The Fame Thief (4 page)

The Wedgwood, the Nox, and the Royal Doult occupy a corner just north of Olympic, at the intersection of two narrow streets which, for the purpose of getting to the end of this sentence, we’ll call Courtney Lane and Baltic Way. They’re not on a map, so don’t bother looking for them.

Normally, when I visit the Wedgwood, I do an intricate little dance of dead-end streets, double-backs, park-and-waits, and other routines for spotting a tail. Ever since the lease was signed over to me by the now-incarcerated Winnie Park—who owes me every breath she’s taken since around 4
P
.
M
., March 9, 2001, when I persuaded someone to put a gun away—I’d kept the existence of Apartment 302 in the Wedgwood from the entire world, even my ex-wife and child. It was my ultimate hiding place, the one real secret of my life, the safe spot I could run to if I ever got one of the behemoths of the local scene mad at me.

Well, Irwin Dressler was the bull behemoth and had been for more than seventy years, ever since the Chicago mob sent him out to domesticate Los Angeles and make it theirs in the early 1940s. He’d exceeded their expectations, not only making the city theirs but also making it better. He created banks. He guided the studios and helped them with their labor problems.
He prevented a strike on the day the Dodgers first played ball at Chavez Ravine. He kept the money flowing back to the Windy City and guided its reinvestment in the Big Orange. He was instrumental in the creation and growth of Palm Springs and Las Vegas. And over the years he pursued a long-range, private program to turn all of it, every little scam, every hundred-million dollar business, legal. He’d never been arrested, never been indicted. He’d testified before Congress so often half the House of Representatives called him by his first name, and he never—not once—was challenged on his testimony, although he arguably never—not once—told the whole truth.

And he knew where my refuge was. The question was, how many other people knew?

I turned into the driveway for the Royal Doult, on Baltic, parked my car beneath the building, and went through two locked doors marked
¡Peligroso!
with an electric-looking, bright red lightning zigzag beneath the word, until I was in the garage beneath the Wedgwood, two buildings away and fronting on Courtney Lane. My escape car—different color, different make—was parked here, and in the apartment upstairs were excellent papers for two new identities, complete with active credit cards and bank accounts, and about $120,000 in cash. I could literally drive in on Baltic Way as me and drive out, half an hour later, in a different car onto a different street, Courtney Lane, as a different person. It had all seemed perfect until about three hours ago.

The Most Beautiful Woman in the World lived on the ninth floor, the next-to-the-highest in the building. I got into the elevator, waved at the hidden camera that was beaming my image to some extremely bulked-up Koreans in the lobby area, and looked for the button for nine.

It required a key.

“
Anyong haseo
, guys,” I said to the microphone in the left
front top corner. I heard a buzz and the elevator started to climb—someone above me had rung for it. “I’m supposed to go see Miss La Marr on nine, and I haven’t got a key. What do I do?”

There was no reply, but the elevator passed the first floor, slowed and then stopped, and then started back down, as whoever it was up there above me leaned impatiently on the buzzer. The doors opened, and I found myself in the amazingly dilapidated lobby, facing the Korean guard I privately thought of as Pyongyang because of his unfailingly threatening expression.

The guy above me buzzed again, and Pyongyang looked up and muttered,
“Pabo,”
which means stupid. Then he said, “She knows you come?”

“She does.”

“You live here,” he said. “So if she yell at me, you—” He made a motion with his hands like someone wringing out a washcloth.

“Got it,” I said.

“You bettah.” He leaned in and slipped a key into the little lock where the button for the ninth floor should have been. And I began my ascent to meet Dolores La Marr.

The reason for
the key became apparent when the elevator opened directly into a private entrance hall, which got my attention. Apparently, the entire ninth floor was a single apartment. That meant it was about 12,000 square feet.

The dominant object in the room was the hollowed-out lower leg, complete with foot, of an elephant, obviously procured in the days before PETA. At the top, about four feet above floor level, it erupted in an enormous bouquet of dusty peacock feathers. Behind it, the entire leg-and-feathers assemblage was duplicated, dust and all, in a single gigantic gold-veined mirror that extended from corner to corner and from floor to ceiling.

The place smelled dry and papery, like old books that have been boxed up for decades.

The floor was wood, black enough to be ebony. Brazilian ebony, the last time I looked, was going for about thirty bucks a square foot. If this whole place was floored in ebony, that had been about a $360,000 decorative touch. Dolores La Marr was obviously not in danger of winding up on food stamps.

I called out, “Hello? Miss La Marr?”

“Come through the archway in front of you and down the hall,” said a voice from above me. I looked around and saw a small speaker, a cube about five inches to a side, tucked into a high corner to the right of the elevator door. It was a nice voice, not conspicuously old or young, although it was shot through with a barely noticeable tremor, just the hint of a vibrato.

“Coming along,” I said. I took another look at the elephant’s leg and went through the archway.

The hallway was high-ceilinged and painted a pale greenish-gray, like faded pewter, if there were such a thing. Every two or three feet on either side, illuminated by a pinspot, hung a large photo of a woman’s face in satiny black and white, shot from every imaginable angle and lighted by the same masters who made the Hollywood black-and-white films of the thirties some of the world’s most beautiful dream-images.

It was quite a face. The eyes, with long, heavy upper lids that continuously threatened to close, were wide-set and obviously a very light blue that photographed a dreamy translucent gray and gave me the illusion I could look through them into the mind of the woman who owned them; the nose was straight and delicate, a faint seashell-whorl defining the nostrils; and the mouth had enough lower lip for two lesser and more forgettable mouths. And all of it was framed by a luxurious waterfall of dark, wavy hair that brushed her neck and shoulders with an
easy familiarity that gave me a pang of envy, and set off the flawless skin so the face seemed to leap out of the photo. I had the sense that if I were to close my eyes and slide my hand over the surface of the image, I would feel the contours of the woman’s features. The last picture was the
Life
cover. The most striking thing about it—the thing that made it a plausible representation of the most beautiful woman in the world—was the fact that the subject of the portrait seemed to be laughing at the whole situation: the camera, the lights, the photographer, herself.

“Don’t dawdle,” the amplified voice said again. “Bring him
in
, Anna.”

I didn’t see Anna, but it was only a few feet more before the hallway emptied into a living room the size of an Olympic pool, ringed with spiky, asymmetrical Art Deco windows, windows so good my palms itched with the urge to steal them right out of the walls. The ones that looked east framed the vertical glitter of downtown. The furniture was all white, glaring against the ebony floor like unmelted pockets of snow floating on dark water. Five groupings of chairs and tables barely filled the place. They rose above the liquid darkness of the floor like extremely comfortable islands, each group gathered in a circle of yellowish light cast by a standing lamp with stained-glass shades that could have been Tiffany. I’d have to get closer to the lamps to look for the confetti glass or the silvery lead or the turn-paddle on-off switch, or any of the other genuine Tiffany giveaways.

“Ah, the patron saint of lost causes,” said the woman at the far end of the room. Three pinspots set into the ceiling converged on her, making the place where she sat the brightest spot in the room.

She was enormous, nearly wide enough to fill the three-cushion sofa on which she sat. The hair was still dark—or dark again—and the face, perhaps because it was so plump, seemed
almost unwrinkled. She wore a shapeless black gown or dress or muu-muu or something very loose, just a parachute of dark cloth with an opening for her neck and long, draping sleeves. As I got closer, it sparkled at me, and I saw it had jet beads sewn to it.

“Is the cause lost?” I pulled the nearest armchair back a foot or two, just to give her some space, and sat. Up close, she could still be recognized as the woman in the photographs, but much bigger and decades older.

“It’s been sixty years,” she said. A little earpiece-and-microphone thing stretched from her ear to her mouth, and I could hear her voice twice, once up close and then echoing from the hall. “Most of the people who had anything to do with it are dead.”

“Dressler doesn’t seem to regard death as an obstacle.”

She shook her head, but not in disagreement. Jet earrings swung back and forth with a little chittering noise. From this distance I could see a fine line of snow-white hair at her scalp and the impasto of makeup, artfully applied but definitely not for daylight. Her eyebrows looked tattooed on. Even on Hollywood Boulevard, where dogs sometimes ride bicycles, she’d have drawn stares. Still, the bone structure was perfect and clearly visible, even beneath the extra weight. “That’s Winnie. His entire life he’s been looking at the world, seeing a problem, and fixing it. I doubt it’s ever occurred to him there’s anything he can’t fix.”

I stopped staring at her and said, “Winnie.”

“Irwin,” she said. “Winnie. I can’t call him Irwin. It makes him sound like an accountant.”

“Winnie’s got its problems, too.”

“I’ve known Winnie since 1948,” she said, and disagreement intensified the quiver in her voice. “I’ve known you two minutes.
If you don’t mind, I’ll let things drift along as they are. What’s your name?”

“Junior Bender. And no, Junior’s not a nickname, it’s my given name. My father was named Merle and he wanted to name me after him, but after a lifetime of being called Merle, he thought it over and just named me Junior.”

“Well, you’re not really in a position to criticize anyone’s name, are you?”

“Who’s Anna?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said. Her mouth tightened for an instant in what might have been irritation. “Anna.”

I waited. When it was evident I’d be allowed to wait quite a while, I said, “I ask because you seemed to suggest she was escorting me down the hallway, but I didn’t see anyone.”

“No,” she said. “You wouldn’t. Maybe you’ll see her later.”

“She’s very small?”

“She’s … shy.” Dolores La Marr cleared her throat as a punctuation mark.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about your problem.”

“I don’t have a problem.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it. Would you mind calling Dressler and telling him? I’d kind of like to go home and forget all this, if you really don’t care.”

Something sparked in her eyes, and I caught a glimpse of the humor I’d seen in the
Life
cover. “It’s not that easy. Nothing is ever that easy, certainly you’ve learned that by now. What are you, thirty-eight?”

“Thirty-seven.” Maybe, I thought, I should be using my girlfriend, Ronnie’s, moisturizers.

“Sorry. You have an air of maturity, if you’ll accept that as an excuse for thinking you’re older than you actually are.”

“No problem. Why isn’t it that easy?”

She leaned across to extend a very white hand and tapped my knee with the tip of her index finger. I looked for the Norma Desmond talon but was surprised by the bitten nails; also by the swollen knuckles and curling fingers of advanced arthritis, the most telling sign of her age. Two rings bit into one of her fingers, almost disappearing in the flesh. “Because it’s
Winnie
,” she said. “Winnie has
decided something
, and when Winnie decides something, it’s like gravity. You can try to ignore it, you can try to deny it, but if you trip you’ll still fall down.” She looked around the room as though searching for someone, and I had an impulse to turn and look for myself. “So here’s the situation as I see it. You don’t want to do this and I don’t particularly want you to do it, but Winnie does. So the best thing for me to do is to give you whatever I can to make it easier for you, and then say goodbye. If you find anything out, you can tell Winnie, not me. I stopped caring fifty years ago.”

“Is there something you want?”

“Many, many things, my dear. But why do you ask?”

“You keep looking around as though you hope the butler has come into the room. Do you want me to get you something?”

“Aren’t you perceptive?” She clapped the crooked hands once. “In the kitchen, which is through that door, you’ll find an old-fashioned cold pantry, and in the pantry are some very nice bottles of Pouilly-Fuisse. Why don’t you get one and a corkscrew and a couple of glasses, and bring them all back in here. At least we can lubricate the next hour or so, even if we can’t skip it.”

The door led through a substantial formal dining room with an oak table that seated twelve, uncovered. It had a dull oakish gleam, but the corner nearest the kitchen door was quite dusty; I could see the little border left by the edge of the dust rag. The room’s size was emphasized by a cathedral ceiling with long, thick, rough-hewn beams running beneath it. Since there
was one more floor of apartments above this one, the cathedral ceiling was lower than most. I figured I could almost touch the beams if I went on tiptoe and jumped just a little. I trailed a finger through the dust on the table’s corner as I passed, leaving a conspicuous jet trail.

In the kitchen, it took me about two minutes to find the wine and the glasses, but the corkscrew stumped me. I stood there, looking at approximately twenty closed drawers, and then something feathery and steamlike kind of blew against the side of my face and straight through my skull, planting a thought: that the second drawer from the left in the top row to the right of the sink just might be the one. I opened it, and there was the corkscrew.