"I got your clue," I said in the most level voice I could manage. "Nice touch." The front of his white shirt was stained brown. Butcher brown.
"Give her the credit. She'd already written my name on the screen when I knocked the door down. All I had to do was change two letters. But I never figured you'd get home so early, much less turn up here before I was gone. Now what am I going to do with you?"
"Is she dead?" Nana hadn't stirred.
"She wasn't supposed to be. She was supposed to call the cops and tell them to come here and then be dead." He gave me a grimace that he thought was a smile. "Downers," he said, giving his head a ponderous shake. "Bad dope. Get you out of control sometimes."
His pupils were enormous, and his fat face was sheened over with sweat.
"Like at her apartment?" I said.
"She was supposed to be there," he said in a reasonable tone. "I guess I just got pissed off. Put her down now." He wiggled the little gun. "I don't want to confuse things," he said. "No prints but Toby's, nobody but Toby. That was the idea."
"Tiny. The idea's already gone wrong."
"Why? Because of you? Just stay where you are, I'll figure you out. You'll be as dead as she is as soon as I work out where to put you."
"That doesn't give me much incentive to cooperate."
"You will, though. As long as you figure you've got a chance to stay alive, like maybe you can outsmart me, get the gun or something, you'll do anything I tell you. I would, in your shoes. And now you're going to put her down, right where you found her."
I looked into his flat black eyes for a long moment. There was nobody inside. I knelt slowly.
"You can drop her," he said in the same calm, toneless voice. "She won't feel it. Drop her on her head if you like."
I laid her down as gently as I could. Her limbs splayed out gracelessly, angular and lifeless. Matted hair masked her face.
"Why her?" I said, standing up again. "I know why you killed Saffron, but why her? What the fuck did she ever do to you? She liked you."
"It wasn't me she did it to," he said. "I wouldn't kill anyone who hurt me. I don't matter that much. I never really mattered." A furrow appeared between his brows as he replayed what I'd said. "Hold on. Stop. You know why I killed Saffron?"
"Sure. Because she and Toby killed Amber."
His face twisted and hardened. "You knew that? You knew that, and you were still on their side?" His mouth worked convulsively for a second, and then he spat on the floor. "That makes it easier," he said. "It wasn't going to be hard anyway, but that makes it even easier."
"I didn't know it until tonight," I said. "They didn't mean to."
"You think that makes any difference to Amber?"
"Tell me what happened."
His eyes filled with laborious cunning. "I thought you knew," he said slowly.
"The swimming pool, Saffron's swimming pool. It happened in the swimming pool."
The fat little eyes became alarming-still empty, but alarming. All force, no intellect: he looked like a one-man holy war. "Who told you? Toby?"
"Nobody told me. I guessed part of it from the way Saffron behaved, but I didn't figure it out until tonight, when I went to Saffron's apartment house and saw the bottom of the pool."
"They played a game with her," he said dreamily. The gun sagged in his hand. "Toby bought a bunch of loads at the Rack, and they had a make-believe contest, you know? Who could take the most loads. Except they only pretended to take theirs, they pretended to take the same loads over and over. It must have been real funny. Amber, she took four or five. And she was already pretty fucked up."
"From junk," I said, measuring the distance between us. The gun was pointed at the floor. Tiny swayed.
"Junk," he said. "I hate junk. Oh, you don't know. You don't know how many times I tried to get her to quit. I even cried." He closed his eyes, but before I could move he pulled them open again. "That's not easy for a Lebanese, crying in front of a woman, but I cried. I begged her to quit. I even hit her a few times, but that just made it worse. She started using it as an anesthetic."
"You tried," I said.
"I never tried anything harder in my life." He shrugged his massive shoulders. "I loved her."
"But you set her up with Toby that night."
"That was different. That was business. She understood the business. Toby was an important customer. Customers were customers. I was, I was supposed to be, something else. Something different." He swayed again. The gun hung limp from his hand.
"And they killed her," he said conversationally. "After they got her so stoned she couldn't walk, they played a game. You know Simon says? Little kids' game. They played Simon says. First she had to close her eyes and touch her nose. Then she had to stand on one leg. Well, she fell, of course. She fell on that whore's floor, and they both laughed."
"Then they went outside," I said.
"First the sidewalk, then the gate to the apartment house. She fell again, off the gate. Then the diving board."
"And she fell off the diving board."
"Sure. Who do you think she was, some Olympic gold medalist? She was a little girl fucked up on twelve kinds of dope. You know how much she weighed?"
"About the same as she does now." I indicated Nana.
He shook his head. "Even less. Even less."
"And she fell."
"Nine feet, I think. She fell on her head."
"But she wasn't dead."
"They didn't know that. Not any more than you know whether that one is dead." He pointed the gun at Nana, and I took a step toward him. His hand tightened on the gun. He closed his left eye to sight. I moved between them, trying to think of something to say.
"So they took her to the Spice Rack, right? I haven't figured that out. Why the Spice Rack? Why not home? Why not someplace else?"
He opened the eye and looked at me. "Oh, they took her home," he said in a sulfurous voice. "Saffron sat on her lap, you hear me? Saffron sat on her lap in that little shit car and then got out and walked like a drunk to the door so that old pervert upstairs would see her. You're telling me they didn't mean to kill her?" He spat on the floor. "She sat on Amber's lap so the guy upstairs would see a girl in the passenger seat when Toby drove away. She acted loaded, imitating Amber. Then she used Amber's keys to get in and waited, and then she left and Toby picked her up around the block, and she sat in Amber's lap again until they got to the Spice Rack. Then they dumped her, just shoved her out of the car. They made the mistake of taking her where I was. They didn't know I was there. They didn't know I was inside, counting the receipts. Usually I don't. Usually I do that at home." His eyelids clamped closed, and he gulped a gallon of air.
"And they didn't know she was alive," I said, just to say something.
He arched a four-pound eyebrow. It looked like it cost him a lot of effort. "I already said that. I already told you that. They thought they could just dump her in the parking lot like garbage and then go home and finish their party. Like garbage. They figured the cops would think someone got her between home and the club."
"But you came out and found her."
He made the grimace again. "She found me. Somehow she crawled to the back door and made some noise." His eyes strayed to a point over my shoulder and focused there. They seemed to move independently of each other. "She had a lot of guts," he said.
A wave broke outside, thundering onto the sand. I had a prickly feeling that if I turned my head, I'd see Amber standing behind me, looking into Tiny's eyes.
"She wouldn't have wanted this," I said.
"She was too soft. Toby has to pay."
"And that was why you broke her arms and legs?"
He forced his eyes back down to me. "One arm was already broken. That's why I started with an arm on this one and Saffron. I carried her to the stage and put her on it, and her arm was all wrong. I tried to put it back, but I couldn't make it look right again. Then." He stopped for a moment, looking suddenly smaller somehow. "Then she died," he said. "She caught a big breath like she was going to say something, and when she let it out something rattled, and then she went away."