“Ferris,” I said reprovingly, “you laughed when your dogs attacked me.”
“ Heek,” he said, and both eyes disappeared. “You looked like you had wet your pants.”
It was a smile, sort of. As much of one as I was likely to get. “I need your help,” I said.
He got comfortable, a man in his milieu. “Of course you do. Why else would you have climbed my fence?”
“I want you to throw a wake for Max.”
Whatever he’d expected, that wasn’t it. “A wake? Whatever for?”
I’d expected a refusal, but not a question. “That’s not how I work,” I said. “I have ideas first and then figure out why I had them.”
“How haphazard.”
“I prefer to think of it as instinctive.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said. “What makes you think I’d consider such a thing?”
“We’ve already covered that. For Max.”
“For years,” he said, “I thought it was a question: ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot?’ My answer was always yes. As quickly as possible.”
“But you didn’t forget.”
“Not for lack of trying. Lord, how I tried.” He toyed with the brass box and then looked up. At Henry.
“Why not?” Henry said.
“An excellent question,” Hanks said promptly, “and one that isn’t asked often enough. I knew a prostitute once, a woman of almost inexhaustible willingness, and that was her credo. Anything anyone asked her to do, she replied, ‘Why not?’ Wound up owning half of North Hollywood. Ever wondered why they call it North Hollywood?”
“Because it’s north of Hollywood.”
“You lack poetry,” Hanks said. “You should spend time with Henry.” He fondled the ears of the nearest dog. “Why me? And don’t give me sentimentalism.”
“You can afford it,” I said. “And it would amuse you.”
He closed both eyes. “It might at that.”
“You haven’t laughed in years,” I pointed out.
“I ain’t never heard him laugh,” Henry said solemnly.
Hanks still had his eyes closed, but the left corner of his mouth went up. “Halloween’s around the corner.”
“Great,” I said. “A theme.”
“I don’t entertain at home,” he said, opening his eyes.
“And I wouldn’t ask you to. I want it in West Hollywood.”
“The dreariest of venues.”
“It’s your chance,” I said, “to show them how it should be done.”
The right corner of his mouth went up, too. It made him look almost pleasant. “If I do it,” he said, “I’ll give them an evening they’ll never forget.”
“Anything you want, as long as it’s legal.”
“Where have you been? Everything’s legal these days.”
“You’ll do it, then.”
He lifted the paws of the dog nearest him and clapped them together lightly in applause. “I’ll think about it. Call Henry at six tomorrow evening.”
“You’re not as bad as they say you are.”
“No one’s as bad as they say he is. I used to come pretty close, though.” His eyes widened. “I thought you didn’t know anything about me.”
“I lied.”
“We’ll have lots of time to talk about me while we plan this thing.” He waved the words away like smoke. “ If I do it. It’ll broaden your frame of reference.” He picked up the ivory box and slammed it onto the tabletop. “Henry,” he said, “it’s midnight. I’ve practically promised this man a favor. Now can I have a fucking cigar?”
Henry stirred from his spot by the wall. “You got to say please,” he said.
15 ~ Back Fence
My answering machine had kept itself busy in my absence. Eleanor had called to say she’d talked to Alan and Christy and that she’d be going to the station with them in the morning in her capacity as a reporter. My mother had checked in with a joke about an old man who found a frog that claimed to be a princess; all he had to do was kiss her to change her back again, with unspeakable delights, unendurably prolonged, as a fringe benefit. At ninety, the old man finally said, he’d just as soon have a talking frog. I wondered what Ferris Hanks would have said. Hammond called from Maui. He and Sonia had met cops of many races, and did I know that Hawaiians ate paste? Three extremely hearty people in the marital line had called to offer me and the little missus a variety of things I’d never heard of and couldn’t do without. Someone with the unlikely name of Ed Pfester-the P was silent, but he’d spelled it-had called, saying he was with Back Fence magazine, and I could call him back at anytime. He was on deadline, he said. In fact, he’d said it twice, both times he called.
Twelve forty-two a.m. qualified as “anytime,” but I didn’t feel an irresistible urge to talk to Back Fence. Think about People, printed badly and dumbed down to a roughly amphibian level, and you’ve got Back Fence. I could imagine the story they’d do on Max- The Secret Life of an American Icon or something-and I couldn’t see any angle in helping them out.
There were a lot of things I couldn’t see any angle in.
I’d brought Max’s piece of Nite Line up the driveway, and I fetched a beer from the refrigerator and smoothed the clip out on the coffee table. Bearded Jack, at the dating service, had been surprised Max would carry something like that around, but it was all I had, and I’d been postponing working through the classifieds on the back of the page. Forty-three of them had been left whole by Max’s scissors and another twelve had been cut through, leaving uninformative fragments.
Let’s say Max met the Farm Boy through the classifieds. Let’s say the Farm Boy worked his lethal scam from out of town, which made a certain amount of sense; he could probably subscribe to gay papers from all over the place, have them delivered to wherever he holed up between destructive forays into other men’s lives.
A comparison of the out-of-town subscription lists of the major-city gay papers might have proved informative. It might also have proved informative to roll back time and watch while Max was assaulted, but I couldn’t do that, either.
About a third of the ads provided phone numbers, all local. On a second look, several of them provided the same phone number, or numbers that differed only by a digit or two. The pros Jack had talked about, all claiming to be handsome, healthy, hankering, and hung. I crossed them out with a red marker, feeling decisive. There. A start.
Most of the others offered post-office boxes, and nineteen of them were out of town. I marked out the ones in L.A. and looked down at the page. Nineteen was too many by about fifteen. Okay, I thought, which ones would Max be likely to answer?
The parameters: troubled tone, low self-esteem, pleas for help. That meant I had to read the damn things. It was enough to make me get another beer.
Older “brother” needed, one said. Whom can I turn to? asked another, a little pedantically. More to the point, Me: Young and inexperienced. You: Strong and caring. Feeling young and inexperienced for the first time in years, I made a note of the P.O. box and the state. A little farther down, Country mouse seeks city mouse. Against the opposite margin, Come and Get me. At the top, New life needed. Next to that, New and adventuresome, right above Mature Daddy wanted.
The third beer went down more quickly than the first two. I was getting a fourth when the phone rang.
“Mr. Grist,” Ed Pfester’s voice said to the machine, “this is Ed Pfester again from Back Fence. I’m up against a heck of a deadline here. Please give me a ring whenever you get in.” He gave the number again, as though I were
