Skin Deep (26 page)

"Forget it. Try to talk Toby into keeping John with him for the rest of the day. Maybe even after work."

"Sure, but why? Has he got something to do with it?"

"Yes," I said. Dolly was asking another question when I hung up.

I dialed my house and got my answering machine. After my idiotic message was over, I said, "Nana, it's me. Pick up the phone, would you?"

"H'lo, Simeon," she said. She sounded drowsy. "What time is it?"

"A little after two. How are you doing?"

"I fell asleep in the sun. It's nice up here. Somebody named Eleanor called."

"Shit," I said. "Did you pick up the phone?"

She laughed. "You peckerhead. Of course not. I just listened after the machine picked up."

"Good. Keep doing that. I don't want you to talk to anybody but me, not even if somebody asks for you. Especially not if somebody asks for you."

"Nobody knows I'm here," she said a trifle anxiously.

"Don't be silly," I said to reassure her. "We're just being extra careful."

"Okay. What if there's a call for you that sounds important?"

"Listen to the machine and write down the name and number. I'll call in from time to time to check. Pick up the phone when you hear me."

"What are you going to do while I work on my tan lines?"

"I'll tell you after I do it."

"You're not going to be silly, are you? I mean, you're not going to stick out your big thick neck or anything."

"My neck is not thick."

"I'd like it even if it weren't. Take care of it for me."

"At last," I said. "A reason to live."

"What time will you be home? I could make something to eat."

"Don't plan on it. I'll be there when I get there, but I'll keep in touch. Go back into the sunshine."

"Maybe I'll work on getting rid of my tan lines instead. Nobody can see me."

"I like tan lines," I said, visualizing hers.

"Your kind always does. When you get back I'll model them for you. Front and back."

"Good-bye, Nana."

She kissed the mouthpiece and hung up. I readjusted my towel in front and strolled back through the locker room, hoping that no one would get the wrong idea. At any rate, no one whistled at me.

20 - Out Of Order

"What do you mean, another one?" Dixie said. "You mean dead?" He looked terrified. We were on the set, between shots. Toby was in his dressing room with Dolly and Big John. "Is Toby . . ." He looked around and lowered his voice. "Is it possible Toby's involved?"

"He is and he isn't."

"That's very informative. That's what I need, right now, the Riddle of the Sphinx. Cryptic, that's what I need. You want to give me a straight answer, or do you want to go on being interesting?"

"Where were you late last night, early this morning?"

"What kind of question is that? What about Toby?"

"We'll get to Toby. What about Rebecca?" Dixie leaned against a prop wall, and it teetered. He straightened up and rubbed his face with both hands. "You know about Rebecca?" he asked in a spiritless voice. "How do you know?"

"No thanks to you," I said. "Northridge, my ass."

"I was ashamed of myself. I know I should have told you, but I was ashamed of myself. I acted like a putz after it happened. I've never acted worse in my life. So you talked to Charlene?"

"You mean Chantra."

"Chantra." He made the name sound like he was spitting. "Imagine, Chantra. A grown woman. Did she sell you any perfume? A crystal for your rearview mirror, keep you from getting rear-ended? Maybe a map to the lines on your palm? A lifetime subscription to the
Harmonic Times?"

"Where were you late last night?"

"So now I'm a suspect? I don't tell you something, and that makes me a suspect? Oh, no, it doesn't. Don't give me that. We hired you, remember?" His voice had risen, and he waved his hands in front of him as if he were trying to shush himself. "Remember that?" he said in a half whisper. "We were the ones who hired you. Why would we have hired you if I were going around killing people? You think I could kill somebody? You haven't even told me who it was."

"You haven't asked."

He put a hand up and rubbed the back of his neck. "This is the kind of day they invented aspirin for. Who was she?"

"The girl who was with Toby when Amber got killed."

He transferred the hand from the back of his neck to the bridge of his nose and rubbed that for a while. "Swell," he said with his eyes closed. "Another naked dancer. This gets more Hearst papers every day. If Joanna Link ever figures it out, we'll all be on
Sixty Minutes."

"That's what I meant when I said Toby was involved. What I meant when I said that he wasn't involved was that he didn't do it."

"You know that for sure?" He looked hopeful for the first time.

"Dolly was with him. She hasn't been more than ten feet from him since seven last night, and the lady was alive at seven last night because I saw her. So Dolly was with him. Who was with you, Dixie?"

"I'm a divorced man," he said testily. "I sleep alone."

"Do you own a camera?"

"Look," he said, "I own lots of cameras. So what, you know? So does Norman. So does Toby. So does everybody in the movie or TV business. We
like
cameras. We don't get enough of them grinding away during our ten-, twelve-hour workdays, so we run out and buy them before the stores close. Where do you think the pictures come from for all those
Mommie Dearest
books? This whole town is camera happy. Shake down the average film crew, you'll find more cameras than a busload of Japanese tourists. Betacams, too. Home movie cameras. Christ, Norman's got a thing that makes daguerreotypes like in the Civil War, ought to be in a museum. So what has this got to do with anything?"

I reached into my hip pocket. "Look at these," I said.

He did, for maybe half a second. Then he slammed his eyes shut, and the color left his face. His forehead was suddenly damp.

"Thanks anyway," he said, "but you can't make me." He sounded like a little boy. "Put them away or I won't open my eyes."

I put them away. His eyes were still closed. "What do you know about clothesline?"

He opened half an eye to make sure the pictures were gone. "Clothesline? It's what they used before dryers. Where did those come from?"

"They were under the girl's body. Where the cops would find them. What did you do with the Polaroids of Rebecca, Dixie?"

I could actually hear him grind his teeth. "Burned them," he said. "What would you have done, willed them to the Louvre? She's my stepdaughter."

"Toby let you have them?"

"Toby was in his apologetic mode, his shit-eating, 'omigod, I didn't mean to hurt her' mode. I should have pushed his face in."

"But you didn't," I said unkindly.

"I didn't do jack shit. That cost me everything, everything I cared about."

"You've still got your job."

He glared up at me. "Fuck you." He looked around at the sound stage as though he'd never seen it before. "Fuck all of this, too." He started to walk away.

I put a hand on his arm, and he jerked away from me. "Don't touch me, you schmuck."

"Dixie," I said, "people are staring."

It was true. Grips, stagehands, makeup women, they were all looking at us. Janie Gordon sat in a canvas chair, an open script cradled in her lap and a pencil between her teeth. When I caught her eyes she looked away.

Dixie stopped walking.
"Damn,"
he said. "Damn, damn, damn, damn." He stood slack and empty, looking at nothing, like a man suspended from a string.

The door of Toby's dressing room opened, and Dolly came out. She searched the set with her eyes and then came over to us.

"I'll be in my office," Dixie said flatly. "You know where it is."

By the time Dolly reached me he was halfway across the set, a little man in a creased corduroy suit that sagged from the shoulders. A stagehand carrying a small table stepped in front of him, and Dixie trudged into him, stumbled, and kept on walking. The stagehand looked after him, shook his head, and then put the table down on top of a cross of masking tape stuck to the floor.

"What's with him?" Dolly said.

"His life's too big for him. How's Toby?"

"Okay. Putting the usual amount up his nose. He's been asking for you."

"Don't tell him I was here."

"You're going? You just got here."

"Exactly, Dolly. Bull's-eye. I'm going. What time are you going to shut down?"

"About another hour. Six, six-thirty, I guess. There's only one scene left, and it's mainly Toby, so it should go pretty fast."

"My," I said nastily, "aren't we learning a lot?"

Dolly's face, as always, was guileless. "Isn't that what I'm supposed to be doing? You got to give the guy credit, if I did as much junk as he does, I couldn't find my pockets. But he's always where he's supposed to be, always has the words right and everything."

Dolly started to say something else, but I cut her off. "Just keep them together, Toby and John, got it? Don't let them split up. Take them to dinner somewhere, you've got an expense account. Don't be stingy. As J. P. Morgan said, you've got to spend money to make money."

"Well," Dolly said, "it's your money."

At eight-twenty that evening I got the first busy signal.

I'd been active, staying in motion to fight the feeling that I was chasing my tail. Tomorrow's edition of the
Daily News
had hit the streets with Saffron's death on page one, in the lower right-hand corner to be sure, but page one nevertheless. The lead mentioned Amber, and there were pictures of both women. Amber's looked like a snapshot taken on one of her bad nights, but Saffron's was a studio still from the seventies, the kind actresses pay too much for, all hopeful eyes and carefully disarranged hair. I was right: she had been beautiful.

Things of the Spirit was unaccountably closed at seven o'clock. Chantra's message about the flow being interrupted hung in the door. The shop was dark, and an iron grid inside the window protected the crystals and aromas from the fingers of unevolved beings who might have wanted to snatch them without paying the proper karmic price. Five minutes of hammering on the door had brought no response, and I didn't see a light in the apartment windows above the store.

I'd spent twenty or thirty minutes circling the block outside the Spice Rack, watching a large number of cops come and go. Customers had turned away at the sight of the squad cars. It was getting so I recognized some of them, among them Ahmed, the Middle Easterner with the yo-yo dollar bills, and a couple of sad sacks from my first night there. I couldn't very well go in, so after my tenth or eleventh pass I gave it up and choked down a hamburger up at the Sunset Grill. I'd phoned Nana from there, and she'd answered, sounding a little high.

"Don't go all Puritan on me," she'd said. "It's just red wine."

"Did you find anything to eat?"

"Sure. Tunut and penis butter." She'd laughed "Whoo. Is that a Freudian slip, or what? I mean tuna and peanut butter."

"Not together, I hope."

"Why not? All goes to the same place eventually."

My burger threatened a reappearance. "Any calls?"

"Not so's you'd notice. Couple of wrong numbers, but they hung up when they heard the machine."

"Well, don't answer."

"You're the only one I want to talk to. Hurry home before I get crazy."

Eventually I fetched up at Fan Fare to flip through Wyl's stack of clips again in the hope of finding something I hadn't found before. Wyl hovered anxiously over me as though he were to blame.

I'd finished my first pass through the material when I got the busy signal on my own number. Oh, well, I thought, I hadn't told her not to call anybody, just not to answer the phone. All the same, I didn't like it. I flipped back through the stack of clips and started again at page one.

"Honey," Wyl said, "you'll ruin your eyes in this light. It's not like TV, you know. It's not different every time you turn it on ... well, neither is TV, for that matter, except for the evangelists, but you know what I mean. You can read it from here to Valentine's Day and it'll always be the same."

I pushed the paper away. "Wyl, do you ever feel like you don't know what you're doing?"

"Literally all the time. The last time I really knew what I was doing was back when Mother was still alive. Taking care of her, right? Trying to pay back a little of what she'd given me. She was so old and helpless, it made me feel terrible, but at the same time I remembered when I was young and helpless, and she was always there, even when I was just awful to her, even later when she realized I was, well, you know, different, as people used to say." He sat down opposite me. His tattooed eyes were shining wetly.

"She knew?"

"Of course she did. I was her son. She knew all the time, I guess. And she never said anything, not a word to make me feel bad. I just took off the makeup every night so I wouldn't make her any more uncomfortable about things than she was anyway." He gestured improvisationally with both hands, trying to make a snowball out of air. "They always know, mothers," he said. "Maybe it's a good thing that there are some people you can't keep secrets from."

"Maybe it is," I said. "Depends on the secrets. May I use your phone again?"

"Need you ask? But then, you were always polite. So few people are polite these days. Far be it from me to discourage it."

I dialed my number again. Still busy. Then I called Universal and got a security man with no public relations skills whatsoever. First he stonewalled me with a rigidity the Watergate crew would have envied. When I said I worked for Norman Stillman and that he could be back patrolling parking lots in Reseda tomorrow morning if he didn't tell me what I wanted to know, he paused and recalibrated his attitude.
High Velocity
had shut down, he told me grudgingly. Everybody was gone. Did I want to leave a message?

"No," I said, "I don't want to leave a fucking message." I hung up.

"That
wasn't polite," Wyl said. "That wasn't polite at all."

I apologized and climbed into Alice. It was finally dark enough to take another look at the other half of Toby's alibi. For some reason there wasn't much traffic as I headed south toward Fountain, and it gave me too much time to think.
Something's moving,
I'd said to Nana, and it felt like it was moving too fast, like it was gaining on me from behind. I kept checking the rearview mirror, I didn't know for what, and almost rear-ended a car turning left off of Highland onto Fountain. Chastened, I followed it to 1424.

A streetlight, the only one on the block that worked, glared down at me as I sat at the curb. There had been plenty of light for the Peeper to see Toby and Saffron in the car when they let Amber out. I looked up at the window and didn't see him at his usual post. So he didn't watch all the time. So maybe he'd gone to the bathroom. Or, on the other hand, maybe he watched the centerfolds on his walls until he heard something.

The only thing to do with a theory is to test it. I got out and slammed the door. Still no one at the Peeper's window. Counting seconds in the classic "one thousand, two thousand" style, I headed up the walk, and when I got to five I looked up, and there he was. I waved up at him, but he was still watching my car.

And no wonder. The streetlight was about fifteen yards up the street. I was standing in almost complete darkness, cut off from its rays by the edge of the building. I shuffled my feet and cleared my throat, and he finally looked down toward me. I could see his face clearly. His window, the one nearest the street, was illuminated. The hard, dark edge of shadow made by the other wing of the V climbed the wall just to the left of his window.

He was looking into the light. I was in the dark. I had to wave again before he saw me. When he did, he let the curtain fall back into place. He hadn't lifted it again when I fired up Alice and pulled back into traffic.

At the first phone booth I saw, I called home again. Still busy. Ants were walking up and down my spine. I tried again, with the same result, and then started to try again. I dropped in my quarter and stood there, listening to the buzz of the dial tone. It reminded me of something, but I shouldered it away. Who could Nana be talking to? The dial tone buzzed in my ear again, steady and sure, and I barked my knuckles hanging up the phone. I knew what it reminded me of, and I ran toward Alice.