The Fame Thief Read Online Free PDF Page B

dusty; I could see the little border left by the edge of the dust rag. The room’s size was emphasized by a cathedral ceiling with long, thick, rough-hewn beams running beneath it. Since therewas one more floor of apartments above this one, the cathedral ceiling was lower than most. I figured I could almost touch the beams if I went on tiptoe and jumped just a little. I trailed a finger through the dust on the table’s corner as I passed, leaving a conspicuous jet trail.
    In the kitchen, it took me about two minutes to find the wine and the glasses, but the corkscrew stumped me. I stood there, looking at approximately twenty closed drawers, and then something feathery and steamlike kind of blew against the side of my face and straight through my skull, planting a thought: that the second drawer from the left in the top row to the right of the sink just might be the one. I opened it, and there was the corkscrew.
    I looked around the kitchen, much as Dolores La Marr had looked around the living room, said
“WEEoooo WEEooo WEEooo”
quietly and asked myself where the tray was. This time I just closed my eyes and stood there for a moment, waiting for the next bit of guidance, and when I opened my eyes again, I was looking at one out of a large number of closed cabinets. In that cabinet, I found the tray.
    I might have hurried a bit getting back to the living room.
    “You may pour,” Dolores La Marr said, a bit grandly, when I was seated.
    When I had the cork worked out, I poured her a good full glass, waiting for her to say, “Stop,” but she didn’t. I was still feeling the wine from Dressler’s house, so I was in
do-I-don’t-I
mode, but the wine smelled like a green hillside with a hint of cut grass, so I poured myself some, hoisted my glass, and said, “Cheers.”
    “And cheers to you, dear. Are you married?”
    “Divorced. One daughter, thirteen.”
    “Pretty?”
    “So pretty it’s too bad
Life
isn’t still publishing.”
    “That was a mixed blessing at best,” she said. “I think that was what tipped everything over.”
    “How so?”
    “People,” she said vaguely. “Do you get to see your daughter?”
    “Yes. My ex-wife and I are polite to each other, through our teeth sometimes, but we both love her too much to make her the rope in a tug of war.”
    “Good for you. So many parents these days—”
    “Miss La Marr,” I said.
    “Dolly.”
    “Well, Dolly, I’m not trying to be rude, but you’re not giving me your time to talk about me. We’re here to start trying to understand what happened to you.”
    “Actually,” she said, and the quaver was back in her voice, “actually, I’m giving you my time
precisely
to talk about you, at least at the beginning. I need to know who’s going to be bulldozing my past. I need, for example, to be relatively certain that whoever it is has the wit to figure it out and the discretion not to sell it to the tabloids. Is that you, dear?”
    I said, “I’ve been a professional burglar since I was fifteen. That’s twenty-two years now, and I’ve never been caught. I have no criminal record. I’ve been working as a kind of detective for crooks, some of them extremely
muscular
crooks, for fifteen years, and none of them has decided to kill me in the aftermath. And except for one richly deserved incident in which I used what I’d learned for blackmail, I’ve never violated a confidence.”
    “How does someone deserve to be blackmailed?”
    “When the crime he committed involved a young girl who was terrified about the story coming out. At the same time, though, the man who messed with her was on the verge of messing withsomeone else. Someone thirteen years old. My client had forbidden me to kill him, so I used what I knew about Girl Number One to force him to abandon his plans for Girl Number Two. He was famous, so being exposed as a child molester was pretty firmly in the
No
column.”
    “And would you have killed him?”
    “If it had seemed to be the