The Bone Polisher

16 ~ Apartment Seven

“I want to borrow Henry,” I said, feeling exposed, unsafe, too big to miss. This was my week for pay phones. Late traffic hummed and whistled, burped and hissed along Sunset behind me.

“Have I missed a stage in our relationship?” Hanks demanded. “Did I sleep through something? I don’t think we’re on the kind of terms that would allow you to ring me up at three-thirty in the morning and request the loan of my literary adviser.”

“Ferris,” I said, “who else could I call at this hour?”

“That’s a sad little question,” he said. “There are lots of people I could call.”

I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the cold chromium of the phone. “I’ll need him for an hour.”

“Henry will have something to say about this. He has free will, you know.”

“Tell him he might get to shoot someone.”

“He’ll like that,” Hanks said. “Who?”

“The guy who killed Max.”

Hanks sucked in his breath. “Is this going to put a crimp in our fete?”

“Quite possibly.”

“Well,” he said, sounding disappointed, “I suppose it’s in a good cause.”

“Ten minutes,” I said. “I’ll honk.”

“Not in this neighborhood. He’ll be out at the gate.”

“Tell him this is probably going to be dangerous,” I said.

“Of course it is. You must tell me all about it when it’s over.” He put his hand over the phone and said something. “Assuming you kill him, or catch him or something, we could still have the party, couldn’t we? Make it a celebration.”

“Sober up, Ferris,” I said. “You sound almost enthusiastic.”

“I’ve warmed to the idea,” he said. “I was thinking in terms of a fountain of holy water. From Lourdes.”

“If you’ve got any on hand,” I said, “give some to Henry for me.”

Henry had dressed for the occasion in black leather, looking like a cross between a killer cyborg and someone who dances behind Madonna. He got into the car without speaking and pulled out a small blue vial with a cork in it. “Di-reck from the Virgin,” he said, pouring a thimbleful of water on me.

“I was joking,” I said, pulling at the front of my wet shirt.

“Never joke about holy water with Ferris. He take this shit serious. How you think he stay so younglike?”

We were rolling down the hill. Despite the heat, I felt chilled where my shirt had been soaked. “I figured surgery had something to do with it.”

Henry snickered. “Nobody cut ol’ Ferris. He too scared about the blood supply.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t plan on bleeding.”

“Hold that thought.” I gave Henry a short version of my chat with Ed Pfester as I cut left on Sunset and right on La Cienega, one long downhill coast, both in terms of topography and real estate values. Below Sunset the world was running on something like normal time, and traffic was lighter. A thin layer of cloud had slid in, and the city’s lights pressed up against it, turning the sky into a flat, reflective sheet of hammered metal.

Henry cleared his throat, making a noise like someone emptying a pool, rolled down the window, and spat. “You think he’s going to be there?”

“If he wants to kill me, he is. But, no, I don’t. I think he left the moment he hung up the phone. If I’d really thought there was any chance he’d hang around, I’d have called the cops.”

“Well,” Henry said, “at least you know you got something he wants.”

“Even though I don’t,” I said. “Tell me about Ferris.”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “You seen him.”

“I’ve seen an old man in a big house. He’s more than that.”

“Ferris is something,” Henry said approvingly. “Still at it, you know?”

“Still at what?” I asked cautiously.

A chuckle rumbled through the car. Henry was a lot calmer than I was. “Everything,” he said, “but I was talking about business.”

“Agenting?”

“Got all the guys he could ever want. Some of them working, too. He’s not as big as he says he used to be, but they still take his phone calls.” He opened the dash compartment idly and closed it again. “Sometimes. But he does okay, for a man who never made nothing in his life.”

“What does that mean?”

“Agents,” he said. “Agents don’t do nothing. They’re not actors, they’re ten percent of actors. They’re ten percent of writers, ten percent of directors. Add it all up, you got thirty percent. Other seventy percent is bullshit. Ferris is a man, you want someone to do something, he sends you someone and takes ten percent, fifteen if he can get it. They like to talk about packaging, elements, putting deals together. What’s to put together? It’s somebody else’s idea, somebody else’s script, somebody else’s money. Except for that ten percent. Ol’ Ferris, he takes it pretty easy.”

“And you?”

“I take it pretty easy myself. It’s a nice slow gig. I read a lot, walk the wolf pack, practice tai chi, help Ferris keep his schedule straight. Point a gun once in a while, when someone needs a look at a gun. People come over that wall a lot.”

“It’s not much of a wall.” I was talking, I realized, to keep my breathing regular. My hands were slick on the wheel. Stay out of dark rooms.

“Ferris don’t want much of a wall. He likes his trouble delivered regular. We get burglars, rough trade, sightseers-Ferris is famous in some circles, you know-people looking for something out of Sunset Boulevard. Expectin’ some old H. Rider Haggard queen with four-inch fingernails in one of Nancy Reagan’s castoffs. And we get the wishfuls who still think Ferris can dump Stardust all over them. And sometimes he does.”

“How’d he find you?”

“I found him,” Henry said in a voice that suggested that the answer was complete. “Turn here.”

Hayworth runs north and south at a slight grade, the kind of faintly dingy street that sings a siren’s tune for the developers. Two bungalows had been razed on the east side of the street, leaving dark spaces like gaps in a memory. The vacant lots were overgrown behind chain link, crammed with a tangle of chaparral that looked wild enough to house coyotes. Two big scraggly tomcats bolted into the brush in exaggerated alarm as Alice’s headlights swept over them. Cats take everything personally.

Thirteen twenty-eight bumped up against the lower of the weedy lots, a featureless two-story oblong with glitter shot into the stucco for that indispensable touch of glamour. Big faux-Oriental letters cut from plywood and sprayed gold told one and all that the building had a name: THE MIKADO.

The plywood eight at the end of the address had fallen sideways to make a slightly ominous infinity sign. Infinity spent at the Mikado seemed like it would last longer, somehow, than infinity anywhere else. An iron gate, wide enough to admit the Rockettes in formation, hung ajar in the building’s center. Halloween decorations, violently colored plastic pumpkins and cats, dangled out of reach above the gate, and hibiscus blossoms littered the big bushes on either side, gawking open-throated at the night.

“Hustlers and screenwriters,” Henry said appraisingly as we approached. “Screenwriters will live anywhere.”

The gate’s squeal had been given oil-free decades to develop a full, almost orchestral tone. When it stopped echoing in our ears, we found ourselves facing a parched courtyard, open to the sheet-metal sky. Green gravel simulated grass, and concrete paths cut straight lines through it, and the building rose dark and solid on all four sides. There was no opening at the far end. Dead center, a skeletal wooden structure that might once have suggested a pagoda to someone with a vivid imagination was collapsing in on itself in silhouette. Four sagging cacti, one at each corner of the structure, cried silently for water. The West Hollywood charm patrol, so ubiquitous elsewhere, evidently hadn’t paid The Mikado a visit. It would be a dismal place to die.

There were twelve apartments downstairs and twelve up, and the entire enclosed area was visible from every single one of them. Their doors opened directly onto the parched geometry of the courtyard, each bordered by a single window about five feet wide. No cheerful lights called to the lonely traveler. Apartment seven was the door in the far corner of the lower level.

“Me first,” Henry whispered. He had his leather jacket open and his hand inside it, brushing the dark skin of his abdomen. His stomach muscles announced themselves like an alluvial ripple pattern washed into stone.

“That’s not polite,” I said, stepping in front of him. “ I invited you.”

Henry wrapped long fingers around my arm. “He’s not looking for me. I figure I’ll go straight across, make a little noise, scuff a little gravel. You stay close to the walls, and when I go past the door you wait a minute and then kick it in.“

My confidence, already low, waned further. “Kick it in?”

He raised a booted foot. “You know. Like on TV.” His eyes went down to my feet, to my battered Reeboks. “Second thought,” he said, “we both go around the side and I kick it in.”

“Henry,” I said, “the window’s open.”

Henry squinted across the courtyard. “In Los Angeles?”

Great. He was nearsighted, too. “Follow me.”

He grabbed me again, harder this time, and hauled me around to face him. “I got Special Forces training,” he said. “Do you?”

I pulled my arm free. “I’m what you might call self-trained.”

“You gonna be what you might call dead, that guy still in there,” he said.

“Goddamn it, Henry, I need a backup, not a replacement.”

He brought his left hand up, fingers splayed wide, and rested it against the center of my chest, forcing me back three steps. It hadn’t taken any visible effort. His right hand had his gun in it. “Ten feet,” he said. “You stay behind me ten feet. I go through the window, you count to ten, and if you don’t hear anything, come in. If I yell for help, come in right away. Otherwise, you’re going in alone.”

I was not going in alone. “After you,” I said.

He nodded once, wheeled, and struck off straight across the courtyard, a man-shaped hole in the night. When he was ten feet in front of me I followed, feeling like one of Ferris’s Yorkies. A very paranoid Yorkie. I took out my own gun and jacked a shell into the chamber.

“Shhhhh,” Henry said.

The pagoda, or whatever it might once have been, loomed dolefully on our left and then receded behind us. I heard music, the muted thump of bass and drum, barely audible over the scuff of Henry’s motorcycle boots. It grew louder as we approached number seven, floating onto the hot still night air through the open window.

At the last moment, Henry jogged left to stand directly beside the window and gestured to bring me beside him. “Start counting,” he said, and then he stepped away from the wall, backed up two long paces, brought his elbows up, and dove headfirst through the window screen. At the count of two, I followed.

I landed on my elbows, getting a nice carpet burn, and rolled to the left, away from the door, until I hit a wall. I was pushing myself to my feet when the light went on, and Henry bloomed from the darkness with his pistol pointed straight at my middle.

“You count fast,” he said.

The room was empty except for a low wooden coffee table with a telephone on it and a six-inch stack of newspapers pulled up next to the table, like a cushion. The edge of the table was fringed with long black scars as though cigarettes had burned themselves out on it. The smell of tobacco was heavy in the air.

A small kitchen glared white across a low counter. Next to it was a corridor. “Bedroom,” Henry said, pointing to it.

Henry preceded me down the hallway, turning left to flick on the lights in the bathroom. I went on to the bedroom, found the light switch, and snapped it up.

The long white thing against the back wall was a bed of newspapers, maybe two inches thick and seven feet long, with an unopened copy of the Sunday Times drafted into service as a pillow. The shapeless olive thing crumpled at the foot of the newspaper bed was an army surplus blanket. The brown rectangle in the center of the room was another low wooden table, a twin to the one in the living room. The black thing in the center of the table was what was left of Max Grover’s hand.

A turquoise ring gleamed at me as I approached. Clutched between two of the three remaining fingers was the stub of a filter cigarette.

I got down on hands and knees. The music came from a cheap boom box under the table: a cassette unspooled itself through the little window. The boom box was equipped with auto-reverse. It could have been playing for hours.

Four-twenty.

“The fuck is that?” Henry said from the doorway.

“I think it’s Kool and the Gang,” I said. “Did you touch anything?”

“The thing on the table,” Henry said.

“Behold the hand of man,” I said, “and dreadful are its works. I asked you whether you touched anything.”

He was standing over the table looking down, his mouth screwed into a knot of muscle. “No.”

“Give me some newspaper.”

He grabbed a sheet from the bed and handed it to me, and I put it over the boom-box and picked the contraption up. Then I hauled it into the living room and opened the front door wide.

“Get ready to leave,” I said. “We’re going to move fast.”

“I never been readier,” Henry said at the door.

I cranked the boom box up full and positioned it in the center of the door. Stepping over it, I ran across the courtyard and through the gate with Henry right behind me. Kool and the Gang bounced off the walls behind us.

Henry was silent all the way back to Hanks’s house. I dropped him at the gate, shepherded Alice down the hill to Sunset, and turned right. West, toward the freeway.