Little Elvises (10 page)

“Sounds good to me.”

“For now, anyway. It’s cute to be poor when you’re young. Lots of art about it, operas and everything. It’s not so cute when you’re old.” She rested an elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her hand. “So,” she said, “your place or mine?”

I actually had to think about it for a moment. “Neither. Not yet.”

“What
is
this?” she said. “A scruple?”

“A daughter. I haven’t been with anybody since Kathy and I broke up, and if you and I make the transition, I’m not sure how Rina would take it.”

“And you’d tell her,” Ronnie said, “because you never lie to her.”

“Exactly.”

“Unbelievable,” she said. “I finally meet a
good
bad boy, and I can’t have him.”

“Well,” I said, “not yet, anyway.”

“Nobody called you,” Popsie snarled through a two-inch crack. Looking at the one visible eye between the door and the door frame, I revised my estimate of her age upward: she had to be in her mid-sixties, and still bench-pressing. “He’s not expecting you.”

“It’s good for him,” I said. “People who never get surprised stop developing. They might as well be rhododendrons.”

“I’ll have to ask.” She started to close the door, looked down, and said, “Move your foot.”

“When I’m inside,” I said. “Then I’ll move it to walk. Till then, it stays where it is. I don’t wait outside for people.”

“He’s not going to like it.”

I put the fingers of my left hand on the inside of my right wrist and took my pulse. “Looks like I’m okay with that.”

Popsie said, “Shit,” and opened the door. By the time I got through it, I was already watching her broad-shouldered back recede down the hallway. Her boots squeaked on the polished wood.

“Should I lock it?” I called after her. “There’s no telling who’ll turn up.”

She didn’t respond, just rounded the first corner. I closed the door and moved quickly behind her, looking into the first room
I passed, which had nothing but two picture windows with a lot of late-afternoon sun coming through them, and the second, which had windows of louvered glass, and the third, which had a couple of good old-fashioned windows that opened in the time-honored, burglar-favored way, with a lower pane you could raise. It was a quick detour to unlock one of them, just slip the semicircular latch that fastened the top pane to the bottom.

All the windows, including this one, were heavily alarmed, but I hadn’t expected anything else.

I made up a little time, so I wasn’t too far behind her when we came into the semicircular room where I’d met DiGaudio the night before. Popsie kept on going, heading right, down another hallway. The big white couch was heavily dented in the center where he’d been sitting, where he apparently always sat. A creature of habit. I figured, what the hell, and sat in the middle of the dent and waited.

There was music coming from somewhere in the house, basic fifties-simple, just drums, bass, guitar, and a keyboard of some kind, maybe an old-fashioned Hammond organ. The instruments weren’t quite together, a little ragged. The guitar was carrying the riff, five notes in an ascending scale, which repeated three times. It sounded like an instrumental intro, the kind of thing record producers used to stick on the front of songs to give disk jockeys something to talk over. Then I heard a voice, mixed pretty far down, definitely not Pavarotti or even Bobby Vinton. Then the music stopped for a second, somebody said something, a pair of drumsticks clicked off the beat, and the instrumental intro began once more.

The music got louder as the organ riff rang out, and then a door closed and the level dropped again. A moment later, it got loud, and then it stopped completely. I waited, and patience was rewarded, sort of, when DiGaudio stalked into the room.

He was draped from head to foot in a black caftan that swirled around his bare feet as he came toward me, and he was holding a half-peeled banana. He didn’t look happy.

“Business hours,” he said. “You ever hear of business hours?”

“Sure,” I said. “What do I look like I’m doing, playing forts?”

“Get out of my seat.” He turned sideways and edged his way between the curved couch and the curved coffee table, and I scooted down to make room. “This better
be
something.”

“Was Derek Bigelow blackmailing you?”

The question stopped him, although the caftan swung back and forth like a hoop skirt for a second. “Kind of bullshit is that?”

“Bigelow was a blackmailer. Was he putting a knife to you?”

“No, but what if he was? I didn’t kill him, and your job is to prove I didn’t.”

“I can only do so much in the dark.”

He sat down, looked at the banana, and dropped it on the table. “What could anybody blackmail me about? I’m, like, fifty years ago. Since the fucking Beatles ruined everything, I done nothing except gain weight. Who’s gonna blackmail me, Jenny Craig?”

“You were, or are, mobbed up.”

He shook his head slowly, like someone who’s been asked the same question too often. “Like I said, you’re forgetting why you’re here. But just to close down this particular line, I was never part of the mob. J. Edgar Hoover spent hundreds of thousands of my tax dollars trying to pin me with that, probably because he wanted to meet some of my boys. All that money, all those FBI guys in bad suits hanging around, what did they find out? That the mob wanted to run me. Salerno, that pinhead, him and the other one, they both wanted in. Wanted in, as in
weren’t
in.”

“And what? You told them no?”

DiGaudio snickered. “Right, and I spit in their face, too. No, I didn’t tell them no. I held them off as long as I could and then one night at four
A.M
. I got the hell out of Philly and took most of the kids with me. Came out here, got a couple of them into pictures, and waited it out while those dickheads ground each other into hamburger. Don’t you know anything about Philly?”

“I know about the mob wars.” And I knew that Salerno and Caponetto weren’t the kinds of guys someone like DiGaudio could have “held off,” not without a lot of help. Something to think about.

He spread his hands at the obviousness of it all. “Well,
yeah
, the mob wars. So they all blew each other away, and here we were, in Palm Tree Land, making records, making movies.”

“I don’t remember your clients making movies.”

“No shit. How old are you?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Whadya think, you should remember it in your DNA or something? We’re talking 1960, ’62, in there somewhere. Your mom was probably thirteen then, ask
her
. Six movies, all dogs, I mean
peeeyuuuu
, but they all did okay moneywise. Little girls showed up. Brought all their friends with them. I had the kids appear at some of the shows. Put them on the road with a pickup band, and they did a live twenty minutes for maybe the first two, three days the picture was on. Packed the little girls in, didn’t cost much of nothing. Kids traveled in buses, band played for cigarettes. Charged an extra four bucks for the live show, half a buck for an autograph. Some of those places, they sat two thousand people. Eight thousand for an hour’s work. Multiply that times two shows a day, three days per city, ten, twelve cities, and you’re talking about money, for those days, anyway. Wouldn’t keep a rock star these days in Kleenex.”

“Then what
did
Bigelow want with you?”

DiGaudio picked up the banana and took a bite. The smell bloomed beneath my nose. “None of your fucking business.”

“Okay, he wasn’t blackmailing you. Let’s say he was looking for a story for one of the rags he sold to.”

“Let’s say you change the subject.”

“Fine. Why was his body left on Giorgio’s star?”

His lower lip came up and then went down and came up again. “Say what?”

“You didn’t know? He was dumped on Giorgio’s square yard of the Walk of Fame.”

“No,” he said, not so much a contradiction as an all-encompassing denial that the world could work like that. He looked past me at the wall, his mind obviously in high gear.

“Afraid so.”

“No,” he said again. He cleared his throat, and then he cleared it again. “No, how would I know anything about that? I didn’t kill him, remember?” But he had beads of sweat on his forehead.

Might as well turn up the heat. “Who knew I was coming here last night?”

He looked back at me as though he’d forgotten I was in the room. “Nobody.”

“Well, let’s start with Cousin Paulie the cop, you, and Helga the house Nazi, or whatever her name is.”

“Popsie. Her name is—”

“You and Popsie and Paulie and who?”

DiGaudio started peeling one of those little white strips from the inside of the banana peel, not looking at it, just fidgeting with his fingers. “Who cares?” He balled up the white thread and flicked it onto the table. “What’s this about?”

“Last night, when I left, there was a Humvee waiting for me
outside. Tried to push me off the side of the hill, and then took a shot at me.”

DiGaudio’s chin fell onto his chest as though his head had suddenly increased in weight. He shifted his eyes around the room, licked his lips, and then dropped the banana back on the table. “Took a shot at you?”

I didn’t say anything, just watched him. He was as pale as someone getting off a roller coaster.

“Nobody,” he finally said. “Nobody else knew. I don’t talk to many people.” He pulled the sleeve of his caftan down over his left hand and used the cloth to blot his forehead.

“You talked to people about wanting to kill Bigelow.”

“Yeah, I … I was dumb. I talked to a couple of people about, you know, doing him for me. And they talked to some other people. And then somebody goes and does him, and here I am, sitting out in plain view, big as a house, waiting for someone to pin it on me.”

“Who’d you talk to about doing him?”

“Mmmmmmmmm.” His eyes were flicking back and forth, as though the question were floating in the air in front of him and he was trying to see past it. Finally, he said, “Stanley Hopper.”

“
Stanley?
Stanley’s a
patzer
. Let’s say you lost a couple of books and the library’s on your tail, that’s the kind of thing Stanley can take care of.”

“Stanley’s who I talked to. And he talked to a couple guys, I don’t know who.”

“And Stanley didn’t know I was coming last night.”

“Uh-uh.”

“So there’s nobody you can think of who might have been sitting out there waiting for me.”

“I said no.”

“And you’d tell me if you
could
think of someone.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Get the fuck off me. You’re all I got right now. You think I’d go through all this to get you here, and then ask somebody to cap you? What kind of crazy is that?”

“Vinnie,” I said. “What’s your secret?”

His eyes involuntarily flicked left, to the hallway the music had come from, but he brought them back to me, licked his lips again, and said, “Secret? I don’t have secrets.” He covered his hand with the sleeve again, but thought better of wiping away the moisture on his forehead. “Me, I’m just a guy. I got nothing to hide. My life is so open I might as well live outdoors.”

“That was quick,”
Ronnie said as I slid behind the wheel.

“I know when I’m not wanted.” I eased the car into a three-point turn, brushing DiGaudio’s azaleas, so I could head back down the driveway.

“Lookit,” Ronnie said, regarding the miscellaneous assortment of vehicles pulled up to the house. “The man either has company or he collects crappy cars.”

“I think he’s got company. I heard some music playing.” I reached down between the seats and came up with my notepad and the pen that’s permanently clipped to it. “Take down those license plate numbers, would you?”

“I thought musicians made money,” she said, jotting down numbers and letters. “What a bunch of junkers.”

“Got them all?”

“Yeah.” Ronnie dropped the pad, ran a finger over the dashboard, and looked at it as though she expected it to be covered in old phlegm. “Speaking of junkers.”

“Were we?”

“Why are you driving this thing? You’re in Los Angeles, where your car is sort of your astral projection, right? I’ve only
been here six months, and I already know that by LA standards, this is a really crappy car.”

I was still watching the mirror. “You think?”

“A white Toyota. I mean, please. With dents.” She put a finger against the bullet hole in the window. “Not to mention this. And the one in the back window.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it has a kind of battered charm, a uniquely soigné sort of post-pizzazz distinction.”

“I should introduce you to Donald. He could get you something nice.”

“White Toyotas are the world’s only invisible automobile. I could blow through a stop sign in this car, right in front of a cop, and not get ticketed. I have literally driven out of a dead-end street with a burglar alarm ringing in a house behind me, and sailed right past two private security cars coming the other way. They didn’t even glance at me.”

“If you say so.” She drew a fingertip circle around the bullet hole. “Where are we going now?”