Little Elvises (2 page)

“Act of generosity,” DiGaudio said. “Remember?”

I may be slow sometimes, but I’m not dead. “Vinnie DiGaudio,” I said. “He’s a relative.”

“My uncle. My dad’s brother. Family, you know? We’re Italian, family means something.”

“I’ve never understood why all the non-WASP groups think they own the concept of family. Italians, Jews, Chinese, Latinos—they’ve all got real
families
. Like WASP families are just groups of people who are close to each other in the phone book.”

“Look at ’em on TV,” DiGaudio said. “They come downstairs every morning and shake hands.”

“Mobbed up?”

“Say what?”

“Your whatever-he-is. Is he mobbed up?”

DiGaudio wiped at his upper teeth with the tip of his index finger and then checked it out. “Italian?” he said. “In Philly? In the music business? Why would you think he was—”

“And he’s your
uncle
?”

He said, “How far back in the conversation would you like me to go? Did you miss most of it, or just bits and pieces?”

“I just want to make sure you’re telling me your uncle is mobbed up. At least now I know we’re not being taped.”

DiGaudio spread the pork chops he used as hands, his imitation of someone being reasonable. “You always this suspicious? You miss a lot in life, you go around suspecting everybody all the time.”

“You know,” I said, “if I go to work for you and the word gets around, I’ll be lucky if there’s enough left of me to identify.”

He looked so surprised his eyes got bigger. “Work for
me
?”

“Okay. What am I missing?”

“See, suspicion, it’s a poisonous thing. You think I’m looking to force you to do something for me, and all I’m doing is bringing you a piece of business.”

“Business.”

“We know—and by
we
I mean a very small number of my colleagues—we know that you do sort of lost-and-found detective stuff for people on the other side of the fence.”

“It’s good it’s a small number,” I said, “because they’re wrong.”

“There’s Wattles, who’s like an executive thug,” he said, holding up a finger. “Three-Eyes Romero, the Valley’s leading car-chopper. The Queen of Crime herself, Trey Annunziato.” He had three fingers in the air. “You tell me what these three people have in common.”

“Good accountants?”

“
You
,” he said. “They got you in common. They all had a little problem and they all went to the go- to guy for crooks with problems. You. Junior Bender, boy crimebuster.” He pulled out another Tootsie Roll. “It’s like that distorted mirror you were talking about. You’re a crook but you’re the crooks’ cop, too.”

“Okay,” I said, “just to see if we can’t wrap this up before we both die of old age, you’re saying you won’t make me for the Hammer job—which I didn’t do—if I help your uncle, the Philly music crook. And I’m saying to you that the whole thing about me, that stuff about solving crimes for crooks, it’s wrong. And even if it were right, and I really did solve crimes for crooks, I’d need to know exactly what your uncle needs help with, because I won’t get anywhere near murder. If I were doing it at all, that is, which of course, I’m not. So what’s his problem?”

DiGaudio said, “Murder.”

The month’s motel was Marge ’n Ed’s North Pole at the north end of North Hollywood. The advantage of staying at the North Pole was that even the small number of people who knew I’d lived in motels since my divorce from Kathy would never figure I’d stoop that low. The disadvantage of staying at the North Pole was everything else.

Generally speaking, motels have little to recommend them, and the North Pole had less than most. But they made me a moving target, and I could more or less control the extent to which anyone knew where I was at any given time. I’d been divorced almost three years, and the North Pole was my 34th motel, and far and away the worst of the bunch.

I’d been put into Blitzen. In an explosion of creativity, Marge ’n Ed had decided not to number the rooms. Since Clement Moore only named so many reindeer in “The Night Before Christmas,” Marge ’n Ed had pressed Rudolph into service and then come up with some names on their own. Thus, in addition to the reindeer we all know and love, we had rooms named Dydie, Witzel, Tinkie, and Doris.

Doris wasn’t actually being passed off as a reindeer. She was Marge ’n Ed’s daughter. Marge, who grew confidential as the evenings wore on and the level in the vodka bottle dropped, had
told me one night that Doris had fled the North Pole with someone Marge referred to as
Mr. Pinkie Ring
, a pinkie ring being, in Marge’s cosmology, the surest sign of a cad. And sure enough, the cad had broken Doris’s heart, but would she come home? Not Doris. Stubborn as her father, by whom I assumed Marge meant Ed, whom I always thought of as
’n Ed
. Ed was no longer with us, having departed this vale of sorrows six years earlier. It was probably either that or somehow orchestrate a global ban on vodka, and death undoubtedly looked easier.

The string of Christmas lights that outlined the perimeter of Blitzen’s front window blinked at me in no discernible sequence, and I’d been trying to discern one for days. They sprang to life whenever anyone turned on the ceiling light, which was the only light in the room. I’d tried to pull the cord from the outlet, but Marge ’n Ed had glued it in place.

“YouTube-dot-com,” Rina said on the phone. “Y-O-U-Tube, spelled like
tube
. Aren’t you there yet?”

Something unpleasant happens even to the most agreeable of adolescents when they talk to adults about technology. A certain kind of grit comes into their voices, as though they’re expecting to meet an impenetrable wall of stupidity and might have to sand their way through it. Rina, who still, so far as I knew, admired at least one or two aspects of my character, was no exception. She sounded like her teeth had been wired together.

“Yes,” I said, hearing myself echo her tone. “I’ve managed somehow to enter the wonderland of video detritus and I await only the magical search term that will let me sift the chaff.”

“
Dad
. Do you want help, or not?”

“I do,” I said, “but not in a tone of voice that says
I’d better talk really slowly or he’ll get his thumb stuck in his nostril again
.”

“Do I sound like that?”

“A little.”

“Sorry. Okay, the interview is called ‘Vincent DiGaudio Interview.’ Have you got that?”

“Slow down,” I said. “Did you just ask me whether I can follow the idea that the Vincent DiGaudio Interview is called ‘Vincent DiGaudio Interview’?”

“Oh.” She made a clucking noise I’ve never been able to duplicate. “Sorry again.”

“Maybe I’m being touchy,” I said. “Thanks. Anything else?”

“Not on video. I’ll email you the links to the other stuff, the written stuff. There’s not much of it. He doesn’t seem to have wanted much publicity.”

“Wonder why,” I said. I figured there was no point in telling her I was going to be getting involved with a mob guy. She might worry.

She said, “But the FBI files are kind of interesting.”

“Excuse me?”

“Somebody used the Freedom of Information Act,” said my thirteen-year-old daughter, “to file for release of a stack of FBI files on the outfit’s influence in the Philadelphia music scene. Since DiGaudio’s still alive and since he never got charged, his name is blacked out, but it’s easy to tell it’s him because a lot of the memos are about Giorgio. The files are on the FBI’s site, but I’ll send you the link so you don’t have to waste time poking around.”

“The FBI site?” I said. “Giorgio?”

“Wake up, Dad. Everything’s online.”

Was I, a career criminal, going to log onto
the FBI site?
“Who’s Giorgio?”

“The most pathetic of DiGaudio’s little Elvises. Really pretty, I mean fruit-salad pretty, but he couldn’t do
anything
. Tone deaf. He stood on the stage like his feet were nailed to the floor. But really, really pretty.”

“I don’t remember him in the paper you wrote.” I was taking a chance here, because I hadn’t actually read all of it.

“I didn’t talk about him much. He was so awful that he kind of stood alone. He wasn’t an imitation anything, really. He was an original void.”

“But pretty.”

“Yum yum yum.”

“Thanks, sweetie. I’ll check it out.”

“You can look at Giorgio on YouTube, too,” she said. “Although you might want to turn the volume way, way down.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s under ‘Giorgio.’ ”

“Try ‘Giorgio Lucky Star.’ That was the name of his first hit. ‘Lucky Star,’ I mean. Little irony there, huh? If there was ever a lucky star, it was Giorgio. If it hadn’t been for Elvis, he’d have been delivering mail. Not that it did him much good in the long run, poor kid. Anyway, search for ‘Giorgio Lucky Star.’ Otherwise you’re going to spend the whole evening looking at Giorgio Armani.”

“Is your mom around?”

A pause I’d have probably missed if I weren’t her father. “Um, out with Bill.”

“Remember what I told you,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t laugh at Bill’s nose.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Bill’s nose.”

“Just, whatever happens, next time you see Bill’s nose, don’t laugh at it.”

“Daddy,” she said. “You’re terrible.” She made a kiss noise and hung up.

It was okay that I was terrible. She only called me Daddy when she liked me.

I’ve had more opportunity than most people to do things I’d regret later, and I’ve taken advantage of a great many of those
opportunities. But there was nothing I regretted more than not being able to live in the same house as my daughter.

I’d wanted to
stay in Donder, but it was taken.

“Donder” is a convincing name for a reindeer. “Blitzen” sounds to me like the name of some Danish Nazi collaborator, someone who committed high treason in deep snow. But Donder was occupied, so I was stuck with either Blitzen or Dydie. I chose Blitzen because it was on the second floor, which I prefer, and it had a connecting door with Prancer, which was unoccupied, so I could rent them both but leave the light off in one of them, giving me a second room to duck into in an emergency, a configuration I insist on. This little escape hatch that has probably saved me from a couple of broken legs, broken legs being a standard method of getting someone’s attention in the world of low-IQ crime. And as much as I didn’t like the name “Blitzen,” there was no way I was going to stay in Prancer. It would affect the way I thought about myself.

Blitzen was a small, airless rectangle with dusty tinsel fringing the tops of the doors, cut-outs of snowflakes dangling from the ceiling, and fluffs of cotton glued to the top of the medicine cabinet. A pyramid of glass Christmas-tree ornaments had been glued together, and then the whole assemblage had been glued to a red-and-green platter, which in turn had been glued to the top of the dresser. Marge ’n Ed went through a lot of glue. The carpet had been a snowy white fifteen or twenty years ago, but was now the precise color of guilt, a brownish gray like a dusty spiderweb, interrupted here and there by horrific blotches of darkness, as though aliens with pitch in their veins had bled out on it. The first time I saw it, it struck me as a perfect picture of a guilty conscience at 3
A.M.:
you’re floating along in a sort of pasteurized
colorlessness, and
wham
, here comes a black spot that has you bolt upright and sweating in the dark.

I have a nodding acquaintance with guilty consciences.

When Andy Warhol predicted that everyone in the future would be famous for fifteen minutes, he was probably thinking about something like YouTube. What a concept: hundreds of thousands of deservedly anonymous people made shaky, blurry videotapes of their pets and their feet and each other lip-synching to horrible music, and somebody bought it for a trillion dollars. But then all this idea-free content developed a kind of mass that attracted a million or so clips that actually
had
some interest value, especially to those of us who occasionally like to lift a corner of the social fabric and peer beneath it.

Vincent DiGaudio Interview
popped onto my screen in the oddly saturated color, heavy toward the carrot end of the spectrum, that identifies TV film from the seventies. Since I was going to meet DiGaudio in about forty minutes, I took a good look at him. In 1975, he’d been a beefy, ethnic-looking guy with a couple of chins and a third on the way, and a plump little mouth that he kept pursing as though he had Tourette’s Syndrome and was fighting an outbreak of profanity. His eyes were the most interesting things in his face. They were long, with heavy, almost immobile lids that sloped down toward the outer corners at about a thirty-degree angle, the angle of a roof. His gaze bounced nervously between the interviewer and the camera lens.

Vincent DiGaudio had a liar’s eyes.

As the clip began, the camera was on the interviewer, a famished woman with a tangerine-colored face, blond hair bobbed so brutally it looked like it had been cut with a broken bottle, and so much gold hanging around her neck she wouldn’t have floated in the Great Salt Lake. “… define your talent?” she was saying when the editor cut in.