Little Elvises (28 page)

For the second or third time, I reflected on the unusual level of sloppiness in the police work around Derek’s death: no Giorgio in the notes from the murder scene, the car sitting right here. Then I shook my head and called myself a mildly unpleasant name. It wasn’t sloppy. It was Paulie DiGaudio, steering the investigation away from Uncle Vinnie. Giving me room to get killed in.

I had a slim jim in my hand, ready to slip it between the driver’s window and the door, but I didn’t need it. The lock was broken, a first for me. I had no idea that car locks ever actually stopped functioning, but here we were: Detroit had staked out yet another frontier.

The front window on the passenger side had been lowered about four inches, letting out a smell like the trolls’ locker room, courtesy of too much time spent in a small space by a man who took too few baths, plus an open, jumbo-size, wide-mouth grape juice bottle full of piss. The grape juice bottle is a popular solution to a stake-out man’s most pressing need, but it’s usually kept tightly capped when it’s not in use. The cap to Derek’s bottle was on the passenger seat, and the bottle was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Hard to imagine anyone driving off with an uncapped bottle of urine in the car.

So he hadn’t had time to cap the bottle before he got yanked. Or else he’d never gotten back to the car from DiGaudio’s
house. And back home, the little woman wasn’t exactly pacing the floor, waiting up for him.

The thought of Ronnie produced a complicated emotional wince, an interesting mixture of desire, warmth, and guilt. It was remarkable how many of my life’s current tangles had one end of the string knotted into my short acquaintance with Ronnie: Kathy’s disappointed face, the excruciatingly awkward situation with Rina, the problem of Derek and Fronts, and my own growing affection for a woman who shook off tails like a spy, lied like a senator, and bounced from one partner to another without any visible second, or even first, thoughts. Precisely the kind of relationship I needed least, and yet I remembered, with a pang, the sight of the gate to her apartment complex swinging closed behind her.

I went around to the curb and opened the passenger door. The car exhaled malevolently at me. I took the precaution of grabbing a napkin from a half-eaten Whopper, still in its grease-spotted Burger King bag, and using it to pick up the bottle of piss. I put the bottle on the curb, where I couldn’t accidentally knock it over as I searched, and went to work.

Nothing in the glove compartment and nothing under the gummy floor mats. Crawling further into the car with my breath held, I pointed my penlight down between the seats and saw a small spiral-bound notebook jammed under the emergency brake. It took a couple of minutes to wiggle it free, meaning that I had to breathe several times. As soon as I had it, I backed out into the fresh air and gave it a flip. Only the first few pages had been written on, so I grabbed another deep breath and crawled back in to look for an earlier notebook, without success. Either Derek had stashed it somewhere when he’d filled it up, or the people who killed him had found it and taken it with them.

Nothing beneath the front seats, nothing on the backseat. A
lot of nothings. I opened the trunk and found a flat spare tire and a few greasy tools, plus a couple of days’ worth of fast-food wrappers and some dispirited French fries. I was trying to move the tire out of the way to look beneath it when I heard the vibration of a car coming up the hill. I slammed the trunk and ducked around to the passenger door to shut it, killing the interior lights just as headlights swept the opposite curb. I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk and held my breath.

The car slowed and then stopped. I could hear the static-ridden back-and-forth of a police radio. A spotlight beamed through Derek’s car’s dirty windows and lit up the hillside behind me. A breeze delivered a sharp whiff of cigarette smoke, so Officer Somebody was breaking the rules. The door of the police cruiser opened, and I listened to the scuff of heavy cop shoes over asphalt. There wasn’t much I could do other than listen, since there was nowhere to go. The smell of smoke got stronger. As near as I could figure, the cop with the cigarette was heading for the front of the car. A moment later, a sharp metallic
bang
confirmed it: The cop had swung something hard, probably his flashlight, at the orange boot.

“Aw, come on,” called the cop in the car. “Nobody can get those things off.”

“When’re they gonna tow this piece of crap?” asked the smoker.

“Oh, who knows? After a few more complaints, probably. Let’s go.”

“If I lived here,” said Officer Nicotine, “I’d complain every time I saw this thing.”

“If you lived here,” the other cop scoffed. “You wanna live here, get transferred to vice or narco.”

“Car really stinks,” the smoker said. He played his flashlight into the windows and then started to come around the front
of the car. I backed away, crablike, and my foot hit something hard. It took me, conservatively speaking, one one-hundredth of a second to realize what it was and how much noise it was going to make if it fell over. I got my hand back there somehow and caught it half an inch before it shattered against the curb. Unfortunately, I caught it by the top, and a pint or two of piss flowed out over my hand and down the curb and into the gutter. I squatted there, enveloped in stink, and watched it wind downhill in a darkly shining stream. All the cop in the car had to do was look. “Jesus,” said Officer Nicotine. “Smells like every cat in the neighborhood’s been using it for pissing practice.”

“And this appeals to you why?” asked the cop in the car. “Come on, I’m hungry and I want to stay that way.”

“Okay, okay. Just doing the job, right?”

“I’ll put you in for a decoration.” Shoes on asphalt again, then the slam of a door. “Dental hygiene, maybe, the way you work on your teeth. Sound good?”

“The Golden Floss Award,” said Officer Nicotine, and the car pulled away.

They’d gone uphill, and I couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t come down again, so I yanked the rear door open again as fast as I could, ran my hands between the seat and the seatback, finding a couple of quarters and a military-looking button with an anchor on it. I was sweating with tension and my hands smelled like they’d been marinated in a urinal. Finally, I grabbed the backseat and yanked it free.

And there, nestled in a graying snarl of extremely unwholesome litter, the decaying scut of a decaying civilization, was a small silvery digital camera.

I drove home with the windows open to dissipate the stink on my hands.

The holiday lights blinked festively in Blitzen’s window, and try as I would, I couldn’t ignore them. My irritation threshold had been eroded to zero by tension, lack of sleep, and a jolt of horse tranquilizer. I suddenly realized that it didn’t matter whether the plug for the lights had been glued into place; I could unscrew the bulbs. I got up with the brisk resolve of someone who’s solved a longstanding problem and did it, burning my fingers in the process. It was worth it. The blinking stopped, Christmas floated away as the clog was at long last cleared from the stream of time, and I went back to the bed and Derek’s notebook.

Page one said,
DiGaudio
and then
Abruzi
, so Derek was on the track of something, even if it wasn’t a gold star for spelling. Beneath that were the words,
insurance policy
? Beneath that,
carrier
?
beneficiary
?

Then,
double indemnity
?????? I counted the question marks.

Then, BHPD?

And beneath that, a sort of a timetable:

I was willing to venture a guess that the latter two dates, the ones without a year attached to them, referred to 1963, since I recognized both of them. Beneath the dates was a rough schematic, more a diagram than a map, with arrows leading from a box that said
Philly
to a box that said
Chicago
and then to a box that said
LA
. Then a line in a different color linked
LA
to a box that said
Hawaii
. There were little arrowheads on the lines, presumably to show the directions in which people had traveled. The arrows between
LA
and
Hawaii
went in both directions. There was also a single two-way line between
Philly
and
Hawaii
, with a question mark drawn above it. The lines between
Philly, Chicago
, and
LA
went only in one direction, west. Then there was one more line, from
Philly
direct to
LA
without connecting through
Chicago
, and it too went only west. So: travels.

BHPD
was obviously the Beverly Hills Police Department.

Then a cryptic equation:
Sal = ID
? I parked that for later consideration, but I didn’t like the look of it.

On the next page, Derek had written
NESSIE
and drawn a heavy black cube around it. A wreath of dollar signs surrounded the cube. Centered on the page beneath the cube were the words,
which is which
?

Then, all alone on the next page,
$350,000
. Wishful thinking or a demand?

The last page that had any writing on it contained a shopping list, and I doubted it was in code because it said
stoli, coke, cigs, white bread, mayo, salami, new ball point
. Given its position between Stolichnaya and cigarettes, I doubted the coke was made in Atlanta and came in a can.

The whole thing gave me a rancid feeling: This was the legacy of a man’s life. Peeping, lurking, sneaking, smoking, coking, drinking, eating crap food, pissing in bottles, sniffing out secrets, looking under the rocks in people’s lives, finding pain points and
the stains of shame, trading them for money. Day in day out, sneak, cheat, betray, steal, get loaded, sleep. How did he get up in the morning? What were his first thoughts when he opened his eyes to the bright new day? Who will I hurt by nighttime? Whose trust will I violate? How fucked up on junk can I get?

It his own subterranean way, I thought that Derek was worse than Fronts. Fronts was a top-of-the-line, designer-label sociopath who half-hoped he wouldn’t live through the day, who inhabited a dim expectation that somebody would shoot him or he’d finally slip over the far edge of an overdose. He’d kill me in a minute for a few bucks, and he’d dutifully hurt me for a while first if that were part of the job, unless there was something good on television, in which case he’d hurt me during commercials. But it wouldn’t be personal. And if push came to shove, he’d just as soon kill himself as me. Fronts was a nightmare wrapped around a void; if you peeled his skin off in a spiral, as you might an apple, there’d be nothing underneath it. A little darkness, a few dead moths, some sour-smelling air. All of it gone in seconds, dissipated like a musty odor when you open a closet door.

But Derek was something else. He was plausible. He functioned in the world just like a real person, someone with a moral code and a soul. He’d hoodwinked Ronnie into marrying him, and no matter how drunk she was, she wouldn’t have done it unless he’d been able to present some alluring surface, some convincing imitation of a human being. To be able to do that, he had to be able to project himself into others, to see what they wanted and cared about. He had to understand what they would see as good and desirable, what made them smile, what they would open their hearts to.
A guy
, he’d said to her,
who was worried he couldn’t write convincingly from a woman’s perspective
. He’d figured she’d be open to that, and then he made himself into it.
So he knew the difference between good and evil, between truth and lie, between human and beast. He just didn’t give a fuck.

It would never even occur to Fronts to pretend to be human. He had no more moral awareness than a cancer cell. You either got it or you didn’t, and it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. He wasn’t going to waste any time trying to look like anything he wasn’t.

If I had the two of them in front of me, I thought, with a gun in my hand and an ironclad guarantee that I’d walk free if I shot one or the other of them, I’d have popped Derek without a moment’s reflection.

I wanted to call Ronnie. But at 3
A.M.
, when she was already furious at me, that probably wasn’t a productive idea.

The battery in Derek’s camera was dead, and I didn’t have a charger that would fit it. I pushed on various bits and pieces until a little slot popped open to reveal the flash memory card. I fished it out and said, “Voilà,” since nobody was around to criticize my accent. The card was the same size as the one in my own camera, and I had a little reader I could slide it into and then plug the whole thing into my laptop through a USB port so I could see the pictures on the screen. I did it all without breaking anything. Rina would have been proud of me.

For a journalist, Derek hadn’t been much of a photographer. The first five or six shots were of something very pink and very blurry that I eventually identified as his index finger, which was partially covering the lens. Then there were three pictures of his lap and one of his feet, about as interesting as they sound, and undoubtedly taken accidentally with the camera hanging by its strap around his neck.