King Maybe (9 page)

“So maybe he got what he deserved.”

“How often does that happen?”

“Right. Do you think my car's ready?”

“They'll call me. So what's the deal with him—with Jeremy?”

“I don't know exactly, but he's somehow got Jake Whelan's balls in a bear trap, and Whelan's talking about his legacy, his life, whatever else he can think of on the spur of the moment to get me to do something about it.”

“Why would you say yes to Jake? Why would anybody?”

“Oh, don't ask. He says he'll have me killed if I don't, but I guess the bottom line is that I feel like I owe him. I rooked him pretty bad on that painting.”

“Conscience,” Louie said. He picked up another french fry. “It's a curse.”

10

Paying By the Inch

I had a new rear window, but it was dappled with greasy black fingerprints, the car was still full of sharp little cubes of greenish glass, and the front quarter of the passenger side, where Ronnie had swiped the Porsche, looked like it had lost an argument with a train. When I turned the wheel to the right, there was a little tug a few inches into the turn and the axle groaned, and while I was sure it was nothing, I wasn't sure enough to take the freeway. By the time I got to Beverly Glen, I was groaning along with it.

Lots of opportunity for groaning as we did the increasingly expensive zigzags of Beverly Glen, the houses growing more royalist as we neared the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains and then bursting into full Louis XIV territory as we started down into the Brentwood/Beverly Hills side. This was, in fact, the same street Ronnie and I had been parked on when we began our long wrangle, only—good Lord—the previous night.

That realization caused me a moment of paralytic blankness, because I suddenly couldn't remember where I'd put the Slugger's stamp. And that, in turn, told me that I was even more tired than I'd thought, since it only took me a few seconds before I recalled putting it into the concealed document compartment in my backpack, on top of the fake ID cards, after Louie and I finished with the books in the storage unit. Louie actually
liked
books; he was one of the few crooks I knew who took advantage of his plentiful free time to broaden his horizons. He'd now taken three courses on Shakespeare's king plays in four years. “Kings,” he'd once said to me, “are just crooks with better hats.”

But as much as I liked Louie, I didn't trust him far enough to tell him about the stamp. At this stage of my life, I trusted very few people: my daughter, Rina, who would tell me only the standard, predictable teenage lies; my former wife, Kathy, who believed in telling the truth not just when the truth hurt but
especially
when it hurt; and—it suddenly occurred to me—someone who had arguably never told me a single true thing about herself, Ronnie.

But I trusted Ronnie
emotionally
.

Three people, out of more than three hundred million in America alone. And one of them lied to me all the time. Pathetic.

I
deserved
this car.

Jake's driveway was always a surprise when I was heading south, because it appeared suddenly on the left just after a long curve in that direction; the moment the road straightened up, there was the driveway. I didn't have time to signal, and the clown behind me was practically grafted to my license plate, meaning I couldn't hit the brakes, so I simply jammed the accelerator and cut diagonally across the street, directly in front of an oncoming Humvee, which sounded its baritone drill-sergeant horn, a feature of the optional Testosterone Package, and swung to
its
left, into the path of the clown behind me, who leaned on his own horn and almost jumped the curb, and we collectively had ourselves a real LA moment, up among the fabulous stars in Brentwood. Made me feel good all over.

I pulled up to the wrought-iron gates at the bottom of Whelan's steep, curving driveway and pushed the buzzer. Then I counted to thirty and pushed it again.

“Whozis?” a woman said through the speaker. She had the bleary and attenuated sound of someone who'd recently had more than her fair share of enjoyment.

“For Jake,” I said. “Junior Bender.”

“Jus' minit. Howdya make this fucking . . .”

“You're Jake's friend from last night, right?”

“Far as I remember,” she said.

“Look, there's a button on the left that says—”

“‘Open,'”
she said triumphantly. “So come in already. Don't know where Jake is. Kin you make coffee?” Texas announced itself in the “kin.”

I said, “I could make coffee in free fall. See you in a minute.”

The driveway was designed to reveal the house in a series of dramatic medium shots, one gorgeous detail at a time, before you topped the hill and saw the whole thing in wide-screen. Back in Jake's glory days, when he was the most famous movie producer in the world, he'd been given a medal of achievement in France, a big heavy Christmas-tree-ornament thing on a tricolor ribbon.

But the prize that mattered wasn't the one they gave him. The awards ceremony was held in the wine country, wherever that is, and the organization had put Jake up for two nights in a small castle that he always said was thirteenth century but I figured as sixteenth, early seventeenth. The day after the ceremony, Jake bought the castle for cash, and in August, when apparently the entire population of France goes on vacation to make disparaging remarks about other countries, he had it disassembled stone by stone and shipped to Bel Air along with a contingent of French craftsmen who put it back together again and added a few frills and gewgaws of Jake's design before returning to France, where they were immediately drummed out of their various guilds for architectural treason. As Jake said to me when he told me the story, “I feel bad for them, but . . . you know, fuck them.” Which was pretty much Jake's attitude about everything.

The last time I'd seen the house, it had been a drizzly November evening, and it had come across like a timeless tone poem of gleaming wet stone and yellow light shining through mullioned windows. At 2
p.m.
on a workaday Tuesday, the place looked frayed and bleached, like an attraction in a shuttered amusement park. The driveway had gone unswept for so long you'd need to rake it before you picked up the broom, and the wood around the beautiful old windows was dried out and splintering, its once-satiny finish a casualty of the remorseless onslaught of California sunshine.

And another telltale, if one were needed: on my previous visit, I'd been met by a tight little trio of armed muscle, one of whom had been carrying an umbrella to keep me dry and two of whom were there to shoot me to death if I'd revealed bad intentions. Jake was famous in the criminal community for keeping enormous amounts of cash on hand to fund his nasal aerobics and his highly compensated dates; there was a theory that the insulation between the castle's walls was made of stacks of hundred-dollar bills. That made the muscle a necessity.

But the greeting committee this time was a tousled young woman who had somehow smeared her lipstick about two inches up her right cheek and who wore a pair of sunglasses with no left lens, as though to balance the effect of the lipstick. She also wore a T-shirt with a pair of those unsettling staring Tibetan eyes printed precisely over the area you didn't want to stare back at and a pair of extra-brief lavender briefs. She was about an inch taller than I was, which made her six-three.

“That's you, huh?” she said. She was leaning rather heavily on the door.

“It is. Jake up yet?”

“And hi to you, too. Coffeepot's back here.” She turned and went in, at the very last moment doing a sort of backward-karate-kick maneuver with her left leg to swing the door open again. “Come
on
,” she said. Then she wavered and tried to get her foot back under her but instead went down full length on Jake's sixteenth- or possibly seventeenth-century wooden floor. It was a pretty noisy fall, involving many knees and elbows.

“Help you up?”

“You're not big enough to help me up,” she said. “But thanks for the thought.” She rolled over onto her stomach and got up on hands and knees, and I left her to her own devices and went into the kitchen.

Which was a mess. And it wasn't a
fresh
mess either, not your standard aftermath-of-a-debauch mess. From the look of it, it had been messy, and getting messier, for months. All the time I'd known him, Jake had been cared for vigorously by a British housekeeper, short, brisk, stout, and—in her fifties—chronologically safe from Jake's impulses. I'd always thought of her as Mrs. Brisket, although that couldn't possibly have been right, and Mrs. Brisket never would have permitted this kind of . . . well, squalor. As I cleared a space on the counter so I could pull out the coffeemaker's filter basket, I found myself thinking,
Jake is in financial trouble.

The thought had no sooner formed in my mind than I heard it spoken aloud behind me. “You think he's still got any money?”

“I have no idea,” I said. Indoors, she'd pushed the broken sunglasses up into her reddish hair. “You'd know that better than I would.”

“This is a first date,” she said, pronouncing it “dight.” She caught sight of her reflection in the side of a toaster. “Why didn't you
tell
me? I look like John Wayne Gacy.” She went to the sink, grabbed an extravagantly foul-looking dish towel, and started to run water on it.

“Toss that,” I said. “Paper towels, over there, but I'd peel off the three or four outer ones.”

“You're a domestic little thing, aren't you?” she said. “When I was a kid, in Texas? I stepped on a rusty nail in a pile of horse shit.
Barefoot.
Bingo, right there in one deep puncture wound, you had everything that's s'posed to cause tetanus. I never even got a headache. Germs are afraid of me.” She went back to the sink and soaked the towel, then began to rub it in circles on her cheek. “I didn't cry neither.”

Back at the coffeepot, I said, “Other side.”

The towel stopped moving. “You sure?”

“I'm looking right at you.”

She switched sides. “Maybe I had too much fun last night. Is it off?”

“No, it's bigger. But it's paler.”

“I'm Casey,” she said scrubbing some more. She looked at the towel, folded it to get a fresh surface, licked it, and went back to work. “Y'all got a name?”

“Junior,” I said, “and yes, that's my real name.”

“Lot of Juniors in Texas.”

“I'll file that away so I know where to go if I ever get lonely.” I popped open a can of coffee beans from the counter: Sumatra from Trader Joe's, not the $60-per-pound Jamaica Blue Mountain that Jake usually drank, although it always seemed to me that he liked to talk about it more than he liked to drink it. I filled up the grinder and pushed the button, and Casey let out a brief, agonized, unspellable sound of protest and jammed her fingers into her ears, the wet paper towel dangling from her right hand.

“Pain before pleasure,” I said, dumping the grounds into the filter.

“Sometimes during, too,” she said. “As well as after.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“Aaaaahhhh,” she said, slapping the sympathy aside.

I went to the faucet to fill the carafe. “So how did you meet Jake?”

Casey pulled the sunglasses out of her hair, positioned them low on her nose, and regarded me steadily over them, a very effective pantomime for
duhhhhhh
.
“A girl in this day and age has an answering service.”

“Got it.”

“When they said they thought he'd like me, I watched some of his old movies on Netflix. You know, to make chitchat, since all men want to talk 'bout is theyselves. Hell, half the time that's why they call us. They were pretty good movies, but he didn't know shit about Texas.”

“Which one was about Texas?”

“
Pearl and Steel.
”

“Sounds like a pair of mismatched cops.”

“Naw, that was
Riggins and Hitch
.
Pearl and Steel
, that's the handle of a gun. It was s'posed to be a western, but everybody sat around pouting when they needed to be shooting people.”

I dredged up a title. “Which one was
A and Zee
?”

“That was the one about subatomic-particle physics? It all happens inside the Hadron Collider.” She pronounced it “
Hay
dron,” and for all I knew, she was right.

I said, “You made that up.” The coffee began to drip, and we both hung suspended in the fragrance for a moment, like coffee addicts everywhere. “The Hadron Collider was built years after Jake made his last movie.”

“Okay, you got me.
A and Zee
was another buddy movie. See, there's these two Secret Service agents who realize that the First Lady is being blackmailed by a terrorist ring.”

“That sounds more like Jake. You watched all of them?”

“In my business,” she said, “or at least the business in which I currently find myself shipwrecked, he's known as a
whale
. S'posed to be, if he serves a girl a salad, it's got shredded-up hunnerds in it.” She tilted the sunglasses as though to focus through the missing left lens and gave me a long look. “I've got to say, as a professional observation, you seem sort of immune to my state of undress.”

“My mother always said it's not what a lady wears, it's how she wears it. Have you seen any signs of Jake throwing money around?”

“Not so much,” she said. “That's why I asked, all those weeks ago.”

“Might have wasted that creativity,” I said. “The cheerleader routine, I mean.”

“Oh, well,” she said. “I was amusing myself, too. This job is
not
enough to keep the mind alive.” She nodded at the coffeepot. “How 'bout you just sort of shove a cup under that thing?”

“Fine.” I opened the cupboard and found exactly two clean china cups, a beautiful luminescent pearl color and thin enough to see the shadow of my finger through. I swapped the pot for one cup and poured its contents into the other. Casey got it away from me before I even knew she'd crossed the room. Up close she smelled like cigarettes. I said, “Jake still smoking?”

“Like a locomotive. Although cigarettes are the least of his problems. Guy's got a nose he could vacuum a cruise ship with.” She drank half the cup, held it out to me, and said, “Trade?”

“Sure,” I said. “What about you?”