The Fame Thief (35 page)

“Toss the gun on the bed, Tuffy,” Dressler said, “and let’s get out of here.”

The gun bounced once on the mattress and came to rest against Pigozzi’s right arm. I said, “Why leave the gun?”

“It was used three weeks ago in a liquor store robbery in South Central,” Dressler said. His voice was as thin as the smoke rising from the floor; there was no lower register. “It’ll drive the cops crazy.” He turned toward the door and froze.

“Is he dead?” It was a woman’s voice, and I turned to see Edna. She had a very shiny automatic, probably nickel-plated, in her hand.

“He’s dead,” Dressler said. He didn’t seem very interested in any of it.

Edna had lost the 1940s big-band hairdo, and now her steel-gray hair was chopped about four inches long, a much more stylish cut. Her eyes wandered over the three of us, and when she got to me, she smiled.

I said, “Hi, Livvy.”

“Well, well,” she said. “A fan.”

“Irwin,” I said. “Meet the little girl behind most of this. Irwin Dressler, Olivia Dupont.”

“Not any more,” Livvy said. “Now I’m the grieving widow of Robert LeCochon, and thanks to you, I’m worth about forty million bucks.” She glanced back to the bed, which was gradually turning a deep dark red. “He is dead, right?”

“He’s dead,” Tuffy said. He edged toward the bed.

“Nope,” she said. “Just stay there.” To Dressler, she said, “He told you, because I heard him, how that little slut sold you out.”

“Yes, Miss,” Dressler said. He sounded almost courtly. “He did.”

“Good. Just want to make sure you know who she really was. It’s a bit much to give me all the credit, though. Bobby started this on his own. I just provided creative guidance. Toward the end, he was so terrified of you he almost forgot he was sick. And I look at you and ask myself what he was so scared of. Just another old guy, waiting for the big ending.” She waved the barrel of the gun at us, her eyes going back to Bobby Pig for a moment, nothing much revealed in them. “Now, I think the three of you should stand next to each other, facing me, at the end of the bed. Except you, big boy. You face Bobby, since you’ve just this moment finished shooting him as I rush into the room with a gun in my hand, and when I shoot you in the back, the old fart and Junior here turn to face me, all startled, and I shoot them. Let’s see if we can’t do this in one take.” She raised the gun and sighted down the barrel and said, “Turn around, big boy.”

Movement outside drew her attention, and I said, “Hummingbirds,” and the glass wall shivered and broke in a million places and cascaded down in a slow-motion waterfall, and one side of Olivia Dupont’s face, the side farther from the window,
was blown into space, and she went sideways, as though leaping to recover it, and followed the cascade of glass to the floor.

Dressler clutched his chest and let out a groan that sounded like someone prying the lid off a wooden box. As he sank to his knees, one hand grabbing at the blankets and pulling them off of Pigozzi, Debbie Halstead stepped through the wreckage of the window and said to Tuffy, “Pick him up and get him out here, to my car. I’ll get him to a hospital.”

I was so disoriented by Debbie’s appearance and the fact that I wasn’t dead that I don’t actually remember carrying Dressler to the car, except for one detail:. He was very light, and he seemed to get lighter.

Debbie drove like she shot—efficiently, accurately, and with a minimum of drama. It was almost relaxing.

Even before she’d navigated the car out of Bobby Pig’s neighborhood, Tuffy had tucked some nitroglycerine tablets under Dressler’s tongue, and within a few minutes he was giving useless orders:
Slow down, there’s a stop sign up here, we have to go get the car; hell, no I don’t need to go to a hospital. Tuffy will take me to my own doctor
.

Debbie glanced into the rearview mirror and said, “Be quiet,” and Dressler shut up, except for the occasional mutinous mumble.

We’d left so quickly, and I’d been so bewildered by Debbie’s sudden appearance and Dressler—whom I guess I’d privately considered immortal—going down like that, that I was surprised when we stopped beside our stolen car near the golf club, and Tuffy pulled the golf bags out of Debbie’s trunk, along with the little zipped bag I’d been carrying, and threw them into the back of our car. He’d grabbed them out of Bobby Pig’s utility room at some point while I was trying to get Dressler comfortable on the backseat of Debbie’s SUV.

He helped Dressler into the stolen car, and Debbie said to me, “They’re going to stop at the doctor’s office. I’ll take you home.”

I said, “Wherever that is,” but stayed in the car. She waited until Tuffy had pulled out, and then put the SUV in gear.

“That car in good shape?” she asked, watching it go.

“I don’t know. Tuffy boosted it from LAX. It got us here all right.”

“Since you don’t seem to know where you live, I’ll follow them to the doctor’s. Just in case.”

And she did, although Tuffy drove like he had a car full of raw eggs, braking at everything he saw and rarely exceeding forty miles an hour, even on the 10 Freeway.

“Who was the one I shot?” she asked.

“An actress. Olivia Dupont.”

“Whoa,” Debbie said. “She played that bitch with the whip.”

“You’re not old enough to remember that.”

“Cable. Everything’s on cable. So the guy on the bed, he was a gangster, right? What was she doing there, a personal appearance?”

“Sort of. She was married to the dead guy in the bed. And she’d been pretending to be someone’s secretary. Boss’s orders, or maybe her own orders, I don’t know.”

Debbie said, “Pretending to be? Was there a real secretary?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Until two or three days ago. I saw pictures of her in a carton I found in her garage. Little, happy-looking fat lady.”

“What happened to her?”

“My guess is, something with a knife. She’ll probably turn up in pieces.” I sat and thought about what I’d just said, and the sign on Pinky’s door popped into my mind’s eye. Doug Trent had probably made a courtesy call to Pinky to tell him I was coming, and Pinky had called Pigozzi, as he had probably been told to do if anyone came nosing around about Dolly. The sign was there to hold me off until Livvy could get there from Palm Springs, at
least one knife-twin in tow, and sit down in Edna’s chair. I was, at least indirectly, responsible for Edna’s death.

Debbie shook her head disapprovingly. “Knives are nasty.”

She drove in silence for a few minutes, and I wrenched myself away from Edna and said, “She made a pretty good movie, Olivia DuPont, I mean, back in 1950.
Hell’s Sisters
.”

Debbie said, her attention on the road, “Yeah?”

“Did you ever see it?”

“Nope. I know this sounds funny, but I like TV better than movies.”

“Why?”

“Nothing I’ve seen on film ever fooled me,” she said. “When I watch a movie, I see how much money they’re spending, and they’re still not fooling me. Makes me nervous, all those wasted bucks. I guess I like TV because it’s cheap.”

“She had a costar in that movie,” I said. “Beautiful girl named Dolores La Marr.”

“Jesus, Tuffy drives slow.” She flicked the brights at him. “Dolores La Marr, huh?” She shrugged. “Nope. Never heard of her.”

We were heading
toward LA on the 10, the sun a few fingers high in the sky behind us, when I said, “This road? The 10?”

“Yeah?” Debbie said. She pumped the brakes once to warn the guy behind her to back off.

“It replaced the old Route 66,” I said. “The dream highway. H.L. Mencken said that the US sloped to the left, and everything that was loose rolled downhill to California. This was the road most of them rolled on.”

“I did,” she said. She looked over at me. “And not from Vegas.”

“I figured.”

“He knew—” She lifted her chin to indicate the car Dressler was in. “He knew you wouldn’t let me tag around behind you. So he dreamed that story up. If you spotted me, I had a reason for being there.”

“Were you around when I went into that office building? Pinky’s office building?”

“Saw you come out both times,” she said. “When I figured you were going home, the second time, I called you to make sure you were in one piece, despite the way you looked.”

I said, “But that means Dressler thought it might get dangerous after all.”

“And it did get dangerous,” she said. “But who knows what he thought?” She triggered her high-beams a couple of times again to speed Tuffy up. Tuffy responded by hitting the brakes. “He’s Irwin Dressler,” she said. “He just wanted to make sure every contingency was covered. That’s what Irwin Dressler does.”

I was halfway
asleep when the phone rang. I looked around a bit wildly, saw that we were approaching the grim, warehouse-rich borders of downtown LA, and dug the phone out of my pocket.

“It’s over,” Rina said. “You should be proud of yourself.”

“I’m not,” I said. “You have no idea how not proud of myself I am.”

“Anyway, it worked. I was all enthusiastic about the house, which was actually pretty nice, and Mom made an offer. Old Dick said it hadn’t been on the market very long, so she shouldn’t lowball it, but that he’d
hand-walk
it—that’s what he said, hand-walk it, as though that makes any sense—through everything. It would go through in no time. Mom was so excited. She’d found a place she liked, and she thought I liked, and she’d have money in the bank. She took me out for dinner, to celebrate.” She sighed. “Pizza.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie.”

“And this morning that sneaky little asshole told her she’d lost the house, somebody outbid her, even though he’d promised he wouldn’t show it to anybody else. So she told him she never wanted to see him again, and she meant it.”

I said, “Mmm-hmmm.”

“And she’s been crying ever since. Why does she have to be so
hapless
? Why can’t she be more like—more like—”

“Like?”

“Like you. I mean, she should be honest, but not, you know,
clueless
.”

“Good people have a problem with people like me and people like Dick, because good people
are
good, and they’re truthful, and they think other people are, too. Your mother is a very good person. You should value that. It’s one of the things we should both love about her. Listen, just take care of her, okay?”

“Which of you am I like?”

“Rina,” I said, “I’m not saying this because I’m your father, but you’re not like anybody in the world. You’re something completely new.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Right.” And she hung up.

I said, “Yipes,” and exhaled so hard it felt like my lungs had turned inside out. Then I put the phone back in my pocket and caught Debbie looking over at me. The moment I looked up, she returned her attention to the road.

She said, “Lucky girl.”

Being dead isn’t entirely without advantages.

For one thing, obviously, those of us who are over here have already gotten through the thing living people fear most. It’s silly, looking back at it all, how afraid of it we were, when it’s really just like going through a window. Without breaking the glass.

All the things that scared me, the things that made me sad, the things that made me climb up on that table, hearing the tragic sound track music in my ears—they were all so silly. Life’s greatest joke is that you don’t get any real perspective until you’re dead.