“So you’re inviting him to a party.”
“With a million people around.”
“All in costume.”
“If it weren’t for the costumes, I know he wouldn’t come.”
“Sort of Catch-22, isn’t it? If people aren’t costumed he won’t come, but if they are costumed you won’t know which one he is.”
The restaurant was octagonal, windowed on all sides, and jammed. About a third of the tables were made up exclusively of men: couples, foursomes, one large and ecstatically raucous birthday party, complete with paper hats and noisemakers. The birthday boy was made up like a cat, and when he’d gotten up to go to the bathroom—something he did with a frequency that indicated a small bladder or large nostrils—I’d seen that he had a long black tail protruding from the seat of his trousers.
“Halloween,” I said, making the connection.
“Wednesday night. And you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Eleanor said, following my gaze.
“There should be a lot of people there,” I said idly. “Tuesday, I mean.”
A small plane coasted in, its frail-looking wings seesawing up and down before it evened off and hit the blacktop. “You haven’t said much about Ferris Hanks.”
“He’s orange and he’s little and he keeps his house colder than a meat locker and he laughs like this.” I gave her my version of Ferris’s heek noise. “For someone who probably thinks of Justine as a training manual, he acts pretty normal. Los Angeles normal, I mean. Anywhere else, I’m sure, they’d put him in a jar in some medical museum.”
“Does he seem evil?”
“I’m not sure I know what evil is any more.”
“Horsefeathers.” Eleanor rarely swore. “You knew it when you met it at Max’s house.”
“Because it was aimed at me. And because he was so damned joyful. If I’d been in his position, I would have stayed in that closet or wherever, or maybe crept up and cut my throat from behind. Instead, he spoke to me, gave me warning, and then tried to cut my throat.”
“More fun that way?”
A chilly little ripple ran over the skin on my arms, and I rubbed at my sliced left forearm with my right hand. “Maybe. Maybe he wanted to incapacitate me and ask me some questions. I don’t know.”
“You weren’t wearing the dog tags.”
“There’s that,” I said. “But I know he meant to kill me. I can rationalize it all I want, but he was going to kill me in that room.”
She tucked her hair behind her right ear. “Do you dream about it?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t remember my dreams, but they’ve been pretty vile.”
“You should try to process them,” she said. “Write down everything you remember as soon as you wake up. There might be something in them you need to know about.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. I had no intention of focusing on those dreams.
“Or phone me,” she said. “Call me the minute you wake up, no matter what time, and we’ll talk them through. Don’t go back to sleep, just pick up the phone.”
I reached over the table and tugged her hair back down so it fell over her cheek. “You’re okay,” I said.
“Careful,” she said, sitting back. “We might start to chat again.”
I started to say something, stopped, and started again.
“Look, it’s a toll call,” she said. “Why don’t you just come home with me?”
My dream was right out of “The Masque of the Red Death.” A castle somewhere, dwarves and nuns and executioners and comic-book superheroes, wet cobblestones and candles everywhere, candles the size of a man that shed an elusive light that made people shrink and grow with every flicker. A figure in scarlet with a face like torn paper and eyes like broken glass, who was Christy somehow, and somehow not, and a wall either being raised or falling down and horses stampeding through the crowd, leaving a heap of empty costumes crumpled on the floor behind them. I began to fling the costumes aside, looking for the people, or for something buried beneath them, and they flew into the air and came down with people in them—different people—and the people stood stock-still where they landed, staring at me, their faces cut and battered by the hooves. One of them had cobblestones pressed into the bloody Oedipus holes in his head where his eyes should have been, stones round and rough and black, and a dumb joke came to me in the dream: Oedipus Rocks, and Eleanor shook me awake.
“You were laughing,” she said.
“Yeah?” I said, sitting up to get closer to the square of moonlight on the foot of the bed. “Well, it wasn’t very funny.”
“Tell it to me.”
When I’d finished, I said, “And I don’t want to hear any nonsense about the big candles.”
“It seems pretty straightforward. It’s an anxiety dream about the wake, about searching through costumes to find someone. And you’re ambivalent about Christy.”
“What about the horses?”
She put an index finger on the bridge of her nose and rubbed it slowly up and down. “They came from behind a wall. They had tremendous strength. They, ah, they dispelled illusion; when they trampled the people in costumes it turned out they weren’t actually people at all, and then they were different people.”
“And?”
“You made a joke in the dream, which is pretty unusual in itself. A pun, a reversal of meaning. I’d say you know something that you’re not acknowledging. Something you’ve put behind a wall, and when you raise or lower the wall, some of the people in the landscape surrounding Max aren’t going to be who you think they are.” She passed both hands, cupped, through the moonlight as though she could scoop some up and drink it. “That’s pretty literal, but it’s the best I can do.”
I put my arms around her. “You could soothe me,” I said.
I woke at eleven in Eleanor’s bright bedroom, feeling rested for the first time in days. A note had been neatly safety-pinned to the pillow beside me.
At the library until 2. Coffee’s ready—just pour water into the thing at the top of the maker.
What are you going to wear to the party?
The coffee maker, an Insta-Brew, had been named by someone who apparently didn’t own a watch. By the time the coffee was finally ready I’d showered with lime-scented soap and Japanese camellia shampoo—a combination of smells that brought more memories than there was room for in the shower stall—and slipped into my jeans from the previous evening, rancid with Typhoon’s cooking oil, plus a clean T-shirt Eleanor had laid out at the foot of the bed. I padded barefoot into the bright little kitchen and poured a cup to the brim and carried it carefully into the living room, full of furniture I’d once lived with, and settled into a chair that knew me well.
I’d never been alone in Eleanor’s house before, and it was a peculiar feeling, both familiar and new. Things I recognized from our time together stood out here and there: a vase, a small painting we’d bought in San Francisco, the lacquer and mother-of-pearl end tables her mother had hauled all the way from China. Most of the objects in the room, though, had come into Eleanor’s life after we’d parted company. I had a sudden pang of—of what? loneliness? regret?—imagining her bringing these new things home, finding the right place for them. To a stranger they would have been indistinguishable from the things I’d bought her, the things we’d chosen together.
Next to the window on the opposite wall, framed in sober black, hung Eleanor’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees. I didn’t have the faintest idea where mine were, but Eleanor’s were on display. For years she’d deprecated their value, the value of her own achievement, hanging the degrees on the wall only when her mother came to visit. Her mother, like most Chinese parents, was fierce about her children’s education, and if the degrees weren’t in full sight when she came for dinner she embarked on a long harangue in Cantonese. Five minutes after she left, the diplomas came down again.
At some point, though, Eleanor had apparently decided to leave them up, and I’d missed the change. One of hundre
ds I’d missed, probably, over the years. She’d pointed out during our interrupted chat that I’d changed and, with her usual tact, hadn’t mentioned herself, but she wasn’t preserved in amber, as much as I might like to think she was. She wasn’t the woman who’d earned those degrees, any more than I was the puzzled kid with all the scholarly initials after his name who hadn’t a clue what to do with his life. She’d undergone her own changes. So far, she still kept a place of some kind for me in her life, but there were no guarantees. She’d had relationships with other men, and I’d handled them in the stolid, approved American-male fashion, hiding both the pain I felt when they began and the relief that had flooded over me when they ended. There wasn’t anything decisive I could do; I’d waived my rights in that area when I’d let her walk down my driveway on the last day we lived together. Let her go because marriage would disrupt my life.
And what was so swell about my life, anyway? I was moving in patterns that had once had meaning, had given me pleasure, but now they were just habits most of the time, like a role in a play that has been running for years. Show up, do the old stunts, collect the money or applause or thanks, go home. A week later I didn’t know what I’d done on any particular day. I drank too much, I didn’t talk enough. I was lonely. Like most people faced with the challenge of getting through a life, I’d developed a bag of tricks that took care of my needs on a few levels and left me unsatisfied on all the others. And when the time came to learn some new ones, I screamed and dug in my heels and hung on for dear life to all the things that didn’t satisfy me.
So what was I protecting against all that love?
The answer presented itself with that peculiar clarity that unwelcome answers usually have. Nothing.
Schultz was right. I should see a shrink, if only to force me to focus on the walls I’d built in my head.
A wall lifting or being lowered, horses thundering through the space where it had been.
I realized I’d been looking at the bright square of a window for long minutes. When I refocused on the room, a dark square floated in front of me. Retinal memory, real-seeming but false, an image from the past persisting until the nerves recharged themselves, a neural version of the emotional images of people we carry until circumstances force us to realize that they’ve changed. Or that they’re no longer there.
On the table in front of the couch were some familiar-looking brochures, full of bright colors and images of wedded bliss. My mother, the emotional guerrilla.
I went to the phone.
It took three tries before I got the right post office. Kearney was apparently riddled with post offices. The woman on the other end sounded thrilled to talk to me, like no one had called in years.
“I sent some money—a cashier’s check, actually—to Phillip Crenshaw, two l’s in Phillip, care of box three thirty-two at your office. He never received it.”
“Hmmm,” she said happily. “Did you put a return address on the envelope?”
“Sure. As I say, there was money in it.”
“Oh, dear. How long ago?”
“Little more than three weeks.”
She made a tsk-tsk sound. “That’s far too long. Something must have happened to it.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Sent from where?”
“Los Angeles,” I said.
“Well, what can you expect?” she said, as though that explained everything. “Los Angeles.”
“I took it to the post office myself.”
“I’ll give it a check. Can you hold on?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking, This is a civil servant?
“Don’t go away,” she said, laughing gaily.
“I’m glued to my chair,” I said truthfully.
Five minutes later she was back. I heard her humming before she picked up the phone.
“Sent it here?” she asked.
I gave her the box number again.
“I just asked,” she said, “because that’s a forwarding box.”
“To where?”
“That’s what’s so funny,” she said. “Los Angeles.”
20 ~ McCarvey
With only two days to create the world between the time Nite Line came out and the wake for Max, Ferris Hanks had swung into a frenzy of activity. When I checked my answering machine from the comfort of Eleanor’s living room, I found no fewer than six messages, each pitched at a higher level of urgency. At the conclusion of the sixth, Henry took the phone away from him, leaving him piping orders in the distance.
“Call the man,” Henry said. “Else, I’m going to have to give him a cigar to calm him down.” The next message was from Spurrier, demanding to know if I had anything to do with the ad in the paper. He left a home number, sounding significantly irritated. I called Joel Farfman instead.
“More than a hundred calls,” he said. “And that’s not counting the ones from Hanks. In, what? Four hours? You’re going to have some party.”
“You going to be there?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. I’m coming as the Lone Ranger.”
“Think you’ll be the only one?”
“I’ll be the only one with a faithful Indian companion. Wait until you see Tonto. But keep your distance.”
Everybody seemed to assume I was gay. “How hard would it be for you to dig out everything you’ve run on the guy who killed Max?”
A brief silence. “Not hard. That’s what interns are for.”
“Can you meet me at the Paragon Ballroom in a couple of hours with some photocopies?”
“What for?”
“I just need to get my bearings.”
“Will you give me an interview?”
“This is a trade?”
“Call it that.”
“Okay. But you can’t use my name.”
“Screw that to the wall and hang a picture on it,” he said pleasantly. “Remember who, what, where, when? You’re ‘who.’ ”
Nite Line, after all, was a weekly. With any luck, this would all be over by the time the next edition came out. And if it wasn’t, I’d probably be safe in jail. “Okay. But the Times is on this, too.”
He laughed, a pinched, wheezy sound like a squeeze bottle being emptied. “The Times,” he said. “I can imagine their angle. ‘The Gay Ripper’ or something like that.”
“I don’t think he’s gay.”
“When did that ever stop them? By the way, Max is in the new People. There’s no press agent like death.”
“You could do me another favor,” I said.
“Yeah?” The tone was noncommittal; like Ferris Hanks, Farfman saw favors as a form of currency.
“I want to know who placed a personal.”
“No can do,” he said promptly. “Everything they want you to know is in their ad.”
“This has to do with Max.”
“Oh.” He barked something to someone else, covering the mouthpiece, and came back. “I don’t think I want to hear this.”
“Sorry. It looks like Max met his killer through your paper.”
I heard a small squealing sound: Farfman sucking breath between his teeth. “You’re sure?”
“As sure as I am of anything at this point.”
“Ah, shit,” he said. “I really hate…” He blew into the mouthpiece of the phone. “Balls,” he said. “Read it to me.”
I unfolded the torn page, which was beginning to fall apart along the fold lines, and read it to him. “Who placed it, when it was placed, how he paid. Anything else you can think of.”
“Yeah, yeah.” There was something new in his voice, an edge that hadn’t been there before. “You got it. See you at the Paragon.”
After all that unaccustomed sleep the second cup of coffee gave me a mild case of the jitters, so I poured the last chill inch or so into the sink and cleaned up. I actually dried the counter. The new Simeon, preparing for domesticity. Then I went out blinking into the flawless sunshine of Venice and drove home.
I avoided the drivewa
y and came up to the house from the side, hiking through tangles of chaparral and surprising a toad the size of one of Ferris’s Yorkies as I hoisted myself up onto the deck. The place was just as I’d left it. No Ed Pfester, or Phillip Crenshaw, or whatever his name was, waiting in the living room and slicing up my carpets for practice. No new messages on the machine. No word from Schultz. A wind had kicked up, and the house was creaking like someone was practicing dance steps on the roof. I set the new world record for changing my trousers and took Topanga into the hot Valley to avoid the beach traffic, heading for West Hollywood.
I’d hit the Monday lull, lunchtime over and all the folks who keep civilization plodding along back in their offices until six, and the traffic on the freeway slipped between the lane lines like it had been greased. I turned on the radio and got the midday disk jockeys. There must be something about sitting alone in a little room with a microphone for hours that is fatal to the soul. The only things that sounded live were the commercials, which were recorded, and the music, some of which was made by people who were dead.
The Paragon Ballroom was a building I’d passed dozens of times without ever noticing it, a two-story red brick barn, liberally enlivened by graffiti, that occupied half a city block on a treesy side street just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. The doorway was arched, double wide, and open, the windows above it blocked with dirty plywood. The hand-painted sign hanging crooked to the left of the door advised all and sundry that Hollywood’s most glamorous venue was available for very special events or, on a more mundane level, as a rehearsal hall. Four cars were scattered, isolated and looking lonely, around the big parking lot.
Inside, the Paragon was one enormous room with a gleaming hardwood floor that must have been sixty years old, blistered and peeling floral wallpaper, and three sets of metal stairs leading to a catwalk that ran along the upper half of the building: a vantage point for the tangle-footed who wanted to watch the dancers. A bandstand, bare plywood set on metal risers, stood against the far wall. The place smelled as though the doors hadn’t been opened in years, a clogged, generic odor of disuse, like damp newsprint or pressed flowers. Three carpenters wearing T-shirts, cutoffs, and bandannas, as though they’d been costumed by the contractor, purposefully banged hammers against the plywood of the stage, and a man with an apron full of tools stood on a rickety, wheeled metal tower in the center of the floor, hanging lights from the beams below the ceiling. The most glamorous venue in Hollywood it wasn’t.
The Bone Polisher Page 21