Little Elvises (14 page)

“I’ve seen hoses,” I said.

“Dickhead answer,” he said, “
Junior
.”

“Sorry. I was just interested, and the tip of the hose was slowing down the story.”

“Right. So she caught him one on the forehead, and he’s all wet and bleeding, backing away with both hands out in front of him. Laugh? I like to pissed myself.”

“How long since you’ve seen them?”

“Nine days.”

“Not eight? Not ten?”

“Nine. Back when I was in school, you still had to be able to count.”

“Nine days,” I said. Pretty close to the time I moved into the North Pole.

“Aren’t you going to ask if I saw them go?”

“Did you?”

“Maybe.”

I said, “Maybe?”

“Does this pass as conversation out in the Valley?” he asked. “I say
nine days
and you say
nine days
. I say
maybe
and you say
maybe
. Don’t invite me to any parties.”

“I’ll rephrase. When you say maybe, what do you mean?”

“Nine days back,” he said, resting a shoulder against the edge of the door, “about eleven thirty at night, I saw him come out in that stupid cap and jacket, start up that little Jap car, and pull it into the driveway past the house. Got my attention, because they never parked behind the house. Let that little car sit out there night and day, dirty as hell, just an eyesore. Dogs peeing on the tires all the time. So I thought,
Huh
.”

I waited a moment and said, “I’ll bet you did.”

“You don’t need to talk. When I pause like that, I’m just getting organized. Car sat back there, maybe half an hour, maybe a little longer. I can’t see it because of the house, right? Just the tail end. But I can hear the back door to the house open and close four or five times, just
bang
, like a screen door that hasn’t got one of those plunger things to slow it down, and the light comes on in the car’s back window when he opens the doors and goes off when he … awwww, you know when it goes off. After a bunch of that, the engine starts and the taillights come on, and the car backs out and takes off. And that’s it. Never came back, and nobody’s taken up a collection to find out where he went. Dickhead.”

“One person in the car, or two?”

He looked at me and then through me, pursed his lips for a moment, and said, “Two?”

“But you’re not sure.”

“Course not,” he said. “It’s not like I was paying attention.”

° ° °

There was no
pneumatic arm on the screen door. I opened it and let it bang shut. Plenty loud enough to be heard from across the street. Just a detail, but details count when you’re trying to decide whether what you’ve been told is the icy truth or an improvisation by someone who needed company.

I went to the door of the garage, backed up a yard to allow for the fact that Pivensey wouldn’t want to run the car into the closed door, and then turned and paced off about fourteen feet, the length of an average-size car. And found myself looking at the house where Old Blue Eyes lived. So he
could
see the back end of the car.

It was about as dark as LA gets, which isn’t very dark. There’s always ambient city light, especially in a neighborhood like that one, with Sunset gleaming to the south and Hollywood Boulevard to the north. The house was a dark block raised against the sky, but enough light bounced off the walls to let me see the black rectangles of the windows. Even from out here, I could feel it. Something bad had happened on the other side of those windows, and I didn’t really think I wanted to know what it was.

I’d been in the house, but not the garage. Knowing that I was being watched from across the street, I went to my Toyota—little dickhead Jap car, he’d probably say—and opened the trunk. From an exhaustive collection of Streamlight flashlights, the policeman’s choice and
de rigeur
for the well-equipped burglar, I chose one that had a focused LED beam, a textured handle that made it harder to fumble, and enough weight to drop someone in his tracks if applied smartly to the side of the head. Holding it in front of me to keep it out of sight from The Ever-Open Eye across the street, I hiked back up the driveway, found the handle of the garage door in the dark, and yanked it up.

The door resisted at first and then swung up, counterweighted
heavily enough to snatch the handle from my hand. Looking back to make sure I was out of sight from across the street, I snapped on the flashlight and played it around.

I wasn’t expecting much of anything, and that’s what I found. There was no internal drywall, just naked two-by fours over tar paper, liberally draped with cobwebs. A theme park for brown recluse spiders,
Death World
. Lots of what looked like black sand at the base of the two-by-fours. On closer examination, it turned out to be termite droppings. In the center of the cement pad was a large, shapeless dark spot, gunmetal gray at the edges shading to black in the middle, built up by God knew how many cars over the course of seventy or seventy-five years. It reminded me of the stains on the carpet at the North Pole.

At the far end of the space, someone who was probably dead by now had built a plywood shelf, maybe five feet off the ground, high enough to allow an old car to nose in beneath it. The plywood belled down in the middle, sagging beneath the memory of decades’ worth of weight. Now, though, there were only a few black plastic trash bags and a couple of cardboard boxes, one old and one new, probably recycled decades apart from behind some supermarket.

I pulled my sleeves down over my hands to avoid leaving prints on the plastic bags, and opened one. It contained men’s clothes, all pretty much worn out, and so did the second. The shirts were missing buttons or had a tear somewhere, the jeans were out at the knee or had a broken zipper. Discards, maybe, or maybe Pivensey was just frugal and he bagged these things up instead of throwing them away. Maybe figured some day he’d get the buttons, zippers, whatever, replaced. I pushed the two bags back to their original positions and passed on the third.

The first box I tugged toward me was the old one, and it weighed a ton. It had been packed to the brim with magazines
from the 1940s, mostly devoted to movie stars. Perfect faces smiled from the covers, lighted and retouched with long-lost artistry. Probably worth something somewhere, since there is nothing that
someone
doesn’t collect. I pushed it aside and pulled the newer box to the edge. It was much lighter.

It was a good-sized box and mostly empty. When I pointed the flashlight into it, metal glinted up at me, something silvery. A tangle of metal shapes, linked by shiny chain. Five—no, six—pairs of handcuffs.

Above the handcuffs was a broad strip of masking tape. Neatly lined up beneath it were six keys. The keys were evenly spaced beneath the tape, and there was room for three more, three that had in fact been there once and had left their impressions in the tape.

I changed my mind about the third plastic bag. I opened it and found more clothes.

Women’s clothes. Some of them torn, some of them starch-stiff with the old rust of dried blood. When I opened the bag, the smell of fear escaped from it, saturated beneath the arms of blouses and sweaters.

Souvenirs.

The smell and the blood, I thought, might be all anyone would ever find of these women.

I pushed the bag back into place and closed the garage door behind me. When I started the car, I glanced across the street and saw one corner of a curtain drop into place.

“If she hears there’s a cop looking for her,” Marge said, “we’ll never see her again.”

“You’re not listening to me. Pivensey is a bad guy.” I hadn’t told her about the handcuffs and the women’s clothes, and I doubted I would.

“Honey,” Marge said, lighting up. “I knew that the first time I looked at him. Pinky ring, weird-shaped head.”

“Little neck,” I contributed.

“That, too. That round head, sitting on that weensy neck. Looked like a balloon on a string. Wish I’d had a pin.” She held up the jug of Old Igor’s Private Reserve, tilted it to sight through it, and tightened her mouth at the results. “Where does this shit
go
?” she asked. “It evaporates right through the bottle.”

Marge ’n Ed, back when they bought the motel, had knocked together two rooms on the ground floor and added a little kitchen, tiny enough to fit on a boat, in place of the second room’s bathroom. We were in what passed as the living room, which was the unit with the kitchen. It had been furnished in sidewalk style; most of the furniture had the dejected patina of something that had sat in the open air for days. The room was as free of Christmas decorations as Ebenezer Scrooge’s bedroom.

“You
need
to talk to the cops,” I said again, moving from
one lump in the couch to another. “Don’t take this lightly. They think Pivensey murdered one woman, and beat up some others. They can put a lot of people on this. I can’t.”

“What for?” Marge said. She was sitting on an aluminum beach chair across the warped coffee table. “She’s been gone nine days, right? That’s what the old man told you, nine days. The house was cleaned out. Whatever was going to happen, it’s already happened. And, in spite of the way the world works, let’s be optimistic. If she got away from him somehow and she finds out cops are involved, she’ll never come home.” She upended the bottle, getting about half a glassful out of it. “And if he’s done something to her, there’s not much we can do about it at this point.” She dropped the empty bottle to the carpet, scrubbed her cheeks with the heel of her free hand, drank deeply, and lit another cigarette.

“You’ve already got one,” I said, pointing at the ashtray.

“So what?” She defiantly lit a third. “I’ll smoke the whole damn pack at once, if I want to. It’s my house.”

“I’m not really fond of cops,” I said. “But I think you’re making a mistake.”

“Ed was a cop,” she said. She puffed on the cigarette between her lips like a machine, without even lifting her hand to it.

Sometimes I have stupid spells. I said, “Ed?”

“Was a cop,” she repeated. She knocked her knuckles against the coffee table. “You in there?”

“And—and what? Doris hates cops because her father was a cop?”

Marge shook her head, a gesture that was half disagreement and half weariness. “Ed got shot. He was breaking up an armed robbery, and he got shot. He killed the person who shot him, a Mexican with a record a mile long, and everybody went batshit. Community
activists
, you know, the vampires who make money by churning up poor people. LAPD did the normal internal affairs
investigation and then looked out the window at all the people carrying signs that said
BLUE MURDER OF BROWN PEOPLE
, and decided that Ed was a small price to pay for peace in the streets. Drummed him out with the bullet still in him. He hadn’t been in long enough for a full pension. It took every nickel we had to buy this place. He never got over it. Doris was her daddy’s girl. Hates cops worse than he ever did.” She knocked the cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, shaking loose a gray cylinder an inch long, then put the cigarette down and picked up one of the other ones. “So I send cops after her, and she’ll smell them coming from a mile away. It’s you or nobody. She’ll never let a cop find her, and if one does, she’ll be so pissed at me she’ll never come home.”

I thought it was highly unlikely that Doris would be coming home any time soon.

“And she’s the only one I’ve got now,” Marge said. She scrubbed her cheeks again. Her eyes were very bright. “If I’ve still got her.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said. It was pure reflex.

“You’re a mensch,” Marge said. “I’ve got some money—”

“No,” I said.

“Why should you care? I’m just the old—”

“I’m not asking for—”

“—broad who owns the motel—”

“—money, so don’t even—”

“—where you happen to be—”

We stopped talking at the same time and looked at each other. Then Marge raised a hand with a cigarette in it, a sign for me to shut up. “There’s no reason you should help me,” she said. “I had no right to ask you to do what you already did. You did it out of the goodness of your heart.”

“I’ve got some left,” I said. “And I haven’t got anybody else to spend it on.”

She turned away from me and studied the front door as though she’d heard something outside, as though Doris would push it open at any moment and come in, her arms full of packages and shopping bags, and I explored the lines of Marge’s profile. A couple of hundred gallons of vodka and fifteen thousand cigarettes ago, Marge had been a thoroughbred. Hell, she was still a thoroughbred.

“I’ll find a way,” she said. “I’ll find a way to thank you.” She still hadn’t looked back at me.

“But let’s not kid each other,” I said. “I’m not real optimistic. What I can do is try to track her down, track him down. And then we’ll see what we see.”

“That’s what we’ll see,” Marge said. She brought up a hand to brush the hair from her face, but she was holding the cigarette, and there was a little frizzing sound and a smell of burning hair. She didn’t even seem to notice.