Skin Deep

9

I'd had lazier weekends. After finishing with Toby, Nana, and Saffron, I'd made an arrangement to keep Toby under wraps for the duration of Saturday and, probably, Sunday as well. Then I'd fooled around with the computer, writing down practically everything the three of them had told me about Amber. Sooner or later, though, I was supposed to do something about it.

Well, the first thing to do was check the alibi.

Amber had apparently been shifting from place to place, and when they told her they were going to take her home- according to Saffron-she hadn't known where she wanted to go. That had the ring of truth to it; I didn't think she could have found her leg in the dark. After some futzing around, they'd taken her to Pepper's place and let her off. The last they'd seen of her she was stumbling toward the door.

The apartment house was on Fountain, on a block where paint was allowed to peel and most of the shrubbery had gotten a jump on the summer heat by dying months before. The building was two stories high, built in the shape of a V open to the street. Someone was frying bacon when I climbed out of Alice, several pounds of bacon by the smell of it. It was almost two. People get up late in Hollywood.

There was no answer when I thumped on the door of Pepper's apartment, which was to be expected. I'd been told she spent most of her nights abroad.

That left the Peeper, as Saffron had called him, an old man who lived on the second floor in the unit nearest the street. "I think he's got his finger caught in the window," she'd said. "I've seen him every time I swung by, and Pepper says he's always there. One of those, you know, voyers. One hand stuck in the window and the other one down his pants."

I knocked again, looked down at my watch, and glanced up at the Peeper's window. A white curtain dropped into place. There were stairs at the juncture of the V, and I climbed them two at a time, tiptoed to his window, and ran my nails down the screen.

The curtain flapped back, and I found myself inches away from a pair of very bright eyes set into an absolutely hairless head. "Well, hey," I said. "How you doing?"

"Who's askin'?" The voice sounded a lot like my fingers on the screen: scratchy and dry, as though it hadn't been used in years.

"It's about the girls downstairs," I said.

"There's a lot of girls downstairs." He sounded guilty, but he didn't drop the edge of the curtain.

"Those girls," I said, thumbing back toward Pepper's door.

"The hootchy-koo girls," he said. Then he laughed briefly, a sound like someone stepping on a glass in a paper sack. "What about 'em?"

"Oh, come on. Weren't the cops here today?"

"You with the cops?"

"How else would I know they were here?"

"You didn't get around to me the first time," he said. "Sloppy work. Well, you might as well come in. Lot of nosy folks here, don't want 'em to see me talking to you through the window." The curtain fell back into place. "Door's open," he rasped from behind it.

When I opened it, hundreds of girls smiled at me. Centerfolds gleamed down at me from the walls, all skin and teeth and amateurishly come-hither eyes. "Quite a collection," I said.

"They can't move very fast, either," he said, giving me the laugh again. He was sitting in a lawn chair, dressed in a white T-shirt and white boxer shorts. An aluminum walker straddled the carpet in front of him. His calves were thinner than his forearms.

"Stop looking," he said. "You'll be old, too, you know. Sooner than you think. What happened to the hootchy-koos?"

"One of them got into trouble last night."

"The one who came home or the other one?"

"Did one of them come home?"

"Cops," he said. "No manners atall." He pronounced it as one word. "Yeah, Mr. Question Man, one of 'em came home."

"Which one?"

"Slow down. You think I just sit here and stare out the window?"

"Yes."

"He, he, he," he wheezed. "Well, I do. The one who dopes all the time. She can't walk no better than me."

"What time?"

He pursed his lips, making them disappear into a vortex of wrinkles. "Eleven," he said, "maybe eleven-ten."

"She went into the apartment?"

"Sure. Where else is she gonna go? Up here?"

"You know for sure it was the dopey one?"

"I was watching, wasn't I? Dropped her keys twice, kicked the door. Seen her do it before."

"Who was she with?"

"Nobody. Went in alone, for a change."

"Did someone drop her off?"

"That's a different question, ain't it? One of them little red cars."

"Who was in it?"

"Two people. One driving and one sitting, like usual. They drove off when she got to the door."

I took a deep breath. "Did she leave again?"

"Yup. Those girls don't stay home."

"When?"

"Pardon?" His eyes glittered maliciously.

"When did she leave?"

"Fifteen minutes. Walked out and turned left. That enough for you?"

"Was anybody waiting for her?"

"Nope. Staggering around on her own."

"And did she come back?"

"Dead, isn't she?" he asked.

"Why do you ask?"

"Well, she didn't. Come back. And then you cops turn up."

"We do indeed," I said.

"Finished?"

"Yes," I said, pulling the door open again, "I'm finished."

"Not exactly Academy Award time," Norman Stillman was saying in what was supposed to be an incisive tone. "Not exactly Bette Davis in Dark Victory." Neither Dixie Cohen nor I pointed out that Davis had lost that year.

It was the next day. After I'd waved good-bye to the Peeper, who was watching me from his aerie, I'd called my answering machine from a pay phone at Fountain and Vista. Dixie had called and, in the tone of voice Dan Rather might use to announce that Europe had disappeared from the map, told me that Stillman wanted to see me Sunday at nine a.m. At his house.

We were in the den, an inevitably nautical room about the size of Colorado. If it had been any more shipshape, the floor would have rolled beneath our feet. I'd been kept waiting as a further hint that I was not the flavor of the month. After a precise fifteen minutes Stillman had swept in with Cohen in tow. He'd favored me with a well-practiced piercing glare and started right in by getting his Oscars wrong.

"You've only got one job," Stillman continued. "That's to stay with Toby. You've got ten thousand dollars of my money to stay with Toby. So what happens? On the first night out, you let him get away from you, and a girl gets killed."

Dixie clucked reprovingly and shook his head. The two of them were dressed right out of Western Costume: Stillman had come ashore in white slacks and a navy blue blazer with, honest to God, an anchor embroidered on the pocket in metallic thread, and Cohen was wearing yet another corduroy suit. Cord du roy, cloth of the king, come down a peg or two to hang on Dixie Cohen's despair-ridden, unregal figure.

"So?" Stillman said.

"I beg your pardon?" I'd stopped listening a minute ago, thinking about the "girl" who got killed. Stillman raised his eyes heavenward, a not-so-ancient mariner on the lookout for the albatross.

"So why shouldn't I can you right now?" he said.

"Can me. It's Toby's money anyway. He'll be interested to know that you're being so frugal with his residuals."

Stillman was too much of a pro to look surprised that I knew he'd paid me with Toby's money. "His future residuals," he said. "If he's not in prison where he can't collect them. And, by the way, are you threatening me?"

"Norman," Dixie Cohen said warningly.

"I'd like some coffee," I said. "It's early. And yes, I'm threatening you."

There was a moment of silence. Stillman discovered that his cuffs needed adjusting and adjusted them. Dixie thrust his hands deep into his trouser pockets and balled them into fists.

"You'll wreck your pleats," I told him. "It's hard to keep pleats in corduroy."

"Don't I know it," Cohen said wearily. He took his hands out of his pockets.

"Do we have coffee on this boat?" I asked. "Maybe I could have some hard tack or a ship's biscuit to go with it."

Stillman made a small impatient gesture, and Dixie scurried out the door. To avoid looking at me, Stillman went over to a map of the Pacific just like the one in his office and regarded it dramatically. A red pin informed me that the Cabuchon was still in Honolulu. I was wishing I were, too, when he yanked the pin and moved it an inch to the right. California bound.

"You should have a pin for Toby," I said.

He didn't turn to face me. "I thought you were my pin in Toby," he said acidly. "Apparently I was mistaken." I let it ride. Beverly Hills birds sang outside the window. They didn't sound any better than Topanga birds.

"I'm a successful man, Mr. Grist." Stillman finally passed on the Pacific and let his eyes wander around the den, taking in the results of all that success. "I'm not inclined to overlook failure."

"Stop talking like a KGB operative. Toby scammed me. He's good at it. You should know. Anyway, I kept the cops away from him, for now. Of course, that's an omission I can always correct."

"My God, you really are threatening me," Stillman said. He sounded relieved to be on familiar ground. "I'm not without influence, you know. I can have your license."

"What would you do with it?"

Dixie scuttled back in. In Stillman's presence, he seemed to walk sideways, like a crab eyeing a tourist. "Coffee's on the way," he said.

"That's not the point, and you know it," Stillman said to me. He still hadn't raised his voice. I didn't imagine he ever raised his voice. "The point is-"

"The point is that you're blowing smoke. It's only a matter of time before the cops get around to Toby. The boy's got bad habits, and the habits are on record, and the cops aren't stupid. What we should be talking about is where we go from here."

"You mean you don't know?" Dixie said. He sounded disappointed. Stillman went back to the Pacific.

"Sure, I know," I said. "We figure out who killed the young woman."

"A drug addict," Stillman said fastidiously, eyeing an area just north of Guam. I was liking him less by the minute. I hadn't liked him that much to begin with.

"Drug addicts can get killed just like the rest of us," I said. "They probably even object to it."

"That's not my problem," Stillman said.

"Yes, it is," Cohen and I said simultaneously. "Norman," Dixie added respectfully.

"Good for you, Dixie," I said. "You're beginning to figure it out."

"It doesn't make any difference whether he did it or not," Dixie explained to Stillman's back. "Once it gets out that the cops are talking to Toby, it's over. Six years of putting up with him down the toilet."

"Well, I know that," Stillman said nastily. "That's why you geniuses are here, to keep it from getting to Toby. Isn't that what we're talking about?"

"Of course, Norman," Dixie said.

"Well, excuse me," I said. "I thought we were talking about firing me."

"Oh, that," Stillman said, sounding impatient. "That was Dixie's idea." Now it was Dixie's turn to roll his eyes heavenward, but he did it behind Stillman's back.

A stout Hispanic maid came in carrying a silver coffee service, and Stillman tore himself away from the briny deep. Dixie stopped rolling his eyes. "Thank you, Vicenta," Stillman said. There was one cup on the tray. I took it without asking and poured.

Dixie cleared his throat. "I've already had a call, Norman," he said, "from Joanna Link."

Stillman paled beneath his sunlamp tan. "Oh, no," he said. "Anybody but Joanna Link."

"Sorry," Dixie said. "She wants to come to the set tomorrow."

"What have I done?" Stillman said. "I take care of my mother. I contribute to African famine. I give to the Urban League."

"Joanna who?" I said.

They looked at me as though I'd lapsed into Morse code. "Three hundred and fifty papers," Cohen said. "Joanna three hundred and fifty papers Link. Joanna Here's the Fucking News from Hollywood Link."

"Oh," I said. "Joanna Link." I'd never heard of her.

"Keep her away," Stillman said. "How does she know anything, anyway?"

"Keep Joanna Link away?" Cohen said. "I could keep the Huns from the gates of Rome if I had the time, I could keep Heloise from Abelard, but keep Joanna Link away from a story? I'd have to kill her. Not that I haven't thought about it."

"How does she know anything?" I asked.

"The young lady's picture was in the paper this morning," Dixie said. "It's the kind of story they love, nude dancer battered." He sounded like Toby. "As luck would have it, one of Link's spies, some two-bit paparazzi, has a picture of Toby and this dame. Going into Nicky Blair's, can you imagine that?"

"Nicky Blair's?" Stillman parroted. "Toby took this junkie to Nicky Blair's?" He put both hands over his face. "He's got a death wish."

"Trouble is," I said, "she's the one who's dead. And she's not a junkie anymore."

"Spare me the self-righteous posturing. I've got enough on my mind. So you stay on the payroll, is that settled?"

"Not quite. I need an assistant."

"What time is Link supposed to be there?" Stillman asked Cohen nervously. "An assistant for what?" he asked me.

"Three o'clock," Cohen said. "We're on Stage Six tomorrow."

Stillman looked at his nautical watch, as if counting the hours between Sunday morning and Monday afternoon. Maybe the watch had Monday on it. It was big enough. "Does Toby know?"

"Not yet."

"Has he got much to do?"

"About twelve pages."

"Dialogue or action?"

"Dialogue. Including the scene with the little kid."

"Twelve pages, the little kid, and Link? He'll plotz."

"To watch Toby," I said.

Stillman looked at me blankly. "What?"

"To watch Toby. I need an assistant to watch Toby."

"I've missed something," Stillman said. "Something's got past me here. You're supposed to be watching Toby."

"Think, Mr. Stillman. How can I bird-dog Toby twenty-four hours a day and figure out who killed the girl? It's two different jobs, or at least you'd better hope it is. If it isn't, Joanna Link's going to have a very big story."

"Joanna Link," Dixie echoed, a kind of lugubrious verbal knee jerk.

"Dixie?" Stillman said doubtfully.

"I think you've gotta let him try it, Norman. It's not that much more money, considering."

"Exactly how much?" Stillman made a tent with his well-buffed fingers and regarded me through it. It was a gesture he'd put some work into.

"Three fifty a day." The woman's asking price was one fifty, but she'd have to put up with Toby, and I didn't feel like saving Stillman money.

"Jesus, I know agents I can get for that much."

"Good. Get an agent."

"Don't get huffy," Stillman said.

"Agents." Dixie made it sound like a profanity.

"Oh, damn it," I said, "don't nickel-and-dime me." I stood up. "We're lazing around here talking, and there are things I should be doing. Like it or not, the police are working their way toward Toby. Either you want to protect the goose who lays the golden eggs or you don't. Three fifty it is, and it's cheap at the price, considering the alternative."

Stillman gave me something that would have passed for a soothing smile if the room had been a lot dimmer. "We're just haggling," he said. "Nothing personal. Call your man in. I'll leave a pass so he can get on the lot."

"She'll come on the lot with Toby," I said. "She's been sitting on top of him since three yesterday afternoon."

The smile scattered to the four winds. "She?" Stillman said. "You're putting a woman with Toby?"

"She can handle him."

Stillman pursed his lips and then nodded. "Good," he said. "No more haggling." He worked up the smile again. "But think ahead, okay? I like a man who thinks ahead."

I smiled back. "And I like a man who likes a man who thinks ahead."

"Done, then," Stillman said. He walked briskly out of the room.

"Thank heaven," Dixie said. "That was getting disgusting." He picked up his oversize briefcase and gave it a tug to see if it had gained any weight during the conversation.

"Dixie," I said, "what in the world are you doing here?"

He looked surprised. "Earning my daily bread. Quite a lot of it, in fact."

"You're too mournful to be a press agent."

"I'm not a press agent." He drummed his fingers on the side of the case. "I'm a public relations consultant. Norman is my only client."

"You're a schoolteacher," I said. "Heloise and Abelard indeed. I know a teacher when I see one. That chronic expression of impending disaster can only be acquired in a classroom. And then there's all that corduroy."

The closest thing I'd ever seen to a smile scudded briefly across Dixie's face. It was faster than the Roadrunner with the Coyote in full pursuit with his Acme rocket boosters on. "I'm an English teacher," he said. "Was an English teacher."

"Allow me to repeat my question. What are you doing here?"

He thought for a moment. "Othello," he said.

"As in the Moor of Venice?"

"That's the one. Good for you."

"Well, it's not a very common name."

"I don't think I'd like it," he said. "Othello Cohen."

"Not much of a ring to it. You'd probably have to change it."

"Othello Schwartz, maybe. That's a joke. Schwartz means black in German."

"I know. Would you like to fill in the blanks?"

"I was Norman's English teacher. He wasn't Norman then, which is to say that he was Norman, but he wasn't the Norman you've met."

"And whom we all know and love."

"Norman's all right. He really likes the shows he makes."

"He'd have a lot on his conscience if he didn't."

"Norman needed some polish back then. He's pretty slick now, don't you think?"

"Slicker than an Olympic rink."

"Well, twelve years ago, he was pure Jersey. That was before it was fashionable to be Jersey, if you're old enough to remember. If asked, he'd have requested a few of dese and a few of dose. He pronounced burger with an o and an i, heavy on the i. He'd just come out to L.A. and he was planning to be a big shot, and he was smart enough to know that he didn't sound smart. Plus you could have floated his frame of reference in a thimble."

"So he went to school."

"Cal State University out in Northridge. Far enough from Hollywood that he wouldn't run into anybody he might know or eventually want to know, but closer than, say, Tucson. He walked into my Intro to Lit class and stayed. The next semester he was in all three of my classes. I've never had such an avid student. He listened so hard he made me forget what I was saying. You know, most of the kids are just sitting there letting the teacher provide the background music while they tune up their hormones. The estrogen level in the average undergrad classroom is higher than Alpha Centauri."

"I remember. I taught too, for about six weeks."

"Then you know. Well, Norman was different. He was older, of course, but that wasn't it. He sat there and sucked in everything I said. I never saw anybody make so many notes. Later he showed them to me; he'd made up his own form of speedwriting, and he had me practically verbatim. Well, that's flattering to someone who's used to feeling like Muzak. His papers were appalling, but there was so much evident effort that I couldn't flunk him, and so I asked him to come see me during office hours."

"Office hours," I said. "What a quaint concept."

"Yeah. I remember them fondly. It meant there were hours that weren't office hours. So he came, and we talked, and I asked him what he wanted out of school. He'd never said much in class, and I almost laughed out loud when he told me he was there for 'culchuh.' It took me a minute to realize that he meant culture. Pretty snotty reaction for a kid who grew up in Brooklyn, but I hadn't spent much time in the real world then. It was all college, first learning and then teaching.

"What he wanted was a sort of topographic map of the things a cultured person should know about. A Michelin guide to highbrow cocktail conversation, at least by Hollywood standards. I told him he was wasting his time shoveling through 'Piers Plowman' and the lyric poems of Leigh Hunt. L.A. cocktail glasses don't come that deep. Hell, they don't come that deep at Harvard."

We were walking toward the front door now, down a high, vaulted entrance hall. To our left a Spanish archway about fourteen feet wide opened into a sunken living room with the most beautifully buffed oak floor I'd ever seen. Everything in the room was seashell pink except for a chest-high vase of birds of paradise, an enormous ersatz Impressionist portrait of Stillman, a matching picture of a smashing blond lady I took to be Mrs. Stillman, and a wall lined from floor to ceiling with books. I had never been in such a silent house.

"Your legacy?" I said, meaning the books.

Dixie eyed them glumly. "He's read them all, too," he said. "He's like a terrier, just never lets go. We made out a list of about one hundred books and plays he had to read, and I loaned him a copy of H. G. Wells's Outline of History because it was short, so he could connect the dots. Norman went out and bought himself a roll of butcher paper, thirty feet long and five feet wide. He made a historical timeline on it as he read the Wells, and then he entered each of the hundred or so books and a few notes on its author. Damnedest thing you ever saw. In fact. ."

He stopped and turned toward the kitchen. "Vicenta," he called. "Vicenta, por favor?"

After a moment the maid emerged. "Senor Cohen?" She gave him a warmer smile than she'd given Stillman.

"La sala por trabajo," he said in highly inventive Spanish. "Es okay?"

"Porqui no?" She shrugged and preceded us up the stairs.

Upstairs the front of the house was standard millionaire's Mediterranean, four doors leading off a central hallway into bedrooms and guest rooms, presumably with connecting bathrooms. Set into the left-hand hallway wall, the one facing the backyard, was a single door, only a few feet from the top of the stairs. Other than that, the wall was blank. Vicenta knocked once and then opened the door.

A single, enormous room ran the entire length of the house. The far wall was all window, looking out onto palm trees and a pale blue pool. Sprinklers spiraled sparkles across the grass.

The other three walls were books from the floor to waist high. Above the books, five feet wide and running the entire length and width of the room, was an unbroken sheet of paper more than sixty feet long. Three broad stripes ran its length, one blue, one red, one black. There was writing everywhere.

"This year's model," Cohen said. "He's never stopped. The red is history, the blue is science, and the black is the arts-you know, 'culchuh.' "

"Son of a bitch," I said.

"Norman's conquest of Western civilization. You've got to give it to him."

"There should be an award."

Dixie made a gesture that took in the room, house, yard, everything. "He hasn't exactly been stiffed."

"What's that?" I pointed toward a large box about two-thirds of the way down the timeline. The writing was black, and the entry branched off the black line, but the sides of the box were drawn in thick gold lines. It was the only place where a fourth color had been used.

"Take a look," Cohen said. I did. Othello, it said. "Tragedy (1603) in five acts by William Shakespeare (see entry). Themes: good, evil, trust, jealousy. Motorcycles."

"Motorcycles?" I said.

"That was the beginning of Norman Stillman," Dixie said. "Othello was the ninth or tenth thing I had him read. He turned it into a motorcycle movie. Black Angel, he called it. About the black leader of a motorcycle gang, his envious white second in command, and his white mama, if you'll excuse the expression. It was probably the last motorcycle movie to make any money, and it made a fortune. Norman never looked back. Three years later he came and offered me four times my teaching salary to work for him."

"And you took it?"

Cohen looked out the window. "Teaching is for losers," he said. "For losers who don't have to pay alimony and child support." It sounded like something he'd rehearsed.

"It's a good job for the right person."

"I was the wrong person."

"So you've traded in the students for Joanna Link."

Dixie shuddered and glanced once more around the room. "At my present rate of pay, if the interview lasts an hour, Joanna Link comes in at about thirty-five dollars a pound. Even veal doesn't cost that much. I can always sneak looks at her and decide how I want the butcher to cut her up."

He closed the door on the world according to Norman Stillman and went back down the stairs. At the front door, he paused. "Where will you be tomorrow, if you're not going to be with us?"

"Out and around. I'll come back at three to hand-hold Toby through the Link interview if you think it's a good idea."

"All the help we can get," Cohen said. "And you're going to stay with him for the evening, or will your man do it?"

"Woman," I said. "I'll stay with him. We've got an appointment at seven."

"What kind of an appointment?"

"You don't want to know."

"Who says I don't?"

I wiggled my eyebrows at him. "It's a wake."