The Fame Thief (24 page)

“Please,” I said. “Take things at your own pace.”

“You know I was married.”

“I’d heard something about it.”

“Blanche Millyard.” He was blinking again “Blanche.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

“She was—not, not … one of us.” He ran his tongue over his upper lip a couple of times, fast. “Upper crust, rich, went to good schools. Pasadena rich,
old
rich for LA. Thought the world was polite. What was I? A
schmendrick
off the streets, had holes in his shoes when he was a kid. I mean, yeah, I was smart, but I was street-smart. Didn’t have grammar, didn’t have polish. Didn’t know how to dress, what to say once I got past ‘Hello.’ ” He squeezed his eyes shut and let them pop open again. “That’s enough of me, right? But I was
faster
than anybody she ever knew, I thought faster, I moved faster. People like the Millyards, they looked at a situation and they saw two, maybe three ways to handle it. I looked at the same thing and saw ten. Of course, some of them involved fucking people up.”

“I married one, too,” I said. “Not
that
kind of upper crust, but too upper for me.”

“We’re mutts, you and me. I know, I know, mutts, that’s garbage, that idea. I mean, whadda
they
got? Money they didn’t make. Houses they didn’t build. But they got a
shine
, you know what I mean? They’ve read things, they’ve been places. Okay, their world is only about an inch thick, like frosting on a cake, and they think it goes all the way down. But we know, you and I, that down underneath the frosting there’s yeast working to keep things up and weevils working to bring it down. But these people, they haven’t heard the news, and the way they live, it’s like the weevils aren’t there, it’s like everybody reads books and has clean fingernails and everybody’s grandparents knew each other. They say
Bring the car around
, and somebody brings the car around. And they bring it around the right way and it’s the right car, the right color, and polished like a star. And it takes them to the right places, the brightest places, and they think that’s the world, and they think it was built just for them.”

I said, “Makes them prime marks.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Dressler said. “Not for this story, it doesn’t. The way it worked, I was me and she was her, and she looked at me and wanted me, and there was no way I could say no. So I said yes, and guess what? Disaster, that’s what. We ran away, we closed the door on her parents and her friends, and it was awful. For one thing, we didn’t have these guys.” He poked the copulating couple with his index finger. “Disaster. I’d been with girls, dozens of girls, and you know what kind of girls they were. Roll them over, jump on, kiss them on the cheek when you’re done, and leave a couple hundred on the dresser. You want to do something they don’t want to do, that’s just the first move in a negotiation. But
Blanche
, nobody had told Blanche about any of it, and Blanche really hated it. Hated all of it. Thought it was undignified, thought it was ugly. Thought
I
was ugly. Thought it hurt, hell, it probably did hurt, the way she felt about it. In
six months, that part of our life was over, not that it ever really got started. And there wasn’t much left after that. She tried to go home, they closed the door on her. And she started to go—” He looked up at me as though he were startled to see me there, as though he’d thought he was alone. “She started to go crazy.”

I needed to say something matter-of-fact. “When was this?”

“Nineteen forty-five. We got married on August 7, 1945. It was over, everything that mattered, by May of ’46. She was alone in the world. The people she’d left, family and friends, they wouldn’t even look at her. She hated me, she hated everyone I knew, and she had nowhere to go. So she went … away. I thought then that she went into the past because she couldn’t stand the present, but later I found out it ran in the family, there was one every generation or two. By 1949, she was in the home, talking to her dead sister.”

“And that’s when you met—”

“Through—well, no matter who it was through. He’s dead for years. It was her face first, I couldn’t believe Dolly’s face. But, come on, a face is just a face. It was who she was, Junior.”

“Who was she?”

“A little half-Jewish girl with a crazy
shiksa
mother, that’s who. A mother who hauled her across the country to whore her out to the studio bosses. So she—
Mom
, I mean—could feel like a star. And Wanda, sorry, Dolly, was just as cut off from everything as Blanche was. Her father wouldn’t speak to her, tried to get her mother arrested on the Mann Act, treated his daughter like a street whore. People in Scranton thought she was a freak; she’d been in the
movies
. But she had the steel. So many people, they look tough, they talk tough, but they haven’t got the steel. Dolly, she looked like an angel who took a tumble and wound up here by accident, but she had it. She played the game, she caught the eyes she needed to catch, she made it work, fair and
square. I got her into Lew’s studio although any of them would have taken her at that point, because he was a gentleman, he’d leave her alone and make everyone else lay off, too. And she was going to be a star. All on her own, she was going to be a star.”

“What about the gangsters? What about George Raft?”

“Raft was a good guy, dumb but a good guy. He had honor. The gangsters, they were like a thrill ride. They didn’t mean anything, not until that last night, when they meant everything. She wasn’t doing anything with any of them, except George once in a while.”

“And that was okay with you?”

For five very long seconds, I didn’t know whether he’d answer me or shoot me. “We weren’t—we weren’t like that. Tell you the truth, and I hope I don’t regret saying this, we tried. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get past Blanche. I’d given Blanche my promise, and she was paying for it with her life. If I didn’t keep my word, the world I live in, I’d have been dead years ago. So I kept my promise. To Blanche.”

I sat back in the chair. It creaked loudly, and Dressler said, “Careful, that’s an antique,” and then he said, “Ahhh, break the fucking thing. Give it a kick for me, too.” He picked up the two ivory carvings and his drink, and then he sat all the way back on the couch, brought up both legs, and slammed them down on the cracked coffee table, which split in two and caved in toward the center as I grabbed the bottle of whiskey and jumped out of my chair.

“That’s better,” he said, and without even grabbing a breath, he was shouting. “
No
, it wasn’t okay with me. What are you, crazy? I loved her, but to her I was a friend. Special, yeah, a special friend, but a friend as far as she was concerned and me, she was the only person in the world I ever loved. No, it wasn’t okay with me, none of it was okay with me.” He got up, a carved
piece of ivory in each of his dangling hands. “
Why now?
you ask. Because Blanche died eight days ago, because I felt like I could finally do something for Dolly, because it wouldn’t matter if the whole fucking world found out, that’s why. And now that you know all that,” he said, leaning toward me as though he was going to take a bite out of the center of my chest, “how are you going to catch this cocksucker?”

“Where’d you get this stuff?”

We were in the breakfast nook, sitting at a more solid table, and Dressler was paging through the loose-leaf notebook Rina had put together. He’d stopped flipping and started reading when he hit the transcript of La Marr’s testimony.

“My daughter,” I said. “She found it on the Internet. She’s tracking the rest of it down now.”

“Internet,” he said. “One more thing I haven’t kept up with. Am I in there?”

“In the Internet?”

“Yeah, yeah. Am I?”

“In highly edited form.”

He flicked the open page with his forefinger. “These people the committee schmucks asked her about, Roselli and them, they’re dead.”

“Well, somebody isn’t. The way Pinky acted proves that.”

“The secretary, his secretary. She’ll know who he called.”

“I’m going to try to find her tomorrow.” The thought of Edna reminded me of my shoe, and all my
let’s get going
energy took a nose dive.

“Still,” Dressler said, “I’m pretty sure everybody’s dead, the
guys in the outfit. Forget about me, most gangsters don’t live so long. It’s not like we’re orchestra conductors.”

“The girls,” I said, tapping the transcript pages. “Do you recognize any of the names?”

He shook his head. “Girls,” he said, “I didn’t really know many girls. Not my vice.” He bent closer to the page. “But this one, this Ella Cowan, she was a showgirl. If she stayed in Vegas and she’s still around, I can probably find her. I’ve still got weight in Vegas, and old showgirls, they’re like a club.”

“Can you help me with Abe Frank?”

“Jesus, he still alive? That was one of the nice things about Vegas, owning the editor of the town paper. Sure, I can fix that up. But why?”

“He’s one of the people Dolly named. Doug Trent, whom I talked to; Pinky; the screenwriter, Oriole something; Olivia DuPont—”

“Oy,” Dressler said. “Olivia DuPont. A name I’m glad not to have heard lately.”

“Seems to be the consensus. And Melly Crain, the gossip columnist.”

“Forget Melly. She’s gaga. Been at the Motion Picture Home, trying to learn the alphabet all over again, for years. Anyway, what’s she going to know?”

“Who gave her the story.”

“Maybe, maybe. But she ran it late, if I remember right. Picked it up from the Vegas paper, like everybody else. So good idea, talking to Abe Frank. But the secretary, she sounds best to me.”

“Me, too. I just have to find her.” I went for the last of my whiskey. “I want Babe or Tuffy or someone like that. Three or four of them.”

“For what?”

“I need someone to watch the people I talk to. Before, during, after. I’m not interested in being responsible for any more deaths.”

“You weren’t responsible for anything. That little PR guy, he did something dirty, he knew who brought Dolly down because he was in on it. And he called whoever that was to rat you out, and he got himself killed.”

“Humor me.”

“Okay, you’re humored.”

“You know,” I said. “The cops are going to be all over this. A case that gets the kind of publicity this will get, especially when they connect Dolores La Marr, the murdered security guard, and Pinky—well, they’re going to work it hard.”

“And?”

“And they’ll find the person who did it.”

He nodded. “And?”

“Just seems worth mentioning.”

“The person who did it,” he said, sounding patient. “When they find the person who killed her, he’ll already be dead. And they won’t find the person who
really
did it, the person who killed Dolly twice.”

I put my face in my hands and closed my eyes. I was slowing down. Of course, he’d be dead.

“So,” Dressler said. “More questions?”

“One. Who knew where La Marr lived?”

“No idea,” he said. “When she moved, she kept it quiet. A couple friends, her awful mother. But she’s been living there a long time. No telling when they found out she was there.”

“It was a while ago,” I said. “Before you hired me. Whoever killed her hid a stockpile of sleeping pills in the apartment, behind a box of cereal too low on the shelf for her to bother with it.”

“You mean, they went in and out? To put pills there? Kind of sense does that make?”

“She was drinking pretty heavily, so getting in and out wouldn’t be so tough, especially if they were getting up by paying the guard they killed. I think they’ve been planning to kill her for a little while, but they were going to make it look like suicide.”

Dressler was shaking his head as though I were speaking a foreign language that he was translating as I went along, and the translation had gone wrong. “Wait, wait, how would you know about the pills?”

“I found them, by accident, when I was getting her a bottle of wine.”

“How do you know they weren’t hers? Why would the killer put them there?”

“I know they weren’t hers because whoever killed her saw that most of them were missing from the pantry and threw a fit, stamping all over the ones that were left.”

“Missing?”

“I took most of them. I was afraid she was stockpiling them for—well, you know why.”

He was looking at me oddly. “You took some.”

“Most of them, actually.”

“Stole them.”

“So she couldn’t—”

“Well, sure.” His gaze was a little embarrassing. “You’re a mensch,” he said. He put a wrinkled hand on top of mine and gave me a pat. “But why go through that
mishegas
? Why not just bring them when he needed them?”

“She had people who came in and cleaned once in a while,” I said. “I think the idea was that the cleaners would see them, and after—after she was dead—they’d testify to that, and it would look more like.…”

“Yeah, yeah, but it still doesn’t make sense. How do you make somebody take a few hundred—”

“There was a broken glass on the kitchen floor, in the middle of a pool of water. I think he ran water into the glass and then went to get the pills so he could dissolve them, maybe grind them up first. My guess is he was going to inject it into her.”