Little Elvises (12 page)

“Current driver’s license,” DiGaudio said. “Issued three years ago. Lorne, with an E, Henry Pivensey.”

“Lorne Henry what?”

“Pivensey.” He spelled it. “First two syllables,
Piven
, like Niven as in David Niven, but with a P. S-e-y as in z-e-e. Pivensey.”

“Got it.”

“DOB 10/16/72. Height five feet six and a fraction. Brown hair and eyes. Got a tattoo on his right upper arm, says
ABANDON HOPE
.”

“Who’s Hope?”

“Funny. Why aren’t you asking?”

“Okay, I’ll ask. Since when do drivers’ licenses note tattoos?”

“They don’t. The tattoo is on his arrest sheet.”

“Awwwww,” I said, thinking about Marge. “How do I get into this stuff?”

“It’s a bad sheet, too,” DiGaudio said. “And I don’t think this has anything to do with my uncle.”

“Why not?”

“Mr. Pivensey is no danger to men. On the other hand, if you know a woman who’s anywhere near him, you might tell her to move.”

“Why is it that I never enjoy talking to you?”

“In 2001 Mr. Pivensey was sentenced to three years for beating up a seventeen-year-old girl. She said something unflattering about his shirt, and he broke her nose and one of her cheekbones. She damn near lost an eye. He got out a year and a half later, courtesy of all the periwinkle doilies on the parole board, and got arrested again seven months after
that
in the investigation of a disappeared waitress named, uh, waitaminute, Laurette Wissert. We never found her, couldn’t make a case the DA would take, but we all knew he killed her. Last time anyone saw her was with him up in Twentynine Palms. She’ll turn up in the desert someday. Some coyote will dig her up, but he’ll never go down for it. And then last year, a couple people saw him try to run over a woman in a parking lot outside Ron’s Market, you know Ron’s, over on Highland?”

“Sure.”

“Tried to hit her a couple of times. Peeled off onto the street, almost banged into a patrol car. So he got arrested, this being a nation of laws, but the woman was too frightened to press charges. We wanted to make a case for attempted murder, but the DA said no. Wouldn’t hold up without a complaint. So your Mr. Pivensey got convicted for reckless driving, paid a fine, and walked. And, since we almost got him on those three, just think how many we don’t know anything about.”

“Why don’t you guys just kill people like that?”

“There are those who claim that we do,” DiGaudio said carefully. “And there are those who claim that we don’t do it often enough. And if you’re taping this call, I’m horrified at the idea of vigilante justice.”

“You got a picture?”

“Sure. Got a nice little gallery of him holding up numbers.”

“Can you send them to me?”

“Oh, sure. Cops send police records to burglars all the time.”

“This guy may have been living with the daughter of someone I know. Now the daughter’s not around.”

“The police,” DiGaudio said. “Remember us? The
someone you know
should call the police.”

“I’ll pass that along. But don’t be a dick. Send me the pictures.”

For a moment, I thought he’d hang up. But then he said, “Well, we haven’t been doing too good with this guy, have we? It’ll take me a couple of minutes to crop down to the face, get rid of the stuff that says
booking photo
. I’ll send you two pictures. What email address?”

“Hold on. Rina,” I called. “What’s your email address?”

“Skyspirit at Bluepool-dot-com,” she said.

“Great,” I said. I gritted my teeth and passed the address to DiGaudio.

“Dot … com,” DiGaudio said, obviously concentrating. It was hard not to picture him writing with the tip of his tongue plastered to his upper lip. “Okay, give me a few minutes. And, Bender, listen.”

“I’m only sorry you can’t see me, see how hard I’m listening.”

“Two things. First, don’t let this asshole Pivensey distract you from Vinnie’s problem. And second, if you run across the little prick and the circumstances are right, do us all a favor. Punch some holes in him. And then, when he’s dead, call us.”

DiGaudio hung up.

He’d done three
movies, Giorgio had, none of them likely to make the AFI’s Twentieth-Century Classics list, but all of them apparently profitable.

“
Johnny Cool
?” Rina read off the screen. “That’s
pathetic
. And then there’s
The Boy with the Gold Guitar
and
Summer Star
. Which one do you want to watch?”

I said, “Watch?”

“Streaming,” Tyrone said. “It’s called streaming.”

“When I want to hear a technical term, I’ll ask for one.”

Tyrone said, “Ooooohhhh,” and pulled his hands up close to his chest, as though a badly made-up mummy had just staggered out of the closet.

“Is it legal?” I asked Rina.

“Who said that?” Rina said, looking around the room. “Whoever that was, did he mean, would we be
stealing
if we watched one of these?”

“Can’t they track you?” I asked.

“Even if they could, I don’t think people are spending much time protecting Giorgio’s movies from being pirated.”

“Call the White House,” Tyrone said. “We got us another Giorgio thief.”

“Okay, okay. Which one sounds least worst to you?”

“
Summer Star
,” Rina said. “At least they can’t screw up the season.”

“Fine.
Summer Star
it is.”

Rina was wrong. They screwed up the season.
Summer Star
was shot entirely on sound stages, apparently for about nine dollars. Bad lighting substituted for the sun, giving everyone three shadows when they were supposed to be outdoors, and painted backdrops substituted for the world. Giorgio substituted for a leading actor. He played identical twins, one good and one bad, although his performance gave new depth to the term
identical
. At one point, the good Giorgio (I think) was hit on the head, but not, unfortunately, fatally, and he went into a coma, which Giorgio did convincingly. And then the bad Giorgio (I think) pretended to be the good brother for some reason that never became clear, although it might have if I could have endured more than about twenty-three minutes of it.

But at minute twenty-three, he began to sing.

It wasn’t that he was tone-deaf. It was more like what he heard in his head was music in whole new keys, keys that had never been played on earthly instruments. It was like the music of the spheres, if the spheres were large, wavering, formless, gelatinous globs of anti-music. And poor Giorgio knew it. His acting was awful, but when he was singing, you could actually feel the kid’s pain. He knew exactly how terrible he was. I felt like I was looking at a dancing bear that had been forced to watch Fred Astaire movies just before he got shoved onstage.

“That’s enough,” I said. “So that’s it? Three movies, and then Hollywood came to its senses?”

“You really don’t know about this?” Rina asked.

“When he was doing whatever you call what he was doing, I wasn’t even born yet. I didn’t even know this scene existed.”

“Well, he started a fourth one. Movie, I mean.
Boola Boola Hula
. It was being shot in Hawaii. But halfway through it, he didn’t show up for the day’s shooting. When they went to his hotel, he was gone. All his stuff was there, but he wasn’t.”

“Yeah? Is that the punch line? I mean, in that interview with DiGaudio, the lady asking the questions brought Giorgio up, and DiGaudio turned into a big nerve ending, but he didn’t say the kid was dead or anything.”

“I saw the interview, Daddy. What he didn’t say was more interesting than what he did say.”

“Textual elision,” Tyrone volunteered. “Lotta times, elided material, the stuff that doesn’t make it into a text is what’s most important. Didn’t make it because whoever wrote the text thought it was self-evident.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m trapped in a room with a primary-source document.”

“So if you two are finished striking up a relationship?” Rina said. “Nobody could find him for about five weeks, and then he called the director and said he was through. Said he was sorry, but he wouldn’t be acting any more. Or singing any more, or doing the star thing. He said he was finished, and he was. He never worked again.”

“Shame they don’t give a Kennedy Center Award for quitting,” Tyrone said.

“And then, a few months later.…” She checked the paper in front of her. “On April 23, 1963, his house burned down with him in it. Smoking in bed, fell asleep.”

Tyrone said, “I withdraw the comment.”

“Dead?” I asked.

“Dead.” She reached up and brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Girls went into mourning all over the place. Bouquets of flowers stacked six feet high outside the fence around
his place. About two thousand people at the funeral. It’s kind of sad,” she said. “That was how he got on the Walk of Fame. They only put him on because he died. It was like burning to death was a good career move.”

“Awwww,” Tyrone said.

“So one day, there was a star named Giorgio,” Rina said. “And then,
pop
.” She spread the fingers on both hands to mime a bursting bubble. “Pop, and he was gone.”

It was just a square of paper, folded into quarters and placed beneath the windshield wiper of my car, and it only had two words and a number on it, but those were enough to make me pop a sweat standing right there at the curb. The worst of it wasn’t that it had been left for me. The worst of it was that it had been left for me in front of Kathy’s and Rina’s house.

The words were,
CALL IRWIN
. Beneath the words was a Beverly Hills phone number, a number that began proudly with the coveted 275 prefix. Whoever wrote the note had been aware of the weight of the prefix; he hadn’t bothered with the 310 area code. Two-seven-five was Beverly Hills and nowhere but Beverly Hills, and it didn’t need no stinking area code.

There were many places I could have gone just then and many things I could have done. I could have gone back to the North Pole to give Marge the bad news that she needed to get the cops involved in Doris’s disappearance. I could have gone to Studio City to pick up one of my Glocks. I could have gone to Hollywood to pick up
another
one of my Glocks, since it was starting to feel like a two-Glock week. I could have gone to the Wedgwood, climbed into bed, and stayed there for six months. I could have gone back to Stinky Tetweiler’s and threatened Ting Ting until Stinky gave me the names and addresses of the mugs who
actually robbed the judge. I could have gone to the offices of
The National Snoop
, the paper Derek Bigelow had been working for when he got beaten to death, and asked whether he’d told his editor anything that might point to a motive for murder. I could have gone to the West Hollywood apartment building where the newly widowed Mrs. Bigelow was living with her grief, and attempted to comfort her. I could have done any of those things and a dozen more. But I knew, standing there with the note in my hand just outside the house inhabited by my ex-wife and my daughter, that there was one thing I was not, under any circumstances, going to do.

I was not going to call Irwin.

Irwin
was the name Stinky had given me.

Irwin Dressler.

The Fixer, the biggest, fattest spider in Los Angeles. In his early nineties now, he had probably lost a little of the power he’d exercised so quietly for more than six decades, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have plenty left. Irwin Dressler was the
eminence gris
of Southern California. The power broker, the man who made things happen, the guy with the secrets. The Wizard of Was.

Except for the fact that he had managed to stay with us.

A lot of people, even a lot of crooks, don’t know much about the Chicago Jewish mob. They know that “the mob” ran Las Vegas for a long time, for example, and they probably think of slick hair and double-breasted suits and names that end in a vowel, but they don’t ask themselves why the mobster who started the whole thing was named Benjamin Siegel instead of something like Luigi Lasagna. He was named Benjamin Siegel, also called “Bugsy” (but not to his face), because he was one of the LA representatives of the Chicago outfit made up almost entirely of Jews who’d had the good sense to flee Russia, where
killing Jews went in and out of fashion as the national sport. They were tough and smart, and they ran their own local rackets and got involved in Chicago politics and joined forces with Capone’s Italian mob as lawyers and financial planners.
Without the Jews
, one Italian mobster famously told Congress,
we’d still be hiding money in mattresses
. Eventually, probably tired of having to explain things four and five times to the Guidos, they split from the Italians and went into business on their own.