The Fame Thief (23 page)

Dressler put down the cup. His hand wasn’t shaking. He was looking at me, but I could see calculation behind his eyes, like someone pretending to pay attention while doing math in his head. “What was the mistake?”

“I thought the person he was frightened of was you. But it wasn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“He didn’t call you today, did he?”

“How would Pinky—what is it, Pinkerton?—how would
Pinky Pinkerton
call me?”

“He didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t call you, but he had his secretary call
someone
. She was dialing the call as I left, but she came out and made sure I was out of earshot before she went back in and finished.”

“Mmm-hmm.” He put his hand on the cup again, and just then Babe came in with a tall glass in his hand. “One for me, Babe,” Dressler said.

“Worked, didn’t it?” Babe said proudly, putting the drink down in front of me.

“Like a charm.” He aimed a knuckle at my glass. “Is that the good stuff?”

Babe said, “Ummm.”

“Take it back, take it back. Bring the—”

“Hold it,” I said, snatching the glass just before Babe wrapped a hand the size of a leg of lamb around it. “Bring him the good stuff, but leave this with me. Give me a chance to compare.”

Babe looked at Dressler, got a
what can you do?
lift of the eyebrows, and trotted out of the room.

“So,” Dressler said to me, settling into the notion. “Someone else.”

“Someone else with weight,” I said. “And I’m going to figure out who it is, with you or without you.”

“Don’t get carried away. Just because you’ve seen me get knocked flat for a minute, don’t think that—”

“Why now?” I asked.

“You’ve interrupted me several times tonight. Don’t make a habit of it.”

I said, “Finished?”

“Finished.”

“Why now? It’s been sixty-two, sixty-three years since someone pulled the rug out from under Dolores La Marr. Why open it up now?”

Dressler cleared his throat and swiped an index finger under his nose. “It’s personal.”

“I know it is.” I pointed at the shelves of jade figurines on the opposite wall. “Remember how we met? The judge and his stolen collection of jade? That jade over there?”

“There are very few things in this long life, Junior,” Dressler said measuring the words, “that I’ve forgotten.”

“Well, good.” I lifted the glass, knocked back a couple of fingers’ worth, stifled the gasp, blinked away the tears, and picked up Dolores La Marr’s hollow book. Dressler’s eyes followed it all the way up to the top of the coffee table, and when I flipped the little latch, he said, “Tuffy,” and Tuffy, his hands suddenly out of his pockets, covered most of the distance between us in the time it takes me to blink.

“It’s not a weapon,” I said. “Or I don’t know, maybe it is. I should have known the minute I saw them.” I took out two of the
netsuke
and put them on the table.

Dressler’s right hand knocked the cup sideways, and a long crack appeared instantly, like a bolt of lightning, across the glass tabletop. He sat there, peering at the little figurines, his mouth hanging half open, and then he twisted himself around so that his shoulder was pointing toward me and his face was averted,
and he made a noise like someone trying to swallow and speak at the same time.

Irwin Dressler was crying.

There was no way I could look at this; he deserved that much. I got up, feeling Tuffy’s stricken eyes on me, and said to him, “Let’s go into the kitchen and see if we can’t help Babe.”

In the end
, it was Babe who got him through it. He sat with Dressler—a good, safe two or three feet away—and the sobs and the coughs rolled toward us, toward Tuffy and me as we sat in the breakfast nook, avoiding each other’s eyes. After one particularly racking seizure, I got up and went into the kitchen and saw the bottle of whiskey on the counter and filled my cup to the brim. I drank half of it straight down, filled it again, and rummaged in the cabinets until I found another matching cup, poured some whiskey into it, and took it in to Tuffy.

I tried to put it down, but Tuffy swiped it from me six inches above the table. He tilted his head back and drained it, then started to get up. I waved him back down, took his cup, and handed him mine. When he’d emptied that one, too, I took them back into the kitchen, where I poured the rest of the bottle into them.

We’d drunk most of what was in our cups when he said, in that acid-washed voice, “Never thought I’d see this.” He looked into the glass, into the remains of the pale amber liquid. To it, he said, “I seen him have his heart attack, and then I seen him have his other heart attack.”

For want of anything else, I said, “That must have been rough.”

“Nothin’,” he said. “Compared to this, nothin’.” The pale blue eyes came up to mine again. Like a disproportionate percentage of men who make their living hurting other men, Tuffy
had beautiful eyes, a clear, transparent blue, set into the battered face like sapphires in a pudding. “What’d you do to him, anyways?”

“Reminded him of someone.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Himself, I think.”

Tuffy said doubtfully, “He’s crying for himself?”

“In the end,” I said, “I think that’s what we all cry about. Who we weren’t.”

“Yeah?” He shrugged. “You say so.”

“Did he ever talk about her? About Dolores La Marr?”

He didn’t even think about it. “Nah. He talked about the Missus, he talked about Carole Burnett, but those were the only women I ever heard—”

“Carole Burnett?”

“He loves her. Got all the old shows on disk. You should see him when he watches, you know that
Gone with the Wind
thing when she comes down the stairs—”

“With the dress and the curtain rod across her shoulders?”

“He just falls on the floor,” Tuffy said. “He seen it a thousand times, and he still laughs.”

I said, “Me, too.”

Tuffy said, “Me too,” and started to smile. Then we both laughed until a sort of Old-Testament wail came from the living room, followed by a series of clucks that had to be Babe.

“But the Missus,” I said.

“Batty as a hen,” Tuffy said. He shook his head. “Years and years. I mean, I been with him twenty-seven years, and she got locked up long before I came aboard.”

“He loved her.”

“Oh, Jeez.” Tuffy reached up and laid the back of his hand against the dark glass of the window, as though he needed to feel
something cool. “How does anybody know what he feels about anything?” Another howl from the living room. “ ’Cept this,” he said. “This, you can tell pretty good. But I heard him say once, about someone—talking real mild, like the guy went through a door first when he should of waited—he said,
He’s a nice boy but he should know better
, and two days later a dog found the guy’s foot in Griffith Park. The missus, he always talked like he loved her. I mean, he said stuff like
Poor Blanche, lost in that nightmare
, and he went to see her every week even though for all she knew he’d come to sell her a set of encyclopedias. But yeah, I suppose he loved her. He respected the hell out of her, that’s for sure, and he loved her memory. You know, who she was before.”

“When she was herself,” I said.

“I guess.” He pushed his lower lip out, far enough to look down at it, and just left it out there to dry. “What I mean,” he said at last, “is that you don’t never know what he’s thinking, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love him, Babe doesn’t love him. ’Cause we do. There’s something in the middle of him that’s all clear, you know? All salted away proper, all in the right place, and once he knows down in there that you’re okay, you’d really have to fuck up like a world war for him to turn on you. And he’d kill somebody for you without even thinking about it. Makes it hard to see him like this.”

“I know what you mean.”

Movement at the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I looked up to see Babe coming in with the platter, which held a pyramid of wadded tissues. He glanced at me without much friendliness and said, “He wants you. Give him two minutes.”

Dressler used the minutes to change his shirt and to paste his sparse hair back over his scalp so it didn’t hang in gray, deranged-looking spikes over his eyes, and he’d found some calm somewhere, as though something basic had shifted inside
him. The look he gave me as I came across the room toward him was nowhere near as stonily remote as before. His eyes looked almost human.

“Sit, sit.” He had a glass of whiskey in front of him and when he lifted it, his hand was steady as a gyroscope. “You’re right, we’ve reached a new stage in our relationship.”

“If we haven’t,” I said, “we don’t have a relationship.”

“At ease, Junior. This is hard enough for me without some junior executive, excuse the expression, going all branch manager on me. Sit.”

I sat, and Dressler raised a hand for Tuffy’s attention. “Bring us a bottle,” he said, “and then you and Babe get out of here. Go to a movie. Tell Babe to go home to the baby. Drive to Omaha. Do whatever you want, but get out of here.”

“Are you sure?” Tuffy asked.

“Since when do you ask me if I’m sure? Go, go. Junior and I have things to talk about. You and Babe will be happier not knowing them. Bring the bottle, go get him, and go out the back door. We’re not saying a word in here until that gate closes behind your car.”

“Yes, sir.” Tuffy turned and double-timed it into the kitchen, although there was a certain amount of miffed flounce in it. Dressler held out a hand, palm up, and I looked at it, and then he nodded at the
netsuke
closer to him. It was my favorite, the sleeping fox, its spine a perfect curve, the carving so artful, making such expert use of a reddish color variation in the ivory, that I half-expected soft fur when my fingers closed around it.

“Eighteenth century,” he said in a voice I hadn’t heard before, the kind of voice he might have used with a child. He put the carving to his cheek and closed his eyes for a moment. “Some anonymous master, guy with no name.” He was looking at me again. “One of the things I like about the Japanese is
their willingness to do perfect work in private, not for credit, not for money, just to make something right. The thing, when it’s finished, it is what it is. It doesn’t need a signature. After all, no real fox is signed.”

“Like the artists who carved stone and colored glass for the cathedrals,” I said.

“Not such a happy comparison for a Jew,” he said. “Those things, those spires, towered over us like threats, like raised fists. They cast a lot of shade, reminding us that we were allowed to be there just as long as we were useful.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then like all the things you’ve done in this city. All the businesses that are here because of you, all the pieces you made and then fit together, making the city work, and never signing anything.”

He tilted his head a bit, accepting it, but he said, “Brute force,” and he held up the fox as though to show it to me. “Compared with this, it was—”

“He took a knife to the ivory,” I said, and blinked away a vision of the cuts on Dolores La Marr’s face and shoulders. “The ivory was cut from a living tusk.”

“But this is,” he said, and then he inhaled deeply. “This is beautiful.” He started to go on, but instead he closed his mouth and ran the tip of his index finger over the fox’s back. “Beauty always counts, doesn’t it? You can enjoy things that are useful, you can admire things that help people, things that stand the test of time, things that are so well built they won’t let themselves be … eroded. They’re all good. But something beautiful. Something beautiful blesses the space it occupies.”

I said, “I’m not going to argue with that.”

“Any room she was in,” he said, and stopped. He was blinking fast.

“I’m sure. She still had some of that when I met her.”

He reached out again, and I gave him the other piece, the pillow-book piece, the man and woman making love. He put the carvings side by side, then tapped the head of the pleasantly occupied man. “Nothing dirty about it.
This is what people do
, is what it says.
Here’s something you might want to try. Look, they’re smiling, you might like it
. This was probably part of a set given to a newlywed couple. It’s sweet, when you think about it. Two young people, they barely know each other, they’ve hardly talked, one of them is a virgin, guaranteed. And these things are right there, next to the mat on the floor, glistening at them. They’re beautiful, they’re sexy, they’re even funny. How sane is that? Helping those babies over the first steps like that.”

“I didn’t know any of that.”

“Do you know how valuable they are?”

“Probably. Within ten, fifteen percent.”

“This one.” He tapped the couple.

“Sixty-five.”

Dressler’s eyebrows went up, an inquiry.

“Thousand,” I said.

“Not bad. Pretty close. You’re a little under, maybe. So look at you, Junior, you know where they came from, you know when they were made, more or less, you know what they’re made out of, and you know what they’re worth. But you don’t know about that blushing girl, so frightened, that boy hoping he doesn’t blow it.” He put his open hands up, a couple of feet apart, and slowly brought them closer together, as though compressing something. “The
concentration
of that moment, two lives coming together, maybe for good, maybe for bad, and so much riding on what happened
right then
, as those kids tried to become one person. And someone loved them enough to put this there. Look how
little
it is, Junior. Look how light-hearted it is. It couldn’t be threatening if it tried.”

I said, “Why now?”

His chin came up, and he looked more like the old Irwin Dressler. “I’m getting to it, I’m getting to it. How come only old people, who have so little time left, know how to be patient?”

“I’ll look into that when I’m older. So you were lovers, you and Dolores La Marr.”

“Listen, you. I sent Babe and Tuffy out of here because I didn’t want to have to live with them after tonight, after I talk about what happened, after what I’m about to tell you. You want to stay on my good side right now, Junior, you don’t want me stewing about this, about what I’ve told you, for the next month or so.”