Skin Deep (14 page)

"It depends. If the woman was strong and Amber was wasted enough, why not? She was pretty thrashed earlier this evening."

"She was totaled. If she was a car, you would have had her hauled. But I don't think a woman could have done it."

"That's what they said about Lizzie Borden. An axe isn't a woman's weapon. Now who's stereotyping?"

"Naw. It's her fingers." She shuddered against me. "Whoever did that really hates women. Like Toby does."

We had come to the end of Sunset, and I turned north up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Topanga. The ocean was invisible to our left, suggested here and there by the mooring lights of a sailboat that bobbed up and down on the water's dark skin, the people in it asleep and dreaming of freedom.

"So did Amber ever fool around with anyone's boyfriend?"

"Simeon, I've told you. She never did anything except dance and try to find a vein. Honey, can we make a deal? You leave me alone now, and I'll talk to you tomorrow till your ears fall off. Right now, all I want is a soft bed and a warm shoulder. Give me about ten hours, okay?"

"I've got Toby tomorrow, too."

"You can handle us both."

"I'm not so sure. I haven't handled much so far."

She put her head on my shoulder and made a drowsy sound. "Stupid," it sounded like. The PCH was wide and dark and empty. After a few minutes I turned right up into the mountains, and we left the deep sleep of the sea behind us.

When we finally reached the top I shook her awake. With her hand in mine, I led her up the steep, unpaved driveway, steering her around the more cavernous ruts until we got to the house. The lights were on, courtesy of the electric timer, but darkness masked the grimmer dilapidation of the exterior. I opened the back door, and Nana stumbled in sleepily.

"Cozy," she said, her eyes half-open. "Where's the bedroom?"

"Well," I said, "there are only three rooms, and you can see the living room and the kitchen. So it must be the other one."

She focused. "Through that door," she said.

"You should give some thought to a career in private investigation."

"Tomorrow. You coming?"

"In a minute. Just go get comfortable."

She nodded drowsily and headed toward bed.

I gave some water to the birds, who didn't acknowledge it, and did a little fruitless tidying up. The red light on my answering machine blinked at me, heralding yet another thwarted attempt at human communication. I got a beer, pushed the playback button, and sat on the rug.

Calls one and two were from Toby. He wanted me to call when I got home, he said in the first one. He gave his number, as if I hadn't already called him once that evening.

In the second message he said he was going to sleep, but that I could call and wake him up if I wanted to make sure he hadn't gone anywhere. The third call wasn't from Toby.

"Hello, Simeon," Eleanor's voice said. "It's almost three in the morning. I couldn't sleep, and I wondered if you couldn't, too. Since you're not answering, I guess you can. . . . Um, I hate talking to this machine. Do you want to have dinner tomorrow night, or Sunday? If you do, call me in the morning. But not too early, please. I may get to sleep yet. I'm going to close my eyes and imagine myself enveloped in a bright white light. Or something. Bye-bye." There was a final-sounding click, and then a dial tone hummed across the wire.

I finished my beer. The narrow, safe life I'd led with Eleanor seemed as remote as an earlier incarnation. The curtains she had made for the house still hung on the windows, but nothing else tangible was left.

I gave the empty bottle a push, and it rolled under a table. I'd get it in the morning, I promised myself. Trying not to think about much of anything, I went into the bedroom.

Nana was lying on top of the blankets, fully clothed and fast asleep. I eased the blankets out from under her and covered her with them. She didn't even murmur. Then I closed the window next to the bed and looked down at her. She was breathing evenly, and she looked about fifteen.

There was a spare blanket folded at the foot of the bed. I grabbed it, turned off the lights, and went back out to the living room.

8 - The Morning After

Saturday may have dawned rosy-fingered, but I missed it.

When I finally swam reluctantly toward consciousness, it was already ten o'clock. Birds—not
my
birds, but their more energetic colleagues outdoors—were singing melodiously to warn each other to stay the hell out of their territory. I gave my lips an exploratory lick. My tongue felt like some supernatural prankster had sneaked in during the night and inserted it into one of those sheepskin seat covers that sports car drivers for some reason covet. A dull and monotonous brass bell clanged regularly in my forebrain. Samuel Johnson, who had something to say about everything, once said that when one woke up one should get up, and when one got up, one should do something. I weighed a very short list of the things I could possibly do and chose the bathroom. I figured I could lift my toothbrush.

Normally, I like waking up alone. I'm used to it. Of all the civilized skills, the power of speech is the last one to drop in on me each day. After I hung up the brush, wiped the rabid-looking foam from my chin, and turned off the water, I listened gratefully to the sound of Nana snoring daintily from the bedroom. I was happy that she wasn't up and around and bombarding me with snappy chatter, but those were pretty cloggy snores. I wondered whether someone had helped her to Toby's prized pink while Toby wasn't watching.

I spit out some Listerine and looked up. My face in the mirror looked like my face. I searched it for a moment and then turned the cold water back on and splashed myself to wash away the sleep. I keep waiting for some cataclysm to change my face. No dice. The only thing that seems to change the way I look is the patient accumulation of years. No matter what happens, nothing seems to make it to the surface, any more than the dirt of Toby's life left any unscoured stains on the all-American billboard of his grin.

Feeling a little better, or at least a little cleaner, I went in and checked out the living room. It was a wreck. It looked like Grendel's lair, except that in place of the gnawed human bones Grendel and his mother scattered around after their nightly Viking shish kebab were more commonplace odds and ends: a woman's hairbrush I didn't recognize, an ashtray full of somebody else's cigarettes, and dust rats curled languidly under the furniture. I hid the hairbrush under a couch cushion, studied the lump it made, and resolved to see what was causing the other lumps at some time in the near future.

Eleanor, my ex-girlfriend, was born to tame furniture. She'd managed to keep the place presentable during our years together, but I'd given up the effort, waiting for the occasional girlfriend to drop by with a sponge and a roll of paper towels. It had been weeks since that had happened. I was definitely not next in line for the cover of
Architectural Digest.

Since I had time to putter, I puttered. Wrapping a towel around my middle, I gave some more water to the birds. Birds go through a lot of water. To my surprise, I was rewarded by a grateful cheep from Hansel. At least, I thought it was Hansel. With birds, who can tell? After last night, I wasn't even sure I could tell with people. Who, for example, was Toby? Or, hitting literally closer to home, who was Nana?

I realized I was gazing dully down into the birds' watering trough, roused myself, and headed for coffee. For what seemed like several hours I leaned against the kitchen counter, averting my eyes from the landscape of my life while I waited to hear water boiling. I managed to pour the water over the grounds without fatal consequences, found a relatively clean cup, and let the whole deal drip directly into it.

The first gulp took off on all cylinders, transversed the road map of my circulatory system on two wheels in the best Le Mans fashion, and screeched across the finish line into my brain, synapses snapping to attention behind it. The second swallow brought the sun out. Well,
well,
I thought, and went to call Toby.

I woke him up, the sluggard. "What time is it?" he mumbled.

"Rise and shine, both of you. I'll be down there in about an hour and a half, and we've got a lot to talk about."

"You didn't call me back." He sounded aggrieved.

"What do you think I'm doing now?"

"Last night," he said sulkily. "You were supposed to call me last night. Don't you know how upset we were?"

"Yeah. Sounds like you haven't closed your eyes all night."

"We didn't until about six. Finally we took a little something. What time did you say it was?"

"Almost eleven. I'll be there between one-thirty and two."

I could hear Saffron in the background. She sounded querulous and cranky. "No," Toby said. "I'll come to you. I've got to take Saffron home anyway." He lowered his voice. "Champ, if I don't get her out of here, I'm going to go crazy."

"Just don't hit her."

"What's a poor boy to do when he's not allowed to express himself? This girl is the ditz of the century."

"She's also your alibi."

"She's a dream walking. How do I get to your house?" I told him and hung up. I was replacing the receiver when I suddenly felt very strongly that someone was looking at me. I turned slowly and stared into the dark, accusing screen of the computer. What the hell, I thought. It's only a machine. How complicated can it be? I drained the cup, poured another and, with an unsteady Toshiro Mifune swagger, pointed myself at the computer, reached it, and switched it on.

A whir as the fan came to life, a blink on the screen, a message: disk error or non-system disk. Balls. I'd forgotten to put anything in the drive. Well, be reasonable, it wasn't the machine's fault. I slipped the DOS diskette in and hit a key. The fan gave way to a buzzing, choking sound as the computer chewed some information off the surface of the disk, and my old nemesis shouldered its way onto the screen: A>

Okay. I'd been this far before. Unknown territory was only a keystroke away. There were twenty-six regular keys, ten numbers, a bunch of keys that said Fl and F2, up to F12, and an irregular cluster of others with labels like CTRL and SYSREQ. Surely one of them did something.

Talk to it, I thought. I typed HELLO. The word appeared on the screen. Terrific, but now what? I hit the Enter key. BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME, the screen said smugly. I growled a little in the back of my throat. HOW YOU HANGING? I typed. The words hung there, glowing greener than electric chlorophyll. I hit Enter.

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME.

"It's not a command, you asshole," I said. "It's a polite greeting. You want a command, I'll give you a command." I typed ACHTUNG! and hit Enter. The machine, like a second-rate psychoanalyst, stuck with the tried and true: BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME. It also beeped, by way of emphasis.

I was galvanized by a surge of adrenaline, my hangover burned away by twelve million volts of emotional electricity. I leaned toward the computer screen, my throat tight. "Okay, you electronic illegal immigrant, wanna know what I did to my last turntable? I backed the car over it. Do you want to wind up in a burlap sack, in pieces small enough to inhale, being mailed back to the factory with FRAGILE written all over you so the post office will drop you as often as possible?
Do
you? Huh?
Huh?"
I slammed the keyboard once with my fist for emphasis.

The computer beeped and then laughed at me.

I sat back quickly and reached for my coffee, and the cup jangled nervously against the saucer. The computer laughed again. "Honey," it said, "you're out of your mind."

I almost jumped out of my chair as Nana's bare arms snaked around my neck and gave me a squeeze. "How come I slept alone?" she said. Her breath smelled good even in the morning.

I had to inhale twice before I could talk. "Don't startle me this early, okay? I'm a little bit jumpy. How are you feeling?"

"Great, better than I've felt in days."

I ran my tongue experimentally over my teeth. My mouth was as furry as an inside-out puppy. "What was so goddamn funny?" I asked a little sourly.

"You. Threatening that computer. How much RAM have you got?"

"As much as I need," I said defensively. What the hell was RAM?

"What, though? Three twenty K, six forty K, or thirty-eight thousand K?"

"Thirty-eight thousand. And change."

Nana gave my throat a vaguely threatening squeeze. "You simp," she said. "Where's the coffee?"

"Where do you think?"

"Aren't we sweet in the morning?" She slipped past me and ambled into the kitchen. Against my will, I turned to look. She'd changed. She was wearing a pair of underpants. My underpants. They hung lazily lopsided, high up on her right hip and so far down on her left that the cleft between her buttocks peeked demurely over the white elastic waistband. Tiny as she was, the elastic was doing its job. She had wonderful, teaspoon-size dimples on either side of the base of her spine. They were the kind of dimples I'd always wanted to fill with salt and dip celery into.

"You don't know squat," she said pleasantly as she poured. "Everybody knows that six forty is the maximum RAM for that machine. What in the world did you buy it for?"

"Work."

"Oh. Work." She slurped her coffee. "Whoo, hot," she said. "Where's the sugar?"

"In the cabinet. Behind you."

She pulled it down and poured half the box into her cup, then gave it a stir. Then she added some more. She sniffed it.

"Sugar doesn't smell," I said in spite of myself. "How do you know when you've got enough?"

"When the spoon stands up by itself," she said. She sipped it once and nodded, then dropped the spoon into the sink. "Coffee's finished," she said. "I'll make some more." She went through the motions, waited until the water was dripping, and turned back to me. "So, you're going to use a computer in your work. What's your software?"

"My what?"

"Software. You know, the stuff that teaches that thing how to think." The pot began to drip obediently behind her.

"I haven't gotten that far."

She came over to me and peered over my shoulder. I could feel her body heat on my arm. "Honey," she said, "you haven't got anywhere at all. What do you want to do first, write something?"

"Sure. I guess so."

"Okay, where are the disks?" She flipped up the neat little black file that I'd bought with the machine and pulled out a diskette. "WordPerfect," she said. "You're in luck. I know my way around this one." She yanked out the DOS diskette and slipped the new one in its place.

"Anything in B?" she asked rhetorically, snapping the drive open. "No, nothing in B. Well, we'll just use good old DOS, no need in wasting time formatting one. In we go."

"God, you're chatty."

"Get off the stool. I can't reach the keys. Scoot, scoot." I scooted. She typed WP and hit Enter, and the screen came to life, welcome to WordPerfect 4.2 it said.

I leaned over her shoulder. "How'd you do that?"

"If you're sweet, I'll teach you. Get a piece of paper so you can write all this down."

Feeling like a third-grader, I got a piece of paper. Negligently naked at the keyboard, Nana initiated me into the mysteries of word processing. I took notes while she batted the machine around in an expert manner, and when she got up to check the coffeepot, I took over. "My God," I said while she clinked things around in the kitchen, "I'm writing."

"Now all you need is something to write about."

"Shush."

In fact, I did have something to write about, TOBY = JACK SPRUNK? I typed. CHECK. HOMETOWN? TOBY'S BUSINESS IN THE BACK ROOM WITH TINY. CHECK. WHO'S SAFFRON, REALLY? VERIFY THEIR STORY. NAMES OF OTHER GIRLS TOBY'S BELTED. DID AMBER HAVE A ROOMMATE?

"Sure, sweetie," Nana said, reading over my shoulder as she sipped a fresh cup of coffee. "That charmer, Pepper. You know, the one who was putting the arm on you while I was sweet-talking Tiny." The underpants had slipped a little lower, clinging for dear life to the sharp jut of her left hipbone. I put my thumb in her navel and gave it a soft twist. It returned immediately to its former shape. The muscles beneath were as smooth and firm as a trampoline. "Jesus, you're elastic."

"Youth," she said. "You probably remember it."

"You know the answers to any of these other questions?"

"Not so's you'd notice. Saffron I know something about. Put your thumb back in my belly button. It's such an unusual approach."

"Later. What's with Toby and Tiny?"

"Toby likes him, I guess. Hell, I like him, too. But as for Toby, well, Tiny takes care of him, sees that nobody hassles him in the club, sets him up with a girl occasionally. Tiny knows a lot of girls."

"Girls for what?"

"What does that mean? You mean, does Toby pay for them, or what? He doesn't have to. Toby's a TV star, remember? They're thrilled just to be with him."

"I mean what does Toby do to the girls Tiny sets him up with?"

"The usual. He doesn't beat them up, I don't think. Tiny'd pasteurize him."

"He beat you up."

She colored slightly. "Tiny didn't know about that. I told him I'd had a car accident." She took my cup and filled it with the coffee she'd brewed.

"How thoughtful of you," I said as she placed the cup in my hand.

"Well, you feel ridiculous when you get slapped around, you know? I've had practice. Anyway, it was none of Tiny's business. I got myself into it, I got myself out of it. You know, you really shouldn't leave the screen on like that if you're not working. You can burn words into it. Have you got Screensave?"

"Have I got what?"

"Eigo,"
she said. "That's Korean for 'you simp.' It's a utility. Got any utilities? Give me that stool."

She slid up onto it, swapped a couple of disks, and slapped some keys around. The screen went dark. "Now we've saved what you wrote onto the disk in the B drive. I'll show you how to get it back in a minute." Pulling the WordPerfect disk out of A, she put DOS into it, typed DIR, and hit Enter. A whole bunch of junk rolled past on the screen.

"Hoo-ha. There it is," she said. "Next time, before you put the word processing program in, type SCRNSAVE." She typed it as she said it.