Skin Deep

18

So Saffron was a liar. It wasn't the first time I'd heard it, and it didn't mean as much as it would have if I hadn't talked to the Peeper, but it put her ahead of Pepper on my list of people to bother. The best time to catch all the ladies with their guards down was in the morning, so I woke Nana with a hot cup of coffee and a boatload of good intentions at six-thirty. The coffee went down quickly, and the good intentions hoisted anchor and set sail when she shrugged the sheet from her shoulders, placed the hot cup between her breasts for a moment, and then removed it and invited me to warm my unacceptable nose. "No gentleman has a cold nose," she said.

Following the dictates of etiquette, I warmed my nose.

It was nine-twenty, and we were both sporting satisfied Toby-class grins by the time we coasted down Topanga Canyon Boulevard toward the sea. As we hit the Pacific Coast Highway an offshore breeze kicked up, right on cue, fracturing the sunlit ocean skin into a tangled riot of scattered light. Two surfers slid gracefully down the smooth slope of a single wave.

The PCH was clogged with the usual rush-hour glut, a ten-mile-long line of cars two abreast, their drivers staring straight ahead at the rear end of the car in front, ignoring the hypnotic blue expanse of the Pacific, minds full of columns of figures, morning meetings, and the possibility of a pink slip at the end of the day.

"Where are they all going?" Nana said, surveying the traffic. "Why don't they just stay here? Why don't we just stay here?"

"They've got things to do," I said as the light changed and I eased Alice out into the left-hand lane heading south. "Money to make, promises to keep. Miles to go before they sleep."

"I know that one," she said. "That poet with all the white hair."

"Kris Kringle?"

"Something like that, something about winter." She was wearing white shorts that had miraculously materialized from her purse and one of my shirts, so big on her that its shoulders hung to her elbows. Her hipbones jutted beneath the belt loops of the shorts. A wisp of black hair, still damp from her, or our, shower, was plastered to her cheek, nestled into the curved shadow below her cheekbone. I reached over and gently lifted it loose. It promptly fell back into precisely the same place. It knew where it belonged.

She turned her head and leaned over to nuzzle my neck as I tried to concentrate on not rear-ending the convertible Mercedes in front of me. The retro at the wheel was putting his top down so everybody could see him talking on his car phone. "What I need now," Nana was saying, "is a complex carbohydrate."

"For instance?"

"For instance, pizza."

"At this hour?"

"At any hour you might care to name. With pepperoni and lots of extra garlic."

"Not until I get a convertible."

She pulled a long strand of hair down and gnawed at it. We'd crept maybe half a mile. "Koreans eat garlic for breakfast," she said. "Do you like me?"

"When you're straight."

"I'm always straight. Even when I'm loaded out of my mind, I'm straight."

"Compared to what?"

"Well, Toby. Or Saffron. I'm straighter at four-thirty Saturday morning than Saffron ever was in Sunday school, if she went to Sunday school, which I doubt. The crucifix would have jumped from the wall."

"Speaking of Saffron," I said.

"Do we have to?"

"You're the one who wanted to come along. You could have spent the day sunbathing, brushing up your computer skills, seducing my birds."

"I wanted to be with you," she said. I shut up. A minute later she giggled. "Boy," she said, "are your buttons up front."

On Chatauqua I turned left and headed up to Sunset, hoping for a stretch of open road. We were lucky. For fifteen minutes or so we stayed within hailing distance of the speed limit, winding between eucalyptus trees, their tall crowns browsing the sky. Normally I like eucalyptus, but now all I could think was that they, too, were operating under false pretenses: the most Californian of all California trees, they'd been imported from Australia. Well, at least they hadn't changed their name.

"What's Saffron's real name?" I said as Nana twisted the dial of Alice's radio in search of heavy metal. She settled for something that sounded like an alcoholic's trash being emptied at four a.m. and sat back. "Jackie, I think," she said. "We're not what you'd call close. I think it's something dykey like Jackie."

"Jackie," I said. "Jack."

"Jack who?"

"Jack Sprunk. Toby, in other words."

"Look out for that stupid cat," she said, pointing through the windshield at a battered tabby scampering suicidally across the road. "Who's Jack Sprunk?"

"Toby Vane. Wake up, Nana. That's his real name."

She turned up the radio as an electric guitarist did a remarkably realistic imitation of a corpse's fingernails being dragged down a drainpipe. "I don't think so," she said.

I turned the radio down and slapped her hand as she reached for the volume knob. "You don't think what?"

"That Toby was ever a Jack. I think he was a Bob."

"Bob?" I said stupidly.

"Or Bobby. Maybe Bobby. Since he's Toby now, maybe he was Bobby then."

"Why Bobby?"

"Well, you know, Toby's such a dumb name. If he'd been a Bob, maybe now he'd be a Tobe."

"But why not Jack?"

"Because he used to be Bobby. When he told me that shitarooni story, you know, the one about the stove, I told it to you in the restaurant, he said Bobby. He said his father called him Bobby when he tied him up. He said, 'We'll come back when we smell Bobby burning,' or something like that." She sat back. "Am I going to get a pizza or not?"

"Not. Not until lunch, anyway. You're certain he said Bobby and not Jack?"

"They don't sound very much alike, you know. Even if I think in Korean sometimes, I can tell Bobby from Jack. Just like I can tell Kris Kringle from Robert Frost."

"How loaded was he?"

"Loaded enough to tell me something personal for a change, but not loaded enough to get his own name wrong. I mean, nobody gets that loaded."

She turned the volume up again, and I turned it back down. Her left hand landed lightly on my thigh, and her nails toyed with my inseam. "Ever do it in a car?" she said.

"More times than I can count." She yanked her hand away. "Let me think for a minute." I did.

"Okay," she said. "I'll bite. I always told myself I'd never ask a man this question, no matter how much he looked like he was thinking, but I'll make an exception in your case." She furrowed her brow and looked intense. "Simeon," she said, "what are you thinking about?"

"Why Toby lied to me about his name."

"Yaah," she said. "Toby couldn't tell the truth to the bathroom mirror. He said his name was Jack?"

"Jack Sprunk."

She shrugged. "Who could make up Jack Sprunk? Maybe he was lying to me."

"Bobby what?"

"Who knows? He was a little kid in that story. Little kids don't have last names. Is this important?"

"I don't know. Yes, I do. Anything that has to do with Toby is important now."

"So why are we going to see Saffron?"

"To learn something about Toby." I reached over and turned up the volume. Cats fought in stereo.

Saffron's neighborhood looked parched and curled at the edges in the morning light. The same cars were parked on the same brown lawns. Tools, engine blocks, and more esoteric components of the process of internal combustion glinted in the sun. A group of brown-skinned guys hunkered down in front of one of the cars, looking justifiably bewildered.

I stopped Alice illegally in front of a fire hydrant. A four-alarm fire was just what the block needed. Saffron's apartment house, a three-story affair made out of aquamarine Gunite with something sparkly mixed into it, reared rectangular in front of us. It looked like a swimming pool yanked inside out. Nana shut the passenger door behind her and took my hand.

"Now what?"

"Now we look around a little. Then we wake up Sleeping Beauty."

"There's nothing to look at. I mean, Drab with a capital D. Imagine living here?"

"People do."

"Well, that's a piercing insight. All these years, my life has been on hold while I waited for a man who could say something like that to me."

"Maybe you'd prefer to wait in the car," I said. "Or under it."

"Sorry. It's just that it's hard to keep a lid on all this irony. Lead the way and I'll be good."

The apartment house had seen its best days in the first forty-eight hours or so after it was built, sometime in the late fifties. It formed a garish U around a paved central courtyard with a minuscule pool in its center. Dying palms sprouted despairingly here and there. The concrete surrounding the pool was cracked and broken. Weeds shouldered their spiky way up through the openings, heading single-mindedly for the sunlight. You don't fool around with photosynthesis.

Once blue water might have sparkled in the pool, but now it was a sun-baked parody of coolness and wet. The same old trash lay jumbled in its bottom: cardboard cartons, paper cups and napkins, plastic utensils from fast-food outlets. What was new was a humming of flies, bluebottles, hundreds of them, crawling all over the cartons at the deep end beneath the diving board.

"God, that's grungy," Nana said. "Simeon? I have a request. Get me out of here. As soon as possible."

"As soon as we finish with Jackie. Or whatever her name is."

"She's in 1-E," she said.

"You've been here before."

"Loads party. Lots of vodka and head banging. But at least there was pizza and music you wouldn't like. And it was nighttime, so it didn't look so bad. There's a lot to be said for the dark."

I followed her to the door I already knew, and she stepped aside so I could knock. I had knocked three or four times before I saw that the screen over the sliding aluminum window was missing and that the window was open. A white curtain made of some indestructible synthetic was drawn inside. It billowed faintly in the breeze.

"Girl knows how to sleep," Nana said.

"Hold on. I'll show you a private detective's trick. Would you like to close your eyes so I don't give away any secrets of the trade?"

"Oh, sure," she said, putting a hand over her face. "I can hardly see through my fingers at all."

"If you peek, you'll ruin Christmas forever."

"I'm a Buddhist. Trust me anyway."

I leaned through the window and pushed the curtain aside. The first thing I saw was the screen, lying on the floor just inside the window. The second thing I saw was the devastation.

"Nana," I said, "get out of here."

"Oh, look," she said at the same time. "We don't need any tricks. The door's not locked." She gave it a shove, and then she said, "Oh. Oh, no."

She stepped back, and I put a hand on her shoulder. "I don't think you should be here."

Inside I could hear still more flies buzzing, cousins to the ones in the pool.

"Well, I am," she said. "Let's get it over with." She pushed me forward and followed a single step behind. I closed the door behind us and locked it.

Saffron was in the bedroom, facedown and still, the center of a humming vortex of bluebottles. She had been cut, and she had been broken. From the extent of the stains-still damp-on the mattress, she had probably been dead before her joints had been snapped backward and her bones had been methodically fractured. It was a small mercy, but it was the only mercy she'd been shown.

Her ankles were tied with clothesline.

"This can't be happening," Nana said from the doorway. Her voice was faint.

"If you'd been home last night," I said, "it would have happened to you. Help me turn her over."

"Why? I mean, I can't. Simeon, I can't touch her."

"Well, you're going to touch her. Goddammit, this isn't a movie. You can't head for the lobby every time things get sticky. Get over here and grab her feet. Or else go to the car and wait there, and stay out of my hair from now on."

She looked down at what was left of Saffron and then back at me. She licked her lips. "Why should we turn her over? I mean, what's under her?"

"If I'd killed her," I said, "it's where I'd leave the picture. Right where the cops would find it."

Her eyes widened. "The picture. You mean, like in Toby's pocket."

"Come on. We can theorize later."

She extended her hands far in front of her even before she started to cross the room. I went to the other end of the bed and reached under Saffron's shoulders. Her blood was thick and sticky on my hands. "On three," I said, feeling like someone about to try to lift a piano. Nana touched Saffron's bound ankles and recoiled involuntarily. Running on sheer will, she reached back down and got a grip. Her eyes were closed.

"To your right, now. One, two, three." We both pulled, and Saffron rolled heavily onto her side and then, slowly, onto her back.

I was wrong.

There wasn't one Polaroid there. There were two.

Both of them were coated in blood.

Nana swayed as I started to wipe them with my sleeve. "Knock it off," I said, and then the pounding on the front door began. It echoed through the empty apartment.

A moment's silence. Then it began again.

"Simeon," Nana said, "What about let's go."

"Great," I said, "a sound idea. But go where?"

From the front of the apartment, a bass voice bellowed, "Open up. Police."

"Out the back," she said. "There's a back door. Simeon, let's go."

We went. We doubled over as we passed through the living room, looking like a couple of guerrilla fighters trapped in short grass and hoping that no one was looking through the window. A boot cracked against the door as Nana led me through an abbreviated kitchen. God was in his heaven for once, and there was a door there.

It was standing open. I closed it behind me.

We tripped over one another, rolling like Chinese acrobats end over end down one of the few remaining Hollywood slopes. Foxtails pierced my clothes, and the spikes of puncherweeds made holes in my skin. Nana wound up on top of me, grass projecting at odd angles from her hair. We were in a dusty cluster of brush and eucalyptus. The apartment house was out of sight.

"Now what?" she said.

I gave her a quick kiss. "Now we dust each other off and take the longest possible way back to the street like a couple with nothing on their minds more important than when the post office opens. Then we get into Alice and drive very slowly away." I tugged the legs of her shorts down to a respectable level. Cops are men, too.

"But Saffron."

"There's nothing we can do for Saffron."

We spent a few seconds doing some perfunctory tidying. Sirens wailed in the distance.

"Who called the police?" she asked.

"The same person who killed Saffron. He wanted them to find these."

"What are they?"

"They're pictures." I wiped the first one off. "Of Saffron." I wiped the other one. "Oh," I said. "Sure."

Nana didn't look. "What is it?"

"The other one's Amber." Nana and I started down toward the boulevard. I put the pictures in my hip pocket and took her hand in mine. Just a couple of Hollywood lovers out for an early stroll.

"There goes half of Toby's alibi," I said.