Little Elvises
Page 18
I said, “Hi, everyone. I was showing Bill a trick. You okay, Bill?”
Bill looked at me and opened his mouth, and I let my left eyelid droop in the way that my father’s did when he was furious, and Bill said quickly, “Fine. I’m fine.”
Kathy said, “A trick.” She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, so the relationship with Bill was well past the let’s-get-pretty stage.
“Since you’ve got him opening the door,” I said, “he’s sort of your first line of defense, isn’t he? And he can’t always be bringing those duck guns to the door.”
“Bill does not hunt ducks,” Kathy said through her teeth, sounding as though we’d argued about it a dozen times, but Rina was trying, and failing, to laugh silently. “And it’s not funny, young lady. Your father is not free to burst in here any time he wants and—and manhandle people.”
“I’m fine,” Bill repeated gamely.
Kathy said, “That’s not the point.” Bill’s face suggested that he thought it had been, but Kathy plowed on. “We have an arrangement, Junior. You have specific visitation times, and you’re supposed to call in advance if you want to change them.”
“I was.…” I said, and broke it off.
“Yes? You were what? Out of gas? In the neighborhood? Just passing by?”
“Lonely,” I said. “I was lonely.”
Kathy’s face softened for a second, but she shored it up from inside. “Well, I’m sorry about that. But this isn’t home base any more. You can’t come running in here every time you get tired of your precious motels.”
“I want to see him,” Rina said.
“Of course, you do, honey,” Kathy said. “It’s natural for you—”
“I mean now. I want to see him now.”
There was an awkward silent moment. Then I said, “Well, that makes two in favor. We only need one more for a majority.”
Tyrone said, “Do I get a vote or am I disenfranchised?”
“This isn’t the Electoral College, Junior,” Kathy said. “And you’re trying to manipulate Rina.”
“Why?” I demanded. “You’re the only one who’s allowed to get lonely?” I glanced at Bill. “Not that you’ve got much room for it.”
“I am not discussing this,” Kathy said.
“Fine. I’ll go into my daughter’s room and spend a few minutes with her, and you can go back to plucking geese or whatever you were—”
“And you’re not funny. Rina, he’s not, so stop laughing right now.”
Rina turned and ran toward her room, and Tyrone ambled along behind her. Kid didn’t have a stiff joint in his body. “I’ll just go on in and chat with her for a little while,” I said.
Kathy watched her daughter’s receding back. “Fifteen minutes,” she said. “We eat dinner in fifteen minutes.”
“That’s nice of you, but—”
“I’m not inviting you. I’m telling you she has to be in the dining room in a quarter of an hour.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t eat game anyway.”
By the time I got to Rina’s room, I was breathing regularly and the light fizziness of fury had left my limbs.
“You shouldn’t get Mom crazy like that,” Rina said as I came in. Tyrone had swiveled a chair around and straddled it, with his arms crossed on top of the back, his hands lying flat. He had amazingly long fingers.
“You play keyboards, Tyrone?” I asked.
“Horn,” he said.
“Which one?”
“There’s only one you just call horn. French.”
“My favorite,” I said. “You know a record called ‘Blue Tubes’?”
“Daddy,” Rina said. “Tyrone plays classical. He doesn’t listen to stuff like—”
“Great record,” Tyrone said. “But it was the guitar riff that made it.”
“I just spent some time with the guy who played that riff.”
Tyrone’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah? How much time?”
“By my clock, about twenty minutes. By his, could have been thirty seconds or the entire Pleistocene.”
Tyrone said, “How’s that?” and then he said, “Oh. Kind of …” He wiggled his hand side to side and said, “Wuhwuhwuh.”
“Exactly. Way too much wuhwuhwuh. Who’s your favorite composer for horn?”
“Mozart,” he said. “The concerti for horn are the top of the stack. But, you know, there’s not that much material for solo horn. It’s more of a color instrument. They just let us in to add color.”
“Tyrone, stop it,” Rina said. “Look at his face.” She came over and hugged me, and I smelled the baby oil she used as a moisturizer. “Poor Daddy. Nothing’s the way you want it to be. Did you really get lonely?”
“I’m so lonely I’m learning ventriloquism, just to hear another voice.”
Rina let go of me. “I should have known better. I’m such a sucker for you.”
“I did miss you.”
“He did,” Tyrone said. “Look at the man.”
“He did,” I said. “He really did.”
“So you came by just to see me?” Rina asked.
I said, “Well, sort of.”
The corners of her mouth contracted. “What’s the rest of it?”
“I want you to check a couple more things for me.”
“Fine,” she said, not seeming particularly fine. She turned her back to me with a certain briskness and pulled out the chair in front of her laptop and sat down.
“But that’s not the real reason I came,” I said.
“Then what is?” she said, sounding quite a bit like her mother.
“It’s—it’s kind of hard to explain. I spent part of the day with someone, a woman whose husband left her in an empty house, and I just, well, I just started to feel, um, complicated.”
She turned enough to give me an imperious profile. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for us. We’re fine.”
I put up both hands in surrender. “I know. I know.”
“Hey, folks,” Tyrone said. “Start over. Everybody likes everybody, no reason to kick each other in the shins.”
Rina filled her lungs and emptied them. “Right. Okay, I’m happy to see you, I really am, and is there anything I can help you with?”
“There is,” I said. I pulled from my pocket the list I’d made of the names written on the boxes of tape in DeGaudio’s studio. “See what you can pull up on any of these.”
“Poison Pie?” she said. “Paw Prints on the Heart? What are these?”
“Either bands or album titles.”
“Is this about the Little Elvises?”
“Whatever those are on that piece of paper, they’re what the guy’s been recording, the guy who drove around and discovered those kids.”
“DiGaudio,” she said. She banged a bunch of keys.
Tyrone said, “Try eMule.”
“These are pretty obscure,” she said. “But who knows? There’s somebody who likes everything.” More scrabbling on the keys. “Nothing for Paw Prints. Let’s try Candy Kisses. Ho, look at this. Three songs. So it’s a band.”
I looked at the screen. The songs were called “Puppybreath,” which provoked an inadvertent audible reaction, “Next Best Thing to Love,” and “Most of Me.”
Tyrone said, “ ‘Most of Me?’ Kind of creepy, isn’t it? Where’s the rest of him?”
“Can you play these?” I asked.
This time Rina gave me a full-out smile, rich in pity. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”
“I’m learning to throw my voice.”
“You have to download these before you can listen to them. And there are only three or four computers on the network that even have them, so it could take a while.”
“What’s a while?”
She shrugged. “Hours? Days? These people, the ones with the songs on their computers? They might not even be online right now. They might only be online a couple of hours a week.”
“Try some of the other bands,” I said.
&nbs
p; She did and got zero on most of them. There were a couple of songs each for Tomorrow’s Shadow and Notes from Underground, and she added them to the download queue, whatever that was. “Okay,” she said. “Now that we’ve humored Tyrone by trying eMule, let’s do the usual stuff.”
For the next five or six minutes I stood around with my hands in my pockets while Rina batted the keyboard around and Tyrone looked at me, shifting his eyes away every time I tried to catch him. Finally, I said, “What?”
He sat up straighter. “What do you mean, what?”
“What are you looking for?”
“Oh,” he said. “Rina. I was looking for Rina. I don’t see much of her in her mom.”
“Really?” Rina asked without slowing at the keyboard. “Mom’s all over me.”
“Not the way I see it,” Tyrone said. “I see more of your dad.”
“If you’re trying to curry favor, Tyrone,” I said, “you’re doing great.”
“Oh, this is awful,” Rina said.
I went and looked at the screen. “What is it?”
“Blender.com. Look.” She pointed at a corner of the screen, at a square graphic that showed a mermaid halfway out of a sparkling sea, surrounded by purple mist and singing into a 1940’s big-band microphone. The type on the picture said Songs from Atlantis, and printed under the square were the words, CD we didn’t even open.
“Is that as bad as I think it is?” I asked.
“It’s the worst thing they can do,” Rina said. “It’s so mean.”
“Can you blow it up?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, and then she switched into a little singsong talk-to-yourself voice: “Right-click, save as jpg, import into Picasa, enlarge.” She was doing things as she spoke, and when she was finished, there was the CD cover, bigger and a little dotty, but legible. In the lower right, it said, LARKSPUR RECORDS.
“Bingo,” I said. “Larkspur Records.” Larkspur was the street Vinnie DiGaudio lived on.
“Boy,” Tyrone said. “Haven’t heard anyone say ‘bingo’ in a long time.”
“Is there a website?” I asked.
“Hold it.” Rina did an online zigzag via Google and said, “Take a look.”
I leaned over and found myself looking at a spiky blue flower, the words LARKSPUR RECORDS, and below that, THE FUTURE OF ROCK IS IN ITS ROOTS. I said, “Pretty.”
“Pretty primitive,” Tyrone said over my shoulder. “Static, noninteractive, no video, nothing. A picture and some buttons.”
“Push the one for music,” I said, and Rina did.
A vertical row of CD boxes populated the screen, ten or twelve of them. Above it was a sort of mission statement:
Larkspur Records proudly releases music by artists who move the future forward as they embrace the roots of rock ’n roll.
“Love the ’n,” Tyrone said. “That went out with ‘bingo.’ ”
“Kind of hard to move the future in any direction except forward,” Rina said.
There were no pictures of bands on any of the CD boxes, just illustrations. I asked, “Can you make any of those things play music?”
Rina clicked on the CD boxes and roamed the screen with the cursor. “No. Maybe he’s afraid of getting pirated.”
“If the guy who plays the music can be believed,” I said, “he’s probably safe from pirates.”
“Then why do you want to hear it?” This was Tyrone.
“The man’s got a home studio, he’s got a house band that he hires six or seven days a week, and he brings in pretty boys to sing, and half the time he doesn’t even record the vocals. I’m kind of curious to see what the hell he’s making.”
“Time,” Tyrone said. “Isn’t that what they used to say, back when they said ‘bingo’? Making time, right? Sounds like he just might possibly hypothetically probably have an unhealthy interest in boys. Look back at the man’s life, that’s about all he’s ever done, nose around for boys.”
“I don’t know. If that’s what he’s after, why hire a band day after day? Why fill the place with witnesses? Why spend all that money? Why change band names all the time? He could hire the band once and have the kids sing to pre-recorded tracks for years, just him and them in the studio, nice and cozy.”
“And look at these CDs,” Rina said. “He’s making something.”
“Can you order them?” I asked.
“Probably. Sure,” she said. “Here’s a P.O. Box. No downloads, just the disks. Sixteen-ninety-five per, plus five dollars for postage and handling, whatever handling is.”
“Order a couple.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ve got nothing better to do with my allowance.” But she already had an order form on the screen. “Two, right? Any two?”
“Right. And here’s fifty bucks, so you make a profit.”
“Oh, no, you shouldn’t,” she said, turning to grab the bills. She shoved them deep into her pocket, as though I might change my mind and try to get them back. “Really, it’s too much.”
“Rina,” Kathy called. “Tyrone. Dinner.”
“I need one more thing,” I said.
“Mom can get dangerous,” Rina said.
“Information about the one who disappeared, the one called Bobby Angel.”
I got the look teenagers reserve for adults who are beyond hope. “Did you read my paper at all?”
“Well, sure,” I said. “It was great, really impressive.”
She wasn’t having any. “How much of it did you read?”
I said hopefully, “Most of it?”
“Where is it? Do you even know where you put it?”
“Sure,” I said, but Rina looked at my eyes and shook her head in disgust. She grabbed some papers from the desk, folded them down the middle, and thrust them at me. “This is the last copy I’ll give you. Go home and read the rest of it. Try to get past page five. Then, if you’ve got another question about Bobby Angel, call me.”
“Rina,” Kathy said, and this time she was standing in the doorway. “Dinner will get cold.”
“Okay.” Rina and Tyrone got up, and she turned to me and kissed my cheek. “Thanks for coming.”
“Actually,” Kathy said. Then she stopped, looked down, located a spot on the carpet, and said to it, “Actually, if you want to stay, Junior, you can.”
“One too many at the table,” I said, slipping Rina’s report into my pocket. “But thanks.”
“Bill’s gone home,” she said.
Rina emitted a puff of breath and said, “Mom.” She sounded like she was hurting.
“It’s nothing,” Kathy said. She pushed a smile into place. “Really, nothing.”
I said, “I am such a jerk.”
“Yes, you are,” Kathy said. “But are you hungry?”
My cell phone rang.
“Hell,” I said. The display said MARGE. “This will just take a second.”
“You remember where the dining room is,” Kathy said. “Come on, kids.”
I waited until they were out the door and said, “Hi, Marge.”
“You oughtta come home,” Marge said. “Your girlfriend has had nine or ten too many.”
I said, “My girlfriend?” and then shrunk eight or ten inches as Kathy turned back to look at me. Behind her, Rina’s mouth was an O. “Is she okay?” Kathy shook her head and pushed past Rina and Tyrone, and the two of them followed her down the hall.
I said, to myself, not to Marge, “Idiot.”
Lights were burning in Blitzen, but that was to be expected if a vodka-sodden Ronnie was woozing around up there. Even drunk people sometimes prefer light. So I trudged up the stairs wrapped in the situation I’d just caused, and walked into an entirely new situation.
The look that greeted me when I opened the door didn’t come from Ronnie. It came from the mirror over the dresser, and it belonged to the individual who was reflected there, a 350-pound white male genetic misfire with a badly shaved head and a nose that looked like it had been hit with a hammer until it was as fla
t against his face as a cricket’s. He was shirtless and seemed to be fully involved in carving something into his stomach with a long, thin knife. A black case lay unzipped and open on the dresser, next to the festive bowl of glued-together Christmas-tree balls. The case contained four disposable syringes, all lined up like good little soldiers, and a couple of rubber-tipped vials. A fifth syringe lay beside the case. A tiny pool of fluid gleamed beneath the tip of the needle.
I pulled the Glock from under my shirt.
The monster in the mirror said, “Hey, Junior.”
“Fronts,” I said. There was a shapeless mound on the bed, covers pulled completely over it. “What did you do to her?”
“Her?” Fronts said. He was picking at his stomach with the knife’s tip. “Oh, her. She’s drunk.” He looked up from his stomach and saw the gun. “That’s funny.”
“The world is full of people who should have shot you the minute they saw you.”
“Uh-uh,” Fronts said, focused on his work again. “The world used to be full of people who shoulda shot me. They ain’t with us no more.”
I stepped away from the door, leaving it half an inch ajar, and moved sideways to the bed, keeping the gun trained on Fronts, who was busy cutting himself. When I tugged the covers down, I found Ronnie looking straight at the ceiling through half-closed eyes. Her mouth was open so wide it looked like she was screaming.
“Stop shitting me,” I said. “What did you do to her?”
“Just being nice. Suppose I have to kill you and she wakes up. This way, she’ll never see me. She’ll have a headache and she’ll have to explain the body on the floor, but she’ll be alive.”
“What did you shoot her with?”
“Horse tranquilizer,” Fronts said. “She was out cold when I came in, didn’t feel a thing. If you live through this, I’m gonna want thirty bucks for the trank. Stuff’s not cheap.”
“I didn’t know you had horses.”
“I don’t.” He took a step back from the mirror, and I gripped the gun in both hands, aimed at the center of his body. “Whaddya think?” He turned to face me.
His chest had more stuff carved into it than a men’s room wall. The fresh bright red letters on his stomach said, “!iH.”