The Fame Thief by Timothy Hallinan

drawer.”
    “Hang on, hang on,” he said to me. He rolled the big chair back and opened a drawer, then pulled out a brown bottle with a white pharmacist’s label on it. He took his time unscrewing the top, put a thumb over the open neck so he could shake the bottle, read the label as though he’d never seen it before, took a slug, winced, waited, took another slug, and then extended the bottle over the desk, eyebrows raised in invitation. The whole show had taken almost a minute.
    I shook my head, and he put the top back on the bottle. I said, “Dolores La Marr.”
    His tongue licked quickly at a corner of his mouth. “What is this? You writing a book or something?”
    “Doug said you were a friend of hers.”
    “Some kinda documentary?
Girls Gone Wrong
or something?”
    “Was Dolores La Marr a girl gone wrong?”
    “Who sent you to Doug?”
    I sat back and looked at him. I have a face I’ve developed for conversations with the police, and it’s about as drained of expression as a face can be. It would be sleepy if it weren’t for an under-layer of hostility. I’ve learned it makes people nervous, so I used Garbo’s trick to prolong it and counted silently from one to ten. When Pinky had scooted back and forth in his chair a few times and cleared his throat, I said, “You really don’t need to know that.”
    “Kiddo—”
    “No, listen. There were some very powerful people in Los Angeles back when you and Dolores La Marr were pals, and some of them are
still
very powerful.”
    The wrinkles around Pinky’s eyes deepened and his eyes got even smaller. He said carefully, as though one of the words in the sentence might explode if he pronounced it wrong, “Someone who was powerful back then.”
    “And who is not patient with obstructions.”
    Pinky’s chair squeaked as he sat back. He said, “Fuck me. You’re kidding.”
    “I’m not kidding. I haven’t told you anything.”
    He was shaking his head before I finished. “We weren’t friends, Dolly and me.”
    “Not what Doug says.”
    He lifted his hands, palms up, the picture of reason. “P.R., you gotta understand, we’re like
everybody’s
friend, you know? It goes with the job. The client’s gotta trust you, so you make like friends, but it’s over the minute they fire you. Not even a hello in the street.”
    “They’ve got to trust you why?”
    “Okay,” he said, nodding. “This is my P.R. speech. I gave it to everybody I ever hired. P.R. is the crossroads between who somebody really is and who they want people to think they are. You get that?”
    “When I fall behind, I’ll wave at you.”
    Pinky folded his hands on the desk, a miniature professorial. “So on the one hand, you’re like a painter doing a portrait, you know? Making the, um, nose smaller, filling in some hair, maybe putting a friendly smile on someone who, in real life, he smiles when somebody gets hit by a car. Putting a picture out there that’s the way your client wants to look. That’s half the job. Onthe other hand, you’re not just a painter, you’re a makeup artist. You gotta know where the warts are, which teeth are rotten. Not just so’s you can cover it up, but so’s you’re prepared when the warts suddenly show.”
    “In a column like Melly Crain’s.”
    “Sure, in the stone age. These days it’s the fucking Internet.
Unlisted, F-Bomb, Hollywood Scoop, Celebrity Dogpile
, all the other ones. Make Melly Crain and
Confidential
magazine look like Saint Clare. But the point, see, the
point
is, the P.R. person has to
know
about this little wart and that fondness for Girl Scout uniforms and that, I don’t know, Olympic-size dope habit. So for the client to be comfortable with that, they have to believe that the P.R. person is a friend.”
    “So your relationship with Dolores La Marr—”
    “Was professional. Nice girl, but really, I hardly knew her.”
    “But you were one of a small number of people who knew where the warts were.”
    “Now, wait,