Right. Or.
I got out of the car and ran my hands under the fenders, getting them good and dirty in the process. I had to lie down on my back and stick my head under the car before I saw it, a little black plastic box clinging like a limpet to the chassis of my car.
Well, I told myself, it was information. Neither good nor bad, just something I probably wasn’t supposed to know about, so my knowing about it was better than my not knowing about it, but on the other hand, it would be a lot better if I weren’t in a position where people representing Irwin Dressler were sticking tracking devices on my car, wouldn’t it?
Leave it on or take it off? That was easy: leave it on for the moment. It probably meant that I couldn’t drive the car to the North Pole, since it was barely possible Dressler’s people didn’t know about the North Pole, but I could live with that. Park a quarter of a mile away and hike it.
I entertained the notion of yanking the limpet and moving out of the motel, but I had a feeling that Dressler could find me anywhere, and also that Marge was going to need me. And while I knew I was in trouble, I thought Marge was in more trouble than I was.
“She’s off the lead,” Louie said.
“Well, that’s just great.” I was doing big zigzags that took me south across Ventura, then a couple of blocks east, then back north across Ventura again, a few blocks further east, and so forth. No followers, although I wouldn’t have expected one, what with the little radio station clamped beneath my car. But I learned a long time ago that it’s usually exactly what you don’t expect that pops up like the handle of a rake and splits your lip. “Who’d you have following her?”
“A girl. Usually pretty good.”
“But our little amateur, our innocent, recently bereaved widow, shook her off.”
“Yeah.” Louie sounded defensive. “Did it pretty smooth, too.”
“Define smooth.”
“Came out, walked right past her car, like she was heading for the Ralphs market a few blocks over, carrying one of those canvas shopping bags people use to save the earth from other kinds of shopping bags. So my girl, she decided driving real slow behind her wasn’t such a great idea, and she went on foot. Your girl turned the corner and climbed into a taxi that she had waiting there, and my girl stood there and watched her drive off.”
I said, “Hmmmm. And she’s not really my girl.”
“I’d say that’s a good thing, considering.”
“Your girl. You say she’s good.”
“Are you kidding?” Louie said. “You never saw her.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means I put her on you for four, five days at the end of her training period.”
“Shut up.”
“God’s truth.”
“I didn’t see her, but Ronnie Bigelow did?”
“Well, yeah.”
I was at that very moment relying on my skill at spotting a tail. “The course of true love,” I said, checking my rearview mirror more closely, “never did run smooth.”
I managed to interrupt a couple of early dinners, get snarled at by three hybrid dogs heavy on the Rottweiler/Doberman my-dog-can-kill-you bloodlines, and hissed at by one cat. The hour between 6 and 7 P.M. is not the best time for knocking on the doors of perfect strangers and asking questions about the neighbors.
Next door on the left and next door on the right, nothing. The residents were vaguely aware that there had at one time been people in the house that Lorne Henry Pivensey aka Lemuel Huff and Marge’s wayward Doris had shared, although nobody seemed to know anything about them, and no one had any idea when they’d left. Good neighbors, LA-style. The folks next door could be waiting for the global premiere of their first movie or cooking up meth in the broom closet, and no one would know. The lady in the house to the right, a spectrally thin woman with jumpy eyes and a dull bruise on her left cheekbone, identified Pivensey from the mug shot and said, “Looked like a prick, so I didn’t talk to him.” She turned her back to me and raised her voice. “I don’t got to go next door for pricks.”
But across the street and one over, I got the person there’s one of on every block. He was eighty, eighty-five, and so wrinkled it looked like he had enough skin for three people. His hair, white as processed flour, was an improbable match for the bristling, jet-black eyebrows beneath which two very bright blue eyes surveyed the world and found it wanting.
“That dickhead,” he said after glancing at Pivensey’s photo. “What is it with guys who have real thin necks? And a head that sticks way out in back, like a little kid’s does?” He drew a curve, like a parenthesis, in the air. “They’re all dickheads, every single one of them. Something in the genes is my guess: curved head, little neck, dickhead. Lee Harvey Oswald, remember? He was one of them. They’re all right next to each other, those genes, there on that little curlicue ribbon. Just one-two-three. Probably holding hands. What’s your name?”
“Junior.”
“Guys named Junior, too. Dickheads, all of them. Maybe you’re an exception, but if you are, you’ll be the first.”
“What can you tell me about them?”
“Dickheads? You haven’t got enough time left on earth for—”
“No, I mean this guy and the woman he lived with.”
“She was too good for him. A real pistol. He’s one of those little guys who pushes women around, right?”
He took a breath to elaborate, so I said, “Right.”
“Didn’t get the extra four or five inches he thought he deserved, maybe got shorted down below, too, know what I mean? Plus he’s got a neck that would barely stretch a rubber band. Wears one a those stupid baseball caps with the bill sideways like he walked into a wall, and a black leather biker jacket. Probably a kid’s size. So he takes it out on the weaker sex, except that this one didn’t put up with it. I’ll bet her mom’s a pistol.”
“She is,” I said.
This piece of information gave him pause. “Yeah? She attached?”
“She’s a widow.”
A speculative scratch at the neck. “Huh. Live around here?”
“In the Valley.”
He gave it the back of his spotted hand. “Full of—”
“I know,” I said. “Wall to wall.”
He squinted at me, although it wasn’t to see me better. He could probably read the newspaper from across the street. “So why you asking me about them? Those two,” he said, glancing past me at the house across the street.
“The mother’s worried. She hasn’t heard from her daughter in—”
“Ahhhhh,” he said. “The mother who should be worried is his. I seen her, a couple weeks back, lay into him with the garden hose. She’s out there, watering that dead grass, and he comes home in his ratty little Jap car and starts yelling at her. And she takes out after him, swinging that hose like it’s a bullwhip, water everywhere and that brass tip thing, you know, with the screw-marks on it where the nozzle—”
“I’ve seen hoses,” I said.
“Dickhead answer,” he said, “Junior.”
“Sorry. I was just interested, and the tip of the hose was slowing down the story.”
“Right. So she caught him one on the forehead, and he’s all wet and bleeding, backing away with both hands out in front of him. Laugh? I like to pissed myself.”
“How long since you’ve seen them?”
“Nine days.”
“Not eight? Not ten?”
“Nine. Back when I was in school, you still had to be able to count.”
“Nine days,” I said. Pretty close to the time I moved into the North Pole.
“Aren’t you going to ask if I saw them go?”
“Did you?”
“Maybe.”
I said, “Maybe?”
“Does this pass as conversation out in the Valley?” he asked. “I say nine days and you say nine days. I say maybe and you say maybe. Don’t invite me to any parties.”
“I’ll rephrase. When you say maybe, what
do you mean?”
“Nine days back,” he said, resting a shoulder against the edge of the door, “about eleven thirty at night, I saw him come out in that stupid cap and jacket, start up that little Jap car, and pull it into the driveway past the house. Got my attention, because they never parked behind the house. Let that little car sit out there night and day, dirty as hell, just an eyesore. Dogs peeing on the tires all the time. So I thought, Huh.”
I waited a moment and said, “I’ll bet you did.”
“You don’t need to talk. When I pause like that, I’m just getting organized. Car sat back there, maybe half an hour, maybe a little longer. I can’t see it because of the house, right? Just the tail end. But I can hear the back door to the house open and close four or five times, just bang, like a screen door that hasn’t got one of those plunger things to slow it down, and the light comes on in the car’s back window when he opens the doors and goes off when he … awwww, you know when it goes off. After a bunch of that, the engine starts and the taillights come on, and the car backs out and takes off. And that’s it. Never came back, and nobody’s taken up a collection to find out where he went. Dickhead.”
“One person in the car, or two?”
He looked at me and then through me, pursed his lips for a moment, and said, “Two?”
“But you’re not sure.”
“Course not,” he said. “It’s not like I was paying attention.”
° ° °
There was no pneumatic arm on the screen door. I opened it and let it bang shut. Plenty loud enough to be heard from across the street. Just a detail, but details count when you’re trying to decide whether what you’ve been told is the icy truth or an improvisation by someone who needed company.
I went to the door of the garage, backed up a yard to allow for the fact that Pivensey wouldn’t want to run the car into the closed door, and then turned and paced off about fourteen feet, the length of an average-size car. And found myself looking at the house where Old Blue Eyes lived. So he could see the back end of the car.
It was about as dark as LA gets, which isn’t very dark. There’s always ambient city light, especially in a neighborhood like that one, with Sunset gleaming to the south and Hollywood Boulevard to the north. The house was a dark block raised against the sky, but enough light bounced off the walls to let me see the black rectangles of the windows. Even from out here, I could feel it. Something bad had happened on the other side of those windows, and I didn’t really think I wanted to know what it was.
I’d been in the house, but not the garage. Knowing that I was being watched from across the street, I went to my Toyota—little dickhead Jap car, he’d probably say—and opened the trunk. From an exhaustive collection of Streamlight flashlights, the policeman’s choice and de rigeur for the well-equipped burglar, I chose one that had a focused LED beam, a textured handle that made it harder to fumble, and enough weight to drop someone in his tracks if applied smartly to the side of the head. Holding it in front of me to keep it out of sight from The Ever-Open Eye across the street, I hiked back up the driveway, found the handle of the garage door in the dark, and yanked it up.
The door resisted at first and then swung up, counterweighted heavily enough to snatch the handle from my hand. Looking back to make sure I was out of sight from across the street, I snapped on the flashlight and played it around.
I wasn’t expecting much of anything, and that’s what I found. There was no internal drywall, just naked two-by fours over tar paper, liberally draped with cobwebs. A theme park for brown recluse spiders, Death World. Lots of what looked like black sand at the base of the two-by-fours. On closer examination, it turned out to be termite droppings. In the center of the cement pad was a large, shapeless dark spot, gunmetal gray at the edges shading to black in the middle, built up by God knew how many cars over the course of seventy or seventy-five years. It reminded me of the stains on the carpet at the North Pole.
At the far end of the space, someone who was probably dead by now had built a plywood shelf, maybe five feet off the ground, high enough to allow an old car to nose in beneath it. The plywood belled down in the middle, sagging beneath the memory of decades’ worth of weight. Now, though, there were only a few black plastic trash bags and a couple of cardboard boxes, one old and one new, probably recycled decades apart from behind some supermarket.
I pulled my sleeves down over my hands to avoid leaving prints on the plastic bags, and opened one. It contained men’s clothes, all pretty much worn out, and so did the second. The shirts were missing buttons or had a tear somewhere, the jeans were out at the knee or had a broken zipper. Discards, maybe, or maybe Pivensey was just frugal and he bagged these things up instead of throwing them away. Maybe figured some day he’d get the buttons, zippers, whatever, replaced. I pushed the two bags back to their original positions and passed on the third.
The first box I tugged toward me was the old one, and it weighed a ton. It had been packed to the brim with magazines from the 1940s, mostly devoted to movie stars. Perfect faces smiled from the covers, lighted and retouched with long-lost artistry. Probably worth something somewhere, since there is nothing that someone doesn’t collect. I pushed it aside and pulled the newer box to the edge. It was much lighter.
It was a good-sized box and mostly empty. When I pointed the flashlight into it, metal glinted up at me, something silvery. A tangle of metal shapes, linked by shiny chain. Five—no, six—pairs of handcuffs.
Above the handcuffs was a broad strip of masking tape. Neatly lined up beneath it were six keys. The keys were evenly spaced beneath the tape, and there was room for three more, three that had in fact been there once and had left their impressions in the tape.
I changed my mind about the third plastic bag. I opened it and found more clothes.
Women’s clothes. Some of them torn, some of them starch-stiff with the old rust of dried blood. When I opened the bag, the smell of fear escaped from it, saturated beneath the arms of blouses and sweaters.
Souvenirs.
The smell and the blood, I thought, might be all anyone would ever find of these women.
I pushed the bag back into place and closed the garage door behind me. When I started the car, I glanced across the street and saw one corner of a curtain drop into place.
“If she hears there’s a cop looking for her,” Marge said, “we’ll never see her again.”
“You’re not listening to me. Pivensey is a bad guy.” I hadn’t told her about the handcuffs and the women’s clothes, and I doubted I would.
“Honey,” Marge said, lighting up. “I knew that the first time I looked at him. Pinky ring, weird-shaped head.”
“Little neck,” I contributed.
“That, too. That round head, sitting on that weensy neck. Looked like a balloon on a string. Wish I’d had a pin.” She held up the jug of Old Igor’s Private Reserve, tilted it to sight through it, and tightened her mouth at the results. “Where does this shit go?” she asked. “It evaporates right through the bottle.”
Marge ’n Ed, back when they bought the motel, had knocked together two rooms on the ground floor and added a little kitchen, tiny enough to fit on a boat, in place of the second room’s bathroom. We were in what passed as the living room, which was the unit with the kitchen. It had been furnished in sidewalk style; most of the furniture had the dejected patina of something that had sat in the open air for days. The room was as free of Christmas decorations as Ebenezer Scrooge’s bedroom.
“You need to talk to the cops,” I said again, moving from one lump in the couch to another. “Don’t take this lightly. They think Pivensey murdered one woman, and beat up some others. They can put a lot of people on this. I can’t.”
“What for?” Marge said. She was sitting on an aluminum beach chair across the warped coffee table. “She’s been gone nine days, right? That’s what the old man told you, nine days. The house was cleaned out. Whatever was going to happen, it’s already happened. And, in spite o
f the way the world works, let’s be optimistic. If she got away from him somehow and she finds out cops are involved, she’ll never come home.” She upended the bottle, getting about half a glassful out of it. “And if he’s done something to her, there’s not much we can do about it at this point.” She dropped the empty bottle to the carpet, scrubbed her cheeks with the heel of her free hand, drank deeply, and lit another cigarette.
“You’ve already got one,” I said, pointing at the ashtray.
“So what?” She defiantly lit a third. “I’ll smoke the whole damn pack at once, if I want to. It’s my house.”
“I’m not really fond of cops,” I said. “But I think you’re making a mistake.”
“Ed was a cop,” she said. She puffed on the cigarette between her lips like a machine, without even lifting her hand to it.
Sometimes I have stupid spells. I said, “Ed?”
“Was a cop,” she repeated. She knocked her knuckles against the coffee table. “You in there?”
“And—and what? Doris hates cops because her father was a cop?”
Marge shook her head, a gesture that was half disagreement and half weariness. “Ed got shot. He was breaking up an armed robbery, and he got shot. He killed the person who shot him, a Mexican with a record a mile long, and everybody went batshit. Community activists, you know, the vampires who make money by churning up poor people. LAPD did the normal internal affairs investigation and then looked out the window at all the people carrying signs that said BLUE MURDER OF BROWN PEOPLE, and decided that Ed was a small price to pay for peace in the streets. Drummed him out with the bullet still in him. He hadn’t been in long enough for a full pension. It took every nickel we had to buy this place. He never got over it. Doris was her daddy’s girl. Hates cops worse than he ever did.” She knocked the cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, shaking loose a gray cylinder an inch long, then put the cigarette down and picked up one of the other ones. “So I send cops after her, and she’ll smell them coming from a mile away. It’s you or nobody. She’ll never let a cop find her, and if one does, she’ll be so pissed at me she’ll never come home.”
Little Elvises Page 10