Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

“Oh, I had no idea who he was. He’d stopped being Rick Hawke twenty-five years before that. He’d operated a charter yacht service in Hawaii and gone to India to wash some holy man’s feet or something, and he’d grown that beard and let it go all white, and he never ever talked about his career in television. No, he was just this courtly gentleman who wore too many rings and always seemed to have some odd boy in tow.”

“Odd in what way?”

Wyl dipped a finger into a mug of coffee to test its temperature, licked off the drops, and drank. “Glum,” he said eventually. “They were all glum. Monosyllabic, like two syllables might prove to be unbearable. And knobbly, not smooth and symmetrical. Some of them didn’t smell very good. Either cheap cologne or no baths, it was hard to say which was worse. They didn’t seem to have pasts.”

“A lot like Christopher,” I ventured.

Wyl blushed crimson. “Christopher is good-looking. And he can talk.”

I tried not to grin. “How many of your antiques did he take?”

“Scads,” Wyl said, his color deepening. “But, you know, they were all old.”

“Antiques generally are.”

He gave me a sharp glance with the heavily lined eyes. “You’re very clever this morning. You might at least have waited until I finished my coffee, so I could be clever back.”

“You introduced him to Max.”

He sipped again and put the cup down. “By then I knew that Max wasn’t just chasing rough trade. He saw himself as the stairway out of the gutter. Christopher seemed to be headed for the gutter, so I referred him to Max. I would have tried to help him myself, but I was running out of antiques.”

The grin won, and I turned and looked out the window to hide it. “Tell me about Rick Hawke.”

Wyl sighed: This was easier ground. “I’ve got an eight-by-ten on table five.” He rose from his stool, a slender man in his youthful seventies with silver-blue hair and a dancer’s narrow waist, set off by pleated trousers into which he’d tucked a yellow silk shirt. As I followed him to table five, the bell over the door rang and about seventeen Japanese came in, all dressed formally, as though they were about to have their photos taken, which I supposed they were.

“ Konnichiwa,” Wyl said without breaking stride.

“ Konnichiwa,” all seventeen said politely. They waited for the next step in the conversation.

“Look, look,” Wyl called, giving up on Japanese and waving his hands in the general direction of the books. “Number one store, ichiban in Hollywood.”

“ Hai,” said the oldest of the Japanese. “Famous store.”

“ Domo arigato gozaimashta,” Wyl pronounced. He sounded as though he’d learned it through Hooked on Phonics. “Look around. Buy something.” He turned to me. “If we’re going to be conquered, it might as well be by somebody polite. God, imagine if it were the French. Rick’s in here.” He started rifling through a box full of glossies, each encased in a transparent sleeve. Faces I hadn’t seen or thought of in years flipped past: Bob Cummings, Dennis Day, Red Skelton, Robert Horton, Hugh O’Brian, Faye Emerson, Ida Lupino.

“Wait,” I said.

“It’s farther back.”

“Just a second. I like Ida Lupino.”

“You do have a frame of reference,” he said. Ida Lupino gazed up at us, tough and broken at the same time, wearing the face of someone too intelligent for the game she’d allowed herself to be trapped in.

“I’ll take this,” I said, pulling Ida out.

“You’re a romantic,” Wyl said, suppressing a smile.

“That’s what Max told me. A disillusioned one.”

“Poor Max.” Wyl used a single fingernail to separate the photos and then withdrew one. “Here.”

Rick Hawke had been splendidly handsome. All the conventions of the photo-the dramatic lighting, the pancake makeup, the too-slick hair-couldn’t mute the individuality of the human being peering out through the angular face, the person sporting the silly western-style shirt and the kerchief tied around his neck. He looked faintly ill at ease, but he also seemed privately to be enjoying the joke. My memory stirred, and I realized that I recognized Max’s younger face from my childhood.

“That’s a good one,” Wyl said, eyeing it critically. “That’s what made him a star. That sense that he was laughing at himself. That bodybuilder with the impossible name has the same quality.”

I picked up the photo. “What’s this from?”

“His show,” Wyl said, masking astonishment at my ignorance. “ Tarnished Star. He played a sheriff who was really an escaped murderer. Self-defense, of course.”

“Slow down,” I said. “That was the story?”

“Imagine the conflict.” Wyl closed his eyes, looking dreamy. “There he is in this dusty little husk of a town with a badge on his shirt and this vast secret in his past, and every week someone came into town who knew who he really was. Everybody in the world came through that town. Sometimes good guys, sometimes bad guys. Once it was Oscar Wilde, if you can believe that, and Oscar Wilde knew. And, of course, he can’t just kill them, because he’s not a murderer at heart, so he has to-”

“Excuse?” the oldest Japanese said.

“Yes?” Wyl said, shaking his head free of memories. “I mean, Hai?”

“Dirty book about Madonna?” the Japanese man said.

“Over there,” Wyl said dismissively. “With the soft porn.”

“Excuse?” The Japanese man looked confused.

“ Poruno,” Wyl said impatiently. “ Pinkku. There.”

“ Hai, arigato,” the man said, trundling off in the direction Wyl had indicated.

I was examining Rick Hawke’s two-dimensional face. “I remember him,” I said. “It was a pretty good show.” I’d seen it in reruns as a little kid.

“It was a smash.” Wyl stared over my shoulder at the street. “Could have run for years.”

“And you say he quit.”

“In the middle of the third season.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe 1957, ’58. Went to Hawaii, as I told you, and then to India.”

“Why?”

“Why’d he quit?” He drew in the corners of his mouth, sorting out his answer. It gave him a judicial air. “None of this is from the horse’s mouth, you understand.”

“He never talked to you about it.”

“Exactly. The trades said at the time it was a salary dispute. Later, people told me that it was because of the Black Widow.”

He seemed disinclined to go further, so I said, “The Black Widow.”

“You know,” he said reluctantly, “like the spider. His agent. He had the same agent as all those fifties actors whose names sounded like laundry detergents. Zip and Punch and Coit, and, oh, I don’t know, Tweak. The agent’s name was Ferris Hanks. He was a very bad man.”

“How was he bad?” A cluster of Japanese had formed around a large book that bore the bald title SEX.

“Manipulative, power-hungry, sick.” Wyl blinked the lined eyelids and opened his mouth to draw air. “Power and pain.”

“Ah,” I said. “And he made Max quit?”

Wyl shook his head. “No. He wanted Max to continue, I’m sure. Max-Rick-was a big star then. But the contracts back then were ironclad. If Max wanted to keep working, he had to keep working for Ferris. And Max wasn’t willing to have ten percent of his salary go for whips and bludgeons and star-struck boys for Ferris. So he quit. Heavens, but Ferris was mad.”

“I’ll bet he was.”

He seemed to get taller. “Are you going to continue making pointless interjections, or are you going to let me tell the story?”

I thought about it. “Should I say something?”

“A polite expression of interest wouldn’t be unwelcome.”