Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (21 page)

“Thass how I recollect it.”

“Henry is my literary adviser,” Hanks said. “You may have been wondering what he was doing here.”

“I hadn’t.”

“He likes to stand in one place for long periods of time. You’ve probably noticed that. He’s not idle, though. He’s working on a mental concordance of English lyric poetry. Aren’t you, Henry.”

“You say so, Ferris.”

“I do say so,” Hanks said. “I say it every chance I get.”

“You loved Max,” I said.

“
Everybody
loved Max,” Hanks said, slapping the table with the flat of his hand. I’d heard a number of people say those words, but not with such intensity. “Max was one of those people other people throw love at. He accepted it like, like air, like confetti, like nothing. He didn’t even know I loved him. He didn’t
notice
. I turned my life inside out for Max. I got rid of clients who weren’t his type, fixed it so other agents wouldn’t take them on. I negotiated raises for him when he was already one of the three highest-paid actors in television. He didn’t notice. He said, ‘Really, Ferris? That’s nice. Can we do anything about the scripts?’ I got the best writers in town, writers who
hated
television. I blackmailed one of them to write scripts for Max, told him wouldn’t it be awful if his wife found out about his little tootsie and started thinking community property. A writer everybody wanted, fucking
Brando
wanted him, and there it was in the trades that he was writing for
Tarnished Star
. Let me tell you something, boysie, one of the tricks of having power is that you don’t throw it around. I was throwing it around like a drunk, like a novice, and all for Max. And what did it get me?
Gornischt
is what it got me. A lawsuit from the network when Max walked is what it got me. A nasty postcard from India is what it got me. Break my heart? Don’t make me laugh.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

He passed a hand over his forehead. “I don’t remember the last time I laughed.”

“Ferris,” I said reprovingly, “you laughed when your dogs attacked me.”

“
Heek
,” he said, and both eyes disappeared. “You looked like you had wet your pants.”

It was a smile, sort of. As much of one as I was likely to get. “I need your help,” I said.

He got comfortable, a man in his milieu. “Of course you do. Why else would you have climbed my fence?”

“I want you to throw a wake for Max.”

Whatever he’d expected, that wasn’t it. “A wake? Whatever for?”

I’d expected a refusal, but not a question. “That’s not how I work,” I said. “I have ideas first and then figure out why I had them.”

“How haphazard.”

“I prefer to think of it as instinctive.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “What makes you think I’d consider such a thing?”

“We’ve already covered that. For Max.”

“For years,” he said, “I thought it was a question: ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot?’ My answer was always yes. As quickly as possible.”

“But you didn’t forget.”

“Not for lack of trying. Lord, how I tried.” He toyed with the brass box and then looked up. At Henry.

“Why not?” Henry said.

“An excellent question,” Hanks said promptly, “and one that isn’t asked often enough. I knew a prostitute once, a woman of almost inexhaustible willingness, and that was her credo. Anything anyone asked her to do, she replied, ‘Why not?’ Wound up owning half of North Hollywood. Ever wondered why they call it North Hollywood?”

“Because it’s north of Hollywood.”

“You lack poetry,” Hanks said. “You should spend time with Henry.” He fondled the ears of the nearest dog. “Why me? And don’t give me sentimentalism.”

“You can afford it,” I said. “And it would amuse you.”

He closed both eyes. “It might at that.”

“You haven’t laughed in years,” I pointed out.

“I ain’t never heard him laugh,” Henry said solemnly.

Hanks still had his eyes closed, but the left corner of his mouth went up. “Halloween’s around the corner.”

“Great,” I said. “A theme.”

“I don’t entertain at home,” he said, opening his eyes.

“And I wouldn’t ask you to. I want it in West Hollywood.”

“The dreariest of venues.”

“It’s your chance,” I said, “to show them how it should be done.”

The right corner of his mouth went up, too. It made him look almost pleasant. “If I do it,” he said, “I’ll give them an evening they’ll never forget.”

“Anything you want, as long as it’s legal.”

“Where have you
been
? Everything’s legal these days.”

“You’ll do it, then.”

He lifted the paws of the dog nearest him and clapped them together lightly in applause. “I’ll think about it. Call Henry at six tomorrow evening.”

“You’re not as bad as they say you are.”

“No one’s as bad as they say he is. I used to come pretty close, though.” His eyes widened. “I thought you didn’t know anything about me.”

“I lied.”

“We’ll have lots of time to talk about me while we plan this thing.” He waved the words away like smoke. “
If
I do it. It’ll broaden your frame of reference.” He picked up the ivory box and slammed it onto the tabletop. “Henry,” he said, “it’s midnight. I’ve practically promised this man a favor.
Now
can I have a fucking cigar?”

Henry stirred from his spot by the wall. “You got to say please,” he said.

My answering machine had kept itself busy in my absence. Eleanor had called to say she’d talked to Alan and Christy and that she’d be going to the station with them in the morning in her capacity as a reporter. My mother had checked in with a joke about an old man who found a frog that claimed to be a princess; all he had to do was kiss her to change her back again, with unspeakable delights, unendurably prolonged, as a fringe benefit. At ninety, the old man finally said, he’d just as soon have a talking frog. I wondered what Ferris Hanks would have said. Hammond called from Maui. He and Sonia had met cops of many races, and did I know that Hawaiians ate paste? Three extremely hearty people in the marital line had called to offer me and the little missus a variety of things I’d never heard of and couldn’t do without. Someone with the unlikely name of Ed Pfester—the
P
was silent, but he’d spelled it—had called, saying he was with
Back Fence
magazine, and I could call him back at anytime. He was on deadline, he said. In fact, he’d said it twice, both times he called.

Twelve forty-two a.m. qualified as “anytime,” but I didn’t feel an irresistible urge to talk to
Back Fence
. Think about
People
, printed badly and dumbed down to a roughly amphibian level, and you’ve got
Back Fence
. I could imagine the story they’d do on Max—
The Secret Life of an American Icon
or something—and I couldn’t see any angle in helping them out.

There were a lot of things I couldn’t see any angle in.

I’d brought Max’s piece of
Nite Line
up the driveway, and I fetched a beer from the refrigerator and smoothed the clip out on the coffee table. Bearded Jack, at the dating service, had been surprised Max would carry something like that around, but it was all I had, and I’d been postponing working through the classifieds on the back of the page. Forty-three of them had been left whole by Max’s scissors and another twelve had been cut through, leaving uninformative fragments.

Let’s say Max met the Farm Boy through the classifieds. Let’s say the Farm Boy worked his lethal scam from out of town, which made a certain amount of sense; he could probably subscribe to gay papers from all over the place, have them delivered to wherever he holed up between destructive forays into other men’s lives.

A comparison of the out-of-town subscription lists of the major-city gay papers might have proved informative. It might also have proved informative to roll back time and watch while Max was assaulted, but I couldn’t do that, either.

About a third of the ads provided phone numbers, all local. On a second look, several of them provided the
same
phone number, or numbers that differed only by a digit or two. The pros Jack had talked about, all claiming to be handsome, healthy, hankering, and hung. I crossed them out with a red marker, feeling decisive. There. A start.

Most of the others offered post-office boxes, and nineteen of them were out of town. I marked out the ones in L.A. and looked down at the page. Nineteen was too many by about fifteen. Okay, I thought, which ones would Max be likely to answer?

The parameters: troubled tone, low self-esteem, pleas for help. That meant I had to read the damn things. It was enough to make me get another beer.

Older “brother” needed
, one said.
Whom can I turn to?
asked another, a little pedantically. More to the point,
Me: Young and inexperienced. You: Strong and caring
. Feeling young and inexperienced for the first time in years, I made a note of the P.O. box and the state. A little farther down,
Country mouse seeks city mouse
. Against the opposite margin,
Come and Get me
. At the top,
New life needed
. Next to that,
New and adventuresome
, right above
Mature Daddy wanted
.

The third beer went down more quickly than the first two. I was getting a fourth when the phone rang.

“Mr. Grist,” Ed Pfester’s voice said to the machine, “this is Ed Pfester again from
Back Fence
. I’m up against a heck of a deadline here. Please give me a ring whenever you get in.” He gave the number again, as though I were a genie who could be prodded into action only by repeating the magic formula three times. I wrote it down out of habit.

Below Ed Pfester’s number, this is what I had on my pad:

Older brother: Albuquerque, NM

A cry in the dark: Boise, ID

Country mouse: Kearney, NE

Me: young: Wheeling, WV

New life: Fresno, CA

Mature Daddy: Decatur, IL

Near Chicago
, I thought. And then I thought,
So what?

Come and Get: Colorado Springs, CO

New and: Provo, Utah

An atlas of sorts, an atlas of real or feigned small-town desperation. I was very happy I wasn’t a closeted gay in Provo, Utah, or anyplace else where the cops all went to church. Or, for that matter, in Ike Spurrier’s territory.

Now what? Write eight letters? I knew the profile that might bring the Farm Boy through the mirror, carpet cutter in hand: older, prosperous, avuncular, roots in a smaller town. But the Farm Boy, according to Schultz’s printouts, planned his joyrides in pairs, two to a city. Keeping his travel expenses down, maybe. It seemed likely that he had both victims identified, had his correspondence or whatever it was well in progress by the time he packed his innocent expression and picked up his boarding pass.

How did he swing it once he got to his destination? Did he work them one at a time or simultaneously? Christy had said no one had been sleeping at Max’s house, so he obviously slept elsewhere. In a hotel? At the home of the man in line to become Finger Number Two?

The penciled numbers on the margin of the page:
237/10/23/6:2
. Ten twenty-three was probably October 23, two days before Max was killed. What was 6:2? A Bible verse? What other numerical format demanded a colon? Time, stupid. 6:2. Max being cryptic. 6:20. That left me 237 on October 23 at 6:20, either a.m. or p.m. Two thirty-seven could have been an address, a hotel room, an office suite, a gym locker, a self-storage compartment, a numerical code of some kind. I was willing to bet it was a flight number.

Approximately ninety airlines fly into, and out of, Los Angeles International Airport, a total of more than eighteen hundred flights a day. The
Official Airlines Guide
lists all of them by city of origin, arranged alphabetically by destination and chronologically from earliest arrival to latest. It’s a peculiarly infuriating publication, printed in a type that gets smaller every year, and I buy a new one every three months, on the off chance that I’ll be presented with a reason to squint at it.

The twenty-third was a Sunday, so I could eliminate all the 6:20 flights numbered 237 with the notation “X7,” meaning
except Sunday
. That would have been helpful if there had been any. There weren’t. A beer and a half later, with my eyes watering, I’d learned that there weren’t any flights from
anywhere
that had landed at LAX at 6:20 a.m. or p.m. on Sunday the twenty-third. Two veritable holes in the schedule of one of the world’s busiest airports.

So maybe it was an address, after all. Or someone’s waist size for that matter. Maybe Max had been murdered by someone with a 237-inch waist.

The phone rang, and I was exasperated enough to pick it up.

“Boy,” said Ed Pfester, “am I happy to get you.”

I wasn’t happy. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Really, really late,” Ed Pfester said cheerfully. “Did I explain that I’m on deadline?”

“Over and over again.”

“And that I’m doing a piece for—”

“
Back Fence
,” I said. “And I don’t want to talk to you.”

“You don’t?” He seemed unable to believe it.

“I don’t like
Back Fence
,” I said. “It’s written for people who put most of their mental effort into growing their fingernails.”

“That’s pretty strong,” he said. “But, listen, this is important to me. It’s sort of my big break.”

“I don’t really—”

“Oh, come on. Please? I only need a couple of minutes. Help the kid out.”

Burbank
, I suddenly thought. I may have slapped my forehead.

“Ed,” I said, “I’ll give you ten minutes. Call me back in five.”

“Promise?”

“Just dial the number.” I hung up and went back to the small print.

One plane into Burbank Airport at 6:20 P.M. on Sunday the twenty-third. Western Air from Denver’s Stapleton Airport. Flight 237.