I smelled it before I saw it. The door was a few inches ajar and she’d had some time in there alone. I stood absolutely still, five or six feet from the small one-step porch with its silly little classical pillars, my heart playing bass drum in my ears, and tried to scan the street without being obvious about it. I brought up my wrist as though to check my watch, looked around in a disoriented fashion, scratched my head like a bad silent-movie actor, and then squinted at the building, just someone searching for an address. I saw no surveillance cameras. I deeply desired not to go in, but I had to.
I took a good, lung-filling breath, held it, stepped up onto the porch, and used my elbow to push the door open and then, as something exploded toward me and past me, I used every bit of that breath in a scream like the one you hear from the heroine in a bad horror movie, the one who keeps turning her ankle as she runs, with the Beast so close behind you can hear it panting.
I’d been ambushed by cats, five or six of them, maybe more, bolting from the room, some of them even darting between my feet, as the door opened. I turned away, unwilling to look at what the cats had been doing. These weren’t someone’s beloved Fluffy and Foo-Foo, these were half-starved feral cats lured down from the hills by Ms. Beckwell-Stoddard’s inadvertent self-advertisement. At two or more days dead, she was a buffet as far as they were concerned. There’s even a nicely unemotional scientific term for it: postmortem predation. If Itsy Winkle were here, she’d have given me a triumphant smile.
And if she’d been here, I could have sent her in, but she wasn’t, so it was down to me. I had to try to find something that would help me identify the Bride of Plastic Man, some agreement, contract, something with a name and some identification on it. I took that lung-busting breath one more time, seeing poisonous little flowers blossom in my field of vision, and elbowed the door open again, keeping my gaze elevated, well away from the thing on the floor. But this tactic did not give me any kind of a break. There was a desk in the middle of the room, the very desk she had dangled those long legs from in that photo, and behind the desk was a corkboard with a lot of long pins pushed partway into it. I didn’t have to look down to know that the woman at my feet had been shot through the back of her head: dangling by one wing at a lopsided angle from one of the pins were her expensive, stylish rimless glasses. The lenses were no longer transparent, and much of the cork was covered in a black spatter pattern that had attracted more flies than I hope ever to see again.
I had the time to register a filing cabinet, open and rifled, papers scattered on the floor around it, many of them dappled by reddish-brown smudges, before I turned and fled, somehow doing it at a stately, unhurried walk across that dead lawn, four accelerated heartbeats per step, until I got to my car. Then I drove away at a languid pace, turned the corner, pulled to the curb, opened the door, and lost all of my peach pie.
Ten minutes later, I had Eaglet on her way to watch Kathy and Rina’s house.
PART THREE
BEFORE THE SUN CAME UP
How did it get so late so soon?
– Dr. Seuss
24
If I Wanted to Talk to a Pisher, I Would Have Called a Pisher.
Although I hadn’t been able to force myself to look directly at what was left of her, the peripheral image of Althea Beckwell-Stoddard chased me all the way out of North Hollywood, through a stop-and-go stretch of Ventura Boulevard, and then up Coldwater Canyon, which was clogged with the pre-rush-hour rush hour. I hadn’t realized I’d seen it at the time—or maybe I’d suppressed it—but my memory, idling with nothing to occupy it as I inched uphill at three miles an hour, mercilessly supplied the final bit of the design, an intricately interwoven lacework of dainty cat tracks, a kind of frilly border surrounding the body, each symmetrical print the dark brown of dried blood.
I also saw those spattered glasses hanging drunkenly on the corkboard, and then the eyes that had looked out through them in her official photograph. The pose had been a little Hollywood-cheesy, probably knowingly so, and the eyes had seemed to comment on that. There had been just a bit too much going on in Althea’s eyes, not only intelligence but also assessment and a certain wary distance. If I’d met her in person she might have seemed warmer and more trustworthy, but on the basis of those eyes alone, I wouldn’t have let her near my daughter.
Still, she hadn’t deserved that. I’d known some bad, bad people in my life but I could think of only one or two whose actions might have led me to regard their being eaten by cats, even postmortem, as justifiable punishment. It was horrific enough to make me wish I had some sort of religious perspective, or the access to the spirit world that Henry Wallace Horton seemed to have found. Something, anyway, that would give me a ten thousand-foot view from which I could have put what I’d seen into some kind of comprehensible panorama, preferably one that would re-frame it as a rite of passage—although a particularly ugly one—to a better existence.
But I didn’t have anything of the kind. So I just heaved a sigh that clouded the windshield as I crept past Jake Whelan’s broken gate, wondering whether Laney Profitt was still there or whether, in the second-rate light of this particular day, she and Jake couldn’t bear the sight of each other for a moment longer. I was wondering how she’d gotten her car started when I reached the top of Coldwater and made a right on Mulholland Drive, the road that stretches along the spine of the large hills or small mountains that separate the San Fernando Valley from the southern expanse of the Los Angeles basin. I was able to express my anxiety by speeding up a bit on Mulholland, if only because sheer economics thinned the traffic. A mile and a half later I made a left and dipped down into the El Dorado of Los Angeles property values, where the annual state taxes on a single house can cost more than it would take to buy some of the newer homes in lesser areas down on the flats. When people say “Hollywood” what they really mean is Brentwood and Bel Air.
The hedge and wall that completely blocked the house from view had gone up in 1947, the year the founding thug of Las Vegas, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, was shot many times in the head at his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills home, the 30-caliber bullets having passed through a brightly lighted window on their way to his skull. Walls instantly became a high-demand item, even (this being Los Angeles) a status symbol among the city’s more prominent crooks. The wall I pulled up to, like Miss Daisy’s ficus hedge, would probably have required special official dispensation for height, although in this case the name of the house’s owner was undoubtedly all the dispensation that was needed.
I was here because I couldn’t think of anything else. Althea Beckwell-Stoddard’s murder had deprived me of my relatively safe route to Allan Frame. The person who lived here, I hoped, might yank Mr. Frame’s fangs, or at least make him think twice before burying them in my throat.
A light went on above the no-nonsense wrought-iron gate as I pulled into the driveway. The moment my finger touched the intercom button, a man said, “He’s not seeing anyone right now.” The last time I had heard that voice it had been singing Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” from the kitchen and putting a lot into it. Given the size of the house, he had to have been putting a lot into it for me to be able to hear him at all, much less identify the song.
“Is he all right, Tuffy?” I asked.
“He’s as all right as you can expect.”
“What do you mean, all right as he can expect?” said the master of the house, from a distance. “What am I, the Wandering Jew? On the hoof since the Year One?”
I said, “What’s he doing that’s so important he can’t see me?”
“Anything you can think of,” Tuffy said. “Trying a new part in his hair. Looking at a tooth implant catalogue. Watching PBS. He’s not entirely happy with you.”
I said, “Ouch.”
The master of the house said, “He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write . . .”
“Awwwww,” I said, “did I hurt its little feelings?�
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“Careful,” Tuffy said.
“You’re right,” I said instantly, feeling like I’d just had cold water poured down the back of my neck. “I didn’t mean to say that. So, uhh, what are you doing that I’m not invited to?”
“You know, Junior,” the master of the house said, obviously having waved aside Tuffy, who outweighed him three to one, “if favors were a teeter-totter, my end would be on the ground without me sitting on it, and you’d be way up in the air talking to the birds.”
“I know,” I said.
“You do?”
“I do.”
“Well, I’ll give you that you got chutzpah,” he said, “but so what? Tuffy, do I like chutzpah?”
“You hate it,” Tuffy said.
“So tell me what you’re doing.” I was getting a little desperate. “Maybe it’s something I can help with.”
“You?” said the master of the house, and Tuffy said, “You?”
“I can do—”
“Now you’re interrupting me?” the master of the house said. “Long time ago, I learned, first they interrupt you. Then they shoot you over dinner.”
I said, “I didn’t.”
“Don’t argue. Never argue. What we’re doing? We’re going to taste a wine, a wine I wouldn’t share with the Pope, not even with Lenny Bruce, rest his soul. And I’m going to share it with a sponger like you?”
“Make a deal,” I said. “I know all about wine. I grew up in a vineyard. I named all the grapes. They came when I called. I taught their children. Give me one little sip—I won’t even swallow it, if that’s what you want—and I’ll tell you more about it than any of those clowns in the restaurants with the ladles around their necks.”
“This is wine with an actual cork,” said the master of the house.
“Okay. Fine. Up to you. That sound you hear is me abandoning all hope. But listen, if you don’t like my critique, you can have Tuffy throw me over the wall.”
“Over the wall?” said the master of the house.
“Or through it. God knows he’s got the muscles for it.”
“Deal.” And the gates slowly ground open.
Tuffy came out to meet me. In defiance of all I thought I knew about human limitations, he had bulked up a little more. He’d had to cut slashes into the ends of the short sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt to let his biceps breathe. The shirt was a primary-color phantasmagoria of South Sea themes, an island so dense with clichés even Moana would have given it a miss. He said, “You’re the first person he’s seen in a week.”
“Why? Is he okay?”
“You decide. You know why he said he’d see you? After the intercom went off?”
“No idea.”
“He said the way you stick it up his nose reminds him of himself, sixty-five, seventy years ago. Said he never knew when to shut up, either. When he was young, he meant.” He turned to lead me in, stopped, and said, “How much do you really know about wine?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “But I watch old James Bond movies. I know how to swish it through my teeth and raise one eyebrow. I can say, ‘Hmmmmm.’”
“You can raise one eyebrow?”
“Not exactly. I mean, I can, but the other one goes up, too.”
Tuffy blew out a little air. “Well, he’s waiting. Don’t say anything about his weight.”
I said, “His weight? What is it, what’s the problem?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. He said a couple of days ago that eating is too much trouble because he just has to do it again in a few hours.”
“Is he depressed?”
“Who can tell? You think he talks about feelings? He’s not eating, he’s too thin, he’s grumpy, he watches old Dancing with the Stars shows two and three times when he already knows who won, he doesn’t sleep for shit. Does that sound depressed to you? Maybe you can cheer him up, although I don’t know why you would cheer anybody up.” For Tuffy, that was a long speech. He turned away again, and I followed him through the door.
The shrunken little old man in the eye-searing plaid golf pants was sitting exactly where he’d been when I saw him last, dead center on the endless white leather couch, staring at the enormous flat screen on the room’s opposite wall. The screen was dark. The man’s name was Irwin Dressler. For almost fifty years he had been the most powerful man on either side of the law in Southern California: a mob boss who had never been arrested; a financier who had started several of California’s major banks for money laundering purposes and then taken them straight; a civic force who had looked at Chavez Ravine and seen a good place for his favorite baseball team to play, despite the fact that there was no stadium there and his favorite team was in Brooklyn; a lawyer who had represented, at one point, both the movie studios and their unions, leading some wit to say, “When the studios got a strike on their hands, Irwin goes into a room alone for half an hour and comes out shaking hands with himself.” He had testified before Congress several times and had been thanked heartily at the end of every session.
And, sure, he’d had some people killed, but in some cases it was a public service. He was, for example, widely believed to have been responsible for the bullets that put the aptly named Bugsy Siegel under the sod at long last. It was rumored at the time that work had started on Dressler’s wall several weeks before Bugsy sat on the wrong couch.
Dressler had summoned me a few years back, sending Tuffy and his secondary muscle, Babe, to bring me in when I was reluctant to come under my own power. Well, okay, not so much reluctant as terrified. Irwin Dressler was known as someone who could make people disappear quite literally with the shake of a head. In one famous incident in the 1970s, he had dispatched three panicked subordinates to catch up to and intercept a hitter who had left the room five or six minutes earlier because a fly had landed on Irwin’s nose during a discussion and he’d shaken it off. They all thought the hitter had gotten up to go to the bathroom.
I’d never heard how that story ended, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had done him one service by helping him dish out retribution to another old mobster, but he was right: favor-wise, I was deep in the hole.
“Boychik,” he said without turning to look at us. The skin beneath his chin had a couple of deflated-looking new folds, and the tongue of the belt that held up his awful golf pants passed through the buckle and continued all the way out of sight behind his back, with several amateur holes punched through it. His thinning white hair was slightly yellowed and longer than I remembered, slicked down in a way I hadn’t seen before, a way that accentuated the shape of his skull. “You were the only thing I didn’t have today,” he said, still with his eyes on the dark screen. “Cramps, I had. A headache, I had. People falling down on Dancing with the Stars, I had. Boredom like there’s no tomorrow, and that’s okay by me, I had. But you, you I didn’t have. So look, a royal flush.”
“Are you eating?” I said.
“At the moment, no. Why, are you hungry?”
“No, thanks.”
“I could get you something,” Tuffy said.
Dressler waved the words away. “Enough about that. He’s hungry, he can eat on his own time.” There was an edge in his voice that froze Tuffy in mid-turn. To me, he said, “So tell me, Mr. Wine Smart Guy, what kinda grapes go into a Merlot?”
“Only the best,” I said. “Grapes like they wish they had in heaven. Picked by left-handed virgins, singing in Latin, beneath a full moon.”
He held up a hand, all knobbed knuckles and blue veins. “Back it up. Red or white?”
I said, “Red or white.”
“That’s what I said.”
“I know,” I said. “I was admiring the way you said it.”
“You don’t know shit, do you?”
“Red.” I made a kind of scornful French laugh, a little pfff that I didn’t even know I could do. “Merlot.
Red or white, it is to laugh. What a question. Pfff pfff.”
Tuffy said to him, “I told you.”
“Told me what?”
“That he couldn’t find his ass in a blizzard.”
“Red, indeed,” I said. “A peasant’s notion, a blunt-force instrument, no refinement at all. In the trade we refer to the color of Merlot as arterial raspberry.”
Dressler gave me a look that might have been the last thing some people ever saw, back in the old days. Then he slowly shook his head.
I said, “Can I sit down?”
“Sure, sit.” he said. “You want to do your trick with the wine?”
“It’s not a trick,” I said. “It’s the result of a lifetime of—”
“Tuffy. Bring Schmendrik here a little wine. You, sit down, sit down. My neck doesn’t bend as good as it used to. Just a couple spoonfuls, Tuffy, in one of the good glasses. Give him every chance. Used to be one of my rules,” he said as Tuffy headed for the kitchen. “Before you pop somebody once and for all, you give them whatever they need for you to see whether they’re worth anything. Then you pop them. What’s your favor?”
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