Little Elvises (24 page)

“I can’t. There’s no category for self-pity. What’s it going to say,
I’m sorry I’m feeling sorry for myself
?”

“Ahhh, lighten up. Worst thing that can happen is you get convicted on the Hammer robbery, Vinnie gets arrested, and Irwin Dressler has you killed in prison.”

“By golly, you’re right,” I said. “I feel much better.”

“Okay,
here’s
good news: Our girl’s in San Berdoo. Got some clerk burning oil all night to search property transfers in the names of Huff, spelled two ways, and Pivensey.”

“And traffic tickets.”

“And parking,” Louie said. “Tickets and property are two different places. She barely made it up there in time to get into the County clerk’s office. Tickets first thing tomorrow.”

“Fine. Great. Peachy.”

“Oh, and Stinky’s pissed at you. He figures you ratted him to Dressler.”

“I’m terrified,” I said. “I can barely steer.”

“Stinky may wear velveteen PJs,” Louie said, “but he can hire heat same as anyone else.”

“I’ll put Stinky’s heat on the list of people who are probably right behind me.” My turn was coming up. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Oh, good,” Louie said. “A reason to live through the night.”

This time, Bill
opened the door.

“Ah,” he said. He looked at me, and I looked at him. Once again, I had to admit that Rina was right; there was nothing wrong with his nose. It would have looked better broken in four or five places, but it was a perfectly good nose.

“Ah, yourself.” I said. “Nice shirt. Territory Ahead?”

He looked down at it. “L.L. Bean.”

“Everything for the fashionable duck hunter. If you’d step aside, I could get off this porch.”

He blinked. “Does Kathy know you’re coming?”

“I don’t see how that affects you,” I said reasonably. I waited a second or two while reason evaporated, my blood pressure tripled, and spots multiplied in front of my eyes, and then I said, “Let me put it more directly, Bill. Get out of my fucking way.”

He was blinking again as he said, “Hold
on
,” and I reached out and grabbed his shoulder. Then I kicked his right foot out from under him, spun him halfway around on his left, put my foot up against his butt, and shoved. He staggered forward into the hallway, and I followed him in fast, planning to tie his arms into a square knot.

And stopped.

The hall ended at an antique bureau that Kathy had bought and painted white and gold. Kathy liked white and gold. To the left was the archway to the living room. To the right was the hall that led to the bedrooms. As Bill engaged in a windmill collision with the bureau, I saw Kathy staring at me from the living room, and Rina, with Tyrone behind her, in the hallway. Rina was open-mouthed, and Tyrone looked appraising, like he wanted to see it again, in slow-mo.

I said, “Hi, everyone. I was showing Bill a trick. You okay, Bill?”

Bill looked at me and opened his mouth, and I let my left eyelid droop in the way that my father’s did when he was furious, and Bill said quickly, “Fine. I’m fine.”

Kathy said, “A trick.” She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, so the relationship with Bill was well past the let’s-get-pretty stage.

“Since you’ve got him opening the door,” I said, “he’s sort of
your first line of defense, isn’t he? And he can’t always be bringing those duck guns to the door.”

“Bill
does not hunt ducks
,” Kathy said through her teeth, sounding as though we’d argued about it a dozen times, but Rina was trying, and failing, to laugh silently. “And it’s not funny, young lady. Your father is not free to burst in here any time he wants and—and
manhandle
people.”

“I’m fine,” Bill repeated gamely.

Kathy said, “That’s not the point.” Bill’s face suggested that he thought it had been, but Kathy plowed on. “We have an arrangement, Junior. You have specific visitation times, and you’re supposed to call in advance if you want to change them.”

“I was.…” I said, and broke it off.

“Yes? You were what? Out of gas? In the neighborhood? Just passing by?”

“Lonely,” I said. “I was lonely.”

Kathy’s face softened for a second, but she shored it up from inside. “Well, I’m sorry about that. But this isn’t home base any more. You can’t come running in here every time you get tired of your precious motels.”

“I want to see him,” Rina said.

“Of course, you do, honey,” Kathy said. “It’s natural for you—”

“I mean now. I want to see him now.”

There was an awkward silent moment. Then I said, “Well, that makes two in favor. We only need one more for a majority.”

Tyrone said, “Do I get a vote or am I disenfranchised?”

“This isn’t the Electoral College, Junior,” Kathy said. “And you’re trying to manipulate Rina.”

“Why?” I demanded. “You’re the only one who’s allowed to get lonely?” I glanced at Bill. “Not that you’ve got much room for it.”

“I am
not
discussing this,” Kathy said.

“Fine. I’ll go into my daughter’s room and spend a few minutes with her, and you can go back to plucking geese or whatever you were—”

“And you’re not funny. Rina, he’s not, so stop laughing right now.”

Rina turned and ran toward her room, and Tyrone ambled along behind her. Kid didn’t have a stiff joint in his body. “I’ll just go on in and chat with her for a little while,” I said.

Kathy watched her daughter’s receding back. “Fifteen minutes,” she said. “We eat dinner in fifteen minutes.”

“That’s nice of you, but—”

“I’m not
inviting
you. I’m telling you she has to be in the dining room in a quarter of an hour.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t eat game anyway.”

By the time I got to Rina’s room, I was breathing regularly and the light fizziness of fury had left my limbs.

“You shouldn’t get Mom crazy like that,” Rina said as I came in. Tyrone had swiveled a chair around and straddled it, with his arms crossed on top of the back, his hands lying flat. He had amazingly long fingers.

“You play keyboards, Tyrone?” I asked.

“Horn,” he said.

“Which one?”

“There’s only one you just call
horn
. French.”

“My favorite,” I said. “You know a record called ‘Blue Tubes’?”

“Daddy,” Rina said. “Tyrone plays classical. He doesn’t listen to stuff like—”

“Great record,” Tyrone said. “But it was the guitar riff that made it.”

“I just spent some time with the guy who played that riff.”

Tyrone’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah? How much time?”

“By my clock, about twenty minutes. By his, could have been thirty seconds or the entire Pleistocene.”

Tyrone said, “How’s that?” and then he said, “Oh. Kind of …” He wiggled his hand side to side and said, “Wuhwuhwuh.”

“Exactly. Way too much wuhwuhwuh. Who’s your favorite composer for horn?”

“Mozart,” he said. “The concerti for horn are the top of the stack. But, you know, there’s not that much material for solo horn. It’s more of a color instrument. They just let us in to add color.”

“Tyrone, stop it,” Rina said. “Look at his face.” She came over and hugged me, and I smelled the baby oil she used as a moisturizer. “Poor Daddy. Nothing’s the way you want it to be. Did you really get lonely?”

“I’m so lonely I’m learning ventriloquism, just to hear another voice.”

Rina let go of me. “I should have known better. I’m such a sucker for you.”

“I did miss you.”

“He did,” Tyrone said. “Look at the man.”

“He did,” I said. “He really did.”

“So you came by just to see me?” Rina asked.

I said, “Well, sort of.”

The corners of her mouth contracted. “What’s the rest of it?”

“I want you to check a couple more things for me.”

“Fine,” she said, not seeming particularly fine. She turned her back to me with a certain briskness and pulled out the chair in front of her laptop and sat down.

“But that’s not the real reason I came,” I said.

“Then what is?” she said, sounding quite a bit like her mother.

“It’s—it’s kind of hard to explain. I spent part of the day with someone, a woman whose husband left her in an empty house, and I just, well, I just started to feel, um, complicated.”

She turned enough to give me an imperious profile. “Don’t you
dare
feel sorry for us. We’re fine.”

I put up both hands in surrender. “I know. I know.”

“Hey, folks,” Tyrone said. “Start over. Everybody likes everybody, no reason to kick each other in the shins.”

Rina filled her lungs and emptied them. “Right. Okay, I’m happy to see you, I really am, and is there anything I can help you with?”

“There is,” I said. I pulled from my pocket the list I’d made of the names written on the boxes of tape in DeGaudio’s studio. “See what you can pull up on any of these.”

“Poison
Pie
?” she said. “Paw Prints on the Heart? What are these?”

“Either bands or album titles.”

“Is this about the Little Elvises?”

“Whatever those are on that piece of paper, they’re what the guy’s been recording, the guy who drove around and discovered those kids.”

“DiGaudio,” she said. She banged a bunch of keys.

Tyrone said, “Try eMule.”

“These are pretty obscure,” she said. “But who knows? There’s somebody who likes everything.” More scrabbling on the keys. “Nothing for Paw Prints. Let’s try Candy Kisses. Ho, look at this. Three songs. So it’s a band.”

I looked at the screen. The songs were called “Puppybreath,” which provoked an inadvertent audible reaction, “Next Best Thing to Love,” and “Most of Me.”

Tyrone said, “ ‘Most of Me?’ Kind of creepy, isn’t it? Where’s the rest of him?”

“Can you play these?” I asked.

This time Rina gave me a full-out smile, rich in pity. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”

“I’m learning to throw my voice.”

“You have to download these before you can listen to them. And there are only three or four computers on the network that even have them, so it could take a while.”

“What’s a while?”

She shrugged. “Hours? Days? These people, the ones with the songs on their computers? They might not even be online right now. They might only be online a couple of hours a week.”

“Try some of the other bands,” I said.

She did and got zero on most of them. There were a couple of songs each for Tomorrow’s Shadow and Notes from Underground, and she added them to the download queue, whatever that was. “Okay,” she said. “Now that we’ve humored Tyrone by trying eMule, let’s do the usual stuff.”

For the next five or six minutes I stood around with my hands in my pockets while Rina batted the keyboard around and Tyrone looked at me, shifting his eyes away every time I tried to catch him. Finally, I said, “What?”

He sat up straighter. “What do you mean, what?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Oh,” he said. “Rina. I was looking for Rina. I don’t see much of her in her mom.”

“Really?” Rina asked without slowing at the keyboard. “Mom’s all over me.”

“Not the way I see it,” Tyrone said. “I see more of your dad.”

“If you’re trying to curry favor, Tyrone,” I said, “you’re doing great.”

“Oh, this is awful,” Rina said.

I went and looked at the screen. “What is it?”

“
Blender.com
. Look.” She pointed at a corner of the screen, at a square graphic that showed a mermaid halfway out of a sparkling sea, surrounded by purple mist and singing into a 1940’s big-band microphone. The type on the picture said
Songs from Atlantis
, and printed under the square were the words,
CD we didn’t even open
.

“Is that as bad as I think it is?” I asked.

“It’s the worst thing they can do,” Rina said. “It’s so
mean
.”

“Can you blow it up?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, and then she switched into a little singsong talk-to-yourself voice: “Right-click, save as jpg, import into Picasa, enlarge.” She was doing things as she spoke, and when she was finished, there was the CD cover, bigger and a little dotty, but legible. In the lower right, it said,
LARKSPUR RECORDS
.

“Bingo,” I said. “Larkspur Records.” Larkspur was the street Vinnie DiGaudio lived on.

“Boy,” Tyrone said. “Haven’t heard anyone say ‘bingo’ in a long time.”

“Is there a website?” I asked.

“Hold it.” Rina did an online zigzag via Google and said, “Take a look.”

I leaned over and found myself looking at a spiky blue flower, the words
LARKSPUR RECORDS
, and below that,
THE FUTURE OF ROCK IS IN ITS ROOTS
. I said, “Pretty.”

“Pretty primitive,” Tyrone said over my shoulder. “Static, noninteractive, no video, nothing. A picture and some buttons.”

“Push the one for music,” I said, and Rina did.

A vertical row of CD boxes populated the screen, ten or twelve of them. Above it was a sort of mission statement:

Larkspur Records proudly releases music by artists who move the future forward as they embrace the roots of rock ’n roll
.

“Love the ’n,” Tyrone said. “That went out with ‘bingo.’ ”

“Kind of hard to move the future in any direction except forward,” Rina said.

There were no pictures of bands on any of the CD boxes, just illustrations. I asked, “Can you make any of those things play music?”

Rina clicked on the CD boxes and roamed the screen with the cursor. “No. Maybe he’s afraid of getting pirated.”

“If the guy who plays the music can be believed,” I said, “he’s probably safe from pirates.”

“Then why do you want to hear it?” This was Tyrone.

“The man’s got a home studio, he’s got a house band that he hires six or seven days a week, and he brings in pretty boys to sing, and half the time he doesn’t even record the vocals. I’m kind of curious to see what the hell he’s making.”

“Time,” Tyrone said. “Isn’t that what they used to say, back when they said ‘bingo’?
Making time
, right? Sounds like he just might possibly hypothetically probably have an unhealthy interest in boys. Look back at the man’s life, that’s about all he’s ever done, nose around for boys.”