I had a feeling this was territory Hanks had explored often. I also had the feeling Hanks thought a lot of people were damn fools.
Upon closer examination, it wasn’t so much that Hanks didn’t seem old; he just seemed a kind of young that did not, that never would, exist in nature. The skin drawn taut over the square face was the color of a glazed ham and the texture of a bat’s wing. The short hair was a peculiar dark red that suggested a genetic link with the later Ronald Reagan. It all came together to create a sort of humanoid artifact, animatronic, perhaps, that required, and got, a great deal of skilled technical care.
He leaned forward, grunting with the effort, and pulled a brass box with a domed lid across the table. With thick, blunt fingers he pried at the lid without result. “What do you know about me?” he asked.
“You were his agent,” I said. I was cold enough to shiver.
“ Heek heek heek,” he wheezed, bouncing slightly with each heek. He picked up the box, turned it upside down, and banged it against the edge of the coffee table. The lid popped off, clattering on the slate floor, and he kicked it under the table and peered into the box. One dog opened a curious eye. The others seemed used to it. “What else?”
“Nothing much,” I lied. “What should I know?”
He’d lost interest in me. “Henry,” he rasped, the back of his throat rattling like a box of rocks on the H. “Where are they?”
“Forget it, Ferris,” Henry said.
Ferris Hanks raised both feet and stamped them on the floor together, causing a furry ripple among the Yorkies, and the dark face went a couple of shades darker. “Cut this shit,” he said. “Go get them.”
“I ain’t leaving you here alone,” Henry said stolidly.
“I know your counting skills aren’t all they should be,” Ferris Hanks said, “but I’m not alone.”
“Fuck you, Ferris,” Henry said, surprising me.
It didn’t surprise Ferris. It seemed to calm him. “You’re a fool, Henry,” he said without force. Then, to me, “We’ve been together too long.”
“At least you haven’t started to look alike.”
“ Heek,” he said. “Don’t you think Henry’s good-looking?”
“He’s a veritable fever dream,” I said.
“You hear that, Henry?” Hanks’s eyes, long and heavy-lidded and a fraudulent deep-sea blue, came back to me. “And that’s all you know about me? You mean, no one’s maligning me these days?” He didn’t sound pleased.
“I’ve heard your nickname, of course.”
His thumb of a nose pointed down, like a disapproving Roman emperor, toward a broad, masculine mouth with a thin upper lip and a full, square lower one. The left corner went up, producing the closest thing I’d ever seen to the half-smile I keep reading about, and the left eye disappeared into a mass of leathery, batlike wrinkles. The right regarded me steadily and coldly enough to have belonged to someone else. “How do you think someone earns a nickname like that?”
The chair I was sitting in was big enough for me, Henry, and Henry’s extended family, and it provided a lot of squirming room, which might have been why it had been offered to me. Hanks watched me expectantly. “I don’t know,” I said. “They called me Sluggo in school, and I never slugged anybody.”
“You made that up,” Hanks said petulantly.
I had. “Mr. Hanks, I’m sure you’ve had a fascinating life, crammed with really rotten stuff, but it’s Max I’m interested in.”
Hanks rummaged in the brass box, just in case something had materialized inside it while he wasn’t paying attention. “You could pretend,” he said.
“Stop fiddling, Ferris,” Henry said. “They not in there.”
He gave the box a thwack with his finger. “Did you hear why Max left me? He was Rick then. Rick Hawke.”
“Sort of a silly name,” I said, just to annoy him.
“I made that name up,” Hanks said mildly. “I made up all their names in those days. They just trotted into the office, dozens of them every week, all as beautiful as a summer’s day, looking to be stars. Truckdrivers, elevator operators, construction workers, men with real jobs. Now they’re all waiters. ‘Good evening, my name is Dwight, and I’ll be your waiter until I’m discovered by a major studio.’ ” His voice had risen to a feathery whine. “I don’t know how anyone can eat out these days,” he said in a normal tone. “Every meal is a fucking audition.”
“With a beefcake appetizer,” I said.
“Jesus, it was fun,” Hanks said. “All the studios wanted boys then. Girls were just scenery, an opportunity for the clothes designers to use a little color. I changed that. Remember Jimmy Dean’s red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause? My influence. ‘Put the color on the boys,’ I said, ‘they’re the ones everybody’s shelling out to see. If the girls want color, dump some on their hair, the silly bitches.’ Just busloads of wannabes every month, pouring in from all over. And I owned the market.” He reached up and twisted a lock of odd-red hair. “Owned the market.”
“And what about Max?”
“Max, Max, Max,” he said vehemently. One of the dogs looked up as though it had heard its name. “I’m much more interesting than Max. Not many people have lived their entire lives on their own terms and gotten away with it, boysie. It’s a small club. I may be its oldest living member.” The hand was still in his hair, and he yanked violently at the lock and then examined his fingers to see whether any had come out. He turned the hand to me and spread it open like a stage magician, showing me that it was empty. “Still, Max was special. Is it true what they’re saying?”
I crossed my legs. “Depends on what they’re saying.”
“You needn’t play it so close to the vest, you know. It wouldn’t pain you to give a full answer once in a while. Unless you get paid by the word, heek heek. They’re saying that some gay basher killed Max and cut off his hand and that he’s some sort of lunatic who does this for jollies. Is that true?”
“Where’d you hear it?”
Hanks snapped his fingers with a sound like a gun going off, and pointed at me. Dogs jumped. “Stop that right now. You want, you give. Law of the jungle.”
“You scarin’ the wolf pack,” Henry observed.
“It’s true,” I said.
His tongue came out and slid over the lower lip. “Did you see the body?”
I wasn’t going to pay in that currency. “No.”
“Hmmm.” He regarded me dubiously. “Did the latest dreary young man?”
“He found Max, if that’s what you mean.”
“Probably wasted on him,” Hanks said. “Max’s boys were always so hapless. Although why he stole that one is really beyond me.”
“Stole?”
“Snatched him away from that old poof with the Bette Davis eyes who runs the Bookstore of the Living Dead Celebrities or whatever it’s called. On Hollywood Boulevard, which should tell you all you need to know.”
Wyl had told me he’d pointed Christy to Max himself. “That’s not the way I heard it.”
“Well, I can’t help that, can I? Consider the source, I always say. Who was your source?”
“Someone who knows all three of them.”
“I suppose discretion is admirable,” Hanks said, pushing two dogs aside so he could probe between the cushions of the couch. “But that doesn’t make it good conversation.”
“They gone, Ferris,” Henry said. “They gone from behind the screen, too, so don’t bother gettin’ up.”
“I don’t know which of you I find less interesting,” Hanks lamented to me. “You won’t tell me anything, and Henry enjoys thwarting me. But whatever anyone told you, the transfer of that sullen lad from the antique dealer to the aging actor was not accomplished without a certain amount of melodrama.”
“And who told you?” I asked.
“I really shouldn’t call Max aging,” Hanks said, ignoring the question. “He was old. Still, you know, he’d aged well. As well as anyone does.” He looked through me, and I heard Henry fidget against his wall. “He didn’t quit acting because of me, you know.”
I made a note to ask Wyl a couple of questions. “Why did he quit, then?”
“Max had principles,” he said, making it sound like a disease. “He couldn’t, what’s the phrase, live a lie. As though we all don’t in one way or another. Not Max, though, oh, no, not Max. It wasn’t enough for him to have a TV show in the top five and pull down ten thousand a week, and that was muchos dolores in those days.”