Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde Read Free Page B

door, leaving me to close it in Benny’s face. I wondered who Hector was and why I didn’t like the name. Benny hadn’t either, the way she drew it like a knife.
    The sitting room was as large as most complete hotel rooms, with fat club chairs, a love seat, a twenty-seven-inch TV set on a stand, and a round oak table with four sturdy chairs. The table was covered with dishes containing omelets, rashers of bacon, hash browns, slabs of toast, and a stack of pancakes wallowing in syrup. It all looked and smelled good to someone who hadn’t eaten since last night, but all I took was coffee. I put down the picture, poured from a white carafe into an unused cup, and put it away in a lump. It scalded my throat and burned away the last of the mescal. Juan—or maybe it was Diego; all four brothers looked alike—had made a production of fishing the worm out of the bottom of the bottle and swallowing it like a goldfish. He was the family comedian.
    “Do you mind if I get dressed while we talk? I’ll leave the door open.” Gilia spoke from the bedroom.
    I set down the cup and went through that door. “Go ahead. Pretend I’m your crew.”
    She’d taken a dress on a hanger from the closet. Now she thought better of it and hung it back up. Two people alone in a bedroom was not the same as a hundred people backstage. She was either a woman with facets or a woman who wanted me to think she had them. She sat on the upholstered bench at the foot of the king bed, pressed her knees together, and folded her hands in her lap. The room had a good view of Dearborn and the Glass House, where Ford executives sat around long tables like in a New Yorker cartoon, chewing Mylanta and arguing about Tokyo and General Motors.
    “Caterina Muñoz’s nephews and their families live in Detroit,” I said. “That slipped your mind. It didn’t when you signed a picture for each of them.”
    “That was months ago, at her request. Before the betrayal.”
    “I’m not People magazine. You can’t brass this one out. I had a long talk with the wardrobe lady. Her English isn’t so good, but her nephews helped translate. One of Signor Garbo’s assistants took that shot of you in your Golden Globes dress with a James Bond camera and sold it to the tabloid. The designer fired and blacklisted the party, all sub rosa , because the publicity would ruin him and he’d have to go back to calling himself Manny Schwartz. Only he and the assistant and you and Caterina knew about it. She’s been with you since your first audition. That doesn’t mean so much, maybe, but you pay better than the tabloids.”
    “She’s worth it. I hope you didn’t turn her against me.”
    “That’s between the two of you. I’m not the one who rigged the frame. Why’s a good place to start.”
    She looked at me. She looked down at her hands. She looked at the Glass House and got no help there either, so she looked back up at me. At least she’d given up on the pidgin English. That had begun to get old when the job still looked legitimate.
    “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Oh, I suppose you’ve heard the usual celebrity complaint, about privacy and
how much you have to spend to have it. I made that trade in the beginning and I never missed it. But you make a little money, okay, a lot of money, and soon everyone you meet has a chisel. It seems I’ve never hired an orphan or an only child. Everyone has a mother or a brother or a cousin ten times removed who’s out of work, and they all wind up on my payroll. When someone told me I had a private detective working security with the experience to help me out, who wouldn’t spill the story to Access Hollywood for a couple of thousand bucks, I couldn’t go on just that. You might be someone’s uncle.”
    “Caterina was a dry run.”
    She nodded. Then she got up and hugged herself and looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the closet door. Her hair made a pale golden fall to her seat.