The Bone Polisher Read online

  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 cop 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.”

  “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 s
hoes,” 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.”