The Fame Thief (19 page)

“Louie.”

“—not it at all. Not even close. You wanna know what it really means?”

“Not particularly.”

“Too bad. It’s a dilly. You still at Valentine Shmalentine? You and Ronnie, I mean. Boy, if love can survive Valentine Shmalentine, it’s built solid. Got
foundations
, you know?”

“And who else knows we’re at Valentine Shmalentine?”

“This is a question with an accusation behind it. I can hear it.”

“I ask because Irwin Dressler knows about it, too.”

“Don’t look at me,” Louie said. “I ain’t on Irwin Dressler’s level. He wouldn’t ask me for a minute if I owned time. He giving you problems?”

“Not really. He just knows things I’d rather he didn’t.”

“Like what?” Louie asked promptly.

“Oh, well,” I said.

“Trust is the foundation of every relationship.”

“Glad you brought that up,” I said. “Seen Debbie Halstead lately?”

“She told you.”

“She did.”

“You gotta understand.…” His voice faded away, and then he swallowed.

“If you’re waiting for me to complete that sentence, you’re going to be on the phone a long time.”

“Listen to you,” he said. “Voice sounds good, you’re breathing regular, you’re okay. I knew she didn’t want to do nothing to you.”

“And I know you’ll be safe, too.”

“Say what?”

“When you start checking her out for me.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Think of it as a karmic debt. At least I’m not sending her to your door. Without so much as a tip-off call.”

“I can explain all that.” I waited for the explanation. Instead, he said, “What do you want to know about her?”

“Whatever you can get. Especially anything you can find about her early life—up to the time she popped up here, killing people. What did she do before, where’s she from, was she ever married, that kind of stuff.”

“Okay. I don’t like it, but okay. Is that why you called me? To bust my balls?”

“Actually, I have a paying job for you. I need some plausibles. About six of them. With good IDs.”

“We got plausibles coming out of our ears,” Louie said. “The Internet has really put a crimp in con games, at least the ones you play in the flesh. Million-dollar accounts in Nigeria, phony AARP dues, they’re doing great.”

“Louie.”

“Here’s how bad it is. I know a few plausibles—you know one of them, too, Handkerchief Harrison—they’re working as extras in the movies.”

“Handkerchief is?” Handkerchief was a widely admired con man, among those who admire con men.

“On a cop show, if you can believe that. Irony is so cheap.”

“Handkerchief would be great. He and about five others. Some of them in pairs, looking married.”

“Who are they supposed to be?”

“House-hunters. Their paper has to look plausible enough to be taken seriously.”

“Papers are rough these days.”

“I’ll get some credit histories from Stinky.”

“If you can afford credit histories, you’re not paying me enough.”

“Nobody’s going to spend anything. They’ll be on loan. I just need them to stand up to a surface check.”

“Stinky’s not easy. Call me after you talk to him. No point in my wasting your money till you know you’re covered.”

A beep in my ear announced that someone else was on the line. “Call you back,” I said. “After I talk to Stinky. But go to work on Debbie Halstead, okay?”

I disconnected and picked up the incoming call.

“Mr. Bender?” It was a thin, old voice, a little wavery.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s Pinky, Pinky Pinkerton.” He coughed once, then said, “I’ve got your stuff.”

I looked out the windshield and was surprised to see that it was dark. I’d been so fixated on the
FOR SALE
signs I didn’t even remember turning on my headlights. “I’m in the Valley,” I said. “It’s, what? Six thirty? Traffic will be terrible.”

Something brushed the mouthpiece of the phone and then there was a long pause. Finally, Pinkerton said, “Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you.” He really did sound weak, years older than he had a few hours earlier.

“You seem tired,” I said. “Why don’t you go home, and I’ll come tomorrow? In the morning sometime.”

“No,” he said. Then he said, “Wait a minute. I need some water.”

Again the sound of something brushing the mouthpiece. When he came back, he said, “Now or never. I’m leaving on vacation tomorrow for—for two weeks. I don’t want to leave this material here all that time.”

“Edna can show it to—”

“No, she can’t,” he said, and his voice scaled up a few tones. “She’s not going to be here, either. Nobody will, not for weeks. If you want to see it, come here now. I’ll wait one hour, no more.” He disconnected.

I sat there, listening to my car tick as the engine cooled, and took stock. Here I was, in the neighborhood I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life in, safely south of Ventura Boulevard
in the gently expensive hills of Tarzana, once part of the giant Edgar Rice Burroughs estate. It suddenly felt to me like I had fallen a great distance from the certainties of that time and that place, and the prospect of driving all the way to Hollywood, at rush hour, on what was essentially a crook’s errand for the über-crook himself, Irwin Dressler, suddenly became a journey of absolutely symbolic proportions. Every mile I traveled in the direction of Pinky Pinkerton and the evidence of Dolly La Marr’s fall from grace represented flight in the wrong direction. What I wanted was here.

But, of course, what I wanted was five years ago, back before Kathy decided, probably correctly, that I was never going to change into a weekly-paycheck guy with a 401(k). What I wanted was this neighborhood with my family in it, intact and optimistic. What I wanted was this neighborhood with the streets as they were when I carried Rina along the sidewalks, riding on my shoulders. What I wanted was this neighborhood without all these fucking
FOR SALE BY RICHARD
“
DICK
”
STIVIC
signs in it. And that neighborhood didn’t exist any more.

And if it had, I wouldn’t have been welcome in it.

I started the car, bumped my forehead against the steering wheel several times, and headed south, toward Hollywood.

But here was
the thing. I didn’t like any of it.

I didn’t like the errand, sure, but I
really
didn’t like the way Pinkerton had sounded, like someone who’d just stopped crying. I didn’t like the quaver in his voice. I didn’t like the sudden vacations.

I didn’t like the sound of something covering the mouthpiece.

And I liked it all a little less with every mile I drove.

It was rush hour, but most of the traffic was coming at me, heading north out of LA toward the Valley’s bedrooms, not
going into town. I was making pretty good time, as I always do when I’m heading someplace I don’t want to go, so I took the Woodman offramp and went down to Ventura, choosing the more leisurely route. Looking for a long line of red lights.

But, of course, red lights are like cops: when you need them, they’re not around. I felt like the president, one light after another obediently going green and bowing down in front of me as I proceeded, at a stately thirty-five miles per hour, toward the declining ZIP codes of Hollywood. I couldn’t even find a traffic jam in the Cahuenga Pass, which is usually denser than the molecular structure of lead. Nope, whistled right up the hill and back down again, for the first time in memory not getting stuck long enough to have a birthday or two at the stoplight that marks the Hollywood Bowl.

So I was well within the allotted sixty minutes when I turned left on Hollywood Boulevard, my dimming hopes pinned to the very good chance that there wouldn’t be a parking space within miles. And there probably wasn’t until the very moment that I hoped I wouldn’t find one, but precisely then, not thirty feet from the entrance to the Tower, someone at the curb started the turn indicator ticking and pulled out in front of me, leaving a yawning space. I checked the nearest sign: legal at this hour. I had almost no change, but the meter had more than an hour left on it.

Fate can really be pushy at times.

At 7:23, I shoved open the door to the half-lit lobby. One of the elevators had been taken out of service, dark and open behind a sign announcing it would be available again at seven the next morning. I looked at the other elevator, thought for a second, and went to the far end of the lobby and took the stairs.

A lot of stairs. My legs were leaden by the time I reached the twelfth floor, where I stopped on the landing and let myself
breathe heavily before I opened the door. The dim hallway tapered away in front of me, in accordance with the laws of perspective. It took me a moment to assemble the floor plan in my mind: the offices radiated off both sides of a U-shaped hallway, with the stairs at one terminal of the U and the elevator at the other. There were offices in the center of the U, so the elevator wasn’t visible to me and—I thought, with an odd sort of easing in my chest—I wasn’t visible from the elevator. Or to anyone who might be watching the elevator.

Pinky’s office had been the last door in the hallway leading away from the elevator, the numbers rising as the elevator receded. So if a visitor wanted an office with a number higher than Pinky’s he or she would have passed the door that opened into Edna’s lair and turned left along the bottom of the U to keep going. That meant that I had to take the hallway in front of me and follow the turn to the right. When I got to the end of the short hall at the bottom of the U, I’d be looking at Pinky’s door.

So I did exactly that, moving on the balls of my feet and making about as much noise as the average fog. As far as I could tell, the offices I passed were all empty. Every other ceiling light in the hallway was off, and no strips of light gleamed beneath the office doors. Just for the hell of it, I tapped on one, about halfway along the corridor, which listed itself on a laser-printed sign as
FANFARE MAIL SERVICE
, probably a one- or two-person outfit that responded to fan mail. It was that kind of building, catering to the disposable fringes of show business. No one answered, and the door was locked. So was the next, and the next.

When Pinky’s door came into sight I stopped, for two reasons. First, because my body declined to carry me any further, and second, because the door was ajar.

In detective novels, doors that are ajar
always
precede the discovery of a body. If fictional detectives took the time to read
detective fiction, the moment a door swung open at their touch, they’d be in full retreat all the way to the street, not even pausing to straighten their fedoras.

Of course, I wasn’t fictional, so the rule didn’t apply. Still, I’d be lying if I said that the door, gaping open a couple of inches like that, didn’t give me pause. In fact, it gave me about five minutes’ worth of pause, which is quite a long pause for someone who’s standing in a boring, empty hallway and listing to his heart thump irregularly in his ears.

At first, it looked to me like the office was dark, open door or not, but by using the old trick of looking past it, to the right, I could see that it actually wasn’t. If I’d been forced to explain the skim-milk-pale light that peeked around the straight, hard edge of the door, I’d have theorized that the lights in Edna’s room were off, but at least one light was burning in Pinky’s inner sanctum. Which made sense, of course: He would have sent Edna home to whatever stone tower she curled up in after hours, and he’d be sitting there, glancing impatiently at his watch.

Speaking of which.

About six minutes remained of the hour he’d given me. It seemed like a very good idea, if he was going to come out at the end of that hour, to wait for him. As opposed, I mean, to going through that door. So I leaned against the wall to my right and waited.

The building creaked and settled around me, thousands of tons of iron and cement tucking itself away for the night. At the end of Pinky’s corridor, the one functioning elevator groaned upward, sending me into full scurry mode backward toward the stairs, but it kept on going, and about a minute later, it went down again, with less protest. Somewhere behind me a phone rang for a very long time. Just as it stopped, the building’s air circulation system filled its giant tin lungs and blew at me, making
a
whoosh
that sent me twelve or fourteen inches into the air. The moment my feet hit the tile, the phone began to ring once more.

Outside, down on the street, neon was burning, cars were honking, people were moving along the sidewalks, staring at the freaks or being stared at by the straights. Some of them were probably chemically deranged, others certifiably schizophrenic, and an improbable percentage of them, in this richest country in the world, were undoubtedly hungry. I would have traded places with any of them.

At ten minutes past the hour, with no sign of Pinky, I took the prudent, if not the boldest, course. I removed my left shoe, stepped away from the wall to get a better angle, lifted my left leg for the windup, and let fly, at a respectable sixty-five miles an hour or so, at Pinky’s door.

The shoe hit with a loud bang, and the door opened about four inches, snagged on something that slowed it for an instant, and then kept opening, having broken through whatever had been—

Bright light
, the kind of hot white light that tells people in nuclear-war movies that they haven’t got the time they need to get close enough to their asses to kiss them goodbye, and then a whole NFL line of sound, six 300-pound linemen wide, muscled itself at me, turning my ears inside out and shoving me back as the door snapped shut again, so hard that it broke in half lengthways and the side without hinges on it arced slowly through the air at me. Or maybe it wasn’t all that slow, because a corner of it caught me in the ribcage and put me on my butt on the cold, hard linoleum.

A wall of smoke charged and then surrounded me, and I sat there, hacking and coughing in a cloud of dust and asbestos and God knew what else, until I rolled away and crawled, as fast as I could, around the far corner, the one that led back down to
the stairs. Then I rested my back against the wall and sat there, choking and sneezing and retching as my ears continued to vibrate like the world’s biggest tympani. A few minutes passed, during which two things did not happen: there was not another explosion, and no alarm began to shrill.