The Fame Thief (20 page)

Nor did I hear the elevator coming back up or footfalls on the stairs. Those two things, I realized later, probably meant only that I was deaf, but I was sufficiently rattled at the time that they reassured me enough to get to my feet, grab a breath of relatively non-poisonous air, and head at a dead run for Pinky’s office.

Edna’s desk was resting on end, leaning against the wall at a seventy-degree angle with its center drawer lolling open like a dog’s tongue. The desk was partially covered in a snowy drift I guessed had erupted from the cushions of the two old leather chairs, now mostly scraps. The hundreds of little white cards on the floor had been sprung from Edna’s Rolodex.

Belatedly, the fire sprinklers awoke to the situation and it began to rain.

Edna was not under the desk, nor was she recognizable in any of the fragments of various substances pasted around the office by the explosion. Wiping water from my face, I opened the door to Pinky’s office, which was closed tight. It opened out, into the reception area, and it had undoubtedly been blown closed in the explosion.

Pinky was in his chair, leaning forward, resting his head on his desk. The door had spared the office most of the force of the blast, but that couldn’t have mattered much to Pinky. The thick, dark pool of blood covering the desk, now being diluted by the water pouring from the sprinklers, made it pretty clear that his throat had been cut.

I’m normally an easy queasy, but the explosion had probably desensitized me, because I knelt beside his chair so I could make
sure that I’d guessed correctly. I had, and whoever did it had been very strong or very angry, or both, because the slash was uselessly, horribly deep. He had been such a weak little man.

There were no boxes of files in the room.

On the way out, barely knowing I was doing it, I grabbed some of the papers from the floor and stuffed them into my pants, then headed for the stairs. I was all the way down to street level, filthy and dripping, and out through the doors and on the way to my car and drawing no more than the usual quota of interested glances, before I heard any sirens. And suddenly there were red lights bouncing off everything, so they’d been closer than I thought. Opening the door of my car, I found myself in the center of a peculiar bell of silence for such a busy boulevard and realized I was virtually deaf.

For the moment, it felt like a blessing.

As luck would have it, when my hearing came back, the radio was playing “Stairway to Heaven.”

I read somewhere that “Stairway to Heaven” has been played more than three million times on the radio, with every million plays representing about 50,000 broadcast hours, or more than 5.8 years of continuous Led Zep. Multiply that by three, and you’ve got a total of 17.4 years of nonstop “Stairway to Heaven.” It just
seems
longer.

I know it’s a minor detail, but I’d be more likely to believe in a God who participates in our daily life if one of His infinite self-assigned tasks was to keep count on the number of times a song has been played, and when that number exceeds reason, to incinerate instantly the disk jockey who’s just put it on. Not only would we be spared another hearing of “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” but there would be a much higher turnover among disk jockeys, and wouldn’t that be nice?

Time to turn the radio off. Time to pull over. Time to stop taking refuge in the world’s irritants and focus on what had just happened.

The person who told me about Pinky Pinkerton had been Doug Trent. Hard to see a reason why Trent would send me to
Pinky and then kill him so he couldn’t talk to me. The only other person who knew I’d even heard the name was Irwin Dressler, for whom I had outlined my day over the phone that morning.

Hmm. Irwin Dressler.

Nope. Same objection: why hire me to answer a question and then kill someone who might give me part of the answer?

Of course, Pinky wasn’t the only intended victim.
I’d
been on someone’s mind, too. Someone had wanted me to come through that door. If I hadn’t thrown that—

Shoe.

Not until that moment, sitting in my car on a residential street in North Hollywood, did I realize I was wearing only one shoe. I’d been so stunned and numb that I hadn’t even noticed it. I’d limped down Hollywood Boulevard, dripping wet and covered in carcinogens, wearing a single shoe. A hundred people must have seen me.

On the other hand, it
was
Hollywood Boulevard.

But that was nit-picking, just a delaying mechanism to postpone the real issue. The issue was not whether anyone had noticed me on Hollywood Boulevard. The issue was almost infinitely more serious than that.

The crook’s first reaction, our most ingrained reflex, is to ask ourselves:
Does this implicate me?
And I’m ashamed to say that I stopped thinking about Pinky Pinkerton and his undoubtedly terrifying and painful death in order to devote full attention to my missing shoe.

It was a cheap shoe, probably made in China, since everything else is. I’d bought it at a shoe outlet in Marina del Rey, a gigantic barn filled with off-brand, anonymous footwear. Unlike some
mode du jour
denizens of Hollywood, I wore socks, although I wasn’t dumb enough to believe that DNA couldn’t push its treacherous little fingerprints through a pair of socks.
One shoe at a murder scene was going to attract a certain amount of attention. Even Deputy Dawg would count the shoes on Pinky’s feet and wonder where the third one came from and whom it belonged to, and most LA Homicide detectives aren’t Deputy Dawg.

My DNA isn’t on file anywhere that I know of, although that can be rectified in ten seconds by a cop with a search warrant and a Q-Tip.

Also, speaking of fingerprints, a shoe undoubtedly will take and hold one.

And, of course, Doug Trent had sent me to Pinky. When this story broke tomorrow, he’d open the paper and reach for the phone.

I was a very good crook. It’s a point of pride with me. In a career that had begun twenty-two years earlier, when at fifteen I broke into the house of the man next door and superglued every single thing he owned in place (I had good reason), I had never been as exposed as I was right now. And this wasn’t some crap burglary. This was
el supremo
, the pinnacle, the pimento in the Big Olive of crime. This was premeditated murder.

Little me.

Breathing whenever I
remembered to, I took Lankershim north until I came to a booming shopping center, one of the ones the recession had somehow missed. The lights in the stores were winking out right on time, at 8:30. There were enough cars rolling through the parking lot that I didn’t feel conspicuous as I eased around the front of the complex and cruised behind it to a Dumpster the size of an ocean liner. As an efficient criminal, I keep track of the trash pickup dates for about a dozen commercial locations, and I knew that this whopper would be emptied tomorrow in the blue light of dawn. I drove aimlessly
past the container, looking for a surveillance camera without seeing one. I pulled around the corner anyway and put on a billed cap, yanking it low over my eyes. Keeping my face down and my shoulders hunched to give myself an oldster walk, I went to the Dumpster, tossed the shoe in, and drove off. My stomach muscles were on
vibrate
, and I could see my fingers on the steering wheel trembling.

As I traveled the ugly, too-familiar streets, an inevitable sequence of events kept running through my head in high definition. Cops find shoe. Story appears in paper. Doug Trent calls cops to say he sent me to Pinky. Edna remembers me. I’m so all over that shoe I might have been licking it for a month.

I’m up to my eyes in trouble.

Rina. Kathy. Ronnie. Rina again. One cheap shoe could end everything. I mean, they’d all recover eventually, but Rina—how could I do that to Rina? Kathy was finished with me, dallying with duck hunters and—Jesus!—realtors, and Ronnie and I were burning bright, but the roots, to mix a metaphor, were still shallow. But
Rina
. Rina’s father fingered as a murderer. The betrayal of trust. The kids in her school.

This could
not
happen.

I drove toward Canoga Park, toward Valentine Shmalentine and Ronnie, trying to figure out what, if anything, I could do to prevent it.

I pulled into
one of the few open parking spaces—the full lot a testimonial to the enduring appeal of adultery—and worked out of my pocket the wet wad of papers I’d snatched off the floor in Edna’s waiting room. The first thing I saw as I separated them was a business card for
EDNA FRAYNE
,
EXECUTIVE ASSOCIATE
, whatever that meant. There was a cluster of phone numbers at the bottom. I was worrying the other sheets apart when my
cell phone rang, instantly tying my innards into a large, uneven knot. I didn’t recognize the number, but I took a deep breath and answered anyway.

“I haven’t heard from you,” a woman said.

“Who is—oh, Debbie. No. No, you haven’t.” This was just exactly what I needed.

“Is there a reason you’d like to share with me?”

“Well, I doubt you’ve got time.”

“Come on, Junior. I work when I work, I make a lot of money, and in between I have nothing but time. Tell Debbie about it. So she doesn’t think you’re just blowing her off.”

“Fine, fine.” I tried to think of something persuasive and failed to find anything more persuasive than the truth. “Okay, here goes. Through no fault of mine, which is to say I haven’t done anything wrong—”

“Please.”

“Well, I haven’t done anything
new
. Anyway, I think I’m just a few hours away from a first-degree murder charge.”

She whistled, which is something few women do. “I can see where that might get your attention.”

“I’m coming to realize that I lack the skills to survive being suspected of murder.”

Headlights in my rear-view mirror drew my attention. The car, a distinctively clunky silhouette, glided past me and pulled into a spot four or five away.

“If it’s any comfort,” she said, “most of the people who develop those skills don’t get to practice them very long. You really didn’t do it?”

I said, “Of course not,” hearing the hurt feelings in my tone. I’d shot and killed one person some time ago, but that was letting him off easy, all things considered, and it had never cost me a moment’s sleep.

“Well, listen,” Debbie said. “Don’t take this wrong. I wouldn’t make this offer for just anybody, but is there someone I can take out for you? As a freebie? Someone the cops need to make the case?”

The door to my car opened, and Ronnie leaned in and smiled at me, widened her eyes at my disheveled state, and then got in, sitting as far away as the seat would let her.

“That’s really sweet of you,” I said, genuinely touched. “No one has ever offered to do that for me.”

Ronnie raised her eyebrows and leaned toward me just enough to hear the other end of the conversation.

“Like I said, don’t take it wrong,” Debbie said. “It’s not a pass or anything. I really liked Ronnie, although I think she’s too pretty for you.”

“She is,” Ronnie said.

“She’s there?” The temperature on the other end of the line dropped about twenty degrees. “She heard my offer?”

“No.” I raised my index finger to my lips and gave Ronnie the big scary eye. She did not look terrified, although she did pinch her nose closed and wave air at me. “I’m in my car, and she just got in a second ago.”

“Well, if you want to discuss this, call me back when you’re alone.”

“No, I mean, listen, this is a very generous offer, but I couldn’t possibly take you up on it. I mean, how in the world would I repay it?”

“Don’t worry. Just think about it. How about this? Would you feel safer if I sort of hung around for a little bit? Invisibly?”

“Actually—and don’t take offense at this—until the moment you said that, I couldn’t think of anything that might make me more nervous than I already am, but you’ve managed to do it.”

“Up to you. Well, the offer stands. And don’t tell Ronnie about it.”

“Of course not,” I said, ringing off. I checked to make sure the phone was dead and said, “Debbie just offered to kill somebody for me. For free.”

Ronnie’s eyebrows went up. “Anybody at all?”

“Why? You got someone in mind?”

“Lot of people. But she didn’t make the offer to me, did she? And that brings me to the obvious question. Why did she make it to you? And who dragged you through a pile of burning tires?”

So I told her.

One of the
things I’m coming to love—yes, I suppose that’s the word—about Veronica Bigelow is that her first reaction to practically every problem is, “What can we do about it?” And her second reaction is to start proposing solutions. Add those traits and her unshakeable nerves to a not-unprepossessing physical appearance, culminating in a sort of genetic dessert topping—the finest, brightest, goldest hair I’ve ever seen—and you’ve got someone it’s easy to look at for long periods of time without the need to rest your eyes. Add the steel under the skin, and she’s precisely the kind of woman I thought would never put up with me.