The Fame Thief (6 page)

“They’re your friends.”

“Good, you’re listening.” She shifted her weight forward and put both hands on the coffee table. “Here’s something you’re too young to know, dear. Getting old shrinks your bladder to the size of a tear duct. I’m going to go to the little girl’s room, and that’ll give you an opportunity to snoop around. Oh, and after you’ve snooped, open another bottle, would you? Now look away for a minute. Stare at the nice view.”

I got up and went to the east-facing window with its bright downtown spangle and watched Dolores La Marr’s reflection in the glass as she leaned far forward over the table, put both hands down, and pushed herself up with an audible grunt.

“A gentleman wouldn’t have heard that.”

I said, “Heard what?”

“You’re a nice boy,” she said, on her feet. She swayed a moment and then edged left, between the couch and the table. Once free of the furniture, she reached behind the couch and
rolled out a walker I hadn’t noticed, and launched herself down the length of the room, aiming for a door that undoubtedly led to the bedrooms and bathrooms.

The wheels of the walker squeaked. It was one of the saddest sounds I’d ever heard. I waited at the window until she’d vanished down the hallway, so as not to let her see me watching her. And then, with the squeaks from her wheels echoing over the hard, bare floors, I started to snoop.

Burglars are expert snoops. We have to be. It’s a hard-and-fast rule that the longer we spend in a place, the more likely it is that we’ll get caught. For me, twenty-five minutes is the maximum. I’ve gone through some pretty roomy houses in twenty-five minutes, and I like to think I found and removed everything worth finding and removing. And done it without leaving a mess behind, because the other hard-and-fast rule is that the longer it takes the pigeon to discover the burglary, the safer the burglar is. I’ve learned to ransack a six-room house in less than half an hour, selecting things as I go, and leave without even disturbing the nap on the carpet. In that regard, successful burglary is like surgery. If you want to remove the appendix, you don’t start at the lungs and work down. You try to get in and out without leaving a scar.

I was almost sorry she’d given me permission.

People like to hide things on bookshelves, mostly because there are so many objects there that they think a crook in a hurry will give them a pass. So smart crooks head straight for the bookshelf.

La Marr’s was a bonanza. In addition to some nice books—from a reader’s perspective, not a burglar’s—she had a row of
very fine ivory figurines, Japanese
netsuke
, maybe eighteenth century, the ivory rubbed so smooth it almost felt soft.
Netsuke
were originally small carvings designed to dangle from the sash of a man’s kimono as a counterweight to a hanging box that served as a pocket. A cord looped through the sash connected them, and man could tug on the
netsuke
and tuck into the sash to bring the box within reach. As time passed kimonos grew pockets, and
netsuke
became purely ornamental. The ones Dolores La Marr had collected were exquisite: a sleeping fox; a duck; a very naughty one featuring a man and a woman in the ever-popular rear entry position; and two beautiful
anabori netsuke
, hollowed out to display beautiful ivory filigree, and derived from the form of a clam’s shell, partly open. Next to the
netsuke
, on a ravishing Meissen platter so thin it was translucent, were half a dozen drop-dead gorgeous, hand-painted blown-glass Christmas-tree ornaments, almost certainly Victorian, the kind of stuff that brings beads of sweat to the forehead of the San Fernando Valley’s premier fine-swag fence, Stinky Tetweiler. In the middle of the fiction section I found a thick book that was actually a little safe, jammed almost uncomfortably full of cash, all in banded bundles of hundreds. Maybe $60,000 in all.

I resolved to speak to her about that. She needed to do better with that kind of money, Korean guards or no Korean guards.

On the top shelf, lying on its side, was a photo album that hadn’t been dusted in years. I opened it and entered the glittering demimonde of the 1940s.

Dolores La Marr, stunning in every photo, at a great number of tables in a great many night clubs, the linens white enough to make me squint and the silverware shining, a thicket of glasses and bottles gleaming in the camera’s flash. I’m not much of a drinker, but I have a sneaking admiration for the days when people just damned their lungs and livers and sailed full speed
ahead, smoking and drinking with both hands as though the morning hangover and cough were a century in the future and they didn’t expect to live long enough to suffer.

And they had a point, or at least the men in these pictures did. They came from a different planet, and had a shorter expected lifespan, than the women with them. The men, sitting between the delicate females in their white satins and silks and looking like the bad teeth in a row of good ones, were dark, porcine, dangerous. Their eyes looked through the camera, half-expecting a gun to materialize out of the flashbulb’s glare. Their hair was slicked back, their chins shadowed with evening stubble. There were a lot of cleft chins, a lot of petulant mouths and budding jowls. A lot of really well-tailored tuxes and double-breasted suits. Here and there, a slumming star: Raft, George Jessel, a couple of Catskills comics. In one picture, captured mid-laugh with his eyes still dangerous, Sinatra.

The mobsters included some box-office names: Tony “The Ant” Mostelli; Georgie’s buddy, Owney Madden; the puppet-master himself, Antonino “Big Tuna” Accardo; Accardo’s showoff front-man, Sam Giancana; Roberto “Bobby Pig” Pigozzi; John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli; and a dozen others, a shifting cast of wise guys, on top for the moment and feeling good about it. They had the eyes of people who could see through walls, although a lot of them would fail to see the last gun aimed at them.

The women, beautiful as they were, had something interchangeable about them, a faint air of desperation, like flowers blooming in the dark. They glittered a little too much. They laughed a little too hard. In no photo were any of the men looking at them. The men looked at each other, they looked at the camera, they looked through the walls, not at the women—with one exception.

The exception was Dolores La Marr. In quite a few pictures, one or several of the men had their eyes on Dolores La Marr. As beautiful as most of the other women were, Dolores La Marr made them look like hat-check girls or the women who sold cigarettes from table to table. She was also the only woman at any of the tables who paid no attention to the camera. She had the sleek, quietly pleased appearance of someone who knew she brought a lot to the party. She seemed to be in her natural element.

No Irwin Dressler. These were not the kinds of parties at which Dressler would have been photographed.

I closed the album and re-shelved it, and someone blew warm air in my ear.

I whirled so fast that one foot slid out from under me on the polished floor, and I tottered there, off-balance, my right hand hanging onto the bookshelf, and looked around the big, empty room. My heart was doing its best to escape my chest via my throat, and the hair on the back of my neck was standing at attention.

Purely instinctive, I told myself. A person thinks he’s alone in a room, and someone breathes into his ear. It’s too intimate, it’s a violation of our expectations, our animal assurance that we’ll sense something before it gets that close to us. That our senses will warn us in time to let us protect ourselves from whatever it is.

What it was, it appeared, was nothing. This did not actually reassure me.

But there was
something
, maybe: a kind of light spot on the floor, moving away from me, an odd little patch that was like a shadow in reverse, a shadow that was paler than the light in which it fell. It seemed to be going toward the dining room, and halfway there it disappeared.

Ooooookaaayyyyy.

I don’t believe in anything. I’m not religious, I don’t buy into the warnings and promises of politics. I don’t believe the Mayans or Nostradamus knew squat about the end of the world, I don’t think there’s a national cause worth dying for unless the politicians are willing to die first, and I have no faith that there’s such a thing as luck. I
certainly
don’t believe in apparitions. But something had led me to the corkscrew and the platter. Something had blown into my ear. Something was causing that odd gleam on the floor.

Something
was giving me goose bumps.

So I took refuge in reason. First, there wasn’t anything there. Second, all whatever-it-wasn’t had done was show me where things were. Third, whatever it wasn’t, it was moving away from me, which seemed like the right direction, toward the dining room and perhaps through it to the kitchen.

Oh
, I thought. Maybe whatever-it-wasn’t was reminding me that Dolores La Marr had asked for another bottle of wine.

See? Another bottle of wine? How scary was that? I’d just had a
thought
, that’s all. I’d just remembered to go get some more wine. Nothing more than that. The thought had blown into my ear somehow, but I could worry about that later. Right at that moment, it seemed like an excellent idea to do what the thought was reminding me to do. Especially since it could blow into my ear.

So I followed the path the little, ummm, patch had taken, into the rather dim dining room. Nothing in there seemed to beckon to me, so I made another line on the dusty table with my fingertip and went into the kitchen. Completely free of ectoplasmic entities as far as I could see, and much, much brighter than the dining room. Bright was good.

I went into the cold pantry, quite a bit dimmer and a hell of a
lot colder than the kitchen. Cold pantries are an engineering feat now lost to the all-thumbs jugheads who build modern houses, a room that draws drafts of cool air from underground, courtesy of a wide, vented pipe. The people who built the Wedgwood—and, I assumed, the other China apartment houses—had run the pipes right up the center of the building, creating a cold pantry in two of the four apartments on each floor. Presumably, since she owned the entire ninth floor, Dolores La Marr could have had a second one somewhere. Maybe she kept her furs in it.

The pantry had shelves on the three walls that didn’t contain the door. The wine was right where I’d found it before, on the bottom shelf, which was the coldest. As I reached down to pick it up, the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees, and the room got just a touch dimmer. Thinking the door might be closing behind me and not at
all
happy at the thought, I turned, still bent forward, and my elbow swept a jumbo-size box of cereal off a knee-high shelf.

I stood there for a moment, holding the wine bottle by the neck like a club, and put out a few cautious feelers. Things were fine. I was in a cold, dim room, with a bottle of very good
Pouilly-Fuisse
in my hand, and I was not being shut in. This was not, I reminded myself, Dracula’s castle. It was a building I lived in from time to time, a building I loved and admired. I was being an idiot.

So I bent down to pick up the box of cereal, which providentially had not spilled its contents, and went to put it back. And right there, behind where the box had stood, were seven little brown plastic bottles, about two inches tall, with big white screw tops. I put the cereal box down on the floor and picked up the nearest of the little bottles and read the label.
Lunesta
, it said. Three milligrams, thirty tablets. I poured the little blue pills into my hand and counted them. Thirty.

The next bottle I opened seemed to have about the same number of pills in it, and so did the next. So: seven bottles, let’s say 210 tablets at three milligrams each. Six hundred and thirty milligrams. I was aware, because I’d known the woman who took them, that it was possible to recover from three hundred milligrams of Lunesta, although it had been a tight squeak. Six hundred and thirty milligrams had a very final ring to it.

I was looking at one of two things: a medicine hoarder’s stash or a suicide’s hope chest.

In either event, it seemed deeply, terrifically wrong.

So I poured a dozen or fifteen pills out of two of the bottles and into another, then poured all but three of the pills out of a third and evened them up so there were ten or eleven pills in each bottle. I put the three partially emptied bottles back on the shelf, pocketed the four full ones, and then put the cereal box back in front of them, doing math in my head: roughly thirty-three tablets at three milligrams, a little less than one hundred milligrams. I thought,
nope
, and moved the cereal box again, but at that moment I heard the squealing wheels on Dolores La Marr’s walker, and I remembered that the effect of medications varied with body weight. The woman who had lived through three hundred milligrams had weighed about 95 pounds, and my guess was that Dolores La Marr was pushing three hundred and twenty. She’d probably sleep for eighteen hours.

“Where are you?” she asked. It was a normal tone of voice, and it was coming from a speaker just outside the pantry. I called out, “Getting the wine,” and closed the pantry door behind me.