Little Elvises (5 page)

“That some asshole shot Derek Bigelow, ace reporter, before he, Vinnie DiGaudio, could get around to it.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“And you didn’t,” Louie said. He was rummaging his pockets for matches. “And that the cops are going to come looking for him, Vinnie, I mean, because he told a bunch of people that he was planning to kill old Derek.”

“Exactly.”

“He tell you why he wanted to kill him?”

“Ah-ah,” I said. “Pronouns.”

“Why he, Vinnie DiGaudio,” Louie said, releasing the words into the air in precisely bitten syllables, “wanted to kill him, Derek.”

“No. Said it shouldn’t matter, since he wasn’t the murderer. But that I should work fast because pretty quick somebody’s going to talk to the cops about him, Vinnie, yakking about wanting to kill—oh, hell, you know who he wanted to kill.”

Louie had given up on his jacket and shirt pockets and was now searching his pants, the unlit cigar sticking out of his mouth like a miniature Louisville Slugger. “Always a good way to work up to offing somebody,” he said. “Tell as many people about it as possible. Buy an ad if you got the budget. Maybe a skywriter.”

He started looking around the room, his ponytail bobbing. Louie was short, wide, and darkly Mediterranean, and if his face had been a house, his forehead would have been the living room, since it occupied about half of the front of his head. For a while he’d worn bangs, but he had a natural curl in his hair, and the bangs flipped up at the ends with a twee effect that made him look like a hitman for the Campfire Girls. Recently he’d grown his hair out and pulled it back with a rubber band in the ever-popular dude-tail so beloved of tiny music executives in pressed jeans. He gave up on searching the motel room, probably because he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore, patted his shirt pocket again, and said, “Got a match?”

“Here.”

“You know, my wife, Alice, she’s been working with this broad who teaches people how to get things done,” he said, and took a deep drag, looking cross-eyed at the coal. “Alice, she’s got problems with what she calls
completions
, meaning everything gets kind of half-done and then it lies around the house until I straighten things up and then Alice gets all crazy because she can’t find stuff. Like she’ll open all the bills and organize them
alphabetically or by color or size or how she feels about the store they come from or some other fucking thing, and then she’ll tear a bunch of checks out of our check book and then she’ll go on a cruise. And a week later, we’re getting late notices and she’s yelling about how I can’t leave stuff alone, and I’m messing up all her
systems
.”

By now Louie’s head was so wreathed in smoke I could hardly see him. “So she hires this broad, and for a hundred fifty bucks an hour, the broad tells her—good thing you’re sitting down—to make lists. I coulda done that for free, but it wouldn’t have meant nothing. But, see the problem with lists is that you gotta organize shit in order of
importance
. Otherwise, you keep adding stuff to the top of the list, and before you know it, your list says stuff like
Go to K-Mart for Michael Bolton CD
and
Don’t forget kibble
, and you find yourself sitting in your car, listening to Michael Bolton with a trunk full of kibble, and you learn that you can cross off number three on your list, because
bang
, somebody just capped your journalist.”

I said, “Michael Bolton?”

He took the cigar out of his mouth and regarded the cylinder of ash on the end with the kind of satisfaction God probably felt on the Seventh Day. “For Alice. See, the thing is, this kind of lets you off the hook about your rules, don’t it? Because you say no murders, but this guy DiGaudio, the reason he’s pissed off is because he
didn’t
commit a murder.”

I said, “He gave me money.”

“Yeah?” Louie waved the smoke away. “You in the giving vein?”

“You’ve been going to your extension course.
Richard III
, right?” Crooks have more time than most people for self-improvement, but Louie was one of the few I knew who took advantage of it. This year it was a seminar on Shakespeare.

“Yeah. Wouldn’t miss it. Good old Richard, nothing stopped him. We’re in the third week on the histories.”

“Aren’t the histories tough?”

“Naaahhh. They’re a snap. Kings are just crooks with better hats.”

“I always had trouble keeping them straight,” I said. “All those Richards and Henrys.”

“No problem. But tell me something, how the hell do you multiply and divide with Roman numerals?” He sucked long and happily on the cigar and then used the little tool he poked the cigar tip with to scratch the surface of the table. “Let’s say Richard III and Henry VIII and two dukes stick up a place, some minor palace, okay? They get, I don’t know, CCCMMXXXVIII shillings or so. Then they gotta divide that by IV.” He scratched the problem, division sign and all, on the table, and regarded it. “I mean, come on. Look at that.”

I said, “It probably came down to who had the biggest gun.” I pulled out the stack of bills DiGaudio had given me and divided it in half by eye, then tossed it to Louie, who picked it up and dropped it into his pocket. “That should be twenty-five hundred. Count it.”

Louie was looking at the long division problem again. “I trust you.”

“In the interest of accuracy. I mean, it looked kind of cool, splitting it that way, but suppose I got it wrong? Suppose you only got twenty-one hundred?”

“Make a deal with you,” Louie said, tapping the pocket with the money in it. “You can count it and divide it up again if you were wrong, or I can count it, and we keep whatever we’ve got, no matter how it turns out.”

“You’re on.”

Louie pulled out his share, folded the hundreds around the
index finger of his left hand, and flipped through with the thumb and forefinger of his right, so fast I couldn’t follow. When he’d finished, he said, “Okay,” and put the money back in his pocket.

“What do you mean,
okay
? How’d it come out?”

“I didn’t say I’d tell you,” he said.

“Fine.” I slipped my share of the money into the pocket of my T-shirt. “So here’s the deal, here’s what I need help with. And there’ll be more money, assuming we both survive.”

“Sounds good.” He looked down at the small round table with the Roman numerals division problem scratched into it and said, “You know these people are really crazy.”

“Which people?”

“
These
people. Marge ’n Ed. The people who put this place together.” He gripped the table by the circumference and rotated it until he’d turned it halfway. Screwed to the edge was a small rectangular brass plate I hadn’t seen before. Engraved on it were the words,
For good elves only
. “Whaddya suppose they do with the bad elves?” Louie said. “Hang them up in stockings in front of the fireplace and smoke them like hams? Make ’em listen to NPR?”

“What’s wrong with NPR?”

“Oh,” Louie said, screwing up his face, “just spare me all that fucking
concern
, okay? All that sensitivity. All those guys named Noah.”

“Do you want to hear what I need help with, or would you rather foam at the mouth?”

“Sure,” he said sourly. “But next month, stay someplace better.”

“Okay. First, I need to know everything anybody’s saying about Bigelow’s murder. Anything, I don’t care how stupid it sounds. Second, I need to know about the Hammer robbery.”

“That the judge?”

“Yeah, and his wife.”

“Stinky Tetweiler,” Louie said.

“Why? Why Stinky?”

“Jade. They took a fucking bulldozer full of jade. All sorts of carved jade from various centuries that were renowned for people being really good at carving jade. Stinky’s the place you’d take that kind of stuff.”

Louie the Lost never ceases to amaze me. Since he destroyed his credibility as a getaway driver by losing his way in Compton after a diamond robbery—a bunch of jacked-up white gangsters in a Cadillac with a million in ice in the trunk, and half the black population of LA staring in through the windows—Louie has turned into one of the premier telegraph stations of the LA underworld. If he doesn’t know it, nobody does, and if he can’t find a piece of information, it’s buried deeper than Vladimir Putin’s conscience.

“Is there a third?” he said. “You said first and second. Is there a third?”

“Well, I’d like to know who tried to kill me tonight, and how they knew I’d be up in the hills when the only people who were supposed to know were Paulie DiGaudio the cop, Vinnie DiGaudio the crook, and me.”

“I got a feeling about that,” Louie said, getting up and giving a friendly pat to the pocket with the money in it. “My feeling is that you’ll get another look at them next time they try.”

Louie was out
tugging on wires or whatever he does when he’s finding stuff out, and I drove over to a little coffee house on Ventura that had its own computers and would sell you half an hour online to go with your pumpkin-butternut squash latte. Sure enough, there was an email from Rina with a couple of links to the FBI site.

Feeling nice and anonymous on the shop’s computers, I clicked on the links and got images of a bunch of really ratty looking documents, badly typed and with all sorts of stuff handwritten diagonally in the margins, liberally crossed out with black marker all over the place to protect both the innocent and the guilty who had good lawyers. The memos detailed a series of wire taps involving Eddie “The Moose” Salerno, one of the Philly big guys from the fifties, and Sammy “The Ferret” Weiss, a lawyer who was clearly not of Italian descent but had been honored with a nickname anyway. What they were talking about was money, naturally, in this case money given to radio stations to play records by Giorgio and also Bobby Angel. After a moment, I recalled that Bobby Angel was the kid who was mentioned in the interview, the one who disappeared. Rina was clearly right—despite all the rows of XXXXXs, it was obvious that these two salamis were talking about DiGaudio.

Thing is
, The Moose was quoted as saying,
that fuckin’ Bobby Angel, he can sing a little. So the stations, you know, they’re okay with it. But fuckin’ Giorgio, they’re getting sued because people are breaking their fingers hitting the buttons to change the station, when the fucking record comes on, you know, they’re steering into trees, they’re running over grandmothers
.

Weiss had responded,
Not in the towns where he’s been on the TV. Where he’s been on the TV, kids call up and ask for the record. Forget radio, Eddie, radio is last year. The TV is where it’s going. We got to keep getting the kid on the radio just enough to get him on the TV, and then everything takes care of itself. The girlies look at him, and it’s all good, they drive the radio station crazy with calls. And we gotta get the contract, Giorgio’s contract, away from that jerk XXXXXXXXXX
.

So break his fingers
, The Moose said.

Not my department
, Weiss responded.
Anyway, XXXXXXXXX has a few other kids who bring it in, too. What we got to do, we got to get them all, which means we got to get XXXXXXXXX under control before Caponetto and them get hold of him
.

Caponetto? Oh, yes.
Caponetto
. The Philly Mob Wars. I’d forgotten about the Philly Mob Wars. Caponetto had won, if you figure that having Eddie The Moose cut into pieces in the kitchen of a restaurant, sauteed with a nice reduction of port wine sauce, and served as a surprise course to some of his partners counted as a win. And, apparently, DiGaudio’s stable of dreamboys was one of the bones the big dogs had been tussling over. My reaction could be summarized in one word,
Hmm
, and a question: did they get to DiGaudio or not? Was there a chance he
wasn’t
mobbed up?

But good Lord, all that was fifty years ago, I thought as I powered off. Who cares any more? Both mobs had been vaporized in the war and its aftermath. No way a gang tug-of-war over someone called
Giorgio
was connected to any of this.

And I remained certain of that right up to the time I pulled to the curb at the Hollywood Boulevard address DiGaudio had given me—the address where Derek Bigelow had been found—and discovered that the Walk of Fame star where old Derek’s body had been dropped had one of those old-fashioned record players on it and that it said in brass type,
GIORGIO
.

And feeling like my luck had just turned very, very bad, I took the money out of my pocket and counted it. I had nineteen hundred dollars, and Louie had walked away with thirty-one hundred.

B. Harrison Tetweiler III wasn’t your garden-variety crook. For one thing, most crooks—if you don’t count politicians—aren’t born rich. Stinky had been conceived dead-center in the unending river of money that flowed from the invention of the perfume strip. It’s safe to say that without Stinky’s family, global fragrance sales would be substantially lower and it would be possible to sleep in the same room as a copy of
Vanity Fair
.

Stinky’s legend said he’d tried to lead the straight life of a worthy heir, had tried to diversify the perfume strip industry into niche markets such as paperback aromatherapy books, fried chicken ads for a national chain, and, most memorably, celebrity sweat. He’d somehow gotten hold of a T-shirt that had belonged to Tom Cruise, and he hired a chemist to create a molecule that smelled precisely like the cloth that had once brushed against Tom’s armpits, and then he inserted the strips into a few million copies of
Entertainment Weekly
as a come-on for people who might like to subscribe to the Stars’ Sweat of the Month Club.