Skin Deep

1

In that crowd, Mr. Beautiful and the Korean girl shimmered like millionaires in disguise, minor gods slumming incognito.

By seven-thirty, the crowd in question had jammed itself noisily into McGinty's of Malibu, which, all gussied up for the Fourth of July, was even more of a slag heap than usual. Red, white, and blue crepe paper sagged despondently from the rafters. Red, white, and blue beach balls had been tossed into the ropy fishnet that hung from the ceiling. They nestled among seashells, starfish, old floats, weights, and other nautical bric-a-brac to create a landscape that looked like the place where drowned children go to play.

The bunch jostling merrily beneath this doleful composition in primary colors was a cross-section of virtually every objectionable white urban minority. There were guys who called each other "Dude." There were cowboys and cowgals wearing western hats with those infuriating feather sunbursts on them. There were people wearing both sunglasses and earphones. There were yuppies, puppies (yuppies who had tied their dogs outside), and suppies-garden-variety suckers, but with aspirations to urban chic. Members of the last-named club had thoughtfully identified themselves by ordering McGinty's "John Philip Sousa," a tall-glassed, red-white-and-blue error in judgment that, drunk on an empty stomach, was guaranteed to plant the happy patriot several feet beneath the Ould Sod. We had Topanga Canyon creek rats, out from their caves to blow a week's worth of recycled aluminum cans on a red, white, and blue drunk, and we had a patriotic trio of amphetamine burnouts, skeletal, wild-eyed, hoisting imaginary drinks and nattering together in a far corner. We had people who still hadn't run out of patchouli. And every moment more of them poured in from the Pacific Coast Highway outside, drawn to the beach to celebrate the freedom that, for better or for worse, made them possible.

Some seventies retro with lead ears had programmed the jukebox to play "Stairway to Heaven" nine times in a row. He'd also located the volume control. I was halfway into the basket, working simultaneously on drinking my fourth beer, ignoring the music, and flirting with the one of the female bartenders when a ripple of excited voices penetrated Led Zeppelin and drew my attention to the door.

The focus of the flutter seemed to be a man and a woman who had just pushed their way into the bar. The woman was convincing evidence for the Argument from Design: beautiful far beyond the demands of function, maybe Korean, maybe twenty, definitely sensational. She had long, tangled black hair, extravagant cheekbones, and a lower lip that might as well had "Bite me" tattooed on it. Wrapped low around her hips was a short black skirt, and even her knees were perfect. The world is full of beautiful women who keep their knees under cover.

I was trying to rip my eyes off her and get back to my bartender when I noticed the guy. His sun-streaked hair was so perfect I was surprised he took it outdoors. The face framed by the artful tousles looked to be around thirty, deeply tanned and classically handsome, terminating in a chin with a cleft that could have been his fanny's little brother. The really blinding feature, though, was a set of teeth white enough and flawless enough to make me involuntarily close my mouth. The teeth were revealed in a grin that had probably sucked half the wattage from the urban grid. People in Santa Barbara were doing macrame in the dark. Below the neck he was trim and muscled, encased in tight black leather clothes that sported more fringe than all five members of the Buffalo Springfield in their prime. In all, he was just the kind of guy the rest of us hate.

But he seemed popular enough at the moment. People were slapping him on the back as he made his way through the crowd. The guys who call people Dude were giving him soul handshakes, pounding their open palms down into his with a smack that could be heard even over the music.

"Here's Godzilla," the bartender said sourly. It was the first sour thing she'd said, on an evening that was sour enough to parch peaches. She picked up a perfectly clean glass and polished it, turning her back pointedly toward the spot at the bar where room was being made for Mr. and Ms. Beautiful. "Simeon, it's seven-thirty," she said tightly, alerting me to the fact that I had apparently told her my name. I stared down at my glass, wondering whether she'd told me hers. "Why don't you finish up that beer and flee this den of contagion?" she asked, wiping the glass fiercely enough to break it. "Go up on the bluff, where all the nice people are waiting patiently for the fireworks. Watch parents hug their children. Look at young couples in love. Don't hang around here getting drunk with these mutants. What do you say?"

The other bartender, a large and aggressively shapeless female wearing a leather butcher's apron that looked like it had dried on her, gave my bartender a hard bump on the shoulder as she squeezed by to grab a bottle of tequila. "Thanks, Roxanne," she said nastily. "Remind me to do something for you sometime."

"I'll take him next drink, Felicia," Roxanne said. "Okay? We'll trade off." Felicia muttered something that would have made my mother sit up very straight indeed and toted the bottle back down the length of the bar as I refocused on

Roxanne. She reminded me of cream rising. There was something clean and dairy-maidish about her that made me expect her to have a milk mustache. She'd braided her long, loose brown hair for the occasion and had woven red, white, and blue gift-wrap ribbon into the braid. I suppose it was intended to make me feel patriotic. It just made me want to unwrap her.

"Are you listening?" she said a touch sharply.

"Of course," I said, sitting up and looking attentive. In fact, I'd been watching the shadowy little pulse in her throat, which was beating in time to Led Zeppelin, and wondering if she'd get upset if I leaned forward and licked it.

"Then are you going to do it?"

I went to mental replay. "Leave, you mean?"

"Sure."

"Uh," I said, looking at her pulse. "No."

Midway down the bar, Mr. Beautiful tasted his drink and spat it on the floor. He shoved the glass back at Felicia, and she missed it and it toppled off the inside edge of the bar. Standing behind him, the Korean girl looked apprehensive. Felicia looked like she'd enjoy taking Mr. Beautiful's hand off at the elbow with her teeth, but she got a new glass and began to mix. Mr. Beautiful yelled precise instructions over the music.

"Why not?" Roxanne said, taking no notice of the scene behind her even though she'd flinched when the glass shattered.

"Because I belong here," I said. "These are my people. Roxanne," I said, retrieving the name and committing it to whatever was passing itself off as my memory. "Why should I deserve better? I got the blues so bad you could use me for a dye. Jesus, I haven't worked in weeks. Did I tell you I'm a private detective?"

She gave me an assessive squint, then picked up my glass and sloshed the fluid around. "How many of these have you had?"

"Tonight?" I said. "Or in my whole life?"

"Skip it," she said. "You've had four. And yes, you told me you were a private detective. Is that supposed to change my life? How many did you have before you got here?"

"Two," I lied. If you can't lie to a stranger, who can you lie to?

One corner of her mouth lifted, tickling a dimple into revealing itself. "You know," she said, "there's guys you can believe and guys you can't. And who cares, anyway? Half the trouble in this world is caused by believing. Give me more about your blues. Guys with the blues are so, I don't know, nostalgic."

"Hey," I said, warming to the subject, "blues. Did I tell you about my computer?"

"Yeah." She shrugged. "You can't work your computer. So who can work a computer? Dweebs, that's who."

"It cost two thousand bucks. It's the most expensive paperweight I ever owned."

"Paperweight?" she said. "Well, at least that's new." The other corner went up, and she was almost smiling.

"What time do you get off?" I asked.

"Slow down. You also said something about a girlfriend." Jimmy Page was launching into his guitar solo for what seemed like the fortieth time, and I leaned forward to hear. "A girlfriend," she shouted. The man on the stool next to me closed his book and stared accusingly.

"Ex," I said. "Ex-girlfriend." I glared at the guy to my right, and he reopened his book. Sartre, just what I should have expected. Eleanor Chan, my long-standing Significant Other, had wisely decided to take a walk, but if she'd been there, she would have sneered at him. "Ex," I said again, daring the guy to look back up at me.

"You told me about her, even if you don't exactly remember doing it," Roxanne said. "That's a point in your favor, that you told me. Maybe not a very big point, but there it is anyway. And besides, you're cute. So I'll break a rule and ask what's the problem."

"Somebody else," I said, skipping the fact that the breakup had been my fault.

"You don't mean someone she's just going out with."

"No. I mean a boyfriend."

Roxanne looked serious and patted my hand. "I'll bet he's a creep," she said. "I'll bet it lasts a week." She left her hand on mine in a sisterly fashion.

"So there I am," I said, cold-shouldering the attempt at comfort. "I'm in the attractive position of feeling hostile, aggressive, and sorry for myself, everything that fascinates women. So what time do you get off?"

"I'm thinking," she said. Then she took my little finger between her thumb and index finger and rubbed it all the way from the tip to the first knuckle in a manner that wasn't even remotely sisterly. She gave me a lazy smile with something very energetic behind it. "I'll give you a buck if you go away and come back for me at ten-thirty. You can buy me dinner."

"Is that a promise?" My little finger wanted more.

"I told you, I'm thinking." She looked around the room. "I don't see a better offer on the horizon. How about you finish your beer, if you must, and go watch the fireworks? I'll be here when you get back." She gave the hand another pat and turned her back to tend to three nervous underage guys at the other end of the bar. I lost myself in soulful appreciation of the twenty-four-year-old female form in retreat. Roxanne had a mountain climber's haunches and a foot plant that seemed to roll the earth away backward behind her. Then she disappeared behind the furious Felicia, and I twisted around on my stool to look at the Pacific, visible across the highway.

Compared to Roxanne, it wasn't much to look at. I'd seen better surf on the Great Salt Lake, and the sun had finally called it a day and rolled on to give skin cancer to people in Hawaii and Asia. Oh, I was in terrific shape.

If someone hadn't finally yanked the jukebox plug, I wouldn't have heard it. There was a shout, and a chair hit the floor. I turned to see Mr. Buffalo Springfield shove the Korean girl away from him and then pour what was left of his drink over her head. Everything went into freeze frame. I saw Roxanne rigid behind the bar, watching. The Korean girl opened her mouth to say something, and the guy in the leather punched her in the face. It wasn't a slap, it was a punch. She went down as if she'd been sapped.

I think I remember throwing a few people out of my way to get to them. The next thing I'm sure I remember was the guy bending down over the girl, with one of his legs pulled back to kick her, and my hand grabbing his Simonized hair and yanking him upright. He came up faster than I'd figured, with the glass in his right hand, and he swung it in the general direction of my face. I pulled back and he missed, and the glass struck the edge of the bar and exploded in his hand. With the total disinterest of someone in another time zone, I saw blood spurt from his palm. Using my free hand, I did my level best to break one of the small bones in the side of his neck.

Necks are soft, but my knuckles popped as I hit him. He looked cross-eyed for a second and then started to go after me with the broken glass in his bleeding hand. I kissed the Marquis of Queensbury good-bye and kneed him in the nuts. When he folded forward, dropping the shards of glass onto the girl's stomach, I caught him under the chin with my other knee. His neck snapped back, and he let out an agonized little "whuff" and flopped backward into the sawdust on the floor. I put my foot on his throat and pressed down, hard.

"Finished?" I said happily. I was glad to see that he'd bitten his tongue when my knee hit his jaw. Blood flowed from his mouth and collected in the dimple on his chin. He didn't answer. Probably he couldn't.

"You stinkin' alkie cowboy," someone said behind me in an accent that was pure Panhandle. "Get off him, you dickhead." The voice belonged to the Korean girl, and she was crying. She'd pulled herself to a sitting position and she tugged her skirt down over her thighs in an oddly modest gesture, considering the fact that she'd just been decked in front of eighty or ninety people. She wiped a forearm across her eyes and looked at me fiercely. "Don't you dare hurt my baby," she said.

"Hurt him?" I said. I was confused. I was trying to play mix and match with the Korean face and the Texas voice and failing. "Urn, lady," I said, giving up, "I don't want to hurt him. I want to kill him. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't."

" 'Cause," the Korean girl said, sitting back slightly. I must have looked pretty fierce myself. " 'Cause it's not his fault, dammit."

"Then whose fault is it?"

She passed a forefinger over her front teeth, checking to see that they were still there, and then cranked out a smile. A very small smile. "He's not usually like this. He's just drunk."

"So am I," I said. "And I've wanted to kill somebody all day." I ground my foot into his throat. "Yum, yum," I said.

A circle of people had gathered around us, watching as passively as if we were the film at eleven on the evening news. "Hey," the Korean girl called to the room at large, "isn't anybody gonna do anything?" Most everybody in the circle looked away, unwilling to get involved, but one zealous-looking jerk in a frontier-style plaid shirt shouldered through the folks around him and sprinted for the pay phone. "Do something," the Korean girl pleaded. "Jesus, something terrible could happen."

"If something terrible hasn't already happened, I'd like to read your datebook," I said. The bar had hushed except for the sound of the plaid shirt punching buttons on the telephone. I felt some of the adrenaline wane, and I looked down at Mr. Beautiful. His face was very red and the veins on both sides of his forehead were throbbing. With some reluctance, I lifted my foot. He rolled his head from side to side, gasping for breath and trying to spit out the blood in his mouth.

"Toby," the Korean girl was saying in thick Texan, "Toby, honey, I'm sorry." If I live until the third millennium, I'll never understand women.

I bent down. "I can either rearrange the rest of your facial furniture, or not," I said. "It's up to you."

"I'm through," he said.

"Toby," the girl said, bending over him. "Sweetie, you okay?"

He brought one hand up to his throat. "Do I look okay, you fucking idiot?" he said. I stepped on his throat again, hand and all, just to refresh his etiquette. He gagged, and the girl grabbed ineffectually at my ankle. As her fingers scraped at my skin I could hear the plaid shirt talking on the phone. I raised my shoe and inspected it. Mr. Beautiful hadn't bled on my laces.

He coughed. "Is he calling the cops?" he rasped, staring wildly at Mr. Zealous.

"I certainly hope so," I said.

"Jesus. Get me out of here. Now, get me out of here right now." He was talking to the circle, and he looked panicked. A buzz arose from the circle as its members began to discuss what they'd just seen as though it had happened on the other side of a television screen. "I can't have the cops," he said desperately. No one looked at him.

"Why?" I said. "The cops are a good deal compared to me. If it weren't for the sweetheart of the rodeo here, you'd be the Fourth of July dinner special. Asshole on the half shell."

"You don't understand," he said. "You," he added vehemently. I was the only one making eye contact; all the others were melting away toward their tables, figuring out what they'd say tomorrow when they told the story. The music kicked in again, still Led Zeppelin, and he raised his voice. "You've got to get me out of here. If you don't, I'm finished." I looked over my shoulder, but there was no doubt about it. He was talking to me.

"Why in the world," I said, "would I help you?"

"Five hundred dollars," he said. "I'll pay you five hundred dollars to get me home."

Five hundred dollars sounded pretty good. It even made one or two of the chickens glance back. The plaid shirt had hung up the phone. In some corner of my subconscious my bankbook gave out a starved squeal. "Cash?" I said.

"Cash."

"Seven fifty," I said.

"Fine, fine, whatever. Just get me home."

"Why can't you get out of here yourself?"

"We got rid of the limo," he said, rubbing at his throat. "The asshole driver wanted to watch the fireworks."

"What about her?" I gestured toward the Korean girl.

His eyes rolled. "Who cares?"

I lifted my foot again. The muscles in my leg twitched rebelliously. "What about her?"

"Send her home in a cab," he said sullenly.

"Toby," the girl said in an anguished squeal. "You got to be kidding."

"Just get her away from me," said the hero on the floor.

"That's the nicest thing you could do for her," I said, "but it costs."

"In my pocket."

"You can't," the Korean girl said. "I'm not old enough to drink, Toby. Cripes, you know about the ABC and the Spice Rack. I'll lose my job."

"Tough shit," he said.

Something dropped into place behind the beautiful face, a cold front that turned her dark eyes into holes I wouldn't have wanted to fall into. "Listen," she said in a tone of voice that could have sliced ripe tomatoes, "you can't shovel it at anyone forever. Sooner or later, you have to be nice."

"Hey," he said, glaring at her, "do you know how to spell 'fuck you'?"

I shoved my hand into the right front pocket of the hero's leather pants and came up with a wad of bills, mostly of the impressive denominations you see in ads for the California lottery. "Where do you live?" I asked her.

"Hollywood." She looked at Mr. Beautiful as though he were something that someone gravely ill had spit onto the floor. "You're going to be sorry, Toby," she said.

I gave her a fifty. "He's pretty sorry already," I said. "This is for the cab." I handed her a hundred. "And this is for your dry cleaning."

She looked from me down to him, the dregs of his drink dripping from her flowing hair. She still looked good. "Yeah? Who's going to clean me? Sooner or later he's going to come back and make smooches, and I'm going to brain him with a flower pot, and when I do he'll kill me. You don't know him."

"Honey, if he gives you any kind of trouble, even constructive criticism, I'll scramble him into an omelet and have him for breakfast." I leaned down to pick him up.

"Simeon," Roxanne said from behind the bar, "you're not going to help him?"

"It's better for everybody," I said, pulling Loverboy to his feet. "Otherwise, she's going to have to go to the police station, too."

"No way in the world," the Korean girl said. "Not as long as I can still run."

"But he's such scum," Roxanne said plaintively. "And he's got it coming."

I heard a siren in the distance. Loverboy tugged at me, looking trapped and terrified. I shrugged it off.

"When the cops get here, tell them he's already left. Tell them his horse showed up. I promise you, if he screws around with her again, I'll make sure he eats the whole deck, okay?" I turned to the Korean girl and fished a crumpled card from my pocket. "There's a phone number here. Use it if he gives you a problem. You can call it anytime, day or night." I looked up at Roxanne. "You going to help out or not?"

She shrugged. "I guess. I'll get her a cab."

"Get her two if she wants them, they're on Prince Valiant here. Are you going to be here when I get back?" The siren was louder now.

Roxanne gave me a dubious look and then a small shrug. "What the hell," she said.

"See you then," I said. I put my arm around the hero's shoulders. "Come on, beautiful," I told him, "this is your exit."

For the first twenty minutes or so after he told me to turn right-north, up toward the Malibu Colony-we shared your basic sullen silence. His fringe flapped in the breeze through the open window, and he sucked at his mangled tongue and fingered his jaw once in a while, but other than that he kept his conversational skills to himself.

That was fine with me.

Traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway was light in both directions. The fireworks were about to start, and most people were staying put. Sweet Alice, the low-rider's special I'd won at cards from a glue-sodden card player named Jaime on a night of which I had only fragmentary memories because of Jaime's generosity with his glue, was chugging along in an exemplary fashion. She was in temporary remission from the tubercular cough that had plagued her recently. Maybe it was the carburetor, whatever that was.

At any rate, that was the limit of my mechanical sophistication, a state I'd long considered remedying. My long-ago graduate adviser when I was taking my doctorate in English, a waspish and perfectly dressed Ph.D. named Miles Brand, maintained that there were people who were put on earth solely to tend to the health of carburetors, and that any attempt by the rest of us to penetrate those mysteries was nothing more or less than irresponsible monkeying with God's master plan. Miles's comfortable faith in the secure future of the upper classes was much greater than mine, probably a result of his lifelong love for Victorian novelists. Trollope, Dickens, Gissing, and Thackeray in the nineteenth century-and, for that matter, Miles in the twentieth-didn't seem to worry as much about gravity as I did. What happens to the top of the social pyramid when you pull out the bottom three or four layers? In all, it seemed to me that the people who understood carburetors could get along much better without the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray than the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray could get along without the people who understood carburetors.

About twelve miles up the road, Mr. Beautiful stirred. He dabbed once or twice at his lip and then reached into his leather pocket and pulled out a small wad of tissue. "Don't hit any bumps," he said sulkily.

I aimed for something that could have been a large tortoise or a small land mine and hit it. Alice bounced. "Anything else?" I said. Roxanne had given us some paper towels as we left, and he'd wadded a couple around his cut palm. They got in his way as he tried to unwrap the tissues. He swore sharply and pulled the paper towels loose from his hand, tossed them to the floor, and peeled open the tissue. In it were six white pills, four small ones and two that were larger.

I've always had an active pharmaceutical curiosity, a vestige of several years of frequently terrifying experimentation. Against my will, I said, "What's that?"

"A load," he said. "Hey, don't make me talk, I've got to get some spit together." He worked his mouth for a moment, then threw his head back and tossed down all six at once. They went down as though he'd oiled his throat. "One perfect world coming up," he said.

"What's a load?" I'd never heard of it.

"Four codeine-four grams each-and two Doriden. I don't like you very much right now, but I could be crazy about you in a few minutes."

He swallowed hard a couple of times and leaned back. A mile glided by in the thickening dark. To our left, on the beach, one premature rocket slithered its lonely way into the heavens and then blew itself to smithereens, making a bright silver spider in the sky. "Have you got a mirror?" he asked.

I swiveled the rearview toward him without speaking.

He adjusted it and then looked at himself critically. First he extended the nipped tongue and regarded it. Then he took his nose, which I didn't remember having hit, between thumb and forefinger and bent it gently, once to the right and two or three times to the left. He touched a swollen lip and let out a whoosh of breath. "You messed me up pretty good," he said conversationally. "They'll have a shit fit tomorrow."

"What's tomorrow?"

"The usual, only earlier. I've got a six o'clock call."

"For what?"

He returned the mirror to something approximating its original position. "For what?" he repeated. "You're telling me you don't know who I am?"

"I haven't got the faintest idea who you are or who you're supposed to be. All I know is that you pick on people who can't pick back."

"Damsels in distress, is that the bit?" He whistled slowly and tunelessly between his teeth for a moment. "Damsel, that's a corruption of 'mademoiselle,' did you know that?" His voice was beginning to sound a little dreamy.

"Yes," I said.

"There are so many words," he said slowly. "Eskimos are supposed to have a hundred words for snow because it's so important to them. Not because they like it, but because it's important. Do you know how many words we have for chicks?"

"Well, chicks," I said. "That's already a bad beginning."

"Oh, spare me. I am so tired of men who are sensitive to women. That little girl tonight, Nana, now that's a chick. You know what's her favorite art form? MTV. What does she read on a cold winter's night? The Enquirer. When she wants a challenge, People magazine. That's why she likes me. Oh, J forgot. You're not supposed to know who I am."

"I don't know who you are, and I'm losing interest rapidly."

"But Nana's interested. Nana's more than just interested. Nana's going to put up with anything I do because I'm supposed to be somebody special. Anything I want to do, that's okay with Nana. I mean, she's pretty enough to look at twice, but she's just another brainless chick. One out of a hundred and fifty million." He swallowed again and closed his eyes. "Oooh, here it comes," he said. Whatever was coming, it arrived quietly. He sat with his head thrown back. His eyelids twitched. There was a half smile on his face, slack and unmuscled, that robbed his features of the malicious intelligence that had animated them so far. Up close he looked older, and I revised my estimate of his age upward: thirty-four, maybe, holding for dear life on to twenty-nine. Getting a little pouchy here and there, but preserved from ruin by his matinee-idol bone structure. Not for long, though.

It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. Almost, but not quite. If there's anything I've learned in my work, it's this: You can always find reasons to feel sorry for shitheads. And when you're finished, they're still shitheads.

He moaned. It sounded like a moan of pleasure. Then, slowly, he pulled himself upright and squinted through the windshield as if he were trying to figure out how far we'd come.

"We keep starting conversations," he said. He was talking very slowly now, as if he had to fish the words out of oily water. "But we never finish them. Nobody ever finishes them. How many conversations have you ever really finished?"

"I'll finish this one. As soon as you get out of the car."

"Every time I try to talk to you, you give me a one-liner."

"This is talking? I thought we were just passing the time until we got to where you could put some ice on your lip. There. That's a two-liner."

"Hey," he said. "You're a person. I'm a person, too. You don't know what was going on. You don't know why I punched her. You came into the scene after the exposition was over. You were just changing channels."

"I didn't like the show."

"What, you put your fist through the screen every time you don't like a program?"

"This wasn't a program. And I don't watch TV. I shot my last one when I was a kid and Nixon was telling me he wasn't a crook."

"Well, hell. At least I didn't use a gun."

"Nixon didn't feel the bullet. Now he's walking around acting like an elder statesman. Even his hairline looks better. Anyway, shooting a television set is one thing. Hitting a woman is another."

"The impulse is the same."

"Impulses are what civilization was created to protect us from."

"Dead wrong." He swallowed thickly. "Civilization was set up to allow the largest number of people to gratify the largest number of impulses and get away with it." His head lolled forward for a moment, and then he snapped it upright. "Money, for example. Civilization's proudest product."

"I thought it was room service."

"Without civilization, Nana's family could kill me. With civilization, money can make it okay. Money is civilization's way of saying you're sorry. Do you really think she wouldn't let me hit her again if there was enough money involved?"

"I think you're full of shit," I said. "Why don't you just sit there and nurse your cuts? Why should you want a conversation with me?"

"It's just the dope," he said after a moment. "Loads make you want to talk to everybody. You want one?"

"No, thanks," I said. "I don't want to talk to everybody."

We rode in silence for a moment. Then he began to laugh. "You really don't like me, do you? I'm Toby Vane."

"Simeon Grist," I said grudgingly. Manners are manners.

"Look," he said. "I'm sorry, okay? I've had a crappy day, a crappy week, in fact, and I was loaded on the wrong stuff. My momma always told me not to drink."

"I'm not the one you should apologize to."

"I'll call her, with you right there, when we get home. I'll go down on my knees. I'll weep and wail. I'll send her a fur coat. I think I've got one around someplace." He laughed again. "It's been a long time since anyone told me I was full of shit."

"Maybe that's your problem. Where do I turn, anyway? We're halfway to Oxnard."

"It's past Zuma. Encinal Canyon, do you know it?"

"I'll find it."

"Ooohh, ooohh, ooohh. Heading into the zone."

"What zone?" I started looking for a speed trap.

"The load zone. Loading zone. I don't know, whatever rarefied zone a load puts me into." He twisted the mirror back toward him and looked into it. "I'm a mess. I'm going to have to wear more makeup tomorrow than Joan Crawford. What do you do for a living?"

"I'm an investigator."

"But you're not a cop." There was some alarm in his voice.

"If I were a cop, you'd have ink all over your fingers, wouldn't you?"

"I put my footprints into cement once." He made a snorting sound, halfway between a wheeze and a laugh. "That's supposed to be a big deal."

"Okay," I said. "You're an actor. You don't need to wear yourself out with oblique references. Here's Zuma."

"It's a few miles farther. Hey, you, ease up. I'm not entirely hopeless."

"You conceal it well."

"You're not still pissed off," he said, turning his head slowly from side to side. "You're just trying to make a point. You made it already, so why don't you lighten up?"

It was true. I wasn't still pissed off. My blues and my drunk were long gone. If anything, I was probably grateful. Toby Vane was not likely ever to become my favorite human being. Still, he was working hard to be liked, and he'd given me a chance to work off several weeks' worth of accumulated disgruntlement by slugging him, and to look like a hero in front of Roxanne while I was doing it.

"What's it like being a detective?" Toby Vane said.

"It's like permanently wondering where you left your car keys. What's it like being an actor?"

"You get up early. You drive or get driven to wherever you're working. You sit in a makeup chair while somebody makes you look like a Singapore transvestite. Then you stand around all day waiting to say something that doesn't sound like anything anyone's ever said in all the time since they invented verbs. Then, if you're very lucky, a man hands you a check for a ridiculous amount of money and you go back home. You get to say things like, ‘That's not where I'm coming from, Loretta.' Or 'I live for the highs, baby. That way the lows are just places to visit.' I had to say both of those sentences yesterday. In front of millions of people, eventually."

"Still," I said.

"Oh, sure. It pays a shitload. We're not really talking about relative values here. Take the right coming up. It gets a little steep going down." He swallowed again. "If the social value of what we do had anything to do with how much we get paid, I'd be standing in line for a bowl of soup. But think about disk jockeys. If the world were right, or anything like it, they'd get paid by having an inch sliced off their bodies for every hour they're on the air. Instead, they rake it in. Think about the members of the National Security Council."

"Court psychiatrists," I said.

"Network executives. The guys who market toys. Fashion designers." He was rolling. "Here it is, this driveway. Hang a right around that bush." I did, and we were there.

There was pretty impressive. The house was a free-form assemblage of timber and glass, framed by tall, undulating cypresses transplanted from a Van Gogh painting. When I cut Alice's engine I could hear the surf booming. "You live here alone?" I asked.

"Just me. . and my shadow," he sang. "Actually, I have a lot of shadows," he added as he reached for the door handle. "It can get pretty crowded." He pushed the door open and then peered over at me, focusing through the drugs. "So come in," he said.

I looked at Alice's clock, the only thing about her that always worked. The drive had taken an hour. "I've got to get back," I said.

"The bartender? She's cute, but she'll wait. It's not even nine yet. Anyway, I don't have all your money on me. You've got to come in to get the rest of it." I must have hesitated for a moment, because he said, "Please. Please come in. I don't want to go in alone."

"Okay," I said. "But only for a minute."

"Good. I've never met a detective before."

He climbed out with some difficulty and closed the door. I followed. Midway to the house he stumbled, and I had to grab his arm to keep him from falling. "No photographers around, right?" he said. "That's what I need, a headline: boy next door overdoses." He used his hands to block out the words in the air. The effort made him tangle his feet again, and I had to hold him upright. "Heeere's Toby," he said to the night sky.

The front door was about twelve feet high. It was made of redwood, studded with massive iron nails that had rusted in the moist ocean air, trailing long dark lines of oxidation into the grain of the wood below them. "That's on purpose, all that rust, can you believe it?" Toby Vane mumbled as he fished for a key. "Looks like shit and you pay extra for it. Typical." He turned the key, and the door creaked inward. "Come in and get paid," he said over his shoulder.

I followed him down an arched hallway and through a triple-size door. Lights came on. I found myself in a bright, spacious room with a cathedral ceiling, white walls, and a bleached oak floor. There was almost no furniture: one small couch with a glass table in front of it, pastel pillows scattered here and there, an eviscerated polar bear spread facedown on the floor, and a long, low bookcase along one wall. Most of the opposite wall was glass. Toby Vane stooped down and did something to a polished brass knob set into the floor, and lights blazed up on the other side of the glass. The Pacific surged and churned, hurling itself with patient, unwearying violence at two low, black, barnacle-covered rocks just a few yards from the glass.

"Very nice," I said.

"Want a toot?" He twisted another knob, and a spotlight struck the glass table in front of the small white couch. The light was focused on something that looked like a silver finger bowl, except that it was heaped to overflowing with a fine pinkish powder. The side of me that wishes I still got loaded all the time pricked up its ears and let its tongue loll in an unappealing fashion. The phone began to ring, but he ignored it.

"McDonald's makes the best straws," he said conversationally. "They're good sturdy plastic, and they're just the right diameter." He sat down on the couch and unrolled a brightly colored plastic straw from a sheet of tissue. The phone continued to ring. "All you've got to do to make them perfect is slice off the tip at a forty-five-degree angle with a razor blade.*' He scooped some of the powder from the bowl with a little spoon and made two tiny mountains on the table. "Want some?"

"No," I said without conviction.

"It's terrific. Pink, see? Very smooth, no jangles, no dental bills from uncontrollable teeth clenching. Excuse me." He leaned over and snorted the mountains. The phone stopped ringing. He ladled out two more little Mount Fujis and looked up at me, his eyes suddenly a lot clearer.

"What's the hardest part of being a detective?"

"Failure." The coke glistened malevolently at me.

"Does that happen?" He shoved a smidgen of coke into line.

"Once in a while." I sat on the floor on the other side of the table. I'd always wanted to climb Mount Fuji. "When the person you're after is a lot smarter than you are, or else so dumb that there's no way to figure out what he's done or why he's done it. Then you let somebody down and you feel terrible about it."

"You really do, don't you?" He started down toward the mountains but then stopped and lowered the straw. "I mean, you really care about the people you work for."

"Sure," I said, feeling uncomfortable. The phone began to ring again. "Oh, hell," I said. "Give me the straw."

He did, and I destroyed the tiny white landscape in front of me. He continued to regard me as if I were an exotic form of plant life as he scooped out some more cocaine. "And you hit me on the neck," he said admiringly, rubbing it with his free hand, "because you didn't want to mark me." The phone jangled on unheeded.

"No," I said. "I hit you on the neck so I wouldn't break my hand." He shook his head as though that were just what he'd expect someone as terrific as me to say. "What's the hard part about being an actor?" I said to change the subject.

"Acting, at least acting on television, is the art of failure." I felt the cocaine begin to buzz in my forebrain while Toby Vane vacuumed the tabletop with his nose. He looked up at me. "You fail as little as you can, that's all. And it has nothing to do with talent. It's electricity." The phone stopped ringing and instantly started in again. "TV is an electric medium. It's got a little tiny screen. Most of the sets are no good. In half the houses of America, I've got a green face. Reception is bad in some areas. You've got to find some electricity, some kind of juice, to cut through all that interference. If you don't, you're just another little pattern of dots in the corner of somebody's living room." He gave me an embarrassed grin. "It sounds immodest, but I suppose it's being able to turn on an electric personality."

The phone, thank God, had stopped. The only ringing now was the cocaine in my bloodstream. "So why do you hit women?" I said.

The grin disappeared. "Champ, I told you. That's not really me. I was drunk and down. She was bitching at me. Do you want me to phone her? I'll do it now." His tone was painfully earnest.

"That's up to you. It's your relationship."

"Relationship," he said. "My favorite word." His eyes went down to the table for a moment and then flicked back up to me. "I'll do it, but let me wash up first and get some ice. My tongue feels like a beanbag chair." He got up and headed for what I guessed was the kitchen. He stopped and turned back to me. "Want a beer or anything? More coke?"

"No, thanks. I passed my limit when I did the first one."

"Well, make yourself at home. I'll be a couple of minutes, and then we'll phone Nana." He disappeared.

Hearing its name, the phone began to ring again. I wondered how he stood it. Mine rang only once or twice a day. I wondered how I stood it. I looked at the coke for a moment and then got up quickly and walked to the other end of the room.

Above the bookcase the wall was hung with a series of bright, four-color magazine covers, maybe twenty in all. Toby's face was on every one of them.

He had a beaming, ingenuous, boyish smile. His expression was open, healthy, friendly. He looked about twenty-seven in most of the photographs.

TV Guide was the only one I recognized. The others all had names like Fab and Rave and For Teens Only, TOBY VANE OF “HIGH VELOCITY”-HIS SECRET SORROW, one shouted. WIN A DATE WITH “HIGH VELOCITY'S” TOBY VANE shrilled another. TOBY VANE TELLS ALL; TOBY VANE'S WEDDING WISH LIST; THE FAN TOBY VANE WILL NEVER FORGET; "WHY ME?" TOBY VANE CRIES.

Other magazines lay heaped on top of the bookcase. Toby's picture graced these, too, but he'd either gotten tired of cutting them out or he hadn't gotten around to it yet. I picked up one on which he looked particularly boyish and turned to page 28, which promised to tell me 100 THINGS TOBY DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT HIM.

Toby apparently didn't want much known about him. Among the riveting nuggets the magazine's crackerjack investigative team had unearthed were the facts that his favorite color was blue, that he cried at sad movies, that he'd had a German shepherd named Sam when he was a boy, and that his ideal girl was one with a lot of self-respect.

I was mulling that last one over when he called from the kitchen. "Simeon? Are you sure you don't want a beer?"

I dropped the magazine guiltily. "I'm fine," I said. "Just looking around." I partially straightened the stack of magazines, which was leaning forward alarmingly. "Is blue really your favorite color?" I shouted.

"What?"

I went to the kitchen door and leaned against it. He was leaning over a sink, holding a washcloth against his mouth. The washcloth was wrapped around something that might have been an ice cube. "Do you really cry at sad movies?"

He started to grin, and then he winced. "Don't," he said. "Don't make me laugh. They just make that stuff up. All I do is pose for the pictures."

"That's a fictitious character, the Toby Vane in those magazines?"

"All the Toby Vanes are fictitious characters. My real name is Jack Sprunk."

"What a peculiar way to live."

"I couldn't agree more. Now go away and let me work on my wounds."

I went back into the living room and straight to the magazines. They had a kind of horrid fascination. The one I picked up this time had a sincere-looking Toby on the cover and the headline TOBY VANE'S NEW YEAR WISHES FOR YOU. I decided I wasn't up to it and dropped the magazine onto the top of the tilting stack, and the whole slippery batch of them slid forward lazily and fell to the floor.

Beneath them was a cheap satin-covered photo album on which was written, in flowery script, "Precious Memories." Beneath that was another, inscribed "Loved Ones."

"Give me another minute," Toby shouted. "Then we can call Nana. Maybe we'll even go get her, if she's forgiven me." Even though I knew he was loaded to the gills on at least two kinds of dope, he sounded healthy and happy.

I opened the top album.

At first the shapes didn't make sense to me: they were just abstract patches of color and shadow. Then I realized what I was seeing. They were pictures, the kind of pictures you normally see only in magazines with names like Pain and Punishment or Whipcrack. But these hadn't been cut out of magazines.

They were Polaroids.

Many of them had been taken in the room I was in.

Women were tied into impossible positions. Women were gagged and handcuffed. A woman lay naked on her back with the photographer's shoe pressing into her chest. A very young girl, no more than sixteen, was covered with broken eggs. An even younger girl had mean-looking electrical clips dangling from her nipples. Then an entire page of close-ups of a woman with two closed, swollen eyes and a split lip.

It was Nana.

"Maybe we could all go out together," Toby was saying cheerfully in the kitchen. "Me and Nana and you and your bartender. Go to a movie or a late dinner or something. How does that sound?"

I closed the album and put the fan magazines back on top of it. I went to the door and through it, without slowing down, without trying to collect the rest of my seven hundred and fifty dollars. I didn't need it any more.

And I certainly didn't need Toby Vane. I didn't need anybody whose idea of an electric personality was an alternating current between Jack Armstrong and Vlad the Impaler. Smile or no smile, he was a sick boy.

I lost my way twice trying to get out of the canyon and up to the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time I finally reached it, it was ten o'clock. I drove south like Mario Andretti, but the holiday traffic was a series of Gordian knots and it was after eleven when I finally got to McGinty's of Malibu. Roxanne was gone.

I'd missed the fireworks, too.