Little Elvises (7 page)

But once in a while we blunder into a web. The webs are everywhere, mostly set too high for normal folks to worry about. They’ve been built for those who are reaching too far, those who are on financial tiptoe, those who are perilously stretched or dangerously ambitious and defenselessly vulnerable. And at the center of those webs are the city’s spiders, each of their eight legs resting on a different strand, waiting for the tug that brings the fangs out, that prompts the scuttle and then the silk, and that ends with the prey conscious but immobilized, trussed, paralyzed, pumped full of digestive juices, being eaten from the inside out. Probably with a laugh track.

The name that Stinky had given me belonged to the biggest and most voracious spider in Los Angeles. All I could hope was that I hadn’t yet tugged on his web, because he could eat me and all my ancestors on both sides of the family tree, stretching ten or twelve generations back, and not even burp.

But there were lights on in Prancer.

I considered my options. Florida sounded nice. Or Akron, Ohio. Who’d look for me in Akron? On a smaller scale, my Glocks sounded good, but they were locked in storage facilities that wouldn’t open until tomorrow morning.

So look on the sunny side. I had surprise in my favor.

Or maybe not.

Maybe I was on a completely shady street. Maybe I’d been dead for half an hour and just hadn’t noticed yet.

See? I asked myself. Things could
too
be worse. I was alive, and life is meant to be confronted. The thing to do was just march up those stairs on tiptoe, kick open the door very quietly, and boldly peek inside for a trillionth of a second, with one foot stretched out behind me so it could bear my weight when the bullet plowed into my chest. That way, I wouldn’t hit my head on the railing as I went down.

I always feel better when I’ve decided on a course of action.

The electric screwdriver from the trunk may have been useless, but it felt good in my hand. I eased the trunk closed and headed around to the front of the building.

The North Pole, beneath all of Marge ’n Ed’s sprayed-on snow, blinkie-lights, and red-and-white candy-cane froufrou, was your standard joyless LA motel: a stucco oblong with the approximate relative dimensions, and the architectural interest value, of a giant brick. Since there were two floors, it was higher than it was deep. The doors on the second floor opened onto a high-railed balcony that ran the entire length of the building, reached on either end by a wooden stairway, home to an expanding universe of termites who probably all had their own problems. In the middle of the building was an elevator in which a great many cats had urinated freely.

At 2:20
A.M.
, Prancer was the only lighted room. Everyone in the place was asleep. Holding my breath, I tiptoed up the stairs, clutching onto my unplugged electric screwdriver.

As I hit the top step, I smelled cigarette smoke. The fear in my gut uncoiled a bit. No professional hitman was going to sit around smoking while waiting for the victim to pop in. And, I
asked myself a bit belatedly, what kind of professional hitman would leave the damn light on in the first place? A professional hitman, I decided, who could possibly be intimidated with an unplugged electric screwdriver. I tiptoed past Prancer’s door, which was about half an inch ajar, and got to Blitzen without getting shot. Marge ’n Ed had exchanged the noisy old mechanical locks for the almost-silent electronic ones that read a slipped-in card. I inserted the card, heard a muffled click, and pushed the door open.

Blitzen welcomed me with its light-hearted holiday fragrance of mothballs, dead cigarettes, and damp carpet. I left the door open behind me just in case, and moved flat-footed, gliding as best I could across the sticky rug, to the adjoining door that opened into Prancer. I pointed the heavy electric screwdriver in front of me with both hands, figuring I could lunge and stab with it if I had to, lifted my right leg, and kicked the door in.

A shrill scream split the night.

“This stuff isn’t
free, you know,” Marge said, mopping vodka off the bedspread. “Not to mention the fucking door.” She had the smoldering filter of a cigarette screwed into the corner of her mouth, and she’d pulled her mouth to the left to get the smoke away from her nose.

“Yeah, well, I rented this room,” I said. “And when I rent a room, I usually rent it empty. I figure if someone turns out to be in it, I’ve got grounds for complaint.”

“It’s just me, for Chrissakes.” She unwound another twenty feet of tissue off the roll of toilet paper in her left hand and went back to blotting the bedspread. “It’s my motel.”

“That’s probably how Norman Bates felt.”

“Who? Oh, never mind.” She sat heavily on the wet bed. “How do I start?”

This was not turning out to be my day. “How do you start what?”

She pulled the cigarette stub from her mouth between thumb and forefinger. “Honey, you been here a while.”

“Eight days,” I said. Marge had obviously been here a while herself. The economy-size jug of generic Vodka, Old Igor’s Private Stock or something, was half empty, and the ashtray, which was shaped like an elf’s boot, complete with pointed toe, was half full. And, now that she’d stopped vibrating all over the room, I could see that Marge looked terrible. Long streaks of black mascara ran down her cheeks like skid marks, and her nose was as red as, well, Rudoph’s.

“Eight days,” she said. She dropped the cigarette butt into the boot and wadded up the vodka-soaked tissue and tossed it onto the rug. Then she shifted to her left, away from the wet spot. “And we talked some, you and me, and I seen you in and out at all hours, not like somebody lives a normal life, with a job and all, and if Ed was here, Ed, he’d say,
That boy’s up to something
.”

“Wish I’d met old Ed,” I said. I wanted to go to bed.

Marge swiped her index finger beneath her nose and then wiped the shiny finger on her pants. She was wearing a sort of matador’s jacket, short in the butt, and black trousers that ended at mid-calf. Her shoes were thong sandals ornamented with gold plastic sequins the size of quarters. The sequins were kind of heartbreaking, for some reason. “You learn,” she said. “In this business, you learn. You learn to tell who’s checkin’ in with a body in the trunk, who lives half a mile away with the little woman but needs a place where he can bring littler women, who’s just staying one more night somewhere on the way down, who’s got a bottle of pills and plans to take them. You gotta pay attention, otherwise it’s not fair to the maids. You don’t want these poor girls from Panama or Salvador
opening the door on something that’ll keep them awake for the rest of their lives.”

“Guess not.”

“So you’re not in the regular world. You’re not a cop because you don’t smell like a cop. You work nights, but irregular. I figure that makes you some kind of crook.” She held up a hand as though to ward off a vehement protest. “I don’t give a shit,” she said. “As long as you’re not, you know, hurting kids or something, and you don’t smell like that, either. What you smell like is a burglar.”

“What’s your sign?” I asked.

Marge’s eyebrows went up. “Aries. Why?”

“Just wondered maybe if you were the same sign as I am, and you’d seen the horoscope this morning. I missed it, and I’d really like to know what it said.”

“What are you?”

“Cancer.”

“That was Ed’s sign,” she said. She wiped her nose again and accompanied the gesture with a sort of memorial sniffle and two blinks. “I always read it.”

“What did it say?”

“Hold on.” She squeezed her eyes shut and screwed her face up so her features looked like something being sucked into a whirlpool, and then she said, “Something about turning challenges into opportunities.”

“I am positively awash in opportunity,” I said. “And listen, it’s nice to know you’ve been thinking about me, but I’m just a normal, everyday—”

“Doris is missing,” Marge said. “I haven’t heard from her in a couple of weeks, and today I went by the dump she lives in with Mr. Pinkie Ring, and the place is clean. I mean, clean. Closets are empty, nothing left in the medicine cabinets, floors swept,
even the kitchen cleaned, just
scrubbed
, everything scoured in nine directions like they were afraid of fingerprints.”

“Marge,” I said as a great wave of weariness washed over me. “It’s probably nothing. They probably—”

“Except,” Marge said. Then she said, “Wait a minute,” and poured a slug of vodka, put the glass down, held up a finger meaning
hang on
, shook out a cigarette, lit it, leaned back against the pillows, and said, “Her glasses. Except for her glasses.”

There was no way I could continue to stand. I sank onto the end of the other bed, Prancer being equipped with two, and felt the room tilt and spin slowly. Hell is sometimes defined as a complete lack of hope. From the top stair of the front porch of hell, I said, “And she needs her glasses.”

“Blind as a—” Marge said, and then she sobbed once, got it under control, hit herself in the face with her forearm to blot the tears, swallowed, and said, “Blind as a bat. She can’t find her own feet without them.”

“And you think I—”

“I think you’re a
mensch
,” Marge said. She wiped her eyes again. “I was married to a mensch for thirty-seven years, and I know one when I see one. I go to the cops, they’re going to ask how old Doris is and I’m going to say, thirty-two, and they’re going to say, Lady, she can go anywhere she wants. She doesn’t have to check in with her mom.”

“Well,” I began.

“And look at these.” Marge dug into a purse the size of a saddlebag and came out with two color snapshots. She dealt them at me, giving each of them an expert, Vegas-worthy flick that carried them from one bed to another. I picked them up and found myself looking at two shots of the same couple.

The female was clearly the issue of Marge’s loins, if the pronounced nasal apparatus and the long upper lip were any
indication, but the man was a complete mystery. In one shot, he was shading his eyes from the sun, and he’d tilted his hand down until nothing showed but his mouth, and in the other, he’d turned his head away at the last moment, creating an interesting modern abstract where his face should have been.

Not good.

Marge said, “Tell me about that.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it. Go away now. Go to bed. Get some sleep.”

And she did, with the purse hanging from her shoulder and the bottle tucked under her arm. I heard her stumble once on the stairs going down, but she obviously grabbed the railing in time, and there were no other indications of disaster. She didn’t even drop the bottle.

I went back into Blitzen, closed the connecting door to try to keep out the smell of the smoke, and lay down on the bed, thinking about turning challenges into opportunities.

The recently widowed Mrs. Derek Bigelow had baby-fine, flyaway blond hair that the morning sunlight was exploring with obvious enjoyment and attractive results. She’d yanked the hair into a long golden rope and twisted it on top of her head and then stuck a fork through it, handle first.

“We’re not gonna stay long,” Louie the Lost said sympathetically, “what with your loss and all, we’ll be out of here in no time, Mrs., uh, Mrs.—”

“Ronnie,” she said. “My—my loss?” Her nose wrinkled in a way that made me want to lean over and smooth it, possibly with my tongue. Ronnie Bigelow was, to put it briefly, quite fine. Even with a wet sponge in her hand, even smelling of some sort of household cleanser that was heavy on the bleach, and wearing an old T-shirt that said
FINAL ANSWER
? above a pair of ragged jeans that could have been a hand-me-down from the Ancient Mariner, Ronnie Bigelow was fine enough to make me wish I kept a diary, just so I could write something about her.

“You know,” Louie said, “Mr., uh, I mean, Derek—”

“Oh,” Ronnie Bigelow said. “
Derek
.” She leaned against the side of the front door to her apartment in West Hollywood, a neighborhood where she was probably the only female on the block. “You seem like a nice little man, and I don’t want to
shock you, but Derek was a twenty-four karat shit, and I haven’t really given him a moment’s thought since the police told me what happened.”

Louie threw me a helpless glance, and I let him flounder. “You were—I mean, you were, um—”

“Married,” Ronnie Bigelow said. “Yes, we were, and I’ve been trying to figure out
why
ever since I woke up next to him on my first abysmal morning as Mrs. Bigelow.” She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them again. “Surely,” she said, “at some time in your life, you’ve done something hopelessly, irredeemably, irremediably, unrecoverably idiotic, haven’t you?”

“Well, sure,” Louie said. “Lotta times.”

“And your tall, silent, nicely muscled friend?” She lifted eyes the color of lapis lazuli up to my face. “Haven’t
you
ever—”

I said, “Suggest something.”

She looked up at me, wrapping me in that lapis blue, for the span of a couple of accelerated heartbeats and then one eyebrow went up a sixteenth of an inch, and she stepped back and held the door open. “Come on in,” she said. “I’ll make some coffee.”