Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

“That so,” he said again. He shifted his gaze back to me and pushed the screen door open. “Whyn’t you come in here and tell me about it.”

“Let’s go, Orlando,” I said.

“He’s not going to want to come in.” Spurrier leaned toward me and raised his eyebrows like someone sharing a confidence. “He’s really not going to want to come in.”

“I can handle it,” Orlando said.

“I don’t give a shit,” Spurrier said tranquilly. “This is a crime scene, and I don’t need you in it.”

I didn’t like the way this was going at all.

“He comes with me,” I said.

Spurrier looked directly into my eyes for two or three long seconds. “Or?”

“Up to you. I can either tell you what I have to say, or I can go to the West Hollywood station and tell them.”

Spurrier tucked a portion of his lower lip between his teeth and gave the street a thorough survey before allowing his eyes to settle on Orlando again. “If you faint, sonny, don’t hit any furniture. We’re not through printing.” He held the door all the way open, and I went in with Orlando following and Ike Spurrier taking the rear. Spurrier let the door bang shut behind us.

The house seemed dark after the slanting afternoon light on the street, and I had time to make out a group of four or five men huddled around something on the floor before a flashbulb went off and blinded me completely. Orlando must have been looking away when it popped, because a second later I heard him gasp, and then I felt his fingers on my arm.

“Told you,” Spurrier said, sounding satisfied, and my vision cleared and one of the men in front of me stepped aside and I saw Max Grover.

He lay on his right side in a shallow lake of blood that surrounded him completely, head to foot. The little white pebbles were teeth. Bloody footprints, many sets of them, went toward him and away from him. His knees were pulled up self-protectively, and his right arm was beneath him, twisted somehow, so that it extended behind his back.

His shirt, dark with blood, had been ripped open, baring one of his shoulders. The thing on the floor was a discard, the carelessly mutilated remains of some animal traditionally eaten on a holiday, the way a turkey carcass might look to a turkey. Nothing that had been Max was left.

“Boots,” Spurrier said conversationally. “And a knife, of course, there.” He pointed with his toe at the blood on the front of Max’s shirt. “Oh, and over here, too, unless he used a bolt cutter or something. You’ll have to come around to get a look.”

I took three steps around the carcass and saw what he meant. Max’s right arm ended at the wrist.

A mosquito began to whine in my ears, and it whined more loudly until it turned into a dentist’s drill, and then I was sitting on the floor with my head between my knees.

“I thought it’d be him,” Spurrier said to someone. Orlando was still standing, but his face was as white as though his blood had been drained. “You never can tell.”

“He had three rings on that hand,” I said when I’d located my voice.

“That so,” Spurrier said. “Well, our boy worked like hell to get them, considering he left about twenty more in the bedroom. Didn’t take his necklaces, either.” I forced myself to look at Max’s throat and saw the two gold chains I’d noticed earlier.

“He was wearing a steel necklace, too,” I said.

“It’ll turn up here somewhere.” Spurrier turned to Orlando. “What’s your name?”

“Orlando de Anza.”

“That’s not a name,” Spurrier said, “it’s a living-room set. Hey, Orlando, I’m going to ask you to go into the kitchen with Stephen here, and he’s going to ask you a few questions, nothing much, just where you’ve been and so forth, while I talk to Simeon out here. Okay with you?”

“Sure,” Orlando said. He sounded lost.

“You ready to get up?” Spurrier asked me.

“I knew him,” I said, feeling vaguely ashamed of myself. “I talked to him for the better part of an hour.”

Spurrier nodded and then extended a hand to help me up. I ignored it and pulled myself to my feet, and Spurrier put his hand into his jacket pocket. “How about we go into the book room?”

“Fine,” I said.

“You know where it is,” Spurrier said, not asking a question.

“It’s where I talked to him.”

“He give you anything to drink?”

“Lemonade.”

“Just the two of you, right?”

“Right. I also touched a table in there and a few books.”

“And now you’ve touched the floor in here,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said, feeling myself flush. “With both hands.”

“Your prints on file?”

“Yes. I’m a licensed private detective.”

“Ah,” Spurrier sighed. “Shit.”

In the library, still fragrant from Max’s bowl of roses, he waved me to the wooden chair, and I watched him sink into the leather one. “Jesus,” he exclaimed. “Quicksand.” He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and held them out. “Smoke?”

“Thanks anyway.”

He put them away without taking one and looked around the room. “What I’d like you to do, I’d like you to tell me what you know about this, straight on through. I’ll ask questions when I need to. Okay?”

I told him about Nordine and the job he’d asked me to do. I downplayed the fights they’d been having because it was inconceivable to me that someone as frail as Christopher could have found the strength to do the violence that had been done to Max. I told him about the other men Max had been picking up, about the talk I’d had with Max, about the sense I had that there’d been someone else in the house when I was there, and about Max’s certainty that he’d been in no danger.

“Psychics,” Spurrier said disgustedly. “So you saw Nordine yesterday afternoon and came here about two this afternoon, and you were here about an hour.”

“Right.”

“You must have been the last person to see him alive.”

“Obviously not,” I said.

“And from here you went where?”

“Parker Center. A wedding, a big one. I got there about three-forty-five, and Christopher called me about four-thirty.”

“A cop got married?”

“Two of them.”

He rubbed the space between his eyebrows with a fat index finger. “So your alibi is a few hundred cops. That’s a new one.”

“I don’t need an alibi,” I said.

“We’ve got a very narrow window here. You say he was alive when you left at-”

“Three,” I said, ignoring the implication.

“And Nordine calls you at four-thirty. I’d say that’s a pretty narrow window.” He worked his way out of the chair and went to the bookcase. “Of course, he wasn’t necessarily alive at three, was he?”

“No,” I said. “You’ve broken me. I killed him, took a shower in his bathroom to get the blood off, burned my clothes in the fireplace, put on a suit, and went straight to LAPD headquarters, having arranged the wedding in advance to give me an alibi.”

He was looking at me intently, his mouth very tight. “Took a shower in his bathroom, huh?”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“Sure did,” he said. “Didn’t burn the clothes, though. Took them with him, apparently. You got your car keys, smartass?”

I tossed them to him, and he handed them to a cop outside the door. “It’s the old blue Buick,” I said.

“What route did you take to Parker Center?”

“Flores to Santa Monica, Santa Monica to La Brea, La Brea to Beverly, and Beverly downtown.”

“All surface streets.”

“My car doesn’t like freeways.”

“I don’t like snappy answers. How’d Nordine know where to reach you?”

“I left the number on my answering machine.”