King Maybe

by Timothy Hallinan

  Now I did have the time, and as much as I wanted to speed-walk up Tigertail and get into that car with Ronnie so we could motor out of the Slugger’s orbit, I stepped back into a hedge instead and thought for a couple of minutes about the person who had just snatched my butt off the barbie.

  The question was simple: Who the hell was she?

  When I met Ronnie, she was a suspect in a situation I’d been forced into working on. My assignment was to make sure that my client wouldn’t be charged with the murder of someone he’d had a lot of reasons to murder. The victim had been Ronnie’s husband, and the first rule of murder when the victim is married is look at the spouse. So, during that first week we knew each other, even as we were falling in love, we were both lying for all we were worth, me trying to figure out whether she was guilty and her trying to look as innocent as lamb’s fleece. It was, let’s say, a layered relationship.

  Eventually I figured out who’d killed Ronnie’s ex, and that would have straightened it all out between us except that she refused to tell me anything about her past, including where she’d come from or what she’d been doing with all the crooks she’d been hanging around with back wherever it was. I knew they were crooks because she’d come to Los Angeles from some dreary East Coast town—Trenton and Albany had been claimed at various times—by being lateraled every thousand miles or so, like a living football, from a car thief to a drug dealer to a blackmailer, the last of whom she’d married.

  I know it feels like it must have taken me some time to consider all this, but I was cranked up pretty good and my mind moves fast when it needs to. I knew I’d missed something in the past couple of minutes, and I was trying to dig that out when headlights swept the street, turning down from Tigertail, not up from the Slugger’s. I stepped farther back into the hedge as my inoffensive, inconspicuous little white Toyota glided by instead of the Jaguar I’d been expecting, the one we’d stolen so we’d blend into the neighborhood better and which had undoubtedly been the heavy beast that had hit the gates. As it went by, my mind replayed Ronnie saying, I’m in your car.

  For a moment I thought about zigzagging surface streets, avoiding her completely, until I got someplace where I could call a cab. Just to give me some time to sort out what had just happened and what it might suggest.

  Also, I realized I was shivering, a delayed reaction to what had nearly happened at the Slugger’s. Ducking Ronnie for a while would also let me get that under control. But then I heard Herbie saying, The longer you delay facing something important, the longer you give it to kill you, so when I pushed myself out of the hedge and started uphill, figuring she’d turn around and pass me on the way back up to Tigertail, I still had no idea what I should say once I got into the car.

  “So?” she said, pulling away from the curb.

  I sat back and worked on not shaking. “Piece of cake.”

  “I ask because you look like the god of spring, with green stuff all over you, twigs in your hair, and bleeding knuckles.”

  “Piece of cake,” I said again.

  “And you’re shaking.”

  “Okay, it was a piece of stale hardtack laced with rat poison.”

  “That’s better,” Ronnie said. “I get all warm and fizzy when you confide in me.”

  “I don’t usually talk after a job,” I said.

  “No shit,” Ronnie said, making a right. She headed uphill, toward Mulholland and the San Fernando Valley. We were in a neighborhood where even the weeds were expensive. I don’t spend a lot of time in areas like this. Too much temptation and too many security cameras.

  I said, “Where are we going?”

  She turned and regarded me just a moment too long, given the number of curves in the street, and I hit an imaginary brake pedal with my right foot. “You’re asking me?” she said. “We’re going to that man with the little tiny nose and the Filipino folk dancers, right? You said he wanted the stamp tonight.”

  “I’m not sure now. There are a lot of balls up in the air.” My phone vibrated. I pulled it out, looked at caller ID, put it to my ear, and said, “Fuck off, Jake.” Then I turned it off.

  “What a relief,” Ronnie said. “It’s not just me. One of the balls?”

  “How’d you get my car?”

  She drove for a moment, and then she said, using the exact same tone she’d used the first time, “One of the balls?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She said, “How do you think I got your car? I drove the Jag back to where we borrowed it, left it there, and hiked up to where we parked this awful little Toyota. I have to say it’s a real step down, going from the Jag to this heap. On the other hand, this has brake lights. I left about a third of the Jag’s rear end in that gate I knocked down.” She drove a few hundred yards and repeated, “That gate I knocked down.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “And thanks. I might not have made it out if you hadn’t done that.”

  “It was nothing. Really, nothing.”

  “Just . . . you know, want to be sure you understand I’m grateful.”

  Ronnie took us around a turn, stopped at an intersection, and then took us further uphill. “It’s written all over your face.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “My father always said, ‘Never interrupt a man who’s thinking. You might prevent him from having his only idea.’”

  “Your father said that, did he? Where did he say that?”

  “I knew we were getting to this,” she said. “And let’s not. Let’s do what we were going to do, before I saved your ass and you got all crazy. Let’s drop the stamp off like you planned and then . . . I don’t know, go to the park and search for poisonous mushrooms, something that suits your mood.”

  “You nailed the gate, swapped cars, and got back to the meeting point.”

  “It sounds so impressive boiled down like that.”

  “It is impressive. And amazingly fast thinking for someone who’s never committed a crime before.”

  “Are you going to continue to be awful?” she said. “Listen, if we’re not going to that man’s house—”

  “Stinky.”

  “To Stinky’s house. I mean, if we’re not going there, where are we going?”

  “I’m working on that. So . . . about your criminal skills, if I were to get someone—say, a cop—to comb through the criminal records in Toronto—”

  “I’ve never been to Toronto.”

  “Or Ontario.”

  “Or Ontario. Oh, look at my knuckles on the steering wheel. They’re all white. Such a stressful line of questioning, when what would be appropriate is appreciation and maybe a kiss.”

  “I appreciate you. Where was it, then? Montpelier?”

  “This is a very peculiar reaction toward someone who just saved your—”

  “And demonstrated an unexpected set of skills, at a speed that suggests well-worn neural pathways. Which, as we both know, are developed through repeated use. Trenton?”

  “Fine, sure, Trenton.” She swerved the car violently into the oncoming lane and then brought it back. “Cat,” she said.

  I hadn’t seen a cat.

  “So we’re not going to Stinky’s, so you’re in this foul mood, because you didn’t get it? The big hotshot burglar didn’t—”

  “I got it. I always get it. I’m a professional. And I flatter myself that I can recognize a professional.”

  The word made her pause just a bit longer than she should have. Perhaps she hadn’t expected me to be so blunt. “Whatever that means. Look. You got your stamp, you got out in a single, not badly shaped piece, with your fairly attractive face intact. You’ve got that stamp in your pocket, and you should be ready to hop on over to your fence’s house—” She bit her lower lip. “That’s what you’d call someone like Stinky, right? A fence?”

  I just looked at her.

  “Yo
u throw that term around a lot,” she said. “Fence this, fence that. ‘I’ll just run this over to my fence.’ Like that. You know?”

  “So if I were to send someone to comb through the criminal files of Trenton or Albany under the name Veronica—wait, what’s your maiden name?”

  “This is territory we haven’t covered,” she said. “And I appreciate that we haven’t covered it. I know it’s taken willpower on your part.”

  “It has. What was it?”

  She did a little warning drumroll on the steering wheel with her nails. “LeBlanc.”

  We shared a moment of silence.

  “You do realize,” I said, “that LeBlanc is not a name that really rings with credibility.”

  She pulled the car to the curb, hard enough to put the front tire halfway up it. We were most of the way to Mulholland, in an area where the houses were sealed behind gates that made the one she’d driven through look like a saloon door. There were no streetlamps, and we were on a tight curve to the right, practically begging to be hit from behind. The top of the ridge, a few hundred yards ahead, was a curving, pillowy line of solid black against the diffuse glow of the Valley’s zillion lights. “I come from a long line of LeBlancs,” she said between her teeth. “LeBlancs all the way down.”

  “Down to where?”

  She sighed heavily, a sign that she needed time to work on the answer and its tone. “Down to 1209 a.d.? The Albigensian Crusade? When Pope Innocent III, of all the ironically named people, decided to kill every single Cathar in France because they didn’t like the cookies the pope served at the altar. That was when we changed our name, because we’d been Cathars, and burning at the stake didn’t seem like an option. Okay?”

  “Changed it from what?”

  “LeNoir,” she said. “Later anglicized to Leonard.”

  “Anglicized when? That makes no sense at all. I mean, if your name is still LeBlanc—”

  “LeNoir was an embellishment,” she said with fraudulent candor. She shook her head fondly at her own foolishness. “I can’t resist embellishments.”

  “You’re telling me. So your family was Cathar?”

  “Still is.”

  “I thought all the Cathars were dead.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t tell the pope. Can we get going now?”

  “And you? You’re a Cathar?”

  “To the center of my clean little bones.”

  “So you believe that the world is the result of a war between God and Satan and that everything that’s visible was created by Satan and is therefore evil?”

  “Explains a lot,” she said, “when you think about it.”

  “And that human beings are the genderless spirits of angels, temporarily trapped inside evil bodies designed in hell, sort of like good champagne in a paper cup?”

  She squinted at me. “What kind of spirits of angels?”

  “Genderless.”

  “If only.”

  “So, at the risk of abandoning this endlessly interesting digression, if I were to have someone probe the criminal files of Newark and Poughkeepsie—”

  “Trenton and Albany.” A pause. “I might have said Newark.”

  “For arrests and charges involving Veronica LeBlanc, of all the silly names, there’d be no record of—”

  “For heaven’s sake. If I don’t even remember which town it was, if I can’t say for sure whether I have a record, surely you can understand that it’s because I’ve blotted it all from my memory, that something happened back there—”

  “Wherever it was—”

  “—so terrible that I’ve drawn a dark veil over it, even for myself, even blocked it from my dreams. There are areas of experience for a woman that a man can’t even begin—Why are you grinning?”

  “Because you’re so fast, which is what gives you away, and because you know instinctively which buttons to go for. Problem is, I don’t have many buttons.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” She reached over and punched me in the vicinity of my heart. “You’ve got a big red one in the middle of your chest that says off, and I just prevented someone from pushing it. Don’t I even get a coupon?”

  “I’m just dazzled by your chops. Makes me think about broadening the act. I could use a partner.”

  “I thought we were partners.”

  “Oh, well,” I said. “In the sense you mean, I suppose we are. In the sense I mean, we’ve barely even compared our credentials.” A car came around the bend, hugging the right curve, and gave us a couple seconds’ worth of irate-sounding horn. “Could we move to someplace where the odds of being killed are a little lower?”

  “Sure.” She started the car. “I suppose I’m flattered by the partnership offer, but I think it’s probably a ploy, a conversational can opener to get at my past.”

  “Could be.” I craned back to check the street. “You can go now.”

  “I can go,” she said, “any damn time I like.”

  “I don’t know who else it could have been.”

  We were maintaining a polite truce as Ronnie took us on a prolonged up-and-down zigzag over the streets south of Ventura, plush by my modest standards but a trailer park compared to Brentwood, just on the other side of the hill. She was keeping an eye on the mirror to humor me while I tried to describe the events of the evening in a way that qualified as a life crisis.

  “I hear what you’re saying, which is more than you do,” she said. “So let me say it out loud to you while you listen. You think it’s possible that your longtime fence, Stinky Tetweiler—”

  “Who did in fact take out a contract on me about seven months ago.”

  “I’m going to get to that. Stinky, who got grumpy with you six or seven months ago and wanted you dead but accidentally hired someone who’s sort of sweet on you—”

  “Was. Was sweet on me.”

  “You’d know more about that than I would. So Stinky decides again to kill you, and this is the plan he comes up with: he goes to the trouble of finding the person who owns that stamp, he digs up all the information about how you could get into the house, which had to be expensive info, and then he tips off the owner of the stamp so he, the owner, can beat you to death. This means that, first, Stinky doesn’t get the stamp and, second, he has to explain to this Slugger person, who doesn’t sound like a very forgiving guy, how he knew you were going to be in his house.”

  I said, “Well, when you put it that way—”

  “Instead of just . . . you know, hiring another person to shoot you or sending you into a dark, empty house full of ninjas.”

  “There’s no such thing as a ninja.”

  “Ninjas are everywhere.”

  “And if ninjas were everywhere, a house full of them wouldn’t be empty.”

  “You’re dodging the fact that I’m right.”

  “Two guys,” I said. “Baseball bats. I’m ninety-percent sure they knew I was in there. Who else could have tipped them?”

  “No one,” she said, turning right for the third or fourth time on Hayvenhurst, “which means that you have to go to the other ten percent. The ten-percent chance that you somehow tipped them to your presence, expert though you are, with your little flashlight. N’est-ce pas?”

  “‘N’est-ce pas’?”

  “That’s how we Cathars talk. ‘Bonjour, n’est-ce pas?’ We say it on the slightest provocation.” She pulled to the curb again, leaned forward, and rested her forehead on the wheel. “I’m hungry. Either I want something to eat and a cup of coffee or I want to go to bed.”

  I looked at my watch. Ten thirty. “Trade you something to eat for the name of the place you were born.”

  She said, “Eat where?”

  “We’re not doing it that way. I’ll suggest someplace, you’ll say no and suggest something else, and we’ll wind up going to the place you suggested.”


  “Since we’re nearly on the other side of the hill, let’s go to K-Town. The barbecue places are open late.”

  “Fine, K-Town.” I waited long enough to see a coyote trot past the car, looking professional. Coyotes always look professional. “Well?”

  “All right,” she said. “Newark.”

  I braced myself for a surge of elation that didn’t arrive. “That’s it?”

  “Why? Too easy?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t feel like I actually won.”

  “You didn’t,” she said. “I lied. Tell you what. Turn on your phone and see whether Stinky’s been trying to get you. Or call him, see if he answers.”

  “I thought you were hungry.”

  “I am, but this way my going hungry pays me back for having lied to you, so you can’t be mad at me. See? We’re even.”

  I turned on my phone, and it rang with the information that it was Jake, so I turned it off again. “Fine, we’ll go to Soot Bull Jeep and get our clothes all smoky and Korean. But change places so I can drive, and give me a little more time first, okay?”

  “What for?”

  “To take a discreet look at Stinky’s house.”

  4

  The Baronial Elite

  Stinky Tetweiler had once referred to himself, in my hearing, as “a member of the baronial elite.” He’s also been known to let his choice of first-person pronoun slip from I to the royal we. If that gives you the impression that he could be an overprivileged, insufferably smug, self-satisfied twit, you would have an accurate impression.

  He came by his smugness in the traditional baronial way, which is to say he inherited it through the dumb-luck accident of birth. He was the scion, albeit in disgrace, of the family that created that most pernicious of innovations, the perfume strip. After earning hundreds of millions with a product that made sensitive people’s uvulas feel like a thumb down their throats, the Tetweiler family had diversified by buying one of the seven global companies that create molecules that mimic natural fragrances for commercial use in detergents, artificially flavored food and drinks, room deodorizers, new cars—everything from mosquito repellent to the seductive smell of a fake leather jacket.