Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

“This is Christy,” the voice said. It coughed, and the cough turned into a choke and then a sob. “Max is dead.”

I looked around the room. Hazel was still yelling at Sonia and Hammond. “Where? How?”

“Home. Be… ah… beaten to death. Where are you?”

“Doesn’t matter. Have you called the cops?”

“And give them a voice-print?” he asked. Then he laughed, and something lassoed the laugh and choked it off, and he coughed again. “Are you crazy?”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Call the cops,” he said, and hung up.

I turned to the nearest cop, the cop who had led me to the phone.

“I want to report a murder,” I said.

“Damn it, Al, I think the guy who did him was in the house. When I was there.” I swung out into the fast lane on Fountain to pass someone who was carrying on an animated conversation in an otherwise empty automobile, and the limousine trailing us followed suit. Hammond, sitting next to me in the passenger seat, was absorbed in a bright yellow brochure that offered a staggering variety of “His amp; Hers” items.

“Washcloths I can see,” he said. “But matching golf shirts?”

“You couldn’t know,” Sonia said to me from the backseat, where she and Orlando had been murmuring conspiratorially to each other for miles. “There’s no point in kicking yourself.”

She and Hammond wore flower leis given them to speed their way to Hawaii. The cops who hung the tiny pink orchids around Hammond’s neck had managed to keep straight faces, but just barely.

“How about some nice pillowcases?” Hammond asked. “Blue for me, pink for you. Christ, it’d be enough to keep you awake, lying there in the dark and wondering if you’ve got the right pillow.”

They’d volunteered to drive to Max’s house with me on their way to the airport, but Sonia’s remark was the first either of them had addressed to me. Hammond had been too busy going through my morning’s mail, and Sonia and Orlando apparently had pressing business to whisper about.

“You’ll have to tell the sheriff’s deputy about what you heard,” Sonia said as though Al hadn’t spoken. “All we can do is hand you off to them. It’s their territory.”

“We’ll put you right with them, though,” Hammond offered. “All you got to do is tell them what happened, tell them about the little doily who hired you, and go home.”

“ Al,” Sonia complained, sounding like a wife.

“Yeah,” Hammond said. “Sorry.” Then he chuckled, deep in his chest. “How about old Hazel, huh?”

“Don’t go thinking she’s still in love with you,” Orlando volunteered maliciously. “It’s just the loss of power she’s worried about.”

I turned left from Fountain onto Flores as Hammond maintained a ponderous silence. I could practically hear him counting to ten.

At about eight, Sonia observed, “Nice area.”

“If you like fruitcake,” Hammond said automatically. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you know, even though there may not be a lot of real good reasons to work for the LAPD, one of them is that the Sheriffs got Boys’ Town.”

“West Hollywood, you bigot,” Sonia snapped.

“The city government leases them,” I said, trying to avert a prehoneymoon separation. After all, they’d only been married half an hour. “It’s a private contract. But they’re thinking of setting up their own force.”

“I can see the uniforms,” Hammond said. “Like Singapore Girls, only packing.”

“That’s enough, Al,” Sonia said sharply.

“What’re we, on 60 Minutes?” Hammond grumbled. Then he caught his bride’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, darling.”

“What a piece of raw material,” Sonia said, softening. “Absolutely everything needs to be changed.”

“Over there,” I said, looking at the cluster of Sheriffs’ cars and the yellow crime-scene tape.

As I pulled Alice toward the curb, a deputy stepped forward. He had the standard-issue mustache, mirrored sunglasses, and tight khaki uniform. In his early thirties, he had no love handles to speak of. I braked, and he came around to the driver’s side and tapped on the window.

“Help you, sir?” he said as I rolled the windows down.

I looked up into two convex versions of my face, reflected in his shades. “I’m the one who called it in.”

“And how did you-” he started, and then peered into the car, seeing Hammond in his LAPD blues and the orchid lei, Orlando in his tux, Sonia in full uniform with a bridal veil in her lap, and, behind us, the black stretch limo. It was enough to make him take off his sunglasses.

“He got a phone call, sonny,” Hammond growled. The LAPD and the Sheriffs had a long and stormy history. “And he was here just before the old queen got killed. And he’s volunteered to come all the way here-’

“Fine, sir.” The deputy looked at me. “I’m sure Sergeant Spurrier will want to talk to you.”

“I’m sure he will, too, stupid,” Hammond muttered, setting me right with the Sheriffs.

Two minutes later Hammond and Sonia were Honolulu-bound, and Orlando and I were following the deputy up the steps to Max Grover’s front porch. I’d promised to run him back to Parker Center to pick up his car, and the deputy had looked at him when he didn’t get into the limousine, and then looked back at me. Then he’d shaken his head.

On the other side of the screen door, flashbulbs popped and someone laughed. The laugh ripped a little hole in the waning daylight and let in an early piece of the night: It was a nasty little laugh, the laugh of someone who’s just seen a silent-movie actor slip on a banana peel and thinks it’s funny because he doesn’t know the man wasn’t really hurt.

“Fasten your seat belt,” I said to Orlando. “This is going to be a bumpy flight.”

The deputy swiveled to face us. “Was he here with you?” he demanded, referring to Orlando.

“No.”

“So who is he?”

“A friend.”

The deputy thought about it. His face took on the expression of someone jogging dutifully uphill, suggesting that thinking was something he did infrequently and reluctantly, and only when there was no alternative. Then he pointed his chin at Orlando. “He stays here.”

“Your tuchis,” I said pleasantly.

He slid the mirrored shades back up the slope of his nose so that his eyes were concealed. “Beg pardon?”

“He comes in. With me.”

“The kid stays here,” he said, going for tough. The tag on his chest read KLEINDIENST.

“Get your superior, Deputy Kleindienst,” I said. “Surely you have many.”

“Kleindienst,” someone called through the screen door, “who you jacking around out there?”

Kleindienst seemed inclined to give the question some thought, so I said, “I’m the one who called you on this.”

“And he brought a little friend along,” Kleindienst said scornfully.

“That so,” said the man behind the door. He pushed it open and looked out at me. “Ike Spurrier,” he said. He was short and compact and broad through the chest, with coloring that made him look as though he was dissolving slowly in a glass of water: almost albino, with white-blond hair and a spiky little white-blond mustache and melancholy eyes the color of wet sand. Beneath the mustache was a plump, shiny red lower lip, as wet and sharply articulated as an earthworm. He wore street clothes: a rumpled off-yellow tweed sport coat with a red polo shirt beneath it, and pressed blue jeans.

“Simeon Grist.” We didn’t shake hands.

“Thanks for calling us.” Spurrier’s sad-looking eyes drifted beyond me and found Orlando. “How’d you know he was dead?”

“Someone phoned me and told me so.”