Little Elvises Read online

  Also by Timothy Hallinan

  The Junior Bender Series

  Crashed

  Little Elvises

  The Fame Thief

  The Poke Rafferty Series

  A Nail Through the Heart

  Breathing Water

  The Fourth Watcher

  The Queen of Patpong

  The Fear Artist

  The Simeon Grist Series

  The Four Last Things

  Everything but the Squeal

  Skin Deep

  Incinerator

  The Man With No Time

  The Bone Polisher

  LITTLE ELVISES

  Copyright © 2012 by Timothy Hallinan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hallinan, Timothy.

  Little Elvises : a Junior Bender mystery / Timothy Hallinan.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-61695-278-5

  1. Thieves—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—California—Los

  Angeles—Fiction. 3. Mystery fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A3923L58 2012

  813’.54—dc23 2012033883

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Illustration by Katherine Grames

  v3.1

  For Ken and Mike

  ° ° °

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One - Lucky Star

  1. All That’s Admirable in Law Enforcement

  2. An Original Void

  3. In Some Cases, I’d Give You a Discount

  4. Christmas for Suicides

  5. A Nice Reduction of Port Wine

  6. Alahar the Alien

  7. Hell Is Sometimes Defined as a Complete Lack of Hope

  8. We’re Still Going to Get into Trouble

  9. Three Guys Away

  10. Might As Well Live Outdoors

  11. Lynching Souvenirs

  Part Two - The Wizard of Was

  12. A Harmless-Looking Little Island of White

  13. Dickheads

  14. If You Stop Lighting Your Hair on Fire

  15. Nobody Wants to Dance with a Bear

  16. Peligroso

  17. The Ninth Circle of Pulmonary Hell

  18. Dry and Wet

  19. How Few Tricks They Know

  20. What They Get Is an Anchor

  21. Ace

  22. We Just Add Color

  23. Trank

  24. Num Num Num

  25. Orange Boot

  26. Stoli, Coke, Cigs

  Part Three - Nessie

  27. Lick and Stick

  28. Beauty Spot

  29. Looking for the Groove

  30. Forty Miles Uphill

  31. A Sort of Plateau

  32. Two Graves, a Car, and a House

  33. Cutters

  34. Candy-Cane Points

  Author’s Note

  From behind his little pile of crumpled Tootsie Roll wrappers, DiGaudio said, “We can make you for the Hammer job.”

  The Tootsie Roll wrappers were the only thing on the table, now that police stations are no-smoking zones. I’ve got nothing against health, but if there’s anyone in the world who needs a cigarette, it’s a crook in a police station.

  “I’d emit an outraged squeal of innocence,” I said, “except I don’t have to. I didn’t do the Hammer job.”

  DiGaudio scratched his cheek. I could hear the whiskers under his nails. “I’m going to extend you a courtesy I usually don’t offer career criminals,” he said. “I’m going to believe you.”

  I would have pushed my chair back but it was bolted to the floor. I said, “This is too easy.”

  “You think? Well, you’re right. See, it doesn’t matter whether you did it. What matters is that we can make you for it.”

  I was already not happy. Since I’m a career criminal, to use DiGaudio’s description—and we might as well, since it’s accurate—I rarely have scrapbook moments in an interrogation room. But now we were in new territory, even for me. It didn’t matter whether I did it?

  Just to test the depth of the tar pit, I said, “I have an alibi.”

  DiGaudio folded his hands over his continental belly, a belly big enough to have a capital city. I could remember when he was a trim-waisted patrolman with laundry-scrubber abs and a three-pack-a-day nicotine habit. When he made detective, four or five years back, he’d traded cigarettes for calories, and now he looked like something you might toss a peanut at. “You probably oughta call the people you were with that night,” he said. “Just, you know, match your memory with theirs.”

  This was especially not good. Generally speaking, even the worst cops don’t intimidate witnesses.

  “The Hammer job,” I said. “As I recall, there was a gun involved.”

  DiGaudio nodded. He had a cop’s eyes, eyes that had seen so much they looked frayed. For the moment, he used them to check out an interrogation room he’d seen a thousand times. He’d put me in one of the nicest in the Van Nuys station. Had a floor and everything. Looking up at a corner of the ceiling, he said, “Special circumstances.”

  “You know that’s not my style,” I said. “I mean, assuming that I steal things in the first place is a laughable proposition, but even if I did, I wouldn’t be dumb enough to use a gun. As pretty much everyone knows.”

  “Sure,” DiGaudio said. “Everyone knows that you don’t steal stuff, since you’ve never actually been convicted of stealing stuff, and everybody also knows that if you did steal stuff, you’d be too smart to go in strapped. Because of—what was that phrase? The one I just used?”

  “Special circumstances,” I said.

  “That was it. And if you got made for robbery under special circumstances, especially against people like the Hammers, who demand and receive the very best in law enforcement, him being a circuit court judge and all, and her a little old lady, weighs about eighty pounds, getting pistol-whipped, you’d probably be looking at twenty years.” He reached into the inside pocket of his Quintuple XL sport coat, courtesy of the local Tall Porkers outlet, and brought out a couple more Halloween-size Tootsie Rolls. “Want one?”

  “I’ll get by without it,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t have given it to you anyway.” He tugged the twists at the ends of the paper wrapper. “I like two at a time.” He popped the first into his mouth and unwrapped the second, parking the first one in his right cheek. The wrappers fluttered down onto the little pile on the table.

  “DiGaudio,” I said. “Are we being recorded?”

  “You crazy?” His teeth were stuck together but the words were understandable.

  “Just checking. Let’s review. You threaten to make me for a robbery you know I didn’t pull, and you’ve intimidated the three people who could verify my alibi, which you know is straight, and you keep bringing the conversation around to special circumstances, just to remind me that I don’t want to be here. My guess is that we’re working our way toward an act of generosity on your part.”

  For a count of ten, or twenty if you’ve had a lot of coffee, DiGaudio gave all his attention to chewing his chocolate cud. Tootsie Rolls demand a lot of chewing. When he’d gotten the candy soft enough so he could pry his teeth apart, he said, “My name mean anything to you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s a synonym for all that’s admirable in law enforcement.”

  He waved a fat hand, the back fringed with black hair, in the direction of his left shoulder, meaning earlier. “Beyond that.”
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  I said, “Philadelphia in the fifties. Imitation Elvises. Handsome Italian kids with tight pants and big hair.”

  He gave me a rich brown grin. Tootsie Rolls are a truly awful color. “How the hell do you remember that?”

  “Rina,” I said. “My daughter.”

  He squinted over my shoulder. “You got a daughter? She proud of her daddy?”

  “Hey, fatso,” I said, “I haven’t punched you in the face yet, but that could change.”

  DiGaudio flushed, and the worn-out little eyes got even smaller. “Any time,” he said. “Here or anywhere.”

  “You start it, you’d better be ready to finish it.” I was past caring about anything he could do to me, legally speaking.

  He passed a pink tongue over his brown teeth. Whatever he found there, it seemed to calm him down. “So, your daughter. What’s she got to do with—”

  I gave myself a three-heartbeat break to get my voice under control. “She’s thirteen,” I said. “But she’s in an accelerated program, and she wrote a paper called ‘The Distorted Mirror’ for some class they didn’t have when I was in school.”

  “ ‘The Distorted—’ ”

  “Mirror. About the way American pop culture imitates itself, the way it stamps out little tin copies of anything original that makes money. The example she chose was all the Little Elvises from Philly who were churned to the surface in the wake of Elvis Presley.”

  “Churned to the surface.” He burped. “Colorful phrase.”

  “It’s Rina’s. So after Elvis you had all these junior goombahs, all these Bobbies and Billies and Frankies and Fabios and so forth, popping up on American Dance Hall and selling lots of records for about six weeks each. And the guy behind them all, according to Rina’s paper, was somebody named DiGaudio.”

  “Vinnie.”

  “Oh, please,” I said.

  “No. Really. Vinnie. Went by Vincent because, well, because who wants to be called Vinnie? But anyway, it was Vinnie DiGaudio, Vincent L. DiGaudio, who found all those kids and made them stars—”

  “Shooting stars, Rina calls them.”

  “Because they went by so fast, right? But they all made a bunch of money, and Vinnie managed to get most of it into his pockets.”

  “As interesting as this is, sort of a tiny-print footnote to the pop music history of the fifties, I’m not sure what it has to do with the Hammer job.”

  “Act of generosity,” DiGaudio said. “Remember?”

  I may be slow sometimes, but I’m not dead. “Vinnie DiGaudio,” I said. “He’s a relative.”

  “My uncle. My dad’s brother. Family, you know? We’re Italian, family means something.”

  “I’ve never understood why all the non-WASP groups think they own the concept of family. Italians, Jews, Chinese, Latinos—they’ve all got real families. Like WASP families are just groups of people who are close to each other in the phone book.”

  “Look at ’em on TV,” DiGaudio said. “They come downstairs every morning and shake hands.”

  “Mobbed up?”

  “Say what?”

  “Your whatever-he-is. Is he mobbed up?”

  DiGaudio wiped at his upper teeth with the tip of his index finger and then checked it out. “Italian?” he said. “In Philly? In the music business? Why would you think he was—”

  “And he’s your uncle?”

  He said, “How far back in the conversation would you like me to go? Did you miss most of it, or just bits and pieces?”

  “I just want to make sure you’re telling me your uncle is mobbed up. At least now I know we’re not being taped.”

  DiGaudio spread the pork chops he used as hands, his imitation of someone being reasonable. “You always this suspicious? You miss a lot in life, you go around suspecting everybody all the time.”

  “You know,” I said, “if I go to work for you and the word gets around, I’ll be lucky if there’s enough left of me to identify.”

  He looked so surprised his eyes got bigger. “Work for me?”

  “Okay. What am I missing?”

  “See, suspicion, it’s a poisonous thing. You think I’m looking to force you to do something for me, and all I’m doing is bringing you a piece of business.”

  “Business.”

  “We know—and by we I mean a very small number of my colleagues—we know that you do sort of lost-and-found detective stuff for people on the other side of the fence.”

  “It’s good it’s a small number,” I said, “because they’re wrong.”

  “There’s Wattles, who’s like an executive thug,” he said, holding up a finger. “Three-Eyes Romero, the Valley’s leading car-chopper. The Queen of Crime herself, Trey Annunziato.” He had three fingers in the air. “You tell me what these three people have in common.”

  “Good accountants?”

  “You,” he said. “They got you in common. They all had a little problem and they all went to the go- to guy for crooks with problems. You. Junior Bender, boy crimebuster.” He pulled out another Tootsie Roll. “It’s like that distorted mirror you were talking about. You’re a crook but you’re the crooks’ cop, too.”

  “Okay,” I said, “just to see if we can’t wrap this up before we both die of old age, you’re saying you won’t make me for the Hammer job—which I didn’t do—if I help your uncle, the Philly music crook. And I’m saying to you that the whole thing about me, that stuff about solving crimes for crooks, it’s wrong. And even if it were right, and I really did solve crimes for crooks, I’d need to know exactly what your uncle needs help with, because I won’t get anywhere near murder. If I were doing it at all, that is, which of course, I’m not. So what’s his problem?”

  DiGaudio said, “Murder.”

  The month’s motel was Marge ’n Ed’s North Pole at the north end of North Hollywood. The advantage of staying at the North Pole was that even the small number of people who knew I’d lived in motels since my divorce from Kathy would never figure I’d stoop that low. The disadvantage of staying at the North Pole was everything else.

  Generally speaking, motels have little to recommend them, and the North Pole had less than most. But they made me a moving target, and I could more or less control the extent to which anyone knew where I was at any given time. I’d been divorced almost three years, and the North Pole was my 34th motel, and far and away the worst of the bunch.

  I’d been put into Blitzen. In an explosion of creativity, Marge ’n Ed had decided not to number the rooms. Since Clement Moore only named so many reindeer in “The Night Before Christmas,” Marge ’n Ed had pressed Rudolph into service and then come up with some names on their own. Thus, in addition to the reindeer we all know and love, we had rooms named Dydie, Witzel, Tinkie, and Doris.

  Doris wasn’t actually being passed off as a reindeer. She was Marge ’n Ed’s daughter. Marge, who grew confidential as the evenings wore on and the level in the vodka bottle dropped, had told me one night that Doris had fled the North Pole with someone Marge referred to as Mr. Pinkie Ring, a pinkie ring being, in Marge’s cosmology, the surest sign of a cad. And sure enough, the cad had broken Doris’s heart, but would she come home? Not Doris. Stubborn as her father, by whom I assumed Marge meant Ed, whom I always thought of as ’n Ed. Ed was no longer with us, having departed this vale of sorrows six years earlier. It was probably either that or somehow orchestrate a global ban on vodka, and death undoubtedly looked easier.

  The string of Christmas lights that outlined the perimeter of Blitzen’s front window blinked at me in no discernible sequence, and I’d been trying to discern one for days. They sprang to life whenever anyone turned on the ceiling light, which was the only light in the room. I’d tried to pull the cord from the outlet, but Marge ’n Ed had glued it in place.

  “YouTube-dot-com,” Rina said on the phone. “Y-O-U-Tube, spelled like tube. Aren’t you there yet?”

  Something unpleasant happens even to the most agreeable of adolescents when they talk to adults about tec
hnology. A certain kind of grit comes into their voices, as though they’re expecting to meet an impenetrable wall of stupidity and might have to sand their way through it. Rina, who still, so far as I knew, admired at least one or two aspects of my character, was no exception. She sounded like her teeth had been wired together.

  “Yes,” I said, hearing myself echo her tone. “I’ve managed somehow to enter the wonderland of video detritus and I await only the magical search term that will let me sift the chaff.”

  “Dad. Do you want help, or not?”

  “I do,” I said, “but not in a tone of voice that says I’d better talk really slowly or he’ll get his thumb stuck in his nostril again.”

  “Do I sound like that?”

  “A little.”

  “Sorry. Okay, the interview is called ‘Vincent DiGaudio Interview.’ Have you got that?”

  “Slow down,” I said. “Did you just ask me whether I can follow the idea that the Vincent DiGaudio Interview is called ‘Vincent DiGaudio Interview’?”

  “Oh.” She made a clucking noise I’ve never been able to duplicate. “Sorry again.”

  “Maybe I’m being touchy,” I said. “Thanks. Anything else?”

  “Not on video. I’ll email you the links to the other stuff, the written stuff. There’s not much of it. He doesn’t seem to have wanted much publicity.”

  “Wonder why,” I said. I figured there was no point in telling her I was going to be getting involved with a mob guy. She might worry.

  She said, “But the FBI files are kind of interesting.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Somebody used the Freedom of Information Act,” said my thirteen-year-old daughter, “to file for release of a stack of FBI files on the outfit’s influence in the Philadelphia music scene. Since DiGaudio’s still alive and since he never got charged, his name is blacked out, but it’s easy to tell it’s him because a lot of the memos are about Giorgio. The files are on the FBI’s site, but I’ll send you the link so you don’t have to waste time poking around.”

  “The FBI site?” I said. “Giorgio?”

  “Wake up, Dad. Everything’s online.”

  Was I, a career criminal, going to log onto the FBI site? “Who’s Giorgio?”