Little Elvises Page 7

  “Well, you distracted me, too.”

  “See what I mean? It may be true, but it’s not an answer.” She eyed the veal chop on my plate. “You going to finish that?”

  “I’ve barely started it.”

  “That’s not an answer, either. Yes or no?”

  “Every last ounce. And then I’m going to take the bone home and have it bronzed.”

  “Jiminy. So what’s the deal? What are you, a crook or a cop?”

  “I’m a burglar. That’s where my heart is, as people say these days. But once in a while, I help out other crooks who have a problem, who got ripped off or something and for obvious reasons can’t go to the cops. It’s a sideline, sort of. And now I’ve got a cop pressuring me to do a favor for him, or he’ll put me in jail for something I didn’t do, and the favor involves the fascinating question of who killed Derek. And the woman who owns the motel I’m living in at the moment thinks something has happened to her daughter and asked me to check it out. And my waist is thirty-two and my inseam is thirty-four. How’d you get from Chicago to LA?”

  She pulled the bread basket over and rifled through it. Before we left the apartment, she’d replaced the fork through her hair with a chopstick, which she deemed dressier. The way she ate, it was surprising she didn’t have a whole table setting in her hair. “You’re more interesting than I am,” she said.

  “To you, maybe. Chicago is what, about seventeen hundred miles from LA?”

  “That’s one way to look at it. Are you hoarding the butter?” I pushed it over to her. “Another way to look at it is that Chicago is three guys away from LA. After I chased Donald off, in Chicago, I got kind of hooked up with DeWayne, and you know he had to be hot to overcome a name like that. Do you think some names are hot and some names aren’t?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Yeah? How do you feel about Ronnie?”

  “I like Veronica better.”

  “You and everybody else, except me. And, I’ve got to tell you, you’ve got more to overcome in the name department than DeWayne did. I mean, Junior? What’s the least hot name for a woman?”

  “Tillie. So, DeWayne. What did he do, run numbers?”

  “DeWayne was a dealer. The straightest, most organized dealer ever. Never touched anything more stimulating than chocolate. Had a six-state route and ran it regularly. Like a milkman, but with dope. And he was gorgeous. If there’d been a dope dealer’s calendar, he’d have been Mr. January to get everybody’s year off to a good start.”

  “But the relationship didn’t last,” I said, cutting into the veal chop and watching her eyes follow my hands. “Did his beauty fade tragically, or what?”

  “Actually, I developed a weensy substance abuse problem. I got to the point where I needed four lines to tie my shoes. And it finally hit me that DeWayne, with his infinite stash, probably wasn’t the ideal companion, so I split. We were out on his route, in Taos, New Mexico. He had artist clients there. Artists do a lot of dope, did you know that? So when this guy Leon wanted to paint me, I took my suitcase out of DeWayne’s car and started posing.”

  “Leon, he do dope?”

  “Leon didn’t do anything except downers, and I hate downers. That was his appeal, that I didn’t want his dope. How can you just sit there and talk with all that nice food in front of you? Some poor little calf lived and died in a tiny wooden pen so you could have that chop, and you’re not paying any attention at all to it. Do you think if I told you all about how they raise veal, you’d lose your appetite and give it to me?”

  I cut a chunk and put it in my mouth. “Not a chance.” I pushed the plate toward her a couple of inches and then snatched it back. She put half the bread away with a single bite. “So, to recap,” I said, “it was Donald from Trenton to Chicago, DeWayne from Chicago to Taos, and there you are, sober in the desert, posing for downered-out old Leon. Girl and Sand, something like that.”

  “I could have been a piñata for all you’d recognize me. Leon was heavily abstract. What he wanted to paint was the energy field. Everything and everyone had an energy field, he said every day of his life, and he said it very slowly, too. When he looked at me, what he saw was something that looked like the northern lights, if the northern lights were made of string cheese.”

  “What colors?”

  “Whatever he had the most of. Anyway, some guy from Vegas came to Taos and saw Leon’s stuff in a gallery, and it reminded the guy of neon. So he asked Leon to come to Vegas and design some abstract neon for a casino he was building, a casino with a kinda modern-art theme, and Leon saw a chance to paint real energy and he jumped at it. And the fourth night we were in Vegas, I bumped into Derek in the bar at the Venetian, and Derek did that number about, you remember, the novel from the female perspective, and eighteen hours later we had blood alcohol counts high enough to make us flammable, and we were married. And Derek towed me to the city where Fate awaited him, which is to say, LA.”

  “If you’ll excuse a personal comment—”

  She pulled the chopstick out, and her hair tumbled down over her shoulders. “It’s about time.”

  “Your affections seem to be, um, short-lived.”

  “Oh,” she said, running her fingers through the spill of gold to untangle it. “I’m terrible. I might as well be a guy. I even eat like a guy. And you, you eat like Miss Manners is sitting on your lap.”

  “I always think this might be my last free meal, the last one I ever eat outside of prison. So I take my time with it.”

  She stopped, her fingers trapped in a snarl of hair. “Oh. Oh, that’s awful.” Then she gave her hair a hard tug and squinted at me. “Unless it’s bullshit.”

  “It is. Sorry.”

  “No problem, but it’ll cost you.” She grabbed her knife and fork, leaned across the table, and sawed off about a third of my chop. “I’m going to be eating now, so you talk.”

  “Same old story. I’m your normal, everyday burglar, but better. I broke into my first house when I was fourteen. I’ve never been caught, never been charged, because I’m careful. I change the way I go in, I work different hours and different neighborhoods, I steal different kinds of stuff, so I haven’t got a trademark the cops can trace. I know a lot about a lot of things, so I can usually recognize value when I see it. If you had nine pieces of good costume jewelry and one real piece, I’d take the real piece every time. In the personal column, I married my high school sweetheart, but I couldn’t change into who she wanted me to be, which was an insurance salesman, and we split up. On the other hand, we managed to produce my daughter, Rina.”

  “Sweet name,” she said. “How old?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Ooooohhhh. The entrance to the hormonal wind tunnel. How’s she handling it?”

  “So far, so good. She hasn’t hit the stage yet where the entire world seems like a personal imposition. I’m sure it’s coming, but so far she can still look at me without sneering.”

  “Does she know what you do?”

  “Sure. I don’t lie to her, ever.”

  “What’s she think about it?” She was chewing, but I could translate.

  “It worries her. The idea that something might happen to me. Kids are pretty conservative. They rebel, but they’re not good with uncertainty.”

  “I guess. I never minded it, but in our house, uncertainty was in long supply. We might not have had enough money to make the rent or buy dinner, but we always had plenty of uncertainty.” She put her fork down and brushed her hands together. “And that’s enough of that. I have to save some of the tragedy for tomorrow. It’d be terrible to run out of tragedy on the first date.”

  “One more question. Other than hanging with bad boys, what do you do?”

  “Whatever I want. I devote one hundred percent of my energy to doing exactly what I want. When I was a kid, I looked around at all the people who worked for a living, and it seemed to me that the living they were working for wasn’t worth the work they were doing. If I have to work, l
ike if I run out of money or I’m between guys or something, I tend bar. It’s a good portable skill that pays pretty well, and since you’re a thief, I’ll also admit that it has a high skim potential. I don’t need much, just a place to sleep and some books. Derek had a wad of money in our joint account, courtesy of Thad Pierce, so I’m okay for a while. When I’m not, I’ll go back to mixing cosmopolitans and flirting with drunk guys. And then I’ll quit again.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “For now, anyway. It’s cute to be poor when you’re young. Lots of art about it, operas and everything. It’s not so cute when you’re old.” She rested an elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her hand. “So,” she said, “your place or mine?”

  I actually had to think about it for a moment. “Neither. Not yet.”

  “What is this?” she said. “A scruple?”

  “A daughter. I haven’t been with anybody since Kathy and I broke up, and if you and I make the transition, I’m not sure how Rina would take it.”

  “And you’d tell her,” Ronnie said, “because you never lie to her.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Unbelievable,” she said. “I finally meet a good bad boy, and I can’t have him.”

  “Well,” I said, “not yet, anyway.”

  “Nobody called you,” Popsie snarled through a two-inch crack. Looking at the one visible eye between the door and the door frame, I revised my estimate of her age upward: she had to be in her mid-sixties, and still bench-pressing. “He’s not expecting you.”

  “It’s good for him,” I said. “People who never get surprised stop developing. They might as well be rhododendrons.”

  “I’ll have to ask.” She started to close the door, looked down, and said, “Move your foot.”

  “When I’m inside,” I said. “Then I’ll move it to walk. Till then, it stays where it is. I don’t wait outside for people.”

  “He’s not going to like it.”

  I put the fingers of my left hand on the inside of my right wrist and took my pulse. “Looks like I’m okay with that.”

  Popsie said, “Shit,” and opened the door. By the time I got through it, I was already watching her broad-shouldered back recede down the hallway. Her boots squeaked on the polished wood.

  “Should I lock it?” I called after her. “There’s no telling who’ll turn up.”

  She didn’t respond, just rounded the first corner. I closed the door and moved quickly behind her, looking into the first room I passed, which had nothing but two picture windows with a lot of late-afternoon sun coming through them, and the second, which had windows of louvered glass, and the third, which had a couple of good old-fashioned windows that opened in the time-honored, burglar-favored way, with a lower pane you could raise. It was a quick detour to unlock one of them, just slip the semicircular latch that fastened the top pane to the bottom.

  All the windows, including this one, were heavily alarmed, but I hadn’t expected anything else.

  I made up a little time, so I wasn’t too far behind her when we came into the semicircular room where I’d met DiGaudio the night before. Popsie kept on going, heading right, down another hallway. The big white couch was heavily dented in the center where he’d been sitting, where he apparently always sat. A creature of habit. I figured, what the hell, and sat in the middle of the dent and waited.

  There was music coming from somewhere in the house, basic fifties-simple, just drums, bass, guitar, and a keyboard of some kind, maybe an old-fashioned Hammond organ. The instruments weren’t quite together, a little ragged. The guitar was carrying the riff, five notes in an ascending scale, which repeated three times. It sounded like an instrumental intro, the kind of thing record producers used to stick on the front of songs to give disk jockeys something to talk over. Then I heard a voice, mixed pretty far down, definitely not Pavarotti or even Bobby Vinton. Then the music stopped for a second, somebody said something, a pair of drumsticks clicked off the beat, and the instrumental intro began once more.

  The music got louder as the organ riff rang out, and then a door closed and the level dropped again. A moment later, it got loud, and then it stopped completely. I waited, and patience was rewarded, sort of, when DiGaudio stalked into the room.

  He was draped from head to foot in a black caftan that swirled around his bare feet as he came toward me, and he was holding a half-peeled banana. He didn’t look happy.

  “Business hours,” he said. “You ever hear of business hours?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What do I look like I’m doing, playing forts?”

  “Get out of my seat.” He turned sideways and edged his way between the curved couch and the curved coffee table, and I scooted down to make room. “This better be something.”

  “Was Derek Bigelow blackmailing you?”

  The question stopped him, although the caftan swung back and forth like a hoop skirt for a second. “Kind of bullshit is that?”

  “Bigelow was a blackmailer. Was he putting a knife to you?”

  “No, but what if he was? I didn’t kill him, and your job is to prove I didn’t.”

  “I can only do so much in the dark.”

  He sat down, looked at the banana, and dropped it on the table. “What could anybody blackmail me about? I’m, like, fifty years ago. Since the fucking Beatles ruined everything, I done nothing except gain weight. Who’s gonna blackmail me, Jenny Craig?”

  “You were, or are, mobbed up.”

  He shook his head slowly, like someone who’s been asked the same question too often. “Like I said, you’re forgetting why you’re here. But just to close down this particular line, I was never part of the mob. J. Edgar Hoover spent hundreds of thousands of my tax dollars trying to pin me with that, probably because he wanted to meet some of my boys. All that money, all those FBI guys in bad suits hanging around, what did they find out? That the mob wanted to run me. Salerno, that pinhead, him and the other one, they both wanted in. Wanted in, as in weren’t in.”

  “And what? You told them no?”

  DiGaudio snickered. “Right, and I spit in their face, too. No, I didn’t tell them no. I held them off as long as I could and then one night at four A.M. I got the hell out of Philly and took most of the kids with me. Came out here, got a couple of them into pictures, and waited it out while those dickheads ground each other into hamburger. Don’t you know anything about Philly?”

  “I know about the mob wars.” And I knew that Salerno and Caponetto weren’t the kinds of guys someone like DiGaudio could have “held off,” not without a lot of help. Something to think about.

  He spread his hands at the obviousness of it all. “Well, yeah, the mob wars. So they all blew each other away, and here we were, in Palm Tree Land, making records, making movies.”

  “I don’t remember your clients making movies.”

  “No shit. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “Whadya think, you should remember it in your DNA or something? We’re talking 1960, ’62, in there somewhere. Your mom was probably thirteen then, ask her. Six movies, all dogs, I mean peeeyuuuu, but they all did okay moneywise. Little girls showed up. Brought all their friends with them. I had the kids appear at some of the shows. Put them on the road with a pickup band, and they did a live twenty minutes for maybe the first two, three days the picture was on. Packed the little girls in, didn’t cost much of nothing. Kids traveled in buses, band played for cigarettes. Charged an extra four bucks for the live show, half a buck for an autograph. Some of those places, they sat two thousand people. Eight thousand for an hour’s work. Multiply that times two shows a day, three days per city, ten, twelve cities, and you’re talking about money, for those days, anyway. Wouldn’t keep a rock star these days in Kleenex.”

  “Then what did Bigelow want with you?”

  DiGaudio picked up the banana and took a bite. The smell bloomed beneath my nose. “None of your fucking business.”

  “Okay, he wasn’t blackmailing
you. Let’s say he was looking for a story for one of the rags he sold to.”

  “Let’s say you change the subject.”

  “Fine. Why was his body left on Giorgio’s star?”

  His lower lip came up and then went down and came up again. “Say what?”

  “You didn’t know? He was dumped on Giorgio’s square yard of the Walk of Fame.”

  “No,” he said, not so much a contradiction as an all-encompassing denial that the world could work like that. He looked past me at the wall, his mind obviously in high gear.

  “Afraid so.”

  “No,” he said again. He cleared his throat, and then he cleared it again. “No, how would I know anything about that? I didn’t kill him, remember?” But he had beads of sweat on his forehead.

  Might as well turn up the heat. “Who knew I was coming here last night?”

  He looked back at me as though he’d forgotten I was in the room. “Nobody.”

  “Well, let’s start with Cousin Paulie the cop, you, and Helga the house Nazi, or whatever her name is.”

  “Popsie. Her name is—”

  “You and Popsie and Paulie and who?”

  DiGaudio started peeling one of those little white strips from the inside of the banana peel, not looking at it, just fidgeting with his fingers. “Who cares?” He balled up the white thread and flicked it onto the table. “What’s this about?”

  “Last night, when I left, there was a Humvee waiting for me outside. Tried to push me off the side of the hill, and then took a shot at me.”

  DiGaudio’s chin fell onto his chest as though his head had suddenly increased in weight. He shifted his eyes around the room, licked his lips, and then dropped the banana back on the table. “Took a shot at you?”

  I didn’t say anything, just watched him. He was as pale as someone getting off a roller coaster.