The Bone Polisher

7 ~ Cereal Killer

The Zipper-I’m sorry-was open.

I’d never been in a darker room. Heavy, wide strips of black plastic, like the ones used to keep warmth out of a supermarket meat locker, hung in the front door to hold October at bay. When they flapped shut behind me, I found myself completely blind. Since my eyes weren’t doing me any good anyway, I closed them.

When I reopened them, a world appeared. A bar, lighted by seven or eight flickering Christmas bulbs, was to my immediate right. The man standing behind it wore a motorcycle jacket and an LAPD cap, complete with badge. He regarded me as though he was afraid I’d come in to sell him a vacuum cleaner. “You’re new.”

“I was a few minutes ago,” I said, sliding my shoes over the floor in case there was a step up.

I sat down on a squeaky stool, and the man behind the bar studied my face while I glanced around at nothing in particular and tried not to look like someone whose face was being studied. “About thirty,” he finally announced, with the muted pride of someone pulling a playing card out of his ear. “I’m Stan.”

“It’s dark in here, Stan,” I said, “and you’re being nice.”

“Been years since I saw anybody in the light,” he said. “Complimentary bullshot?”

“Why not?” After all the water with Christopher, I would have drunk Mogen David from a workboot.

“Interesting clothes,” he said, setting the drink down in a glass that looked uncomfortably like an erect penis on a flat, circular base.

“I thought so when I bought them.”

“Thirty-four?” he asked, squinting at me.

“Thirty-seven.” The bullshot was vile and wonderful at the same time. The glass felt silly in my hand. Somebody laughed roughly behind me, and I turned to see two men entwined in a booth.

“You’re taking care of your skin,” the bartender said, pursuing his theme, “but you want to watch the bullshots.”

I tapped the glass with a forefinger. “I’m keeping my eye on this one.”

“You know,” the bartender said, watching me carefully, “there are other bars up the street.” He mopped the surface of the bar with a rag that might have been Veronica’s Veil two thousand years ago. “Straight bars, you know? If that’s where you’d rather be.”

“Is it as obvious as that?” In some unweeded corner of my soul, I was dismayed.

“About two blocks up. Like I said, this one’s on the house.”

Everyone was offering me freebies today. “But I like it here.”

“You’re being asked to leave,” a new voice said, and I turned to see one of the men in the booth standing up with evident hostile intent. He was bigger than Godzilla and he was wearing most of Argentina’s annual export of black leather. “And you’re being asked real nice. Stan’s a lot sweeter than I am.”

The situation was slipping away from me, a familiar sensation lately. “You know Max Grover?” I asked the giant.

He paused for a count of five. “Max?” he said. “Everybody knew Max.”

“What’s Max to you?” Stan the bartender asked.

“Christy hired me,” I said. “The cops want Christy, and I’m his, um, his guy to, um, keep them away from him.”

“Prove it.” That was Stan.

I swiveled on my squeaky stool. “Oh, sure. Prove it. There’s no way I can prove it. I mean, I’ve got a card, but-”

“Let’s see it.”

I decided not to finish the sentence, which had been something to the effect that anyone could print a card, and pried one of my detective cards out of my wallet. I handed it to Stan, and he held it under one of the Christmas lights, reading it during blinks. This was obviously an acquired skill.

“Simon Grist,” he read aloud. “Private investigator.”

“ Simeon,” I corrected him. “As in ‘Simeon.’”

“Apelike,” the giant supplied into the conversational void.

“As in Simeon Stylites,” I said, stung. “A saint who spent most of his life standing on a pillar in the desert. My parents are interested in-”

“He’s a private eye,” Stan said. He sounded impressed; maybe I was the first one he’d met. If so, there was disillusionment in his future.

“And Christy hired me,” I said.

There was a long pause.

Then the man still seated in the booth stirred and raised his face to mine. It was a memorable face, the face of a prizefighter who’d gone fifteen rounds with a 747. “Poor Max,” he said in a voice softer than a fresh diaper.

“Everybody loved Max,” Stan the bartender said, nodding. “Max was a hundred percent.”

“A thousand per cent,” said Mr. Leather. “Oh, Jeez, Max.”

“So he was in here?” I asked, breathing again.

“In and out with his caseload,” Stan said. He touched his index finger to his forehead. “You know, his lost souls.”

“The kids he was helping,” I suggested.

“There’s never been anyone like Max,” the leather giant said tenderly. “Easiest touch in the world. Money for nothing, you know? And too old to expect anything for it.”

“And now the cops want Christy,” I said.

“Christy.” Stan sounded reflective. “Harmless plus.”

“But they were fighting,” said the man sitting at the table.

“Jealous, Christy,” Stan offered, immediately revising his opinion.

“Didn’t mean anything, though,” the giant tendered fondly. “Those guys had a karmic link.”

“Ancient souls,” Stan said, nodding. Agreeing with everyone was apparently part of his job description.

“Took a swing at Max, he did,” the sitting man said, “at Dante’s a couple of weeks ago.”

“He always had a violent streak,” Stan agreed.

“But he couldn’t have hurt Max,” said the giant.

“Absolutely not,” Stan said.

This could go on all day. “There’s a guy with the Sheriffs Department who thinks he did,” I said.

“Name?” asked the giant.

“Spurrier.”

“Spiky Ikey,” the man sitting at the table said, surprising me. “Ike Spurrier couldn’t find his asshole in a shit-storm.”

The pivot beneath my seat squealed as I turned. “You know him?”

“Everybody knows Spurrier.” The man at the table emitted a choked sound like a muzzled dog barking. A laugh. “The Sheriffs’ Department’s number one closet case.”

It was mildly interesting. “You think so?”

“This is a guy in deep denial,” Stan said.

I considered it for a moment and then stopped considering it. “So who killed Max?”

“Somebody,” said the giant, who had taken the hand of the soft-voiced man at the table, “who should have his skin stripped off inch by inch.”

Realizing I had the bullshot in my hand, I drank some.

“Did Max bring any new kids in here in the last month or so?”

“Other than the caseload?” That was the bartender.

“How would you know who wasn’t part of the caseload?”

“Street kids,” the bartender said. “You can smell them in the dark.”

“There was the pretty one,” said the man still seated at the table.

“Shhhh,” the giant said.

“Whenever anyone says ‘Shhhh,’ I get real interested,” I said. “Maybe I should have told you that before.”

“Skip it,” said the giant apologetically.

“The hell I’ll skip it. Max is dead, and you’re hushing people because, um, because-”

“Because he thought the kid was cute,” the man at the table said, drawing the word “cute” into three heavily sugared syllables: kee-yee-ute.

“He was cute,” Stan the bartender said.

“The boy was nice,” the giant said defensively. “Everybody liked him. You,” he said to the man at the table, “have a mind like a third-world latrine.”

“Just that one boy,” said the man at the table to me. “Very young, very pretty. Hair like corn.”

“Like wheat,” the giant said.

The man at the table looked up at him. “When was the last time you saw wheat? When was the last time you were outdoors?”

The giant opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I get outside,” he said, sounding hurt. “Wheat, corn. Some kind of cereal. Rice puffs, maybe.”

“Hair the color of corn,” the man at the table said dreamily. “Scared eyes. Looked maybe seventeen, eighteen, but he had I.D.”

“I.D.” I swiveled around to regard Stan. “Was there a name on the I.D.?”

“Sure,” Stan said. “But who remembers? Danny? David?”

“Something with a D,” the giant said. “I remember a D.”

“What kind of I.D.?”

Stan thought about it. “Driver’s license. Out-of-state, kind of funny-looking. No, I don’t remember which state.”

“Someplace where they grow them big and blond,” the man at the table said. “Like a farm state. He was, I don’t know, a farm boy. Hair like corn.”

“Wheat,” the giant murmured rebelliously.

“When were they here?”

“A couple of days ago.”

“Sunday?”

Stan the bartender looked at the wall opposite. “I guess so. It was pretty quiet. Could have been Sunday.”

“How were they getting along?”

“Max treated him like he was a piece of candy,” said the man at the table. “The kid was staring like a tourist who’d never been to town before, afraid to talk to anyone.”

“Everybody liked him,” the giant in leather repeated defiantly. “There was something really sweet about him. Not just the way he looked, either. I’ve seen lots of great-looking kids who gave off negative vibes, but this kid was really…”

“Sweet,” offered the man at the table. He nodded his head. “I guess he was.”

“Okay,” I said, “he was sweet.”

“You ever like anyone on first sight?” the man at the table asked me.

“My job doesn’t really lend itself to snap opinions.”

“Well, everybody here liked him on first sight.” He lifted a broad hand and massaged a scar on his cheek. “Funny thing, charm.”

“It certainly is,” I said. “How tall?”

“Stand up.” That was Stan again. I did. “Same as you,” he said. “Six feet or so.”

“What color eyes?”

Stan lifted a hand. “Who could see?”

“Blue,” said the man at the table.

“Ho, ho,” the giant said softly.

The man at the table blinked up at him. “Same color as mine.”

“Blond hair, blue eyes, six feet, seventeen or eighteen. Build?”

“Strong,” the man at the table said. “I told you. Like a farm boy.”

“Anything else?” I asked the room at large. No one spoke.

I turned to face the bartender. “How much do I owe you?”

“On Max,” he said mournfully.

So, everybody loved Max, I thought outside, squinting against the glare. So, a farm boy.

Twenty-five cents in a pay phone bought me two messages on my answering machine. Christy, sounding brisker than he had last night, said he’d found a place to stash himself for the meantime, and he’d call later, he didn’t want to leave the number on a machine. I was commending him for his discretion when the machine beeped and my mother’s distinctive cigarette rasp asked if I was there. When I wasn’t, she snorted impatiently and ordered me to call. If I still remembered the number.

I dropped another quarter into the phone and dialed, inhaling the reek of ammonia and remembering a time when phone booths didn’t double as public urinals. Phone booths probably thought of it as the golden age.

“This is your son,” I said when my mother answered. She wore her hearing aid in the ear she didn’t put the handset against, and lately she sometimes failed to recognize my voice.

“Oh,” she said. “Hold on.” The phone clattered to the surface of her kitchen counter. I used the idle moment to watch a young businessman in a Heineken-green Mazda Miata gently rear-end a large truck on Santa Monica Boulevard. The truckdriver climbed deliberately down from his cab, an unusually wide man with a Marine buzz cut, wearing camouflage combat fatigues and seven-league boots, and stalked slowly back toward the Miata. The yuppie in the Miata took one horrified look, reversed out from under the truck, and backed away rapidly, cutting the wheel sharply and bumping up into the parking lot of a minimall.

“Had to turn off the stove,” my mother said.

“I don’t know how you can cook in this heat,” I said, just to be polite.

“And you don’t much care, either. Are you sitting down?”

“No. Why?”

“I just wondered. I thought perhaps you were ill or something.”

“No, I’m fine.” The man in the Miata threw the car into first and squealed off down Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Or had broken your leg.”

“Both legs in working order, thanks.”

“Or your dialing finger.”

“Here I am, Mom,” I said. “Standing on a sweltering corner in West Hollywood, up to my ankles in urine, calling my dear old mother.”

“I want to see you.” Mom didn’t waste a lot of time on chat.

“Fine. When?”

“Whenever you can spare a moment for your only mother.”

“Anytime that’s good for you.”

“Well, as you know, we have a very crowded social schedule, your father and I. Channel nine is showing back-to-back reruns of M*A*S*H.”

The truckdriver had run out of profanity after unleashing a long and inspiringly original stream of invective. “Just say when.”

“Three,” she said. “ M*A*S*H starts at four-thirty.”

I checked my watch: one-forty. “Fine,” I said.

“Three sharp,” she said. “You know how your father feels about Alan Alda.”

The man who answered the line at the Long John Connection was even less chatty than my mother. A shrill chorus of phones rang insistently in the background.

“Yeah, I heard about Max,” he said. “Awful, just awful.”

“I need to talk to the owner.”

“That’s me. I’m a little short on help here.”

“It won’t take much time.”

“I doubt that. Look, I can’t keep this line tied up. It’s costing money. Can you come over here?”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“Kings Road. Just north of the Boulevard.”

“Which boulevard?”

There was a pause. “Santa Monica,” he said patiently. “The Boulevard.”

“Sorry, I’m a little addled today. See you in five minutes.”

Addled was an understatement. The bullshot had cooked up in the sunshine, sending its fumes directly to my frontal lobe, by the time the door to apartment 8 opened to reveal a man who looked like Grizzly Adams’s more poorly groomed younger brother: maybe forty-five, beard to mid-chest over an Alvin Ailey T-shirt, thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail, tinted aviator-style glasses over odd gold-colored eyes.

“You’re the pay phone?” The gold-brown eyes flicked over my shoulder, making sure I was alone.

“About Max,” I said.

He ran the name through his frontal lobe while he looked at me. It was a speculative look. Finally he nodded. “I’m Jack.” He put out a hand and mauled mine with it. “Come on in, air-conditioning’s expensive. I can give you ten minutes.”

Four men sat on couches and director’s chairs, talking on phones. “Oooh, I’d like that,” one of them said in a seductive voice. “Do you think you could do it twice?”

I closed the door behind me. “You knew Max?”

Jack straightened his glasses, which were already as straight as a plumbline. “Everybody knew Max.” It was beginning to sound like a litany. “The saint of the sidewalks. What’s your connection?”

I told him. He never took the gold-brown eyes from my face. No polite nods, no reflexive sounds of agreement. When I was finished, he said, “Christy,” in a noncommittal tone.

“That seems to be the general opinion.”

Jack turned toward the kitchen, and I followed. “He’s a Jonah. You a sailing man?”

“I know what a Jonah is. Bad luck.”

“More than that.” He reached back and pulled fingers through his ponytail. “Bad luck for other people, too. Some people trail clouds of it, like scent.” The kitchen was white and spotless, with three electric coffee makers on the tile counter. Labels on the pots read cinnamon, decaf, and ecstasy blend. At the far end of the kitchen was one of those little greenhouse windows people are so fond of these days, jammed full of terra-cotta pots sprouting foliage. Jack pulled up a stool at the counter and indicated another for me.

I eyed the coffee. “Who had it in for Max?”

He shrugged. “Nobody. What was there to hate? He was generous, good-hearted, and stupid. The perfect mark.”

“He didn’t strike me as stupid.”

“About himself. He was brilliant about everybody else.”

“You know that personally?”

He looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Was he brilliant about you?”

Jack chewed the inside of his lip, looking dubious, and followed my gaze toward the coffeepots. “You’re confusing me. You want some coffee?”

“I’d love some. I’m recovering from a bullshot.”

“Lady Ecstasy for you,” he said, getting up to pour.

“So what about Max?”

“I’m not sure why you’re here.” He held out a heavy white mug.

“I told you.” I took the mug and wandered toward the greenhouse window.

“Max,” he said, weighing his words, “Max just had to help people. There weren’t enough hours in the day, you know?”

“So I gather.” The plants in the little pots were herbs: rosemary, basil, mint, and a couple I couldn’t identify. They gave the air near the sink a pungency that clashed pleasantly with the coffee.

Jack’s stool shifted behind me. “What do you know about us?”

I turned to look at him. “Who’s ‘us’?”

He made a circling motion, index finger down, as though stirring the air in the apartment. “Us.”

“You’re a, what, a hot line.”

“Safe sex,” he said. “Through the ear, like the Holy Ghost’s words to Mary. Did you know that Mary was impregnated through the ear?”

I pressed a leaf between thumb and forefinger and inhaled the dark, sweet green-clove scent of basil. “Sounds uncomfortable.”

“We’re more than a hot line. We’re also a dating service. Not-so-safe sex, but people are people. They’ve got to take their own precautions.”

“You’re First-Class Male, too?” I asked.

He nodded. “And we’re a computer bulletin board. Something Fine Online.” He looked dissatisfied. “Got to work on that name,” he said.

“So tell me about this,” I said. I licked the basil from my fingertips and pulled the folded newspaper from my pocket. Jack peered across the kitchen at it.

“Our ads,” he said, sounding satisfied. He got up and held out a hand, and I passed the page to him. “Designed them myself on the computer. That’s the Nite Line. Comes out once a week, on Monday. It’s a bar rag. Lots of little ads.” He turned the page over and ran a thumb over the classifieds. “Like these. All these beautiful, sensitive, lonely young men, desperately seeking a soulmate. Preferably a soulmate with many credit cards.”

“Not on the level,” I said.

“About as much as the sex ads in the straight papers. Hustlers, mostly, or old fatties pretending to be twenty-four and buffed up. Sad stuff. Where’d you get this?”

“It was Max’s. It’s what brought me here.”

Jack’s eyes widened briefly. “Max? Max had this?”

“Not what you’d expect?”

“Not bloody hardly. Max found his kids on the street, where he could see they were desperation cases. Plenty of kids on the pavement these days. One side of the economy the Times rarely sees fit to cover.”

“So why would he have the paper?”

He refolded it along the sharp creases, looking at me. “God knows. He had his hands full as it was, between his lost kids, Christy, and the service.”

I was getting confused. “Which service?”

“The computer service. Something Fine Online. I thought that’s why you were here.”

“I’m just blundering around,” I said, “chasing lines in the Nite Line.”

Jack jerked his head over his shoulder. “Come on. So your day shouldn’t be a complete loss. I’ll show you a new side of Max.”

We went through the living room, where angel’s flight seemed to have struck: All the phones were silent, and the young men sat staring into the middle distance, gathering their energies for the next erotically charged encounter. One of them was doing a crossword puzzle. Jack led me down a hallway hung with a few small and unconvincing Dali lithographs, mostly watches that seemed to have collided with pizzas, and into a bedroom where a tower-model desktop computer hummed away on a huge desk made from two tables placed end to end. The setup covered an entire wall. Multiple-tiered in and out baskets screwed to the wall held stacks of modems, their red lights blinking like the eyes of animals in a Disney forest. Four screens were filled with flying text, scrolling almost too rapidly to be read.

“About thirty online at the moment,” Jack said, eyeing the modems. “What do you know about how this works?”

I’d come up against a bulletin board before, a particularly vile heterosexual meat market where children were the merchandise. “People call in on their computers and talk to each other in real time, using their keyboards, or leave messages for each other.” It didn’t sound very expert. “I guess all boards are different, though.”

“All boards are exactly the same, at least as far as the hardware and software go,” Jack said. “It’s the wetware that makes them different.”

“Wetware.”

“The people.” He gestured at the screen, at the ribbon of words. “Boards are neutral, just like a TV set or a telephone line, until you add in the human factor. This is a gay board. Most everybody on it is gay, they live in the local calling area, and they give it its distinguishing characteristics, which is to say they make it a West Hollywood gay board, lots of jokes, lots of industry talk, lots of jokey, horny e-mail. And, naturally, a psychic flavor, since this is probably the only city in America where psychics outnumber real people.”

“And that’s where Max-”

“Not entirely. Close, though.” He seated himself at the computer and did something fast and practiced. “Look here,” he said.

TALK TO THE THERAPIST glowed in the middle of the largest screen.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Max?”

“Therapist and psychic,” Jack said. “All-around emotional handyman. Some of the strangest questions you ever read. That was one of the things I loved about him: Nothing struck him as weird. If someone said to him that he needed his aura fluffed, Max would have figured out a way to fluff the man’s aura. He dealt with some pretty disgusting stuff here, too, but Max never got disgusted.”

“Nothing human disgusts me,” I said.

Jack gave me a skeptical glance. “Or Max.”

“That’s a Tennessee Williams line,” I said. “Actually, I disgust fairly easily.”

On the screen, I read:

I’m thirty-eight years old, and lately I’ve been fantasizing sex with women. My dreams are totally peculiar, but I wake up with a big woody anyway. My lover is beginning to suspect something is wrong. Do you think you can help?

Beneath it was the Therapist’s-Max’s-reply:

You lucky boy. It’s a new world. Don’t be afraid of facing it. Look at it this way: It doubles the number of possibles. Anyway, it may only be a phase. I’d suggest that you talk to your lover about it. He might actually like it if you suggested he run down to Victoria’s Secret and buy a little-

Beside me, Jack gave a kind of gasp, like someone exhaling a knot.

— peignoir or something. Of course -

“Holy Jesus,” Jack said, and I swiveled to look at the screen in front of him. Words were scrolling past, black on the white display. Jack turned wide eyes to me and put a hand over the screen as though it were emitting heat.

“It’s from Max,” he said.