Skinflick by Joseph Hansen Page B

anymore. He was very good to her, and she treated him like dirt. Listen, mothers know girls. Fathers can be fooled. Her mother was right.”
    Somewhere distant a telephone rang. Sylvia Katzman waggled pudgy, ringed fingers toward carpeted stairs. “Go, maybe she’s home.” She hurried off in the direction of the ringing phone, buttocks wobbling inside the tight shorts. “You’re a nice man to come and tell her. But you’re wasting your—” A door closed, cutting off the last word. If with Sylvia Katzman there ever was a last word.
    Dave climbed in air-conditioned silence to the third level and went along a gallery past five glass fronts to the glass front of thirty-six. She was right. The view was good. It would be better without the brown haze. But below, Los Angeles sloped off for miles toward the sea. On a clear night there would be a carpet of lights, on a clear day treetops. The curtains were drawn on thirty-six. He pressed a button. A buzzer went off inside but no one came to the door. Somebody had scraped with a thumbnail at a United Fund Drive sticker inside the glass. The traffic down on Sunset made surf noises. A blue jay squawked. Dave poked the buzzer again. Again no one came. He snapped open a leather key case and slipped a small blade into the lock. It turned.
    The walls were bare and painted melon color. He stood on brown shag carpet. Brown velour couches made an open-sided square around a coffee table where flowers were dead in a brown pottery bowl. He smelled decayed food. Two TV dinners in aluminum trays lay on a brown Formica counter with melon-color stools. Mold grew on the food, and soft drinks evaporated in glasses. Beside an incongruously clean stainless steel sink were stacked unwashed dishes. When he opened doors under the sink, soft drink cans, Colonel Sanders boxes, taco wrappers tumbled onto a spotlessly clean, glossily waxed floor. Incongruous again. He opened the window over the sink to let the garbage smell out if it would go. Almost near enough the window to reach out and touch, an embankment, propped at its foot by cement blocks, rose very steeply twelve, fifteen feet to a curved street. On the near side of the street, a chain-link fence had been cut into at the bottom, the corners of the cut folded back. The refrigerator hummed.
    In the bedroom, the piece of furniture meant to be slept on was round. The sheets were satin or some wonders-of-modern-science substitute. They were melon-color and half off the bed that looked as if wrestling had taken place there. A pillow half out of its melon satin cover lay in a corner. He opened closet doors that ran on rollers. Not much hung there, and what did smelled of stale sweat. Dresser drawers held blue jeans and T-shirts and pullover sweaters with the kind of turtleneck that droops. There were pantyhose, little clean underpants, little clean socks. He shut the drawers. In the bathroom, the medicine chest held aspirin, cold medicine, deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, disposable razor. Hair had been cut in here. Dark tufts lay in corners of the coral tile floor. It clogged the basin drain.
    He went back into the bedroom and frowned around at it. What was missing was a jacket to keep her warm nights. The closet had showed him caps, hats, a couple of flimsy scarves and a tumble of shoes. He blinked. A poster was Scotch-taped to the wall over the bed. A naked young man knelt, face pressed into the belly of a standing girl whose head was thrown back, lips parted, eyes closed. She was naked too. His hands gripped her buttocks. The background was black. The lettering was red. ALL THE WAY DOWN. That was at the top. At the foot was A SPENCE ODUM PRODUCTION. The girl had big breasts and didn’t appear to be blond.
    Out in the room with the view, he looked again at the glasses on the breakfast bar. Each of the abandoned soft drinks had a plastic swizzle stick angling down into it. One was a sickly yellow, the other a sickly blue. He bent close but the