She broke it off and sat there, looking down at the hands clasped between her legs. “Okay,” she said. “I won’t tell her.”
“I think that’s smart.”
“Don’t sound so relieved. There’s a deal involved.”
“This is not a complete surprise.”
“What’s her name?”
“Ronnie. Short for Veronica.”
“I like Veronica better.”
“Me, too.”
“Well, if Ronnie is still around in a week, I want to meet her.”
“Fine.”
I got a sidelong look. “Does she know you have a daughter?”
“She does. And she knows I tell you everything that matters.”
“So you were going to tell me about—”
“I was. I just wanted to do it my way.”
“Huh,” Rina said. “We’ll be looking at each other pretty hard. All this information.”
“Just to get this straight in advance,” I said, “I will refuse to leave the room. I won’t go out for a walk, I won’t even go get anyone a glass of water. There will be no girl talk, no heart to heart. I’ll be there the entire time. Like a, a lifeguard.”
“The sure sign of a guilty conscience.”
“Read it any way you want.”
“Okay,” she said. “That’s how I’ll read it.” She sat up and looked around the room. “Why am I here again?”
“I want to borrow your eyes. You’ve seen pieces of American Dance Hall on YouTube, right?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve seen more of it than they’ve got here.”
“Well, we’re looking for anything that sticks out. Anything that’s out of the ordinary. Anything that reminds you of something that maybe wasn’t in your paper. And just explain things to me.”
“There’s a lot of stuff that wasn’t in my paper. I barely wrote about Giorgio at all.”
“Let’s go, then.” I pushed PLAY again, and the screen flickered and then stuttered a few black-and-white frames before settling into something coherent.
“Here’s somebody I know you’re going to like,” said Art Clay, who had built his local Philadelphia TV show into a national phenomenon and then made it the basis of an enormous production company dedicated entirely to mediocrity, all the while staying miraculously clear of payola charges. And here he was, baby-faced and slick-haired, holding a microphone the size of a blackjack. “He’s one of our own,” Clay said, “but he’s riding the rocket to national stardom. Let’s hear it for Giorgio.”
Fade to black for a moment to build the expectation level, and then the lights went up on the stage in the corner of the studio, and Giorgio stood there like someone frozen on the train tracks. His hair was plastered back and triple-combed, except for a long comma that had been trained forward to fall over the left half of his forehead and bisect his eyebrow. He licked his lips nervously, waiting for the music to start. The camera tracked left to provide some movement, since Giorgio wasn’t supplying any, and the kids came into the shot, and Rina said, “Freeze it.”
I looked down at the remote, which was complicated enough to fly the space shuttle. It had buttons, wheels, arrows, sliders, everything but an ashtray. As I stared helplessly at it, Giorgio’s music came out of the TV speakers, chunk, chunk, chunk, three major chords.
Rina said, “God, just give it to me.”
I handed it to her without even bothering to protest, and she played a quick Chopin polonaise on it with her thumbs, and the picture on the screen froze just as Giorgio opened his ridiculously perfect lips to sing.
“That’s great,” I said. “No sound on freeze-frame. We don’t have to listen to him.”
“Look,” Rina said, and she backed up the DVD at about quarter-speed, and there, as the camera reached the farthest extremity of its track to the left, you could see the edge of the set and Art Clay over Giorgio’s shoulder, and standing next to Clay, whispering in his ear and apparently believing he was off-camera, was a pudgy, mustachioed Italian guy in a loose, boxy suit.
“DiGaudio,” Rina said. “In his late twenties, probably. Doesn’t he look like a gangster?”
“I think that was just the neighborhood style. The FBI files make it pretty clear that the Philly mob wanted him, not that they had him.”
Rina said, “Daddy.”
Something in her tone made me look over at her.
“My footnotes,” she said. “All those footnotes at the end of my paper? The footnotes I spent so many hours on?”
“I saw them,” I said, knowing I was in trouble. “Very professional looking. Very, uh, scholarly.”
“The Philly mob wanted DiGaudio,” she said. “But not because he wasn’t a gangster. You didn’t read them.”
“I think I can honestly say that I’ve never read a footnote in my life. I skip them. They’re the linguistic equivalent of pimento. That was the main reason I educated myself mostly out of novels. Most novelists don’t use—” I stopped and replayed what she’d said. “What do you mean it wasn’t because he wasn’t a gangster?”
“He was a gangster. He just wasn’t a Philly gangster. The Philly gangsters wanted to get him away from the gang that was running him.”
“The gang that was—” I said, and stopped. I felt like someone had broken an egg over my head. “Los Angeles,” I said. “He came to Los Angeles.” The page from Derek’s notebook swam into view, supplying the next piece right on cue. “And he came by way of Chicago.”
“As you’d know, if you’d read—” Rina began.
“So Sal=ID was wrong,” I said over her.
“Sal equals ID?” Rina asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a speculation,” I said, “made by someone who’s no longer with us. He was wondering whether Eddie ‘The Moose’ Salerno—”
“Right, the Philadelphia mob guy who got cooked in that restaurant.”
“—whether Salerno was partners with Irwin Dressler, here in Los Angeles.”
“Irwin who?”
“Dressler. Irwin Dressler. The LA presence for the Chicago mob.”
“The mob that was running DiGaudio’s company,” Rina said.
“Right, and I would have known that earlier if I’d read your footnote.”
“Or a few more of those FBI files I linked you to.”
“It creeped me out, being on the FBI’s site,” I said. “I had a feeling they were looking back at me.”
She crossed her legs and returned her attention to the television screen. “They probably were.”
“But he was wrong, our dead guy. Salerno didn’t equal Irwin. Irwin and Salerno were rivals.”
“If this Irwin was Chicago,” Rina said, “his guys probably started the war that got the Italians in Philadelphia to eat each other for dinner.”
“What year was that?”
She turned back to me and looked doubtful. “Nineteen sixty-four? Sixty-five?”
“That works,” I said.
“Works for what?”
“For a time line. And now I understand why Irwin wanted to know—” I broke it off, but it was too late. Rina was staring at me as though I’d just spontaneously burst into flame.
“Irwin?” She looked horrified. “You’re talking to this guy Irwin?”
“You know,” I said airily. “You meet all kinds—”
“This mob guy? This mob guy who must be, what, two thousand years old? This is all forty-five, fifty years ago. But still—”
“He’s old and harmless now,” I said. “Just an old guy in plaid slacks.”
“I suppose this is something else I shouldn’t go talking to Mom about.”
“Let’s watch our nice show.”
“You drive me crazy,” she said, and she hit PLAY and cranked up the volume as Giorgio made his noises. I had my fingers in my ears when she slowed the disk again. There was a camera behind Giorgio, and it caught the kids dancing in front of him and looking up at him, the girls with awe and the boys with a kind of ir
ritated tolerance.
“That’s Corinne,” she said, freezing the frame and leaning forward to touch the face of a girl whose eye makeup had been inspired by Elizabeth Taylor’s in Cleopatra. “Lots of guys thought she was hot. She’s dancing with somebody whose name I don’t know, but later she took Kenny away from Arlene and then dropped him, and everybody got all vengeful about it, like she should have to wear a scarlet letter.”
“Kind of a waste on black-and-white TV.”
“You know what I mean.” She tapped the screen again. “See how she’s pushing that broomstick she’s dancing with toward Giorgio? One of the reasons girls hated her was that she had such an obvious case on Giorgio.”
Corinne had piled her hair into a beehive high enough to conceal a highway safety cone. The black lines around her eyes were as thick as jet trails, and she’d also put some kind of beauty spot on her chin.
Rina pushed PLAY and used her index fingers to identify other regulars as they danced through the reverse shot over Giorgio’s shoulder, and then the camera was back in closeup on Giorgio’s perfect face, and once again I had the sense that he was terrified.
“This poor kid,” I said. “He should never have been up there.”
“No. He never looked like he enjoyed it.”
“Well, he was terrible. It’s like watching a stool try to tap dance.”
“There are lots of terrible singers,” Rina said. “Although you’re right, there weren’t many as bad as Giorgio. And look, he’s a little fat on this show. The poor kid gained weight real easily. See under his chin? He’s got maybe five, ten pounds on him that aren’t there in his movies.”
“Maybe he wanted to be fat,” I said. “Maybe he figured if he got fat, everybody would leave him alone.”
“Maybe,” she said. “He was apparently really fat when he was making the movie in Hawaii, the one he walked off of. They had him like living on lettuce.”
“How much longer does this song go on?”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “It just seems long. Got another audience shot coming up, when he bows.”
And sure enough, the song actually did end and Giorgio stopped lip-synching, and the kids screamed dutifully while he kind of ducked his head, looking deeply embarrassed. The kids flocked around him, with the tramp, whatever her name was—Corinne—in the lead, gazing up at him with a kind of manic adoration. It looked like she was going to lean forward and take a bite out of his thigh. And then they changed camera angles to shoot over the kids’ heads at Giorgio, and DiGaudio was standing about four feet from him, at the edge of the stage looking like he expected his star to bolt.
“That’s one eerie guy,” Rina said.
There was a brief glimpse of a commercial for Clearasil, and then the DVD skipped to the next track and Art Clay, all slick hair, narrow tie, and blackjack microphone, introduced Bobby Angel.
I sat forward.
Bobby was square-featured and pudgy, and the shiny white, oversize shirt with the puffy sleeves didn’t do much to disguise it. He had the loose, ultra-cool, left-hand finger-snap thing down pat, and even before he started to lip-synch, I knew what I was in for: late-period, pallid, third-generation Sinatra, via Bobby Darin, modest swing vocals with a hand-me-down ring-a-ding-ding attitude, and that’s what I got. But the kid had a decent voice and despite the extra pounds, his body language was rhythmic and economical. And he looked like he was having fun.
“Embryonic lounge singer,” I said.
“That’s probably what he would have been, if he hadn’t vanished.” Rina said. “I kind of like him. He looks, I don’t know, nice. He looks like someone who thought he’d always be the little fat boy in the corner, and instead he’s standing up there with all the girls looking at him.”
“Not exactly drooling, though.”
“No.” The audience was back on camera, and Rina hit PAUSE. The kids were dancing, paying more attention to each other than to Bobby, but they were obviously enjoying themselves. “Kenny and Arlene,” Rina said, tapping a nail against the screen. Two perfectly ordinary looking kids, except that Kenny had the ghostly ambition of sideburns, just shadows now but a style choice that would probably have gotten him into trouble at school in a week or so. “They were off and on, off and on.” Rina sat back. “Like a soap opera. It’s hard to believe anybody was interested.”
“Where’s Corinne?”
“Who knows? Giorgio’s not on, so she’s probably in the bathroom, putting burnt cork on her eyes.”
We watched Bobby Angel work the song, making a real effort to look like he was singing live. Rina was right: There was something endearing about him. He was a schlub who couldn’t believe his luck, and it was impossible not to enjoy it along with him.
“How tall were they?” I asked.
“You mean Giorgio and Bobby? I have no idea.”
“We don’t get to see them standing next to anybody, do we?”
“I think Giorgio was around five-ten,” Rina said. “In the movies, he looks just, you know, kind of tall. He’s not towering over everybody, but he’s not standing on a box, either.”
“Here he comes again,” I said as the DVD moved to the next track. This time, Art Clay waded through the crowd of kids, microphone in hand, doing a tease intro: “One of the brightest new stars in American music, a young man who’s on his way to Hollywood—”
I was halfway out of my chair before I said to Rina, “Stop it. Freeze it right there.”
She did, stranding Art Clay with his mouth open, all the kids around him looking at him except the Egyptian-eyed Corinne, who was staring off to her left, where Giorgio had presumably taken his place on the stage. I looked at her and said, “Holy shit.”
Rina said, “I’m obviously missing something significant.”
“The mole on her chin,” I said. “That’s not a beauty spot.”
“We’re going home,” I said, starting the car.
“So what?” Rina demanded for the fourth time. “So what if it wasn’t a beauty spot?”
“It would take me half an hour to explain it to you.”
“Remember rush hour?” she said. “From here to the Valley, we’ve only got like the rest of our lives.”
“I need to think.” I put the car into reverse.
“You need to look behind you, too,” she said. “You’re going to back into that Hummer.”
“A Hummer,” I said, putting the car back into park and resisting the urge to rest my forehead on the steering wheel and close my eyes. The Hummer sat square in my rearview mirror, not going anywhere. I couldn’t see who was driving without adjusting the side mirror, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“Listen to me,” I said. “And I mean listen one hundred percent. Are you with me?”
“Right here.”
“Okay. If you go left in the alley at the end of this lot, it’ll take you to Brighton Way. If you go right on Brighton Way and then left at the first cross street, that will take you straight down to Wilshire.”
“And?”
“And when you get a light to cross, because there’s a lot of traffic, you can go into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.”
“That’s really interesting,” Rina said, “but I’m not the one who’s driving.”
“I’m going to get out of the car now. At the count of three. When I say ‘three,’ you open your door just a crack, at the same time I do. Hold it so it doesn’t open further. I’ll leave mine open so the light in the car stays on.”
“Why do we want the light in the car to—”
“Shush. If I hit the trunk or the fender hard, twice, that means you open your door the rest of the way and take off running as fast as you can. Left into the alley, right on Brighton—”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Good. Because you need to run like there’s a fucking bear after you. Right on Brighton and left at the first—”
“Got it. Into the hotel, if I can get there.” Rina’s face was pale. “Then wha
t?”
“Wait ten minutes. If I don’t show up, call your mom.”
“Oh, boy.” There was perspiration at her hairline.
“You’re okay. At the count of three. One. Two. Three.”
I opened the door and climbed out, and I felt, rather than heard, Rina’s door pop off the latch. I got out, and was surprised to see the Humvee move forward. Once it was out of the way, it stopped and the door opened, and Fronts clambered out and said, “We gonna need to move that car, I think.”
“You should have moved Derek’s.”
“I forgot. Let me see your hands, Junior.”
My hands, unfortunately, were empty. I have a policy of not being armed when I’m around my daughter, so the Glock was in the trunk. I thought for a second about going back and popping the trunk but the automatic hanging straight down beside Fronts’ leg changed my mind. I wasn’t sure he even knew he had it in his hand, and I didn’t want to remind him.
“Beverly Hills,” Fronts said, nodding ponderously. He was the color of library paste, the color of someone who has voluntarily had every drop of blood drained out of him, the dead, long-term floater-white of Rina’s fishburger patty. He wore a pair of horrifically stained painter’s coveralls and a white T-shirt, and the T-shirt was translucently wet, hanging heavy with sweat despite the cool day. There was a wide bandage wrapped around the upper arm I’d put the bullet through. Carved into the forearm below it, his right, in gouges still fresh enough for the meat to be red, was the word LEFT.
“My kind of town,” I said. “All this glamour.”
“Always with a chick,” Fronts said, squinting through the back window at Rina. “I don’t have all these chicks.”
“You want to find a girl who really needs something to read.”
“You’re fuckin’ up,” Fronts said. “I thought I was kind of plain about it, but here you are, looking at old TV. That’s what people do in there, right? How’s the other one?”
“The other what?”
He winced for a second, and I mistook it for pain until I realized it was the sheer effort of trying to remember what we were talking about. “The other chick. The one in bed.”
“Fine,” I said. “She woke up.”
Little Elvises Page 24