“You,” he rasped. He hadn’t shaved in days and he was wearing a maroon silk robe that had probably cost a couple thousand bucks when it was new but looked now like something I might use to dry my car. The sash was knotted over a little pot belly that I’d never seen before.
I said, “Me.”
“Drab as ever,” he said. He cleared his throat against the rasp; at his apogee, Jake’s voice had been silken, and never more so than when it was gelding some subordinate. “In movies, criminals are interesting.”
“Well,” I said in a flare of spite, “I see that you’ve put on a few.”
For a moment I thought he was going to shut the door, but instead he took a couple of steps back. “And thank you for pointing that out,” he said. “You’ve gotten shorter, haven’t you? You’re almost as short as an agent these days.”
“It’s just, you know, you’ve always been so . . . trim.” It was true: Jake had been one of the handsomest young men in Hollywood for an unreasonable length of time before he became one of the handsomest old men in Hollywood. He’d started out as an actor, long on face and short on talent, but he’d quickly developed a reputation for taking control of the pictures he was in—even when he had a supporting role, as he usually did once it became apparent that his talent had to be stretched very little before it became transparent. Directors complained bitterly about his behavior, but producers’ ears went up: here, improbably handsome, like someone wearing reverse camouflage, they recognized one of their own, an expert in wielding power he didn’t deserve. In no time Jake owned Hollywood. It was said that he paid for tables for four to be held for him seven days a week at his nine favorite restaurants, just in case the spirit moved him or he got hungry when he was being driven through the neighborhood. And I mean held all the time, all through lunch and all through dinner.
“Trim,” Jake said in the tone of someone who had just remembered an ancient Arab curse. “You haven’t reached this stage of life, yet.” He turned around and went back down the stone-floored hall, leaving me to close the door and follow. He’d apparently started dyeing his hair by himself, because he’d missed a tuft in the back, and it gleamed like a silver weed. As we passed the enormous living room that no one ever used, he said over his shoulder, “And the way you’re going, you might not reach it, so allow me to share some of the highlights with you. Things begin to hurt, especially things that bend, like knees and elbows, and even though you used to play two, three sets of tennis without even wrinkling your whites, you gradually find yourself avoiding stairs, waking up eight or ten times a night and wishing you could sleep next to the toilet, and feeling in the morning like it might take, I don’t know, a piece of earth-moving equipment to get you out of bed. So you’re slowing down, you can’t work off the calories so easily. Next in the parade of blessings, your secondary appetites fade and, well, narrow. I used to put in a half hour or so every afternoon flipping through my daybook, just trying to decide which famous or semi-famous stranger, acquaintance, contractee, friend, lesser princess, or ex-wife I wanted to tuck in with that night. Now, all that’s left of what was once a really sybaritic range of pleasures is a mild enthusiasm for sugar. If you were to ask me right now what I want most in the world, it would be to die while I’m eating crème brûlée.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
Ahead of us was the kitchen, and to our right was the den Jake pretty much lived in, so he stopped and looked back at me. “No, you’re not. You’re still pissed at me because of King Maybe.”
“I am,” I said. I watched Jake hobble quite slowly, one hand on the rail, down the three stairs to the sunken room with its eternal blaze crackling and snapping in a fireplace the size the stable Jesus was born in. “And you invited me in,” I said, “because you feel guilty about it.”
“I’ve got calluses on my guilt impulse,” Jake said, easing himself into the room’s best chair, a butter-colored leather masterpiece that always faced the fire. His knees cracked. “I sleep okay, once I finally fall asleep, and in between hikes to the john.”
“I’m sure you do.” I sat, too, sinking into a perfectly nice armchair that probably cost a third of what Jake’s did. “What happened to the movie?”
“What movie?” He put out an arm and made a flicking gesture with the back of his hand in the direction of the fireplace. “Could you poke the fire a little? It’s cold in here.”
It wasn’t, but I got up. “The movie you were so worried about, the one you supposedly sent me to King Maybe’s office to find out about. Something long about a women nothing ever happens to.”
“Not much of a TV Guide slug.”
I moved a couple of logs at random, feeling as though my eyebrows were about to burst into flame. “It was going to be your—I don’t remember the word you used—your apology or something for all the crap—”
“I don’t owe anybody an apology.” His tone had a lot of teeth in it. “I made five of the nine highest-grossing pictures ever, up until the Chinese started buying tickets. Fucking Chinese,” he said. “Do you know what they’ve—”
“Yes, you’ve told me. Sequels, franchises, tentpoles, all that.”
“Don’t do that,” Jake snapped. “Don’t tell me I’ve told you something when I haven’t.”
I managed to roll the log over in an eruption of sparks. “But you did tell me. We were sitting right—”
He slapped both hands, fingers spread, on the arms of his chair. “Well, don’t fucking tell me about it. I may not be enjoying this stage of my life, but I don’t want to be told I don’t even remember it. My mother,” he said, bouncing a little against the cushion behind him, “toward the end of her life, she watched the same four I Love Lucy shows over and over again. I got them for her on film from Lucy herself. My mom laughed at them like all the jokes were brand new. Before she died, like a parting gift or something, I brought Lucy over, in person, and my mom looked at her like she’d never seen her before. Like she was the new nurse or something.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“We come out of the room, Lucy says, ‘It’s hard to get a laugh these days.’” Jake barked out a laugh of his own, as brief and unamused as the sound of a trap snapping shut. “So guess what. Dying isn’t the only thing you got to worry about, you gotta worry about forgetting you’re alive. Leave that fucking fire alone and sit down. Why are you here?”
“Right,” I said. I put the fire tools back and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I’m giving you a chance to work off a little bad karma.”
“Don’t worry about my karma. I’ve been who I am since before you ate anything you had to chew.”
“Well what I need is easy, I think. Are kid actors still in those books, those directories, with the head shots for casting directors?”
“If their agents pay for it.” He shook his head. “It’s mostly a scam now, not like it was years ago. Now it’s all online. Directories are for bottom-level. Con artists.”
“Con artists sounds exactly right. Here.” I reached into the pocket of my T-shirt and handed him Ronnie’s two best shots of the kids. She’d cropped to the faces and blown them up. One of the pictures of the little girl was good enough for her to use professionally. “I want you to get one of your people—do you still have people?”
He didn’t even look up at me.
“One of your people to comb though those directories and find these kids and get the names of their agents.”
“Tell me again why I’m doing this.”
“You know exactly why. King Maybe. So, yes, you’re going to do this for me, and if you don’t, I know a fence, a fine art specialist, with half a dozen guys working for him who’d love to get a few minutes in the museum downstairs. Just looking around this place, it doesn’t seem like the fortress it was, back when you had all the live-in muscle.”
“You’re not only as short as an agent,” Jake said. “You act like an ag
ent, pulling out the heavy artillery when a simple please would do the job.”
“Please.”
“Yeah, sure. But tell me something. You got a payday in here someplace?”
“I do.”
“I’ll set it up, you foot the bill. Run you twenty, thirty an hour.”
The old Jake would never have asked for money. I said, “Sure. And here’s another one.” I fished out the picture of Harried Mom.
“Jesus,” he said, holding it at arm’s length. Jake never wore his glasses. “What is this? ‘Bride of Plastic Man?’ She’s so ugly you could use her as bat repellent.”
“I’ll ignore the sexism—”
“Look at me not yawning.”
“—but the way she looks is obviously a matter of personal choice.”
“Gee, you think?” Jake said. “She’s made up to the teeth, and they’re not even her real teeth. This goop around her jawline, her neck? Prosthetic. Makes her look heavier than she is. She’s got stuff wadded up under her upper lip to change the shape of her mouth. That hair. What color were her eyes, green?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then. The defense rests. Green eyes occur ninety-five percent of the time in genre fiction. How many times you actually seen green eyes? Listen, I made all three of the Face Shifter movies, seventy-million buck opening weekend for the second one, and she’d have fit right into the eighth reel, when Julia Roberts has turned halfway into John Goodman. I probably would’ve used her on the poster.”
“So you’re saying the picture is useless.”
“That’s what I’m saying. No way to tell what she really looks like.”
“Well, the kids then. I want their agents’ names and whatever other contact information your guy can get.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said. “So that’s why you came.”
“That’s pretty much it.”
He slipped the pictures into the pocket of his robe and looked over at the fire, chewing on his lower lip. “You, uh, you want to stay for lunch?”
“I ate lunch about four hours ago, Jake, but thanks.”
Jake stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles, then uncrossed them and crossed them the other way. Gazing down at his feet as though he wasn’t quite sure what they were, he drew a breath to say something, shook his head, exhaled heavily, and then said, “Dinner?”
14
Not Replaced with Junk
If I were given to being melancholy over the lives of people I don’t particularly like, I might have been feeling melancholy for Jake as I coasted down his driveway, popping the clutch to bring the engine to life when I was halfway down and mentally thanking Louie for installing the manual transmission after I bought the car. I really hate automatic transmissions, I thought, practically out loud, and then I realized I was trying to divert myself from the fact that I actually was feeling melancholy. For Jake.
“Fuck him,” I said, not very convincingly. That was, after all, what he would have said about me. Probably was what he was saying at that moment.
Still, despite the massive ego and the tiny moral code, he’d had a vitality I’d admired and envied, even if the energy was fueled largely by malice; malice seems to slow time for men of a certain type, keeping them young, or at least a malign imitation of young. Whatever the source of Jake’s energy—and adding to the anger, you had to remember, were the products of global drug smuggling operations and a lot of sub-rosa chemistry—he’d once seemed to be walking proof that there actually were people upon whom Time couldn’t lay a glove. In my uneasy late thirties I’d taken a small amount of comfort from that, and I could almost hear the hiss as another illusion slowly deflated.
I stopped at the bottom of the driveway. The cars streaming by had their headlights on; it was that awful time of day when it’s neither as light nor as dark as you think it is, or would like it to be. I hit speed dial, and Ronnie said, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me here alone.”
“I know a few people who survived a night there,” I said. “Is it too awful?”
“Too awful for what? Too awful for Architectural Digest? Yes. Too awful for people who shoot up elementary schools? No. Close, but no.”
“Well, sorry if this sounds tactless, but is it too awful for you?”
“Oh, no. Certainly not. I mean, it’s got walls and everything.”
“I’ve got one more stop to make. Could be an hour, could be more. Do you want to check out and go someplace nicer? There’s a Sheraton on the Universal lot, about two miles away.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said. “I’ll be able to use this against you for years. But here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to go to the best restaurant within a fifteen-mile radius, order two complete dinners, pick at both of them, and bring nothing back for you.”
“Have a steak,” I said.
“I don’t want a steak.”
“No, but I do. What kind of revenge would it be to have a kale mash or something like that? I wouldn’t be upset that you didn’t bring me any. I’d probably thank you.”
“Right,” she said. “One rare, prime rib-eye, bone in, at Taylor’s, left intact and untasted on the table while I chow down on the kale mash. No, I’ll bring you one small piece of cold fat.”
“Everything okay on the security front?”
“You mean, do I think anyone might be looking for me at Minnie’s Mouse House? No. And I did absolute figure eights getting here. I’m alone.”
“Okay,” I said. “Love you.”
“Oh, well,” she said, “if you put it that way.” And she hung up.
I sat there at the bottom of Jake’s steep, unswept drive, projecting a sequence of events in roughly chronological order onto the inside of the car’s windshield: the first call from Stinky; the Bride of Plastic Man with her hired kids; the creaking, ransacked darkness of Horton House; the broken chair that a frantic Miss Daisy used to keep someone out, probably having crawled across the floor to wedge it there; Luz Ginzberg, aka Lumia White Antelope, hiccups and all, hired by the competition, afraid of them, but nevertheless going out into the night and that waiting white car; the heavyweight who barged into Stinky’s in the middle of the night at the center of a whirlwind of threats; and then, in the more distant past, Henry Wallace Horton, Jr., aka Edgar Francis Codwallader, dragging his fake name, his stolen gold, and his English first editions across raw, scratchy stretches of the West in the nineteenth century; his surprisingly bookish journey to England; an antique French doll with a triangle cut into its back; the building of the worst house I’d ever been in.
Sort it out, boil it down. One object, small and worth killing for. One helpless old woman, dead. One nice female burglar, someone for whom I’d once had a secret, unexpressed affection, murdered. Two people—presumably, anyway—who wanted the small object badly enough to hire competing burglars to go into a house they either wouldn’t, couldn’t, or were afraid to enter. Behind it all, more than a century ago, one old claim jumper who liked to read.
Why did they kill Lumia? Was it anger, or would they have killed her even if she’d brought them what they wanted, just to dead-end the connection? Was I on someone’s shoot list, too, whether I delivered or not?
It had gone full dark while I’d sat there. It was also evening rush hour, so Coldwater was a serpentine necklace of lights as it wound its way up toward Jake’s eyrie.
Okay, I thought, don’t worry about getting killed, worry about working it out so they don’t get a chance at me. There are balls in the air. Be methodical. Check things off. I had Jake putting someone to work to find the kids. I had Louie digging up everything he could on old man Horton. I was about to barge in on Itsy Winkle and try to pry her competing client’s name out of her. I had the name of a fence for the kind of stuff that had been stolen out of Horton House, I had the old notebook that probably contained the names of the faithful
servants who had presumably stolen it . . .
Just on reflex, I mentally challenged my assumption that the best stuff had been stolen from Horton House, as opposed to having been removed in an orderly and lawful fashion. The place was, after all, about to be torn down. It’s standard procedure, I thought, when a house is waiting for the bulldozers: Haul off everything worth selling, and sell it. It was virtually guaranteed to happen.
But in that case it wouldn’t have been replaced with junk. There would have been no point in that crap furniture if the house was just being cleared. No, Miss Daisy had been nailed to that bed for a long time, the rest of the family apparently unwilling or forbidden to visit her, and during her long illness the best stuff was toted off for sale, one or two pieces at a time, by people, at least two of them, who remained in the house, who still needed a table to eat dinner at, a place to sprawl in the enormous living room.
So, the servants. What, if anything, did they know about the forces that were in play? Maybe the notebook from the kitchen would lead me to them. If not, maybe the fence whose name Stinky had given me could direct me to the shops where the stuff had been sold. The shop owners would have the names of the people they bought it from, just in case it turned out to be hot.
I was sitting there, thinking, I’m missing something, when a car pulled into the driveway at considerable speed, jammed on its brakes so hard that it bounced when it stopped, and then hit its high beams a couple of times, in case I had somehow failed to notice its arrival.
I flicked mine back, just indicating that my car was occupied, and then opened the dash compartment to get the automatic. Who knew? I decided to let whoever it was come to me. After a short my-dick-is-bigger-than-your-dick pause, the driver’s door on the other car opened and I discarded the modifying phrase because it was obvious, even with her headlights half-blinding me, that the other driver hadn’t framed the delay in those terms. She was unquestionably, conspicuously, even notably female.
Lush was the word that came to mind, lush as a Rachmaninoff chord. I tucked the automatic out of sight but still within reach and put my window down as she approached, and then, as my headlights hit her face, I recognized her as the leading actress in a sitcom from ten or fifteen years ago, a strikingly beautiful comic talent. If she’d been born a little earlier, she would probably have been a movie star, able to explore all the dimensions of her gift instead of debasing it in the same fucking limiting way every week for six years until she went up in a tabloid-celebrated mushroom cloud of cocaine.
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