Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (10 page)

“Is it as obvious as that?” In some unweeded corner of my soul, I was dismayed.

“About two blocks up. Like I said, this one’s on the house.”

Everyone was offering me freebies today. “But I like it here.”

“You’re being asked to leave,” a new voice said, and I turned to see one of the men in the booth standing up with evident hostile intent. He was bigger than Godzilla and he was wearing most of Argentina’s annual export of black leather. “And you’re being asked real nice. Stan’s a lot sweeter than I am.”

The situation was slipping away from me, a familiar sensation lately. “You know Max Grover?” I asked the giant.

He paused for a count of five. “Max?” he said. “Everybody knew Max.”

“What’s Max to you?” Stan the bartender asked.

“Christy hired me,” I said. “The cops want Christy, and I’m his, um, his guy to, um, keep them away from him.”

“Prove it.” That was Stan.

I swiveled on my squeaky stool. “Oh, sure. Prove it. There’s no way I can prove it. I mean, I’ve got a card, but—”

“Let’s see it.”

I decided not to finish the sentence, which had been something to the effect that anyone could print a card, and pried one of my detective cards out of my wallet. I handed it to Stan, and he held it under one of the Christmas lights, reading it during blinks. This was obviously an acquired skill.

“Simon Grist,” he read aloud. “Private investigator.”

“
Simeon
,” I corrected him. “As in ‘Simeon.’”

“Apelike,” the giant supplied into the conversational void.

“As in Simeon Stylites,” I said, stung. “A saint who spent most of his life standing on a pillar in the desert. My parents are interested in—”

“He’s a private eye,” Stan said. He sounded impressed; maybe I was the first one he’d met. If so, there was disillusionment in his future.

“And Christy hired me,” I said.

There was a long pause.

Then the man still seated in the booth stirred and raised his face to mine. It was a memorable face, the face of a prizefighter who’d gone fifteen rounds with a 747. “Poor Max,” he said in a voice softer than a fresh diaper.

“Everybody loved Max,” Stan the bartender said, nodding. “Max was a hundred percent.”

“A thousand per cent,” said Mr. Leather. “Oh, Jeez, Max.”

“So he was in here?” I asked, breathing again.

“In and out with his caseload,” Stan said. He touched his index finger to his forehead. “You know, his lost souls.”

“The kids he was helping,” I suggested.

“There’s never been anyone like Max,” the leather giant said tenderly. “Easiest touch in the world. Money for nothing, you know? And too old to expect anything for it.”

“And now the cops want Christy,” I said.

“Christy.” Stan sounded reflective. “Harmless plus.”

“But they
were
fighting,” said the man sitting at the table.

“Jealous, Christy,” Stan offered, immediately revising his opinion.

“Didn’t mean anything, though,” the giant tendered fondly. “Those guys had a karmic link.”

“Ancient souls,” Stan said, nodding. Agreeing with everyone was apparently part of his job description.

“Took a swing at Max, he did,” the sitting man said, “at Dante’s a couple of weeks ago.”

“He always had a violent streak,” Stan agreed.

“But he couldn’t have
hurt
Max,” said the giant.

“Absolutely not,” Stan said.

This could go on all day. “There’s a guy with the Sheriffs Department who thinks he did,” I said.

“Name?” asked the giant.

“Spurrier.”

“Spiky Ikey,” the man sitting at the table said, surprising me. “Ike Spurrier couldn’t find his asshole in a shit-storm.”

The pivot beneath my seat squealed as I turned. “You know him?”

“Everybody knows Spurrier.” The man at the table emitted a choked sound like a muzzled dog barking. A laugh. “The Sheriffs’ Department’s number one closet case.”

It was mildly interesting. “You think so?”

“This is a guy in deep denial,” Stan said.

I considered it for a moment and then stopped considering it. “So who killed Max?”

“Somebody,” said the giant, who had taken the hand of the soft-voiced man at the table, “who should have his skin stripped off inch by inch.”

Realizing I had the bullshot in my hand, I drank some.

“Did Max bring any new kids in here in the last month or so?”

“Other than the caseload?” That was the bartender.

“How would you know who wasn’t part of the caseload?”

“Street kids,” the bartender said. “You can smell them in the dark.”

“There was the pretty one,” said the man still seated at the table.

“Shhhh,” the giant said.

“Whenever anyone says ‘Shhhh,’ I get real interested,” I said. “Maybe I should have told you that before.”

“Skip it,” said the giant apologetically.

“The hell I’ll skip it. Max is dead, and you’re hushing people because, um, because—”

“Because he thought the kid was cute,” the man at the table said, drawing the word “cute” into three heavily sugared syllables:
kee-yee-ute
.

“He
was
cute,” Stan the bartender said.

“The boy was nice,” the giant said defensively. “Everybody liked him. You,” he said to the man at the table, “have a mind like a third-world latrine.”

“Just that one boy,” said the man at the table to me. “Very young, very pretty. Hair like corn.”

“Like wheat,” the giant said.

The man at the table looked up at him. “When was the last time you saw wheat? When was the last time you were
outdoors
?”

The giant opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I get outside,” he said, sounding hurt. “Wheat, corn. Some kind of cereal. Rice puffs, maybe.”

“Hair the color of corn,” the man at the table said dreamily. “Scared eyes. Looked maybe seventeen, eighteen, but he had I.D.”

“I.D.” I swiveled around to regard Stan. “Was there a name on the I.D.?”

“Sure,” Stan said. “But who remembers? Danny? David?”

“Something with a D,” the giant said. “I remember a D.”

“What kind of I.D.?”

Stan thought about it. “Driver’s license. Out-of-state, kind of funny-looking. No, I don’t remember which state.”

“Someplace where they grow them big and blond,” the man at the table said. “Like a farm state. He was, I don’t know, a farm boy. Hair like corn.”

“Wheat,” the giant murmured rebelliously.

“When were they here?”

“A couple of days ago.”

“Sunday?”

Stan the bartender looked at the wall opposite. “I guess so. It was pretty quiet. Could have been Sunday.”

“How were they getting along?”

“Max treated him like he was a piece of candy,” said the man at the table. “The kid was staring like a tourist who’d never been to town before, afraid to talk to anyone.”

“Everybody liked him,” the giant in leather repeated defiantly. “There was something really sweet about him. Not just the way he looked, either. I’ve seen lots of great-looking kids who gave off negative vibes, but this kid was really…”

“Sweet,” offered the man at the table. He nodded his head. “I guess he was.”

“Okay,” I said, “he was sweet.”

“You ever like anyone on first sight?” the man at the table asked me.

“My job doesn’t really lend itself to snap opinions.”

“Well, everybody here liked him on first sight.” He lifted a broad hand and massaged a scar on his cheek. “Funny thing, charm.”

“It certainly is,” I said. “How tall?”

“Stand up.” That was Stan again. I did. “Same as you,” he said. “Six feet or so.”

“What color eyes?”

Stan lifted a hand. “Who could see?”

“Blue,” said the man at the table.

“Ho, ho,” the giant said softly.

The man at the table blinked up at him. “Same color as mine.”

“Blond hair, blue eyes, six feet, seventeen or eighteen. Build?”

“Strong,” the man at the table said. “I told you. Like a farm boy.”

“Anything else?” I asked the room at large. No one spoke.

I turned to face the bartender. “How much do I owe you?”

“On Max,” he said mournfully.

So, everybody loved Max, I thought outside, squinting against the glare. So, a farm boy.

Twenty-five cents in a pay phone bought me two messages on my answering machine. Christy, sounding brisker than he had last night, said he’d found a place to stash himself for the meantime, and he’d call later, he didn’t want to leave the number on a machine. I was commending him for his discretion when the machine beeped and my mother’s distinctive cigarette rasp asked if I was there. When I wasn’t, she snorted impatiently and ordered me to call. If I still remembered the number.

I dropped another quarter into the phone and dialed, inhaling the reek of ammonia and remembering a time when phone booths didn’t double as public urinals. Phone booths probably thought of it as the golden age.

“This is your son,” I said when my mother answered. She wore her hearing aid in the ear she didn’t put the handset against, and lately she sometimes failed to recognize my voice.

“Oh,” she said. “Hold on.” The phone clattered to the surface of her kitchen counter. I used the idle moment to watch a young businessman in a Heineken-green Mazda Miata gently rear-end a large truck on Santa Monica Boulevard. The truckdriver climbed deliberately down from his cab, an unusually wide man with a Marine buzz cut, wearing camouflage combat fatigues and seven-league boots, and stalked slowly back toward the Miata. The yuppie in the Miata took one horrified look, reversed out from under the truck, and backed away rapidly, cutting the wheel sharply and bumping up into the parking lot of a minimall.

“Had to turn off the stove,” my mother said.

“I don’t know how you can cook in this heat,” I said, just to be polite.

“And you don’t much care, either. Are you sitting down?”

“No. Why?”

“I just wondered. I thought perhaps you were ill or something.”

“No, I’m fine.” The man in the Miata threw the car into first and squealed off down Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Or had broken your leg.”

“Both legs in working order, thanks.”

“Or your dialing finger.”

“Here I am, Mom,” I said. “Standing on a sweltering corner in West Hollywood, up to my ankles in urine, calling my dear old mother.”

“I want to see you.” Mom didn’t waste a lot of time on chat.

“Fine. When?”

“Whenever you can spare a moment for your only mother.”

“Anytime that’s good for you.”

“Well, as you know, we have a very crowded social schedule, your father and I. Channel nine is showing back-to-back reruns of
M*A*S*H
.”

The truckdriver had run out of profanity after unleashing a long and inspiringly original stream of invective. “Just say when.”

“Three,” she said. “
M*A*S*H
starts at four-thirty.”

I checked my watch: one-forty. “Fine,” I said.

“Three sharp,” she said. “You know how your father feels about Alan Alda.”

The man who answered the line at the Long John Connection was even less chatty than my mother. A shrill chorus of phones rang insistently in the background.

“Yeah, I heard about Max,” he said. “Awful, just awful.”

“I need to talk to the owner.”

“That’s me. I’m a little short on help here.”

“It won’t take much time.”

“I doubt that. Look, I can’t keep this line tied up. It’s costing money. Can you come over here?”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“Kings Road. Just north of the Boulevard.”

“Which boulevard?”

There was a pause. “Santa Monica,” he said patiently. “The
Boulevard
.”

“Sorry, I’m a little addled today. See you in five minutes.”

Addled
was an understatement. The bullshot had cooked up in the sunshine, sending its fumes directly to my frontal lobe, by the time the door to apartment 8 opened to reveal a man who looked like Grizzly Adams’s more poorly groomed younger brother: maybe forty-five, beard to mid-chest over an Alvin Ailey T-shirt, thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail, tinted aviator-style glasses over odd gold-colored eyes.

“You’re the pay phone?” The gold-brown eyes flicked over my shoulder, making sure I was alone.

“About Max,” I said.

He ran the name through his frontal lobe while he looked at me. It was a speculative look. Finally he nodded. “I’m Jack.” He put out a hand and mauled mine with it. “Come on in, air-conditioning’s expensive. I can give you ten minutes.”

Four men sat on couches and director’s chairs, talking on phones. “Oooh, I’d
like
that,” one of them said in a seductive voice. “Do you think you could do it twice?”

I closed the door behind me. “You knew Max?”

Jack straightened his glasses, which were already as straight as a plumbline. “Everybody knew Max.” It was beginning to sound like a litany. “The saint of the sidewalks. What’s your connection?”

I told him. He never took the gold-brown eyes from my face. No polite nods, no reflexive sounds of agreement. When I was finished, he said, “Christy,” in a noncommittal tone.

“That seems to be the general opinion.”

Jack turned toward the kitchen, and I followed. “He’s a Jonah. You a sailing man?”

“I know what a Jonah is. Bad luck.”

“More than that.” He reached back and pulled fingers through his ponytail. “Bad luck for other people, too. Some people trail clouds of it, like scent.” The kitchen was white and spotless, with three electric coffee makers on the tile counter. Labels on the pots read cinnamon, decaf, and ecstasy blend. At the far end of the kitchen was one of those little greenhouse windows people are so fond of these days, jammed full of terra-cotta pots sprouting foliage. Jack pulled up a stool at the counter and indicated another for me.

I eyed the coffee. “Who had it in for Max?”

He shrugged. “Nobody. What was there to hate? He was generous, good-hearted, and stupid. The perfect mark.”

“He didn’t strike me as stupid.”

“About himself. He was brilliant about everybody else.”

“You know that personally?”

He looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”