The Bone Polisher

4 ~ Spurrier

“Damn it, Al, I think the guy who did him was in the house. When I was there.” I swung out into the fast lane on Fountain to pass someone who was carrying on an animated conversation in an otherwise empty automobile, and the limousine trailing us followed suit. Hammond, sitting next to me in the passenger seat, was absorbed in a bright yellow brochure that offered a staggering variety of “His amp; Hers” items.

“Washcloths I can see,” he said. “But matching golf shirts?”

“You couldn’t know,” Sonia said to me from the backseat, where she and Orlando had been murmuring conspiratorially to each other for miles. “There’s no point in kicking yourself.”

She and Hammond wore flower leis given them to speed their way to Hawaii. The cops who hung the tiny pink orchids around Hammond’s neck had managed to keep straight faces, but just barely.

“How about some nice pillowcases?” Hammond asked. “Blue for me, pink for you. Christ, it’d be enough to keep you awake, lying there in the dark and wondering if you’ve got the right pillow.”

They’d volunteered to drive to Max’s house with me on their way to the airport, but Sonia’s remark was the first either of them had addressed to me. Hammond had been too busy going through my morning’s mail, and Sonia and Orlando apparently had pressing business to whisper about.

“You’ll have to tell the sheriff’s deputy about what you heard,” Sonia said as though Al hadn’t spoken. “All we can do is hand you off to them. It’s their territory.”

“We’ll put you right with them, though,” Hammond offered. “All you got to do is tell them what happened, tell them about the little doily who hired you, and go home.”

“ Al,” Sonia complained, sounding like a wife.

“Yeah,” Hammond said. “Sorry.” Then he chuckled, deep in his chest. “How about old Hazel, huh?”

“Don’t go thinking she’s still in love with you,” Orlando volunteered maliciously. “It’s just the loss of power she’s worried about.”

I turned left from Fountain onto Flores as Hammond maintained a ponderous silence. I could practically hear him counting to ten.

At about eight, Sonia observed, “Nice area.”

“If you like fruitcake,” Hammond said automatically. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you know, even though there may not be a lot of real good reasons to work for the LAPD, one of them is that the Sheriffs got Boys’ Town.”

“West Hollywood, you bigot,” Sonia snapped.

“The city government leases them,” I said, trying to avert a prehoneymoon separation. After all, they’d only been married half an hour. “It’s a private contract. But they’re thinking of setting up their own force.”

“I can see the uniforms,” Hammond said. “Like Singapore Girls, only packing.”

“That’s enough, Al,” Sonia said sharply.

“What’re we, on 60 Minutes?” Hammond grumbled. Then he caught his bride’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, darling.”

“What a piece of raw material,” Sonia said, softening. “Absolutely everything needs to be changed.”

“Over there,” I said, looking at the cluster of Sheriffs’ cars and the yellow crime-scene tape.

As I pulled Alice toward the curb, a deputy stepped forward. He had the standard-issue mustache, mirrored sunglasses, and tight khaki uniform. In his early thirties, he had no love handles to speak of. I braked, and he came around to the driver’s side and tapped on the window.

“Help you, sir?” he said as I rolled the windows down.

I looked up into two convex versions of my face, reflected in his shades. “I’m the one who called it in.”

“And how did you-” he started, and then peered into the car, seeing Hammond in his LAPD blues and the orchid lei, Orlando in his tux, Sonia in full uniform with a bridal veil in her lap, and, behind us, the black stretch limo. It was enough to make him take off his sunglasses.

“He got a phone call, sonny,” Hammond growled. The LAPD and the Sheriffs had a long and stormy history. “And he was here just before the old queen got killed. And he’s volunteered to come all the way here-’

“Fine, sir.” The deputy looked at me. “I’m sure Sergeant Spurrier will want to talk to you.”

“I’m sure he will, too, stupid,” Hammond muttered, setting me right with the Sheriffs.

Two minutes later Hammond and Sonia were Honolulu-bound, and Orlando and I were following the deputy up the steps to Max Grover’s front porch. I’d promised to run him back to Parker Center to pick up his car, and the deputy had looked at him when he didn’t get into the limousine, and then looked back at me. Then he’d shaken his head.

On the other side of the screen door, flashbulbs popped and someone laughed. The laugh ripped a little hole in the waning daylight and let in an early piece of the night: It was a nasty little laugh, the laugh of someone who’s just seen a silent-movie actor slip on a banana peel and thinks it’s funny because he doesn’t know the man wasn’t really hurt.

“Fasten your seat belt,” I said to Orlando. “This is going to be a bumpy flight.”

The deputy swiveled to face us. “Was he here with you?” he demanded, referring to Orlando.

“No.”

“So who is he?”

“A friend.”

The deputy thought about it. His face took on the expression of someone jogging dutifully uphill, suggesting that thinking was something he did infrequently and reluctantly, and only when there was no alternative. Then he pointed his chin at Orlando. “He stays here.”

“Your tuchis,” I said pleasantly.

He slid the mirrored shades back up the slope of his nose so that his eyes were concealed. “Beg pardon?”

“He comes in. With me.”

“The kid stays here,” he said, going for tough. The tag on his chest read KLEINDIENST.

“Get your superior, Deputy Kleindienst,” I said. “Surely you have many.”

“Kleindienst,” someone called through the screen door, “who you jacking around out there?”

Kleindienst seemed inclined to give the question some thought, so I said, “I’m the one who called you on this.”

“And he brought a little friend along,” Kleindienst said scornfully.

“That so,” said the man behind the door. He pushed it open and looked out at me. “Ike Spurrier,” he said. He was short and compact and broad through the chest, with coloring that made him look as though he was dissolving slowly in a glass of water: almost albino, with white-blond hair and a spiky little white-blond mustache and melancholy eyes the color of wet sand. Beneath the mustache was a plump, shiny red lower lip, as wet and sharply articulated as an earthworm. He wore street clothes: a rumpled off-yellow tweed sport coat with a red polo shirt beneath it, and pressed blue jeans.

“Simeon Grist.” We didn’t shake hands.

“Thanks for calling us.” Spurrier’s sad-looking eyes drifted beyond me and found Orlando. “How’d you know he was dead?”

“Someone phoned me and told me so.”

“That so,” he said again. He shifted his gaze back to me and pushed the screen door open. “Whyn’t you come in here and tell me about it.”

“Let’s go, Orlando,” I said.

“He’s not going to want to come in.” Spurrier leaned toward me and raised his eyebrows like someone sharing a confidence. “He’s really not going to want to come in.”

“I can handle it,” Orlando said.

“I don’t give a shit,” Spurrier said tranquilly. “This is a crime scene, and I don’t need you in it.”

I didn’t like the way this was going at all.

“He comes with me,” I said.

Spurrier looked directly into my eyes for two or three long seconds. “Or?”

“Up to you. I can either tell you what I have to say, or I can go to the West Hollywood station and tell them.”

Spurrier tucked a portion of his lower lip between his teeth and gave the street a thorough survey before allowing his eyes to settle on Orlando again. “If you faint, sonny, don’t hit any furniture. We’re not through printing.” He held the door all the way open, and I went in with Orlando following and Ike Spurrier taking the rear. Spurrier let the door bang shut behind us.

The house seemed dark after the slanting afternoon light on the street, and I had time to make out a group of four or five men huddled around something on the floor before a flashbulb went off and blinded me completely. Orlando must have been looking away when it popped, because a second later I heard him gasp, and then I felt his fingers on my arm.

“Told you,” Spurrier said, sounding satisfied, and my vision cleared and one of the men in front of me stepped aside and I saw Max Grover.

He lay on his right side in a shallow lake of blood that surrounded him completely, head to foot. The little white pebbles were teeth. Bloody footprints, many sets of them, went toward him and away from him. His knees were pulled up self-protectively, and his right arm was beneath him, twisted somehow, so that it extended behind his back.

His shirt, dark with blood, had been ripped open, baring one of his shoulders. The thing on the floor was a discard, the carelessly mutilated remains of some animal traditionally eaten on a holiday, the way a turkey carcass might look to a turkey. Nothing that had been Max was left.

“Boots,” Spurrier said conversationally. “And a knife, of course, there.” He pointed with his toe at the blood on the front of Max’s shirt. “Oh, and over here, too, unless he used a bolt cutter or something. You’ll have to come around to get a look.”

I took three steps around the carcass and saw what he meant. Max’s right arm ended at the wrist.

A mosquito began to whine in my ears, and it whined more loudly until it turned into a dentist’s drill, and then I was sitting on the floor with my head between my knees.

“I thought it’d be him,” Spurrier said to someone. Orlando was still standing, but his face was as white as though his blood had been drained. “You never can tell.”

“He had three rings on that hand,” I said when I’d located my voice.

“That so,” Spurrier said. “Well, our boy worked like hell to get them, considering he left about twenty more in the bedroom. Didn’t take his necklaces, either.” I forced myself to look at Max’s throat and saw the two gold chains I’d noticed earlier.

“He was wearing a steel necklace, too,” I said.

“It’ll turn up here somewhere.” Spurrier turned to Orlando. “What’s your name?”

“Orlando de Anza.”

“That’s not a name,” Spurrier said, “it’s a living-room set. Hey, Orlando, I’m going to ask you to go into the kitchen with Stephen here, and he’s going to ask you a few questions, nothing much, just where you’ve been and so forth, while I talk to Simeon out here. Okay with you?”

“Sure,” Orlando said. He sounded lost.

“You ready to get up?” Spurrier asked me.

“I knew him,” I said, feeling vaguely ashamed of myself. “I talked to him for the better part of an hour.”

Spurrier nodded and then extended a hand to help me up. I ignored it and pulled myself to my feet, and Spurrier put his hand into his jacket pocket. “How about we go into the book room?”

“Fine,” I said.

“You know where it is,” Spurrier said, not asking a question.

“It’s where I talked to him.”

“He give you anything to drink?”

“Lemonade.”

“Just the two of you, right?”

“Right. I also touched a table in there and a few books.”

“And now you’ve touched the floor in here,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said, feeling myself flush. “With both hands.”

“Your prints on file?”

“Yes. I’m a licensed private detective.”

“Ah,” Spurrier sighed. “Shit.”

In the library, still fragrant from Max’s bowl of roses, he waved me to the wooden chair, and I watched him sink into the leather one. “Jesus,” he exclaimed. “Quicksand.” He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and held them out. “Smoke?”

“Thanks anyway.”

He put them away without taking one and looked around the room. “What I’d like you to do, I’d like you to tell me what you know about this, straight on through. I’ll ask questions when I need to. Okay?”

I told him about Nordine and the job he’d asked me to do. I downplayed the fights they’d been having because it was inconceivable to me that someone as frail as Christopher could have found the strength to do the violence that had been done to Max. I told him about the other men Max had been picking up, about the talk I’d had with Max, about the sense I had that there’d been someone else in the house when I was there, and about Max’s certainty that he’d been in no danger.

“Psychics,” Spurrier said disgustedly. “So you saw Nordine yesterday afternoon and came here about two this afternoon, and you were here about an hour.”

“Right.”

“You must have been the last person to see him alive.”

“Obviously not,” I said.

“And from here you went where?”

“Parker Center. A wedding, a big one. I got there about three-forty-five, and Christopher called me about four-thirty.”

“A cop got married?”

“Two of them.”

He rubbed the space between his eyebrows with a fat index finger. “So your alibi is a few hundred cops. That’s a new one.”

“I don’t need an alibi,” I said.

“We’ve got a very narrow window here. You say he was alive when you left at-”

“Three,” I said, ignoring the implication.

“And Nordine calls you at four-thirty. I’d say that’s a pretty narrow window.” He worked his way out of the chair and went to the bookcase. “Of course, he wasn’t necessarily alive at three, was he?”

“No,” I said. “You’ve broken me. I killed him, took a shower in his bathroom to get the blood off, burned my clothes in the fireplace, put on a suit, and went straight to LAPD headquarters, having arranged the wedding in advance to give me an alibi.”

He was looking at me intently, his mouth very tight. “Took a shower in his bathroom, huh?”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“Sure did,” he said. “Didn’t burn the clothes, though. Took them with him, apparently. You got your car keys, smartass?”

I tossed them to him, and he handed them to a cop outside the door. “It’s the old blue Buick,” I said.

“What route did you take to Parker Center?”

“Flores to Santa Monica, Santa Monica to La Brea, La Brea to Beverly, and Beverly downtown.”

“All surface streets.”

“My car doesn’t like freeways.”

“I don’t like snappy answers. How’d Nordine know where to reach you?”

“I left the number on my answering machine.”

“What’s your phone number?”

I told him, and he wrote it down. “What’s that,” he asked, looking at it, “Santa Monica?”

“Topanga.”

“We’re your neighborhood cops, then,” he said, sounding pleased. He held up the phone number. “You mind if I have somebody call this?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“Wouldn’t slow us down a second. Dial this,” he said to a cop I hadn’t seen before, who had taken up the station outside the door. “Write down the message and bring it to me.”

“My tax dollars at work,” I said.

He picked up a snapshot that had been facedown on the table and showed it to me. Christopher Nordine, a healthy Christopher Nordine, squinted happily into the sun. “Is this your buddy Nordine?”

“He’s a lot thinner now.”

He looked at me through the wet-sand eyes. I guess it was supposed to be frightening. “That’s not what I asked you.”

I hesitated. “It’s the guy who told me he was Nordine.”

He nodded: I was learning. “Why’d he call you instead of us?”

“How would I know?” I wasn’t about to tell him what Christopher had said about a voice-print.

“Okay. Why’d Nordine choose you to talk to the old man?”

“He went to someone else for advice, and that someone recommended me.”

He waited a moment, making a show of being patient, and then asked, “And who would that someone be?”

“William Williams. Also known as Wyl Will.” I spelled it for him.

“Cute,” he said, writing. “He a hink, too?”

“Is he gay? Yes. He runs a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“That so. What kind of bookstore?”

“Hollywood memorabilia. It’s called Fan Fare.”

“Joan Crawford posters?” he asked, reaching into the pocket of his jacket. “Bette Davis’s old scripts, Judy Garland concert programs, that sort of thing?”

“He’s got some of that.”

“I’ll bet he does. You a collector?”

“No.”

“How do you know him?”

I paused, organizing an answer, and he snapped his fingers.

“Williams, how do you know him?”

I was disliking Spurrier more with every passing minute. “It’s a small world,” I said.

“And where in your small world is Nordine?”

“I haven’t got any idea.”

He dropped his notebook to the table. “Try harder.”

“You want me to make something up?”

Spurrier pulled a latex glove out of his pocket and slipped it over his left hand, snapping the opening over his wrist, and started to put on the right. “Get up,” he said.

“I’m comfortable,” I said, watching him. His neck and cheeks were flushed, and I saw rage in the tight set of his shoulders.

“So what’re you?” he asked when he had the second glove on. “Sherlock Homo? The Gay Detective? You investigate a lot of police brutality?”

“I don’t think there is a lot of police brutality.” My throat was very dry.

“Think again,” Spurrier said, and he stepped up to me and hit me with the heel of his right hand, just below the heart.

The chair went over beneath me and splintered on the hardwood floor, and I curled reflexively into a ball, trying to find some air somewhere in the world and fighting down a hot, poison-green wave of nausea. Spurrier’s shiny black shoes were inches from my face.

“Not a mark,” he said. “Not even a red spot.” His fingers curled around my arms and pulled me to my feet, but I couldn’t straighten up, so I was leaning forward when he turned me around and brought a fist down on my kidney.

I went to my knees. “Why didn’t Nordine call us?” he said quietly.

“Because he didn’t want to talk to an asshole,” I gasped. I barely had enough breath to get to the end of the sentence.

“Well, I suppose he’s an expert on assholes.” Spurrier sounded meditative. “You know what my big question is?”

“Which shoe to take off first at night?”

He brought a cupped hand around and slammed it over my left ear. It sounded as though someone had fired a pistol inside my skull, and the pain skittered like foxfire through the bones of my jaw and straight down my throat to my heart. “Can you hear me?” he asked. The hand came up again.

“I can hear you,” I said.

“Nothing in his car, Sergeant,” said a cop at the door. Behind him, I saw Orlando gazing at me with wide eyes.

“Give the gentleman his keys,” Spurrier said, and the cop tossed them at me. They hit my shoulder and clattered to the floor. I tried to pick them up, but my fingers wouldn’t do anything I wanted them to.

“My big question is what a faggot P.I. was doing at a cop’s wedding.”

“I was a bridesmaid,” I said through jaws that felt like they’d been wired together.

He laughed, and I heard the snap of latex as he peeled a glove from his hand. “Who was calling that phone number?” he yelled.

“I was, Sarge,” said a very young cop. “I had to call a couple times to get it all down.”

“Give it here.” He looked at the paper the cop had handed him and said, “What’s this number?”

“Parker Center pistol range,” the cop said. My fingers finally managed to wrap themselves around my keys.

“They have a wedding there today?”

The young cop shifted nervously. “I didn’t ask.”

“Ask,” he said, giving the piece of paper back and turning to face me. He ran his tongue over the plump red lip. “I believe you, of course. You’re just a good citizen who did his civic duty. Wish we had more like you. Well, maybe not exactly like you. Get up and sit in the other chair. You seem to have broken this one.”

I did as I was told, trying to sort out the various sources of pain and rank them by intensity. The ear was the worst.

“You are completely unbruised,” Spurrier said, stuffing the gloves into his pocket. “Nothing happened here, and a lot more nothing will happen if you stick your nose into this affair. I’ve got your address and I’ve got units in the neighborhood twenty-four hours a day. If you don’t want to develop undiagnosable internal injuries, you stay miles away from all this. Am I communicating?”

“Very unambiguously.”

“Just so we’re straight. Sorry, wrong term. Just so you’re clear on it. Are you? Clear on it?”

“Yes,” I said through a spasm of hatred that threatened to close my throat completely.

“Good,” he said. “Stephen, the pretty boy check out?”

“He’s a cop’s little brother, the bride’s. He was at the wedding, went there with her. With her all day, he says.”

“Where’s she?”

“On her way to Honolulu.”

Spurrier screwed up his face in frustration. “How long?”

“Two weeks.”

“You get a number?”

“Yeah. Maui.”

“How nice for her.”

“There was a wedding there today,” the young cop said, coming into the room. “At Parker Center, I mean.”

“My, my,” Spurrier said admiringly. “It all checks out.”

“You primitive piece of shit,” I said.

“I can understand your frustration, sir,” Spurrier said. “Wasting so much of your day this way. But I’d like to thank you for coming forward and assisting us with our inquiries.

“You’ll be wanting to get along now.” Spurrier backed away from the chair, his face tight, as though he hoped I was going to come out of it and try to rip his heart out. “I’m sure you two have a big evening planned.”

I got up more painfully than Christopher Nordine had. “I’ll be seeing you,” I said.

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he said. “But not on this case.”

As we went down the porch steps, I heard the laugh again, and recognized it as Spurrier’s.

“Is that what they’re like, the Sheriffs?” Orlando asked twenty minutes later. It was the first thing he’d said since we left Grover’s house.

“It’s what some of them are like. Not many. There used to be more like Spurrier. Now the problem is that the better cops don’t do anything when a bad one gets out of line. White people don’t generally see too much of it, though.”

“White heterosexual people, you mean.”

“Yeah. Spurrier’s a little twisted on the subject of gays. I wonder what his analyst has to say about it.”

“He thought you were gay.” He turned on the radio and gave the indicator a skid across the dial.

“He thought we both were.”

Orlando found a station playing heavy metal, something that sounded like a head-on collision between San Diego and Tijuana, listened for a second, and turned it down. “I am,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, nonplussed. The first time I’d met him, he’d been hondling Eleanor to introduce him to a girl.

He fiddled with the tuning knob on the radio, giving it all his attention. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “About Eleanor and that Chinese girl.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“I was fooling myself. Telling myself I couldn’t get dates with girls because I was too young for the ones at UCLA, telling myself I was too shy to talk to women, when what was really happening was that I didn’t want to.” He threw me a quick evaluative glance. “I was in denial.”

Denial. “ You’re seeing a therapist,” I said.

“At school. She’s helped a lot. It’s hard for a Latino guy, especially when he comes from a family of cops.”

“Therapists like to tell people they’re suppressing homosexual feelings,” I said cautiously. “It gives them something to do.”

“In my case, though, it’s true.” He gave up on the radio and began to gnaw on the nail of his right index finger.

“Don’t bite your nails,” I said automatically.

He laughed. Then I started to laugh, too, and he leaned back and made hooting noises, laughing off some of the tension from Max Grover’s house.

“Was your cop okay to you?” I asked, braking to avoid rear-ending someone who was apparently multiplying addresses in his head as he drove. The laughter had hurt in several places.

“Stephen? No, he was very nice, really sympathetic. In fact, I think he might be gay. He was good-looking enough to be gay, anyway. Has anybody told you you have repressed homosexual feelings?”

“Lots of people. All therapists.”

He hesitated. “But it isn’t true.”

“If it is, they’re very repressed. I mean, I think men are interesting people, and some of them are good-looking, but there’s nothing sexual about it.”

“I think I’ve known forever,” Orlando said dreamily. “Since I was eight or nine or something.”

“Does Sonia know?”

“Of course.” He sounded affronted. “That’s why she got so mad at Al in the car.”

“Then Al doesn’t-”

“Not yet,” he said quietly. “He’s got a surprise coming.”

“It’ll raise his consciousness,” I said. “Something has to.”

“Al’s all right,” Orlando said, surprising me a second time. “He’s probably not ready for me to bring anybody over to spend the night, though.”

“No. Probably not.”

“If it was a girl he’d be all ho-ho-ho and hearty and nudgy, winking at me across the room and thumping me on the back whenever we were alone. But a guy-no way.”

“Not yet.”

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” Orlando said with pride. “My first.”

“Well,” I said banally, “good for you.”

He caught my tone and pulled away slightly. “Does it bother you?”

“No,” I said. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’m not very good at intimacy.”

“And I’m not good at anything else. Eleanor’s the same way. That must be a problem between you.”

I was beginning to feel like our relationship was on CNN; everybody knew everything. “You could say that.”

“You never told that sergeant you weren’t gay.”

“It wasn’t any of his business,” I said. “Anyway, you know, it’s just one thing about you. Whether you like guys or girls or Eskimos or Arabian horses. It’s just one thing out of thousands, like who you voted for or whether you shave before you shower or after. It doesn’t have much to do with who you are.”

“It does when you can’t admit it,” Orlando said.

“I guess it would.”

“Here we are,” he said. “The next lot.” We negotiated the parking lane, deserted at this hour, and I braked at the curb when he told me to. He started to get out of the car, and then stopped and looked at me. “You’re okay,” he said. “Al is always talking about you being somebody unusual, but I never knew what he meant. You took everything that stunted little clown could dish out, and you never lost your dignity. I don’t know if I could have done that.”

“I got beaten up,” I pointed out.

“What you said about his shoes,” Orlando said, and then he laughed again. He extended a hand, and I shook it and watched him slide out of the car and angle across the parking lot, a slender teenager in a tuxedo, heading toward God only knew what. Then I drove home through the ragtag remnants of the rush hour, climbed the driveway to my house, and took a pistol away from Christopher Nordine, who was waiting in my living room.