The Fame Thief (31 page)

I said, “And then the bookmarks started coming in. What, like ten thirty, eleven?”

“The—oh, yeah, the bookmarks. Stompanato was one of them. Damn, he was a good-looking kid. Three others, in and out. The big guys would melt away and the bookmarks would come in, then the big guys would come back and the bookmarks would disappear, except that as it got later the bookmarks outnumbered the big guys.”

“Who was the last big guy to leave?”

The look she gave me over the cigarette was profoundly unfriendly. “Why does that matter?”

“You know why it matters. Last one out, he’s the one who gave the cops the high sign.”

She sat back on the couch. Then she turned her head and looked at the drapes over the big glass door at the end of the room. She still had a classically beautiful profile. “I don’t remember.”

“You went to jail that night. You remember.”

“Jail,” she said. “Couple of hours, laughing with the cops.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll tell you who it was, and if I’m right, you nod.”

Her lower lip came out and retreated again, and she shrugged. I said a name, the only one I thought was possible. The only one without an expiration date, far as I could tell.

She nodded.

Since I had hours before my plane and I was in Vegas anyway, I swung past the address of one of the women whose names Debbie Halstead had given me and knocked on the door. The harassed-looking woman who answered was probably Debbie’s age, maybe thirty-seven or thirty-eight, and the baby squalling in her arms was, she said, ten months old. The house was little and dingy and kind of sad, with that prematurely abandoned look a place acquires when the people who live there don’t like it; and the woman, whose name was Petey Ryan—short for Petunia, can you imagine being named Petunia?—was a remarkably unskillful liar. She said the things she’d been told to say and got caught up in
ums
and
uhs
when I asked her a question that took her off the script. What she had to say was, yes, Debbie was an old friend, and yes, Debbie had a daughter. The daughter’s name? Uhhh, Tiffany, and her father had taken, uhhh, Tiffany with him when he left Debbie and had
poisoned her mind
against her mother ever since, and wasn’t that terrible?

I agreed it was terrible and asked when she had last seen Crystal. When she was ten months old, Petey said, without correcting the name. And when had she seen Debbie last? Eight,
nine years ago. And how many years had it been since Debbie’s husband sneaked off with the kid?

“Oh, boy,” Petey said. She kept her eyes on me but started making little numbers on the tabletop with the tip of her index finger, and I got up and thanked her for her time, and as she followed me to the door, she said, “Wait, I haven’t told you all of it.”

“It’s okay,” I called back over my shoulder. “I can fill it in.”

I got an
earlier plane and thought all the way back to LA, even turning down the generous offer of a bag of peanuts and some water. Debbie’s mysterious daughter, Crystal or Tiffany, was as fictitious as Ella Cowan’s youthful face, so what had Debbie wanted with me in the first place? Something to stew about.

In the Vegas airport, I’d used my iPhone to download an email from Rina, answering a few questions I’d asked her the night before, and then I’d used the incredibly awkward browser for a little follow-up. The two senators, Durkee and Wheeler, who’d led the questioning of Dolores La Marr, had come from Illinois and California, respectively, which made sense. Dressler’s gang was based in Chicago, and Los Angeles was where the movie industry and its unions were. Just to tie the knot a bit more tightly, Senator Wheeler, the Californian, had spent fourteen months in some soft-hands Federal prison for campaign fund irregularities, which consisted of whopping under-the-table donations from a couple of Hollywood unions. Rina also sent me some background on the little kerfuffle among several of the unions in 1952 that had resulted in Dressler’s law firm being fired as their counsel of record and another firm being appointed to replace him, although a little less than three years later, Dressler was back in charge. Just your basic back-and-forth.

As Rina said, unions were dull.

Until you think about how much money flows through them.
About how much money is in their pension and health funds. Then unions become very interesting.

I thought I more or less knew what had happened to Dolores La Marr all those years ago, and why. I also more or less knew why she, Pinky Pinkerton and Doug Trent had been killed, and why. I knew, I was
almost
certain, what had happened to Edna. And poor Pyongyang had just gotten in the way.

If I was right about Dolores La Marr, she’d been even sadder than I’d believed. She’d had to live not only with obscurity and solitude and the loss of her beauty and the perpetual taunt of what might have been, but also with the weight of her betrayal. The regret for the person who, in the end, she hadn’t been. For all I knew, I thought as I got off the plane in LA, toting my one carry-on, she might have welcomed the end, even through the terror of the moment.

The pity I felt for her had an almost physical weight to it, and it distracted me, interfered with my radar in the LAX parking structure. I’d popped the trunk to toss my carry-on into it before I heard the scuff of a shoe on the concrete behind me.

He was three feet away, all jitters and all nose, a beak that dominated a narrow, olive-skinned face, and he couldn’t have weighed more than 140 pounds even though he was as tall as I was. The dark blue shirt bloused out all around him, coming almost to a point where it was tucked into a waist maybe twenty-six inches around. The other thing I noticed about the shirt was that the right sleeve was rolled up, all the way above the elbow, to keep it out of the way of the knife.

He made a rough little sound in his throat, a kind of chortle, probably in appreciation of our relative positions. There he was with a heavy, bone-handled hunting knife in his right hand, its cutting edge honed to a fine and shining line of silver, and his body poised to bring it around in a downward diagonal
arc, edge out, that would flay me from throat to navel. And there I was, the doofus of the century, flat-footed, one hand holding up the trunk’s lid and the other toting a soft, useless little cloth suitcase.

The noise he made brought the smell of his breath to me, a heavy, queasy mix of rotted meat and speed, and it got to me in a way nothing else had, and I whipped the hand—my left—with the bag in it toward him, and as he gracefully stepped away from it, I brought it back again and lifted it high, as though to try to hit him over the head with it, presenting the picture of failure, my chest and stomach open to him. As he stepped in, I brought my right hand straight up, holding the thin little knife from the trunk lining, and he swung his knife-arm down and onto its upraised point.

My knife slipped between his radius and ulna and jammed, trapped between the bones, and I yanked it toward me, keeping it upright. It hauled him forward, all awkward, angular motion, sharp knees and elbows in all directions, screaming in some language I didn’t speak, and as he banged into the back of my car I dropped the suitcase and brought the trunk down with my left hand, cracking his head so hard the trunk bounced back up out of my hand. But by then his knees weren’t working, and he went down, clipping the bottom of his chin on my bumper and then again when he hit the concrete. When I rolled him over to yank my knife free, he was bleeding freely from the mouth, so he’d done some serious damage to his tongue.

I kicked his head, hearing a snap that said nothing good about the state of his neck, and then backed away, fighting for breath and scanning the structure for witnesses.

And there he was again, standing five feet away from me, knife in hand, sleeve rolled up, as though nothing had happened to him. It took me a second to process it, but when I looked
down, the first one was right where I’d left him and obviously not going anywhere. I thought,
Heckle and Jeckle?
and turned back to the standing one. His eyes were pinwheels of speed and rage and maybe grief, and the scream he emitted was high enough to break me out in goose bumps all over, and I knew I wasn’t going to get lucky with the knife again, so I reached into the recesses of the trunk and brought out the Glock I’d taken out of storage before going to Vegas and shot him with it.

The impact knocked him back a few feet, into another parked car. The car began to emit a
whoop-whoop-whoop
alarm and then an authoritative electronic voice said, “Stand away from the vehicle,” and both of us looked around, startled, and the
whoop-whoop
started up again and then the electronic voice, and as I sighted the Glock at him, he turned and ran, bending over with both hands pressed to his right side.

The one on the concrete, the dead one, was pitifully light, but even 140 pounds of dead weight is still dead weight, and it took me maybe half a sweaty, cursing minute to hoist him into the trunk and get his arms and legs folded tightly up, like a swatted spider, and even so when I slammed the trunk down, it bounced back up and I had to take out the suitcase before I could get the trunk’s lock to engage. I drove out of the structure slowly and deliberately, forcing myself to breathe deeply and evenly, searching everywhere for the second twin or a witness to what had happened, trying to look like someone who’d come off a boring flight, barely awake, nobody worth remembering, and thinking I was succeeding until, when I tried to pay the guy at the exit gate, I dropped change all over the street.

“Twins,” I said
to Dressler. It was almost an hour later, and I still hadn’t caught my breath.

“I’ve heard of them,” he said, rocking back and forth on the
couch a little. “Syrian or something. Supposed to be completely nuts.” He was looking tired and even a little thinner but a lot more like himself than the last time I’d seen him. And there was that pent-up energy rocking him back and forth and the
something
in his eyes, a little spark like the one in a magician’s eyes just before he makes the rabbit pop out of the hat.

But I had my own rabbit, and getting to it was probably going to be difficult. I put my laptop on the table, watching my hands tremble, and Dressler said to the room, “He’s going to check his email?”

The front door opened, and Tuffy, who’d beaten me back from Vegas, came back in. He’d already assured me that both Ella Cowan and Abe Frank were still under watch and that nothing had gone wrong. “Got him,” Tuffy said. He tossed me my keys, and I caught them. “He’s a skinny one.”

“Crack,” I said. I could hear my voice shaking. “The diet
du jour
.”

“I’ll get rid of him a little later.”

“Just out of curiosity,” I said, “how do you do that? Not that I—”

“You’re right,” Dressler said. “You don’t.”

I went back to the laptop. “That’s what I was saying.”

“So that’s good, Tuffy,” Dressler said. “You take care of that later. Ask Babe to make something for us to eat. You hungry, Junior?”

“I didn’t eat the peanuts,” I said. I was trapped in Windows Eternity, waiting for my laptop to load, with my knee bobbing up and down two times per second, and I wasn’t paying much attention. When I heard the silence, I looked up to find him regarding me as though I’d just spoken the language of flowers or something. “On the plane,” I clarified. “I didn’t eat the peanuts on the plane.”

“So,” he said with what was supposed to be a patient nod, “you’re hungry.”

“I am?”

“You heard him, Tuffy. Just something easy, sandwiches or something.”

I said, “Sandwiches would be—”

“When he finishes with his email, he’ll eat a little,” Dressler said.

“It’s not my email,” I said. “I want to show you something.” I yawned, the nervous kind of yawn. “Sorry. Bad night, bad flight, no peanuts. Killed a man. Takes it out of you.”

He didn’t even blink. “This is the second body I’m getting rid of for you.”

It seemed important to set him straight. “But the first one I killed.”

“You never killed anybody before?” His head was cocked slightly to the right, and I had no idea whether he knew the truth, so I didn’t take a chance.

“Once.”

“Did
that
take it out of you?”

I gave it a minute’s consideration, trying to cut through the fog of the present and find my way back to it. “Not right away. He was a pretty loathsome guy. Later, though, it got to me later.”

“I’d think it would,” he said. “You’ll feel better after a sandwich.”

His equanimity pissed me off. “Is that what
you
do?” I said. “Eat a sandwich?”

“Me?” He sounded more surprised than I’d ever heard him. “I never killed anybody.”

“You? You never.…”

“Of course not. I’m offended you would think that. Do I look like somebody who kills people?”

“Well, do
I
?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Lot of nice-looking guys kill people. Take Tuffy. Don’t you think Tuffy’s a nice-looking guy?” Tuffy smiled at me.

“Jesus, I don’t know. I suppose. Compared to a lot of guys, yeah, I suppose Tuffy’s a nice-looking guy.”