“Not that that will hamper them,” Schultz said.
“We have met the enemy,” I suggested, “and he is missing.”
“A call to the police might speed them up.”
“From me? I thought you were the one with clout.”
“Get married,” he advised soothingly. “Settle down.”
“Norbert,” I said, “have you been talking to my mother?”
He turned shrink on me. “Should I?”
Eleanor wasn’t home yet, so she and Christy and Alan were presumably still at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s station. My mother would be out in the courtyard of her apartment house, having cocktails with her cronies, a group of women she calls the cacklers. My father regards the telephone as a small and noisy piece of furniture and generally refuses to answer it. When my mother comes in, he usually says, “Phone rang,” as if that were helpful information.
That left the computer.
From the layout of the document, it was a letter. That confirmed what its name, letter. thr, might have led even a nonprofessional to suspect. The four short lines at the top suggested that Max might be the kind of old-fashioned correspondent who put an internal address even in private correspondence, and wouldn’t that be nice?
Detective fiction just crawls with skilled cryptographers who can take one look at a slate of characters in Mayan knot writing or Linear B, snort once or twice in a superior fashion, and read it aloud. I suppose such people exist in real life, too, but they don’t seem to get out much. Still, a code is a code. Max’s letters had to be based on the alphabet, and the alphabet has its own rules of internal consistency. The one everyone always seizes on is the fact that E is the letter that gets the most use. Unless, of course, the writer of the code is intentionally avoiding words with an E in them, or is allergic to the letter E, or belongs to a religion that regards the letter E as the devil’s work, or has a keyboard with a broken E key, or is writing in a language in which E is the least common letter, or can’t spell and doesn’t know about the silent E, or…
The phone broke in on this productive train of thought, although “broke in” might be putting it a trifle strongly. So might “thought.” I practically flew across the room to answer it.
“Your Sergeant Spurrier is a piece of work,” Eleanor said without preface. “Never again will I wonder where the concentration camp guards came from, or the Albanian secret police, or the men who poured the hemlock into Socrates’ mouth.”
“He drank it himself,” I said.
“Well, if the Athenian cops were anything like Spurrier, it was the wisest course of action. He browbeat poor Christy until it was a wonder Christy had any brow left. Every question got asked thirty-two times, one for each tooth, like it was some sort of chewing rule. And he kept smiling at me and calling me ‘little lady,’ as though we were on the same side in some loathsome conspiracy.”
“How’d Christy take it?”
“He’ll survive. He tires so easily, though. If it hadn’t been for Alan, I don’t think he would have made it. Alan, as Wayde might say, is way cool. He treated Spurrier like something that had just crawled onto land and needed a good kick back into the drink.”
“Where’s Christy going to stay?”
“With Alan and his friend tonight. Tomorrow, he said he might check into a hotel. I told him what you said about staying away from the house.”
“He can go back tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow’s Monday, the day Nite Line will hit the streets-
“What vivid language.”
“-and our killer will know Christy doesn’t have his damn tags.”
“Our killer,” she said dryly. “Spurrier made Christy look at pictures of Max.”
“He’s a gob of phlegm,” I said. “Write about it.”
“I can’t. They’re giving it to someone on the police beat. Thank you very much, now butt out. How does someone turn into Spurrier?”
“Bitterness,” I said. “He’s only got one sport coat.”
“I’m serious.”
“How do I know? Some cops get like that. Some people become cops because they’re already like that. As Harry Golden once said about an anti-Semite, maybe his teeth hurt.”
“Well, I’m going to shower him off.”
“I tried that once,” I said. “It took a lot of water. What are you doing after your shower?”
“I don’t know. Get dirty, I guess.”
“Want to have dinner?”
She paused. I pictured her curling the phone cord around her index ringer, something she doesn’t know she does. She’s always wondering why the cord gets knots in it. “I’d considered it.”
“With me.”
“A girl lives clean for months,” she said, “deferring worldly pleasures in the pure faith that saintly conduct will be rewarded, and the world does not disappoint.”
“Is that a yes?”
“What language do you think in?” she asked. “Of course it’s a yes.”
“We can work on my English,” I said.
“You have more pressing problems. Eight o’clock?”
“Eight’s great, mate,” I said.
“I’ve got to learn to hang up earlier,” she said, hanging up.
The phone rang again immediately. “Listen to this,” Jack said. Then he read me Max’s letters. They were even better than I’d hoped.
“How did you do it?”
“Have you got Microsoft Word?”
“No. WordPerfect.”
“Well,” he said with leaden patience, “import the document.”
“I’ve got it on my screen.” I carried the phone to the computer and sat down.
“Okay, go into fonts. Wait, wait, highlight the document first. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yes, Jack,” I said through my teeth, “I know how to do that.”
“Got it?”
“Hold it. Okay.”
“Go into fonts. Choose roman, choose anything. Nah, choose roman. That’s all Max did, the old codger. He wrote his letter, printed it, mailed it, and then saved a file copy in a nonalphabetic font called Monotype Sorts. Talk about transparent codes.”
We shared a hearty laugh over how transparent the code was. I picked roman from the menu, and when the menu box cleared, I was looking at Max Grover’s last letter.
Mr. Phillip Crenshaw
P.O. Box 332
Kearney, NE 68849
Dear Phillip:
You’re a brave young man and a sweet one. I’m enclosing the cash for your ticket to a new life. I only hope I can help you find your feet here in the big city.
It’s not as bad as you’ve heard, especially if you have friends. I’m an old man, but I have a lifetime’s worth of friends. I know they’ll want to help you as much as I do.
Godspeed,
Max
P.S.
I’ll be at the gate with bells on (and your uncle’s dog tags, too).
“Think that’s the guy?” Jack asked.
“I know it is,” I said. Phillip Crenshaw.
Kearney, Nebraska. Farm boy territory.
19 ~ Typhoon
“Do you honestly think he’ll come?” Eleanor was wearing a scoop-necked sleeveless silk top the color of fresh salmon, an antique necklace of silver, marcasites, and jet, and four thin black bracelets that kept sliding up her arm like designer shackles. Those bracelets had prompted a number of perverse fantasies in the past, and from the way I kept drifting away from the topic, they hadn’t lost their power.
“Will he dare not to come?” I asked. “Maybe. But look what he’s done already. He risked his life to go back to the house to get the tags, and he went crazy when he couldn’t find them. He called me at home and actually left his number on my machine.”
“A number in an empty apartment.”
“Still, there were other people around, tenants, the manager. The sheriffs have a description now. Whatever information is on the tags, it’s more dangerous to him than a physical descript
ion. Max’s letter says they belonged to his uncle, but of course the kid told him that, and I don’t think we should put too much credence in anything the kid says. Whoever they belonged to, though, there’s a connection, a big look here sign that points right at him. He needs to get them back.”
“You don’t think they were his?”
“I don’t think he’s old enough to have been in the military. And I think they belong to someone he hates.”
Eleanor had decided on Typhoon, a modishly upscale pan-Asian restaurant that occupied the old control tower of a private airport and drew an unnaturally good-looking, semicelebrity clientele. It had been crowded when we arrived, full of people who were certain they’d be better known tomorrow and had decided to pick at sashimi and Burmese chicken while they watched the planes glide in and waited for a segment on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. We didn’t have a reservation, but the manager had taken one look at Eleanor and led us straight to the best table in the house, overlooking the runway and far enough away from the semifamous to allow conversation. Eleanor always gets tables like that. She thinks everybody does.
“If the tags are so dangerous, why would he fool around with them in the first place?” She was really tucking into a plateful of steamed vegetables, which the restaurant insisted on calling Buddha’s Delight; she’d wolfed down two forkfuls in only fifteen minutes.
“Schultz says they’re a totem of some sort.”
“Schultz,” she said, making what she probably thought was an ugly face. She hadn’t liked him the first time they’d met, and he hadn’t much opportunity since to exercise his dreadful charm on her.
“He knows his stuff, although I wish he’d speak English. He says they’re ‘imprinted objects.’ ”
She interrupted her feeding frenzy, suspending in midair a fork containing a single snow pea. “I know about imprinted objects. They’re superreal, like objects in a dream, usually associated with a trauma of some kind. They attain a kind of ritualistic importance.”
“You should be eating with Schultz,” I said.
She batted her lashes at me. “He didn’t ask me.”
“ ‘Ritual’ is the word he used. He also used ‘fetish.’ Those are the ones I can pronounce.”
“Why do you enjoy acting stupid?”
I poked through the shredded remains of my Filipino Beef Strings or whatever it was, looking for something I could chew. “I’m good at it. We all like to do things we’re good at.”
“Fetishes enable some people sexually,” she said. “I wonder if he means that these dog tags enable your kid from Nebraska to commit murder.”
“They are,” I said, paraphrasing Schultz, “essential accessories to the act.”
“Dog tags are a kind of identification. They probably turn his victim into the person he really wants to kill.”
I looked under the table for Schultz. “You know,” I said, “you could make small amounts of money and work unreasonable hours assisting the police.”
“And put up with people like Spurrier? Thanks anyway.”
I stole a forkful of her vegetables. “You like Al and Sonia.”
She watched her vegetables all the way to my mouth. “They’re different.”
“No,” I said. “Spurrier’s different.”
Eleanor caught a man at a nearby table staring, and gave him a smile that made him drop his spoon into his soup. “What are you doing about Nebraska?”
“Nothing yet. Post office is closed on Sunday. I’ll call tomorrow and see what I can find out. For all we know, though, he sets up shop in a new town every time he decides to go back into business.”
“What a life. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for him.”
“Spend it on someone who deserves it,” I said. “Are you going to finish those?”
“Give me your plate.” I passed it to her, and she slid most of the vegetables onto it and handed it back. “You’re not drinking,” she observed.
“Only in secret.”
“It wouldn’t do you any harm to cut down.”
“Right,” I said. This was familiar territory.
“For heaven’s sake. You should see yourself. Your face is all squinched shut. You look like you’re chewing an aspirin.”
“I’ve quit aspirin. It leads to Anacin, and eventually to Excedrin.”
“Be that way,” she said. I was good at stupid, but she was superlative at indifferent. I probably bore some of the responsibility for that.
I stabbed my fork into the center of the mound of vegetables and left it standing there. “After he scared the shit out of me,” I said, “I got drunk, and it made things worse. I was half-drunk when he phoned me, and he scared me then, too. Somehow, getting drunk doesn’t appeal to me.”
“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 aga
in.”
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.”
The Bone Polisher sg-6 Page 20