Charlie chuckled, shook his head in admiration, and murmured, “Fenster.”
“Yeah. Just wanted to thank you for him.”
“The Taliban. He’s good.”
Sammy decided to check out the lease prices on a new Porsche. Why the fuck not? Carpe diem. Carpe everything, for that matter. Now that he was no longer a prisoner in his home, he would escalate his campaign. When he got back from car shopping, he’d call Marcy. Invite her for a weekend at La Costa. They’d drive down in the Carrera, which, fortunately, sat only two.
State Farm finally got back to him. Now that the Taliban was involved, the destruction of his car was officially deemed the result of “an act of terrorism,” and, as stipulated by Article 16, Paragraph 6, Subsection F, not covered by his policy. He was, as his Good Neighbor put it, shit out of luck.
With no Lexus to trade in, he would have to lease the Porsche. And that would require a financial background check, which he may or may not survive. He still owed money on his home improvement loan and had already tapped into the equity on the condo. The computer might very well spit him out. He was going to have to convince them to hand over the keys to a sixty-thousand-dollar vehicle with only his mortgaged condo as collateral. Worse, if the car dealer made him as the guy whose car was blown up, mistakenly or not, in the Vons parking lot, he would no doubt consider him a poor risk.
Did he dare ask Marcy Gray to co-sign his car lease? She had co-signed his patio deck contract. If he kept coming to her for money, she would start to see him as the deadbeat he was. It was bad enough that he was living in Paradise Gardens with a limited wardrobe and the ashes of a Lexus in an urn above his fireplace. But a Porsche was still a Porsche. Wasn’t it? What woman could resist a man behind the wheel of a new Carrera?
So once again, he knocked on her door and told her that the worst thing that could happen would be that she would have to take possession of a brand-new automobile. She could sell it, pay off the lease. Or she could drive around the Springs stopping traffic.
So he got the Carrera—silver gray, in her honor—with black leather interior, walnut dash, and racing tires. $4,999 down and $890 a month for thirty-nine months. By then he would either be at the bottom of the Salton Sea wearing a cement boot, or, preferably, living off the fat of the land with Marcy Gray.
He drove it home from the dealership and pulled into the parking space beside her car. As he emerged from the parking garage, car keys jangling from his fingers, ready to knock on the door to announce the good news, he heard the loud piercing sound of a pneumatic drill. And it was coming from the African’s patio, where two men in Acme Exterminating and Patio Deck jumpsuits were chewing up the old deck in preparation for installing a new one.
He put the Porsche keys in his pocket and walked to his condo. Inside, he double-locked the door. Then he poured himself a very large glass of single malt and allowed the realization to sink in that it was not Phil Finoccio who’d blown up his car. While he had been playing golf with Walt and his periodontist, Biff was booby-trapping his car. If Sammy hadn’t gone into Vons to get the Drano . . .
Holy shit.
VIII
MARCY
Sammy Dee’s car getting blown up in the Vons parking lot had a definite effect on Marcy Gray’s program of due diligence in determining which of the two men would be her lover, if not her next husband. It gave her pause, to put it mildly. What kind of man gets his car blown up at a supermarket?
Best-case scenario: Sammy was a victim of random violence; his car just happened to be parked in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there was the cat poisoning—for which he very well may have been the target—and Evelyn Duboff’s opinion that Sammy was trying to hide his past. It seemed increasingly improbable that he was merely a nice half-Jewish retiree who had made a little money selling cement.
Reporters were camped outside Paradise Gardens, waylaying residents and pumping them for stories about their neighbor. Though Marcy had never been publicity-shy, she refused to answer any questions about Sammy Dee. It was bad enough that he had narrowly escaped getting killed, but did the poor man have to be harassed by the tabloid press?
These feelings, however, did not prevent Marcy from taking extra care with her appearance. She no longer went out in running shoes and tracksuits, and she chose a lipstick shade that complemented her outfits. After all, there was no reason to look like a poorly dressed Palm Springs matron with nothing better to wear than shmatas she picked up in the bargain bin at Penney’s.
Au contraire. She was the companion, potentially the girlfriend, of a man whom the media were pursuing. She was a mature, fascinating, enticingly damaged woman, whose life was lived on the edge of intrigue. And she had to act and dress the part. Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Okay, that was a bit of a stretch. More like Glenn Close in Reversal of Fortune.
With the reporters camped out in front of the building, she brought hot dinners over for Sammy, who was trapped in his condo with the shades drawn. As the flashbulbs popped, she was careful to turn her face profile right, her good side, but resisted smiling or waving. That would have been really tacky.
Sammy was visibly shaken. Yet she resisted asking questions about why there had been a bomb under his car. If he wanted to talk about it, that was fine, but she wasn’t going to pry. She had hired Evelyn Duboff to do that.
As if he had some sort of sixth sense that told him when Sammy was alone with her, Didier showed up, with a bottle of wine, and the three of them had dinner together. Sammy didn’t say or eat very much, and Didier dominated the conversation, such as it was, talking about the art business. Things were apparently a little slow in the African antiquity market.
“It is the recession. No one seems to have the money. And yet they still throw it into the stock market. Incroyable. They might as well toss it into the ocean, to be washed out by the tide. They must know that art, like gold, increases in value during difficult times. It is tangible, not to mention beautiful . . .”
Sammy didn’t bother commenting. Usually he would offer some deflating remark about Didier’s life and business, but he was too preoccupied to indulge in running down his rival. Instead, he stared blankly at the camera lights leaking through the blinds.
Occasionally, he shook his head and murmured, “Vultures.” There was nothing more forthcoming from him about why his condo was besieged by reporters. And, as usual, Didier didn’t leave until she did, waiting her out as they got sleepy from the wine. Sammy refused to turn the TV on. “I don’t want to encourage them,” he said with endearing, if faulty, logic.
The next morning, the reporters were gone. Ethel Esmitz said that the police had dispersed them late last night, claiming that they were disturbing the peace. They were replaced by ACLU picketers defending the right of journalists to harass people. It didn’t take long for the Arab Anti-Defamation League to show up to protest racial profiling in the assumption that the people who tried to kill Sammy Dee were Middle Eastern, and they, naturally, brought out the Jewish Defense League. Which, of course, brought the police back to keep these two groups from each other’s throats. And, eventually, the reporters returned to cover the confrontation with the police.
“My God,” the PGHOA president declared. “You’d think we were in Iraq, or Paris, or someplace like that.” She was holding court in the multipurpose room, where a meeting had been called to discuss the latest development.
“We are going from cat murderers to senior citizen bombings,” Tuuli complained. Majda agreed, nodding demonstrably. They looked like a couple of crones in an Ingmar Bergman movie, The Witches of Skövde. They sat there in matching cardigans, knitting contrapuntally, the surviving cat on one of their laps.
Mrs. Epstein—Sammy’s neighbor, wearing a seersucker dress that was probably out of fashion when she’d bought it during the Second World War—kept clicking her tongue, shaking her head, and repeating, “It’s awful, it’s terrible,” and other lamentations that Marcy thought were in Yiddish.
&n
bsp; The one positive result of the deluge of press attention coming from the car bombing was that they no longer needed a community watch program. No one was getting in or out of Paradise Gardens unobserved.
Sammy didn’t show up. He wanted, no doubt, to avoid the hostility—spoken or silent—of his neighbors, who considered him the cause of their sudden notoriety. It was bad enough that he was a suspected cat assassin, but now he was also a possible terrorist, or counter-terrorist, or just a run-of-the-mill criminal who had crossed powerful underworld elements. His empty parking space stood gaping at them like a gravesite waiting for an occupant.
Sammy Dee’s brush with death had a peculiar effect on Marcy. The incident should have moved him down the short list, well below Didier. Did she really want to spend the rest of her life worrying every time she got into a car with him? At this point in her life, she was looking more for security than adventure.
And yet—go figure—she found herself more attracted to Sammy Dee after the bombing than before. Her pulse quickened in his presence. Her body felt unfamiliar stirrings. It was as if the danger around him emitted some sort of pheromone.
She was perplexed enough about this reaction that she decided to have a phone session with Janet.
“It’s like I’m back in high school, turned on by the bad boy. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. After I saw that movie, I went home and masturbated. Can you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“You can?”
“It’s a post-adolescent reaction against your parents.”
“My parents have been dead for twenty years.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Huh?”
“On some level, our parents never die. Erikson says we don’t really become adults while our parents are still alive.”
If Marcy was looking for solace, she had dialed the wrong number.
“So I just ignore these feelings? Pretend they don’t exist?”
“You don’t have to ignore them. You just don’t act on them. Unless, of course, you want to.”
“Get involved with a guy whose car gets blown up?”
“It would seem that you already are involved with him. Emotionally, at least. The rest of the deal is up to you.”
“I just wish I knew what his story is.”
“Ask him.”
“Right. Hello, are you in witness protection, and is somebody trying to kill you?”
“Why not? If it’s important for you to know.”
“What if he lies to me?”
“Then you’ll either be falsely comforted or falsely alarmed. That is, if you discover that he didn’t tell you the truth. Which might not be the case. Some people are very accomplished liars.”
Marcy let out a long, aspirated sigh to express her frustration with this psycho-talmudic wisdom.
“Listen,” Janet said in her let’s-wind-up-I-have-another-patient tone of voice. “If I were you, I’d just go with the pitch.”
“That’s some fella you got there, darling.”
Evelyn Duboff’s flat New York diphthongs came over the phone the morning after Sammy Dee’s car was blown up. Marcy was on her second cup of coffee, hung over from Didier’s bottle of first-growth Bordeaux, as well as groggy from a sleepless night trying to figure out why she wanted to have anything to do with a man that people were clearly trying to kill.
“You heard?”
“Heard? It’s all the over the TV. Apparently your condo complex is surrounded by reporters.”
“Yeah, it’s terrible. We’re like trapped inside.”
“So it looks like someone wants your guy dead.”
“You don’t think it was some random thing?” Marcy asked, but without conviction. She had been over and over it in her mind, groping for some reason to believe that Sammy had merely parked his car over a bomb meant for someone else.
“The short answer is no. Anyway, it looks like our WITSEC scenario is right on the money. It’s got to be somebody he testified against.”
“Who do you think it is?”
“I got a couple of ideas, but nothing specific yet. I’m working the data on recent canaries on the East Coast. If I can get you a physical description, maybe we can do a match and get you his real name.”
Marcy wasn’t sure she wanted Sammy’s real name. At this point, what difference did it make whether his name was Sammy Dee or Dean Martin?
“They’re going to try to relocate him.”
“Shit. Really?” Marcy blurted before she could stop herself.
“The DOJ doesn’t like their stoolies to get made. It puts a damper on their attempts to get other people to talk.”
“Can they do that to him if he doesn’t want to?”
“Technically, no, but they can put pressure on him. They can cut off his living allowance. They can stop his mail drop. They can even take away his social security and medicare if they really want to get nasty.”
“There still hasn’t been any picture of him on the news, or in the paper.”
“Well, it looks like somebody knows who he really is. Somebody with a bug up their tush. Listen, darling, if I were you, I’d keep a little distance. I wouldn’t want you to be collateral damage.”
Marcy couldn’t see herself walking away totally from Sammy Dee, especially now, when he really needed her. Who was going to bring him hot meals and go shopping for his beer and pretzels?
And even if she wanted to walk away, how would she do it? Relocate herself? Move back to LA, to that apartment in Studio City with the postage-stamp pool and the cottage-cheese ceiling? Get her agent to put her up for laxative commercials?
No, for better or worse, she had to stick by Sammy, his own damaged woman—even if she ended up like Faye Dunaway, getting shredded by machine bullets alongside Warren Beatty.
“You want to hear about the African?”
“Is this good news or bad news?”
“I don’t know yet. It could be either. Or nothing. But your guy applied for a home improvement loan.”
“Didier took out a loan?”
“Twenty-five grand. From Wells Fargo.”
“What for?”
“A new patio deck.”
“That’s exactly what Sammy did.”
“I know. Strange coincidence, huh?”
“Yeah. Wow. What does it mean?”
“Beats me, but does it seem kosher to you that both a WITSEC stoolie and a former drug dealer would be that concerned about their patio decks?”
Marcy silently shook her head. After a moment, Evelyn Duboff said, “Stay tuned, darling. I’ll be back to you when I have more.”
That was the first interesting phone call of the day. The second was from her agent, Artie Reman. She hadn’t spoken to him since she had moved to Palm Springs.
“How you doin’, doll?”
“Okay, I guess. You’re calling me?”
As she asked the rhetorical question, she remembered the sick joke about the actor who comes home to find his wife beaten and raped. When she tells him it was his agent who did this to her, he beams and says, “My agent came by?”
“I saw you on television.”
“Really? Oh, you mean on the news?”
“Yeah. You were going in to see your famous neighbor, Sammy Dee.”
“Oh that . . . he’s just a friend.”
Marcy waited for the pitch. There was no way that Artie Reman had called her just to say hello.
“So, listen, at the staff meeting this morning, guess whose name came up?”
“Mine?” she replied, playing along with what she hoped wasn’t just a cruel game.
“You bet.”
“Meryl die?”
He laughed. It was a bad joke, but it cleared the air. They had been in business for twenty years, and the least he could do was not bullshit her.
“Give me the emmis, Artie? Okay?”
“Okay. After the meeting, my office was full of lit agents. They all want to get the rights to this guy�
�s story, for their clients. It’s a clean seven-figure option deal for whoever walks in with his rights. But nobody can get to him. He’s not answering his phone.”
“So?”
“So I’m figuring you can get to him.”
“So?”
“So if you can get to him, maybe we can put something together.”
“Like what?”
“A movie deal.”
“I’m not a writer, Artie.”
“What I’m talking about, Marcy, is putting you up as the girl in a movie about this guy.”
“The girl?”
“Yeah. There’s got to be a girl, no?”
“I’m sixty . . . three.” She was still lying but not by as much as usual.
“This guy’s like in his sixties, right?”
“Come on, Artie, you ever see Tommy Lee Jones or Harrison Ford, or even Clint with a woman his age? And he’s nearly eighty.”
“Okay, so you could be his mother.”
She almost hung up, but years of playing this game kept her on the line. Where there was light, there was hope. Artie Reman picked up on the thickness of the silence and quickly corrected his suggestion.
“I meant his sister—his younger sister. You can play early sixties, right?”
“Of course.” She was right back in.
“So you talk to him and see if he’s willing to let us put him with a writer. And then we’ll go from there, okay?”
“I’ll get back to you, Artie.”
“ASAP, doll. CAA’s going to be all over this. Like flies on shit. Call me any time, night or day.”
The agent gave her his cell phone number, a privilege she hadn’t enjoyed even when she was earning money for him. He had just reeled her right back in. And it hadn’t been very difficult. Just when she was getting to the point of accepting the reality that she no longer had a career, he had dangled a little bait in front of her and she was biting. Big time. Marcy could just hear Janet’s reaction. What planet are you living on?
Clint Eastwood’s younger sister? Why not? If they got the DP to light her well, she could play sixty, sixty-one. Maybe even late fifties. Clint’s first wife? Better—a woman he was having an affair with. A damaged woman. But on the way back to rebuilding her life. Thanks to the love of a good man.
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