The Bone Polisher sg-6 Read online

  Sonia put out a hand to silence him. “Al says you’re a wonderful mother. I hope we can be friends.”

  “Well, hope again, honey,” Hazel said. “But don’t give my kids any trouble, hear?”

  “I have my own child,” Sonia said, touching her stomach, “to worry about.”

  From Hazel’s expression, as blank and astonished as the paper targets at the far end of the room, this was the first she’d heard about it.

  “That call’s for me,” I said to the nearest cop, taking the coward’s way out. “I left the number on my answering machine.”

  Hazel’s voice rose behind me as the cop led me to a phone mounted on one of the white walls. “Yeah?” I said into the mouthpiece.

  “This is Christy,” the voice said. It coughed, and the cough turned into a choke and then a sob. “Max is dead.”

  I looked around the room. Hazel was still yelling at Sonia and Hammond. “Where? How?”

  “Home. Be… ah… beaten to death. Where are you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Have you called the cops?”

  “And give them a voice-print?” he asked. Then he laughed, and something lassoed the laugh and choked it off, and he coughed again. “Are you crazy?”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Call the cops,” he said, and hung up.

  I turned to the nearest cop, the cop who had led me to the phone.

  “I want to report a murder,” I said.

  4 ~ Spurrier

  “Damn it, Al, I think the guy who did him was in the house. When I was there.” I swung out into the fast lane on Fountain to pass someone who was carrying on an animated conversation in an otherwise empty automobile, and the limousine trailing us followed suit. Hammond, sitting next to me in the passenger seat, was absorbed in a bright yellow brochure that offered a staggering variety of “His amp; Hers” items.

  “Washcloths I can see,” he said. “But matching golf shirts?”

  “You couldn’t know,” Sonia said to me from the backseat, where she and Orlando had been murmuring conspiratorially to each other for miles. “There’s no point in kicking yourself.”

  She and Hammond wore flower leis given them to speed their way to Hawaii. The cops who hung the tiny pink orchids around Hammond’s neck had managed to keep straight faces, but just barely.

  “How about some nice pillowcases?” Hammond asked. “Blue for me, pink for you. Christ, it’d be enough to keep you awake, lying there in the dark and wondering if you’ve got the right pillow.”

  They’d volunteered to drive to Max’s house with me on their way to the airport, but Sonia’s remark was the first either of them had addressed to me. Hammond had been too busy going through my morning’s mail, and Sonia and Orlando apparently had pressing business to whisper about.

  “You’ll have to tell the sheriff’s deputy about what you heard,” Sonia said as though Al hadn’t spoken. “All we can do is hand you off to them. It’s their territory.”

  “We’ll put you right with them, though,” Hammond offered. “All you got to do is tell them what happened, tell them about the little doily who hired you, and go home.”

  “ Al,” Sonia complained, sounding like a wife.

  “Yeah,” Hammond said. “Sorry.” Then he chuckled, deep in his chest. “How about old Hazel, huh?”

  “Don’t go thinking she’s still in love with you,” Orlando volunteered maliciously. “It’s just the loss of power she’s worried about.”

  I turned left from Fountain onto Flores as Hammond maintained a ponderous silence. I could practically hear him counting to ten.

  At about eight, Sonia observed, “Nice area.”

  “If you like fruitcake,” Hammond said automatically. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you know, even though there may not be a lot of real good reasons to work for the LAPD, one of them is that the Sheriffs got Boys’ Town.”

  “West Hollywood, you bigot,” Sonia snapped.

  “The city government leases them,” I said, trying to avert a prehoneymoon separation. After all, they’d only been married half an hour. “It’s a private contract. But they’re thinking of setting up their own force.”

  “I can see the uniforms,” Hammond said. “Like Singapore Girls, only packing.”

  “That’s enough, Al,” Sonia said sharply.

  “What’re we, on 60 Minutes?” Hammond grumbled. Then he caught his bride’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, darling.”

  “What a piece of raw material,” Sonia said, softening. “Absolutely everything needs to be changed.”

  “Over there,” I said, looking at the cluster of Sheriffs’ cars and the yellow crime-scene tape.

  As I pulled Alice toward the curb, a deputy stepped forward. He had the standard-issue mustache, mirrored sunglasses, and tight khaki uniform. In his early thirties, he had no love handles to speak of. I braked, and he came around to the driver’s side and tapped on the window.

  “Help you, sir?” he said as I rolled the windows down.

  I looked up into two convex versions of my face, reflected in his shades. “I’m the one who called it in.”

  “And how did you-” he started, and then peered into the car, seeing Hammond in his LAPD blues and the orchid lei, Orlando in his tux, Sonia in full uniform with a bridal veil in her lap, and, behind us, the black stretch limo. It was enough to make him take off his sunglasses.

  “He got a phone call, sonny,” Hammond growled. The LAPD and the Sheriffs had a long and stormy history. “And he was here just before the old queen got killed. And he’s volunteered to come all the way here-’

  “Fine, sir.” The deputy looked at me. “I’m sure Sergeant Spurrier will want to talk to you.”

  “I’m sure he will, too, stupid,” Hammond muttered, setting me right with the Sheriffs.

  Two minutes later Hammond and Sonia were Honolulu-bound, and Orlando and I were following the deputy up the steps to Max Grover’s front porch. I’d promised to run him back to Parker Center to pick up his car, and the deputy had looked at him when he didn’t get into the limousine, and then looked back at me. Then he’d shaken his head.

  On the other side of the screen door, flashbulbs popped and someone laughed. The laugh ripped a little hole in the waning daylight and let in an early piece of the night: It was a nasty little laugh, the laugh of someone who’s just seen a silent-movie actor slip on a banana peel and thinks it’s funny because he doesn’t know the man wasn’t really hurt.

  “Fasten your seat belt,” I said to Orlando. “This is going to be a bumpy flight.”

  The deputy swiveled to face us. “Was he here with you?” he demanded, referring to Orlando.

  “No.”

  “So who is he?”

  “A friend.”

  The deputy thought about it. His face took on the expression of someone jogging dutifully uphill, suggesting that thinking was something he did infrequently and reluctantly, and only when there was no alternative. Then he pointed his chin at Orlando. “He stays here.”

  “Your tuchis,” I said pleasantly.

  He slid the mirrored shades back up the slope of his nose so that his eyes were concealed. “Beg pardon?”

  “He comes in. With me.”

  “The kid stays here,” he said, going for tough. The tag on his chest read KLEINDIENST.

  “Get your superior, Deputy Kleindienst,” I said. “Surely you have many.”

  “Kleindienst,” someone called through the screen door, “who you jacking around out there?”

  Kleindienst seemed inclined to give the question some thought, so I said, “I’m the one who called you on this.”

  “And he brought a little friend along,” Kleindienst said scornfully.

  “That so,” said the man behind the door. He pushed it open and looked out at me. “Ike Spurrier,” he said. He was short and compact and broad through the chest, with coloring that made him look as though he was dissolving slowly in a glass of water: almost albino, with white-blond hair
and a spiky little white-blond mustache and melancholy eyes the color of wet sand. Beneath the mustache was a plump, shiny red lower lip, as wet and sharply articulated as an earthworm. He wore street clothes: a rumpled off-yellow tweed sport coat with a red polo shirt beneath it, and pressed blue jeans.

  “Simeon Grist.” We didn’t shake hands.

  “Thanks for calling us.” Spurrier’s sad-looking eyes drifted beyond me and found Orlando. “How’d you know he was dead?”

  “Someone phoned me and told me so.”

  “That so,” he said again. He shifted his gaze back to me and pushed the screen door open. “Whyn’t you come in here and tell me about it.”

  “Let’s go, Orlando,” I said.

  “He’s not going to want to come in.” Spurrier leaned toward me and raised his eyebrows like someone sharing a confidence. “He’s really not going to want to come in.”

  “I can handle it,” Orlando said.

  “I don’t give a shit,” Spurrier said tranquilly. “This is a crime scene, and I don’t need you in it.”

  I didn’t like the way this was going at all.

  “He comes with me,” I said.

  Spurrier looked directly into my eyes for two or three long seconds. “Or?”

  “Up to you. I can either tell you what I have to say, or I can go to the West Hollywood station and tell them.”

  Spurrier tucked a portion of his lower lip between his teeth and gave the street a thorough survey before allowing his eyes to settle on Orlando again. “If you faint, sonny, don’t hit any furniture. We’re not through printing.” He held the door all the way open, and I went in with Orlando following and Ike Spurrier taking the rear. Spurrier let the door bang shut behind us.

  The house seemed dark after the slanting afternoon light on the street, and I had time to make out a group of four or five men huddled around something on the floor before a flashbulb went off and blinded me completely. Orlando must have been looking away when it popped, because a second later I heard him gasp, and then I felt his fingers on my arm.

  “Told you,” Spurrier said, sounding satisfied, and my vision cleared and one of the men in front of me stepped aside and I saw Max Grover.

  He lay on his right side in a shallow lake of blood that surrounded him completely, head to foot. The little white pebbles were teeth. Bloody footprints, many sets of them, went toward him and away from him. His knees were pulled up self-protectively, and his right arm was beneath him, twisted somehow, so that it extended behind his back.

  His shirt, dark with blood, had been ripped open, baring one of his shoulders. The thing on the floor was a discard, the carelessly mutilated remains of some animal traditionally eaten on a holiday, the way a turkey carcass might look to a turkey. Nothing that had been Max was left.

  “Boots,” Spurrier said conversationally. “And a knife, of course, there.” He pointed with his toe at the blood on the front of Max’s shirt. “Oh, and over here, too, unless he used a bolt cutter or something. You’ll have to come around to get a look.”

  I took three steps around the carcass and saw what he meant. Max’s right arm ended at the wrist.

  A mosquito began to whine in my ears, and it whined more loudly until it turned into a dentist’s drill, and then I was sitting on the floor with my head between my knees.

  “I thought it’d be him,” Spurrier said to someone. Orlando was still standing, but his face was as white as though his blood had been drained. “You never can tell.”

  “He had three rings on that hand,” I said when I’d located my voice.

  “That so,” Spurrier said. “Well, our boy worked like hell to get them, considering he left about twenty more in the bedroom. Didn’t take his necklaces, either.” I forced myself to look at Max’s throat and saw the two gold chains I’d noticed earlier.

  “He was wearing a steel necklace, too,” I said.

  “It’ll turn up here somewhere.” Spurrier turned to Orlando. “What’s your name?”

  “Orlando de Anza.”

  “That’s not a name,” Spurrier said, “it’s a living-room set. Hey, Orlando, I’m going to ask you to go into the kitchen with Stephen here, and he’s going to ask you a few questions, nothing much, just where you’ve been and so forth, while I talk to Simeon out here. Okay with you?”

  “Sure,” Orlando said. He sounded lost.

  “You ready to get up?” Spurrier asked me.

  “I knew him,” I said, feeling vaguely ashamed of myself. “I talked to him for the better part of an hour.”

  Spurrier nodded and then extended a hand to help me up. I ignored it and pulled myself to my feet, and Spurrier put his hand into his jacket pocket. “How about we go into the book room?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You know where it is,” Spurrier said, not asking a question.

  “It’s where I talked to him.”

  “He give you anything to drink?”

  “Lemonade.”

  “Just the two of you, right?”

  “Right. I also touched a table in there and a few books.”

  “And now you’ve touched the floor in here,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said, feeling myself flush. “With both hands.”

  “Your prints on file?”

  “Yes. I’m a licensed private detective.”

  “Ah,” Spurrier sighed. “Shit.”

  In the library, still fragrant from Max’s bowl of roses, he waved me to the wooden chair, and I watched him sink into the leather one. “Jesus,” he exclaimed. “Quicksand.” He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and held them out. “Smoke?”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  He put them away without taking one and looked around the room. “What I’d like you to do, I’d like you to tell me what you know about this, straight on through. I’ll ask questions when I need to. Okay?”

  I told him about Nordine and the job he’d asked me to do. I downplayed the fights they’d been having because it was inconceivable to me that someone as frail as Christopher could have found the strength to do the violence that had been done to Max. I told him about the other men Max had been picking up, about the talk I’d had with Max, about the sense I had that there’d been someone else in the house when I was there, and about Max’s certainty that he’d been in no danger.

  “Psychics,” Spurrier said disgustedly. “So you saw Nordine yesterday afternoon and came here about two this afternoon, and you were here about an hour.”

  “Right.”

  “You must have been the last person to see him alive.”

  “Obviously not,” I said.

  “And from here you went where?”

  “Parker Center. A wedding, a big one. I got there about three-forty-five, and Christopher called me about four-thirty.”

  “A cop got married?”

  “Two of them.”

  He rubbed the space between his eyebrows with a fat index finger. “So your alibi is a few hundred cops. That’s a new one.”

  “I don’t need an alibi,” I said.

  “We’ve got a very narrow window here. You say he was alive when you left at-”

  “Three,” I said, ignoring the implication.

  “And Nordine calls you at four-thirty. I’d say that’s a pretty narrow window.” He worked his way out of the chair and went to the bookcase. “Of course, he wasn’t necessarily alive at three, was he?”

  “No,” I said. “You’ve broken me. I killed him, took a shower in his bathroom to get the blood off, burned my clothes in the fireplace, put on a suit, and went straight to LAPD headquarters, having arranged the wedding in advance to give me an alibi.”

  He was looking at me intently, his mouth very tight. “Took a shower in his bathroom, huh?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  “Sure did,” he said. “Didn’t burn the clothes, though. Took them with him, apparently. You got your car keys, smartass?”

  I tossed them to him, and he handed them to a c
op outside the door. “It’s the old blue Buick,” I said.

  “What route did you take to Parker Center?”

  “Flores to Santa Monica, Santa Monica to La Brea, La Brea to Beverly, and Beverly downtown.”

  “All surface streets.”

  “My car doesn’t like freeways.”

  “I don’t like snappy answers. How’d Nordine know where to reach you?”

  “I left the number on my answering machine.”

  “What’s your phone number?”

  I told him, and he wrote it down. “What’s that,” he asked, looking at it, “Santa Monica?”

  “Topanga.”

  “We’re your neighborhood cops, then,” he said, sounding pleased. He held up the phone number. “You mind if I have somebody call this?”

  “Would it matter if I did?”

  “Wouldn’t slow us down a second. Dial this,” he said to a cop I hadn’t seen before, who had taken up the station outside the door. “Write down the message and bring it to me.”

  “My tax dollars at work,” I said.

  He picked up a snapshot that had been facedown on the table and showed it to me. Christopher Nordine, a healthy Christopher Nordine, squinted happily into the sun. “Is this your buddy Nordine?”

  “He’s a lot thinner now.”

  He looked at me through the wet-sand eyes. I guess it was supposed to be frightening. “That’s not what I asked you.”

  I hesitated. “It’s the guy who told me he was Nordine.”

  He nodded: I was learning. “Why’d he call you instead of us?”

  “How would I know?” I wasn’t about to tell him what Christopher had said about a voice-print.

  “Okay. Why’d Nordine choose you to talk to the old man?”

  “He went to someone else for advice, and that someone recommended me.”

  He waited a moment, making a show of being patient, and then asked, “And who would that someone be?”

  “William Williams. Also known as Wyl Will.” I spelled it for him.

  “Cute,” he said, writing. “He a hink, too?”

  “Is he gay? Yes. He runs a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard.”

  “That so. What kind of bookstore?”

  “Hollywood memorabilia. It’s called Fan Fare.”