Little Elvises (9 page)

“What? What is it?”

“Same reason the bathroom got wet.” I pulled the door all the way open and showed her the drainage pipe that ran down from the center of the sink. It ended abruptly about eight inches above the bottom of the cabinet. “The traps have been taken.”

“The traps?”

“You know. That elbow-bend in the pipe that’s always under a drain. It’s there to catch anything valuable, rings or anything, that might fall down there.”

“But why would anyone want those?”

“He didn’t want the traps. He wanted whatever might have been in them. Hair, for example. Anything that might have had DNA on it.”

Ronnie took a couple of steps back, looking around the room as though transparent forms were writhing in the air. The house chose that moment to creak. She said, “Can we leave now?”

“Trenton, New Jersey,” Ronnie said, and then swallowed. “A great place to be from and a terrible place to go back to.” A few scraps of steak clung to the bone in front of her, a steak that had disappeared while I was still buttering bread. I’d never seen a woman eat that fast. My former wife, Kathy, would still have been salting it.

I cut the second piece out of my veal chop. “And you left Trenton because?”

“Because I could.” She looked around the restaurant, Musso & Frank, one of the oldest restaurants in LA, and practically the only place I ever eat in Hollywood. “Do you think anybody would notice if I picked up the bone and just sort of chewed on it?”

“Most of these waiters have been here since the King of Spain owned the state. They’ve seen it before.”

“Good.” She grabbed it in both hands.

“Okay, so Trenton wasn’t hard to say goodbye to. What was the cue to kiss it off, though?”

“Another bad boy,” she said. The light from the window that opened onto Hollywood Boulevard fell across her face, deepening the blue of her eyes and revealing a dusty little constellation of freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. “I’ve got this
problem with men. I only like the dangerous ones. If I had a pet, it’d be a coral snake.”

“And the guy who got you out of Trenton—”

“Was Donald. Donald had green eyes and he liked other people’s cars. We left Trenton in a Porsche at about 3
A.M
. By the time we got to Chicago, we’d also been in a Corvette, in that sweet little Lexus sports coupe, and a Jaguar. Oh, and an Audi. The Audi was for comic relief. As things turned out, so was Donald.”

My phone rang. “Audi,” I said. “Donald. Hold the thought and gnaw on your bone.”

“Yeah?” It was Paulie DiGaudio, from the cop branch of the family, returning my call.

“Your uncle’s putative victim,” I said. “He was doing some blackmailing.”

Ronnie looked across the table at me, but she didn’t stop picking at the bone.

“That’s interesting,” DiGaudio said. “Kinda opens it up, doesn’t it? Gives us some more suspects, besides Uncle Vinnie, I mean.”

“I thought you’d like it. Do you happen to know whether Bigelow was blackmailing your uncle?”

“Let’s pretend you didn’t ask that.”

“Fine. I don’t suppose you’ve got a cop I could borrow.”

A sound that might have been a chortle, if I’d ever heard a chortle to compare it to. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“Hey, he’s
your
uncle.”

“You’re it, Bender. Maybe you want a license plate run or something, I could handle that. Check a reverse-directory, something like that, no problem. But if you think I’m calling attention in the department to my uncle the crook, you’re nuts.”

“Okay,” I said, getting to the actual reason for the call. “I
need to know whether there’s a current driver’s license issued to someone living at an address in Hollywood. Or any license listing that address in the past five years.”

“This have anything to do with Vinnie?”

“It’s what I’m working on,” I said.

“Okay. Address.”

“One-four-six-seven Florence. Zip is probably 90068.”

“Got it. Couple of hours.”

“And listen. Don’t put any cops on this, no matter what name turns up. The blackmailing thing, well, there could be dangerous people involved, and I don’t want to be walking around with my fly open, not knowing that some cop has already been knocking on doors and asking questions.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He hung up.

“That was
extremely
interesting,” Ronnie said. She had the bone in her right hand and a small piece of meat between the thumb and forefinger of her left. “That was a cop, right? First you asked him for something he wouldn’t give you, just to let him say no, and then you got what you really wanted. And everything you told him was true, but it was also a total lie. The address, which is where we just were, has nothing to do with Derek because it was about your landlady’s daughter. So this cop is out getting a name and he doesn’t have any idea why.”

I nodded. “And?”

“And he feels like he won the conversation.”

“I’d shrug modestly, but I need practice.”

She looked at the piece of meat between her fingers, popped it into her mouth, and said around it, “And then there’s the fact that you’re a crook but you seem to be working for cops. I know there are cops who work for crooks, but I didn’t think it worked the other way around. And while I’m on this topic, I probably should
ask you why you’re interested in Derek in the first place. I would have asked back at my apartment, but you distracted me.”

“Well, you distracted me, too.”

“See what I mean? It may be true, but it’s not an answer.” She eyed the veal chop on my plate. “You going to finish that?”

“I’ve barely started it.”

“That’s not an answer, either. Yes or no?”

“Every last ounce. And then I’m going to take the bone home and have it bronzed.”

“Jiminy. So what’s the deal? What are you, a crook or a cop?”

“I’m a burglar. That’s where my heart is, as people say these days. But once in a while, I help out other crooks who have a problem, who got ripped off or something and for obvious reasons can’t go to the cops. It’s a sideline, sort of. And now I’ve got a cop pressuring me to do a favor for him, or he’ll put me in jail for something I didn’t do, and the favor involves the fascinating question of who killed Derek. And the woman who owns the motel I’m living in at the moment thinks something has happened to her daughter and asked me to check it out. And my waist is thirty-two and my inseam is thirty-four. How’d you get from Chicago to LA?”

She pulled the bread basket over and rifled through it. Before we left the apartment, she’d replaced the fork through her hair with a chopstick, which she deemed dressier. The way she ate, it was surprising she didn’t have a whole table setting in her hair. “You’re more interesting than I am,” she said.

“To you, maybe. Chicago is what, about seventeen hundred miles from LA?”

“That’s one way to look at it. Are you hoarding the butter?” I pushed it over to her. “Another way to look at it is that Chicago is three guys away from LA. After I chased Donald off, in Chicago, I got kind of hooked up with DeWayne, and you
know
he had to be hot to overcome a name like that. Do you think some names are hot and some names aren’t?”

“Definitely.”

“Yeah? How do you feel about Ronnie?”

“I like Veronica better.”

“You and everybody else, except me. And, I’ve got to tell you, you’ve got more to overcome in the name department than DeWayne did. I mean,
Junior?
What’s the least hot name for a woman?”

“Tillie. So, DeWayne. What did he do, run numbers?”

“DeWayne was a dealer. The straightest, most organized dealer ever. Never touched anything more stimulating than chocolate. Had a six-state route and ran it regularly. Like a milkman, but with dope. And he was gorgeous. If there’d been a dope dealer’s calendar, he’d have been Mr. January to get everybody’s year off to a good start.”

“But the relationship didn’t last,” I said, cutting into the veal chop and watching her eyes follow my hands. “Did his beauty fade tragically, or what?”

“Actually, I developed a weensy substance abuse problem. I got to the point where I needed four lines to tie my shoes. And it finally hit me that DeWayne, with his infinite stash, probably wasn’t the ideal companion, so I split. We were out on his route, in Taos, New Mexico. He had artist clients there. Artists do a lot of dope, did you know that? So when this guy Leon wanted to paint me, I took my suitcase out of DeWayne’s car and started posing.”

“Leon, he do dope?”

“Leon didn’t do anything except downers, and I hate downers. That was his appeal, that I didn’t want his dope. How can you just sit there and talk with all that nice food in front of you? Some poor little calf lived and died in a tiny wooden pen so you
could have that chop, and you’re not paying any attention at all to it. Do you think if I told you all about how they raise veal, you’d lose your appetite and give it to me?”

I cut a chunk and put it in my mouth. “Not a chance.” I pushed the plate toward her a couple of inches and then snatched it back. She put half the bread away with a single bite. “So, to recap,” I said, “it was Donald from Trenton to Chicago, DeWayne from Chicago to Taos, and there you are, sober in the desert, posing for downered-out old Leon.
Girl and Sand
, something like that.”

“I could have been a piñata for all you’d recognize me. Leon was heavily abstract. What he wanted to paint was the
energy field
. Everything and everyone had an energy field, he said every day of his life, and he said it very slowly, too. When he looked at me, what he saw was something that looked like the northern lights, if the northern lights were made of string cheese.”

“What colors?”

“Whatever he had the most of. Anyway, some guy from Vegas came to Taos and saw Leon’s stuff in a gallery, and it reminded the guy of neon. So he asked Leon to come to Vegas and design some abstract neon for a casino he was building, a casino with a kinda modern-art theme, and Leon saw a chance to paint
real
energy and he jumped at it. And the fourth night we were in Vegas, I bumped into Derek in the bar at the Venetian, and Derek did that number about, you remember, the novel from the female perspective, and eighteen hours later we had blood alcohol counts high enough to make us flammable, and we were married. And Derek towed me to the city where Fate awaited him, which is to say, LA.”

“If you’ll excuse a personal comment—”

She pulled the chopstick out, and her hair tumbled down over her shoulders. “It’s about time.”

“Your affections seem to be, um, short-lived.”

“Oh,” she said, running her fingers through the spill of gold to untangle it. “I’m terrible. I might as well be a guy. I even eat like a guy. And you, you eat like Miss Manners is sitting on your lap.”

“I always think this might be my last free meal, the last one I ever eat outside of prison. So I take my time with it.”

She stopped, her fingers trapped in a snarl of hair. “Oh. Oh, that’s awful.” Then she gave her hair a hard tug and squinted at me. “Unless it’s bullshit.”

“It is. Sorry.”

“No problem, but it’ll cost you.” She grabbed her knife and fork, leaned across the table, and sawed off about a third of my chop. “I’m going to be eating now, so you talk.”

“Same old story. I’m your normal, everyday burglar, but better. I broke into my first house when I was fourteen. I’ve never been caught, never been charged, because I’m careful. I change the way I go in, I work different hours and different neighborhoods, I steal different kinds of stuff, so I haven’t got a trademark the cops can trace. I know a lot about a lot of things, so I can usually recognize value when I see it. If you had nine pieces of good costume jewelry and one real piece, I’d take the real piece every time. In the personal column, I married my high school sweetheart, but I couldn’t change into who she wanted me to be, which was an insurance salesman, and we split up. On the other hand, we managed to produce my daughter, Rina.”

“Sweet name,” she said. “How old?”

“Thirteen.”

“Ooooohhhh. The entrance to the hormonal wind tunnel. How’s she handling it?”

“So far, so good. She hasn’t hit the stage yet where the entire world seems like a personal imposition. I’m sure it’s coming, but so far she can still look at me without sneering.”

“Does she know what you do?”

“Sure. I don’t lie to her, ever.”

“What’s she think about it?” She was chewing, but I could translate.

“It worries her. The idea that something might happen to me. Kids are pretty conservative. They rebel, but they’re not good with uncertainty.”

“I guess. I never minded it, but in our house, uncertainty was in long supply. We might not have had enough money to make the rent or buy dinner, but we always had plenty of uncertainty.” She put her fork down and brushed her hands together. “And that’s enough of that. I have to save some of the tragedy for tomorrow. It’d be terrible to run out of tragedy on the first date.”

“One more question. Other than hanging with bad boys, what do you do?”

“Whatever I want. I devote one hundred percent of my energy to doing exactly what I want. When I was a kid, I looked around at all the people who worked for a living, and it seemed to me that the living they were working for wasn’t worth the work they were doing. If I
have
to work, like if I run out of money or I’m between guys or something, I tend bar. It’s a good portable skill that pays pretty well, and since you’re a thief, I’ll also admit that it has a high skim potential. I don’t need much, just a place to sleep and some books. Derek had a wad of money in our joint account, courtesy of Thad Pierce, so I’m okay for a while. When I’m not, I’ll go back to mixing cosmopolitans and flirting with drunk guys. And then I’ll quit again.”