Kyle with an E?
A heart-stopper by any name.
“To Doreen,” I agreed, raising my glass.
We clanked. We sipped. He showed off his perfect teeth, gave me a few good-boy pats on the shoulder, wheeled around, and weaved across the room to whisper into the ear of an overweight gent dressed in dollar signs who looked up from his stockpile of goodies and aimed his heavy-lidded eyes at me, nodding affirmatively to whatever he was hearing.
About fifteen minutes later, I slipped some cocktail napkins I had packed with hors d’oeuvres into my pockets and waved adieu to invisible friends. Outside, Doreen Kyle was waiting for her car, heavy into conversation with the gent with the pencil-thin moustache. I waved off an eager parking attendant and headed for my Benz, a dusty relic of the ’eighties that I had discreetly curbed outside the Hancock Park gates, down three blocks and around the corner. Wondering if I’d be able to muster the courage to phone Doreen, even if only to ask why she had played a name game with me, somebody she didn’t know, had never met; a stranger off the street, crashing a memorial service to scarf a free meal. Well, maybe not the last part.
Doreen. Doreen Kyle—
It didn’t sound as right as Faye Allyson had sounded.
Didn’t fit her as well, either.
She looked more like a Faye Allyson than a Doreen Kyle.
I tried putting her out of mind, but she refused to budge and was still consuming my thoughts when I got back to my apartment, a one-bedroom on the second floor of one of the ’thirties-style buildings lining both sides of Detroit Street, south of Melrose Avenue. Mine was the last one feeding off a narrow central hallway perfumed by years of dust and an undecipherable stew of cooking odors.
I stored the Stoli and Smirnoff I’d kited on the kitchen counter, then pulled a dinner plate from the cabinet and began transferring my captured hors d’oeuvres from the napkins in my pocket, unfolding one napkin at a time. Faye’s napkin was the last one out and came with a surprise. I discovered she’d used some sleight of hand to give me more than a phone number.
Wrapped in her napkin was a flash drive, one of those tiny portable gizmos you plug into a computer and transfer data onto. This one was about the size and shape of a cigarette tube lighter. An immediate overdose of curiosity propelled me back to the living room and my desktop computer. I fiddled after an open slot that would take the drive, and clicked into its contents.
Only, I couldn’t get past the opening screen.
It called for a password.
I didn’t have a password.
So I called Doreen Kyle, instead.
And, when I heard that sultry satin voice that became unforgettable the moment I first heard it at Noel Webster’s mansion, I called her “Faye.”
“Who is this?” she said.
“Ellis Hyland,” I said, my voice clearly less memorable than hers. “It’s Ellis Hyland, Faye.”
“Ellis Island.” A question mark running under the surface.
“Earlier today? The gathering for Mr. Webster? Hyland with an H?”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, so goodbye with a G,” she said.
And clicked off.
I punched in her number again.
She picked up on the first ring, a warning the first words through her memorable lips: “No more. Quit or I’m calling the cops.”
And clicked off again.
Before I could swat away my rankle or fall into some serious sulking, my phone rang.
Her.
Saying, “I was just playing with your mind, Hyland with an H.”
“Faye?”
“I want to see you again.” Her voice was husky with anticipation. She sounded as anxious as my beating heart. “Are you free for dinner?”
Her address took me to the electronically controlled main entrance gate of “High-Rise Heaven,” what everyone called the condominium buildings south of Century City, where prices start at a million five for one-bedrooms on the lowest floors, with balcony views limited to neighbors’ useless picture windows across grounds as lush as a tropical paradise.
Faye’s condo was on the twenty-second floor, which promised an unrestricted view of the city in every direction, eastward clear to the Pacific. In fact, it turned out to be all the twenty-second floor, accessible by invitation only on a private elevator that took a security key to operate. Only, it didn’t turn out to be Faye greeting me as the door slid open.
Nobody I recognized, that’s who it was.
She was tinier than Faye by a few inches, with one of those compact athletic bodies she was displaying in a well-stocked halter top and tennis shorts that ended in a tie with her muscular thighs. Her fire-engine-red hair pulled back from her handsome freckled face into a tight ponytail. Her brown eyes digesting me while her tongue lubricated lips frozen into a seductive smile.
“Hyland with an H?” she said.
“And you’re?”
“Faye with an E,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I scanned past her and around, pausing a second or two to take in the Picasso oil on the embossed white silk wall covering. Large. Not cheap. Cubist period. The lady in the portrait looking like she’d been constructed by some cockeyed Dr. Frankenstein.
“Oh, damn. Somebody else I couldn’t fool.” She hooted and, grabbing me by the wrist, tugged me from the elevator and pointed toward a living room the size of Nevada. “I’m Faye’s roomie. She had to run out for a few. Said to entertain you until she gets back. Then, I’ll be gone — like the wind.”
On another wall, a Degas, a Chagall, and, not as out of place as you might think, a Warhol canvas, four images of a grim-faced Noel Webster in clashing colors. Webster also the star of most of the photographs in crystal or sterling-silver frames on top of the baby grand piano parked by the floor-to-ceiling window looking northwest to the Hollywood hills, the HOLLYWOOD sign rising above the rooftops, the dome of the Griffith Park Observatory still higher.
She parked me on an oversized, overstuffed leather sofa and duck-walked across the room to the bar. She called, “Name your poison. I’m having a nice glass of Beaujolais myself. The genuine item. Imported. Every year a good year or it wouldn’t be here. That’s how Mr. Webster was about everything he touched.”
I indicated the Beaujolais was fine for me and said, “Including Faye?”
“Including Faye. And she had a special touch for him. Believe it.”
“And you?”
“Someone has to keep this oasis tidy, you follow? Beats me trying to make the rent all by my lonesome on the dump we’d been sharing in the valley. North Hollywood, where drive-by shootings are treated like a neighborhood sport.” She padded over with our wines and settled on one of the matching leather chairs across the coffee table from me. “Cheers,” she said. “Name’s Tiffany, by the way. From the breakfast of the same name.”
I acknowledged the toast and swirled the wine around in my glass like I knew what I was doing, then sipped and rinsed. Gave the Beaujolais a thumbs-up and swallowed. Took a bigger taste and settled the glass on the table. Checked my watch. Gave her an inquiring look.
She shrugged. “Any minute, I’m guessing.” We fell into a brief, awkward silence before she looked up from the invisible finger scribbles she was making on the table and asked, “You remember to bring it?”
“Remember to bring what?”
“The gizmo? The flash thingie Faye gave you when you guys hooked up today at Mr. Webster’s send-off? She said she gave it to you for safekeeping until dinner tonight.” She raised an eyebrow, but my suspicions were already higher that something was wrong here. I’d been thinking how a Noel Webster would be too shrewd, too discreet, to have a third party, a “roomie” by any name, around twenty-four/seven. It was too awkward for a man who certainly hadn’t made his name, reputation, and fortune without wiser calculation than that.