The Bone Polisher

by Timothy Hallinan

  Kitchen, full of guys in French maid’s uniforms. Bathrooms, empty for once. Batman at the back door, working on another glass of wine. Me, pushing through the crowd, carrying an odd weight of despair, waiting for Darryl Wilder. The whole thing feeling dismayingly familiar, dismayingly old. Donald Duck on a quest. Not very brave and faintly ridiculous. Poking my way again into other people’s lives, lives that looked—from the outside, at least—fuller and more complete than my own.

  People kissing in the corner. The Supremes working on their Motown moves.

  Someone staring at me. Spurrier’s eyes, mad little lights through the holes in the wolf mask. I suddenly realized that Snell wasn’t the only drunk at the party.

  Back in the main room, Henry was still on the stage. “We’re running late,” he said, all business. He stepped aside and tucked the mike under his arm while he conferred with Ferris. I heard a bellow from the bar and saw Spurrier straighten galvanically, throwing off a glittering arc of white wine, and clutch his rear end. Candy Toy came toward me through the crowd, looking grimly satisfied.

  The front door was still manned, although the soldiers on duty had their backs to the street and their eyes on the stage. On the sidewalk, I breathed in the cooling air and watched the traffic. People drove by on the errands that take up so much of life, unaware of Max, ignoring the fact that someone could walk into their homes with a carpet cutter and, with one short upward swipe, turn all their plans, all their errands, into a bad joke.

  The parking lot was full of empty cars. It was nice to be where nothing was happening.

  “…these testimonials would have embarrassed Max,” Ferris Hanks was saying when I went back in. “He would have wanted us to have a good time. I’m going to suggest that you all write out your farewells, and I’ll buy a special supplement in Nite Line so my old friend Joel Farfman can print them, along with the pictures and stories from this party. A special supplement for Max. How does that sound?”

  “Expensive,” called his old friend Joel Farfman, who had an arm thrown around Tonto’s shoulders.

  “Heek,” Hanks said perfunctorily, gazing at Joel as though he were a bad oyster. “That Joel. Now, before we raffle off the evening’s door prize, I’d like to turn the microphone over to Christopher Nordine, who has an announcement to make.”

  Zorro climbed the steps to the stage. Christopher looked great, slender and dashing in his black clothing. He was wearing a pencil-thin mustache beneath his mask, and it emphasized the strong curve of his jaw. I sagged against my post at Bernadette’s font and searched the room for Spurrier. Not at the bar, which was something.

  Blonde hair across the room.

  “Most of you know me,” Christy began. Then he stopped and looked up at the lights as though he’d lost his place. After the time it took him to draw three deep breaths he hooked his thumb under the black mask and pushed it up onto his forehead so the crowd could see his face. “You probably wonder what Max saw in me. Well, now that I’ve had a little time without him, a little time to think about it, so do I.”

  I worked my way toward the bright head of hair.

  Noise from the door, a sudden loud voice.

  “You’re a good guy, Christy,” someone called. There was a smattering of applause.

  “I’ve been a sorry excuse for a human being,” he said. “I’ve been a taker and a user.”

  “And a whiner,” someone suggested, but not harshly, and Christy grinned and nodded.

  The blonde hair belonged to Marilyn Monroe, in her Seven Year Itch white dress. I’d checked her three times already.

  “And you know what?” Christy was visibly gaining confidence. “That’s what Max saw in me. Room for improvement. Miles of room for improvement. Enough potential for improvement, considering where I started from, to make it worth his time. Max wanted to fix everybody’s life.”

  A sudden ripple of movement from the direction of the street, jostling its way into the center of the room, and someone shouted again. I went up on tiptoe but couldn’t see anything.

  “Max left some money behind,” Christy said, squinting through the lights toward the door. “More money than—well, enough money to fix a lot of lives. And I’ve figured out a way to use it that will keep Max’s memory—

  A folding chair sailed over the heads of the crowd and smashed onto the floor of the stage. Christy jumped back at the same time that I jumped forward, toward the door.

  I couldn’t get there. People had turned their backs to the stage, trying to see what was happening, and they were being pushed backward into the room. I shoved my way through until I came up behind a kimono-clad geisha who must have weighed three hundred pounds.

  “Sorry,” I said. I put my hands on the small of his/her back and pushed, using her as an icebreaker, and we plowed through six or eight densely populated yards before the crowd suddenly gave way and she pitched forward, barely remaining upright, and collided with a very wide young man wearing a plaid shirt and oil-stained blue jeans who grabbed her by the shoulders, spun her around, and brutally threw her back into the crowd.

  He had at least a dozen friends with him. Some of them had tire irons and some of them had baseball bats, and all of them had shaved heads and glum, glowering expressions. They were all white and all young, and all larger than I would have liked them to be, and they stood in the center of a wide circle of partygoers, scowling into the room and tapping their bats against the floor with a sound like the first drops of heavy rain.

  None of them was Darryl Wilder.

  The geisha had taken four people down with her when she smacked into the crowd, and as they got up I saw that one of them was the deputy who’d struck up an acquaintance with Tallulah. He stepped into the middle of the circle. His drugstore sunglasses had been knocked crooked, and he looked very young.

  “You guys had better turn around and get out on the sidewalk,” he said.

  “Look here,” said the wide one who had tossed the geisha. “It’s officer Florence.” He took two steps toward the deputy, who didn’t move.

  “I’m ordering you to disperse,” the deputy began nervously, and the wide man swung his bat.

  It caught the deputy on the side of the neck, and he went over like a tree, hit the crowd, and bounced back again. The bat struck him beneath the rib cage this time, folding him in half. He emitted a strangled grunt and sank to the floor.

  “Home run,” said one of the skinheads.

  Three of them broke from the group and grabbed a nun, pulling her into the circle. Two of the three pinned the nun’s arms while the third seized the cloth over her head and yanked it down, revealing a crew cut with a bald spot at the back of the head. Suddenly the nun—Sister Victima, I recalled—was a struggling middle-aged man in an absurdly ostentatious habit.

  I turned to get back into the room so I could signal the Seven Dwarfs and get Spurrier’s attention for his fallen deputy, but the crowd was too thick. I was pushed back into the circle, just in time to see one of the bashers, a pig-faced baldie with a Hitler mustache, bring a tire iron around with both hands against the nun’s left arm. I could hear the bone break ten feet away.

  “You leave that nun alone,” said a familiar voice, and the tragic Supreme stepped out from the crowd, her sequins glistening in the light. “Y’all should be ashamed of yourself.”

  The wide man tapped his bat against the side of his leg, major-league style, and said, “Well, well. A boogie. Double points.”

  “Pretty little boogie, too,” said the man who had swung the tire iron. He stepped up to the Supreme and put his hand flat against her crotch. “Nothin’ here,” he said, playing to his friends. “You cut it off?”

  “Maybe she’s a girl,” said another, a man fat enough to sustain a tribe of cannibals through a long winter. “You a girl, sweetie?”

  “You got to check that yourself,” the Supreme said coyly. She hiked her dress and extended a long, shapely leg. The skinheads watched the dress inch higher. The Supreme wrapped carm
ine-tipped fingers around the arm of the man who had swung the tire iron and guided his free hand toward her crotch. At the last moment, she sidestepped, put a hand on his shoulder, and flipped him over her leg onto the floor.

  “Motherfucker,” she said, raising a high-heeled foot.

  The wide skinhead lifted his baseball bat, but he hadn’t gotten it any higher than his shoulder before three hundred pounds of geisha sailed into him, knocking him over the fallen deputy and into his friends. Someone shoved past me, and I saw Little Bo Peep going in low and planting a shoulder into the gut of the nearest of the intruders, who tried to back up, bumped into the man behind him, and got hoisted four feet from the floor and dropped on his back. Behind Bo Peep came her sheep, slashing at every shaved head in sight with the spike heels on his hands.

  He landed one on the cheek of the pig-faced thug with the Hitler mustache, opening up a red slice from eye to chin. The wounded man stumbled back into his pals, who separated and let him fall and then converged on the attacking sheep.

  They didn’t get a chance to do him much harm. A nearby cowboy raised his branding iron and imprinted the old Rocking-D brand on one shaven scalp, and after him came the deluge: A gaily dressed mob of Rockettes, vampires, Roman centurions, football players, cheerleaders, vestal virgins, Boy Scouts, killer bees, multiple Carol Channings, and Liza Minnelli clones charged the intruders with a roar. The last thing I saw, as I forced my way back through the crowd, was the three-hundred-pound geisha, kimono flying, planting both heels dead center in a plaid chest.

  Hanks was calling for order from the stage, patting the air soothingly above the heads of the crowd with his free hand while Henry tried to stay in front of him. I waved for Henry’s attention and yelled for him to keep an eye on Christy, who was trying to climb down off the stage and get into the action. Henry reached down and scooped Christy up by the back of his shirt, like he was picking up a puppy, but Christy twisted around and knocked Henry’s hand away. Henry dropped him, and Christy, Zorro’s cape flying behind him, headed for the brawl.

  Darryl Wilder hadn’t come in the front door; if he was here, that left the back. I passed Mickey Snell’s office, looked in long enough to see Mickey snoring on his desk, before I threw open the back door.

  The door caught partway, and Batman looked in at me.

  “Anybody come in back here?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Batman said. I pushed the door farther, struck an obstruction again, and looked down at a pair of bare feet. The screams behind me reached a crescendo.

  “Simeon?” Batman asked.

  “What is it?” I gestured at the feet. “Who’s that?”

  “I’ve got a message for you,” Batman said, reaching into his utility belt and pulling out a small silver automatic. “From Max.”

  25 ~ Paragon (3)

  The gun was aimed at my abdomen, where a bullet would do harm anywhere it hit.

  “You put your mask on crooked, Darryl,” I said. “Your hair is showing.”

  Wilder reflexively put up his empty hand, stopped it at chest level, and grinned at me. His teeth were white and regular. The grin, even beneath the mask, was friendly. “Darryl?” he said. The grin got wider. “You got me confused with someone else.”

  “I doubt it. Mrs. McCarvey remembers you very vividly.”

  “Mrs. McCarvey,” he said, shaking his head. “Old Auntie Sarah. She drinks, you know. Don’t you think it’s terrible when a woman can’t control her drinking? Such a waste of potential.”

  “Did you kill him?” I asked, glancing down at Batman’s feet.

  “Not enough time,” he said regretfully. “Those jug-heads just couldn’t wait to get inside. No finesse.”

  “Pleasure postponed,” I said. “I guess you know all about that, Darryl.”

  The gun made a tiny circle. “So you know my name. So what? Names are easy. And I don’t know much about pleasure of any kind. Take off your mask, and do it real slow.”

  I lifted my mask to the top of my head. Someone came out of the women’s room behind me. I heard her sniffle as her heels clacked their way down the hallway, and then the sounds were swallowed up in a new burst of noise from the ballroom.

  “Wondered what you looked like. That was cute, leaving through the window. Scared you, didn’t I?”

  The door opened out. There was no way I could get my hands on it and pull it closed without giving him time to perforate my insides. “You’re crazy,” I said. “Crazy people scare me.”

  “I am crazy,” he said calmly. “It’s smart of you to recognize that, Simeon. I hope you’ll keep it in mind as we negotiate our way through our next fifteen minutes together. Have you got a boyfriend?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, there’s someone for everyone in this world, so there’s certainly someone for you. Just be glad it isn’t me.”

  Henry was up on the stage. Spurrier and his cops were probably in the middle of the fracas. The Seven Dwarfs were God only knew where. “Go away,” I said. “I’ll give you ten minutes to get clear.”

  He made a kissing noise, two times, fast. “Is that a promise? Like ‘it won’t hurt’? Or ‘I won’t come in your mouth’?” Darryl Wilder laughed. Then he stopped, like someone turning off a tap. “Back up,” he said. “Just three paces. Stick your hands in the front of your pants and keep them there. Don’t do anything stupid, okay? You probably won’t believe this, but I’d really hate to hurt you.”

  I did as I was told. The pressure of my hands against my stomach was oddly comforting, as though they might slow the bullet. Wilder put his free hand against the door and pulled, shoving Batman’s bare feet back across the asphalt. He stepped inside, forcing broad shoulders through the opening, and tugged the door closed. The gun was rocksteady.

  “Bathrooms?” he asked, looking at the doors to my left. I nodded. “And that one?”

  “Office.”

  “Is it empty?”

  “It might as well be.”

  “In there, then. In a straight line, okay?” He shielded the gun under the black cape and followed me into Mickey Snell’s office, closing the door behind him. It had a little latch on the inside, and he threw it into the locked position.

  Snell snored stuporously on the desk. Wilder barely glanced at him. “I used to think all faggots were handsome, you know, men who took care of themselves and put a little effort into how they look. But those are just the ones you’re aware of, right? The ones that put on a show. You see a fat bag of shit like this, you never think he might be a fruit.”

  “Was Jason McCarvey handsome?”

  “Uncle Jason?” He gave it some thought, dividing his attention between me and the comatose Snell. “You know, I don’t know. I grew up with the man. And he looked like my father, and I guess you never really know what your father looks like. He was a real skunk, though, Uncle Jason, I mean, although my father was no bargain either. No wonder poor Auntie Sarah drinks.”

  “Where’d you get the skinheads?”

  “I was tagging along after Max’s boyfriend when they showed up. I followed them to the jail and bailed them out. I thought it’d be fun to bring them to your party. Take all their IQs and add them up, and you’ve still got a centigrade temperature. Who’s got my tags?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, sure you do.” He sat on a corner of the desk that Mickey Snell wasn’t using, fished in one of the pouches of the utility belt, and extracted a package of Marlboros and a heavy military Zippo. He seemed to have all the time in the world. “Do you smoke?”

  “No.”

  “Mind if I do?” He waited for an answer.

  “Darryl,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind if you ate the lighter.”

  “I guess not.” He shook a cigarette loose, placed it between his lips, and put the package back. Then he fired the Zippo and inhaled. “Uncle Jason’s,” he said, showing me the lighter before he dropped it into the pouch. “Who’s got the tags?”

  “I told you—”
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  He waggled the gun. “It’s noisy out there. I could shoot you and no one would hear a thing, except for our fat friend here. Empty your pants pockets.”

  “There aren’t any,” I said. “Donald Duck doesn’t carry stuff around.”

  “Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants, so let’s not pretend to be purists. Lift your shirt and turn around.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything to do but obey. The air felt cold on my stomach and back.

  When I was facing him again, he said, “Open the shirt at the neck. The first four buttons. Pull it open.”

  “You won’t get out of here,” I said, “unless you go out the back door now.”

  He put the gun against Mickey Snell’s belly and pushed it in. “No one will hear a shot through all this fat,” he said. “I could pull the trigger just for fun. Open the shirt, like I told you.”

  I showed him my neck and chest, and he sighed. “You’re making this difficult. Help the kid out, and I’ll be out of here. No one will get hurt.”

  “Until the next time,” I said.

  He drummed the back of his heels against the desk, the first sign of impatience. “I’m finished. I thought there would be a mystery or something when they died, something special. I thought I would feel something. Just like I thought faggots were different. But they’re not. They’re just like everyone else. They live stupid, disgusting lives and they die messy. When they’re dead, they’re dead. Nothing to get excited about, nothing interesting there at all. Just another shitty life and a lot of blood and bones.”

  The noise outside was dying down. “You mean that?”

  “What? That I’m finished? Sure I do. I want a life, a job, kids.” He smiled at me. “I’ve got a girlfriend now. I can’t go on with this. I get home, she asks me what I did today, and I’m supposed to say, ‘I killed a queer’? I want to go back—back somewhere—and be a person.” He turned his head toward the door as though he’d heard something and then brought it back around to me. “I don’t want to be crazy anymore.”