“I sand my fingertips.”
She gave it a moment’s thought, which was more than it deserved, and said, “Why?”
“Certain kinds of locks,” I said. “Certain kinds of locks require an elevated sense of touch.”
Louie waved a hand to interrupt the confession. “So, your former, um, this guy you—”
“My deceased better half?” Ronnie Bigelow asked.
“Yeah. Him. Derek.”
“Is there a question there somewhere?” She turned to me. “And why are you interested in locks?”
This time, Louie literally leaned in between us. “Derek, he made his money writing for those little rags you read in line at the market, right?”
“Ah, well, that’s an interesting question.” She sipped her coffee. “Here’s what he would do. This is how Derek Bigelow eked out a living. He would scuttle along the bottom of the sea of life, down where all the shit eventually winds up, looking for something that would cause pain to some people and give a cheap thrill to some other people. The people he would cause pain to were generally rich and famous, and the people to whom he would give a cheap thrill couldn’t afford an expensive one. They’re almost all women, and nothing lifts their poverty-stricken little hearts like learning that some rich, glamorous movie star has gained three hundred pounds and is living on an intravenous supply of coconut milk, or that this female sitcom star is gay and secretly married to a transsexual NFL tackle, or that country music star has three children of, ahem, mixed race, chained to the wall of some tar-paper shack in North Carolina. Cancer, mastectomies, secret sex-change operations, plastic surgery gone horribly awry. In other words, stuff that demonstrates that misery, despite all the evidence to the contrary, actually does get its claws into the people who have everything.”
“Pay much?” I asked.
The question almost brought a smile. “Aren’t you quick. No, it doesn’t. And Derek had an expensive nose, in addition to his other vices. He went through a lot of money, without—I could add, if I were that kind of person—without directing much of it at me.”
I said, “What’s Ronnie short for?”
She reached up and touched the fork jammed into her hair as though she wanted to make sure she’d used the sterling. “Veronica. What name is hiding behind Junior?”
“Junior,” I said. “It’s my name. My dad was named Merle, and he wanted to name his son after him, but wasn’t going to hang Merle on me, so he called me Junior. Veronica’s a pretty name.”
“A little long,” she said. “There’s something about a fourth syllable—”
“I really hate to break in on all this,” Louie said, “but I’m sure you got a lot to do.”
“Not really,” Ronnie Bigelow said. “I’ve exhausted the thrill of scouring. Have you had lunch?”
“I haven’t even had breakfast,” I said.
She looked at me as though I’d just told her I was scheduled for a heart transplant and I was too busy to go. “Oh, that’s not good. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
“I keep hearing that,” I said, “and I’m sure it is, to the people who eat it.”
“This money thing,” Louie said.
“So.” She looked at Louie but pointed at me. “He’s quick, and you’re focused. Is that how it works?”
“He’s focused some of the time,” Louie said.
“Well, then,” she said. “It’s interesting that the police didn’t ask me about this.”
“About the additional opportunities for income?” I asked.
“Of course. It should have occurred to them, shouldn’t it? Here he is, Derek. He developed damaging information about people with money. That’s what he did for a living. He had the ability to get that information into supermarket lines all around the world with nothing more than a keyboard and an Internet connection. So he could take it two ways, couldn’t he?”
“Sure,” I said. “How often did he take it the other way?”
“Often enough to keep his nose running,” she said.
“For example.”
“Okay. Thad Pierce, you know Thad Pierce?”
“That series,” Louie said. Louie watched a lot of television. “Black Lightning or something.”
“Right, Black Lightning. Thad Pierce is the nation’s top-rated stud. Mister Cool-Tattoos-Ultra-Macho-Series-Star. Well, Mr. Pierce is a big fan of America’s Next Top Model.”
Louie said, “So? Me, too.”
“But he’s really a fan. He’s such a fan he has a stenographer take down every word spoken in every show and turn it into a script, and then he invites a bunch of the guys over and they act it out. In costume.”
Louie said, sounding dismayed, “Awwwww. You mean, like dresses?”
“And bikinis and the occasional thong panties. And they take a lot of pictures.”
I said, “Ouch.”
“Derek got a bunch of them. The pictures. Bought them from one of the guys, one who wasn’t getting any work and had borrowed too much money from the wrong people. And Derek was faced with an ethical dilemma, wasn’t he? Hand the pictures over to the publishers of a rag that’ll pay him five, six thousand for them, or have a chat with Thad Pierce, who will part with ten or twenty times as much.”
Louie says, “Or maybe have him killed.”
“In Thad Pierce’s case, he went with the money. But, see, Derek was good. He knew the secrets of being a successful blackmailer. He knew instinctively how much to demand, and he never, ever went back for more. But you’re right, of course. If Derek threatened the wrong kind of people, there was always the possibility that they’d choose the cheaper option of just, you know, beating him to death.”
“That’s how he died?” Louie asked.
“According to the police, fourteen broken bones,” Ronnie Bigelow said. “They left him eight teeth. A closed-casket funeral was strongly recommended.” She put her cup down and said to me, “So, then, how about an early lunch?”
“Okay,” I said. “But we have to make a stop first.”
° ° °
“Hollywood,” she said, looking out the window. “If this is glamour, you can keep it.” Louie had gone back to pulling on wires, and Ronnie and I were stuck in traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, not too far from the stretch of sidewalk where Derek Bigelow had washed up, extravagantly fractured, on Giorgio’s star. “I was so horrified when I first got here. Hard to imagine it was ever anything but awful.”
“In the thirties,” I said. “It was really something in the thirties.”
“Hmmm,” she said, glancing at my left hand on the steering wheel. “What’s your wife like?”
I said, “She’s recently divorced.”
“Oh, my. I’m sorry. Well, no, I guess I’m really not.”
“You’re forward,” I said. “Has anybody ever told you that?”
“If I were a man,” she said, “you’d describe me as decisive. Goal-oriented. Something like that. And no one has used the word forward in years and years. Would it be out of line for me to ask what happened? With your marriage, I mean.”
“According to the laws of polite discourse in the twenty-first century,” I said, “women are allowed to ask any man any question that comes to them at any time, and a man who doesn’t answer it is marked for life as emotionally unresponsive.”
“I wish someone had told me that years ago. What happened?”
“We were too different, I guess. And we got more different as time went by.”
She put her feet up on the dashboard. “I’ve always thought differences make for more interesting relationships. What’s the fun in being with somebody who thinks all the same things you do? It’d be like watching a TV channel that doesn’t show anything except your own home movies.”
“There’s different, and then there’s different. If we’d had any less in common, it would have been an interspecies marriage.”
“But that’s vague, isn’t it? There’s always a main issue, a specific issue. Wit
h Derek and me it was that he was a shit and I wasn’t. What was it with you?”
“I suppose it was mainly my job.”
The light changed eight or nine cars ahead of us and we went through the inevitable urban pause while several drivers tried to remember how to get their foot from the brake to the accelerator. When we were finally moving, she said, “Which is what?”
“I steal things.”
“What is it with me?” she asked. “I go from a blackmailer with a terrible prose style to a thief.”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Oh, pshaw,” she said, actually pronouncing it. “Don’t pretend. You know what’s going on.”
“Yeah, I suppose I do.”
Ronnie leaned forward and fiddled with one of the sandals decorating my dashboard. She had painted only the smallest toenail on each perfect foot, just a tiny dot of color at the border between foot and not-foot. “Tell me at least that you only steal from the rich.”
“Okay.”
She put an elbow out the open window. “That’s a little better.”
“They’re the only ones with anything worth taking. What are you going to steal from the poor? Aspirations?”
“It’s not going to make any difference,” she said. “Whatever you tell me, however awful, it’s not going to make any difference. We’re still going to get into trouble.”
I said, “Glad to hear it.”
“Exactly what are we doing here?” Ronnie asked. We were picking our way up a concrete walkway to a peeling clapboard bungalow on a street folded in between Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset. The neighborhood hadn’t been fashionable seventy years ago and still wasn’t. The lawn looked like it hadn’t been watered since the Hoover administration.
“We’d be breaking in,” I said, “except that I’ve got a key. Although we could still break in, if you’d like to get a feel for it.”
She slowed down, looking dubiously at the bungalow, which was rapidly approaching shack status and looked like the place where dark waits for night to arrive. “Who lives here?”
“Right now, probably nobody. Until recently, it was occupied by a guy who wears a pinkie ring and the daughter of the woman who owns the motel I’m living in this month.”
“That sentence opens up so many questions I can’t even figure out which one to ask.”
“All will be revealed,” I said, climbing the three cement steps to the front door.
“When?” She was behind me, but hanging back, and I didn’t blame her. The bungalow practically rippled with unhappiness.
“At lunch.” I keyed the door and pushed it open, and was greeted by the stale, old-paper odor of an uninhabited house. “Coming in?”
Marge was right: The place had been cleaned with a suspicious amount of energy. I could even see the tracks left by a handheld vacuum on the couch cushions. The house had been rented furnished and the furniture was still on hand, so if it ever came down to hairs and fibers, traces probably lingered here and there, but not for want of trying to remove them.
“I need the bathroom,” Ronnie said. “I always need the bathroom when I’m someplace weird.”
“I’m sure it’s sparkling clean,” I said. “Probably down the hall.”
“Spooky houses,” she said, going down the hallway, “are spookier in the daytime.”
The living room walls had been painted a bad-mayonnaise yellow, and most of the light in the room was absorbed by a floor of dark-chocolate linoleum with a pumpkin swirl in it, probably laid down over the original oak floors back in the fifties, when the first thing people did when they bought an old house was to wreck it. In the dining-room, the toxic yellow walls gave way to pink-patterned wallpaper in a vaguely Aubrey Beardsley nouveau-decadent pattern, printed on what looked like aluminum foil. A dusty, cobwebbed chandelier in wrought iron hung over the round Formica table. Three chairs were pulled up to the table while a fourth, missing a rear leg, loitered drunkenly against the wall. The effect was depressing beyond measure.
“Hey,” Ronnie called. “Come look at this.”
I went down the hall and found her standing at the doorway of a bathroom that had a quarter of an inch of water on the floor. “You went in there?” I asked.
“It was dry when I went in. This happened when I washed my hands. I turned on the water, and all of this came out of the cabinet under the sink.”
The day got even dimmer. I said, “Oh, no.”
“Oh, no what?”
“Let me look at the kitchen,” I said. I didn’t want to, but I had to. Ronnie followed me back down the narrow hallway and grunted at the sight of the dining room wallpaper as though someone had punched her in the stomach. In the kitchen, I went down on one knee in front of the sink and opened the door to the cabinet beneath it. Then I said, “Shit. Shit, shit shit.”
“What? What is it?”
“Same reason the bathroom got wet.” I pulled the door all the way open and showed her the drainage pipe that ran down from the center of the sink. It ended abruptly about eight inches above the bottom of the cabinet. “The traps have been taken.”
“The traps?”
“You know. That elbow-bend in the pipe that’s always under a drain. It’s there to catch anything valuable, rings or anything, that might fall down there.”
“But why would anyone want those?”
“He didn’t want the traps. He wanted whatever might have been in them. Hair, for example. Anything that might have had DNA on it.”
Ronnie took a couple of steps back, looking around the room as though transparent forms were writhing in the air. The house chose that moment to creak. She said, “Can we leave now?”
“Trenton, New Jersey,” Ronnie said, and then swallowed. “A great place to be from and a terrible place to go back to.” A few scraps of steak clung to the bone in front of her, a steak that had disappeared while I was still buttering bread. I’d never seen a woman eat that fast. My former wife, Kathy, would still have been salting it.
I cut the second piece out of my veal chop. “And you left Trenton because?”
“Because I could.” She looked around the restaurant, Musso & Frank, one of the oldest restaurants in LA, and practically the only place I ever eat in Hollywood. “Do you think anybody would notice if I picked up the bone and just sort of chewed on it?”
“Most of these waiters have been here since the King of Spain owned the state. They’ve seen it before.”
“Good.” She grabbed it in both hands.
“Okay, so Trenton wasn’t hard to say goodbye to. What was the cue to kiss it off, though?”
“Another bad boy,” she said. The light from the window that opened onto Hollywood Boulevard fell across her face, deepening the blue of her eyes and revealing a dusty little constellation of freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. “I’ve got this problem with men. I only like the dangerous ones. If I had a pet, it’d be a coral snake.”
“And the guy who got you out of Trenton—”
“Was Donald. Donald had green eyes and he liked other people’s cars. We left Trenton in a Porsche at about 3 A.M. By the time we got to Chicago, we’d also been in a Corvette, in that sweet little Lexus sports coupe, and a Jaguar. Oh, and an Audi. The Audi was for comic relief. As things turned out, so was Donald.”
My phone rang. “Audi,” I said. “Donald. Hold the thought and gnaw on your bone.”
“Yeah?” It was Paulie DiGaudio, from the cop branch of the family, returning my call.
“Your uncle’s putative victim,” I said. “He was doing some blackmailing.”
Ronnie looked across the table at me, but she didn’t stop picking at the bone.
“That’s interesting,” DiGaudio said. “Kinda opens it up, doesn’t it? Gives us some more suspects, besides Uncle Vinnie, I mean.”
“I thought you’d like it. Do you happen to know whether Bigelow was blackmailing your uncle?”
“Let’s pretend you didn’t ask that.”
“Fine. I don’t suppose you’ve got a cop I could borrow.”
A sound that might have been a chortle, if I’d ever heard a chortle to compare it to. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“Hey, he’s your uncle.”
“You’re it, Bender. Maybe you want a license plate run or something, I could handle that. Check a reverse-directory, something like that, no problem. But if you think I’m calling attention in the department to my uncle the crook, you’re nuts.”
“Okay,” I said, getting to the actual reason for the call. “I need to know whether there’s a current driver’s license issued to someone living at an address in Hollywood. Or any license listing that address in the past five years.”
“This have anything to do with Vinnie?”
“It’s what I’m working on,” I said.
“Okay. Address.”
“One-four-six-seven Florence. Zip is probably 90068.”
“Got it. Couple of hours.”
“And listen. Don’t put any cops on this, no matter what name turns up. The blackmailing thing, well, there could be dangerous people involved, and I don’t want to be walking around with my fly open, not knowing that some cop has already been knocking on doors and asking questions.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He hung up.
“That was extremely interesting,” Ronnie said. She had the bone in her right hand and a small piece of meat between the thumb and forefinger of her left. “That was a cop, right? First you asked him for something he wouldn’t give you, just to let him say no, and then you got what you really wanted. And everything you told him was true, but it was also a total lie. The address, which is where we just were, has nothing to do with Derek because it was about your landlady’s daughter. So this cop is out getting a name and he doesn’t have any idea why.”
I nodded. “And?”
“And he feels like he won the conversation.”
“I’d shrug modestly, but I need practice.”
She looked at the piece of meat between her fingers, popped it into her mouth, and said around it, “And then there’s the fact that you’re a crook but you seem to be working for cops. I know there are cops who work for crooks, but I didn’t think it worked the other way around. And while I’m on this topic, I probably should ask you why you’re interested in Derek in the first place. I would have asked back at my apartment, but you distracted me.”
Little Elvises Page 6