Timothy Hallinan - Skin Deep

"No thanks to you," I said. "Northridge, my ass."

"I was ashamed of myself. I know I should have told you, but I was ashamed of myself. I acted like a putz after it happened. I've never acted worse in my life. So you talked to Charlene?"

"You mean Chantra."

"Chantra." He made the name sound like he was spitting. "Imagine, Chantra. A grown woman. Did she sell you any perfume? A crystal for your rearview mirror, keep you from getting rear-ended? Maybe a map to the lines on your palm? A lifetime subscription to the Harmonic Times?"

"Where were you late last night?"

"So now I'm a suspect? I don't tell you something, and that makes me a suspect? Oh, no, it doesn't. Don't give me that. We hired you, remember?" His voice had risen, and he waved his hands in front of him as if he were trying to shush himself. "Remember that?" he said in a half whisper. "We were the ones who hired you. Why would we have hired you if I were going around killing people? You think I could kill somebody? You haven't even told me who it was."

"You haven't asked."

He put a hand up and rubbed the back of his neck. "This is the kind of day they invented aspirin for. Who was she?"

"The girl who was with Toby when Amber got killed."

He transferred the hand from the back of his neck to the bridge of his nose and rubbed that for a while. "Swell," he said with his eyes closed. "Another naked dancer. This gets more Hearst papers every day. If Joanna Link ever figures it out, we'll all be on Sixty Minutes."

"That's what I meant when I said Toby was involved. What I meant when I said that he wasn't involved was that he didn't do it."

"You know that for sure?" He looked hopeful for the first time.

"Dolly was with him. She hasn't been more than ten feet from him since seven last night, and the lady was alive at seven last night because I saw her. So Dolly was with him. Who was with you, Dixie?"

"I'm a divorced man," he said testily. "I sleep alone."

"Do you own a camera?"

"Look," he said, "I own lots of cameras. So what, you know? So does Norman. So does Toby. So does everybody in the movie or TV business. We like cameras. We don't get enough of them grinding away during our ten-, twelve-hour workdays, so we run out and buy them before the stores close. Where do you think the pictures come from for all those Mommie Dearest books? This whole town is camera happy. Shake down the average film crew, you'll find more cameras than a busload of Japanese tourists. Betacams, too. Home movie cameras. Christ, Norman's got a thing that makes daguerreotypes like in the Civil War, ought to be in a museum. So what has this got to do with anything?"

I reached into my hip pocket. "Look at these," I said.

He did, for maybe half a second. Then he slammed his eyes shut, and the color left his face. His forehead was suddenly damp.

"Thanks anyway," he said, "but you can't make me." He sounded like a little boy. "Put them away or I won't open my eyes."

I put them away. His eyes were still closed. "What do you know about clothesline?"

He opened half an eye to make sure the pictures were gone. "Clothesline? It's what they used before dryers. Where did those come from?"

"They were under the girl's body. Where the cops would find them. What did you do with the Polaroids of Rebecca, Dixie?"

I could actually hear him grind his teeth. "Burned them," he said. "What would you have done, willed them to the Louvre? She's my stepdaughter."

"Toby let you have them?"

"Toby was in his apologetic mode, his shit-eating, 'omigod, I didn't mean to hurt her' mode. I should have pushed his face in."

"But you didn't," I said unkindly.

"I didn't do jack shit. That cost me everything, everything I cared about."

"You've still got your job."

He glared up at me. "Fuck you." He looked around at the sound stage as though he'd never seen it before. "Fuck all of this, too." He started to walk away.

I put a hand on his arm, and he jerked away from me. "Don't touch me, you schmuck."

"Dixie," I said, "people are staring."

It was true. Grips, stagehands, makeup women, they were all looking at us. Janie Gordon sat in a canvas chair, an open script cradled in her lap and a pencil between her teeth. When I caught her eyes she looked away.

Dixie stopped walking. "Damn," he said. "Damn, damn, damn, damn." He stood slack and empty, looking at nothing, like a man suspended from a string.

The door of Toby's dressing room opened, and Dolly came out. She searched the set with her eyes and then came over to us.

"I'll be in my office," Dixie said flatly. "You know where it is."

By the time Dolly reached me he was halfway across the set, a little man in a creased corduroy suit that sagged from the shoulders. A stagehand carrying a small table stepped in front of him, and Dixie trudged into him, stumbled, and kept on walking. The stagehand looked after him, shook his head, and then put the table down on top of a cross of masking tape stuck to the floor.

"What's with him?" Dolly said.

"His life's too big for him. How's Toby?"

"Okay. Putting the usual amount up his nose. He's been asking for you."

"Don't tell him I was here."

"You're going? You just got here."

"Exactly, Dolly. Bull's-eye. I'm going. What time are you going to shut down?"

"About another hour. Six, six-thirty, I guess. There's only one scene left, and it's mainly Toby, so it should go pretty fast."

"My," I said nastily, "aren't we learning a lot?"

Dolly's face, as always, was guileless. "Isn't that what I'm supposed to be doing? You got to give the guy credit, if I did as much junk as he does, I couldn't find my pockets. But he's always where he's supposed to be, always has the words right and everything."

Dolly started to say something else, but I cut her off. "Just keep them together, Toby and John, got it? Don't let them split up. Take them to dinner somewhere, you've got an expense account. Don't be stingy. As J. P. Morgan said, you've got to spend money to make money."

"Well," Dolly said, "it's your money."

At eight-twenty that evening I got the first busy signal.

I'd been active, staying in motion to fight the feeling that I was chasing my tail. Tomorrow's edition of the Daily News had hit the streets with Saffron's death on page one, in the lower right-hand corner to be sure, but page one nevertheless. The lead mentioned Amber, and there were pictures of both women. Amber's looked like a snapshot taken on one of her bad nights, but Saffron's was a studio still from the seventies, the kind actresses pay too much for, all hopeful eyes and carefully disarranged hair. I was right: she had been beautiful.

Things of the Spirit was unaccountably closed at seven o'clock. Chantra's message about the flow being interrupted hung in the door. The shop was dark, and an iron grid inside the window protected the crystals and aromas from the fingers of unevolved beings who might have wanted to snatch them without paying the proper karmic price. Five minutes of hammering on the door had brought no response, and I didn't see a light in the apartment windows above the store.

I'd spent twenty or thirty minutes circling the block outside the Spice Rack, watching a large number of cops come and go. Customers had turned away at the sight of the squad cars. It was getting so I recognized some of them, among them Ahmed, the Middle Easterner with the yo-yo dollar bills, and a couple of sad sacks from my first night there. I couldn't very well go in, so after my tenth or eleventh pass I gave it up and choked down a hamburger up at the Sunset Grill. I'd phoned Nana from there, and she'd answered, sounding a little high.

"Don't go all Puritan on me," she'd said. "It's just red wine."