Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (19 page)

“Do me a favor. Get a recent one and look in the agents’ section. I want an address for Ferris Hanks.”

“He’s alive?” I let it pass, and Wyl came to his own rescue. “Awful, awful man,” he said. “You know, the good die—”

“
You’re
still alive,” I pointed out.

There was a silence, and when he spoke he sounded affronted. “One needn’t say everything one thinks of,” he said snippily. “One does not need to be reminded of one’s age.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Listen, Wyl, I’m in a phone booth.”

“Oh, you
poor
boy.” He sounded aghast. “I’ll get right to it.”

A moment later I had an address. “That’s up near the bird streets,” he said, “just off Sunset Plaza. There aren’t any offices up there. He must be working from his house.”

“Thanks, Wyl.”

“Anytime,” he said. “Well, cheerio.” Make it six Manhattans.

Thirty years ago the Valley was mostly Anglo, with a few Hispanic pockets tucked in to supply a work force in the remnants of the orange groves and tomato farms that once stretched, fragrant and fruitful, across its broad floor. Now, in the flatlands north of Ventura Boulevard, most of the Anglos had followed the orchards into memory. The faces in the cars and on the sidewalks were brown, black, and occasionally yellow. The new cash crop seemed to be the minimall, motley collections of unrelated businesses shoveled into cramped, fanciful stucco structures with too few parking spaces. The donut shops and the nail parlors were run by Vietnamese, and most of the video stores offered
películas en español
. Two Latino kids leaned out of the window of a primo seventies Oldsmobile and whistled appreciatively at Alice. “Bitchen Buick,” the driver called. Then, when the light changed, he laid rubber all over the street. Some things hadn’t changed.

Elena Aguirre’s house was one of a set of five on Hesperia Street, as identical as grapes in a bunch. The contractor had attempted to disguise the limitations of his imagination by photocopying the same blueprint five times, throwing the copies into the air, and then building the houses however the plans landed. Some sported their front doors on the left and some on the right, suggesting quintuplets who parted their hair differently. Some faced the street and some sat sideways. They were painted a remarkable range of colors that extended from old mustard to new mustard. In the daylight, I thought, they’d look like Schultz’s teeth.

Each house apparently served as the Mother Ship to three or four automobiles. The half-acre of pink primer on the fenders and doors offered a complement of catsup for all that mustard. I found a parking space opposite the address I’d copied from the phone booth and sat there, wondering what to do.

The scene with Spurrier played and replayed in my mind. He’d let me off easy; I didn’t really think my threat of revelation had been anything but transparent. On the other hand, a man like Spurrier was likely to have a veritable convention of skeletons in his closet. And then there was Spurrier’s closet itself—the one he was in, according to the man in The Zipper. Not likely to look for help, Schultz had said.

No one went in or out of Elena Aguirre’s house. No lights were on.

Had it been Elena, or Marta herself who had hung up on me?

By now Marta knew about Max’s death. I asked myself what I would do, if I were an illegal alien whose boss had been murdered, and I decided I’d do exactly what Marta was doing. I’d go to ground and stay there. But would I go to ground in my cousin’s house?

I would if I didn’t have anyplace else to go. Did Marta? For all I knew, she was back in San Salvador by now.

Why did I keep replaying the conversation with Spurrier? There was nothing remarkable about it. He’d wanted something from me that I was already prepared to give him, and when I finally gave it to him, he recognized it for what it was: a pawn waiting to be sacrificed. He’d almost laughed in my face. And I’d almost laughed back, and that was why I kept holding the encounter up to the light.

I hadn’t been terrified. My mind hadn’t overloaded and shut down, my stomach hadn’t rebelled. I’d faced him down, both of us playing games and both of us seeing through the other’s game, and I’d walked away from it with no more damage than a new bandage on my arm, a broken taillight, and a car that needed washing. I could have regarded myself as whole again, if it hadn’t been for one thing.

It wasn’t Spurrier who terrified me. It was the kid in the dark, the kid with the friendly voice and the carpet cutter.

Headlights swept the street, and a no-color Hyundai, as dented and puckered as a raisin, pulled into Elena Aguirre’s driveway and a woman in blue jeans and a white T-shirt got out, lugging a pillowcase full of something soft and heavy: laundry. She was of medium height, and her dark hair reached midback. Elena, probably. She walked very briskly, back straight despite the weight of the load thrown over her shoulder, to the front door. All business, she dug through a ring of keys and did the necessary. Three locks, a lot of locks but not excessive for Reseda these days. She went into the house and pulled the door closed without so much as a glance around.

Wouldn’t she look around if her cousin were hiding there? I decided she would and started the car. I’d pulled it out of the space and turned it around before I realized that no lights had gone on in the house.

So maybe she went to the back.

Maybe the electricity was off.

Maybe the Farm Boy was in there, waiting for her.

Shit
. I backed into the space again and got out of the car.

It wasn’t a wide street, but it seemed to take several minutes to cross. One small blessing: The builder had economized on windows, so I could edge around the side of the house without having to duck down more than once, as I passed a cheap, rectangular, aluminum-framed sliding affair that probably opened onto a dining room or a bedroom. Elena’s car exhaled heat, creaking and popping behind me.

The backyard was dirt, with a few large rocks scattered around like a training set for an apprentice Zen gardener. A light gleamed through a square eighteen-inch window in the back door, and I crept toward it, bent as sharply as a man getting into a helicopter. Through the window I saw Elena Aguirre dumping men’s clothing into a machine, singing in Spanish as she worked, a woman doing someone else’s laundry. She didn’t sort it. Maybe she was using cold water. Maybe she didn’t care if the colors ran.

Even if Marta was in there, I didn’t want to talk to her when her cousin was home. I went back to the car, walking straight this time, and headed back to West Hollywood.

“Whatchoo want?” said the voice through the little speaker. It was the voice of someone who’d earned an advanced degree in Urban Black. He’d spoken even before I rang the bell.

“Is Ferris Hanks there?” The gates across Hanks’s driveway were black wrought iron, at least twelve feet tall, and must have weighed a thousand pounds apiece. They had a design of some kind in the center.

“Whoozzat?”

“Nobody he knows.” My eyes interpreted the design in the center, rejected it, and reinterpreted it. It was
still
a spider.

“Fuck off,” said the voice on the speaker.

“Say
please
, Henry,” said a new voice. It was a dry, thin voice, brittle enough to punch a finger through, but it had a lot of authority.

“Fuck off, please,” said Henry, brandishing his social skills.

The spider had a red spot, shaped like a violin, on its abdomen. I wondered what the neighbors thought. “I’m here about Max Grover,” I offered.

“It’s a little late to talk about Max,” the dry voice said. “Max is a dead issue.” There was a pause, and I pictured him rubbing his hands, listening for my response. “
Heek heek heek
,” he finally said, a laugh of sorts, a laugh that needed to be taken outdoors and given a good shaking and hung on the line for a week.

“I only need a few minutes,” I said. “I was a friend of his.”

“One of Max’s
friends
?” The voice had dismay in it. “I think not. We’re not in the market for scruffy this evening. Leave at once.”

“The hell I will.”

“Well, you can’t stay
there
. The Pinkerton Patrol will get you. And you can’t climb the fence into the yard because my dogs will eat you alive. We haven’t fed the dogs, have we, Henry?”

Henry rumbled a negative and then cleared his throat. “So fuck off,” Henry said. “Please.”

The fence, also wrought iron, was nowhere near as high as the gates. Just for the hell of it, I opened Alice’s door quietly, got out, and kicked the fence. No ravening hounds barked at me. I got back into the car without closing the door.

“I’ll see you,” I said.

“In your dreams,” said the dry voice.

The house sat on the curve of a narrow street, maybe a mile above Sunset, where the houses were half a city block apart. I coasted down to the next house, pulled partway onto a grass parking strip, and climbed out, my muscles no longer protesting each change of position. The city lay spread out below, a scattered cache of rhinestones cut off by the hard dark line of the Pacific.

Hanks’s fence looked like it had been built to be climbed, a lattice of black iron that thoughtfully offered the would-be intruder both horizontals to step on and verticals to hold on to. When I got up there I found that the verticals reared two feet above the final horizontal at the top, demanding a delicate approach if a human male wanted to negotiate it and continue to sing any of the melodies on the bass clef. Hanging there and contemplating emasculation, I kicked the fence again, waiting for the whelps of the Hound of the Baskervilles to materialize beneath me, snarling and dripping foam. Mailmen face worse every day, I thought, dropping to the grass on the inside of the fence.

A line of oleanders marched in tight ranks parallel to the fence to mask the house. I pushed my way through them and found myself facing another row. Oleanders are noisy bushes, with flat dry leaves, but the dogs weren’t waiting for me on the other side.

The lawn sloped downhill toward the house, a beautiful, rambling white twenties Mediterranean with a red tile roof and a round tower at either end, Hanks’s gardeners had planted big generic bushes here and there to soften the house’s lines, not that they needed softening, and the bushes looked like they might provide a convenient set of resting places as I worked my way toward the front door. I’d reached the third one when a bank of floodlights went on.

“Stay right there,” Henry’s voice boomed. “Move and I’ll let them off the leash.”

I froze. “I’m here,” I said.

“Well, don’t move your ass.” Now I could hear panting. It was coming directly toward
my
bush, which suddenly looked very small. Too small to climb, at any rate.

“Oh, hell,” said the dry voice. “Let them loose.”

There was no getting to the fence. I stood there, paralyzed, as a series of clips was unfastened, and then the bush rustled and a cloud of Yorkshire terriers trotted around it, averaging about two pounds each, and gazed up at me, their tongues lolling. One of them bounded up and viciously sniffed my shoe.

Through the roaring in my ears I could hear the dry voice. It said, “
Heek heek heek
.”

The hardest part was reconciling the picture of Ferris Hanks I’d assembled in my imagination with the Ferris Hanks sitting across from me. I’d anticipated a wizened, exquisite Mandarin from Central Casting’s criminal mastermind division: crippled perhaps, shaved bald as an egg, and wearing flowing robes or thigh-high boots and a black leather cape. What I’d gotten was a miniature Broderick Crawford. In a USC jogging suit.

Everything about Hanks’s face was square. He had a nose like a thumb and a chin like a shoebox. His short dark hair, expertly clipped into varying lengths, was combed forward in Roman fashion, and the lower ridge of his skull, where it jutted out over the back of his neck, had a corner like a coffee table. The neck was powerful, roped with muscle, giving him the look of someone who habitually opened doors with his head. As short as it was thick, the neck emerged from shoulders as broad as an automobile bumper.

“Max was a fool,” he said in his dry old-man voice. The voice was the oldest thing about him. “A good actor, but a fool.”

We were in a living room almost long enough and almost cold enough for a game of ice hockey. Frigid air was being pumped energetically into the room through two vents, big enough to crawl through, high on the walls. It was a room my mother had definitely not furnished. Navajo rugs imposed dull-colored angular patterns over a gray slate floor, and tall hand-painted Japanese screens, profusely decorated with irises and camellias, concealed the corners. Crowds of men, women, and gods congregated festively on the walls, each crowd cut from a separate panel of heavy flat Thai teak. The furniture was low and massive, dark wood and burgundy leather, with the cushions tied to the wooden frames as though they’d attempted in the past to rearrange themselves while no one was looking. Against the longest of the walls stood a police lineup of full-size wooden cigar-store Indians. In the center of the lineup, looking like the one who dreaded stepping forward, was Henry. Henry had a gun in his hand and an ambivalent gleam in his eye.

“He did a lot of good,” I said.

The Yorkshire terriers had scattered themselves over the burgundy leather couch on either side of Hanks, like living throw pillows. Hanks removed one from his lap and opened a profusely carved ivory box. He closed it again, looking disappointed. “He could have done more good by staying in front of the cameras,” he said. “The damn fool.”

I had a feeling this was territory Hanks had explored often. I also had the feeling Hanks thought a lot of people were damn fools.

Upon closer examination, it wasn’t so much that Hanks didn’t seem old; he just seemed a kind of young that did not, that never would, exist in nature. The skin drawn taut over the square face was the color of a glazed ham and the texture of a bat’s wing. The short hair was a peculiar dark red that suggested a genetic link with the later Ronald Reagan. It all came together to create a sort of humanoid artifact, animatronic, perhaps, that required, and got, a great deal of skilled technical care.