Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (27 page)

A wall lifting or being lowered, horses thundering through the space where it had been.

I realized I’d been looking at the bright square of a window for long minutes. When I refocused on the room, a dark square floated in front of me. Retinal memory, real-seeming but false, an image from the past persisting until the nerves recharged themselves, a neural version of the emotional images of people we carry until circumstances force us to realize that they’ve changed. Or that they’re no longer there.

On the table in front of the couch were some familiar-looking brochures, full of bright colors and images of wedded bliss. My mother, the emotional guerrilla.

I went to the phone.

It took three tries before I got the right post office. Kearney was apparently riddled with post offices. The woman on the other end sounded thrilled to talk to me, like no one had called in years.

“I sent some money—a cashier’s check, actually—to Phillip Crenshaw, two
l
’s in Phillip, care of box three thirty-two at your office. He never received it.”

“Hmmm,” she said happily. “Did you put a return address on the envelope?”

“Sure. As I say, there was money in it.”

“Oh, dear. How long ago?”

“Little more than three weeks.”

She made a
tsk-tsk
sound. “That’s
far
too long. Something must have happened to it.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Sent from where?”

“Los Angeles,” I said.

“Well, what can you expect?” she said, as though that explained everything. “Los
Angeles
.”

“I took it to the post office myself.”

“I’ll give it a check. Can you hold on?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking,
This is a civil servant?

“Don’t go away,” she said, laughing gaily.

“I’m glued to my chair,” I said truthfully.

Five minutes later she was back. I heard her humming before she picked up the phone.

“Sent it here?” she asked.

I gave her the box number again.

“I just asked,” she said, “because that’s a forwarding box.”

“To where?”

“That’s what’s so funny,” she said. “Los Angeles.”

With only two days to create the world between the time
Nite Line
came out and the wake for Max, Ferris Hanks had swung into a frenzy of activity. When I checked my answering machine from the comfort of Eleanor’s living room, I found no fewer than six messages, each pitched at a higher level of urgency. At the conclusion of the sixth, Henry took the phone away from him, leaving him piping orders in the distance.

“Call the man,” Henry said. “Else, I’m going to have to give him a cigar to calm him down.” The next message was from Spurrier, demanding to know if I had anything to do with the ad in the paper. He left a home number, sounding significantly irritated. I called Joel Farfman instead.

“More than a hundred calls,” he said. “And that’s not counting the ones from Hanks. In, what? Four hours? You’re going to have some party.”

“You going to be there?”

“Wouldn’t miss it. I’m coming as the Lone Ranger.”

“Think you’ll be the only one?”

“I’ll be the only one with a faithful Indian companion. Wait until you see Tonto. But keep your distance.”

Everybody seemed to assume I was gay. “How hard would it be for you to dig out everything you’ve run on the guy who killed Max?”

A brief silence. “Not hard. That’s what interns are for.”

“Can you meet me at the Paragon Ballroom in a couple of hours with some photocopies?”

“What for?”

“I just need to get my bearings.”

“Will you give me an interview?”

“This is a trade?”

“Call it that.”

“Okay. But you can’t use my name.”

“Screw that to the wall and hang a picture on it,” he said pleasantly. “Remember who, what, where, when? You’re ‘who.’ ”

Nite Line
, after all, was a weekly. With any luck, this would all be over by the time the next edition came out. And if it wasn’t, I’d probably be safe in jail. “Okay. But the
Times
is on this, too.”

He laughed, a pinched, wheezy sound like a squeeze bottle being emptied. “The
Times
,” he said. “I can imagine their angle. ‘The Gay Ripper’ or something like that.”

“I don’t think he’s gay.”

“When did that ever stop them? By the way, Max is in the new
People
. There’s no press agent like death.”

“You could do me another favor,” I said.

“Yeah?” The tone was noncommittal; like Ferris Hanks, Farfman saw favors as a form of currency.

“I want to know who placed a personal.”

“No can do,” he said promptly. “Everything they want you to know is in their ad.”

“This has to do with Max.”

“Oh.” He barked something to someone else, covering the mouthpiece, and came back. “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

“Sorry. It looks like Max met his killer through your paper.”

I heard a small squealing sound: Farfman sucking breath between his teeth. “You’re sure?”

“As sure as I am of anything at this point.”

“Ah, shit,” he said. “I really hate…” He blew into the mouthpiece of the phone. “Balls,” he said. “Read it to me.”

I unfolded the torn page, which was beginning to fall apart along the fold lines, and read it to him. “Who placed it, when it was placed, how he paid. Anything else you can think of.”

“Yeah, yeah.” There was something new in his voice, an edge that hadn’t been there before. “You got it. See you at the Paragon.”

After all that unaccustomed sleep the second cup of coffee gave me a mild case of the jitters, so I poured the last chill inch or so into the sink and cleaned up. I actually dried the counter. The new Simeon, preparing for domesticity. Then I went out blinking into the flawless sunshine of Venice and drove home.

I avoided the driveway and came up to the house from the side, hiking through tangles of chaparral and surprising a toad the size of one of Ferris’s Yorkies as I hoisted myself up onto the deck. The place was just as I’d left it. No Ed Pfester, or Phillip Crenshaw, or whatever his name was, waiting in the living room and slicing up my carpets for practice. No new messages on the machine. No word from Schultz. A wind had kicked up, and the house was creaking like someone was practicing dance steps on the roof. I set the new world record for changing my trousers and took Topanga into the hot Valley to avoid the beach traffic, heading for West Hollywood.

I’d hit the Monday lull, lunchtime over and all the folks who keep civilization plodding along back in their offices until six, and the traffic on the freeway slipped between the lane lines like it had been greased. I turned on the radio and got the midday disk jockeys. There must be something about sitting alone in a little room with a microphone for hours that is fatal to the soul. The only things that sounded live were the commercials, which were recorded, and the music, some of which was made by people who were dead.

The Paragon Ballroom was a building I’d passed dozens of times without ever noticing it, a two-story red brick barn, liberally enlivened by graffiti, that occupied half a city block on a treesy side street just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. The doorway was arched, double wide, and open, the windows above it blocked with dirty plywood. The hand-painted sign hanging crooked to the left of the door advised all and sundry that Hollywood’s most glamorous venue was available for very special events or, on a more mundane level, as a rehearsal hall. Four cars were scattered, isolated and looking lonely, around the big parking lot.

Inside, the Paragon was one enormous room with a gleaming hardwood floor that must have been sixty years old, blistered and peeling floral wallpaper, and three sets of metal stairs leading to a catwalk that ran along the upper half of the building: a vantage point for the tangle-footed who wanted to watch the dancers. A bandstand, bare plywood set on metal risers, stood against the far wall. The place smelled as though the doors hadn’t been opened in years, a clogged, generic odor of disuse, like damp newsprint or pressed flowers. Three carpenters wearing T-shirts, cutoffs, and bandannas, as though they’d been costumed by the contractor, purposefully banged hammers against the plywood of the stage, and a man with an apron full of tools stood on a rickety, wheeled metal tower in the center of the floor, hanging lights from the beams below the ceiling. The most glamorous venue in Hollywood it wasn’t.

“The man hisself.” It was Henry, dressed to spar with Sylvester Stallone in gold boxing trunks and a sky-blue sleeveless formfit T-shirt that made him look even blacker. He had a pen tucked into the hair above his ear. “Ferris been pulling his hair out with both hands.”

“Anxiety’s good for him. It raises the pulse rate.”

“He thinks the fountain might oughta go over there,” Henry said, pointing to the corner of the room directly right of the stage.

Ferris’s holy water. “Up to him.”

“And close off the gallery up there. Keep everybody down on the floor. Put a couple of our helpers on the catwalk to keep an eye on folks.”

“How many helpers have we got?”

“Many as you want.”

“Two should do it up there. No need to be conspicuous. Where is he?”

“I sent him home. He was driving everybody crazy. We moved the stage three times already.”

“So walk me through it.”

He wrapped a big hand around my arm, making me feel like a toddler, and towed me to the door. “People come in here, which I’m sure is no surprise. Two guys here, handing out tickets for the drawing and identifying everybody they can. Valet parking outside—Ferris wants to control the cars. Hell, Ferris wants to control everything. He was all upset this morning that daylight savings was over, wondering who he could call about it. He’s trying to get the street turned one-way for the evening. Okay, they come into the room and head for the bar—”

“Where?”

“Left wall. It’s got the plumbing outlets. Bar’ll go in this afternoon. Four bartenders, white wine, five kinds of bubble water, fruit juice for the fanatics. Eight of Ferris’s actors dressed like Roman slaves, whatever that means, moving around with trays of what Ferris calls finger foods, fried fingers or something. There’s a kitchen in the back, but it’s pretty dire, just pounds of rat shit in the ovens. Food’s being brought in already cooked from Hugo’s Hankerings. We’ll scrub down the counters, nuke ’em good and cover them with butcher paper, just use them to hold the food before it goes on the trays. Four people there, shoveling the stuff whenever the slaves run out. They going to be costumed like French maids.”

“A touch of class.”

“You say so. One monitor—good word, huh?—over by that door to keep an eye on the bathroom, like you wanted. Make sure everyone who goes in comes back out.”

“That’s twenty-one so far, not counting the parking attendants.”

“They stay outside.”

“You know all these people by sight?”

“Ferris does. Like I say, a lot of them are going to be his boys. Then there’s the band, the Silverlake Flyers.”

“Bar band?”

“Old hits.” Henry grimaced. “Disco, Jay and the Americans, Barry Manilow. The neighbors got any taste, we’re in trouble.”

“Invite them.”

He pulled a small pad of paper from the elastic waistband of his trunks, retrieved the pen, and made a note. “I’ll photocopy the ad, put it under doors and stuff.”

“You’re good at this, Henry.”

“What’s to be good at? You and Ferris thought of everything already. I just run around and check shit off.”

“Other exits?”

He lifted his chin in the direction of the door leading to the bathrooms. “Fire door back there. We’ll have a walkie-talkie outside.”

“That makes twenty-two, not counting the stage crew. Good thing Ferris is rich.”

“Ho.” Henry’s voice was flat. “Also, scoff, scoff. He’s promoting the food and all the drinks except the wine. The waiters are working for free. Ballroom cost six fifty, band goes for scale. He’s got a source in Lourdes for the holy water. He says. Maybe a couple thou all together. Don’t you know about rich folks? They
never
spend money.”

“The dog tags.”

“Yeah, well—” Henry leaned toward me. “They going to be plated. Ferris is really pissed at—” He looked past me, toward the door. “Speak of the devil.”

“Henry,” Joel Farfman said. “Simeon.” He gazed darkly around the room. The eye with the punctured pupil lazily followed the good one. “To quote Bette Davis, ‘What a dump.’ ”

“Little glitter,” Henry said impassively, “some bunting, turn down the lights and fill it with people. Gonna look great.”

“You have a genuinely fervid imagination,” Farfman said. “Where’s John Beresford Tipton?”

“Having his nap,” Henry said. “He got up early this morning, maybe ten. Hard on an old man, specially when he don’t go to sleep until nine.”

“I should have half his energy,” Farfman said. “You can’t
believe
the number of times he’s called today.”

“You have no idea what I’d believe,” Henry said. “I live with the man.”

“And you seem so untouched.” Farfman held up a manila folder and waved it in my direction. “Here’s your stuff.”

“I got things to do,” Henry said tactfully. “Some of these water pipes as clogged as Ferris’s arteries.” He trudged away across the floor, pausing briefly to assess the work of the man hanging the lights, and disappeared through the door into the kitchen.

I took advantage of a lull in the hammering. “Why was Hanks calling?”

“Staying on top of things,
heek, heek
,” Farfman squeaked, sounding enough like Hanks to unnerve me. “I made the mistake of telling him, the first time he phoned, that we’d been getting calls all morning. Since then, it’s been every twenty minutes. Who’s called? How many? Do they sound excited? Should we have put his name in the ad? How many photographers are we going to send? Will they be in costume? I told him they’d be dressed as photographers, and it seemed to satisfy him. For about fifteen seconds. Should he pitch the television stations? What about radio? Has anyone called
People
or
Us
or
Back Fence?
He’s asked about everything except movie rights.”