Little Elvises

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Well, I do, but that’s beside the point. You actually think I had something to do with Derek’s—”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said.

  “He worries about you,” Louie said, demonstrating loyalty for the second time in a single evening.

  Ronnie wrung more water out of her hair. “He’s not worried about me. He suspects me. I can’t believe it. I’m nice to him, I get lonely for him, I drive over here when he’s not home and sleep outside his door, I let him fumble at me and bounce all over me, I keep his landlady company, and he—he—”

  I said, “Fumble?” and then the penny dropped. “You drove over here,” I said. “The car.” It had only taken me twenty-four hours to figure out what my question had been, back when she was telling me about the cops’ search.

  It stopped her for a second, and then she said, “What about the car?”

  “You said the cops searched Derek’s car.”

  “They’re cops,” Ronnie said. “He’s dead. That’s one thing they do. They search things.”

  “He was out working,” I said. “When he got killed, he was—”

  She took a good gulp of coffee, waving me to stop, and said, “And?”

  “And his car was there. In your parking space.”

  “Sure, it was. Like I just said, I drove it here.”

  “But why was it there?”

  “Oh.” The towel started to slip, and she tucked the coffee under her chin and rewrapped the towel as Louie, ever the gentleman, turned his back. “Why was it there when he wasn’t? Good question.”

  “Got a good answer?”

  “Sure. When he was working on something that involved surveillance or tailing, he’d change cars. Get a new one every day or two.” She turned to Louie. “Something you ought to try once in a while.”

  Louie said, “Mmmph,” like somebody catching one in the gut.

  “Where did he get the cars?”

  “He was British,” she said. “That means he hated to spend money. He got them at Cheap Wheels.”

  “Those are wrecks,” Louie said with what seemed like actual, physical pain. “How could anybody drive a—”

  “Put some clothes on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Louie said, “You’re in no shape to drive.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but I’ve got a friend who’s a driver.”

  “LA’s a big town to look for one car in,” he said, but he’d already reached into his jacket pocket for his driving gloves.

  “Only two places to look,” I said.

  We started with the theory that Derek had been followed home and then grabbed after he parked, so we began the search directly in front of the apartment house and did concentric circles around it, then went all the way up to Sunset and zigzagged back and forth down to Santa Monica.

  “It’ll be a heap,” Louie said for the fourth or fifth time. “Got CHEAP WHEELS on the license plate frames.”

  “We know,” I said.

  “It’s just, you know, you look at a couple thousand cars, it’s easy to forget what you’re looking for.”

  “Thank you for the reminder,” Ronnie said. “Again.” She was still talking more slowly than usual, thanks to the trank.

  “Just saying,” Louie said.

  “Well,” I said, “if a junker would stick out anywhere, it’d be here. I never saw so many clean cars in my life.”

  “Gay guys,” Ronnie said. “They take care of things. This is the carpet-shampoo-and-clear-fingernail-polish capital of the world. These guys pick up their dogs’ poop.”

  Louie said, “Eeeeewww.”

  “Better than leaving it there for some nice girl like me to step on. I’ll tell you, nobody in Albany picked up their dog poop.”

  “I thought it was Trenton,” I said.

  She turned to look out the window for a moment and said, “It was. Look, there’s one.”

  “Naw,” Louie said. The car she’d pointed out was an eggplant-colored Plymouth coupe from about 1948, gleaming beneath the streetlights. “That’s vintage. Somebody put a stack of money into that.”

  “Trenton or Albany?” I asked.

  “Who cares?” Ronnie said. She waved her hand in front of her face as though to dispel the question. “They’re both pissholes in the snow.”

  “They may be,” I said, “but you’re from either one or the other.”

  She turned to give me both eyes, neither friendly. “I lived in Trenton and Albany, and nobody scooped the poop in either of them. Okay?”

  “Leave her alone,” Louie said.

  “You skipped Trenton when you told me your life story.”

  “I skipped fifth grade, too.”

  “Actually,” I said, “you didn’t skip Trenton. It was Albany you skipped. Quick. What was the name of the guy who drove you to Chicago?”

  “John Doe,” Ronnie said. “I’m loaded, remember? And are we taking this conversation in the direction I think we’re taking it in? The Ronnie-the-suspect direction?”

  Louie said, “Fronts probably did Derek.”

  “But obviously somebody hired Fronts,” Ronnie said. “And you’re having me followed, and you’re cross-examining me while I’m under the influence of drugs, and it’s always the spouse, right?”

  “Not all the time,” Louie said comfortingly.

  “Turn right,” she said. “The light coming up. Turn right.”

  Louie took a look. “We been up that street.”

  “I don’t care. Turn right.”

  Louie turned right and lead-footed the car uphill a couple of blocks.

  “Here. Stop here.” Ronnie already had her door open an inch.

  “Don’t be childish,” I said.

  “How is this childish?”

  “Your car is at my place, and you’re jumping out here.”

  “Where my car is is my concern. I choose not to spend the evening with somebody who thinks I order hits on people.”

  “He don’t mean it,” Louie said. “He just acts dumb sometimes.”

  She opened the door the rest of the way. “Is that right, Junior? Do you act dumb sometimes?”

  I said, “Trenton or Albany? Who was that Michelangelo in the desert, the one who painted neon?”

  Ronnie said, “Goodbye,” and got out of the car.

  “You are dumb,” Louie said, watching her go. “Girl like that don’t land in your hand every day. And how would she know Fronts? Whaddya think, they met at a party? A fund-raiser, like for chamber music?”

  “I’m not in the mood to be lied to. Let’s go.”

  Louie muttered something and put the car into first, but I said, “Wait a second.”

  I watched as she keyed the gate to get into the complex and kept my eyes on her until it was closed again. “Okay,” I said. “Hollywood.”

  “Talk about a mixed message,” Louie said at the top of the hill, as he hit the turn indicator to go right on Sunset and slowed for the stop. “Why couldn’t you ease up on her? So she told you a couple. What chick doesn’t?”

  “Skip it.”

  “Oho,” Louie said, making the turn.

  I waited. “Is that it? Oho?”

  “That’s it. Sometimes oho is enough.”

  “Well, whatever it was meant to suggest, you can roll down your window and throw it into the street.”

  “Oho,” Louie said again. “And you can’t force me out of the car, because I’m driving.”

  “I didn’t force her out of—”

  “You could of just made a mental note, you know? Sort of wet your finger and made a one in the air to remind you that there’s details that don’t fit together. Maybe a little fib here and there. Instead, you give it to her right in the face. What city? What name?” He braked to a stop at the light in front of the Chateau Marmont. “Girls don’t like that, you know? They feel like they got a right to make up the past. Old Alice, for about twenty years I believed she was the youngest sister, and it turned out Ora and
Gladys were both younger than she was.”

  I didn’t say anything, just watched a knock-kneed, rickety-looking white girl in a short coat and calf-high yellow patent leather boots stand between parked cars and troll the oncoming traffic.

  “But that’s not it, is it?” he said.

  “What’s not what?” I asked, against my better judgment.

  “It’s not about her, Ronnie, I mean. It’s about Kathy and your kid. You’ve got the guilts.”

  A car slowed to window-shop the woman in the yellow boots, and she leaned down to give the driver a better look, but the car accelerated and sped away. The girl offered it a parting middle finger and turned back to fish the traffic stream.

  “Has it occurred to you that you’re asking a personal question?”

  Louie said, “Personal shmersonal.”

  “One of the things I like least about crooks,” I said, “is that they don’t have a subconscious. They say pretty much everything. They expect everybody else to say pretty much everything.”

  Louie said, “Don’t change the subject. You shtupped her, right? And you got this no-lies policy with your kid. So one big talk, coming up.”

  “It’s worse than that.” I told him about the my girlfriend slip in front of Kathy and Rina.

  “You’re as fucked as Custer,” Louie said. “You can’t even have the old heart-to-heart, break it to her your way. And you know women, they’re both back there turning it into the crime of the century. Planting it in a little garden in the center of their hearts and watering it with feelings. Talking about it, sharing it. You’re a cheat, you’re a heartbreaker, you’re like a museum exhibit, Everything That’s Wrong with Guys.”

  “And in the meantime,” I said, “Kathy’s sleeping with this survivalist, Mr. Twelve-Gauge Wilderness. Plaid shirts and ankle traps. Venison jerky. But that’s supposed to be okay. It’s like there are two sets of rules.”

  “Alice says, sure, two sets of rules. Men and women need different rules on account of how they’re not anything alike, what with women being all admirable and so forth.”

  We were most of the way to La Brea now, and I told Louie to aim for the 6000 block of Hollywood. You can tell Louie where you want to go as long as you never suggest a route. Professional drivers regard choosing the route as a nonnegotiable prerogative.

  “Argyle,” he said at once. “Flows nice. Stop signs where it needs them. It’ll take us right there. What’s there?”

  “Giorgio’s star. Where they dumped Derek.”

  “Don’t make sense,” Louie said, hitting the turn indicator for a left. “What do you figure, they killed him and then drove him there in his own car, dropped him off, parked the car, and walked home? I mean, would anybody do that?” He made the left and said, “Well, okay, Fronts might. He’s that dumb.”

  “Actually, I kind of like it because it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Nothing else makes sense, either. I’ve got a suspect with an airtight alibi he won’t use, a recording studio where expensive session musicians come in six days a week to cut tracks for singers who can’t sing and whose vocals aren’t even recorded half the time, a bunch of band names that nobody’s ever heard of, and some sort of beast that breathes water.”

  Louie almost rolled through a stop sign. “Say what?”

  “There’s somebody in Vinnie DiGaudio’s house who pretty much caught me inside last night but instead of shooting me, he breathed at me. Through a microphone.”

  “Breathed at you.” Louie stopped for the light at Hollywood Boulevard.

  “From the bottom of a swimming pool is what it sounded like.” I put a hand on his arm. “Get across the boulevard and pull over wherever there’s a streetlight. I need to read something.” I patted my pockets until I located the folded copy of Rina’s paper. I pulled it out, waiting for Louie to find me some light.

  “Forget a parking space,” Louie said, crossing Hollywood Boulevard. “Every doper in town is shopping the sidewalk, and they’re all parked back here. Just open the dash compartment and read it on your lap. Should be enough light.”

  I popped the dash, and a twenty-watt bulb put out a squint’s worth of yellow light. I opened the paper and flipped through it until I got to page six, and there it was.

  Bobby Angel (Roberto Abbruzzi) was the least typical of the Little Elvises. For one thing, he looked like an accountant with a weight problem. All the other boys DiGaudio discovered had a slight resemblance to Elvis Presley. They looked like Elvis’s cousins, with dark hair and plump faces. Most of them learned to sneer. But Bobby Angel was tubby and so near-sighted that he looked at the wrong camera all the time when he was on TV. The other thing that made him different was that he could sing. His records are the best of all the DiGaudio productions, even better than Fabio’s and Eddie Winston’s. He was so good he almost made up for Giorgio. Bobby Angel was the only one of the Philadelvises who had real talent. He disappeared in Philadelphia on April 19, 1963. He left the house he shared with his parents, saying he’d be back in a few hours, and was never heard from again. There were theories that Angel was killed by the Philadelphia mob as a threat to DiGaudio, but DiGaudio had already been in Los Angeles for a year by then.

  “Abbruzzi,” I said. I refolded the paper, seeing in my mind’s eye the sheet music on the stands in DiGaudio’s studio. It had been written by DiGaudio and Abbruzzi. What the hell?

  “Nice town, Abbruzzi,” Louie said. “Good wine, too. We looking for this car, or what?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sure. Let’s cruise.”

  “Got a lot more heaps here,” Louie said, making a turn onto some anonymous little street that paralleled Hollywood Boulevard. “Harder to spot one here than in Boy’s Town.”

  And it was. Every third or fourth car qualified as a junker, and we had to check the license plate frame on every one of them. By the time we’d stopped and looked at a couple of hundred of them, Louie was yawning, and I was catching it from him.

  “Time is it?” he asked.

  “Coming up on two thirty.”

  “And you’re not tired?”

  “I had a nap,” I said. “Although it feels like three days ago.”

  “Half an hour with Fronts will do that to a guy. I gotta tell you, I don’t think old Derek’s car is gonna be here.”

  “I’ll defer to your judgment. Let’s pack it in.”

  Louie worked his way via back streets to the Cahuenga Pass and then dropped down on the other side of the hill onto Ventura, made a right onto Lankershim, and let me out at the North Pole. He waited, just in case, while I went upstairs, but there was no need. For the first time in what seemed like weeks, there was no light on, no mourning motel owner, no sleeping beauty, no self-mutilating hit man. I had Blitzen to myself.

  It almost felt lonely.

  Thirty minutes after I’d turned the light off, I turned it back on and got dressed. Because obviously, there weren’t only two places where Derek’s Cheap Wheels heap could have been.

  There were three.

  I was still feeling kind of fuzzy from Fronts’ trank, but at least traffic wasn’t a challenge. At 3:20 A.M., Ventura Boulevard was almost deserted. I had clear sailing all the way, watching the lane lines very carefully and braking at every yellow light, until I got to the turn that would take me south of the Boulevard, up into the exclusive neighborhood of second-string TV stars, screenwriters, pornographers, Van Nuys slumlords, and such upstanding citizens as Stinky Tetweiler and Vincent L. DiGaudio. Despite the old saying, lots of people who live in glass houses more or less throw stones for a living.

  It took me about eight minutes to find the car, which was parked a couple of blocks uphill from DiGaudio’s house. It would have been hard to miss even if I hadn’t been looking, because a forged-steel, bright orange boot had been clamped to the front wheel on the driver’s side, the city’s greeting card to people who have been parked for too long and whose cars suggest that they’d be more at home in a different kind of neighborhood.

  An
d, in fact, among the little Porsches and the big Escalades, whatever those are, Derek Bigelow’s rented wreck looked like an artichoke in a bowl of roses. Rusted, dented, crumpled like tinfoil in places, it was a pea-green Ford Falcon from the American automotive nadir of the late sixties, when the Big Three rolled out one piece of crap after another as the Japanese slid in below the radar with cars that actually worked and didn’t require a gallon and a half of gas to get from the garage to the curb.

  For the second or third time, I reflected on the unusual level of sloppiness in the police work around Derek’s death: no Giorgio in the notes from the murder scene, the car sitting right here. Then I shook my head and called myself a mildly unpleasant name. It wasn’t sloppy. It was Paulie DiGaudio, steering the investigation away from Uncle Vinnie. Giving me room to get killed in.

  I had a slim jim in my hand, ready to slip it between the driver’s window and the door, but I didn’t need it. The lock was broken, a first for me. I had no idea that car locks ever actually stopped functioning, but here we were: Detroit had staked out yet another frontier.

  The front window on the passenger side had been lowered about four inches, letting out a smell like the trolls’ locker room, courtesy of too much time spent in a small space by a man who took too few baths, plus an open, jumbo-size, wide-mouth grape juice bottle full of piss. The grape juice bottle is a popular solution to a stake-out man’s most pressing need, but it’s usually kept tightly capped when it’s not in use. The cap to Derek’s bottle was on the passenger seat, and the bottle was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Hard to imagine anyone driving off with an uncapped bottle of urine in the car.

  So he hadn’t had time to cap the bottle before he got yanked. Or else he’d never gotten back to the car from DiGaudio’s house. And back home, the little woman wasn’t exactly pacing the floor, waiting up for him.

  The thought of Ronnie produced a complicated emotional wince, an interesting mixture of desire, warmth, and guilt. It was remarkable how many of my life’s current tangles had one end of the string knotted into my short acquaintance with Ronnie: Kathy’s disappointed face, the excruciatingly awkward situation with Rina, the problem of Derek and Fronts, and my own growing affection for a woman who shook off tails like a spy, lied like a senator, and bounced from one partner to another without any visible second, or even first, thoughts. Precisely the kind of relationship I needed least, and yet I remembered, with a pang, the sight of the gate to her apartment complex swinging closed behind her.