Skin Deep

she was, but if he said so, it was right-in Montana. Minnesota had too many people to check. I told him to try it anyway. Then I called Wyl.

'Dear boy. It's all here and organized to a fare-thee-well, the total scope on Toby Vane. Such a terrible boy, really. It's enough to make you doubt appearances.'

'Anything interesting?'

'Depends on the point of view, don't you know. A lot of the photos are absolutely riveting from my perspective, although I doubt you'd linger over them for very long.'

'Jesus, how much is there?'

'More than you'd think. Most of it is fannies, of course. Since you're going to be kind enough to return it to me, I've broken it down into categories. The newspaper clips should be the most interesting. I don't think you really care what his favorite color is.'

'Blue,' I said.

'You almost never cease to surprise me. Are you going to pick it up?'

I looked at my watch. I had more than an hour before the dreaded Joanna Link was due at Universal. 'Sure,' I said. 'Be there in ten minutes.'

'I'll go in the back room and put my bells on,' Wyl said before he hung up.

He was right. The newspaper clips were the most interesting. The second page I read told me something very interesting: it told me that both Stillman and Dixie had lied to me.

'May I use your phone?' I asked Wyl.

I had only one friend in the police department. Al Hammond was a sergeant, a prototypical middle-aged desk cop with a problem belly and creased skin on the back of his neck that was thicker than the average catcher's mitt. When I first decided that I had chosen a career that was going to put me into uneasy proximity to the police-uneasy for me, at any rate-I'd started drinking at a couple of police bars downtown. Hammond and I had gotten pulverized together four or five times before I told him what I did for a living. He wasn't thrilled, but he'd kept drinking with me.

'Records, Sergeant Hammond,' he snarled. Then he remembered departmental public relations. 'Oh, yeah, and how may I help you?'

'Your bedside manner is impeccable,' I said. 'This is Simeon.'

'Would you spell that, sir?'

'Simeon,' I said. 'S-i-m-'

'Not that, shithead. Impeccable.'

'With three different vowels.'

'Are you still drinking?'

'Only when I'm thirsty.'

'Thought maybe you'd gone to the Betty Ford Clinic or something. Seems to me it's been a few months since I saw you throw up.'

'You've never seen me throw up. By the time I begin to get queasy, you're unconscious. Listen, I'm looking for a girl. Her name is Rebecca Hartsfield.'

'Has she got a sheet?'

'I doubt it. She's more in the victim line. She got knocked silly about four years ago at Ontario Motor Speedway. A police report was filed.'

'But not with us. You're talking to the LAPD, remember? You want the Ontario cops or the sheriffs, if Ontario's in L.A. County.'

'I was hoping that you had some sort of relationship with the Ontario cops. You know, brotherhood of the blue or something like that.'

'Yeah, well, they won't hang up on me if I call them. But four years ago? For battery? Jeez, Simeon, that's ancient history. If it was murder. .'

'The weapon was fists. The fists belonged to an actor named Toby Vane.'

'Oh,' Hammond said. 'My daughter likes him.'

'On the other side of the TV screen, he's no problem. Just don't let her get any closer.'

'Is this important?'

'Have I ever asked you to do anything stupid?'

He gave forth with a mirthless laugh. 'How much time have we got?'

'I've got all day. I thought the police were busy.'

'Are we involved?' 'We' was the LAPD.

'No,' I said. It was a lie I might have to answer for later.

'So what do you want?'

'A phone number, an address, whatever.'

'Call me later. About four, okay?' He hung up.

'People are hanging up on me today,' I said to Wyl.

'I can tell. Your left ear is getting callused.'

I hefted the stack of stuff he'd given me. 'Thanks for the archives,' I said. 'I'll get them back to you in a day or two.' Yellow stick-it papers protruded from the pile of magazines and newspapers. Each was meticulously labeled with a date. 'Must have been a lot of work,' I said.

'It was fun, actually. I don't think he's got staying power, though. Steve McQueen he's not.'

'Wyl,' I said, 'he's not even Butterfly McQueen.'

'Oooh,' Wyl said, 'Gone With the Wind. She was terrific.' 'Tara's Theme' rang out behind me as I left.

Toby had caused hospital-scale injuries to a sixteen-year-old girl named Rebecca Hartsfield during a shoot at Ontario Motor Speedway four years ago-two years before the mayhem in Northridge that Dixie and Stillman had described as his first 'problem' incident. As I pulled into the Universal lot I decided not to ask them about it until I'd talked to the girl, if I actually got to talk to the girl. People move in Southern California more often than they do anywhere else in the world, and a four-year-old address could be more outdated than the pillbox hat I remembered my mother buying because she liked Jackie Kennedy's.

When the guard pushed open the door to the closed set where High Velocity was filming, Norman Stillman himself greeted me. The requisite blue blazer and white slacks had been augmented by a captain's hat, but Stillman's expression was not that of a seasoned sea dog hardened by misadventure on the bounding main. He looked like the anxious, if overage, freshman who had sat down in Dixie's class all those years ago.

'Here you are,' he said in a highly keyed stage whisper. 'They're already in his dressing room. She came early, the bitch.'

'How early?'

He steered me across the sound stage. 'Half an hour.'

'Good policy,' I said. 'She's no dope.'

'Don't mention dope,' Stillman hissed. 'So far, no problem.' The lights on the set were off, so his insistence on speaking sotto voce was an affectation, but it was an effective one. I found myself lowering my own voice in return.

'What are they talking about?'

'Before she kicked me out, she was asking about how he'd feel when High Velocity was finished.'

'Not much news there,' I said, wishing I'd been around when Joanna Link kicked Norman Stillman out of his own star's dressing room.

'That's what's worrying me. You don't talk to a star about his series when the ratings have dropped unless you plan to slip him a shiv.'

'Shiv?' We were most of the way across the sound stage.

'You know, a knife. Unless you plan to stab him in the back,' he explained with an air of exaggerated impatience. 'Jesus, you don't know what a shiv is?'

'Sure. I was wondering how you knew.' We were at Toby's door.