Little Elvises (16 page)

“No. I mean it looks more like Vinnie did it. As opposed to less. More, please.”

“Yes, that’s the conclusion most people would draw.” He was pouring. “I need you to do what you’ve been told to do, if that’s possible. But if it’s not—like I say, if it turns out to be Vinnie—I want you to give me some notice.”

I knocked back most of it. The second glass was even better than the first. “That’s peachy for you. But if it’s Vinnie, and if there’s nobody I can pin the Hammer robbery on, so I can get out from under DiGaudio the cop, I’m kind of screwed, aren’t I?”

“On the contrary,” Dressler said, looking genuinely surprised. “You will have done me a service.”

“You’ll excuse me if that sounds like a thin blanket for a cold winter.”

The head-shake this time was just an irritated back-and-forth jerk. “Is
anything
I’ve been told about you true?”

“Depends on what you’ve been told.”

“You’ve been described as intelligent and resourceful. Surely one aspect of being resourceful is being able to recognize a resource when you see it. Maybe it’s just that you’re young.” He put down his glass and tugged at the pleats in his awful plaid slacks, then put his hands on his knees and leaned toward me again. “You will have done me a service,” he said slowly. “I will owe you. Irwin Dressler will owe you.”

“Oh,” I said.

“That’s something you can take to the bank anywhere in this state.”

“How
much
will you owe me?”

He waggled a finger at me, side-to-side. “Uh-uh. Doesn’t work that way. Let’s see how much you want. When you decide you want it.” He drained his glass and made a little
drink-up
gesture, wiggling his hand, palm up. “Finish it. Time to go.”

I tipped the glass back and emptied it. I would have wrung it out if I could have. By the time I put it down Dressler was already standing.

“The guys don’t need to follow you,” he said.

“Not as far as I’m concerned. I mean, I always like company, but—”

“To make sure you’re not going to hang around, keeping an eye on this place, for example.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve got a full datebook.”

“Wouldn’t want to detain you.” He put a hand on my arm, stopping me. “We have an understanding, you and I.”

“We do.”

“Tell me what you think it is.”

“In short, I keep looking at what happened to Bigelow, and
if it turns out that what happened to him was Vinnie, you’re the first to know. And at some undefined point in the future, if I get my heinie in a crack, you’ll help me pull it out.”

“Exactly. Who knows? Maybe you
are
smart. Stranger things have happened.” He was ahead of me, trudging across the carpet and then up the two steps that led to the entry hall. I took one last look at the little pieces of carved jade as I passed them. They were okay, but nothing I couldn’t live without. I followed him to the door, which he pulled open. There was a man standing there, a finger half an inch from the doorbell.

I had first seen his face on a movie screen when I was maybe eight years old, and most recently about six weeks ago. There couldn’t have been more than two or three actors in the history of Hollywood who’d managed to cling to the top rung as long as he had.

My mouth must have dropped open, because he mimicked it and then gave me a devil’s smile, the devil’s smile that had made him a star in the first place. He stepped aside to let me by, and then he went in and Irwin closed the door.

Irwin Dressler may have been ninety years old. His power may have faded away, may have been largely symbolic by that point. But in Los Angeles, it’s always informative to see what segment of the list people hung with. Dressler was hanging with the apex of the A-list.

Irwin Dressler. Little Elvises. Both DiGaudios. The Philly mob. The missing Doris. Lorne Henry Pivensey, a possible serial killer. Popsie, the Nazi Dustmop. Rina. Tyrone.

I needed time to think and a place to do it in.

There was no one behind me. Babe and Tuffy were probably still chewing in Dressler’s breakfast nook. Since I was on the Beverly Hills side of the little crumple of dirt and stone called the Santa Monica Mountains, I headed toward Koreatown, using all the loops and dead-ends the neighborhood offered to make sure I wasn’t dragging anybody new.

By the time I hit Sunset, I knew I was alone. Sunset was flowing pretty well. It was after ten
P.M
., most law-abiding people were home, and it was a weeknight. Sunset follows the trail that the Chumash Indians took to the sea when the basin got hot in the summertime. I wondered, as I made a right onto Fairfax, what they’d think of Sunset now—an electric canyon of light that flows from the brown Hispanic blocks of downtown to the bone-white suburbs of the Pacific Palisades and the wide blue hard-line horizon of the Pacific. The sage and chaparral gone, the sun-warmed stones and fresh springs gone, the cougars and eagles gone. The land held at bay, the entire way paved with money.

I took Fairfax south to Olympic and turned left, still keeping an eye on the rearview mirror, but mostly for form’s sake. I spotted a big green Dumpster at one end of the parking lot of a typical Olympic Boulevard mini-mall—Cambodian donuts, a Vietnamese nail shop, a Mexican taco takeout, and a tire store of indeterminate parentage. I pulled in, bought a couple of apple fritters, and put them on the passenger seat. Then I got under the car, grabbed the magnetic limpet, and stuck it on the inside of the Dumpster. I figured the Dumpster wasn’t likely to go anyplace, and I could pick the thing up again when I wanted to. Then, chewing on the first of the fritters, I pointed the Toyota toward K-town.

The Wedgwood, the Lenox, and the Royal Doulton stand on a corner just a few blocks north of the long stretch of Olympic where all the signs are in Korean. The peeling facades of two of the buildings face onto a street we shall, for the purposes of this narrative, call Courtney Lane, and the third is directly around the corner, facing onto Baltic Way. (Don’t bother looking on a map for either street.) Under the pretense of reinforcing and reconstructing the buildings’ basements, the Korean syndicate who bought the buildings excavated an underground parking lot beneath each of them. Many thousands of pounds of earth were hauled out, and many building inspectors pocketed many hundred-dollar bills during the process.

I pulled into the driveway for the apartment house that faced onto Baltic, using a remote to slide open the iron bars that blocked access to the garage. I drove all the way across the big, echoing space, to the far side of the building above me, and parked. Then I got out of the car, chose a key, and opened a door in the wall that said, in large red letters surrounded by lightning bolts,
DANGER/PELIGROSO—HIGH VOLTAGE
. The door swung inward on well-oiled hinges, and I stepped through it into
the underground garage of the building next door. It took me about a minute to cross that and open a similar door on the far side, and then I crossed the third garage and turned the key that called the elevator.

If anyone had been following me, I was two apartment buildings away from the one they’d seen me pull into. And on a different street. I’d gone in on Baltic Way and I was now on Courtney Lane.

The elevator was dingy and sad. Its once glorious oak paneling now looked like something salvaged from a sunken liner, warped and scratched and written on. Its chandelier was dark and missing most of its crystals. The only light came from a cheap fluorescent ring stuck any old way on the ceiling. A bare wire ran across the ceiling from the fluorescent fixture and vanished into a hole that had been bored roughly into the paneling. Behind the hole, about two inches back so it would be hard to spot, was a little fish-eye lens attached to a closed-circuit camera that was monitored twenty-four hours a day by some very muscular Koreans. I waved at the camera.

The third-floor hallway, like all the hallways, was dark and disconcerting. The carpeting had holes in it. Water stains had been skillfully painted on the ceilings, and here and there the plaster was flaking away like industrial dandruff. Most of the light fixtures had burned out; irregular pools of light bloomed at odd intervals, usually above the worst stretches of carpet.

It took three keys to open the door to Unit 302, and not junk keys, either. And then I closed the door behind me, redid all the locks, and sighed into the dark.

The window that
took up most of the wall at the far end of the living room was architectural art deco from 1923, a spiky tangle of thin black wrought-iron, holding irregularly-shaped pieces
of glass: trapezoids, rectangles, triangles. Looking at it from the leather armchair, it reminded me of the geometrical nightmare that served as the floor plan of Vinnie DiGaudio’s house. Since I was going to have to pay Vinnie a visit later that evening, I let my mind wander over what I remembered and what I’d conjectured about the parts of the house I hadn’t seen.

People in the twenties understood that high ceilings promoted peace of mind. The ceilings at the Wedgwood were fourteen feet high, lighted at the edges by triangular brass sconces that threw light upward, turning the entire white ceiling into a lighting source. The sconces were the only lights I had turned on, and the illumination they produced was evenly distributed, practically shadowless. The oak floor gleamed, polished by the Korean cleaning crew that came with the building and who also functioned as spies to tell the syndicates whether any tenants were trashing the premises.

The skyline of Los Angeles’ small, tightly bunched crowd of downtown skyscrapers glittered through the window. A skyline Irwin Dressler had helped to build, lending capital from labor union pension funds, bringing high-rollers to the city’s new banks, initially money laundries but all legit now. Twenty years after he died, there would probably be a Dressler Drive somewhere down there.

There was room in the world for big money, big mobs, and small-time crooks like me. Somewhere in that continuum was the niche occupied by the predators like Lorne Henry Pivensey. While part of my mind was working my way through the upcoming creep of Vinnie’s house, another part was laying out a roadmap that might lead me to Doris, living or—more likely—dead. How was I going to deal with Marge?

For that matter, how was I going to deal with the beautiful widow Bigelow? A woman who seemed not to have a thought
to spare for her murdered husband, who essentially did a cross-country
dos-à-dos
from Trenton to Los Angeles, being passed from hand to hand, from one creep to another, like a scuzzball square dance. And now she seemed to like me. And I seemed to like her.

And what about Rina?

I got up and went into the kitchen, which was the only room I’d done anything to. The original marble floor, polished to a mirror surface, now reflected an eight-burner chef’s stove, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and other objects of hardware lust. If I was going to hide out here for a year or two, I was going to cook and eat well. And I was going to read; the apartment had a library, wall-to-wall walnut shelves, and they were jammed with books I’d picked up second-hand.

And, in two of those books, glued in between the thin boards of the covers, so someone could fan the pages without anything falling out, were the keys to a completely different life: a passport, social security card, birth certificate, and driver’s license. Parked in the garage downstairs was a blue Toyota, this one registered to Silas A. Noone, my alter ego. The name was an almost-anagram for
alias no one
. In a locking, recessed niche four feet up inside the living room chimney was a steel box with almost eighty thousand dollars in it, plus half a dozen credit cards, all current and paid up.

If everything came down some day, I could pull into the driveway on Baltic Way as Junior Bender and, five minutes later, pull out of the driveway on Courtney Lane in a different car, as a different person.

And then I could disappear forever.

But it wasn’t time for that yet. Things were tangled, but not terminal.

I took down a bottle of Glenfiddich and poured a one-and-a-half, since a double would have been pushing it. This was one of
five bottles I had of the Glenfiddich produced in 1937, a bottle of which, billed as the world’s oldest single-malt whiskey, had sold for about twenty thousand bucks in Hong Kong. Only sixty-one bottles had been produced. I’d liberated my five from the house on Carol Way, the one with the looping driveway that had let me dodge the Humvee. Glass in hand, I wandered the rooms of the apartment, just appreciating the workmanship and letting the high ceilings open my head up to relieve the pressure. Things
were
a tangle. Well, I’d been in tangles before, and I’d gotten out of them by applying an approach attributed to St. Francis of Assisi:
Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you will be doing the impossible
.

What was necessary, at this hour of the night, was figuring out what was going on in Vinnie DiGaudio’s house.