Little Elvises

by Timothy Hallinan

  “A couple of hours. Let’s say noon.”

  She said, “Let’s say two.”

  I said, “Let’s say three hundred fifty.”

  “Noon it is,” she said. She hung up, and I dialed another number.

  The man who picked up the phone said, in a voice with a rasp like a match being struck on a zipper, “Don’t waste my time.”

  “Nobody says hello any more. This is Paul Klee.”

  “Hey, Paul. Still painting?”

  “With these petroleum prices,” I said, “who can afford to work in oils? You want to make a call for me?”

  “What I live for,” Jake Whelan said. Whelan had been one of Hollywood’s top producers until his unerring nose for a hit was permanently numbed by several tons of cocaine. These days he lived in baronial splendor in a fourteenth-century French chateau that had been reassembled in Laurel Canyon, where he passed his days hoovering white lines, working on his tan, ordering up tag teams of hookers, and enjoying a large private collection of mostly stolen art. He thought he owed me a favor, and apparently he hadn’t yet found out that he actually didn’t.

  “The Museum of Television and Radio,” I said. “I need the kind of access you’d get.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe this afternoon.”

  “Okay. What do you need to look at?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “I haven’t laughed since they wheeled Cheney out of the White House.”

  “American Dance Hall.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sure. You want me to send a woman with a whip, too? Maybe a scourge and a hair shirt?”

  “I don’t think I’ll need them. I want to see whatever they’ve got with two of the Little Elvises from Philadelphia, Bobby Angel and Giorgio.”

  “I’m gonna have to get somebody else to make the call,” Whelan said. “No fucking way I’m gonna have people think I want to look at Giorgio.”

  “I’m surprised you even remember him.”

  “Ahhh, well. Somebody came to me a few years back with a screenplay about those kids. Idea was to get a bunch of really pretty, minimum-wage boys and do the story on the cheap, cut a CD, promote the whole thing on MTV, make a reality show out of the casting. The whole shmear.”

  “What happened?”

  “You mean, aside from the fact that the idea sucked?”

  “Since when does that matter?”

  “You should be in the business. Sure, it sucked, but I figured it was good for some development bucks. I mean, it’d never get made, but I could probably have pried a million, million and a half out of one of the blow-drys at the studios. But the fatso who discovered all the kids said no way.”

  “DiGaudio.”

  “That’s the guy. Jeez, what a schmuck. I make one call, just a polite feeler, and all of a sudden I got lawyers on the phone. You’da thought I was suggesting a prequel to Genesis.”

  “Protective.”

  “You could say that. Like he had something to hide.”

  “I’m pretty sure he does,” I said. “Listen, I’m not certain I’m going to need you to make the call. I’ll let you know in a little while if I do.”

  “Oh, well,” Whelan said. “I’ll just put my whole day on hold.”

  It seemed like a good time to be careful. I wasn’t stopping, in spite of what Fronts had said, and I’d already been shot at and had my throat nicked. So I paid a lot of attention to the rearview mirror as I drove over the hill to try to chat with Melissa Simmons, the next of the names Marge had starred as being one of Doris’s special friends.

  Even with one eye in front of me and the other on the mirror, it was hard not to think about Vinnie DiGaudio and the various ways his little secret could kill me. I was pretty sure I had sixty percent of it figured out, but the remaining forty percent was probably all sharp edges. Which is which? had been the best question in Derek’s notebook, and the difference between Possibility Number One and Possibility Number Two was yet another murder.

  People who are trying to hide a murder can get touchy.

  Derek had been puzzling it through, both chronologically and geographically, and he’d figured that it was worth a lot of money—$350,000 counts as a lot of money to me—but I didn’t think he’d gotten any closer to the real answer than I had. He’d gotten close enough to get killed, though, so I was obviously out on the end of the plank myself, with Fronts behind me, holding the sword to my back, and the sharks circling below.

  The question was, who were the sharks?

  Or were there any? Was Fronts the only weapon aimed at me, or was there another, one left over from a murder a long time ago? One threat or two?

  Sal = ID?, Derek had written. I knew who Sal was and I was afraid I also knew who ID was.

  So, safer to figure two. Or even more. I started watching the side mirrors, too.

  Melissa Simmons had spent a fortune on not aging, and she hadn’t. Instead of moving forward with the rest of us, towed in the wake of time’s arrow, she’d gone sideways, into a parallel universe where people’s faces morphed monthly, lips plumping, cheekbones swelling, chins clefting, noses shrinking, muscles relaxing to the point of paralysis, neck skin stretching as tight as a drumhead.

  “Yes?” she said, thinking about smiling. You could see traces of the expression around her eyes, trying to push its way out.

  I said, “Doris Enderby.”

  “Oh,” she said, the ghost of her smile replaced by the ghost of concern. Beneath the concern, she looked at me the way a wolf would look at a pork chop. “Poor Doris.”

  She was standing in the open doorway of a small house in the flats of Beverly Hills, a semi-modest rococo excrescence that, even at today’s fire sale prices, would probably fetch, as the real estate agents like to say, about four million. She had tilted her body away from me at a forty-five degree angle as though inviting me to push past her. I got a definite feeling that she was considering offering me more than I was there for. She’d first seen me about thirty seconds ago, and it smelled a little desperate. The plastic surgery suddenly looked like a plea for attention by someone who had stopped getting any.

  These women—Amber, Melissa, and Doris—had been friends since high school. It was enough to make me wonder what was wrong with our lives: Two decades after swearing undying allegiance as optimistic high school students with a whole world of primrose promise in front of them, Amber lived alone in her rundown, childless house, Melissa was sculpting her face in Beverly Hills and hitting on strangers, and Doris had stayed home with Mom, surrounded by the bargain-basement glitter of the North Pole, until she eloped with the Big Bad Wolf.

  Nevertheless, I said, “Why poor?”

  “Sad, lonely little soul,” she said. “It makes one ask oneself about her past lives. That mother and that awful little man.”

  “You met him?”

  “Forty-five minutes was all I could stand. I made my excuses and just fled.” She accompanied the verb with a sideways sweep of her hand, noticed some imperfection in one of her long, lacquered nails, and glanced down at it. When she’d either diagnosed the problem or dismissed it, she looked back up at me and said, “I felt guilty about it, but I’m not responsible for Doris’s choices, am I?”

  Along with the facial restructuring, Melissa had had surgery on her vowels, which sounded like she’d spent her childhood as a prisoner in a BBC serial before escaping to Brooklyn. She put a hand on the door jamb and I caught a glimpse of a diamond the size of the doorknobs at Versailles.

  “How long ago did you see them?” She kept looking at me, so I said, “Doris and Huff.”

  “Ages.” She closed her eyes to think and then managed to open them again. “Three months? Four? It’s hard to keep track when one’s life is so full.”

  “What didn’t you like about him?”

  She tightened her mouth enough to make her look like she was sipping through a straw, then relaxed it again. “What was there to like? He was small in the wrong way.” Her eyes tracked me f
rom head to foot, apparently seeking reassurance that I was a proper size. “Some small men have a sort of fierce energy, don’t they? They want to get even with the world, I suppose. It can be attractive. But Doris’s awful man was small like those little metal statues people used to put on lawns, the ones that once were black. African-American, I mean. Holding a lantern. He had a cowlick. It made him look like he’d escaped from Appalachia. And slippery eyes. Every time I looked at Doris, he would stare at me, and then, when I felt his gaze, he’d look away. At anything, the door, the rug, a fork on the table. And then he’d look at me again. There was something humid in the way he looked at me. It gave one the creeps.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “Like someone who’s just bought something expensive she’s not sure of. A Louis Vuitton bag, maybe, and you suddenly notice that one of the seams runs through the logo.”

  “That’s bad?”

  She put a hand, fingers open, in the center of her chest. “It’s disaster. It means you’ve got a fake.”

  “You think he was a fake.”

  An economical shake of the head. “Don’t be so literal. He was all too real. No one would pretend to be like that. No, one came away from the meeting with the feeling that under all the obvious disagreeableness, there was something even more disagreeable.”

  “Still waters,” I said, thinking of Amber.

  “I suppose.” She was losing interest in the topic. She stepped a little further aside as though to prove to me that the house was empty behind her. She said, “It’s cooler inside.”

  “Looks cooler,” I said. “Have you seen Doris, or heard from her, since?”

  She looked from one of my eyes to the other and back again, which I’d never seen anyone do except in the movies. In the movies, it usually meant a kiss was on the way. “You haven’t told me why you’re asking me these questions, have you?”

  “No. I haven’t.” I smiled at her.

  “Then I don’t see why I should answer them.” Despite the words, she made no move to close the door. She was now far enough to one side to let me walk in without even turning sideways. “It’s not that I doubt your motives, you understand. You’re modestly attractive, and something about you inspires trust.”

  “I’ve been told that.”

  She did her best to raise an eyebrow. “But, after all, who are you?” She put out a single finger and touched it to the tip of my chin. “Popping up on one’s doorstep in the middle of the day like a pizza, asking all these questions.”

  I pulled my head back an inch or so. “I’m just someone who’s worried about Doris.”

  “Yes, well, we’re all worried about Doris.” She lowered the hand and rested it on her hip, a stance with a certain amount of banked impatience behind it. “Or we were, at any rate.”

  “You were, but now you’re not?”

  She blew out a perfunctory puff of air. “An enviably concise way to put it.”

  “Then you have seen Doris since—since whenever it was you met her with Huff?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “Doris is on her own path.” She made the statement forcefully, as though she thought I might have difficulty following it. “It might not be the path I would choose, but perhaps she had fewer alternatives than I’ve had.” She turned her head from side to side, looking past me at the front yard, surveying her alternatives. “But, to tell you the truth, I have far too much to think about in my own little life to waste much time worrying about the directions other people take.”

  “I understand. Other people’s lives are so sloppy.”

  Her chin came up an inch or so, and I knew I’d lost a little more favor. “You’re making me sound unsympathetic. One always wants the best for others, I’m sure.”

  “And Doris? One wants the best for Doris, too, I assume. You say you’re not worried about her any more. Does that suggest she’s changed paths, so to speak? Does it suggest that you know where she is now?”

  She stepped back and put a hand on the door, but this time it wasn’t an invitation. She was barring the way. “In Seattle,” she said.

  “Why Seattle?”

  “Oh, who knows?” Melissa Simmons said, just barely not curling a lip. “Maybe she wanted to wear plaid shirts. She said Seattle, and I saw no reason to question her.”

  “Who else would you talk to, if you were trying to find her?”

  “You mean, someone who might be keeping track of Doris? Not a soul in the world. Please step back.”

  She closed the door in my face.

  “A parking ticket,” Louie the Lost said on the phone. “Six days ago. You wouldn’t think it’d be in the system that fast, but they got these little electric tablet things now, the cop writes the ticket on the screen and pushes a button, and the ticket goes up into the sky and comes down in the computer.”

  “Really,” I said. I was on Maple Drive, just around the corner from Melissa Simmons’s house, watching my mirrors.

  “How the hell we supposed to get away with anything any more?” Louie’s tone was querulous. “All this information floating around in the sky.”

  “Where was he parked when he got the ticket?”

  “Twentynine Palms. Bunch of sand and rocks. Snakes all over the place. Up near Joshua Tree.”

  “Well, that’s nice. He’s in a small town.”

  “Anyway, that’s the good news.”

  “I hate it when people say that.” A Beverly Hills Police Department car came into my rearview, saw me, and slowed as it approached.

  “Yeah, me, too. Here’s the bad news. No property sales involving any male named Huff or Pivensey. Maybe he’s renting.”

  The cop rolled past in slow-mo, looking over at me. I gave him a little wave, pointed at my phone, and made a yack-yack sign with my hand, just a law-abiding citizen obediently pulled over to talk on the cell phone. He nodded and kept going, but I figured he’d be back. Beverly Hills is the only place in Los Angeles where a white Toyota stands out. “Could be renting, I guess,” I said. “It was worth a try. Did your girl get printouts?”

  “Printouts? Of something there isn’t?” Louie was trying not to sound like someone talking to an imbecile, and he was almost succeeding.

  “Of any transfer involving anyone with names like Hough or Huff or Pivensey. In fact, have her look under Enderby, too.”

  “She’s already driving—”

  “Then tell her to turn around. Tell her to get the printouts for any pages that have those names, or names near those in the alphabet. Just the pages of records that those names would be on alphabetically, plus one page on either side.”

  “Gonna cost you.”

  “Like I expect anything to be free,” I said, and hung up. The phone rang immediately.

  “No,” Joanie White said.

  “Is that the full report? I’m paying two hundred fifty dollars a letter?”

  She slurped something through a straw, obviously emptying the bottom of the glass. “No, there’s no Hilda the Queen of the Gestapo. Or Helga the Queen of the Gestapo. Or Hilda the Bitch of the Gestapo. There isn’t now and there never has been. The only two wrestlers ever to use Gestapo in their names were men. Do you want to know about them?”

  “No. I’ve had enough useless information for one day.”

  “Oh, come on,” Joanie said.

  “I’d love to hear about them.”

  “Bruce of the Gestapo, who came into the ring in a chenille sundress and ripped it off to reveal black leather lederhosen and a swastika tattoo on his chest, and Gestapo Gus, the Nazi Cowboy, who used a bullwhip in the ring.”

  “And they say American creativity is dead.”

  “Bruce of the Gestapo’s swastika tattoo was a press-on—you know, a lick-and-stick. He shaved his chest so it would take. He teaches third grade now. Worth five bills?”

  “To the extent that something absolutely worthless can be.”

  “Good. Send me a check. In the mail, right?”

  “Soon as I can f
ind my stamps,” I said.

  I pulled away from the curb and drove the streets aimlessly for a few minutes, looking at the big houses where movie stars did or didn’t live. Geographically, I was maybe a mile below Irwin Dressler’s off-white mansion, but metaphorically, I had no idea where the hell I was. It seemed relatively certain that both Amber Schlumberg and Melissa Simmons knew, or thought they knew, something about Doris, and it seemed possible that Doris had told them to lie about it. Either that or she’d lied to both of them. Las Vegas and Seattle were unlikely stops on any single itinerary.

  Of course, Pivensey could have made her lie to them. For all I knew, Doris had talked to her girlfriends on the telephone while Pivensey stood over her with his gun pressing a cold circle into her forehead.

  But then why hadn’t he forced her to call her mother? If anyone was going to make a fuss, it was her mother. If Pivensey were going to worry about Doris’s girlfriends, why not worry about Marge?

  Stupidity presented itself, with a little curtsy, as a possible reason. This was, after all, a guy who attempted to run down a woman in broad daylight in a supermarket parking lot. Barely animate. But, still. The simple desire for survival usually confers a certain minimal level of animal cunning, and skipping the call to Marge didn’t measure up to it.

  But I couldn’t stay focused on Doris, however much I might want to. No Hilda the Queen of the Gestapo. That opened up a number of questions, none of them welcome. But I might as well ask them. If Fronts was going to be stalking me between bouts of carving Bartlett’s Quotations into his chest and stomach, I probably ought to deserve it.

  Which is which? That was the issue. I thought I ought to take a look at the two nominees.

  So I called Jake Whelan back, and ten minutes later got a call from someone at the Museum of Television and Radio who managed to sound both young and starchy at the same time, and who told me that the Museum would be delighted, institutionally speaking, to make available a private viewing room and the program material—as she described it—that Mr. Whelan had asked about, but they’d appreciate ninety minutes or so to pull it together because it was infrequently requested. I told her I could well believe that, and she said that she’d see me at three.