"What do you use to polish your aura?"
"Spit," she said. "Spit and saddle wax. What do you use on yours?"
"I have a no-polish aura. It's new from Du Pont."
She stretched like a cat and rolled her head back and forth. She had an extraordinarily long throat. "Do you really have to ask me questions?" she said.
"Only if I want answers."
"Okay," she said in a businesslike tone. "I started dancing because I had this girlfriend who was doing it and she kept asking me to. I was sixteen and a half, and my father had chased me out of the house a year before. He chased me all the way from Killeen to Hollywood. Killeen is a service town, lots of guys who used to be in Korea and lots of Korean women who were married to them. I got to Hollywood, got a fake ID, and started working at a bookstore, but I wasn't making any money. And then my girlfriend, who had become my roommate, started in on me. I knew the girls weren't whores or anything because I knew my roommate, and she was a nice girl. She still is a nice girl. I made a hundred and forty dollars a week at the bookstore, and they knocked off an hour if I went to lunch, so I didn't go to lunch. I was hungry all the time. The first night I danced, place down near the airport, I made three hundred and ninety, in cash. One guy tipped me a hundred bucks. I was the only Oriental girl in the club, and I guess I was a novelty."
"I didn't ask you how you started dancing."
"You were going to. Weren't you?"
"Sooner or later. Why did Amber start dancing?"
"She had a boyfriend who was supposed to be a writer. He was working on the great American haiku or something. Well, naturally, he couldn't do that, juggle all seventeen of those syllables and hold down a job, too. So he moved in with Amber and let her take care of him by dancing while he slaved every day over a hot typewriter."
"How was the haiku?"
"Who knows? He never finished it. Probably never started it. From what people tell me, he spent most of his time looking for something to stuff up his nose."
"Is he still around? You didn't mention him to the cops."
"Long gone. He picked the cutest way to move out. Amber went down to San Diego one afternoon to dance a party, and she stayed the night because they finished so late. When she got home the next day, she found some of her furniture in the front yard, and the door to the house was wide open. There was nothing inside, and I mean not a dish towel. He'd had a yard sale while she was gone. Sold all her stuff and split."
I negotiated a curve. "Sensitive guy."
"You know artists."
"When was this?"
"A couple years ago. Right about the time I came to the Spice Rack."
"I thought Amber was Tiny's."
"What a Southern way of putting it."
"Maybe you could put your feminist umbrage on ice for a while so we could discuss the issues."
"She was pretty wiped out after el creepo split. I guess she thought she loved the jerk. Tiny came to the rescue, took care of her, let her move in with him, and picked up after her for six months or so. It could have been longer. I don't think he even fooled around with her. He just wanted to get her straight."
"It's hard to imagine Amber straight."
"She never really doped until Claude left. Claude, that was the creep's name. Jesus, I thought I'd forgotten it. Oh, you know, she coked once in a while to get her up so she could go on stage. Most of the girls do something. They have to."
"She had more tracks than the New York subway system."
"That was later. I don't think she ever shot up until she was living at Tiny's."
"Have you ever shot up?"
"We're not talking about Amber now," she said.
"No," I admitted.
"I tried it once. Somebody had to do it for me because I was afraid of the needle. I couldn't even look. I was sick for days."
"Lucky you."
"For once."
"So who hated Amber?"
"Nobody. Why would anyone hate her? Most days she couldn't put on her nail polish, much less hurt anyone. She danced to make money so she could do smack, and she did smack so she could dance. There wasn't much in between."
"No other men?"
"Not after Tiny. She got enough of men in the club."
"Do most of the girls have boyfriends?"
"Most of them have pimps," she said shortly.
"I thought they weren't whores."
"They have guys who pocket the money their girlfriends make dancing naked in front of other men. That's a pimp, as far as I'm concerned."
"Did Amber ever make a move on another girl's boyfriend?"
This was a new thought, and she looked out the window. "You think a woman could have done that to her? Broken her fingers like that?"
"It depends. If the woman was strong and Amber was wasted enough, why not? She was pretty thrashed earlier this evening."
"She was totaled. If she was a car, you would have had her hauled. But I don't think a woman could have done it."
"That's what they said about Lizzie Borden. An axe isn't a woman's weapon. Now who's stereotyping?"
"Naw. It's her fingers." She shuddered against me. "Whoever did that really hates women. Like Toby does."
We had come to the end of Sunset, and I turned north up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Topanga. The ocean was invisible to our left, suggested here and there by the mooring lights of a sailboat that bobbed up and down on the water's dark skin, the people in it asleep and dreaming of freedom.
"So did Amber ever fool around with anyone's boyfriend?"
"Simeon, I've told you. She never did anything except dance and try to find a vein. Honey, can we make a deal? You leave me alone now, and I'll talk to you tomorrow till your ears fall off. Right now, all I want is a soft bed and a warm shoulder. Give me about ten hours, okay?"
"I've got Toby tomorrow, too."
"You can handle us both."
"I'm not so sure. I haven't handled much so far."
She put her head on my shoulder and made a drowsy sound. "Stupid," it sounded like. The PCH was wide and dark and empty. After a few minutes I turned right up into the mountains, and we left the deep sleep of the sea behind us.
When we finally reached the top I shook her awake. With her hand in mine, I led her up the steep, unpaved driveway, steering her around the more cavernous ruts until we got to the house. The lights were on, courtesy of the electric timer, but darkness masked the grimmer dilapidation of the exterior. I opened the back door, and Nana stumbled in sleepily.
"Cozy," she said, her eyes half-open. "Where's the bedroom?"
"Well," I said, "there are only three rooms, and you can see the living room and the kitchen. So it must be the other one."
She focused. "Through that door," she said.
"You should give some thought to a career in private investigation."
"Tomorrow. You coming?"
"In a minute. Just go get comfortable."
She nodded drowsily and headed toward bed.
I gave some water to the birds, who didn't acknowledge it, and did a little fruitless tidying up. The red light on my answering machine blinked at me, heralding yet another thwarted attempt at human communication. I got a beer, pushed the playback button, and sat on the rug.
Calls one and two were from Toby. He wanted me to call when I got home, he said in the first one. He gave his number, as if I hadn't already called him once that evening.
In the second message he said he was going to sleep, but that I could call and wake him up if I wanted to make sure he hadn't gone anywhere. The third call wasn't from Toby.
"Hello, Simeon," Eleanor's voice said. "It's almost three in the morning. I couldn't sleep, and I wondered if you couldn't, too. Since you're not answering, I guess you can. . Um, I hate talking to this machine. Do you want to have dinner tomorrow night, or Sunday? If you do, call me in the morning. But not too early, please. I may get to sleep yet. I'm going to close my eyes and imagine myself enveloped in a bright white light. Or something. Bye-bye." There was a final-sounding click, and then a dial tone hummed across the wire.