King Maybe (20 page)

What had driven me to the window was anger on the purely personal, black-widow-spider scale. When I'd gotten onto my feet, I'd been looking at a series of photos of Tasha Dawn taken over the course of the past year or two. In her present-day incarnation, the pretty, ordinary teenager had been burned away completely to be replaced by an anxiety-ridden, emaciated, Giacometti sculpture of tendons, tension, and teeth. Her collarbone was a bas-relief of anxiety above the ten-thousand-dollar gowns that hung like regrets from her sharp shoulders. People stood a safe distance from her, as though what she had was contagious, when it was so obvious that what she needed most in the world was a hug. In picture after picture, she winced at the camera, the fast shutter and the flashbulb probably freezing her in mid-tremble.

I was certain she shook much of the time.

If what I was seeing was caused by what I
thought
had caused it, the same cause that had kept that girl in that terrible show, uncoached and unprotected, that had put her alone on that stage at Comic-Con in front of an audience of merciless kids only a couple of years younger than she was . . . well, if that was the driving force behind the way Tasha Dawn looked in those pictures—at the ripe old age of twenty-one or twenty-two—then Jeremy Granger, despite his cool, emotionless exterior, was the angriest, most merciless son of a bitch I'd ever met in my life.

PART FOUR

IMAGINARY COUNTRIES

Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.
—Screenwriter Ben Hecht

20

Soju

Ten
a.m.
came and went with no call from Stinky.

I'd phoned him twice and gotten the same energized female phone-mail voice that answered my phone and had until recently answered Ronnie's.

Louie called a little after nine and said, “Your car's ready. Got you a new right front panel, got it washed, got the glass all vacuumed out. Looks good as new, which isn't saying much.”

“Great,” I said, rubbing at my eyes, which burned from lack of sleep. “I'll take it.”

“You don't like the Town Car?”

“I'll borrow it for funerals.”

“Nothing new on Stinky,” he said.

“And Garlin Romaine?”

“Her I got. Where are you?”

“Down near K-Town.” I was sitting in the living room of Apartment 302, nursing a cold cup of coffee.

“Whereabouts?” Louie said. “I could meet you in the Toyota, pick up the limo.”

“Good idea. I'll pay you, too. You know Tom N Toms, the good one, in the 3900 block of Wilshire?”

“I'll find it. We'll swap cars, I'll give you Garlin's info.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah. She said she'd been waiting for someone to ask her about Suley.”

“Suley?”

“Tasha. Suley's her real name, I think. Nobody's really named Tasha.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. “It's a tragic fucking name.”

Tom N Toms
is a Korean coffeehouse that's open twenty-four hours, and I could sympathize with the five bedraggled, crumple-suited Korean businessmen hunched together in a vortex of fumes in the far corner, obviously trying to caffeinate their way out of an all-night drunk. I'd started coming down here to sober up at all hours a few years earlier when I was having a little tango with alcohol myself. It's a genetic predisposition from my father's side of the tree, and every now and then it takes a bite out of me. I liked Tom N Toms because it was always open, because the coffee was strong, and because—this being Koreatown—there was usually someone here who was in worse shape than I was, having lost a fight with soju, Korea's deceptively mild-tasting, ethanol-rich rice liquor, the alcohol content of which can reach a semipoisonous forty-two percent. I'd drunk it myself a few times and spent the next day or two searching for my car.

I'd had a scratchy night, not going to bed until almost four and even then just stewing on the pillow until well after the morning began to pale on the other side of the window. When I finally managed to drop off, I had dreams that were all frustration: running through endless airports for planes that had left days earlier, trying to follow maps that faded and reshaped themselves on the page, looking for someone or something in a dark house and being certain that whatever it was, it wasn't in front of me at all—it was following me.

That last one brought me awake and all the way up to a sit.

Dreams may not tell the future, but they sure as hell animate our fears, cut and paste them into a dramatic structure, and present them to us in color, and it took no great rational leap for me to know that particular dream meant I was scared senseless about going into Jeremy Granger's overdecorated square mile of house tonight. And I had no way to get out of it without going to jail.

I popped a sweat just thinking about the dream, and when I wiped my forehead, one of the guys sitting at the soju-recovery table shook his head in sympathy and gave me a pained grin.

“Nice place,” Louie said from halfway across the room, much more loudly than was necessary. A couple of the Korean guys covered their ears. “Whaddaya recommend?”

“Peach tea, if you don't want coffee. The cakes are good.”

“Anything for you?”

“Yeah,” I said, holding up my cup. “Ask the waitress for a refill.”

“Ask the waitress for a refill,
please
,” Louie said.

I said, “Oh, skip it,” and got up as Louie sat down. He said, “Peach tea for me.”

I said, “You're welcome,” and my phone rang. I put my half-full cup on the counter, mimed a refill, said “Peach tea,” and answered the phone.

“So what about old Tyrone, then?” Tyrone said.

“I'm working on it,” I said as the counter attendant topped off my coffee with peach tea and pushed it back to me with a big smile.

“Party's tomorrow,” Tyrone said. “Not to try to light a fire under you or anything.”

“Believe me, I know when the party is. It's blinking in front of me like an End Freeway sign. Aren't you in school?”

“'Course I'm in school. Between classes. Reason I called you, in fact. Rina just walked past me, going the other way.”

“Didn't say anything?”

“Didn't look at me. Didn't even
not
look at me—you know how you can tell when someone's not looking at you?”

“I do.” I leaned across the counter. “One more coffee, please.”

“Must be nice to be someplace having coffee, 'stead of standing around in a school hallway being not-looked at. I'm kind of feeling the pressure here.”

“I've already got something, but I don't know what it means.”

“What? What have you got?”

“You'll keep it to yourself, right?”

“Sure.”

“Because I'm still working on this, and I don't want it dribbling out, I don't want to use it until it's complete.”

“I don't dribble,” Tyrone said. “And if you want to keep secrets—”

“Sorry. She's lying about her birthday. Patricia is. It's really in March.”

Tyrone said, “Whoa.”

“So the question is why? And I actually have people picking away at that right now.”

“The question is why?” Tyrone said.

“I just
said
that.” I put too much money on the counter, picked up the cup that was half coffee, half peach tea, and took it over to the table, where I set it in front of Louie.

“I knew I'd heard it somewhere,” Tyrone said.

I turned back to the counter to get my coffee, but I still heard Louie's gasp at the taste. When I got back to the table, his expression suggested that he'd found a way, without opening his tightly compressed lips, to tie his tongue in a knot. I said, “You didn't say please.”

“Off my patch,”
Louie said. I'd bought him a strawberry shortcake, a piece of cheesecake, and a bottle of Perrier to cleanse his palate, and I'd slipped him the thousand for setting things up with Garlin Romaine, but he was still sulking. “Whadda I know about Philippine dance troupes?”

“You gave me the idea, in a way,” I said. “Yesterday or last night or some damn time, you said to me something like
‘It ain't like he's got groups he moves in,' and—”

“Doesn't sound like me,” he said. Behind him, two of the Korean businessmen had given up and gone to sleep, their heads on the table, and one of them was snoring. “Grammar like that, doesn't sound like me.”

“Well, you said it. Probably better, of course.”

“I mighta said it better. It's
true
, anyways.”

“And the answer is, the group he moves in is made up entirely of his Filipino houseboys.”

Louie nodded. “Guy must really like adobo.”

“Somewhere in Los Angeles, there's someone who arranges tours for Filipino dance troupes.”

“Like I said, way off my patch. But I mean, what's Stinky gonna do? Call up and ask for company? You think the guy delivers?”

“No, I think he'll call to try to locate the one who left him a few months back, a guy named Ting Ting.”

“Ting Ting?”

“Ting Ting.”

“And why did . . . uhhh, Ting Ting leave him? I mean, aside from the fact that he could?”

“He fell in love. With a hit person, named Eaglet. They're living together—”

Louie's head came up. “Eaglet? She's that kind of delayed flower child? Feathers in her hair? Friend of Debbie Halstead? Like a protégée or something?”

“That's the one. You met her?”

“Back when Stinky contracted me to hire a hit on you and I gave it to Debbie because I knew she'd miss, sweet as she was on you.”

“She
wasn't
sweet on—”

“Tell it to your confessor. Anyway, after she missed you the second time, your friend Eaglet called me up, asked did I want
her
to take a crack at you.”

“She did?”

“Said Debbie couldn't hit you if you had the end of her gun in your mouth. Offered like a sale price, too. You know, clearance.”

“Really.” I was feeling betrayed. “Jesus, I took her to Kathy's and introduced her to Rina.”

Louie gave me a full-press Italian shrug. “It wasn't personal.”

“Not to you, maybe. So anyway, I figured maybe whoever set up these dance-troupe tours could tell me whether Stinky had tried to find Ting Ting.”

Louie looked at me, looked at his empty Perrier bottle, looked at the window letting in the milky November light, at the bushes jitterbugging in the wind. Then he said, gently, “Whyn'cha just ask Ting Ting?”

The Korean girl behind the counter was leaning forward, her chin on her hand and her eyes on me, and although it was obvious she was just daydreaming, it felt as though she, like Stinky, had been waiting for me to ask myself that question.

“Because the only way Stinky could find out where Ting Ting was . . .” I trailed off, distracted by Louie's encouraging nods. “You're right,” I said. “The only thing I actually need to know is . . . I'm not sleeping well.”

“Guess not,” Louie said, with a little too much sympathy.

“Well then,” I said, all business. “Let's get to it.” I pulled out my phone and brought up Eaglet's number. Ting Ting answered, and I said, “Hey, Ting Ting, it's Junior.”

“Mr. Junior,” Ting Ting said happily. “You are doing good?”

“Doing great. Hey, have you heard anything from Stinky?”

“Oh,” Ting Ting said. Then he hung up.

Garlin Romaine lived
and worked in a onetime auto-repair shop south of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, less than a mile from Ronnie's place. It took up a double lot, just oily-looking asphalt and a low-slung, architecture-disdaining building to which someone had added, obviously as an afterthought, a slender Art Deco tower probably scalped from a teardown somewhere else in the city. The words
hansen's automotive
, painted decades ago in a dark pigment, had ghosted their way through a couple of coats of cheap whitewash, and a battered metal sign out front still said
mechanics illustrated recommended!
The sign had a couple of bullet holes in it.

When I pulled the Toyota across the asphalt in front, the wheels bumped over a fat rubber tube and a bell chimed inside, an antediluvian way of announcing a customer on the lot. So Garlin Romaine knew that I, or at least someone, was out here. Which put me under a little pressure, because suddenly I wasn't sure I wanted to go in.

All the way over from K-Town, I'd been asking myself why Tasha—née Suley, which probably wasn't her real name either—had become so important to me. I'd been trying to rationalize it by convincing myself that she might direct me to Granger's Achilles' heel, assuming he had one, but on sober reflection it seemed as though my initial assessment of her as
powerless
had been an understatement. When she was a child, he'd used her like a hand puppet to bring down Barry Zipken, his old boss at Farscope, and then, possibly because she could hold that over him, he'd married her and made her rich, put her into a TV show and made her famous, and used all of it to make her miserable. And now he was forcing me to go into his house and remove the most valuable painting he owned so he could divorce her without its being factored into the community-property settlement.

So he could, in short, screw her over one final time.

It was inescapable that I was on the wrong side. I hate, hate,
hate
being on the wrong side. And if that sounds odd or unconvincing coming from a burglar . . . well, broaden your horizons.

So just sorting it out, looking for some sort of rational explanation for my actions: What the hell was I doing here? Why did I want to see Garlin Romaine? Was I trying to find a way to bring Jeremy Granger down or looking for a reason to refuse to go into that house tonight? An excuse, that is to say, to do something that would get me charged with, and convicted of, burglary in the company-owned town of Culverton.

Putting an end to my life as I knew it.

Without knowing I was going to do it, I looked down at my watch—4:40.

A little less than three hours until I was going to have to go into that house.

Part of me just wanted to flatten the accelerator and leave Garlin Romaine waiting for the knock at her door. Forget learning any more about any of it. I didn't have to be Junior Bender my whole life long. I had money stashed in storage units all over town and in a box secured inside the chimney at the Wedgwood. I had valid identification in many names. I had saving accounts and credit cards with multiple banks under each of those many names. I had escape routes I'd laid out years ago. I had lots of people I could be. I had a well-paved road to freedom.

I had a daughter.

Facing the biggest threat to my way of life in years, I found that I actually cared more about whatever the hell Patricia Gribbin was trying to do to Rina than I did about anything else. I had to remain an active presence in Rina's life.

So no alternative identities. No running away. Stay Junior Bender and work through this.

An amplified voice, a female voice, said, “Hey. White Toyota.”

I looked out the window to see that a light had come on over a windowless steel door between the two drive-in repair bays. “If you're the person Louie told me about, come in. If you're not, this is private property.”