The Bone Polisher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “And you’re telling me you won’t hurt anybody here if I help you get the tags.”

  “Nope. Honest Injun.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m surprised. People usually do. It doesn’t matter, though. I could just shoot you here and go get them myself.”

  The thought had crossed my mind, too. “There’s a room full of people in costume out there. You think I know which one’s got them.”

  “And you’re denying it. Is that smart?”

  “I’m not sure who’s got them,” I said. “That’s the truth. I know who’s got the gold replicas, but I’m not sure who has the real ones.”

  “I used to like science in school,” Darryl Wilder said, as though we were trading youthful confidences. “Let’s go out there and try a few hypotheses. We go up to likely people and you ask them for the tags. Sooner or later, one of them will give them to you, and I’m gone. Simple.”

  “What if somebody stumbles over Bruce Wayne back there?”

  The heels again, bouncing against the side of the desk. “Then people will get hurt,” he said. “The longer we sit here, the more likely that is. If I have to shoot somebody for that reason, you’re going to blame yourself.”

  Spurrier and his cops, Henry and the Seven Dwarfs were out there. My options in here seemed to be limited to getting shot. “Let’s go,” I said.

  “You’re going to be good?”

  “We’ll get the tags, and then I’ll walk you to the door.”

  “That’s exactly what you’ll do, or there are going to be a lot of dead drag queens at your party.”

  “I hear you.” I went to the door and unlatched it. “I guess you want to be behind me.”

  “Wait,” he said. “I didn’t give you your message yet.”

  I leaned against the wall. “No. You didn’t.”

  “Max said you should get married. That’s hard to believe, one fruitcake telling another to tie the old knot, but that’s what he said. It was just about the last thing he said. Said you’re one of those people who need love too much to let it into their lives, whatever that means, but the time has come. God, he talked a lot.”

  The wall felt cool against my cheek. “Is that it?”

  “No. He said the girl won’t wait forever.” He thumped the desk again. “That right? Is there really a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you thinking about it? Tying the old knot?”

  “I suppose so.”

  He laughed lightly, the laugh I’d heard when he was Ed Pfester. “A little resistance there? Boy, do I know how you feel. I’ve got this weensy little problem with love, too. But I’m trying to get past it, just like you. It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

  “I figured you lived alone.”

  “Oh, I do. But it’s time—you know, you can get trapped in a pattern, and you don’t even know it’s there. Did you ever look at your life and wonder where it came from? It’s like, whoosh, suddenly there you are, and you don’t even know why you’re living where you’re living. You know what I’m talking about. I can sense it.”

  “Don’t try it, Darryl.”

  A beat. “Try what?”

  “This is what you do, isn’t it?”

  “Skip it,” he said harshly.

  “You cozy right up to them, Young Mr. Vulnerable, with all the same problems they have. You’re an early edition of them, aren’t you? A chance to unmake the mistakes they made in their own lives.”

  “Let’s get the hell out there,” he said furiously.

  “I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re pretty good.”

  “The girlie,” he said. “Just think about the precious little girlie. She’s not going to want you to come home with your guts in your pockets.” I heard him ease himself off the desk. “I’ll be right next to you, close enough to pick the spot where it’ll hurt longest before you die. And then, of course, a lot of other people will die, too.”

  “No one has to die.”

  “Put on your mask, Simeon. And don’t tempt me.”

  He followed me through the door, but before he could come up beside me we practically collided with Spurrier. Spurrier had his Big Bad Wolf mask shoved back on his head and one hand over his mouth. He looked fevered and disoriented.

  “Hey, Ike,” I said.

  Spurrier barely registered us. “Ooolp,” he said, barreling through the door to the men’s room. I watched one of my hopes disappear.

  “Cop?” Wilder asked. A cheer went up from the ballroom.

  “Yes,” I said helplessly. Spurrier vomited violently in the bathroom.

  “Cops are like women. They shouldn’t drink. Are all the cops dressed out of Disney?”

  “No. It’s a coincidence.”

  “How are they dressed?”

  “As cops.” The cheering rose and peaked. “Sounds like your friends are in trouble.”

  “Cretins,” he said. “Keep moving.”

  He threw his left arm over my shoulder and we came out of the hallway and into the cavernous space of the Paragon Ballroom. Wilder stopped near Bernadette’s font, and I stopped with him. Hanks, Christy, and Henry were on the stage, but the space in front of it was empty. Literally everyone else had their backs to us, focused on the doorway.

  The crowd broke open, and one of the skinheads emerged, bleeding from the head and trying to break into a run. He covered less than a yard before he was tackled from behind by a guitar-toting mariachi and Joel Farfman’s beefy Tonto, who dragged him back into the thick of the melee. He got kicked by a remarkable assortment of shoes before he vanished from sight.

  There was nobody near us.

  Wilder registered it a split second after I did and began to withdraw his arm from my shoulders, but I grabbed his wrist in both hands, pulled it down, and stuck out my hip. I lifted him from the floor as he tried frantically to free the gun from the cape, and brought him around my hip, and he was down, slamming his shoulder against the base of the font, and I raised my foot to kick his gun hand, but he rolled away from me and came up on one knee, the gun pointed at my middle again, and I stopped cold, involuntarily sucking in my midsection. I was aware of a movement on the stage behind him, and Darryl Wilder screwed up his mouth and spat at me, swiveled on his knees, raised the automatic with both hands, and shot Ferris Hanks twice.

  Hanks staggered back across the stage as though he’d been kicked by a horse, blood gouting from his side and one of his thighs. He collided with the wall behind the stage and started to crumple. He hadn’t even hit the floor before Henry pulled a gun from the boxy suit and emptied the chamber into Darryl Wilder, punching him back into the font, which collapsed around him with a tinkle of glass and a rush of water.

  There was no miracle. Darryl Wilder died while my ears were still ringing.

  26 ~ Good Friday

  On Friday, two days after the wake and eleven days after Max Grover was murdered, Christy flew to Boulder to take part in the farewell service Max had designed in his will. It had been delayed twice: first for the police autopsy, and then to give Max’s sister a chance to regain her bearings. When she felt well enough, she called Christy personally and invited him to come.

  Christy later told me that the sun had been shining when he landed in Boulder, although it was unseasonably cold. He hadn’t been dressed warmly enough. He’d taken a cab to a small white clapboard house on the city’s outskirts, huddling in the backseat and using the forty-minute ride to continue outlining his plans for Max’s institute. Helen, Max’s sister, had come to the curb to greet him. Already inside the house were four tiny women in their eighties and Max’s lawyer, the same Mr. Jenks I’d talked to on the phone. Mr. Jenks was the shortest person in the room.

  There had been hot tea and home-baked seed cake and talk of Max. Tears were not encouraged. Max, in Helen’s view, had been exactly who he’d wanted to be, and the service was a way for them all to pay tribute to a good man who’d managed to live a good life. When they left the house, Helen
asked Christy to carry the urn containing Max’s ashes. Outside, they saw that the sky had disappeared beneath a featureless ceiling of gray clouds.

  With Mr. Jenks at the wheel of a van, the seven of them drove up the side of a mountain and over several miles of dirt track before stopping at a grove of trees—the property Max had left to Helen. A wind had kicked up, forcing Helen to raise her voice as she read Max’s farewell. Christy wouldn’t tell me what Max had written. When Helen was finished reading she took the urn from Christy and threw a handful of ashes into the air. Christy raised his eyes and saw them coming down, coming down everywhere, thick and fast and white, lost in a flurry of sudden snow.

  The day that Christy was in Denver, Ferris Hanks went home from the hospital. At seven that evening I drove up Sunset Plaza Drive and through the open gate, parking Alice on the brick circular drive that arched in front of the house. I didn’t ring the bell; the front door was ajar. Cold air streamed through it into the night.

  Two of Ferris’s Yorkies met me at the door, sniffing my ankles in a perfunctory, professional manner. The big living room was empty. I stood there for a moment, listening to nothing in particular and looking around. The people crowded into the teak carvings held their frozen dance steps. Heavy cobwebs, gray with dust, drooped above the thick open beams. I hadn’t noticed them on my first visit.

  To the left were two steps leading up to a dark dining room, dominated by a massive carved table at least fifteen feet long. Chairs of wood and leather were pushed back from it all along its length, as though the party had risen only moments before. I counted twenty of them. Dust coated the leather seats.

  The Yorkies trotted along in front of me, anticipating my destination, as I crossed the living room and climbed the spiral stair to the second story. The stairs curved upward, hugging the walls of a circular tower, sliced by long thin windows, some of them thirty feet high. The city blinked and glittered below like broken glass.

  The hallway leading to the bedrooms was arched; its white plaster walls were lighted every four or five feet by black iron sconces left over from the Spanish Inquisition. The Yorkies scampered through a partially open door, and I followed them into an enormous vault-ceilinged, white-carpeted bedroom.

  “What a nice surprise,” Ferris Hanks said with his back to me.

  He lay on his side, dead center in the king-sized bed, facing a small black-and-white television set and surrounded by his little dogs. He looked very small. The blankets had been tented above his broken leg. The screen of the television set showed me the hall I had just come through.

  “Japanese,” Hanks said, still looking at the screen. “They’re so clever, don’t you think? That’s what people say, anyway. Watch.” The picture changed: the front door. Then the living room. Then the gate outside. “You didn’t bring me flowers,” he said, still facing the screen.

  “No,” I said. “I figured you might be allergic.”

  “You’re going to have to come over here,” he said. “I can’t roll over without help, and Henry seems to have decided to take a turn in the evening air. Just when I wanted someone to read to me. Would you like to read to me?”

  I picked up the two Yorkies and put them on the bed. The other dogs scooted aside to make room. “I don’t feel like reading,” I said, “but I’ll tell you a story.”

  “Am I going to like it?” I still hadn’t come around to the side he was facing, but he made no effort to turn his head.

  “You should,” I said. “You wrote it.”

  “What’s the fun in that?” he asked plaintively. “I know how it comes out.”

  “Well, you’re going to hear it anyway,” I said. “Let’s start with a secondary character. Darryl Wilder was an interesting guy. He was nuts, but he was interesting. I wonder who he would have killed if his uncle hadn’t put a move on him. Someone, that’s for sure. Bus drivers, maybe, or Girl Scout troop leaders, or left-handed horticulturists. Somebody specific, and he would have created an elaborate, self-serving story that justified killing them, and he would have killed them ritually, the same way every time.”

  “I’ve never understood how anyone can do anything the same way every time,” Hanks said. “It’s so boring. So perhaps your thumbnail appraisal of what’s his name isn’t accurate. Perhaps he wasn’t an interesting guy.”

  Hanks may have been bored, but the dogs were paying attention. Nine or ten pairs of black eyes followed my every movement. “He was careful, too. Wilder, I mean. Did his research, meticulous as a graduate student. Gay men of a certain age, successful, living in a big city but born in a small town. That was important to him—that they came from somewhere else, somewhere small, where lots of people knew them. It gave him the opportunity to take a revenge that went beyond killing them. It had to be important, because it was the most dangerous part of his act. He had to send the papers and the finger. Anything you mail has a postmark, or if it’s Federal Express it has a waybill number. He left a description of himself every time he sent off one of his little packages.”

  “Compulsives,” Hanks said dismissively. “I don’t see how you can think he was interesting.”

  “It was there the whole time,” I said. “From the moment Spurrier told me about Max’s finger arriving in Boulder. Max didn’t fit the profile. The other men were in the closet at home; that’s why the packages were so destructive. But Max went out of his way to let the entire world know he was gay. He walked away from a career to do it. He walked away from you to do it.”

  “I wish I could see your face,” Hanks said.

  “Max never answered that ad. There were enough troubled kids on the sidewalk to keep him in the guardian angel business for the rest of his life. Max didn’t even read Nite Line. Someone put a clipping from the paper into the pocket of one of Max’s pairs of pants. He even wrote a flight number on it.”

  “Some people,” Hanks said, “are too fucking clever for their own good.”

  “He didn’t try to forge Max’s handwriting. Just numbers, cryptic enough to make it look like Max didn’t want anyone to know what they meant. But Max was a calligrapher. He wrote numbers in the old style. He crossed his sevens.”

  “That’s not all he crossed,” Hanks said.

  “Darryl Wilder came to Los Angeles to kill you,” I said. “You and someone else he never got around to. You’re from Walpole, New Hampshire. On some bizarre level, you think you’re still in the closet. You like the closet, Ferris. You told me so, remember?”

  He tried to move, groaned, and abandoned it. “If you’re going to stay over there, would you at least help me turn over? This might be a little more interesting if I could watch you as you tell it.”

  “Watch your TV. You’re never going to walk through your house again, so you might as well take a final look.”

  “And I’m not allergic to flowers,” he said.

  “He read about you somewhere, or heard about you. You represented a new phase in his career. Somebody famous, a trophy kill. He probably came up to the gate one night—I’m sure you don’t answer ads in Nite Line any more than Max did—and he probably told you he wanted to be an actor. Henry said that still happens from time to time. He hadn’t counted on Henry, though. After a few days he made his move, and Henry stopped him. Is that right?”

  “It seems I was wrong,” Ferris said. “I don’t know how this comes out.”

  “When Henry had taken care of Wilder, tied him up and stuffed him in a cupboard or one of your dungeons or something, you began to think about putting together a deal. That’s what you do, remember? Henry said it best: ‘Agents don’t do anything. They get other people to do things. They’re not actors, they’re not writers, they’re not killers. Other people do the work.’ ”

  “Henry said that?” He sounded hurt.

  “Henry persuaded Wilder to tell the two of you what he was up to. Henry can be very persuasive. So you proposed a three-point deal. Point one. You didn’t call the police. Point two. You told Wilder about Max, probably mak
ing him out to be what he looked like from the outside, an old man who preyed on helpless young ones. Point three. You offered him something—money, or a movie career—to do his act on Max. A man even more famous than you are.”

  “Just to keep you talking until Henry gets back,” Hanks said, “let’s say I promised him fifty thousand dollars. Could I have a drink of water?”

  “So he placed the ad in the paper, just like he always did—you probably wrote it, even though you knew Max would never see it—and you told him where he’d be likely to meet Max. And Darryl took it from there. He put the ad in Max’s pocket—he wanted the credit for the kill—he used Max’s computer to write some letters I found on a computer bulletin board, he even wrote letters to Max, which Max never read. You probably wrote the letters from Max, too.”

  “Your characters aren’t consistent,” Hanks said. “If Darryl was a compulsive, he would have to do things his way. The way he always did them. The act of writing to Max would have been important to him. That’s the way he did it before, right? So let’s say I arranged a meeting—just talking story here—and Darryl sort of got things going and then told Max he had to go back to, I think it was Nebraska, and he set himself up somewhere in L.A. and started writing letters to Max and sending them to a post office box for forwarding. And Max wrote back out of the inexhaustible goodness of his heart, asking Darryl to come back to Los Angeles so Max could help him do whatever Max thought he could help him do. If you really want me as the heavy, though, I might have drafted a few points for Darryl’s letters. Setting the bait, you might say.”

  “And Max took the bait, and Darryl killed him, and—and what? You decided not to pay him?”

  “If I’d offered him fifty thousand dollars,” Hanks said, “I might have rethought it. That’s a lot of money to pay someone who’s doing something he enjoys.”

  “You’re used to dealing with actors.”