The Bone Polisher sg-6 Read online

  “Joan Crawford posters?” he asked, reaching into the pocket of his jacket. “Bette Davis’s old scripts, Judy Garland concert programs, that sort of thing?”

  “He’s got some of that.”

  “I’ll bet he does. You a collector?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know him?”

  I paused, organizing an answer, and he snapped his fingers.

  “Williams, how do you know him?”

  I was disliking Spurrier more with every passing minute. “It’s a small world,” I said.

  “And where in your small world is Nordine?”

  “I haven’t got any idea.”

  He dropped his notebook to the table. “Try harder.”

  “You want me to make something up?”

  Spurrier pulled a latex glove out of his pocket and slipped it over his left hand, snapping the opening over his wrist, and started to put on the right. “Get up,” he said.

  “I’m comfortable,” I said, watching him. His neck and cheeks were flushed, and I saw rage in the tight set of his shoulders.

  “So what’re you?” he asked when he had the second glove on. “Sherlock Homo? The Gay Detective? You investigate a lot of police brutality?”

  “I don’t think there is a lot of police brutality.” My throat was very dry.

  “Think again,” Spurrier said, and he stepped up to me and hit me with the heel of his right hand, just below the heart.

  The chair went over beneath me and splintered on the hardwood floor, and I curled reflexively into a ball, trying to find some air somewhere in the world and fighting down a hot, poison-green wave of nausea. Spurrier’s shiny black shoes were inches from my face.

  “Not a mark,” he said. “Not even a red spot.” His fingers curled around my arms and pulled me to my feet, but I couldn’t straighten up, so I was leaning forward when he turned me around and brought a fist down on my kidney.

  I went to my knees. “Why didn’t Nordine call us?” he said quietly.

  “Because he didn’t want to talk to an asshole,” I gasped. I barely had enough breath to get to the end of the sentence.

  “Well, I suppose he’s an expert on assholes.” Spurrier sounded meditative. “You know what my big question is?”

  “Which shoe to take off first at night?”

  He brought a cupped hand around and slammed it over my left ear. It sounded as though someone had fired a pistol inside my skull, and the pain skittered like foxfire through the bones of my jaw and straight down my throat to my heart. “Can you hear me?” he asked. The hand came up again.

  “I can hear you,” I said.

  “Nothing in his car, Sergeant,” said a cop at the door. Behind him, I saw Orlando gazing at me with wide eyes.

  “Give the gentleman his keys,” Spurrier said, and the cop tossed them at me. They hit my shoulder and clattered to the floor. I tried to pick them up, but my fingers wouldn’t do anything I wanted them to.

  “My big question is what a faggot P.I. was doing at a cop’s wedding.”

  “I was a bridesmaid,” I said through jaws that felt like they’d been wired together.

  He laughed, and I heard the snap of latex as he peeled a glove from his hand. “Who was calling that phone number?” he yelled.

  “I was, Sarge,” said a very young cop. “I had to call a couple times to get it all down.”

  “Give it here.” He looked at the paper the cop had handed him and said, “What’s this number?”

  “Parker Center pistol range,” the cop said. My fingers finally managed to wrap themselves around my keys.

  “They have a wedding there today?”

  The young cop shifted nervously. “I didn’t ask.”

  “Ask,” he said, giving the piece of paper back and turning to face me. He ran his tongue over the plump red lip. “I believe you, of course. You’re just a good citizen who did his civic duty. Wish we had more like you. Well, maybe not exactly like you. Get up and sit in the other chair. You seem to have broken this one.”

  I did as I was told, trying to sort out the various sources of pain and rank them by intensity. The ear was the worst.

  “You are completely unbruised,” Spurrier said, stuffing the gloves into his pocket. “Nothing happened here, and a lot more nothing will happen if you stick your nose into this affair. I’ve got your address and I’ve got units in the neighborhood twenty-four hours a day. If you don’t want to develop undiagnosable internal injuries, you stay miles away from all this. Am I communicating?”

  “Very unambiguously.”

  “Just so we’re straight. Sorry, wrong term. Just so you’re clear on it. Are you? Clear on it?”

  “Yes,” I said through a spasm of hatred that threatened to close my throat completely.

  “Good,” he said. “Stephen, the pretty boy check out?”

  “He’s a cop’s little brother, the bride’s. He was at the wedding, went there with her. With her all day, he says.”

  “Where’s she?”

  “On her way to Honolulu.”

  Spurrier screwed up his face in frustration. “How long?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “You get a number?”

  “Yeah. Maui.”

  “How nice for her.”

  “There was a wedding there today,” the young cop said, coming into the room. “At Parker Center, I mean.”

  “My, my,” Spurrier said admiringly. “It all checks out.”

  “You primitive piece of shit,” I said.

  “I can understand your frustration, sir,” Spurrier said. “Wasting so much of your day this way. But I’d like to thank you for coming forward and assisting us with our inquiries.

  “You’ll be wanting to get along now.” Spurrier backed away from the chair, his face tight, as though he hoped I was going to come out of it and try to rip his heart out. “I’m sure you two have a big evening planned.”

  I got up more painfully than Christopher Nordine had. “I’ll be seeing you,” I said.

  “I’ll be looking forward to it,” he said. “But not on this case.”

  As we went down the porch steps, I heard the laugh again, and recognized it as Spurrier’s.

  “Is that what they’re like, the Sheriffs?” Orlando asked twenty minutes later. It was the first thing he’d said since we left Grover’s house.

  “It’s what some of them are like. Not many. There used to be more like Spurrier. Now the problem is that the better cops don’t do anything when a bad one gets out of line. White people don’t generally see too much of it, though.”

  “White heterosexual people, you mean.”

  “Yeah. Spurrier’s a little twisted on the subject of gays. I wonder what his analyst has to say about it.”

  “He thought you were gay.” He turned on the radio and gave the indicator a skid across the dial.

  “He thought we both were.”

  Orlando found a station playing heavy metal, something that sounded like a head-on collision between San Diego and Tijuana, listened for a second, and turned it down. “I am,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, nonplussed. The first time I’d met him, he’d been hondling Eleanor to introduce him to a girl.

  He fiddled with the tuning knob on the radio, giving it all his attention. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “About Eleanor and that Chinese girl.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “I was fooling myself. Telling myself I couldn’t get dates with girls because I was too young for the ones at UCLA, telling myself I was too shy to talk to women, when what was really happening was that I didn’t want to.” He threw me a quick evaluative glance. “I was in denial.”

  Denial. “ You’re seeing a therapist,” I said.

  “At school. She’s helped a lot. It’s hard for a Latino guy, especially when he comes from a family of cops.”

  “Therapists like to tell people they’re suppressing homosexual feelings,” I said cautiously. “It gives them
something to do.”

  “In my case, though, it’s true.” He gave up on the radio and began to gnaw on the nail of his right index finger.

  “Don’t bite your nails,” I said automatically.

  He laughed. Then I started to laugh, too, and he leaned back and made hooting noises, laughing off some of the tension from Max Grover’s house.

  “Was your cop okay to you?” I asked, braking to avoid rear-ending someone who was apparently multiplying addresses in his head as he drove. The laughter had hurt in several places.

  “Stephen? No, he was very nice, really sympathetic. In fact, I think he might be gay. He was good-looking enough to be gay, anyway. Has anybody told you you have repressed homosexual feelings?”

  “Lots of people. All therapists.”

  He hesitated. “But it isn’t true.”

  “If it is, they’re very repressed. I mean, I think men are interesting people, and some of them are good-looking, but there’s nothing sexual about it.”

  “I think I’ve known forever,” Orlando said dreamily. “Since I was eight or nine or something.”

  “Does Sonia know?”

  “Of course.” He sounded affronted. “That’s why she got so mad at Al in the car.”

  “Then Al doesn’t-”

  “Not yet,” he said quietly. “He’s got a surprise coming.”

  “It’ll raise his consciousness,” I said. “Something has to.”

  “Al’s all right,” Orlando said, surprising me a second time. “He’s probably not ready for me to bring anybody over to spend the night, though.”

  “No. Probably not.”

  “If it was a girl he’d be all ho-ho-ho and hearty and nudgy, winking at me across the room and thumping me on the back whenever we were alone. But a guy-no way.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ve got a boyfriend,” Orlando said with pride. “My first.”

  “Well,” I said banally, “good for you.”

  He caught my tone and pulled away slightly. “Does it bother you?”

  “No,” I said. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’m not very good at intimacy.”

  “And I’m not good at anything else. Eleanor’s the same way. That must be a problem between you.”

  I was beginning to feel like our relationship was on CNN; everybody knew everything. “You could say that.”

  “You never told that sergeant you weren’t gay.”

  “It wasn’t any of his business,” I said. “Anyway, you know, it’s just one thing about you. Whether you like guys or girls or Eskimos or Arabian horses. It’s just one thing out of thousands, like who you voted for or whether you shave before you shower or after. It doesn’t have much to do with who you are.”

  “It does when you can’t admit it,” Orlando said.

  “I guess it would.”

  “Here we are,” he said. “The next lot.” We negotiated the parking lane, deserted at this hour, and I braked at the curb when he told me to. He started to get out of the car, and then stopped and looked at me. “You’re okay,” he said. “Al is always talking about you being somebody unusual, but I never knew what he meant. You took everything that stunted little clown could dish out, and you never lost your dignity. I don’t know if I could have done that.”

  “I got beaten up,” I pointed out.

  “What you said about his shoes,” Orlando said, and then he laughed again. He extended a hand, and I shook it and watched him slide out of the car and angle across the parking lot, a slender teenager in a tuxedo, heading toward God only knew what. Then I drove home through the ragtag remnants of the rush hour, climbed the driveway to my house, and took a pistol away from Christopher Nordine, who was waiting in my living room.

  5 ~ Requiem for Max

  “Would you like to tell me what you think you’re doing?”

  The couch had broken Nordine’s fall. He sat there and rocked back and forth, flexing the fingers of his right hand, the hand that had held the gun. I had the gun now, and it was pointed at his solar plexus.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Only that Max is-”

  “You saw him,” I said, wondering whether it had been smart not to tell Spurrier everything, swine though he was.

  “Oh, my God,” Nordine said, blinking back tears. “It was, it was like Friday the Thirteenth or something. Poor Max, poor sweet old Max. And I thought, I guess I just went crazy, I thought, well, you’d been there-”

  “So had you,” I said.

  “But after he was dead,” Nordine said. He raised both hands, as though I’d put the gun to his head. “Wait, wait, you don’t think that-”

  “The cops do.”

  “Well, of course they do,” Nordine snapped. “What would you expect? Why do you think I called you instead of them?” He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day before, and I couldn’t see anything wrong with them.

  “Listen, Christopher, they’re going to be hard-nosed about this. There are guys with guns looking for you. You had means, motive, and opportunity. And don’t tell me about how much you loved him. I’m tired of hearing about people loving each other. Open your coat.”

  “What?”

  “Open your coat. I want to see your shirt.”

  “Oh,” he said flatly. “How thorough of you.” He unbuttoned the jacket and held it wide. The shirt was damp with sweat but unstained. I gestured for him to button up.

  “How’d you do that?” he asked sulkily.

  “Do what?”

  “You were supposed to come in over there.” He waved a hand in the direction of my front door.

  “I smelled your cologne,” I said. “So I went around the side of the house and climbed up onto the sun deck, and threw a folding chair over the roof toward the front door. When you got up and faced the door, I came in behind you.”

  “You threw a chair over the roof?”

  “It’s not a very big house.”

  “No,” he said, giving it an unaffectionate eye, “it isn’t. It’s not very nice, either.”

  “Did you kill him, Christopher?”

  “Do you honestly think I could kill Max?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

  “Max was the best human being I ever met.” He sounded like he was about to cry.

  “So somebody else killed him.”

  “Well, of course they did. One of those walking trash heaps he was always picking up on the street.”

  “Okay,” I said, popping the clip out of the gun and emptying it: seven rounds. I pocketed the bullets and held the gun out to him. “Get out of here.”

  He gazed at the gun without taking it. “But wait. You have to help me.”

  “Why do I have to do that?”

  “Because they’re looking for me.”

  “You should have called them in the first place.”

  “No,” he said. “I couldn’t.” He shook his head, and the joints in his neck popped. “Absolutely not.”

  “It’s just made it worse for you.”

  “That means you told them about me.”

  “Christopher,” I said, as though to a five-year-old, “I had to explain why I was there.”

  He stared up at me, white completely surrounding the irises of his sunken eyes. “You told them everything?”

  “I didn’t tell them about the will. I didn’t tell them what you said about the voice-print.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” he said. “They’ll find out about the will in fifteen minutes, and that’ll be it. Do you know what those guys are like? About gay people, I mean? They’ll treat me like I’m Typhoid Mary. Gloves and masks and I don’t know what all.”

  The kidney Spurrier had slammed sent off a little skyrocket of pain. With the pain came a sudden, overpowering conviction that I was sick and tired of other people’s lives. “I’ve got to sit down,” I said.

  “It’s your house.” He was back to a sulk.

  “Do you want some water?”


  “I already took some.” He leaned over the edge of the couch, and I started fumbling in my pocket for the bullets, but all he came up with was a half-drained bottle of Evian.

  “Good,” I said, sitting in the only other chair in the room. “But don’t do that again.”

  “Do what?”

  “Bend over and pick up anything I can’t see.”

  He put a hand to his chest. “Oh, my God, you still think it was me.”

  “I.” It was involuntary.

  “You? Oh, I see. You’re correcting my grammar. How-”

  “Old-fashioned,” I suggested.

  “I was going to say how anal-retentive.”

  “I’m almost as tired of that,” I said, “as I am about hearing people talk about love.”

  “You really must be hurting,” he said, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of Evian. “Oh, I remember. ‘The fondness comes and goes.’ Gone at the moment?”

  I was tired, and my left kidney was sending out painful little pulses, blasts of cold air aimed at my back. “Leave me alone. When I want analysis, I’ll pay for it.”

  He drank. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to be detached when you’re peeling off the bucks to a shrink. That’s half the problem with psychiatry, the money.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “It doesn’t work.”

  “There’s that,” I acknowledged.

  He sat back, wedging the bottle between his legs. “I had analysts all over the South. Max was the only one who ever helped me, even a little.”

  “Throw me the water.” He tightened the cap and tossed it to me underhand, like a softball, and I drank half of what was left. It tasted like warm plastic. “Okay,” I said. “Tell me how Max helped you.”

  He grimaced. “Is this necessary?”

  “No. You could just leave.”

  The deep eyes fastened on mine and then cruised the room, settling on one of the darkened windows, and he sighed. “We always want to be the hero,” he said.

  “We want a lot of things,” I said.

  He gathered his lips together and let out another sigh, one with a big P at the beginning of it. “I was just a total waste,” he said. “A mess. I hurt people and stole from them. I told lies day and night. I lied about who I was and what I’d done and when I’d gone to the bathroom last and how tall I was. It didn’t matter what, I lied about it.”