy. I’m going to be in big trouble if I use his name.”

  “Not Spurrier.”

  “Not. Is that good enough?”

  The kid was hopeless. “I guess it’ll have to be. What do you want to know?”

  “Can I say you’re investigating Mr. Hawke’s death?”

  “You can if you want to get sued.”

  “Boy,” he said admiringly, “you don’t have a problem with confrontation, do you? That’s something I have to work on.”

  “Just practice,” I said. There was something familiar about his voice.

  “How well did you know him?”

  “I met him once, for about an hour.”

  “That’s all?” His dismay was palpable.

  “That’s it.”

  “And what did you think of him?”

  What had I thought of Max? “He was courtly. Sort of remote, but not in an unfriendly way. Intuitive.”

  “Wait,” he said. “I’m writing.” I hung on for a moment. “Would you describe him as an inspiration to everyone who came into contact with him?”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, how about someone who could teach us all something about life?”

  “Where do you get this stuff? Norman Vincent Peale? Reader’s Digest?”

  “Not good, huh?” He didn’t seem the least bit bothered. “How about in your own words?”

  “Actually, I thought he was a little cracked.”

  “I can’t use that,” he said. “Ill of the dead, and all.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hard news, then. I gather you actually saw the body.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Terrible, huh?”

  “Worse than terrible. The work of a subhuman.”

  There was another pause. “Writing,” he said, after a moment. “Subhuman, you said?”

  “Ed,” I said, “why don’t you buy a tape recorder?”

  “Do you know what they pay me? I’m lucky to have a phone. Hey, listen, I’m hearing the killer may have left something at the scene.”

  A little breeze sprang into life behind me and blew directly onto the back of my neck. “You’re hearing that, are you?”

  “This could be a real scoop,” he said. “You know what a scoop is?”

  “I’ve heard the term,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “So did he?” he asked, and I knew where I’d heard his voice before.

  I looked around the room, a deeply familiar room with Eleanor imprinted on it, and wondered whether I should go down the hill, get into the car, and drive somewhere very far away. “What’s this phone number?” I asked.

>   A beat. “My apartment. Where else would I be at this hour?”

  “Right,” I said. Then I drew a long breath and let it out silently. “This is off the record, Ed,” I said. “The answer is yes.”

  “Off the record,” Ed Pfester said.

  “You’ve heard the term,” I said.

  “Well, sure,” he said. “I may be green, but—aw, you’re kidding me.”

  “I’m kidding you,” I confirmed.

  “So, off the record. Who has it? Whatever he left, I mean. So I can talk to him, I mean.”

  I was walking now, dragging the long cord behind me. “I can’t tell you that.”

  A brief silence. Then: “Can’t tell me? Or don’t know?”

  “The former.”

  “You’re not helping me much.” He didn’t sound so happy.

  I looked at the moon through the door to the deck. Two hundred forty thousand miles sounded about right. “It’s not actually my purpose in life to help you, Ed.”

  “You’re not going to tell me who—”

  “I think I’ve made that clear.”

  He cleared his throat. “Do you suck dick?” he asked.

  “With your mouth,” I said.

  “Faggot,” Ed Pfester spat. “Stay out of dark rooms.” He hung up.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Hammond asked groggily on the other end of the line.

  “Simeon. I need some help, Al.”

  “You know, pal, people sometimes sleep on their honeymoons.”

  “This is serious. I need access to the reverse directory.”

  “It’ll leave tracks,” he said. “They log all the requests these days.”

  “I can’t help that.” I told him what had happened.