The Bone Polisher

20 ~ McCarvey

With only two days to create the world between the time Nite Line came out and the wake for Max, Ferris Hanks had swung into a frenzy of activity. When I checked my answering machine from the comfort of Eleanor’s living room, I found no fewer than six messages, each pitched at a higher level of urgency. At the conclusion of the sixth, Henry took the phone away from him, leaving him piping orders in the distance.

“Call the man,” Henry said. “Else, I’m going to have to give him a cigar to calm him down.” The next message was from Spurrier, demanding to know if I had anything to do with the ad in the paper. He left a home number, sounding significantly irritated. I called Joel Farfman instead.

“More than a hundred calls,” he said. “And that’s not counting the ones from Hanks. In, what? Four hours? You’re going to have some party.”

“You going to be there?”

“Wouldn’t miss it. I’m coming as the Lone Ranger.”

“Think you’ll be the only one?”

“I’ll be the only one with a faithful Indian companion. Wait until you see Tonto. But keep your distance.”

Everybody seemed to assume I was gay. “How hard would it be for you to dig out everything you’ve run on the guy who killed Max?”

A brief silence. “Not hard. That’s what interns are for.”

“Can you meet me at the Paragon Ballroom in a couple of hours with some photocopies?”

“What for?”

“I just need to get my bearings.”

“Will you give me an interview?”

“This is a trade?”

“Call it that.”

“Okay. But you can’t use my name.”

“Screw that to the wall and hang a picture on it,” he said pleasantly. “Remember who, what, where, when? You’re ‘who.’ ”

Nite Line, after all, was a weekly. With any luck, this would all be over by the time the next edition came out. And if it wasn’t, I’d probably be safe in jail. “Okay. But the Times is on this, too.”

He laughed, a pinched, wheezy sound like a squeeze bottle being emptied. “The Times,” he said. “I can imagine their angle. ‘The Gay Ripper’ or something like that.”

“I don’t think he’s gay.”

“When did that ever stop them? By the way, Max is in the new People. There’s no press agent like death.”

“You could do me another favor,” I said.

“Yeah?” The tone was noncommittal; like Ferris Hanks, Farfman saw favors as a form of currency.

“I want to know who placed a personal.”

“No can do,” he said promptly. “Everything they want you to know is in their ad.”

“This has to do with Max.”

“Oh.” He barked something to someone else, covering the mouthpiece, and came back. “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

“Sorry. It looks like Max met his killer through your paper.”

I heard a small squealing sound: Farfman sucking breath between his teeth. “You’re sure?”

“As sure as I am of anything at this point.”

“Ah, shit,” he said. “I really hate…” He blew into the mouthpiece of the phone. “Balls,” he said. “Read it to me.”

I unfolded the torn page, which was beginning to fall apart along the fold lines, and read it to him. “Who placed it, when it was placed, how he paid. Anything else you can think of.”

“Yeah, yeah.” There was something new in his voice, an edge that hadn’t been there before. “You got it. See you at the Paragon.”

After all that unaccustomed sleep the second cup of coffee gave me a mild case of the jitters, so I poured the last chill inch or so into the sink and cleaned up. I actually dried the counter. The new Simeon, preparing for domesticity. Then I went out blinking into the flawless sunshine of Venice and drove home.

I avoided the driveway and came up to the house from the side, hiking through tangles of chaparral and surprising a toad the size of one of Ferris’s Yorkies as I hoisted myself up onto the deck. The place was just as I’d left it. No Ed Pfester, or Phillip Crenshaw, or whatever his name was, waiting in the living room and slicing up my carpets for practice. No new messages on the machine. No word from Schultz. A wind had kicked up, and the house was creaking like someone was practicing dance steps on the roof. I set the new world record for changing my trousers and took Topanga into the hot Valley to avoid the beach traffic, heading for West Hollywood.

I’d hit the Monday lull, lunchtime over and all the folks who keep civilization plodding along back in their offices until six, and the traffic on the freeway slipped between the lane lines like it had been greased. I turned on the radio and got the midday disk jockeys. There must be something about sitting alone in a little room with a microphone for hours that is fatal to the soul. The only things that sounded live were the commercials, which were recorded, and the music, some of which was made by people who were dead.

The Paragon Ballroom was a building I’d passed dozens of times without ever noticing it, a two-story red brick barn, liberally enlivened by graffiti, that occupied half a city block on a treesy side street just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. The doorway was arched, double wide, and open, the windows above it blocked with dirty plywood. The hand-painted sign hanging crooked to the left of the door advised all and sundry that Hollywood’s most glamorous venue was available for very special events or, on a more mundane level, as a rehearsal hall. Four cars were scattered, isolated and looking lonely, around the big parking lot.

Inside, the Paragon was one enormous room with a gleaming hardwood floor that must have been sixty years old, blistered and peeling floral wallpaper, and three sets of metal stairs leading to a catwalk that ran along the upper half of the building: a vantage point for the tangle-footed who wanted to watch the dancers. A bandstand, bare plywood set on metal risers, stood against the far wall. The place smelled as though the doors hadn’t been opened in years, a clogged, generic odor of disuse, like damp newsprint or pressed flowers. Three carpenters wearing T-shirts, cutoffs, and bandannas, as though they’d been costumed by the contractor, purposefully banged hammers against the plywood of the stage, and a man with an apron full of tools stood on a rickety, wheeled metal tower in the center of the floor, hanging lights from the beams below the ceiling. The most glamorous venue in Hollywood it wasn’t.

“The man hisself.” It was Henry, dressed to spar with Sylvester Stallone in gold boxing trunks and a sky-blue sleeveless formfit T-shirt that made him look even blacker. He had a pen tucked into the hair above his ear. “Ferris been pulling his hair out with both hands.”

“Anxiety’s good for him. It raises the pulse rate.”

“He thinks the fountain might oughta go over there,” Henry said, pointing to the corner of the room directly right of the stage.

Ferris’s holy water. “Up to him.”

“And close off the gallery up there. Keep everybody down on the floor. Put a couple of our helpers on the catwalk to keep an eye on folks.”

“How many helpers have we got?”

“Many as you want.”

“Two should do it up there. No need to be conspicuous. Where is he?”

“I sent him home. He was driving everybody crazy. We moved the stage three times already.”

“So walk me through it.”

He wrapped a big hand around my arm, making me feel like a toddler, and towed me to the door. “People come in here, which I’m sure is no surprise. Two guys here, handing out tickets for the drawing and identifying everybody they can. Valet parking outside-Ferris wants to control the cars. Hell, Ferris wants to control everything. He was all upset this morning that daylight savings was over, wondering who he could call about it. He’s trying to get the street turned one-way for the evening. Okay, they come into the room and head for the bar-”

“Where?”

“Left wall. It’s got the plumbing outlets. Bar’ll go in this afternoon. Four bartenders, white wine, five kinds of bubble water, fruit juice for the fanatics. Eight of Ferris’s actors dressed like Roman slaves, whatever that means, moving around with trays of what Ferris calls finger foods, fried fingers or something. There’s a kitchen in the back, but it’s pretty dire, just pounds of rat shit in the ovens. Food’s being brought in already cooked from Hugo’s Hankerings. We’ll scrub down the counters, nuke ’em good and cover them with butcher paper, just use them to hold the food before it goes on the trays. Four people there, shoveling the stuff whenever the slaves run out. They going to be costumed like French maids.”

“A touch of class.”

“You say so. One monitor-good word, huh? — over by that door to keep an eye on the bathroom, like you wanted. Make sure everyone who goes in comes back out.”

“That’s twenty-one so far, not counting the parking attendants.”

“They stay outside.”

“You know all these people by sight?”

“Ferris does. Like I say, a lot of them are going to be his boys. Then there’s the band, the Silverlake Flyers.”

“Bar band?”

“Old hits.” Henry grimaced. “Disco, Jay and the Americans, Barry Manilow. The neighbors got any taste, we’re in trouble.”

“Invite them.”

He pulled a small pad of paper from the elastic waistband of his trunks, retrieved the pen, and made a note. “I’ll photocopy the ad, put it under doors and stuff.”

“You’re good at this, Henry.”

“What’s to be good at? You and Ferris thought of everything already. I just run around and check shit off.”

“Other exits?”

He lifted his chin in the direction of the door leading to the bathrooms. “Fire door back there. We’ll have a walkie-talkie outside.”

“That makes twenty-two, not counting the stage crew. Good thing Ferris is rich.”

“Ho.” Henry’s voice was flat. “Also, scoff, scoff. He’s promoting the food and all the drinks except the wine. The waiters are working for free. Ballroom cost six fifty, band goes for scale. He’s got a source in Lourdes for the holy water. He says. Maybe a couple thou all together. Don’t you know about rich folks? They never spend money.”

“The dog tags.”

“Yeah, well-” Henry leaned toward me. “They going to be plated. Ferris is really pissed at-” He looked past me, toward the door. “Speak of the devil.”

“Henry,” Joel Farfman said. “Simeon.” He gazed darkly around the room. The eye with the punctured pupil lazily followed the good one. “To quote Bette Davis, ‘What a dump.’ ”

“Little glitter,” Henry said impassively, “some bunting, turn down the lights and fill it with people. Gonna look great.”

“You have a genuinely fervid imagination,” Farfman said. “Where’s John Beresford Tipton?”

“Having his nap,” Henry said. “He got up early this morning, maybe ten. Hard on an old man, specially when he don’t go to sleep until nine.”

“I should have half his energy,” Farfman said. “You can’t believe the number of times he’s called today.”

“You have no idea what I’d believe,” Henry said. “I live with the man.”

“And you seem so untouched.” Farfman held up a manila folder and waved it in my direction. “Here’s your stuff.”

“I got things to do,” Henry said tactfully. “Some of these water pipes as clogged as Ferris’s arteries.” He trudged away across the floor, pausing briefly to assess the work of the man hanging the lights, and disappeared through the door into the kitchen.

I took advantage of a lull in the hammering. “Why was Hanks calling?”

“Staying on top of things, heek, heek,” Farfman squeaked, sounding enough like Hanks to unnerve me. “I made the mistake of telling him, the first time he phoned, that we’d been getting calls all morning. Since then, it’s been every twenty minutes. Who’s called? How many? Do they sound excited? Should we have put his name in the ad? How many photographers are we going to send? Will they be in costume? I told him they’d be dressed as photographers, and it seemed to satisfy him. For about fifteen seconds. Should he pitch the television stations? What about radio? Has anyone called People or Us or Back Fence? He’s asked about everything except movie rights.”

“He’s probably sold them already.”

“And you probably think that’s funny. I’m sure he’s already cast himself. Maybe John Forsythe.”

“Too old,” I said. “Not tall enough.”

“Hey, can we get through here?” Someone prodded me on the shoulder, and I turned to see four beefy individuals crowded into the doorway. Behind them was a massive mahogany bar half the size of my living room. It was shaped like Florida.

“Left wall,” I said. Mr. Official. “Careful of the floor.”

“I don’t know who you are,” said the man who had tapped me. He wore a leather butcher’s apron and a tie-dyed T-shirt, and he was bigger than both members of a wrestling tag team, but his voice was a rusty squeak. “I’m Mickey Snell, and I manage this place.”

“Well,” I said, following Farfman toward the stage, “it’s a swell floor.”

“Built in 1937,” Mickey Snell cheeped at my back. “All old oak from a nineteenth-century sailing ship. Of course, it was saturated with-”

“Hey, Mickey,” one of the bruisers said. “Can we cut the history and move the fucking bar?” Mickey Snell didn’t even draw a breath. He was telling the air how the salt had been leached out of the wood as the bruisers shoved the bar through the door, making an unsettling squealing noise on the swell floor.

Farfman’s folder held seven articles on the murders. The one on top had been written after the killing of the third man, the first of the New Orleans victims. It was on fax paper, and when I glanced up at Farfman, he reached over and slid a finger over its slick surface. He’d been inking his hands again.

“I had New Orleans send it to me,” he said. “They had three stories. The others are our own, out of Nite Line.”

The first clipping was a more or less perfunctory rundown, short on facts. A fifty-four-year-old college professor and unsuccessful city council candidate named Jefferson Hope had been beaten and sliced to death and his hand severed. Police were making inquiries. The community was grieving. All pretty much standard, except for the tone, which was an unjournalistic cross between bereaved and outraged.

Chapter Two: Jefferson Hope’s index finger had been mailed to the newspaper in his home town of Preston, Virginia, and the coverage blossomed. The second story was four times as long as the first. The cops were suggesting a link to two similar murders in Chicago. The reporter had done some investigative work, trying to trace Hope’s movements in the days preceding his death, but without much luck. Hope, normally a gregarious man, had apparently dropped out of circulation about a week before his body was discovered.

Over behind the bar Mickey Snell was squeaking away about the water pipes-solid copper, it appeared-when I turned to the third article. This one warranted a three-column headline. It detailed the death of another New Orleans man, an orthodontist named William Smythe. Smythe was not a gregarious man, and the first indication anyone had that something was wrong came in the form of a call to the New Orleans police from a reporter in Mentone, Illinois, who had had the misfortune to open the morning mail and discover a human finger and some Polaroids in which Smythe was clearly identifiable. The Polaroids, the story euphemized, were “of a highly personal nature.”

“Look at the next-to-last graph,” Farfman said in a tight voice.

This time, the reporter’s efforts had paid off. He’d found a friend of Smythe’s who had dropped by the house unannounced the day before the murder and had seen someone in the hallway behind Smythe when he answered the door. He’d only glimpsed him for a moment; he’d assumed that Smythe was busy, made his apologies, and left. Smythe’s guest was described as a young man, probably in his late teens, very good-looking, with light blond hair.

“He’s the one who bought the ad in Nite Line,” Farfman said tightly. “In person. I took the order myself.”

“When?”

“October eleventh. For two weeks.”

“Only two?”

He nodded. The good eye darted down to the clipping while the other wandered down my chest. “That’s unusual. Most people want it in for a month or two. Some of them keep it in for a year; they just call in changes in the wording every now and then to make it seem fresh.”

“Did you help him write it?”

“He had it all figured out. I remembered him the moment you read me the ad. He looked like, I don’t know, someone who isn’t hip enough to wait for the walk sign, but he knew precisely what he wanted. He even knew how much it would cost. He had the exact amount, in cash, in an envelope. I said something like, ‘Two weeks isn’t very long,’ and he said, ‘It’ll be long enough.’ ”

The ad had expired on the twenty-fifth. Max had met the plane on the twenty-sixth, if I could trust his penciled notes on the newspaper clipping. Cutting it close. As Farfman had said, the kid knew precisely what he wanted.

“Don’t people have to fill out some kind of form or something? Don’t you keep records?”

“Under the newspaper stories,” Farfman said.

It was a standard ass-protector from some legal mill: The advertiser represented that the information in his ad was accurate and accepted all liability for any damages that might arise from misrepresentation. The advertiser understood that the newspaper was not responsible for any consequences that might follow from his decision to place the advertisement, bla, bla, bla. At the bottom a series of blanks had been filled out in longhand: “Name: Phillip Crenshaw. Age: 19 Address: Box 322, Kearney, Nebraska.” A phone number.

“Have you dialed this number?”

“I left it for you.” Farfman seemed embarrassed.

“And this is his handwriting?”

He swallowed and looked away from me, one eye at a time. “It’s mine,” he said, blushing furiously. “I wrote it out for him. His hand was bandaged.”

“Smart boy.”

Farfman looked like a man who’d just been sucker-punched by his best friend. “And he seemed like he’d just come from milking a cow. Talked about how he couldn’t find his way around L.A., how he had to go back home that afternoon, how he hoped someone would answer the ad, give him a new life.”

I searched his face for a trace of the cynicism I’d seen the previous afternoon. “That didn’t sound like bullshit to you?”

The blush deepened, and he slipped his hand into the collar of his shirt and ran it over the back of his neck as though he were perspiring. “Now that I say it out loud, it’s patently ridiculous. At the time, though-if he’d told me he was trying to escape from an evil stepmother, I’d have believed him. If he’d said he was the bastard son of Howard Hughes and Marilyn Monroe, I’d have believed him.” He put the inky fingers over his lips and rubbed, leaving a dark smear from his nose to the tip of his chin. “He was the nicest kid I ever met in my life.”

“That seems to be the general opinion. Listen, Joel, he’s good at this. He let five men get a lot closer to him than you got, and no one seemed to think anything was wrong.”

“And now there are going to be six,” he said. He riffed the clips with his thumb. “Look. It happens in pairs.”

“Maybe it won’t this time,” I said, sliding down from the stage. “Let’s try this number.”

The room was filling up with men. The electrician on the tower had been joined by an assistant who pushed the big metal tower down the length of the beams as new lights went up. Two slender guys with dangerous-looking staple guns were attaching blue cloth to the edge of the stage to hide the risers beneath it. Tables laden with half-open floral arrangements had been trundled in. Mickey Snell’s crew had the bar in position and were doing exotic things to the copper water pipes while Mickey speculated aloud on why the threading on plumbing fixtures ran counterclockwise. Like a dowdy old tart, like some architectural Apple Annie, the Paragon Ballroom was being pinched and prodded into a semblance of glamour.

Without interrupting the flow of speculation, Mickey Snell pointed a wrench in the direction of a pay phone in the hall near the bathrooms, and Farfman handed me a fistful of quarters. People who live in West Hollywood, where parking a car is more expensive than buying a house, carry a lot of quarters.

A harried-sounding woman answered the phone. Several children practiced for the Olympic Screaming finals in the background. No, no Phillip Crenshaw lived there. No, this wasn’t a new number, they’d had it for years. No, she didn’t know anyone named Crenshaw in Kearney. She didn’t know anyone who answered Phillip Crenshaw’s description, although she wouldn’t mind it if she did.

When I hung the phone up, it rang.

“Don’t you ever go home?” Schultz asked sourly.

“As little as possible at the moment. How’d you get this number?”

“The phone book, under Paragon Ballroom. You should try it some time. J. D. McCarvey, remember?”

“What have you got?”

“McCarvey, Jason David. Vietnam veteran, enlisted at eighteen in 1964. That’d make him forty-nine now, right? Honorably discharged in ’72, so he did a few tours.”

I snagged Henry, who was shadowboxing by, and grabbed his pen. “What else?”

“Here’s the good part. He was wounded. I mean, that’s not so good for him, but for us it’s a bonanza. The VA has him living in Seattle, 1432 Wooster Drive, Seattle, Washington.”

I wrote the address on the wall. “That’s great, Norbert,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Hold on,” Schultz said. “Don’t you want his phone number?”