Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

“Please, Wyl,” I said, “oh, please tell me the rest of the story.”

“Ferris went after him publicly.” His eyebrows chased each other toward his hairline. “ Publicly, can you imagine? In the fifties?”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Perhaps that’s because you’re trying to lead,” he said. “Six months after Max quit, a story appeared in one of the scandal magazines of the day, implying quite clearly that Max-Rick-was gay. They didn’t say gay, of course. No one said ‘gay’ in the fifties. They simply suggested, quite openly in kind of a sneaking way, that Max preferred men to women, which was quite enough back then. Some of us, of course, were thrilled. I’m sure champagne corks popped all over the country. But a story like that would have finished Max, if he hadn’t been finished already. Everyone said later that Ferris had planted the story, even though it would have been suicide for him to do it.” He wound down, putting a hand over his heart as if to slow his breathing.

“Why suicide?”

“Because all of Ferris’s clients were gay. He was playing with fire, so to speak. The bad apple and all that. Contagion. Hollywood was absolutely gripped with paranoia at the time. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood Ten and all.”

“That was communism.”

“That was rampant stupidity,” Wyl corrected, “seasoned with the most pernicious kind of cowardice. But if they can investigate one thing, they can investigate another. It was very dangerous for Ferris to have leaked that story. He must have been beside himself.”

“Why would he have done it?”

Wyl gave me a sidelong glance, Bette Davis at her most mysterious. “Wounded pride, perhaps. Hell hath no fury, and so forth.”

“Is Ferris still alive?” A boisterous laugh went up from the group of Japanese, crowded around the book.

“He couldn’t be,” Wyl said, glancing at his customers. “He’d be in his nineties.”

“I’ll let you get to them in a second. Wyl, do you know anything about Max having a new boy, just before he died?”

Wyl gave me the age-old gaze of the innocent. “How could he have? He loved Christy.”

The newspapers had taken note of Max’s death, but just barely. WEST HOLLYWOOD MAN KILLED read the headline on the third page of the Metro section of the Times. So they hadn’t yet figured out who Max had been, not too surprising when the call reporting his death came in so late. As I’d assumed they would, the cops had sat on the details of the mutilation.

I had a notebook page full of names and numbers from Christopher, and I used Wyl’s phone to call the first on the list, Marta Aguirre, his housekeeper, an illegal from San Salvador whom Christopher loathed with unconcealed intensity. A snoop and an eavesdropper and a petty thief, he called her. Everything stuck to her fingers. She sounded like just what I needed.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t home. I got an older woman who told me, in Spanish, that she was tired of people calling up and asking for Marta. I asked what time she’d be back and got hung up on.

Wyl was seated at the cash register, ringing up his entire stock of Madonna memorabilia-which included an aluminum brassiere of dubious provenance-as I tried the second number. “Shaw, Barton, and Jenks,” a woman said brightly, as though she’d thought of it herself.

“Mr. Jenks, please.” Holding the phone between ear and shoulder, I put both hands in the small of my back and arched backward. The ache in my kidney eased slightly.

“Who shall I say is calling?”

I bent forward, provoking a dry chuckle from Wyl, who enjoys seeing the aging process at work in other people. “Lysander Atwill, regarding Max Grover.”

I listened to two verses of “Under My Thumb” played pizzicato on what sounded like a pocket comb. The revolution was definitely over.

“Jenks,” said a man with an ersatz deep voice, sort of a near-beer bass. I had a feeling Mr. Jenks was a very small man.

“Lysander Atwill here,” I said, “calling from Boulder?”

“Yes?”

“I’m a partner in Atwill, Grey, and Gorgonzola. We handle affairs for Mr. Grover’s sister, Helen.” According to Christopher, Helen was the sole surviving member of Max’s family, the last Grover left back in Boulder.

“Terrible thing,” Mr. Jenks said, letting his voice ease up half an octave.

“We’re all shocked here in Boulder, of course.”

A lawyer’s pause. “How can I help you, Mr. Atwill?”

“Well, I know this sounds a bit quick off the mark, but I have a question about Mr. Grover’s will, which I understand you prepared.”

“I can’t discuss the terms-”

“Of course not. We know them anyway. We know that, um, Christopher Nordine is the primary legatee and that Miss Grover stands to inherit only certain memorabilia of a sentimental nature, plus twelve acres of undeveloped land outside of Boulder.”

“And the question, Mr. Atwill?”

“My client was just wondering whether the will had been altered in any way in the last year. There’s no need to discuss specifics.”

“I should hope not,” he said primly.

“Please understand, Mr. Jenks. My client is an elderly woman of uncertain means who is devastated by her brother’s death. She’s seizing on this issue because she doesn’t want to confront her loss. She’s not, if you understand me, being reasonable.”

“I see.” He made mouth noises into the phone, mulling it over. Finally, he said, “Negative.”

“Negative what?”

“Negative to the question you asked me. Nothing of the kind.”

“All provisions remain intact?”

“I just told you that the answer to the question you asked was negative.” No one was going to trick Mr. Jenks into speaking English.

“Are you positive?” I asked. I couldn’t help it.

“Good-bye, Mr. Atwill.” He hung up.

“People do hang up on one,” I said to Wyl, who was counting a wad of gaily colored Japanese traveler’s checks.

“The world’s rife with it, Mr. Atwill,” Wyl said blithely. “Full of people who don’t give their right names, too.”

“It’s a scourge,” I said, getting up.

“Be careful with that back,” Wyl called after me. “A man your age can’t take his spine for granted.”

Max Grover’s dry cleaner was a large, fierce-looking Korean man in a little shop dead center in a minimall on Sunset Boulevard, just east of Sunset Plaza, a mall he shared with an Arab yogurt parlor, a Vietnamese nail salon, and a Thai restaurant. He regarded me darkly, as though he were wondering whether it would be simpler to comply with my request, or just fold me into equal threes and throw me through the window. “Mr. Grover not come himself?” he asked suspiciously.

So he didn’t read the English-language newspapers. Or maybe, like so many Koreans, he started work before they were delivered.

“Mr. Grover died,” I said. He was going to learn about it sooner or later, and I didn’t want him to call the cops when he did.

“Hah?” he said, blinking at me.

“He’s dead,” I said. “Somebody killed him.”

He was taken aback. Literally. A full step. “Mr. Grover? He dead?”

“I’m afraid so. Mr. Nordine sent me to pick up his things.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, nononono.” His voice was shaking.

“I can pay the bill,” I said stupidly.

“Bill? I don’t care bill.” He balled up a fist and brought it down on top of the Formica counter. The entire shop shook. “You think I care bill? Bill, hell to it. Mr. Grover good man.”

“He was,” I said. “He was a very good-”

“He give me money my sister,” the Korean said. His face was scarlet. “Money bring her from Korea.” He wiped a callused palm roughly across his eyes. “She problem,” he said, “he pay bring her from Korea.”