Little Elvises (21 page)

“ ’Cause there’s gotta be some sort of connection between Irwin and Vinnie, and Irwin, he wants to clean things up, cut the strings.”

“And I’d be one of the strings,” I said.

“Irwin is living a happy old age, all tucked away in Brentwood like that, wearing those ugly pants. He wants to stay invisible. That’s what they used to call him, you know that? The invisible man.”

“You made that up.”

“Uh-uh,” he said. “Irwin’s never had a glove laid on him, you know? Stole like a billion dollars, set up hits, run the fuckin’ state like his personal piggy bank, and nobody’s ever made him. What a guy.”

“What do you think I should do?”

Louie shifted his
tuchis
around so he was facing me. “Me? You’re asking me?”

“Why not?”

“No reason. I’m just flattered. Nobody ever asked me what to do about Irwin Dressler before. It’s like you just found out you got cancer and you say to me, ‘Louie, what should I do?’ and all of a sudden I feel like a doctor. Here’s what you should do. Whatever he told you to do, plus a little more in the same direction. Listening around the words he said, sounds to me like he doesn’t want it to be Vinnie.”

“Pretty much what I thought.”

“So,” he said, fishing for another cigar. “No conflict of interest, huh? Paulie doesn’t want it to be Vinnie, Irwin doesn’t want it to be Vinnie. So, no problem.”

I opened the door. “Unless it’s Vinnie,” I said.

“Yeah,” Louie said, going to work on the cigar tip. “Then you’re fucked.”

“I need four
names and addresses to go with some license plates,” I said into the phone.

“And I need your friend and her daughter in here, now.” The cooling-off period hadn’t cooled Paulie DiGaudio off any.

“I can’t give them to you. They don’t want to talk to you.”

“You’re not listening. Those people come in here, or you do.”

“Charged with what? Refusing to make an introduction? Losing my phone book?”

“How about obstruction of justice?”

“Sounds good. You want me to come in and give myself up? I’m sure you can find somebody else to work on Vinnie’s problem. But I’ll tell you that you’d better find somebody good, because he looks ripe for it.”

Paulie put something crunchy in his mouth and chewed on it, and I held the phone away from my ear. “I could look like gold,” he finally said. He was trying for wistful. “You
bring these people in and we find Pivensey, I could look like gold.”

“Make a deal with you. I’ll do whatever I can to talk the mom into coming in—”

“You mean the kid’s still missing?”

“That’s what I mean. And all mom knows is that her daughter was living with him at that address in Hollywood. She’s been gone nine days.”

“And they left together,” he said. So the cops had talked to the All-Seeing Eye across the street, too.

“Looks like it.”

“What was her name?”

“The mother or the daughter?”

“Either.”

“Neither,” I said. “And be careful with your tenses. Far as we know, she’s alive and eating three squares a day.”

Paulie said, “And they’re gonna put George W. Bush on Mount Rushmore.”

“The license plates, remember?” With my free hand I unfolded the list of numbers Ronnie had copied off the junkers parked in Vinnie’s driveway.

“What for?” DiGaudio said. He sounded like his feelings were hurt. “I mean, why do I want to do this for you?”

“I think one or more of the folks who own those cars might be Vinnie’s alibi.”

While I talked
with DiGaudio I’d been sitting on the fender of my car, where it had been parked behind Louie’s, up on Sunshine Terrace. Sunshine Terrace is rich in eucalyptus trees, and the November clouds had parted enough to allow a drizzle of diluted afternoon sunlight to turn the leaves five or six shades of green and tan, while a light breeze kicked up mysteriously and
jittered them around in a picturesque fashion. The people who live south of the Boulevard can afford breezes.

Marge’s list of people to talk to about the missing Doris was handwritten in purple ink on a notepad that had
MARGE
’
S JOTTINGS
printed across the top and was undoubtedly purchased for more lighthearted jottings. She had a child’s big, careful handwriting, the vowels round and fat, with little circles hovering like halos over each lowercase I. She’d drawn precise five-pointed stars beside the names of the folks she thought Doris was most likely to have confided in.

The closest one with a star was an Amber Schlumberg in Burbank. The closest of my Glocks was also in Burbank. I pulled out a quarter and flipped it. When I took my hand away, I was looking at a bird, and for a disorienting minute, I had no idea whether that meant heads or tails. Then I couldn’t remember whether the Glock had been heads and Amber had been tails, or vice versa.

I figured, the hell with it. Get the gun.

A little burglar boy has no better friends than his storage units. Scattered among them, my three contained guns, ammo, about twenty thousand in small bills, the
ne plus ultra
in illegal lock-picking technology, some hot jewelry being allowed to cool gradually, and two alternative realities in the form of forged documents: drivers license, Social Security cards, birth certificates, all bearing the names of males who would have been my age if they hadn’t died in infancy. One of them even had a passport. They weren’t as good as the set at the Wedgwood, but they’d do for short-time use.

Like all storage facilities, the one in Burbank smelled like people used it primarily to store dust. Within a minute of keying the three keyable locks and spinning the combination dial on the fourth, I’d sneezed twice and I had a nice, cold, slightly oily
automatic jammed into the front of my pants and a couple thousand in twenties in my pockets. I grabbed two extra clips to give my pants that desirable
cholo
sag and relocked everything, then headed for Lankershim and followed it past the time-honored Warner Brothers lot, haunted even now by the shades of Bogey and Cagney and Bette Davis, Paul Muni and the Bowery Boys. Other studios were classier or more elegant or made flossier musicals, but Warner was the toughest and the grittiest. Crooks with taste like Warner Brothers best.

Amber Schlumberg lived in a little fifties stucco box crouched behind an ancient pepper tree that had killed the lawn, just burned it right down to the dark brown Valley dirt. A red tricycle, just like one I once bought for Rina, rusted in a far corner, looking like it hadn’t been moved in a year or more. At some none-too-recent point, someone had started to put up shingles, trying to make the place look like a charming rural cottage. The shingles covered the front third of the house but gave out about four feet from the eaves. It looked like an eye-patch. Around and below the shingles, which had turned a dark woody brown with exposure, the stucco was the yuck-yellow of Dijon mustard.

The front door was yanked open before I could knock, and a woman, dimly visible through the dirty mesh of a screen, demanded, “What now?”

I said, “Always a good question.” The air coming from inside the house smelled stale.

The woman’s face came closer to the screen, a relatively nice face marred by an extremely unpleasant expression. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a friend of Doris Enderby’s.”

“Yeah?” Something guarded came into her face, and she reached up and wiggled something around inside the door. I
heard the hook slip through the little eye that holds it in place. “How come I don’t know you?”

“Karma? Kismet? The fact that almost eight million people live in Los Angeles?”

A tiny but decisive shake of the head. “I know Doris’s friends.”

“Well, I lied to you. I’m actually a friend of Doris’s mother, Marge. Marge is worried about Doris, and she’s asked me to talk to people, see if I can get some kind of fix on what’s happening with her.”

A beat, while she seemed to try to figure out what to say, as though there were a lot of possibilities. Then she licked her lips. “Worried why?”

“Either you know or you don’t. If you don’t, I can leave now.”

She started the shake again but broke it off with her head angled away from me. Regarding me from the corner of her eye, she said, “You’re not a cop.”

“If you’re Doris’s friend, you know Marge wouldn’t send a cop after Doris.”

She looked at me long enough to take my pulse, her head still turned partly away as though she might decide to call over her shoulder for help. “I’ll phone Marge.”

“By all means.”

Her mouth twisted to the right, and she chewed on the inside of her lip. Then she said, “Forget it. Ask your questions. But no coming in.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll sit here.” And I sank cross-legged onto her welcome mat.

She said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and popped the lock.

A big grandfather
clock beat time in the living room, one of the tall ones in dark wood with the brass pendulum, ticking loudly
enough for us to hear it in the kitchen, or the kitchenette, or whatever you’d call it. The kitchen was almost as small as Marge’s and much messier. Other than Amber’s voice, the clock made the only sound in the house.

“Maybe two weeks ago, maybe a little more,” Amber said. Across the kitchen behind her, the window over the sink offered a view of a dead-brown backyard. “Doris was—well, she wasn’t happy. It was getting kind of old with Lem, although you’d think someone named Lem would remain ever fresh, wouldn’t you? First time she told me about him, I said, ‘What is he, Dodo? A leftover from
Deadwood
?’ So after that I didn’t hear from her for a while, you know how women are sometimes. If the old girlfriend doesn’t like the new boyfriend, guess which one gets the ax?” She picked up a cup of herbal tea and blew on it, surrounding me in a cloud of cinnamon and mint. The phrase
fields of asphodel
ran through my mind, barefoot and trailing pastel gauze, even though I had no idea what asphodel was.

I said, “And?”

She chewed the inside of the lip again. “Yeah, right, old story. So we didn’t see each other for a while. She felt sorry for him. He was such a sad little man. She said he reminded her of her father. You know about her father?”

“Yeah. Marge and I have had long talks.”

“I’ll bet they were long,” Amber said. She leaned back in her chair, which was too banged up to be retro. It was just old—bent chrome, patched with rust in spots, with heavily taped plastic cushions that had hosted fannies since the fifties. I was in a matching number, facing her across a veneer breakfast table that looked like it was used for everything girly; it was littered with dirty, lip-printed cups, napkins that had been used to blot lipstick of many colors, a makeup mirror with a snowdrift of face powder, a day-book open to an empty week, a pencil diagonally
optimistic across the page. At the edge of the table against the wall was a chipped ceramic mug filled with pens, and a hinged picture frame, open wide and facedown. Amber followed my glance to the frame, looked up to me, and said, “That Marge could talk the paint off the walls. That was one of the reasons Doris wanted to get out.”

“Marge is lonely,” I said. “Her husband’s dead, and everybody she meets stays one night and leaves.”

“Well, that’s pitiful and all, but Doris got decades of it. Talk and vodka, vodka and talk. So when Lem appeared and needed so much
work
, Doris was gone like a shot.”

“But then she called you—what?—a couple of weeks ago?”

Her eyes slipped from my face. “Something like that.” She sipped the tea. Her hair was streaked unevenly, and the roots were dark and looked oily. The light through the kitchen window made sharp furrows out of the creases on either side of her mouth, the fan of crinkles at the corner of her eyes. The powder on her face was splotchy. Her T-shirt needed washing and her nails were not so much bitten as gnawed. We’d walked a path through a dusty living room to get here, and the house felt like most of its rooms had been unused for a long time.

It came to me with some force that she’d been abandoned. And although my departure from the house I’d shared with Kathy had been a mutual decision, it was impossible for me to look at Amber and not see Kathy.

I vaporized the image and said, “And she said she wanted to leave him.”

She blew a wisp of hair from her face, and it promptly fell back. “Didn’t take it that far. Said he was weirder than she thought. Said the house was getting way small and he was like everywhere in it all the time.”

“Did she elaborate?”

“No. She’s the opposite of her mom that way. Doesn’t talk much. Just said he was—what’s the thing about still waters?”

“They run deep.” She sipped the tea again, her eyes on me, but there was no evidence of a penny dropping. “Still waters do,” I said helpfully. “They run deep.”

“Jesus, beat it to death, why don’t you? I was just thinking that old Lem was about the stillest water I ever saw. Guy was practically a photograph. So what if they run deep? I mean, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ummm, unexpected depths. Intelligence, some kind of hidden trait. It’s generally a compliment.”

“It wasn’t when she said it. It was like the water was deep, deep, deep, and there might have been things swimming around way down there.”

“In the dark,” I said.

She made a little shiver, bringing her shoulders up practically to her ears. “We need a campfire,” she said. “You could tell the one about The Hook.”

“Mmmm.”

She leaned toward me, her eyes tightening at the corners. “Where’d you go? What does
Mmmm
mean?”

“It means I don’t know whether you’re serious or not.”

“Serious about what? Old Lem?”

“About being worried about Doris.”

She looked down into the mug of tea and took hold of the string, pulled the teabag out, and then picked up a spoon. Said to the spoon, “I didn’t actually say I was worried.”

“Are you?”

She centered the bag on the spoon and then wrapped the string around the spoon and the bag a few times and pulled it to squeeze liquid out of the bag. “Naw,” she said, watching the droplets fall into the mug. “She told me she was going away for
a while. When we talked. Said she was going someplace, maybe to Vegas or like that, you know, someplace where she could have some fun.”