Skin Deep

8

Saturday may have dawned rosy-fingered, but I missed it.

When I finally swam reluctantly toward consciousness, it was already ten o'clock. Birds-not my birds, but their more energetic colleagues outdoors-were singing melodiously to warn each other to stay the hell out of their territory. I gave my lips an exploratory lick. My tongue felt like some supernatural prankster had sneaked in during the night and inserted it into one of those sheepskin seat covers that sports car drivers for some reason covet. A dull and monotonous brass bell clanged regularly in my forebrain. Samuel Johnson, who had something to say about everything, once said that when one woke up one should get up, and when one got up, one should do something. I weighed a very short list of the things I could possibly do and chose the bathroom. I figured I could lift my toothbrush.

Normally, I like waking up alone. I'm used to it. Of all the civilized skills, the power of speech is the last one to drop in on me each day. After I hung up the brush, wiped the rabid-looking foam from my chin, and turned off the water, I listened gratefully to the sound of Nana snoring daintily from the bedroom. I was happy that she wasn't up and around and bombarding me with snappy chatter, but those were pretty cloggy snores. I wondered whether someone had helped her to Toby's prized pink while Toby wasn't watching.

I spit out some Listerine and looked up. My face in the mirror looked like my face. I searched it for a moment and then turned the cold water back on and splashed myself to wash away the sleep. I keep waiting for some cataclysm to change my face. No dice. The only thing that seems to change the way I look is the patient accumulation of years. No matter what happens, nothing seems to make it to the surface, any more than the dirt of Toby's life left any unscoured stains on the all-American billboard of his grin.

Feeling a little better, or at least a little cleaner, I went in and checked out the living room. It was a wreck. It looked like Grendel's lair, except that in place of the gnawed human bones Grendel and his mother scattered around after their nightly Viking shish kebab were more commonplace odds and ends: a woman's hairbrush I didn't recognize, an ashtray full of somebody else's cigarettes, and dust rats curled languidly under the furniture. I hid the hairbrush under a couch cushion, studied the lump it made, and resolved to see what was causing the other lumps at some time in the near future.

Eleanor, my ex-girlfriend, was born to tame furniture. She'd managed to keep the place presentable during our years together, but I'd given up the effort, waiting for the occasional girlfriend to drop by with a sponge and a roll of paper towels. It had been weeks since that had happened. I was definitely not next in line for the cover of Architectural Digest.

Since I had time to putter, I puttered. Wrapping a towel around my middle, I gave some more water to the birds. Birds go through a lot of water. To my surprise, I was rewarded by a grateful cheep from Hansel. At least, I thought it was Hansel. With birds, who can tell? After last night, I wasn't even sure I could tell with people. Who, for example, was Toby? Or, hitting literally closer to home, who was Nana?

I realized I was gazing dully down into the birds' watering trough, roused myself, and headed for coffee. For what seemed like several hours I leaned against the kitchen counter, averting my eyes from the landscape of my life while I waited to hear water boiling. I managed to pour the water over the grounds without fatal consequences, found a relatively clean cup, and let the whole deal drip directly into it.

The first gulp took off on all cylinders, transversed the road map of my circulatory system on two wheels in the best Le Mans fashion, and screeched across the finish line into my brain, synapses snapping to attention behind it. The second swallow brought the sun out. Well, well, I thought, and went to call Toby.

I woke him up, the sluggard. "What time is it?" he mumbled.

"Rise and shine, both of you. I'll be down there in about an hour and a half, and we've got a lot to talk about."

"You didn't call me back." He sounded aggrieved.

"What do you think I'm doing now?"

"Last night," he said sulkily. "You were supposed to call me last night. Don't you know how upset we were?"

"Yeah. Sounds like you haven't closed your eyes all night."

"We didn't until about six. Finally we took a little something. What time did you say it was?"

"Almost eleven. I'll be there between one-thirty and two."

I could hear Saffron in the background. She sounded querulous and cranky. "No," Toby said. "I'll come to you. I've got to take Saffron home anyway." He lowered his voice. "Champ, if I don't get her out of here, I'm going to go crazy."

"Just don't hit her."

"What's a poor boy to do when he's not allowed to express himself? This girl is the ditz of the century."

"She's also your alibi."

"She's a dream walking. How do I get to your house?" I told him and hung up. I was replacing the receiver when I suddenly felt very strongly that someone was looking at me. I turned slowly and stared into the dark, accusing screen of the computer. What the hell, I thought. It's only a machine. How complicated can it be? I drained the cup, poured another and, with an unsteady Toshiro Mifune swagger, pointed myself at the computer, reached it, and switched it on.

A whir as the fan came to life, a blink on the screen, a message: disk error or non-system disk. Balls. I'd forgotten to put anything in the drive. Well, be reasonable, it wasn't the machine's fault. I slipped the DOS diskette in and hit a key. The fan gave way to a buzzing, choking sound as the computer chewed some information off the surface of the disk, and my old nemesis shouldered its way onto the screen: A›

Okay. I'd been this far before. Unknown territory was only a keystroke away. There were twenty-six regular keys, ten numbers, a bunch of keys that said Fl and F2, up to F12, and an irregular cluster of others with labels like CTRL and SYSREQ. Surely one of them did something.

Talk to it, I thought. I typed HELLO. The word appeared on the screen. Terrific, but now what? I hit the Enter key. BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME, the screen said smugly. I growled a little in the back of my throat. HOW YOU HANGING? I typed. The words hung there, glowing greener than electric chlorophyll. I hit Enter.

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME.

"It's not a command, you asshole," I said. "It's a polite greeting. You want a command, I'll give you a command." I typed ACHTUNG! and hit Enter. The machine, like a second-rate psychoanalyst, stuck with the tried and true: BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME. It also beeped, by way of emphasis.

I was galvanized by a surge of adrenaline, my hangover burned away by twelve million volts of emotional electricity. I leaned toward the computer screen, my throat tight. "Okay, you electronic illegal immigrant, wanna know what I did to my last turntable? I backed the car over it. Do you want to wind up in a burlap sack, in pieces small enough to inhale, being mailed back to the factory with FRAGILE written all over you so the post office will drop you as often as possible? Do you? Huh? Huh?" I slammed the keyboard once with my fist for emphasis.

The computer beeped and then laughed at me.

I sat back quickly and reached for my coffee, and the cup jangled nervously against the saucer. The computer laughed again. "Honey," it said, "you're out of your mind."

I almost jumped out of my chair as Nana's bare arms snaked around my neck and gave me a squeeze. "How come I slept alone?" she said. Her breath smelled good even in the morning.

I had to inhale twice before I could talk. "Don't startle me this early, okay? I'm a little bit jumpy. How are you feeling?"

"Great, better than I've felt in days."

I ran my tongue experimentally over my teeth. My mouth was as furry as an inside-out puppy. "What was so goddamn funny?" I asked a little sourly.

"You. Threatening that computer. How much RAM have you got?"

"As much as I need," I said defensively. What the hell was RAM?

"What, though? Three twenty K, six forty K, or thirty-eight thousand K?"

"Thirty-eight thousand. And change."

Nana gave my throat a vaguely threatening squeeze. "You simp," she said. "Where's the coffee?"

"Where do you think?"

"Aren't we sweet in the morning?" She slipped past me and ambled into the kitchen. Against my will, I turned to look. She'd changed. She was wearing a pair of underpants. My underpants. They hung lazily lopsided, high up on her right hip and so far down on her left that the cleft between her buttocks peeked demurely over the white elastic waistband. Tiny as she was, the elastic was doing its job. She had wonderful, teaspoon-size dimples on either side of the base of her spine. They were the kind of dimples I'd always wanted to fill with salt and dip celery into.

"You don't know squat," she said pleasantly as she poured. "Everybody knows that six forty is the maximum RAM for that machine. What in the world did you buy it for?"

"Work."

"Oh. Work." She slurped her coffee. "Whoo, hot," she said. "Where's the sugar?"

"In the cabinet. Behind you."

She pulled it down and poured half the box into her cup, then gave it a stir. Then she added some more. She sniffed it.

"Sugar doesn't smell," I said in spite of myself. "How do you know when you've got enough?"

"When the spoon stands up by itself," she said. She sipped it once and nodded, then dropped the spoon into the sink. "Coffee's finished," she said. "I'll make some more." She went through the motions, waited until the water was dripping, and turned back to me. "So, you're going to use a computer in your work. What's your software?"

"My what?"

"Software. You know, the stuff that teaches that thing how to think." The pot began to drip obediently behind her.

"I haven't gotten that far."

She came over to me and peered over my shoulder. I could feel her body heat on my arm. "Honey," she said, "you haven't got anywhere at all. What do you want to do first, write something?"

"Sure. I guess so."

"Okay, where are the disks?" She flipped up the neat little black file that I'd bought with the machine and pulled out a diskette. "WordPerfect," she said. "You're in luck. I know my way around this one." She yanked out the DOS diskette and slipped the new one in its place.

"Anything in B?" she asked rhetorically, snapping the drive open. "No, nothing in B. Well, we'll just use good old DOS, no need in wasting time formatting one. In we go."

"God, you're chatty."

"Get off the stool. I can't reach the keys. Scoot, scoot." I scooted. She typed WP and hit Enter, and the screen came to life, welcome to WordPerfect 4.2 it said.

I leaned over her shoulder. "How'd you do that?"

"If you're sweet, I'll teach you. Get a piece of paper so you can write all this down."

Feeling like a third-grader, I got a piece of paper. Negligently naked at the keyboard, Nana initiated me into the mysteries of word processing. I took notes while she batted the machine around in an expert manner, and when she got up to check the coffeepot, I took over. "My God," I said while she clinked things around in the kitchen, "I'm writing."

"Now all you need is something to write about."

"Shush."

In fact, I did have something to write about, TOBY = JACK SPRUNK? I typed. CHECK. HOMETOWN? TOBY'S BUSINESS IN THE BACK ROOM WITH TINY. CHECK. WHO'S SAFFRON, REALLY? VERIFY THEIR STORY. NAMES OF OTHER GIRLS TOBY'S BELTED. DID AMBER HAVE A ROOMMATE?

"Sure, sweetie," Nana said, reading over my shoulder as she sipped a fresh cup of coffee. "That charmer, Pepper. You know, the one who was putting the arm on you while I was sweet-talking Tiny." The underpants had slipped a little lower, clinging for dear life to the sharp jut of her left hipbone. I put my thumb in her navel and gave it a soft twist. It returned immediately to its former shape. The muscles beneath were as smooth and firm as a trampoline. "Jesus, you're elastic."

"Youth," she said. "You probably remember it."

"You know the answers to any of these other questions?"

"Not so's you'd notice. Saffron I know something about. Put your thumb back in my belly button. It's such an unusual approach."

"Later. What's with Toby and Tiny?"

"Toby likes him, I guess. Hell, I like him, too. But as for Toby, well, Tiny takes care of him, sees that nobody hassles him in the club, sets him up with a girl occasionally. Tiny knows a lot of girls."

"Girls for what?"

"What does that mean? You mean, does Toby pay for them, or what? He doesn't have to. Toby's a TV star, remember? They're thrilled just to be with him."

"I mean what does Toby do to the girls Tiny sets him up with?"

"The usual. He doesn't beat them up, I don't think. Tiny'd pasteurize him."

"He beat you up."

She colored slightly. "Tiny didn't know about that. I told him I'd had a car accident." She took my cup and filled it with the coffee she'd brewed.

"How thoughtful of you," I said as she placed the cup in my hand.

"Well, you feel ridiculous when you get slapped around, you know? I've had practice. Anyway, it was none of Tiny's business. I got myself into it, I got myself out of it. You know, you really shouldn't leave the screen on like that if you're not working. You can burn words into it. Have you got Screensave?"

"Have I got what?"

"Eigo," she said. "That's Korean for 'you simp.' It's a utility. Got any utilities? Give me that stool."

She slid up onto it, swapped a couple of disks, and slapped some keys around. The screen went dark. "Now we've saved what you wrote onto the disk in the B drive. I'll show you how to get it back in a minute." Pulling the WordPerfect disk out of A, she put DOS into it, typed DIR, and hit Enter. A whole bunch of junk rolled past on the screen.

"Hoo-ha. There it is," she said. "Next time, before you put the word processing program in, type SCRNSAVE." She typed it as she said it.

"This is the worst coffee I ever drank," I said. "On the other hand, where'd you learn to do all this stuff?"

"Computer school. I went for a year daytimes, when I started dancing. I'm a real whiz kid. I even got Tiny to put the books at the Spice Rack on computer. Okay, here's WordPerfect back again, and here come your notes." Sure enough, they blinked back onto the screen. "Now watch." We watched. I slid my thumb up her spine to pass the time. After about a minute, the screen went blank.

"What happened?"

"That's Screensave. To get it back, just hit a key." I hit one, and there everything was again.

"It's a miracle," I said.

"This is totally excellent coffee," she said, sipping at hers. "The coffee of the gods. End of lesson number one. Do you want to ignore me, or what?" She gave the elastic on her underpants an exploratory snap. "How about or what?"

"I'd love to. But Toby's coming by, and I think we ought to get ready."

"Is he bringing Saffron?"

"I told him to. She's his alibi."

"How you going to get ready? Put on some insect repellent?"

"I thought a shower might be in order."

"Why? You'll just want another one after she leaves."

"You really don't like her, do you?"

"There's nothing wrong with her that demonic possession wouldn't improve. I mean, she's okay if you like people who lie and cheat and steal."

"Then I'd better shower now, before she steals the soap. Why don't you get dressed?"

"I'll bet you say that to all the girls. Am I doing something wrong?"

"Of course not." I gave her an appreciative pat on her round little rump. "But you see, I was injured in the war."

"No fooling," she said, concerned. "What war?"

"The War of 1812."

"Fine," she said, sounding grumpy. "Message noted."

"Nana. We hardly know each other."

"I know I like you."

"Well, I like you, too. Even if your coffee should be given serious consideration by the Pentagon. Let's see what happens." She looked at me doubtfully. "Okay?"

She chewed at her lip. "This doesn't happen to me often."

"Nothing's happened."

"That's what I mean." She sounded slighted.

"Hey. We don't have to fall into a frenzied clinch on our first morning together. Let's learn to talk to each other first."

"Fine," she said. "Be enlightened. Actually, I kind of like it. But it's not exactly the style I'm used to."

"That doesn't mean you have to put up with it."

"Sometimes I like that, too. Don't make me a victim, Simeon. It may be hard for you to understand, but I enjoy a lot of things about my life."

"For example."

"Freedom. I can do whatever I want, with whoever I want. I make cash every night, so I've always got money in my pocket. I don't want to work, I don't work. Little Korean girls don't get that much freedom."

I sipped at her truly awful coffee and then put it down. "So you kicked over the traces."

"I knocked down the whole damn house. It was that or be Daddy's girl."

"That doesn't mean what I think it means."

"It doesn't?" She didn't take her eyes off me.

"Well, I hope not." The screen on the computer went blank again. She leaned across me and hit a key to bring it back to life. She had a faint, sweet, yeasty smell, like fresh-baked bread. Her black hair brushed my arm. I put my hand on her warm, silky shoulder.

"Take a shower," she said. She smiled at me and shook her head. "You're a real innocent, you know? Listen, go get clean. Then you can face Toby and the lovely and talented Saffron with a pure heart. You'll need it."

I put my arms around her, and she tilted her head up and gave me a butterfly kiss on the throat. Wrapping my towel virtuously around me, I headed for the shower. When I came back out, wearing my Saturday jeans and a brightly colored, loose-fitting shirt that Eleanor had bought me from Bali a couple of years before, the living room looked as though the Angel of Good Housekeeping had paid a visit. The few things that could be polished actually looked polished. Nana had taken a dish towel and twisted it around her head like a turban and poured herself approximately into her clothes from the evening before. She was on her hands and knees, using a paper towel to roll up a particularly virulent looking dust rat underneath the table. I hadn't even known I had any paper towels.

"Honey," she said, "it's all well and good to be a bachelor, but this is ridiculous. You should send the whole house to the dry cleaner." She got up, went into the kitchen, and dumped the rolled-up towel into an overflowing waste-basket. "When do the trash men come, or do they?"

"They come," I said. "I just haven't figured out the schedule." A car door slammed down the hill. "And speaking of trash, here's Toby."

"Jesus. I look like Mother Hubbard." She yanked the dish towel off her head and gave her head a shake.

"I thought you didn't like Toby."

"I don't. I don't like Saffron, either. That's why I have to look good." She ran her fingers through her hair. "You know even less about women than you do about computers. It's kind of attractive."

"I'm full of negative virtues." I heard the scrunch of two people coming up the driveway, accompanied by an occasional ladylike gasp of displeasure from Saffron. I could imagine her teetering on her platform heels and clinging limply to Toby's arm as they negotiated the ruts. Nana vanished into the bedroom, tugging at obscure fastenings on her clothes. She was back before they knocked on the door, running her fingers through her hair. She looked beautiful.

Saffron came in first, out of breath and looking bad-tempered. "Well," she said, looking from Nana to me and back again. "Don't we work fast."

"Who's we, white girl?" Nana said. "And here's Toby."

Toby looked as if he really hadn't slept. His face was puffy and his eyes were red, and the patented hair was hanging limp. The mood of the moment was one of weary sincerity. "Nana," he said, "I'm sorry about Amber."

Nana's eyes flickered. If I'd been Toby, I would have stepped back. "Aren't we all?" she said shortly.

"You didn't really think I had anything to do with it."

"It's just a good thing you were with Cinderella here. Otherwise I'd have gone out there and cut your balls off."

"And a good morning to you, too," Saffron said.

"We can bicker in the living room," I said. "We've got some things to work out."

"Like what?" Saffron said icily. She hadn't moved a step. She was going to be the great lady.

"Like what you two are going to say to the cops when they finally get around to you. Now come the rest of the way in here and sit down. Nana's fixed some wonderful coffee."

Saffron and Nana maintained the greatest possible distance as we went into the living room. Saffron eyed the decor the way Margaret Dumont looked at Groucho's cigar. Toby cleared his throat but said nothing until he and Saffron were seated on the couch and Saffron had gathered her skirt around her as if she were afraid something might run up it. Then he said, "Jesus, champ, what're you, Davy Crockett? I didn't know anybody still had a wood-burning stove."

"Toby," I said, "just shut up for a couple of minutes. At this point I'm trying to figure out whether I want anything to do with you, and every time you open your mouth you just make it that much easier for me to decide."

"Right," he said. "I'll shut up." He patted Saffron's hand. "And you shut up, too, darling."

"Nana, get our guests some coffee."

"Yes, master," Nana said. "Six lumps or eight, dear?" she asked Saffron.

"I don't eat sugar," Saffron said haughtily.

Nana made a tiny gagging sound and went into the kitchen, banging things around a little more than was strictly required before reemerging with the worst mugs I owned. "Don't touch the red one," she said to Saffron as she set them down on the table. "It's mine. I wouldn't want to put any impurities into your system. They wouldn't last a moment, poor little things."

Saffron curled her fingers possessively around Toby's arm, ignoring his look of irritation, extended an elegant, red-tipped pinkie on the other hand, and picked up her mug. She swallowed, and her eyes widened. She put the cup down hastily. "Oh, my God," she said. "That's horrible."

None too gently, Toby disengaged his arm. "So why are the cops going to want to talk to us? We left her at home. She was okay then."

"Sooner or later they're going to find out I've got a private investigator's license, and they're going to ask what I was doing there."

"And you're going to tell them?"

"Maybe. It depends on you."

"On me? Why? What do you want me to do?"

"I want to know all there is to know about Amber, from you and from Saffron."

"What's your interest?"

"I've got two. First, if I'm going to keep working for you and Stillman, I want to be satisfied that you really didn't have anything to do with it." He made a gesture of protest, but I clapped my hands together to cut him off. "Second, I made a promise that I'd try to find out who did do it."

"A promise to who?"

"To me," Nana said fiercely. "He promised me."

"Damsels," Toby said. It didn't sound chivalrous.

"The girl was destroyed," I said. "Somebody broke her systematically, one little bone at a time. Somebody who took his time about it. Somebody who enjoyed it."

"Okay, okay," Toby said. "You don't have to be so goddamned vivid. I'll admit that I get a little out of hand from time to time, but I couldn't do anything like that." He put his hands out, palms up, his blue eyes wide and earnest. "Ask anyone."

Nana snorted.

"Damn it, Nana, you know it's true," Toby said.

"Somebody did it, Toby," she said.

"We all know it wasn't me," he said. He looked around the room. Nana looked out the window. Saffron was staring down into her coffee cup as if she expected to find a sugar cube floating on its surface.

"Don't we?" he demanded. "Does anybody here really think it was me?"

"You, you, you," Nana said, still facing the mountains. "That's all you ever talk about. If you'd delivered the Gettysburg address, it would have been about you."

"I know you didn't do it," Saffron said grandly. "You were with me."

"The whole time," I said.

"We've been over this," Toby said.

"The whole time," Saffron said.

"Maybe you did it together," Nana said.

The great lady went out the window fast. "You little gook cunt," Saffron said, getting up. I reached over and put my hand on her forehead and pushed. She sat back down, looking surprised. "Toby," she said imploringly.

"That's enough. If you ladies want to punch each other out, do it outdoors, and wait until we're finished. Now tell me about Amber. Everything you can think of. Where she lived, who she knew, who didn't like her, who she didn't like, where she got her dope, everything you can think of. Nana, you, too. Saffron, we'll start with you. Everybody else keep quiet unless you hear her tell a lie. If you do, speak up."

"I barely knew her," Saffron said sullenly.

"That's lie one," Nana said.

"Explain."

"Amber was always nice to her. She always shared coke with her. She even talked to her. She was the only one who could stand her." Nana sat back, daring Saffron to contradict her.

"Amber was nice to everybody," Toby said in a low voice. I looked at him, surprised.

"That's true," Nana said. Nobody spoke for a minute.

"She really was," Saffron said finally. "She was okay, Amber was." Her chin trembled, and she blinked twice. Nana made a sniffling sound. Even Toby was quiet. He stared down at the rug.

"Oh, hell," Nana said.

"Nana," Saffron said, "I'm sorry I said that. Amber was fine to me. She was the nicest junkie I ever met." A tear slid down her cheek, and she didn't brush it away.

"Poor little jerk," Nana said.

"Remember the garage sale?" Saffron was crying openly now.

"I told Simeon about it last night," Nana said. "That kid just couldn't pick a friend."

"I hated that bugger," Saffron said. "Oh, Jesus, remember Homer?"

"Who?" Nana asked.

"Who was Homer?" I asked Saffron.

"This dork Amber was supporting for a while. Before Claude."

"No," I said to Saffron. "We're going to have to be more specific than that. You're going to tell me everything you know about Amber, and we're going to start with Homer. Then we'll work backward. Then we'll work forward. Until we finish."

Nana looked at Saffron, and Saffron looked at Nana. Then the two of them looked at Toby.

"We're going to start now," I said.

Three hours later, I knew a lot more about Amber. I wasn't sure that any of it would help, but at least I had her address, a place to start looking, and someone who might have seen them drop her there. Toby had volunteered to give Nana a ride into town, and when they left she and Saffron were arm in arm. When women cry over someone they love, they forget who they hate.

I was on the way to the phone to call Eleanor when I heard a whirring sound. After a moment I identified it as the fan in the computer. The screen was dark. I touched a key, and words leapt onto the screen.

SIMEON IS OKAY WITH NANA, it said.

I looked at it for a long time and then went to call Eleanor.