The Fame Thief (21 page)

So, since I was still emotionally and intellectually stuck in neutral and she was Ronnie, it was her plan we acted upon. At ten forty that night, after I’d showered and changed, she putt-putted out of Valentine Shmalentine in her little Hupmobile or whatever it was. I gave it about a minute to let some traffic glide past and then pulled out behind her with my ears still popping from time to time, trying to keep one eye on her and the other on my rearview mirror, looking like Jean-Paul Sartre and searching for a tail on either or both of us.

There was only a slight chance that anyone would be there, but I had to play find-the-watcher anyway, just in case whoever
had tried to kill me back at Pinky’s office knew about Valentine Shmalentine. It seemed improbable. A bomb is an indiscreet way to kill someone, and most murderers, given the choice, will go for something a bit lower-profile. These guys hadn’t, and to me that argued that they didn’t know where to find me.

Still, I couldn’t expect that state of affairs to last forever, so Valentine Shmalentine was now a memory, and not a very fond memory at that, and Ronnie was returning to the safe, sunny little apartment she’d vacated in West Hollywood to join me in the motel-of-the-month lifestyle I’d thought would keep me safe.

Two miles later I’d decided there was no one behind her, no one behind me. We had the cell phones on and connected, and I directed her up to Ventura and then across it, sending her south of the boulevard to make a turn that would take her parallel to it while I stayed on Ventura. I cruised along until I pulled over a few parking spaces before the street I’d just told her to take back down. No car pulled to a stop behind me, and when she came through the light and made her right, toward LA, she wasn’t towing anyone.

“You’re okay,” I said. “I’ll take a different route and drive by your apartment in about an hour. If everything’s all right, turn on the light above your door.”

“I don’t know,” Ronnie said. “I don’t know why I have such rotten taste in men. Car thieves, drug dealers, British journalists, and now whatever you are.”

“I am sort of indefinable,” I said.

“You certainly are. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to park about half a mile away and come in and stay with me? Danger makes me feel sexy.”

“That probably explains the taste in men you were just—”

“You think? Huh. Probably does. Maybe I should see a therapist.”

“If you do, make up some different names.”

“Doctors can’t tell.”

“Fine. Then just change
my
name. For all I care, you can show him pictures of the others.”

“Think about it. Coming by, I mean.”

“Nope. The point right now is to keep me away from you.”

“You expect me to waste the way I’m feeling?”

I said, “I’m sure you’ll find something.”

“I will. And I won’t have to listen to it snore, either.”

She hung up, and I made the call I’d been thinking about for more than an hour. I called Dolores La Marr.

And got no answer.

In the dream, the leaves she loved so much—leaves of that pale, tender shade of spring green thrown off by the sound of strings in their high register—were brushing her cheek, soft as cobwebs. In the dream, she turned her face to them, her young, beautiful face, and let the leaves caress her, let their green light wash over her. In her dream, she laughed.

The leaves scratched her.

She opened her eyes. The only light came through the big window across the room from the bed, just junk light, a stew of colors from the city. She’d forgotten to close the blackout curtains. The wine slammed in her head. Her mouth tasted sour.

The touch, soft as moving air.

She said, “Anna?”

There was no response except a sudden vision—almost projected on the darkness—of herself, on a narrow beach ringing a black lake, the lake full not of water but a thick, sticky, liquid terror, a deep hole filled with fear. From where she stood on the beach, the lake was to her left, the direction, in the room, where the touch had come from. Where, she thought, Anna was.

“What is it?” She realized she was whispering. She looked
around the room, identifying the vague shapes she knew: the dresser, the darker rectangle of the open closet door, the table with the big flatscreen television on it. The glimmer Anna sometimes gave off was nowhere to be seen, but if Anna wasn’t here, where was the fear coming from? She reached for the clock on the table, touched its top, and got a cold blue glare: 9:24.

She’d been asleep a little more than an hour, and she hadn’t undressed or gotten under the covers.
Got to watch the drinking
, she thought,
one bottle is more than—

A sound, not from the left, but from the right, the direction of the living room, at the other end of the hallway that led to her bedroom. Dolly felt her mouth go dry.

It wasn’t much of a sound, but she knew what it was: one of the floorboards in the living room. The building was around ninety years old, and wooden floors will develop creaks after all that time. She supposed, Dolly did, that she had a mental map of every creaking board in the entire—

Another noise, the masticating sound of something crunching, as though someone was stepping on a wad of paper or popcorn or something harder, but still brittle enough to be crushed underfoot. One, and then two.

Working against her weight, this weight she’d carried for years and
still
hadn’t grown accustomed to, she pulled herself to a sitting position and invested every bit of her energy in listening. From the left, at the very threshold of hearing, there was a sort of frantic papery/whispery sound, one of the things she associated with Anna.

But, maybe, just maybe, Anna wasn’t real. The sounds in the living room—here came another one, another
crunch
, a sound like old dried bones being pulverized beneath a boot—were real.

Someone

was

out

there.

She turned herself slowly, muffling a grunt of effort as she swung the big, half-useless legs over the side of the bed. How slender, how strong those legs had been, how they’d carried her across the brightly lighted space in front of the cameras, across the dance floors in those envy-filled nightclubs as she whirled. How they’d lifted her, effortlessly, as she flew up the steps to her Hancock Park apartment, the one place she’d been happy, before everything went away.

How they’d shone in silk stockings.

Well, they were no good to her now. Another papery whisper from Anna, if Anna existed, and Dolly saw, in her mind’s eye, that burglar whom Winnie had sent, whatever his name had been, standing in her pantry, holding a wine bottle like a club. She reached out and found the bottle she’d emptied and pulled it across the table toward her so she could grab it by the neck once she was up. You could do a lot of damage with a wine bottle, she thought, or someone else thought and sent it to her. Satisfied that she could locate the bottle one-handed, she swung her hand through the air, searching for the aluminum edge of the walker.

She went an inch too far.

The sound it made hitting the wooden floor almost split her head open. And even so, over it, she could hear that frantic dry-grass whisper from Anna, cutting through the noise as though the whisper was being made far inside her ear. Folding herself forward, flailing frantically above the floor for the fallen walker, she heard a deep growl from the living room and then slow, heavy footsteps, the sound rolling down the hallway and through the door in a dark, choking cloud of a red she’d never
seen before, a thick, arterial, almost fragrant red, and it enveloped her and cushioned her as the sounds came closer and the shape appeared in the doorway, and it seemed to her for just a moment (almost the last moment) that the cloud even,
somehow
, lessened the force of the first, massive blow.

I was stinking with sweat by the time the elevator doors opened. For once, I’d skipped all the evasive maneuvers, driving as fast as I could without getting pulled over, ignoring the usual switchbacks, and—for the first time ever—dropping directly down the driveway of the Wedgwood instead of using the entryway around the corner. When the elevator doors opened, I called up to the microphone in the ceiling to say I’d need the key to Miss La Marr’s place on the ninth floor, but halfway through the sentence, I saw it. It was hanging there, right where the button would have been if a key weren’t required.

I backed out of the elevator as though the key had been a six-pound black widow and went back to the car and popped the trunk. I’m an optimist in spite of a lifetime of evidence to prove that living optimistically is likely to be as disappointing as taking astrological advice, so I never carry a gun until I realize too late that the moment calls for one. This moment was no exception, but under the trunk lining, fastened to the underside in a Velcro sheath, was a very slender and very sharp knife, its handle flat and not much thicker than a couple of silver dollars. I palmed it, point up my sleeve so it wouldn’t be visible to anyone watching the closed-circuit feed, and went back into the elevator. I said,
“Hi, again, going straight up,” and twisted the key, expecting to hear something authoritative in an Korean accent.

But I didn’t get it. What I got was an elastically prolonged elevator ride, its length stretched out by my anxiety, past floor after floor until the car shuddered to a stop, did the terrifying little three-inch downward plunge it always offers up when it reaches its destination, and then hung there motionless until the doors reached an agreement to slide apart, revealing Dolores La Marr’s Hollywood-Gothic entry hall.

The precise moment I stepped out of the elevator, it hit me: a cold wet sheet of something weightless and invisible and without any texture at all, just chilled, distilled, heart-clutching
anguish
. Just a shriek of the nerves, a sense of tragedy on a par with the final, rending moments of a Greek play, when the malice of the Fates is finally revealed and every illusion that makes life worthwhile is stripped away.

Anguish that constricted my chest, almost made it hard to breathe.

Without willing it, I flailed at the air with my arms, trying to repel whatever it was and hoping to create an empty space around me, the way I had tried to wave away the smoke in that office hallway earlier in the evening. I had a sense of the presence, whatever it was, receding, retreating a bit: letting go of me, but not going far. The terror and sadness remained.

I stepped back into the elevator, and instantly it all stopped, as sudden and complete as a film cut. I’d been
there
, now I was
here
. I stood there, my heart doing tympani triplets from the experience, but it was memory now, not present-tense. I was—the only word I could find—
alone
. Whatever that was, it couldn’t follow me out of the apartment.

The entry hall yawned in front of me, still dusty, still dominated by the elephant’s foot and the peacock feathers, something
left over from a William Powell or Carole Lombard movie. Sort of silly, sort of saddening, sort of—

Something made a wet sound, a bit like a cough underwater. Just once.

I got goosebumps in places I didn’t know I could get goosebumps. I backed up so fast I hit the rear wall of the elevator, and the doors chose that precise moment to begin to slide closed. Without a moment’s thought, I jumped forward and pushed them open again.

They opened, bounced a little, and then stayed open. It felt
patient
to me. It seemed to be saying,
Up to you, buddy. We tried
.

I said, “Fuck this,” and stepped back into the apartment.

Immediately the cold sheet was back, but this time I had the feeling it was maintaining a distance of a few inches, as though it knew it would chase me off if it wrapped itself around me again. I had the notion of the scream you don’t hear, someone’s last shrill of pain and terror, wasted on the far side of a thick wall, not reaching another human ear.

I said, very quietly, “
Anna
?”

And the space around me seemed to clear, as though some vibration on a barely perceptible wavelength had ceased, or rather, been damped down. I felt free to move, so I stepped farther into the apartment, and the elevator doors snicked closed behind me, and I figured,
Okay, like it or not, I’m in
, and headed down the hall, calling out “Miss La Marr?”