Read Online Skinflick by Joseph Hansen - Free Book Online Page B

before, she said she’d made it. She had a part. A big part. She was going to be a movie star. She’d even met the producer.”
    “Did she name him?” Dave said.
    “How could she name him? Somebody drives a new Seville along here waving an open door at the girls on the sidewalk—he’s going to give his real name?” The Debussy piece came to an end. He looked at Dave. “Who are you and what do you want with her?”
    “You said the man would do anything for her,” Dave told him. “I think he died for her. He died, that’s for sure. If I can find her, maybe she can tell me why.”
    “She hasn’t been around,” the musician said.
    “For how long?” Dave said. He named the date of Gerald Dawson’s death. “Would that be the last time?”
    “You think she’s dead?” His skin never saw sunlight. The darkness of his hair and moustache, the intensity of the little light glaring off the sheet music on the instrument, reflecting into his face, made it look like ivory. Now it turned to chalk. “Christ, she was only sixteen.”
    “Is the date right?” Dave said.
    “Yeah. No. I don’t know. Who reads calendars all the time? Every night is the same in here.” His mouth trembled. He sounded as if he were going to cry. “Jesus. I guess that’s right. Ten days ago, right? Yeah, it must have been about that long.”
    “She hasn’t been back to her apartment,” Dave said. “Where else would she go?”
    “I don’t know, man. She slept around, right? For bread. I mean, nobody’s ever going to get her into that glass slipper. A pumpkin is always going to be a pumpkin for her. What a dumb, crazy little kid.”
    “Do you write your own lyrics?” Dave said.
    He grinned wanly. “That’s a quote from some flick.” But the tune under his fingers now was “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” the celesta sound giving it a toy-shop aptness. “Who knows? You could check who’s suddenly signed million-dollar contracts and moved into Beverly Hills mansions.”
    “Million-dollar contracts I don’t think she’d get,” Dave said. “Did you ever hear of a producer called Odum? Spence Odum?”
    “They keep making those pictures about that Little League baseball team. The Bad News Bears. She could be in the next one. The Bad News Bears Meet the Dirty Old Men ?”
    “She didn’t tell you this producer who signed her was named Spence Odum?”
    “She didn’t give me the name,” he said. “She stuck out her tongue when I asked her. She flounced away, right? Grammar-school stuff. ‘Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.’” He made his voice simpering. His hand flipped switches. Ravel mourned. Then stopped. The cover came down over the keyboards. “I’ve got to eat.”
    Dave gave him a card. “If you remember anything about her that you haven’t told me, call me, will you?”
    The card went into a shirt pocket where there were ball-point pens and cigarettes. The skeletal thighs slid off the high bench. “Later,” he said, and dropped off the platform and wove in and out through the knots of talkers, and after a pause to put on dark glasses, out into what was left of the daylight. Dave set down his unfinished drink and followed. Eating still went on. So did Peter Frampton. The temperature had cooled and shirts had come from nowhere to cover the suntan-oiled shoulders. Priss came at him, empty tray at her side.
    “Charleen Sims,” she said. “A big, dumb kid was here with a picture. Scrawny little blond. In a high-school yearbook from some tacky little town in the boonies. Showing her picture to everybody. Had anybody seen Charleen? I forgot before.”
    “Now is a good time,” Dave said. “What did this big, dumb kid look like? Did he have a name? What was the name on the yearbook? What tacky little town in the boonies?”
    “You know what you could take him for?” she asked.
    “A two-toed sloth?” Dave said.
    “Big Foot,” she said. “The monster that’s supposed to run the woods in Oregon