Little Elvises (34 page)

Or, since I was doing two things at the same time, whether I was both behind it
and
in front of it.

In either case, the only thing to do was run. So, as I drove east on Ventura, away from Kathy’s house, I took the first steps to get out of the way on at least one front.

“He didn’t murder Derek Bigelow,” I said into the phone. Traffic was crawling. The sun was touching the horizon, and it was about to get dark. “But the person who did is very close to him, and Vinnie’s going to get splashed.”

“Splashed,” Irwin Dressler said. “How bad?”

“Bad enough. It’s all going to come out, the whole story. And I have to tell you, he’s going to have at least an accessory charge against him.”

“What’s going to come out? No, never mind. You said a splash, not a charge.”

“Not a charge on Bigelow. Somebody else.”

“For
what
with somebody else? Kidnapping? Rape? Murder?”

“Murder. As I think you already know.”

“Pretend I don’t. Who?”

“I don’t feel like pretending. But I’ll tell you, if I were you, I’d do whatever it takes to cut the strings.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “And you owe me.” I hung up.

With my Glock
in one hand and the stubby Sig Sauer P226 I’d taken from Fronts in the other, it would have been awkward for me to finesse the hardware on Vinnie DiGaudio’s door, but I didn’t have to. It was standing wide open.

I’d hiked up the driveway, figuring I’d give them as little warning as possible. It had been a waste of energy. There were no cars in the parking area, and the front door was all the way back against the inside wall that Popsie—or, rather, Corinne—had kept slamming it against.

I went in quietly anyway.

The house was darkening and silent, no lights on that I could see, and there was a strong scorched smell, familiar somehow and kind of homey. All I could hear was the occasional creak of wood as the air outside cooled and bits and pieces of the house contracted and settled. I slowly worked my way down the length of the entrance hall, my back brushing the wall on the right,
and checking each dimming room as I went. Nobody in either of the first two rooms. Nobody in the big room with the curved window, just the dented cushions in the center of the couch and, in front of it, an open and empty drawer where DiGaudio had kept his cash. I checked to make sure. Nothing but four rubber bands, all twisted up in that kind of agonized tangle rubber bands sometimes achieve when they’ve been triple-stretched around something and then rolled off.

The smell in here was sharper and heavier at the same time. Definitely something burning.

Standing in the middle of the floor, I turned toward the window. I was right on the spot where Corinne had been when she sensed Derek. It wasn’t hard to imagine him out there, frozen in the darkness, with no idea that he was minutes away from making his final discovery, peeking under his final rock, firing off the flash that would bring Fronts into his life

The door to the hallway, the hallway where Vinnie had been photographed chatting with Nessie, was closed. I went instead into the kitchen and turned on the light to reveal the familiar mess. The charred smell in here was almost strong enough to make me sneeze. A covered pot sat atop a back burner with a low flame beneath it. I tucked Fronts’ gun under my left arm to free up a hand and lifted the lid. Smoke escaped from the browned, dried-out rice inside, so I put the lid back and turned off the fire. Missing money, burning rice, no lights on: All seemed to signal a hurried departure, and not long ago, before the sun had sunk. Fronts had obviously recovered enough to make a phone call, or maybe even to drop by.

I flipped the kitchen lights off and was about to open the swinging door into the hallway when the music started.

I froze.

It was your basic eight-bar intro, nothing special about it.
Variations of it had been used to open tens of thousands of records over the years. Nothing unusual about the instruments, either: just the classic rock configuration of lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, and drums. Ace Rabinowitz was probably in the mix somewhere, drilling for oil and coming up with Mazola. The progression repeated, and then it repeated again. Then it repeated again. It sounded like the tape had been allowed to run unattended as the musicians noodled around with the intro, ran through it over and over, making little changes, trying to crank up the groove, trying to get it right.

The lead guitar suddenly dropped out. A second later, the bass went mute, and then it was as though the strings on the rhythm guitar had been snipped with scissors, and all that was left was the drum track. It got louder and louder. It filled the house, until it was loud enough to make the swinging kitchen door vibrate under my fingers. I probably could have fired the Glock without being heard over it.

There didn’t seem to be much point in tiptoeing. I shoved open the door, and the drums thundered down the hall, two-four on the offbeat: snare, high-hat cymbal, double-kick on the bass pedal. It got even louder.

The hallway was dark, but light fell across the carpet and up the wall opposite the open door to the control room.

I was being invited down.

Since an entire mechanized division of the old Soviet Army could have mobilized, sputtering and clanking behind me without my hearing a thing, I decided to check my back. I took a look into the pyramid room, which was still empty and not conspicuously alive with spirit, and the two bedrooms, both unoccupied. Closets full of clothes, but no one lurking inside. Bathrooms rifled—drawers open, stuff on the floor—but unpopulated. The door that had been locked on the night I broke in was standing
wide, and I looked into a big room with a king-size bed in it. Hanging from a frame above the bed was a dark blue canopy of some sort of glittering midnight cloth, as fey as the decor in a Disney cartoon. It looked like birds might have swooped in and hung it there while the princess slept. Other than the ornate bed, there wasn’t much else in the way of furniture: a small table beside the bed with a lamp and a couple of books on it, a desk with a computer. No chairs, which wasn’t a surprise.

The walls were almost completely covered with posters. Different titles, different venues, different costumes, different dates, but always the same face, shot from every possible angle, the same name, over and over again. It hadn’t been much of a career, but it had been extensively photographed.

I went back into the hall and approached the open door of the control room. I stood beside it for a moment, grabbed a breath, brought both guns up, and stepped into the doorway. There he was. He’d turned the wheelchair around, putting his back to the console so he could look up at me. He reached behind him and pulled down a slider on the board, and the drums mercifully stopped.

I said, “Hi, Giorgio.”

He weighed three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce. The left side of his head was bald, the border between bare scalp and graying hair as irregular as the edge of a splash of water. Below the baldness, the left half of his face was a liquid smear of skin that looked like something done to modeling clay by a willful child. The left eye was fused closed, but the right one glittered up at me. He had a violet blanket folded across his lap and one hand underneath it. There was something in the hand.

I wiggled the two guns, just claiming his attention, and he smiled with the right side of his mouth.

“I told them,” he said, and he drew one of those fluid-filled breaths. “I told them you’d figure it out.”

“I’d have known earlier if all that sheet music hadn’t said ‘Abbruzzi.’ What was the point?”

“Vinnie always thought we’d have a hit.” He made a noise like someone tearing wet paper, and I realized it was a laugh. “He had a vision of us on top of the charts again. I never bought it, but if it happened, I wanted the money to go to Bobby’s family.”

“Blood money.”

“I guess. Kind of academic, though, isn’t it? We never sold anything.”

“The night you caught me in here. Why didn’t you raise some sort of alarm?”

“We’d had enough alarms for one night. That was pretty cute, the thing you did with the alarm. And I figured, why bother? Sooner or later, you know. It had to come sooner or later. It’s already lasted way too long.”

“Why are you still here? Why didn’t you go with them?”

He shrugged. “Same reason. Didn’t want to. Too much trouble. Anyway, why bother? What am I going to do, melt into the crowd? Grow a mustache, wear sunglasses? I’ve had enough. It’s terrible about Bobby, terrible he had to die, but I’d trade places with him.”

“Too bad you didn’t realize that before you killed him. It was you, wasn’t it?”

“And Corinne. It was Corinne’s idea. She told Vinnie to get him to come out here, tell him it was a secret, not to tell anybody anything. Told him it was about the movies.” The laugh again. “I guess it was, sort of.” Laugh or no laugh, he couldn’t hold my eyes. His gaze dropped to the floor between us.

“Your movie in Hawaii. What happened?”

He sighed. It sounded like resignation; there was no way out of the conversation. “Salerno. It was plain old stupid revenge.
He didn’t even want Vinnie’s business any more, not with the Chicago guys on the scene. He just wanted to hurt somebody. So he sent a couple of guys to Honolulu, just a pair of thugs. They knocked on my door, told me The Moose had sent them and to say hi to Vinnie, and poured acid on me. Then they cut the tendons behind my knees and left.”

“It never made the papers.”

He sat bolt upright in the chair, gaining a couple of inches in height. “Look at me,” Giorgio said. “I’m hideous. I’m half-blind. I can’t walk. This hurt like nothing in the world has ever hurt. I was
not going to be in the newspapers
. I was not going to be the freak of the year, the hole the world poured pity into. That was all I had left. It was the only thing I could control.” His voice had tightened until it was almost shrill. He stopped, drew a deep breath, and brought his eyes back up to mine. “So.” He paused and ran hit tongue over his upper lip. “Vinnie hauled me out of there wrapped from head to foot in sheets, someone in Chicago arranged for a doctor to wash everything out, disinfect it, do what he could do. It wasn’t much. Then Vinnie and Corinne and I got on a freighter and came home. The press doesn’t meet freighters. The people on board had never heard of me—they were too old. Vinnie and Corinne pushed me right off the boat in a wheelchair and took me home, and nobody even glanced at us.”

“But sooner or later,” I said, “people would have begun to wonder where you were. They’d have come looking for you. Sooner or later, it would have been
poor Giorgio.”

“With the vermin milking it,” he said. “Magazine covers. Guest experts. Hack psychiatrists. Sob sisters. ‘How does it
feel
to have half your face wiped away?’
Hideous
Giorgio,
tragic
Giorgio, a modern-day Phantom of the Opera, we feel so
sorry
for him, that’ll be three-ninety-five for the magazine,
your thirty-second commercial will run you a hundred thou.” He moved the hand beneath the blanket, and I tapped the door frame with the barrel of the Glock. He stopped moving the hand. “And they’d trot me out on Halloween or during slow news weeks. Art Clay would have made a fortune out of it.”

“So there was Bobby. You’d gained weight, you were about the same height. What did you use?”

“Ether. It dissipates faster than barbiturates, which was pretty much all there were in those days. Doesn’t leave much of anything in the respiratory system that a fire wouldn’t account for. I soaked a napkin with it and knocked him out. Corinne put him in my bed and lit a cigarette. Then she poured ether on the sheets and dropped the cigarette into the middle of it. Went up like that flash paper magicians use, just
fwoooosh
. Ether’s so flammable it ignites at a hundred eighty degrees, did you know that?”

“I haven’t had much need for the information.”

“I found out later. Read a lot about it, over the years. It became one of my topics. So anyway, Bobby was in the part of the house that burned longest, my height, my weight, my bed, and we knew Vinnie would be called to make the identification. No DNA then, and neither of us had fillings, so no dental work to check. Oh, we gave Bobby a bracelet I wore, a big clunky thing with my name on it. An ID bracelet, remember ID bracelets?”

“Not really.”

“You’ve worked out the rest of it, probably.”

“I suppose. You here, safe and sound. Corinne to take care of you, Vinnie to support you. The band coming in to cut records. Kids singing, but the idea was always to pull their vocals—if the vocals were even recorded—and put you on later. And my guess is that the kids were all good-looking because Vinnie was looking for someone commercial, somebody who’d
look good when it was time to lip-synch to the records, if it ever came to that.”

“Imagine,” Giorgio said. “Someone willingly pretending to have my singing voice.”

“You hated singing, you hated performing. I saw you. You hated every minute of it. Why would you let them go through all this?”

He looked over my shoulder, and I almost turned to check it out, but then the open eye came to mine. “It was the only thing I could give them. I didn’t have anything else for them. Look at all they’d done for me. They’d ruined their lives for me. Vinnie, Corinne. Maybe Corinne most of all. Because they loved me. They thought it would make me
happy
, having more hits, being a star again, even if some other kid’s face was on the record. They thought I enjoyed writing the songs. They thought.…” He relaxed his neck suddenly and his head dropped forward, his chin on his chest. Slowly he brought it back up and turned it from side to side. It obviously hurt. “They thought it made me happy. How could I tell them it didn’t?” The hand beneath the blanket moved again. “If I’d said no, if I hadn’t let them do it, what would they have had? All they wanted was to make me happy.”

“Love,” I said.

I got the half-smile again. “Weird, isn’t it.”

“So here you are—what?—forty-five, forty-six years later, something like that? And all that time you’ve been buried in this house, and somebody finally got sloppy, and there was Derek Bigelow.”