Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

“And you tested positive.”

“He knew I would. He’d felt it inside me.” He pushed himself to his feet slowly, putting a hand against the wall for support, and started toward the front door. “When I got the results, I went wild, just totally insane. I thought I’d be dead in days or something.” He got to the door, opened it, and closed it again, moving just to move. “Max drove me to the clinic to get the report. He took me back to his place-I’ll never forget that car ride, all those people on the streets who were going to live forever-and when we got home I started screaming and breaking things. He just handed me new things to throw until there wasn’t anything left in the living room small enough for me to break, and then he took me by the hand and led me into the kitchen so I could start on the dishes. I guess I broke a few, and then I passed out.” He turned toward the open door. “Did you say that was a deck?”

“Good idea,” I said. “Let’s go out.”

We climbed out onto the deck. Christopher’s eyes went to the moon, four-fifths full, hanging over the mountains to the west with a high thin line of cloud above it. Below us in the canyon people’s lights were on.

“This is why you live here,” he said, taking it in.

“It’s one reason.”

“Did your girlfriend live here with you?”

“She found it.”

“So that’s another reason.” He looked around the deck and spotted the remaining canvas chair. “I guess the other chair’s out near the front door.”

“Sit. I usually let my legs hang over the edge anyway.”

“Long way down.”

“Somebody once injected me with vodka so he could throw me off it and it’d look like I’d been drunk.”

“That’d do the job,” he said, easing himself into the chair. “What happened?”

“I killed him.”

“My, my.” He leaned back and stared up at the moon. “All those pockmarks,” he said. “I never thought the moon was romantic.”

“It’s okay at a distance.”

He started to move his feet, preparing to get up. “I forgot the water.”

“It’s almost gone anyway. I’ll get a new bottle.”

In the kitchen, I realized he was talking.

“…after I’d burned out on the terror, Max started talking to me about what I should do with the rest of my life. Nothing was different, he said, except now we had a deadline. I don’t think I’d ever really heard that word before. And I, I was just amazed. Because, you see, I’d assumed he’d throw me out.”

I stayed where I was, holding the bottle of water like a chalice of some kind.

“So he said we had to start making time count. We had to build my strength and work on my spirit. My spirit, Jesus, no one ever talked to me about my spirit before. I figured I had a spirit like some people have lint in their pockets, no more important than that, and I tuned him out and interrupted him with something I thought was really important, like whether he was actually going to let me stay. And he said to me, ‘Where else would you go?’

“And then he put his hand in the center of my chest, his palm to my chest, and held it there, and I felt a kind of warmth come into me, and the warmth turned into a tingle and flowed into my arms and legs. ‘What is that?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘That’s your spirit.’” Nordine stopped talking for a long time, but I didn’t move. “So we went to work on my spirit,” he said at last.

I waited a moment and then took the water out onto the deck. Christopher was slumped in the chair, his head down and his hands folded in his lap. I unscrewed the top on the water and sat next to him. “Two days later,” he said without moving, “Max told me about the house, that he’d willed it to me.” He reached over, and I gave him the bottle. “I didn’t kill him,” he said. Then he drank.

“Okay,” I said.

“And I have maybe two years left, if that, and I am not going to spend even one day in a jail cell.”

“Okay,” I said again, thinking about how Spurrier would treat him, remembering the latex gloves he’d put on before he hit me.

Christopher coughed, then cleared his throat of something with a sound that reached all the way down into his midsection.

“I’ll need information,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. It was very light.

“You’ll have to move fast,” he said. “When the publicity hits, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the cops to find someone, and I’m the one they’re going to try to find.”

“I don’t think there’ll be that much publicity,” I said. “They’ll keep quiet about most of, um, what was done to Max. They always do. And anyway, it’s just another gay murder as far as they’re concerned.”

He turned to me and gave me the smile again. “There’ll be tons of publicity,” he said. “All over the country. Max used to be famous.”

“He was Rick Hawke,” Wyl Will exclaimed, wide-eyed. A couple of years ago, after his mother died, he’d had his eyelids tattooed to spare himself the necessity of putting on makeup every day, and the combination of the heavily lined eyelids and the wide eyes made him look something like the latter-day Bette Davis.

“Humor me,” I said. “I’m a little young for Rick Hawke.”

It was ten a.m., and busloads of tourists in short sleeves were already sweltering up and down Hollywood Boulevard, reading the names in the brass and terrazzo stars on the sidewalks and stepping over the bums who keep the stars company on the concrete. Only in Hollywood can a penniless wino sleep on top of a star.

“I knew you’d say that,” Wyl said peevishly. He’d gotten to the point where he took youth as a personal insult. “But there’s cable, you know. Everything’s on cable now. I flipped on the set last night and saw I Married Joan, of all things. Do you remember how she died?”

“Who?” I was facing the window, watching a sleek, well-dressed Arab shepherd a flock of heavily robed women up the sidewalk. They may have been wrapped to their eyebrows, but the heat didn’t seem to be bothering them. The other tourists, the ones in shorts and T-shirts, were red and wet.

“Joan Davis.” He blinked fast, either tears or something in his blue contacts. “Burned to death, poor thing. Just like Gene Tierney.”

“Who?” I said again. “Oh, yeah. Gene Tierney.”

“Played a Chinese in one movie.” Wyl clasped his hands prayerfully in front of his chest. “Lord, she was beautiful.”

The Arabs passed from view, followed by two heavyset cholos in plaid wool shirts and wide black pants who looked very interested in them. The ear Spurrier had slapped had been ringing all morning, and my lower back hurt. “Rick Hawke, Wyl.”

“Well, he was beautiful, too. I saw him on TV in 1957 and thought, Well, California, don’t you know. We were about the same age, but he looked younger. I wrote him a fan letter and got a signed photo back, not that he signed it himself, I’m sure, but they did things right in those days. Imagine getting a reply to a fan letter to Madonna.”

“And then you came out here and met him.” I was the only customer in Wyl’s store, and he was seated behind the counter that ran along the left-hand side of the shop. Between me and the window, shelves housed thousands of books about show business, and tables and glass cabinets offered up boxes full of old posters and glossy studio stills.

“Decades later,” Wyl said. “The early eighties, I guess. Have you had coffee?”

“If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing up. How did you meet him?”

“Circles,” Wyl said airily, making a vaguely circular gesture with his right hand.

I massaged my bruised kidney. “That must have been nice, traveling in the same circles as one of your favorite stars.”