“Why not?”
“Mr. Pivensey is no danger to men. On the other hand, if you know a woman who’s anywhere near him, you might tell her to move.”
“Why is it that I never enjoy talking to you?”
“In 2001 Mr. Pivensey was sentenced to three years for beating up a seventeen-year-old girl. She said something unflattering about his shirt, and he broke her nose and one of her cheekbones. She damn near lost an eye. He got out a year and a half later, courtesy of all the periwinkle doilies on the parole board, and got arrested again seven months after that in the investigation of a disappeared waitress named, uh, waitaminute, Laurette Wissert. We never found her, couldn’t make a case the DA would take, but we all knew he killed her. Last time anyone saw her was with him up in Twentynine Palms. She’ll turn up in the desert someday. Some coyote will dig her up, but he’ll never go down for it. And then last year, a couple people saw him try to run over a woman in a parking lot outside Ron’s Market, you know Ron’s, over on Highland?”
“Sure.”
“Tried to hit her a couple of times. Peeled off onto the street, almost banged into a patrol car. So he got arrested, this being a nation of laws, but the woman was too frightened to press charges. We wanted to make a case for attempted murder, but the DA said no. Wouldn’t hold up without a complaint. So your Mr. Pivensey got convicted for reckless driving, paid a fine, and walked. And, since we almost got him on those three, just think how many we don’t know anything about.”
“Why don’t you guys just kill people like that?”
“There are those who claim that we do,” DiGaudio said carefully. “And there are those who claim that we don’t do it often enough. And if you’re taping this call, I’m horrified at the idea of vigilante justice.”
“You got a picture?”
“Sure. Got a nice little gallery of him holding up numbers.”
“Can you send them to me?”
“Oh, sure. Cops send police records to burglars all the time.”
“This guy may have been living with the daughter of someone I know. Now the daughter’s not around.”
“The police,” DiGaudio said. “Remember us? The someone you know should call the police.”
“I’ll pass that along. But don’t be a dick. Send me the pictures.”
For a moment, I thought he’d hang up. But then he said, “Well, we haven’t been doing too good with this guy, have we? It’ll take me a couple of minutes to crop down to the face, get rid of the stuff that says booking photo. I’ll send you two pictures. What email address?”
“Hold on. Rina,” I called. “What’s your email address?”
“Skyspirit at Bluepool-dot-com,” she said.
“Great,” I said. I gritted my teeth and passed the address to DiGaudio.
“Dot … com,” DiGaudio said, obviously concentrating. It was hard not to picture him writing with the tip of his tongue plastered to his upper lip. “Okay, give me a few minutes. And, Bender, listen.”
“I’m only sorry you can’t see me, see how hard I’m listening.”
“Two things. First, don’t let this asshole Pivensey distract you from Vinnie’s problem. And second, if you run across the little prick and the circumstances are right, do us all a favor. Punch some holes in him. And then, when he’s dead, call us.”
DiGaudio hung up.
He’d done three movies, Giorgio had, none of them likely to make the AFI’s Twentieth-Century Classics list, but all of them apparently profitable.
“Johnny Cool?” Rina read off the screen. “That’s pathetic. And then there’s The Boy with the Gold Guitar and Summer Star. Which one do you want to watch?”
I said, “Watch?”
“Streaming,” Tyrone said. “It’s called streaming.”
“When I want to hear a technical term, I’ll ask for one.”
Tyrone said, “Ooooohhhh,” and pulled his hands up close to his chest, as though a badly made-up mummy had just staggered out of the closet.
“Is it legal?” I asked Rina.
“Who said that?” Rina said, looking around the room. “Whoever that was, did he mean, would we be stealing if we watched one of these?”
“Can’t they track you?” I asked.
“Even if they could, I don’t think people are spending much time protecting Giorgio’s movies from being pirated.”
“Call the White House,” Tyrone said. “We got us another Giorgio thief.”
“Okay, okay. Which one sounds least worst to you?”
“Summer Star,” Rina said. “At least they can’t screw up the season.”
“Fine. Summer Star it is.”
Rina was wrong. They screwed up the season. Summer Star was shot entirely on sound stages, apparently for about nine dollars. Bad lighting substituted for the sun, giving everyone three shadows when they were supposed to be outdoors, and painted backdrops substituted for the world. Giorgio substituted for a leading actor. He played identical twins, one good and one bad, although his performance gave new depth to the term identical. At one point, the good Giorgio (I think) was hit on the head, but not, unfortunately, fatally, and he went into a coma, which Giorgio did convincingly. And then the bad Giorgio (I think) pretended to be the good brother for some reason that never became clear, although it might have if I could have endured more than about twenty-three minutes of it.
But at minute twenty-three, he began to sing.
It wasn’t that he was tone-deaf. It was more like what he heard in his head was music in whole new keys, keys that had never been played on earthly instruments. It was like the music of the spheres, if the spheres were large, wavering, formless, gelatinous globs of anti-music. And poor Giorgio knew it. His acting was awful, but when he was singing, you could actually feel the kid’s pain. He knew exactly how terrible he was. I felt like I was looking at a dancing bear that had been forced to watch Fred Astaire movies just before he got shoved onstage.
“That’s enough,” I said. “So that’s it? Three movies, and then Hollywood came to its senses?”
“You really don’t know about this?” Rina asked.
“When he was doing whatever you call what he was doing, I wasn’t even born yet. I didn’t even know this scene existed.”
“Well, he started a fourth one. Movie, I mean. Boola Boola Hula. It was being shot in Hawaii. But halfway through it, he didn’t show up for the day’s shooting. When they went to his hotel, he was gone. All his stuff was there, but he wasn’t.”
“Yeah? Is that the punch line? I mean, in that interview with DiGaudio, the lady asking the questions brought Giorgio up, and DiGaudio turned into a big nerve ending, but he didn’t say the kid was dead or anything.”
“I saw the interview, Daddy. What he didn’t say was more interesting than what he did say.”
“Textual elision,” Tyrone volunteered. “Lotta times, elided material, the stuff that doesn’t make it into a text is what’s most important. Didn’t make it because whoever wrote the text thought it was self-evident.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m trapped in a room with a primary-source document.”
“So if you two are finished striking up a relationship?” Rina said. “Nobody could find him for about five weeks, and then he called the director and said he was through. Said he was sorry, but he wouldn’t be acting any more. Or singing any more, or doing the star thing. He said he was finished, and he was. He never worked again.”
“Shame they don’t give a Kennedy Center Award for quitting,” Tyrone said.
“And then, a few months later.…” She checked the paper in front of her. “On April 23, 1963, his house burned down with him in it. Smoking in bed, fell asleep.”
Tyrone said, “I withdraw the comment.”
“Dead?” I asked.
“Dead.” She reached up and brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Girls went into mourning all over the place. Bouquets of flowers stacked six feet high outside the fenc
e around his place. About two thousand people at the funeral. It’s kind of sad,” she said. “That was how he got on the Walk of Fame. They only put him on because he died. It was like burning to death was a good career move.”
“Awwww,” Tyrone said.
“So one day, there was a star named Giorgio,” Rina said. “And then, pop.” She spread the fingers on both hands to mime a bursting bubble. “Pop, and he was gone.”
It was just a square of paper, folded into quarters and placed beneath the windshield wiper of my car, and it only had two words and a number on it, but those were enough to make me pop a sweat standing right there at the curb. The worst of it wasn’t that it had been left for me. The worst of it was that it had been left for me in front of Kathy’s and Rina’s house.
The words were, CALL IRWIN. Beneath the words was a Beverly Hills phone number, a number that began proudly with the coveted 275 prefix. Whoever wrote the note had been aware of the weight of the prefix; he hadn’t bothered with the 310 area code. Two-seven-five was Beverly Hills and nowhere but Beverly Hills, and it didn’t need no stinking area code.
There were many places I could have gone just then and many things I could have done. I could have gone back to the North Pole to give Marge the bad news that she needed to get the cops involved in Doris’s disappearance. I could have gone to Studio City to pick up one of my Glocks. I could have gone to Hollywood to pick up another one of my Glocks, since it was starting to feel like a two-Glock week. I could have gone to the Wedgwood, climbed into bed, and stayed there for six months. I could have gone back to Stinky Tetweiler’s and threatened Ting Ting until Stinky gave me the names and addresses of the mugs who actually robbed the judge. I could have gone to the offices of The National Snoop, the paper Derek Bigelow had been working for when he got beaten to death, and asked whether he’d told his editor anything that might point to a motive for murder. I could have gone to the West Hollywood apartment building where the newly widowed Mrs. Bigelow was living with her grief, and attempted to comfort her. I could have done any of those things and a dozen more. But I knew, standing there with the note in my hand just outside the house inhabited by my ex-wife and my daughter, that there was one thing I was not, under any circumstances, going to do.
I was not going to call Irwin.
Irwin was the name Stinky had given me.
Irwin Dressler.
The Fixer, the biggest, fattest spider in Los Angeles. In his early nineties now, he had probably lost a little of the power he’d exercised so quietly for more than six decades, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have plenty left. Irwin Dressler was the eminence gris of Southern California. The power broker, the man who made things happen, the guy with the secrets. The Wizard of Was.
Except for the fact that he had managed to stay with us.
A lot of people, even a lot of crooks, don’t know much about the Chicago Jewish mob. They know that “the mob” ran Las Vegas for a long time, for example, and they probably think of slick hair and double-breasted suits and names that end in a vowel, but they don’t ask themselves why the mobster who started the whole thing was named Benjamin Siegel instead of something like Luigi Lasagna. He was named Benjamin Siegel, also called “Bugsy” (but not to his face), because he was one of the LA representatives of the Chicago outfit made up almost entirely of Jews who’d had the good sense to flee Russia, where killing Jews went in and out of fashion as the national sport. They were tough and smart, and they ran their own local rackets and got involved in Chicago politics and joined forces with Capone’s Italian mob as lawyers and financial planners. Without the Jews, one Italian mobster famously told Congress, we’d still be hiding money in mattresses. Eventually, probably tired of having to explain things four and five times to the Guidos, they split from the Italians and went into business on their own.
In the thirties and forties, the Chicago mob came west, in the person of Siegel, Mickey Cohen, and some others, and the first thing they did was shove over a cliff the Italian mob, represented at that time by a thug named Jack Dragna. The Chicago guys were smarter than Dragna’s bunch, better at long-range planning, more likely to use brains than machine guns and baseball bats, and they took one look at LA and saw the biggest piece of fruit on the national tree. Without too much effort, they picked it.
They ran most of the movie studios, the entertainment unions, the music business. The hotels and the hotel unions. The Teamsters. They started country clubs and banks and law firms. When the property of Japanese-Americans was confiscated after Pearl Harbor, the Chicago mob got one of their own, Robert Bazelon, named at the federal level to run the redistribution effort, and Bazelon made sure that millions of prime acres in California went to the family, so to speak. They ran the California Democratic party. They elected mayors. They elected governors. They elected presidents of the Screen Actors Guild. They played a key role in electing at least one president of the United States.
And slowly, over decades, they did what the Italians never quite succeeded in doing. They took their businesses legit. Gradually, they began to play by the rules, to declare their profits, to pay their taxes, to indulge in conspicuous philanthropy. But lurking back behind the white-shoe law firms, the big landmark buildings, the stock option plans, and the shiny, world-famous logos, behind all the apparent corporate rectitude, some of the roots still ran to Chicago, and by and large, they ran through one man, a lawyer named Irwin Dressler.
When there was a strike at a studio, when there was a strike in Vegas, when the Dodgers moved to LA and their opening day was threatened by a strike by the guys in the parking lot, Irwin Dressler stepped in. When the Teamsters Pension Fund had twenty or thirty million to invest, Irwin Dressler invested it. When a famous Italian-American singer, known for punching people, went ahead and punched someone, Irwin Dressler picked up the pieces. When an unsuccessful actor was named to head up one of Hollywood’s top studios, and stars and directors all over town refused to work for him, Irwin Dressler made the peace.
And more to the point, where I was concerned, when guys got seriously out of line—mob guys or cops, it didn’t matter—and then disappeared from view forever, Irwin Dressler’s name was often whispered. And he’d done all this and a lot more, and made a massive fortune doing it, without ever having been formally charged with a crime. He’d been called to testify before Senate committees on organized crime more often than I’d been to baseball games, and at the end of his testimony, he was always thanked and praised for his cooperation, although you could probably spend years reviewing his testimony without stumbling over a single statement that was entirely true.
If the mob was an enormous black iceberg just inches beneath the surface of the sea, Irwin Dressler was the tiny tip, a harmless-looking little island of white in the middle of all that dark water. He might have been in his nineties, but there was still a lot of weight behind Irwin Dressler.
I wasn’t about to call Irwin. Irwin and I barely inhabited the same galaxy.
So. Get in the car. Study the rearview mirror. Start the car. Drive up into the hills, into the remainder of the old Edgar Rice Burroughs estate that gave Tarzana its name, keeping one eye on the mirror. Head left up Willow Court and follow it slowly until it dead-ended at the iron gates of someone with more money than he needed. Turn the car around and wait as the sun did its daily descent.
Watch a coyote with a limp cross the street, tongue hanging out like pink ribbon, ribs like pleats beneath the scruff of fur, eyes all over the place. Coyotes in the wild are like dogs with an edge, but in civilization they’re curs, always worried about the shotgun or the white truck that means their ass is over. I can identify with that, so I commune silently with the coyote until he’s out of sight. Listen to a mockingbird, the Mozart of the animal world, run through a ten-minute medley of trills, chirps, riffs, bells, and whistles without a single repetition. Think about how to tell Marge about Lorne Henry Pivensey. Spend a minute or two looking at Pivensey’s mug shots, fresh from Rina’s prin
ter, seeing a thin, short, nervous-looking nonentity with a receding hairline, a weak chin, and a wandering left eye. Pivensey didn’t look any more dangerous than a paper cut.
But then, Irwin Dressler looked like a benign little old man with an extensive selection of plaid slacks. Like a man who never remembered to put batteries in the remote and had to call his kids when he wanted to watch TV.
Think about my reaction to Tyrone. I’d never seen myself as a racist. I had black friends and associates, I’d given ill-gotten gains to organizations that provided one-on-one tutoring to offset the weaknesses of inner-city schools. I’d voted for a black man for president. I was an enlightened, unprejudiced resident of the brave new multiracial world. Wasn’t I?
So why had the hair on the back of my neck stood up when it became obvious that Rina and Tyrone were, at the very least, dancing around the beginning of a mutual attraction?
In William Gaddis’s towering 1955 novel, The Recognitions, which was the first book I had used to educate myself when I decided that college wouldn’t do the job, there is a character named Otto. Otto is a fake. He pretends to be a writer but he’s not. He pretends to be an intellectual but he’s not. He’s a counterfeit human, someone who continually tries to shape his life so it looks enviable to others, without worrying about the fact that it’s all surface. It has no core. He occasionally looks at his expensive wristwatch, admires it, and then realizes that he forgot to check the time. Otto thinks only about forging the next moment, so he’ll continue to be accepted as Otto.
But one sentence haunts him: All of a sudden, somebody asks you to pay in gold, and you can’t. Maybe Tyrone was that for me, a moment when I had to pay in gold, when I had to cut through the layers of bubble-wrap surrounding my core beliefs and see what they really were. And I didn’t know how to do it, hadn’t even thought I needed to until Tyrone opened that door.
Okay, later for that. Look through the damn windshield, see whether death is in the neighborhood. Couldn’t hear any cars approaching, didn’t see one appear around the bend. Either nobody was bothering to follow me, or.…
Little Elvises Page 9