King Maybe Page 7

  “Not unless he doesn’t have his headlights on.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Then he’s probably not coming.”

  “Why not?”

  “Either I knocked the front wheel cockeyed or I pushed the fender into it so tightly it’ll cut into the tire and blow it the first couple of yards he drives. That’s why I clipped him at that angle. I probably screwed up Pookie’s passenger side—”

  “She’s not named Pookie.”

  “—but I wanted to make sure I hit his wheel just right.” She turned to me. “So where are we going? Or do you want to drive?”

  “No, really,” I said. “Wouldn’t hear of it. You’re doing fine.”

  6

  The Great Unspanked Baby of the World

  “People live like this?” Stinky was squinting against the light. The Du-par’s on Ventura, just a block from Laurel Canyon, has been uncomfortably bright inside all night long for about forty years, with the shadowless, concentrated glare of twenty-four-hour coffee shops everywhere. I’ve always figured the candlepower was meant to discourage dopers and draw cops, who convene from the night like moths. In fact, four uniformed motorcycle cops, their leather creaking as they shifted in their seats, were the only other customers in the place. Stinky glanced at them, dismissed them, and pouted at his plate. “Where in the world are we?”

  “Studio City.”

  “On a deeper level,” Stinky said, making a point of not rolling his eyes. “What kind of place is this?” He prodded the coconut cream pie I’d ordered him. “Is this supposed to be food?”

  “People who leave their houses occasionally,” I said, “have places. They might not be great places, they might not earn three stars from the Guide Michelin, but they have several things going for them. We’re used to them, they stay in the same location, and we have memories set in them.”

  Stinky prodded his plate. “Gluten,” he said, in the tone I’d been saving to say “knot of writhing centipedes,” and then touched the tip of his fat little index finger to his tongue. “Sugar.”

  “It’s pie,” Ronnie said, poking a hole in the top crust of a piece of apple and then licking the back of the fork. One of the things that recommends Ronnie to me is that she loves to eat. She may have lied to me about literally everything else in her life, but her love of food is genuine. I don’t trust people who don’t like to eat, which is not exactly the same thing as saying I trusted Ronnie. She said, “What do you eat anyway?”

  “Lean protein in small quantities,” Stinky said. “Cruciferous vegetables. Seeds and nuts.”

  I said, “You’re still going to die.”

  Stinky said, “Do you know how this stuff accumulates in the gut, how it turns to putrefactive acids, how long it takes you to excrete it?”

  “Not my topic.” My pie was peach and had more sugar in it than Hershey, Pennsylvania. “I figure I can either die having eaten pie or die without having eaten pie, and as existential choices go, that one’s a snap. It requires even less energy than figuring out who to vote against.”

  “You have memories about this place?” Ronnie asked with her mouth full.

  “This was where I received the Gospel According to Herbie,” I said. “He brought me here the night we met, and we came back regularly, whenever he had the urge to pass along a lifetime of learning. Du-par’s was the soda fountain of knowledge, so to speak.”

  “Herbie Mott,” Stinky said, having sniffed his water and put it down. “Great burglar.”

  “There should be a Burglary Hall of Fame,” I said. “Posthumous, of course, no need to make it any easier for the cops than it already is.” I nodded in the direction of the four uniformed officers in the booth, busily turning my tax dollars into burgers and fries. One of them, who had been staring at Ronnie, held my gaze in the biologically approved male-primate fashion. I smiled to indicate submission. “Herbie would be the first inductee.”

  “The pathological need of Americans to give each other awards,” Stinky said. “It’s pathetic. It infantilizes us in the eyes of the world.”

  “We’ve been infantilized in the eyes of the world for a long time,” I said. “Back in the 1920s, after we came out of World War I in a single piece, the painter John Sloan— Do you know that Herbie left me a Sloan painting?”

  Stinky put his elbow on his pie, glanced down at it, and left it there. He rubbed his nose with his free hand, the sure sign that his heartbeat had just increased—I’ll kill the person who tells him about it—and said, “You have a Sloan?”

  “I do.”

  He rubbed his nose again. “Have you thought about selling it?”

  “Of course not. Anyway, after the war ended, with us largely protected by oceans, Sloan referred to America as ‘the great unspanked baby of the world.’”

  “Very apt, I’m sure,” Stinky said. “You have a Sloan?”

  “Who retained you to get the stamp?” I said.

  “Surely you jest,” Stinky said. Ronnie batted his arm away from his pie, pulled the plate over to her, and began to eat around the elbow dent. “You have the stamp, and you think I’ll tell you who the buyer is?”

  “Lookie here.” I took the stamp out of my pocket and brought it within half an inch of the coffee in my cup. I wiggled it back and forth, feeling the heat of the coffee on my fingers. “What do you think?”

  “You wouldn’t,” Stinky said, his eyes on the stamp. “You have an aesthetic sense, however rudimentary.”

  “Yes, I do. But I confine it to things that are valuable on purpose. It doesn’t extend to accidents.”

  “I can’t tell you who—”

  “One,” I said, lowering the stamp toward the coffee. “Two.”

  “I hate to be pushy,” Ronnie said, wagging her fork at him, “but just to sidestep the melodrama and move things along—and not attract any more attention from les gendarmes—look at it this way. It took less than ninety minutes after the Slugger almost caught Junior here for him to show up at your house. So what that suggests to me—and, I’m assuming, to Junior—is that he didn’t have to work his way through a long list of alternatives, a random selection of acquaintances. The people who are normally closest to collectors—and to junkies, too, since it’s sort of the same thing—are dealers. Ergo, the person who asked you to steal the stamp might well be the person who sold the stamp to the Slugger in the first place, and the Slugger figured that out, and somewhere in the course of being beaten into pâté de foie gras, the dealer spoke your name. Something along those lines, Junior?” She gave me a bright smile and put her fork in her mouth.

  Stinky was giving her that look again, the sort of silent eeeek he’d unleashed on her in the car, and I felt something like it on my own face, so I just smiled and said, “That’s exactly where I was going.”

  “You don’t even have to tell us his name,” Ronnie said as I sat there wondering which act of the play I’d missed. “Just call him and see if he’s there.”

  “It’s late,” Stinky said.

  She patted his hand comfortingly, and he snatched it away. “If you get him, tell him what happened tonight and suggest he go to Colorado or someplace. He’ll be grateful.” She felt the cop’s gaze, returned it, turned her palms up and indicated Stinky and me, and then shrugged, as though to say, What can I do?

  Stinky pulled an antique cell phone, complete with a hinge, out of his pocket, angled it away from us so we couldn’t see the dial pad, and punched a bunch of buttons. His eyes wandered the room, hopscotched over the cops, and came back to the surface of our table. Probably unaware that he was doing it, he pressed the balls of his thumbs to some piecrust crumbs on the table, then licked them off. He looked up at Ronnie and then at me, and Ronnie said, “No answer?”

  “He should be there,” Stinky said.

  “He probably is,” Ronnie said, “but in no shape to take calls.”

 
Stinky said again, “He should be there,” and I realized he hadn’t heard Ronnie. His forehead was shiny with sweat. He closed his eyes like someone fighting seasickness, and then, without opening them again, he put the phone on the table and snapped it closed. The hand he rested on it was trembling.

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said, and at that moment there was a burst of electrified chatter, several people talking at once, coming from the table with the cops at it. The two on the ends of the banquette, including the one who had been lofting pheromone flares in Ronnie’s direction, scrambled to their feet, and the other two slid out. One made writing motions on the air, which I interpreted as On the tab, we’ll be back, and they all pushed their way through the door.

  Ronnie said, “It’s probably something,” and sirens wailed into life in the street, accompanied by blinking red lights, and then they were gone. “Does your guy live near here?”

  “I still don’t know where here is,” Stinky said. “I don’t drive, and when you’re in the backseat of a limo, knowing where you are is the driver’s job.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What street does he live on? Even in a limo, you have to give the driver an address.”

  He hesitated.

  “Stinky,” I said, “I doubt he’s in any shape to make a deal with me.”

  Stinky closed his eyes. After a moment, without opening them, he said, “Sunnyslope.”

  Twelve or fourteen silent minutes later, we turned off of Sunnyslope to head back down to Ventura, each of us carrying the vivid memory of a roomy, sturdy-looking Spanish house, all its doors wide open, afire with the red lights of half a dozen LAPD cherry tops.

  7

  The Bangle King

  We had to offload Stinky—first, because I was tired of him and second, to keep him from knowing where we were going—and the mostly empty parking lot behind Du-par’s was as good a place as any to wait.

  The three of us sat musing quietly in the dark car, Stinky and I probably processing somewhat similar trains of thought and Ronnie thinking about who the hell knew what. Every now and then, I looked around to see whether the car, which its missing rear window had made quite distinctive, was drawing the wrong kind of attention, although there was no reason for Du-par’s to be on the Slugger’s map.

  When Stinky finally called a limo company to come get him, taking obvious pains not to give the dispatcher a destination, what with Ronnie and me both listening, I memorized his account number. Never know when you’ll need a free limo.

  From time to time, a cool breeze came through the shattered back window.

  Stinky cleared his throat. “Your . . . um, your friend here said somebody else wants you killed, somebody other than me and the Slugger, I mean. Who?”

  “It’s hard for me to see,” I remarked a bit loftily, “how that concerns you.”

  Stinky said, “I worry.”

  Ronnie said, “It’s—”

  I interrupted her. “It’s no one you’d know.”

  Stinky said, “I know a lot of people.”

  “Well, you don’t know this one. Not in your circle. A four-time Oscar winner. As though you know any four-time Oscar winners.”

  “Jake Whelan,” Stinky said promptly. “The fence’s dream.”

  “That’s who it is,” Ronnie said.

  Stinky said to her, “What the hell is your game?”

  “My . . . my . . . ?”

  “Game,” Stinky said.

  I said, “Good question.”

  “Who says I have a game?”

  “Where did you meet her?” Stinky asked me.

  “Interesting you should ask. Her husband got murdered—”

  “Did she do it?”

  “That was my question, too,” I said.

  Ronnie said, “I knew it.”

  “It’s always the wife,” I said apologetically.

  “Obviously not, since I’m sitting here.”

  “Well,” Stinky said, “you might not have done that, but you’ve done plenty of other things.”

  “I am as pure as the driven—”

  “Oh, come on,” Stinky said. “It’s written all over you.”

  My phone did the polite little burp it uses to tell me I have mail. I said, “I don’t want to miss this chat, but hold on.”

  It was from Jake Whelan, who had somewhere discovered a trove of threatening emojis. The screen was full of grimacing zombies, hatchets dripping blood, sharp-looking vampire teeth, black widow spiders, a spitting cobra, and a skull wearing sunglasses. I figured that last one was a future self-portrait, since at some point, unless Jake had medicated himself to the degree at which he literally could not die, he would eventually become a skull wearing sunglasses, Bentley platinum sunglasses, to be exact, $45,000 worth of tinted glass, big enough to hide the bags beneath his eyes. He’d be sporting those shades in his coffin, because even in death, Jake, who had been a phenomenally handsome young man, would be thinking about the bags beneath his eyes. They’d been the topic of a typically sympathetic Hollywood joke back in the days when people still talked about him. Person A, the joke went, would say, “Why doesn’t Jake Whelan get rid of those bags under his eyes?” and Person B would say, “Because they’re full of cocaine.” Then everyone would laugh, making sure that he or she wasn’t laughing harder than anyone else in the room. Ahhh, Hollywood.

  I showed them the screen. “From Jake,” I said. “Just saying hi.”

  “I keep watching you, waiting for the penny to drop,” Ronnie said with some asperity.

  “Which penny is that?”

  A limousine too long to turn most corners eased itself into the parking lot, and Stinky said, “He’ll wait.” To Ronnie he said, “Which penny is that?”

  “All this attention for little me?” Ronnie said, her fingers interlaced in the general region of her heart.

  “Which penny is that?” I asked.

  “Nobody tells someone that he’s hired hit men to take that someone out,” she said. “Much less makes threatening calls about it all night and then sends a sort of death-animation parade. This is obviously not a death threat. It’s the beginning of a negotiation.”

  “This is what I mean,” Stinky said as I tried to assemble a reply. “What’s your game?” The door of the limo opened, and a sleepy-looking guy started to get out, and Stinky shouted through his broken window, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! I see you!” To Ronnie he said, “Well?”

  “I have no idea what you’re—”

  “Where are you from?”

  Ronnie said, “Where am I from?”

  I said, “Great question.”

  “Let’s simplify it,” Stinky said. “Where were you born?”

  Ronnie looked at me as though I’d planned the entire evening to lead up to this question, drew a long breath, and said, “Bangalore.”

  “Really. Bangalore.” Stinky nodded slowly. “And what were you doing in Bangalore?”

  “Well, I was born there, so no one consulted with me about the itinerary.” She paused, but Stinky just nodded again, his eyes on her face. “My father was a bangle merchant,” she said, “and Bangalore at the time was the global center of the bangle trade, as the name suggests. Bangle, the word, is of course derived from Bangalore.”

  “Bangle,” I said, “entered English in the eighteenth century, based on the Hindi word baṅglī, meaning a glass bracelet.”

  “Hindi, Bangalore. And?” Ronnie said, without giving me a glance. “Shall I go on?”

  Stinky said, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” He’d lowered his head as though he were considering goring her with his horns, looking at her from beneath his carefully shaped eyebrows. And as twee as Stinky seemed at times, I wasn’t sure I’d like him to look at me like that.

  “Well, my papa,” Ronnie said. “That’s what we all called him, my five sisters and I,
Papa, with the accent on the second syllable like that because our native language was French—”

  “She’s one of the Languedoc LeBlancs,” I said.

  “LeBlanc,” Stinky murmured. “Of course.”

  “Well, Papa built an absolutely phenomenal business. He became known as the Bangle King. Our house, a palace, really, in the fairy-tale Bangalore style—”

  “Describe one detail of the fairy-tale Bangalore style,” I said.

  Stinky said, “Don’t slow her down. She’s just getting going.”

  “Minarets,” she said, even before Stinky had finished. “Minarets everywhere one turned. Minarets that had their own minarets. Anyway, the palace fairly gleamed with bangles—even the minarets gleamed with bangles. My earliest memory is of gleam.”

  I started to say something, but Ronnie held up a hand. “And then it happened. Just as Papa was laying the groundwork for a massive move into baubles—”

  “From the French,” I said, “originally meaning child’s toy. No beads?”

  The eye she turned upon me could be accurately described as chilly. “Beads are vulgar. Would you like to tell the story?”

  “Not on my best day.”

  “So as Papa was preparing for the bauble expansion, it happened: the Great Bangalore Bangle Theft. We came home all veiled from church one day, because we never missed church, and the palace had been denuded. Not a gleam anywhere. ‘Sacré bleu!’ cried Papa, slapping his forehead. ‘The vaults!’ And we ran across the city, we five girls still in our Communion dresses, veils trailing behind us like abandoned hopes, to find the vaults empty except for one cruel detail: Dead center in each vault, like a taunt, was a single bangle. Deliberately scratched.”

  I said, “Sacré bleu.”

  “And well you may say that,” Ronnie said. “Right there, in the middle of the fifth and final vault, that vault that had echoed with the cheerful clatter of bangles and our hopeful laughter, I knelt beneath my veil, eleven spotless years old, beside that single scratched bangle—all that remained of my father’s empire—and I made a vow. I vowed I would recover every bangle we had lost.”