Timothy Hallinan: Skin Deep

"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.

"McDonald's makes the best straws," he said conversationally. "They're good sturdy plastic, and they're just the right diameter." He sat down on the couch and unrolled a brightly colored plastic straw from a sheet of tissue. The phone continued to ring. "All you've got to do to make them perfect is slice off the tip at a forty-five-degree angle with a razor blade.*' He scooped some of the powder from the bowl with a little spoon and made two tiny mountains on the table. "Want some?"

"No," I said without conviction.

"It's terrific. Pink, see? Very smooth, no jangles, no dental bills from uncontrollable teeth clenching. Excuse me." He leaned over and snorted the mountains. The phone stopped ringing. He ladled out two more little Mount Fujis and looked up at me, his eyes suddenly a lot clearer.

"What's the hardest part of being a detective?"

"Failure." The coke glistened malevolently at me.

"Does that happen?" He shoved a smidgen of coke into line.

"Once in a while." I sat on the floor on the other side of the table. I'd always wanted to climb Mount Fuji. "When the person you're after is a lot smarter than you are, or else so dumb that there's no way to figure out what he's done or why he's done it. Then you let somebody down and you feel terrible about it."

"You really do, don't you?" He started down toward the mountains but then stopped and lowered the straw. "I mean, you really care about the people you work for."

"Sure," I said, feeling uncomfortable. The phone began to ring again. "Oh, hell," I said. "Give me the straw."

He did, and I destroyed the tiny white landscape in front of me. He continued to regard me as if I were an exotic form of plant life as he scooped out some more cocaine. "And you hit me on the neck," he said admiringly, rubbing it with his free hand, "because you didn't want to mark me." The phone jangled on unheeded.

"No," I said. "I hit you on the neck so I wouldn't break my hand." He shook his head as though that were just what he'd expect someone as terrific as me to say. "What's the hard part about being an actor?" I said to change the subject.

"Acting, at least acting on television, is the art of failure." I felt the cocaine begin to buzz in my forebrain while Toby Vane vacuumed the tabletop with his nose. He looked up at me. "You fail as little as you can, that's all. And it has nothing to do with talent. It's electricity." The phone stopped ringing and instantly started in again. "TV is an electric medium. It's got a little tiny screen. Most of the sets are no good. In half the houses of America, I've got a green face. Reception is bad in some areas. You've got to find some electricity, some kind of juice, to cut through all that interference. If you don't, you're just another little pattern of dots in the corner of somebody's living room." He gave me an embarrassed grin. "It sounds immodest, but I suppose it's being able to turn on an electric personality."