Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

I picked up the two Yorkies and put them on the bed. The other dogs scooted aside to make room. “I don’t feel like reading,” I said, “but I’ll tell you a story.”

“Am I going to like it?” I still hadn’t come around to the side he was facing, but he made no effort to turn his head.

“You should,” I said. “You wrote it.”

“What’s the fun in that?” he asked plaintively. “I know how it comes out.”

“Well, you’re going to hear it anyway,” I said. “Let’s start with a secondary character. Darryl Wilder was an interesting guy. He was nuts, but he was interesting. I wonder who he would have killed if his uncle hadn’t put a move on him. Someone, that’s for sure. Bus drivers, maybe, or Girl Scout troop leaders, or left-handed horticulturists. Somebody specific, and he would have created an elaborate, self-serving story that justified killing them, and he would have killed them ritually, the same way every time.”

“I’ve never understood how anyone can do anything the same way every time,” Hanks said. “It’s so boring. So perhaps your thumbnail appraisal of what’s his name isn’t accurate. Perhaps he wasn’t an interesting guy.”

Hanks may have been bored, but the dogs were paying attention. Nine or ten pairs of black eyes followed my every movement. “He was careful, too. Wilder, I mean. Did his research, meticulous as a graduate student. Gay men of a certain age, successful, living in a big city but born in a small town. That was important to him-that they came from somewhere else, somewhere small, where lots of people knew them. It gave him the opportunity to take a revenge that went beyond killing them. It had to be important, because it was the most dangerous part of his act. He had to send the papers and the finger. Anything you mail has a postmark, or if it’s Federal Express it has a waybill number. He left a description of himself every time he sent off one of his little packages.”

“Compulsives,” Hanks said dismissively. “I don’t see how you can think he was interesting.”

“It was there the whole time,” I said. “From the moment Spurrier told me about Max’s finger arriving in Boulder. Max didn’t fit the profile. The other men were in the closet at home; that’s why the packages were so destructive. But Max went out of his way to let the entire world know he was gay. He walked away from a career to do it. He walked away from you to do it.”

“I wish I could see your face,” Hanks said.

“Max never answered that ad. There were enough troubled kids on the sidewalk to keep him in the guardian angel business for the rest of his life. Max didn’t even read Nite Line. Someone put a clipping from the paper into the pocket of one of Max’s pairs of pants. He even wrote a flight number on it.”

“Some people,” Hanks said, “are too fucking clever for their own good.”

“He didn’t try to forge Max’s handwriting. Just numbers, cryptic enough to make it look like Max didn’t want anyone to know what they meant. But Max was a calligrapher. He wrote numbers in the old style. He crossed his sevens.”

“That’s not all he crossed,” Hanks said.

“Darryl Wilder came to Los Angeles to kill you,” I said. “You and someone else he never got around to. You’re from Walpole, New Hampshire. On some bizarre level, you think you’re still in the closet. You like the closet, Ferris. You told me so, remember?”

He tried to move, groaned, and abandoned it. “If you’re going to stay over there, would you at least help me turn over? This might be a little more interesting if I could watch you as you tell it.”

“Watch your TV. You’re never going to walk through your house again, so you might as well take a final look.”

“And I’m not allergic to flowers,” he said.

“He read about you somewhere, or heard about you. You represented a new phase in his career. Somebody famous, a trophy kill. He probably came up to the gate one night-I’m sure you don’t answer ads in Nite Line any more than Max did-and he probably told you he wanted to be an actor. Henry said that still happens from time to time. He hadn’t counted on Henry, though. After a few days he made his move, and Henry stopped him. Is that right?”

“It seems I was wrong,” Ferris said. “I don’t know how this comes out.”

“When Henry had taken care of Wilder, tied him up and stuffed him in a cupboard or one of your dungeons or something, you began to think about putting together a deal. That’s what you do, remember? Henry said it best: ‘Agents don’t do anything. They get other people to do things. They’re not actors, they’re not writers, they’re not killers. Other people do the work.’ ”

“Henry said that?” He sounded hurt.

“Henry persuaded Wilder to tell the two of you what he was up to. Henry can be very persuasive. So you proposed a three-point deal. Point one. You didn’t call the police. Point two. You told Wilder about Max, probably making him out to be what he looked like from the outside, an old man who preyed on helpless young ones. Point three. You offered him something-money, or a movie career-to do his act on Max. A man even more famous than you are.”

“Just to keep you talking until Henry gets back,” Hanks said, “let’s say I promised him fifty thousand dollars. Could I have a drink of water?”

“So he placed the ad in the paper, just like he always did-you probably wrote it, even though you knew Max would never see it-and you told him where he’d be likely to meet Max. And Darryl took it from there. He put the ad in Max’s pocket-he wanted the credit for the kill-he used Max’s computer to write some letters I found on a computer bulletin board, he even wrote letters to Max, which Max never read. You probably wrote the letters from Max, too.”

“Your characters aren’t consistent,” Hanks said. “If Darryl was a compulsive, he would have to do things his way. The way he always did them. The act of writing to Max would have been important to him. That’s the way he did it before, right? So let’s say I arranged a meeting-just talking story here-and Darryl sort of got things going and then told Max he had to go back to, I think it was Nebraska, and he set himself up somewhere in L.A. and started writing letters to Max and sending them to a post office box for forwarding. And Max wrote back out of the inexhaustible goodness of his heart, asking Darryl to come back to Los Angeles so Max could help him do whatever Max thought he could help him do. If you really want me as the heavy, though, I might have drafted a few points for Darryl’s letters. Setting the bait, you might say.”

“And Max took the bait, and Darryl killed him, and-and what? You decided not to pay him?”

“If I’d offered him fifty thousand dollars,” Hanks said, “I might have rethought it. That’s a lot of money to pay someone who’s doing something he enjoys.”

“You’re used to dealing with actors.”

“If you’re suggesting that I usually do business with people who don’t kill for their jollies, I’ll concede that.”

“You thought you could get away with it. You must have figured he’d just disappear. After all, you had Henry to protect you, and you could put Darryl in jail. Or worse.”

He didn’t say anything. He seemed glued to the screen of the TV, but I could sense him straining to listen.

“But you didn’t know about the dog tags. You didn’t know he couldn’t leave without them. All you knew was that he was still here, still in Los Angeles, and that made you nervous. Did he phone you?”

A deep sigh. “It’s your story.”

“Let’s say you got nervous enough to decide to pay him. And when you found out about the tags, you decided you’d give them to him. At the wake. And all the time, you were acting like Max’s misunderstood friend, paying for his farewell party.”