Skin Deep

First I reopened the closet and went through the shoes again, shaking each one to check for a false heel. Nobody really has false heels, and Tiny was no exception. Then I ran my hands down the seams and linings of his clothes. No deal. Then I took the desk apart a second time. When I'd finished that, I spread the couch all over the office and put it back together again.

I looked down at it. For all its grease, it looked inviting. It was just the spot for a bout of concentration. I sank back into it and thought about hiding places. My watch told me I'd been in the club for forty-three minutes. I'd allowed myself forty-five.

The best hiding places are in plain sight. In a famous short story someone hides a diamond in a glass of water, where it would disappear. Trouble was, something long and thin could disappear almost anywhere. And I'd been almost everywhere in that office. Correction. I'd been everywhere.

Which meant it was someplace I'd already been.

Clothes hangers? No, too thick. Nails? Same problem.

Well, then, the next rule was to hide it where people were afraid to look. And then I remembered my friend Carl.

Carl made a living smuggling. Specifically, he smuggled religious pictures, and even more specifically, he smuggled them out of Asia and into the United States. He didn't make much money, but he liked Asia and the smuggling paid for his tickets. Getting his smuggled artworks into the United States was no problem because U.S. customs exempt art and antiques from duty. The problem was getting them out of Asia. Many Asian countries require a special duty charge to take antiques out, and others make it almost impossible to export a likeness of the Buddha. Asian art and Asian religions being what they were, antique likenesses of the Buddha are at the top of any small-time smuggler's shopping list. The solution, Carl discovered, lay in the intrinsic male-to-male sensitivity of the Asian customs inspector.

He'd buy a couple of copies of an inoffensive Asian skin magazine, say the heavily censored Singapore edition of Playboy, and he'd fold up his pictures and place them between the pages. Then he'd take a glue stick and run it around the edges of the pages and paste them together so the pictures were sealed from sight. When they dried he'd iron them to get rid of any telltale ripples and then hide them in his luggage as carefully as he would have if they'd been a kilo of heroin. When the inspectors found them, as they very frequently did, he'd blush scarlet and muster his most embarrassed smile. It worked every time except the last time; up until then, the customs inspector had always smiled back, one guy to another, and helped him hide the magazines so the women in line behind him didn't see them. The last time, unfortunately for Carl, the inspector was a woman.

The porno was in the double-locked drawer, hanging in Pendaflex folders. There was nothing in the magazines or at the bottom of the folders. Pendaflex folders hang in the file drawer courtesy of metal rods that run the width of the drawer and hook into steel runners on the upper inside walls of the drawers. Long thin metal rods.

The one I wanted was in the fifth folder back. At one end the rod was hooked, just like all the others, but the other end had been filed into an irregular serrated pattern. Despite the clumsiness of the gloves, I managed to pull it out of the folder and slip it into the crack in the linoleum. The square popped open. I was looking at surprise number three: six large brown glass jars.

Two of them held the smaller pills that Toby had identified as codeine, and the other four were full to the brim with Doriden. Good old paternal Tiny was dealing loads.

I'd been there more than an hour, and it was time to move. The linoleum square locked with Japanese precision, and the key slipped back into the folder. I didn't want Tiny to know that anyone had discovered his stash, even if his office and the desk had been broken into.

On the way out I used the tire iron to break open both doors, the one into the main room and the one leading from the parking lot into the hallway. Then I closed them as best I could. It wasn't perfect, but I didn't want it to be. At least no one would suspect that a key had been used.

Squinting in the sunlight of a bright, peaceful Sunday afternoon, I pointed Alice toward Fan Fare.

There isn't much of Hollywood left on Hollywood Boulevard, but Hollywood Boulevard was the only place Fan Fare could possibly have been. Fan Fare is the Smithsonian Institution of motion picture ephemera. Its proprietor, Wyl Will (born William Williams), is an aging, blue-haired gentleman who, had he had his druthers and been born a respectable middle-class lady, would have been the pride of any small-town library in America. Small towns in the fifties, however, were not a comfortable place for someone like Wyl, and he'd had the sense to head for California, where he became a librarian of a different kind. If anything's been written about Hollywood, Wyl knows where to find it.

Sunday is a big tourist day on Hollywood Boulevard. People from Ohio and Illinois rub sunburned shoulders with Japanese tourists, ogling the chewing gum that splatters the stars on the Walk of Fame and kicking the bags from McDonald's out of the way to force their big feet into Joan Crawford's tiny concrete footprints in the courtyard of what used to be Grauman's Chinese Theater.

Outside Fan Fare, a bunch of Hell's Angels from Central Casting straddled their bikes possessively and made derogatory remarks about the tourists. The dope of the day seemed to be downers mixed with French fries from Jack's Triple Burger. Jack's, long the BankAmerica of chemical ecstasy, had been taken over by Iranians. The Angels were still there, so I supposed the dope was, too.

When I opened the door to Fan Fare, an electronic doorbell played the first four bars of 'Tara's Theme' from Gone With the Wind. The cotton fields that shimmered into my mind's eye were no match for the real vista of what seemed like miles of books and magazines, stacked neatly onto shelves and piled haphazardly onto tables, according to their worth. I knew Wyl made a tidy living from Fan Fare, but every time I went there I seemed to be the only customer in the world. With the exception of a pimpled youth in a long black cape who was transfixed by the section on Dracula, it was true that day as well.

'Wyl,' I called out. 'John Beresford Tipton has sent me to make you a millionaire.'

'Again?' Wyl's voice floated from the back of the store. 'I'll have to buy a king-size bed. My mattress is absolutely stuffed.'

I headed for the main counter, but Wyl intercepted me. He can do that: he's the only man I ever met who can actually materialize. 'Dear Simeon,' he said. 'How's Eleanor?'

'I'll tell you tomorrow. I'm having dinner with her tonight.'

'But things are still. .' He hesitated. 'Fait accompli?' He gave his hand a small loose-wristed shake, a gesture that means 'no way' all over the world.

'As far as she's concerned. I'm still working on it.'

He patted my arm. 'Faint heart ne'er won fair lady,' he said.

'Yo,' I said to aggravate him. 'No guts, no glory. If you want it, go for it.'

'You make her sound like a strike in bowling. Altogether too blue-collar. Nothing against the huddled masses, of course. God knows my heart is with them.' It was, too. Wyl was a socialist from way back.

'Wyl,' I said, 'what have you done to your eyes?'

He closed them halfway. 'You tell me.'

'They're, um, different. Not that they don't look nice.'

'Please. We both know they look like Joan Collins at four a.m. Not that that doesn't have something to recommend it.'

'To whom?'

'To Dr. Alfred Nesbit, for one. He's the one who did it. At my urging, of course, and at considerable cost.'

'You have a doctor doing your eyes?'

'Well, only once, silly. Who could afford one every day? They're tattooed.'

'Tattooed? But that means-'

'Exactly. That I can't take them off. But I forgot. Of course, you don't know, do you? Mother died.'

'Oh, Wyl,' I said. 'I'm sorry.'

He patted my hand. 'That's sweet of you. But it was a mercy, really. She'd got to the point where she thought she was still in Shaker Heights. She didn't even know she was old anymore. Not a bad way to go, really.'

'So you had your eyes tattooed?'

'Certainly. No more reason to take them off every night. God, it was such a bother to put them on again.