Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (8 page)

“Good idea,” I said. “Let’s go out.”

We climbed out onto the deck. Christopher’s eyes went to the moon, four-fifths full, hanging over the mountains to the west with a high thin line of cloud above it. Below us in the canyon people’s lights were on.

“This is why you live here,” he said, taking it in.

“It’s one reason.”

“Did your girlfriend live here with you?”

“She found it.”

“So that’s another reason.” He looked around the deck and spotted the remaining canvas chair. “I guess the other chair’s out near the front door.”

“Sit. I usually let my legs hang over the edge anyway.”

“Long way down.”

“Somebody once injected me with vodka so he could throw me off it and it’d look like I’d been drunk.”

“That’d do the job,” he said, easing himself into the chair. “What happened?”

“I killed him.”

“My, my.” He leaned back and stared up at the moon. “All those pockmarks,” he said. “I never thought the moon was romantic.”

“It’s okay at a distance.”

He started to move his feet, preparing to get up. “I forgot the water.”

“It’s almost gone anyway. I’ll get a new bottle.”

In the kitchen, I realized he was talking.

“…after I’d burned out on the terror, Max started talking to me about what I should do with the rest of my life. Nothing was different, he said, except now we had a deadline. I don’t think I’d ever really
heard
that word before. And I, I was just amazed. Because, you see, I’d assumed he’d throw me out.”

I stayed where I was, holding the bottle of water like a chalice of some kind.

“So he said we had to start making time count. We had to build my strength and work on my spirit. My spirit, Jesus, no one ever talked to me about my spirit before. I figured I had a spirit like some people have lint in their pockets, no more important than that, and I tuned him out and interrupted him with something I thought was
really
important, like whether he was actually going to let me stay. And he said to me, ‘Where else would you go?’

“And then he put his hand in the center of my chest, his palm to my chest, and held it there, and I felt a kind of warmth come into me, and the warmth turned into a tingle and flowed into my arms and legs. ‘What
is
that?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘That’s your spirit.’” Nordine stopped talking for a long time, but I didn’t move. “So we went to work on my spirit,” he said at last.

I waited a moment and then took the water out onto the deck. Christopher was slumped in the chair, his head down and his hands folded in his lap. I unscrewed the top on the water and sat next to him. “Two days later,” he said without moving, “Max told me about the house, that he’d willed it to me.” He reached over, and I gave him the bottle. “I didn’t kill him,” he said. Then he drank.

“Okay,” I said.

“And I have maybe two years left, if that, and I am not going to spend even one day in a jail cell.”

“Okay,” I said again, thinking about how Spurrier would treat him, remembering the latex gloves he’d put on before he hit me.

Christopher coughed, then cleared his throat of something with a sound that reached all the way down into his midsection.

“I’ll need information,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. It was very light.

“You’ll have to move fast,” he said. “When the publicity hits, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the cops to find someone, and I’m the one they’re going to try to find.”

“I don’t think there’ll be that much publicity,” I said. “They’ll keep quiet about most of, um, what was done to Max. They always do. And anyway, it’s just another gay murder as far as they’re concerned.”

He turned to me and gave me the smile again. “There’ll be tons of publicity,” he said. “All over the country. Max used to be famous.”

“He was
Rick Hawke
,” Wyl Will exclaimed, wide-eyed. A couple of years ago, after his mother died, he’d had his eyelids tattooed to spare himself the necessity of putting on makeup every day, and the combination of the heavily lined eyelids and the wide eyes made him look something like the latter-day Bette Davis.

“Humor me,” I said. “I’m a little young for Rick Hawke.”

It was ten a.m., and busloads of tourists in short sleeves were already sweltering up and down Hollywood Boulevard, reading the names in the brass and terrazzo stars on the sidewalks and stepping over the bums who keep the stars company on the concrete. Only in Hollywood can a penniless wino sleep on top of a star.

“I knew you’d say that,” Wyl said peevishly. He’d gotten to the point where he took youth as a personal insult. “But there’s
cable
, you know.
Everything’s
on cable now. I flipped on the set last night and saw
I Married Joan
, of all things. Do you remember how
she
died?”

“Who?” I was facing the window, watching a sleek, well-dressed Arab shepherd a flock of heavily robed women up the sidewalk. They may have been wrapped to their eyebrows, but the heat didn’t seem to be bothering them. The other tourists, the ones in shorts and T-shirts, were red and wet.

“Joan
Davis
.” He blinked fast, either tears or something in his blue contacts. “Burned to death, poor thing. Just like Gene Tierney.”

“Who?” I said again. “Oh, yeah. Gene Tierney.”

“Played a Chinese in one movie.” Wyl clasped his hands prayerfully in front of his chest. “Lord, she was beautiful.”

The Arabs passed from view, followed by two heavyset
cholos
in plaid wool shirts and wide black pants who looked very interested in them. The ear Spurrier had slapped had been ringing all morning, and my lower back hurt. “Rick Hawke, Wyl.”

“Well, he was beautiful, too. I saw him on TV in 1957 and thought, Well,
California
, don’t you know. We were about the same age, but he looked younger. I wrote him a fan letter and got a signed photo back, not that he signed it himself, I’m sure, but they did things right in those days. Imagine getting a reply to a fan letter to Madonna.”

“And then you came out here and met him.” I was the only customer in Wyl’s store, and he was seated behind the counter that ran along the left-hand side of the shop. Between me and the window, shelves housed thousands of books about show business, and tables and glass cabinets offered up boxes full of old posters and glossy studio stills.

“Decades later,” Wyl said. “The early eighties, I guess. Have you had coffee?”

“If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing up. How did you meet him?”

“Circles,” Wyl said airily, making a vaguely circular gesture with his right hand.

I massaged my bruised kidney. “That must have been nice, traveling in the same circles as one of your favorite stars.”

“Oh, I had no idea who he was. He’d stopped being Rick Hawke twenty-five years before that. He’d operated a charter yacht service in Hawaii and gone to India to wash some holy man’s feet or something, and he’d grown that beard and let it go all white, and he never ever talked about his career in television. No, he was just this courtly gentleman who wore too many rings and always seemed to have some odd boy in tow.”

“Odd in what way?”

Wyl dipped a finger into a mug of coffee to test its temperature, licked off the drops, and drank. “Glum,” he said eventually. “They were all glum. Monosyllabic, like two syllables might prove to be unbearable. And knobbly, not smooth and symmetrical. Some of them didn’t smell very good. Either cheap cologne or no baths, it was hard to say which was worse. They didn’t seem to have pasts.”

“A lot like Christopher,” I ventured.

Wyl blushed crimson. “Christopher is good-looking. And he can talk.”

I tried not to grin. “How many of your antiques did he take?”

“Scads,” Wyl said, his color deepening. “But, you know, they were all old.”

“Antiques generally are.”

He gave me a sharp glance with the heavily lined eyes. “You’re very clever this morning. You might at least have waited until I finished my coffee, so I could be clever back.”

“You introduced him to Max.”

He sipped again and put the cup down. “By then I knew that Max wasn’t just chasing rough trade. He saw himself as the stairway out of the gutter. Christopher seemed to be headed for the gutter, so I referred him to Max. I would have tried to help him myself, but I was running out of antiques.”

The grin won, and I turned and looked out the window to hide it. “Tell me about Rick Hawke.”

Wyl sighed: This was easier ground. “I’ve got an eight-by-ten on table five.” He rose from his stool, a slender man in his youthful seventies with silver-blue hair and a dancer’s narrow waist, set off by pleated trousers into which he’d tucked a yellow silk shirt. As I followed him to table five, the bell over the door rang and about seventeen Japanese came in, all dressed formally, as though they were about to have their photos taken, which I supposed they were.

“
Konnichiwa
,” Wyl said without breaking stride.

“
Konnichiwa
,” all seventeen said politely. They waited for the next step in the conversation.

“Look, look,” Wyl called, giving up on Japanese and waving his hands in the general direction of the books. “Number one store,
ichiban
in Hollywood.”

“
Hai
,” said the oldest of the Japanese. “Famous store.”

“
Domo arigato gozaimashta
,” Wyl pronounced. He sounded as though he’d learned it through Hooked on Phonics. “Look around. Buy something.” He turned to me. “If we’re going to be conquered, it might as well be by somebody polite. God, imagine if it were the French. Rick’s in here.” He started rifling through a box full of glossies, each encased in a transparent sleeve. Faces I hadn’t seen or thought of in years flipped past: Bob Cummings, Dennis Day, Red Skelton, Robert Horton, Hugh O’Brian, Faye Emerson, Ida Lupino.

“Wait,” I said.

“It’s farther back.”

“Just a second. I like Ida Lupino.”

“You
do
have a frame of reference,” he said. Ida Lupino gazed up at us, tough and broken at the same time, wearing the face of someone too intelligent for the game she’d allowed herself to be trapped in.

“I’ll take this,” I said, pulling Ida out.

“You’re a romantic,” Wyl said, suppressing a smile.

“That’s what Max told me. A disillusioned one.”

“Poor Max.” Wyl used a single fingernail to separate the photos and then withdrew one. “Here.”

Rick Hawke had been splendidly handsome. All the conventions of the photo—the dramatic lighting, the pancake makeup, the too-slick hair—couldn’t mute the individuality of the human being peering out through the angular face, the person sporting the silly western-style shirt and the kerchief tied around his neck. He looked faintly ill at ease, but he also seemed privately to be enjoying the joke. My memory stirred, and I realized that I recognized Max’s younger face from my childhood.

“That’s a good one,” Wyl said, eyeing it critically. “That’s what made him a star. That sense that he was laughing at himself. That bodybuilder with the impossible name has the same quality.”

I picked up the photo. “What’s this from?”

“His show,” Wyl said, masking astonishment at my ignorance. “
Tarnished Star
. He played a sheriff who was really an escaped murderer. Self-defense, of course.”

“Slow down,” I said. “That was the story?”

“Imagine the conflict.” Wyl closed his eyes, looking dreamy. “There he is in this dusty little husk of a town with a badge on his shirt and this
vast
secret in his past, and
every week
someone came into town who knew who he really was. Everybody in the
world
came through that town. Sometimes good guys, sometimes bad guys. Once it was Oscar Wilde, if you can believe that, and Oscar
Wilde
knew. And, of course, he can’t just kill them, because he’s not a murderer at heart, so he has to—”

“Excuse?” the oldest Japanese said.

“Yes?” Wyl said, shaking his head free of memories. “I mean,
Hai
?”

“Dirty book about Madonna?” the Japanese man said.

“Over there,” Wyl said dismissively. “With the soft porn.”

“Excuse?” The Japanese man looked confused.

“
Poruno
,” Wyl said impatiently. “
Pinkku
. There.”

“
Hai, arigato
,” the man said, trundling off in the direction Wyl had indicated.

I was examining Rick Hawke’s two-dimensional face. “I remember him,” I said. “It was a pretty good show.” I’d seen it in reruns as a little kid.

“It was a smash.” Wyl stared over my shoulder at the street. “Could have run for years.”

“And you say he quit.”

“In the middle of the third season.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe 1957, ’58. Went to Hawaii, as I told you, and then to India.”

“Why?”

“Why’d he quit?” He drew in the corners of his mouth, sorting out his answer. It gave him a judicial air. “None of this is from the horse’s mouth, you understand.”

“He never talked to you about it.”

“Exactly. The trades said at the time it was a salary dispute. Later, people told me that it was because of the Black Widow.”

He seemed disinclined to go further, so I said, “The Black Widow.”

“You know,” he said reluctantly, “like the spider. His agent. He had the same agent as all those fifties actors whose names sounded like laundry detergents. Zip and Punch and Coit, and, oh, I don’t know, Tweak. The agent’s name was Ferris Hanks. He was a
very
bad man.”

“How was he bad?” A cluster of Japanese had formed around a large book that bore the bald title
SEX
.

“Manipulative, power-hungry, sick.” Wyl blinked the lined eyelids and opened his mouth to draw air. “Power and pain.”

“Ah,” I said. “And he made Max quit?”

Wyl shook his head. “No. He wanted Max to continue, I’m sure. Max—Rick—was a big star then. But the contracts back then were ironclad. If Max wanted to keep working, he had to keep working for Ferris. And Max wasn’t willing to have ten percent of his salary go for whips and bludgeons and star-struck boys for Ferris. So he quit. Heavens, but Ferris was mad.”