“Nobody,” he finally said. “Nobody else knew. I don’t talk to many people.” He pulled the sleeve of his caftan down over his left hand and used the cloth to blot his forehead.
“You talked to people about wanting to kill Bigelow.”
“Yeah, I … I was dumb. I talked to a couple of people about, you know, doing him for me. And they talked to some other people. And then somebody goes and does him, and here I am, sitting out in plain view, big as a house, waiting for someone to pin it on me.”
“Who’d you talk to about doing him?”
“Mmmmmmmmm.” His eyes were flicking back and forth, as though the question were floating in the air in front of him and he was trying to see past it. Finally, he said, “Stanley Hopper.”
“Stanley? Stanley’s a patzer. Let’s say you lost a couple of books and the library’s on your tail, that’s the kind of thing Stanley can take care of.”
“Stanley’s who I talked to. And he talked to a couple guys, I don’t know who.”
“And Stanley didn’t know I was coming last night.”
“Uh-uh.”
“So there’s nobody you can think of who might have been sitting out there waiting for me.”
“I said no.”
“And you’d tell me if you could think of someone.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Get the fuck off me. You’re all I got right now. You think I’d go through all this to get you here, and then ask somebody to cap you? What kind of crazy is that?”
“Vinnie,” I said. “What’s your secret?”
His eyes involuntarily flicked left, to the hallway the music had come from, but he brought them back to me, licked his lips again, and said, “Secret? I don’t have secrets.” He covered his hand with the sleeve again, but thought better of wiping away the moisture on his forehead. “Me, I’m just a guy. I got nothing to hide. My life is so open I might as well live outdoors.”
“That was quick,” Ronnie said as I slid behind the wheel.
“I know when I’m not wanted.” I eased the car into a three-point turn, brushing DiGaudio’s azaleas, so I could head back down the driveway.
“Lookit,” Ronnie said, regarding the miscellaneous assortment of vehicles pulled up to the house. “The man either has company or he collects crappy cars.”
“I think he’s got company. I heard some music playing.” I reached down between the seats and came up with my notepad and the pen that’s permanently clipped to it. “Take down those license plate numbers, would you?”
“I thought musicians made money,” she said, jotting down numbers and letters. “What a bunch of junkers.”
“Got them all?”
“Yeah.” Ronnie dropped the pad, ran a finger over the dashboard, and looked at it as though she expected it to be covered in old phlegm. “Speaking of junkers.”
“Were we?”
“Why are you driving this thing? You’re in Los Angeles, where your car is sort of your astral projection, right? I’ve only been here six months, and I already know that by LA standards, this is a really crappy car.”
I was still watching the mirror. “You think?”
“A white Toyota. I mean, please. With dents.” She put a finger against the bullet hole in the window. “Not to mention this. And the one in the back window.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it has a kind of battered charm, a uniquely soigné sort of post-pizzazz distinction.”
“I should introduce you to Donald. He could get you something nice.”
“White Toyotas are the world’s only invisible automobile. I could blow through a stop sign in this car, right in front of a cop, and not get ticketed. I have literally driven out of a dead-end street with a burglar alarm ringing in a house behind me, and sailed right past two private security cars coming the other way. They didn’t even glance at me.”
“If you say so.” She drew a fingertip circle around the bullet hole. “Where are we going now?”
“I’m going to Tarzana to see my daughter, and you’re going home, unless you want me to drop you somewhere else.”
“Home, I guess.”
We were on Sunnyslope, heading down toward Ventura. “Tell me what Derek was working on.”
“If you’re taking me home and dropping me off, you can damn well say please.”
“Consider it said.”
“I’ll consider it said when I hear it.”
“Okay. Pleeeeeeeeease?”
“We didn’t talk much, unless he was just totally jammed on powder. But then, he got jammed a lot. Said he had something going on Warren Wallace, you know, the actor. He’d been in a kids’ Ku Klux Klan, like junior bigots, when he was twelve or something, and, let’s see, oh, he was nosing around that Latina singer, somebody Lopez, he thought he had some stuff on her. And there was some big deal about singers from the fifties, people nobody’s thought about in half a century.”
“Someone was thinking about them. That’s the one that got him killed.” I explained about Derek’s having been dumped on Giorgio’s Walk of Fame star.
“But who’d care?” she asked. “Why would the National Trashbag, or whatever the paper’s called, want something about those guys? Talk about over. They’re probably all old and fat or even dead, and who cares?”
“Those are all good questions,” I said. “And I’m asking them, too.” I hung a left onto the Hollywood Freeway on-ramp. “Let’s say for a minute that Derek landing on Giorgio’s star is just a coincidence. Can you think of anything else at all that he was focused on?”
“Other than that actor and Lopez? Jeez. You know, sometimes when he was jammed, I was, too. He shared once in a while. Let me work on it for a minute.” We merged into the traffic, which was miraculously in motion, as opposed to its usual state of total immobility. “He said one other thing, but it can’t have anything to do with LA. He said he’d discovered the Loch Ness Monster.”
“You’ll call me later?”
She was leaning against the driver’s door, head halfway into the car. The sun in her hair was almost blinding. This close, she smelled of talcum powder.
“Either later or tomorrow morning.”
“Wake me up in the morning,” she said. “I’d like that.”
“Boy,” I said. “This is serious.”
“It’s about this serious,” she said, and she leaned the rest of the way in and kissed me, not a virtuoso, high-concept, ten-out-of-ten, Olympic-level kiss, just the kind of kiss that you think about when you think about being kissed, more sweetness than anything else, but with a shot of cayenne in it. Then she pulled back and grinned at me. She said, “I knew you’d taste like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you. Call me, or you’re meat.” She turned around and went into the apartment house, and I found myself studying the widow’s backside in the faded jeans with a surprising pang at parting rather than the mild case of heat-friction I usually experience when I’m watching a well-shaped female backside. I was actually going to miss her. So I felt guilty when the door closed behind her and I picked up the phone to call Louie and tell him to get someone to watch Ronnie’s apartment for the next twenty-four hours, and follow her wherever she went.
“I thought you guys were glued to each other,” Louie said. “I figured you were talking baby names by now.”
“Louie,” I said. “What’s the first rule of homicide?”
“Oh, yeah,” Louie said. “Right. The spouse.”
The house sat back from the street, making room for a couple of lopsided orange trees that were still struggling to recover from an overenthusiastic pruning I’d given them five or six years back. I’d bought the place when Kathy and I got married, fifteen years ago. Energized by newlywed optimism, I’d painted the place, built the garage by hand, and dug most of the hole for the pool in back before coming to my senses and hiring someone. I’d removed the old, crummy front door that you could have knocked down with a blunt remark and replaced it with a very heavy o
ne of solid oak, equipped with half a dozen good locks. Even though I’d resigned myself to the idea that the house was now Kathy’s, I still thought of that door as mine.
So I was surprised when it was opened by someone I’d never seen before.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah, yourself. Who the hell are you?”
He grinned, giving me a glimpse of several yards of silver wire woven through some crooked but soon-to-be-straight teeth. “You’re her dad,” he said.
“That takes care of one of us,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Tyrone.”
“And?”
“And? Oh, and. I’m Rina’s friend.” Tyrone was almost as tall as I was, but weighed maybe forty pounds less. He had a waist that was smaller around than my thigh and eyes the color of fallen leaves. He wasn’t just black, he was on the far side of black, so dark the brown eyes looked almost beige.
“Really,” I said from the center of a cloud of mutually exclusive feelings. “Where’s Rina?”
“In the bathroom. Like girls always are.” The smile, which was very broad, disappeared. “Oh, gosh. I’m in the middle of the doorway, huh?” He stepped back to allow me in.
“Thanks,” I said. “So.” I stopped and tried to figure out how to put it and then gave up. “What are you guys doing?”
“Your project,” he said. “The Little Elvises. We’ve got some shit you—I mean, some stuff you won’t believe.”
“Really.” I ran through ten or twelve possible responses and said, “Great. That’s great.”
“These kids, most of them, they were really hapless.”
The word stopped me, and Tyrone gave me a victor’s grin. “Hapless,” he said. “As in, not possessing any hap.”
“Is that him?” Rina called from the back of the house.
“Is that he,” I corrected, mostly to get even for hapless.
“Yeah,” Rina said. “That’s him. Daddy, the guy who probably just scared you is Tyrone. Come on, I’m in my room.”
“After you,” Tyrone said.
I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and headed down the hall.
I hadn’t been inside the house for a while, since I usually picked Rina up outside when we had our afternoons together. It wasn’t that Kathy and I didn’t get along. We just didn’t seem to have much to say to each other, and after all we’d been through together, that made me sad. She was on her third replacement since the split, this guy Bill. Rina was right, there wasn’t really anything wrong with Bill’s nose, at least physically. The problem with Bill’s nose was that he was sticking it into what I still thought of as my family.
I glanced into the master bedroom as I passed it, looking for, I don’t know, a plaid wool shirt or a brace of recently shot ducks. According to Rina, Bill was an enthusiastic hunter, a guy who could head out into the nuclear winter with a gun over his shoulder and kill his family’s radioactive meat. Whereas I’d go out and steal it, so I guess Kathy was moving up in the world.
The bedroom was reassuringly free of fresh game and it still looked pretty girly, and I felt my spirits rise. Bill hadn’t taken up residence yet. I felt marginally better about not having knotted Ronnie Bigelow’s hair in my fist and dragged her into Blitzen at the North Pole, which was what the part of me that’s probably most like Bill had wanted to do. I had an unfamiliar sensation of holding the moral high ground.
“We’ve found more than you can imagine,” Rina said at the door to her room. I put my arms around her and grabbed a peek over her shoulder at the bed, which was tightly made, without even the kind of wrinkles that would be caused by someone sitting on it, and there were two chairs pulled up in front of Rina’s computer. Some spring somewhere underneath my heart uncoiled a little, and breathing got easier.
“More than she even had for her paper,” Tyrone said behind me.
“Tyrone’s in my modern media class,” Rina said. “He did this amazing paper about lynching souvenirs. I’m frittering away my time doing little Elvises and he’s doing lynching, like, merchandise. Did you know that towns in the south used to sell postcards of lynchings and little nooses and miniature signs that said stuff like NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU IN THIS TOWN?”
I said, “Huh.” Something more seemed to be called for, so I added, “How about that?”
Tyrone laughed. “Yeah. How about that?”
“Is that sick or what?” Rina said. “Like in the Middle Ages, with splinters of the True Cross, only even grosser.”
“Only one True Cross,” Tyrone said. “Lot of lynching trees.”
“But your stuff,” Rina said. “You’re not going to believe it. It’s like nobody’s obscure any more. Whoever you are, if you ever did anything anywhere, there’s whole cartons of stuff on you, and it’s all available.”
“If you know where to look,” Tyrone said.
“Oh, come on,” Rina said, and her dimples made a brief appearance. “You could have found it all.”
“In a year, maybe.”
“I hate to interrupt all this mutual validation,” I said. “But maybe you could show me something.”
“Sure.” Rina stepped aside to let me get to the computer. “Who do you want first?”
“Giorgio.”
“I knew it. What’s that word, you know, when things work together and it’s kind of an accident?”
“Synchronicity,” Tyrone and I said together. Tyrone held up an open hand for a high five, and I blundered into a reciprocal gesture that couldn’t have been clumsier if I’d been in a straitjacket. Tyrone grinned but had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.
“That’s it,” Rina said. “Giorgio was the only one I didn’t really focus on in my paper, so he was the most fun to research, you know? ’Cause it was all new to me. So sit down and look at all this.”
All this was a veritable blizzard of facts, hype, urban myths, statistics, photos, fan clubs, love letters, concert souvenirs, scrapbook pages, mp3 files of Giorgio imitating someone who was singing, everything except the kid’s fingerprints and social security number.
“Here’s the recap,” Rina said, pulling a stack of pages out of her printer. “Born in 1943, in Philadelphia. Had a little trouble with the cops when he was twelve or thirteen or something, pre-shave, anyway. He got arrested for trying to buy liquor—boy, thirteen’s pretty young to try that one—and he was in a stolen car another time, although he wasn’t driving and it looked like he didn’t know it was stolen. For a kid in that neighborhood, he was a good boy. Father was a roofer, mother, who’s still alive, was a housewife. They’d probably call her a homemaker today.”
“Your mother always called herself a housewipe,” I said, “because—”
“Because she spent most of her time wiping stuff,” Rina said. “That joke is still alive and well. Got a laugh out of Bill recently.”
“Good,” I said. “Glad to know Kathy’s found someone who’s easily amused.”
“He actually laughs at the funny papers.”
I suppose I said something, but in my head I was running a sort of equation: funny papers=morning paper=Bill in my house at breakfast=Bill spending night while Rina is here=Junior killing Bill.
“Got discovered by that guy DiGaudio sitting on his front stoop,” Rina was saying when I surfaced. She was looking at the pages in her hand. “Whatever a stoop is. He was sixteen, so it was 1959. DiGaudio seems to have driven around all the time—kind of creepy, huh?—just searching for kids who had a look, you know, that sort of Elvis thing? He’d promise them the moon and sign them up, and three weeks later they’d be on this show called American Dance Hall that I guess everybody watched back then, and a week after that they’d be on Billboard’s Hot 100. They’d get towed around the country, singing on a bill with half a dozen other acts.”
“White acts,” Tyrone said.
“Sure. It would have been cruel to put them onstage with black acts.”
“Cruel to put Giorgio on a stage anywhere,” Tyrone said.
“You don’t get it, Tyrone,” Rina said, sounding like her mother. “All he had to do was stand there. It wasn’t like anybody could hear him. He just came on stage, and the girls screamed. I found a contract online that has what they called ‘The Giorgio Clause’ in it. It says that DiGaudio Enterprises has to turn over two hundred dollars from the ticket sales to pay for people to wash the seats after the show. Because so many girls peed themselves.”
I wrenched myself away from the deep red zone of revenge on Bill to say, “For him? That lox? The kid I saw on YouTube?”
“Lox?” Rina said. “He was beautiful, even if he didn’t have any talent. How often do you see someone who’s really beautiful? Pretty, sure, cute, sure, but not beautiful. That’s why he turned into a movie star.”
My cell phone rang. “You just stay here,” I said to Rina. “Here, in this parallel universe where there was a movie star named Giorgio, and I’ll be right back.” I put the phone to my ear and said, “Hi,” as I went into the hall.
“Got a pencil?” DiGaudio the cop said.
“No hello? No how you doing?” I said, searching my pockets. “Hang on a second.” I got out the pad and pen I’d brought in from the car, and put the pad against the wall. “Shoot.”
“Current driver’s license,” DiGaudio said. “Issued three years ago. Lorne, with an E, Henry Pivensey.”
“Lorne Henry what?”
“Pivensey.” He spelled it. “First two syllables, Piven, like Niven as in David Niven, but with a P. S-e-y as in z-e-e. Pivensey.”
“Got it.”
“DOB 10/16/72. Height five feet six and a fraction. Brown hair and eyes. Got a tattoo on his right upper arm, says ABANDON HOPE.”
“Who’s Hope?”
“Funny. Why aren’t you asking?”
“Okay, I’ll ask. Since when do drivers’ licenses note tattoos?”
“They don’t. The tattoo is on his arrest sheet.”
“Awwwww,” I said, thinking about Marge. “How do I get into this stuff?”
“It’s a bad sheet, too,” DiGaudio said. “And I don’t think this has anything to do with my uncle.”
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