Skin Deep

he said, snapping his fingers in the direction of a nervous-looking girl wearing surplus-store military camouflage. Abashed that her cloak of invisibility hadn't worked, she scurried away and, seconds later, pressed a chair against the back of my legs. I sat, turning to smile thanks, but she was already in full retreat.

'So,' Toby said, poking me with a finger. 'You're mine now.'

'Back off,' I said. 'Nobody bought me for you. I can go whenever I want.'

'Okay,' Toby said placidly. 'You're on loan. Norman doesn't have a lot of good ideas, but this is one of them.'

'You mean you like it? Why? I'd hate it.'

'Nah. I can use a baby-sitter. Hell, I know that. I don't like to get into trouble, you know.' He sounded as though trouble descended on him from the skies unexpectedly and at random. 'And besides, I've got a piece of the syndication bucks. I sold my residuals to Norman for a couple million, but I've got a contingency if the loot tops forty.'

A few yards away Janie Gordon glowered at us. I had evidently gone over to the enemy's camp. I gave her a reassuring smile, but the effort involved muscles that seemed to have their roots in my hips, and she turned away. 'You sold your residuals,' I said to Toby. 'What does that mean?'

'I keep forgetting you don't know anything,' Toby said, fiddling with an expensive-looking watch. 'Residuals are something that drudges like Norman pay us actors every time this crap gets boosted back onto the airwaves. My paycheck only covers the first two times. After that, someone has to send me a little check, whether it's a network rerun or some dinky station in Crooked Elbow, Montana. It takes a lot of little checks to make two million, and it means I've always got to be looking at someone's books to make sure they're staying straight, which nobody does, least of all the Normans. That part you probably know about.'

'For all that money,' I said, 'why don't you just put your hands in your pockets and keep them there? Why not buy big soft boxing gloves and punch out the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated?'

He shifted in his chair. 'I've gotta work in a second.'

'Fine,' I said. 'Duck it. Maybe, if you're lucky, the girls will duck, too.'

'Don't be dumb,' he said, sounding as comfortable as a man who was having his prostate probed. 'It's not all that easy. Christ, if it was. .'

The girl in camouflage cleared her throat behind him. 'Ready, Mr. Vane,' she said.

'And just in time,' Toby said, getting up. 'We were on the verge of a lovers' quarrel. Have I ever told you how pretty you are?' The girl laughed uneasily and led him up the walk and into the light. Toby's enormous stand-in came over and flopped into the chair Toby had vacated. I could feel him staring at me. The middle-aged woman stayed put as Toby joined her; I guessed she wasn't important enough to have a stand-in. With Toby in the shot, people all over the place snapped to attention, donning earphones, moving behind cameras, manipulating boom mikes. I started to get up, and a massive hand fell onto my forearm. I looked over into a pair of vacant blue eyes.

'Who are you,' Toby's stand-in asked tonelessly. Up close, he looked even bigger.

'Well, hi,' I said, trying to move my arm. No deal. He waited, the weight of his hand bearing down on me, giving me the patient gaze of someone for whom things have to be taken in order. 'Urn,' I said, 'I'm Simeon.'

Right answer. He thought it over for a moment and then smiled. 'I'm John,' he said.

'Toby's friend,' I said, probably more slowly than was necessary. His smile broadened, but that was it. 'I'm Toby's friend, too,' I heard myself saying as I eased my arm free. John nodded, smile frozen in place. It looked like it would be there for some time. That seemed to be the end of the conversation. I smiled back, got up, and strolled in the direction of Dixie's car. A little cold spot on the back of my neck told me that John's eyes were following me.

Lights snapped on all over the set. Across the street the crowd of onlookers surged forward expectantly. This was what they'd been waiting for. The middle-aged woman with the autograph book was right up front, staring at Toby and the actress as though the Second Coming, long overdue, had finally clambered down the steps and off the plane.

'So what the hell are you doing here, Simeon?' It was Janie, clipboard firmly in place against her slender waist.

'Experiencing the pangs of guilt,' I said. 'Are we allowed to talk now? Aren't they shooting or something?'

'No way. They'll rehearse it two or three times. For her, not for him. He always knows his lines.'

'One-take Toby,' I said.

'Well, well,' she said acidly, 'that proves it. There's something nice you can say about everyone. So you're his new buddy? What do you guys do for fun, tag-team matches against Girl Scouts?'

'Sure. In between rounds we go out and molest plants. Who's this?'

Janie turned to see a dusty Chevy station wagon pull in behind Dixie's Mercedes. A youngish woman got out. She could have been anywhere between her late twenties and her early forties, pretty in an exhausted way, her small face framed by a fluffy, outdated hairdo that fringed inward below her high cheekbones, below the dark circles that seemed to hold her eyes in place. Her clothes were determinedly young, a frilly blouse and a short skirt with a wide belt. Over her left breast was a large teddy bear pin that might have been made out of bread dough or hardened library paste, the kind of jewelry that got front-page placement in catalogs targeted to elementary-school teachers. A lanky man in a dark green shirt climbed out from the passenger side and opened the back. He began to pull out an array of photographic equipment.

'It's the fannies,' Janie said, giving up on hostility for the moment.

'Fannies?'

'Come on, Simeon. Fannies as in fan magazines. Fan as in fantasy, fantasy pipelines for adolescent girls. Toby's constituency, right? The chenille downside of the American dream.'

'Janie,' I said, 'what the hell are you doing here?'

'I asked you first.' The hostility was back in full force, and she hugged the clipboard against her like a bulletproof shield.

'I'm Toby's watchdog,' I said. 'I'm supposed to protect the world from him. And it pays well.'

'Yow,' she said, avoiding my eyes, 'you're messing with my ideals. Mommy was paying you, and you didn't have a nickel. You still helped me instead of her.' She dug the toe of her boot into some inoffensive dirt and punted it past me.

'Sheesh,' I said, replying to her yow, 'there are the girls.'

'Which girls?'

'The ones he'll beat up if I don't stop him.'

'Yeah,' Janie said. It was pretty halfhearted.

'Has he fooled with you?' Behind her the photographer in the green shirt was setting up a big wooden camera on a tripod and a complicated arrangement of iron pipes under the direction of the tired-looking young woman. He tugged a cord, and a roll of seamless blue paper dropped to the ground from the crossbar at the top of the pipes.

'Nothing I can't handle,' Janie said. 'The occasional hand on the fanny, like you saw today. He tried to feel me up once when we were on the sound stage.'

'How many of his balls did you collect?'

She smiled for the first time in what seemed like days. 'None. But I stomped his foot.'

'And he did what?'

'Yanked my hair. I told him if he laid a finger on me, I'd take his eyes out. Meant it, too. He backed off and said something about chicks having no sense of humor.'

'He didn't get you fired, obviously.'

'No, Simeon, that's the funny thing. He's like a little kid. After he's bad to someone he gets really contrite. He brought me a Danish.'

'Conscience?'

'Toby? His conscience must be smaller than Medusa's G-spot. Listen, he's twisted. It's just the way the man is.'

'Well,' I said, 'he's my baby.'

Back on the set the baby shouted something that sounded angry and impatient. The actress stepped back