There was no receptionist, just a desk with a bell. When I rang, a familiar wheezy voice called, “Just a minute,” through the open office door. I sat on the lopsided couch. The trades on the glass table dated from November and the sole Us Weekly had been used to mop up a coffee spill. An antique sash window, warped with dry rot, looked out five feet to a brick wall, but a glimpse of billboard was visible in the sliver of sky above. I knew the one; I’d seen it go from Johnny Depp to Jude Law to Heath Ledger and now to Keith Conner. I was weary of this town. My life here had traced a brief arc from obsolete to defunct, and from where I was, even the big time didn’t seem so big anymore.
Finally the voice called out again, rescuing me from the waiting room. The office looked to be a movie set from the fifties. Crooked venetians, stacks of files rising architecturally from every surface, an artichoke of cigarette butts blooming in a porcelain ashtray, all suffused with a yellowed light that seemed dated in its own right.
Crammed behind a chipped desk, visible through a flight path between piles of paperwork, Roman LaRusso was overweight, but his face was fatter than he was, blown Ted Kennedy wide at the cheeks so the bulges tugged his earlobes forward. He was immersed, it seemed, in work and didn’t favor me with even a cursory glance through the delicate rectangular reading glasses screwed into either side of his jiggling lion’s mane. It wasn’t a disgusting face, not at all. It was improbable, magical, something to behold.
I said, “I’m interested in Deborah B. Vance.”
“I no longer represent her.”
“I think you do. I think you hired her out for a con job.”
He made a big show of reading something on his desk, frowning down over the glasses and breathing ponderously through his nose, which gave off a faint whistle. Then he put away his glasses in a case the size of a nail buffer and finally looked up. “Admirably direct. Who are you?”
“The lead suspect in the Keith Conner murder.”
“Uh . . .” He didn’t get further than that.
“You specialize in commercials?”
“And features,” he said quickly, by habit. “Did you see Last Man on Uptar?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, a client was one of the aliens.”
Eight-by-tens graced the walls, a few I recognized from the Web site, along with midgets, an albino, and a woman missing both arms.
He followed my gaze. “I don’t like the pretty ones. I represent talent with character. Actors with disabilities, too. It’s sort of a niche. But it means more to me. Don’t think I don’t know what it’s like to be stared at.” He put his knuckles on the blotter and tugged to pull in his chair, but it didn’t budge. “I give my clients a place in the sun. Everyone wants to fit in. Have a piece of that sunshine.”
“Is that what you did for Deborah Vance?”
“Deborah Vance, if that’s what you’re calling her, didn’t need anybody to look after her.”
“What’s that mean?”
“She’s a hustler, that one. Ran lonely-hearts scams. Chat-room stuff. She’d e-mail pictures to men, they’d wire her money to set up a condo in Hawaii for assignations, that sort of thing.”
“Her?”
“She didn’t send pictures of herself. Thus the death threats.”
“Death threats?” It was becoming clear not just why they’d chosen Deborah Vance but how they planned to cover their tracks when they erased her from the picture.
“Nothing to be taken seriously,” he continued. “Men don’t like being embarrassed, that’s all. Especially when their good intentions are preyed on.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So she went to ground, switched off names, that kind of stuff. We lost touch. Her and me had a good run on commercials a few years back. They were booking a lot of ethnics. I got her a Fiberestore and two Imodiums.” He smirked. “No business like show business, right? But I never got involved in her scams.”
“Then how do you know about them?”
He hesitated too long, saw that I’d noticed. “We used to talk.”
“Why’s she still on your home page?”
“I haven’t updated that thing in ages.”
“Yeah, I noticed a picture of a client who’s deceased.”
He looked down sharply, his features sliding on their cushioning. A drawer rattled open, and then he mopped at his neck with a handkerchief. “The cops said Mikey had an accident.”
“They came to see you?”
“No. I read . . .”
“They know about Peralta and Deborah Vance but haven’t figured out you as the connection. You should tell them you sent her to the same guys you sent him to.”
His considerable weight settled, and he tugged miserably at his ruddy face. “I get these side jobs sometimes. It’s legitimate work. Mall openings. Dinner theater. Kids’ parties or whatever. People want to rent certain types sometimes.” Sorrow had worked its way into his voice. “I couldn’t have known. . . . It was just a hit-and-run. Mikey drank some. The papers said it was a hit-and-run.”
“No,” I said. “Mikey Peralta was killed because of this job.”
LaRusso’s face shifted; he’d known but had managed to keep it from himself at the same time. “You don’t know that.”
“I’m on the inside of this thing. I do know.”
He balled the handkerchief in a fist. “Did you really kill Keith Conner?”
“You think I’d be here trying to save your client if I had?” I said. “Make no mistake: They will kill Deborah Vance next. And then they’ll probably come after you.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know anything about the guy. Everything over the phone. Money orders. I never even saw a face. Jesus, you really think . . . ?” His eyes were leaking from the edges, and the tears were confused about which way to go.
“Like I told the guy, all she gives out anymore is an e-mail. I don’t even have a better way to reach her.” He couldn’t hold my stare, and finally he gazed up. He flipped through some papers, tipping a stack of folders onto the barely visible floor and came up with a leather planner. His hands were trembling. “She hasn’t been answering her phone.”
“Then give me an address,” I said. “And get yourself out of town.”
She opened the door and laughed at me. It wasn’t to mock me, I didn’t think, but to underscore the absurdity of our meeting again, here, in a ground-floor apartment in Culver City. Her affect and bearing—her very posture—were completely different from Elisabeta’s. Even that cackle had a different timbre; it was somehow accentless. She looked well, as she had in the Fiberestore commercial—less puffy and worn. I wondered how much makeup it took to turn someone into a haggard Hungarian.
The fuzzy red bathrobe hanging to her knees made her look like Blinky from Pac-Man. Stepping back, she waved me in with a dramatic sweep of her arm. The cramped apartment gave off a humid floral scent, and I could hear a bath running. Pinching the lapels over her bare chest, she scurried back and turned off the faucet, then returned. “Well,” she said.
I tried to get a read on whether she knew that I was a suspect in Keith’s murder, but she seemed too blasé about my appearance. No, it seemed I was still just a guy she’d scammed.
“You’re in danger,” I said.
“I’ve had people after me before.”
“Not like this.”
“How would you know?”
I still couldn’t get used to the perfect English, how effortlessly her mouth shaped the words. I glanced around. Antique furniture, broken down but hanging on. A Victrola with a dent in the horn. Noir movie one-sheets covered the walls, and vintage travel posters: CUBA, LAND OF ROMANCE! Since moving to L.A., I’d been in a variation of this place countless times. All that style at garage-sale prices, all those fantasies projected onto the walls, the cloche hats, the deco coasters, the metal cigarette cases from another time, not your time—if only you’d lived then, things would’ve been different, you would’ve glided seamlessly into all that smoke and glamour. I thought of my own Fritz Lang movie print, bought with such pride at a schlock shop on Hollywood Boulevard the week I’d graduated college. I’d thought it was my initiation into the club, but I was just another kid trying too hard, buying a leather jacket two months after they’d gone out of fashion. If they don’t let you walk the walk, doggone it, you can still lease a PT Cruiser.
“If I found you,” I said, “they will, too.”
“Roman gave you my address, I’m sure, because it’s clear that you’re harmless.”
“You want to stake your life on Roman’s backbone?”
“Roman would never hurt me,” she said. “He’s part pimp, sure, but part daddy, too. No one else connected to this knows my name or this address.”
“What is your name?”
“This week? Does it matter?”
It did matter. Paired with an address, a real name—and, I hoped, a real rap sheet—it seemed concrete enough for me to try to reenlist Sally. But I’d have to let it go for now. “Can I call you Deborah?”
“Honey,” she said, in a perfect Marlene Dietrich, “you can call me whatever you want.”
“Does a company called Ridgeline, Inc., ring a bell?”
“Ridgeline? No.”
“You never met whoever hired you,” I said. “Phone calls and money orders.”
“That’s right.”
“You must have thought . . .”
“What?”
We were still standing, a few feet inside the closed front door. I noticed her nails, that beautiful manicure that had seemed so out of place on a penniless waitress. “That I was an idiot.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Not at all. You were so goddamned sweet it about killed me.” Humiliation coursed through me like a fever; I couldn’t meet her eyes. “That’s why most cons work,” she said in consolation . “Everyone wants to believe they’re more important than they are.”
The pity was worse somehow. And worse even than that, her empathy. I wanted to be nothing like her, and yet of course we shared the same broken promise, the same stymied dreams; she had reached right through the looking glass and tapped me down the primrose path.
“How did you even . . . ?”
“I was e-mailed a script. Well, more like a treatment. It had all the basics—sob story, sick kid, stingy health-insurance company. I filled in the rest. My background is mostly Russian, but how standard is that? Plus, with my luck you’d have had some bubby from the old country and known something about it. But I’m also Hungarian, I guess, and who the hell knows anything about Hungary? So you know how it works—it’s like writing, I’d imagine. Those telling details. Budapest is too obvious, so I picked Debrecen, the second-largest city. They’d provided the affliction—the heart thing. But the bananas were my own touch. I figured you’d ask, you know? Sometimes you lead someone in from an angle, they don’t see the obvious.”
Despite her nod to our colleagueship, I doubted I’d ever had her talent or professionalism. I could no more contain my bitterness than she could her pride. “You’re a gifted actress,” I said. “You’ll go far in this town.”
“Too late for that. But I make a living.”
“The cash . . . ?”
“A few hours after you left, I delivered the duffel bag to the trunk of a parked car on a quiet street.”
“A white Honda Civic.”
“How’d you know?”
I shook my head, not wanting to get off track. “They told you about me.”
“Little bit. No more than last time.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Last time?”
“There was another guy.” Now with the accent. “He come also to help poor Elisabeta and granddaughter with terrible illness.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “Do you . . . Who? Who was he?”
As quickly as she’d transformed into the world-weary waitress, she’d morphed back again. “I don’t remember his name. But he gave me his card. He was big on his business card. I have it here somewhere. . . .” She crossed to an apothecary cabinet with more tiny drawers than I could count and started searching them.
I said, “You don’t understand what this whole thing is, do you?”
But she didn’t break focus. “Hang on, I know I kept it.”
After a few more moments watching her open and close drawers, I said, “Mind if I use your bathroom?”
“Not at all. The damn thing’s here somewhere. . . .”
The bathroom window looked across a narrow strip of quartz and succulents to a matching window in the neighboring complex. The waiting bathwater thickened the air, misted the mirror. After closing the door behind me, I eased open the medicine cabinet, praying it wouldn’t squeak. No prescription bottles inside, but I found a few in one of the drawers. The neat type read, Dina Orloff.
“Got it!” she called out triumphantly, mimicking my own sentiment. I gently pressed the drawer closed and turned to go, reaching for the knob. The doorbell shrilled in the tiny condo. I froze, the knob twisted in my hand. The button lock popped open into my palm.
Through the door I could hear her mutter something. Then a few padded footsteps.
The door opened with a jangle, and then there were two muffled percussions. A thump of body hitting carpet. Then the door closing, at least two sets of footsteps moving. Dragging.
My stomach clutched, and I fought not to gasp, not to start, not to do anything but breathe and rotate that doorknob slowly and silently back to its resting position.
If they’d followed me, then her death was my fault. And, obviously, they’d know I was here. If that were the case, I wouldn’t live long enough for the guilt to seep in.
Barely audible—“Let’s move, let’s move.”
The bedroom door banged open.
They were searching.
Holding my panic at bay, I crept across the bathroom and started turning the crank to open the casement window. The pane made a soft pop as it broke the seal and began to swing outward.
Now I heard the closet shutters one room over, raked back on their rails.
A drop of sweat ran down my forehead and stung my eye. I rotated the crank as quickly as I could, but the window seemed to move in slow motion.
That same voice: “Check the bathroom.”
I tried to swallow, but my throat clicked dryly, wanting to gag.
Approaching footsteps. The window lazily rotated outward, wide enough for my foot, my calf, my thigh. Judging from the creak of the floorboards, the guy was right outside the bathroom door now.
I slithered through, the gap still tight enough to mash my nose against the pane. My sneakers grinding the rocks outside, I flattened to the wall, just out of sight of the window.
The bathroom door shoved open, banging the wall behind. Footsteps.
The sidewalk was no more than twenty yards away, but a single step on the rocks would broadcast my position. My head was craned to the side, taking in a thin sliver of bathroom floor. I breathed, prayed, willed my muscles still. If he came to the window and peered through the gap, I was dead.
When the next step creaked the floorboards, I saw the toe of a black boot come into view. Through my terror it hit me that I was probably looking at a size-eleven-and-a-half Danner with a pebble jammed in the tread.
If they had followed me here, he’d probably think to check outside. But that boot remained, still. What was he looking at?
Held breath burned in my lungs. Every muscle taut. My unblinking eyes stung. He was maybe four feet away; I could probably reach through the window opening and tap him in the chest. The faintest sound would buy me a face-to-face. My hand curled into a fist. I forced myself to plan an attack in case a face appeared in that narrow window gap. Eyes and throat. Then a wind sprint.
The boot withdrew silently, and I heard a hand stir the water, no doubt parting the bath bubbles. Then the steps moved away, and it took a few wild and disbelieving moments for it to sink in that he’d gone.
In the main room, they mumbled, conferred. The front door opened and shut, and then there was a moment of silence.
But no relief.
I remained in full view from the street; depending on which way they exited the building, they’d spot me. A gate creaked open around the corner, jarring me into action. I stepped back through the window into the bathroom and plastered myself against the far wall. Waited. And listened for footsteps across the quartz. But none came.
Sometime after, the held breath burst from my lungs and my whole body shuddered and slid down the wall. I clutched my knees.
I sat there for ten minutes, or maybe thirty. Breathing. Then I stood, my muscles stiff and creaking.
She lay about five feet from the front door. No sign of damage, save a neat hole in the fabric above her ribs and a crimson halo beneath her head; one of the shots must have entered her open mouth. The bathrobe had come open, and thrown on her bare chest was a note composed of clipped magazine letters: LyINg bITcH.
Lonely-hearts scams and death threats and chickens coming home to roost. Another solid cover for a murder that was nothing more than a cold efficiency.
The more I tried to press forward, the more everything spiraled out of control. I had landed, now, in a whole different order of trouble. I was the lead suspect in Keith Conner’s murder. I had set the cops on the trail of this woman; from their perspective she was a centerpiece in my paranoid delusion. I couldn’t be here, at the scene of her murder. I needed to be across town with newfound submissiveness and an airtight alibi. I needed to flee. But I couldn’t stop looking at her.
Sprawled on the floor, vulnerable and hopeless, she was Elisabeta again. And again I would have done anything to help her. Beside her, I took a knee, tugged the bathrobe up over an exposed breast. I didn’t know what else I could do for her.
A single drawer in the apothecary cabinet remained half open. I stared over at it for a time before rising.
The drawer itself was no bigger than a business card, and sure enough it held a single ivory rectangle of sturdy paper stock. I withdrew it, read the name, and bit down on my lip to hold my shock in check. It couldn’t be. And yet it made perfect sense.
Moving swiftly, I grabbed a paper towel and used it to wipe the bathroom doorknob and surfaces, and then I stepped back out through that window. I tiptoed through the cacti and veered out onto the street, glancing around and blinking against a bright day that seemed an impossible contrast to what I had just witnessed. My heart had yet to slow. I tossed the paper towel down a storm drain.
A half block away, I pulled out that card and double-checked the name, just to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it.
Joe Vente.