Little Elvises

by Timothy Hallinan

  And here she came, a pair of calves that would have raised eyebrows at a Mr. Universe pageant, her feet encased in what looked like live rabbits, but proved, as they came closer, to be beige fur slippers. Dangling to the right of her knees, which was as far up as I could see, was the shiny black double trouble of a shotgun barrel. Popsie was bad enough. Popsie with a shotgun was almost enough to send me home.

  She went left, probably to take a look down the driveway, and I re-angled myself beneath the car so I was head-on to her. That way, if she caught sight of me as she came back, at least she wouldn’t see a man-shaped silhouette. I watched the hem of her pink nightgown come into sight as she went eight or ten feet down the drive.

  Okay, a bit of good news: she wasn’t waving a flashlight around. She was depending on the exterior lights. So she couldn’t just idly point a couple of hundred watts under the car. I stayed still, barely breathing, and watched her climb back up and then head around the other side of the house.

  “Anything?” DiGaudio called from inside.

  “Jesus Christ on a broomstick,” Popsie said to herself. To him, she said, “Just handle your end.”

  He said, “Okay,” sounding like he’d had his hand slapped. Then nothing happened for a minute or so, until Popsie reappeared and went to the chain-link gate that led to the pool. I heard it click shut behind her. By the time she came back, DiGaudio was standing in the doorway, although I couldn’t see anything except a pair of bare feet.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Fucking alarm.”

  “Damn,” Popsie said. “My sleeping pill had just kicked in.”

  “So take another one,” DiGaudio said. “You got a thousand of them.” The door closed.

  A bit later, they snapped off the exterior lights. I pulled up my sleeve and looked at my watch, a Timex with that useful little death-ray-blue light that comes on whenever you push a button. I decided it would take twenty, twenty-five minutes for them to get resettled, for Popsie to drop another sleeper, and for the two of them to toddle off to dreamland.

  Thirty-two minutes later, I opened the window again.

  The fourth time the alarm sounded, around 3:40, they finally disabled it. It was hard to believe that Popsie was still walking, since she’d kept announcing her intention to take another of her little blue sweeties. I gave them forty-five minutes and then opened the window for the fifth time, unaccompanied by the siren this time, and climbed in. Once inside, I stood motionless beside the window for a slow count of two hundred. Then I eased myself into an armchair and removed my shoes. I didn’t want the rubber soles of my sneakers making basketball squeaks on the hardwood floors.

  I dropped the shoes into the satchel and then rummaged inside it until I found a penlight, not much thicker than one of Marge’s cigarettes, with an adjustable-width beam. I pointed it at the floor, turned it on, and twisted the business end to narrow the splash of light as much as possible. Then I scanned the room once, located the doorway into the hall, and shut the penlight off. Once my eyes had readjusted to the darkness, I headed for the door.

  The hallway was close to pitch black, but the darkness paled as I made my way toward the room with the big curved window. I went into it, waited a moment to listen again, and then turned on the penlight and did a sweep. Nothing interesting, nothing I hadn’t seen before. Below, through the window, the Valley sparkled like the world’s gaudiest, worst-shaped Christmas tree.

  Acting on a burglar’s compulsion, I went around behind the coffee table and opened the drawer from which Vinnie had pulled the five thousand bucks. It was stuffed with rubber-banded half-inch bricks of hundreds, stacked crisscross. Had to be thirty-five, forty thousand dollars. Maybe he was a big tipper. Closing the drawer without lifting some of the stash was a test of character. I failed. I counted down three stacks and pulled two or three bills out of each stack beneath those. I figured it would be weeks before he discovered it, if he ever did. With a diminished sense of self-esteem partially offset by twelve hundred dollars in my pocket, I put the intact stacks back on top and got up from the permanent dent Vinnie had made in the couch.

  I hadn’t seen the kitchen, so I pushed through the swinging door and found myself in a space bigger than both my rooms in the North Pole put together. Marble, or maybe granite, gleamed everywhere. What caught my attention, though, was the clutter. The place was a pigsty. Dishes tottered in precarious stacks. Smeared glasses and half-full cups lolled everywhere. Bits of food—bread, banana peels, half-eaten oranges—littered the counters and smooshed beneath my stockinged feet. The place smelled like a garbage disposal that needed a lemon run through it. So Popsie and Vinnie, whatever their good points might have been, weren’t neat-freaks.

  My penlight caught a glint in one corner: a stack of aluminum hospital trays, the kind with fold-out legs to fit over a person’s lap in bed. Unlike the rest of the kitchen, they were spotless. Well-lubricated, too, as I learned when I picked one up and unfolded a leg. It moved easily, without a sound, snapping precisely into place.

  Hmmmm. DeGaudio’s kaftan, the abnormal thickness of the legs he could barely cross. Was he an occasional invalid? Popsie’s muscles made a new kind of sense.

  The kitchen had a second door, in the wall to the right. I figured it had to open into the hallway I hadn’t been down yet, the hallway that led to the recording studio, the bedrooms, and whatever else was down there. Like the door I’d entered the kitchen through, it was a swinging door, meaning no noisy hardware to deal with. I turned off the penlight, put my ear to the door for a minute or two, and then pushed it open.

  And once I was through it, I heard the burglar’s favorite sound: snoring. It was in stereo, coming from rooms twenty feet apart. I stood outside the room from which the deeper snores came, trying to guess which one of them it was. As far as I could match up the inside of the house with the outside, the bedrooms were the two protruding teeth. To my right was the pyramid-shaped room, which was empty except for a fur rug dead center, a headache-inducing mandala on one wall, and something that looked like a mirrored disco ball but had probably been sold as an energy conduit. It hung from the apex of the pyramid, inert as far as I could tell. I tried to pick up on the room’s spiritual vibration, but the snoring drowned it out. Maybe it was a disco ball.

  Between the pyramid and the two bedrooms was a locked door. I tried it twice, as quietly as possible, but it wanted to stay locked, and I wasn’t about to try to pick it. The room on the other side of the door had to be the one with the concave window, which made it the biggest room in this wing of the house, and I would have figured Vinnie would have staked it out as his palace of slumber, but apparently it served another purpose.

  That left the two doors at the end of the hall, which had to lead to the recording studio. I opened the nearer one as slowly as possible, put my hand on the edge, and closed it gently behind me so it was open only by the thickness of my hand. Then I switched on the penlight.

  An old-fashioned sound-mixing board, all sliders and round pots for volume control, leaped out of the darkness. Two wheeled office chairs were pushed up against it, and beyond it the penlight bounced off a window of what seemed to be smoked glass, undoubtedly allowing a view into the studio when the lights were on. I was in the control room.

  I got my fingers out of the way and eased the door closed. Then I gave the room five minutes, long enough to learn that Vinnie was using eight-track tape, state of the art in maybe 1973, but neolithic in this age of ProTools and infinite hard drives. Little pieces of white surgical tape reflected light at various points along the paths taken by the sliders, obviously indicating a mix setting that had been satisfactory at the last session and had been preserved. In the middle of the console was a microphone with a button below it, to allow the producer to talk to the musicians on the other side of the glass.

  A set of rough plywood shelves built into one wall held boxes of recorded tape, maybe the size of a dinner plate and about an inch thick. I counted fourteen of them. So
meone with an enviably precise printing style had written titles in black marker on the spines of the boxes: Candy Kisses, Pressed Flowers, Songs from Atlantis, Box of Light, Tomorrow’s Shadow, Rear View Mirror, The Lost Album, Notes from Underground, Poison Pie, Black Beauty, Paw Prints on the Heart. Song or album titles, I supposed. They seemed to reflect a changing sensibility, starting with early sixties sweetness and gradually turning a little fantasy-land, a little psychedelic, a little minimalist, a little Rimbaud, a little dark. I’d probably listen to an album called Paw Prints on the Heart.

  A door to the left of the mixing board led into the studio. I took a last survey of the control room and opened the door.

  Cigarettes had left their stale signature on the air. The penlight picked out half a dozen folding chairs set in an irregular semicircle. An acoustic guitar leaned against one of them, a squarish electric bass against another. On the scruffy carpet gleamed a couple of round film tins, maybe ten inches in diameter, each containing a mound of cigarette butts. Back behind the chairs, up on risers about eighteen inches high, was a drum kit, the sticks neatly crossed atop the snare drum.

  Movable baffles—just upright wooden frames padded with soft material to absorb sound—stood here and there. The biggest one, about five feet high, had been positioned in front of the drum kit, probably to reduce leakage from the drums into the microphones for the guitar and bass, standing beside the folding chairs. In front of each chair was a black metal music stand with sheet music on it.

  I chose a chair that wasn’t supporting an instrument, sat on it, and thumbed through the sheets. On top was a piece called “Your Name on My Mind.” Two-four time, written in D, the classic pop-song form: first verse, second verse, hook, third verse, and so forth. The composers were indicated in the upper right-hand corner: DiGaudio/Abbruzzi. Publisher was B.O.I. Music. The second song, “The Map to You,” was also by DiGaudio/Abbruzzi. There were six songs in all. In the old days, a good session’s worth. These days, it seems to take most bands a month to finish a single track, what with the depth of the contemporary creative process and all.

  I put the sheet music back on the stand and let the penlight play over the room. On the wall behind the drums someone had hung a big whiteboard calendar. I was picking my way between the chairs to look at it when I thought I heard something. I killed the light and froze.

  Whatever it was, it had been at the very threshold of hearing. I remained motionless just long enough to orient myself and then, with both hands in front of me, I felt my way toward the drums. In between them and me was the big padded baffle, and I edged around it and dropped down behind it. If the lights came on, I would be invisible from the control room. Not much, but something. I knelt on the floor and waited.

  And for quite a while, nothing happened.

  I asked myself whether I had really heard anything. The only safe course of action was to assume that I had, so I spent an increasingly uncomfortable ten minutes or so on my knees, listening.

  Then there was a soft click, which seemed to come from everywhere at the same time, and something very odd happened. The walls of the room seemed to recede. I mean, they receded in my hearing; when you’ve spent as much time as I have working in the dark, you learn to hear walls. They’re usually the nearest sound-reflective surface. I’d been in the studio long enough to get an ear’s-shot estimate of the distance from me to all four walls, probably accurate within a foot or two.

  But with that click, it was as though the walls had moved back somehow, and the room lost all shape in my head. If I hadn’t been kneeling, I probably would have sat down.

  And then, as my head cleared and the floor stayed solid beneath me, I knew what it was. Someone had pressed the button to turn on the microphone in the control room, with an audible click, and was holding it down. I was hearing, through the studio’s speakers, the ambient noise of another room altogether. What I had heard first, the sound that made me turn off the penlight, had been the door from the control room to the hallway, closing on the other side of the pane of glass.

  Someone in the control room.

  The penlight had been on when I heard the door close. He’d seen me. Or she: I suddenly remembered Popsie’s shotgun.

  I still hadn’t gone to pick up one, two, or all three of those Glocks. Hard to believe it was only that afternoon that I’d realized that I’d forgotten to do it. Felt like a week. But, of course, even if I’d retrieved all three of them, I wouldn’t have one on me. As Paulie DiGaudio had taken pains to point out in our first chat, going into a house strapped is a whole new world of woe if you get caught. The cops and the courts are resolutely unamused by armed robbery.

  So forget weapons. What I had on my side was years of experience, a good grasp of the house’s floor plan, infinite patience, and my native cunning.

  In other words, I was screwed.

  A fingernail or something passed over the surface of the microphone, making a sound like a rockslide. In the silence that followed, somebody breathed.

  And what a breath it was. It sounded as though it had been drawn through a wad of wet tissues, a gag of soaking Kleenex. It faded into a lower chest-rumble that came all the way from the ninth circle of pulmonary hell. It was difficult not to visualize thick ropes of drool.

  My underarms released a pint of water each. I knelt behind the baffle, still as stone and newly wet, and heard another click as the mike button was released, and then—a minute or two later—the almost imperceptible sound of the control room door opening and closing again. I stayed where I was, running all sorts of doomsday scenarios through my head, for ninety minutes by my little blue-lit watch. Finally, when I figured sunrise was only half an hour away, I forced myself to get up, and then I felt my way at the highest possible speed out of the room, out of the house, and down the driveway, expecting at every second to see Popsie’s shotgun blossom in the darkness. I didn’t even stop to put on my shoes.

  And when I pulled into the parking lot of the North Pole in the grayest moment of early morning, the first thing I saw was that the light above the door to Blitzen was out. The second thing I saw was the body curled up there.

  She didn’t weigh much, and she wasn’t much of an actress, either. Her eyelids did a telltale flutter when I picked her up, and one corner of her mouth lifted when I had to jam her inelegantly against the wall to get the card-key into the slot so I could open the door. So I toted her into the room, lifted her to shoulder height, and dropped her onto the bed.

  Ronnie said, “Uuuhhhffffff,” and opened her eyes. “You were doing so well, too.”

  “How long were you out there?” I thought about turning on the light but decided that the paling day through the window was appropriately bleak.

  “Four hours? Five?”

  “Just huddled like some refugee against the door. Being soaked by the dew and chilled by the wind and so forth.”

  She sat up and rubbed the forearm I’d scraped against the wall. “It was cold, yes. And your tone leaves something to be desired.”

  “It probably does.”

  “Well.” She tugged down on her blouse, which had a pattern of small sunflowers on it. “The bloom came off the old rose pretty fast, didn’t it?”

  I went to the chair beside the table reserved for good elves and sat down. “Maybe we’d better start over.”

  “I think we already have.”

  “Why don’t you fill me in on your day?”

  She threw her legs over the side of the bed and let them dangle in their faded jeans. “And why don’t you go to hell?”

  “Let’s start with why you were crumpled so dramatically against my door.”

  “How about this? It was cold, and I’d been standing there for hours.” She straightened her arm at the elbow and bent it sharply, a demonstration. “You may have noticed that human beings are hinged here and there in a way that allows them to deviate from upright whenever they want. My feet got tired. I was freezing. I crumpled, as you so picturesquely put it, in order
to try to get some sleep.”

  “And you were there in the first place because …?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I was dumb enough to think you’d be glad to see me.”

  “Let’s take it back a couple of steps. I’m still curious about how you spent the day.”

  “Just to keep us talking,” Ronnie Bigelow said, “let’s pretend you have a right to ask the question. If you did, I’d probably tell you that I did a bunch of stuff.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s informative.”

  “If you ever turned your damn phone on, you’d know some of what happened today.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hold it.” I pulled the phone out and powered it on.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said to the room. “He’s checking on me.”

  “I’m a crook. By now, with a whole string of us behind you, you ought to know we’re not real trusting.”

  She rubbed lightly at the scraped arm. “And here I thought I was special, in my dowdy little way.”

  I had four voicemail messages. The first was from Ronnie, asking where I was and what I was doing. The next two were from Louie. First, he told me that Ronnie had returned to her apartment about 8 P.M., around the time I’d been getting hijacked to Irwin Dressler’s place, and then he called back to say that the new person he’d assigned to watch the apartment house had followed her to my place, where she was just standing around outside the door. And then there was a message from Ronnie, telling me it was 2 A.M., and she was freezing her ass off outside my door, and that she was frightened to go home because she was being followed.

  When I folded the phone, the room had brightened to the point where I could see her face clearly, and it wasn’t friendly. And the new day wasn’t the only thing that had dawned.

  “It was you,” she said. “You had those people follow me.”

  Sometimes I’m dismayed by how easily I lie. “I was worried about you.”