Skin Deep (18 page)

12 - Saffron in the Morning

It may have been one p.m. to the rest of the world, but to Saffron it was early morning.

She lived in the kind of neighborhood where they park on the lawn. The dry swimming pool was half-full of trash. I'd had to knock four times before a thick moan of protest announced that she was coming to the door. There was a prolonged fumbling with multiple chains and latches inside, a muttered expletive or two, and then the door swung open four inches, and Saffron peered out into the sunlight. Her chin rested on the taut chain.

"I paid the rent," she said. Then she focused. "Oh, shit. It's you." She pushed at the door, but it wouldn't close.

"The old foot in the door," I said. "It's amazing how many people still let you get a foot in the door."

"Listen, I just went to bed. How about you get out of here and come back next week? Or maybe Labor Day." She gave the door an exploratory shove.

The apartment behind her was dark, and I could hear the hum of a window air conditioner, part of a night person's standard insulation against the day. A door closed behind me, and a youngish man with vivid pimples decorating a pasty complexion beneath slicked-back black hair walked quickly across the courtyard and toward the street. He gave me a nervous glance. It seemed like a pretty furtive apartment house, all things considered.

"Saffron, I'm coming in, and you're going to talk to me."

"Fuck off," she said, shoving again at the door. It didn't budge. Her puffy face suddenly arranged itself into the expression of a four-year-old headed for a tantrum. It wasn't pretty.

"I could knock this door in with one hand," I said. "Then you'd have to talk to me, and you'd have to get your door fixed, too. Why don't you do it the easy way?"

"You push this door in and I'll call the cops."

"Oh, no, you won't."

She stamped her foot. She was wearing little white ankle socks and a short nightgown. Her chin trembled, and I thought for a moment she was going to cry. I wondered what wretched drugs she was on.

"Open the door," I said as gently as I could. "Please?"

She stared up at me through petulant eyes that looked like black-and-blue marks. "You'll have to move your foot," she said in an angry little-girl voice. "I can't undo the chain if you don't."

"Lock it and I'll come in through the window."

"I'm not going to lock it."

"Oh, good," I said. "My first opportunity to trust you."

I pulled my foot back, putting both palms against the door as a precaution. I needn't have bothered. She didn't close it all the way, just slid the lock off the catch and retreated back into the gloom. The door slowly swung open. It was cheap, hollow fiberboard. I probably could have walked through it.

"Let yourself in," she said.

I followed her into the darkness. The apartment was in total disorder. Saffron had more shoes than Imelda Marcos, but nowhere near the closet space. They were everywhere, on the floor, on the table and couch, even on the messy single bed that Saffron had just vacated. They fought for space with dresses, pants, blouses, slips, underwear. Saffron obviously belonged to the drop-it-where-you-take-it-off school of undressing. Blankets masked the light from the windows, so I left the door standing open.

Ashtrays overflowed with cigarettes. Most of them had half the filter torn out; white, fibrous little piles of whatever they make filters out of were everywhere. Saffron was smoking a lot of cocaine.

She sat on the bed, reached over to the table for one of her coco-puffs, and lit it. Sweet smoke curled toward me. Over the bed was a Day-Glo poster of Jimi Hendrix from the halcyon days of the Fillmore West. I revised my estimate of her age upward.

"Nice place," I said conversationally.

She took a deep hit. "Yours ain't exactly Camelot. What do you want?" One foot was curled beneath her, and it jiggled up and down nervously. Her shin needed shaving. Probably both of them did.

"Just a talk. Can you sleep after you smoke one of those?"

"I can sleep after a dozen. That what you want to talk about?"

"I want to talk about Amber."

"We've already done this scene. There was no payoff. Like I said before, go away."

"And Toby."

She inhaled again, held it for a second, and yawned out a plume of smoke. "Fuck Toby. Fuck you, too. I'm sorry I ever met him."

"Why?"

"Why not? Who needs the All-American boy when his idea of a sex toy is a Louisville Slugger?" She tried a laugh, but it didn't work. "It's enough to make you wish you liked girls." One strap of her nightgown fell loose over her shoulder. She left it there.

I leaned over and straightened it. She pulled away from me, regarded me darkly for a second, and then went back to work on the cigarette.

"Did he rough you up?"

She exhaled vehemently and coughed, doubling over on the bed. "Toby can't say hello without sticking his elbow in your eye," she said when she'd caught her breath. "It's like a character flaw."

"It's a blemish the size of Van Nuys. You're an actress?"

She looked surprised. "Sure," she said. "I'm really Meryl Streep." She waved her cigarette around to indicate the apartment. "All this is just part of getting into character."

"But you came here—to Hollywood, I mean—to be an actress."

"Who says?" She sounded suspicious.

"You. You said we'd already done this scene. No payoff, you said. Real people don't talk like that. What do the folks back home think you're doing?"

Saffron started to stub out her cigarette and then thought better of it. She used it to light another and dropped the butt into an already overloaded ashtray. She sucked up the smoke from the new one. Wrinkles creased the area around her mouth.

Closing her eyes to get away from me, she exhaled. "They think I wait tables," she said after a moment.

"Well, you do, in a way."

"Yeah, and the pope's a Protestant. Stop sucking around and get to the point."

"Did Toby tell you he'd help you?"

Something that might have had a smile as a distant ancestor flitted across her tired face. "Well, he really did help, you know? That's the worst thing about Toby. We all know he's an asshole, but sometimes he comes through. He actually got me a part on
High Velocity.
Two parts, in fact, but they cut one of them out. Anyway, that was before."

"Before what?"

"Before he got what he wanted."

"And what was that?"

The smile was gone. "Never you fucking mind what he wanted. It's not anything I like to talk about. And don't play shrink with me."

"So he got you a couple of parts."

"The only ones in fourteen years. You know, after a while a girl begins to wonder whether she's got any talent, aside from what she can do with her feet pointed at the ceiling." She took another deep drag. "I wanted to be Julie Harris," she said, looking embarrassed. "You know, not a big star or anything, but someone who did good work. Trouble is, I've got the wrong equipment. All knockers and no brains. Why am I talking about this?"

"You're talking."

"It's the coke talking. And you're not my friend. You're just somebody who wants to keep Mr. Teen-cream from getting what's coming to him." She worried one of her long fingernails with her teeth, making a gritty little chewing noise.

It was time to let her think, so I got up and navigated the landscape of clothing until I reached a corner that I'd been glancing at since I first came in. It looked like a corner from another apartment entirely that had been grafted surgically onto Saffron's space. Stones from the seaside, rubbed smooth by the waves, had been piled carefully to create a kind of shrine. Plants grew from the center of the pile and cascaded down its sides. Above the plants, on the wall, was a vertical Zen garden: flat, vaguely rectangular stones with holes worn through them. Nails had been driven through the holes to hold the stones in place. They hung in an apparently random arrangement that nevertheless had a kind of finality about it. You couldn't have moved one without ruining the effect.

"Who did this?"

"Who do you think? Nobody here but us chickens."

"It's very nice."

"I don't look at it anymore. I don't remember the last time I turned on the lights."

"You water the plants."

"Sure. You have to water plants. If you don't, they die. Even a detective should know that." Her voice was flatter than plane geometry.

"Why are you so upset at Toby? Because of something he did to you or something he did to Amber?"

"He started treating me like shit the minute we left your house," she said. Then she heard the rest of my question, and a current of alarm straightened her spine. She shook her head, bleached blond hair stiff over her shoulders. She had very nice shoulders. She must have been a beautiful girl once. "Toby didn't do anything to Amber. You know that."

"No,
you
know it. Or else you don't. You're his alibi, and he's yours. That's a tidy arrangement, but it's not very satisfying."

"We took her home." Her pitch had risen.

"I know you did, but the cops don't. They could be very unpleasant while they're figuring out that you're telling the truth."

She reached down under the mattress and came up with a small purse. "I'm not worried. And the cops don't have to know anything. Nothing happened, remember?" She pulled from the purse a small purple jar and twisted the lid off. It was full of a white cream. Taking the outside of the jar between her fingers she twisted again. The inside of the jar came loose, and she pulled it out. Beneath the shallow false bottom that held the cream, white powder glistened.

"We were straight with you," she said. "You can stiff the cops. We were straight with you." She dipped a fingernail into the powder and held it under a nostril, then sniffed sharply. She repeated the ritual for the other nostril. "Hey, what do you want from me? You bust in here before the birds get up, get me talking about stuff I never tell anybody, and then you try to screw me over." She did another couple of snorts.

"Amber was okay when you dropped her off?"

"I guess she was okay by Amber's standards. I hope to God I never get like that," she said, wiping her nose. "But you know something? I thought she was totaled then. After you called, when Toby said she was dead, I figured it was an overdose."

"But nobody messed with her."

She'd dipped her nail into the jar again, but now she looked up at me. "Nobody messed with her," she said. "What do you think we are, sadists? I mean, what do you think I am? We both know about Toby." The nail came halfway to her nose.

"Where'd Toby get the loads?"

"Some street corner, Adams and Crenshaw, maybe. You can always get them there." The fingernail completed its trip, and she sniffed.

"He wasn't gone long enough."

"Hollywood and Highland, then. Who gives a shit?"

"Did he get them at the club? At the Spice Rack?"

Saffron looked at me for a long moment. Then, very deliberately, she screwed the top of the jar back on. "Goodbye," she said. "Close the door behind you."

"Is that where he got them?"

"Nobody scores at the Spice Rack. Now get out of here."

"The Spice Rack's clean, huh?"

"Cleaner than Betty Crocker. I thought you were leaving."

"If the Spice Rack is Girl Scout Central, how come you're so nervous?"

"Nervous? Who's nervous? I need to sleep. I'm dancing tonight. I've got a public to worry about. Now get out of here, or I really will call the cops."

"You can't. You'll be in detox before you can spell your name, whatever it really is."

"You're right," she said petulantly. "You're just so very clever. I can't call the cops. But I can call Tiny, and if I do, you'll wish I
had
called the cops. If you're not afraid of Tiny, you're not brave, just stupid."

An image of Tiny popped unbidden into my mind's eye. "I try not to be stupid," I said.

"Keep trying, you may make it yet. And remember, nobody scores at the Spice Rack."

I was going to have to face Tiny sooner or later, but later seemed to have a lot to recommend it. I went to the door and pulled it open. "Write down my phone number," I said.

"For what?" She sounded weary.

"Just in case. Get a pen and write it down." She fished something that could have been a pen out of a drawer, and I gave her the number. "Listen. If anything goes wrong or if things just get too crazy, call me. If you even just
think
things are getting crazy, call."

She flopped down on the bed and covered her eyes with her forearm. "Crazy?" she said. "In
my
life? Just close the door. I'll lock it later."

"Sleep well," I said. I closed the door. I was skirting the pool, looking down at the trash when I heard the locks being yanked into place.

On Sunset Boulevard I pulled Alice, gleaming her usual rabid horsefly iridescent blue, into a gas station. "Fill it up," I said to the Persian at the pump.

"This one, she takes gas, eh?" he said. He had a widow's peak that was about to exert territorial imperative over his eyebrows.

"No," I said. "She runs on Islamic fervor. I just give her gas once in a while to remind her of the good old days when all the oil came from Texas."

"You pay more here at this pumps. Self-serve are more cheaper."

"A receipt, okay? Do the pay phones work?"

"Sometimes. You know, punks." He pronounced it "ponks." "Sometimes they works."

I called Bernie first. No Sprunks in either of the Dakotas, he told me, sounding satisfied. Also no Sprunks in Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, or Wyoming. One Sprunk, a widow in her seventies—I didn't ask how Bernie knew how old she was, but if he said so, it was right—in Montana. Minnesota had too many people to check. I told him to try it anyway. Then I called Wyl.

"Dear boy. It's all here and organized to a fare-thee-well, the total scope on Toby Vane. Such a terrible boy, really. It's enough to make you doubt appearances."

"Anything interesting?"