“He was mean
when he was drunk,” she said, plonking three blue-and-white Chinese-willow cups onto their saucers, “and boring when he was sober. He had the personal hygiene of a truffle. There was no woman he ever met,
ever
, that he didn’t make a pass at. He had terrible taste in clothes. He had British teeth. Sugar?”
Louie and I took our coffee black and unsweetened, and it was pretty good. The apartment was basic but neat and bright, with blond wood Ikea furniture and rugs of a slightly overstimulated robin’s-egg blue. The long wall in the living room was floor-to-ceiling books, always a good sign. The titles were eclectic with a slight tilt toward biography, and not all of women, which I took
as another good sign. No matter how militantly we may be either male or female, it’s no stretch to admit that the world has seen interesting specimens of both sexes.
“I don’t mean to be personal—” I said.
“Why not?” she said. She looked down at her bare feet as though she’d just bought them and hadn’t made up her mind about them yet. “I was insanely drunk, and I thought his accent was cute. We were in Las Vegas. He told me he was a novelist, working on a book written from a woman’s perspective, and he was being devoured by insecurity about whether he was capable of carrying it off.
Devoured
was the word he used, and I was drunk enough to think that sounded sensitive. I’m a fool for sensitive.” She regarded her feet for another moment and then gave them a resigned-looking nod of acceptance. She said to me, “Are you sensitive?”
“I sand my fingertips.”
She gave it a moment’s thought, which was more than it deserved, and said, “Why?”
“Certain kinds of locks,” I said. “Certain kinds of locks require an elevated sense of touch.”
Louie waved a hand to interrupt the confession. “So, your former, um, this guy you—”
“My deceased better half?” Ronnie Bigelow asked.
“Yeah. Him. Derek.”
“Is there a question there somewhere?” She turned to me. “And why are you interested in locks?”
This time, Louie literally leaned in between us. “Derek, he made his money writing for those little rags you read in line at the market, right?”
“Ah, well, that’s an interesting question.” She sipped her coffee. “Here’s what he would do. This is how Derek Bigelow eked out a living. He would scuttle along the bottom of the sea
of life, down where all the shit eventually winds up, looking for something that would cause pain to some people and give a cheap thrill to some other people. The people he would cause pain to were generally rich and famous, and the people to whom he would give a cheap thrill couldn’t afford an expensive one. They’re almost all women, and nothing lifts their poverty-stricken little hearts like learning that some rich, glamorous movie star has gained three hundred pounds and is living on an intravenous supply of coconut milk, or that
this
female sitcom star is gay and secretly married to a transsexual NFL tackle, or
that
country music star has three children of, ahem, mixed race, chained to the wall of some tar-paper shack in North Carolina. Cancer, mastectomies, secret sex-change operations, plastic surgery gone horribly awry. In other words, stuff that demonstrates that misery, despite all the evidence to the contrary, actually
does
get its claws into the people who have everything.”
“Pay much?” I asked.
The question almost brought a smile. “Aren’t you quick. No, it doesn’t. And Derek had an expensive nose, in addition to his other vices. He went through a lot of money, without—I could add, if I were that kind of person—without directing much of it at me.”
I said, “What’s Ronnie short for?”
She reached up and touched the fork jammed into her hair as though she wanted to make sure she’d used the sterling. “Veronica. What name is hiding behind Junior?”
“Junior,” I said. “It’s my name. My dad was named Merle, and he wanted to name his son after him, but wasn’t going to hang
Merle
on me, so he called me Junior. Veronica’s a pretty name.”
“A little long,” she said. “There’s something about a fourth syllable—”
“I really hate to break in on all this,” Louie said, “but I’m sure you got a lot to do.”
“Not really,” Ronnie Bigelow said. “I’ve exhausted the thrill of scouring. Have you had lunch?”
“I haven’t even had breakfast,” I said.
She looked at me as though I’d just told her I was scheduled for a heart transplant and I was too busy to go. “Oh, that’s not good. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
“I keep hearing that,” I said, “and I’m sure it is, to the people who eat it.”
“This money thing,” Louie said.
“So.” She looked at Louie but pointed at me. “He’s quick, and you’re focused. Is that how it works?”
“He’s focused some of the time,” Louie said.
“Well, then,” she said. “It’s interesting that the police didn’t ask me about this.”
“About the additional opportunities for income?” I asked.
“Of course. It should have occurred to them, shouldn’t it? Here he is, Derek. He developed damaging information about people with money. That’s what he did for a living. He had the ability to get that information into supermarket lines all around the world with nothing more than a keyboard and an Internet connection. So he could take it two ways, couldn’t he?”
“Sure,” I said. “How often did he take it the other way?”
“Often enough to keep his nose running,” she said.
“For example.”
“Okay. Thad Pierce, you know Thad Pierce?”
“That series,” Louie said. Louie watched a lot of television. “
Black Lightning
or something.”
“Right,
Black Lightning
. Thad Pierce is the nation’s top-rated stud. Mister Cool-Tattoos-Ultra-Macho-Series-Star. Well, Mr. Pierce is a big fan of
America’s Next Top Model
.”
Louie said, “So? Me, too.”
“But he’s
really
a fan. He’s such a fan he has a stenographer take down every word spoken in every show and turn it into a script, and then he invites a bunch of the guys over and they act it out. In costume.”
Louie said, sounding dismayed, “Awwwww. You mean, like dresses?”
“And bikinis and the occasional thong panties. And they take a lot of pictures.”
I said, “Ouch.”
“Derek got a bunch of them. The pictures. Bought them from one of the guys, one who wasn’t getting any work and had borrowed too much money from the wrong people. And Derek was faced with an ethical dilemma, wasn’t he? Hand the pictures over to the publishers of a rag that’ll pay him five, six thousand for them, or have a chat with Thad Pierce, who will part with ten or twenty times as much.”
Louie says, “Or maybe have him killed.”
“In Thad Pierce’s case, he went with the money. But, see, Derek was good. He knew the secrets of being a successful blackmailer. He knew instinctively how much to demand, and he never, ever went back for more. But you’re right, of course. If Derek threatened the wrong kind of people, there was always the possibility that they’d choose the cheaper option of just, you know, beating him to death.”
“That’s how he died?” Louie asked.
“According to the police, fourteen broken bones,” Ronnie Bigelow said. “They left him eight teeth. A closed-casket funeral was strongly recommended.” She put her cup down and said to me, “So, then, how about an early lunch?”
“Okay,” I said. “But we have to make a stop first.”
° ° °
“Hollywood,” she said
, looking out the window. “If this is glamour, you can keep it.” Louie had gone back to pulling on wires, and Ronnie and I were stuck in traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, not too far from the stretch of sidewalk where Derek Bigelow had washed up, extravagantly fractured, on Giorgio’s star. “I was so horrified when I first got here. Hard to imagine it was ever anything but awful.”
“In the thirties,” I said. “It was really something in the thirties.”
“Hmmm,” she said, glancing at my left hand on the steering wheel. “What’s your wife like?”
I said, “She’s recently divorced.”
“Oh, my. I’m sorry. Well, no, I guess I’m really not.”
“You’re forward,” I said. “Has anybody ever told you that?”
“If I were a man,” she said, “you’d describe me as
decisive. Goal-oriented
. Something like that. And no one has used the word
forward
in years and years. Would it be out of line for me to ask what happened? With your marriage, I mean.”
“According to the laws of polite discourse in the twenty-first century,” I said, “women are allowed to ask any man any question that comes to them at any time, and a man who doesn’t answer it is marked for life as emotionally unresponsive.”
“I wish someone had told me that years ago. What happened?”
“We were too different, I guess. And we got more different as time went by.”
She put her feet up on the dashboard. “I’ve always thought differences make for more interesting relationships. What’s the fun in being with somebody who thinks all the same things you do? It’d be like watching a TV channel that doesn’t show anything except your own home movies.”
“There’s different, and then there’s different. If we’d had any less in common, it would have been an interspecies marriage.”
“But that’s vague, isn’t it? There’s always a main issue, a specific issue. With Derek and me it was that he was a shit and I wasn’t. What was it with you?”
“I suppose it was mainly my job.”
The light changed eight or nine cars ahead of us and we went through the inevitable urban pause while several drivers tried to remember how to get their foot from the brake to the accelerator. When we were finally moving, she said, “Which is what?”
“I steal things.”
“What
is
it with me?” she asked. “I go from a blackmailer with a terrible prose style to a thief.”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Oh, pshaw,” she said, actually pronouncing it. “Don’t pretend. You know what’s going on.”
“Yeah, I suppose I do.”
Ronnie leaned forward and fiddled with one of the sandals decorating my dashboard. She had painted only the smallest toenail on each perfect foot, just a tiny dot of color at the border between foot and not-foot. “Tell me at least that you only steal from the rich.”
“Okay.”
She put an elbow out the open window. “That’s a little better.”
“They’re the only ones with anything worth taking. What are you going to steal from the poor? Aspirations?”
“It’s not going to make any difference,” she said. “Whatever you tell me, however awful, it’s not going to make any difference. We’re still going to get into trouble.”
I said, “Glad to hear it.”
“Exactly what are
we doing here?” Ronnie asked. We were picking our way up a concrete walkway to a peeling clapboard
bungalow on a street folded in between Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset. The neighborhood hadn’t been fashionable seventy years ago and still wasn’t. The lawn looked like it hadn’t been watered since the Hoover administration.
“We’d be breaking in,” I said, “except that I’ve got a key. Although we could still break in, if you’d like to get a feel for it.”
She slowed down, looking dubiously at the bungalow, which was rapidly approaching shack status and looked like the place where dark waits for night to arrive. “Who lives here?”
“Right now, probably nobody. Until recently, it was occupied by a guy who wears a pinkie ring and the daughter of the woman who owns the motel I’m living in this month.”
“That sentence opens up so many questions I can’t even figure out which one to ask.”
“All will be revealed,” I said, climbing the three cement steps to the front door.
“When?” She was behind me, but hanging back, and I didn’t blame her. The bungalow practically rippled with unhappiness.
“At lunch.” I keyed the door and pushed it open, and was greeted by the stale, old-paper odor of an uninhabited house. “Coming in?”
Marge was right: The place had been cleaned with a suspicious amount of energy. I could even see the tracks left by a handheld vacuum on the couch cushions. The house had been rented furnished and the furniture was still on hand, so if it ever came down to hairs and fibers, traces probably lingered here and there, but not for want of trying to remove them.
“I need the bathroom,” Ronnie said. “I always need the bathroom when I’m someplace weird.”
“I’m sure it’s sparkling clean,” I said. “Probably down the hall.”
“Spooky houses,” she said, going down the hallway, “are spookier in the daytime.”
The living room walls had been painted a bad-mayonnaise yellow, and most of the light in the room was absorbed by a floor of dark-chocolate linoleum with a pumpkin swirl in it, probably laid down over the original oak floors back in the fifties, when the first thing people did when they bought an old house was to wreck it. In the dining-room, the toxic yellow walls gave way to pink-patterned wallpaper in a vaguely Aubrey Beardsley nouveau-decadent pattern, printed on what looked like aluminum foil. A dusty, cobwebbed chandelier in wrought iron hung over the round Formica table. Three chairs were pulled up to the table while a fourth, missing a rear leg, loitered drunkenly against the wall. The effect was depressing beyond measure.
“Hey,” Ronnie called. “Come look at this.”
I went down the hall and found her standing at the doorway of a bathroom that had a quarter of an inch of water on the floor. “You went in
there
?” I asked.
“It was dry when I went in. This happened when I washed my hands. I turned on the water, and all of this came out of the cabinet under the sink.”
The day got even dimmer. I said, “Oh, no.”
“Oh, no what?”
“Let me look at the kitchen,” I said. I didn’t want to, but I had to. Ronnie followed me back down the narrow hallway and grunted at the sight of the dining room wallpaper as though someone had punched her in the stomach. In the kitchen, I went down on one knee in front of the sink and opened the door to the cabinet beneath it. Then I said, “Shit. Shit, shit
shit
.”