can kick the shit out of people and nobody can say dick.” Mr. Threat.
She shook her head and used her right foot to scratch her left. “I don’t know who they are.”
“Mort dropped out of sight last Friday. You with me, Kimmie?”
“Unh-hunh.”
“He took his son with him. Perry. You ever meet Perry?”
“Unh-unh.”
“Yesterday, the cops found Mort dead up by Lancaster. He was shot to death. The boy’s missing. Now Mort’s wife is missing. Maybe kidnapped. Those two Mexicans, maybe they want to make you missing, too.”
Larry grunted. “Spics.”
“What was the trouble about?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said, picking at her fingernail polish.
I looked past her to Larry. “Bullshit, Kimberly. Mort loved you. He would’ve said something to you.”
She followed my eyes to Larry and tried to remember how to look offended. “Mort was my mentor and my friend,” she said. I think she moued.
I looked back at Larry. “You her mentor, too?”
“Fuck off.”
I could see Mort’s card hanging by the thin wire from the wilted flower: For the girl who gives me life, all my love. Right, Mort. Asshole.
She paced in a small circle with her thumbs back in her shorts, then stood in the middle of the room. Show- and-tell time. “I’m scared.”
“With good ol’ Larry here?”
Larry gave me his tough look. She said, “Mort took me to this party to meet some guy. A guy from Mexico. A Financier.” She said financier like it was Duke or Earl or Governor. “Mort’s friend Garrett found him. Garrett’s a producer. When you’re starting out you have to meet producers and directors and the power people.”
“When was this?”
“Early last week. Tuesday.” Tuesday, Mort was still living at home, Ellen wasn’t yet being badgered into seeking a private investigator, the Lang children’s lives were shaky but still intact.
“Okay.”
“Mort said that Dom was thinking about backing one of Garrett’s movies, so it’d be good if they knew me for parts.”
“Yours or theirs?”
“Hunh?”
“Is Dom the Mexican?”
She nodded. “All they said was Dom. I don’t know his last name.” She giggled. I hate women who giggle. “He’s an older man. Really neat. Sort of old-fashioned, you know. He called me Miss Marsh.” She giggled again. “He used to be a bullfighter, only now he’s got oil and stuff.”
“Good connection,” Larry agreed.
I frowned at him.
“It was a big deal,” Kimberly said. “Mort told me to dress sexy and be real nice, you know, laugh at their jokes and smile a lot and follow his lead. Mort knew just what to do, you know. He’s great at getting with the right people and making the right connections.”
I thought of Mort sitting in his chair, looking at his photo album, crying. I thought of his steadily shrinking bank balance, all out and no in. I thought of Mort with four bullets in him. “Yeah, his strong point. Where was the party?”
She looked confused and gestured somewhere off into outer space. “Somewhere over the hill. I dunno. It was dark.”
“All right. What happened?”
“It was rad. We were hanging out, talking, doing lines. Everyone was very sophisticated. The dope was first- rate.”
“Mort, too?”
“What?”
“Doing coke.”
“Sure.”
I could see it: palatial living room, marble coffee table, crystal bowl with the white powder, everybody playing Pass the Mirror. Old Mort right in there with them direct from Elverton, Kansas, by way of Oz, laughing when they laugh, nodding when they nod, eyes nervous, darting, wondering if they accept him or if they’re just faking it. I couldn’t make the pictures fit. I couldn’t clip Mort out of the snapshot in his pool with the three kids, color in Versace threads, and drop him around that marble table with this woman and Garrett Rice and that life. Maybe Mort couldn’t make the picture fit, either. Maybe that had been his problem.
Kimberly giggled. “Dom really liked me, you know.”
I was getting tired of ‘you know.’ Larry took the towel away and grinned, but there was no humor in it. “It’s the business, man.” His nose was a mess.
“You’re going to need a doctor,” I said. “It’s broken.”
He stood up, wobbled, then went to the shelves by the slimy fishbowl. He took a slender blue cigarette from a little painted box and lit up, pulling deep. “For the pain.”
“Was anyone else there?”
“These people from Italy. They said they might want to get into movies, too. You know-”
“Yeah. Financiers. How much did Dom like you, Kimberly?”
She tried to look embarrassed but they probably hadn’t covered that in acting school. “Dom, you know, wanted to get to know me.” Giggle. That made four.
“How’d Mort feel about that?”
A shrug. “You know.”
“No, I don’t know,” I said carefully. “If I knew I wouldn’t be here with you and him listening to this.”
Larry giggled.
Kimberly focused on me like she wasn’t quite sure what I had said and gave me a pout. “Mort had to act like such an asshole. Dom is rich . Dom said he might make a three-picture deal and I could be in all of them.”
Larry giggled again. “The old spic fucked her brains out.”
I looked at him. “Shut up.”
Larry frowned and stared at the slime in the fish tank.
“When Dom and I came back, Mort got all upset and Dom started yelling in Spanish and Garrett was yelling and this Italian woman just kept laughing. Then Garrett got everybody calmed down and they went off and talked for a while and then Mort came back and we left. It just went all wrong. Mort had to act like such an asshole.”
Her story could explain Garrett Rice. A guy like Rice, he’d get pissed if his friend blew a deal just because he didn’t want his girlfriend humping for dollars. Guy like Garrett Rice, that’d be a pisser, and Rice certainly had been pissed.
“Mort tell you what they talked about when they went out?”
“We didn’t talk on the way home. I was so mad.”
“Sure,” I said. “Who could blame you.”
She cocked her head and gave me that sort-of-confused look again. “The next day he calls me and says we’re in trouble. He says he can’t talk because his wife is in the next room, but if anybody comes around the apartment I wasn’t to answer the door and that he’d call when it was okay again. I got so scared I called Larry and came up here.”
Larry sat up straighter and nodded. Defender of damsels.
“Did Mort say anything about the boy?”
“Unh-unh.” Kimberly started to sniffle. “I kept checking my answer machine but Mort never called back. Now you say he’s dead and there’s guys watching my apartment and I’m scared.”
Larry smirked. It didn’t look like much, considering his nose had evolved into a rutabaga. “Coupla spics. Let’m come and see what happens.”
“Yeah. Like with me.”
