Little Elvises

From behind his little pile of crumpled Tootsie Roll wrappers, DiGaudio said, “We can make you for the Hammer job.”

The Tootsie Roll wrappers were the only thing on the table, now that police stations are no-smoking zones. I’ve got nothing against health, but if there’s anyone in the world who needs a cigarette, it’s a crook in a police station.

“I’d emit an outraged squeal of innocence,” I said, “except I don’t have to. I didn’t do the Hammer job.”

DiGaudio scratched his cheek. I could hear the whiskers under his nails. “I’m going to extend you a courtesy I usually don’t offer career criminals,” he said. “I’m going to believe you.”

I would have pushed my chair back but it was bolted to the floor. I said, “This is too easy.”

“You think? Well, you’re right. See, it doesn’t matter whether you did it. What matters is that we can make you for it.”

I was
already
not happy. Since I’m a career criminal, to use DiGaudio’s description—and we might as well, since it’s accurate—I rarely have scrapbook moments in an interrogation room. But now we were in new territory, even for me. It didn’t matter whether I did it?

Just to test the depth of the tar pit, I said, “I have an alibi.”

DiGaudio folded his hands over his continental belly, a belly
big enough to have a capital city. I could remember when he was a trim-waisted patrolman with laundry-scrubber abs and a three-pack-a-day nicotine habit. When he made detective, four or five years back, he’d traded cigarettes for calories, and now he looked like something you might toss a peanut at. “You probably oughta call the people you were with that night,” he said. “Just, you know, match your memory with theirs.”

This was
especially
not good. Generally speaking, even the worst cops don’t intimidate witnesses.

“The Hammer job,” I said. “As I recall, there was a gun involved.”

DiGaudio nodded. He had a cop’s eyes, eyes that had seen so much they looked frayed. For the moment, he used them to check out an interrogation room he’d seen a thousand times. He’d put me in one of the nicest in the Van Nuys station. Had a floor and everything. Looking up at a corner of the ceiling, he said, “Special circumstances.”

“You know that’s not my style,” I said. “I mean, assuming that I steal things in the first place is a laughable proposition, but even if I did, I wouldn’t be dumb enough to use a gun. As pretty much everyone knows.”

“Sure,” DiGaudio said. “Everyone knows that you don’t steal stuff, since you’ve never actually been convicted of stealing stuff, and everybody also knows that if you
did
steal stuff, you’d be too smart to go in strapped. Because of—what was that phrase? The one I just used?”

“Special circumstances,” I said.

“That was it. And if you got made for robbery under special circumstances, especially against people like the Hammers, who demand and receive the very best in law enforcement, him being a circuit court judge and all, and her a little old lady, weighs about eighty pounds, getting pistol-whipped, you’d probably be looking at twenty years.” He reached into the inside pocket of his Quintuple
XL sport coat, courtesy of the local Tall Porkers outlet, and brought out a couple more Halloween-size Tootsie Rolls. “Want one?”

“I’ll get by without it,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have given it to you anyway.” He tugged the twists at the ends of the paper wrapper. “I like two at a time.” He popped the first into his mouth and unwrapped the second, parking the first one in his right cheek. The wrappers fluttered down onto the little pile on the table.

“DiGaudio,” I said. “Are we being recorded?”

“You crazy?” His teeth were stuck together but the words were understandable.

“Just checking. Let’s review. You threaten to make me for a robbery you know I didn’t pull, and you’ve intimidated the three people who could verify my alibi, which you know is straight, and you keep bringing the conversation around to special circumstances, just to remind me that I don’t want to be here. My guess is that we’re working our way toward an act of generosity on your part.”

For a count of ten, or twenty if you’ve had a lot of coffee, DiGaudio gave all his attention to chewing his chocolate cud. Tootsie Rolls demand a lot of chewing. When he’d gotten the candy soft enough so he could pry his teeth apart, he said, “My name mean anything to you?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a synonym for all that’s admirable in law enforcement.”

He waved a fat hand, the back fringed with black hair, in the direction of his left shoulder, meaning
earlier
. “Beyond that.”

I said, “Philadelphia in the fifties. Imitation Elvises. Handsome Italian kids with tight pants and big hair.”

He gave me a rich brown grin. Tootsie Rolls are a truly awful color. “How the hell do you remember that?”

“Rina,” I said. “My daughter.”

He squinted over my shoulder. “You got a daughter? She proud of her daddy?”

“Hey, fatso,” I said, “I haven’t punched you in the face yet, but that could change.”

DiGaudio flushed, and the worn-out little eyes got even smaller. “Any time,” he said. “Here or anywhere.”

“You start it, you’d better be ready to finish it.” I was past caring about anything he could do to me, legally speaking.

He passed a pink tongue over his brown teeth. Whatever he found there, it seemed to calm him down. “So, your daughter. What’s she got to do with—”

I gave myself a three-heartbeat break to get my voice under control. “She’s thirteen,” I said. “But she’s in an accelerated program, and she wrote a paper called ‘The Distorted Mirror’ for some class they didn’t have when I was in school.”

“ ‘The Distorted—’ ”

“Mirror. About the way American pop culture imitates itself, the way it stamps out little tin copies of anything original that makes money. The example she chose was all the Little Elvises from Philly who were churned to the surface in the wake of Elvis Presley.”

“
Churned to the surface.”
He burped. “Colorful phrase.”

“It’s Rina’s. So after Elvis you had all these junior goombahs, all these Bobbies and Billies and Frankies and Fabios and so forth, popping up on
American Dance Hall
and selling lots of records for about six weeks each. And the guy behind them all, according to Rina’s paper, was somebody named DiGaudio.”

“Vinnie.”

“Oh, please,” I said.

“No. Really. Vinnie. Went by Vincent because, well, because who wants to be called Vinnie? But anyway, it was Vinnie DiGaudio, Vincent L. DiGaudio, who found all those kids and made them stars—”

“Shooting stars, Rina calls them.”

“Because they went by so fast, right? But they all made a bunch of money, and Vinnie managed to get most of it into his pockets.”

“As interesting as this is, sort of a tiny-print footnote to the pop music history of the fifties, I’m not sure what it has to do with the Hammer job.”