Skin Deep (22 page)

I parked that one for the meantime. "What happened?"

"Very bad energies. Rebecca was just a kid. She had a crush on Toby Vane. Her stepfather told her about the thing at Ontario, and she wanted to go. I figured what the hell, and we went."

"And Toby got his hands on her."

"Well, that was easy under the circumstances. He was all charm. She was right in the front row, naturally."

"Why naturally?"

She gave me her level gaze. It made me want to ask her out to dinner. "That'll keep," she said, waving a dismissive hand and fanning some lavender toward me. "So he asked her if she wanted to see the car up close, and she did. Then he asked if she'd like to see his dressing room. I wasn't near her at the time. It was a big trailer that was parked right near the track."

"I've seen it."

"And the next thing I knew I felt something terrible sweep over me and found myself running toward the trailer. I was about a hundred feet away when the door opened and Rebecca fell out of it, down the stairs, and onto the ground. Her face was covered with blood."

"He'd hit her."

"He'd hit her many times. Her nose was fractured and her lip was split, and two of her teeth were broken. When I took her in my arms she coughed the teeth into my lap." She gave me an apologetic smile. "I don't mean to be dramatic, but that's what happened. She was hysterical. This was her hero. She had his pictures all over her room. They were signed. They said 'To Rebecca with love, Toby.' When I got home I tore them all down. She'd been taken to the hospital by then."

"Where was her stepfather?"

"Oh, he was busy. He was busy for hours. He had to clean up after Toby. When he got home I told him I was leaving. By the time I got Rebecca out of the hospital I was already gone. I'd taken the apartment over this shop."

"Who is he?"

"You really don't know?" I shook my head.

"Hartsfield is my first husband's name," she said. "In addition to being a widow, I'm deliriously happy to be the ex-Mrs. Dixie Cohen."

I sat back, and the books creaked and let out an aromatic gust. The two of us smoked in self-defense. The silence stretched around us. In the street someone laughed drunkenly.

"So," she said. "Is there anything else?"

"Yeah," I said. "Charge for the catalogs. Three bucks each. That way you're ahead either way."

She gave me a full-bore smile. "I knew I liked you," she said.

16 - La Maison

My third stop of the evening was in the Valley, so I had plenty of time to think as I drove. I needed it.

The main hope, of course, given the source of my almost fictitiously large paycheck, was that someone was trying to frame Toby. Unless, that was, Toby really had killed Amber, a notion that even an eyewitness couldn't altogether drive from my mind, given what I knew about the lad.

Even if he'd had nothing to do with Amber, there were plenty of people who might have wanted to put a big black period at the end of his life. When you live like Toby lived, there are always going to be people who want to pop your cork for good.

Heading west on Ventura Boulevard, a cherried-out old Buick, vintage 1953 or thereabouts, blew a fishtail kiss at Alice and began playing tag with me. First it tailgated me, and then it passed me, got in front, and slowed down. What looked like four very large kids kept glancing back, waiting for me to hit the horn or give them a bump in the rear. In Los Angeles that's a good way to get shot, so I just pulled into a service station and earned a disappointed finger from the kid in the front passenger seat. Hell, maybe
they
killed Amber. Three days on the case and I hadn't ruled anybody out, not even the golden boy himself, and new possibilities were blooming like wildflowers.

At two thousand a day I felt overpaid.

And I was curiously fuzzy about things. My mental state wasn't helped any by the fact that everybody who was involved seemed to have made up a name just for me. Toby, Nana, Dixie, Tiny, Saffron, certainly Chantra—almost everybody had an AKA; nobody had the Christian name he or she was born with. And the few who did, Norman Stillman, for example, had invented personalities instead.

It didn't delight me that I was now on my way to an encounter with the most improbable name of all.

Dixie, back in the good old days when I thought he was leveling with me, had given me the names and numbers of four of the pros he and Stillman had hired for Toby to knock around as a safe outlet for his boyish energies. One of the numbers had also popped up on the yellow pad I'd used to copy the contents of Tiny's phone book. Hookers move even more frequently than the average Angeleno, and that was the only number out of the four that was still good. My call had reached a machine that informed me that business hours were ten in the morning until twelve midnight and that she'd be at something called La Maison. I was headed for La Maison, and the woman I was going to see called herself Mistress Kareema.

Ventura Boulevard is a sad street. Back in the days of the third or fourth real estate boom, when Bob Hope and Bing Crosby owned everything the Chandler family didn't, the Valley had been positioned as paradise: no smog, an orange tree or six in every yard, the grime and crime of the city at a safe remove across the mountains. Ventura Boulevard was the artery of optimism, the pioneering east-west street, the first to be developed, with stucco storefronts and palatial motion picture houses. After fifty years, Ventura was a dotted line of prosperity and decline. No building material in history has ever decayed with quite the speed of stucco.

Mistress Kareema, whoever she might be, practiced her trade on a street named Sunny Vista, which, as I might have expected from the way things were going, was one of the few shady spots in the Valley. It was a narrow ribbon of asphalt that gnarled and knotted its way south of the boulevard, overhung with oaks and eucalyptus that had grown to an antebellum, Edward Gorey thickness. Even the moon couldn't peek through. The storefronts extended south a couple of blocks, and La Maison was the last commercial establishment before the houses took over.

La Maison had all the discretion of accomplished vice: whatever happened there, it happened inside a pale, anonymous stucco box with two windows in front that could have been installed to display anything from guitars to tires. The windows were masked with brown paper, new territory for Stillman's timeline. The sign was about the size of a piece of legal paper, and the building was as anonymous as the French Foreign Legion. The front door looked solid and locked. Junk newspapers littered the doorway. As I pulled through the driveway to park Alice in the rear, I wondered if it were even open.

I had started on foot toward the front of the building when I saw the back door. The sign, larger than the one in front, said
La Maison
. La Maison looked like the kind of place one entered through the back door, and I gave it a try.

It wasn't locked. A bell rang as I opened it, nothing electronic, just a regular old bell that got slammed by a piece of metal every time the door opened. I was in a dark corridor, not that much different from the Spice Rack. A single naked light bulb in a bare porcelain socket flung its forty watts valiantly into the gloom. The gloom won. I stood there in it, waiting for someone to answer the bell's summons.

After about twenty seconds, I heard somebody moan. Then she cried out. Then she cried out again, a choked, panicked, whimpering sound that made the hair on my arms stand straight up. Wishing I had the gun I'd left in Alice's glove compartment, I started down the hallway.

Ten feet down, the corridor turned left. There were doors on either side now. In each door there was a small window, about four inches by six. All but one were dark.

The cry turned into a scream. The scream died away into a kind of hopeless sobbing. Then I heard a
smack
that sounded like something hard against bare flesh, and I headed for the lighted window.

"No," a woman's voice cried out. "No, please, no. No more, no more, no more." She coughed, or choked, and I was at the window.

I was looking at a living room. There was a lot of ordinary furniture, most of it red: a red couch, a coffee table, red pictures on the walls. There was also one piece of extraordinary furniture, a kind of aluminum frame that looked like a cross between a sawhorse and a torture rack. On it was a small blond girl. She was strapped to it, bent over it brutally, spread-eagle and as naked as a saint's forehead. Between us stood Toby Vane, stripped to the waist with his back to me. In his hand was a whip. I surveyed the room as best I could through the little window. No Big John. Then Toby lifted the whip and brought it whistling down across the girl's spine. She cried out again and arched her slim back.

I kicked the door in on the first try. My right foot caught Toby behind the knee before he had a chance to turn around, and he crumpled headlong toward the floor. I managed to catch his chin with my foot as he fell. The sound of his neck snapping up was deeply satisfying. He twisted and landed on his face, and I slammed his left kidney with my heel for the sheer pleasure of it. He moaned and rolled over, curling into an embryonically protective ball.

That was when things started to go wrong.

The first thing I registered was that it wasn't Toby. It was someone I'd never seen before, a young man with so little chin that he must have knotted his tie directly below his overbite. The second thing I registered was the voice of the girl. She didn't say, "Thank God," or, "My hero." What she said was, "What the
fuck.
"

Whoever was on the floor moaned. Whoever was on the rack muttered nastily. Whoever had come into the room behind me said, "Alma, language, please," and then she said, "Who the hell are you?"

Until that moment I don't think I'd ever known what the word
nonplussed
meant, but now it shouldered its way through the orderly ranks of my vocabulary and leapt unfettered out of my mouth. "I'm nonplussed," I said.

"What you just did usually costs three hundred bucks," said the woman in the doorway. She was wearing a black outfit that looked like the kind of lingerie the Spanish Inquisition might have designed—a whalebone black corset, fishnet stockings, and high-heeled boots that reached her knees. Her hair was an impossible bottle black, and her eyebrows arched higher than Lucille Ball's. "Maybe if you give it to poor William here, he won't call the cops on you."

"He's
going to call the cops? What about her?"

"Holy Mary, mother of God," said the girl on the rack in a resigned tone. William, still on the floor, used his elbows to put a couple of yards between him and me and looked up at me with the kind of rolling eyes that up till then I'd only seen on hooked fish. I looked again at his nonexistent chin and wondered how I'd managed to catch it with my foot.

"I thought I was helping," I said. "Is William really in a position to call the cops?" William tried to shake his head and then grabbed his throat. Obviously I hadn't hit his chin at all. The whip curled limply from his left hand.

"In a perfect world, maybe," the lady with the lingerie said. The barest hint of a smile curled the corners of her mouth. "Since the world is manifestly imperfect, a simple apology will probably suffice."

Etiquette classes had not prepared me for this, so I did the only thing I could think of. I reached down to William. He cringed. "Jesus, William," I said. "I'm sorry. I thought you were somebody else."

"I'm not," he croaked. "I'm me. I'm only me."

"Only
you? You're a strong man, William," said the lady in the lingerie. "He caught you from behind. You'd have killed him if he hadn't." William attempted a nod and then rubbed his throat again. "We all know who you are, William, and we're all afraid of you. But," she said to me in a tone like a shredded tire, "who did
you
think he was?"

What the hell, I figured. "Toby Vane."

The girl on the rack turned quickly to look at me, and Miss Lingerie of 1564 gave me a sharp glance. "See, William," she said, looking at me in a speculative fashion. "He thought you were Toby Vane. It must have taken a lot of courage for him to attack you like that."

"Not really," I said without thinking. Both women looked at me imploringly. "I mean, I was behind you," I improvised. "It wasn't fair."

"No," the one in the lingerie said as though she were talking to a child. "It wasn't fair at all. It was dirty fighting." I managed a nod. "Now come on," she said to me, "let's leave William and Alma alone. Alma, are you sure it's all right if we leave you alone with William?"

"I don't know, Mistress Kareema," the girl on the rack said plaintively. She had a fourth-grader's lisp. "Maybe he's mad now."

"Of course he's mad," Mistress Kareema said, "but not at you. That's right, isn't it, William?"

William had lifted himself cautiously to a sitting position. "No," he squeaked. "It's not her I'm mad at." Then he shifted his fish-eyes toward Mistress Kareema. "Is it?"

"It's him," she said, indicating me. "But I don't want trouble, so I'm going to get him out of here before you take vengeance. Now, I want you to promise that you won't take it out on Alma."

"Oh,
pleeeease"
Alma squealed. "Not on me, William." She twitched her bare bottom.

"I like Alma," William said in a voice as soft as rain-water. "But keep
him
away from me, or I won't answer for the consequences." He gave the whip a sad little shake.

"He's going. Now, Alma, you give William a good time, you hear? But call me if he gets too rough."

"Oh, I will," Alma said. "Stay close, please?" She rolled her eyes at William in an approximation of terror that wouldn't have fooled a blind man. Mistress Kareema put three solid steel fingers around my wrist and tugged me toward the door. "Be sweet, William," she said, pushing me past her. "Remember, Alma's at your mercy."

William gave a brusque macho nod, and Kareema shoved me the rest of the way through the door and closed it behind us.

"Jesus Christ," she said. "That's a good customer, twice a week, at least. You can't fuck with their libidos like that. These are very fragile guys."

"What about Alma? What's she made of, magnesium?"

"Alma can take care of herself. One word from her and William will be on his knees begging for forgiveness and thankful for the opportunity. Come with me."

She led me into one of the dark rooms and flicked on the light. It was decked out as a medieval torture chamber. False stone walls dripped real water. "Have a seat." I sat on something that passed as a ledge. She tapped her foot. "What's this shit about Toby Vane?"

"But she's tied to that thing."

"Relax. Alma's been at this gig for three years. She's only gotten hurt once."

"By whom?"

"If you hadn't said his name, I'd have brained you on the spot." She dropped something heavy onto the stone sacrificial slab in front of me. It wasn't anything fancy, just a good old-fashioned sap. "You'd have been hearing birds for weeks," she said. She was still standing.

I was at a loss, and I attempted to compensate by getting comfortable.

"Get your feet off the slab," Mistress Kareema said in a voice that could have sliced through a diamond. "Where do you think you are, at home? Alma's the submissive here. I like to be in charge. What are you up to, anyway?"

"I got your number from Dixie Cohen."

She looked like she was going to spit. "Some reference. You've got two minutes to tell me what's going on, and then out."

I gave it to her in ninety seconds. She nodded a couple of times and then reached into her cleavage and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She lit up without offering me one. "So you're supposed to keep him out of trouble. So what? What's that got to do with Alma and me? Don't answer that." She turned away. "Wait'll I turn off the drip. Jesus, have you looked at your water bill lately?" A moment after she left the room, the water stopped trickling down the walls.

She came back, and I described what had happened to Amber. Her eyes narrowed, and she knocked the cigarettes over to me, pulling up a wooden stool.

"Could be," she said, sitting. "He broke Alma's thumb. That cost him five thousand bucks. It wasn't enough. Alma almost quit, and that would have cost him a lot more. It's hard to find a real submissive these days."