Skin Deep sg-3 Page 2

  "In my pocket."

  "You can't," the Korean girl said. "I'm not old enough to drink, Toby. Cripes, you know about the ABC and the Spice Rack. I'll lose my job."

  "Tough shit," he said.

  Something dropped into place behind the beautiful face, a cold front that turned her dark eyes into holes I wouldn't have wanted to fall into. "Listen," she said in a tone of voice that could have sliced ripe tomatoes, "you can't shovel it at anyone forever. Sooner or later, you have to be nice."

  "Hey," he said, glaring at her, "do you know how to spell 'fuck you'?"

  I shoved my hand into the right front pocket of the hero's leather pants and came up with a wad of bills, mostly of the impressive denominations you see in ads for the California lottery. "Where do you live?" I asked her.

  "Hollywood." She looked at Mr. Beautiful as though he were something that someone gravely ill had spit onto the floor. "You're going to be sorry, Toby," she said.

  I gave her a fifty. "He's pretty sorry already," I said. "This is for the cab." I handed her a hundred. "And this is for your dry cleaning."

  She looked from me down to him, the dregs of his drink dripping from her flowing hair. She still looked good. "Yeah? Who's going to clean me? Sooner or later he's going to come back and make smooches, and I'm going to brain him with a flower pot, and when I do he'll kill me. You don't know him."

  "Honey, if he gives you any kind of trouble, even constructive criticism, I'll scramble him into an omelet and have him for breakfast." I leaned down to pick him up.

  "Simeon," Roxanne said from behind the bar, "you're not going to help him?"

  "It's better for everybody," I said, pulling Loverboy to his feet. "Otherwise, she's going to have to go to the police station, too."

  "No way in the world," the Korean girl said. "Not as long as I can still run."

  "But he's such scum," Roxanne said plaintively. "And he's got it coming."

  I heard a siren in the distance. Loverboy tugged at me, looking trapped and terrified. I shrugged it off.

  "When the cops get here, tell them he's already left. Tell them his horse showed up. I promise you, if he screws around with her again, I'll make sure he eats the whole deck, okay?" I turned to the Korean girl and fished a crumpled card from my pocket. "There's a phone number here. Use it if he gives you a problem. You can call it anytime, day or night." I looked up at Roxanne. "You going to help out or not?"

  She shrugged. "I guess. I'll get her a cab."

  "Get her two if she wants them, they're on Prince Valiant here. Are you going to be here when I get back?" The siren was louder now.

  Roxanne gave me a dubious look and then a small shrug. "What the hell," she said.

  "See you then," I said. I put my arm around the hero's shoulders. "Come on, beautiful," I told him, "this is your exit."

  For the first twenty minutes or so after he told me to turn right-north, up toward the Malibu Colony-we shared your basic sullen silence. His fringe flapped in the breeze through the open window, and he sucked at his mangled tongue and fingered his jaw once in a while, but other than that he kept his conversational skills to himself.

  That was fine with me.

  Traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway was light in both directions. The fireworks were about to start, and most people were staying put. Sweet Alice, the low-rider's special I'd won at cards from a glue-sodden card player named Jaime on a night of which I had only fragmentary memories because of Jaime's generosity with his glue, was chugging along in an exemplary fashion. She was in temporary remission from the tubercular cough that had plagued her recently. Maybe it was the carburetor, whatever that was.

  At any rate, that was the limit of my mechanical sophistication, a state I'd long considered remedying. My long-ago graduate adviser when I was taking my doctorate in English, a waspish and perfectly dressed Ph.D. named Miles Brand, maintained that there were people who were put on earth solely to tend to the health of carburetors, and that any attempt by the rest of us to penetrate those mysteries was nothing more or less than irresponsible monkeying with God's master plan. Miles's comfortable faith in the secure future of the upper classes was much greater than mine, probably a result of his lifelong love for Victorian novelists. Trollope, Dickens, Gissing, and Thackeray in the nineteenth century-and, for that matter, Miles in the twentieth-didn't seem to worry as much about gravity as I did. What happens to the top of the social pyramid when you pull out the bottom three or four layers? In all, it seemed to me that the people who understood carburetors could get along much better without the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray than the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray could get along without the people who understood carburetors.

  About twelve miles up the road, Mr. Beautiful stirred. He dabbed once or twice at his lip and then reached into his leather pocket and pulled out a small wad of tissue. "Don't hit any bumps," he said sulkily.

  I aimed for something that could have been a large tortoise or a small land mine and hit it. Alice bounced. "Anything else?" I said. Roxanne had given us some paper towels as we left, and he'd wadded a couple around his cut palm. They got in his way as he tried to unwrap the tissues. He swore sharply and pulled the paper towels loose from his hand, tossed them to the floor, and peeled open the tissue. In it were six white pills, four small ones and two that were larger.

  I've always had an active pharmaceutical curiosity, a vestige of several years of frequently terrifying experimentation. Against my will, I said, "What's that?"

  "A load," he said. "Hey, don't make me talk, I've got to get some spit together." He worked his mouth for a moment, then threw his head back and tossed down all six at once. They went down as though he'd oiled his throat. "One perfect world coming up," he said.

  "What's a load?" I'd never heard of it.

  "Four codeine-four grams each-and two Doriden. I don't like you very much right now, but I could be crazy about you in a few minutes."

  He swallowed hard a couple of times and leaned back. A mile glided by in the thickening dark. To our left, on the beach, one premature rocket slithered its lonely way into the heavens and then blew itself to smithereens, making a bright silver spider in the sky. "Have you got a mirror?" he asked.

  I swiveled the rearview toward him without speaking.

  He adjusted it and then looked at himself critically. First he extended the nipped tongue and regarded it. Then he took his nose, which I didn't remember having hit, between thumb and forefinger and bent it gently, once to the right and two or three times to the left. He touched a swollen lip and let out a whoosh of breath. "You messed me up pretty good," he said conversationally. "They'll have a shit fit tomorrow."

  "What's tomorrow?"

  "The usual, only earlier. I've got a six o'clock call."

  "For what?"

  He returned the mirror to something approximating its original position. "For what?" he repeated. "You're telling me you don't know who I am?"

  "I haven't got the faintest idea who you are or who you're supposed to be. All I know is that you pick on people who can't pick back."

  "Damsels in distress, is that the bit?" He whistled slowly and tunelessly between his teeth for a moment. "Damsel, that's a corruption of 'mademoiselle,' did you know that?" His voice was beginning to sound a little dreamy.

  "Yes," I said.

  "There are so many words," he said slowly. "Eskimos are supposed to have a hundred words for snow because it's so important to them. Not because they like it, but because it's important. Do you know how many words we have for chicks?"

  "Well, chicks," I said. "That's already a bad beginning."

  "Oh, spare me. I am so tired of men who are sensitive to women. That little girl tonight, Nana, now that's a chick. You know what's her favorite art form? MTV. What does she read on a cold winter's night? The Enquirer. When she wants a challenge, People magazine. That's why she likes me. Oh, J forgot. You're not supposed to know who I am."

  "I don't know who you are, and
I'm losing interest rapidly."

  "But Nana's interested. Nana's more than just interested. Nana's going to put up with anything I do because I'm supposed to be somebody special. Anything I want to do, that's okay with Nana. I mean, she's pretty enough to look at twice, but she's just another brainless chick. One out of a hundred and fifty million." He swallowed again and closed his eyes. "Oooh, here it comes," he said. Whatever was coming, it arrived quietly. He sat with his head thrown back. His eyelids twitched. There was a half smile on his face, slack and unmuscled, that robbed his features of the malicious intelligence that had animated them so far. Up close he looked older, and I revised my estimate of his age upward: thirty-four, maybe, holding for dear life on to twenty-nine. Getting a little pouchy here and there, but preserved from ruin by his matinee-idol bone structure. Not for long, though.

  It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. Almost, but not quite. If there's anything I've learned in my work, it's this: You can always find reasons to feel sorry for shitheads. And when you're finished, they're still shitheads.

  He moaned. It sounded like a moan of pleasure. Then, slowly, he pulled himself upright and squinted through the windshield as if he were trying to figure out how far we'd come.

  "We keep starting conversations," he said. He was talking very slowly now, as if he had to fish the words out of oily water. "But we never finish them. Nobody ever finishes them. How many conversations have you ever really finished?"

  "I'll finish this one. As soon as you get out of the car."

  "Every time I try to talk to you, you give me a one-liner."

  "This is talking? I thought we were just passing the time until we got to where you could put some ice on your lip. There. That's a two-liner."

  "Hey," he said. "You're a person. I'm a person, too. You don't know what was going on. You don't know why I punched her. You came into the scene after the exposition was over. You were just changing channels."

  "I didn't like the show."

  "What, you put your fist through the screen every time you don't like a program?"

  "This wasn't a program. And I don't watch TV. I shot my last one when I was a kid and Nixon was telling me he wasn't a crook."

  "Well, hell. At least I didn't use a gun."

  "Nixon didn't feel the bullet. Now he's walking around acting like an elder statesman. Even his hairline looks better. Anyway, shooting a television set is one thing. Hitting a woman is another."

  "The impulse is the same."

  "Impulses are what civilization was created to protect us from."

  "Dead wrong." He swallowed thickly. "Civilization was set up to allow the largest number of people to gratify the largest number of impulses and get away with it." His head lolled forward for a moment, and then he snapped it upright. "Money, for example. Civilization's proudest product."

  "I thought it was room service."

  "Without civilization, Nana's family could kill me. With civilization, money can make it okay. Money is civilization's way of saying you're sorry. Do you really think she wouldn't let me hit her again if there was enough money involved?"

  "I think you're full of shit," I said. "Why don't you just sit there and nurse your cuts? Why should you want a conversation with me?"

  "It's just the dope," he said after a moment. "Loads make you want to talk to everybody. You want one?"

  "No, thanks," I said. "I don't want to talk to everybody."

  We rode in silence for a moment. Then he began to laugh. "You really don't like me, do you? I'm Toby Vane."

  "Simeon Grist," I said grudgingly. Manners are manners.

  "Look," he said. "I'm sorry, okay? I've had a crappy day, a crappy week, in fact, and I was loaded on the wrong stuff. My momma always told me not to drink."

  "I'm not the one you should apologize to."

  "I'll call her, with you right there, when we get home. I'll go down on my knees. I'll weep and wail. I'll send her a fur coat. I think I've got one around someplace." He laughed again. "It's been a long time since anyone told me I was full of shit."

  "Maybe that's your problem. Where do I turn, anyway? We're halfway to Oxnard."

  "It's past Zuma. Encinal Canyon, do you know it?"

  "I'll find it."

  "Ooohh, ooohh, ooohh. Heading into the zone."

  "What zone?" I started looking for a speed trap.

  "The load zone. Loading zone. I don't know, whatever rarefied zone a load puts me into." He twisted the mirror back toward him and looked into it. "I'm a mess. I'm going to have to wear more makeup tomorrow than Joan Crawford. What do you do for a living?"

  "I'm an investigator."

  "But you're not a cop." There was some alarm in his voice.

  "If I were a cop, you'd have ink all over your fingers, wouldn't you?"

  "I put my footprints into cement once." He made a snorting sound, halfway between a wheeze and a laugh. "That's supposed to be a big deal."

  "Okay," I said. "You're an actor. You don't need to wear yourself out with oblique references. Here's Zuma."

  "It's a few miles farther. Hey, you, ease up. I'm not entirely hopeless."

  "You conceal it well."

  "You're not still pissed off," he said, turning his head slowly from side to side. "You're just trying to make a point. You made it already, so why don't you lighten up?"

  It was true. I wasn't still pissed off. My blues and my drunk were long gone. If anything, I was probably grateful. Toby Vane was not likely ever to become my favorite human being. Still, he was working hard to be liked, and he'd given me a chance to work off several weeks' worth of accumulated disgruntlement by slugging him, and to look like a hero in front of Roxanne while I was doing it.

  "What's it like being a detective?" Toby Vane said.

  "It's like permanently wondering where you left your car keys. What's it like being an actor?"

  "You get up early. You drive or get driven to wherever you're working. You sit in a makeup chair while somebody makes you look like a Singapore transvestite. Then you stand around all day waiting to say something that doesn't sound like anything anyone's ever said in all the time since they invented verbs. Then, if you're very lucky, a man hands you a check for a ridiculous amount of money and you go back home. You get to say things like, ‘That's not where I'm coming from, Loretta.' Or 'I live for the highs, baby. That way the lows are just places to visit.' I had to say both of those sentences yesterday. In front of millions of people, eventually."

  "Still," I said.

  "Oh, sure. It pays a shitload. We're not really talking about relative values here. Take the right coming up. It gets a little steep going down." He swallowed again. "If the social value of what we do had anything to do with how much we get paid, I'd be standing in line for a bowl of soup. But think about disk jockeys. If the world were right, or anything like it, they'd get paid by having an inch sliced off their bodies for every hour they're on the air. Instead, they rake it in. Think about the members of the National Security Council."

  "Court psychiatrists," I said.

  "Network executives. The guys who market toys. Fashion designers." He was rolling. "Here it is, this driveway. Hang a right around that bush." I did, and we were there.

  There was pretty impressive. The house was a free-form assemblage of timber and glass, framed by tall, undulating cypresses transplanted from a Van Gogh painting. When I cut Alice's engine I could hear the surf booming. "You live here alone?" I asked.

  "Just me. . and my shadow," he sang. "Actually, I have a lot of shadows," he added as he reached for the door handle. "It can get pretty crowded." He pushed the door open and then peered over at me, focusing through the drugs. "So come in," he said.

  I looked at Alice's clock, the only thing about her that always worked. The drive had taken an hour. "I've got to get back," I said.

  "The bartender? She's cute, but she'll wait. It's not even nine yet. Anyway, I don't have all your money on me. You've got to come in to get the rest of it." I must have
hesitated for a moment, because he said, "Please. Please come in. I don't want to go in alone."

  "Okay," I said. "But only for a minute."

  "Good. I've never met a detective before."

  He climbed out with some difficulty and closed the door. I followed. Midway to the house he stumbled, and I had to grab his arm to keep him from falling. "No photographers around, right?" he said. "That's what I need, a headline: boy next door overdoses." He used his hands to block out the words in the air. The effort made him tangle his feet again, and I had to hold him upright. "Heeere's Toby," he said to the night sky.

  The front door was about twelve feet high. It was made of redwood, studded with massive iron nails that had rusted in the moist ocean air, trailing long dark lines of oxidation into the grain of the wood below them. "That's on purpose, all that rust, can you believe it?" Toby Vane mumbled as he fished for a key. "Looks like shit and you pay extra for it. Typical." He turned the key, and the door creaked inward. "Come in and get paid," he said over his shoulder.

  I followed him down an arched hallway and through a triple-size door. Lights came on. I found myself in a bright, spacious room with a cathedral ceiling, white walls, and a bleached oak floor. There was almost no furniture: one small couch with a glass table in front of it, pastel pillows scattered here and there, an eviscerated polar bear spread facedown on the floor, and a long, low bookcase along one wall. Most of the opposite wall was glass. Toby Vane stooped down and did something to a polished brass knob set into the floor, and lights blazed up on the other side of the glass. The Pacific surged and churned, hurling itself with patient, unwearying violence at two low, black, barnacle-covered rocks just a few yards from the glass.

  "Very nice," I said.

  "Want a toot?" He twisted another knob, and a spotlight struck the glass table in front of the small white couch. The light was focused on something that looked like a silver finger bowl, except that it was heaped to overflowing with a fine pinkish powder. The side of me that wishes I still got loaded all the time pricked up its ears and let its tongue loll in an unappealing fashion. The phone began to ring, but he ignored it.