The Bone Polisher sg-6

by Timothy Hallinan

  I covered the distance to the sidewalk on hands and knees and sat on the pavement, looking at the broken window. White curtains stirred peacefully in the breeze.

  Some soprano was singing in my ears, thin and high as a far-off violin. The porch light came on in front of the house to the left of Max’s, and at the sight a wave of delayed panic rose in me, a swarm of gnats in the muscles and veins, and I got up and ran, bleeding back and front, toward the lights of Santa Monica Boulevard. I was on the Pacific Coast Highway before the fear subsided. I pulled the car over to the dirt shoulder and rested my forehead against the steering wheel. My shirt was stiff and scratchy with dried blood, and my shoulder and forearm burned as though coals had been slipped beneath the skin. The air seemed almost solid. I drew it in and let it go in great shuddering gulps until one caught in my throat and I opened the door and leaned out and vomited coffee and hot bile onto the road. My stomach kept heaving long after the coffee was gone.

  It was cooler here, the air chilly on my wet face. Even so, it couldn’t dispel the hot flush of shame that suddenly seized me, grabbing me by the throat and shaking me like a wet rag. He’d been in the house, cornered, and I’d run. I’d let him go.

  A pair of headlights in my rearview mirror reminded me that I was back in the sheriffs territory, and the fear clutched me again and did macrame with my stomach muscles, and I peeled off the blood-slick gloves, put Alice into gear, and drove home.

  The cut to my forearm was deep but only a couple of inches long. The one to my shoulder, I saw in the bathroom mirror, was longer, but shallow. Both were clean and straight, testimony to the sharpness of the carpet cutter. There were scratches on my legs from Max’s window. I washed the cuts with soap and warm water and patted them dry. Then, catching my own acrid smell, I got into the shower and tried to scrub the fear away. I scrubbed for a long time.

  Naked and wet, I climbed onto the roof of the downstairs room and stood in the moonlight, letting the air dry me. My entire body hurt, cut in places, battered in others. Topanga Canyon smelled sharp and dusty. The moon was only a few degrees above the mountain that blocks my view of the sea, going down and taking the night with it, pulling the day in its wake. I focused on a solitary light in a house at the bottom of the canyon and willed myself into that room, a room with people sitting safely in it.

  Being frightened is part of my job. Giving in to it isn’t.

  This was something new, I thought, as I opened the refrigerator and took out a beer. This was something new and unwelcome. I drank the beer in three long, continuous swallows and opened another, taking it to the couch. The bright marriage brochures winked at me from the table.

  This had been Eleanor’s living room once. She had found the little jerry-built cabin, one board thick in most places, when we first decided to live together. Until then we’d maintained separate apartments near UCLA, where we’d met. She’d been specializing in Oriental studies and I’d been postponing my entrance into the real world, accumulating one worthless degree after another until my name, with all the initials following it, began to look like a bad Scrabble hand. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the degrees-English literature, drama, and comparative religion-but at least I understood how college worked. It was a place where you did something and you got something-a grade, a degree-in return. All anybody in the real world seemed to get was money, and I didn’t really care about money.

  I was surprised to find that my bottle of beer was empty. I didn’t recall having finished it. My muscles felt a little looser as I stood to get another. Since I had to go all the way to the refrigerator, I grabbed two.

  Several months after Eleanor and I met, someone threw one of Eleanor’s friends, a diminutive Taiwanese pianist named Jennie Chu, off the roof of one of the dormitories. Eleanor kept saying that no one could have wanted to kill Jennie, and as it turned out, she was right: Jennie had been tossed by a cocaine dealer who couldn’t tell Asians apart even when he wasn’t fried. By way of helping Eleanor through her grieving process, I found him and gave him to the police, but not until I had broken both his elbows, snapping his arms over my knees like sticks of kindling. They’d broken surprisingly easily. Cocaine, they say, weakens the bones.

  My reaction to breaking his arms had been complicated.

  It had taught me something about myself I hadn’t known before, something I’d been keeping an eye on ever since. My reaction to solving Jennie’s murder, though, was simplicity itself: I’d found something I wanted to do. And I’d done it, with some success, after Eleanor and I moved into the cabin in Topanga, and I’d kept doing it after she packed her bags and left.

  Now I wondered whether I could still do it.

  He’d sounded so friendly.

  Knives have always terrified me. They’re so much more personal than guns. A bullet punches a hole into you when it enters and punches another when it exits, and it messes up anything it can get to in between. Knives are generally less lethal, but I’ll take the dull, brutal blow of a bullet over the sharp edge slipping through the skin any time. Still, I’d faced knives before without…

  He’d surprised me. The room had been dark and small, the carpet cutter had been curved. I’d seen what he’d done to Max. I’d had the sheriffs to worry about. There were a million reasons.

  Eleanor’s curtains, the curtains she’d made, still hung on the windows. She’d chosen the couch and paid for it, dipping into one of those mysterious bank accounts Chinese always seem to have. The couch was a collection of odd-shaped lumps now, and there were bullet holes in it, courtesy of a Chinese gangster who’d tried to kill me in this very room. I’d been frightened then, but not terror-stricken, not paralyzed with fear as I’d been in Max’s bedroom. Something had kicked in, as it always had before, adrenaline or fury or a sense of outraged dignity, and it had held me together until that particular dance was done. I hadn’t fallen apart until afterward.

  The bottle in my hand was empty. I threw it across the room, opening the cut in my shoulder. The bottle hit the wall, harmlessly, just as the chair had. I could throw things at walls, it seemed, all night long without doing any harm. I picked up the other bottle and drank, bleeding onto the leather of the couch.

  I’d run away from Eleanor, as my mother had pointed out during several of our rare personal talks. After we’d been living together long enough to begin talking about marriage, I’d had an affair, and then another, meaningless and passionless. Mechanical. Stupid. She’d found out, as I supposed I meant her to, and forgiven me. Then I did it again, and she stopped forgiving me and started suggesting I get some counseling. Instead, I had another affair. That was when she packed. Now she lived in a small cottage in Venice, working on her third book and writing occasionally about the New Age for the Los Angeles Times, and I lived alone on my hilltop, venturing out from time to time to make a little money. To poke around in other people’s untidy lives. To get into knife fights in dark rooms with people who scared me senseless.

  The bottle was half-full this time, and it made a nice splash when it hit the wall, beer spewing forth in a foamy arc to soak the carpet. See, I could do some damage. I climbed to my feet again and went to the refrigerator and drank the three remaining bottles straight down, standing there and staring at the wall. Then I grabbed a paper towel and pressed it over the cut on my shoulder until the bleeding stopped, and then I hauled my aching body to bed.

  10 ~ Special Delivery

  I surfaced out of a bad dream and into the knowledge that someone was in the house.

  The house has only three rooms on the upper level: the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. The bathroom door opens directly into the bedroom, and the little room downstairs, the one whose roof serves as the sun deck, can be entered only from outside. That’s the whole house. The noise that had punched a hole in my nightmare had come from the kitchen.

  Sunlight burned through the window: late morning. I inched my hand to the edge of the mattress and then beneath it until my fingers tou
ched the handle of the nine-millimeter automatic I keep there. I pulled it out and hid my hand under the covers and let my eyes close most of the way, looking at the door through the rainbows the sunlight made against my eyelashes.

  The living-room floor creaked and something clinked, like a couple of bottles being knocked together. Then a sharper sound, from the kitchen again, metallic this time. Under the covers, I snapped the automatic open and then shut again, forcing a bullet into the chamber. It was deafening.

  The bedroom doorway darkened and Eleanor Chan stood there, a coffee mug in each hand. I kept my lids down and enjoyed the sense of looking at her when she didn’t know she was being observed, feeling the now-familiar knot in my abdominal muscles dissolve. She wore a pair of red UCLA gym shorts, an oversized gray T-shirt with dalmatians on it, and a pair of white knee-socks folded to midcalf. No shoes: Eleanor doesn’t believe shoes belong in the house. Her black hair was pulled back against the heat, held on top of her head with an elastic band strung through two little red plastic balls that matched her gym shorts. On anyone else it would have been too cute. Dark wisps of hair fell around her high cheekbones, and she lowered her head impatiently and blew them away.

  “You’re a mess,” she said.

  I opened my eyes. “You’ve known that for years.”

  “You look like you walked into a windmill. The shoulder probably needs stitches, and the arm looks like it’s infected.”

  “You saw my arm?” My arm was under the covers.

  She regarded me from head to foot. “I saw everything. You were in a coma.”

  “So much for vigilance,” I said. I reached over and put the gun back under the mattress. “Is one of those for me?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and I admired a smooth length of thigh. There’s something unwholesomely interesting about knee socks. Her lips pursed in disapproval. “If you think you can manage it after all that beer.”

  “I only drank part of it. I poured the rest on the living-room floor.”

  “So I saw,” she said, holding out one of the cups. “It’s a novel way to cut down.”

  “Can you hang on to that for a minute? Sitting up is going to demand most of my attention.” I put my hands flat on the mattress beside me and heaved myself upward, feeling the muscles in my legs and stomach form a union and wave little neural signs in protest. “Jesus,” I said, staring at my cut arm. It was bright red.

  “It’s Mercurochrome, you dolt,” Eleanor said. “I put some on your shoulder, too.”

  “And I slept through it?”

  “That’s not all you slept through,” she said.

  This did not sound good. “What else?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  I took the coffee. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t suppose I am.”

  “Why should today be different?”

  She raised her eyebrows and sipped her coffee.

  Normally I love Eleanor’s coffee, but the smell of it made my stomach heave rebelliously, and I turned it into a cough and blew on the cup.

  “Told you so,” she said with some satisfaction. “You’re not as young as you used to be.”

  I closed my eyes. “People keep saying that.”

  She traced the cut on my shoulder with a light finger. “Maybe you should listen. There was a time, and I remember it more vividly than I’d like to, when you could go out and get minced and then come home and drink a case of beer, and you’d still wake up as fresh as a daisy.”

  “ ‘Fresh as a daisy,’ ” I said admiringly. “I like that. Is that a New Age expression?”

  “I have a New Age expression for you,” she said, “but I’m a lady.”

  “And yet here you are in a man’s bedroom.”

  “An invalid,” she said, “and I’m on an errand of mercy.”

  “I was wondering about that.” She didn’t usually come over these days unless I called, and sometimes not even then.

  “Why don’t you get dressed?” she asked. “If you can. And we’ll talk about it.”

  “Whenever you say, ‘We’ll talk about it,’ I begin to perspire.”

  She got up. “Well, perspire your way into the living room, and we’ll have a chat.”

  I got more toothpaste on my chin than in my mouth, and I cut myself shaving, but other than that my ablutions were uneventful. The orange shirt I chose first clashed with my Mercurochrome, so I traded it for a loose robin’s-egg blue number with long sleeves to cover the damage and a pair of white drawstring pants Eleanor had brought me from the solo trip to Bali her first book advance bought her. It was eleven o’clock, and the air was hot enough to melt bacon fat.

  Eleanor was sponging the back of the couch with a paper towel and muttering under her breath when I came into the living room. When she heard me she held up the paper towel accusingly. It was wadded and rust-brown with dried blood. “You need a full-time nurse,” she said. “Or a mobile hospital following you around.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “If I’d known you were coming I would have bled outdoors.”

  “You did.” She folded the towel over to present a clean surface and swabbed at the couch again. “You’re hell on furniture.”

  I sat where the couch was damp. It felt cool. “Is this our chat?”

  She avoided my eyes. “Where’s your coffee?”

  “Why, Eleanor,” I said. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were stalling.”

  “I made it, you can drink it.” She went into the bedroom and came out with the mug in her hand and stood over me until I’d forced some down and made appreciative noises. “I want you to know,” she said severely, “that I had nothing to do with anything your mother said.”

  “I never thought you did. Not your style.”

  “She called me a couple of days ago. Said she wanted some girl talk, said your father had been grumpy all week and she was bored.”

  “He’s not much on girl talk even when he’s cheerful.” The second gulp of coffee tasted better.

  “She has a right to worry about you, you know.”

  “My God, what she went through,” I said, “giving me birth. Did you know I was born at three in the morning?”

  “Of course I did. I’ve known that for years.”

  I moved my arm experimentally. My shoulder hurt like hell. “I don’t know what time you were born.”

  She looked down at the front of her T-shirt as though the dalmatians were a surprise. “There’s a lot you don’t know.” Her eyes came up to mine. “But you do know I’d never set anything up with your mother.”

  “She wants us to get married,” I said, working the other arm. That shoulder hurt, too. “She says we’d have adorable children.”

  “We would. Another genetic possibility goes unfulfilled.” She tugged at the bottom of the shirt, which was perfectly unwrinkled.

  “We chose names once, remember?”

  Eleanor picked up the wad of paper towels, which she’d dropped onto the table, and poked it experimentally with her forefinger. Water dripped from it. “We did a lot of things,” she said shortly. “Some of them were silly.”

  “Some of them,” I said, “were pretty wonderful.” I reached up with the arm that hurt least and took her hand, paper towels and all. Her hand felt as if it had been in mine forever.

  “I’m having a little problem,” I said.

  She ran her nails over the skin on the inside of my wrist. “That’s evident.”

  “You said it, that thing about there having been a time when I could get run over or whatever, and not lose the crease in my pants.”

  She was watching me, looking past the tone and under the words. “Yes?”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m scared.”

  She put her fingers around my wrist and rotated my arm, bringing the long cut into view. “That’s probably a sign of good sense.”

  “It’s not just that. I mean, it is just that, but why? Why now?”

>   “Simeon, you’ve spent so much time looking at other people’s lives that you’ve forgotten about your own. Not that you ever wanted to know anything about yourself. Ask yourself why, out of all the jobs in the world, you chose this one. I mean, talk about outward-directed. You bounce from one set of lives to another, putting together what’s broken if you can, trying to change things. And you think you don’t change. You’re impervious to it, when everyone else can tell from a hundred yards away that you’re not the same person you were five years ago, or even three. Somewhere along the way, the big penny dropped. You’ve figured out you’re going to die.”

  “I always knew I was going to die.”

  “Knowing it in your big fat head is one thing. You know it now in the center of your chest. And you know what that means? It means that life isn’t infinitely elastic, the way it was in your twenties. You can’t go back for retakes. You can’t fix it. You’re making choices you’re going to have to live with. And some of them, if you’ll pardon the candor, have been pretty stupid.”

  “You and me,” I said.

  “That’s one.”

  I took her hand from my wrist and held it between both of mine. It felt cool, smooth, familiar, right. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about you and me.”

  The door to the roof opened and Wayde walked in, stark naked.

  “For example,” Eleanor said, withdrawing her hand.

  “Yo, Simeon,” Wayde said on her way to the kitchen. “Your girlfriend is way cool.”

  “I’m cool,” Eleanor said, watching Wayde’s rear end analytically. There were no visible flaws. “She and I have had a chat.”

  “Can I have some of this Evian?” Wayde called from the kitchen. “I feel like a french fry.”