Little Elvises (37 page)

One of the very few good things about the desert, at least for my purposes that evening, is that it’s relatively smooth. It’s where God put all the sand left over from the beach, and there’s a lot of moving air. The air makes the sand flow like a very slow liquid, smoothing it, even creating ripples like the ones you’d see in a photograph of moving water. Among all that smoothness, irregularity stands out: rocks, brush, the decaying skeletons of Joshua trees and cholla plants, the littered scree of small stones in the bottoms of temporary stream beds. Here and there I saw a hole surrounded by a fan of loose sand where a coyote had gone subterranean, digging after some burrowing prey.

I’d crossed the plot of land four times now, and still hadn’t alerted a dog, so there probably wasn’t one. The house was getting pretty close. I changed my pattern and started moving in a squared-off U pattern, beginning about forty feet from the
house. I went around the sides and the back of it, always maintaining my distance, then moved another ten yards away and repeated the U in the other direction.

By now, I had theories. If I were going to bury someone in the desert, I’d avoid the flash-flood gullies for the obvious reason that the water would bring whoever it was to the surface sooner or later, possibly scattering bones for a conspicuous mile or five across the desert as storm followed storm. Steep slopes were out because of wind erosion and the possibility of sand slides opening the grave. No, if I wanted to bury someone, I’d either look for a relatively flat patch of high ground, or I’d dig on the downwind slope of a gentle hill.

My eyes began to go automatically to those areas, and on the fourth U, maybe fifty yards behind the house, I saw it. A level area, a sort of plateau. Its surface was broken and irregular. A hole had been dug and something had been put into it, something with significant volume, because there was a lot of sand left over. Three piles of it, not yet smoothed, streamlined by the wind.

I dropped to my knees and, with profound misgivings, began to dig with my bare hands.

The hole was recent. The sand hadn’t settled. It was still loose and easy to scoop out of the way. It was easier than I wanted it to be. I wanted resistance, I wanted difficulty, I wanted anything that would delay the moment when my fingers found the hand.

I stopped, popping goose bumps so pronounced I felt like a cactus. I didn’t want to look at it, but I dug further down, eyes raised to the moon, until I could grip the entire hand. It was a small hand and a cold one. And now I could smell it.

I stood up so quickly I got dizzy. Without even knowing I was doing it, I took three or four steps back, away from the grave. Then, not wanting to, I looked down.

Five fingers protruded from the hole I’d dug. They were spread wide and slightly curled toward the palm. It looked like the hand of someone who’d tried to claw back to the surface, back to the air and the moonlight and the spangle of stars. I knew I was imagining that, knew he wouldn’t bury anyone who wasn’t dead, because—well, because sand is soft. I was sure his imagination was sufficiently vivid to allow him the vision of someone digging free, staggering up out of the hole. Coming for him.

But that’s what the hand looked like. Someone trying to dig out. Someone small.

I was glad that Marge wasn’t alone.

And it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to kill Pivensey.

I’d seen the car parked beside the house, so he was there. With the moon at its high point in the sky, there were no obscuring shadows now, but it didn’t worry me. There had been no lights on in the house the first time I saw it, forty or fifty minutes ago, and there still weren’t.

Odds were that he’d be in the front bedroom. The door at the rear of the house led into the kitchen if my mental floor plan was accurate. The back door was farther from the bedroom than the front door, so the back door it was. It had a lock I could have opened with a toothpick. In about ten seconds, I took the step up into the kitchen, which was right where I thought it would be.

Even though a skilled burglar gets in and out as quickly as possible, it’s always a good idea to spend the first minute or two in a house just standing still and listening. I was breathing through my mouth with my tip of my tongue against the roof of the mouth, which is the quietest way to breathe. The moonlight through the windows spread itself over a spotless kitchen. A day’s worth of dishes for a single person—three plates, a cup,
a couple of glasses, and some silverware—gleamed in a drying rack next to the sink. A dishtowel had been folded into smooth quarters and placed beside the rack. A painted wooden shelf a couple of feet above the counter held big sealed mayonnaise jars full of what looked like sugar and tea and coffee beans and flour, plus smaller containers of herbs and spices. A boxy white refrigerator from the 1950s, barely shoulder high, hummed against the wall next to the door that led to the living room. On top of the refrigerator was an old wooden breadbox.

It was all pretty homey.

The kitchen floor was wood, with too much space between the uprights to which the floorboards were nailed, and it creaked. I slid my feet over the surface, moving slowly and transferring my weight as smoothly as possible, the Glock loose and comfortable in my right hand. I crossed the kitchen with a minimum of noise and paused at the door to the living room. The fireplace, made of river stone, took up much of the wall to the right. Facing it was an old couch, covered in corduroy or some other napped fabric that ate light without giving any back. A pale pine coffee table, rough-hewn and a couple of inches thick, sat in front of the couch. Magazines were fanned out over its surface, tidy as the selection in a dentist’s office at the beginning of the day. Smug, glossy women looked up from the covers:
Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour
. Doris’s leftovers, dreams between covers.

The only other furniture in the living room was an armchair covered in scarred leather, one of those ones with the brass nailheads on the front of the arms to make it clear that it’s one hundred percent guy furniture. Beyond the armchair was a dark rectangle, the opening into the hallway leading to the bedrooms.

After the kitchen, the living room was a breeze because a rug covered almost the entire floor. It was a cheap oriental
nine-by-twelve in a dark pattern that might have been mainly red in daylight, and it was thin, but it was a lot quieter than bare wood. The front wall of the living room was mostly a big window that let in plenty of moonlight, but the hallway was much darker. As I stood beside the entrance to the hall, I could see a soft rectangle of cold white moonlight falling through an open door on the right, the door to the front bedroom. Other than that, the hall was dark enough to make me nervous.

For all I knew Lorne Henry Pivensey was standing somewhere in there right now, breathing as quietly as I was, gun in hand. Maybe the open door was an invitation. Maybe he was behind the mostly-closed door on the opposite side of the hall, waiting for me to edge my way to that open door and stand in it, my back to him, silhouetted in moonlight, presenting my spinal column for a nice, clean shot.

Most people aren’t very good at remaining completely still for long periods of time. I’m an exception. I stood to the side of the hall entrance and counted mentally to a thousand, even though I knew much sooner than that—knew by the time I got to three hundred—that there was someone inside the bedroom with the open door, knew that the person in that room was taking the slow, even breaths of sleep. Still, I stood there, unmoving, waiting for anything to suggest the presence of another person in the house.

And didn’t hear, or feel, a thing.

So I inched my way down the hall and looked into the bedroom and listened to the sleeping person, watched the covers rise and fall, and then leveled my gun and switched on the light so the little prick would see it coming, and squinted against the light as Doris Enderby sat bolt upright in the bed and screamed her head off.

“There he is, the little shit,” Doris said, looking down at the protruding hand. “Jesus, when that light went on, I thought he’d come back for me.”

We were both sipping coffee, possibly the worst I’d ever drunk. Doris was very thrifty with her coffee and very generous with her water. As far as she was concerned, a little caffeine went a long way. But it seemed to steady her.

“How did you do it?”

“He’s on top of somebody,” Doris said. “That’s why he’s so close to the surface. Some poor girl is already down there. For a year, maybe.”

“That wasn’t actually my question.”

“He had a game he liked to play.” She blew on her coffee, even though it was already cool. “I’m assuming he was the same with all of them—all of
us
—because, well, you know, pathology. My guess is, it was like one-two-three every time. So anyway, first he swept them—no, let’s say
me
—off my feet. Found somebody lonely and pathetic and maybe a little resentful. Like me, in other words. Treated me like he’d been alone on a desert island his whole life and the goddess of love had appeared. I was perfect. I was smart and funny and beautiful and everything he’d ever hoped for.”

She kicked sand, quite a lot of it, in the general direction of the protruding hand. “Okay, so I’m not so beautiful and I’m apparently not very smart, either, but I’d been stuck in that motel with my mother ever since my father died, and I was ripe for somebody like Lem. So we take off and get married, and I move into the house, I mean the house in Hollywood, and it’s just honeymoon time. After a week or so, he brings me up here, shows me this hideaway he’d been renting, and explained it was for sale. He’d buy it for me, and we could escape up here whenever we wanted. Just honeymoon all day and all night. Except that after a little while it isn’t, because I begin to
disappoint
him. That was always the word, disappoint. Things weren’t perfect after all. Now that I look back on it, I can see that he was working himself up. This was his one-man play, he’d probably performed it in front of half a dozen women, women who had no idea what their role would be. It went on like that for a few weeks, just kind of downhill, until we were barely speaking.” She crossed her arms and hugged herself a little, as though she was cold. “We had some real fights, too. I hit him with the garden hose once. He came home and I was watering the lawn, and he accused me of running up the water bill, and I just did a short-circuit and went after him with the hose.”

“Somebody told me about it.”

“Gee, I wonder who that could have been. Mister Neighborhood Watch, I called him. He made Lem
really
nervous, although I didn’t know why at the time. Obviously, or I’d have been out of there. But I wasn’t, because nobody ever really believes the person they’re with is a complete nightmare lunatic. I was thinking, ‘Wow, his mom must have been hard on him,’ and he was thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll hang her by her ankles for a few days and then kick her head in.’ ”

“No,” I said. “That wouldn’t occur to most people.”

“Didn’t to me, anyway. And then one day I came home a little later than I’d said I would, and that was the trigger he’d been waiting for. He grabbed me by the hair, punched me in the face, kicked me around a little, and then handcuffed me. That was when the fun really began for him, because what he enjoyed most was frightening me. Just plain terrifying me. So he had me cuffed on the kitchen floor, one cuff around my right hand and the other around the plumbing trap under the sink, and he pulled up a chair and got comfy and told me about all his girls.”

“The ones who disappointed him.”

“Did they ever. Do you have a cigarette?”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, well. I lived through him, I can live through a nicotine attack. A couple of hours of scaring the shit out of me, telling me about all the girls sleeping in the sand, made him hungry, and he wasn’t about to let me get a hot frying pan in my hands, so he went out for Chinese. Asked me if I’d prefer Thai, if you can believe that, there I am, punched out, bleeding, cuffed to a pipe, and half-crazy afraid, and he’s asking whether I want pad Thai or kung pao chicken. Just a total raving barker. I told him Chinese because the Chinese place he liked was farther away than the Thai place.”

“And.”

“And he didn’t know that my dad had taught me everything there is to know about handcuffs, working with good cuffs, LAPD cuffs. And Lem’s cuffs—I mean, they were junk, and don’t forget, I had a hand free. I waited until he left the house, and then I got out of them and went into the garage, where he’d gone to get the first set, and I got two more pairs. When he came home I hit him with the chair he’d been sitting on, so hard I knocked one leg off it. Then I cuffed his hands and his feet, so tight he could never work his way out of them, and took his gun
and moved the car around to the side of the house and cleaned the place while I waited for him to wake up.”

“That must have been a twist for him.”

Doris turned her head slowly, as though she were seeing the landscape for the last time. “He didn’t have any way to deal with it. Just
gaped
at me, like the steak he’d been eating had suddenly taken a bite out of his tongue. I got him into the car and drove him up here, hands and feet cuffed and another pair of cuffs holding those together so he was folded in half, right? And all the way I’m telling him I’m just going to deliver him to the sheriff’s office up here, and he’s a cinch for the death penalty or life in prison, whichever it is these days. I tell him he’s only got two choices. He can show me a grave and prove he hasn’t been bullshitting me, and I’ll think about how to handle it, or I can take him straight to the cops and we’ll let
them
dig the place up. And, I mean, he knew I was still going to turn him in, but any chance was better than none, so we got up here and he hopped to the house and got a shovel, and he dug with his hands still cuffed until he was knee-deep and I saw some cloth and some bone. And then, since he was already standing in a grave, I shot him with his own gun.”