Little Elvises

by Timothy Hallinan

  “So there was Bobby. You’d gained weight, you were about the same height. What did you use?”

  “Ether. It dissipates faster than barbiturates, which was pretty much all there were in those days. Doesn’t leave much of anything in the respiratory system that a fire wouldn’t account for. I soaked a napkin with it and knocked him out. Corinne put him in my bed and lit a cigarette. Then she poured ether on the sheets and dropped the cigarette into the middle of it. Went up like that flash paper magicians use, just fwoooosh. Ether’s so flammable it ignites at a hundred eighty degrees, did you know that?”

  “I haven’t had much need for the information.”

  “I found out later. Read a lot about it, over the years. It became one of my topics. So anyway, Bobby was in the part of the house that burned longest, my height, my weight, my bed, and we knew Vinnie would be called to make the identification. No DNA then, and neither of us had fillings, so no dental work to check. Oh, we gave Bobby a bracelet I wore, a big clunky thing with my name on it. An ID bracelet, remember ID bracelets?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’ve worked out the rest of it, probably.”

  “I suppose. You here, safe and sound. Corinne to take care of you, Vinnie to support you. The band coming in to cut records. Kids singing, but the idea was always to pull their vocals—if the vocals were even recorded—and put you on later. And my guess is that the kids were all good-looking because Vinnie was looking for someone commercial, somebody who’d look good when it was time to lip-synch to the records, if it ever came to that.”

  “Imagine,” Giorgio said. “Someone willingly pretending to have my singing voice.”

  “You hated singing, you hated performing. I saw you. You hated every minute of it. Why would you let them go through all this?”

  He looked over my shoulder, and I almost turned to check it out, but then the open eye came to mine. “It was the only thing I could give them. I didn’t have anything else for them. Look at all they’d done for me. They’d ruined their lives for me. Vinnie, Corinne. Maybe Corinne most of all. Because they loved me. They thought it would make me happy, having more hits, being a star again, even if some other kid’s face was on the record. They thought I enjoyed writing the songs. They thought.…” He relaxed his neck suddenly and his head dropped forward, his chin on his chest. Slowly he brought it back up and turned it from side to side. It obviously hurt. “They thought it made me happy. How could I tell them it didn’t?” The hand beneath the blanket moved again. “If I’d said no, if I hadn’t let them do it, what would they have had? All they wanted was to make me happy.”

  “Love,” I said.

  I got the half-smile again. “Weird, isn’t it.”

  “So here you are—what?—forty-five, forty-six years later, something like that? And all that time you’ve been buried in this house, and somebody finally got sloppy, and there was Derek Bigelow.”

  “One of the musicians,” Giorgio said. “He and the reporter—Derek, I guess that’s the name—were coke buddies. So, naturally, they talked. And talked, and talked. And the reporter figured out something, I don’t know what, exactly, but that there was some sort of monster in Vinnie’s house, and he did a lot of research and he took that picture. And then he came to Vinnie for money.”

  “Three hundred fifty,” I said. “Here’s the thing I can’t figure out. Why dump Bigelow’s body on your star? Of all the places in the world, why there?”

  “Ah,” he said. “That was the result of a little tiff.”

  “A tiff.”

  “Between Vinnie and Corinne. Vinnie was going to pay. Talked about killing the guy, even put out a feeler but then he pulled back because Vinnie’s soft. Decided to pay. Thought Derek would take the money and go away, and we could all go back to being the happy family we’d been before. But Corinne, who has a forceful personality, said, essentially, fuck that, and hired that human potato with the cuts all over him to take care of the reporter. She had him left on top of me—on that part of the sidewalk, I mean—as a warning to Vinnie. Like a statement: No negotiation, ever. Problem was, Vinnie’s cop nephew got you involved.” He shook the ruined head. “Terrified Corrine so bad she set it up so the potato would kill you when you left. But it didn’t work, and then you told Vinnie that Bigelow had been dropped on my star, and Vinnie figured it out, figured it had to be Corrine. But what was he going to do by then? Try to call you off?”

  He rocked back and forth in the wheelchair, his weight producing a squeak. “It was so dumb. Vinnie had an alibi and everything, but he figured if he used it—you know, recording session; musicians—it would point at me somehow, especially after where the body was found. And, of course, if it pointed to me, then who’s buried in my grave? See? Murder one way or the other.” He sighed deeply, and the heavy shoulders drooped. “So here we are, and I’ve had enough. More than enough. This was never fun, but now it’s just not worth doing any more. I wouldn’t do it even if I could.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Who knows? Vinnie grabbed everything valuable he could get his hands on, tried to take me with him, and ran. He couldn’t exactly pick me up and carry me out. Corinne said to me, Hold tight, sweetie, it’s not over, and left with the potato. Oh, yeah, and she kissed me,” he said. “Right about here, she kissed me,” and he brought the hand out from under the blanket and touched the barrel of the gun to his right cheek and said, “Right here,” and pulled the trigger.

  He was thrown back against the console, shoving the slider back up, and the drums boomed out again. They chased me all the way out of the house. I could still hear them at the bottom of the hill, the same simple pattern over and over again, snare, high-hat, double bass pedal, twenty, twenty-five, thirty times.

  Looking for the groove.

  Nobody was happy with me. Paulie DiGaudio wasn’t happy with me because Vinnie was hanging out there in the wind somewhere, Irwin Dressler wasn’t happy with me because ditto, Marge wasn’t happy with me because I didn’t have anything to tell her about Doris except that Pivensey might be in Twentynine Palms, and Rina and Kathy weren’t happy with me, for a whole handful of reasons.

  And of all of them, I was probably the least happy with me. I should have seen it coming the moment I registered the blanket in Giorgio’s lap. The moment I saw him sitting there, alone in that house, suicidally overweight, disfigured, crippled, abandoned, waiting for nothing.

  Sitting on the edge of my bed at the North Pole, I couldn’t stop seeing the kid in those black-and-white images from half a century ago. The Philadelphia street kid who’d been kidnapped from his front stoop and shoved into the light. Who couldn’t sing, couldn’t act, couldn’t do much of anything. Trapped behind that beautiful face. Frightened all the time, terrified as he hung from his lucky star, far too high. And he’d been right to be terrified.

  I should have known what he was going to do the moment I saw that there was something in his hand. I should have known he didn’t intend to use it on me.

  In search of an appropriate outlet for my feelings, I took off one shoe and went over to the dresser. I gripped the shoe by the front end and used the heel to hammer at the glued-together Christmas-tree balls until every single one of them was pounded to fragments. When the dresser was covered with shards of glass, multicolored and shimmering like the shattered shells of phoenix eggs, and there were half a dozen small cuts on my knuckles, I threw the shoe at the bowl the balls had been in, breaking it in half. Then I went to the bed, sat down, picked up the phone and dialed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when she answered.

  She said, coolly, “You have good reason to be.”

  “I know who killed Derek.”

  “Excuse me if I don’t gasp with surprise. I thought we knew yesterday who killed Derek.”

  “I know who hired him.”

  “I see,” Ronnie said. “And you’re calling to inform me that it wasn’t I.”

  “Something like that. It was someone you’ve
never even heard of.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. I may not have lived an exemplary life, back there in Trenton or Albany, but it’s good to know I didn’t have my husband murdered.”

  “I don’t care where you used to live. I don’t give a shit.”

  “That may be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “And I meant every word of it.”

  She said, “Are you smoking?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “If you did, would this be the kind of conversation you’d smoke during?”

  “Nonstop.”

  “Then it must matter,” she said.

  “I think it does.” I listened to the sound of her breathing for a second, and then I said, “I told my daughter about—well, about.”

  “Lord almighty,” she said. “I won’t ask how she took it. Want me to come over?”

  “Would you?”

  “Instantly. Or I could come over there.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ve kind of totaled this room. Let me check the other one. If it doesn’t look worthy of you, I’ll go to you.”

  “What do you mean, you totaled the room?”

  “Just finding a creative way to express my self-loathing.” I was up and walking.

  “Self-loathing? This is the kind of problem women are for. I’ll be right there.”

  “Wait,” I said. I had the door to Prancer open, and there was a thin stack of computer printouts dead-center on top of the table. Louie had made use of his key. “I need to call you back.”

  “I’m coming over,” she said. “You can hang up, but I’m coming.” She disconnected.

  Nine sheets of paper, clusters of property records centered on three letters of the alphabet: P for Pivensey, H for Huff and/or Hough, and E for Enderby. Just as I’d asked, Louie’s young woman had pulled the sheet with each of those names on it, or the sheet on which they would have fallen alphabetically, plus the one on either side of it.

  There were no Pivenseys, neither male nor female. There was one Enderby, but his name was Edgar, and anyway, he was a seller, not a buyer. There was nobody named Huff. There was nobody named Hough.

  But there was a Hoff. A Doris E. Hoff. E, at a guess, for Enderby.

  A sixteen-acre parcel, probably snipped from a 19th-century 640-acre homestead, the parcel described as having a cabin, a legal easement, and an official hookup to city electric and water. Within the city limits of Twentynine Palms.

  Right where he’d gotten the parking ticket.

  So he’d married Doris—something Marge didn’t know—and bought the property in her name, staying off the official records. Probably told her he was putting her name on the title so it would always be hers. Like a gift. Undoubtedly painted her a picture of a secluded refuge, away from the craziness and dirt of the city, someplace they could live the good, simple life. Someplace with clean air, big skies, warm days, crisp nights. Maybe a wood-burning stove and a big front porch looking out over the otherworldly beauty of Joshua Tree.

  Someplace with lots of room for a grave.

  He’d introduced the typo into the record at some point in the process, or maybe he just had the luck of the wicked, and Marge had heard him wrong: Huff instead of Hoff. Doris E. Hoff. It might have kept him safe for decades, once she was out of the way.

  Which she almost certainly was by now.

  The deed listed the property by parcel number, but even better, there was a street address. 1772 Sunrise Drive. It took two minutes on the Rand McNally website to map the whole thing out.

  I grabbed the extra magazines for the Glock and checked the Sig Sauer, which was full. The bluing was worn away in places, so the gun had seen a lot of use, but the P226 is a solid, if ugly, piece of machinery and when I popped the clip and racked the slide a couple of times, it was as precise as a Rolex, no burrs or glitches. It dry-fired more easily than I expected; I could have pulled the trigger with an eyelash. Seemed way too light a pull for someone as jittery in his approach to life as Fronts, but you never knew. He might have been a savant where guns were concerned.

  My flashlights were already in the car. I owned a pair of night-vision goggles, but they were in storage. I put both guns and the extra clips into a briefcase and toted it down to the Toyota, where I laid it on the floor in front of the passenger seat. The case would be visible to cops, but they’d need probable cause to open it, and I didn’t want the weapons locked away in the trunk. I’d had enough of that in my most recent interaction with Fronts.

  I opened the trunk and chose a flashlight. I also selected a knife from a small assortment I keep under the spare tire, a razor-sharp, bone-handled buck knife in a leather sheath that it only took a moment to slip over my belt. I hate knives, but I hate the idea of dying more.

  I got behind the wheel, started the car, and called Ronnie.

  “I’m ten minutes away,” she said.

  “I have to leave.”

  A pause. “This better be good.”

  “I think I know where Doris is.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s good.”

  “Can you spend some time with Marge without getting hammered?”

  “If I really, really try. What’s my excuse?”

  “You came to see me but I wasn’t home. Stop somewhere and pick up a bottle of vodka, something good, not that formaldehyde she usually drinks. Tell her you were bringing it to me and thought she might like it.”

  “How long are we talking about?”

  “If I drive fast and don’t get arrested or killed, you mean?”

  “Yes. Especially not killed.”

  “Two and a half, three hours. By then I’ll either know something or I’ll be in the wrong place.”

  “Or dead.”

  “There’s that. But if I’m not, and I know something, then I think Marge had better have someone with her.”

  “Okay. Not to sound like a girl, but are you going to be careful?”

  “Stealthy,” I said. “I’m going to be stealthy as hell.”

  “You’d better be. If you get yourself killed, don’t come nosing around for sympathy.”

  “Take care of Marge,” I said.

  It was almost nine o’clock, and the Hollywood Freeway was clear all the way to the 10. Los Angeles slid by flat and glittering, the only real spike in the horizon the high-rise downtown skyline to the left. A fat moon, yellow as a smoker’s teeth, cleared the horizon through my windshield as I sped east at about seventy-five miles per hour. I was keeping pace with the other traffic, sticking pretty much to one lane, neither the slow lane nor the fast lane, driving my invisible car as invisibly as possible.

  When and how had Corinne managed to find her way into Giorgio’s life? Obviously it was pre-Hawaii, because she’d been on the scene in Honolulu to help DiGaudio get him home. That was only a few years after DiGaudio decamped to Hollywood, taking most of his boys with him. She was still in her teens then, still dancing on the television show. How could a girl that age—

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. That eye makeup. That faux-Egyptian raccoon mask. No other girl wore makeup that extreme. Everybody else was groomed for Sunday school, and there she was, looking like the doorwoman to a pyramid. Why was she allowed to look like that? Why did she dance with different guys all the time? Why were her eyes glued to Giorgio every moment he was onstage?

  Because the rules didn’t apply to her. Because Corinne was Giorgio’s girlfriend.

  She came to California with him. It was a lifelong love. For both of them, I figured, both DiGaudio and Corrine. They were both in love with the boy with the impossible face. The absolutely, resolutely unremarkable boy who was trapped for life, first behind the accident of his beauty and then inside the ruin of that beauty. Beauty means nothing, it just is, but we pour our feelings into it and demand that it means something, and eventually it does. It means whatever we wanted to see in it. And Corinne and DiGaudio had poured themselves into Giorgio until he was part of them. The three of them,
sharing their nightmare Eden as a ménage à trois until the serpent appeared in the form of a junk journalist with a camera.

  Not knowing that there was a murder back there.

  And they were a family, of a kind. And they weren’t willing to be ripped apart. So, hello, Fronts. Bye-bye, Derek.

  I was working to keep my eyes and my mind on the road, but there was no way I could keep myself from seeing that gun come up from beneath the blanket, arc through the air and finish its journey right here.

  On the kiss.

  And then, of course, there was the other tragedy, the forgotten tragedy: Roberto Abbruzzi, Bobby Angel, sacrificed to prevent the very thing Derek was threatening to expose. Bobby Angel, who could actually sing, who actually had a modest talent. In a different world, Bobby would have been more important than Giorgio. But this is the world we have, and the people who live in it don’t live or die for a modest talent. They’ll live or die for beauty, though. And poor Bobby wasn’t beautiful.

  Thoughts and recriminations tumbled around in my head, and when I spotted the turnoff for Highway 62 coming up, I realized I was doing almost ninety. Not a good policy with two guns in a briefcase on the floor and a knife on my belt. I slowed and took the long lazy loop that put me onto 62.

  62, also called the Twentynine Palms Highway, is essentially forty miles uphill. It begins on the ancient seafloor where Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs bake in the year-round heat, and it ascends: up, up, and up some more, all the way to the high desert. As I climbed, the air cooled and cleared, and the stars popped into sharp relief. The moon whitened and grew colder looking.

  It was a pretty big moon, bigger and brighter than I’d have requested if I’d been consulted. It was the kind of moon that casts shadows. The kind of moon that makes motion obvious even to those who aren’t on the lookout. A killing moon, if my luck was bad.

  I couldn’t get killed. Rina wanted to live with me.

  And look where I was, just a few hours after our confrontation with Fronts, look what I was doing.