Timothy Hallinan: The Bone Polisher

“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.