Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (17 page)

“Three doors down.” He was bent over the printout.

I went out into the waiting room. Miss Trink was a thin, heavily made-up woman dressed in a long brown skirt and a brown shawl on a day that was well into the nineties. She wore her burlap-colored hair in a ponytail, which she had greased until it stood straight up from the top of her head, like the flame on a candle or a convenient handle for the Rapture. The table in front of her chair was littered with newspapers, and she was busily cutting out a story with an X-Acto knife. Clippings were scattered on the floor in front of her and over the cushions of the couch. She didn’t look up.

“I won’t be long,” I said.

“No hurry,” she whispered to someone who was floating several feet above my head. Then she reached over and pushed a button on the table next to her.

I stood in the hall long enough to make my excuse plausible, and then went back in. She was working on a different story, and she leaned farther over it when the door opened, hiding her face from me. The erect ponytail quivered.

“That woman’s nuts,” I said to Schultz.

“I get a lot of them,” he said. The light did its agitated little blink. He shook his head. “It’s good for her to wait. Being early is a manipulation mechanism, and I’m teaching her they don’t always work.”

“You mean she isn’t really eager to talk?”

“Oh, she’s dying to talk. She keeps badgering me to give her two-hour sessions, but I ask you…”

“You have my sympathy,” I said. “Why the newspaper clippings?”

“She’s organizing the world,” he said. “She cuts up the papers and then rearranges them into some order that suits her. Sometimes it’s geographical, sometimes chronological, sometimes by topic, sometimes by whether they’ve got photos.” He shook his head. “A really boring mania. To tell you the truth, I miss police work. At least the nuts were interesting.”

“You think our guy is organizing the world?”

He leaned back in his chair and inhaled half the cigarette. “Most crazy people are,” he said, giving himself a smoke shawl. “We just don’t recognize the patterns they’re trying to fit it into. This guy certainly isn’t happy about the presence of a third sex. And his assumption that it’s deeply shameful is interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought that being outed was worse than being killed.”

“Is he gay?”

The eyebrows went up, making wrinkles like tiny rice terraces all the way to the top of his bald head. “He’s not acting out.” He listened to what he’d said and blinked twice. “I mean, murdering people certainly qualifies as acting out, but I’d be surprised if he engaged in physical homosexual acts. My guess is that he leads his victims on, learns as much as he can about them without giving them what they want, what he
thinks
they want. The murder is the consummation. Of course,” he added apologetically, “this could all be bunk.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Whenever we hate something deeply,” he said, “it’s almost always something we recognize in ourselves. Remember, when you point at something, only one finger points away. The other three point back at you.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Can I use that?”

He grinned, a flash of cheddar yellow. “It’s not original.”

“What about a cop who beats up on gays?”

“You mean methodically? Singling them out? Without cause?”

“He’s infamous for it.”

“Oh, dear. He needs help. And he’s not likely to look for it.” The corners of his mouth went down, making him look like a man fighting stomach cramps. “LAPD?”

“Sheriff,” I said.

He looked relieved. “Don’t know much about them.” The light flashed again, signaling Miss Trink’s finger, or perhaps her ponytail, on the button. “Damn that woman,” he said.

“The healing attitude.”

“Feh. You’ve got to be tough to heal crazy people. I’ll bet our boy is burning to talk. I’ll bet he’s keeping a diary.”

“You think so?”

“He’s on a crusade,” Schultz said. “He’s cleaning up the world, making it safe for the heterosexual middle class. He sees himself on the side of the angels.”

I got up and walked across the office and removed the baby-poop yarn construction from the wall. “Who on earth does these things?” I asked. “And why?”

His face stiffened. “My wife.”

I hadn’t even known he was married. He had the sloppy fussiness that often descends on single men in middle age. “It’s certainly an unusual medium.”

“She works with children,” he said severely. “Yarn therapy is a good way to get them to externalize. Gradually, she began to do it herself.”

I replaced it on its nail. “It’s very…” I began, and then hit a wall. I had absolutely no idea where to go.

“It’s calming,” he said.

“Does she need a lot of calming?”

“I mean for my patients. It calms my patients. Some of them look at it throughout the entire session.”

“It suggests childhood,” I said to mollify him. “Infancy, in fact.”

“Well,” he said approvingly. “There you are.”

“The two killings in Chicago,” I asked. “Were they consecutive?”

“Could you straighten the assemblage please? Up a bit on the right. I was wondering when you’d ask that. Yes, they were. So were the two in New Orleans. So you see the pattern.”

“He’s going to do it again here.”

“In two to three weeks,” he said. “If the pattern holds.”

“Will it?”

“That’s another reason I wish I were back working with the cops,” Schultz said fretfully. “These patterns always hold.”

“A serial killer?” Christy Nordine asked.
“Max?”

“It changes things,” I said. We were in the living room of a small house just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from Max’s place. Robert and Alan, whose guest Christy was, had met me at the door. Robert, about fifty, had graying hair combed straight back and wore a blue linen leisure suit. A silver fish silhouette, the old Christian symbol, hung from a chain around his neck. Alan, ten or twelve years younger, favored Ivy League, complete to a little buckle at the back of his chinos, a fashion touch I hadn’t seen in decades, and no evident religious affiliation. They’d set out a plate of crudités and an ice bucket full of bottled mineral water and withdrawn to the back of the house, looking domestic and worried.

“What does it change?” Nordine challenged, settling into a wooden captain’s chair.

The captain’s chair was of a piece with its surroundings, which might have been one of my mother’s numerous living rooms. Cherrywood furniture, imitation Early American, gleamed on hooked rugs. Two English Toby mugs, gap-toothed, weather-beaten old sailors with a cheery alcoholic flush on their cheeks, grinned at each other from opposite ends of the wooden mantel. Between them was a small coven of black cats cut from paper, their backs arched in fear or fury, the first Halloween decorations I’d seen. A pinlight picked out what might have been a real Grandma Moses above the mantel, and a grandfather clock ticked slowly next to the front door. The smell of Lemon Pledge everywhere. We could have been in Grand Rapids.

I gave the crudités a fish-eye. I’d come direct from Schultz’s office, and I hadn’t eaten in what seemed like weeks. “It makes it tougher. Before, I was looking for someone who might conceivably have been in Max’s circle of acquaintances for some time, who might have left footprints all over the place. This is someone who floated in from nowhere and doesn’t know anyone, and now he’s going to float out again.”

Nordine’s mouth set into a straight line that put vertical creases in both cheeks. “He still killed Max,” he said. Despite the strain he’d been under, he looked more rested than I’d ever seen him. Alan and Robert were taking good care of him.

I spread my hands. “It’s a different kind of animal.”

“If you’re worried about money—”

“I’m not.”

“—I’ve got a small pile of it.”

“Glad to hear it, but that’s not the point.”

“Well, what is the point?”

“I’m reporting to you,” I said. “That’s part of my job.”

He sat back as far as the chair would allow, and three or four emotions staged an argument over possession of his face. Relief won. “You’re not quitting?”

“I’m telling you that things have changed, that’s all. So far, I’ve checked out the places Max went, talked to the people he knew. All routine. All of it aimed at finding a hypothetical somebody from this community who got next to Max, probably in view of several people, and then killed him. The premise I’ve been operating on, if you can call something this thin a premise, is that the murder was spontaneous. At some point in the relationship or whatever it was, the killer decided that he could get more out of Max dead than alive, and he killed him. Up to that point, he had no reason to be particularly secretive. But this guy—the guy we’re dealing with now—intended to kill Max from the beginning. He didn’t let a lot of people see him. And he’s not going to hang around, going through the motions of a normal life, because he doesn’t have a normal life, at least not in Los Angeles.”

“You said he was going to kill someone else here.”

“I said that he’d followed that pattern in the past.”

“ ‘In a few weeks,’ you said.” Nordine’s stubborn mode was becoming very familiar.

“If the pattern holds.”

“Well, then,” he said, as though everything was settled.

“It may not be in West Hollywood,” I said.

“Of
course
it’ll be in West Hollywood. Why would he go anywhere else?”

There were a dozen reasons he might go somewhere else, but I didn’t think they’d hold Christy’s attention, and I needed all of it. “I want you to go to the cops,” I said.

That caught him by surprise. He opened his mouth and closed it. Then he swallowed. “You’re joking.”

“Take a lawyer. Take two, if you’ve got a pile of money somewhere. I know a reporter on the
L.A. Times
you can talk to before you go in. Hell, she’d probably go with you. Even Spurrier isn’t going to pound on you with the media watching.”

He considered it and changed the subject slightly. “They’re already watching.”

“Come again?”

“I told you they would be. Haven’t you seen the paper?”

“I don’t get one.”

“Hold on.” He got up and went into the back of the house, and I heard Alan’s inquiring voice before Christy reappeared with a folded copy of the
Times
in his hand.

MURDERED MAN WAS TV STAR read the headline. Bottom right corner of page one. Not bad for a gay murder; the
Times
is so conservative on some issues as to be fundamentalist.

A West Hollywood man who was murdered on Tuesday was a popular television star in the 1950s
, the story began.
Max Grover, 77, who was brutally beaten to death in his home by an unknown assailant, starred in a top-rated series
, Tarnished Star,
under the name Rick Hawke
.

“They finally woke up,” I said. Nothing about the mutilation, nothing yet about the serial angle.

“Well,” Christy said, the soul of reason, “Max kept it pretty quiet.”

“All the more cause for you to talk to a reporter before you go in.”

Reason went out the window and truculence came in. “I’m not going in.”

“Shush,” I said. I’d seen a name toward the bottom of the story.

Grover’s longtime agent, Ferris Hanks, told the
Times
that Grover had lived quietly since abandoning his career toward the end of the fifties. “Max could have been a major star,” Hanks said. “He was a great talent. When he quit, he could have had his pick of the networks
.”

“Ferris Hanks,” I said.

“Oh, how Max loathed that man,” Christy said. “Said he was inverse proof that the good die young. Eighty-two—he
says
—and still doing mischief.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“
Meet
him? We wouldn’t go near him.”

“Before Max, I mean.”

“Of course not. Hardly my circle.”

“But Max talked about him.”

“Like you’d talk about an operation you once had. And he called a couple of times.”

“What about?”

“He never gave up. He wanted Max to go back to work, can you imagine?”

That took me by surprise. “I thought he hated Max.”

“He was terrible to him for years. The old ‘you’ll never work in this town again’ stuff, as though Max cared. And then, just like nothing had happened, there he was on the phone, offering work. I ask you.”

“But Max said no.”

“Max, work for Ferris Hanks? Of course not. An unbelievable man. Absolute sewage.”

“So everyone says.”

“And for once, everybody is right.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems to me that a community is usually right when it passes judgment. Look how people felt about Max.”

“And how they feel about me,” Christy said, using my least favorite of his repertoire of tones.

“People don’t think badly of you,” I said. “They just wonder when you’re going to do something on your own.”

It startled him. Everyone was being nice to him, and here I was, kicking him in the shins. “Like what?” he demanded. “How much time—”

“I know all about that,” I said, “and you have no idea how much time you have. You could live for years. You’re going to have money. What are you going to do, Christy?”

“How would I know? I haven’t thought about it.”

“Start by going to the cops.”

“Why? Why should I do that?”

“Well, they’re looking for you, for one thing. You can’t hide with Robert and Alan forever. You get caught, they’re going to be in trouble, too.”

“I’ll go somewhere else,” he said.

“And you can’t help me until you’re free to move around.”

“Help you?” He sounded skeptical. “You think I can help you?”

“Of course you can. I’ve needed to talk to you a dozen times in the past two days, and I didn’t know where you were. And even now, now that I do know, I can’t call you from home because the cops might be monitoring my phone. I need to get into things, like Max’s safe-deposit box, that I don’t have access to without you.”