The Bone Polisher

2 ~ Blue Sky

“You’re the boy Christy sent.” Max Grover looked down at me through the screen door.

“That’s me,” I said, junking my mental image of the man Christy wanted to protect. I hadn’t figured he’d be six feet six or something, nor had I expected the trimmed, cloud-white beard and sky-blue eyes, a color scheme he was keeping intact by wearing a loose, long blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and creased, spotless white trousers. He was tanned, broad-shouldered, and barefoot, and he had one long brown hand wrapped around a large lemon.

“I must say, you don’t look very dangerous.” The eyes were not a fool’s eyes. They were, if anything, amused.

“Yeah, well you’re not what I imagined, either.”

“A psychic should be more… elfin,” he suggested, watching me. “Small-boned and bigheaded, like the aliens people keep showing pictures of to Robert Stack.” He snapped the screen with his forefinger, making a little cloud of dust. “Are you disappointed?”

“I’m not much of anything,” I said.

He closed his eyelids for a moment and then reopened them and peered at me a little more closely. The amusement had dipped beneath the blue surface. “The danger is there, though,” he said. “It runs through your veins, like a heavier blood. I wonder what brings it to the surface.”

This was not going as I’d planned.

He must have seen something in my face, because he said, “Control is an illusion. You must know that by now.”

“I gave up on control years ago. Now I settle for not being bewildered.”

“Can I help?” It was a serious question.

A car passed behind me on the street, Flores Street in West Hollywood, dragging a wake of heat behind it. “Well, you can tell me why you have a lemon in your hand.”

He looked down at it and then showed me a row of straight teeth that looked white even in the white beard. “Come in,” he said. “Have some lemonade.”

He led me through a perfectly restored craftsman’s bungalow, circa 1918-high ceilings, white walls, bleached oak floors, and broad arches leading from one room to another. I’d once heard a real-estate agent say that a house had “flow.” Max Grover’s house flowed like the Mississippi.

I waited in a small book-lined room while he squeezed lemons in the kitchen. He’d never laid eyes on me before, but he trusted me alone in his house. A cut-crystal bowl filled with antique roses scented the room, Mozart’s concerto for flute and harpsichord cooled the air, and I indulged a private vice: I absolutely cannot be left in someone’s library without checking out the titles. Max Grover had assembled a serious trove of religion and metaphysics: three biographies of the Buddha, a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Book of Urantia, whatever that was, the complete guesses of Edgar Cayce, several feet of baseless speculation on the pyramids, Robin Lane Fox debunking the Bible, a well-thumbed copy of The Book of Mormon, and at least two thousand more. I was leafing through Dore’s illustrations of Dante, hunting for the popes in hell, when Max said: “Here we are, then. Find anything you like?”

I turned. “Robin Lane Fox, in a pinch.”

“A cynic. But you’d have to be, wouldn’t you? With your job.” He was carrying a white wicker tray with two tall glasses of lemonade on it.

“But which came first?” I asked. “The cynicism or the job?” I didn’t get many chances to talk to psychics. Especially not for free.

“Our primary characteristics preexist us,” he said, as matter-of-factly as someone else might have said, “Hot, isn’t it?” and lowered the tray on a small wooden table. “But you’re the kind of cynic who develops it late in life, who grows-or rather, shrinks-into it. The better kind of cynic.”

“Which is?”

“A disappointed romantic, of course. You knew the answer to that. Have a seat. Take the soft one, the one nearer the window. At my age, it’s wise to keep the back straight.”

I sat on, or partway through, an old leather armchair that threatened briefly to let me sink all the way to the floor. Max Grover lowered himself precisely onto a wooden chair with a high, slatted back and combed clean fingers through his beard. Closer up, the skin around his eyes was deeply lined, slices of white cut into the tan of his face. He wore three ornate rings on his right hand: two turquoise in silver and a snake’s-eye agate.

“Christy is excitable,” he offered, putting an end to the preliminaries. “It goes with youth.”

“He feels you’re in danger.”

“We’re all in danger.”

“I had something a little less cosmic in mind.” The lemonade was tart and heart-clutchingly cold.

He shrugged and turned the sky-blue eyes on me. “While there are homosexuals-and heterosexuals, too, of course-who derive sexual excitement from danger, I’m not one of them. I don’t think it matters how we die, do you?”

“For a couple of minutes, it might.”

“After seventy-seven years on this earth, I’m not going to worry about a couple of minutes. Old age, according to Charles de Gaulle, is a shipwreck. After you’ve been through a shipwreck it’s hard to hang on to your worries.”

I thought about all the intensely worried old people I knew, people who tiptoed from room to room behind locked doors and lowered blinds, people afraid to go to the supermarket, worried about the young strong ones who might snatch their empty purses and break their brittle arms. Tall, lithe, ramrod-straight, and trusting, Max Grover wasn’t much of a fit.

I sipped my lemonade. “He says you’re picking up trash.”

“Trash.” He laughed. “A vivid word, but just a word, and it means whatever Christy wants it to mean. Words are so useless when things matter, as I’m sure you’ve discovered in your investigations. We’ve debased them so. The plumbing in my bathroom is called Ideal Standard. Now surely that’s an oxymoron. Unless it’s a tautology. Meaninglessness isn’t one of my fields. And anyway, trash is such a southern notion, don’t you think? Christy brought it with him from Arkansas. Remember ‘white trash’? And he’s forgetting that he was trash himself not so long ago.”

“Was he?”

“Christy was not above the occasional sugar daddy, and he stole from them in exactly the way he accuses my young visitors of doing. Did it twice, in fact.”

“And you knew that when you-” Something moved somewhere in the house. “When you, um…”

Grover was looking straight at me, but part of his attention was directed toward the noise. “Brought him home. Certainly. Christy’s previous, ah, flame introduced him to me, right after he bailed him out.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a favor.”

He shrugged, and a long loop of steel chain-a necklace of some kind-worked its way between the open buttons of his shirt. He glanced down at it and tugged it back inside. He also wore two delicate gold chains, and the heavy steel looked odd and out of place. “Christy’s had a difficult life. He grew up gay in a wretched little southern town without another homosexual in sight, although I’m sure there were plenty hiding behind their big cracker faces and their Rural Delivery plaid shirts. The pressure in that sort of situation is terrific. He had a kind of breakdown in his second year of junior college and just took off for New Orleans.” He gave me a beatific smile and reached up to slip a finger through the steel chain and lift it free of his neck for a second, as though he wasn’t yet used to the weight of it.

“New Orleans must have been more congenial.”

“I should say so. He landed a job in the Mardi Gras industry. Worked for a man who owned a float and costume business.” Max’s voice was as deep and sonorous as a Gregorian chant. “They struck up a relationship, and Christy became the man’s accountant. That’s what he’d studied in college, accounting, until he suddenly couldn’t make anything add up. Numbers, life, sex, anything at all. When things went sour with the man in New Orleans, he embezzled eighteen thousand dollars, bought an airline ticket for Chicago, and took the bus to Los Angeles.”

“That shows a certain flair.”

“He’d seen it in a movie. He’s a hopeless criminal.”

I remembered belatedly that we were supposed to be talking about Max. “And when he got here, he did it again, and you-”

“Well, actually, he lost all his money first. He got-do people still say ‘ripped off’?”

“I guess.”

“Well, that’s what happened, so I suppose it was a sort of poetic justice.”

“How?”

“He wanted to be a movie star. He and every other young faggot with a dimple in his chin.” He smiled broadly, watching me trying not to react. “It’s all right. Gays can say ‘faggot,’ but I wouldn’t sling the term around if I were you. He got an agent, got some pictures taken, and-are you ready for this? — got the lead in a movie.”

He was looking terrifically amused. “It sounds way too easy.”

“Well, of course, it was.” He drank deeply and then gave a faint shudder. “I take it without sugar. It’s more intense that way. The older I get, the more intensity I desire. Since one only has so much time left, it might as well be intense. There’s not much that one can do about the length of time remaining, but the depth can be adjusted. But about Christy. Of course it was too easy. It was a sucker trap, and he was the sucker. They had a script, a director, a star. All they needed was the completion bond.“

“Which cost?”

He leaned toward me. “Guess.”

“Eighteen thousand dollars.”

“Every dollar, and the wallet it was in. Then they closed the office and disappeared. Christy found out later that the script was a translation of a cheap Mexican vampire movie called Sangre de Muerto. We saw it on television one night, right here in my living room, in fact. He was furious.” He laughed again.

“And he couldn’t go to the cops.”

“Certainly not about that money.” The laughter deepened, and I heard someone move, possibly in the kitchen.

“Are you alone here?”

“Except for you,” Max said serenely. “Old houses make meaningless noise, just as old men do.” He toasted me with the lemonade. “So Christy was stranded in the big city, with nothing. And an older man, not as old as I am, but old enough, as they used to say, to know better-”

I had an eye on the door into the hallway. “They still say it.”

“Thank you. They say ‘There’s no fool like an old fool,’ too, and they’re absolutely right. Anyway, the older man took him under his wing, and Christy decided to go into the antique business. With the older man’s antiques. And went to jail.”

“And with this curriculum vitae, you took him in.”

He looked down at his glass and rubbed his index finger around its rim. “One doesn’t choose whom one will love.”

“No,” I said, “but one can avoid stepping into a hole, can’t one?”

“Are we talking about Christy or the new boys?”

“Chris is worried about the new boys. And now I see why.”

He looked at me. “Did you choose whom you love?”

This was not on my agenda. “Not very well, apparently.”

“She’ll come back to you,” Max Grover said.

“I know,” I said impatiently. “Nostradamus predicted it.”

He gave me a little chug of a laugh. “Disappointed romantics.”

I felt stung. “And you’re a satisfied romantic.”

“I do what I can. I’ve been fortunate, you see, and so many haven’t. Sometimes I help one way, sometimes I help another. I like to think that the ones who steal from me are helped, too.”

“I’m sure you do.”

He refused to take offense. “You think it’s self-delusion, and you’re probably right. At my age, no one else is going to take the trouble to delude me-at least, not romantically-so I have to do it for myself. Besides, I derive a certain almost sensual pleasure-nothing to start a war over-from doing favors for people. And, since I am Not As Other Men, I tend to do my favors for young men. How can they hurt me? I don’t own much. This house, which I bought thirty-five years ago, a few books-”

“They can hurt you,” I said. “For example, one of them could decide to cut you open.”

“And steal what? A year or two, after I’ve lived seventy-seven of them? Small change. And anyway, that’s not going to happen.” He gave me a benevolent smile. “Why did she leave you?”

“I screwed around. I’m a jerk sometimes. Listen, Max-can I call you Max?”

“I can’t think of a better name. And believe me, I’ve tried.”

“Your desire for intensity can get you killed.”

“I’m safe,” he said. “But you’re in peril.”

I ignored it. “Whatever you get from these kids can’t be worth the risk.”

“What I get?” He pointed a finger at himself. “You think I sleep with them?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Of course I thought he slept with them.

He laced his fingers together over one crossed knee and sat back a good half-inch. There were long ropes of muscle in the tan forearms. “Well, I do. But that’s all. Two heads on the pillow, maybe a little buddy talk before the light goes off, someone to squeeze an orange for in the morning. But sex, never. I just want to help. I thought you understood. I’m in love with Christy.”

I started to reply, and he said, “That was tactless of me.”

I’d missed something. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your relationship. You were in love, but that didn’t keep you faithful.”

“It takes all kinds,” I said. I was suddenly as hot as the day pressing itself against the windows.

“You were unfaithful because you were afraid of being in love,” he said. He looked past me, at the rows of books, and grinned. “Love is nothing to be afraid of, you know.”

“We’re not talking about-”

The grin broadened. “Most men your age don’t blush so easily.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got a lot to blush about.”

“A blush is just the higher nature showing through.”

“Poking its big fat nose in,” I said.

“The higher nature is always with you. All of you is always with you, the little dirty secret things and the big grand ones, too. Whatever snapshot you think you’re posing for at the moment, it’s all with you.”

“Max,” I said, “if you want to keep all of you with you, stop picking up street kids.”

“I’m safe,” he repeated.

“Christopher doesn’t think so.”

Max drained his unsweetened lemonade and gave me an encouraging look. “Maybe Christy knows more about what kind of danger I’m in than he told you.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d surprised me. “I considered that.”

“A cynic like you, I’m sure you did.”

“And I didn’t know then that he had a lifetime habit of ripping off older men.”

“Well, now you do.”

I replayed my conversation with Christopher Nordine. “I think he cares about you,” I said.

“And so do I, about him. But a sociopath-you know about sociopaths?”

“I’ve met a few.”

He beamed at me. “Interesting, aren’t they? They can hold two completely conflicting views simultaneously. Like politicians. Or saints.”

“The multiple murderer Emil Kemper,” I said. “Talking to the psychiatrists, he said, ‘When I meet a pretty girl, part of me is saying what an interesting girl. I’d really like to get to know her. And part of me is wondering how her head would look on a stick.’ ”

“I don’t think Christy wants to see my head on a stick,” Max Grover said seriously.

“Probably not. Emil Kemper was a special guy.”

“But still, let’s say Christy wants to kill me. Let’s say part of him says, ‘Oh, I love Max. He’s been so good to me.’ And another part of him is saying, ‘That disgusting old man, there’s nothing but his rotting body between me and his money.’”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Of course not. But think about it. First he hires a detective to tell me that my life could be in danger, and then he kills me. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Like most prophecies, actually; prophecies are no big deal. Makes him look good, wouldn’t you say?”

“Especially since he’d be the obvious suspect.”

“The will,” Max Grover said. “He told you about the will?”

“First thing.”

“Very prompt of him. A bit Victorian, the will. Still, people have killed for less.”

“But, as I said, you don’t believe it.”

Grover rattled the ice cubes in his glass and pressed its sweating surface against his cheek. “Not at all.”

“Then why bring it up?”

He wiped the moisture from his cheek and dried his hand on his blue shirt and smiled at me again. “I’m just having fun,” he said. Then he reached out the bejeweled hand and tapped me on the knee. “I see a wedding in your future.”

I fingered the ring in my pocket. “You certainly do,” I said.