Behind a bare wooden desk a man said, “What about Zabriskie?”
He looked like a stage Mexican. He had a thin droopy mustache and thick black hair that seemed uncombed and fell artfully over his forehead. He was wearing a Western-cut white shirt with billowy sleeves, and he was smoking a thin black cigar.
“You del Rio?” I said.
Behind the stage Mexican there was a low table, as plain as the desk. On it was a picture of an aristocratic-looking woman with black hair touched with gray, and beside it, a picture of a young woman, perhaps twenty, with olive skin and a strong resemblance to Jill Joyce. I was pretty sure I had a picture of her when she was younger, inside my coat pocket.
“I asked you a question, gringo.”
“Ai chihuahua!” I said.
Del Rio smiled suddenly, his teeth very white under the silly mustache.
“Then Chollo here sings a couple of choruses of ‘South of the Border,’” he said, “and we all have tortillas and drink some tequila. Si?”
“You got a guitar?” I said.
“The ‘gringo’ stuff impresses a lot of anglos,” del Rio said. “Makes them think I’m very bad.”
“Scared the hell out of me,” I said.
“I can see that,” del Rio said.
Chollo had gone to one side of the office and lounged in a green leather armchair, almost boneless in his relaxed slouch. His black eyes had no meaning in them.
“You see how we scared him, Chollo?” del Rio said.
“I could improve on it, Vic, if you want.” It was the first time he’d spoken. Neither he nor del Rio had even a hint of an accent.
“You sure you guys are Mexican?” I said.
“Straight from Montezuma,” del Rio said. “Me and Chollo both. Pure bloodline. What’s this about Zabriskie?”
I took the picture out of my inside pocket and put it in front of del Rio. He looked at it without touching it. I picked it up again and put it back in my pocket.
“So?” del Rio said.
“Your daughter,” I said.
Del Rio didn’t speak.
“I got it from her grandmother.”
Del Rio waited.
“Anything you don’t want him to know?” I said.
“Chollo knows what I know,” del Rio said. “Chollo’s family.”
“How nice for Chollo,” I said. “I know who your daughter’s mother is.”
“Yes?”
“Jill Joyce,” I said, “America’s cutie.”
“She tell you that?” del Rio said.
“No,” I said. “She hasn’t told me anything, and half of that is lies.”
Del Rio nodded.
“That would be Jill,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Information,” I said. “It’s like huevos rancheros to a detective.”
“Si,” del Rio said.
“Were you and Jill married?” I said.
Del Rio leaned back a little in his chair with his hands resting quietly on the bare desktop in front of him. His nails were manicured. I waited.
“Your name is Spenser,” he said.
I nodded.
“Okay, Spenser. You think you’re a tough guy. I can tell. I see a lot of people who think they are a tough guy. You probably are a tough guy. You got the build for it. But if I just nod at Chollo you are a dead guy. You understand? Just nod, and . . .” He made an out sign, jerking his left thumb toward his shoulder.
“Yikes,” I said.
“So you know,” del Rio said, “you’re on real shaky ground here.”
“It goes no further than me,” I said.
“Maybe it doesn’t go that far,” del Rio said. “Why are you nosing around in my life in the first place?”
“I’m working on a murder in Boston,” I said. “And I’m working on protecting Jill Joyce. The two things seem to be connected and your name popped up.”
“Long way from Boston,” del Rio said.
“Not my fault. Somebody has been threatening Jill Joyce. Someone killed her stunt double. Jill won’t tell me anything about herself, so I started looking and I found her mother and then I found you.”
Del Rio looked at me again in silence.
“Okay, Spenser. I met Jill Joyce when she was Jillian Zabriskie and she was trying to be an actress, and I was starting to build my career. We were together awhile. She got pregnant. I had a wife. She didn’t want the kid, but she figured it would give her a hold on me. Even then I had a little clout. So she had it and left it with her mother. I got her some parts. She slept with some producers. I supported the kid.”
“You still got the same wife?”
“Yes. Couple years after Amanda was born, Jill’s mother started disappearing into the sauce. She was never much, but . . .” He shrugged. The shrug was eloquent. It was the first genuine Latin gesture I’d seen. “So my wife and I adopted her.”
“Your wife know about you and Jill?”
“No.”
“She know you’re the kid’s father?”
“No. She thinks we adopted her from an orphanage. We don’t have any other children.”
“How old is Amanda now?”
“Twenty.”
“What happens if your wife finds out?”
“Whoever told her dies.”
“What happens to her?”
Again the eloquent shrug. “My wife is Catholic,” del Rio said. “She is a lady. She would feel humiliated and betrayed. I won’t let that happen.”
“Amanda know?”
“No.”
We all were silent then, while we thought about these things.
“And Jill knows better than to talk about this,” I said.
“Jill don’t want to talk about it. Jill don’t want anyone to know she got a spic baby.”
“But if someone was looking into things you might want to squelch that,” I said.
“I wanted to, I would,” del Rio said.
“What if you sent some soldier out there to clip her and he got the wrong one,” I said.
“Get you killed,” del Rio said, “thinking things like that.”
I nodded. “Something will, sooner or later,” I said.
“Most people prefer later,” del Rio said.
We all thought a little more.
“I don’t like you for it,” I said. “It’s too stupid. Killing Jill or somebody else like that stirs up more trouble than it squashes. You’d know that.”
“Haven’t killed you yet,” del Rio said.
“Same reason,” I said. “You don’t know who knows I’m here.”
“You gotta understand something, Spenser.” He always pronounced my name as if it were in quotes. “I’m a bad guy. Maybe the baddest in southern California. But bad guys maybe have good sides too.”
“Hitler loved dogs,” I said. “I hear he was sentimental.”
“I love my wife. I love my daughter. I’m going to protect them—their privacy, their dignity, all of it. And if that means killing some people, I’m bad enough for that. And if it means not killing people I ought to kill, I’m all right there too.”
“Okay,” I said. “I buy it. What you told me is between us.”
“If it isn’t, you’re dead.”
“It is, but not because you might kill me,” I said, “. . . if you can.”
Del Rio frowned at me for a moment, then his face cleared.
“No,” he said. “It’s probably not.”
“What can you tell me about Jill?” I said.
Del Rio gestured toward the other green leather chair, the only other piece of furniture in the office.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” he said.
25
CHOLLO was still draped in the chair like a dead snake. The shadow of the bulky Mexican was still motionless outside the door. I was in the other chair, sitting in it backwards with my forearms folded over the back. It had grown dark outside the office and del Rio hadn’t turned on a light, so we all sat in the aftermath of sunset as del Rio talked.
“She was already starting to get a little attention,” del Rio said. “She had that face, and the body . . . eighteen years old, maybe. The face says I’m an angel, and the body says, The hell I am. We were at a fund-raiser for barrio kids.” Del Rio paused to laugh softly. “Nobody there ever been to the barrio, except me. I was the most important barrio graduate they could find . . . and I was a crook.” He laughed again. “It was a fashion show, and the models were supposed to be well-known actresses and TV people, but mostly they were kids like Jill. She tagged on to me. She didn’t have much class, she didn’t know how to act, but she had a quality.” He shrugged. “I’m very loyal to my wife. I love her. I admire her. She’s not part of my business, she’s got nothing to do with that world. She lives in another one. I live there sometimes too. But in the business world I snack now and then . . . still do. It’s got nothing to do with her. Nothing to do with her world. You understand?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t matter if you understand or not,” he said. “Jill was just another snack. Except for that quality.”
He paused again and thought about the quality. I waited.
“We were together maybe a year. Always careful, never embarrass my wife, but when she had the kid she started to turn the screw a little.”
Again he paused and thought about things. Again I waited.
“I’m not a good man to pressure; but this came close to the other world, if you follow me, and there was the kid. Whatever else she was, Jill was my kid’s mother. I couldn’t just have her clipped. So I supported the kid, and I went to see her when I could. It didn’t take long to see where it was headed. You’ve seen Jill’s old lady.”
I nodded.
“I got lawyers, I talked with my wife. I said there was a girl, daughter of one of my people. I said her father died, her mother didn’t want her. I said I wanted to adopt her. My wife is very proud. It was always a loss to her that she couldn’t have kids . . .” He spread his hands.
I nodded.
“We raised her careful. She went to school with the nuns. Goes to school now in Geneva. She plays the piano, speaks French perfect. Maybe you saw her when you came up the drive. Riding a white horse. Can ride like a jockey.”
I nodded.
“I bought her that white horse for her sixteenth birthday. From school she writes it letters. Her mother reads them to the horse.”
Del Rio looked at me hard for a moment. I made no comment.
“She’s home for Christmas,” he said.
I nodded. To my left Chollo got up and squatted before the fireplace on the left wall. He fiddled with it for a moment while del Rio and I watched. Then a gas flame appeared. Chollo put a couple of dry, barkless logs on top of the grate and stood and went back to his chair. The blue gas flame began to move among the logs, turning orange where it hit them and caught.
“So I told Jill,” del Rio said, “I take care of the kid. The kid is mine. She is no longer yours. She belongs to me and to my wife. My wife is her mother now. I said if she ever caused me trouble, if she ever hurt my daughter or my wife, if she ever spoke of this . . .”
Del Rio held his right hand out, with the first two fingers apart like the blades of a scissors, and closed them. Nobody said anything. The flame had caught the bone-dry wood and made bright heatless orange movements in the Mexican tile fireplace. A California fire. All light, no heat.
“Jill never really had any luck,” del Rio said. He was sitting back in his chair now, his hands locked behind his head, staring into the fire. “Sounds funny to say about her. She’s a big star, big TV star. But she’s never really caught a break . . . except me.”
Del Rio paused again. I could hear him breathing softly through his nose.
“I got her started. She came from nowhere. Mother’s a drunk. Old man left when she was a kid. Had a baby, had to give it up. She never knew what she was, then she got to be a star and everybody started treating her like she was a princess, you know . . . the fucking emperor’s daughter . . . so she thought she was.”
“She knows she isn’t,” I said.
Del Rio shifted his eyes to me thoughtfully.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe she does.”
“Makes it worse,” I said.
Del Rio nodded slowly with the right side of his face lit by the fire and the left side in darkness.
“Si,” he said.
26
JILL’S agent worked for an agency that occupied the top half of a new skyscraper in Century City where, if you looked out the windows, you could see Twentieth Century Fox. While I sat in the waiting room two would-be starlets with flat blue eyes and a lot of blond hair chanted at the switchboard.
“Robert Brown Agency, good morning.”
Each of them said it maybe a hundred times while I waited. Each time they said it exactly as they had said it previously. Then they would listen and touch a button and the call would be processed. There was a mindless fascination to it, like watching water boil. The waiting room was done in beige marble and pale green carpeting. On the wall above the blond bentwood chair I sat in was a picture of the founder of the agency. Robert Brown had a wide face and red cheeks, and the smile of a child molester. Under the portrait was a brass plaque bearing his name and the single word INTEGRITY.
On some of the other chairs sat people trying to look in control while they waited hopefully. There was a guy in a silk tweed jacket and starched jeans carrying a manila envelope that reeked of manuscript. He had no socks on, and his ankles were tan above the low cut of his woven leather loafers. Under the silk tweed he wore a tuxedo shirt, open at the throat. Agents, mostly men, mostly young, strolled through the waiting room to and from the inner spaces, carrying themselves as insiders always did in the presence of outsiders.
A good-looking young woman with more hair than the switchboard ladies came out from one of the doors behind the switchboard. She wore a cobalt silk dress spattered with red flowers. Her hips rolled as she walked.
“Mr. Spenser?” she said. Her eyes sparkled, her smile gleamed.
I nodded.
“Hi, I’m Jasmine, Ken’s assistant. Ken’s on the phone long-distance to London and he asked me to see if you wanted coffee or anything.”
“Hot diggity,” I said.
Jasmine’s smile gleamed even more brightly.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“London is exciting,” I said. “I mean, how would I feel if you came out and said I’d have to wait because Ken was on the phone to Culver City?”
Jasmine seemed a bit confused, but it in no way interfered with the luminosity of her smile.
“Exactly,” she said. “Did you say you wanted coffee?”
“No, thank you, Jasmine.”
“Tea, juice, Perrier?”
“No, thank you, Jasmine.”
“Well, you be comfortable, and Ken will be with you as soon as he can get off the phone.”
“Sure,” I said.
Jasmine rolled her hips away from me, walking with a long stride on high heels which emphasized her natural wiggle. I waited. Behind the switchboard operators was a floor-to-ceiling picture window for looking at Twentieth Century. On either side were doors that opened into the working spaces of the Robert Brown Agency, where clients and agents conspired on who knows what unspeakable project. A fat woman with extensive makeup came in carrying an animal that looked like a fluffy rat. She was wearing a fur coat, though when I’d come in a half hour a
go the temperature at Century City had been eighty-seven. Her hair in its natural state was probably brown turning gray. In its present state, however, it was the color of a lemon, and stiff with hair spray so thick that you could cut yourself on her curls. She spoke inaudibly to one of the switchboard operators, then took up a seat with the fluffy rat on her lap, and gazed at the room before her the way Marie Antoinette must have gazed at the crowds in Paris. The small white animal wiggled out of her lap and waded through the pale green carpet and stood in front of me and began to yap. It was a persistent high yap that had the same metronomic quality that the ladies of the switchboard displayed.
“Oh, Beenie,” the fat blonde said, “stop that noise right now.”
Beenie paid her no heed at all.
“He won’t hurt you,” the blonde said.
“That’s for sure,” I said.
The blonde looked startled. “Well, he won’t. He’s usually very good with strangers.”
The yaps continued. It was a piercing sound. Even the two switchboard receptionists turned glazed eyes toward the sound.
“What kind of rat is this?” I said politely.
“Rat?” The blonde’s voice went up an octave in the middle. Not easy to do in a one-syllable word.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Of course he’s not a rat. Guinea pig maybe?”
“You fucking creep,” the blonde said.
Jasmine appeared radiantly at the door. She frowned a little, but only for a moment, at the yapping and the “fucking creep” and then smiled even more brilliantly than before and said, “Ken can see you now, Mr. Spenser.”
I scooped up the yapping animal and dropped it into the blonde’s lap as I headed for the office door.
“Spenser,” she said. “I’ll remember that name.”
I smiled my killer smile at her. She remained calm. I followed Jasmine through the door. I went down the long corridor lined with glass-partitioned cubicles. At the end was a bigger office, with real walls as befits a senior agent representing the highest TVQ in the industry. He stood and walked around his desk, a tall elegant man in a double-breasted blazer and a soft white shirt. He had the kind of tan that would soon lead to basal cell carcinoma, and his dark hair, touched with gray at the temples, was combed back in easy waves, longish in the back. His grip was firm as we shook hands.
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