His eyes froze on it.
I said, “I’m here to apologize, I’m here to talk business, and I’m here to get your property back to you. But first I need you to get rid of Sad Sack, to my right.”
“You don’t pull up a chair uninvited and tell me who sits at my table.”
I put my hand behind my ear and said, “Pardon? You know, if the hired help went out and played in the street for a few minutes, I could slide in next to you and we could talk.” I waved the stamp back and forth.
His eyes went back and forth with it, and then he gave a single nod. “Stumpy,” he said. “Beat it.”
I said, “Stumpy?”
“Don’t push it,” the Slugger said. “Even if you and me turn out to be friends, he’d still do you for an afternoon highlight.”
Stumpy got up, making a little more noise with his chair than was strictly necessary, and stalked away, bumping other people’s chairs as he went.
“Stumpy’s in a huff,” I said.
“Get to it,” he said. “I’m hungry.” He was watching the waitress again as she threaded between the tables, and he wasn’t looking at the food. In what seemed to be an unconscious gesture, he reached up and fingered the fringe hanging across his forehead.
“Okay. First, mea culpa, which is Latin for ‘I’m guilty.’ I stole this stamp from you, not knowing who you were. So now I find myself in kind of an awkward position.”
“I’d say so,” he said, his attention back on me.
“So what I thought I’d do, I’d make a kind of double restitution. I’d get your stamp back to you and pay you forty K to do a hit.”
“Whoa,” he said. “You think you can walk in here and hire me? Even if I were the kind of person you could hire to do a hit, which I’m not, how could I know you’re not wired up the ying-yang? How could I know this whole thing isn’t a setup?”
“Do you know Irwin Dressler?”
“What’re you talking about? Of course I don’t know Irwin Dressler. How would I know—”
“Well, I do,” I said. “And he’ll vouch for me.”
He looked around the room, his eyes snagging on the waitress for a moment. “Yeah? I don’t see him.”
“Then you know what he looks like.”
“Sonny,” he said, “everybody with more than four parking tickets knows what he looks like.”
“Okay, here’s how we can work it.” I reached behind me, watching him stiffen, and pulled out my wallet so I could show him the only driver’s license I have that’s got my real name on it. He leaned forward to look at it. He looked at it so long that I started to get nervous, but when he sat back, the look on his face wasn’t suspicious, so maybe it just took him a while to process information.
“So?” he said. “Junior. And you’re razzing Stumpy about his name?”
“This is who I am,” I said, tapping the license. “Junior Bender. Now, here’s what we’ll do. You take a picture of me with your phone, okay?”
He squinted at me, wondering where this was going. “I can handle that.”
“And I’ll give you the cell-phone number of one of Dressler’s bodyguards, who’s pretty much always with him. You send the picture to him with two questions: ‘What’s this guy’s name, and do you trust him?’ Got it?”
“Oh, sure. And I’m really sending it to some mook who sends it back and says, ‘Hundred percent,’ and I’m supposed to think—”
I said, “You said you know what he looks like, right?”
He examined the question for trick clauses and then said, “Yeah.”
“Fine. I’ll have Dressler’s guy ask Dressler to hold up the phone with my picture on it, sort of cheek to cheek, and he’ll take a picture of Dressler holding my picture and send that back with the answer. How does that sound?”
“It sounds, um . . .”
“Okay, here’s a last fillip.”
“Who’s Philip?”
“Fillip,” I said, spelling it. “It’s like an extra, a little boost. Just before you take my picture, you tell me to do something, whatever, so you know the picture Irwin will be holding will be the one you just took, not something I arranged a year ago, wearing the same clothes and all. It’s not very plausible, but what the hell. Okay?”
He thought about it for so long that Stuffy or whatever his name was pushed his way through the door and into the room, and the Slugger, who saw him before I did, waved him back out. While he was doing that, the food arrived.
“Can I eat his?” I said.
“I don’t give a fuck.” He smiled at the waitress and got one back. When she was out of earshot, he said, “Okay, we’ll do it.” He raised the phone. “Hold the fork up.” I held the fork up. Then he asked me for Tuffy’s phone number, took so long to key in the text that I’d eaten half of Stuffy’s food by the time he finished, and pressed to send it.
“Now what?” he said.
“This is good,” I said. “Best thing I ever ate in here. Probably tastes better when someone else is paying. Now we wait until your phone buzzes or does the cha-cha or whatever it does.”
I passed him the bread basket, but he waved it away, so I took the last piece of bread. His pasta didn’t look as good as Stuffy’s chicken. I said, “His name is Stuffy?”
“Stumpy,” he said. He twirled some noodles on a fork, but he had his eyes on the phone, and then he dropped the whole thing, fork and food, onto his plate and grabbed the phone with both hands. He looked at it, and when his eyes came up to mine, they might have belonged to a different person. He looked frightened.
I said, “Can I see?”
He turned the phone to me. Dressler, one cheek pressed to the phone he was holding, on which was a tiny me, hoisting a fork. A very small hand was reaching up to take the phone away from him. The words beneath the picture were: he’s junior bender. i trust him. in fact, i like him. a little.
The Slugger said, “Who do you want me to do?”
“Twenty thousand now,” I said, sliding the envelope with half of Stinky’s money in it across the table. “The other twenty and the stamp when it’s done.”
He hesitated, licked his upper lip, and then nodded. “Suicide,” he said.
“If your guy can make it convincing. Like I told you, he leaves the studio at seven and goes home. The house is empty until then, most of the time, and I gave you the combinations for the alarms. Just make sure your guy leaves the gun and it isn’t traceable, so it’s plausible the dead man might have owned it.”
“Got boxes full of them,” he said.
“Well, good,” I said. “Attention to detail is essential to success.”
“Okay, we’re on. Any refinements?” He waited, his Montblanc fountain pen poised over the small leather notebook in which he’d been making notes.
I said, “Excuse me?”
“Options? Extras?”
“No. Dead will be fine.” I pushed back my chair, meaning to stand, but instead I said, “No, wait, I’m wrong. Just before your guy pulls the trigger, I want him to say, so it’s the last thing Granger ever hears, ‘This is for Suley.’”
“S-O-O—”
“No.” I got up from the table. “Suley, S-U-L-E-Y.”
The slugger wrote it down and shrugged. “Sounds the same.”
I said, “But it’s not,” and my tone brought his eyes up to mine. “Even if he’s just saying it out loud, I want her name spelled right.”
32
A Lower Standard
Ronnie had finally gotten her Korean food, and she wolfed it down as though she hadn’t eaten anything since the first time I promised it to her, all those nights ago. Still full of Stumpy’s roast chicken, I’d just picked at mine. We were in Soot Bull Jeep on West Eighth, in K-Town, and when we came out, burping garlic, she said, “So what’s the surprise?”
I still hadn’t
committed entirely to the plan, but the question gave me the shove I needed. “It’s about a mile from here.”
She said, “And I’m going to need my toothbrush?”
“If I get lucky.”
She slipped her arm through mine, and my heart did a little change step. She said, “Did you see the expression on Tyrone’s face?”
“I did.”
“I see something like that,” she said, “and know that you set it up, and how much you probably had to do to arrange it, and it almost makes me willing to hold you to a lower standard.”
I said, “I would love to be held to a lower standard.”
“Well, if we’re going to be an item, as they used to say, I should probably be willing to forgive a lapse here and there.”
“Lapses ‘R’ Us,” I said. I opened the car door for her and said, “Does this count, too?”
“A really infinitesimal amount. This is the kind of thing that might make me overlook you chewing with your mouth open. Occasionally.”
“Do I chew with my—”
“No, silly. Just giving you an idea of scale.”
I got in and started the car. Took Eighth a couple of blocks and made a left. Blew out a bunch of air.
“Lungs are sounding good.”
“Great, great.”
“Although sudden, window-rattling sighs don’t really inspire confidence.”
“I’m just nervous.”
“Nervous. Where are we going?”
“I think it’s better if you just see it.”
“Want me to close my eyes until we get there?”
“Great idea.”
So she did, and I said, “Keep them closed,” when I pulled down the driveway into the underground garage. When I got out of the car, I said, “Don’t open them yet.”
“I’m not walking in a strange place with my eyes closed. I’m wearing heels.”
“Up to you.”
A moment later she said, “Oh,” a syllable packed with disappointment. The garage took up an acre and was lit just enough to allow a person to make out large objects, at least if they were light colored and moving. I led her to the scratched and battered elevator doors and pushed the cracked call button, and when we got in and she saw the gouged walls and the graffiti and the single, dangling sour-milk fluorescent tube, her mouth tightened.
I waved at the recessed camera.
She said, “What?”
“The guards,” I said.
“To keep people in, I assume.”
I pushed up, and the elevator did its programmed little stutter and groan and creaked its way into motion. Ronnie stood closer to me and put her hand on my arm. “If this thing drops,” she said, “I’m jumping straight into the air and doing everything I can to land on you.”
“It won’t drop,” I said. “That’s all stage effects.”
“Really. For what purpose?”
“You’ll see.”
We fell into a silence that thickened significantly when the doors opened on the third-floor corridor. There were water stains on the ceilings and cracks in the walls, and here and there the tacky maroon carpeting, stickier even than the rug at the Dew Drop Inn, was flaked with plaster that seemed to have fallen from the ceiling.
“Special effects?” she said.
I said, “Uh-huh.”
“Shame they left out the dead junkie hunched over his needle in the corner.”
“They spoil,” I said. “We’re in between dead junkies right now.”
We reached the door of Apartment 302, and I keyed the first lock and then the second. Before I opened the door, I said, “I’ve never told anyone about this before.”
“And I can see why.”
“Not even Rina. Not Kathy, not Louie. No one.”
She was looking up at me.
“Just you,” I said, and I opened the door.
Two well-spent hours later, we were in the living room, me in my bathrobe and her in one of my shirts, both of us drinking wine and looking at the aspirational lights of the Los Angeles skyline. She said, “A library.”
“I knew you’d like it.”
“So this is your . . . your bolt-hole. You’re living in those motels and you have this place waiting for you.”
“It’s where I’ll go when it all comes down.”
“If,” she said.
“When,” I said.
“And you told me about it.”
“I love you,” I said.
“It sounds so bald when we’re together. It’s easier on the phone.” She snuggled closer to me. “But . . . uhh, me, too.”
“And I’ve still got a million questions about you, but this isn’t a quid pro quo arrangement. I brought you here because I trust you and I love you, and I promise never to ask you those questions again until you’re ready to talk about them.”
She went to kiss me on the chin, but I got my mouth down there in time and said, “I win.”
“You know,” she said, “not to wave off all those nice things you just said, but you promised last time that you wouldn’t ask me about—”
“Yeah, but this time I mean it.”
She tilted her head to the right, regarding me. “So you didn’t mean it the first time?”
“Sure I did,” I said. “But this time I’ll mean it longer.”
33
USDA Prime
Three days later Jeremy Granger owned the news. movie mogul found dead was the biggie, plus the cluster stories: dead tycoon’s wife missing and double mystery in hollywood, although none of it had actually happened in Hollywood; and after the cops announced they’d found the towels I used to clean up Suley’s blood, right where I’d left them in the linen closet off the second-floor drawing room, the headline I’d waited for appeared: granger: murder-suicide?
That last one became the topic of endless, mindless on-air and online discussion that grew into a firestorm after the cops revealed that the use of luminol in the drawing room had revealed traces of blood on the floor and on the candlestick, obviously unconnected with Granger’s death, since he’d been shot, or shot himself, downstairs in his home office. Suley’s parents, who were described as being “distraught,” had let the cops swab them for DNA to match the blood on the towels, but even before the results came in, a great many conclusions had been jumped to. TMZ used the murder-suicide possibility as an excuse to run a lurid history of Granger’s mansion—titled, naturally, house of horrors—that swallowed the whole thing without chewing and linked it to the spirit of the suicidal Thud for good measure. Hollywood Ghouls and Ghosts, which led the credulous on tours of the city’s plentiful suicide, murder, and overdose sites, complete with color postcards, added the house to their itinerary.
“You heard about it?” the Slugger said on the other end of the phone the day the first stories broke.
“Hard to avoid it. Good work.”
“You can bring me my stuff tonight, and you can buy the dinner, too.”
“You got it. What time?”
“An hour.” It was 7 p.m.
“Where? I want to go somewhere with a bar. You know, hoist one and then get a table to eat.”
“Ricochet in Beverly Hills. You know it?”
I did. It was one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, a one-percenter pickup joint par excellence. “Sounds great,” I said. “See you there. Make it eight fifteen, though. I’ve got something I have to do.”
“Fine. Hey, don’t forget the stamp.”
“I promise,” I said. “I’ll put it directly into your hand. Will Stumpy be there, or can we do without him?”
“Just you and me,” he said. “He didn’t know about our arrangement, and I can’t think of any reason to tell him about it.”
“Man after my own heart,” I said.
“Not yet,” the Slugger said, and we shared a hearty laugh.
“You keep the twenty K he’ll be carrying,” I said into the phone as I stood outside the restaurant. “He’ll have the stamp in his pocket, and that’s mine. I’ll give you the last ten K when you hand me the stamp.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just come in here and let’s get it over with.”
I pocketed the phone and went in.
The bar was packed, and the Slugger was already at his table. He looked antsy, like he was half afraid I wouldn’t show, and his eyes went to me the moment I started across the floor.
“The twenty,” I said, putting an envelope on the table, “and the Gandhi.”
He pried it open and glanced inside. “All tied up neat,” he said. “You satisfied?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“Amazing, about the wife disappearing and the blood and all,” he said, looking at me with an edge of interest I hadn’t provoked before. “Almost like you knew about it in advance.”
“Nah,” I said.
He licked his lips. “I just mention it, you know, ’cause you wanted my guy to say her name and so on.”
“Purest coincidence,” I said. “How’d he take it?”
“In the right ear.”
“I meant the mention of her name.”
“Oh, yeah. He wet himself. Although he could have done that before, I guess. My guy wasn’t real clear on the timeline.”
“No,” I said, “I suppose he wouldn’t be.”
“Even a pro,” he said, “they tend to be a little wound up when the target’s that close.”
“I’m actually glad to hear that.”
“Listen,” he said. He flicked a corner of the envelope, hesitating. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to give me, like, an endorsement? To . . . you know.” He pointed a finger in the air, and his eyes darted past me, toward the bar, and rested there for a moment. He fingered his fringe reflexively and came back to me.
“Already did,” I lied. “Told him you exceeded all expectations.”
“Was he . . . um, was he in on the deal?”
I gave him a reproachful look and zipped my lips closed.
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