Little Elvises Read online

  He shook his head, just a general rejection of anything I might have to say. “Like I was saying, Paulie’s got one of your nuts in a vise, and what you’re trying to do is keep the other one out.”

  “What I’m trying to do is walk away from this with an even number. But I have some rules about what I do, and here they are: No mob guys, no murder cases, and no freebies. I’ve had to break One and Two just to get here tonight, but I’ll be damned if I’ll break Three. If you want to talk for more than sixty seconds, if you want to tell me about your problems with the cops, I need five thousand in my hand. In cash. If you don’t want to pay, I’ll walk out of here, and Paulie can do whatever he wants.”

  He’d lifted his chin to look at me better, and I could see all the work that had been done to keep him looking younger than the seventy-five, seventy-six years old he had to be. He’d been lifted, sanded, scrubbed, buffed, peeled, and Botoxed until the face under the dead black hair looked like it was made from some misguided new synthetic, Sim-U-Life or something. “You think I got five thousand just laying around?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The plump little mouth pursed, so there were some muscles the Botox hadn’t reached. “You any good?”

  “I’m fucking fantastic. And, no, I won’t give you referrals.”

  He said, “Pfuhhh,” and I realized it was a laugh of sorts. “Guess not. Okay, say I give you the five. Then what?”

  “Then you explain what’s going on and I tell you whether I can do anything about it. If I can’t, I give you half of the five back and go home and wait for Paulie to show up with his vise. If I can, you give me more money whenever I ask for it, up to about fifty thousand, depending.”

  “Fifty?” He cracked his knuckles so emphatically I got sympathetic joint pain in both hands. “Depending on what?”

  “On how tough it is. On whether I have to kill anybody. Generally speaking, I prefer not to kill anybody.”

  The door banged open, and Popsie barged into the room with a cheap plastic glass in one hand. She’d filled it to the brim, and as she shoved it at me, water slopped onto my forearm and down the front of my trousers. Then she wheeled around and stalked out.

  “Of course,” I said, watching her, “in some cases, I’d give you a discount.”

  He grinned at the stains on my pants. “Ahhh, she’s okay.”

  “Yeah?” I said, and I leaned over the coffee table and poured water in his lap.

  “What the fuck,” he said, trying to get up, but his left leg was stuck on top of his right, and even if it hadn’t been, he was too bulky to rise without pushing off with his hands. He got the foot on the floor and then sat there, breathing at me.

  “Keep the help under control,” I said. “And give me the money. I’m not having fun, and I’m not going to go on not having fun for much longer without getting paid for it.”

  “Jeez,” he said. “And Paulie thinks you’re soft.”

  I said, “Money.”

  He opened a drawer in the coffee table. “You didn’t have to get me wet.”

  “You’ll dry.”

  He had a stack of hundreds in his hand. “I don’t know about this.”

  “You see the gun in my hand?” I said. “Am I threatening you? I’d just as soon go home.”

  “Sheesh,” he said, flipping the stack of bills with his thumb. “Is it okay if I talk while I count?”

  “If you can.”

  “Oh, back off. I was counting money when you were still messing your pants.” He licked a thumb and started dealing hundreds onto the table. “Guy got killed in Hollywood three nights ago. You hear anything about it?”

  “Is this what we’re here to talk about?”

  “Nah,” DiGaudio said. “I always kick off a conversation this way.”

  “Then keep counting.” I watched the stack grow. “Where?”

  His hands didn’t slow at all. “Hollywood Boulevard.”

  “Somebody got killed on Hollywood Boulevard? Boy, that hardly ever happens.”

  “I don’t know if he got killed there.” He was up to twenty-seven hundred, hands moving fast and sure. “He got found there. Six thousand block, pretty crappy block even for Hollywood. Might have been killed somewhere else.”

  “Who was he?”

  He looked up, the stack in his left hand, a single bill in his right. “English journalist. Scum hound, wrote for the rat rags, the ones with the two-headed babies on the front page. Bat Boy Graduates from Princeton, Maharishi’s Face on Mars, that kind of shit. Name of Derek Bigelow.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Sure, same way I’d make friends with a herpes wart.”

  “And?”

  “Hold on.” He dropped the last five bills onto the pile. “And what?”

  I picked up the money. “And what’s it got to do with you?”

  He looked at me as though he’d just realized he’d been speaking a language I didn’t understand. “What it’s got to do with me? They’re going to arrest me for it.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Are you sure you’re any good? ’Cause, I mean, what kind of question is that?”

  “Humor me. Did you?”

  “No. But, I mean, would I say yes? What’re you, furniture?”

  “Then why are they going to arrest you for it?”

  “There’s the question,” he said. “Finally.”

  I waited for a good slow count of three. “Want me to ask it again?”

  “For five thousand bucks? Sure.”

  “Why are they going to arrest you for it?”

  “Because I was going to kill him. I was going to kill him tonight.”

  “Louie,” I said into the phone as I navigated a tight curve, which seemed to be the only kind they had up here. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Everybody needs to talk to me,” Louie the Lost said. “Whole world’s got questions, and I’m like Mr. Answer Man. Phone’s ringing off the hook.”

  “Well, let it ring. Meet me at the North Pole in fifteen minutes.”

  “Awwww,” Louie said. “Not the North Pole. Place is like Christmas for suicides. Hey, good name for one of them bands, huh? Christmas for—”

  “It’s great,” I said. “I just met the guy who could manage them.” There were bright headlights in my rearview mirror, coming up fast, faster than I’d normally drive the twisting streets above the Boulevard. “Fifteen minutes. I’m in Blitzen.”

  “That’s so cute,” Louie said. “Marge try to give you Dydie?”

  The headlights were blinding. I angled the mirror down and said, “See you there,” and then dropped the phone onto the passenger seat.

  And the car rammed me.

  I was taking yet another sharp curve, to the right this time, and the impact caught the left rear fender, swinging my car halfway around. I spun the wheel in the direction I’d been shoved and gunned the accelerator, and the car jumped the curb on the right and plowed eight or ten feet up an ivy-covered slope with a Norman castle on top of it. For a moment, I was afraid I was going to roll, but I kept accelerating and cranking the wheel to the right, and then I was heading back down through the ivy to the street, and the car that had hit me was already a hundred yards past me.

  But it was turning around, making an ungainly three-point turn, and I could see why it had hit me so hard. The damn thing was a Humvee.

  Since I’d essentially made a U-turn, I was facing back uphill, toward DiGaudio’s house. If I’m going to be chased, I’d rather be chased uphill, where I can get some muscle out of the eight-cylinder Detroit behemoth of an engine Louie wedged into my innocent-looking white Toyota. I downshifted and punched the accelerator again, leaving rubber on the street, the tail of the car whipping around as I straightened up and followed the yellow cones of my headlights back up the hill I’d just come down. A couple of mailboxes whipped past, and then it was a tight crook, almost a hairpin, to the left, and there was nothing to the right except fifty or sixty feet of vertical ch
aparral, and I found myself grateful that they hadn’t rammed me there, or I’d be waving at coyotes as I plummeted past them, hoping to land in somebody’s swimming pool.

  Over the sound of my engine, I heard the souped-up roar of the Humvee, eating the distance between us, and its headlights briefly swung into my mirror and then out again as the road took another turn, right this time, and I ran it as fast as I could without losing the pavement and fishtailing hopelessly through the flimsy guardrail and out into space, hoping that the Humvee’s high center of gravity would force it to slow down, and then there was a hump in the road and I was briefly airborne and even before my tires hit the asphalt again, I saw the bright lights behind me.

  Closing fast.

  I own three Glock nine-millimeter automatics. They were neatly boxed up, wrapped in oilcloth and safe from rust, inside the storage lockers I keep in Burbank, Hollywood, and down near the airport. I had an electric screwdriver with me, but it was in the trunk, and it seemed unlikely that I’d be able to locate an outlet even if I managed to get the damn thing out without getting killed.

  Tight to the right again, scraping the guardrail this time, fighting the urge to brake, and instead dropping the car into second as the road took a dip down, the San Fernando Valley glimmering off to my right, and suddenly on the left a little street called Carol Way opened up—a little earlier than I’d anticipated—and I slammed on the brakes, spun the wheel left, and jammed the accelerator again, a half-formed image of a driveway assembling itself in my mind even as I passed the yellow diamond-shaped sign that said DEAD END.

  Carol Way was steep and narrow, just a series of drop-dead curves and suicide switchbacks that snaked along the side of the hill, a testimonial to the greed of some contractor who wasn’t going to let a virtual cliff-face prevent him from carving out a few lots. The Humvee wasn’t in my mirror yet, but I could see its lights sweeping the brush as it made the turns behind me, stabbing right and left through the darkness like a giant’s flashlight. They’d slowed a little now, having seen the dead end sign. They probably figured either that I’d made a bad turn or was planning to back into some driveway and wait with my lights off as they rolled past.

  But I wasn’t depending on a driveway I could hide in. I was depending on my burglar’s memory.

  I slowed, too, resisting the urge to look at the rearview. I’d see their lights without looking at the mirror, and I didn’t want to be blinded. But I needed them to be able to see me if this was going to have a chance of working.

  And then there they were, accelerating behind me and closing the gap, and I heard a cracking sound and something whistled past my head and punched a spidery hole in my windshield. I would have zigzagged, but Carol Way was too narrow now, barely wider than my car, so I just put my head down and ransacked the lighted curbside as it slid past, and there it was, the first Whitley driveway, and I accelerated past it to the second one and cut the wheel right, too fast, slamming against the curb and banging my head on the roof of the car, but I got it under control and powered up the driveway that pointed to the top of the hill, to the Southern colonial mansion I’d broken into about six months ago.

  And behind me, the Humvee made the turn and slowed, taking the narrow drive at a sane speed, because, after all, where could I go?

  Around was where I could go. The Whitley’s driveway was a big U that ran behind the house, past a gravel parking area smugly populated by a Lamborghini and a Bentley, and then swung left and went straight back down the hill to Carol Way again, and within eight to ten seconds, that’s where I was, tires hitting high C as I pushed the car’s weight downhill, seeing the Humvee’s brake lights in my mirror, stuck partway up the second driveway, and knowing that there was no way it could get up and over the loop behind the house and back down again in time to catch me before I could turn off and lose myself in the web of streets that crisscross the hills above Ventura.

  I thought for a second about pulling in somewhere and waiting for them, then trying to track them to wherever they’d go to report, but then I looked at the bullet hole in the windshield and chose the better part of valor. I went home.

  I said, “He said, ‘Some asshole shot him before I could.’ ”

  “Lemme get these pronouns straight,” Louie the Lost said. He was doing something mildly disgusting with his tongue to the end of a new cigar. Someday I’m going to videotape it and show it to him, and he’ll never do it again. “He, the first he, the one that’s doing the saying, that’s Vinnie DiGaudio, and the him who was shot, that’s the Brit reporter, Derek something—”

  “Bigelow.”

  “See?” Louie said, lipping the cigar in a way that made my whole face itch. “See how much easier conversation is when you use names? As I understand it, Vinnie DiGaudio told you that some asshole, we could call him X if we wanted—”

  “Let’s not.”

  “That some asshole shot Derek Bigelow, ace reporter, before he, Vinnie DiGaudio, could get around to it.”

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “And you didn’t,” Louie said. He was rummaging his pockets for matches. “And that the cops are going to come looking for him, Vinnie, I mean, because he told a bunch of people that he was planning to kill old Derek.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He tell you why he wanted to kill him?”

  “Ah-ah,” I said. “Pronouns.”

  “Why he, Vinnie DiGaudio,” Louie said, releasing the words into the air in precisely bitten syllables, “wanted to kill him, Derek.”

  “No. Said it shouldn’t matter, since he wasn’t the murderer. But that I should work fast because pretty quick somebody’s going to talk to the cops about him, Vinnie, yakking about wanting to kill—oh, hell, you know who he wanted to kill.”

  Louie had given up on his jacket and shirt pockets and was now searching his pants, the unlit cigar sticking out of his mouth like a miniature Louisville Slugger. “Always a good way to work up to offing somebody,” he said. “Tell as many people about it as possible. Buy an ad if you got the budget. Maybe a skywriter.”

  He started looking around the room, his ponytail bobbing. Louie was short, wide, and darkly Mediterranean, and if his face had been a house, his forehead would have been the living room, since it occupied about half of the front of his head. For a while he’d worn bangs, but he had a natural curl in his hair, and the bangs flipped up at the ends with a twee effect that made him look like a hitman for the Campfire Girls. Recently he’d grown his hair out and pulled it back with a rubber band in the ever-popular dude-tail so beloved of tiny music executives in pressed jeans. He gave up on searching the motel room, probably because he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore, patted his shirt pocket again, and said, “Got a match?”

  “Here.”

  “You know, my wife, Alice, she’s been working with this broad who teaches people how to get things done,” he said, and took a deep drag, looking cross-eyed at the coal. “Alice, she’s got problems with what she calls completions, meaning everything gets kind of half-done and then it lies around the house until I straighten things up and then Alice gets all crazy because she can’t find stuff. Like she’ll open all the bills and organize them alphabetically or by color or size or how she feels about the store they come from or some other fucking thing, and then she’ll tear a bunch of checks out of our check book and then she’ll go on a cruise. And a week later, we’re getting late notices and she’s yelling about how I can’t leave stuff alone, and I’m messing up all her systems.”

  By now Louie’s head was so wreathed in smoke I could hardly see him. “So she hires this broad, and for a hundred fifty bucks an hour, the broad tells her—good thing you’re sitting down—to make lists. I coulda done that for free, but it wouldn’t have meant nothing. But, see the problem with lists is that you gotta organize shit in order of importance. Otherwise, you keep adding stuff to the top of the list, and before you know it, your list says stuff like Go to K-Mart for Michael Bolton CD
and Don’t forget kibble, and you find yourself sitting in your car, listening to Michael Bolton with a trunk full of kibble, and you learn that you can cross off number three on your list, because bang, somebody just capped your journalist.”

  I said, “Michael Bolton?”

  He took the cigar out of his mouth and regarded the cylinder of ash on the end with the kind of satisfaction God probably felt on the Seventh Day. “For Alice. See, the thing is, this kind of lets you off the hook about your rules, don’t it? Because you say no murders, but this guy DiGaudio, the reason he’s pissed off is because he didn’t commit a murder.”

  I said, “He gave me money.”

  “Yeah?” Louie waved the smoke away. “You in the giving vein?”

  “You’ve been going to your extension course. Richard III, right?” Crooks have more time than most people for self-improvement, but Louie was one of the few I knew who took advantage of it. This year it was a seminar on Shakespeare.

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t miss it. Good old Richard, nothing stopped him. We’re in the third week on the histories.”

  “Aren’t the histories tough?”

  “Naaahhh. They’re a snap. Kings are just crooks with better hats.”

  “I always had trouble keeping them straight,” I said. “All those Richards and Henrys.”

  “No problem. But tell me something, how the hell do you multiply and divide with Roman numerals?” He sucked long and happily on the cigar and then used the little tool he poked the cigar tip with to scratch the surface of the table. “Let’s say Richard III and Henry VIII and two dukes stick up a place, some minor palace, okay? They get, I don’t know, CCCMMXXXVIII shillings or so. Then they gotta divide that by IV.” He scratched the problem, division sign and all, on the table, and regarded it. “I mean, come on. Look at that.”

  I said, “It probably came down to who had the biggest gun.” I pulled out the stack of bills DiGaudio had given me and divided it in half by eye, then tossed it to Louie, who picked it up and dropped it into his pocket. “That should be twenty-five hundred. Count it.”