Timothy Hallinan - Skin Deep

Once blue water might have sparkled in the pool, but now it was a sun-baked parody of coolness and wet. The same old trash lay jumbled in its bottom: cardboard cartons, paper cups and napkins, plastic utensils from fast-food outlets. What was new was a humming of flies, bluebottles, hundreds of them, crawling all over the cartons at the deep end beneath the diving board.

"God, that's grungy," Nana said. "Simeon? I have a request. Get me out of here. As soon as possible."

"As soon as we finish with Jackie. Or whatever her name is."

"She's in 1-E," she said.

"You've been here before."

"Loads party. Lots of vodka and head banging. But at least there was pizza and music you wouldn't like. And it was nighttime, so it didn't look so bad. There's a lot to be said for the dark."

I followed her to the door I already knew, and she stepped aside so I could knock. I had knocked three or four times before I saw that the screen over the sliding aluminum window was missing and that the window was open. A white curtain made of some indestructible synthetic was drawn inside. It billowed faintly in the breeze.

"Girl knows how to sleep," Nana said.

"Hold on. I'll show you a private detective's trick. Would you like to close your eyes so I don't give away any secrets of the trade?"

"Oh, sure," she said, putting a hand over her face. "I can hardly see through my fingers at all."

"If you peek, you'll ruin Christmas forever."

"I'm a Buddhist. Trust me anyway."

I leaned through the window and pushed the curtain aside. The first thing I saw was the screen, lying on the floor just inside the window. The second thing I saw was the devastation.

"Nana," I said, "get out of here."

"Oh, look," she said at the same time. "We don't need any tricks. The door's not locked." She gave it a shove, and then she said, "Oh. Oh, no."

She stepped back, and I put a hand on her shoulder. "I don't think you should be here."

Inside I could hear still more flies buzzing, cousins to the ones in the pool.

"Well, I am," she said. "Let's get it over with." She pushed me forward and followed a single step behind. I closed the door behind us and locked it.

Saffron was in the bedroom, facedown and still, the center of a humming vortex of bluebottles. She had been cut, and she had been broken. From the extent of the stains-still damp-on the mattress, she had probably been dead before her joints had been snapped backward and her bones had been methodically fractured. It was a small mercy, but it was the only mercy she'd been shown.

Her ankles were tied with clothesline.

"This can't be happening," Nana said from the doorway. Her voice was faint.

"If you'd been home last night," I said, "it would have happened to you. Help me turn her over."

"Why? I mean, I can't. Simeon, I can't touch her."

"Well, you're going to touch her. Goddammit, this isn't a movie. You can't head for the lobby every time things get sticky. Get over here and grab her feet. Or else go to the car and wait there, and stay out of my hair from now on."

She looked down at what was left of Saffron and then back at me. She licked her lips. "Why should we turn her over? I mean, what's under her?"

"If I'd killed her," I said, "it's where I'd leave the picture. Right where the cops would find it."

Her eyes widened. "The picture. You mean, like in Toby's pocket."

"Come on. We can theorize later."

She extended her hands far in front of her even before she started to cross the room. I went to the other end of the bed and reached under Saffron's shoulders. Her blood was thick and sticky on my hands. "On three," I said, feeling like someone about to try to lift a piano. Nana touched Saffron's bound ankles and recoiled involuntarily. Running on sheer will, she reached back down and got a grip. Her eyes were closed.

"To your right, now. One, two, three." We both pulled, and Saffron rolled heavily onto her side and then, slowly, onto her back.

I was wrong.

There wasn't one Polaroid there. There were two.

Both of them were coated in blood.

Nana swayed as I started to wipe them with my sleeve. "Knock it off," I said, and then the pounding on the front door began. It echoed through the empty apartment.

A moment's silence. Then it began again.

"Simeon," Nana said, "What about let's go."

"Great," I said, "a sound idea. But go where?"

From the front of the apartment, a bass voice bellowed, "Open up. Police."

"Out the back," she said. "There's a back door. Simeon, let's go."

We went. We doubled over as we passed through the living room, looking like a couple of guerrilla fighters trapped in short grass and hoping that no one was looking through the window. A boot cracked against the door as Nana led me through an abbreviated kitchen. God was in his heaven for once, and there was a door there.

It was standing open. I closed it behind me.

We tripped over one another, rolling like Chinese acrobats end over end down one of the few remaining Hollywood slopes. Foxtails pierced my clothes, and the spikes of puncherweeds made holes in my skin. Nana wound up on top of me, grass projecting at odd angles from her hair. We were in a dusty cluster of brush and eucalyptus. The apartment house was out of sight.

"Now what?" she said.

I gave her a quick kiss. "Now we dust each other off and take the longest possible way back to the street like a couple with nothing on their minds more important than when the post office opens. Then we get into Alice and drive very slowly away." I tugged the legs of her shorts down to a respectable level. Cops are men, too.

"But Saffron."

"There's nothing we can do for Saffron."

We spent a few seconds doing some perfunctory tidying. Sirens wailed in the distance.

"Who called the police?" she asked.

"The same person who killed Saffron. He wanted them to find these."

"What are they?"

"They're pictures." I wiped the first one off. "Of Saffron." I wiped the other one. "Oh," I said. "Sure."

Nana didn't look. "What is it?"

"The other one's Amber." Nana and I started down toward the boulevard. I put the pictures in my hip pocket and took her hand in mine. Just a couple of Hollywood lovers out for an early stroll.

"There goes half of Toby's alibi," I said.

"She's seventy-four," Bernie said, "but she's sharp." His intelligent, slightly startled looking blue eyes peered across the desk at me. Outside the grimy narrow window of his research assistant's office, UCLA went on being UCLA, sane and healthy and full of libraries and beautiful girls. Bernie's impossibly curly hair clustered around his head in tight coils like a convention of Slinky toys, and his sleeveless sweatshirt read K.535. MOZART WROTE IT FOR ME. Intellectual jock chic.

"Who's sharp?" I had a headache.

"The Widow Sprunk."

"Bernie," I said, wincing against the pain, "didn't you used to have a mustache?"

He looked at me with a certain amount of concern. "I don't know how to tell you this, Simeon," he said, "but I still have a mustache." Then he reached up to finger it as if he were making sure.

I rubbed my eyes, trying to ease the hammering in my skull and feeling very tired. "Well, something's different."

"I'll give you a hint. They perched on my nose, and I used to look at you through them."

"Ah," I said. "How in the world are you functioning without them?"

"You may have heard of contacts. Joyce likes me better with them."

"I'm surprised you can blink," I said, remembering the sheer heft of Bernie's almost opaque glasses. "Christ, they must be thicker than potato chips. And who's Joyce?"

"Someone new," he said shortly. "Would you like my ophthalmologist's phone number, or are you interested in the Widow Sprunk?"