Skin Deep

19

"She's seventy-four," Bernie said, "but she's sharp." His intelligent, slightly startled looking blue eyes peered across the desk at me. Outside the grimy narrow window of his research assistant's office, UCLA went on being UCLA, sane and healthy and full of libraries and beautiful girls. Bernie's impossibly curly hair clustered around his head in tight coils like a convention of Slinky toys, and his sleeveless sweatshirt read K.535. MOZART WROTE IT FOR ME. Intellectual jock chic.

"Who's sharp?" I had a headache.

"The Widow Sprunk."

"Bernie," I said, wincing against the pain, "didn't you used to have a mustache?"

He looked at me with a certain amount of concern. "I don't know how to tell you this, Simeon," he said, "but I still have a mustache." Then he reached up to finger it as if he were making sure.

I rubbed my eyes, trying to ease the hammering in my skull and feeling very tired. "Well, something's different."

"I'll give you a hint. They perched on my nose, and I used to look at you through them."

"Ah," I said. "How in the world are you functioning without them?"

"You may have heard of contacts. Joyce likes me better with them."

"I'm surprised you can blink," I said, remembering the sheer heft of Bernie's almost opaque glasses. "Christ, they must be thicker than potato chips. And who's Joyce?"

"Someone new," he said shortly. "Would you like my ophthalmologist's phone number, or are you interested in the Widow Sprunk?"

He sounded mildly miffed, so I tried a little balm. "How did you get her to talk to you?"

"She's seventy-four, Simeon. Our society being what it is, no one's asked her opinion about anything in years. The natural resource we're wasting, not turning to later-life citizens for wisdom. Joyce is a gerontologist."

"Later-life citizens?"

He made an impatient gesture. "Old people to you," he said. "The reserve of experience they have."

"The living encyclopedia of our times," I suggested.

He looked as though he wished he had a book to slam shut. "Fine," he said, "be snide. Skip the Widow Sprunk. You still owe me almost three hundred dollars." Like most academics, Bernie was very interested in money.

"I'm listening," I said. "I'm just tired."

"Sure. The detective's life. Fast cars and fast women." He'd thrown a series of speculative and seriously envious glances at Nana while she'd used his phone to call a cab to take her back to Topanga. She'd protested, but I'd won. It had taken some doing, and I'd had to do some of the doing in front of Bernie. "It must be especially difficult at your age," he added nastily.

"Tell me about the Widow Sprunk."

He sat back, looking satisfied. "The Widow Sprunk has a great-nephew named, as I'm sure you've guessed, Jack Sprunk. The great-nephew-Jack, in other words-is in this case the son of her husband's mother's son. Her husband's mother's third son. Out of four."

I sighed. Genealogy was not my strong point, but it was one of Bernie's Great Themes. His mother, who had fed me regularly when Bernie and I were undergraduates, could regale a snoring dinner table for hours with tales about seventh cousins twice removed who had married into obscure offshoots of the Rothschild clan and had gone on to invent the piano or the oboe or something. The stories were equal in complexity to Chinese interlocking rhymes because just when you thought they were finally over and you could stop pretending to chew and say something, the couple had children, and the children went on to invent harmony. In classical China, some interlocking rhymes had gone on for years.

"And Jack was the husband's brother's son's third son. Did you get that?"

"Good thing we're not into exponentials," I said. "We'd be at the sixth power by now."

Bernie raised an admonitory hand. "We've gotten to Jack Sprunk, in case you hadn't noticed."

"I'm all ears, except for a few remaining shreds of intellect."

"Save what you've got left," Bernie said. "You'll need it. And do you know why? Of course you don't. Jack Sprunk was deeply defective in the intellect department."

"Hell, Bernie," I said. "I already know Toby. Speaking mentally, he could stand on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Newton, and he'd still be shorter than Billy Barty."

"You're not listening. Jack Sprunk was seriously shortchanged. This was a Centigrade IQ. If you asked him how many fingers he had on his right hand, you would have had to give him an error factor of plus or minus two. We're talking about a permanent fourth-grader here."

I sat up. "Oh," I said.

"He got to high school by an act of collective charity," Bernie said. He looked pleased with himself, an expression that allowed his gold right front tooth to glint rakishly. "No one had the heart to flunk him. Small town and all that, you can't make the kid study harder unless you're a heartless sonofabitch, which there aren't any of in small towns, because he wasn't capable of studying harder. The best he could do with his books was carry them home and bring them back again. Which was good practice, because whether he ever graduated or not, he was going to wind up moving heavy objects aimlessly from room to room in his father's hardware store, so why not pass him?"

He paused dramatically.

"So he passed," I said a little impatiently.

"In a manner of speaking. He passed out of sight." He looked smug enough to choke.

"Bernie, if you don't stop being cryptic, I'm going to steal your notes and leave."

"He only had one friend in school," Bernie said. "The bad boy, naturally, the kid who could tell old Jack what to do for his own evil ends." He raised his eyebrows Groucho style. "This was the absolutely worst kid in the whole school. One morning the town woke up-rurally early, no doubt-and poor, dumb Jack Sprunk and the other kid were gone."

"And the other kid's name?"

"Pepper."

That made two Peppers and one Peeper. "That was his first name?"

"Last."

"Bobby Pepper," I said.

"Well, shit," Bernie said. "If you already knew that, why'd you let me keep talking?"

"I didn't know it. I guessed. You've done great. You've earned every nickel."

"Hey, allow me a point once in a while. Do you want me to go on?" He squinted elaborately through his new contacts at a black plastic runner's watch. The watch he usually wore was made of four pounds of steel. I had a feeling Joyce was into fitness.

"You mean there's more?" I asked submissively.

"Sure there is, the best part as far as the Widow Sprunk is concerned."

"Do we have to keep calling her the Widow Sprunk? Isn't that sexist or something?"

"Clara," he said sulkily. "Clara Sprunk."

"So what was the best part for Ms. Sprunk?"

"If I'd called her Ms., she would have hung up on me."

"So you called her Clara. You devil, you."

"I called her Mrs. Sprunk. Simeon, even money goes just so far."

"Sorry, Bern. You mean that Bobby Pepper showed up on TV one night, but his name was Toby Vane."

"That's one-third of it. And since you're being so insufferable, I'll tell you the other two-thirds out of order. First, or actually second, chronologically speaking, some little twit from Hollywood who said he was Toby Vane's personal press agent-"

"Dixie Cohen?" I said, wondering whether Dixie had known that Toby wasn't really Jack Sprunk.

"No, some guy named Chubb. Bertram Chubb," he added, consulting his notes. "Mrs. Sprunk said he sounded like he was wearing a bow tie. You'd like Mrs. Sprunk."

"And what did Bertram Chubb do?"

"He called the town's mayor. Did I mention that the town is called Crooked Elbow?"

"Crooked Elbow?"

"Crooked Elbow, Montana. There's a story behind it."

"I'm sure there is. Maybe later."

"The mayor is also the barber. Barbers talk, as I'm sure you know."

"I didn't even know there were still barbers. I thought they were all stylists now."

"In Montana, they're still barbers. Anybody calling himself a stylist would be quarantined."

"Probably a good idea."

"Well, Bertram Chubb asked Mr. Ingstad-that's the barber's name, lot of Norwegians up in Montana, apparently — whether the town wouldn't like to host a big homecoming parade for Toby Vane."

"And what did the barber say to Bertram Chubb?"

"He said thanks, but no, thanks. He said, to paraphrase, that Crooked Elbow would receive the return of Toby Vane with mixed emotions, and that the mixture would be one part fear and two parts loathing. He said that he couldn't guarantee Toby's personal bodily safety, much less a ticker-tape parade."

"And Mrs. Sprunk knows all this."

"As I believe I've already said, barbers talk."

"I'm surprised it didn't make the papers."

"It'll never make the papers. As far as the good people of Crooked Elbow, Montana, are concerned, Bobby Pepper, AKA Toby Vane, doesn't exist. They'd like to keep it that way."

"But he must have had some family. Even bad boys have family."

Bernie put a defensive hand, palm down, over the four-by-five cards containing his notes. "Can you read upside down?" he asked in a suspicious tone of voice.

"Bernie, I couldn't read your handwriting right-side up."

"Well, Bobby's family is the first part of the story, chronologically speaking. There are no longer any Peppers in Crooked Elbow."

"Is that so?" I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

"There were five little Peppers to begin with. Bobby, two sisters, Mommy, and Daddy. Daddy Pepper was apparently someone who, in a larger town, would have been confined to a small white room relatively early in his career, minus his belt and shoelaces. He just loved to knock the shit out of women."

"I know some of this already," I said. "In L.A. or New York, he would have been classified as a psychotic, probably irreversible. In Crooked Elbow, people just thought he was mean."

Bernie looked across the desk at me. "This is pretty sordid stuff."

"I'll survive," I said. "Just tell me about the Peppers."

"Daddy clubbed the two girls until they ran away," Bernie said distastefully. "Nobody in town knows where they went, apparently they were pretty careful about that. They covered their tracks and went, about a year apart. That left Bobby and Mommy to take whatever Daddy wanted to dish out."

"Poor Mommy," I said. "So what happened?"

"Bobby finally ran away. Nobody would have looked very hard for him, Mrs. Sprunk said. But Jack was gone, too, and him they were worried about. It was winter, and there'd just been a blizzard. They were afraid he might have lost his way and frozen to death. They went around checking snowdrifts and looking down wells. About three days later, they found out that the Pepper farmhouse had burned down."

"No," I said.

"Because they lived so far from anything or anyone, and because of the storm, no one went out there until someone suggested that's where Jack might be. Even then it took them a day to get there. Roads were bad, cars wouldn't start, the wind chill factor was around absolute zero. Real frontier days, you know?"

I nodded. I was even more tired than I had realized, but I'd forgotten about my headache. Now that I thought about it, it came back.

"Well, the house was gone. Just two walls standing and part of one room. The room that was left was the whole original house. It had been built out of sod about a hundred years before. The rest of the place was wood, and it caught like cellophane."

"Who was in the room that was standing?" I said, knowing the answer.

"Mrs. Pepper. Simeon, she'd been tied up. She was partially burned, but they could see that she'd been tied hand and foot. Like a heifer, Mrs. Sprunk said." He swallowed.

"With clothesline," I said.

Bernie flipped through his notes. "Gee," he said. "I didn't ask what kind of rope it was."

"It was clothesline," I said. "Take my word."

"Does that mean something? Obviously it does."

"Is there more? Are we finished, or is there more?"

"Sure there's more. If there weren't, your boy would be in jail. The house had been doused with gasoline. Halfway between the house and the garage, up to his shoulders in snow, they found Daddy Pepper. He was as frozen as most fresh fish. They had to break his fingers to get the gasoline can out of his hands. Mrs. Sprunk said he got lost in the snow in his own backyard. Whiteout or something. Case closed."

"The clothesline had been taken down," I said. "He needed it."

"What's all this about clothesline?"

"Skip it," I said. "After I leave, shut the door and forget about it." I stood up and reached into my pocket. Trying to keep my hands from shaking, I peeled off three hundred dollars of Stillman's and Toby's money. Then I added another hundred.

"What's that for?" Bernie asked. "It was only three hundred, actually two eighty-five. I had my watch running the whole time."

"Use it to clean your clothes. Clean your desk. Send the phone to the cleaner's, if you like. Clean everything you used or touched while you were working for me. I'm sorry, Bernie. I shouldn't have gotten you involved. Apologize to Joyce for me. Next time, we'll all go to Anna Maria's for Italian."

"Great," he said. "And what about you? What are you going to do?"

"Me?" I said. "I'm going for a run."

I ran six miles, maybe the fastest six miles of my life. The Sunset Boulevard uphill, about six-tenths of a mile at a grade of about roughly forty percent, was the hardest. I skipped the sauna but made up for it with an extra-long shower. Then, with a towel wrapped around my middle, I called the High Velocity set at Universal and talked to Dolly. Toby was there, she said. They'd been there since eight-thirty.

"Has he been out of your sight?"

"Not since last night."

"What about the big guy, the stand-in? John," I added, since Dolly's silence indicated a certain level of confusion.

"He's here. He's across the stage from me now. They're setting up a shot."

"Has he been there all day?"

"Gosh, Simeon, I don't know. You didn't say anything about watching him."

"Forget it. Try to talk Toby into keeping John with him for the rest of the day. Maybe even after work."

"Sure, but why? Has he got something to do with it?"

"Yes," I said. Dolly was asking another question when I hung up.

I dialed my house and got my answering machine. After my idiotic message was over, I said, "Nana, it's me. Pick up the phone, would you?"

"H'lo, Simeon," she said. She sounded drowsy. "What time is it?"

"A little after two. How are you doing?"

"I fell asleep in the sun. It's nice up here. Somebody named Eleanor called."

"Shit," I said. "Did you pick up the phone?"

She laughed. "You peckerhead. Of course not. I just listened after the machine picked up."

"Good. Keep doing that. I don't want you to talk to anybody but me, not even if somebody asks for you. Especially not if somebody asks for you."

"Nobody knows I'm here," she said a trifle anxiously.

"Don't be silly," I said to reassure her. "We're just being extra careful."

"Okay. What if there's a call for you that sounds important?"

"Listen to the machine and write down the name and number. I'll call in from time to time to check. Pick up the phone when you hear me."

"What are you going to do while I work on my tan lines?"

"I'll tell you after I do it."

"You're not going to be silly, are you? I mean, you're not going to stick out your big thick neck or anything."

"My neck is not thick."

"I'd like it even if it weren't. Take care of it for me."

"At last," I said. "A reason to live."

"What time will you be home? I could make something to eat."

"Don't plan on it. I'll be there when I get there, but I'll keep in touch. Go back into the sunshine."

"Maybe I'll work on getting rid of my tan lines instead. Nobody can see me."

"I like tan lines," I said, visualizing hers.

"Your kind always does. When you get back I'll model them for you. Front and back."

"Good-bye, Nana."

She kissed the mouthpiece and hung up. I readjusted my towel in front and strolled back through the locker room, hoping that no one would get the wrong idea. At any rate, no one whistled at me.