Little Elvises (36 page)

Not knowing that there was a murder back there.

And they were a family, of a kind. And they weren’t willing to be ripped apart. So, hello, Fronts. Bye-bye, Derek.

I was working to keep my eyes and my mind on the road, but there was no way I could keep myself from seeing that gun come up from beneath the blanket, arc through the air and finish its journey
right here
.

On the kiss.

And then, of course, there was the
other
tragedy, the forgotten tragedy: Roberto Abbruzzi, Bobby Angel, sacrificed to prevent the very thing Derek was threatening to expose. Bobby Angel, who could actually sing, who actually had a modest talent. In a different world, Bobby would have been more important than Giorgio. But this is the world we have, and the people who live in it don’t live or die for a modest talent. They’ll live or die for beauty, though. And poor Bobby wasn’t beautiful.

Thoughts and recriminations tumbled around in my head, and when I spotted the turnoff for Highway 62 coming up, I realized I was doing almost ninety. Not a good policy with two guns in a briefcase on the floor and a knife on my belt. I slowed and took the long lazy loop that put me onto 62.

62, also called the Twentynine Palms Highway, is essentially forty miles uphill. It begins on the ancient seafloor where Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs bake in the year-round heat, and it ascends: up, up, and up some more, all the way to the high desert. As I climbed, the air cooled and cleared, and the stars popped into sharp relief. The moon whitened and grew colder looking.

It was a pretty big moon, bigger and brighter than I’d have requested if I’d been consulted. It was the kind of moon that casts shadows. The kind of moon that makes motion obvious even to those who aren’t on the lookout. A killing moon, if my luck was bad.

I couldn’t get killed. Rina wanted to live with me.

And look where I was, just a few hours after our confrontation with Fronts, look what I was doing.

Why do you live like this
, she’d asked, and I’d said, as though it were a joke, that it kept me young. But it wasn’t a joke, or at least not completely. I lived like this because I enjoyed it. I liked to flip coins, I liked not knowing whether I’d win or lose, and I liked it when the stakes were high. I liked breaking into houses, I liked stepping into the maze of a puzzle, more complicated than the floor plan of DiGaudio’s house, not knowing whether there was a Minotaur inside.

It made me feel alive.

But so did Rina. In a completely different way. What would I be giving up if she lived with me? What would I be giving up if she didn’t?

Long ago, Kathy had told me I was two different people, and I’d said it was okay as long as I could hold it to two.

Wrong again. I was wrong so often, you’d think I’d be used to it. It seemed like all I did was make mistakes and drive. What I needed was an inflatable therapist, a fatherly vinyl figure in a tweed jacket I could blow up and put in the passenger seat. I could work through my issues as I drove.

The highway rose, here and there slicing between steep walls cut through stone, but more often just rolling across trackless sand. Occasionally a narrow road, usually unpaved, bisected it at a perpendicular and dwindled to a point in the distance. Here and there, I caught the glitter of one of the desert’s mysteries: a shiny, metallic ribbon of cassette tape, unspooled and fluttering across the road’s surface, knotted into a bush or snagged on one of the reflectors that have thoughtfully been posted every few hundred yards to provide some sort of margin that might prevent the half-hypnotized driver from drifting off the road and onto the deceptive smoothness of the desert. I found myself wondering, as I always did when I made this drive, who the hell listens to cassette tapes any more? Long-haul truckers? High-desert Luddites unwilling to be dragged into the age of the mp3 file? Aging hippies wedded to their 40-year-old mix tapes?

Once in a very great while, a yellow rectangle of light defined a distant window. Somebody’s life, out there in the silence.

Almost 11:30. Any minute now.

I’d already passed through Joshua Tree, basically a big sign announcing a small town. I’d reached the outskirts of Twentynine Palms, long a rest station on the Utah Trail, now a military town that serves a Marine base.

The terrain rose to the left of the road and rolled downhill to the right, south toward the untouched and protected desert of the Joshua Tree Monument. Most of the development, such
as it was—the new dirt roads, the occasional block of stucco houses—were up to the left, rising toward the foothills of some modest, prickly-looking mountains, nameless to me. Street signs began to appear, some of them reflective and official, others hopeful, just names printed in black on white fiber board, marking the way to some developer’s optimistic grid scratched into the sand, or perhaps the refuge of some desert rat, solitary as a trapdoor spider.

From the description on the deed to Pivensey’s parcel, the cabin he’d bought as Doris’s last address had been one of those, a spider’s lair. The only structure in a square of sixteen acres, probably surrounded by square miles of nothing, somewhere up there on the slope.

The terrain was populated now by Joshua trees, the kings of the high desert, essentially variants on the yucca that mimic trees with their branches upraised to heaven, the prayerful silhouette that led the Mormons on the Utah Trail to give them their name. The sandy stretches between the Joshuas were broken by patches of scrub: ocotillo, mesquite, cholla cactus bristling with barbed spines that bite into the skin and break off when you try to pull them out. And here and there rose the massive boulders, glacier-dragged and then slowly broken into geometric piles by million years of heat and erosion. The moon, now about a third of the way up, caught the southeastern surfaces of the giant rocks, coating them in white chalk and creating enormous shadows, holes in the moonlight, on the opposite side.

Even though I was driving slowly, the little sign that said
FELDSPAR LANE
bloomed in my headlights almost too late for me to make the left, and the rear of the car swung wide as I cut the wheel. According to Rand McNally, I’d follow Feldspar for a little more than a mile and then make another left onto Sunrise
Drive. After another two-fifths of a mile, Sunrise Drive led to the access road to Pivensey’s dream cottage.

And it was uphill all the way, with nothing between me and it except a few piles of rock and some Joshua trees. There was more moonlight than I wanted, but at least it meant I could turn off my headlights. I got far enough off the highway that I felt reasonably secure I wouldn’t draw the attention of the Highway Patrol and doused the lights.

Feldspar Lane, two compact vehicles wide, was slightly banked on either side, just ridges of the sand that had been bulldozed aside to create a smoother surface, and the ridges caught the moonlight and turned the lane into a sharp-edged crayon line scrawled over the desert. Easy for me to follow, easy for someone else to see from above, even with no headlights.

I slowed without tapping the brakes—not eager for the blink of red lights—and leaned over to grab the briefcase from the floor. With one hand on the wheel, I popped the two snaps that kept the case closed and felt around until my hand hit the reassuringly cold and solid surface of the Glock. I put it in my lap and then located the Sig Sauer and put it on the seat beside the briefcase. Finally, I pulled out the two full clips and dropped them into my shirt pocket. They were amazingly heavy. Then I pushed the briefcase back onto the floor and located the Sig by touch once again. Put my hand back on the wheel and found the Sig once more. Then I did it again and again, until I could hit it first time every time, with my hand right on the grip.

I passed a little turn-off, no sign, just a track across the sand that led toward one of the rock monoliths.

I used the flashlight to check the odometer. Eight-tenths of a mile since I turned off the highway. About three-tenths left, and then the left onto Sunrise. And I was seeing nothing on either side or ahead of me that looked like a plausible alternative
destination: no houses, no bar, no rundown motel. Anyone sitting on the front porch of Pivensey’s house would have to figure I was on my way to drop in.

And there was no way the house didn’t face south. South was where the view was.

Sound carries in the desert. He could hear me, too.

I said, “Hell,” and pulled the car over. I got the right front tire up and over the little ridge of sand at the edge and cut the wheel left as hard as I could. No way to do this without the brake lights coming on, but what was the alternative? Feldspar was so narrow that it took me several back-and-forths, with a lot of blinking red lights, before I’d managed a three-point turn to point myself back down the road. I let the car coast until I came to the track I’d just passed, and then I turned onto it and followed it to the rocks. As I’d hoped, it swung around them, and I stayed on the track until my car was out of sight from the slopes to the north. Then I stopped and turned the engine off. And sat there.

I decided to give it an hour. After an hour, whoever saw the brake lights would be bored enough to do something else.

Maybe.

Once you get outside Palm Springs, desert land values have remained low, and I had a lot of opportunity to appreciate the reasons for that as I hiked toward Pivensey’s property. The desert is dull and featureless for long stretches, and when it suddenly isn’t, it’s because you’ve just walked into a bunch of things that can kill you. Even the plants bite. By the time I’d gone halfway, I’d been spiked several times, I’d heard a couple of probably poisonous life forms slither away from me, and I’d turned my ankle on a rock that nature had abandoned to sulk all by itself in the middle of nowhere.

The moon was almost halfway across the sky when I encountered yet another reason to hate the evening. Although it hadn’t been visible from the highway or from Feldspar Lane, the area around
chez
Pivensey was comparatively hilly. Erosion had cut gullies through it, and mounds of sand, topped with thorny stuff, rose up all over the place. While the rolling terrain might help me stay out of sight, it would also complicate the search that was my first order of business.

I was keeping Sunrise Drive to my left as I walked. I figured I had to be getting close, so I slogged up to the highest of the rises and found myself looking across three or four other small hills to the straight white line of a roof, the white probably chosen to
reflect the sun and cool the house, to whatever extent that was possible. The burglar’s Eternal Question came to me, somewhat belatedly: are there dogs? Not much I could do about it at this point if there were. I took the Glock out of my belt, put my finger on the trigger guard, and moved quietly in the direction of the house.

I topped the hill closest to it and took a longer look. It was at least fifty years old, a basic clapboard rectangle of three or four rooms, maybe 1,200 square feet. A narrow, south-looking porch ran along the side of the house I was facing, and a chimney sprouted from the near left corner of the roof, announcing the location of the living room. Looking down at the roof, I visualized a plausible floor plan. The front door, which I could see, opened from the porch directly into the living room. The kitchen would be straight back, and the bedroom and bathroom would be off to the right, linked by a short hall, with perhaps another, smaller bedroom or storage room behind the front bedroom. Rudimentary but big enough for two people.

Or, of course, for one.

There were no lights in the windows.

Sixteen acres isn’t all that big. From where I stood I could see the driveway to the house, just an economical, straight sand track that went past the structure and disappeared from sight. I figured I could use the driveway and the house as reference points to let me walk a grid of parallel lines across the property, so I hiked on down the hill, heading toward the point at which the driveway intersected Sunrise Drive. It took me about five minutes, with only one serious slip, when my feet went out from under me and nearly dropped me into a patch of cholla, but I got there.

It seemed unlikely that anyone would dig a grave any closer to the property line than thirty yards, so I measured off thirty
long paces from the beginning of the driveway and then turned left. I blundered up and down the little rises for ten minutes or so, walking as straight a line as possible and taking a sighting of the house’s roof whenever it was visible, to keep me on track. When I figured I was close to the edge of the property—assuming that the driveway and the house were roughly centered on it—I made a right that took me about ten yards closer to the house and then turned again in the direction I’d come, and hiked back to the driveway, keeping my eyes on the ground as much as possible, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Then I went ten yards back up the driveway until I was exactly opposite the point at which I’d gone left, and this time I went the other way. After nine or ten minutes, I did the ten-yard zigzag that took me closer to the house and hiked back to the driveway. I continued with that pattern: go as straight as possible from one probable property line to the other, then get ten yards closer to the house, and go back again, scanning the ground as I went.