The Fame Thief (27 page)

I was shaking my head before he finished his question. “It is not.”

“Three for forty,” he said.

“Thirty-five plus the one I showed you. Another five plus this piece if any money is removed from the accounts.”

Stinky looked longingly at the signature again, clearly resisting an impulse to lean across the desk and lick it. “Done.” He rubbed his nose. “But only because I like you.”

Four murders, I thought, four murders in one night. Three of them throat-cuttings. All of them because Irwin Dressler had decided to look into the destruction of the career of an as-yet-minor actress sixty years earlier.

Someone—I forget who—once said that, if the universe was created in order to produce humanity, one would hope for a better equivalence between the size of the machine and the amount of the product. Four murders and an attempted fifth, against me, seemed out of proportion to something that probably wasn’t even a crime, spiteful though it might have been, when it was done back in 1950.

So that was a possible key to the locked box. The sheer violence of the present-day reaction. Something to consider.

I tried to consider it at my apartment in the Wedgwood after I toted up the box labeled
PHOTOS
from Edna’s garage, popped it open, and spent a few minutes looking at a lot of people I’d never seen before, unable even to recognize Edna. I tried to consider it as I grabbed the papers bearing the name I’d used for the airplane and the hotel in Vegas, tried to consider it as I drove up and out the driveway of the Nox and worked my way back toward the Valley, conscious that I might be late for lunch and,
more importantly, my flight. Tried to consider it as I took one of my Glocks out of a storage facility and hid it in the trunk. Tried to consider it and got nowhere.

Except for one thought: This all could be sheer, simple terror. The malice might have been exhausted half a century earlier—in fact, it was difficult to imagine anyone fanning away at it, keeping it burning that long—but the terror could be new. Just kickstarted, in fact, by the news that I was turning over rocks.

Four murders, almost five. That’s a lot of fear.

Stanley’s Restaurant was an anomaly: a nice little place serving good, basic American food that wasn’t owned by Worldwide Quick Eats or some other globe-gobbling corporate monolith. I spotted Louie the moment I went in, facing me over the shoulder of a man I presumed was Handkerchief Harrison, although I didn’t remember the yarmulke-size bald spot gleaming up through the yellowish hair on the back of his head. Even crooks get older. As Louie’s eyes found me, I raised my hands palms up, and shrugged, meaning
Handkerchief?
and Louie gave me a tiny nod, but not too tiny to escape Handkerchief’s notice. He twisted around like Wild Bill Hickock hearing someone come into the saloon, and I twiddled my fingers at him, Oliver Hardy-style, as I wove between the booths toward them.

Handkerchief had the kind of faded, attenuated, over-refined handsomeness that just missed being silly: a long, narrow Collie’s nose above an upper lip so long it always looked as though a mustache had just been stolen from it, downward-sloping eyes, a touch too close together, and eyebrows that rose in the center like a roof. He always looked a little like he smelled something unpleasant and was very politely not suggesting it was you.

Still, that family-portrait face and the Hitler Youth coloring and a wardrobe Tom Ford would have envied—reinforced by an attitude that announced clearly that he was accustomed
to someplace much better than wherever he was—had pried millions of dollars out of the rich and credulous, men and women alike. And Handkerchief had blithely spent it, always secure in the assumption there was plenty more where that came from.

And here he sat, flat broke and wanting in on a petty scam in Van Nuys.

“Handkerchief,” I said, shaking the softest hand this side of the Duke of Wales and registering the hankie of the day, a meticulously folded flag of oyster-white silk with tiny red dots, protruding exactly correctly from the breast pocket of his navy blue blazer.

“
So
good to see you, Junior.” Handkerchief ran his thumb over his palm, wiping away the contagion of the common. “Been dog’s years, hasn’t it?”

Louie said, “Handkerchief’s English this week.”

“Really. He should have a chat with Stinky.”

“I been telling him, this is a snap, just him and Doris—”

“Amanda,”
Handkerchief said, so firmly that I could have told from across the room that her name, whatever it might have been, was certainly not Amanda. “Yes, yes, Amanda,” he said, subsiding a bit. “Delightful girl.”

“Don’t take this wrong,” I said, “but maybe you could move the accent three or four thousand miles West. Say, Ohio or something like that. Unless Amanda is from Knightsbridge or Kensington.”

“Fine,” Handkerchief said. “No problem. The flat inflections of the great American heartland, the tone-deaf vowels of Carl Sandburg.” He sounded like a Cleveland weather man.

Louie rolled his eyes and gave his leather jacket, in which his cigars awaited death by fire, a longing pat.

“You’ve explained it all?” I asked him.

“It’s almost a disappointment,” Handkerchief said. “Like hiring a great heart surgeon to fix a deviated septum.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “But it’s
my
deviated septum.”

“Today, you said.”

I felt a sharp edge emerge, tried to hide it, and figured what the hell. “Unless you have something better going.”

“No, no, no,
no
.” Handkerchief tossed a quick look at Louie. “Just, you know, the old calendar.”

“Well, assuming we have a suitable blank in your datebook, here’s your paper. Credit cards, Social Security, a California driver’s license. Louie will take you to a guy not half a mile from here who’ll put your face on it.” I fanned it out over the table, and Handkerchief gave it a glance half a second long, which was all he needed.

“And twelve hundred,” I said, putting a number-ten envelope on top of the identification. “Nothing bigger than a fifty, nothing brand-new. You can count it after I leave.”

“You ain’t eating with us?” Louie said.

“Got a plane to catch.” I got up. “Nice to see you, Handkerchief. Oh, just for clarity. You use those papers once, exactly the way Louie told you, and an hour later, Louie’s got them again. Not one dollar will be spent out of this particular borrowed pocket, got it? Not a necktie, not a pair of nice silk socks.
Nada
.”

“Of course,” Handkerchief said, a little stiffly. “Honor among thieves and all that.”

“And all that.” I scooped up the documents, just in case, but left the envelope with the cash. “Louie will bring these back to you. Walk me to the car, Louie?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Louie the Lost got up just as a waitress arrived with their food. I didn’t waste any time wondering which of them had ordered the burger and which the prime rib.

The moment we hit the sidewalk, Louie lit up, trailing smoke behind us like some car that had chugged all the way from the Dust Bowl. “Guy gives me the creeps,” he said. “Tell you the truth, they all do.”

“We rob and steal for a living,” I said. “Good, honest work. They tell lies for a living. Rubs away at the soul.”

“You look like shit,” Louie said.

“Always nice to have a suspicion confirmed.” I blinked hard, trying to clear what felt like a pound of sand out from beneath my eyelids. “I need you to be no more than half a block from Handkerchief until you’ve got all those papers back. And I need you to count them three times.”

“No problem.”

We got to my car, and as I started around to the driver’s side, Louie put a hand on my arm. “About Debbie Halstead,” he said. “Near as anybody knows, she never had a kid.”

The temperature in
Las Vegas was a balmy seventy-two degrees, the sun was dyeing the western sky tangerine, and the humidity was nosebleed-low. On the way out of the McCarren Airport parking lot in my rented Flahoolie or whatever the hell it was, I wondered what McCarren had looked like back in 1950, when the little plane with Dolly and George Raft in it had touched down. Probably a coat-hanger scratch in the desert, barely long enough for a two-engine prop plane.

Abe Frank, the one-time Vegas newspaper editor, lived out in North Vegas, in a relatively new development that was mostly unsold. Brand-new houses sat behind dead lawns. Tumbleweeds had blown up onto their porches and plywood masked more than a few windows. Chain link, the world’s most melancholy fencing material, surrounded some lots, and here and there the chain link was topped with razor wire for that welcoming hello to hopeful
house-hunters. The streets had been laid out in long gentle curves to compensate for the resolute flatness of the terrain, so the empty shells revealed themselves gradually as I followed the turns. Here and there on a neutron-bombed block a house light gleamed.

Frank’s house, sitting on a quarter-acre of barren sand, looked as unoccupied as the ones on either side except for the lamp in a front window and a yellowish porch light that was hosting a convention of large moths. I slowed when I saw the car parked across the street, tinted windows rolled up against the heat, but then the driver’s-side window slid down and Tuffy gave me an ironic salute. I pulled up next to him and lowered my own window.

“How long have you been here?”

“Longer than you can imagine,” he said. “Feels like a week, but it’s actually—” He looked at his watch. “Four hours.”

“Any movement?”

“One fabulously thrilling episode when he went to a liquor store and I followed him. He was alone. He went in alone. He came out alone. I went in, too, and he didn’t talk to anyone while he was in there except to buy a gallon of gin. He said, ‘How much?’ He came home.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

“He hasn’t come to the window and waved. He hasn’t brought me an iced tea. He looks pretty frail. He might not have noticed me.”

“Okay. You want to run out and get something to eat while I’m in there?”

“Babe made me a turkey sandwich on bread he baked this morning. I’m okay.”

“Great. Well, then.”

“Ending a conversation is a bitch, ain’t it?” Tuffy said, raising the window.

I pulled the car around to the other side of the street and parked directly in front of Abe Frank’s house, which was Spanish-influenced in the same way a kosher burrito is, which is to say around the edges: just a pale stucco box with reddish tiles on the roof and the porch cowering from the sun beneath an archway. Long, one story. No stairs for a man who, according to Wikipedia, had been born in 1923.

A dog barked at me from inside as I went up the walk, and turned it up when I rang the bell. It didn’t sound big, but it sounded like it had a lot of teeth. I put my foot against the bottom of the screen door, which opened out.

I was about to ring again when the inner door opened. The woman who was standing there was almost certainly American Indian, her high-boned, coppery face perfectly framed by a long shawl of straight black hair, and a pair of eyes that looked at me twice and seemed not to be horrified by what they saw, which was a definite sop to my vanity. I put her age in the early forties, a period when some women finally become comfortable with their beauty. This woman had a lot to become comfortable with.

At her feet, a small white dust-mop yapped at me.

“Yes?” Her voice was a pleasant contralto, with quite a lot held in reserve, despite the eyes.

“I’m Junior Bender,” I said, wishing, as I often do, that my name was
Anthony Dash
or something with a little more swash and a few buckles. “I think Mr. Frank is expecting me.”

She gave the dust-mop a deft bit of sideways action with her bare foot that produced a soprano squeak, but it stopped barking. “Are you going to upset him?”

“I don’t know. Does he upset easily?”

“He was upset when he spoke to your friend in Los Angeles today.”

“Irwin is a more upsetting person than I am.”

She looked at all of me again, head to feet and back again. “You’re cute,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t take the bat to you if you get him upset.”

I said, “The bat?” but she was already using one foot to shove the dust-mop back across the tile floor like a hockey puck and unlocking the screen door. She pushed it open and stood aside. “He’s in there,” she said, indicating a room to the left of the entry hall.

“Don’t I get to follow you?”

“Not in this lifetime. Beer?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

She turned and headed off in the other direction, managing it very skillfully. The dust mop growled at me twice and then trotted over, wagging its tail, and I scooped it up and went into the living room with it licking my face.

From the couch, where he was lying full-length, propped up on a mountain of pillows, Abe Frank said, “Sic him, Waldo.”

He was olive-skinned and bald except for a four-inch frizz of gray hair that stood almost straight up from the center of his head, as though he had balded from the sides rather than the center, like everyone else. He had deep, almost black circles—badly discolored skin—hanging beneath a pair of spaniel’s eyes. Everything in his face had yielded to gravity: The skin beneath his chin trembled like a turkey’s wattle, and his cheeks sagged heavily enough to tug down the edges of his mouth. His nose drooped. Even his earlobes seemed unnaturally elongated. His face was a monument to mournfulness, a Mount Rushmore for depressives, set atop a hollow chest and a protruding belly. His feet were up, and the bottoms of his slippers were so unscuffed that I wondered whether he got around by crawling before remembering that Tuffy had followed him to the liquor store. A wheeled oxygen tank, complete with a little Dennis Hopper breathing mask, stood on the floor beside him.