The Fame Thief (32 page)

“And what do I look like?”

“You look like a man with bad taste in pants.”

“They’re golf slacks. Golf, you should play golf. Calm you down, lower your blood pressure.”

“You don’t play golf.”

“Not willingly, no. I belong to the clubs because that’s where a lot of the deals get made and the money changes hands, but golf is a game for the prematurely dead.”

“But you’re telling me to play—”

He raised both hands and patted the air at me. “Oh, calm down. I’m just changing the subject, that’s all. You were all upset. You needed a boring minute or two.”

My phone rang.

“Check your email,” Dressler said. “Talk on the phone. I got nowhere to go.”

“This’ll just take a second.” I got up and walked over to the shelf with the carved jade on it. “Hi, sweetie.”

Dressler said, “Sweetie, he says.”

“It’s my daughter.”

“So talk to her,” Dressler said. “The sandwiches, Tuffy?”

“Mom and Dick made up, sort of. He’s got another one for her to look at.”

“Not a guy to give up.”

“You know what he reminds me of? Do you remember Annabelle?”

“He reminds you of Annabelle?” Annabelle had been Rina’s
best friend for a couple of years, the relationship now mysteriously severed.

“Not Annabelle. Pippy. Annabelle’s Airedale.”

“Annabelle’s Airedale.”

“No matter how many times you said no, no matter how many times you pushed him away, Pippy would try to hump your leg. There was only one thing he wanted to do in the whole world, and he wanted to do it all the time. Dick’s like that.”

“Metaphorically, of course.”

“It’s actually a simile,” she said.

“Everybody’s explaining things to me lately. Listen, she wants you to go with her, right?”

“Sure. She’s pretending it matters what I think.”

“Well, unless it’s just terrible, love it.”

“Sorry?”

“Love it. Get excited about it. Get her to make an offer.”

“But you.…” I could almost hear it dawn on her. “You’re going to
do
something about this, aren’t you?”

“That’s my damn house,” I said. “I mean it’s her damn house and your damn house, but she’s not going to sell it to make a few bucks for the boyfriend of the week.”

“That’s not exactly fair.”

“Okay,” I said, “which issue do you want to address?”

Dressler said, “You talk like that to your daughter?”

“My daughter can take it.”

“How old?” Dressler said.

Rina said, “Who’s there? Who are you talking to?”

I said to Dressler, “Thirteen,” and to Rina, “Irwin Dressler.”

“Omigod,” Rina said. “Can I meet him sometime?”

“I don’t know.” To Dressler, I said. “She wants to meet you.”

“Me?” Dressler said. “An
alter kocker
like me?”

I said, “He says sure.”

“Omigod,” she said again. “He’s like history in person. Like a Rose Parade float. Did you screw up the first house?”

I said, “I cannot tell a lie.”

Dressler said, “Useful to know.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said to Rina. “Just be enthusiastic, okay?”

“This isn’t about the house for you, is it?” she said slowly. “This is about Dick.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Well, it’s okay with me on both counts. Bye.”

I put the phone in my pocket. “I pretty much don’t tell lies,” I said to Dressler.

Dressler nodded slowly. “Sounds like you got something to tell me that I don’t want to hear.”

“Afraid so.”

“What’ll it hurt if it waits half an hour? I’m feeling pretty good right now and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Nothing will change in half an hour.”

“You’ll be not so crazy,” Dressler said. “So we’ll have a little nosh first.” He smiled at me. It was almost friendly. “After all,” he said, “you didn’t eat the peanuts.”

“Within fifteen minutes
of our first conversation,” I said, “while I was on my way to see Dolores La Marr, I said something to my daughter that was right on the money.”

“Easy to say,” Dressler said, “since none of us was there to hear you.” He was holding down the entire couch, emitting a prickly aura that kept it empty. We’d eaten sandwiches and drunk wine. Tuffy had sprawled his impressive bulk on the carpet about three feet from me, and Babe was sitting on the step up to the dining room.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t really so smart, because I promptly forgot about it. But while I was thinking about it, I asked Rina to
track down La Marr’s testimony in front of the Kefauver Committee. Just in case ruining her wasn’t really the point.”

“Which means what?” Tuffy asked, and then looked at Dressler as though asking retroactive permission to speak. Dressler was looking at me.

“Rina got it immediately,” I said. “She said something like, ‘You mean she might not have been just a victim. She might have been a weapon.’ ”

“This girl, your daughter,” Dressler said, “she’s how old?”

“Thirteen,” I said again.

“Devious mind,” he said approvingly. “Although I can’t see how Dolly would have been a weapon. Against whom?”

“I’ll get there. So at first, when I talked to the people La Marr had known back then, I was looking for people who knew that she had these—friendships—with gangsters. Who knew enough about it—you know, where she’d be, when she’d be there—enough that they could have dimed her out that night. And what I found out was that it was a dead end. Everybody knew, even if they didn’t have all the details. Doug Trent said it was no secret.”

Dressler said, “But I—”

“You were a secret. Probably her only secret. But even so,
somebody
knew about you, or none of this would have happened.”

He turned his head toward the dining room, perhaps looking at Babe. “You’re saying that—”

“If I don’t tell this my way, you’re not going to accept it. So let me walk you through it, okay?”

Without turning back to me, he gave me a brusque nod.

“So,” I said, “if I couldn’t figure out who had the opportunity, the question became, who
profited
? It wasn’t like she was all set to play Scarlett in a remake of
Gone With the Wind
and
there were four girls lined up behind her, looking for a cliff to push her off. What that meant to me was that it had to be someone in your end of her world, so to speak, someone who had a game in mind. A game with a payoff that would be worth all that trouble.”

Now he
was
looking at me, and his eyes were hooded and as still as those of a stuffed animal.

“I decided to look at it from three perspectives at the same time. One was to try to work back from the stories in the paper, try to figure out who planted them, since they were obviously planned in advance. I mean, the newspaper stories were the whole point of the party, what with the big guys gone and just a handful of nonentities in the room by the time the cops and the photographers busted in.”

He nodded again, slowly this time.

“Problem is, everybody’s dead. The editor who took the call at the newspaper in Vegas that night, the cop who called in the tip for the photographers to come to the jail in the morning. Dead, all of them. So I went at it from the second perspective, her testimony before the committee, to see who they asked her about. You read it. Who did they ask her about?”

“Everybody. Nobody. I mean, they asked her about some of the guys, but it wasn’t like they were fishing for information. It was more to incriminate her than anything else. ‘Did you know he’s a crook?’ That sort of stuff.”

“That’s right,” I said. “So I found myself thinking about perspective number three, that old thing about last one out of the room turns off the lights. And I went to work figuring out who the last big guy to leave the party was.”

Dressler asked, very softly, “And did you?”

“Yes. But then Rina found something else.” This was going to be the hard part. I swiped the touchpad to bring my laptop
back to life and turned it toward him. “Did you know that Dolores La Marr went back before the committee? A second time? In a secret session?”

The look he gave me was solid flint. “No. And I don’t believe she did.”

“Read it,” I said. “Look who they’re asking her about.”

He read it, his lips moving with the words at the beginning. When he got to his own name, he glared around the room as though it angered him that we were there watching, but he kept reading. Then he began to smile, and at the end, he chuckled softly. “She had a pair on her,” he said.

“That’s what it looks like,” I said. “Too bad it’s bullshit.”

He didn’t say anything. Just gazed down at the laptop, putting up a wall between him and whatever I was about to say.

“She probably really said all that stuff, she may even have gotten up and walked out of the room, but I guarantee you that the moment they dismissed the stenographer, she came back in and sat down again.”

“Based on what?” The laptop screen went dark but he continued to look at it.

“This shouldn’t have been released at all, this bit. That session was held in camera. And even if it had been officially released, it wouldn’t have been redacted so sloppily. They never would have let ‘Winny’ get through.”

Dressler said something very softly, with a tiny catch in it, and it took me a second to realize he’d just repeated, “Winny.”

“This was leaked to give her an out, in case someone recognized her, back in Washington. In case you heard about it, or someone in Chicago did. They would have found a way to get this to whoever it was.”

“Who’s
they?
” Dressler asked. “The committee? Why would they do that?”

“It was part of her deal,” I said. “She thought they could put things together again for her. You read it right there. They offered to set things straight.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “She’d never have sold me out. Not Dolly.” He stopped and listened to himself. “That wasn’t who she was.”

I didn’t reply.

“And if she
did
tell them what—whatever it is you think she told them, why didn’t they come after me? Why haven’t I ever faced charges?”

“That wasn’t what they wanted,” I said.

He leaned toward me, his mouth a straight, tight line.

“When you ran the IBEW unions, how much did you personally pocket each year?”

Tuffy said, “IBEW?”

“International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers,” I said. “At the time, they controlled most of the behind-the-scenes unions in Hollywood.” Dressler was watching me as though he expected me to produce a poisonous snake at any moment. “How much? In a year, how much did you pocket?”

“Two, two and a half mil,” he said, and I could see he knew where this was going.

“Let’s say two,” I said. “If you’d been greedy instead of smart, how much could you have taken?”

“Five.”

“And if you’d wanted to dip into the pension fund?”

“Another two.”

“So, seven million a year. In 1952. And in 2012 dollars, how much would that be?”

Dressler said, “More than a hundred and forty million. Inflation since that time is a little better than twenty to one.”

“In 1952,” I said, “you had to let go of those unions. I didn’t
pay much attention to it when I first noticed it, because you got them back in two, two and a half years, but two and a half years—assuming the person who replaced you was greedy instead of smart—he made almost four hundred million bucks in modern money. I mean the stuff he could have bought with it, back then, would cost almost four hundred million if you bought it now.”

Dressler nodded. His eyes were on the dark laptop again.

“This is my guess,” I said. “Chicago told you to let go of them for a while.”

“That’s a good guess.” His voice was toneless.

“Here’s the rest of the guess. They got a call from Durkee, their own Illinois senator whom they undoubtedly helped to put in office, saying the committee had stuff on you that could be very embarrassing to everyone concerned, and it would be better if you sort of stepped back for a while.”

“They didn’t tell me the specifics,” he said. “They gave me other things to do instead, suggested I’d be too busy to handle everything carefully.”

“The California senator, Wheeler, got thrown in the slammer in 1956 for illegal contributions from those unions going back to 1952-53, the years when you weren’t in charge. I’d be surprised if Durkee didn’t get a pile of cash, too. He was just luckier than Wheeler was.”

“So what you’re saying.…”

“I’m saying that my first guess was right. The whole setup was a plan to turn Dolores La Marr into a weapon that could be used against you. Not to incriminate you, not to imprison you, but to get those unions away from you. For money, plain and simple. Everything that happened to her—the end of her career, the destruction of her life—was just collateral damage. Sort of an accident, like the surgical sponge left in a patient. What they wanted was that money.”

“What who wanted?” Dressler seemed almost sleepy.

“One of the guys in Vegas. It was set up in Vegas, between a crook and a couple of bent senators. One other thing. I asked you who knew where she lived, after everything fell apart and she went into hiding at the Wedgwood. Well, her mother did, and the guy she married after
Hell’s Sisters
held an office in one of those unions, one of the ones that agitated for a change in management. So whoever set it up probably knew where she lived, too.”

“And do you know who it was?” He was reaching into the pocket of his shirt.

“I think so.”

He nodded and then cleared his throat. The cords in his neck were almost rigid with tension. “Last time you were here, I told you I had made a mistake, I hadn’t made it clear that the malice might still be out there.”

“I remember.”

He took a slip of paper from the pocket. It had been torn from a small notepad, maybe four inches by five, and folded once the long way. When he opened it, I saw three lines in a small, careful handwriting. “And the reason I made that mistake was because I made an assumption, something I almost never do. But I figured, if there was a guy from back then and I hadn’t heard a word about him for fifty, sixty years, he was dead. Even if I didn’t know when he’d died, after all this time if he wasn’t on anybody’s radar, he was dead.”