The Fame Thief (22 page)

Halfway down, I saw little spots of white on the gleaming black floor in the living room—not very big, irregularly shaped, like the aftermath of tiny explosions, fuzzy little galaxies seen from millions of light-years away. I slowed and stopped calling out. For the second time that night, I took off a shoe, but this time I took off both of them.

From where I stood, not yet out of the hallway, I was looking across the living room at Dolores La Marr’s bookshelves. To my right, but not visible to me, the living room stretched off to the window facing downtown, with the couch, table and chair in front of it. That end of the room opened onto the dining room with its big, empty, dusty table and then the kitchen and the cold pantry. In the part of the living room to the left of where I stood, the other hallway led to the bedrooms and bathrooms and closets.

I’d never been in the part of the apartment to the left of the entry hall, but I’ve burgled enough floor plans to make it easy to visualize the area: the biggest bedroom, the one La Marr used, at the far end of the hall with its own bathroom, and two other bedrooms and a second bathroom opening onto the hall from both left and right.

Doors, I thought, I’d just as soon not pass in front of.

Operating on habit, I had slowed my breathing, making it as noiseless as breathing can be. I put the shoes down very quietly, wrapped my right hand around the hilt of the thin, razor-sharp knife, and slid my stocking feet over the smooth floor toward the living room. I was dreading a sound that would tell me I wasn’t alone, but most of all I was dreading a repeat of that terrible wet noise.

At the end of the hallway I chose the right wall, put my shoulder against it, and looked quickly into the end of the room where the couch and window were. Nothing except Los Angeles, gaily glittering away as though nothing bad had just happened.

I
knew
something bad had just happened. I think I would have known it even without the anguish-saturated fog that had clung to me the moment I stepped off the elevator. I pushed all of that away, plus all the emotion that went with it, busying myself by looking toward the bookshelf. Everything seemed to be there, even the fake book with all the money in it.

I stepped into the room and turned, looking down the hallway toward the bedrooms. The lights in the hall were out, although light from the living room bled partway down it, making the floor gleam and setting off the black rectangle of the open door at the far end of the hall. I felt another sharp-winged flutter of anguish, but then it left me alone.

The little splashes of powder on the floor weren’t completely white. I leaned forward and saw tiny bits of blue, irregular little gray-blue tatters, like flakes of lizard skin. And then I knew what they were, and all the hope I’d been trying to muster drained away. I stood absolutely still, listening as I’ve learned to listen in a house I’m not certain is empty, and knowing that there was something terrible in one direction and something almost as bad in the other. I chose the less-bad first. I kept my right arm loose with the elbow crooked slightly, the hand with the knife tilted upward, at the right angle—about seventy degrees—to slip beneath the rib cage, and I headed for the kitchen.

But it wasn’t necessary to go all the way, because the dining room floor was littered with empty prescription bottles, two or three of them smashed into the hardwood and dragged over it, hard enough to leave a pattern of gouges. Just to make sure, I went on through, into the kitchen, stepping around the shards of a broken glass glistening in a pool of water in the center of the floor, and continued to the open door of the cold pantry. The floor in there was inches deep in loose cereal from the carton, now torn to scraps, that had hidden the bottles of Lunesta. All of which were gone.

I was seeing fury. A plan interrupted. The cereal box shredded, the glass shattered. The bottles tossed and stamped on, the remaining pills crushed to dust.

Which left me with nothing to do except the thing I dreaded. I was reasonably sure I was alone in the apartment now, and I
moved quickly and quietly back out through the dining room and down the length of the living room to the other hallway, threading my way through the splotches of white powder. Out of the habit of caution, I stood at the entry to the hallway, barely breathing, for a count of one hundred, and then I went straight down the hall to the door at the end and slid my hand over the wall until I hit the light switch. At the same time, I kicked the door against the wall as hard as I could, just in case.

The sound seemed to drive the dark away, seemed to bring into existence and solidify the dreadful display in front of me.

I had to close my eyes.

It must have been twenty or thirty seconds before I could force them open again. The bed, high, wide, canopied, was an abattoir. I couldn’t look at Dolores La Marr for more than a second or two, but when I did, my heart stopped. On the pillow, only a few inches from the ravaged face, was the headset she’d been wearing. The wet sound I’d heard when I came in—

I forced myself across the room and gently took the wrist dangling off the end of the bed, silently asking permission. Still warm, still supple. No pulse. Closing my eyes again, I leaned down, close enough to her to put my ear a few inches from her mouth.

She wasn’t breathing.

Straightening up, I felt a surge of the purest, whitest, coldest rage. It almost crumpled me. Whatever had happened in 1950, bad as it had been, hadn’t closed the books. The books had been closed tonight. Whatever it was that had destroyed Wanda Altshuler/Dolores La Marr so ruthlessly, way back then, had been patiently waiting until it felt that it was necessary to finish the job.

It was still out there. And by accepting Irwin Dressler’s assignment, I had brought it back to life.

Which meant that, as far as I was concerned, the books weren’t closed. They wouldn’t be closed until I closed them, and I would do that, no matter who I had to cross.

I pulled my shirttail loose and backtracked through the place, using the shirt to wipe everything I could remember having touched. Then I went into the hall and peeled my socks off, putting my bare feet directly into my shoes without letting them touch the floor. I slipped my hands into the socks and went back into the living room, where I pulled the book full of money off the shelf and popped it open. There was just enough room for four of the
netsuke
, and I wedged the others into my pockets.

On the way down, I remembered the headset. There
must
have been time for her to scream. I stopped the elevator at the lobby level. One look at the floor was all it took: footprints in the distinctive brownish red of drying blood, leading away from the room where the guards were stationed. Avoiding the bloody spots, I used my shirttail to pull the door open and found myself looking down at the man I’d thought of as Pyongyang. His throat had been cut. He was on his side, one hand stretched straight up, as though he’d hoped something might reach down and take his hand and snatch him to safety.

Two throat-cuttings in one night. People who use knives are different than you and me.

Down in the garage, moving with slow deliberation and keeping my mind as still as possible, I returned the knife to its hiding place and put the book full of money into the trunk. Then I powered up the driveway, made a right and then another. The street with the Nox on it led me down to Olympic, and I sat there for all of three or four seconds before turning right, west, toward Bel Air.

Irwin Dressler looked one hundred and fifty years old. All the frailty, all the vagueness, all the fretfulness, all the tremors—all the palsies and neural misfires and cosmetic damage he’d been holding at bay all these years—had joined forces and knocked him sideways. He sat on the enormous couch, folded forward over another bright pair of golf slacks, hugging himself tightly and rocking back and forth like someone who is keening.

He said, “But.” It was the fourth or fifth time he’d said it.

Tuffy stared at him from the doorway to the dining room, his forehead so furrowed he looked like a Basset Hound. He had his hands jammed in his pockets with his fists balled up, the picture of helpless concern. Babe was rattling things around in the kitchen, whipping up something or other that, from the sound of it, involved pans and glasses.

“It happened between seven-forty-five and ten,” I said. “Probably closer to ten, because she was alive when I went in, just alive enough to make one sound that I heard over the speakers. You know about the speakers?” He didn’t respond, and I said, “Do you know about—”

Dressler waved me away and said, “Junior—” It was a warning.

“No,” I said. “With all due respect, Mr. Dressler—Irwin—we’re at a new stage in our relationship. Tonight I’ve almost been killed, I’ve put myself in the frame for a murder charge, and I’ve seen something I’ll never forget, even if I—if I live longer than you have. I’m not just on a case any more.”

“No,” Dressler said, sounding like he was being strangled. “What are you on?”

“A fucking crusade. I am personally going to deal somebody the big one, and I hope I get to do it in a really unpleasant fashion.”

“Here, Mr. Dressler,” Babe said, coming into the room at a half-trot, balancing a small tray on his upraised hand. In the center of the tray was a clear glass coffee-cup, almost full of something steaming hot, a kind of muddy, nondescript brown. Babe put it on the table, and Dressler reached for it.

All three of us watched his hand shake.

Babe reached over and pushed it closer.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Whiskey, Worcester Sauce, V-8, Vitamin B-12, and four dissolved capsules of Tryptophan.”

“I’ll take one, too,” I said, “but leave out everything but the whiskey.”

Babe automatically glanced at Dressler, who was trying to lift the cup without spilling all over his terrible slacks. He dipped his head about a quarter of an inch.

“Fine,” Babe said, a bit disapprovingly.

“A big one,” I said. “And not hot.”

Tuffy jammed his hands even more deeply into his pockets.

I said to Dressler, “Do you want a hand?”

“You give me a hand,” he said, more gasp than voice, “and I’ll have Tuffy kill you right here.” He sipped the drink, swallowed, and sipped again. “On my good carpet.”

“That’s better,” I said. Tuffy relaxed his arms, bending his elbows slightly. This was a good move, since he’d been on the verge of shoving his pants down over his thighs.

“What do you mean,” Dressler asked, a little more voice in it, “
you’re
on a crusade? What about me?”

“What
about
you?” I pulled the chair closer to the table, putting a big ripple in his good carpet. “When I took this on, I didn’t ask you any of the questions I would have asked anyone else in the world, because—well, because of who you are. But that doesn’t count now. I was alone in that room with her, and nothing counts any more.”

Dressler waved the back of one spotted hand at me as he drank. The awful putty-gray color was leaving his face. When he lowered the cup, he said, “How do you know you didn’t
cause
what happened? How do you know—how do I know—you didn’t make some incredibly stupid mistake that told them where she was?”

“
Where she was
is a different topic, and we’ll get to it. I did make a mistake. I didn’t ask you, when you gave me this job, whether you thought all that malice was still out there. Whether that particular play was finished, or just in a long intermission.”

Dressler’s eyes tried to look straight through my head, an eagle’s glare, and then faltered. He blinked, started to drink again, and stopped, the cup still close to his lips. “No, you didn’t,” he said, “and that was my fault. I made it sound.… I—I
guess
I made it sound … like history.”

“And because of that, I made another mistake, a second mistake,” I said. “Talking to Pinky Pinkerton, when he got a little difficult, I tried a scare tactic. I told him that there were people who were dangerous, way back then, and that one of them was still dangerous today. It terrified him.”