Little Elvises (13 page)

In the thirties and forties, the Chicago mob came west, in the person of Siegel, Mickey Cohen, and some others, and the first thing they did was shove over a cliff the Italian mob, represented at that time by a thug named Jack Dragna. The Chicago guys were smarter than Dragna’s bunch, better at long-range planning, more likely to use brains than machine guns and baseball bats, and they took one look at LA and saw the biggest piece of fruit on the national tree. Without too much effort, they picked it.

They ran most of the movie studios, the entertainment unions, the music business. The hotels and the hotel unions. The Teamsters. They started country clubs and banks and law firms. When the property of Japanese-Americans was confiscated after Pearl Harbor, the Chicago mob got one of their own, Robert Bazelon, named at the federal level to run the redistribution effort, and Bazelon made sure that millions of prime acres in California went to the family, so to speak. They ran the California Democratic party. They elected mayors. They elected governors. They elected presidents of the Screen Actors Guild. They played a key role in electing at least one president of the United States.

And slowly, over decades, they did what the Italians never quite succeeded in doing. They took their businesses legit. Gradually, they began to play by the rules, to declare their profits, to pay their taxes, to indulge in conspicuous philanthropy. But
lurking back behind the white-shoe law firms, the big landmark buildings, the stock option plans, and the shiny, world-famous logos, behind all the apparent corporate rectitude, some of the roots still ran to Chicago, and by and large, they ran through one man, a lawyer named Irwin Dressler.

When there was a strike at a studio, when there was a strike in Vegas, when the Dodgers moved to LA and their opening day was threatened by a strike by the guys in the parking lot, Irwin Dressler stepped in. When the Teamsters Pension Fund had twenty or thirty million to invest, Irwin Dressler invested it. When a famous Italian-American singer, known for punching people, went ahead and punched someone, Irwin Dressler picked up the pieces. When an unsuccessful actor was named to head up one of Hollywood’s top studios, and stars and directors all over town refused to work for him, Irwin Dressler made the peace.

And more to the point, where I was concerned, when guys got seriously out of line—mob guys or cops, it didn’t matter—and then disappeared from view forever, Irwin Dressler’s name was often whispered. And he’d done all this and a lot more, and made a massive fortune doing it, without ever having been formally charged with a crime. He’d been called to testify before Senate committees on organized crime more often than I’d been to baseball games, and at the end of his testimony, he was always thanked and praised for his cooperation, although you could probably spend years reviewing his testimony without stumbling over a single statement that was entirely true.

If the mob was an enormous black iceberg just inches beneath the surface of the sea, Irwin Dressler was the tiny tip, a harmless-looking little island of white in the middle of all that dark water. He might have been in his nineties, but there was still a
lot
of weight behind Irwin Dressler.

I wasn’t about to call Irwin. Irwin and I barely inhabited the same galaxy.

So. Get in the car. Study the rearview mirror. Start the car. Drive up into the hills, into the remainder of the old Edgar Rice Burroughs estate that gave Tarzana its name, keeping one eye on the mirror. Head left up Willow Court and follow it slowly until it dead-ended at the iron gates of someone with more money than he needed. Turn the car around and wait as the sun did its daily descent.

Watch a coyote with a limp cross the street, tongue hanging out like pink ribbon, ribs like pleats beneath the scruff of fur, eyes all over the place. Coyotes in the wild are like dogs with an edge, but in civilization they’re curs, always worried about the shotgun or the white truck that means their ass is over. I can identify with that, so I commune silently with the coyote until he’s out of sight. Listen to a mockingbird, the Mozart of the animal world, run through a ten-minute medley of trills, chirps, riffs, bells, and whistles without a single repetition. Think about how to tell Marge about Lorne Henry Pivensey. Spend a minute or two looking at Pivensey’s mug shots, fresh from Rina’s printer, seeing a thin, short, nervous-looking nonentity with a receding hairline, a weak chin, and a wandering left eye. Pivensey didn’t look any more dangerous than a paper cut.

But then, Irwin Dressler looked like a benign little old man with an extensive selection of plaid slacks. Like a man who never remembered to put batteries in the remote and had to call his kids when he wanted to watch TV.

Think about my reaction to Tyrone. I’d never seen myself as a racist. I had black friends and associates, I’d given ill-gotten gains to organizations that provided one-on-one tutoring to offset the weaknesses of inner-city schools. I’d voted for a black
man for president. I was an enlightened, unprejudiced resident of the brave new multiracial world. Wasn’t I?

So why had the hair on the back of my neck stood up when it became obvious that Rina and Tyrone were, at the very least, dancing around the beginning of a mutual attraction?

In William Gaddis’s towering 1955 novel,
The Recognitions
, which was the first book I had used to educate myself when I decided that college wouldn’t do the job, there is a character named Otto. Otto is a fake. He pretends to be a writer but he’s not. He pretends to be an intellectual but he’s not. He’s a counterfeit human, someone who continually tries to shape his life so it looks enviable to others, without worrying about the fact that it’s all surface. It has no core. He occasionally looks at his expensive wristwatch, admires it, and then realizes that he forgot to check the time. Otto thinks only about forging the next moment, so he’ll continue to be accepted as Otto.

But one sentence haunts him:
All of a sudden, somebody asks you to pay in gold, and you can’t
. Maybe Tyrone was that for me, a moment when I had to pay in gold, when I had to cut through the layers of bubble-wrap surrounding my core beliefs and see what they really were. And I didn’t know how to do it, hadn’t even thought I needed to until Tyrone opened that door.

Okay, later for that. Look through the damn windshield, see whether death is in the neighborhood. Couldn’t hear any cars approaching, didn’t see one appear around the bend. Either nobody was bothering to follow me, or.…

Right.
Or
.

I got out of the car and ran my hands under the fenders, getting them good and dirty in the process. I had to lie down on my back and stick my head under the car before I saw it, a little black plastic box clinging like a limpet to the chassis of my car.

Well, I told myself, it was information. Neither good nor
bad, just something I probably wasn’t supposed to know about, so my knowing about it was better than my not knowing about it, but on the other hand, it would be a
lot
better if I weren’t in a position where people representing Irwin Dressler were sticking tracking devices on my car, wouldn’t it?

Leave it on or take it off? That was easy: leave it on for the moment. It probably meant that I couldn’t drive the car to the North Pole, since it was barely possible Dressler’s people didn’t know about the North Pole, but I could live with that. Park a quarter of a mile away and hike it.

I entertained the notion of yanking the limpet and moving out of the motel, but I had a feeling that Dressler could find me anywhere, and also that Marge was going to need me. And while I knew I was in trouble, I thought Marge was in more trouble than I was.

“She’s off the
lead,” Louie said.

“Well, that’s just great.” I was doing big zigzags that took me south across Ventura, then a couple of blocks east, then back north across Ventura again, a few blocks further east, and so forth. No followers, although I wouldn’t have expected one, what with the little radio station clamped beneath my car. But I learned a long time ago that it’s usually exactly what you don’t expect that pops up like the handle of a rake and splits your lip. “Who’d you have following her?”

“A girl. Usually pretty good.”

“But our little amateur, our innocent, recently bereaved widow, shook her off.”

“Yeah.” Louie sounded defensive. “Did it pretty smooth, too.”

“Define
smooth
.”

“Came out, walked right past her car, like she was heading
for the Ralphs market a few blocks over, carrying one of those canvas shopping bags people use to save the earth from other kinds of shopping bags. So my girl, she decided driving real slow behind her wasn’t such a great idea, and she went on foot.
Your
girl turned the corner and climbed into a taxi that she had waiting there, and my girl stood there and watched her drive off.”

I said, “Hmmmm. And she’s not really my girl.”

“I’d say that’s a good thing, considering.”

“
Your
girl. You say she’s good.”

“Are you kidding?” Louie said. “You never saw her.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means I put her on you for four, five days at the end of her training period.”

“Shut
up
.”

“God’s truth.”

“I didn’t see her, but Ronnie Bigelow did?”

“Well, yeah.”

I was at that very moment relying on my skill at spotting a tail. “The course of true love,” I said, checking my rearview mirror more closely, “never did run smooth.”

I managed to interrupt a couple of early dinners, get snarled at by three hybrid dogs heavy on the Rottweiler/Doberman my-dog-can-kill-you bloodlines, and hissed at by one cat. The hour between 6 and 7
P.M
. is not the best time for knocking on the doors of perfect strangers and asking questions about the neighbors.

Next door on the left and next door on the right, nothing. The residents were vaguely aware that there had at one time been people in the house that Lorne Henry Pivensey aka Lemuel Huff and Marge’s wayward Doris had shared, although nobody seemed to know anything about them, and no one had any idea when they’d left. Good neighbors, LA-style. The folks next door could be waiting for the global premiere of their first movie or cooking up meth in the broom closet, and no one would know. The lady in the house to the right, a spectrally thin woman with jumpy eyes and a dull bruise on her left cheekbone, identified Pivensey from the mug shot and said, “Looked like a prick, so I didn’t talk to him.” She turned her back to me and raised her voice. “I don’t got to go next door for pricks.”

But across the street and one over, I got the person there’s one of on every block. He was eighty, eighty-five, and so wrinkled it looked like he had enough skin for three people. His hair, white
as processed flour, was an improbable match for the bristling, jet-black eyebrows beneath which two very bright blue eyes surveyed the world and found it wanting.

“
That
dickhead,” he said after glancing at Pivensey’s photo. “What is it with guys who have real thin necks? And a head that sticks way out in back, like a little kid’s does?” He drew a curve, like a parenthesis, in the air. “They’re all dickheads, every single one of them. Something in the genes is my guess: curved head, little neck, dickhead. Lee Harvey Oswald, remember? He was one of them. They’re all right next to each other, those genes, there on that little curlicue ribbon. Just one-two-three. Probably holding hands. What’s your name?”

“Junior.”

“Guys named Junior, too. Dickheads, all of them. Maybe you’re an exception, but if you are, you’ll be the first.”

“What can you tell me about them?”

“Dickheads? You haven’t got enough time left on earth for—”

“No, I mean this guy and the woman he lived with.”

“She was too good for him. A real pistol. He’s one of those little guys who pushes women around, right?”

He took a breath to elaborate, so I said, “Right.”

“Didn’t get the extra four or five inches he thought he deserved, maybe got shorted down below, too, know what I mean? Plus he’s got a neck that would barely stretch a rubber band. Wears one a those stupid baseball caps with the bill sideways like he walked into a wall, and a black leather biker jacket. Probably a kid’s size. So he takes it out on the weaker sex, except that this one didn’t put up with it. I’ll bet her mom’s a pistol.”

“She is,” I said.

This piece of information gave him pause. “Yeah? She attached?”

“She’s a widow.”

A speculative scratch at the neck. “Huh. Live around here?”

“In the Valley.”

He gave it the back of his spotted hand. “Full of—”

“I know,” I said. “Wall to wall.”

He squinted at me, although it wasn’t to see me better. He could probably read the newspaper from across the street. “So why you asking me about them? Those two,” he said, glancing past me at the house across the street.

“The mother’s worried. She hasn’t heard from her daughter in—”

“Ahhhhh,” he said. “The mother who should be worried is
his
. I seen her, a couple weeks back, lay into him with the garden hose. She’s out there, watering that dead grass, and he comes home in his ratty little Jap car and starts yelling at her. And she takes out after him, swinging that hose like it’s a bullwhip, water everywhere and that brass tip thing, you know, with the screw-marks on it where the nozzle—”