Little Elvises (29 page)

The next five were of Ronnie, and for just a moment I felt a little softening toward Derek.

She was asleep, the sheets bunched around her bare shoulders,
the cotton as softly crumpled as an angel’s robe in a Flemish painting. Soft light flowed through a window to the left, and he’d shot without the flash so he wouldn’t wake her up. He’d moved in close, catching the heartbreak curve of cheekbones and the perfect line of her nose, the upturned corners of her lips, so pronounced that she seemed to be smiling even in sleep. The last shot was an extreme close-up: a luxuriant tangle of hair, almost an abstract, looking like the swirling grain of a cypress or a whirlpool of spun gold, all curls and whorls and vortexes set off by the slant of light through the window. So he’d cared on some level. He’d at least been able to recognize beauty, and for the space of a few snapshots, he’d risen to its challenge. He’d actually felt something, even if it was just a spark of desire to keep some tracery, a two-dimensional miniature of the woman who would ultimately leave him. Ultimately, I was certain, everybody left him.

And then, in the next eight or ten shots, he went back to being Derek. A steep driveway that I recognized as DiGaudio’s, shot in broad daylight, then a close-up of the mailbox with the address clearly readable. The house, photographed from a hill above it, its asymmetric geometry staggering through the azaleas and across the lawn, the pool a blue kidney behind it. From the slant of the shadows, it was early afternoon. Cars pointed every which way in the parking area, so a recording session was in progress, and I wondered what Ace and the guys had been calling themselves that day—Foot of the Nameless? Cyanide Chapstick?

Then the house at night, windows ablaze, the camera shaky from being hand-held for a long exposure without a flash. He’d moved in closer to get a blurred shot of the room with the curved window where I’d spoken twice with DiGaudio. In the center of the room, a ghostly apparition was in streaky motion, heading away from the couch. DiGaudio from the bulk, but it
was hard to tell; the exposure was probably half a second, the hand holding the camera was jittery, the lens had auto-focused on the surface of the window, and the person inside was moving.

But it was DiGaudio. Nobody else in that house was that big. And I couldn’t see legs, so he was probably wearing a kaftan.

The door was open behind him, the door to the hallway that led to the bedrooms and the recording studio. The doorway was a dark rectangle, but there was something framed in it, back there in the gloom of the hall, something pale and formless. It was too far back to catch the splash of light from the main room, amorphous as a puff of steam.

I clicked to enlarge, but there wasn’t enough detail, and what I got was a bigger blur. About the only thing I could tell for certain was that it was short. Even allowing for the fact that it was a few feet back in the hall, it barely reached the doorknob. Not a child: too wide, too bulky. A very wide dwarf, perhaps.

Or a very tall mushroom. From all I could tell, it was a wandering piece of furniture.

The next shot showed DiGaudio going through the door to the hallway. He was pressing himself to the wall, so whatever was in the hall was relatively wide, although it didn’t have to be all
that
wide, since DiGaudio was pretty wide himself. He had his head tilted downward, either looking at whatever it was, or else—

Of course. Talking to it.

Derek had tried to zoom in on the next shot, but whatever he’d seen, it had been clearer to him than it had to the camera. I could just make out a deeper darkness that was probably Vinnie DiGaudio in black-kaftaned retreat down the hallway, now on the far side of the pale blur, which was, if anything, even less resolved. But its shape had changed. Before, it had been vaguely rectangular, and now it was shaped a little like a lowercase
h
. It reminded me of something, although I couldn’t say what.

I hit the space bar to navigate to the next picture, and the hair stood up on my arms. I was looking at Popsie, who was standing in the middle of the room, frowning as she stared out the window, her eyes fixed on at a spot to Derek’s left. Even the mole on her chin bristled with suspicion. She’d heard or sensed something, but he was apparently far enough out of the light that she couldn’t see him. It wasn’t hard to imagine him frozen there, not daring to move, as Popsie’s eyes raked the darkness. The next shot was just a dim blur of motion with something that might have been a foot at the bottom of the frame, probably another accidental shot as Derek hauled ass away from the window and Popsie.

And then, paydirt.

First, a blinding star of light reflected in the glass of a window—Derek finally seeing something worth risking the flash for, but forgetting to angle the camera away to deflect the light’s bounce. He got it right in the next shot, the camera pointed down, catching the bottom edge of the window, and the flash bringing a flat, grainy face out of the darkness, a face no more than four feet off the floor to judge by the height of the window, a face that looked like a watercolor that had been left in the rain so the colors ran down the page and the shapes drooped irregularly, or maybe a face glimpsed underwater, distorted by the ripples on the surface, one eye fixed in wide alarm on the camera and the other fully closed, closed so completely that it looked as though it had been sealed in that position.

The face was so low that I realized that the shape in the hallway that I’d seen as a lower-case “h” was actually a chair, someone in a chair. Most likely, a wheelchair.

I heard again that amphibious breathing.

I said, “Nessie.”

I slept until almost ten
A.M
., and when I woke up, I didn’t even go get coffee before I reached for the phone and dialed.

“Yeah?” Joanie White was short on social skills but long on information retrieval. She was a PhD candidate in the social sciences at UCLA, the daughter of an acquaintance—a bookie to the stars who had the idyllic family life straight people never think crooks enjoy, including a pair of great kids. I’d paid Joanie for research on a few occasions before Rina turned into the Mistress of the Internet.

“The World Wrestling Federation,” I said. “And its predecessors.”

“That’s the worst conversation opener of the year,” Joanie said. “Pardon me while I yawn in your ear.”

“Five hundred bucks.”

“You’re approaching my frame of reference,” Joanie said.

“I need to find out everything there is to know about a former wrestler,” I said, “and I’ll pay five hundred dollars to the person who locates the information.”

“What about the whiz kid? I thought I’d been permanently replaced.”

“She’s at school at this hour. Plus, we’re at a delicate stage in our relationship,” I said.

“Really. A father and a daughter? At a delicate stage? Call the
LA Times
.”

“Interested in the money?”

“Sure. Got a name?”

“Sort of. Hilda, the Queen of the Gestapo.”

“Oh, well,” she said. “At least there’s probably only one of them. How long do I have?”

“A couple of hours. Let’s say noon.”

She said, “Let’s say two.”

I said, “Let’s say three hundred fifty.”

“Noon it is,” she said. She hung up, and I dialed another number.

The man who picked up the phone said, in a voice with a rasp like a match being struck on a zipper, “Don’t waste my time.”

“Nobody says hello any more. This is Paul Klee.”

“Hey, Paul. Still painting?”

“With these petroleum prices,” I said, “who can afford to work in oils? You want to make a call for me?”

“What I live for,” Jake Whelan said. Whelan had been one of Hollywood’s top producers until his unerring nose for a hit was permanently numbed by several tons of cocaine. These days he lived in baronial splendor in a fourteenth-century French chateau that had been reassembled in Laurel Canyon, where he passed his days hoovering white lines, working on his tan, ordering up tag teams of hookers, and enjoying a large private collection of mostly stolen art. He thought he owed me a favor, and apparently he hadn’t yet found out that he actually didn’t.

“The Museum of Television and Radio,” I said. “I need the kind of access you’d get.”

“When?”

“Maybe this afternoon.”

“Okay. What do you need to look at?”

“Don’t laugh.”

“I haven’t laughed since they wheeled Cheney out of the White House.”

“
American Dance Hall
.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sure. You want me to send a woman with a whip, too? Maybe a scourge and a hair shirt?”

“I don’t think I’ll need them. I want to see whatever they’ve got with two of the Little Elvises from Philadelphia, Bobby Angel and Giorgio.”

“I’m gonna have to get somebody else to make the call,” Whelan said. “No fucking way I’m gonna have people think I want to look at Giorgio.”

“I’m surprised you even remember him.”

“Ahhh, well. Somebody came to me a few years back with a screenplay about those kids. Idea was to get a bunch of really pretty, minimum-wage boys and do the story on the cheap, cut a CD, promote the whole thing on MTV, make a reality show out of the casting. The whole shmear.”

“What happened?”

“You mean, aside from the fact that the idea sucked?”

“Since when does that matter?”

“You should be in the business. Sure, it sucked, but I figured it was good for some development bucks. I mean, it’d never get made, but I could probably have pried a million, million and a half out of one of the blow-drys at the studios. But the fatso who discovered all the kids said no way.”

“DiGaudio.”

“That’s the guy. Jeez, what a schmuck. I make one call, just a polite feeler, and all of a sudden I got lawyers on the phone. You’da thought I was suggesting a prequel to Genesis.”

“Protective.”

“You could say that. Like he had something to hide.”

“I’m pretty sure he does,” I said. “Listen, I’m not certain I’m going to need you to make the call. I’ll let you know in a little while if I do.”

“Oh, well,” Whelan said. “I’ll just put my whole day on hold.”

It seemed like
a good time to be careful. I wasn’t
stopping
, in spite of what Fronts had said, and I’d already been shot at and had my throat nicked. So I paid a lot of attention to the rearview mirror as I drove over the hill to try to chat with Melissa Simmons, the next of the names Marge had starred as being one of Doris’s special friends.

Even with one eye in front of me and the other on the mirror, it was hard not to think about Vinnie DiGaudio and the various ways his little secret could kill me. I was pretty sure I had sixty percent of it figured out, but the remaining forty percent was probably all sharp edges.
Which is which
? had been the best question in Derek’s notebook, and the difference between Possibility Number One and Possibility Number Two was yet another murder.

People who are trying to hide a murder can get touchy.

Derek had been puzzling it through, both chronologically and geographically, and he’d figured that it was worth a lot of money—$350,000 counts as a lot of money to me—but I didn’t think he’d gotten any closer to the real answer than I had. He’d gotten close enough to get killed, though, so I was obviously out on the end of the plank myself, with Fronts behind me, holding the sword to my back, and the sharks circling below.

The question was, who were the sharks?

Or were there any? Was Fronts the only weapon aimed at me, or was there another, one left over from a murder a long time ago? One threat or two?

Sal = ID?
, Derek had written. I knew who Sal was and I was afraid I also knew who ID was.

So, safer to figure two. Or even more. I started watching the side mirrors, too.

Melissa Simmons had
spent a fortune on not aging, and she hadn’t. Instead of moving forward with the rest of us, towed in the wake of time’s arrow, she’d gone sideways, into a parallel universe where people’s faces morphed monthly, lips plumping, cheekbones swelling, chins clefting, noses shrinking, muscles relaxing to the point of paralysis, neck skin stretching as tight as a drumhead.