I thought it was highly unlikely that Doris would be coming home any time soon.
“And she’s the only one I’ve got now,” Marge said. She scrubbed her cheeks again. Her eyes were very bright. “If I’ve still got her.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said. It was pure reflex.
“You’re a mensch,” Marge said. “I’ve got some money—”
“No,” I said.
“Why should you care? I’m just the old—”
“I’m not asking for—”
“—broad who owns the motel—”
“—money, so don’t even—”
“—where you happen to be—”
We stopped talking at the same time and looked at each other. Then Marge raised a hand with a cigarette in it, a sign for me to shut up. “There’s no reason you should help me,” she said. “I had no right to ask you to do what you already did. You did it out of the goodness of your heart.”
“I’ve got some left,” I said. “And I haven’t got anybody else to spend it on.”
She turned away from me and studied the front door as though she’d heard something outside, as though Doris would push it open at any moment and come in, her arms full of packages and shopping bags, and I explored the lines of Marge’s profile. A couple of hundred gallons of vodka and fifteen thousand cigarettes ago, Marge had been a thoroughbred. Hell, she was still a thoroughbred.
“I’ll find a way,” she said. “I’ll find a way to thank you.” She still hadn’t looked back at me.
“But let’s not kid each other,” I said. “I’m not real optimistic. What I can do is try to track her down, track him down. And then we’ll see what we see.”
“That’s what we’ll see,” Marge said. She brought up a hand to brush the hair from her face, but she was holding the cigarette, and there was a little frizzing sound and a smell of burning hair. She didn’t even seem to notice.
“Names and addresses,” I said. “All her friends, former friends, boyfriends, coworkers, anything you can think of. Likely or unlikely. Places she liked to go, places she might hide out if she just needed some time alone. Places from childhood, I don’t care. Anything you can think of. And the newest picture you’ve got of her.” Marge’s hand came up again, and I reached across the table and pushed it down. “Make a deal,” I said. “I’ll do what I can if you stop lighting your hair on fire.”
She looked back at me, and her eyes filled with tears. “You … you …” She stopped and swallowed twice. “You sound just like Ed.”
“Whaddya got?” demanded DiGaudio the cop.
“Not much. Your uncle has something to hide, though, that’s for sure.” I was on the sidewalk of a small street, about a block east of Lankershim Boulevard. Hiking east, toward the rising moon, heading to the car. Going out to get something to eat. Like an idiot, I’d answered the phone.
“So?” DiGaudio said, and I could hear the sneer. “You don’t have anything to hide?”
“Lots, but I’m not the issue.”
“Like I said, whaddya got?”
Big plane trees had grown up on both sides of the street, and the car was parked in the dark spot beneath one of them. “We know Bigelow was a blackmailer. I think he was in the first stages of blackmailing somebody new, and I think it was your uncle.” I opened the door of my car but the light didn’t come on.
“You got anything to back that up?”
“Well, sure. His body was dumped on Giorgio’s star.”
Somebody was sitting in my car.
“Say what?”
“Bigelow’s body. It was on Giorgio’s star.” I backed up, thinking about what Louie had said about lists. I’d let the day get away from me, and I hadn’t picked up even one Glock.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Wasn’t nothing about that in the report.”
The person in my car hadn’t moved. “Cop was probably too young,” I said, backing farther away. “Probably never heard of Giorgio.” I stopped. I’d backed into something that hadn’t been there a minute ago. It breathed on my neck.
“Kind of crap work is that?” DiGaudio said.
“Standards,” I said as a gun dug into my right kidney. “They’ve gone to hell.”
He made a noise that sounded like he was shredding cellophane with his teeth. “Lemme get back to you.”
The gun wiggled back and forth, just a little prompt for attention. I said, “I hope you can.”
“You didn’t call,” Irwin Dressler said.
“I didn’t have much to say.”
We were in a sunken living room, long enough to have goal posts. The furniture was white, the carpets were white, the walls were white. The hundred and fifty or so small carved objects on the white lacquered shelves on the far side of the room were a brilliant green, except for a few that were lavender.
The guys who had brought me were in the breakfast nook. Dressler had opened the door himself. He’d looked past me and regarded them with some affection. “Tuffy, Babe,” he said. “You missed dinner. Eat, eat.” Now I could hear utensils against plates and smell something that was almost certainly roast beef.
“You know,” he said, crossing one plaid leg over another. He gave me a look that made me feel like he’d removed my skin, checked beneath it, and then put it back. “You have a reputation for being intelligent. Perhaps it’s undeserved.” He leaned back on his white sofa.
What was I supposed to do? Contradict him? I just sat there.
“You’ve got that look,” he said. “In the last fifty, sixty years, I’ve seen a million guys with that look, says I’m smarter than you, I’m one jump ahead. Generally, they keep that look right up to the point when the bullet hits them. You know how they look then?”
He waited for an answer. “Dead?”
“Yeah.” He passed a spotted hand over his chin. “But first they look surprised.”
“I didn’t come in here pretending to be smart.”
“Maybe not. But I doubt you’ve done many things as stupid as not calling me when I asked you to.” Dressler leaned forward again, literally taking a closer look. It was just as intimidating as he meant it to be. His shoulders were bent so far forward it looked like they were trying to meet in front, forming a line as curved as the wood on a bow, and he carried his head way back to compensate, so he could extend his neck farther than most people. His eyes, sunk deeply into the bones of his face, were West Point gray, set in yellowish whites. The skin on his face drooped downward as sharply as an astronaut’s on liftoff, the gravity of age pulling the corners of his mouth into an inverted U. Age spots bloomed on his forehead, and his fog-gray hair was plastered down with some kind of hair tonic from the forties. I knew the smell, possibly from my father’s hair. For ninety-something, he looked youthfully deadly. And he had an aura of solid steel.
“You know who I am.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, sir.” The sir came without thought and was accepted without comment. Dressler pulled his head back, and what I saw was a snapping turtle making a feint before the fatal strike.
“I’m an old man,” he said.
Another pause, so I tried for polite. “Not so—”
He held up a cautioning hand. “I assume that some day you’d like to be an old man.”
“Um, sure.”
“Well, Junior, right now, you’re not on course.” He blinked, so heavily I was surprised I couldn’t hear it. “In my experience, people visualize old age as something very wide, as wide as the sea. Something there’s no way around. Inescapable. Doesn’t matter which way they go, they’ll get there. But I’ll tell you, the right way to think of old age is as a spot on a map. A small town.” He put out an index finger and touched it, very precisely, to a spot on the tabletop. “A dot. In the Badlands, you know the Badlands?”
“By reputation.”
“Just chasms everywhere. So your town, old age, it’s in there. And there’s only one road that’ll get you there. Take a detour, make a wro
ng turn, you wind up under your car at the bottom of one of those chasms.”
“That’s a very vivid metaphor.”
A stout Latina came into the room, black hair to the middle of her back, wearing a white nurse’s uniform. She carried a polished wooden tray, which she put on the table in front of Dressler. It was piled with cheeses—Brie, Stilton, a crumbling, yellowish Cheddar, one of those goat-cheese log-things that’s been rolled in dead herbs. A large baguette lay intact in the middle. Dressler told the woman, “The Margaux,” picked up the baguette, and began to tear it into ragged pieces. His hands weren’t shaky. “Another way to look at it,” he said. “Nobody wants to dance with a bear, right?”
It didn’t seem to be a rhetorical question, so I said, “Right,” watching him rip the bread apart.
“But when the bear wants to dance with you, and you’re aiming at old age, what’s the smart thing to do? Turn around and run—hope you can run faster than a bear—or dance with him?”
“Well—”
“Good choice,” Dressler said. He picked up a small silver knife, performed an incision on the wedge of Brie, cut off a thumb’s worth, and spread it on one of the tatters of bread. “Here.” He held it out to me. “Get a napkin.”
I leaned over and picked up a yellow linen napkin. Dressler deposited the bread and cheese in the center of the napkin and dug the knife into the Cheddar. “Why do you think you’re here?”
I’d known the question was coming, but that didn’t mean I had an answer to it. “Jade?”
He waggled his head from side to side, a compromise between a nod and a head-shake. “Okay, jade. That’s one way to get there. The judge got robbed by some idiots who overstepped their instructions. Got stupid. They hurt an old lady. So everybody’s upset, and who can blame them? Violence is almost always stupid. There are so many ways to avoid it. Is that chair comfortable?”
“Sure.”
“Because you keep shifting around.”
“I have a lot of energy.”
“Eat your cheese. Relax. You want to get old, you have to keep the blood pressure down. It’s strange when you think about it. So many of the things that could keep us alive and guarantee us a peaceful, rewarding old age are under our control. They’re simple. Diet, exercise, reduce stress. Happiness. You know, Abraham Lincoln once said he thought most people were about as happy as they made up their minds to be.”
Abraham Lincoln? “Is that so?”
He picked up another piece of bread and tore it in half. Goat cheese this time. “Life is easy, if you just keep in mind how much of it you’re actually in charge of. Eat right, get rest, don’t stress out, be happy. Don’t stand on the railroad tracks when a train is coming.”
“The problem is knowing when you’re on the tracks.”
“That’s not bad,” he said, chewing. “I have to tell you, so far, this has been a disappointing conversation. I’d expected more. Jade, you say. Well, the jade is part of it. It’s true that I have a weakness for jade.”
The Hispanic woman came back into the room carrying a high-shouldered bottle of red wine, the cork sticking up an inch and a half. She put it on the table, took one of the linen napkins and pulled the cork, which came free with a soft pop. Then she put down the bottle, picked up a second napkin, and went to a glass-fronted cabinet, which she opened using one of the napkins. Then, with a napkin in each hand, she took two deeply-cut crystal glasses off the shelf, handling them only with the napkins. She brought them back, put them on the table, and took two steps back. She’d never touched the glasses.
“That’s fine, Juana,” Dressler said. “Have you chilled the salad plates?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Fifty degrees, no colder.” He picked up the bottle and filled both glasses. “I won’t be long.”
Juana didn’t bow, but she thought about it. A moment later, we were alone again.
“To our getting along,” Dressler said. He picked up his glass.
I picked up my own. It weighed a ton. We clinked rims and drank. Every precious, pretentious, ridiculous, overblown thing I’d ever heard anyone say about wine went through my head at the speed of light. It was that good. The room took on the shimmer of perfection.
Dressler drank his like it was Kool-Aid and then picked up the bottle and refilled his glass. He held it out to me, but I shook my head. “It’s too good to gulp.”
“The men who pistol-whipped the judge’s wife won’t be heard from again,” Dressler said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Not unless there’s a terrific drought.”
“A drought?”
“Long enough to empty a couple of lakes. So that’s good for some people. They’ll never get robbed by a couple of mutts who beat up an old lady because they enjoyed it. But for you, it’s a problem, isn’t it?”
That question called for another drink. I poured, downed half the glass and said, “You’re well informed.”
“Of course, I am. The way you were going to get out from under that fat cop’s thumb was to bring in the thieves, with a case the most timid district attorney would see as a lead pipe cinch.”
“DiGaudio.”
“Of course. An Italian, naturally. When people talk about a fine Italian hand, I think they must mean penmanship. As far as plotting is concerned, they’re klutzes, Machiavelli notwithstanding.” He busied himself with the cheese again as though choosing the right one was the only important thing in the world. “He’s got you by the short ones, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t spent much effort on working my way out of it.”
The hand holding the knife stopped. “And do you think you can?”
“Not to sound immodest,” I said, “but the day I can’t outthink Paulie DiGaudio is the day I deserve to be in jail.”
“You got that expression on your face.”
“Sorry. But it’s true. I could outthink DiGaudio with my left brain tied behind me.”
“Then why haven’t you tried?”
“Two reasons. First, I didn’t know that the guys who stole the jade are going to spend eternity underwater. Second, I got interested.”
“In what?”
“The whys and whats. Why Vinnie DiGaudio wanted to kill Bigelow, whether he did or not. What Bigelow had on Vinnie, because he had something, sure as hell. Why the killer called attention to Vinnie by leaving Bigelow’s body on the Walk of Fame star that belongs to one of Vinnie’s imitation Elvises. Why DiGaudio has a former female wrestler working for him when he seems like the type to hire ex-strippers and dress them in cellophane. And some other whys, too.”
Dressler shook his head. “I don’t care about any of those things. Here’s what I care about. Nobody comes looking for the jade. And, for reasons of my own, I would prefer that Bigelow’s death not be tied to Vinnie DiGaudio.”
“You and everyone else.”
Dressler held up an index finger with arthritic parentheses for joints. “Not quite. I know your cop wants you to prove somehow that it wasn’t Vinnie. Well, if it is Vinnie, if it turns out Vinnie actually did it, then he did it. But I need to know before anyone else does. Right now, it looks like it was Vinnie, doesn’t it?”
“More or less.” I held out my glass. “More.”
“More, please,” Dressler said, picking up the bottle anyway.
“No. I mean it looks more like Vinnie did it. As opposed to less. More, please.”
“Yes, that’s the conclusion most people would draw.” He was pouring. “I need you to do what you’ve been told to do, if that’s possible. But if it’s not—like I say, if it turns out to be Vinnie—I want you to give me some notice.”
I knocked back most of it. The second glass was even better than the first. “That’s peachy for you. But if it’s Vinnie, and if there’s nobody I can pin the Hammer robbery on, so I can get out from under DiGaudio the cop, I’m kind of screwed, aren’t I?”
“On the contrary,” Dressler said, looking genuinely surprised. “You w
ill have done me a service.”
“You’ll excuse me if that sounds like a thin blanket for a cold winter.”
The head-shake this time was just an irritated back-and-forth jerk. “Is anything I’ve been told about you true?”
“Depends on what you’ve been told.”
“You’ve been described as intelligent and resourceful. Surely one aspect of being resourceful is being able to recognize a resource when you see it. Maybe it’s just that you’re young.” He put down his glass and tugged at the pleats in his awful plaid slacks, then put his hands on his knees and leaned toward me again. “You will have done me a service,” he said slowly. “I will owe you. Irwin Dressler will owe you.”
“Oh,” I said.
“That’s something you can take to the bank anywhere in this state.”
“How much will you owe me?”
He waggled a finger at me, side-to-side. “Uh-uh. Doesn’t work that way. Let’s see how much you want. When you decide you want it.” He drained his glass and made a little drink-up gesture, wiggling his hand, palm up. “Finish it. Time to go.”
I tipped the glass back and emptied it. I would have wrung it out if I could have. By the time I put it down Dressler was already standing.
“The guys don’t need to follow you,” he said.
“Not as far as I’m concerned. I mean, I always like company, but—”
“To make sure you’re not going to hang around, keeping an eye on this place, for example.”
“No,” I said. “I’ve got a full datebook.”
“Wouldn’t want to detain you.” He put a hand on my arm, stopping me. “We have an understanding, you and I.”
“We do.”
“Tell me what you think it is.”
“In short, I keep looking at what happened to Bigelow, and if it turns out that what happened to him was Vinnie, you’re the first to know. And at some undefined point in the future, if I get my heinie in a crack, you’ll help me pull it out.”
Little Elvises Page 11