Little Elvises (18 page)

Between the pyramid and the two bedrooms was a locked door. I tried it twice, as quietly as possible, but it wanted to stay locked, and I wasn’t about to try to pick it. The room on the other side of the door had to be the one with the concave window, which made it the biggest room in this wing of the house, and I would have figured Vinnie would have staked it out as his palace of slumber, but apparently it served another purpose.

That left the two doors at the end of the hall, which had to lead to the recording studio. I opened the nearer one as slowly as possible, put my hand on the edge, and closed it gently behind me so it was open only by the thickness of my hand. Then I switched on the penlight.

An old-fashioned sound-mixing board, all sliders and round pots for volume control, leaped out of the darkness. Two wheeled office chairs were pushed up against it, and beyond
it the penlight bounced off a window of what seemed to be smoked glass, undoubtedly allowing a view into the studio when the lights were on. I was in the control room.

I got my fingers out of the way and eased the door closed. Then I gave the room five minutes, long enough to learn that Vinnie was using eight-track tape, state of the art in maybe 1973, but neolithic in this age of ProTools and infinite hard drives. Little pieces of white surgical tape reflected light at various points along the paths taken by the sliders, obviously indicating a mix setting that had been satisfactory at the last session and had been preserved. In the middle of the console was a microphone with a button below it, to allow the producer to talk to the musicians on the other side of the glass.

A set of rough plywood shelves built into one wall held boxes of recorded tape, maybe the size of a dinner plate and about an inch thick. I counted fourteen of them. Someone with an enviably precise printing style had written titles in black marker on the spines of the boxes:
Candy Kisses, Pressed Flowers, Songs from Atlantis, Box of Light, Tomorrow’s Shadow
, Rear View Mirror,
The Lost Album, Notes from Underground, Poison Pie, Black Beauty, Paw Prints on the Heart
. Song or album titles, I supposed. They seemed to reflect a changing sensibility, starting with early sixties sweetness and gradually turning a little fantasy-land, a little psychedelic, a little minimalist, a little Rimbaud, a little dark. I’d probably listen to an album called
Paw Prints on the Heart
.

A door to the left of the mixing board led into the studio. I took a last survey of the control room and opened the door.

Cigarettes had left their stale signature on the air. The penlight picked out half a dozen folding chairs set in an irregular semicircle. An acoustic guitar leaned against one of them, a squarish electric bass against another. On the scruffy carpet
gleamed a couple of round film tins, maybe ten inches in diameter, each containing a mound of cigarette butts. Back behind the chairs, up on risers about eighteen inches high, was a drum kit, the sticks neatly crossed atop the snare drum.

Movable baffles—just upright wooden frames padded with soft material to absorb sound—stood here and there. The biggest one, about five feet high, had been positioned in front of the drum kit, probably to reduce leakage from the drums into the microphones for the guitar and bass, standing beside the folding chairs. In front of each chair was a black metal music stand with sheet music on it.

I chose a chair that wasn’t supporting an instrument, sat on it, and thumbed through the sheets. On top was a piece called “Your Name on My Mind.” Two-four time, written in D, the classic pop-song form: first verse, second verse, hook, third verse, and so forth. The composers were indicated in the upper right-hand corner:
DiGaudio/Abbruzzi
. Publisher was B.O.I. Music. The second song, “The Map to You,” was also by DiGaudio/Abbruzzi. There were six songs in all. In the old days, a good session’s worth. These days, it seems to take most bands a month to finish a single track, what with the depth of the contemporary creative process and all.

I put the sheet music back on the stand and let the penlight play over the room. On the wall behind the drums someone had hung a big whiteboard calendar. I was picking my way between the chairs to look at it when I thought I heard something. I killed the light and froze.

Whatever it was, it had been at the very threshold of hearing. I remained motionless just long enough to orient myself and then, with both hands in front of me, I felt my way toward the drums. In between them and me was the big padded baffle, and I edged around it and dropped down behind it. If the lights came
on, I would be invisible from the control room. Not much, but something. I knelt on the floor and waited.

And for quite a while, nothing happened.

I asked myself whether I had really heard anything. The only safe course of action was to assume that I had, so I spent an increasingly uncomfortable ten minutes or so on my knees, listening.

Then there was a soft click, which seemed to come from everywhere at the same time, and something very odd happened. The walls of the room seemed to recede. I mean, they receded in my hearing; when you’ve spent as much time as I have working in the dark, you learn to hear walls. They’re usually the nearest sound-reflective surface. I’d been in the studio long enough to get an ear’s-shot estimate of the distance from me to all four walls, probably accurate within a foot or two.

But with that
click
, it was as though the walls had moved back somehow, and the room lost all shape in my head. If I hadn’t been kneeling, I probably would have sat down.

And then, as my head cleared and the floor stayed solid beneath me, I knew what it was. Someone had pressed the button to turn on the microphone in the control room, with an audible click, and was holding it down. I was hearing, through the studio’s speakers, the ambient noise of another room altogether. What I had heard first, the sound that made me turn off the penlight, had been the door from the control room to the hallway, closing on the other side of the pane of glass.

Someone in the control room.

The penlight had been on when I heard the door close. He’d seen me. Or
she
: I suddenly remembered Popsie’s shotgun.

I still hadn’t gone to pick up one, two, or all three of those Glocks. Hard to believe it was only that afternoon that I’d realized that I’d forgotten to do it. Felt like a week. But, of course, even if I’d retrieved all three of them, I wouldn’t have one on
me. As Paulie DiGaudio had taken pains to point out in our first chat, going into a house strapped is a whole new world of woe if you get caught. The cops and the courts are resolutely unamused by armed robbery.

So forget weapons. What I had on my side was years of experience, a good grasp of the house’s floor plan, infinite patience, and my native cunning.

In other words, I was screwed.

A fingernail or something passed over the surface of the microphone, making a sound like a rockslide. In the silence that followed, somebody breathed.

And what a breath it was. It sounded as though it had been drawn through a wad of wet tissues, a gag of soaking Kleenex. It faded into a lower chest-rumble that came all the way from the ninth circle of pulmonary hell. It was difficult not to visualize thick ropes of drool.

My underarms released a pint of water each. I knelt behind the baffle, still as stone and newly wet, and heard another click as the mike button was released, and then—a minute or two later—the almost imperceptible sound of the control room door opening and closing again. I stayed where I was, running all sorts of doomsday scenarios through my head, for ninety minutes by my little blue-lit watch. Finally, when I figured sunrise was only half an hour away, I forced myself to get up, and then I felt my way at the highest possible speed out of the room, out of the house, and down the driveway, expecting at every second to see Popsie’s shotgun blossom in the darkness. I didn’t even stop to put on my shoes.

And when I pulled into the parking lot of the North Pole in the grayest moment of early morning, the first thing I saw was that the light above the door to Blitzen was out. The second thing I saw was the body curled up there.

She didn’t weigh much, and she wasn’t much of an actress, either. Her eyelids did a telltale flutter when I picked her up, and one corner of her mouth lifted when I had to jam her inelegantly against the wall to get the card-key into the slot so I could open the door. So I toted her into the room, lifted her to shoulder height, and dropped her onto the bed.

Ronnie said, “Uuuhhhffffff,” and opened her eyes. “You were doing so well, too.”

“How long were you out there?” I thought about turning on the light but decided that the paling day through the window was appropriately bleak.

“Four hours? Five?”

“Just huddled like some refugee against the door. Being soaked by the dew and chilled by the wind and so forth.”

She sat up and rubbed the forearm I’d scraped against the wall. “It was cold, yes. And your tone leaves something to be desired.”

“It probably does.”

“Well.” She tugged down on her blouse, which had a pattern of small sunflowers on it. “The bloom came off the old rose pretty fast, didn’t it?”

I went to the chair beside the table reserved for good elves and sat down. “Maybe we’d better start over.”

“I think we already have.”

“Why don’t you fill me in on your day?”

She threw her legs over the side of the bed and let them dangle in their faded jeans. “And why don’t you go to hell?”

“Let’s start with why you were crumpled so dramatically against my door.”

“How about this? It was cold, and I’d been standing there for hours.” She straightened her arm at the elbow and bent it sharply, a demonstration. “You may have noticed that human beings are
hinged
here and there in a way that allows them to deviate from upright whenever they want. My feet got tired. I was freezing. I crumpled, as you so picturesquely put it, in order to try to get some sleep.”

“And you were there in the first place because …?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I was dumb enough to think you’d be glad to see me.”

“Let’s take it back a couple of steps. I’m still curious about how you spent the day.”

“Just to keep us talking,” Ronnie Bigelow said, “let’s pretend you have a right to ask the question. If you did, I’d probably tell you that I did a bunch of stuff.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s informative.”

“If you ever turned your damn phone on, you’d know some of what happened today.”

“Oh,” I said. “Hold it.” I pulled the phone out and powered it on.

“I can’t believe this,” she said to the room. “He’s
checking
on me.”

“I’m a crook. By now, with a whole string of us behind you, you ought to know we’re not real trusting.”

She rubbed lightly at the scraped arm. “And here I thought I was special, in my dowdy little way.”

I had four voicemail messages. The first was from Ronnie, asking where I was and what I was doing. The next two were from Louie. First, he told me that Ronnie had returned to her apartment about 8
P.M
., around the time I’d been getting hijacked to Irwin Dressler’s place, and then he called back to say that the new person he’d assigned to watch the apartment house had followed her to my place, where she was just standing around outside the door. And then there was a message from Ronnie, telling me it was 2
A.M
., and she was freezing her ass off outside my door, and that she was frightened to go home because she was being followed.

When I folded the phone, the room had brightened to the point where I could see her face clearly, and it wasn’t friendly. And the new day wasn’t the only thing that had dawned.

“It was
you
,” she said. “You had those people follow me.”

Sometimes I’m dismayed by how easily I lie. “I was worried about you.”

She plucked up fistfuls of bedspread and let them drop. “We go out once, for lunch, you haul me to some—some
crime scene
—and you think you have the right to check up on me? To worry about who I’m seeing, what I’m doing?” She got up and made for the door. “Jesus, suppose we’d gone on a real date. What would you have done, fenced me in a yard somewhere? Put me on a leash?”

“Not like that,” I said. “I was worried about your safety.”

She had her hand on the doorknob, and her eyes were narrow. “Yeah? Why?”

“Your husband’s been murdered. Nobody knows why. Nobody’s sure what you do or don’t know about his business. Suppose whoever killed Derek was after information, and suppose they didn’t get what they wanted. Where would they look next?”

“That’s not bad for spur of the moment.” She turned to face me. “I don’t believe a word of it, but I’m going to give you the benefit of a very slim doubt, and you can thank your landlady for that.”

“Marge?”

“She came up twice. First time to see what I was doing, second time to bring me some rum and invite me down to sleep on her couch. I took the rum and passed on the couch. ‘Oh, no,’ I said trustingly. ‘He’ll be home any minute.’ ‘Sure he will, honey,’ your landlady said. ‘Whatever you say.’ And then she told me it didn’t matter what time you got home, you were worth waiting for. She said you were a keeper.”