Little Elvises (6 page)

He’d already lined up a year’s worth of media personalities, mostly people who were at a point in their careers where they were waiting in vain for a call from
Celebrity Rehab
, but it was not to be. Stinky was served with a cease and desist order by the Church of Scientology, which claimed that a person’s “biological
fragrance” remains mystically connected to, and is thus a part of, the person’s Operating Thetan, whatever that is, and Stinky’s business was nipped in the bud.

Thus embittered, people said, Stinky turned to a life of crime. A tragic story of decline.

And eyewash, start to finish. Stinky was as crooked as Brillo and always had been. He’d been kicked out of the Cub Scouts for paying another kid to climb a rope for him, and that was what Oprah might call a life-defining moment. He’d set foot on the slippery slope, and the first thing he did was steal a pair of skis so he could get down it faster.

And now, what with crime paying really well, he lived in his own shining city on a hill, a three-story, mostly-glass Rubik’s cube in Encino, not far from Vincent DiGaudio’s spiky dodecahedron. It was 12:30
A.M
. by the time I pulled up the driveway, but the lights were blazing away. Stinky rarely went to bed until he’d read the morning papers.

The door was opened by the latest in a long line of wasp-waisted Filipino houseboys, maybe the fifth one I’d seen over the years. Rumor had it that Stinky underwrote American tours by entire folk-dance troupes from the Philippines, encouraging the most light-footed and narrow-waisted of the boys to overstay their visas and move in to help with the dusting. Later, when he’d succumbed to the hunger for novelty that is the Mark of Cain on all human males, there’d suddenly be a new dance troupe performing down at the Shrine Auditorium, and the former Boy of the Day would be set up with either a donut shop or a florist outlet, depending on which way the kid faced, so to speak. There were supposed to be reunions up at the house on the anniversary of the overthrow of Ferdinand and Imelda, with a dozen or more of Stinky’s formers grilling plantains and whipping up
adobo
while the others argued over which doilies to put on the table.

Stinky was in the all-beige living room, sitting at a primly distressed table of white oak. In front of him, on a square of green felt, was a wooden box full of rubies and emeralds, just sitting there the way some families might display a box of shells picked up on their last trip to the beach.

“How absolutely ripping to see you, Junior,” Stinky said without getting up. “Just ripping. Bearing up all right, are we?” Stinky was born in Tarzana and had spent a total of maybe ten days in London, but he ate a lot of scones.

“I still have two legs,” I said. “Nice rocks.”

“Aren’t they,” Stinky said. He picked up ten or twelve and let them trickle through his fingers. They made a disappointingly prosaic clatter as they landed, but they threw off a lot of fire. “Lot of stories collected here, I’d imagine, old boy. Good jewels trail stories behind them. Volumes of stories.”

“And if it’s all the same to you,” I said, “I’d just as soon not hear them.”

“Ahh, Junior,” Stinky said in his best disappointed-Sydney-Greenstreet mode. One of the things about Stinky was that he was Sydney Greenstreet if your eyes were closed and Alahar the Alien if they were open, what with the tiny nose and big, slightly sloping eyes. Like Vincent DiGaudio, Stinky’d had some work done, a couple of lifts that had yanked his entire face up like he’d been grabbed by the hair for the Rapture. The surgeries had smoothed everything, tilted his eyes at the corners, and made him look like someone who’d just moved to California from Roswell, New Mexico.

“Ahh, Stinky,” I replied, pulling out a chair and sitting. Stinky smiled to the extent that his various lifts permitted, and pulled the box of stones about six inches closer to his chest.

“What is it, then? Have you something for me? Oh, and can I have Ting Ting get you anything?”

“No, thanks,” I said. Ting Ting hovered discreetly for a moment and then ushered himself out in a way that made it clear that there was a flower shop in his future.

“Ting Ting?” I asked. “Isn’t that one of the TeleTubbies?”

“Lightness of spirit,” Stinky said. “That’s what I love best about Filipinos. Lightness of spirit. So buoyant, so unlike the leaden animating energy of the Anglo-Saxon.”

“I’ve heard they float really well.”

“Not to cut things short, old bean,” Stinky said, “but I’m on a bit of a tight lead. Show me what you’ve got.”

“Actually, it’s question time,” I said.

“Is it?” he said, turning the friendliness down by about 30 percent.

“Carved jade,” I said. “Seen much lately?”

“Ah,” Stinky said, scratching his nose. Stinky didn’t know he touched his nose when you shot him in the heart, and I wasn’t going to tell him. “Might have done,” he said cautiously. “Yes, might have done.”

“All those Chinese craftsmen,” I said. “Craftswomen, too, I suppose. Digging away by candlelight at those smooth green stones with their sharp little tools, coughing their lungs out from the dust. Dying at their tables, the hand extended uselessly, the gouger or whatever it was, dropping one last time from their lifeless fingers—”

“They wore silk masks over their mouths and noses,” Stinky said. “I assume you have a point.”

“Carved jade,” I said. “Didn’t I already say that?”

Stinky didn’t reply, just sat farther back in his chair. He had a ruby the size of a mammoth’s molar in his hand, and he turned it between his fingers without looking at it.

“See, some was stolen recently,” I said. “Jade, I mean. From a judge, no less. Terrible thing, when a judge can’t even collect
carved jade any more without attracting the attention of brutes. Did I say he was a judge?”

“You did.” He clicked the stone against the table and then glanced down to make sure he hadn’t distressed the wood any further.

“So, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of effort being put into finding the miscreants who kipped the jade and slammed Mrs. Judge around with their big old automatics.”

He went after the tip of his nose again. “And if I
had
seen some lately?”

“Well, I’d think it would be really imperative to keep even a hint of it from reaching the constables. I mean, I’ve heard directly from them that they’re under a lot of pressure.”

Stinky pushed his lips out like somebody trying to speak French. “And if I hadn’t seen any?”

“Same thing. Really, if someone were just to
suggest
to the cops that bits and pieces of the judge’s collection had passed through this house, I think it would be hard for even Ting Ting to get the place clean enough to withstand a really sincere search. And if they didn’t find the jade, you know how hard they’d look to find something else.” I reached over and picked up one of the stones—a ruby, cold and slippery—and Stinky’s eyes followed my hand until I dropped it back into the box. “For example,” I said.

“The Hollywood Reservoir,” Stinky said dreamily.

“What about it?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that you’ve been found floating there, face-down, some day.” He tossed the ruby back into the box. “What do you want?”

“Names.”

“And what do I get? And don’t give me that bushwa about not going to the cops. Of course, you don’t go to the cops, but what do I get in the future?”

“What do you want?”

“A job,” he said, not sounding even faintly British. “At some point in the future, I designate a target, you hit it, and I get the proceeds.”

“All the proceeds?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Just so you understand, Stinky, if I take the deal, there will be an absolutely unbreakable chain leading from me back to you. Just in case it turns out to be a double-dodge and the room is full of cops.”

He smiled. “I’d expect you to make arrangements of some kind.”

I smiled back. “And I won’t disappoint your expectations.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll give you a name. But you’re not going to like it.” And he did, he gave me a name.

And I
didn’t
like it.

The name Stinky gave me was enough to make me think about going to the Wedgwood Apartment House and staying there for a year or two, just ordering Chinese and pizza in, and waiting for someone to die.

Number 302 at The Wedgwood is my rabbit hole. The monthly change of motels is an effective way of avoiding most trouble, since most of those who might want to damage me live outside the law, and despite Hollywood’s love affair with brilliantly twisted criminal masterminds, the majority of crooks can charitably be described as slow learners, people who have trouble finding even someone who stays put. The motel scheme has the added advantage of looking like it’s my method of hiding out. Once someone who’s looking for me figures out the motels, he probably thinks he’ll have me in his sights. In fact, if I ever
really
need to hide out, Number 302 at the Wedgwood is always waiting.

No one, and I mean no one, has ever been there.

In the 1920s, Western Boulevard (as its name suggests) had marked a western margin of urban Los Angeles. West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, and Brentwood were just dirt roads and chaparral at the time, and since Los Angeles’s moneyed elite has, by and large, tended to live on the western edge of things, the area
around Western Boulevard was home to some extraordinary apartment buildings, art deco monuments to gracious living that had once housed Mae West and Wallace Beery and other members of the posse of privilege.

But Los Angeles moved west, and Western Avenue stayed put, and these days the old luxury buildings had mostly been chopped up into smaller places to house Latinos and other recent arrivals. Three of them, though—the Wedgwood and its sister buildings, the Lenox and the Royal Doulton, called the “China” apartments because they’d been named after prominent makers of china—had been bought by syndicates of Koreans, who left the outside of the buildings looking sadly shabby but restored the living spaces to their former grandeur. From the outside, the China buildings were indistinguishable from their sadly declined sisters, but inside they were monuments to 1920s elegance. This approach had the advantage of giving the landlords control of dazzlingly beautiful and extremely expensive apartments with very low property taxes.

A twenty-year lease on Number 302 is held by a Korean con woman named Lee Cha-Young, who is known to some of her friends as Winnie Park. Winnie owed me a very, very big one, and 302 was the way we evened things up. I paid the rent, she had someone maintain the papers while she languished in a Singapore jail, and I had no legal connection with the place at all. I went there only two or three times a year, doing hours of aimless circles and double-backs to identify anyone who might be behind me. I was certain that no one had the place mapped.

Given the reputation and the advanced age of the person whose name Stinky had provided, a year or two at the Wedgwood seemed like a prudent move.

Except that it would have kept me from Rina. She couldn’t come to me, and every time I went to her there might be someone
waiting. I weighed the alternatives as I drove down the hill from Stinky’s. On the one hand, protecting my neck; on the other hand, protecting my relationship with my daughter. At the last moment, I turned toward the North Pole.

A sudden silvery
dazzle in the web of cracked glass surrounding the bullet hole in my windshield grabbed my eye as I turned into the motel parking lot, drawing my attention away from the cute wooden hitching posts with the reindeers’ names on them that had been set up at the front of every space, and making me look up.

The lights were on in Prancer. My unoccupied adjoining room.

Right. Given the day thus far, an ambush made perfect sense for Act Three. I hadn’t hit the brakes yet, so I just kept going in the hope that whoever was up there either wasn’t watching the lot or didn’t know what my car looked like. I headed left and pulled around behind the building, into the Parking Area Whimsy Forgot, just asphalt and painted lines, completely devoid of seasonal creativity.

There was no Humvee parked back there. That was something.

I backed in between a couple of more or less parallel lines, cut the motor, and leaned sideways until my cheek was resting against the cool glass of the window. Okay: Paulie DiGaudio the cop, leading to Vinnie DiGaudio the gangster, leading to the Philly mob, leading to a murdered Brit journalist, leading to a talentless Italian Adonis named Giorgio. And then the other wing of the structure: DiGaudio the cop, leading to the Hammer robbery, leading to carved jade, leading to the city’s foremost recipient of exotic stolen goods, Stinky Tetweiler, leading to.…

I shivered. I couldn’t even bring myself to
think
the name.

And now there was a light on in Prancer. A room I had strategically left dark so it would look unoccupied.

Maybe I
should
go to the Wedgwood.

Los Angeles is your basic urban forest. By and large, we gambol unharmed in its asphalt glades, resting in the shade of the giant concrete trees, avoiding the thorns, the poison oak, and the occasional carnivorous plant, keeping an eye out for the things that are bigger or faster than we are and have sharper teeth, or things that can see in the dark, and most of the time we tuck ourselves safely into our little nests at night without even a flicker of gratitude for the fact that we’re still alive.