“Exactly. Who knows? Maybe you are smart. Stranger things have happened.” He was ahead of me, trudging across the carpet and then up the two steps that led to the entry hall. I took one last look at the little pieces of carved jade as I passed them. They were okay, but nothing I couldn’t live without. I followed him to the door, which he pulled open. There was a man standing there, a finger half an inch from the doorbell.
I had first seen his face on a movie screen when I was maybe eight years old, and most recently about six weeks ago. There couldn’t have been more than two or three actors in the history of Hollywood who’d managed to cling to the top rung as long as he had.
My mouth must have dropped open, because he mimicked it and then gave me a devil’s smile, the devil’s smile that had made him a star in the first place. He stepped aside to let me by, and then he went in and Irwin closed the door.
Irwin Dressler may have been ninety years old. His power may have faded away, may have been largely symbolic by that point. But in Los Angeles, it’s always informative to see what segment of the list people hung with. Dressler was hanging with the apex of the A-list.
Irwin Dressler. Little Elvises. Both DiGaudios. The Philly mob. The missing Doris. Lorne Henry Pivensey, a possible serial killer. Popsie, the Nazi Dustmop. Rina. Tyrone.
I needed time to think and a place to do it in.
There was no one behind me. Babe and Tuffy were probably still chewing in Dressler’s breakfast nook. Since I was on the Beverly Hills side of the little crumple of dirt and stone called the Santa Monica Mountains, I headed toward Koreatown, using all the loops and dead-ends the neighborhood offered to make sure I wasn’t dragging anybody new.
By the time I hit Sunset, I knew I was alone. Sunset was flowing pretty well. It was after ten P.M., most law-abiding people were home, and it was a weeknight. Sunset follows the trail that the Chumash Indians took to the sea when the basin got hot in the summertime. I wondered, as I made a right onto Fairfax, what they’d think of Sunset now—an electric canyon of light that flows from the brown Hispanic blocks of downtown to the bone-white suburbs of the Pacific Palisades and the wide blue hard-line horizon of the Pacific. The sage and chaparral gone, the sun-warmed stones and fresh springs gone, the cougars and eagles gone. The land held at bay, the entire way paved with money.
I took Fairfax south to Olympic and turned left, still keeping an eye on the rearview mirror, but mostly for form’s sake. I spotted a big green Dumpster at one end of the parking lot of a typical Olympic Boulevard mini-mall—Cambodian donuts, a Vietnamese nail shop, a Mexican taco takeout, and a tire store of indeterminate parentage. I pulled in, bought a couple of apple fritters, and put them on the passenger seat. Then I got under the car, grabbed the magnetic limpet, and stuck it on the inside of the Dumpster. I figured the Dumpster wasn’t likely to go anyplace, and I could pick the thing up again when I wanted to. Then, chewing on the first of the fritters, I pointed the Toyota toward K-town.
The Wedgwood, the Lenox, and the Royal Doulton stand on a corner just a few blocks north of the long stretch of Olympic where all the signs are in Korean. The peeling facades of two of the buildings face onto a street we shall, for the purposes of this narrative, call Courtney Lane, and the third is directly around the corner, facing onto Baltic Way. (Don’t bother looking on a map for either street.) Under the pretense of reinforcing and reconstructing the buildings’ basements, the Korean syndicate who bought the buildings excavated an underground parking lot beneath each of them. Many thousands of pounds of earth were hauled out, and many building inspectors pocketed many hundred-dollar bills during the process.
I pulled into the driveway for the apartment house that faced onto Baltic, using a remote to slide open the iron bars that blocked access to the garage. I drove all the way across the big, echoing space, to the far side of the building above me, and parked. Then I got out of the car, chose a key, and opened a door in the wall that said, in large red letters surrounded by lightning bolts, DANGER/PELIGROSO—HIGH VOLTAGE. The door swung inward on well-oiled hinges, and I stepped through it into the underground garage of the building next door. It took me about a minute to cross that and open a similar door on the far side, and then I crossed the third garage and turned the key that called the elevator.
If anyone had been following me, I was two apartment buildings away from the one they’d seen me pull into. And on a different street. I’d gone in on Baltic Way and I was now on Courtney Lane.
The elevator was dingy and sad. Its once glorious oak paneling now looked like something salvaged from a sunken liner, warped and scratched and written on. Its chandelier was dark and missing most of its crystals. The only light came from a cheap fluorescent ring stuck any old way on the ceiling. A bare wire ran across the ceiling from the fluorescent fixture and vanished into a hole that had been bored roughly into the paneling. Behind the hole, about two inches back so it would be hard to spot, was a little fish-eye lens attached to a closed-circuit camera that was monitored twenty-four hours a day by some very muscular Koreans. I waved at the camera.
The third-floor hallway, like all the hallways, was dark and disconcerting. The carpeting had holes in it. Water stains had been skillfully painted on the ceilings, and here and there the plaster was flaking away like industrial dandruff. Most of the light fixtures had burned out; irregular pools of light bloomed at odd intervals, usually above the worst stretches of carpet.
It took three keys to open the door to Unit 302, and not junk keys, either. And then I closed the door behind me, redid all the locks, and sighed into the dark.
The window that took up most of the wall at the far end of the living room was architectural art deco from 1923, a spiky tangle of thin black wrought-iron, holding irregularly-shaped pieces of glass: trapezoids, rectangles, triangles. Looking at it from the leather armchair, it reminded me of the geometrical nightmare that served as the floor plan of Vinnie DiGaudio’s house. Since I was going to have to pay Vinnie a visit later that evening, I let my mind wander over what I remembered and what I’d conjectured about the parts of the house I hadn’t seen.
People in the twenties understood that high ceilings promoted peace of mind. The ceilings at the Wedgwood were fourteen feet high, lighted at the edges by triangular brass sconces that threw light upward, turning the entire white ceiling into a lighting source. The sconces were the only lights I had turned on, and the illumination they produced was evenly distributed, practically shadowless. The oak floor gleamed, polished by the Korean cleaning crew that came with the building and who also functioned as spies to tell the syndicates whether any tenants were trashing the premises.
The skyline of Los Angeles’ small, tightly bunched crowd of downtown skyscrapers glittered through the window. A skyline Irwin Dressler had helped to build, lending capital from labor union pension funds, bringing high-rollers to the city’s new banks, initially money laundries but all legit now. Twenty years after he died, there would probably be a Dressler Drive somewhere down there.
There was room in the world for big money, big mobs, and small-time crooks like me. Somewhere in that continuum was the niche occupied by the predators like Lorne Henry Pivensey. While part of my mind was working my way through the upcoming creep of Vinnie’s house, another part was laying out a roadmap that might lead me to Doris, living or—more likely—dead. How was I going to deal with Marge?
For that matter, how was I going to deal with the beautiful widow Bigelow? A woman who seemed not to have a thought to spare for her murdered husband, who essentially did a cross-country dos-à-dos from Trenton to Los Angeles, being passed from hand to hand, from one creep to another, like a scuzzball square dance. And now she seemed to like me. And I seemed to like her.
And what about Rina?
I got up and went into the kitchen, which was the only room I’d done anything to. The original marble floor, polished to a mirror surface, now reflected an eight-burner chef’s stove, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and other objects of hardware lust. If I was
going to hide out here for a year or two, I was going to cook and eat well. And I was going to read; the apartment had a library, wall-to-wall walnut shelves, and they were jammed with books I’d picked up second-hand.
And, in two of those books, glued in between the thin boards of the covers, so someone could fan the pages without anything falling out, were the keys to a completely different life: a passport, social security card, birth certificate, and driver’s license. Parked in the garage downstairs was a blue Toyota, this one registered to Silas A. Noone, my alter ego. The name was an almost-anagram for alias no one. In a locking, recessed niche four feet up inside the living room chimney was a steel box with almost eighty thousand dollars in it, plus half a dozen credit cards, all current and paid up.
If everything came down some day, I could pull into the driveway on Baltic Way as Junior Bender and, five minutes later, pull out of the driveway on Courtney Lane in a different car, as a different person.
And then I could disappear forever.
But it wasn’t time for that yet. Things were tangled, but not terminal.
I took down a bottle of Glenfiddich and poured a one-and-a-half, since a double would have been pushing it. This was one of five bottles I had of the Glenfiddich produced in 1937, a bottle of which, billed as the world’s oldest single-malt whiskey, had sold for about twenty thousand bucks in Hong Kong. Only sixty-one bottles had been produced. I’d liberated my five from the house on Carol Way, the one with the looping driveway that had let me dodge the Humvee. Glass in hand, I wandered the rooms of the apartment, just appreciating the workmanship and letting the high ceilings open my head up to relieve the pressure. Things were a tangle. Well, I’d been in tangles before, and I’d gotten out of them by applying an approach attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you will be doing the impossible.
What was necessary, at this hour of the night, was figuring out what was going on in Vinnie DiGaudio’s house.
I made a quick stop at the mini-mall to reattach the limpet and then straightlined back to the Valley. It was a little after 1 A.M., and I had the roads pretty much to myself. After making the turn off of Ventura, I pulled to the curb, opened the trunk, grabbed everything I might need, and dropped it into the little black leather satchel I use for what I think of as house calls. Then I put the Toyota into gear and powered up the hill toward Vinnie’s.
Virtually no traffic in the neighborhood, not many lights on in the houses. This part of the Valley is still more an early-to-bed community than, say, Silverlake or Venice, where a demographically significant number of people stay up well into the night. I took the last couple of turns with the lights out and pulled to the curb, careful not to let my tires squeal against it, grabbed the satchel, which was fairly light, and hoofed it up the driveway, steep enough to get me breathing hard. My cheap Chinese sneakers, which I’d dyed black long ago, were reassuringly soundless.
The windows I could see were all dark. Just to make sure nobody was up, nursing night sweats or whatever, I decided to make a complete circuit, trying at the same time to reassemble the puzzle of the floor plan in my mind’s eye. From the front door I headed left, following the wall outside the rooms I’d glanced into from the long hallway. The window I’d unlocked was still unlocked. I kept going until I came to the long curved wall, but I could go only about two feet further than the edge of the window glass, because at that point the wall kissed the edge of a fifteen-foot drop, maybe a 70-degree angle, spiky with ice plant, that ended at the edge of a fenced yard below. The moon, dead center in a firefly party of stars, winked at me from the surface of a swimming pool.
So. Turn around and go back to the front door. Explore to the right of the door this time.
This was the side where geometrical whimsy had won the day. The first room I passed had triangular walls sloping up to a point, which I supposed made it a pyramid. Next came a concave wall, curving inward toward the middle, with another long window, the opposite of the one that bent out in the room where I’d talked to DiGaudio both times. These were the rooms I hadn’t been able to look into. The black area on my burglar’s map.
I ducked down as I passed the concave window, thinking as I did it that a piece of glass that size, cut to fit and custom-curved, had to cost a fortune. As DiGaudio told me himself, the only thing he’d done since 1960 was get fat. It was hard to believe that the stream of royalties from the Little Elvises was much more than a trickle, all these years later. Other than the occasional nostalgia CD hocked on late-night TV by a former member of Sha Na Na, the Frankies and Giorgios were a curiosity, a momentary lapse in taste, a fading echo in pop culture. It was hard to see where the money was coming from. Good investments? With a house like this, it was obvious that DiGaudio wasn’t hoarding.
The next two rooms were rectangles, but they protruded from the side of the house like a couple of crooked teeth, with a V-shaped slice of grass between them like a green piece of pie. Good-sized rooms, maybe bedrooms. Then I came to a long, unbroken stretch of wall, completely window-free. It took a moment for the penny to drop: this was the recording studio. So put one in the plus column—I’d located the studio—and one in the minus column: there was no way to know for sure that the Rolling Stones or Dion and the original Belmonts weren’t inside, rocking up a storm. I sat down with my back to the wall for a couple of minutes and just let my ears explore the night. Heard an owl doing the ever-fresh huu huu number, heard something—probably a possum—crackle its way through the ice plant on the hillside below, heard the occasional brrrrr of an especially loud engine, far down on the Valley floor.
Heard no music at all. Heard instead the reverberations of a voice in my inner ear.
Irwin Dressler. A few hours back, I’d been in the same room with Irwin Dressler. Me, an obscure burglar who wouldn’t deserve an asterisk in the long florid history of Southern California crime, having a one-on-one with The Dark Lord himself. The man with the plan, the geographer of local history. Famous and powerful men and women had been his hand puppets, acting out the plays he wrote for them. Business tycoons, Hollywood moguls, public faces, politicians. All navigating the intricate hopscotch pattern Irwin Dressler had chalked on the sidewalk of time. Erasing it behind them. Shaping the state of California.
An old guy in plaid pants. Looked as harmless as a skink.
And what he’d essentially told me was that I shouldn’t worry about DiGaudio the cop. The inference was that he could take care of Paulie DiGaudio without even rolling over in bed. So worry about him, Irwin, instead.
This was not an improvement in my affairs. Paulie DiGaudio was the comic cut-out troll in a child’s pop-up book compared to Irwin Dressler. When I’d unlocked the window in Vinnie’s house earlier that day, it had just been a burglar’s reflex, the way a shoe salesman might have glanced at a man’s footwear. I didn’t really have a reason to break into the house, since my job was to demonstrate Vinnie’s innocence. Now, though, I had a new client, so to speak, and the assignment had changed.
There was absolutely no music coming from the house. I gave it another minute or so, hands cupped around my ears, but nope. I heard a woman laugh, a harsh, unamused laugh I was glad wasn’t directed at me, from somewhere way down the hill, but nothing that demanded a treble clef.
So I reluctantly got up, a touch creaky from the cold ground, and followed the perimeter of the house until I came again to the ice-plant-covered drop. Passed several more windows, probably two more rooms, but no lights. Not so much as a candle.
Showtime.
The great thing about burglar alarms is that they’re much more irritating to homeowners than they are to burglars. My sense of both Vinnie DiGaudio and Popsie was that they had extremely low irritation thresholds. I spotted a good hidey hole beneath the chassis of Vinnie’s stately old Rolls Royce as I passed the front door.
I positioned myself under the unlocked window, opened the satchel, and pulled out a pair of black
cotton gloves and a black ski mask. It took a moment to put them on, but it seemed to take longer because I was completely focused on listening for a voice, a door, a creak underfoot, anything to say that anyone inside was sentient and vertical. Nothing. I zipped the bag, looped the handles over my left arm so I wouldn’t have to bend down to pick it up, and opened the window.
The alarm was shrill enough to abrade flesh. I eased the window back down until it was completely closed and scooted for the underside of the Rolls as the speakers tattered the night.
It took them long enough: they both must have been heavy sleepers. It was probably a full thirty seconds before I saw lights go on, and then something happened that I should have anticipated but hadn’t—the area around the house was suddenly bathed in the kind of wattage that’s usually reserved for major league night games. Even all in black, even underneath the Rolls, I figured that anyone who came through the front door would see me, as long as I could see them.
I hated to do it, because there are few things I dislike more than being hunted by someone I can’t see, but I rolled to the far side of the Rolls. From my new position, I couldn’t even see the bottom of the door. I was going to have to listen for footsteps and try to adjust my position. The nearest bushes were useless: they were azaleas, ten feet away and too low to hide behind. People look in bushes first anyway. I think it’s some sort of animal holdover: if it can eat you, it’s hiding in the bushes.
They finally shut down the alarm, and I heard the front door open and then slam up against the hallway wall. I recognized Popsie’s velvet touch, and sure enough, a second later I heard her addressing her boss.
“Just check inside the fucking house like I told you. I’ll take care of it out here.”
An unintelligible response from DiGaudio, still inside. I couldn’t make out the words, but it was clear that he wasn’t returning any of the attitude. Kind of an interesting employer/employee dynamic, I thought, keeping my eyes on the part of the paved area nearest the front door.
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