Skin Deep (4 page)

He started to grin, and then he winced. "Don't," he said. "Don't make me laugh. They just make that stuff up. All I do is pose for the pictures."

"That's a fictitious character, the Toby Vane in those magazines?"

"All the Toby Vanes are fictitious characters. My real name is Jack Sprunk."

"What a peculiar way to live."

"I couldn't agree more. Now go away and let me work on my wounds."

I went back into the living room and straight to the magazines. They had a kind of horrid fascination. The one I picked up this time had a sincere-looking Toby on the cover and the headline TOBY VANE'S NEW YEAR WISHES FOR YOU. I decided I wasn't up to it and dropped the magazine onto the top of the tilting stack, and the whole slippery batch of them slid forward lazily and fell to the floor.

Beneath them was a cheap satin-covered photo album on which was written, in flowery script, "Precious Memories." Beneath that was another, inscribed "Loved Ones."

"Give me another minute," Toby shouted. "Then we can call Nana. Maybe we'll even go get her, if she's forgiven me." Even though I knew he was loaded to the gills on at least two kinds of dope, he sounded healthy and happy.

I opened the top album.

At first the shapes didn't make sense to me: they were just abstract patches of color and shadow. Then I realized what I was seeing. They were pictures, the kind of pictures you normally see only in magazines with names like
Pain and Punishment
or
Whipcrack.
But these hadn't been cut out of magazines.

They were Polaroids.

Many of them had been taken in the room I was in.

Women were tied into impossible positions. Women were gagged and handcuffed. A woman lay naked on her back with the photographer's shoe pressing into her chest. A very young girl, no more than sixteen, was covered with broken eggs. An even younger girl had mean-looking electrical clips dangling from her nipples. Then an entire page of close-ups of a woman with two closed, swollen eyes and a split lip.

It was Nana.

"Maybe we could all go out together," Toby was saying cheerfully in the kitchen. "Me and Nana and you and your bartender. Go to a movie or a late dinner or something. How does that sound?"

I closed the album and put the fan magazines back on top of it. I went to the door and through it, without slowing down, without trying to collect the rest of my seven hundred and fifty dollars. I didn't need it any more.

And I certainly didn't need Toby Vane. I didn't need anybody whose idea of an electric personality was an alternating current between Jack Armstrong and Vlad the Impaler. Smile or no smile, he was a sick boy.

I lost my way twice trying to get out of the canyon and up to the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time I finally reached it, it was ten o'clock. I drove south like Mario Andretti, but the holiday traffic was a series of Gordian knots and it was after eleven when I finally got to McGinty's of Malibu. Roxanne was gone.

I'd missed the fireworks, too.

2 - Syndication

The fifth of July had a delayed case of the June glooms: dull and flat and gray, courtesy of low-hanging clouds that had slid in overnight to lower the ceiling and the spirits of everyone stuck under it. At eight-thirty in the morning the day looked as bright as it was likely to get. I was sitting with my chin on one hand, muffled and depressed from Toby Vane's cocaine, staring at a dark screen that had nothing on it but two characters that blinked in a bright, bilious green. This is what it said:

A>.

I'd been looking at A> for what seemed like months, wondering what was supposed to come next. So far, what had come next was frustration, surfing a wave of nostalgia for the user-chummy old Apple I'd given away.

A stack of fat books stood next to the computer. They were written in a language somewhere between beginning English and advanced Dada. The index to the one on top, the open one, said that the chapter called "Getting Started" began on page 92. I slapped it shut and hit one of the computer's keys at random, and the damn thing beeped at me. My blood pressure tripled. I found myself standing up with my fists clenched, took two breaths, and wandered over to say good morning to Hansel and Gretel, my parakeets. They ignored me. I ignored me too and climbed out onto the sundeck.

Topanga Canyon folded itself away toward the horizon.

In front of me, hidden by the hills to the northwest, was the Pacific; to the southeast was L.A. Below me was the thinnest of thin air. Someday, probably while I'm sleeping, the house I live in will fall into the canyon, where I fervently hope it will crush the heavy-metal drummer who pounds away, day and night, some six hundred feet below. Until then, the house just leans over the edge, a creaking testimonial to the resilience of seventy-year-old wood.

Mine is probably the oldest and certainly the worst-built house in the canyon. At one time, it was also the most remote. It was so remote that the death of its original owner, an unskilled hermit who'd slapped it together in the century's teens out of odds and ends and sheer hermetic rage, wasn't discovered until his mummified body was found hanging from the living room rafter almost a decade after he'd tied the knot in his final necktie. As far as anyone knew, he'd been driven to toss his good-bye kiss at the world by nothing more profound than the sight of Old Topanga Canyon Boulevard being paved beneath him.

Beneath the diluted daylight on the deck, I stretched. Joints popped. Kids' joints didn't pop. I guessed I wasn't a kid any more.

A hungry hawk sliced through the sky above me, and I realized I was lying down. It felt too early to lie down. It also felt too late to get up. Given the fact that I had a mild case of the post-coke heebie-jeebies, my first in years, I hadn't expected to be comfortable so soon. My eyes called for a vote. It came out two to one, with me on the losing side, and the eyes closed.

At the moment that my eyelashes converged, the phone rang. This was no tired, cranky, irritated ring like Toby Vane's phone had produced. It was a coloratura soprano trilling, full of hope and spring, the lighter-than-air notes of a diva who's finally been told she can sing after weeks of laryngitis. The phone had rung so rarely of late that I'd taken to waxing it.

On the seventh ring, I made my first big mistake of the day. I got up to answer it. First, though, I had to find it. I had a vague, watery memory of having tried to get Roxanne's number from information the night before, and of having dialed Eleanor when that attempt failed. I remembered turning off my own answering machine in petty revenge when Eleanor's machine had answered. What I didn't remember was where I'd put the phone.

It continued to trill merrily away while I began at the wall outlet and painstakingly traced the cord through many a loop and circumnavigation of my cluttered living room. Finally I lost patience, took the cord in both hands, and gave a sharp pull. The telephone emerged abruptly from one of the bookcases and clattered to the floor, taking Frederick B. Artz's
The Mind of the Middle Ages
with it. I slapped the book into place while the phone squawked at the floor, then picked up the receiver.

"So?" My voice sounded grumpy even to me.

"Hello?" someone said in a bright and friendly fashion. "Is Simeon Grist there?"

I weighed the pros and cons. "Depends."

"This is Norman Stillman's office calling."

"Mr. Stillman has a talking office?"

"Well, of course not." She sounded vaguely affronted. "I'm a secretary. Mr. Stillman would like to see you."

"About what?"

"I'm afraid I don't know."

"Mr. Stillman can talk, right? Even if his office can't."

"Well, of course."

"Then let him talk."

"He's very busy at the moment."

I gave half a weary eye to the computer screen. A> blinked at me. "So am I," I said. "I've got someone winking at me right now." She paused, and when she spoke again she'd given up on friendly. "I'll see if Mr. Stillman can come to the phone."

"Take the phone to him," I suggested. "It's not heavy."

I knew Norman Stillman, sort of. Everyone in Los Angeles did. A case I'd been working on had required my presence at the "launch" of one of the many television series let loose upon an unsuspecting world by Norman Stillman Productions. I remembered him as a slender, balding man in a nautical blazer who was fond of misquoting the classics. A very rich slender, balding man in a nautical blazer.

"Mr. Grist?" Norman Stillman's voice slithered bonelessly through the line. "We certainly owe you a world of thanks, don't we?"

"Do we?"

"Let's don't be modest, Mr. Grist. This is a delicate time, and you pulled the fat right out of the fire."

"Mr. Stillman." I closed my eyes and rubbed wearily at the bridge of my nose. The room reeled, and I quickly reopened my eyes. "I'm not being modest. I just don't know what you're talking about." Even as I said it, I realized that I knew exactly what he was talking about.

He chuckled lightly, something I've never been able to master. I can do a hearty chuckle when I've had a few strong ones, but a light chuckle is too Noel Coward for me. I was trying to imitate his when I realized he was talking.

". . . our boy," he said. "One more problem and we would all have been in very hot water."

"I don't know about you," I said, "but he passed simmer a long time ago."

"He speaks highly of you."

"With the chemical content of his blood, he can't speak any way but highly."

"Now, now," he said. "Let's not be judgmental."

It was too stupid to answer, so I examined the phone cord for knots. Phone cord knots, unlike anything else in the Universe, appear via spontaneous generation.

"I've practically watched him grow up," Stillman said after a beat. "And you can take it from me, at heart Toby's a fine young man."

"I'll bet," I said, "that you called me for a reason."

Stillman cleared his throat of Toby. "Do you think you could be in my office around noon?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"I have a job for you."

I looked out the window, focusing through one of the holes in the screen on the mountains to the south. I had two hundred of Toby's dollars in my shirt pocket and owed $315 for rent. Then, also, there was the possibility of Roxanne. I couldn't very well ask her to pay for a date. At least, not a first date.

"Mr. Grist?"

"I'm here. I don't think I can make it at noon. What about one-thirty?"

"I have a screening at two. Oneish?"

"Okayish. Where are you?"

"Universal Studios. Just give your name at the Lankershim gate and the guard will direct you."

We muttered polite good-byes. If I was to meet him at one, my mental state needed emergency surgery, and the only way I knew how to do that was to run eight or nine hard, sweaty miles. Afterward I would need a long sauna and a good fifteen minutes under a shower before I could hope to regain that boyish glow. It was a full agenda. To my surprise, the day looked a little better.

Feeling righteous, I went over to the computer and snapped it off. It sputtered at me.

I completed my rise from the dead at UCLA in Westwood, where the sauna is hot and the coeds are the daughters of the California girls the Beach Boys warned us about. Iridescent from the sauna, I tossed my running shoes into Alice and pointed her north and east. Since I had a little time and I hadn't dipped into Hollywood in a few weeks, I tracked along Wilshire to Santa Monica and then east on Santa Monica to Highland. Winos dozed on bus benches. Little old ladies using walkers waited for the yellow light before beginning their long toddle across the street and then looked agitated as the horns blared. In the brown-paper-bag sunlight along Santa Monica Boulevard the hookers trolled the traffic for business with their thumbs extended. School was out, and the average age had dropped appreciably.

Highland Boulevard took me over the Cahuenga Pass and then turned mysteriously into Ventura Boulevard. A right onto Lankershim and a dip down the hill, and I was at Universal Studios. I parked Alice between a Rolls-Royce and a Maserati and left her, looking like a bright blue boil in a courtesan's box of beauty spots.

Stillman's office was a cute little million-dollar bungalow shaded by a couple of eucalyptus trees. I got my first surprise when he opened the door himself.

"You're Mr. Grist," he said enthusiastically.

I agreed. He took my elbow to lead me, and I took it back. "I can see okay," I said.

Stillman laughed as if I'd said something funny. He was the sort of man who is always a little shorter than you remember him being, as though he'd shrunk while you weren't looking. I got an economical glimpse of immaculate white teeth that must have cost a fortune to straighten and cap, set off by a sunlamp tan and a pair of very small dark eyes huddling furtively beneath eyebrows that had, just possibly, known the sting of a tweezer. He'd traded his blazer for a hand-knitted sweater with a sailboat on the front. Still nautical, but not so formal. His balding head gleamed.

"Dierdre and Pauline are at lunch," he said, indicating a couple of empty desks with a careless wave. "You're certainly punctual. I appreciate that."

He continued to appreciate me as we passed through the secretarial area and into a short hallway. The closed door at the end of the hall said MR. STILLMAN on it in letters the size of the Hollywood sign. "Here we are," he said in case I'd missed them.

The room on the other side of the door looked bigger than the entire bungalow had looked from outside. I stepped onto Wedgwood blue carpeting that an iron-shod Percheron could have galloped across in silence. The window shades were drawn to keep the day at a tasteful distance, and the lighting was indirect. The mahogany-spoked wheel of a yacht hung on the opposite wall, behind a desk that looked like a bowling alley on legs. The only object on the desk's polished surface was a huge brass ship's compass.

"I don't know why," I said, "but I'd be willing to bet you've got a boat."

He laughed again and went to stand possessively behind his desk. "Half-right, Mr. Grist. In fact, I've got two of them. One's in the Marina, and one's on her way here from Hong Kong." He gestured at a large map of the Pacific that filled most of one wall. Two red pins were the only blemishes in its pale blue surface. "The
Cabuchon.
At this precise moment, she should be pulling into Honolulu."

"Lucky her."

"This is Mr. Cohen. Dixie, this is our hero, Mr. Grist."

I didn't see Dixie Cohen until he stood up; he had that kind of negative charisma. He'd been perching on a captain's chair near the door, and now he held his hand out to me, a thin, worried-looking, nearly completely bald little man on whose corduroy shoulders the angel of despair almost visibly perched. "Terrific work," he said mournfully. He wore professorial leather patches on the elbows of his jacket.

"Not on purpose," I said.

"The result is the same," Cohen said.

Sitting down, Norman Stillman briskly rubbed his smooth, tapered hands together. They made a dry, powdery noise.

"Nothing in the press," Cohen murmured lugubriously to the carpet, looking at it as though it were an old friend who had just died. "Good all around."

"Good for whom?" I fought off an urge to pat Dixie Cohen comfortingly on the shoulder and looked around for someplace to sit.

"For us, Mr. Grist." Stillman followed my glance. "Dixie," he commanded, "give Mr. Grist your chair." Cohen shuffled off across the carpet to grab one from a matched platoon lined up against the wall.

"What's so good?" I said, sitting. "Who cares if the little bedbug gets tossed in the can? It's better than he deserves."

"Let's not get sidetracked into a discussion of Toby's character," Stillman said. He looked down at the schooner sailing across the front of his sweater, spotted a wrinkle in the mainsail, tugged it straight, and then treated me to another million-dollar smile. The smile was as meaningless as Toby's, just something that staked claim to the lower half of Stillman's face whenever it felt like it. "Toby's approach to life is not the topic of the day."

"And what is the topic of the day?"

"Employment for you, Mr. Grist. I think I said that on the phone. Highly lucrative employment."

From behind me I heard Cohen lug a chair across the carpet. He sat down behind me and breathed resentfully once or twice.

"Would it be vulgar," I asked, "to mention an actual number?"

Stillman gave me his light chuckle. "That'll come. First, let's explain our little problem and see if it interests you. From what Toby's told me, I gather that's very much in your line. Quite the White Knight, Toby says." He cut off the chuckle and tapped the surface of his desk with a polished nail. "Dixie?"

Dixie stood up with a deep sigh that seemed to have its roots in his knees. He put his hands in his pockets and walked to the edge of Stillman's desk. Then he looked off into space until Stillman cleared his throat significantly.

"How much do you know about Toby Vane?" Cohen said to the room at large.