Or She Dies Read online

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I won’t sell this house. I’ll go in tomorrow and see what I can figure out. Maybe a loan against the business. I don’t . . . I don’t know.’

  For a moment I was too moved to respond. ‘I don’t want you to—’ I caught myself, rephrased. ‘Do you think it’s safe for you to go into work?’

  ‘Who knows what’s safe anymore? Certainly not you prying around. But we no longer have any options.’

  I said, ‘You do.’

  Her mouth opened a little.

  I said, ‘This is hell. And it’s going to get worse from here. It makes me sick to think about you having to . . . Maybe we should think about putting you on a flight—’

  ‘You’re my husband.’

  ‘I haven’t been much good on that front lately.’

  She was angry, indignant. ‘And, if you want to keep score, I’ve been a shitty wife in a few obvious ways. But either the vows mean something or they don’t. This is a wake-up call, Patrick. For both of us.’

  I reached for her hand. She squeezed once, impatiently, and let go. I said, ‘No matter how many years it takes, I will figure out some way to make this up to you.’

  She managed a faint smile. ‘Let’s just worry about making sure we have those years.’ She shoved a fall of hair out of her eyes, then looked at the notes around her, as if needing to take refuge in details. ‘Julianne called. She said she looked into the names you gave her, to no avail. I guess between the cops, the agents, and the press, everything around The Deep End went into information lockdown, so there’s nothing on Trista Koan. And Julianne had no more luck than Detective Valentine finding out about Elisabeta — or Deborah Vance or whoever. She was very apologetic, Julianne. She’s desperate to be helpful. Did you check out that prefab house in Indio?’

  I told her what I’d learned — or hadn’t learned — on the trip. ‘What was so amazing is the level of detail that woman saw to.

  I mean, the accent, the banana peels. Her performance was amazing.’

  ‘Where would you find people to play those roles? I mean, how would you even locate talent like that? Let alone talent willing to work a con?’

  As usual, she’d jumped into my stream of thought. ‘Exactly. Exactly. You’d need an agent. A sleazy agent willing to plug his clients in to cons.’

  ‘Would an agent do that?’ she asked.

  ‘Not any I’ve heard of. So I’d imagine if you found one willing to play ball, you’d probably stick with him.’

  She got it immediately. ‘Doug Beeman’s agent,’ she said. ‘That message. On Beeman’s cell phone. Asking him why he missed his call time on the set for the shaving-cream commercial.’

  ‘Deodorant,’ I said. ‘But yes. Roman LaRusso.’

  Already she was typing. ‘And what was Doug Beeman’s real name?’

  ‘Mikey Peralta.’

  She paired them, and the search engine threw back its results. Sure enough, a website. The LaRusso Agency, in an average neighborhood that the site announced as ‘Beverly Hills-adjacent.’ Head shots of various clients formed a row, the photos spinning like slot-machine reels, replacing themselves. From the looks of it, LaRusso repped character actors. Barrel-chested Italian, cigar wedged between stubby fingers. Scowly black woman, curling red nails pronounced against a yellow muumuu. Mikey Peralta, grinning his offset grin. We watched with held breath as the little square head shots flipped and flipped, replenishing themselves. All those cheekbones, all those dimples, all that promise. The precious slideshow seemed an inadvertent commentary on Hollywood itself — dreamers and wannabes tethered to a gambling machine, their faces replaceable, interchangeable. And, as Mikey Peralta had learned, expendable.

  I tensed with excitement and pointed. There she was. Her photo flashed up only for a few seconds, but there was no mistaking those doleful eyes, that profound nose.

  Ariana said, ‘That’s exactly how I pictured her.’

  The deck of photos shuffled Elisabeta back into obscurity.

  I sat in the dark of the living room, peering out at the street. The front lawn gleamed with sprinkler water. I couldn’t make out any vans or photographers or telescopes in the apartment windows across the street. They were still there, hidden in the night, but for a moment I could pretend that everything was as it had always been. I had come down to sit in the armchair and sip a cup of tea, to think about a lesson plan or what I wanted to write next, my wife upstairs in a plumeria bubble bath, on the phone with her mom or reviewing sketches, and I would go up, soon, and make love to her, and then we’d slumber, her arm thrown across my chest, cool beneath the lackluster heating vent, and I’d awaken, find her in the kitchen with bacon on the griddle and a lavender mariposa in her hair.

  But then Gable and his compatriots came crashing through the fantasy. I pictured them laboring even at this late hour in the detective bullpen, charts and timelines and photographs spread on desks and pinned to walls, piecing together a story that had already mostly been written. Or maybe they were already speeding up Roscomare with renewed determination and a signed warrant. Those headlights there, touching the artless block of boxwood framing the steps of the apartment across. But no, just a 4Runner, slowing to rubberneck, gaping college faces at the window, taking in The House.

  My tea had gone cold. I dumped it in the kitchen sink, walked past the spilled trash, and trudged upstairs. A car backfired, and I actually left the floor; I’d been braced for RHD to kick down the front door. How would we live, waiting, knowing that that moment could come at any time, and probably the instant we let down our guard?

  The TV was on, Ariana curled in bed, watching a candlelight vigil taking place in Hollywood. Teddy bears and photo montages. A weepy teenager held up a fan picture of Keith as a young boy. Even as a child, he was astonishing to look at. Perfect features, pug nose, that well-proportioned jaw. His hair was sandy blond, lighter than it had become. He held the end of a garden hose and wore a bathing suit and cowboy six-shooters in double hip holsters, and his smile was pure delight.

  The news cut away to the Conners’ house in Kansas. Keith’s father, a fireplug of a man, had a rough-hewn, almost ugly face. I remembered he was a sheet-metal worker. His wife, a stocky woman, had the pretty cheekbones and singer’s mouth that Keith had inherited. The sisters also took after their mother — small-town pretty dressed up with new money. Mom was crying silently, comforted by the daughters.

  Mr Conner was saying, ‘ — bought us this house right here after his first deal. Put both the girls through college. Most generous soul I’ve ever known. Cared about the world around him. And he knew what he was doing up there on the screen. Got his mother’s looks, lucky for him.’ A tearful smile from his wife, and he caught her eye and looked away quickly, and then the creases in his wind-chapped face deepened and his bottom lip rose, clamping over the top, trying to hold it still. ‘He was a good kid.’

  Ariana turned off the TV. Her face was heavy.

  I asked, ‘What?’

  She said, ‘He was real.’

  Chapter 41

  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 website, 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 email 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 a 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.

  ‘She has to be warned.’

  ‘Like I told the guy, all she gives out anymore is an email. 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 LA, 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 r
eal name — and, I hoped, a real rap sheet — seemed concrete enough for me to try to re-enlist 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 emailed 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.’