Little Elvises

by Timothy Hallinan

  I went around to the curb and opened the passenger door. The car exhaled malevolently at me. I took the precaution of grabbing a napkin from a half-eaten Whopper, still in its grease-spotted Burger King bag, and using it to pick up the bottle of piss. I put the bottle on the curb, where I couldn’t accidentally knock it over as I searched, and went to work.

  Nothing in the glove compartment and nothing under the gummy floor mats. Crawling further into the car with my breath held, I pointed my penlight down between the seats and saw a small spiral-bound notebook jammed under the emergency brake. It took a couple of minutes to wiggle it free, meaning that I had to breathe several times. As soon as I had it, I backed out into the fresh air and gave it a flip. Only the first few pages had been written on, so I grabbed another deep breath and crawled back in to look for an earlier notebook, without success. Either Derek had stashed it somewhere when he’d filled it up, or the people who killed him had found it and taken it with them.

  Nothing beneath the front seats, nothing on the backseat. A lot of nothings. I opened the trunk and found a flat spare tire and a few greasy tools, plus a couple of days’ worth of fast-food wrappers and some dispirited French fries. I was trying to move the tire out of the way to look beneath it when I heard the vibration of a car coming up the hill. I slammed the trunk and ducked around to the passenger door to shut it, killing the interior lights just as headlights swept the opposite curb. I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk and held my breath.

  The car slowed and then stopped. I could hear the static-ridden back-and-forth of a police radio. A spotlight beamed through Derek’s car’s dirty windows and lit up the hillside behind me. A breeze delivered a sharp whiff of cigarette smoke, so Officer Somebody was breaking the rules. The door of the police cruiser opened, and I listened to the scuff of heavy cop shoes over asphalt. There wasn’t much I could do other than listen, since there was nowhere to go. The smell of smoke got stronger. As near as I could figure, the cop with the cigarette was heading for the front of the car. A moment later, a sharp metallic bang confirmed it: The cop had swung something hard, probably his flashlight, at the orange boot.

  “Aw, come on,” called the cop in the car. “Nobody can get those things off.”

  “When’re they gonna tow this piece of crap?” asked the smoker.

  “Oh, who knows? After a few more complaints, probably. Let’s go.”

  “If I lived here,” said Officer Nicotine, “I’d complain every time I saw this thing.”

  “If you lived here,” the other cop scoffed. “You wanna live here, get transferred to vice or narco.”

  “Car really stinks,” the smoker said. He played his flashlight into the windows and then started to come around the front of the car. I backed away, crablike, and my foot hit something hard. It took me, conservatively speaking, one one-hundredth of a second to realize what it was and how much noise it was going to make if it fell over. I got my hand back there somehow and caught it half an inch before it shattered against the curb. Unfortunately, I caught it by the top, and a pint or two of piss flowed out over my hand and down the curb and into the gutter. I squatted there, enveloped in stink, and watched it wind downhill in a darkly shining stream. All the cop in the car had to do was look. “Jesus,” said Officer Nicotine. “Smells like every cat in the neighborhood’s been using it for pissing practice.”

  “And this appeals to you why?” asked the cop in the car. “Come on, I’m hungry and I want to stay that way.”

  “Okay, okay. Just doing the job, right?”

  “I’ll put you in for a decoration.” Shoes on asphalt again, then the slam of a door. “Dental hygiene, maybe, the way you work on your teeth. Sound good?”

  “The Golden Floss Award,” said Officer Nicotine, and the car pulled away.

  They’d gone uphill, and I couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t come down again, so I yanked the rear door open again as fast as I could, ran my hands between the seat and the seatback, finding a couple of quarters and a military-looking button with an anchor on it. I was sweating with tension and my hands smelled like they’d been marinated in a urinal. Finally, I grabbed the backseat and yanked it free.

  And there, nestled in a graying snarl of extremely unwholesome litter, the decaying scut of a decaying civilization, was a small silvery digital camera.

  I drove home with the windows open to dissipate the stink on my hands.

  The holiday lights blinked festively in Blitzen’s window, and try as I would, I couldn’t ignore them. My irritation threshold had been eroded to zero by tension, lack of sleep, and a jolt of horse tranquilizer. I suddenly realized that it didn’t matter whether the plug for the lights had been glued into place; I could unscrew the bulbs. I got up with the brisk resolve of someone who’s solved a longstanding problem and did it, burning my fingers in the process. It was worth it. The blinking stopped, Christmas floated away as the clog was at long last cleared from the stream of time, and I went back to the bed and Derek’s notebook.

  Page one said, DiGaudio and then Abruzi, so Derek was on the track of something, even if it wasn’t a gold star for spelling. Beneath that were the words, insurance policy? Beneath that, carrier? beneficiary?

  Then, double indemnity?????? I counted the question marks.

  Then, BHPD?

  And beneath that, a sort of a timetable:

  January 7 ’62

  December ? ’62

  April 19

  April 23

  I was willing to venture a guess that the latter two dates, the ones without a year attached to them, referred to 1963, since I recognized both of them. Beneath the dates was a rough schematic, more a diagram than a map, with arrows leading from a box that said Philly to a box that said Chicago and then to a box that said LA. Then a line in a different color linked LA to a box that said Hawaii. There were little arrowheads on the lines, presumably to show the directions in which people had traveled. The arrows between LA and Hawaii went in both directions. There was also a single two-way line between Philly and Hawaii, with a question mark drawn above it. The lines between Philly, Chicago, and LA went only in one direction, west. Then there was one more line, from Philly direct to LA without connecting through Chicago, and it too went only west. So: travels.

  BHPD was obviously the Beverly Hills Police Department.

  Then a cryptic equation: Sal = ID? I parked that for later consideration, but I didn’t like the look of it.

  On the next page, Derek had written NESSIE and drawn a heavy black cube around it. A wreath of dollar signs surrounded the cube. Centered on the page beneath the cube were the words, which is which?

  Then, all alone on the next page, $350,000. Wishful thinking or a demand?

  The last page that had any writing on it contained a shopping list, and I doubted it was in code because it said stoli, coke, cigs, white bread, mayo, salami, new ball point. Given its position between Stolichnaya and cigarettes, I doubted the coke was made in Atlanta and came in a can.

  The whole thing gave me a rancid feeling: This was the legacy of a man’s life. Peeping, lurking, sneaking, smoking, coking, drinking, eating crap food, pissing in bottles, sniffing out secrets, looking under the rocks in people’s lives, finding pain points and the stains of shame, trading them for money. Day in day out, sneak, cheat, betray, steal, get loaded, sleep. How did he get up in the morning? What were his first thoughts when he opened his eyes to the bright new day? Who will I hurt by nighttime? Whose trust will I violate? How fucked up on junk can I get?

  It his own subterranean way, I thought that Derek was worse than Fronts. Fronts was a top-of-the-line, designer-label sociopath who half-hoped he wouldn’t live through the day, who inhabited a dim expectation that somebody would shoot him or he’d finally slip over the far edge of an overdose. He’d kill me in a minute for a few bucks, and he’d dutifully hurt me for a while first if that were part of the job, unless there was something good on television, in which case he’d hurt me during commercials. But it wouldn’
t be personal. And if push came to shove, he’d just as soon kill himself as me. Fronts was a nightmare wrapped around a void; if you peeled his skin off in a spiral, as you might an apple, there’d be nothing underneath it. A little darkness, a few dead moths, some sour-smelling air. All of it gone in seconds, dissipated like a musty odor when you open a closet door.

  But Derek was something else. He was plausible. He functioned in the world just like a real person, someone with a moral code and a soul. He’d hoodwinked Ronnie into marrying him, and no matter how drunk she was, she wouldn’t have done it unless he’d been able to present some alluring surface, some convincing imitation of a human being. To be able to do that, he had to be able to project himself into others, to see what they wanted and cared about. He had to understand what they would see as good and desirable, what made them smile, what they would open their hearts to. A guy, he’d said to her, who was worried he couldn’t write convincingly from a woman’s perspective. He’d figured she’d be open to that, and then he made himself into it. So he knew the difference between good and evil, between truth and lie, between human and beast. He just didn’t give a fuck.

  It would never even occur to Fronts to pretend to be human. He had no more moral awareness than a cancer cell. You either got it or you didn’t, and it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. He wasn’t going to waste any time trying to look like anything he wasn’t.

  If I had the two of them in front of me, I thought, with a gun in my hand and an ironclad guarantee that I’d walk free if I shot one or the other of them, I’d have popped Derek without a moment’s reflection.

  I wanted to call Ronnie. But at 3 A.M., when she was already furious at me, that probably wasn’t a productive idea.

  The battery in Derek’s camera was dead, and I didn’t have a charger that would fit it. I pushed on various bits and pieces until a little slot popped open to reveal the flash memory card. I fished it out and said, “Voilà,” since nobody was around to criticize my accent. The card was the same size as the one in my own camera, and I had a little reader I could slide it into and then plug the whole thing into my laptop through a USB port so I could see the pictures on the screen. I did it all without breaking anything. Rina would have been proud of me.

  For a journalist, Derek hadn’t been much of a photographer. The first five or six shots were of something very pink and very blurry that I eventually identified as his index finger, which was partially covering the lens. Then there were three pictures of his lap and one of his feet, about as interesting as they sound, and undoubtedly taken accidentally with the camera hanging by its strap around his neck.

  The next five were of Ronnie, and for just a moment I felt a little softening toward Derek.

  She was asleep, the sheets bunched around her bare shoulders, the cotton as softly crumpled as an angel’s robe in a Flemish painting. Soft light flowed through a window to the left, and he’d shot without the flash so he wouldn’t wake her up. He’d moved in close, catching the heartbreak curve of cheekbones and the perfect line of her nose, the upturned corners of her lips, so pronounced that she seemed to be smiling even in sleep. The last shot was an extreme close-up: a luxuriant tangle of hair, almost an abstract, looking like the swirling grain of a cypress or a whirlpool of spun gold, all curls and whorls and vortexes set off by the slant of light through the window. So he’d cared on some level. He’d at least been able to recognize beauty, and for the space of a few snapshots, he’d risen to its challenge. He’d actually felt something, even if it was just a spark of desire to keep some tracery, a two-dimensional miniature of the woman who would ultimately leave him. Ultimately, I was certain, everybody left him.

  And then, in the next eight or ten shots, he went back to being Derek. A steep driveway that I recognized as DiGaudio’s, shot in broad daylight, then a close-up of the mailbox with the address clearly readable. The house, photographed from a hill above it, its asymmetric geometry staggering through the azaleas and across the lawn, the pool a blue kidney behind it. From the slant of the shadows, it was early afternoon. Cars pointed every which way in the parking area, so a recording session was in progress, and I wondered what Ace and the guys had been calling themselves that day—Foot of the Nameless? Cyanide Chapstick?

  Then the house at night, windows ablaze, the camera shaky from being hand-held for a long exposure without a flash. He’d moved in closer to get a blurred shot of the room with the curved window where I’d spoken twice with DiGaudio. In the center of the room, a ghostly apparition was in streaky motion, heading away from the couch. DiGaudio from the bulk, but it was hard to tell; the exposure was probably half a second, the hand holding the camera was jittery, the lens had auto-focused on the surface of the window, and the person inside was moving.

  But it was DiGaudio. Nobody else in that house was that big. And I couldn’t see legs, so he was probably wearing a kaftan.

  The door was open behind him, the door to the hallway that led to the bedrooms and the recording studio. The doorway was a dark rectangle, but there was something framed in it, back there in the gloom of the hall, something pale and formless. It was too far back to catch the splash of light from the main room, amorphous as a puff of steam.

  I clicked to enlarge, but there wasn’t enough detail, and what I got was a bigger blur. About the only thing I could tell for certain was that it was short. Even allowing for the fact that it was a few feet back in the hall, it barely reached the doorknob. Not a child: too wide, too bulky. A very wide dwarf, perhaps.

  Or a very tall mushroom. From all I could tell, it was a wandering piece of furniture.

  The next shot showed DiGaudio going through the door to the hallway. He was pressing himself to the wall, so whatever was in the hall was relatively wide, although it didn’t have to be all that wide, since DiGaudio was pretty wide himself. He had his head tilted downward, either looking at whatever it was, or else—

  Of course. Talking to it.

  Derek had tried to zoom in on the next shot, but whatever he’d seen, it had been clearer to him than it had to the camera. I could just make out a deeper darkness that was probably Vinnie DiGaudio in black-kaftaned retreat down the hallway, now on the far side of the pale blur, which was, if anything, even less resolved. But its shape had changed. Before, it had been vaguely rectangular, and now it was shaped a little like a lowercase h. It reminded me of something, although I couldn’t say what.

  I hit the space bar to navigate to the next picture, and the hair stood up on my arms. I was looking at Popsie, who was standing in the middle of the room, frowning as she stared out the window, her eyes fixed on at a spot to Derek’s left. Even the mole on her chin bristled with suspicion. She’d heard or sensed something, but he was apparently far enough out of the light that she couldn’t see him. It wasn’t hard to imagine him frozen there, not daring to move, as Popsie’s eyes raked the darkness. The next shot was just a dim blur of motion with something that might have been a foot at the bottom of the frame, probably another accidental shot as Derek hauled ass away from the window and Popsie.

  And then, paydirt.

  First, a blinding star of light reflected in the glass of a window—Derek finally seeing something worth risking the flash for, but forgetting to angle the camera away to deflect the light’s bounce. He got it right in the next shot, the camera pointed down, catching the bottom edge of the window, and the flash bringing a flat, grainy face out of the darkness, a face no more than four feet off the floor to judge by the height of the window, a face that looked like a watercolor that had been left in the rain so the colors ran down the page and the shapes drooped irregularly, or maybe a face glimpsed underwater, distorted by the ripples on the surface, one eye fixed in wide alarm on the camera and the other fully closed, closed so completely that it looked as though it had been sealed in that position.

  The face was so low that I realized that the shape in the hallway that I’d seen as a lower-case “h” was actually a chair, someone in a chair. Most li
kely, a wheelchair.

  I heard again that amphibious breathing.

  I said, “Nessie.”

  I slept until almost ten A.M., and when I woke up, I didn’t even go get coffee before I reached for the phone and dialed.

  “Yeah?” Joanie White was short on social skills but long on information retrieval. She was a PhD candidate in the social sciences at UCLA, the daughter of an acquaintance—a bookie to the stars who had the idyllic family life straight people never think crooks enjoy, including a pair of great kids. I’d paid Joanie for research on a few occasions before Rina turned into the Mistress of the Internet.

  “The World Wrestling Federation,” I said. “And its predecessors.”

  “That’s the worst conversation opener of the year,” Joanie said. “Pardon me while I yawn in your ear.”

  “Five hundred bucks.”

  “You’re approaching my frame of reference,” Joanie said.

  “I need to find out everything there is to know about a former wrestler,” I said, “and I’ll pay five hundred dollars to the person who locates the information.”

  “What about the whiz kid? I thought I’d been permanently replaced.”

  “She’s at school at this hour. Plus, we’re at a delicate stage in our relationship,” I said.

  “Really. A father and a daughter? At a delicate stage? Call the LA Times.”

  “Interested in the money?”

  “Sure. Got a name?”

  “Sort of. Hilda, the Queen of the Gestapo.”

  “Oh, well,” she said. “At least there’s probably only one of them. How long do I have?”