King Maybe (30 page)

Her eyes widened for a split second before she got them under control. I had a sudden conviction that she
lived
like this, suspecting every new actor on the stage of possessing the information that would reveal her for what she was, and all I could think of was the despair that had shaped her. She shifted, moving her phone away, and said, “Thanks. It . . . uh, it means a lot to me to have my party with Rina like this.”

I said, “I'll bet it does.”

She started to chew on the inside of the left corner of her mouth.

I leaned down toward her and lowered my voice. “I'm not going to cover your phone again, so the rest of this is on camera. You can leave now if you want. Tell them you don't feel good.”

She said, with some steel in her voice, “What good would that do me?”

“Up to you.” I felt Anime's eyes on me, and when I looked in her direction, she had her eyebrows arched in inquiry.

I turned back to Patty and figured, let the kid have a last chance to escape the unveiling. I said, “I've got something for you.”

“A present?” Patty said, giving the word a nasty twist.

“I guess.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a little box. She hesitated but then took it. Elsewhere in the room, conversation had finally broken out, and it made the moment more endurable.

She opened the box and saw the key chain bearing the capital
H
with its two vertical strokes curving inward toward the center—the abstraction of two fish bellies that signifies Pisces. When she looked up at me, she'd forced her mouth into a smile. “Well done,” she said.

I said, “You understand that I have to tell Rina about Machiavelli. You broke her heart.”

Patty said, “It'll heal. She'll break it a dozen times before it breaks for good. But of course, her being
her
, it'll never break for good.” She got up and brushed past me, heading for the door.

Rina said, “Patty?”

“Gotta go,” Patty said. “I hear my mother calling me.” The door closed behind her, and as Rina started after her, Lilli put a hand on her arm and handed her the iPad. “Unwrap this,” she said. “The thing you need to look at is all cued up. Just turn it on and push
play
.” Then she followed Patty through the door.

The clip they'd lined up was the four-minute one where Patty persuaded the dim, beautiful Denise to keep grabbing Tyrone's hand. The lines that echoed in the room were Patty's, after Denise said, “I barely know him.”

“Come on,” Patty had said, “what's he gonna do, call the cops? He's a nice guy—he'll just let you hang on to his hand.” When it was over and all the kids had been drawn to the screen and were looking at each other, Anime said into the silence, “It's sort of an Internet TV show. The whole thing was a setup.”

With her fingers raised to her lips, Rina said, “But I . . . I called . . . I mean, I broke up with—”

“It's okay, honey,” Kathy said from the kitchen door. “Here's your other present,” and she stepped aside and Tyrone came in, looking like someone who didn't know whether his face was about to be kissed or slapped, and Rina choked a couple of times and burst into tears. Kathy said to the kids, “Why don't we all take the cake outside and leave them alone for a minute?”

Fifteen minutes later, as Ronnie and Anime and I were leaving, Rina and Tyrone were still face-to-face, only inches apart, in a corner, and he had her hand between his. As the door closed behind us, we saw Lilli coming toward us from her talk with Patty. I said, “What did you say to her?”

Lilli looked at me, lifted her chin high, and said, “I offered her a job.”

31

Dead Will Be Fine

It was almost eight as we rounded the corner that took us back to the storage unit. When the gate opened for us, Ronnie said, “Where in the world are we?” and Anime said, “You've never been here? Come on in.”

Ronnie said, “Into a
storage
unit?”

“You'll love it,” Lilli said. “Free vending machines.”

“Gummy bears?” Ronnie said.

“And some. We've even got Japanese Kit Kats, weirdest candy on earth. Matcha Green Tea, Wasabi, Baked Potato, Shinshu Apple, tastes
exactly
like hairspray—”

“I am so in there,” Ronnie said, opening the door. “You coming?”

“In a minute. I've got to make a call, and I'm hoping to get one.”

“Your loss.”

I watched the three of them go as I tried to organize my mind. Louie was around the corner from the Slugger's, waiting to see if he'd go out to dinner again, as he apparently did virtually every night, and if he did, I needed to be ready. And the man I was calling, the man I had to talk to before I moved to the next stage of the evening, did not cheerfully accept waffling; I needed an agenda. I thought for a moment, eyes closed, took a few seconds to appreciate the apparent end of the windy season, and dialed.

“Yeah?” It was Babe, one of the Man's hired muscle flexers.

“It's me,” I said. “Junior. Is he there?”

“He's busy.”

“What,” I said, “is he watching reruns of
Taxi
?”

“That's funny,” Babe said. “Okay, I'll tell him you're calling, see if he laughs.”

There was a pause, a snatch of loud music, and then Irwin Dressler said, “So? Make it quick, I'm busy.”

I said, “I need a favor.”

“And I should do one for you why?”

“Oh, I don't know. The memory of good times past?”

“Ten, nine, eight.”

“Because then I'll owe you one.”

“This is a joke, right?” he said. “A favor from me is worth twenty from you.” Pulling away from the phone, he said, “Just a minute, sweetie.”

“Sweetie?” I said. “And what's that music?”

“You don't want to know.”

“Of course I do. Everything about you fascinates me.”

“You know what it is, you schlub.”

“I do,” I said. “It's that song from
Frozen
, but that would imply that you have very small female children in your living room.”

“Me?” he said.

I said, “Sweetie?”

“I've heard this song three thousand times today alone,” Dressler said, “beginning about nine in the morning. About the two-thousandth time, it gets kind of catchy. Then, around twenty-five hundred, it becomes everything you hope the rest of your life won't be.”

“What's that?”

“Repetitive, perky, optimistic, perky.”

“You already said perky.”

“Three thousand times I've heard it,” he said. “And even if it was only two thousand, perky pisses me off. I see someone who's perky, I see someone whose hat I want to shoot off.”

“You should look out the window once in a while. Nobody wears hats anymore.”

“And I'm why. So what's the favor?”

I crossed my fingers. “I need to tell someone I know you.”

“That runs high. You'll owe me big. Who?”

“A hitter.”

“Junior,” he said, “hitters are out of your league. Petty larceny, okay. Jaywalking, okay. Wait, hang on.” He partially covered the mouthpiece with his hand and sang, “‘Let it
go
.'” Then he said, “Small-time con games, okay. But for you—”

“You
do
,” I said. You've got a kid there. You, Irwin Dressler, the Dark Lord of Los Angeles, are singing along with—”

“I've been running a big part of this town since your whole life. I've been in the business, here and elsewhere, more than
twice
your life. I seen a lot of bright boys come and go—”

“Thank you.”

“—and you're not one of them. I mean, you're smart, but it's the kind of smart you can buy a lot of, and you don't got to go to Beverly Hills to get it.”

“Ah,” I said.

“So hitters, no, out of your depth, take my advice. It may not seem like it—‘Let it
go
'
—
but I have a modest affection for you, Junior. Nothing you could mortgage a house on, just the kind of affection says I wouldn't prefer you dead.”

“Here comes the chorus again,” I said.

“‘Let it
go
,'” he sang, although most of the notes he hit were the ones they store in the spaces between the piano keys. Then he said, “It's Babe's daughter, she's four, and this is what she needs to be happy now, okay? Believe me,
she's
not happy, you don't want to be around.”

“It's the Slugger,” I said. “And I have to talk to him. If you wouldn't prefer me to emerge from the conversation dead, let me use your name.”

“Look, I gotta sing here.”

“Well, you know how to make me hang up.”

“Fine, use my name, live in health. I'm told he swings high, so maybe you'll duck. We'll talk later about what this costs.”

“Thanks.”

He said, “Aaaahh,” and hung up, but he was singing again before the connection was severed.

I sat there in the car, feeling distinctly uneasy about the rest of the evening, just daring the wind to kick up again. If it had, I'd probably have called it all off, but it stayed as still as it apparently does when it becalms sailboats in the Doldrums, so I went inside to try a Matcha Green Tea Kit Kat and ask Ronnie if she'd mind my leaving her there for an hour or so.

It was a
very expensive, very noisy, very famous-face, and not very good Italian place on San Vicente in that weird little boutique area before it curves to the right to meet up with Wilshire. I'd eaten there once and sworn not to come back, but here I was, breaking my promise to myself.

“Had any wind?” I asked the parking guy as he handed me the ticket.

He said, “Huh?”

I said, “Park it close. Get it to me within a minute, it's an extra twenty.”

The noise clapped invisible hands over my eardrums as I went in. I paused, ignoring the maître d' as he shouted over the din for my name. The place was packed with second-string talent, and there he was, sitting with another man at a table for four, up against the wall. I said, “There's my party,” and zigzagged between tables that were so close together the diners could have eaten off the dishes of the customers on either side. They didn't hear me coming, so they were unprepared when I pulled out an empty chair and sat down. That put the two of them—the other one was the
Spinal Tap
reject who checked under the beds—across from me with their backs to the wall. Looking startled.

The Slugger, who'd been staring at a very watchable waitress two tables away, said, “What the fuck?”

Up close it was difficult to imagine him as the man I knew him to be. He was slender, with a strong jaw, cold blue eyes, and a patrician nose. The swipe of gray hair over his forehead was tinted slightly blue and meticulously cared for. He looked, in fact, a little like a fussier, vainer Charlie Watts, whose elegant older-guy appearance I'd long hoped I'd grow into.

I said, “Hi.” Then I took out the stamp, in its transparent envelope, and held it up.

His eyes froze on it.

I said, “I'm here to apologize, I'm here to talk business, and I'm here to get your property back to you. But first I need you to get rid of Sad Sack, to my right.”

“You don't pull up a chair uninvited and tell me who sits at my table.”

I put my hand behind my ear and said, “Pardon? You know, if the hired help went out and played in the street for a few minutes, I could slide in next to you and we could talk.” I waved the stamp back and forth.

His eyes went back and forth with it, and then he gave a single nod. “Stumpy,” he said. “Beat it.”

I said, “Stumpy?”

“Don't push it,” the Slugger said. “Even if you and me turn out to be friends, he'd still do you for an afternoon highlight.”

Stumpy got up, making a little more noise with his chair than was strictly necessary, and stalked away, bumping other people's chairs as he went.

“Stumpy's in a huff,” I said.

“Get to it,” he said. “I'm hungry.” He was watching the waitress again as she threaded between the tables, and he wasn't looking at the food. In what seemed to be an unconscious gesture, he reached up and fingered the fringe hanging across his forehead.

“Okay. First, mea culpa, which is Latin for ‘I'm guilty.' I stole this stamp from you, not knowing who you were. So now I find myself in kind of an awkward position.”

“I'd say so,” he said, his attention back on me.

“So what I thought I'd do, I'd make a kind of double restitution. I'd get your stamp back to you and pay you forty K to do a hit.”

“Whoa,” he said. “You think you can walk in here and
hire
me? Even if I were the kind of person you could hire to do a hit, which I'm not, how could I know you're not wired up the ying-yang? How could I know this whole thing isn't a setup?”

“Do you know Irwin Dressler?”

“What're you
talking
about? Of course I don't know Irwin Dressler. How would I know—”

“Well, I do,” I said. “And he'll vouch for me.”

He looked around the room, his eyes snagging on the waitress for a moment. “Yeah? I don't see him.”

“Then you know what he looks like.”

“Sonny,” he said, “everybody with more than four parking tickets knows what he looks like.”

“Okay, here's how we can work it.” I reached behind me, watching him stiffen, and pulled out my wallet so I could show him the only driver's license I have that's got my real name on it. He leaned forward to look at it. He looked at it so long that I started to get nervous, but when he sat back, the look on his face wasn't suspicious, so maybe it just took him a while to process information.

“So?” he said. “Junior. And you're razzing Stumpy about
his
name?”

“This is who I am,” I said, tapping the license. “Junior Bender. Now, here's what we'll do. You take a picture of me with your phone, okay?”

He squinted at me, wondering where this was going. “I can handle that.”

“And I'll give you the cell-phone number of one of Dressler's bodyguards, who's pretty much always with him. You send the picture to him with two questions: ‘What's this guy's name, and do you trust him?' Got it?”

“Oh, sure. And I'm really sending it to some mook who sends it back and says, ‘Hundred percent,' and I'm supposed to think—”

I said, “You said you know what he looks like, right?”

He examined the question for trick clauses and then said, “Yeah.”

“Fine. I'll have Dressler's guy ask Dressler to hold up the phone with my picture on it, sort of cheek to cheek, and he'll take a picture of Dressler holding
my
picture and send that back with the answer. How does that sound?”

“It sounds, um . . .”

“Okay, here's a last fillip.”

“Who's Philip?”

“Fillip,”
I said, spelling it. “It's like an extra, a little boost. Just before you take my picture, you tell me to do something, whatever, so you know the picture Irwin will be holding will be the one you just took, not something I arranged a year ago, wearing the same clothes and all. It's not very plausible, but what the hell. Okay?”

He thought about it for so long that Stuffy or whatever his name was pushed his way through the door and into the room, and the Slugger, who saw him before I did, waved him back out. While he was doing that, the food arrived.

“Can I eat his?” I said.

“I don't give a fuck.” He smiled at the waitress and got one back. When she was out of earshot, he said, “Okay, we'll do it.” He raised the phone. “Hold the fork up.” I held the fork up. Then he asked me for Tuffy's phone number, took so long to key in the text that I'd eaten half of Stuffy's food by the time he finished, and pressed to send it.

“Now what?” he said.

“This is good,” I said. “Best thing I ever ate in here. Probably tastes better when someone else is paying. Now we wait until your phone buzzes or does the cha-cha or whatever it does.”

I passed him the bread basket, but he waved it away, so I took the last piece of bread. His pasta didn't look as good as Stuffy's chicken. I said, “His name is Stuffy?”

“Stumpy,” he said. He twirled some noodles on a fork, but he had his eyes on the phone, and then he dropped the whole thing, fork
and
food, onto his plate and grabbed the phone with both hands. He looked at it, and when his eyes came up to mine, they might have belonged to a different person. He looked frightened.

I said, “Can I see?”

He turned the phone to me. Dressler, one cheek pressed to the phone he was holding, on which was a tiny me, hoisting a fork. A very small hand was reaching up to take the phone away from him. The words beneath the picture were:
he's junior bender. i trust him. in fact, i like him. a little.

The Slugger said, “Who do you want me to do?”

“Twenty thousand now,”
I said, sliding the envelope with half of Stinky's money in it across the table. “The other twenty and the stamp when it's done.”

He hesitated, licked his upper lip, and then nodded. “Suicide,” he said.

“If your guy can make it convincing. Like I told you, he leaves the studio at seven and goes home. The house is empty until then, most of the time, and I gave you the combinations for the alarms. Just make sure your guy leaves the gun and it isn't traceable, so it's plausible the dead man might have owned it.”