Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

Doc and Grumpy were back on the catwalk. They’d switched shifts with Dopey and Sleepy, and returned to duty, and now they were lounging against the rail and looking as bored as dwarfs can look. There was no one in the Paragon who hadn’t been stricken from the whozzat list. Spurrier had paused at the bar, where he was putting a significant dent in the white wine supply and using both elbows to support himself.

One of Spurrier’s deputies was over in the corner, chatting with Tallulah Bankhead. Tallulah reached out a handkerchief and mopped perspiration from the deputy’s brow.

“…to thee, blithe spirit,” Mickey Snell was saying in a high, plummy Old Vic voice, sort of John Gielgud on helium.

I was at Ferris’s font, avoiding Daisy, when a wad of rumaki struck Mickey Snell in the forehead. He blinked heavily, wrapped his other hand around the microphone-enveloping it completely-dropped to one knee, and began to sing “Feelings.” It occurred to me that Mickey Snell was very drunk.

Ferris Hanks had had enough. He stepped forward, waving his hands for attention, and caught a stuffed grape leaf on his lapel. It made an interesting smear, like a snail’s track, down the front of his jacket.

Suddenly Henry was on the stage. His wig had wilted. He interposed himself between the crowd and Ferris, lifted a fist, and dropped it casually onto the top of Mickey Snell’s head. Mickey Snell looked up at Henry with mild curiosity and then fell forward, on top of the microphone. There was a razz of static, followed by a snap like the world’s biggest rubber band giving way, and then silence. In the hum that followed, I started to work the room again.

Kitchen, full of guys in French maid’s uniforms. Bathrooms, empty for once. Batman at the back door, working on another glass of wine. Me, pushing through the crowd, carrying an odd weight of despair, waiting for Darryl Wilder. The whole thing feeling dismayingly familiar, dismayingly old. Donald Duck on a quest. Not very brave and faintly ridiculous. Poking my way again into other people’s lives, lives that looked-from the outside, at least-fuller and more complete than my own.

People kissing in the corner. The Supremes working on their Motown moves.

Someone staring at me. Spurrier’s eyes, mad little lights through the holes in the wolf mask. I suddenly realized that Snell wasn’t the only drunk at the party.

Back in the main room, Henry was still on the stage. “We’re running late,” he said, all business. He stepped aside and tucked the mike under his arm while he conferred with Ferris. I heard a bellow from the bar and saw Spurrier straighten galvanically, throwing off a glittering arc of white wine, and clutch his rear end. Candy Toy came toward me through the crowd, looking grimly satisfied.

The front door was still manned, although the soldiers on duty had their backs to the street and their eyes on the stage. On the sidewalk, I breathed in the cooling air and watched the traffic. People drove by on the errands that take up so much of life, unaware of Max, ignoring the fact that someone could walk into their homes with a carpet cutter and, with one short upward swipe, turn all their plans, all their errands, into a bad joke.

The parking lot was full of empty cars. It was nice to be where nothing was happening.

“…these testimonials would have embarrassed Max,” Ferris Hanks was saying when I went back in. “He would have wanted us to have a good time. I’m going to suggest that you all write out your farewells, and I’ll buy a special supplement in Nite Line so my old friend Joel Farfman can print them, along with the pictures and stories from this party. A special supplement for Max. How does that sound?”

“Expensive,” called his old friend Joel Farfman, who had an arm thrown around Tonto’s shoulders.

“ Heek,” Hanks said perfunctorily, gazing at Joel as though he were a bad oyster. “That Joel. Now, before we raffle off the evening’s door prize, I’d like to turn the microphone over to Christopher Nordine, who has an announcement to make.”

Zorro climbed the steps to the stage. Christopher looked great, slender and dashing in his black clothing. He was wearing a pencil-thin mustache beneath his mask, and it emphasized the strong curve of his jaw. I sagged against my post at Bernadette’s font and searched the room for Spurrier. Not at the bar, which was something.

Blonde hair across the room.

“Most of you know me,” Christy began. Then he stopped and looked up at the lights as though he’d lost his place. After the time it took him to draw three deep breaths he hooked his thumb under the black mask and pushed it up onto his forehead so the crowd could see his face. “You probably wonder what Max saw in me. Well, now that I’ve had a little time without him, a little time to think about it, so do I.”

I worked my way toward the bright head of hair.

Noise from the door, a sudden loud voice.

“You’re a good guy, Christy,” someone called. There was a smattering of applause.

“I’ve been a sorry excuse for a human being,” he said. “I’ve been a taker and a user.”

“And a whiner,” someone suggested, but not harshly, and Christy grinned and nodded.

The blonde hair belonged to Marilyn Monroe, in her Seven Year Itch white dress. I’d checked her three times already.

“And you know what?” Christy was visibly gaining confidence. “That’s what Max saw in me. Room for improvement. Miles of room for improvement. Enough potential for improvement, considering where I started from, to make it worth his time. Max wanted to fix everybody’s life.”

A sudden ripple of movement from the direction of the street, jostling its way into the center of the room, and someone shouted again. I went up on tiptoe but couldn’t see anything.

“Max left some money behind,” Christy said, squinting through the lights toward the door. “More money than-well, enough money to fix a lot of lives. And I’ve figured out a way to use it that will keep Max’s memory-

A folding chair sailed over the heads of the crowd and smashed onto the floor of the stage. Christy jumped back at the same time that I jumped forward, toward the door.

I couldn’t get there. People had turned their backs to the stage, trying to see what was happening, and they were being pushed backward into the room. I shoved my way through until I came up behind a kimono-clad geisha who must have weighed three hundred pounds.

“Sorry,” I said. I put my hands on the small of his/her back and pushed, using her as an icebreaker, and we plowed through six or eight densely populated yards before the crowd suddenly gave way and she pitched forward, barely remaining upright, and collided with a very wide young man wearing a plaid shirt and oil-stained blue jeans who grabbed her by the shoulders, spun her around, and brutally threw her back into the crowd.

He had at least a dozen friends with him. Some of them had tire irons and some of them had baseball bats, and all of them had shaved heads and glum, glowering expressions. They were all white and all young, and all larger than I would have liked them to be, and they stood in the center of a wide circle of partygoers, scowling into the room and tapping their bats against the floor with a sound like the first drops of heavy rain.

None of them was Darryl Wilder.

The geisha had taken four people down with her when she smacked into the crowd, and as they got up I saw that one of them was the deputy who’d struck up an acquaintance with Tallulah. He stepped into the middle of the circle. His drugstore sunglasses had been knocked crooked, and he looked very young.

“You guys had better turn around and get out on the sidewalk,” he said.

“Look here,” said the wide one who had tossed the geisha. “It’s officer Florence.” He took two steps toward the deputy, who didn’t move.