Little Elvises (33 page)

“Not exactly drooling, though.”

“No.” The audience was back on camera, and Rina hit
PAUSE
. The kids were dancing, paying more attention to each other than to Bobby, but they were obviously enjoying themselves. “Kenny and Arlene,” Rina said, tapping a nail against the screen. Two perfectly ordinary looking kids, except that Kenny
had the ghostly ambition of sideburns, just shadows now but a style choice that would probably have gotten him into trouble at school in a week or so. “They were off and on, off and on.” Rina sat back. “Like a soap opera. It’s hard to believe anybody was interested.”

“Where’s Corinne?”

“Who knows? Giorgio’s not on, so she’s probably in the bathroom, putting burnt cork on her eyes.”

We watched Bobby Angel work the song, making a real effort to look like he was singing live. Rina was right: There was something endearing about him. He was a schlub who couldn’t believe his luck, and it was impossible not to enjoy it along with him.

“How tall were they?” I asked.

“You mean Giorgio and Bobby? I have no idea.”

“We don’t get to see them standing next to anybody, do we?”

“I think Giorgio was around five-ten,” Rina said. “In the movies, he looks just, you know,
kind of
tall. He’s not towering over everybody, but he’s not standing on a box, either.”

“Here he comes again,” I said as the DVD moved to the next track. This time, Art Clay waded through the crowd of kids, microphone in hand, doing a tease intro: “One of the brightest new stars in American music, a young man who’s on his way to Hollywood—”

I was halfway out of my chair before I said to Rina, “Stop it. Freeze it right there.”

She did, stranding Art Clay with his mouth open, all the kids around him looking at him except the Egyptian-eyed Corinne, who was staring off to her left, where Giorgio had presumably taken his place on the stage. I looked at her and said, “Holy shit.”

Rina said, “I’m obviously missing something significant.”

“The mole on her chin,” I said. “That’s not a beauty spot.”

“We’re going home,” I said, starting the car.

“So what?” Rina demanded for the fourth time. “So what if it wasn’t a beauty spot?”

“It would take me half an hour to explain it to you.”

“Remember rush hour?” she said. “From here to the Valley, we’ve only got like the rest of our lives.”

“I need to think.” I put the car into reverse.

“You need to look behind you, too,” she said. “You’re going to back into that Hummer.”

“A Hummer,” I said, putting the car back into park and resisting the urge to rest my forehead on the steering wheel and close my eyes. The Hummer sat square in my rearview mirror, not going anywhere. I couldn’t see who was driving without adjusting the side mirror, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

“Listen to me,” I said. “And I mean listen one hundred percent. Are you with me?”

“Right here.”

“Okay. If you go left in the alley at the end of this lot, it’ll take you to Brighton Way. If you go right on Brighton Way and then left at the first cross street, that will take you straight down to Wilshire.”

“And?”

“And when you get a light to cross, because there’s a lot of traffic, you can go into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.”

“That’s really interesting,” Rina said, “but I’m not the one who’s driving.”

“I’m going to get out of the car now. At the count of three. When I say ‘three,’ you open your door just a crack, at the same time I do. Hold it so it doesn’t open further. I’ll leave mine open so the light in the car stays on.”

“Why do we want the light in the car to—”

“Shush. If I hit the trunk or the fender hard, twice, that means you open your door the rest of the way and take off running as fast as you can. Left into the alley, right on Brighton—”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Good. Because you need to run like there’s a fucking bear after you. Right on Brighton and left at the first—”

“Got it. Into the hotel, if I can get there.” Rina’s face was pale. “Then what?”

“Wait ten minutes. If I don’t show up, call your mom.”

“Oh, boy.” There was perspiration at her hairline.

“You’re okay. At the count of three. One. Two. Three.”

I opened the door and climbed out, and I felt, rather than heard, Rina’s door pop off the latch. I got out, and was surprised to see the Humvee move forward. Once it was out of the way, it stopped and the door opened, and Fronts clambered out and said, “We gonna need to move that car, I think.”

“You should have moved Derek’s.”

“I forgot. Let me see your hands, Junior.”

My hands, unfortunately, were empty. I have a policy of not being armed when I’m around my daughter, so the Glock was in the trunk. I thought for a second about going back and popping the trunk but the automatic hanging straight down beside
Fronts’ leg changed my mind. I wasn’t sure he even knew he had it in his hand, and I didn’t want to remind him.

“Beverly Hills,” Fronts said, nodding ponderously. He was the color of library paste, the color of someone who has voluntarily had every drop of blood drained out of him, the dead, long-term floater-white of Rina’s fishburger patty. He wore a pair of horrifically stained painter’s coveralls and a white T-shirt, and the T-shirt was translucently wet, hanging heavy with sweat despite the cool day. There was a wide bandage wrapped around the upper arm I’d put the bullet through. Carved into the forearm below it, his right, in gouges still fresh enough for the meat to be red, was the word
LEFT
.

“My kind of town,” I said. “All this glamour.”

“Always with a chick,” Fronts said, squinting through the back window at Rina. “I don’t have all these chicks.”

“You want to find a girl who really needs something to read.”

“You’re fuckin’ up,” Fronts said. “I thought I was kind of plain about it, but here you are, looking at old TV. That’s what people do in there, right? How’s the other one?”

“The other what?”

He winced for a second, and I mistook it for pain until I realized it was the sheer effort of trying to remember what we were talking about. “The other chick. The one in bed.”

“Fine,” I said. “She woke up.”

He nodded. “It’s better when they wake up.” He let his eyes drop to the pavement. His body swayed to the left, but he stepped to the side before he went down. “Hey, look,” he said, still studying the pavement. “The hell with moving the car. I’m going to have to kill you.”

“You’re screwed,” I said. “I know everything, and I’m not the only one who does. You kill me, it’s going to point straight at you. You’re going to get an extra death sentence. What you
ought to do is get the hell out of here. Go tell her you did it, tell her I’m dead, get your money, and get out of town.”

It took him a moment, but it eventually brought his head up. “Her,” he said.

“I know it all, Fronts. And, like I said, I’ve shared it with some people. If you do me, there’s only going to be one suspect.”

I watched him process it, watched his eyebrows come together and his lips move, and then he shook his head heavily and brought up the arm with the gun in it until it was pointed straight at my chest.

“Uh-uh,” he said. “Sorry, Junior.”

I was backing away. “That’s your right arm,” I said.

“What is?” The gun was as steady as a hypnotist’s gaze.

“The one you carved
LEFT
on.”

“It’s a joke,” Fronts said, and he closed one eye to sight more precisely, and I took two more steps back, and the car roared into life and jerked into reverse with a shriek of rubber, missing me by about an inch and knocking Fronts a good five feet. I caught a glimpse of Rina’s enormous eyes, her head craned all the way around, and then I sprinted around the back of the car and found Fronts, looking confused, trying to push himself to his knees. I snatched the gun out of his hand and pasted him across the side of the head with it. He emitted the peaceful sigh of a man whose sleeping pill has finally kicked in, and went back down. I got both hands under him and rolled him back like a rug across a dance floor, giving Rina enough room to back the car the rest of the way out, and then I got in as she slid across the seat and huddled against the passenger door, which swung open under her weight. If I hadn’t grabbed her arm, she’d have fallen sideways out of the car. She closed the door and put on her seat-belt, moving like a robot and breathing shallowly through her mouth, and I drove decorously away, heading for the parking
kiosk, where the attendant was looking everywhere at the world except at me. He opened the gate as I pulled up, flapping both hands at me and saying, “No charge, no charge,” and I turned right onto Canon.

“I didn’t know you could drive,” I said.

“I’m not so good at going forward,” Rina said, and there was something spidery and insubstantial in her voice, as though she’d run three miles but didn’t want it to show, and then suddenly we were both laughing. Then she stopped laughing, as abrupt as a film cut, and said, “He was going to shoot you.”

“He was thinking about it,” I said. “In his own way.”

“I
ran over him
.” She put her hand over her mouth, fingers pointed up, looking like she needed to keep the next words from escaping, as though that could somehow derail the thought behind them. “He might be.… He might be—”

“He isn’t,” I said. “He barely felt it. This is a guy who irons himself for fun.”

“But the car—it felt like I hit a tree.”

“You knocked him ass over elbow,” I said. “But he wasn’t even unconscious, or at least no more unconscious than he usually is. I had to slap him with this to put him out.” I took the gun off my lap and put it on the seat between us. She scooted away from it until she was plastered to the door again.

“Lock that thing,” I said. “If you’re going to lean on it, lock it.”

“You’re worried about a
car door?”

“I’m worried about you. Lock it.”

“Who was he?”

“He was—is—a guy named Fronts. He kills people.”

“And he—I mean, you—” She broke off and turned to look at me for the first time since I’d gotten into the car. “Why do you
live
like this?”

I said, “It keeps me young.”

“You’re crazy. My father is crazy. You want to know what Mom sees in Bill?
This
is what she sees in Bill. There isn’t any of this with Bill.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Suppose the ducks decide to get even.”

Rina said, “It isn’t funny.”

“It might as well be. Since it has to be something, it might as well be funny.” I made a sudden right onto a smaller street and pulled into a red zone. “Hold on a second,” I said. I got out of the car and ran toward the sidewalk and bent over with my hands on my knees and threw up. Then I threw up again. I stood there like that, all bent over with my guts in spasm, until Rina’s window went down and her hand came out with two sticks of gum in it.

“Here,” she said.

I said, “Thanks,” and took it. I let the wrappers flutter to the pavement and chewed for a moment, feeling the clean spearmint replace the acidic taste of vomit. Then I went around the car and climbed back in. I put both hands on the wheel and just sat there, shaking, for what felt like a couple of minutes.

“I suppose,” Rina said, “that you don’t want me to tell Mom about this.”

I started to laugh again, and a second later, Rina laughed, too. She said, “Yeah, maybe you need to make some changes before I move in,” and the two of us laughed harder.

I pulled into traffic, and her cell phone rang. She was still laughing, kind of a high-pitched, breathless laugh, as she dug the phone out of her purse, opened it, caught her breath, and said, “Hello.” I caught an undertone in her voice I’d never heard before and turned to see her sitting with her head inclined forward, curled protectively over the phone, one hand cradling it
as though it were the Koh-i-noor Diamond and the other hand shielding her mouth as if that would keep me from hearing her end of the conversation, and I stopped laughing and it felt like a part of my heart broke off and sank.

I said, “Tyrone?” and she nodded.

“It’s my dad,” she said into the phone. She wiped at her eyes. “You won’t believe what just happened. What’s up?” She sat up. “Really? What’s it sound like?” To me, she said, “One of those records of DiGaudio’s just finished downloading.” She said to Tyrone, “Sure. Right now, I can believe anything. Play it for me.” She used her free hand to cover her other ear and listened for a few moments, and her eyes widened, and she turned to me and said, “
Daddy
,” looking like she’d just seen someone rise from the dead.

And I said, “I know.”

Since I’ve been
looking into things, so to speak, for other people, I’ve learned that there comes a point in every case when the rock begins to roll downhill. What you do at that point depends on whether you’re behind the rock, trying to see where it’s going, or in front of it, trying not to get smashed flat. I was unmistakably at the point where the rock has started to roll. The question was whether I was behind it or in front of it.