Skin Deep

the kind actresses pay too much for, all hopeful eyes and carefully disarranged hair. I was right: she had been beautiful.

Things of the Spirit was unaccountably closed at seven o'clock. Chantra's message about the flow being interrupted hung in the door. The shop was dark, and an iron grid inside the window protected the crystals and aromas from the fingers of unevolved beings who might have wanted to snatch them without paying the proper karmic price. Five minutes of hammering on the door had brought no response, and I didn't see a light in the apartment windows above the store.

I'd spent twenty or thirty minutes circling the block outside the Spice Rack, watching a large number of cops come and go. Customers had turned away at the sight of the squad cars. It was getting so I recognized some of them, among them Ahmed, the Middle Easterner with the yo-yo dollar bills, and a couple of sad sacks from my first night there. I couldn't very well go in, so after my tenth or eleventh pass I gave it up and choked down a hamburger up at the Sunset Grill. I'd phoned Nana from there, and she'd answered, sounding a little high.

'Don't go all Puritan on me,' she'd said. 'It's just red wine.'

'Did you find anything to eat?'

'Sure. Tunut and penis butter.' She'd laughed 'Whoo. Is that a Freudian slip, or what? I mean tuna and peanut butter.'

'Not together, I hope.'

'Why not? All goes to the same place eventually.'

My burger threatened a reappearance. 'Any calls?'

'Not so's you'd notice. Couple of wrong numbers, but they hung up when they heard the machine.'

'Well, don't answer.'

'You're the only one I want to talk to. Hurry home before I get crazy.'

Eventually I fetched up at Fan Fare to flip through Wyl's stack of clips again in the hope of finding something I hadn't found before. Wyl hovered anxiously over me as though he were to blame.

I'd finished my first pass through the material when I got the busy signal on my own number. Oh, well, I thought, I hadn't told her not to call anybody, just not to answer the phone. All the same, I didn't like it. I flipped back through the stack of clips and started again at page one.

'Honey,' Wyl said, 'you'll ruin your eyes in this light. It's not like TV, you know. It's not different every time you turn it on … well, neither is TV, for that matter, except for the evangelists, but you know what I mean. You can read it from here to Valentine's Day and it'll always be the same.'

I pushed the paper away. 'Wyl, do you ever feel like you don't know what you're doing?'

'Literally all the time. The last time I really knew what I was doing was back when Mother was still alive. Taking care of her, right? Trying to pay back a little of what she'd given me. She was so old and helpless, it made me feel terrible, but at the same time I remembered when I was young and helpless, and she was always there, even when I was just awful to her, even later when she realized I was, well, you know, different, as people used to say.' He sat down opposite me. His tattooed eyes were shining wetly.

'She knew?'

'Of course she did. I was her son. She knew all the time, I guess. And she never said anything, not a word to make me feel bad. I just took off the makeup every night so I wouldn't make her any more uncomfortable about things than she was anyway.' He gestured improvisationally with both hands, trying to make a snowball out of air. 'They always know, mothers,' he said. 'Maybe it's a good thing that there are some people you can't keep secrets from.'

'Maybe it is,' I said. 'Depends on the secrets. May I use your phone again?'

'Need you ask? But then, you were always polite. So few people are polite these days. Far be it from me to discourage it.'

I dialed my number again. Still busy. Then I called Universal and got a security man with no public relations skills whatsoever. First he stonewalled me with a rigidity the Watergate crew would have envied. When I said I worked for Norman Stillman and that he could be back patrolling parking lots in Reseda tomorrow morning if he didn't tell me what I wanted to know, he paused and recalibrated his attitude. High Velocity had shut down, he told me grudgingly. Everybody was gone. Did I want to leave a message?

'No,' I said, 'I don't want to leave a fucking message.' I hung up.

'That wasn't polite,' Wyl said. 'That wasn't polite at all.'

I apologized and climbed into Alice. It was finally dark enough to take another look at the other half of Toby's alibi. For some reason there wasn't much traffic as I headed south toward Fountain, and it gave me too much time to think. Something's moving, I'd said to Nana, and it felt like it was moving too fast, like it was gaining on me from behind. I kept checking the rearview mirror, I didn't know for what, and almost rear- ended a car turning left off of Highland onto Fountain. Chastened, I followed it to 1424.

A streetlight, the only one on the block that worked, glared down at me as I sat at the curb. There had been plenty of light for the Peeper to see Toby and Saffron in the car when they let Amber out. I looked up at the window and didn't see him at his usual post. So he didn't watch all the time. So maybe he'd gone to the bathroom. Or, on the other hand, maybe he watched the centerfolds on his walls until he heard something.

The only thing to do with a theory is to test it. I got out and slammed the door. Still no one at the Peeper's window. Counting seconds in the classic 'one thousand, two thousand' style, I headed up the walk, and when I got to five I looked up, and there he was. I waved up at him, but he was still watching my car.

And no wonder. The streetlight was about fifteen yards up the street. I was standing in almost complete darkness, cut off from its rays by the edge of the building. I shuffled my feet and cleared my throat, and he finally looked down toward me. I could see his face clearly. His window, the one nearest the street, was illuminated. The hard, dark edge of shadow made by the other wing of the V climbed the wall just to the left of his window.

He was looking into the light. I was in the dark. I had to wave again before he saw me. When he did, he let the curtain fall back into place. He hadn't lifted it again when I fired up Alice and pulled back into traffic.

At the first phone booth I saw, I called home again. Still busy. Ants were walking up and down my spine. I tried again, with the same result, and then started to try again. I dropped in my quarter and stood there, listening to the buzz of the dial tone. It reminded me of something, but I shouldered it away. Who could Nana be talking to? The dial tone buzzed in my ear again, steady and sure, and I barked my knuckles hanging up the phone. I knew what it reminded me of, and I ran toward Alice.

Hollywood isn't very big. I pulled up to the curb of Saffron's apartment house six minutes later and pulled a little flashlight from the glove compartment. No one was around, no peepers were at the windows, and the only things I heard were the hum of traffic and the thump of my heart, which seemed to have taken up permanent residence in my ears. I marched in time to the heartbeat all the way to the pool.

Nana had wanted to leave, wanted to see Saffron right away and get out of there. If she hadn't, maybe I'd have checked the pool. And maybe not. It seemed like weeks since I'd done anything right. I hoisted myself down the ladder at the shallow end and waded through the trash until I was beneath the diving board.

The flies were gone, until morning, and they'd taken their buzz with them. The beam of the flashlight played over the junk at the deep end. I could only use one hand to toss things aside because of the flashlight, but most of the stuff down there was large, cardboard cartons and pieces of what might once have been pool furniture. Within a minute I was looking at the bottom of the pool.

Except that I wasn't looking at the bottom. I was looking at a large, rust-colored stain that tapered off on the downhill slope toward the drain. The irrelevant fact that the drain still worked flashed across my mind. There must have been quite a lot of blood. How much did the human body hold? Six quarts? Eight? How much difference did it make if the body was a small one?

The math calmed me as I climbed back up the ladder. In the car, I made myself breathe slowly for two minutes and then headed up Highland toward the Ventura Freeway. Toby was with Dolly, I told myself. So was John. Why hadn't I told her where to take them for dinner? At least I'd know. Just before I got to the freeway I saw a coin phone in a minimall, one of the thousands that now scar Los Angeles, and shoved the same old quarter into the slot.

My number was busy. It couldn't be busy that long.

I got the operator on the line. After we'd negotiated the price for an emergency break-in and I'd fed the last of my remaining change into the phone, she left the line. When she came back she said triumphantly, 'That phone is