Little Elvises (38 page)

“Good for you.”

She nodded. “I figure that vengeance is the Lord’s unless it takes him too long.”

“But why stay here? And what’s with calling Amber and Melissa?”

She lowered the coffee cup, which she had raised to her lips. “Have you been paying attention? I murdered somebody. Oh, sure he was overdue, but come on. I hit him with a chair, handcuffed him, drove him all the way up here, shot him, and covered him with sand. Does that sound like a self-defense plea? Can you spell
premeditation
? It’s not just something you can
walk away from. So I told a few people I was going various places so nobody’d come looking for me, and then I stayed here and tried to figure out what to do.” She tossed the remainder of her coffee onto something thorny. “
Tried
is the operative word.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Well,” she said, “in the best of all possible worlds, I’d make Lem’s body disappear from the face of the earth, and then I’d arrange for the girls who are buried here to be found so their families could stop wondering what happened to them, and then I’d go home to Mom without leaving a trace that I’d ever been here.”

I said, “Okay.”

“Sure,” she said. “Fine.” She nodded carefully. “Glad we had this talk.”

“Do you know how many girls are buried up here?”

At first, I didn’t think she’d answer. She was looking at me as though I might suddenly sprout claws. But then she said, “Two. The one Lem’s on top of and another one about twenty feet from here, over by that dead Joshua Tree.”

“Go get your stuff. Everything that belongs to you.”

“Yeah? I mean, you think we can just take a stroll into a new world? There are
bodies
here. I killed one of them.”

“Somebody owes me a favor,” I said. “How’s cell phone reception up here?”

“It’s good. What else are they going to use all this dirt for? They put cell towers on it. Are you kidding me? About being able to fix this?”

“You can listen in,” I said, and I dialed Irwin Dressler’s number.

He answered on the first ring.

“Here’s where we find out how much you owe me,” I said.

“Vinnie’s under control,” he said, whatever that meant. “Thanks to you. So I owe you pretty good.”

“I’m going to give you an address in Twentynine Palms. When your guys get here, they’ll find two graves, a car, and a house.”

“Yeah?”

“The graves will have white flags over them, dishtowels on sticks. One of the graves has two people in it. The one on top is a male, and he’s relatively fresh. He’s material for one of those lakes you told me about. Nobody should ever be inconvenienced by tripping over the remains and maybe spraining an ankle. Not ever. The other two are women he killed. They’re skeletal. They should be dug up and re-buried someplace eight or ten miles away, and then tips should be called in to the cops, so the families can find out what happened to their daughters.”

“The guy murdered the girls?”

“And some others.”

“You’re having an interesting evening. Is that all?”

“No. The car will have keys in it. It needs to disappear forever. The house needs to burn down.”

“This is getting kind of complicated.”

“Two guys—what are their names? Babe and Tuffy?—or three at most, a couple of hours, what’s complicated? The only tricky part is the reburial. Everything else is just gruntwork. Drive the car off, send it to Mexico to get chopped. And the house will go up like a box of matches. And then we’re even.”

“I’ll think about that,” Dressler said. “Maybe even, maybe not. Maybe you’ll owe me.”

“Tonight,” I said.

“Don’t push. Okay, tonight, but forget even.” He hung up.

“Come on,” I said to Doris. She had taken a couple of steps away from me as she listened, and her mouth was halfway open. “You’ve got to get your stuff, and I’ve got to make those flags.”

“Who the hell
are
you?” Doris asked.

“Oh, that reminds me,” I said, punching a new number into the phone. I listened until it rang, and then I handed it to her. “Say hello to your mother.”

An hour and
a half later, Doris and I toted a suitcase and three plastic trash bags full of stuff around the big rock I’d parked behind, and I opened the passenger door. As the light from inside the car struck Doris, Fronts said, “Jeez. You can even find a chick in the desert.”

Doris said to him, “Do you smoke?”

“Naw,” Fronts said. He ambled into the light. His left arm was all scraped up from hitting the pavement, but other than that he looked the same as always, which is to say terrible. The bandage over the bullet hole in his arm was filthy. He had another Sig Sauer in his hand. Brand loyalty. “I got some other stuff if you want it. Junior, leave your hands there.”

“Where?”

“Where they are now. Don’t think about the guns. Hey, is one of them mine?”

“Used to be,” I said.

“For Christ’s sake,” said a woman’s voice. “Just shoot them and get it over with.”

“Hey, Corinne,” I said into the darkness.

“Like what?” Doris asked.

Fronts said, “Whaddya mean, like what?”

“You said you had other stuff. Like what?”

Fronts scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. “Melaril, which is like a tranquilizer for people in the electric chair. Got some opium, got some Xanax, at least I think I got some Xanax. I took a handful a while back. I got some horse trank, you could ask Junior about it.”

“I don’t recommend it,” I said. “It was you, wasn’t it, Corrine? You’re the one who put the transmitter on the car.”

“Second time you dropped by.” I heard her scuffing over the sand before I saw her. Still in black, chewing gum like she was angry at it. Now I could see the rectangular silhouette of the Humvee behind her. “What the hell are you waiting for, Fronts?”

“I saw Giorgio,” I said. “He told me you kissed him goodbye.”

She broke stride for a moment, but picked up the pace again. “It wasn’t goodbye,” she said. “I’ll see him again. I’ll always see him again.”

I said, “I’m sure you will.”

“You know, Mom,” Fronts said to her, “you didn’t say nothing about shooting no chick.”

Corrine said, “Who cares? Shoot one, shoot two, what’s the difference? And don’t call me Mom, dammit.”

“You shoot everybody who asks you for a smoke?” Doris said. She was ignoring Corinne completely, and I was liking her better by the minute.

“Chicks are extra, Mom,” Fronts said. “On account that I don’t like shooting them.”

“I’ve paid you a fortune,” Corinne said. “And so far it’s been one fuckup after another.”

“You don’t look much like your mom,” Doris said.

“Thanks,” Fronts said. He was looking at her with interest. His eyes were on her forearms. “You a cutter?”

“When I was a kid,” Doris said. “After my father died.” She held out her left arm, which had a series of fine-ridged scars cross-hatched into it. “It kept me going.”

“I do it two-handed,” Fronts said. “I’m ambidextrous.”

“Yeah?” She studied him. “You can write with both hands?”

“In a mirror, too,” Fronts said. His eyes came to mine for a
moment, and he looked embarrassed. “Sometimes I get it backward.”

“I quit after a few years,” Doris said. “You should stop. Infections are the shits.”

“I don’t get infected,” Fronts said. “I just take antibiotics all the time.”

Doris shook her head. “Antibiotics are bad for your stomach.”

“This is
enough
of this,” Corinne said, and there was a small gun in her hand. To Fronts, she said, “You’re not getting paid to stand around discussing your psychoses. Just get it over with so we can get out of here.”

“She’s the only thing that ties Derek to Irwin Dressler,” I said to Fronts.

“You shut up,” Corinne said, and she pointed her gun at me, but Fronts put out a hand in a lazy gesture and shoved her shoulder, and she stumbled sideways and almost went down.

He said, “Say what?”

“Irwin Dressler. He was connected to Vinnie and Corinne, and he’d be happier if there weren’t any links around. You know, he just wants to lead a peaceful life.”

“Irwin Dressler,” Fronts said. “The old guy.”

“That’s the one.”

“Shoot him, or I will,” Corinne said. Her voice was getting shrill. “Just do your fucking job.”

“And he’s interested,” Fronts said. “Irwin is.”

“Like I said.”

Doris said, “You wouldn’t shoot another cutter.”

“You’re a nice girl,” Fronts said. “But just so you know, Junior has a lot of girlfriends.”

“That’s it,” Corinne said. “Bunch of morons.” She held the gun at arm’s length and aimed it at my head, and Fronts reached over and plucked it from her hand.

He said, “Sorry, Mom,” and tossed the little gun into the darkness.

Corinne jumped at him and grabbed his shoulder. “I am not your mom, you stupid freak retard, if I were your mom I’d have a retroactive abortion. Give me that gun, you dumb fuck, you fat, disgusting—”

Fronts put his free hand around Corinne’s throat. He was so big his fingers almost met. Corinne’s voice went up a few squeezed notches, but she kept grabbing at him, clawing at his arm with her nails.

Fronts said, “Irwin Dressler.”

“Doesn’t want any links,” I said.

Corinne emitted a strangled scream and kneed Fronts between the legs, and he turned to her, looking irritated, and the gun in his hand went off with a bang that rebounded immediately from the rockpile behind us and then spread out over the desert floor. Corrine was flung back until she slammed against the side of the Hummer. She slowly slid to a sitting position, her eyes wide, a stain spreading out from the center of her chest.

Fronts said, “Oops.”

There was a silence of ten or twenty seconds. I heard Doris swallow. Then Corinne made a rattling sound.

I said to Fronts, “We’ve got a shovel.”

At ten in the morning, my cell phone rang. I had to reach across Ronnie’s bare back to get it. She didn’t even stir.

I said, “It’s early.”

“You’re breaking my heart.” It was Paulie DiGaudio. “Try working a real job sometime.”

“No, thanks.”

“Vinnie’s in Costa Rica,” Paulie said. “The guy who told the Hollywood cops that Vinnie was going to hire him to do Derek Bigelow now says he made the whole thing up. Says he was just trying to get attention. He’s needed attention his whole life, he says.”

“Well, there you are.”

“But there’s also that new dead guy in Vinnie’s house, the wheelchair guy, so I’m not completely happy.”

“Who is, these days?”

“So okay, the new guy is a suicide. But I don’t have anybody for Derek. And you remember, that was the other part of the problem: One, get Vinnie off the hook, and two, nail somebody for Derek,”

“Derek had a lot of enemies. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn somebody hired a pro.”

Paulie said, “Oh, some other people changed their minds,
too. Turns out you
do
have an alibi for the night the Hammers got robbed and old Mrs. Hammer got knocked around.”

“See?” I said. “Sooner or later, the truth always comes out.”

“Just kind of interesting, don’t you think? In one night, everybody changed their story. Your buddies remember being with you even though I put some pretty good weight on them to forget it, and the guy who fingered Vinnie suddenly tells us he just needs a lot of attention. It’s like they all talked to somebody, you know?”

“The Ghost of Christmas Past,” I said.

Ronnie said, “How can you talk so
early?
”

“You’re not alone,” Paulie said accusingly.

“Emphatically,” I said. “I’m as far from being alone as it’s possible to be.”

“You got a sleepy dame talking in your ear and I’m sitting here at this cheap desk looking out at the smog. There ain’t no justice, is there?”

“Actually, there is,” I said. “We were talking earlier about someone, someone you sent me pictures of.”

“Yeah. Your friend’s daughter. The guy who had your friend’s—”

“He doesn’t have her any more. She’s home, safe and sound. And he’s nothing you have to worry about, not ever again.”

I heard paper rustling: Paulie was unwrapping a Tootsie Roll. “How sure are you?”