The Fame Thief (9 page)

“No,” Ronnie said, keeping her eyes on what she could see of Debbie’s hands. “I kind of do it in the morning and forget about it.”

“You’ve got that kind of skin,” Debbie said. “Wish I did. Hold this.” She extended a hand that had a 22 automatic in it. “I keep bending my nails on it.”

Ronnie took the gun and gave me a helpless look.

“That should relax everyone,” Debbie said rooting around in the bag.

“You’ve got others,” I said.

“Well, sure I do. And that one’s empty, anyway. It was just a gesture. What kind of moisturizer?”

“Clinique,” Ronnie said. “The yellow stuff.”

“Pricey.”

“You’re only young for free once. After that, they charge you.”

“Ah, here we are.” Debbie pulled out a thick envelope. “You can thank your little friend Louie for one thing. He inflated your fee for saying yes.”

“He’ll hit me for the difference,” I said. I got up and took the envelope, giving it an experimental heft. “How much?”

“Thirty-five hundred.”

“The piker,” I said. “He could’ve said five.”

“With all due respect to you and your friendship, he was walking a balance beam. He figured you wouldn’t want me to be too highly invested in the outcome. As a disappointed customer, I’m a nightmare.”

“I don’t have any disappointed customers.”

“Not what I hear. Trey Annunziato isn’t crazy about you.”

“Trey’s the only one.”

“Or Jake Whelan.”

I said, “Oops.”

“Just messing with you. He thinks you’re terrific.”

“That’s a relief.” Jake Whelan, once Hollywood’s hottest producer, had paid me some of the money he had left over
after buying all the cocaine in the western hemisphere, and had received in return a picture he thought was a genuine Paul Klee. I’d been waiting for that shoe to drop for more than a year. “You’ve been busy.”

“Attention to detail is essential to success.” She said it almost automatically, as though it were a mantra. “Don’t you find that?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

I got the pursed mouth of disapproval. “If you don’t, you won’t be in business long.”

“I also believe in unprepared improvisation. You can’t always have a plan. Sometimes you have to make your leap and grow your wings on the way down.”

“Did you make that up?”

“No,” I said, “but I believe it. So, your daughter.”

She waggled her hand,
mas o menos
. “My daughter
maybe
.”

“Okay. Take it in order. How do you know anyone is looking for you, why do you think it might be your daughter, and why—if it is your daughter—would she want to kill you?”

“That’s what I like about men,” Debbie said. “No emotions at all.”

“I didn’t see you break out a hankie.”

“How do I know someone is looking for me, right? That was the first question. Someone, a young woman of about eighteen, has been knocking on doors in my hometown—”

“Which is?”

“Las Vegas.”

Ronnie said, “I didn’t think anyone came from Las Vegas.”

“Yeah?” Debbie said. “Where are you from?”

“Trenton,” Ronnie said.

I said, “Or Albany.” Debbie’s smile slipped, and I said, “She and I are still discussing it.”

“I don’t always tell the truth,” Ronnie said.

“And you think she might be your daughter why?” I said.

“She says she is. And she’s about the right age.”

“And part three of the question. Why would she want to kill you?”

Debbie shook her head, and her hair bounced adorably. “I didn’t say she did. I said I wanted to
find out
if she did.”

“Why would you think—”

“Not important,” Debbie said. “Drop it.”

“Nothing about the reason might help me?”

“I don’t know. For now, let’s just save it for later. If I actually need to tell you.”

I decided to let it pass. “How many people do you want me to talk to in Las Vegas?”

She sat back. This was more comfortable territory. “Four. All women.”

“I’ll need names and addresses, numbers, all that stuff.”

“I have to talk to them first. They’re not in the business, but they’re not exactly not in the business, either. Or at least two of them aren’t.”

“I don’t care if they make socks out of kittens,” I said. “I just need to talk to them.”

“They don’t need to know much about me,” Debbie said. “Two know better than to ask certain kinds of questions, but the ones who do ask, well, stiff them as much as you can. So you’ll go? To Vegas?”

“Sure,” I said. “I have to go anyway.”

Ronnie said, lighting up like a spotlight, “We’re going to Vegas?”

“No, I am.”

“You don’t have to take that kind of talk,” Debbie said to Ronnie. She reached down into the bag and pulled out the little
gun again. “I’m just going to load this so I’ll be comfortable on my way out. Don’t let it bother you.”

“Before you put in the bullets,” Ronnie said, “don’t tell me what kind of talk to take or not take, okay? This relationship may not look perfect to you, but I’m a long way from finished.”

I said, “Finished?”

“With changing you.”

“Good luck with that,” Debbie said, sliding the magazine in with a decisive
click
. “I’ve tried, but it never took.” She glanced up and caught Ronnie’s stare. “Not with Junior honey, relax.”

“Put the gun away, now,” I said. I waited until she had. “Let’s get the details straight. I’m going to find out whether someone is looking for you and who she might be, and I’ll give you the information you need to decide whether it’s your daughter or not, if I can. As to what her motives are, I don’t read minds. I’ll ask you for more money when and as I need it, but the minimum you’re going to pay me, if I find her, is twelve thousand five. The maximum could be double that.”

Debbie said, “Jiminy.”

“If I don’t get enough information for a positive identification, you don’t pay me beyond ten thousand.”

Debbie thought about it for a moment, her eyes wandering the room, lingering on some of its odder features, of which there were many. “Okay,” she said.

“Good. How do I get in touch with you?”

“I’ll leave you a card. It’s got phone, email, Facebook.”

Ronnie said, “Facebook?”

“Sure,” Debbie said. “Killers need friends, too.”

Five minutes later
, Ronnie said, “God. I thought she’d never leave. At least, not with both of us still alive.”

“Changing me, huh?”

“Well, I am,” she said. “One stubborn little atom at a time.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Puh
leeeeze
. Planning to go to Vegas without me? Hit-women dropping in at all hours? Living in this pop-up porno book of a motel? Where should I start?”

I wiggled my eyebrows at the enormous pink bed. “How about there?”

She pushed her foot against the carpet, setting the contraption in which she was sitting on a long slow swing back and forth. “How about the Death Chair?”

“How about a narrowly missed pelvic fracture?”

She pushed again, and the ceiling creaked. “I’m not worth a narrowly-missed pelvic fracture?”

“Of course you are. Tell you what. This time
you
lie on the floor.”

“With you on the seat? Never work. Physiology, remember? Not even worth a try.”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” I said, getting up. “Put on your red hat.”

Demographically speaking, I was all over the place. A crowd of people in their eighties on one hand, and Debbie’s 18-year-old, or thereabouts, on the other.

The age gap suggested an approach to organizing my time, which was that I speak first to those who were more likely to die of old age. That decision also reinforced my instinctive sense that, scary as Debbie Halstead was, Irwin Dressler was scarier by several magnitudes, golf slacks or no golf slacks.

So by 10:30
A
.
M
. the next day, I was in a small living room with a pumpkin-orange leather couch and a coffee table of blue-green Coca-Cola glass, regarding the magically smooth face of Doug Trent.

Trent—the director of
Hell’s Sisters
and about thirty other movies, according to Wikipedia—had been a very good-looking young man, and he was doing everything money, medical science, and a high pain threshold could accomplish to make him a very good-looking old man. His skin had the fraudulent flawlessness of a wall that’s just had graffiti sandblasted off it. And if that wasn’t enough to put me off him, his naturally silver hair was as blue as a delphinium and curled into long commas that fell over his Teflon forehead. To make it a trifecta, he was also
wearing an ascot, tucked into the open neck of a loose white shirt.

“Yeah, yeah, Dolly,” he said. He touched the tips of his fingers to the corner of his right eye, as though checking to make sure the masonry was holding. “Terrible, terrible thing, what happened to her. Beautiful girl, just beautiful. Couldn’t act for shit, of course, but it didn’t matter, as long as she hit her key light. Light went right into those pale eyes, and the audience just filled them in with whatever emotion the background music had to offer. Do you know how Mauritz Stiller got those long, heart-wrenching close-ups of Garbo?”

“No.”

“He got the light exactly right, put the camera a foot from her nose, and told her to count to ten.”

I said, “In Swedish?”

Trent, who had moved on to patting the skin beneath his eye, stopped and gave me a first-rate cold look. “How would I know? The
point
is that a lot of what an actress gets credit for is actually due to the director.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I mean, makes perfect sense.”

“Trust me,” Trent said. “I know actresses. I married six of them.”

“What was it like, being married to six actresses?”

“Like being married to one of them. They’re all pretty much alike.”

“Why’d you keep doing it, then?”

“ ‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’ ” Trent said, “that tickles your scrotum at the moments when you most need a clear head.”

“How’d you get along with La Marr on
Hell’s Sisters
?”

“She was fine,” he said. He looked around the room, and sighed with apparent regret. Doug Trent was living out his
sunset years in an over-furnished one-bedroom apartment in Encino, only eight or ten miles from Valentine Shmalentine, and everything about him telegraphed that he regarded it as a comedown. “Everybody liked her. Of course, it helped that the other one was … was.…” He put the tip of his index finger between his eyebrows and closed his eyes.

“Olivia Dupont,” I said.

Trent said, “Don’t
do
that. I have to fight this thing, or it’ll get me. When I go adrift, you just sit there. If you must do something, cross your fingers for me.”

“Sorry.” I liked him for the first time.

“Olivia. What a flaming, seven-day-a-week bitch she was.” He lifted his head, angled his face away from me by about twenty degrees, and regarded me out of the corners of his eyes. It was pretty stagy. “Am I right?
Was
?”

“Is, actually.”

“I should have known it. She’ll live forever, sucking the blood of the unborn. I directed pictures for more than thirty years and never worked with a bigger shit than Olivia Dupont. Oh, I mean, there were some big stars who were almost in her league, but not many even of those. But Livvy was never a big star.”

“Dolores La Marr said she slept her way sideways.”

“For years. Before I knew about that, it amazed me that she kept working. I was in a pre-production meeting at Warner once, and when someone read her name on the cast list, everyone groaned.” He circled a thumb and index finger and pushed his other index finger in and out of the opening. “The front office,” he said. “She was boinking every executive producer at every studio in town.” He looked down at his hands and put them in his lap. “Directors, too, if they were on the A-list.”

“How many times did you work with her?”

“Twice. The first time, I asked for her, and the second she was forced on me, and I caved in.”

“
Hell’s Sisters
? Was that the first or the second time?”

“The second. The first time, I was an almost-big name and she did the sweet-young-thing act. As you’ve probably deduced, I have a weakness for actresses. The second time, I was, let’s say, somewhat faded, and I couldn’t say no.”

“Why faded?”

He pursed his mouth, as though to spit out a seed. “Bad judgment. I associated with the wrong people, politically. I was big enough for the anti-communists to go after, but not big enough to be one of the Hollywood Ten.” He gave me a very small smile, something the corners of his mouth might have been doing on their own, without permission. “Even in times of disaster I wasn’t big enough for top billing. If there had been a Hollywood Fifty-three, I would have made the cut.”

“But you got
Hell’s Sisters
.”

“It was the last one, under my own name, and it wasn’t much of a picture. Nobody was more surprised than I was when it did business. But by then, even a hit couldn’t help me. From that point on, I worked in television as a
consultant
, under the name Albert Paris, showing neophyte TV directors where to put the camera and how to figure out which takes to print.”