The Fame Thief (34 page)

It was still a pretty long list. For one thing, I had no way of knowing how many people were in the house. And we had exactly one gun among us, the one Tuffy was carrying. Dressler had been insistent that no other firearms would be allowed inside, and at the last moment I’d left the Glock in the trunk of my car. I didn’t know what was so magical about the gun Tuffy had, which was a banged-up, ordinary-looking Sig Sauer, but Irwin Dressler didn’t get to be Irwin Dressler by allowing himself to be second-guessed.

He was already in motion, heading past me into the living room. All I could do was follow and try to see what had caught his eye.

The room was in full light now, and it made me check my watch: 6:14
A
.
M
. The sun rose earlier here than it did in Los Angeles because of the flat, endless expanse of desert to the east. I should have taken that into consideration. I reached for Dressler’s arm to get his attention, but he shrugged me off and kept going.

The far right corner of the living room had been rounded
off and the space filled with a huge fireplace, almost tall enough to walk into. It obviously saw a lot of use; the inside was fire-blackened, and the wall above it was smudged with smoke and soot. But what had drawn Dressler was a scattering of long pieces of rusty-looking iron, three of them, lying on the hearth. They weren’t the conventional fireplace tools although they were about the same length, and he had picked one up and was studying its end.

He made an abrupt gesture to Tuffy, waving him over. A box of long wooden matches stood to the left of the fireplace, and beside that I saw a lever to turn on the gas in the exhaust-pipe size gas log that ran almost the full width of the opening. Dressler motioned for Tuffy to strike a match, and then he leaned down and turned on the gas.

Tuffy had the match going within a second or two, and the gas caught with a
whoosh
when he tossed it in. I tried to get closer, but Dressler extended the piece of iron between us, pointing it at me like a sword, and I thought he was threatening me with it until I saw his eyes. The moment I caught his gaze, he dropped it to the end of the piece of iron he was holding, and I looked down at it.

It was a brand. At the end was the silhouette of a plump, happy-looking pig. In a cursive script beneath it, backward, of course, I read Rancho Piggy. From the look of the tip, which was charred and even crusted, it had seen a lot of use.

He gave me the hard, mirthless little grin I’d seen at his house when we identified Bobby Pig, and he put the branding iron down on the hearth with its tip in the fire.

Time was wasting, and this had nothing to do with why I was here. I waved at him to follow, but all he did was turn back to the fireplace and adjust the branding iron to center its tip more precisely in the flame. The flames emerged blue from the gas log
but turned a cooler yellow where they flowed around the tip of the iron, like water around a stone in the center of a stream.

I gave up on Dressler and Tuffy, and went back through the dining room and into the kitchen. I stopped and listened again, and then stepped into the corridor.

It had no external walls, and therefore no windows, so it was relatively dim. It suddenly grew a lot dimmer, and I turned quickly to see Tuffy in the door to the kitchen, with Dressler behind him. They stood there, looking, as I was, down the hall.

There were three doors on the left side of the hallway, the first and third closed, and an open door at the far end with the morning light coming through it; the room obviously had either a large window or a glass wall. The open door on the left was between the two closed ones, and when I had moved quietly down the hall to it and peeked around the edge I saw that it was a bathroom. So, my guess was bedroom, bathroom, bedroom.

To my right was a glass-framed tub and shower. Directly ahead were a white marble vanity with a sink at its center and a floor-to-ceiling mirror that reflected me in the doorway, looking a little spooked, staring in with Tuffy just behind me. To the left, near the vanity, was an open door, obviously leading to the bedroom we’d just passed.

Sliding my plastic-shod feet over the marble floor, I went to the bedroom door. There, asleep or unconscious on a narrow single bed, was Heckle, the surviving twin. His skin was a bad gray color and his black hair was damp with sweat. He’d tossed the covers back and bandages sheathed him from shoulder to hip.

Someone pulled me back: Tuffy. Dressler squeezed in front of me, looked at the bed, and said, very softly, “Dolly?”

I whispered, “Certainly.” He nodded and looked past me at Tuffy, who wrapped an arm around my neck from behind and dragged me, almost gently, backward out of the bathroom and
into the hall. He let go of me, put both hands up, palms facing me in a
stay there
gesture, and went back into the bathroom. Dressler nodded at him and came out to join me. He stood there, looking at the floor, and I heard a soft grunt and something like a stick breaking, and then Tuffy came back out, wiping his hands on the thighs of his shorts. Other than the damp hands, there was no sign that anything at all had happened in the room.

This time, I followed them.

They gathered in front of the second closed door, both looking at me. I shut my eyes, let out all my breath, drew another one, and very slowly turned the knob and pushed the door open about two inches.

A queen-size bed, pale pastels with white posts, neatly made and empty.

I opened the door another foot or so to reveal a feminine room, not frilly or whimsical, but done in soft colors and with more mirrors than most men want in their bedrooms. There was nothing to indicate that the room was occupied—no clothes lying around, no shoes or slippers on the floor. Some women’s clothing hung in the open closet to the right, but there was no way to tell how long it had been since anyone had gone through the clothes or had slept in the bed. I could see in the mirror that no one was behind the door.

If I had been alone, I might have picked up something I failed to notice at the time. I was distracted by the two of them peering around me and also by the sharp smell of hot iron from the living room. Whatever excuse I might want to make, the fact is that I closed the door and led them down the hall and into the big, bright bedroom where Bobby Pig lay on his bed, eyes wide, watching us come in.

He looked terrible.

The bed was king size, but it was still a hospital bed with a high railing running along one side and a cluster of controls on a corded remote just to Bobby Pig’s right. He’d raised the head of the bed to about a forty-five degree angle so he could sit up. He was gaunt and wasted, the bones of his skull pushing through the skin and his eyes enormous, glittering like wet stones at the bottom of a hole. The fat that had supported them had been burned away by disease.

A clear plastic oxygen tube ran beneath his nose. His hair was mostly gone, but what he had left was long and combed straight back from a fleeing widow’s peak and dyed black in lank strands, pasted to a gleaming scalp. His eyebrows, still thick and bushy, had turned stark white.

“Bobby,” Dressler said. “Long time.” He followed me into the room, giving most of his attention to the wall of glass at the far end, which faced out onto a white-brick-enclosed courtyard with what looked like metal sculptures scattered around it, each holding a reservoir of reddish fluid. Dressler took it all in, turned back to Pigozzi, and said, “You look like shit.”

“I been—” Pigozzi began, and he broke off and swallowed hugely. “I been sick.”

“No kidding,” Dressler said, looking out the window again. “You gonna die?”

Pigozzi cleared his throat and said, “So they tell me.”

“All of this,” Dressler said, and suddenly his voice was shaking, “all of this and you were gonna die anyway?”

“You know how it is, Irwin,” Pigozzi said. His eyes were burning like those of a man who has lost everything to pain, and he’d never for a moment taken them off of Dressler, even though Tuffy and I were in the room. His voice was a husk. “You want every minute you can get.”

“Actually, Bobby,” Dressler said, “I
don’t
know how it is. I don’t know how it is to live like a liar and a thief and a traitor and a sneak. I always tried to do my business, even when it got a little rough around the edges, I always tried to do it honorably. I figured you were the same. I figured everybody was the same.”

Pigozzi closed his eyes. I identified the very soft hiss I was hearing as the sound of the oxygen flowing out of the tube beneath his nostrils.

“Nice view,” Dressler said. “Good to get all this light like this. I should do this to my bedroom, back at home. You ever been to my house?”

“No.” Pigozzi’s eyes were still closed.

“These things out here,” Dressler said. “You gotta open your eyes, Bobby, so you know what I’m asking you about, okay? These things out here with all the pink stuff in them. What are they?”

“They’re hummingbird feeders,” Pigozzi said.

Dressler looked at them a moment longer and then said, “Hummingbird feeders.”

“I like to watch hummingbirds.”

“How about that?” Dressler said. To me, he said, “He likes to watch hummingbirds.”

“Lot of people like hummingbirds,” I said.

“Yeah? Why is that?”

“They’re beautiful,” I said. “They’re harmless—”

“Tell you the truth, Junior,” Dressler said, “I wasn’t asking you. I was asking Bobby here.”

Behind Dressler, on the other side of the glass wall, a hummingbird dropped down and stopped dead in mid-air, looking in at us. Pigozzi watched it. “What that guy said,” Pigozzi said. “I like them.”

The hummingbird turned to one of the feeders, inserted its beak with tremendous precision, and hung there weightlessly, feeding.

“And how would you feel, Bobby,” Dressler said, “if I sneaked in here some day and cut all your hummingbirds’ throats, maybe smashed them flat with a hammer.”

I could hear Pigozzi swallow, but he didn’t answer.

“I know how you’d feel. You’d be
bereaved
, wouldn’t you? Because you’re right, they are beautiful, and things that are beautiful should get a pass, don’t you think? You were never beautiful, were you, Bobby?”

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Pigozzi said.

“Me, neither. Wonder what it feels like. I know—
you
know—that not all people who are beautiful are good just because they’re beautiful. And even the ones who are good, well, they’re not good all the time. Right?”

Pigozzi looked past us at the door.

“He’s not coming,” Dressler said. “He’s dead. Broken neck. Seemed appropriate, since they were twins and that’s what happened to his brother.” To Tuffy, he said, “Broken neck, right? You broke his neck?”

Pigozzi cleared his throat again and said, “Get to it, you fucker. Just get to it.”

“Yeah, okay, right.” Dressler sounded like a man who’d forgotten why he’d come. “Tuffy. Go get it.”

Tuffy looked puzzled for a moment but then he turned and jogged out of the room. I stood there, listening to the crackle of his slippers on the wooden floor until I couldn’t hear them any more. Pigozzi looked at the doorway through which Tuffy had disappeared. Then he reached up and peeled away the oxygen tube.

“So, Bobby,” Dressler said. “I’m going to do something for you that you didn’t do for her. I’m going to offer you a choice. Not an easy choice, but a choice.” He turned as Tuffy came into the room, holding the brand. The tip wasn’t glowing, but it was smoking, and I could feel the heat even three feet away. “Whaddya want, Bobby? You want to get shot or you want to get branded?”

Pigozzi tried to talk but went into a spasm of coughing. He was flailing for the oxygen tube when Dressler said, “Me, too. That’s what I’d choose, too. Give me that thing, Tuffy.” And he took the brand and walked toward Pigozzi, holding the smoking iron in front of him, aimed at the center of the blue silk pajamas covering his chest.

“Come on,” Pigozzi said. It would have been a shout if he’d had any voice left. As it was, it sounded like two rocks rubbed together. “You dumb fucker, you pathetic mark. She sold you—she sold you like an old car. A million five, that’s what you were to her. Petty fucking change.”

Dressler stopped dead where he was. His arm, the arm holding the brand, began to shake, and he let it straighten and hang down until the tip of the brand hissed against the pale wooden floor, sending up a fragrant thread of smoke. “All my life,” he
said. “All my life I been trying to be something I could live with. And I’m going to give that away for you? A piece of crap like you?” He let the brand fall from his hand and clatter to the floor. “No. You’re not important enough.”

“Irwin,” Pigozzi said, trying to lean forward. “I knew you wouldn’t, I knew—Irwin, you won’t regret it, I didn’t mean what I said about her. I’ll—I’ll make it up to you, you can have, you can have—”

“This was always one of your problems, Bobby,” Dressler said. He sounded sad. “You jump to conclusions.” He looked away from the bed. “Tuffy?”

Without hesitation, Tuffy shot Pigozzi through the chest, twice. The sound felt like a punch to both my ears, and outside hummingbirds took flight in all directions.