Skin Deep (27 page)

Hollywood isn't very big. I pulled up to the curb of Saffron's apartment house six minutes later and pulled a little flashlight from the glove compartment. No one was around, no peepers were at the windows, and the only things I heard were the hum of traffic and the thump of my heart, which seemed to have taken up permanent residence in my ears. I marched in time to the heartbeat all the way to the pool.

Nana had wanted to leave, wanted to see Saffron right away and get out of there. If she hadn't, maybe I'd have checked the pool. And maybe not. It seemed like weeks since I'd done anything right. I hoisted myself down the ladder at the shallow end and waded through the trash until I was beneath the diving board.

The flies were gone, until morning, and they'd taken their buzz with them. The beam of the flashlight played over the junk at the deep end. I could only use one hand to toss things aside because of the flashlight, but most of the stuff down there was large, cardboard cartons and pieces of what might once have been pool furniture. Within a minute I was looking at the bottom of the pool.

Except that I wasn't looking at the bottom. I was looking at a large, rust-colored stain that tapered off on the downhill slope toward the drain. The irrelevant fact that the drain still worked flashed across my mind. There must have been quite a lot of blood. How much did the human body hold? Six quarts? Eight? How much difference did it make if the body was a small one?

The math calmed me as I climbed back up the ladder. In the car, I made myself breathe slowly for two minutes and then headed up Highland toward the Ventura Freeway. Toby was with Dolly, I told myself. So was John. Why hadn't I told her where to take them for dinner? At least I'd know. Just before I got to the freeway I saw a coin phone in a minimall, one of the thousands that now scar Los Angeles, and shoved the same old quarter into the slot.

My number was busy. It
couldn't
be busy that long.

I got the operator on the line. After we'd negotiated the price for an emergency break-in and I'd fed the last of my remaining change into the phone, she left the line. When she came back she said triumphantly, "That phone is out of order."

"No way," I said.

"Then it's off the hook. You've overdeposited," she said. "I told you fifty cents. If you'll give me your full name and number, I'll see that it's credited to your account."

I left the receiver dangling and sprinted to Alice.

There wasn't much traffic at that hour, but there was too much. More than thirty minutes had passed before I turned off Topanga Canyon onto Old Topanga, swearing at Alice for not being a Porsche. Her springs creaked on the curves, and I nearly burned out the clutch going uphill on Topanga Skyline. I jumped out at the bottom of the driveway, left the door open, and went up as quietly as I could.

All the lights were on.

I circled the house before I went in, but the windows were too high for me to see anything. They'd always been too high. Why should tonight be different? I grabbed a shovel and headed up the little corridor that led to the front door.

It had been kicked in. It sagged from its hinges dispiritedly like a shot sentry. It had been broken in two places, both above and below the latch.

My foot hit something as I went in. It was an empty bottle of red wine. I watched it roll reproachfully away from me before I lifted my eyes.

Devastation.

The coffee table was overturned. The throw rug was crumpled against the far wall. The couch was halfway into the middle of the room, as if someone had tried to take cover behind it. The door to the sun deck hung open. It creaked as a breeze stirred it.

Hefting the shovel in both hands, blade forward, I went into the bedroom. Nobody. Nobody in the bathroom, just a tap dripping water. I shut it off and went out onto the sun deck.

The lights of Topanga stretched below me, each light representing a little room where people sat together, safe from the night. To my right and far away, a coyote howled at the moon. I knew there was no one in the room beneath my feet, but I went outside and down the hill to check anyway. I was right.

Back in the living room, I sat down on the floor and tossed the shovel halfway across the room. It landed with a thump and a clatter. A flash of bright blue near the overturned table caught my attention, and I crawled over on my hands and knees to look.

It was Hansel. His head had been torn off. There was more blood on the floor than Hansel's body could possibly have held. I put an exploratory finger into the nearest pool. It was thick and tacky.

Something chirped, and I looked up. Gretel sat on top of a curtain rod, looking down at me. She cocked her head for a better look and then chirped again.

"Good for you," I said thickly. I looked over at the birds' cage. It was battered and broken. The door was gone. Suddenly the hair on my arms stood straight up, my heart slammed against my throat, and I was bathed in sweat—and I realized that I was angrier than I'd ever been in my life.

The anger focused me. I got up and picked up the phone, putting the receiver back on the hook. The red light on the answering machine blinked at me steadily, and I hit the button for playback.

First I got Eleanor. For the first time since I'd known her, I fast-forwarded the machine past her message. Then I was listening to Nana and me. "Tunut," Nana said. I hit fast forward again and then pushed the play button.

"Nana," a male voice whispered coarsely. "Nana, pick up the phone. I know you're there, Nana." Then nothing, just the hum of the line. Whoever it was had disconnected with a sharp click.

I waited. "Wednesday, eight-oh-three p.m.," the machine said tonelessly. The tape continued to roll.

Then the whisper was back. "Nana," it said, "pick up the phone. Something has happened to Simeon. Pick up the phone."

"Hello?" Nana's voice said. "Hello? Who is this? What's happened? Is he all right?"

No answer. Just the wind howling through the phone lines again. "Is he all right?" Nana said insistently. There was a click.

"Wednesday, eight-oh-five p.m.," the machine said.

Then there was nothing. Nothing at all.

I sat there, feeling my blood pressure subside and listening to the silence. Crickets made cricket noises. The house creaked. There was one other sound, one I couldn't identify at first. A kind of whirring. The refrigerator? No, not the refrigerator.

It came from the computer.

I went over to it, stood over it. The screen was dark, but the machine was on. I touched a key. Screensave, Nana had called it. The message leapt into life before me on the screen.

IT'S ABOUT EIGHT, it said. SIMEON, SOMEONE CALLED HERE. SAID SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH YOU. WHEN I ANSWERED HE HUNG UP. SIMEON, SOMEONE JUST CALLED AGAIN. IT'S A LITTLE AFTER EIGHT NOW. SIMEON, I'M SCARED.

There was a blank space on the screen, then some more words.

SOMEBODY'S HERE. I HEAR THEM OUTSIDE. I HEAR

That was the end of it.

I paced the length of the living room. The pool of blood caught my eye. Then I had an idea and went back to the computer. I pushed the key that said Page Down.

A single word appeared neatly centered in the middle of the screen. It was all in capital letters. It said:

TOBY

21 - Murder

First I called the police and reported Toby's Maserati stolen. The license plate was easy, since the last time I'd seen it I'd been flat on my back and it had been two feet from my chin: TOBY 1.

I could think of only one place he might have taken her, but if I was wrong, they could still be on the road. They couldn't have been gone much more than forty minutes. Red Maseratis aren't that common, even in Los Angeles; some alert cop might get lucky and spot the car. And I might win the state lottery next month, too.

Then I ran back down the driveway, leaving the broken door sagging open behind me, to check out the only remotely likely guess I had.

I coaxed extra speed out of Alice down the winding roads of the canyon, keeping my mind blank and my breathing even. Halfway to the coast I got stuck behind a necking couple with more eyes for the moon and each other than for the road. I hit the horn twice and got an aggressive slowdown from the lovesick creep at the wheel, a display of automotive macho for the little lady. I waited for a right-hand curve, gunned Alice, and slammed into the driver's side of the creep's rear bumper. He fishtailed off to the right, and I passed him on a blind curve and left him stalled out most of the way onto the shoulder.

By the time I ran the red light on the PCH and headed north at seventy miles per hour, fourteen minutes had elapsed since I left the house.

Try as I might, I couldn't keep my mind from working. I was doing the only thing I could think to do, but there was a tickle in the back of my head that I couldn't ignore.

I knew Toby hadn't killed Saffron.

I had bet Nana's safety on the assumption that he hadn't killed, or at least intended to kill, Amber, that he wasn't a cold-blooded murderer. And, except for Nana, Toby was the only person involved who knew where I lived. Even Dixie only had my phone number.

And then, as Malibu Canyon receded behind me, that particular security blanket ripped right down the middle.

Saffron had known. She'd been there.

Whoever killed Saffron had played with her for a long time.

I tried to accelerate, but my foot was already pushed to the floor. To the left the Pacific rolled in as black as blood. Something like drowsiness kept slipping over my consciousness, and it took too long for me to identify it as defeat. The minute I'd found Saffron dead I should have known I couldn't take Nana home.

You've killed her,
a voice said in my ear.

I shook my head and shoved vainly at the accelerator.

There was so much blood,
the voice said. Hansel's headless body popped into my mind's eye.
She's dead,
the voice said.

"Fuck you," I said to the voice, and turned left into Encinal Canyon. The turn had caught me unaware, and Alice almost spun out. It had been more than thirty minutes.

I parked partway down and ran the rest of the way to the house. From the driveway the house looked dark, but there was enough moonlight to show me that Toby's car wasn't there. There
was
a car there, though, pulled crookedly into the drive with both its front doors open.

I knew whose car it was.

The tide was out, so I went around to the beach side of the house, climbing over slippery, still wet rocks, falling once before I got to the picture windows. The curtains were drawn, but lights burned inside. Then there was a flash, like small-scale lightning. But from inside. Then another.

He was taking pictures.

A surge of pure adrenaline joined forces with another flashbulb to carry me through knee-deep water and up onto the beach to the front door. It was open.

It would be. She couldn't walk, not after all that blood. He'd had to carry her inside. He didn't plan to stay long.

I listened: not a sound. No more flashes. Then I heard footsteps across a hardwood floor, and a door opened somewhere in the house.

Now.

My wet running shoes made squelching rubbery sounds as I moved across the dark entrance hall toward the pale rectangle of light that fell from the archway leading into the living room. The room was empty and not empty.

No one was standing there, but what looked like a heap of clothing was crumpled in the corner between the bookcases. Multiple images of Toby's face grinned down from the wall at what was left of Nana. Black hair and red blood. One slender arm was outthrown. It was broken midway between the elbow and the wrist.

The next thing I remember, I had gathered her in my arms and was picking her up. I had carried her before, but now she was horribly light. I wondered how much all that blood weighed. Her head lolled back, and a savaged face caught the light. It was impossible to tell if she was alive or dead. Her eyes were swollen and open and empty. She looked like she could see through walls. I took two steps toward the front door.

"Put her down," said a voice from behind me.

A tremor ran through me, and I turned with her dangling from my arms. The door to the beach was open, and Tiny stood in it. He bloomed there, gigantic in white, framed by the darkness. A little nickel-plated gun gleamed in his hand.

"I got your clue," I said in the most level voice I could manage. "Nice touch." The front of his white shirt was stained brown. Butcher brown.

"Give her the credit. She'd already written my name on the screen when I knocked the door down. All I had to do was change two letters. But I never figured you'd get home so early, much less turn up here before I was gone. Now what am I going to do with you?"

"Is she dead?" Nana hadn't stirred.

"She wasn't supposed to be. She was supposed to call the cops and tell them to come here and then be dead." He gave me a grimace that he thought was a smile. "Downers," he said, giving his head a ponderous shake. "Bad dope. Get you out of control sometimes."

His pupils were enormous, and his fat face was sheened over with sweat.

"Like at her apartment?" I said.

"She was supposed to be there," he said in a reasonable tone. "I guess I just got pissed off. Put her down now." He wiggled the little gun. "I don't want to confuse things," he said. "No prints but Toby's, nobody but Toby. That was the idea."

"Tiny. The idea's already gone wrong."

"Why? Because of you? Just stay where you are, I'll figure you out. You'll be as dead as she is as soon as I work out where to put you."

"That doesn't give me much incentive to cooperate."

"You will, though. As long as you figure you've got a chance to stay alive, like maybe you can outsmart me, get the gun or something, you'll do anything I tell you. I would, in your shoes. And now you're going to put her down, right where you found her."

I looked into his flat black eyes for a long moment. There was nobody inside. I knelt slowly.

"You can drop her," he said in the same calm, toneless voice. "She won't feel it. Drop her on her head if you like."

I laid her down as gently as I could. Her limbs splayed out gracelessly, angular and lifeless. Matted hair masked her face.

"Why her?" I said, standing up again. "I know why you killed Saffron, but why her? What the fuck did she ever do to you? She liked you."

"It wasn't me she did it to," he said. "I wouldn't kill anyone who hurt me. I don't matter that much. I never really mattered." A furrow appeared between his brows as he replayed what I'd said. "Hold on. Stop. You know why I killed Saffron?"

"Sure. Because she and Toby killed Amber."

His face twisted and hardened. "You knew that? You knew that, and you were still on their side?" His mouth worked convulsively for a second, and then he spat on the floor. "That makes it easier," he said. "It wasn't going to be hard anyway, but that makes it even easier."

"I didn't know it until tonight," I said. "They didn't mean to."

"You think that makes any difference to Amber?"

"Tell me what happened."

His eyes filled with laborious cunning. "I thought you knew," he said slowly.

"The swimming pool, Saffron's swimming pool. It happened in the swimming pool."

The fat little eyes became alarming—still empty, but alarming. All force, no intellect: he looked like a one-man holy war. "Who told you? Toby?"

"Nobody told me. I guessed part of it from the way Saffron behaved, but I didn't figure it out until tonight, when I went to Saffron's apartment house and saw the bottom of the pool."

"They played a game with her," he said dreamily. The gun sagged in his hand. "Toby bought a bunch of loads at the Rack, and they had a make-believe contest, you know? Who could take the most loads. Except they only pretended to take theirs, they pretended to take the same loads over and over. It must have been real funny. Amber, she took four or five. And she was already pretty fucked up."

"From junk," I said, measuring the distance between us. The gun was pointed at the floor. Tiny swayed.

"Junk," he said. "I hate junk. Oh, you don't know. You don't know how many times I tried to get her to quit. I even cried." He closed his eyes, but before I could move he pulled them open again. "That's not easy for a Lebanese, crying in front of a woman, but I cried. I begged her to quit. I even hit her a few times, but that just made it worse. She started using it as an anesthetic."

"You tried," I said.

"I never tried anything harder in my life." He shrugged his massive shoulders. "I loved her."

"But you set her up with Toby that night."

"That was different. That was business. She understood the business. Toby was an important customer. Customers were customers. I was, I was supposed to be, something else. Something different." He swayed again. The gun hung limp from his hand.

"And they killed her," he said conversationally. "After they got her so stoned she couldn't walk, they played a game. You know Simon says? Little kids' game. They played Simon says. First she had to close her eyes and touch her nose. Then she had to stand on one leg. Well, she fell, of course. She fell on that whore's floor, and they both laughed."

"Then they went outside," I said.

"First the sidewalk, then the gate to the apartment house. She fell again, off the gate. Then the diving board."

"And she fell off the diving board."

"Sure. Who do you think she was, some Olympic gold medalist? She was a little girl fucked up on twelve kinds of dope. You know how much she weighed?"

"About the same as she does now." I indicated Nana.

He shook his head. "Even less. Even less."

"And she fell."

"Nine feet, I think. She fell on her head."

"But she wasn't dead."

"They didn't know that. Not any more than you know whether that one is dead." He pointed the gun at Nana, and I took a step toward him. His hand tightened on the gun. He closed his left eye to sight. I moved between them, trying to think of something to say.

"So they took her to the Spice Rack, right? I haven't figured that out. Why the Spice Rack? Why not home? Why not someplace else?"

He opened the eye and looked at me. "Oh, they took her home," he said in a sulfurous voice. "Saffron sat on her lap, you hear me? Saffron sat on her lap in that little shit car and then got out and walked like a drunk to the door so that old pervert upstairs would see her. You're telling me they didn't mean to kill her?" He spat on the floor. "She sat on Amber's lap so the guy upstairs would see a girl in the passenger seat when Toby drove away. She acted loaded, imitating Amber. Then she used Amber's keys to get in and waited, and then she left and Toby picked her up around the block, and she sat in Amber's lap again until they got to the Spice Rack. Then they dumped her, just shoved her out of the car. They made the mistake of taking her where I was. They didn't know I was there. They didn't know I was inside, counting the receipts. Usually I don't. Usually I do that at home." His eyelids clamped closed, and he gulped a gallon of air.

"And they didn't know she was alive," I said, just to say something.

He arched a four-pound eyebrow. It looked like it cost him a lot of effort. "I already said that. I already told you that. They thought they could just dump her in the parking lot like garbage and then go home and finish their party. Like garbage. They figured the cops would think someone got her between home and the club."

"But you came out and found her."

He made the grimace again. "She found me. Somehow she crawled to the back door and made some noise." His eyes strayed to a point over my shoulder and focused there. They seemed to move independently of each other. "She had a lot of guts," he said.

A wave broke outside, thundering onto the sand. I had a prickly feeling that if I turned my head, I'd see Amber standing behind me, looking into Tiny's eyes.

"She wouldn't have wanted this," I said.

"She was too soft. Toby has to pay."

"And that was why you broke her arms and legs?"

He forced his eyes back down to me. "One arm was already broken. That's why I started with an arm on this one and Saffron. I carried her to the stage and put her on it, and her arm was all wrong. I tried to put it back, but I couldn't make it look right again. Then." He stopped for a moment, looking suddenly smaller somehow. "Then she died," he said. "She caught a big breath like she was going to say something, and when she let it out something rattled, and then she went away."

"Wait. Wait a minute. She didn't tell you anything?"

"I knew where she'd been. I knew who she was with. I knew about Toby, what Toby was, what Toby likes to do to women. I'd seen
her"
—he jerked the gun toward Nana— "when Toby was finished with her. She gave me some bullshit story, but I knew Toby. I told him then if he ever touched another one of my girls in the wrong way, I'd hurt him. But for Amber, for hurting Amber, I'd kill him."

"You brutalized her. And you didn't even know for sure what had happened."

"She was dead. I stood over her, crying like a big baby, and broke whatever I could break. I did it one bone at a time, thinking about Toby. You see, he's not just going to die. The whole world is going to know what he is before the law kills him. They're going to know what filth he is. They're going to hate him as much as I hate him. That means he'll die twice. I wish I could figure a way to make him die three times."