Supremes. “I’ll go in with you.”
Candy Toy grabbed Ferris Hanks by the arm, curled a baleful lip at Charlie, and said, “This is Candy Toy in West Hollywood, where joy and sorrow-’
Henry joined me as I followed Bo Peep and her sheep into the ballroom. “Looks okay, huh?” he asked.
“You couldn’t have done better,” I said. The ballroom was completely transformed. Pinlights picked out the bar and the stage, where a warm-up band called the Bottoms played slow country and western. The lead singer, a woman with a brush cut and penciled sideburns down her cheeks, was doing her third k. d. lang song in a row while people near the stage danced or just swayed back and forth, hugging. Costumed men had formed a circle around Bernadette’s font, waiting patiently to anoint themselves.
Ferris’s handsome Roman slaves, decked out in short white tunics with a Greek key motif and wearing brass bands on their ankles and upper arms, wove through the crowd with trays of rumaki, petit fours, and other appetizers that had apparently been on ice since the fifties and that made me wonder how long it had been since Ferris had been to a party. The door to the kitchen swung open every few seconds as a newly laden tray was borne into the room. The ballroom’s primitive air conditioning was already showing signs of giving up for the evening, and the slaves were sweating with effort.
“They in for quite a night,” Henry said. “You wouldn’t think it, looking at all these little-bitty waists, but this crowd is murder on free food.”
“I’m going to check the back,” I said. Henry stayed with me as we passed the kitchen and went down the dark hallway to the exit. The door to Mickey Snell’s office was open, and he was seated at his desk, blowing cigar smoke and directing a stream of squeaky chatter at one of Ferris’s Roman slaves, who was spreading tan body makeup on one of the whitest legs I’d ever seen. Henry stopped halfway down the hall and took hold of a man coming out of the ladies’ room.
“None of that,” he said. “We got real women here.”
“I am a real woman,” the man said. He was dressed as Barbra Streisand, complete with three pounds of putty on his nose. “Real enough for you, any day. Who in the world is doing your hair?” Barbra made a peace offering of air kisses and swayed her way back to the ballroom while Henry fluffed up his wig.
I pushed the rear door open and came face to face with Batman. “Everything okay?” I asked.
“No problem,” Batman said. “Nobody in the lot but the parking attendants. Okay if I smoke a joint?”
“Have you got marijuana in your utility belt?” Henry demanded, still working on his hair.
“You wouldn’t believe what I’ve got in my utility belt,” Batman said, patting a complicated system of pouches surrounding his washboard stomach. “I don’t know how I’m going to get along without it. Maybe I’ll keep it when I return the costume.”
“No grass,” Henry said sternly. “No poppers, no coke, no nothing. I’ll bring you some white wine, but that’s it.”
“Nobody talks to Batman like that,” Batman said. “Who are you supposed to be?”
“Never mind,” Henry snapped. “Whoever I am, I can tell Batman to go climb a pole, and if Batman don’t get his ass up that pole fast enough, then I give ol Batman a ticket home. You know what that means?”
“No money?” ventured Batman.
“You got it, Bat.”
“Batman knows the value of a dollar,” Batman said.
“One wine, coming up,” Henry said. “You got your walkie-talkie?”
“In my utility-”
“Well, take it out of your utility belt, Bruce, how you gonna get to it if you need it? Geez,” he said to me. “I always hated Batman. Even when I was a little kid. All you had to do was look at Robin, you knew the dude was in deep trouble.”
“Get personal, why don’t you,” Batman said sullenly.
“I ain’t even started,” Henry said. “And don’t trip on your cape.”
“Testing, one, two-” someone squeaked over the P.A. system in the ballroom, and I went back up the hall, past Mickey Snell’s office, empty now, and the rest rooms, to see what was going on.
The Bottoms were congregated at the back of the stage, unplugging their instruments and calling to friends in the crowd. Mickey Snell tapped a muscular thumb on the microphone, making a noise like someone doing a cannonball into a vat of tapioca. Someone yelled, “It’s on, Mickey. Do something about the air.”
“Testing,” Mickey Snell said implacably. “This little piggy went to market-”
Two of the Seven Dwarfs, complete with little peaked cap and granny glasses, were patrolling the catwalks, looking down on the crowd. One of them made a thumbs-up sign at me, conveniently pointing me out to anyone who might be wondering who was in charge, and I looked behind me, pretending to think the signal was intended for somebody else. Henry was right there.
“Okay, Doc,” he called. “You and Grumpy trade off with Dopey and Sleepy in half an hour.”
The sun came out. Ferris, basking in a circle of light with Candy Toy, and with Charlie the cameraman limping in tow, walked past me, pausing to give a glad hand and an encouraging word to people who had no idea who he was. Toy held her microphone inches from his lips, catching every historic syllable for the benefit of the guys who would edit it out back at the station.
“When do the eulogies start?” Ferris asked me. I turned my back to Charlie’s camera and brought both hands up behind me with one finger extended in an ancient insult. Charlie’s lights died.
“You know damn well when they start,” I said. “And keep me off camera. Where are the dog tags?”
“Right here,” he said. He reached into his jacket and withdrew a long thin red velvet case, like something a bracelet might come in.
“Remember words?” I asked, pushing the case back into the recesses of his jacket. “Use them.”
“Aren’t we touchy,” Hanks said. “Opening-night jitters,” he explained to Candy Toy.
Candy Toy jumped a foot and let out a muffled little scream, and I saw the Big Bad Wolf glaring over her shoulder at me. “He pinched me,” Candy Toy said to Charlie.
“Be glad he didn’t eat you up,” I said. “What is it, Wolfie?”
“In the back,” Spurrier said. “Got something for you.” The Big Bad Wolf’s mask had lipstick all over it, and someone had stuffed his jacket pockets with flowers. Spurrier’s eyes were narrow with rage.
“Don’t take this wolf stuff too literally,” I told him as we fought our way through the crowd. “Just remember that most of these girls aren’t.”
He stopped and turned, giving me a glimpse of the indignant little eyes through the slits in the rubber mask. “Getting chummy?” His fingers dug through my Donald Duck sailor shirt and found a nerve in my upper arm, and a barbed-wire worm crawled up my neck, in between layers of skin. “Don’t,” he said. “We’re not buddies.”
“Ike,” I said, “how long do you usually go without someone telling you you’re an asshole?”
He compressed the nerve again, and I reached out and grabbed his face through the mask, squeezing as hard as I could. The rubber mask pulled at the skin on his face, and he stepped back quickly, letting go of my arm. Tallulah Bankhead was staring at us, so I pinched the black bulbous nose of the mask and said, “Honk, honk.” Tallulah laughed her famous laugh, honking back at us, and I pushed in front of Spurrier and led him to Mickey Snell’s office.
“Alone at last.” I closed the door, shutting out some seventies rock from the Silverlake Flyers, who had taken the microphone away from Snell by force. Spurrier pulled off the mask, showing me four angry welts on his cheeks.
“When this is over,” he said, “You’re going to want to move out of Topanga.”
“You’re not that big a deal,” I said. “I know half the deputies up there, and they just want to do their jobs. You’re an aberration, Ike, and good cops know it.”
He planted his feet wide and brought up a hand, and for a moment I thought he was going to take a swing at me. Instead, the hand went inside his coat. “Just so you know. We’re a long way from finished.”
I sat in Mickey Snell’s copious chair and looked down at the front of my Donald Duck suit. “Be still, my quacking heart.”
“This is the guy,” he said, pulling out a folded sheet of paper. He opened it and dropped it onto the desk, just out of reach. I leaned over and picked it up, removing my mask for a better view.
The kid looked no more than eighteen. He had shoulder-length blond hair, parted carelessly in the middle, and even in the fax I could see he was good-looking. Except for the length of his hair, he had the face of the soda jerk
