I reached into my hip pocket. "Look at these," I said.
He did, for maybe half a second. Then he slammed his eyes shut, and the color left his face. His forehead was suddenly damp.
"Thanks anyway," he said, "but you can't make me." He sounded like a little boy. "Put them away or I won't open my eyes."
I put them away. His eyes were still closed. "What do you know about clothesline?"
He opened half an eye to make sure the pictures were gone. "Clothesline? It's what they used before dryers. Where did those come from?"
"They were under the girl's body. Where the cops would find them. What did you do with the Polaroids of Rebecca, Dixie?"
I could actually hear him grind his teeth. "Burned them," he said. "What would you have done, willed them to the Louvre? She's my stepdaughter."
"Toby let you have them?"
"Toby was in his apologetic mode, his shit-eating, 'omigod, I didn't mean to hurt her' mode. I should have pushed his face in."
"But you didn't," I said unkindly.
"I didn't do jack shit. That cost me everything, everything I cared about."
"You've still got your job."
He glared up at me. "Fuck you." He looked around at the sound stage as though he'd never seen it before. "Fuck all of this, too." He started to walk away.
I put a hand on his arm, and he jerked away from me. "Don't touch me, you schmuck."
"Dixie," I said, "people are staring."
It was true. Grips, stagehands, makeup women, they were all looking at us. Janie Gordon sat in a canvas chair, an open script cradled in her lap and a pencil between her teeth. When I caught her eyes she looked away.
Dixie stopped walking. "Damn," he said. "Damn, damn, damn, damn." He stood slack and empty, looking at nothing, like a man suspended from a string.
The door of Toby's dressing room opened, and Dolly came out. She searched the set with her eyes and then came over to us.
"I'll be in my office," Dixie said flatly. "You know where it is."
By the time Dolly reached me he was halfway across the set, a little man in a creased corduroy suit that sagged from the shoulders. A stagehand carrying a small table stepped in front of him, and Dixie trudged into him, stumbled, and kept on walking. The stagehand looked after him, shook his head, and then put the table down on top of a cross of masking tape stuck to the floor.
"What's with him?" Dolly said.
"His life's too big for him. How's Toby?"
"Okay. Putting the usual amount up his nose. He's been asking for you."
"Don't tell him I was here."
"You're going? You just got here."
"Exactly, Dolly. Bull's-eye. I'm going. What time are you going to shut down?"
"About another hour. Six, six-thirty, I guess. There's only one scene left, and it's mainly Toby, so it should go pretty fast."
"My," I said nastily, "aren't we learning a lot?"
Dolly's face, as always, was guileless. "Isn't that what I'm supposed to be doing? You got to give the guy credit, if I did as much junk as he does, I couldn't find my pockets. But he's always where he's supposed to be, always has the words right and everything."
Dolly started to say something else, but I cut her off. "Just keep them together, Toby and John, got it? Don't let them split up. Take them to dinner somewhere, you've got an expense account. Don't be stingy. As J. P. Morgan said, you've got to spend money to make money."
"Well," Dolly said, "it's your money."
At eight-twenty that evening I got the first busy signal.
I'd been active, staying in motion to fight the feeling that I was chasing my tail. Tomorrow's edition of the Daily News had hit the streets with Saffron's death on page one, in the lower right-hand corner to be sure, but page one nevertheless. The lead mentioned Amber, and there were pictures of both women. Amber's looked like a snapshot taken on one of her bad nights, but Saffron's was a studio still from the seventies, 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."