The Fame Thief (8 page)

The architect, or animator, or whoever designed the place, had put on the roof a revolving statue of Cupid, looking like a baby who was going to grow up into someone with a weight problem, and had tricked out the building’s corners with little hearts, stucco versions of those chalky valentine candies nobody ever gave me in elementary school. In a final desperate stab at inspiration, he or she had surrounded it with a sort of ditch full of water—or moat—that, according to a sign, was The River of Love.

It had probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now The River of Love was half-full of an alarmingly green, viscous-looking liquid with a lot of fast-food packaging floating in it. Heavy chains connected the bridge to the front of the building, suggesting that the whole thing could be drawn up in the event of an attack by the unromantic, or a mob of militant interior decorators. Wasn’t anyone going to wade through the gunk in that moat.

One drove graciously over the bridge and made a dramatic entrance into a small parking lot, unadorned except that the lines marking out the parking spaces were hot pink, and then one proceeded right through a tunnel in the middle of the building and into the much larger parking lot behind the building, where no one driving past might spot and recognize a car. The guy who built the place must have gotten a deal on the skip-loader, because the moat ran all the way around the back of the parking lot. In the eleven days Ronnie and I had been there, we’d already had one paralytic drunk sink his brand-new car
in the water. Places like Valentine Shmalentine, if there
are
any places like Valentine Shmalentine, attract a lot of people who have nothing to do all day but sip and
shtup
, and there must have been twenty of us gathered out there, blinking in the cold winter sunlight and avoiding each other’s eyes, when they finally pulled the car out, definitively ridded of that new-car smell.

Ronnie’s little something, a mystery car made in Albania or some other country that’s been closed for a while, was in its usual spot. I pulled in beside it, got out, and, from force of habit, put a palm on the hood. I felt vaguely ashamed of myself, but also reassured that it was cool to the touch, so she’d been home, or at any rate,
here
, for a while. Okay, I’m a skeptic, but Ronnie isn’t exactly addicted to the truth.

One of the things I liked best about the recently widowed but defiantly unmournful Ronnie Bigelow was that she didn’t care where she lived. She had a bright, if somewhat twee, little apartment in the Boys’ Town section of West Hollywood, but she’d been with me at Valentine Shmalentine since the day I moved in. We’d never even discussed it. When my endless month at Marge ’n Ed’s North Pole was finally up, she helped me pack and had me follow her to her place, where I sat around uselessly as she banged some stuff into a small suitcase, pulled four books off the shelves, and trotted helpfully behind me as I toted it to the car. Since then, she’d only gone home for a couple of new books.

Appalling as it was, Valentine Shmalentine was sort of appropriate because Ronnie and I were still in the
oh-brave-new-world-that-has-such-creatures-in-it
stage, the enchanted interlude during which we both found charming the traits we’d probably hate in each other a couple of years down the road. Even Rina, the person I loved most in the world, liked Ronnie. My ex-wife, Kathy, hadn’t been polled on the question yet and hadn’t volunteered an opinion beyond a certain tightness around
the mouth when the conversation drifted in Ronnie’s direction. The duet with Ronnie was my first attempt at the boy/girl thing since my divorce, and it was going well enough to make me stop thinking about Dolores La Marr, Irwin Dressler, and a case that made no sense to me whatsoever.

So there was a spring in my step as I bounded up the stairs of Valentine Shmalentine, beginning at the ground floor—or, as the management called it, “Infatuation,” containing the smallest, darkest, cheapest, mustiest, most overtly threatening rooms—and continuing up through the higher-rent districts, “First Love” and “Love in Bloom,” to the fourth floor, “Obsession,” which was all suites, if dividing a small room into two smaller rooms creates a suite. Ronnie and I ruled our kingdom of passion from Obsession IV (Roman numerals only on the fourth floor), which had an expansive view of a large reddish hole that, according to a rusting sign, had been dug, in a more optimistic year, to hold a bank. The drizzle through which I was hurrying had arrived on the heels of two days of rain, and the hole held about eight inches of muddy water, reflecting a featureless sheet of black sky.

As I pulled the hot-pink card key, the one marked
HIS
, from my shirt pocket, I heard voices inside, both female. It slowed me down. This was a first. Ronnie reserved most of her dazzle for the opposite sex, and if she had any close female friends she’d kept them away from me. We’d made friends with Marge, the woman who ran Marge ’n Ed’s North Pole, but Marge tended not to stray more than a couple of blocks away from her vodka bottle.

So, then, who?

Just in case I was the topic of discussion, I knocked lightly, counted a discreet three, and then slipped the card in and turned the handle.

Ronnie smiled at me from the dangling contraption hanging
from the ceiling, a sort of basket chair with a strategically placed hole in the seat that could be raised and lowered via a complicated setup of ropes and pulleys, and which had almost killed me the one time we tried it out. She gave the chair a bounce and said, “Look, Junior, your friend Debbie is here.” I glanced over at the woman sitting on the love seat, registered the face, checked it against my internal database, and felt my heart stop.

I said, “Huuuuh,” as though I’d been kicked in the stomach.

“Junior,” Debbie said. “No kiss for an old friend?”

I said, wondering where the closest weapon was, “A kiss?”

Ronnie said, “I can turn my back if you’d like. But not for long.”

“Not necessary,” Debbie said, getting up to her full five feet two, as unthreatening as a sea monkey. Her face fell naturally into a smile, eyes permanently crinkled, dimples in play, the
gamine
features surrounded by a soft fluff of reddish-blond hair. She was holding a sort of carpet bag that looked heavy. “There’s nothing I want to do to Junior that I can’t do in front of you.”

That didn’t necessarily make me feel better. “Then let her leave,” I said.

“In a few minutes,” Debbie said. “Maybe.”

Ronnie said, “
Let
me leave? Have I lost free will somewhere along the way?”

“Stay where you are, Ronnie,” I said.

Debbie put her hand into the bag. “Junior,” she said. “What you want to do is sit on the bed and not say anything else, especially anything that would tell Ronnie, whom I like quite a bit, anything she doesn’t need to know.”

Ronnie said, “Such as what?”

“You really, really
don’t
want to know,” Debbie said. “It has nothing to do with Junior. He and I don’t have any history,
one way or the other. In fact, we barely know each other.” She looked over at me. “Why aren’t you sitting?”

“Sitting,” I said. I lifted my hands, fingers spread wide, and tugged my sleeves up in the traditional magician’s gesture to demonstrate that I wasn’t holding anything that might surprise her. Then I sat on the bed.

I got a cute smile of appreciation. With her Reddi-Wip hair, button nose, and child’s frame, Debbie Halstead was cuter than Hello Kitty.
Cute
was the professional stock in trade that had allowed her about a dozen times, if what I’d heard was accurate, to get close enough to someone to slip a tiny gun into the other person’s ear, an effective point of entry although it probably muffled any parting words she’d been asked to deliver. Still, who was going to complain? In the world of crime, where originality is rare, a distinctive signature is a good way to raise your profile among potential customers. Among other things, the small-gun-in-the-ear approach, which said, DEBBIE HALSTEAD WAS HERE, was a good way to keep people, initially, at least, from wondering who ordered the hit. By the standards of the criminal world, Debbie was having a great career.

“I’m here on personal business,” she said. “Not on the job, so to speak.”

“Then take your hand out of your purse.”

“What job?” Ronnie asked, and I was seeing something in her eyes that indicated a very bad next thirty or forty seconds.

I got up and said, “Debbie does a job you don’t need to know about.” When her eyes came to mine, I actually went on tiptoe to reinforce my words. “It would be better for all of us if you didn’t know about it. It would be best of all if you poured water on your temper and sat the fuck down.”

Ronnie opened her mouth, closed it, and sat.

“You let him talk to you like that?” Debbie asked.

Sitting again, I said, “She’ll get me later.”

Debbie tilted her head to one side, evaluating it. “And you know that, but you talked to her that way anyhow. It’s enough to make a girl envious.” She took her hand out of the purse, empty, and waved it at me. “Now, why don’t we all take three or four deep breaths and start over? Ronnie, honey, can you do that? Really, none of this has anything to do with you.”

“I have a question,” I said before Ronnie could reply. “Why don’t we let Ronnie leave? That way, you and I can talk without worrying about what she does or doesn’t know.”

“I’ll make a counterproposal.” Debbie smiled a smile cute enough to be on a Japanese T-shirt. “Since I have some sensitivity about people leaving my sight this early in a relationship, to do who-knows-what, why don’t I tell you why I’m here, being a weensy bit careful, and if it seems to me that we’re getting into territory that it wouldn’t be safe for Ronnie to explore, I’ll raise a hand and she can step out of the room for a minute or two.”

I said, “Ronnie?”

“This is stupid,” Ronnie said. “I mean, what could be that awful?”

There was a silence long enough to learn a new language in. Then Ronnie said, “Oh.”

Debbie lifted both hands, palms out. “I’m harmless,” she said. “You’re safe as milk. It’s a profession, not a hobby.” She looked back to me. “Are you strapped?”

“No.” I patted my shirt and pants to demonstrate the absence of a gun-bulge. I hit the little bottles of Lunesta but kept going. “And there’s nothing in the apartment.”

“Where
is
the gun?” Debbie asked Ronnie. She leaned over. “Whisper it to me.”

Ronnie gave me a look that should have peeled the skin off my face, and whispered something into Debbie’s ear.

Debbie leaned back and said, “Junior? Where did she tell me you’ve put your gun?”

“In storage compartments. She doesn’t know where.”

“Compartments, plural? You have more than one gun?”

“I lead a rich and varied life.”

“That’s why I’m here.” She put the carpetbag on the floor beside her feet, and I relaxed a little bit. “I have a problem, and I’m told you can solve problems.”

“Who told you? In fact, who told you where I was?”

“Do I have to say?”

“Not unless you want help.”

She chewed at the left corner of her mouth for a moment, and said, “Louie the Lost.”

I said, “That fucker.”

“I thought you were friends,” Debbie said.

“We are. That’s why I’m pissed. Nothing personal, but most people wouldn’t be grateful to someone who handed you their address.”

“I guess not.”

“It’s like giving directions to the Grim Reaper.”

She nodded. “I get a lot of that.”

“And he didn’t even call to warn me.”

“Well,” Debbie said, “I’m afraid that was my fault. I told him I’d—you know—”

“Kill him,” Ronnie said. “Let’s just say it out loud, so we can finish in time for Craig Ferguson.”

“Exactly,” Debbie said, looking grateful. “I told him I’d kill him.”

“Okay,” I said. “So now we’re all friends. What can I do for you?”

“Someone is looking for me,” Debbie said. “She says she’s my daughter.”

“That’s sweet,” Ronnie said. “How long since you’ve seen her?”

I said, to Debbie, “And what?”

Debbie grabbed a breath, puffed her cheeks out, and then blew. “And two things. One, I need to know whether she really is my daughter. And, two, if she is, I need to know whether she wants to kill me.”

I said, “Twenty-five hundred up front, before you even tell me about it.”

Ronnie said, “You don’t look old enough to have a daughter.”

Debbie said, “I like her better than I like you.”

“I’m not looking for your vote,” I said. “I have rules, and that’s one of them.”

“So Louie said.” Debbie was alone on the love seat, and it dwarfed her, making her look like a ten-year-old. A ten-year old who had a great many notches on her water pistol. “I’m going to pick up the bag now,” she said. “Don’t get your intestines in a knot.” She bent down and hoisted the carpetbag, just barely muffling a grunt.

“Jesus,” I said. “What’s in there, your bowling equipment?”

“It’s mostly makeup,” she said, up to her elbow in the bag. “Don’t you carry a lot of makeup?”

“I think that one was for you,” I said to Ronnie, who was watching Debbie as though she were something coiled in a circle on the other side of a plate of four-inch-thick glass.