King Maybe (18 page)

17

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As I trailed Anime and Lilli back to the storage facility, just being Papa Bear, I called Stinky again and left a message to the effect that the stamp would be glued to an envelope and mailed to Transylvania at ten the next morning if I hadn't heard from him. In fact, I was beginning to see a better use for it, but I couldn't think of any reason Stinky should be resting comfortably while I was tethered to an anthill.

The electric gate slid open for the girls' car, and I followed them in, scanning the weedy field on the other side of the chain-link fence, the field from which—on another windy night a few months earlier—a skeletal hit man had arisen to kill us, actually wounding Lilli. I got out of my car before they did and waited beside the big garage door. When Lilli unlocked it, I went in ahead of them and looked around as they snapped the lights on.

“Okay,” I said.

“Whew,” Lilli said. “When I think of all the times we've come in here without you, it just makes my palms sweat.”

“Her palms always sweat,” Anime said, earning a vicious glance from her girlfriend. “Do you know that doctors made up a fancy name for that? Palmar hyperhidrosis. I mean, seriously, is that stupid or not?”

“Puts the doctor in charge,” I said. “You go in and say,
‘My hands sweat,' and he says, ‘You have palmar hyperhidrosis. That'll be two hundred and thirty bucks.'”

“Well, we're inside now,” Lilli pointed out. “Look, we're alive and everything.”

“I worry about you.”

“Worry about yourself,” Anime said. “You're in worse trouble than we are.”

Louie said, “Do
you know what time it is?”

“Why? Don't you have a watch?” I'd been poking my way east, not paying attention to where I was until I registered the soul-puckering ugliness of the failing mini-malls, chain restaurants, and car washes that characterize the area where Saticoy Street and Van Nuys Boulevard intersect, and I realized I wasn't far from Louie's. So I'd called him.

“That's like a reproach,” he said. “You call me too late, and I say that, about what time is it, and you feel guilty.”

“I'm bearing up under it somehow,” I said. “Have you found out anything about Stinky?”

“Nope. I put lines out, but nobody's called in. Went past his house, but everything was dark.”

“Not surprised. Did you try the door?”

“What are you, crazy? I don't do that. I have
people
who do things like that.”

“Name one,” I said.

“Why? You wouldn't know them anyway.”

“I just want to hear what you come up with.”

“Edward J. Fensterfoot,” he said.

“Little guy,” I said. “Yellow ears. You want a cup of coffee?”

“It's midnight. You woke me up. I should be asleep. Why would I want a cup of coffee?”

“You know, male bonding? Mind melding. Hoisting the hearty mug of friendship in the teeth of a cold universe. Sharing a laugh at the pointlessness of it all.” I turned south onto what I hoped would be a shortcut to the freeway, some nameless, characterless, beauty-free street, just 1950s apartment houses, broken streetlights, scraggly trees, and bad-luck wind. “So whaddya think?”

“I think I'm going back to sleep.”

“Before you hang up, can you think of anyone I could talk to about what's-her-name, Tasha Dawn?”

Louie yawned. “Only person I knew who met her was Garlin Romaine, and that was when Garlin was doing fake paper. Now that she's a big art hotshot, she probably won't be happy to hear from me.”

“Well, get me an address if you can. By tomorrow.”

“I just know,” Louie said, “that it's only your good breeding that's kept you from mentioning money.”

“A thousand for the artist. Find Stinky, two thousand.”

“I'll try. I mean, Garlin, no problem, I could do that free, although I know you'll forget I ever said so. But Stinky, who does he even
know
? I don't think he's left the house in ten, fifteen years. It ain't like he's got groups he moves in. The way he lives, he might as well be in a display case.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You've given me an idea.”

But before trying
out my idea, I slipped beneath the freeway and across Ventura, heading south into the hills so I could drive past Stinky's place, which was as dark as it had been last time I saw it. I went all the way around to the golf course, hung a U-turn, and went past again. Then, throwing caution to the prevailing winds, I drove the big Caddy up the driveway, turned off the lights but left the motor running, took the Glock out of the dash compartment, and waited.

For nothing, as it turned out. I gathered my courage, dismissed my fears, and opened the car door. And then, the precise moment I got out of the car, something
did
happen. A gust of wind slammed me on the back and blew Stinky's front door open, hard enough to make it bang against the wall.

I screamed.

And stood there, gasping for breath. Apparently I hadn't dismissed my fears sharply enough. At least, I comforted myself, I hadn't fired the gun, but that was only because that particular Glock had a stiff pull, which Duck Dixon had described to me when I bought it as “the suicide's parachute.” Duck's theory was that suicides are shaky and usually deeply ambivalent on some level or other, and a gun that's just plain hard to fire might be all the persuasion they need to put the weapon down, paste on a smile, and go forth to seize the day, get the girl, win the Nobel Prize. Or he could have made it all up on the spot when I complained about the pull.

It took me five pulse-pounding seconds to realize the significance of that earsplitting bang when the door slammed into the wall. When I was here last and had pushed it open, it had bumped into someone, Stinky's houseboy Jejo-something, who was in no condition to get up and move.
Jejomar
, short for Jesus, Joseph, Mary. I apologized to his spirit for momentarily forgetting his name as I stepped into the hall, which was empty. The moon was up, and its light, which was coming over my shoulder, was enough to let me see that the floor was free of bodily fluids or any of the other unattractive residues murder so often leaves behind. I backed out, into the warm, windy night. I knew I would have registered crime tape if there had been any, even if I'd passed it in the dark, but I looked again to make sure. Nope.

Whoever had moved the body hadn't done it officially.

That left me with three possibilities: (1) Jejomar hadn't been dead in the first place, (2) the Slugger and his guys had come back to clean up, or (3) Stinky had arranged for Jejomar to be picked up and transported someplace more fitting.

I'm better than I'd like to be at recognizing when someone is dead, so that smoked Number One. The Slugger was a possibility—in fact, that might have been why he was still in the neighborhood when we arrived—so Number Two survived the first sharp pass of Occam's razor.

But the one I liked best was Number Three.

I was actually
enjoying the big car, the deference its sheer mass earned from the other cars on the road, as I headed for the Wedgwood, one eye on the rearview mirror. At a point a little less than halfway up the Cahuenga Pass, roughly at the spot where a decisive battle had taken place in 1831, an uprising against an unpopular Spanish governor who was probably the inspiration for the one that Zorro was always fighting, my primary phone rang. It read
blocked
, so I let the call bounce over to voice mail. A minute later the phone did the neurotic little end-of-its-rope shiver it always puts out when it gets voice mail, and I angled over to the right-hand lane with the phone on my lap—a bright screen at night will earn you a big ticket in LA—and turned on the speaker.

“Have we got stuff for you,” Anime said, and, behind her, Lilli shrilled, “Jeez, look at
this
!” and Anime hung up.

Stuff about what? About Patricia and what I was beginning to think of as her campaign against Rina, or about Jeremy Granger's 34,000-square-foot bungalow in Brentwood?

And was I really going to break into that house in about nineteen hours?

The burst of wind that hit the side of the car was enough to make me correct my steering. Even in a car
that
heavy. I got off at the Hollywood Bowl to take a final shortcut, watching the mirror all the way.

18

Liminal

By 1:30
a.m.
, I could have walked through Jeremy Granger's house backward with my eyes closed, thanks to the links that Anime and Lilli had sent me: high-definition photos on Zillow and Curbed LA, and virtual walk-throughs on VisualTour, all sites that the intelligent twenty-first-century burglar should bookmark. The place was as big as God's house must have felt after the Kid moved out, and there wasn't a square inch of it that wasn't either ostentatiously overornamented or unconvincingly austere. The ceilings on the first floor averaged fourteen feet and sixteen on the second and third, not inappropriate for a medieval chapel but still an odd choice for a guy who was sensitive about being short. Just out of curiosity, I checked the original blueprints and found the first-floor ceilings indicated at sixteen feet, too, so I supposed he'd raised the floor on the ground story, where he'd do most of his entertaining. Spare no expense; add in his $60,000 cowboy boots and he'd effectively lowered the ceilings by two feet, four inches.

Most of the slightly lower first-floor ceilings were painted with vaguely Italianate clouds and rays of sunlight, so banal they could have been copied from budget greeting cards or toilet-paper wrappers. In the dining room, the skyscape had been augmented with baby angels sweet enough to eat on sticks. The master bedroom's ceilings, on the second floor, were innocent of paint, but one wall supported a flaking fresco created in some obscure Italian church in the fifteenth century by someone who definitely wasn't Giotto. It had been sawed out by architectural vandals centuries later for sale to the highest bidder.

Who, according to the records, had been Jeremy Granger, the year after he bought the place. You couldn't blame him for the basic layout of the house, although his buying it was an editorial comment in itself. The floor plan hadn't changed much since the first owner laid it out. The guy from Qatar apparently never set eyes on it; for him it was just an investment on a spreadsheet. The heiress lived mainly on the ground floor, since there was no elevator then and stairs were beneath her. The Thud put in an elevator and constructed a recording studio on the third floor, and when his career went upsy-daisy, he pulled the studio and replaced it with a boxing ring, complete with a microphone that could be lowered into the center of the ring, 1950s style. He'd killed himself quite messily in the ring with an absolutely end-of-the-line mix of pharmaceuticals and an electric carving knife that he'd plugged into the microphone outlet, so it might not have been for purely aesthetic or spiritual reasons that Granger yanked the ring, scattered sand over the floor, brought in a few big gray rocks and some ferns, and claimed that it was a meditation space.

The “meditation space” made Granger, in my book, a Grueddhist, another of the gruesome LA poseurs who claim to follow the Buddha's Way to enlightenment in between bouts of ripping people off. In my forays through Beverly Hills, I'd seen the Buddha meditating on license-plate frames that belonged to cars so big they probably emitted carbon monoxide when the engine was off. I'd seen his likeness offered as a $1,500 “table accent.” I'd seen it in the display windows of upscale lingerie shops, flanked by bustiers and garter belts. I'd wondered occasionally what the Christian reaction would have been to a full-scale crucifixion employed as a decorative element in, say, the window of a marital-aids shop in Abu Dhabi, in the unlikely event that there were any marital-aids shops in Abu Dhabi. But while the crucifixion was taken seriously in much of the world as a kind of hair-raising shorthand for “I am the way and the life,” to Grueddhists like Granger, the Buddha, wrapped in his eternal calm, was essentially a spiritual clothing label that said,
I'm cooler than you, and I'll be cooler than you when I'm dead, too.

I was in my dim, silent living room at the Wedgwood, sitting on the couch drinking ice water, with my laptop open on the oak coffee table. Beside it a tiny portable inkjet printer ground out the building plans that Anime and/or Lilli had dug up. The plans were solid gold, because they told me not only where the walls were but also what was
behind
them. I yawned, not because I was bored but because I was tired.

I was also feeling sour.

I had no one to cuddle with, which was a problem, because I'm not an indiscriminate cuddler. In my entire adult life—actually, ever since the thorny thicket of desire that was tenth grade—I've only seriously wanted to cuddle with two people, and I'd screwed it up with both of them.

What was so important about knowing the details of Ronnie's story when I instinctively felt there was no way in the world she'd intentionally do me harm? When I knew, although she'd never actually told me so, that she loved me, in whatever way she was capable of loving? Is love such a common thing, is it such low-hanging fruit that I should be studying it through a jeweler's loupe, looking for flaws and inclusions? Shouldn't I just grab it and run, hoping I wouldn't screw it up yet again? As, apparently, I had.

Herbie once told me not to be so hard on myself. “That's what other people are for,” he'd said. One night during my most difficult period with Kathy, he'd told me, “You can't think about you and the job at the same time. You can't think about
anything
and the job at the same time.”

The job.

In a normal month, I might work twice, and if I scored big in one or both of those operations, it could be three or four months before I again found myself easing my way into some locked and shrouded space where I didn't belong. The days were long past when I'd done it just for fun, just to look at the diorama of people's lives, their individuality and their peculiarities as evident in the way they placed the furniture, the things they kept on their shelves and tables, as it was in the houses they built or chose for themselves. At this stage in my life, it was strictly business, and my skill at separating the stuff from the duff allowed me to risk it infrequently.

But now I was contemplating three burglaries in four nights and not liking it at all. The first two had ended badly, and I had no faith whatsoever that the one scheduled for the following evening wasn't going to prove to be the worst mistake of my professional life.

It felt all wrong, completely, totally, one hundred percent wrong. The sensation a steer probably gets as he's being goaded toward the slaughterhouse, not being allowed a moment to pause and get a whiff of what's happening in there. I was being pushed from behind, hurried along before the reek hit my nostrils, by Officer Biehl, by the cops waiting down below with their cherry lights blinking, by the man who'd made the police force possible, King Maybe. According to Jake Whelan, the most powerful person in Hollywood.

Something was bothering me about the cop, Biehl. It wasn't just that I had a feeling I'd seen him before. It was something else.

I found myself at the window, looking downtown at LA's liminal skyline.
Liminal
is the kind of word that makes me want to know who was smart enough to make it up, since what it describes is a complete abstraction, a state of incomplete transformation, something that's caught in the process of becoming something else, like someone partway through the initiation ceremony of a secret society: he's not a member yet, but he's no longer
not
a member either. In spite of my habit of viewing life as a sort of snapshot album, complex moments reduced to bright, hard-edged squares of immobile memory, in fact I know perfectly well that virtually everything is actually in transition. The skyline of Los Angeles, a city that had grown outward for more than a century because earthquakes regularly shuddered the taller buildings into clouds of dust and mounds of rubble, has only lately begun to grow upward, and in spite of its shiny new impressiveness, our downtown is still in the early stages of sprouting skyline that might someday be awe inspiring.

I was also liminal. I was caught in the teeth of something that was forcing me to commit an act that, I felt instinctively, might destroy the precarious life I'd created for myself and turn it into something I didn't want to look at. Even putting the run of bad luck to one side, tomorrow night's break-in reeked of the slaughterhouse.

That brought me back to the topic of Jeremy Granger's power. As powerful as he seemed to be, as real as his power felt to me at this moment, it, too, was liminal. He'd eaten shit for decades on his way to that Regency desk, and no one stays in power forever in Hollywood.

And suddenly I found myself asking why so much of his story, so much of his rise and his public life—even the reason he was forcing me into his house tomorrow night—had its roots in someone with no power at all.