The Fame Thief (26 page)

A tiny pool, in bad need of some chlorine, reflected the gray sky behind a chainlink fence. The back door was locked, too, but it might as well have been standing open for all the resistance the lock put up. Given that there actually are good locks in
the world, it never ceases to amaze me that so many people use hardware no more secure than the lock on a teenage girl’s diary. I could have picked it with a fingernail, and there wasn’t even a chain on the inside.

The door opened into a little utility area, industrial-gray linoleum beneath the washer, the dryer, and the hot-water heater. All were spotless. The whole room smelled of ammonia. Edna apparently used a lot of Windex.

Normally, the smell would have made me pause, wondering whether someone had been thinking about fingerprints. But it just didn’t feel that way. I opened the door to what I supposed was the kitchen, since builders tend to keep the plumbing close together, and it was indeed the kitchen. A few drawers were open, but the search, if there had been one, had been polite. I stood just inside the room, looking at the autographed photos from the Big Band era on one wall, mostly white female vocalists who’d sung their way out of Idaho and Tennessee and South Dakota in the days of radio, the days when it didn’t really matter what the singers looked like. And many of them didn’t look like much, which I found sort of reassuring. From the perspective of a time when most stars have been buffed and sanded and capped and snipped and Photoshopped, it was a kind of relief to look at these real faces with their too-big chins and crooked noses and unfixed teeth and tight, beauty-shop hairdos.

I knew there was nobody in the house. This is a topic on which I am an expert. Nevertheless, I stood there studying the Bettys and LaVernes and Margarets for a couple of minutes, and then I went through the place.

I had to wonder about Edna. I’d assumed that she and Pinky were longtime partners, probably everything all proper and above-board, but neither of them keeping any big secrets from the other. And yet here I was, just a few miles from the office where
Pinky had been killed, looking at a house that had been abandoned in a very orderly, and—from what I could see—unhurried manner. The contents of the bedroom closet had been reduced by about half, judging from the gaps in the hanging clothes; many of the drawers were open and empty; and the neatly made bed still showed rectangular indentations where two suitcases had gradually gained weight. To cinch the notion of an unforced departure, the medicine cabinet in the bathroom was mostly empty, the toothbrush was gone, and there was a plastic laundry basket placed neatly beneath the mail slot in the front door. No unsightly spill of mail for our Edna.

So while Pinky was being tormented, while he was phoning me, while he was trying desperately to believe that the knife was just a threat, that it wasn’t
really
going to be drawn across his throat, Edna had been at home, packing. The only way I could see it was that she’d made the call, waited until the errand boys, and maybe whoever sent the errand boys, arrived, and then drove calmly home and got ready for her trip. And then …?
Edna fugit
.

And don’t forget: before she’d finished dialing, she’d gone to the door to make sure I wasn’t listening.

It all seemed pretty cold to me. But consistent. Whatever was behind all this, whoever had been behind it for decades, had a rich, inexhaustible vein of coldness.

I went back into the utility room. At about light-switch level beside the door was a rectangular button, clear plastic with a little orange light in it to make it easy to find in the dark. I pushed it and watched through the window in the upper half of the door as the garage door rose. Sitting there, neatly centered, was a dark Infiniti sedan, a couple of years old. So someone had picked Edna up. Without much hope of finding anything, I went out the door, popping the latch so it couldn’t swing closed
behind me, and skirted the chainlink fence and the stagnating pool to the garage.

The car and the garage were as clean as the house. Storage boxes, all labeled in an even, slanting handwriting, rose in careful vertical stacks on either side. I took one labeled
Linens
and opened it to find linens. Rattled one labeled
China
and heard what sounded like china.

I took the one that said
Photos
and put it in my trunk. Then I went back inside, moved the laundry basket to the rear of the hall so Edna’s mail would be scattered all over the place, and went back out through the utility room, closing the garage door as I went.

I’d just finished
booking a plane to Vegas under one of the aliases I kept stored at the Wedgwood when the phone rang. It was still in my hand.

“Dick’s found a house Mom likes,” Rina announced. “She’s taking me there this afternoon, and she says she might make an offer.”

I had pulled over, most of the way down to Hollywood Boulevard, to make the reservation, and I was still idling there. “Hang on a minute while I get a pencil,” I said as two black-and-whites went past me, heading uphill, probably to Edna’s. A long moment later, they were followed by a black unmarked car that had probably missed the light.

I grabbed a pen off the sunshade and flipped over one of the papers from Pinky’s office, now dry and stiff. “Did you get the address, like I told you?”

“Of course, I did,” Rina said. “I got the address like, or rather, as, you told me. Are you ready?”

When I was finished writing, I said, “Go with her. Don’t be too negative, there’s no point in getting her upset with you. Just nod and be polite.”

“What if I love it?”

“Keep it to yourself.”

“I’m just pulling your chain,” she said. “I’m not going to love it. I want to stay here.” She hung up.

I called Louis the Lost as yet another unmarked car went by. Gonna be a cop party at Edna’s.

“I got you Handkerchief Harrison,” he said. “And he’s paired up with a girl, looks like, who was that girl singer from the fifties, made all those movies with what’s-his-name?”

I took a wild stab. “Doris Day.”

“Yeah, her. Looks just like her. Handkerchief’s gonna want some money.”

“And I’m going to give him some. Where can we meet up?”

“Time is it?”

I had no idea what time it was, which meant I was even more tired than I felt. I can usually guess the time within three or four minutes. It was almost too much work to look at my watch. “Nine forty. Where’s Handkerchief coming from?”

“You think he’d tell me?”

“Right, sorry. Okay, noon at Stanley’s on Ventura, near Woodman. I’ll buy you lunch, you and Handkerchief, but not the girl. I don’t want the girl to see me. And I’m going to need a few more couples, so you might keep looking.”

“No need. I got enough couples to cast
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.” Louie was one of the few crooks who made good use of the free time crooks have so much of. For the past two years he’d been taking adult classes on Shakespeare.

“Keep them in reserve.”

“Believe me, they got nowhere to go. Times are hard. You know a country’s in trouble when the crooks are unemployed.”

Stinky Tetweiler was
the San Fernando Valley’s premier fence and had been for more than a decade. He could tell fake from real across an impressively broad spectrum—paintings, jewelry, furniture, fine silver, antiques of practically any kind. But all that taste and even refinement didn’t mean he wouldn’t back a truck over you, literally or metaphorically, if he felt like you needed tire treads on your chest.

I rang the bell of his Cubist fantasy of a house, high above the Boulevard, and was ushered in, to my surprise, by the same Filipino boy who’d opened the door for me several months earlier. Stinky was known on both sides of the Pacific for funding tours by Philippine dance troupes, almost all of which went home one dancer short. I’d just seen ads for a troupe performing down at the Shrine, which was Stinky’s venue of choice, so I figured he was doing another trade-in.

But nope. I got the same smile and the same assurance that Stinky would be delighted to see me, which was almost certainly not the case in any emotional sense. Stinky and I regarded each other warily across the great capitalist divide, each secretly believing he was somehow being cheated by the other. But as is always the case with those on opposite side of the great capitalist divide, we needed each other.

“Junior,” Stinky said, whittling a bit off the warmth of the welcome by not getting up. He was sitting at a new/old piece of furniture, a high, two-sided partner’s desk that I automatically classified as mahogany, Hong Kong or Southeast Asia, roughly 1880.

“Ting Ting’s got staying power,” I said after my guide had shimmered noiselessly out of the room. “I figured you’d have him all set up in a flower shop by now.”

“Ting Ting is different,” Stinky said, and for a heart-clutching moment I was afraid he was going to bare his soul to me, but
I should have known better. “Marvelous conversationalist, just ripping.” He was continuing to cling to an English accent he’d picked up on a decades-old visit to old Blighty followed by years of eating more than his share of scones. “What have we here?” He was looking at the thing under my arm.

“We have money,” I said. I pulled up a chair, uninvited, to the other side of the partner’s desk, sat, and opened Dolores La Marr’s big hollow book. “I’m here as a buyer, not a seller.”

“Pity,” Stinky said. And he meant it. As much as Stinky loved money, what he loved most was the first sight of something he really, really wanted. Born into the family fortune generated by the invention of the perfume strip, he’d taken up a life of crime because it eased his access to beautiful things. He regarded the money I revealed when I opened the book with the air of someone who already had lots of it, probably newer and more neatly folded than what I had to offer.

“Be nice to me,” I said, “and I’ll show you something so sweet the memory of it will warm your feet all winter.”

Stinky Tetweiler had been given at birth the small features you sometimes see in drawings of aliens, and he’d had various doctors sawing away at them pretty much ever since, until the front of his head was as smooth as someone wearing a stocking mask. He touched his microscopic nose whenever something interested him strongly, a tic of which he was blissfully unaware. He touched it now, just brushed at the side of it as though he suspected there might be a grain of soot there, sniffed, and said, “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

“Four IDs,” I said. “With financial weight behind them.”

“Astronomical,” Stinky said promptly. “Much more than you have in your cunning little box.”

“Not so fast. First, the financials don’t have to stand up to forensics. They just need to look solid to the basic credit check.”

Stinky didn’t look impressed. “And second?”

“Second, not a penny will be transferred out of the marks’ accounts. These are for show only, and I’ll return them to you in short order, still all shiny and ready to sell.”

“Even if I believed that—and, since we’re old friends, let’s pretend I do—time is quite literally money in this case. Every single hour from the moment an identity is lifted there’s a greater chance that it’ll be detected and reported and everything will be closed down.”

“Yes, Stinky, and thank you for reminding me of that. If you’d also like to remind me that ice melts, or that tomorrow is another day, I’d be glad to sit here, looking interested, until you’re finished.”

“Touchy, touchy.”

“The loan, not the purchase, of four IDs, each to be used only for two days, returned as promptly as possible, without a nickel nicked.”

“This is for a game,” Stinky said with an exaggerated air of discovery.

“It is.”

He looked at me the way he might have looked at an automobile mechanic who had just revealed a passion to perform Chopin. “Stick to stealing,” he said. “You’re good at that. Games require strategic thinking.”

“Gee,” I said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of the two
anabori netsuke
, this one in the form of a partially-open clam shell. Painstakingly carved inside the shell were a miniature Japanese hut and the juniper tree that shaded it, with a stocky little peasant sitting on the ground in front of it, carving a tiny
netsuke
that was shaped like a partially-open clam shell. I spread my hand flat with the piece dead-center on it.

Stinky went after his nose as though it were trying to escape.
“Modestly interesting,” he said, sounding like someone swallowing a sock. He reached across the desk. “May I?”

“You may not.” I closed my hand over it. “You may not see the really good one, either.”

One aggrieved blink. “You brought them here for a reason. You didn’t just pull on those awful jeans this morning without being aware you had a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of old ivory—”

“You think so?” I opened my hand and looked at it again. “Wowzer, I figured—”

Stinky was blushing for the first time in my memory. He’d made a duffer’s mistake. “You said you had another,” he said, just barely not stammering. “I meant both of them, of course, assuming the other one is much,
much
better than that old thing.”

“I do believe it is. Four IDs, just for a few days, no actual money spent. Thirty thousand.”

“Ho,” Stinky said. “Ho, ho. Sixty, and the ivory.”

“Three IDs for thirty-five and one piece of ivory. I hold the other one in reserve. If any money is spent out of the marks’ accounts, you’ll get it. Otherwise, it’s part of my trousseau.”

“Open your hand.”

I did, and Stinky looked at the
netsuke
so hard my palm heated up.

“The other one,” he said.

“I’ll show you the signature,” I said.

Stinky rubbed his nose. Dressler had been right; most Japanese carvers released their work into the world unsigned. But that made a signed piece by a master craftsmen even more valuable. While Stinky was busy with his nose, I pulled out the other carving, holding it below the edge of the desk, and turned it in my hand until only the signature showed. I held it up.

He swallowed. “Is it damaged?”