Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

“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 shoes,” 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.

“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.”

“You threw a chair over the roof?”

“It’s not a very big house.”

“No,” he said, giving it an unaffectionate eye, “it isn’t. It’s not very nice, either.”

“Did you kill him, Christopher?”

“Do you honestly think I could kill Max?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

“Max was the best human being I ever met.” He sounded like he was about to cry.