Little Elvises Read online

  Louie was looking at the long division problem again. “I trust you.”

  “In the interest of accuracy. I mean, it looked kind of cool, splitting it that way, but suppose I got it wrong? Suppose you only got twenty-one hundred?”

  “Make a deal with you,” Louie said, tapping the pocket with the money in it. “You can count it and divide it up again if you were wrong, or I can count it, and we keep whatever we’ve got, no matter how it turns out.”

  “You’re on.”

  Louie pulled out his share, folded the hundreds around the index finger of his left hand, and flipped through with the thumb and forefinger of his right, so fast I couldn’t follow. When he’d finished, he said, “Okay,” and put the money back in his pocket.

  “What do you mean, okay? How’d it come out?”

  “I didn’t say I’d tell you,” he said.

  “Fine.” I slipped my share of the money into the pocket of my T-shirt. “So here’s the deal, here’s what I need help with. And there’ll be more money, assuming we both survive.”

  “Sounds good.” He looked down at the small round table with the Roman numerals division problem scratched into it and said, “You know these people are really crazy.”

  “Which people?”

  “These people. Marge ’n Ed. The people who put this place together.” He gripped the table by the circumference and rotated it until he’d turned it halfway. Screwed to the edge was a small rectangular brass plate I hadn’t seen before. Engraved on it were the words, For good elves only. “Whaddya suppose they do with the bad elves?” Louie said. “Hang them up in stockings in front of the fireplace and smoke them like hams? Make ’em listen to NPR?”

  “What’s wrong with NPR?”

  “Oh,” Louie said, screwing up his face, “just spare me all that fucking concern, okay? All that sensitivity. All those guys named Noah.”

  “Do you want to hear what I need help with, or would you rather foam at the mouth?”

  “Sure,” he said sourly. “But next month, stay someplace better.”

  “Okay. First, I need to know everything anybody’s saying about Bigelow’s murder. Anything, I don’t care how stupid it sounds. Second, I need to know about the Hammer robbery.”

  “That the judge?”

  “Yeah, and his wife.”

  “Stinky Tetweiler,” Louie said.

  “Why? Why Stinky?”

  “Jade. They took a fucking bulldozer full of jade. All sorts of carved jade from various centuries that were renowned for people being really good at carving jade. Stinky’s the place you’d take that kind of stuff.”

  Louie the Lost never ceases to amaze me. Since he destroyed his credibility as a getaway driver by losing his way in Compton after a diamond robbery—a bunch of jacked-up white gangsters in a Cadillac with a million in ice in the trunk, and half the black population of LA staring in through the windows—Louie has turned into one of the premier telegraph stations of the LA underworld. If he doesn’t know it, nobody does, and if he can’t find a piece of information, it’s buried deeper than Vladimir Putin’s conscience.

  “Is there a third?” he said. “You said first and second. Is there a third?”

  “Well, I’d like to know who tried to kill me tonight, and how they knew I’d be up in the hills when the only people who were supposed to know were Paulie DiGaudio the cop, Vinnie DiGaudio the crook, and me.”

  “I got a feeling about that,” Louie said, getting up and giving a friendly pat to the pocket with the money in it. “My feeling is that you’ll get another look at them next time they try.”

  Louie was out tugging on wires or whatever he does when he’s finding stuff out, and I drove over to a little coffee house on Ventura that had its own computers and would sell you half an hour online to go with your pumpkin-butternut squash latte. Sure enough, there was an email from Rina with a couple of links to the FBI site.

  Feeling nice and anonymous on the shop’s computers, I clicked on the links and got images of a bunch of really ratty looking documents, badly typed and with all sorts of stuff handwritten diagonally in the margins, liberally crossed out with black marker all over the place to protect both the innocent and the guilty who had good lawyers. The memos detailed a series of wire taps involving Eddie “The Moose” Salerno, one of the Philly big guys from the fifties, and Sammy “The Ferret” Weiss, a lawyer who was clearly not of Italian descent but had been honored with a nickname anyway. What they were talking about was money, naturally, in this case money given to radio stations to play records by Giorgio and also Bobby Angel. After a moment, I recalled that Bobby Angel was the kid who was mentioned in the interview, the one who disappeared. Rina was clearly right—despite all the rows of XXXXXs, it was obvious that these two salamis were talking about DiGaudio.

  Thing is, The Moose was quoted as saying, that fuckin’ Bobby Angel, he can sing a little. So the stations, you know, they’re okay with it. But fuckin’ Giorgio, they’re getting sued because people are breaking their fingers hitting the buttons to change the station, when the fucking record comes on, you know, they’re steering into trees, they’re running over grandmothers.

  Weiss had responded, Not in the towns where he’s been on the TV. Where he’s been on the TV, kids call up and ask for the record. Forget radio, Eddie, radio is last year. The TV is where it’s going. We got to keep getting the kid on the radio just enough to get him on the TV, and then everything takes care of itself. The girlies look at him, and it’s all good, they drive the radio station crazy with calls. And we gotta get the contract, Giorgio’s contract, away from that jerk XXXXXXXXXX.

  So break his fingers, The Moose said.

  Not my department, Weiss responded. Anyway, XXXXXXXXX has a few other kids who bring it in, too. What we got to do, we got to get them all, which means we got to get XXXXXXXXX under control before Caponetto and them get hold of him.

  Caponetto? Oh, yes. Caponetto. The Philly Mob Wars. I’d forgotten about the Philly Mob Wars. Caponetto had won, if you figure that having Eddie The Moose cut into pieces in the kitchen of a restaurant, sauteed with a nice reduction of port wine sauce, and served as a surprise course to some of his partners counted as a win. And, apparently, DiGaudio’s stable of dreamboys was one of the bones the big dogs had been tussling over. My reaction could be summarized in one word, Hmm, and a question: did they get to DiGaudio or not? Was there a chance he wasn’t mobbed up?

  But good Lord, all that was fifty years ago, I thought as I powered off. Who cares any more? Both mobs had been vaporized in the war and its aftermath. No way a gang tug-of-war over someone called Giorgio was connected to any of this.

  And I remained certain of that right up to the time I pulled to the curb at the Hollywood Boulevard address DiGaudio had given me—the address where Derek Bigelow had been found—and discovered that the Walk of Fame star where old Derek’s body had been dropped had one of those old-fashioned record players on it and that it said in brass type, GIORGIO.

  And feeling like my luck had just turned very, very bad, I took the money out of my pocket and counted it. I had nineteen hundred dollars, and Louie had walked away with thirty-one hundred.

  B. Harrison Tetweiler III wasn’t your garden-variety crook. For one thing, most crooks—if you don’t count politicians—aren’t born rich. Stinky had been conceived dead-center in the unending river of money that flowed from the invention of the perfume strip. It’s safe to say that without Stinky’s family, global fragrance sales would be substantially lower and it would be possible to sleep in the same room as a copy of Vanity Fair.

  Stinky’s legend said he’d tried to lead the straight life of a worthy heir, had tried to diversify the perfume strip industry into niche markets such as paperback aromatherapy books, fried chicken ads for a national chain, and, most memorably, celebrity sweat. He’d somehow gotten hold of a T-shirt that had belonged to Tom Cruise, and he hired a chemist to create a molecule that smelled precisely like the cloth that had once brushed ag
ainst Tom’s armpits, and then he inserted the strips into a few million copies of Entertainment Weekly as a come-on for people who might like to subscribe to the Stars’ Sweat of the Month Club.

  He’d already lined up a year’s worth of media personalities, mostly people who were at a point in their careers where they were waiting in vain for a call from Celebrity Rehab, but it was not to be. Stinky was served with a cease and desist order by the Church of Scientology, which claimed that a person’s “biological fragrance” remains mystically connected to, and is thus a part of, the person’s Operating Thetan, whatever that is, and Stinky’s business was nipped in the bud.

  Thus embittered, people said, Stinky turned to a life of crime. A tragic story of decline.

  And eyewash, start to finish. Stinky was as crooked as Brillo and always had been. He’d been kicked out of the Cub Scouts for paying another kid to climb a rope for him, and that was what Oprah might call a life-defining moment. He’d set foot on the slippery slope, and the first thing he did was steal a pair of skis so he could get down it faster.

  And now, what with crime paying really well, he lived in his own shining city on a hill, a three-story, mostly-glass Rubik’s cube in Encino, not far from Vincent DiGaudio’s spiky dodecahedron. It was 12:30 A.M. by the time I pulled up the driveway, but the lights were blazing away. Stinky rarely went to bed until he’d read the morning papers.

  The door was opened by the latest in a long line of wasp-waisted Filipino houseboys, maybe the fifth one I’d seen over the years. Rumor had it that Stinky underwrote American tours by entire folk-dance troupes from the Philippines, encouraging the most light-footed and narrow-waisted of the boys to overstay their visas and move in to help with the dusting. Later, when he’d succumbed to the hunger for novelty that is the Mark of Cain on all human males, there’d suddenly be a new dance troupe performing down at the Shrine Auditorium, and the former Boy of the Day would be set up with either a donut shop or a florist outlet, depending on which way the kid faced, so to speak. There were supposed to be reunions up at the house on the anniversary of the overthrow of Ferdinand and Imelda, with a dozen or more of Stinky’s formers grilling plantains and whipping up adobo while the others argued over which doilies to put on the table.

  Stinky was in the all-beige living room, sitting at a primly distressed table of white oak. In front of him, on a square of green felt, was a wooden box full of rubies and emeralds, just sitting there the way some families might display a box of shells picked up on their last trip to the beach.

  “How absolutely ripping to see you, Junior,” Stinky said without getting up. “Just ripping. Bearing up all right, are we?” Stinky was born in Tarzana and had spent a total of maybe ten days in London, but he ate a lot of scones.

  “I still have two legs,” I said. “Nice rocks.”

  “Aren’t they,” Stinky said. He picked up ten or twelve and let them trickle through his fingers. They made a disappointingly prosaic clatter as they landed, but they threw off a lot of fire. “Lot of stories collected here, I’d imagine, old boy. Good jewels trail stories behind them. Volumes of stories.”

  “And if it’s all the same to you,” I said, “I’d just as soon not hear them.”

  “Ahh, Junior,” Stinky said in his best disappointed-Sydney-Greenstreet mode. One of the things about Stinky was that he was Sydney Greenstreet if your eyes were closed and Alahar the Alien if they were open, what with the tiny nose and big, slightly sloping eyes. Like Vincent DiGaudio, Stinky’d had some work done, a couple of lifts that had yanked his entire face up like he’d been grabbed by the hair for the Rapture. The surgeries had smoothed everything, tilted his eyes at the corners, and made him look like someone who’d just moved to California from Roswell, New Mexico.

  “Ahh, Stinky,” I replied, pulling out a chair and sitting. Stinky smiled to the extent that his various lifts permitted, and pulled the box of stones about six inches closer to his chest.

  “What is it, then? Have you something for me? Oh, and can I have Ting Ting get you anything?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. Ting Ting hovered discreetly for a moment and then ushered himself out in a way that made it clear that there was a flower shop in his future.

  “Ting Ting?” I asked. “Isn’t that one of the TeleTubbies?”

  “Lightness of spirit,” Stinky said. “That’s what I love best about Filipinos. Lightness of spirit. So buoyant, so unlike the leaden animating energy of the Anglo-Saxon.”

  “I’ve heard they float really well.”

  “Not to cut things short, old bean,” Stinky said, “but I’m on a bit of a tight lead. Show me what you’ve got.”

  “Actually, it’s question time,” I said.

  “Is it?” he said, turning the friendliness down by about 30 percent.

  “Carved jade,” I said. “Seen much lately?”

  “Ah,” Stinky said, scratching his nose. Stinky didn’t know he touched his nose when you shot him in the heart, and I wasn’t going to tell him. “Might have done,” he said cautiously. “Yes, might have done.”

  “All those Chinese craftsmen,” I said. “Craftswomen, too, I suppose. Digging away by candlelight at those smooth green stones with their sharp little tools, coughing their lungs out from the dust. Dying at their tables, the hand extended uselessly, the gouger or whatever it was, dropping one last time from their lifeless fingers—”

  “They wore silk masks over their mouths and noses,” Stinky said. “I assume you have a point.”

  “Carved jade,” I said. “Didn’t I already say that?”

  Stinky didn’t reply, just sat farther back in his chair. He had a ruby the size of a mammoth’s molar in his hand, and he turned it between his fingers without looking at it.

  “See, some was stolen recently,” I said. “Jade, I mean. From a judge, no less. Terrible thing, when a judge can’t even collect carved jade any more without attracting the attention of brutes. Did I say he was a judge?”

  “You did.” He clicked the stone against the table and then glanced down to make sure he hadn’t distressed the wood any further.

  “So, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of effort being put into finding the miscreants who kipped the jade and slammed Mrs. Judge around with their big old automatics.”

  He went after the tip of his nose again. “And if I had seen some lately?”

  “Well, I’d think it would be really imperative to keep even a hint of it from reaching the constables. I mean, I’ve heard directly from them that they’re under a lot of pressure.”

  Stinky pushed his lips out like somebody trying to speak French. “And if I hadn’t seen any?”

  “Same thing. Really, if someone were just to suggest to the cops that bits and pieces of the judge’s collection had passed through this house, I think it would be hard for even Ting Ting to get the place clean enough to withstand a really sincere search. And if they didn’t find the jade, you know how hard they’d look to find something else.” I reached over and picked up one of the stones—a ruby, cold and slippery—and Stinky’s eyes followed my hand until I dropped it back into the box. “For example,” I said.

  “The Hollywood Reservoir,” Stinky said dreamily.

  “What about it?”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that you’ve been found floating there, face-down, some day.” He tossed the ruby back into the box. “What do you want?”

  “Names.”

  “And what do I get? And don’t give me that bushwa about not going to the cops. Of course, you don’t go to the cops, but what do I get in the future?”

  “What do you want?”

  “A job,” he said, not sounding even faintly British. “At some point in the future, I designate a target, you hit it, and I get the proceeds.”

  “All the proceeds?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Just so you understand, Stinky, if I take the deal, there will be an absolutely unbreakable chain leading from me back to you. Jus
t in case it turns out to be a double-dodge and the room is full of cops.”

  He smiled. “I’d expect you to make arrangements of some kind.”

  I smiled back. “And I won’t disappoint your expectations.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll give you a name. But you’re not going to like it.” And he did, he gave me a name.

  And I didn’t like it.

  The name Stinky gave me was enough to make me think about going to the Wedgwood Apartment House and staying there for a year or two, just ordering Chinese and pizza in, and waiting for someone to die.

  Number 302 at The Wedgwood is my rabbit hole. The monthly change of motels is an effective way of avoiding most trouble, since most of those who might want to damage me live outside the law, and despite Hollywood’s love affair with brilliantly twisted criminal masterminds, the majority of crooks can charitably be described as slow learners, people who have trouble finding even someone who stays put. The motel scheme has the added advantage of looking like it’s my method of hiding out. Once someone who’s looking for me figures out the motels, he probably thinks he’ll have me in his sights. In fact, if I ever really need to hide out, Number 302 at the Wedgwood is always waiting.

  No one, and I mean no one, has ever been there.

  In the 1920s, Western Boulevard (as its name suggests) had marked a western margin of urban Los Angeles. West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, and Brentwood were just dirt roads and chaparral at the time, and since Los Angeles’s moneyed elite has, by and large, tended to live on the western edge of things, the area around Western Boulevard was home to some extraordinary apartment buildings, art deco monuments to gracious living that had once housed Mae West and Wallace Beery and other members of the posse of privilege.

  But Los Angeles moved west, and Western Avenue stayed put, and these days the old luxury buildings had mostly been chopped up into smaller places to house Latinos and other recent arrivals. Three of them, though—the Wedgwood and its sister buildings, the Lenox and the Royal Doulton, called the “China” apartments because they’d been named after prominent makers of china—had been bought by syndicates of Koreans, who left the outside of the buildings looking sadly shabby but restored the living spaces to their former grandeur. From the outside, the China buildings were indistinguishable from their sadly declined sisters, but inside they were monuments to 1920s elegance. This approach had the advantage of giving the landlords control of dazzlingly beautiful and extremely expensive apartments with very low property taxes.