Little Elvises (39 page)

“Several bullets and fifteen or twenty feet of lake water sure.”

“See, this is interesting, too,” Paulie said. “Because we hear the Sheriffs in San Berdoo got some calls this morning about girls. In the desert. Dead girls, I mean.”

“Boy,” I said. “What a night.”

“Okay,” Paulie said. “Okay. Hope I don’t see you for a while.” He hung up.

Ronnie stretched, her arms fully extended in a high V, and
the sunshine through the window caught the fine golden hair on her forearms and turned it into liquid light. “That was wonderful last night,” she said. “I think I cried more than Marge did. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so happy. That’s the difference between men and women. Women cry at love.”

“Yeah? What do men cry at?”

“The World Series.”

“Love’s funny,” I said. “Seems like everything I’ve been doing for the last few days has been about love in one way or another, and a lot of people got killed for it. And all the love doesn’t make them any less dead.”

“Well,” she said, “love can make you feel more alive, too.”

“My God,” I said. “Is that a compliment?”

The phone rang again, and I looked at the display.

“Why don’t you go for a walk?” Ronnie said. “Take that thing with you.”

“Hello, Rina,” I said. “Aren’t you at school?”

“Sure, I’m at school. I’m in between classes. I read about Giorgio this morning. Was that you?”

“No. It was Giorgio.”

“Well, I know that. But you—I mean, did you have anything to do with it?”

“No. They’d been living in a pressure cooker for years. It was going to blow up sooner or later.”

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“Does anybody know where Corinne is? Wow, imagine her following him all the way from Philadelphia.”

“I was just saying, there’s no way to know about love.”

“Just saying to who?
Whom
, I mean, just saying to whom?”

I looked down at Ronnie, who gave me a small smile with a large charge behind it.

“Ronnie?” Rina said. “Is Ronnie there?”

“She is.”

“I want to talk to her. Come on, let me talk to her. I’ve only got a minute until I have to be in class.”

“Rina,” I said into the phone, “meet Ronnie.”

Ronnie took the phone and said, “You’re the only thing your father talks about.”

Somebody knocked on the door.

“Why don’t we just move to the bus station?” I said. I got up and went into the bathroom and wrapped a towel around me, listening to Ronnie laugh at something Rina had said, and then I went to the door and opened it.

Marge’s eyes were so swollen I was surprised she’d been able to find the door, but she looked almost weightless, transparent with joy. She’d put on a blouse the color of a dubious pumpkin, with a sequined yellow chrysanthemum dead-middle. The chrysanthemum glittered as though there were a light source in the center of her chest. She held out a sheaf of brightly printed cards.

“For you,” she said, and sniffled.

“Thank you,” I said. I took the cards and found myself looking at hundreds of little peppermint-striped canes.

“That’s fifty thousand candy-cane points,” Marge said. “It’s our frequent sleeper program. That’s the highest level. It means you can stay here anytime you want. For free, I mean.”

“Oh, no,” I said, with complete sincerity. “I couldn’t. Really, I couldn’t.”

“You can even have Donder.”

Behind me, Ronnie was whispering into the phone.

“This is too much,” I said to Doris. “And I’ll tell you a secret. I think my daughter might be moving in with me, and I don’t think a motel—”

“No,” Marge said, taking the candy-cane points back. “Your
daughter. How wonderful. You’ll have to make her a proper home.”

“Tell you what. Let’s all have lunch in a couple of hours. We can talk about it then.”

“Lunch is on me,” Marge said. “You name it. Denny’s, El Torito, anywhere.” She was tearing up again. “Doris loves El Torito.”

“El Torito it is,” I said. “See you at noon.”

I closed the door and turned to the bed. Ronnie said something into the phone and then closed it. She put it on the table beside the bed. “You phony,” she said.

“How? How am I a phony?”

“Mister Tough Burglar. Mister Soft-Touch Find-the-Missing-Daughter Burglar. Mr. Daddy-of-the-Year-Worry-About-Your-Daughter’s-Boyfriend Burglar. You cream puff.”

“I may be a cream puff,” I said, climbing back onto the bed, “but there’s a very hard candy at my center.”

“If there is,” she said, “I’ll find it. And then I’ll melt it.”

“That could take a while.”

“No problem.” She unknotted the towel. “I don’t have to go back to Trenton for a long time.”

“Or Albany,” I said.

She wrapped her arms around my neck. “Or Albany,” she said.

For those of
you who are either too young to remember the sixties or who have the instinctive taste and discretion to avoid early sixties, post-Chuck Berry, pre-Beatles rock music (one of the most dire periods in the history of Rock & Roll, if you exclude the wonder of Motown), there really were “little Elvises” who were “churned to the surface in the wake of Elvis Presley,” to use Rina’s phrase.

Some of them were country and western stars who combed their hair into pompadours, learned how to sneer, and were either temporarily or permanently repurposed as rock stars. Others were just good-looking kids with loose hips who made one or two records and then went back to selling shoes or, for all I know, completing doctorates in astrophysics.

And it’s also true that a number of them—some of the more successful, as it turned out—came out of Philadelphia and were managed and produced by an Italian-American guy whose name, like Vincent DiGaudio’s, ended in a vowel. The primary purpose of this page is to state emphatically that, other than those two similarities, none of the characters in this book is intended to represent either that music producer nor his prodigies. Their existence gave me the book’s title and an idea for the story, but that’s all there is to it.

Books come out of the ether. I’d been contemplating for some time the tendency of American pop culture to stamp out little tin duplicates, often scrubbed and sanitized, of the relatively small number of genuinely individual breakthroughs. For years I lived in a house on Venice Beach next to one of the great songwriters of the 20th century, Jerry Leiber. With his partner, Mike Stoller, he wrote “Hound Dog,” Stand By Me,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Love Potion Number Nine,” “Up on the Roof,” “Is That All There Is,” and dozens—hundreds—more. I also wrote songs (dismally) for a while, and I saw whole schools of songwriters trying and failing to match the Leiber/Stoller magic. Didn’t work, any more than any of the people who were billed as “the next Dylan” worked (although some of them, such as Bruce Springsteen, outgrew the hype to make it on their own merit). Now, of course, following “American Idol,” every fourth show is a talent competition judged by members of that increasingly amorphous group, celebrities.

So I wanted to play with the idea of media imitation and also the way fame can destroy people who aren’t equipped for it. The title appeared in front of my eyes while I was taking a morning run, and that determined everything that followed.

I want to say that I deserve combat pay for this book. Music is an essential component of my writing environment, and for this book I downloaded—and
listened
to—days’ worth of so-called rock recorded between 1959 and 1963. I like to think that my musical tastes are broad, but this experience brought me smack up against my limitations. It was like walking into a glass door. In the vast and flowered meadow that is 20th century popular music, the years between 1959 and 1963 are crowded into a tangled, dusty patch of thorny and noxious scrub, “an unweeded garden,” as Hamlet says, “that grows to seed things rank and gross in nature.”

Yeah, I know, there
were
good records—mostly country music transplants such as the Everly Brothers, Marty Robbins, Patsy Cline, and the astonishing Roy Orbison; brilliant R&B from, among others, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles, and Lloyd Price; plus some amazing girl groups, including the Shirelles and the Marvelettes; and then there was Motown. Most of the rest of it was mayonnaise, and I say pfui to it. I had to listen to it.

Anybody who’s got any obscure masterpieces from that period is invited to send them to me at
timothyhallinan.com
and if I haven’t heard them, I promise to listen. For at least ten seconds.

Thanks to my wife, Munyin Choy, who disagrees with me about some of this music, and to my editor, Juliet Grames, who probably hasn’t heard much of it but who edited this book in an absolute marathon frenzy and made a big difference.

And thanks to you for getting this far.