Little Elvises (17 page)

I made a quick stop at the mini-mall to reattach the limpet and then straightlined back to the Valley. It was a little after 1
A.M.
, and I had the roads pretty much to myself. After making the turn off of Ventura, I pulled to the curb, opened the trunk, grabbed everything I might need, and dropped it into the little black leather satchel I use for what I think of as house calls. Then I put the Toyota into gear and powered up the hill toward Vinnie’s.

Virtually no traffic in the neighborhood, not many lights on in the houses. This part of the Valley is still more an early-to-bed community than, say, Silverlake or Venice, where a demographically significant number of people stay up well into the night. I took the last couple of turns with the lights out and pulled to the curb, careful not to let my tires squeal against it, grabbed the satchel, which was fairly light, and hoofed it up the driveway, steep enough to get me breathing hard. My cheap Chinese sneakers, which I’d dyed black long ago, were reassuringly soundless.

The windows I could see were all dark. Just to make sure nobody was up, nursing night sweats or whatever, I decided to make a complete circuit, trying at the same time to reassemble the puzzle of the floor plan in my mind’s eye. From the front door I headed left, following the wall outside the rooms I’d glanced into from the long hallway. The window I’d unlocked
was still unlocked. I kept going until I came to the long curved wall, but I could go only about two feet further than the edge of the window glass, because at that point the wall kissed the edge of a fifteen-foot drop, maybe a 70-degree angle, spiky with ice plant, that ended at the edge of a fenced yard below. The moon, dead center in a firefly party of stars, winked at me from the surface of a swimming pool.

So. Turn around and go back to the front door. Explore to the right of the door this time.

This was the side where geometrical whimsy had won the day. The first room I passed had triangular walls sloping up to a point, which I supposed made it a pyramid. Next came a concave wall, curving inward toward the middle, with another long window, the opposite of the one that bent out in the room where I’d talked to DiGaudio both times. These were the rooms I hadn’t been able to look into. The black area on my burglar’s map.

I ducked down as I passed the concave window, thinking as I did it that a piece of glass that size, cut to fit and custom-curved, had to cost a fortune. As DiGaudio told me himself, the only thing he’d done since 1960 was get fat. It was hard to believe that the stream of royalties from the Little Elvises was much more than a trickle, all these years later. Other than the occasional nostalgia CD hocked on late-night TV by a former member of Sha Na Na, the Frankies and Giorgios were a curiosity, a momentary lapse in taste, a fading echo in pop culture. It was hard to see where the money was coming from. Good investments? With a house like this, it was obvious that DiGaudio wasn’t hoarding.

The next two rooms were rectangles, but they protruded from the side of the house like a couple of crooked teeth, with a V-shaped slice of grass between them like a green piece of pie.
Good-sized rooms, maybe bedrooms. Then I came to a long, unbroken stretch of wall, completely window-free. It took a moment for the penny to drop: this was the recording studio. So put one in the plus column—I’d located the studio—and one in the minus column: there was no way to know for sure that the Rolling Stones or Dion and the original Belmonts weren’t inside, rocking up a storm. I sat down with my back to the wall for a couple of minutes and just let my ears explore the night. Heard an owl doing the ever-fresh
huu huu
number, heard something—probably a possum—crackle its way through the ice plant on the hillside below, heard the occasional
brrrrr
of an especially loud engine, far down on the Valley floor.

Heard no music at all. Heard instead the reverberations of a voice in my inner ear.

Irwin Dressler. A few hours back, I’d been in the same room with Irwin Dressler. Me, an obscure burglar who wouldn’t deserve an asterisk in the long florid history of Southern California crime, having a one-on-one with The Dark Lord himself. The man with the plan, the geographer of local history. Famous and powerful men and women had been his hand puppets, acting out the plays he wrote for them. Business tycoons, Hollywood moguls, public faces, politicians. All navigating the intricate hopscotch pattern Irwin Dressler had chalked on the sidewalk of time. Erasing it behind them. Shaping the state of California.

An old guy in plaid pants. Looked as harmless as a skink.

And what he’d essentially told me was that I shouldn’t worry about DiGaudio the cop. The inference was that he could take care of Paulie DiGaudio without even rolling over in bed. So worry about him, Irwin, instead.

This was not an improvement in my affairs. Paulie DiGaudio was the comic cut-out troll in a child’s pop-up book compared
to Irwin Dressler. When I’d unlocked the window in Vinnie’s house earlier that day, it had just been a burglar’s reflex, the way a shoe salesman might have glanced at a man’s footwear. I didn’t really have a reason to break into the house, since my job was to demonstrate Vinnie’s innocence. Now, though, I had a new client, so to speak, and the assignment had changed.

There was absolutely no music coming from the house. I gave it another minute or so, hands cupped around my ears, but nope. I heard a woman laugh, a harsh, unamused laugh I was glad wasn’t directed at me, from somewhere way down the hill, but nothing that demanded a treble clef.

So I reluctantly got up, a touch creaky from the cold ground, and followed the perimeter of the house until I came again to the ice-plant-covered drop. Passed several more windows, probably two more rooms, but no lights. Not so much as a candle.

Showtime.

The great thing about burglar alarms is that they’re much more irritating to homeowners than they are to burglars. My sense of both Vinnie DiGaudio and Popsie was that they had extremely low irritation thresholds. I spotted a good hidey hole beneath the chassis of Vinnie’s stately old Rolls Royce as I passed the front door.

I positioned myself under the unlocked window, opened the satchel, and pulled out a pair of black cotton gloves and a black ski mask. It took a moment to put them on, but it seemed to take longer because I was completely focused on listening for a voice, a door, a creak underfoot, anything to say that anyone inside was sentient and vertical. Nothing. I zipped the bag, looped the handles over my left arm so I wouldn’t have to bend down to pick it up, and opened the window.

The alarm was shrill enough to abrade flesh. I eased the window back down until it was completely closed and
scooted for the underside of the Rolls as the speakers tattered the night.

It took them long enough: they both must have been heavy sleepers. It was probably a full thirty seconds before I saw lights go on, and then something happened that I should have anticipated but hadn’t—the area around the house was suddenly bathed in the kind of wattage that’s usually reserved for major league night games. Even all in black, even underneath the Rolls, I figured that anyone who came through the front door would see me, as long as I could see them.

I hated to do it, because there are few things I dislike more than being hunted by someone I can’t see, but I rolled to the far side of the Rolls. From my new position, I couldn’t even see the bottom of the door. I was going to have to listen for footsteps and try to adjust my position. The nearest bushes were useless: they were azaleas, ten feet away and too low to hide behind. People look in bushes first anyway. I think it’s some sort of animal holdover: if it can eat you, it’s hiding in the bushes.

They finally shut down the alarm, and I heard the front door open and then slam up against the hallway wall. I recognized Popsie’s velvet touch, and sure enough, a second later I heard her addressing her boss.

“Just check inside the fucking house like I told you. I’ll take care of it out here.”

An unintelligible response from DiGaudio, still inside. I couldn’t make out the words, but it was clear that he wasn’t returning any of the attitude. Kind of an interesting employer/employee dynamic, I thought, keeping my eyes on the part of the paved area nearest the front door.

And here she came, a pair of calves that would have raised eyebrows at a Mr. Universe pageant, her feet encased in what looked like live rabbits, but proved, as they came closer, to be
beige fur slippers. Dangling to the right of her knees, which was as far up as I could see, was the shiny black double trouble of a shotgun barrel. Popsie was bad enough. Popsie with a shotgun was almost enough to send me home.

She went left, probably to take a look down the driveway, and I re-angled myself beneath the car so I was head-on to her. That way, if she caught sight of me as she came back, at least she wouldn’t see a man-shaped silhouette. I watched the hem of her pink nightgown come into sight as she went eight or ten feet down the drive.

Okay, a bit of good news: she wasn’t waving a flashlight around. She was depending on the exterior lights. So she couldn’t just idly point a couple of hundred watts under the car. I stayed still, barely breathing, and watched her climb back up and then head around the other side of the house.

“Anything?” DiGaudio called from inside.

“Jesus Christ on a broomstick,” Popsie said to herself. To him, she said, “Just handle your end.”

He said, “Okay,” sounding like he’d had his hand slapped. Then nothing happened for a minute or so, until Popsie reappeared and went to the chain-link gate that led to the pool. I heard it click shut behind her. By the time she came back, DiGaudio was standing in the doorway, although I couldn’t see anything except a pair of bare feet.

“Everything’s fine,” he said. “Fucking alarm.”

“Damn,” Popsie said. “My sleeping pill had just kicked in.”

“So take another one,” DiGaudio said. “You got a thousand of them.” The door closed.

A bit later, they snapped off the exterior lights. I pulled up my sleeve and looked at my watch, a Timex with that useful little death-ray-blue light that comes on whenever you push a button. I decided it would take twenty, twenty-five minutes for
them to get resettled, for Popsie to drop another sleeper, and for the two of them to toddle off to dreamland.

Thirty-two minutes later, I opened the window again.

The fourth time
the alarm sounded, around 3:40, they finally disabled it. It was hard to believe that Popsie was still walking, since she’d kept announcing her intention to take another of her little blue sweeties. I gave them forty-five minutes and then opened the window for the fifth time, unaccompanied by the siren this time, and climbed in. Once inside, I stood motionless beside the window for a slow count of two hundred. Then I eased myself into an armchair and removed my shoes. I didn’t want the rubber soles of my sneakers making basketball squeaks on the hardwood floors.

I dropped the shoes into the satchel and then rummaged inside it until I found a penlight, not much thicker than one of Marge’s cigarettes, with an adjustable-width beam. I pointed it at the floor, turned it on, and twisted the business end to narrow the splash of light as much as possible. Then I scanned the room once, located the doorway into the hall, and shut the penlight off. Once my eyes had readjusted to the darkness, I headed for the door.

The hallway was close to pitch black, but the darkness paled as I made my way toward the room with the big curved window. I went into it, waited a moment to listen again, and then turned on the penlight and did a sweep. Nothing interesting, nothing I hadn’t seen before. Below, through the window, the Valley sparkled like the world’s gaudiest, worst-shaped Christmas tree.

Acting on a burglar’s compulsion, I went around behind the coffee table and opened the drawer from which Vinnie had pulled the five thousand bucks. It was stuffed with rubber-banded half-inch bricks of hundreds, stacked crisscross. Had to be thirty-five,
forty thousand dollars. Maybe he was a big tipper. Closing the drawer without lifting some of the stash was a test of character. I failed. I counted down three stacks and pulled two or three bills out of each stack beneath those. I figured it would be weeks before he discovered it, if he ever did. With a diminished sense of self-esteem partially offset by twelve hundred dollars in my pocket, I put the intact stacks back on top and got up from the permanent dent Vinnie had made in the couch.

I hadn’t seen the kitchen, so I pushed through the swinging door and found myself in a space bigger than both my rooms in the North Pole put together. Marble, or maybe granite, gleamed everywhere. What caught my attention, though, was the clutter. The place was a pigsty. Dishes tottered in precarious stacks. Smeared glasses and half-full cups lolled everywhere. Bits of food—bread, banana peels, half-eaten oranges—littered the counters and smooshed beneath my stockinged feet. The place smelled like a garbage disposal that needed a lemon run through it. So Popsie and Vinnie, whatever their good points might have been, weren’t neat-freaks.

My penlight caught a glint in one corner: a stack of aluminum hospital trays, the kind with fold-out legs to fit over a person’s lap in bed. Unlike the rest of the kitchen, they were spotless. Well-lubricated, too, as I learned when I picked one up and unfolded a leg. It moved easily, without a sound, snapping precisely into place.

Hmmmm. DeGaudio’s kaftan, the abnormal thickness of the legs he could barely cross. Was he an occasional invalid? Popsie’s muscles made a new kind of sense.

The kitchen had a second door, in the wall to the right. I figured it had to open into the hallway I hadn’t been down yet, the hallway that led to the recording studio, the bedrooms, and whatever else was down there. Like the door I’d
entered the kitchen through, it was a swinging door, meaning no noisy hardware to deal with. I turned off the penlight, put my ear to the door for a minute or two, and then pushed it open.

And once I was through it, I heard the burglar’s favorite sound: snoring. It was in stereo, coming from rooms twenty feet apart. I stood outside the room from which the deeper snores came, trying to guess which one of them it was. As far as I could match up the inside of the house with the outside, the bedrooms were the two protruding teeth. To my right was the pyramid-shaped room, which was empty except for a fur rug dead center, a headache-inducing mandala on one wall, and something that looked like a mirrored disco ball but had probably been sold as an energy conduit. It hung from the apex of the pyramid, inert as far as I could tell. I tried to pick up on the room’s spiritual vibration, but the snoring drowned it out. Maybe it
was
a disco ball.