Little Elvises

by Timothy Hallinan

  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.”

  “Good for you.”

  She nodded. “I figure that vengeance is the Lord’s unless it takes him too long.”

  “But why stay here? And what’s with calling Amber and Melissa?”

  She lowered the coffee cup, which she had raised to her lips. “Have you been paying attention? I murdered somebody. Oh, sure he was overdue, but come on. I hit him with a chair, handcuffed him, drove him all the way up here, shot him, and covered him with sand. Does that sound like a self-defense plea? Can you spell premeditation? It’s not just something you can walk away from. So I told a few people I was going various places so nobody’d come looking for me, and then I stayed here and tried to figure out what to do.” She tossed the remainder of her coffee onto something thorny. “Tried is the operative word.”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “Well,” she said, “in the best of all possible worlds, I’d make Lem’s body disappear from the face of the earth, and then I’d arrange for the girls who are buried here to be found so their families could stop wondering what happened to them, and then I’d go home to Mom without leaving a trace that I’d ever been here.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Fine.” She n
odded carefully. “Glad we had this talk.”

  “Do you know how many girls are buried up here?”

  At first, I didn’t think she’d answer. She was looking at me as though I might suddenly sprout claws. But then she said, “Two. The one Lem’s on top of and another one about twenty feet from here, over by that dead Joshua Tree.”

  “Go get your stuff. Everything that belongs to you.”

  “Yeah? I mean, you think we can just take a stroll into a new world? There are bodies here. I killed one of them.”

  “Somebody owes me a favor,” I said. “How’s cell phone reception up here?”

  “It’s good. What else are they going to use all this dirt for? They put cell towers on it. Are you kidding me? About being able to fix this?”

  “You can listen in,” I said, and I dialed Irwin Dressler’s number.

  He answered on the first ring.

  “Here’s where we find out how much you owe me,” I said.

  “Vinnie’s under control,” he said, whatever that meant. “Thanks to you. So I owe you pretty good.”

  “I’m going to give you an address in Twentynine Palms. When your guys get here, they’ll find two graves, a car, and a house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The graves will have white flags over them, dishtowels on sticks. One of the graves has two people in it. The one on top is a male, and he’s relatively fresh. He’s material for one of those lakes you told me about. Nobody should ever be inconvenienced by tripping over the remains and maybe spraining an ankle. Not ever. The other two are women he killed. They’re skeletal. They should be dug up and re-buried someplace eight or ten miles away, and then tips should be called in to the cops, so the families can find out what happened to their daughters.”

  “The guy murdered the girls?”

  “And some others.”

  “You’re having an interesting evening. Is that all?”

  “No. The car will have keys in it. It needs to disappear forever. The house needs to burn down.”

  “This is getting kind of complicated.”

  “Two guys—what are their names? Babe and Tuffy?—or three at most, a couple of hours, what’s complicated? The only tricky part is the reburial. Everything else is just gruntwork. Drive the car off, send it to Mexico to get chopped. And the house will go up like a box of matches. And then we’re even.”

  “I’ll think about that,” Dressler said. “Maybe even, maybe not. Maybe you’ll owe me.”

  “Tonight,” I said.

  “Don’t push. Okay, tonight, but forget even.” He hung up.

  “Come on,” I said to Doris. She had taken a couple of steps away from me as she listened, and her mouth was halfway open. “You’ve got to get your stuff, and I’ve got to make those flags.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Doris asked.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” I said, punching a new number into the phone. I listened until it rang, and then I handed it to her. “Say hello to your mother.”

  An hour and a half later, Doris and I toted a suitcase and three plastic trash bags full of stuff around the big rock I’d parked behind, and I opened the passenger door. As the light from inside the car struck Doris, Fronts said, “Jeez. You can even find a chick in the desert.”

  Doris said to him, “Do you smoke?”

  “Naw,” Fronts said. He ambled into the light. His left arm was all scraped up from hitting the pavement, but other than that he looked the same as always, which is to say terrible. The bandage over the bullet hole in his arm was filthy. He had another Sig Sauer in his hand. Brand loyalty. “I got some other stuff if you want it. Junior, leave your hands there.”

  “Where?”

  “Where they are now. Don’t think about the guns. Hey, is one of them mine?”

  “Used to be,” I said.

  “For Christ’s sake,” said a woman’s voice. “Just shoot them and get it over with.”

  “Hey, Corinne,” I said into the darkness.

  “Like what?” Doris asked.

  Fronts said, “Whaddya mean, like what?”

  “You said you had other stuff. Like what?”

  Fronts scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. “Melaril, which is like a tranquilizer for people in the electric chair. Got some opium, got some Xanax, at least I think I got some Xanax. I took a handful a while back. I got some horse trank, you could ask Junior about it.”

  “I don’t recommend it,” I said. “It was you, wasn’t it, Corrine? You’re the one who put the transmitter on the car.”

  “Second time you dropped by.” I heard her scuffing over the sand before I saw her. Still in black, chewing gum like she was angry at it. Now I could see the rectangular silhouette of the Humvee behind her. “What the hell are you waiting for, Fronts?”

  “I saw Giorgio,” I said. “He told me you kissed him goodbye.”

  She broke stride for a moment, but picked up the pace again. “It wasn’t goodbye,” she said. “I’ll see him again. I’ll always see him again.”

  I said, “I’m sure you will.”

  “You know, Mom,” Fronts said to her, “you didn’t say nothing about shooting no chick.”

  Corrine said, “Who cares? Shoot one, shoot two, what’s the difference? And don’t call me Mom, dammit.”

  “You shoot everybody who asks you for a smoke?” Doris said. She was ignoring Corinne completely, and I was liking her better by the minute.

  “Chicks are extra, Mom,” Fronts said. “On account that I don’t like shooting them.”

  “I’ve paid you a fortune,” Corinne said. “And so far it’s been one fuckup after another.”

  “You don’t look much like your mom,” Doris said.

  “Thanks,” Fronts said. He was looking at her with interest. His eyes were on her forearms. “You a cutter?”

  “When I was a kid,” Doris said. “After my father died.” She held out her left arm, which had a series of fine-ridged scars cross-hatched into it. “It kept me going.”

  “I do it two-handed,” Fronts said. “I’m ambidextrous.”

  “Yeah?” She studied him. “You can write with both hands?”

  “In a mirror, too,” Fronts said. His eyes came to mine for a moment, and he looked embarrassed. “Sometimes I get it backward.”

  “I quit after a few years,” Doris said. “You should stop. Infections are the shits.”

  “I don’t get infected,” Fronts said. “I just take antibiotics all the time.”

  Doris shook her head. “Antibiotics are bad for your stomach.”

  “This is enough of this,” Corinne said, and there was a small gun in her hand. To Fronts, she said, “You’re not getting paid to stand around discussing your psychoses. Just get it over with so we can get out of here.”

  “She’s the only thing that ties Derek to Irwin Dressler,” I said to Fronts.

  “You shut up,” Corinne said, and she pointed her gun at me, but Fronts put out a hand in a lazy gesture and shoved her shoulder, and she stumbled sideways and almost went down.

  He said, “Say what?”

  “Irwin Dressler. He was connected to Vinnie and Corinne, and he’d be happier if there weren’t any links around. You know, he just wants to lead a peaceful life.”

  “Irwin Dressler,” Fronts said. “The old guy.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Shoot him, or I will,” Corinne said. Her voice was getting shrill. “Just do your fucking job.”

  “And he’s interested,” Fronts said. “Irwin is.”

  “Like I said.”

  Doris said, “You wouldn’t shoot another cutter.”

  “You’re a nice girl,” Fronts said. “But just so you know, Junior has a lot of girlfriends.”

  “That’s it,” Corinne said. “Bunch of morons.” She held the gun at arm’s length and aimed it at my head, and Fronts reached over and plucked it from her hand.

  He said, “Sorry, Mom,” and tossed the little gun into the darkness.

&
nbsp; Corinne jumped at him and grabbed his shoulder. “I am not your mom, you stupid freak retard, if I were your mom I’d have a retroactive abortion. Give me that gun, you dumb fuck, you fat, disgusting—”

  Fronts put his free hand around Corinne’s throat. He was so big his fingers almost met. Corinne’s voice went up a few squeezed notches, but she kept grabbing at him, clawing at his arm with her nails.

  Fronts said, “Irwin Dressler.”

  “Doesn’t want any links,” I said.

  Corinne emitted a strangled scream and kneed Fronts between the legs, and he turned to her, looking irritated, and the gun in his hand went off with a bang that rebounded immediately from the rockpile behind us and then spread out over the desert floor. Corrine was flung back until she slammed against the side of the Hummer. She slowly slid to a sitting position, her eyes wide, a stain spreading out from the center of her chest.

  Fronts said, “Oops.”

  There was a silence of ten or twenty seconds. I heard Doris swallow. Then Corinne made a rattling sound.

  I said to Fronts, “We’ve got a shovel.”

  At ten in the morning, my cell phone rang. I had to reach across Ronnie’s bare back to get it. She didn’t even stir.

  I said, “It’s early.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.” It was Paulie DiGaudio. “Try working a real job sometime.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Vinnie’s in Costa Rica,” Paulie said. “The guy who told the Hollywood cops that Vinnie was going to hire him to do Derek Bigelow now says he made the whole thing up. Says he was just trying to get attention. He’s needed attention his whole life, he says.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  “But there’s also that new dead guy in Vinnie’s house, the wheelchair guy, so I’m not completely happy.”

  “Who is, these days?”

  “So okay, the new guy is a suicide. But I don’t have anybody for Derek. And you remember, that was the other part of the problem: One, get Vinnie off the hook, and two, nail somebody for Derek,”

  “Derek had a lot of enemies. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn somebody hired a pro.”