The Fame Thief (11 page)

“Why would he?”

“The milk of human kindness. An opportunity to extend a hand to a fellow journeyer across the barren plain of life.”

More coughing, followed by a long, painful-sounding throat-clearing and a very clearly pronounced
ptui
.

“He’s not in,” Edna said.

“Yeah?” I said. “He forgot his lungs?”

She looked me straight in the eyes and said, “He coughs so much it echoes around in there when he’s gone.”

I held her gaze until I started to laugh. She didn’t laugh with me, but when she picked up her butt and stuck it into her mouth, she sort of grinned around it.

“Jesus, Edna,” said a breathless voice from the other room, “Whyn’cha just let the kid come back? Whaddya think I’m doing back here?”

“I know better than to ask,” Edna said.

“Come in, kid. And don’t feed the dragon.”

I waved at Edna, who took the butt out of her mouth and picked a shred of tobacco off the tip of her tongue. I looked again at the ashtray, and there wasn’t a filter in sight. “Live dangerously,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m worried sick.”

I heard her nails on the keyboard as I went into Pinky Pinkerton’s office.

“You gotta ‘scuse Edna,” he said, going through some gyrations that looked like part of his body wanted to get up to greet me but the rest of him wouldn’t go along with it. I waved him down, and he relaxed, sinking gratefully into the big leather chair that made him look even smaller.

At first glance, Pinky Pinkerton was the size of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He wore his clothes as though they’d been buttoned on him thirty years ago, when he was normal-size; he seemed to be sinking into them to the point where it was easy to envision his clothes sitting here empty in another five or ten years, long after Pinky slid out, probably down a pants leg. His chin hardly cleared the shiny surface of his desk, bare except for a name plaque that read
PRESIDENT
. He was being worn by a dark jacket and a blue shirt with a bright yellow tie, and even though the shirt was buttoned all the way up, it was loose
enough to get a clenched fist inside it. His face had shrunk away from a truly remarkable nose that dominated not only his face but his entire upper body, or at least the part of it that was visible above his desk.

Since my command performance at Dressler’s, I’d spent a lot of hours talking to people in their eighties, although most of them seemed to have dodged some of the erosion long stretches of time usually bring. But every year that had somehow missed Dressler and Dolly La Marr, every year that had been scraped from the face of Doug Trent, had landed directly on top of Pinky Pinkerton. He was as wrinkled as a tree root and as spotted as a foxed book.

“Sit, kiddo, sit,” he said in a voice like the scrape of a match, and then he doubled over and coughed, and I found myself staring at the part in a toupee ancient enough to have jewel-like little beads of rubber cement at the part. He coughed so hard one of his feet came up and kicked the underside of his desk, and that seemed to calm the spasm. He wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands and said, “That’ll hold her for a minute or two.”

“You take your medicine?” Edna called.

“Nah. Couldn’t find it in all this fucking smoke.” He winked at me, then coughed again.

“Right top drawer,” Edna said. “You need water?”

“I’ve never in my life needed water.” His eyes, bright with tears, wreathed in wrinkles and separated forever by the mountain range of his nose, came to me. “So, kiddo. Doug Trent, huh?”

“Doug Trent.”

“Who’s he married to these days?” The noise was half laugh, half cough, sort of a
caugh
. “Christ, I think the only one he missed was Garbo.”

“He’s single.”

“He musta run out. Or he’s just counting the days, huh? Like the rest of us. So, what about Doug?”

I said, “Actually, it’s about Dolores La Marr.”

All the merriment vanished from his eyes. He said, “Dolores.…”

“La Marr.”

“Edna,” Pinky called. “
Where’s
the medicine?”

“Right top drawer.”

“Hang on, hang on,” he said to me. He rolled the big chair back and opened a drawer, then pulled out a brown bottle with a white pharmacist’s label on it. He took his time unscrewing the top, put a thumb over the open neck so he could shake the bottle, read the label as though he’d never seen it before, took a slug, winced, waited, took another slug, and then extended the bottle over the desk, eyebrows raised in invitation. The whole show had taken almost a minute.

I shook my head, and he put the top back on the bottle. I said, “Dolores La Marr.”

His tongue licked quickly at a corner of his mouth. “What is this? You writing a book or something?”

“Doug said you were a friend of hers.”

“Some kinda documentary?
Girls Gone Wrong
or something?”

“Was Dolores La Marr a girl gone wrong?”

“Who sent you to Doug?”

I sat back and looked at him. I have a face I’ve developed for conversations with the police, and it’s about as drained of expression as a face can be. It would be sleepy if it weren’t for an under-layer of hostility. I’ve learned it makes people nervous, so I used Garbo’s trick to prolong it and counted silently from one to ten. When Pinky had scooted back and forth in his chair a few times and cleared his throat, I said, “You really don’t need to know that.”

“Kiddo—”

“No, listen. There were some very powerful people in Los Angeles back when you and Dolores La Marr were pals, and some of them are
still
very powerful.”

The wrinkles around Pinky’s eyes deepened and his eyes got even smaller. He said carefully, as though one of the words in the sentence might explode if he pronounced it wrong, “Someone who was powerful back then.”

“And who is not patient with obstructions.”

Pinky’s chair squeaked as he sat back. He said, “Fuck me. You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding. I haven’t told you anything.”

He was shaking his head before I finished. “We weren’t friends, Dolly and me.”

“Not what Doug says.”

He lifted his hands, palms up, the picture of reason. “P.R., you gotta understand, we’re like
everybody’s
friend, you know? It goes with the job. The client’s gotta trust you, so you make like friends, but it’s over the minute they fire you. Not even a hello in the street.”

“They’ve got to trust you why?”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “This is my P.R. speech. I gave it to everybody I ever hired. P.R. is the crossroads between who somebody really is and who they want people to think they are. You get that?”

“When I fall behind, I’ll wave at you.”

Pinky folded his hands on the desk, a miniature professorial. “So on the one hand, you’re like a painter doing a portrait, you know? Making the, um, nose smaller, filling in some hair, maybe putting a friendly smile on someone who, in real life, he smiles when somebody gets hit by a car. Putting a picture out there that’s the way your client wants to look. That’s half the job. On
the other hand, you’re not just a painter, you’re a makeup artist. You gotta know where the warts are, which teeth are rotten. Not just so’s you can cover it up, but so’s you’re prepared when the warts suddenly show.”

“In a column like Melly Crain’s.”

“Sure, in the stone age. These days it’s the fucking Internet.
Unlisted, F-Bomb, Hollywood Scoop, Celebrity Dogpile
, all the other ones. Make Melly Crain and
Confidential
magazine look like Saint Clare. But the point, see, the
point
is, the P.R. person has to
know
about this little wart and that fondness for Girl Scout uniforms and that, I don’t know, Olympic-size dope habit. So for the client to be comfortable with that, they have to believe that the P.R. person is a friend.”

“So your relationship with Dolores La Marr—”

“Was professional. Nice girl, but really, I hardly knew her.”

“But you were one of a small number of people who knew where the warts were.”

“Now, wait, wait, don’t jump to—”

“You can’t have it both ways. Maybe you weren’t friends, but you knew her secrets.”

“Well, look at it that way—”

“Maybe easier for someone who knows the secrets but
isn’t
a friend to sell the other person out.”

He sat up straight, or at least that was what he seemed to be trying to do. “I never sold out anyone in my life.”

“No matter how much was offered?”

“Wouldn’t have made any—”

“Or who was offering it?”

He started to cough again, but abandoned it halfway through the first one, so the medicine might have been helping. “That’s more like it, if I ever did. Who, not how much. But I didn’t. Terrible for business. It gets out one day—and sooner or later
everything gets out in this town, even if it’s only to certain people—and you’re marked dirty for life. Never get another client, not if you walked down Hollywood Boulevard with a sandwich board, said,
PUBLIC RELATIONS
,
CHEAP
.”

“But you knew about her—her dates.”

“Well, sure, sure. Everybody did, but listen, listen to me, you gotta understand. I was second-rate, okay? I was the first guy people hired, on their way up, and then they either dropped out of sight or got billed above the title, and either way, I lost them. But Dolly, Dolly was different.” His face lit up when he said her name, and he looked thirty years younger. “I was really
doing
it for her. I got her the
Life
cover, I made a huge noise about her reviews in
Hell’s Sisters
. I
arranged
some of those reviews. I had every photographer on the West Coast lined up to shoot her. I was hounding Max Zeffire to offer her a picture, and he would have. You gotta believe this, Dolly was going to be a star, and she knew that I was the one who was making it happen. She woulda stayed with me. She woulda been my first real star client. My whole life would have changed.” He blinked, and his eyes softened. “I’d have been big.” He coughed once, not even bothering to cover his mouth. “And she was a nice girl.”

I didn’t say anything. Pinky glanced toward the outer office and then came back to me, and I realized I hadn’t heard a peep out of Edna for a while.

He lifted a hand and let it fall on the desk. “So.”

“So,” I said. I got up. “Did you maintain a clip file on Dolores La Marr?”

“Sure. I maintained a clip file on everyone.”

“I want to see it.”

“That’s sixty years ago.”

“I know, but I doubt you threw it away. That was your best shot, as you’ve just finished telling me.”

“It’s not here,” he said, sulking. “In storage.”

“Can you or Edna get it?”

“You mean, today?”

“Why not? It’s not even two o’clock.”

Edna cleared her throat sharply in the other room.

“Yeah,” Pinky said. He licked his lips and blinked. Then he patted his palm on his forehead, which was damp with sweat. “Tell you what. Give me your phone number and I’ll call you when we got it.”

“Today.”

“Sure, yeah, today. Jesus.”

“Great,” I said. I got up. On the way out, I said, “Thanks, Edna.”

While the door was still closing behind me, I heard the buzzer on Edna’s desk. I let the door close and put my ear to it.

“Okay, okay,” Edna said. “I’ll get him for you. Hang onto your horses for a minute.”

I double-timed it down the hall and then slowed, almost to the elevators, as I heard the door open. It stayed open for a moment and then closed, and I knew that Pinky was making his call. Maybe later in the day, I’d find out to whom.

There were no orange trees here, but Dolly was in love with the way the leaves on the California sycamores that rustled just outside her windows, held the light. Three months ago, when she moved into the upper floor of the big Hancock Park duplex, what had caught her attention was the space—seven big, graceful rooms, all hers. But after a few days, she began to see the leaves through the tall, inward-opening windows in the living room, and she got into the habit, on the days she didn’t have to go to the studio, of taking her morning coffee to the couch in front of the windows, where she curled up and lost herself in an orchestra of greens. The green she loved best was the brilliant emerald of the newer leaves when they were lighted from behind by the still-rising sun. When they brought back that high, singing note.