Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (28 page)

“He’s probably sold them already.”

“And you probably think that’s funny. I’m sure he’s already cast himself. Maybe John Forsythe.”

“Too old,” I said. “Not tall enough.”

“Hey, can we get through here?” Someone prodded me on the shoulder, and I turned to see four beefy individuals crowded into the doorway. Behind them was a massive mahogany bar half the size of my living room. It was shaped like Florida.

“Left wall,” I said. Mr. Official. “Careful of the floor.”

“I don’t know who you are,” said the man who had tapped me. He wore a leather butcher’s apron and a tie-dyed T-shirt, and he was bigger than both members of a wrestling tag team, but his voice was a rusty squeak. “I’m Mickey Snell, and I manage this place.”

“Well,” I said, following Farfman toward the stage, “it’s a swell floor.”

“Built in 1937,” Mickey Snell cheeped at my back. “All old oak from a nineteenth-century sailing ship. Of course, it was saturated with—”

“Hey, Mickey,” one of the bruisers said. “Can we cut the history and move the fucking bar?” Mickey Snell didn’t even draw a breath. He was telling the air how the salt had been leached out of the wood as the bruisers shoved the bar through the door, making an unsettling squealing noise on the swell floor.

Farfman’s folder held seven articles on the murders. The one on top had been written after the killing of the third man, the first of the New Orleans victims. It was on fax paper, and when I glanced up at Farfman, he reached over and slid a finger over its slick surface. He’d been inking his hands again.

“I had New Orleans send it to me,” he said. “They had three stories. The others are our own, out of
Nite Line
.”

The first clipping was a more or less perfunctory rundown, short on facts. A fifty-four-year-old college professor and unsuccessful city council candidate named Jefferson Hope had been beaten and sliced to death and his hand severed. Police were making inquiries. The community was grieving. All pretty much standard, except for the tone, which was an unjournalistic cross between bereaved and outraged.

Chapter Two: Jefferson Hope’s index finger had been mailed to the newspaper in his home town of Preston, Virginia, and the coverage blossomed. The second story was four times as long as the first. The cops were suggesting a link to two similar murders in Chicago. The reporter had done some investigative work, trying to trace Hope’s movements in the days preceding his death, but without much luck. Hope, normally a gregarious man, had apparently dropped out of circulation about a week before his body was discovered.

Over behind the bar Mickey Snell was squeaking away about the water pipes—solid copper, it appeared—when I turned to the third article. This one warranted a three-column headline. It detailed the death of another New Orleans man, an orthodontist named William Smythe. Smythe was
not
a gregarious man, and the first indication anyone had that something was wrong came in the form of a call to the New Orleans police from a reporter in Mentone, Illinois, who had had the misfortune to open the morning mail and discover a human finger and some Polaroids in which Smythe was clearly identifiable. The Polaroids, the story euphemized, were “of a highly personal nature.”

“Look at the next-to-last graph,” Farfman said in a tight voice.

This time, the reporter’s efforts had paid off. He’d found a friend of Smythe’s who had dropped by the house unannounced the day before the murder and had seen someone in the hallway behind Smythe when he answered the door. He’d only glimpsed him for a moment; he’d assumed that Smythe was busy, made his apologies, and left. Smythe’s guest was described as a young man, probably in his late teens, very good-looking, with light blond hair.

“He’s the one who bought the ad in
Nite Line
,” Farfman said tightly. “In person. I took the order myself.”

“When?”

“October eleventh. For two weeks.”

“Only two?”

He nodded. The good eye darted down to the clipping while the other wandered down my chest. “That’s unusual. Most people want it in for a month or two. Some of them keep it in for a year; they just call in changes in the wording every now and then to make it seem fresh.”

“Did you help him write it?”

“He had it all figured out. I remembered him the moment you read me the ad. He looked like, I don’t know, someone who isn’t hip enough to wait for the
walk
sign, but he knew precisely what he wanted. He even knew how much it would cost. He had the exact amount, in cash, in an envelope. I said something like, ‘Two weeks isn’t very long,’ and he said, ‘It’ll be long enough.’ ”

The ad had expired on the twenty-fifth. Max had met the plane on the twenty-sixth, if I could trust his penciled notes on the newspaper clipping. Cutting it close. As Farfman had said, the kid knew precisely what he wanted.

“Don’t people have to fill out some kind of form or something? Don’t you keep records?”

“Under the newspaper stories,” Farfman said.

It was a standard ass-protector from some legal mill: The advertiser represented that the information in his ad was accurate and accepted all liability for any damages that might arise from misrepresentation. The advertiser understood that the newspaper was not responsible for any consequences that might follow from his decision to place the advertisement, bla, bla, bla. At the bottom a series of blanks had been filled out in longhand: “Name: Phillip Crenshaw. Age: 19 Address: Box 322, Kearney, Nebraska.” A phone number.

“Have you dialed this number?”

“I left it for you.” Farfman seemed embarrassed.

“And this is his handwriting?”

He swallowed and looked away from me, one eye at a time. “It’s mine,” he said, blushing furiously. “I wrote it out for him. His hand was bandaged.”

“Smart boy.”

Farfman looked like a man who’d just been sucker-punched by his best friend. “And he seemed like he’d just come from milking a cow. Talked about how he couldn’t find his way around L.A., how he had to go back home that afternoon, how he hoped someone would answer the ad, give him a new life.”

I searched his face for a trace of the cynicism I’d seen the previous afternoon. “That didn’t sound like bullshit to you?”

The blush deepened, and he slipped his hand into the collar of his shirt and ran it over the back of his neck as though he were perspiring. “Now that I say it out loud, it’s patently ridiculous. At the time, though—if he’d told me he was trying to escape from an evil stepmother, I’d have believed him. If he’d said he was the bastard son of Howard Hughes and Marilyn Monroe, I’d have believed him.” He put the inky fingers over his lips and rubbed, leaving a dark smear from his nose to the tip of his chin. “He was the nicest kid I ever met in my life.”

“That seems to be the general opinion. Listen, Joel, he’s good at this. He let five men get a lot closer to him than you got, and no one seemed to think anything was wrong.”

“And now there are going to be six,” he said. He riffed the clips with his thumb. “Look. It happens in pairs.”

“Maybe it won’t this time,” I said, sliding down from the stage. “Let’s try this number.”

The room was filling up with men. The electrician on the tower had been joined by an assistant who pushed the big metal tower down the length of the beams as new lights went up. Two slender guys with dangerous-looking staple guns were attaching blue cloth to the edge of the stage to hide the risers beneath it. Tables laden with half-open floral arrangements had been trundled in. Mickey Snell’s crew had the bar in position and were doing exotic things to the copper water pipes while Mickey speculated aloud on why the threading on plumbing fixtures ran counterclockwise. Like a dowdy old tart, like some architectural Apple Annie, the Paragon Ballroom was being pinched and prodded into a semblance of glamour.

Without interrupting the flow of speculation, Mickey Snell pointed a wrench in the direction of a pay phone in the hall near the bathrooms, and Farfman handed me a fistful of quarters. People who live in West Hollywood, where parking a car is more expensive than buying a house, carry a lot of quarters.

A harried-sounding woman answered the phone. Several children practiced for the Olympic Screaming finals in the background. No, no Phillip Crenshaw lived there. No, this wasn’t a new number, they’d had it for years. No, she didn’t know anyone named Crenshaw in Kearney. She didn’t know anyone who answered Phillip Crenshaw’s description, although she wouldn’t mind it if she did.

When I hung the phone up, it rang.

“Don’t you ever go home?” Schultz asked sourly.

“As little as possible at the moment. How’d you get this number?”

“The phone book, under Paragon Ballroom. You should try it some time. J. D. McCarvey, remember?”

“What have you got?”

“McCarvey, Jason David. Vietnam veteran, enlisted at eighteen in 1964. That’d make him forty-nine now, right? Honorably discharged in ’72, so he did a few tours.”

I snagged Henry, who was shadowboxing by, and grabbed his pen. “What else?”

“Here’s the good part. He was wounded. I mean, that’s not so good for him, but for us it’s a bonanza. The VA has him living in Seattle, 1432 Wooster Drive, Seattle, Washington.”

I wrote the address on the wall. “That’s great, Norbert,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Hold on,” Schultz said. “Don’t you want his phone number?”

The Wake

I went to a dance the other night
Everybody went stag
I said over and over and over again
This dance is gonna be a drag.

—Bobby Day

“Over and Over”

“You need professional help from Schultz,” Al Hammond said. “You’re nuts, off the edge, missing in action.” The connection from Hawaii sounded like a meteorite shower was slamming the satellite: brief, sharp-edged shards of clarity embedded in bursts of ragged static. My own voice was mimicked by a sort of mission-control echo that had the unfortunate effect of forcing me to listen to everything I was saying, but the NASA comparison ended there: Mission control usually knew what it was doing. “Maybe I should come home,” Hammond said between head-on collisions.

“Maybe he should,” Schultz said peevishly. We were using the speakerphone in his office, and he was leaning back in his reclining chair, nervously trying to tie his legs in a knot. Even though Schultz was the one who’d insisted we call Al, and even though it was his speakerphone, he didn’t seem to have gotten the hang of it. He addressed all his remarks to me and waited for me to relay them to Hammond.

“You’re on your honeymoon,” I said, being dutiful. Actually, having Al on hand sounded pretty good.

“We’ve met all the cops,” Hammond said. “It’s raining so hard you can’t find the beach. We’re the only people in the hotel who aren’t Japanese. Japanese are different when there are more of them than there are of you. They look at us like they’re waiting for us to shoot somebody. We feel like Mr. and Mrs. Godzilla.”

“Tell him what I said,” Schultz prodded. He’d managed to get one foot through the armrest. If the chair went over, he was ticketed all the way down.

I felt as though I were playing pass it along. “Tell him yourself.”

“I told him he could go to jail,” Schultz shouted to Hammond, taking long distance literally. “I told him he was interfering in an investigation.” He started using hand gestures for extra emphasis across all those wet miles. “I told him”—he pointed at me—“to call the Sheriffs”—he put his hand to his head, finger and thumb extended, to mime a telephone—“and give them the phone number.”

The speakerphone emitted space noises, perhaps a solar flare or a distant planetary system being blasted into cinders, and as the photons and neutrinos receded Hammond’s voice said, “—ass in jail.”

“My opinion exactly,” Schultz said, vindicated.

“If what you’re afraid of is that McCarvey will tip the kid off after I call, forget it,” I said to both of them. “The kid’s not in Seattle. He’s here. In Los Angeles. And if Schultz is right, Al, this McCarvey is someone he hates, someone he keeps killing. They’re not going to be chatting with each other. Look, all I want is a name.”

“And if you get it?” Suddenly it was like Hammond was in the room.

“I’ll give it to the Sheriffs.”

“Huh.” Hammond was unconvinced. “Sonia thinks you should call them now.”

“Thank Sonia for a constructive share.”

“And Sonia thinks this party you’re throwing is even dumber than not giving them the phone number.”

“It’s a wake,” I said for the second time, “and if he doesn’t come, so what? Max deserves a wake. He helped a lot of people.”

Audio bric-a-brac of hisses and pops. “—you know it’s a waste of time,” Hammond said.

“Actually,” Schultz said, “I don’t think it is.” This was the part that made him
really
nervous, because he might be wrong, and he hated being wrong. He was leaning back in the chair, rocking back and forth furiously.

“Is that Schultz?” Hammond asked.

“My expert,” I said.

“I remember,” Hammond said sourly. He didn’t like Schultz any more than Eleanor did. “Ask him why—”

I rapped on the desk for attention. “Look, you guys, this is a
speakerphone
. Break the word up, analyze its components.
Speaker
, as in loudspeaker.
Phone
, as in telephone. You can talk to one another directly. You’re both speaking English, you don’t need an interpreter. Now, Al, do you have a question for Norbert?”

Hammond woofed. “Schultz, your name is
Norbert
?”

“At least it’s a real name,” Schultz bristled. This was clearly an issue he and his own analyst needed to spend some time on. “ ‘Al’ sounds like something on the periodic table of elements.”

“Hey,” I said happily, “you guys are talking to each other.”

“So tell me, Norbert,” Hammond said, heavy on the name. “Why do you think the perp is going to show up for Simeon’s party?”

“I didn’t say he
would
.” Schultz, like most scientists, seemed to feel that definite statements were a conversational throwback, one step up from a grunt. “I think he
might
.”