The Bone Polisher

26 ~ Good Friday

On Friday, two days after the wake and eleven days after Max Grover was murdered, Christy flew to Boulder to take part in the farewell service Max had designed in his will. It had been delayed twice: first for the police autopsy, and then to give Max’s sister a chance to regain her bearings. When she felt well enough, she called Christy personally and invited him to come.

Christy later told me that the sun had been shining when he landed in Boulder, although it was unseasonably cold. He hadn’t been dressed warmly enough. He’d taken a cab to a small white clapboard house on the city’s outskirts, huddling in the backseat and using the forty-minute ride to continue outlining his plans for Max’s institute. Helen, Max’s sister, had come to the curb to greet him. Already inside the house were four tiny women in their eighties and Max’s lawyer, the same Mr. Jenks I’d talked to on the phone. Mr. Jenks was the shortest person in the room.

There had been hot tea and home-baked seed cake and talk of Max. Tears were not encouraged. Max, in Helen’s view, had been exactly who he’d wanted to be, and the service was a way for them all to pay tribute to a good man who’d managed to live a good life. When they left the house, Helen asked Christy to carry the urn containing Max’s ashes. Outside, they saw that the sky had disappeared beneath a featureless ceiling of gray clouds.

With Mr. Jenks at the wheel of a van, the seven of them drove up the side of a mountain and over several miles of dirt track before stopping at a grove of trees-the property Max had left to Helen. A wind had kicked up, forcing Helen to raise her voice as she read Max’s farewell. Christy wouldn’t tell me what Max had written. When Helen was finished reading she took the urn from Christy and threw a handful of ashes into the air. Christy raised his eyes and saw them coming down, coming down everywhere, thick and fast and white, lost in a flurry of sudden snow.

The day that Christy was in Denver, Ferris Hanks went home from the hospital. At seven that evening I drove up Sunset Plaza Drive and through the open gate, parking Alice on the brick circular drive that arched in front of the house. I didn’t ring the bell; the front door was ajar. Cold air streamed through it into the night.

Two of Ferris’s Yorkies met me at the door, sniffing my ankles in a perfunctory, professional manner. The big living room was empty. I stood there for a moment, listening to nothing in particular and looking around. The people crowded into the teak carvings held their frozen dance steps. Heavy cobwebs, gray with dust, drooped above the thick open beams. I hadn’t noticed them on my first visit.

To the left were two steps leading up to a dark dining room, dominated by a massive carved table at least fifteen feet long. Chairs of wood and leather were pushed back from it all along its length, as though the party had risen only moments before. I counted twenty of them. Dust coated the leather seats.

The Yorkies trotted along in front of me, anticipating my destination, as I crossed the living room and climbed the spiral stair to the second story. The stairs curved upward, hugging the walls of a circular tower, sliced by long thin windows, some of them thirty feet high. The city blinked and glittered below like broken glass.

The hallway leading to the bedrooms was arched; its white plaster walls were lighted every four or five feet by black iron sconces left over from the Spanish Inquisition. The Yorkies scampered through a partially open door, and I followed them into an enormous vault-ceilinged, white-carpeted bedroom.

“What a nice surprise,” Ferris Hanks said with his back to me.

He lay on his side, dead center in the king-sized bed, facing a small black-and-white television set and surrounded by his little dogs. He looked very small. The blankets had been tented above his broken leg. The screen of the television set showed me the hall I had just come through.

“Japanese,” Hanks said, still looking at the screen. “They’re so clever, don’t you think? That’s what people say, anyway. Watch.” The picture changed: the front door. Then the living room. Then the gate outside. “You didn’t bring me flowers,” he said, still facing the screen.

“No,” I said. “I figured you might be allergic.”

“You’re going to have to come over here,” he said. “I can’t roll over without help, and Henry seems to have decided to take a turn in the evening air. Just when I wanted someone to read to me. Would you like to read to me?”

I picked up the two Yorkies and put them on the bed. The other dogs scooted aside to make room. “I don’t feel like reading,” I said, “but I’ll tell you a story.”

“Am I going to like it?” I still hadn’t come around to the side he was facing, but he made no effort to turn his head.

“You should,” I said. “You wrote it.”

“What’s the fun in that?” he asked plaintively. “I know how it comes out.”

“Well, you’re going to hear it anyway,” I said. “Let’s start with a secondary character. Darryl Wilder was an interesting guy. He was nuts, but he was interesting. I wonder who he would have killed if his uncle hadn’t put a move on him. Someone, that’s for sure. Bus drivers, maybe, or Girl Scout troop leaders, or left-handed horticulturists. Somebody specific, and he would have created an elaborate, self-serving story that justified killing them, and he would have killed them ritually, the same way every time.”

“I’ve never understood how anyone can do anything the same way every time,” Hanks said. “It’s so boring. So perhaps your thumbnail appraisal of what’s his name isn’t accurate. Perhaps he wasn’t an interesting guy.”

Hanks may have been bored, but the dogs were paying attention. Nine or ten pairs of black eyes followed my every movement. “He was careful, too. Wilder, I mean. Did his research, meticulous as a graduate student. Gay men of a certain age, successful, living in a big city but born in a small town. That was important to him-that they came from somewhere else, somewhere small, where lots of people knew them. It gave him the opportunity to take a revenge that went beyond killing them. It had to be important, because it was the most dangerous part of his act. He had to send the papers and the finger. Anything you mail has a postmark, or if it’s Federal Express it has a waybill number. He left a description of himself every time he sent off one of his little packages.”

“Compulsives,” Hanks said dismissively. “I don’t see how you can think he was interesting.”

“It was there the whole time,” I said. “From the moment Spurrier told me about Max’s finger arriving in Boulder. Max didn’t fit the profile. The other men were in the closet at home; that’s why the packages were so destructive. But Max went out of his way to let the entire world know he was gay. He walked away from a career to do it. He walked away from you to do it.”

“I wish I could see your face,” Hanks said.

“Max never answered that ad. There were enough troubled kids on the sidewalk to keep him in the guardian angel business for the rest of his life. Max didn’t even read Nite Line. Someone put a clipping from the paper into the pocket of one of Max’s pairs of pants. He even wrote a flight number on it.”

“Some people,” Hanks said, “are too fucking clever for their own good.”

“He didn’t try to forge Max’s handwriting. Just numbers, cryptic enough to make it look like Max didn’t want anyone to know what they meant. But Max was a calligrapher. He wrote numbers in the old style. He crossed his sevens.”

“That’s not all he crossed,” Hanks said.

“Darryl Wilder came to Los Angeles to kill you,” I said. “You and someone else he never got around to. You’re from Walpole, New Hampshire. On some bizarre level, you think you’re still in the closet. You like the closet, Ferris. You told me so, remember?”

He tried to move, groaned, and abandoned it. “If you’re going to stay over there, would you at least help me turn over? This might be a little more interesting if I could watch you as you tell it.”

“Watch your TV. You’re never going to walk through your house again, so you might as well take a final look.”

“And I’m not allergic to flowers,” he said.

“He read about you somewhere, or heard about you. You represented a new phase in his career. Somebody famous, a trophy kill. He probably came up to the gate one night-I’m sure you don’t answer ads in Nite Line any more than Max did-and he probably told you he wanted to be an actor. Henry said that still happens from time to time. He hadn’t counted on Henry, though. After a few days he made his move, and Henry stopped him. Is that right?”

“It seems I was wrong,” Ferris said. “I don’t know how this comes out.”

“When Henry had taken care of Wilder, tied him up and stuffed him in a cupboard or one of your dungeons or something, you began to think about putting together a deal. That’s what you do, remember? Henry said it best: ‘Agents don’t do anything. They get other people to do things. They’re not actors, they’re not writers, they’re not killers. Other people do the work.’ ”

“Henry said that?” He sounded hurt.

“Henry persuaded Wilder to tell the two of you what he was up to. Henry can be very persuasive. So you proposed a three-point deal. Point one. You didn’t call the police. Point two. You told Wilder about Max, probably making him out to be what he looked like from the outside, an old man who preyed on helpless young ones. Point three. You offered him something-money, or a movie career-to do his act on Max. A man even more famous than you are.”

“Just to keep you talking until Henry gets back,” Hanks said, “let’s say I promised him fifty thousand dollars. Could I have a drink of water?”

“So he placed the ad in the paper, just like he always did-you probably wrote it, even though you knew Max would never see it-and you told him where he’d be likely to meet Max. And Darryl took it from there. He put the ad in Max’s pocket-he wanted the credit for the kill-he used Max’s computer to write some letters I found on a computer bulletin board, he even wrote letters to Max, which Max never read. You probably wrote the letters from Max, too.”

“Your characters aren’t consistent,” Hanks said. “If Darryl was a compulsive, he would have to do things his way. The way he always did them. The act of writing to Max would have been important to him. That’s the way he did it before, right? So let’s say I arranged a meeting-just talking story here-and Darryl sort of got things going and then told Max he had to go back to, I think it was Nebraska, and he set himself up somewhere in L.A. and started writing letters to Max and sending them to a post office box for forwarding. And Max wrote back out of the inexhaustible goodness of his heart, asking Darryl to come back to Los Angeles so Max could help him do whatever Max thought he could help him do. If you really want me as the heavy, though, I might have drafted a few points for Darryl’s letters. Setting the bait, you might say.”

“And Max took the bait, and Darryl killed him, and-and what? You decided not to pay him?”

“If I’d offered him fifty thousand dollars,” Hanks said, “I might have rethought it. That’s a lot of money to pay someone who’s doing something he enjoys.”

“You’re used to dealing with actors.”

“If you’re suggesting that I usually do business with people who don’t kill for their jollies, I’ll concede that.”

“You thought you could get away with it. You must have figured he’d just disappear. After all, you had Henry to protect you, and you could put Darryl in jail. Or worse.”

He didn’t say anything. He seemed glued to the screen of the TV, but I could sense him straining to listen.

“But you didn’t know about the dog tags. You didn’t know he couldn’t leave without them. All you knew was that he was still here, still in Los Angeles, and that made you nervous. Did he phone you?”

A deep sigh. “It’s your story.”

“Let’s say you got nervous enough to decide to pay him. And when you found out about the tags, you decided you’d give them to him. At the wake. And all the time, you were acting like Max’s misunderstood friend, paying for his farewell party.”

He lifted a hand above the covers. “I said I’d pay for the wake before I learned anything about the tags.”

“Hell, Ferris, the wake was a chance to pay Darryl anyway, if he showed up. Or kill him. Have Henry kill him, I mean. You tried that once, didn’t you? Henry had orders to go into that apartment ahead of me. If he’d killed Wilder, would you have gone through with the wake? Or would you have begged off, saved a little money?”

“That’s a low blow.”

“I couldn’t aim low enough to hit you.”

The Yorkies were sensing Hanks’s agitation now, getting up and changing their positions on the bed. One of them jumped down, raised a leg, and started licking itself nervously.

“Stop that, Dolly,” Hanks commanded. “It’s disgusting.” He turned his neck, allowing me a view of his battered profile. His face was an unhealthy yellow, made more livid by the dark circles incised beneath his eyes. “And if I had done any of this feverish nonsense, why would I have done it? What did I have to gain? Have you taken it that far?”

Something moved behind me in the hallway. I kept my eyes on Hanks’s face. “Max left you. Max was the only person who ever left you. You tried to destroy him in the press when he quit the show. Then, after years without contact, you started trying to reach him. Maybe you had a fantasy of forgiving him. You have to have a lot of power over someone to forgive them. And he stiffed you. No response. No power, Ferris. After all those years of waiting, after all you’d done for him, after you condescended to fall in love with him, you couldn’t get Max Grover to pick up a telephone.”

“You think this was about power?” His position had to be uncomfortable, but he held it, the muscular neck rigid with effort.

“I think you’re about power, Ferris. I think it’s what keeps your heart beating. Orchestra conductors live to be older than anyone. They say it’s all that arm waving, but I think it’s the naked exercise of power.”

“Wait a minute.” His broad mouth stretched into a taut straight line and he closed his eyes, and moved beneath the blankets. The mouth opened just wide enough to emit a moan. Veins popped into relief beneath the yellowish skin, and then his upper lip lifted in a grimace, revealing his teeth, and I saw why he’d perfected the half-smile. His teeth were as false as George Washington’s. When he let his head fall back on the pillow, he was lying on his back. He opened his eyes and aimed them at me, as flat and opaque as buttons.

“Max sentenced me to death,” he said. His forehead and upper lip gleamed with sweat. Behind him, on the television screen, someone moved in the hallway outside the door. “After Max, there was nobody else for me. For years I lived with it. I had no choice, so it became one of the things I had to learn to live with. One of many. You have no idea, at your age, some of the things we have to live with.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“People,” he snapped. “Men and women. Every year you learn to live with something else, some failing or limitation, some sickness, some sin. They hang around your neck like chains, like weights. But you go on. If you’re strong, you go on.”

He tried to shift his position slightly, displaying the plastic teeth again, and his head twisted impatiently, trying to pull his weakened body with it. He gave up and looked at me out of the corners of the long eyes. “It’s bearable to be alone when you’re young,” he said. “When you’re old, it’s death. No one should be alone when he’s old. Max wouldn’t return my calls. I gave up. I’m old. I’m sick. I was ready to die. The chains were too heavy for me to carry any more. Then Darryl Wilder came through my gate.”

“Killing Max kept you alive?”

“You can never question what keeps someone alive. You’ll find that out sooner or later.”

“It would have been better if you’d died,” I said.

He gave me the familiar half smile. “As I’m sure you’ll allow, that’s a matter of perspective.”

“They probably won’t kill you for this,” I said. “Not at your age.”

“ Heek heek. Excuse me for laughing in your face, but with your face, you’re probably used to it. Heek heek. We’ve just been talking, that’s all. You’ve been entertaining a sick man. You told me a story and I improvised a coda for it. It was a good story, too, except for the letters. But you can’t prove anything, not anything at all.”

“No,” I said. “But he can.”

I stepped aside and Henry came through the door.

Hanks’s eyes widened briefly and then narrowed again. “Where have you been?”

“You sposed to say, ‘ Et tu, Brute,’ ” Henry said.

Hanks lifted his head an imperious two inches. “Get rid of this man.”

“No way, Ferris,” Henry said. “I cut a deal.”

“You ignorant jungle bunny,” Hanks said. “No one can prove-”

“Maybe, maybe not. If they couldn’t, I made a mistake. If they could, though, I got to think about old Henry.”

“What about me?” Hanks demanded. “What about loyalty?”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Ferris,” Henry said, “but you don’t inspire much loyalty.”

“I’ll leave you two to chat,” I said.

“What Henry tells them isn’t worth anything,” Hanks said to me, raising his voice. “He’s trying to protect himself. No jury will believe him.”

“You could be right,” I said. “They’ll believe you, though. I’m wired, Ferris. Every word we said was recorded in a Sheriffs’ van parked in the street. They’ll be up any minute now. Oh, and let me give you a tip. The one with the awful sport coat is named Ike Spurrier. I wouldn’t get too cute with him. Bye, Henry.”

I passed Spurrier and three deputies in the living room. It seemed like a lot of force for one old man with two bullet holes in him. Spurrier brushed past me as though the room were too small for the two of us, which I suppose it was.

Sitting in the car, I lifted my arms to the steering wheel. They weighed eighty pounds apiece, and I let them drop to my lap. Getting old, I thought. Too old for the likes of Ferris Hanks, anyway.

Two more deputies came through the gate, toting a stretcher between them. I didn’t want to see any more. I started Alice and turned her around, and the two of us put-putted down Sunset Plaza to Sunset and headed toward the Pacific. Alice wasn’t young any more, either.

At the Pacific Coast Highway I sat at the light and looked out at the flat black expanse of the sea. When the person behind me hit his horn I turned right, to the north, toward home. Toward my house and my view and my life. Toward everything I’d built for myself, intentionally and accidentally. I’d built it the way some mollusks build their shells, picking up pieces of debris here and there on the seafloor, and fitting them together to create a suit of armor that’s too rigid to be crushed, too spiky to be swallowed, and virtually impossible to shed. Collector shells, they’re called. Some of them are beautiful.

At Topanga Canyon I pulled over to the side of the road and waited until the traffic had passed so I could make the U-turn that would take me south. Toward Eleanor. Maybe she’d let me in.