Skin Deep by Timothy Hallinan

nodded. "Her, um, her nose was broken." He looked embarrassed. Stillman just looked at me.
    "How many have there been?"
    Cohen shrugged. "Not that many. Eight or ten. After a while we caught on, started planting pros around."
    "Pros don't bleed," I said.
    "Pros don't talk to the press," Stillman said. "Let's get down to the bottom line. I have a screening to go to. Toby Vane is a big star, okay? Toby is a star because he's the boy every woman loves: he's a son to the middle-aged dames, a grandson to the old ones, the boy next door to preteens, and a fantasy lover to girls in their late teens and twenties. His show is worth fifty-four million dollars for exactly as long as that big friendly grin of his doesn't get shit all over it. If it does, High Velocity isn't worth carrots. I'm not going to let that happen. You're not going to let that happen. Dixie here isn't going to let that happen." He raised a hand, the man with the plan.
    "We've all got our jobs cut out for us. You spend days and evenings with him, keeping him out of trouble. Dixie manages the press and keeps anything that's already happened from surfacing in some rag. And I negotiate the syndication deal as fast as I can, and pay both of you."
    "Two weeks with Toby Vane," I said.
    "Say ten days," Stillman said.
    "Say two thousand a day," I said.
    Stillman looked at Cohen. Cohen looked at Stillman. "Okay," Stillman said. "But you'd better keep his ass out of trouble."
    "I'll wrap it in linen all the way up to the back of his neck," I said. "But I want to make one thing clear: if he gets out of hand, I'm going to deck him."
    "Don't hit him in the face," Stillman said.
    There was a moment of silence while we all listened to the echo. "I'll take the first five days on account," I said.
    "Ten thousand dollars." Stillman pulled a checkbook from one desk drawer and a gold Mont Blanc fountain pen from another. The pen scratched expensively. He blew on the check for a moment and then held it out across the desk. He didn't get up.
    I did.
    "Dixie will take you to the set," he said. Now that he'd bought me, he wasn't quite so polite.
    Ten thousand dollars richer, I followed Dixie to the door. I paused at the threshold.
    "Tell me one thing," I said. "Why me?"
    Stillman looked back up at me. "Don't you know, Mr. Grist? Toby likes you."

3 - Panty Hose Oaks
    "It's a simple matter of crisis control," Dixie Cohen said, maneuvering the big Mercedes through suicidal freeway traffic. The air conditioner roared away. "Problem is, there's no time between crises."
    "Must be hard on the digestion." We were out of the Cahuenga Pass, heading for the Valley.
    "I wouldn't know. Last thing I digested was my backbone. If I still had it, I'd have clobbered Toby long ago."
    I looked over at him, figuring the odds on his decking Toby. His most conspicuous muscle was his Adam's apple. The hands on the leather-covered wheel were long, supple, yellowish, and fine-knuckled, a violinist's hands. It wasn't hard to imagine the sound of his fingers splintering on contact with Toby's jaw. He had a musician's profile, too. He looked like a guest conductor for a minor orchestra specializing in tragic opera.
    "He's in his mid-thirties or something," I said, trying vainly to turn the air conditioner vent away from me. "It's a little late for corporal punishment. Why should you have clobbered him?" I settled for rolling down my sleeves.
    "That's personal," Dixie said. It was as though he'd tugged a zipper closed between the front seats. He tightened his mouth like someone working up to a spit.
    The Ventura Freeway hurtled by, bordered by laurels, oleanders, and other poisonous shrubbery. The Oracle at Delphi had chewed laurel, and look where it got her. I was sighing, preparatory to changing subjects, when Dixie swerved the wheel sharply, dexterously cutting off a brown Japanese something in the lane to the left. We were awarded by an outraged beep.
    "Crazy woman," Dixie said, although he'd been at fault. "If