Shooting Elvis Read online

  12

  I bought a newspaper and jumbo cup of coffee at the 7-Eleven on Sunset, parked and read it down the street from Alice’s. News coverage of the airport bombing had dropped to a small box in the lower left corner of page five, pushed back by newer and bigger disasters. The article went:

  Blast Victim Identified

  Los Angeles—Police identified the sole fatality of the July 10 bombing at LAX as Viktor Kabyenko, age 47. Identification had been delayed, according to the Coroner’s Office, due to the fragmented nature of the remains. Police investigators theorize Mr. Kabyenko was standing at or near the epicenter of the blast. Born in Moscow, Kabyenko defected from the Soviet Union in 1982. He became a naturalized citizen in 1986 and was active in the import-export business at the time of his death.

  The way I was thinking, Mr. Kabyenko was hardly an innocent victim. It looked to me like he made a deal with Frick and Frack for whatever was supposed to be in the case. Only Frick and Frack for one reason or another didn’t want Mr. Kabyenko around after he delivered it. When Jerry relieved me that afternoon, I drove to the office to talk to Ben, see if I could trick him into helping me a little.

  It was about a hundred degrees in the office when I got there. Ben was wedged into the chair nearest the window. He’d taken off his shoes, his feet propped on the desk looked big as hams. His head was tilted back over the chair. His eyes were closed. He was listening to opera on a boom box. I didn’t know much about opera, the cassette next to it said La Boheme. A dead meat smell mingled with a couple dozen cigarette butts stubbed out in a black ashtray from the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas. Two pizza boxes, family size, lay twisted near the trash can.

  I turned down the boom box, said, “You keep eating and smoking this way, you’ll kill yourself.”

  Ben peeled open an eye, said, “That’s one way to lose weight, I guess.”

  I kicked at the pizza boxes.

  “You eat both these yourself?”

  “Sure did.”

  “That’s kinda excessive, you think?”

  “About normal. I’m what you call a binge eater. Sometimes I eat a whole lot. Other times, just a lot.”

  He pointed to a broken six-pack on top of the file cabinet.

  “How about gettin’ me a Coke?”

  The Coke can was about ninety degrees. Ben chugged it in ten seconds flat, tossed the empty at the trash can. He missed by a good three feet. His lungs hacked the debris from his last cigarette, cleared it out for a fresh smoke, which he lit and dangled from his lower lip. I lifted the Nikon from my bag, looked at Ben in the changed world of the lens, trimming and shaping his image through the viewfmder.

  He said, “Don’t you got better things to do than annoy me?”

  I snapped a shot of him, the cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth, his head turning away, his eyes half closed as the back of his hand flashed through the frame.

  I said, “I wanna learn about the detective business.”

  Ben flicked an ash in the direction of the Stardust ashtray, said, “You’re workin’ already. What more you need to know?”

  “How to find people.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “I dunno, just people.”

  Ben started to move. He rolled his legs onto the floor, moaned as though the effort might kill him. He swiveled around and pitched forward in his chair. I thought he was going all the way over, face first onto the floor, but he knew his own gravity and the chair held under him. He rummaged around behind his desk, came up with a massive three-ring binder. He held it a foot above his desk and let it drop.

  “This is my missing persons book.”

  He flipped it open at random, waved me over.

  “Whenever anybody offers a reward to bird-dog the missing, they go here into this book. Mostly it’s kids they want to find, but you got people from all walks of life here. Guys went out to the store for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Girls went hitchhiking, destination nowhere. Runaways. Missing heirs and heiresses. Amnesia cases. And the biggest section of all, child-custody kidnaps.”

  I said., “Let’s say the person isn’t missing, but say, just for examples he works in import-export and you need to find out where he lives without anybody knowing you’re asking.”

  Ben lit up, watched the smoke drift like he was thinking hard, said, “Well, if it was a client situation, I’d run a credit check, then as backup I’d get a friend of mine to look him up with the Department of Motor Vehicles, then to back up the backup I’d hire three operatives, have them work a three-man tails follow the guy around until we knew where he lived, where he ate, if he was getting any, how often he was getting it and with whos should be able to bill a couple grand that way.”

  I said, “You don’t get much business, do you?”

  “No, but what I do get I maximize.”

  “What would you do if it wasn’t a client situation?”

  Ben pointed to the white pages, said, “I’d look in the phone book.”

  I looked at him insulted he thought I was so stupid.

  “Rule one in detective work is try the obvious first. What’s the guy’s name?”

  “No guy at all, it was just a hypothetical.”

  “If I want bullshit, I’ll buy a fifty-pound sack.”

  I thought, Why not, said, “Kabyenko.” Spelled it for him, too.

  Ben pulled the white pages from the shelf, looked it up, asked, “Mikhail?”

  “Viktor.”

  He dropped that book on the floor, selected another from the shelf, thumbed the pages, turned it around for me to see. “There’s a Viktor Kabyenko in Woodland Hills, on Ellenview.”

  I looked at him like, shocked, said, “That was easy!”

  Ben turned the boom box up again. I listened a few minutes, high-pitched voices, low-pitched voices, classical music in between, I just didn’t get it. I said, “Hey, how come a guy like you is interested in sissy stuff like opera?”

  Ben said, “Opera is the only place in the world where the hero is a fat guy who gets the girl in the end. Maybe he gets shot, stabbed or hacked to bits, but at least he gets laid.”

  A white convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche was parked in front of the loft when I got home. In the fading twilight, its paint glistened as pure and virginal as the creamy white hind parts of an angel. I coasted to a stop a good car-length behind the Rolls, rode the last few yards to the curb with both feet on the brake pedal I was so terrified of hitting the thing. Up the block, a warm gust of Santa Ana wind swept a sheet of newsprint down a garbaged-up gutter, lofted it over a flattened trash can, sailed it past the street-stripped Buick two doors down. The newspage, cartwheeling and skidding through the air, seemed certain to make a direct hit on the Rolls, until a last-minute shift in wind direction drifted it slightly off course, saved the Rolls from a smudge or worse.

  I found out whose car it was when I walked into the studio. Billy b was talking to Bobby Easter, didn’t see me come in. I went to my room. All those hard surfaces, high ceilings, sound really traveled in the loft. I sat and listened. They were talking about me. Weird experience, listening to somebody you know talk about you when they don’t know you’re there.

  Bobby Easter said, “You mean that sweet little girl?”

  “That sweet little girl is a killer,” Billy b answered.

  “I mean, she was right there in the gallery with me.”

  “And you didn’t have a clue.”

  “She wouldn’t do anything violent, would she?”

  “Depends on how far she’s pushed, I think.”

  “Define far.”

  “That’s the one thing I don’t know.”

  “You’re calling the police, of course.”

  “No. I’m letting her stay.”

  “Suppose she tries to kill you.”

  “She won’t.”

  “The cops will throw you in jail just for having a cup of coffee with a person like that.”

  “I should be so l
ucky. Think about Jeff Koons.”

  Jeff Koons was one of Billy b’s idols. Some painter and sculptor invented kitsch as an art form. Did the kind of little dogs in ceramic my mom would buy in a drugstore, the ones with pink tongues, big eyes and bow collars, only Mom paid about a buck-fifty for hers, and Koons sold his little dogs for thousands of dollars.

  Bobby Easter said, “What about Jeff Koons?”

  “You remember what happened to his career when he married a famous Italian porn star?”

  “I get it, good publicity.”

  “Not just publicity. A whole new work. A series of paintings devoted to famous American criminals.”

  “It’s one thing to have Kim Basinger on your wall, something else Charles Manson.”

  “Think of crime as part of consumer culture. What we’re dealing with here is the entertainment business. Criminals are celebrities now, big as movie stars. It’s the commercialization of bad taste in behavior. It’s kitsch.”

  Bobby Easter said, “Yeah, but I can get a hard-on looking at Kim Basinger.”

  “You don’t think this girl can give you a hard-on?”

  “What about that hooker a year back, the Beverly Hills madam, remember her? The one arrested with all those Hollywood names in her little black book.”

  “Exactly what I’m talking about. Imagine walking into your gallery, and there she is, Heidi Fleiss, up on the wall bigger than life, next to that woman who cut off her husband’s dick.”

  “Lorena Bobbit? Scary woman.”

  “Then, at the end of the gallery, screened off and alone in a small room, you walk up to this.”

  A noise, sounded like a big canvas being moved.

  Bobby Easter said, “Kinky but still cute. It works, but from a publicity angle, it works better if you two are fucking.”

  “Since when do you have to worry about me not fucking someone?”

  They laughed.

  Easter asked, “But what if she doesn’t get caught?”

  Billy b said, “I’m just a painter. Publicity is your responsibility.”

  I lay back on the bed, waited until Bobby Easter left the studio. I got up, washed my face in the bathroom, picked up a carving knife in the kitchen, walked into Billy b’s studio. He sat on a stool, stared at the painting of me. I almost softened, seeing him look at his painting. But I didn’t. I walked up to him with the knife in my hand. He looked at the knife, didn’t understand what I wanted with him, held his hands up, pretending I was going to stab him. I slapped the knife handle against his right palm, showed him my spine.

  “You wanna stab me in the back, now’s your chance.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I bared my neck to him.

  “Maybe you’d rather slit my throat.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  He tossed the knife onto his workbench.

  “I’m a lunatic, a killer.”

  “You were here, heard Bobby talking to me.”

  “Not exactly. I was here, heard you talking to Bobby.”

  “I didn’t tell Bobby any different than I told you.”

  “I haven’t heard you tell me I was a killer before.”

  “That was just to get him juiced up about the new work.”

  “You tell him who I am just to get him excited, help you sell a few more paintings?”

  Billy b looked at me like he didn’t see a problem, said, “Sure.”

  “You just about ordered him to call the cops on me.”

  Billy b got up from his stool, tried to put his arm around me, said, “Why would I go to the trouble of buying you a new identity if I was going to turn you in the next day? If you think about it logically, you might see I’m trying to make it possible for you to stick around a little while, not get arrested right away.”

  I pushed him away, walked out the door. Funny thing is, I wasn’t so much bothered by the fact he was getting ready to sell me down the river as I was his crack about fucking.

  13

  Close to midnight, half the cars downtown were cops prowling for drunks, the other half drunks trying to stay clear of the cops. I looked like trouble in the mini-truck, just the kind of social misfit who might drink and drive, not have insurance. I kept the speedometer five miles under the speed limit into Hollywood. I knew where Jerry would come down the Hollywood Hills onto Beechwood, parked there at a quarter to midnight. I spotted the hulking shape of his van as it sped down the hill, flashed my headlights one-two, one-two.

  He drove right on by. I thought he’d missed the signal until he pulled a U-turn in the middle of Beechwood, drove past me again, this time heading up canyon. Jerry had a head for intrigue. I started the truck and followed him. The houses thinned. Roadside trees flashed silver and green in my headlights. The truck’s big tires thumped from asphalt to dirt, gravel kicked against the undercarriage. The houses disappeared. The road wound into a scrub-brush canyon. My headlights picked up a horse corral and barn in the distant dark. It was crazy. Five miles from Sunset and Vine, here it was cowboy country. But that’s L.A. From any point in the city it’s always five miles to the other side of the world.

  Jerry nosed the van up to the corral and cut his lights. Had a beer waiting for me when I got out of the truck, but what I had in mind that night, I asked for a Coke instead. I rested my foot on the lowest rung of the split-rail fence, looked at the jagged black line of the ridge against the blue black sky. The horses stood at the opposite end of the corral. About twenty in the herd, most with mustang blood, short and squat with blockish heads. “Whore-ses,” Jerry called them, because they worked the tourist trade, would give a ride to anybody with twenty bucks. I popped the tab on my Coke. The lone pinto in the herd wandered over, the slow clop of her hoofs on dirt a dim memory of afternoons in the corral where my sister at fifteen kept an old mare about the same age.

  I said, “I was just thinking tomorrow I might try to park down the hill, take my camera and go around to the back of Alice’s house, maybe fool Joe into thinking nobody was watching.”

  “Only one thing wrong.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re thinking again. Not that I don’t think you’re smart, because I’m sure you are, but like I said before, you don’t know anything, and if you don’t know anything, thinking can be dangerous.”

  “So we’re kinda protecting her just by being there, is that it?”

  “Sure, something like that.”

  I filled a cupped hand with Coke, offered it across the fence. The pinto sniffed at it. Jerry told me to be careful, and I said, “No problem,” because I knew the horse might get confused, give my hand a good nip. So I was careful, the pinto was cautious, between the two of us she lipped the Coke down just fine.

  Jerry thought that was pretty good, I could tell by the way he grinned. He asked me, “Know how to ride?”

  I told him I rode some as a girl.

  “Few things sexier than a girl on a horse.”

  “Except maybe a boy on a horse.”

  “I know the people here, can get us saddled up in fifteen minutes. You take that trail up the ridge, there’s a patch of open country up top, and further on, you get a view of the whole damn city, lights sparkling like stars far as you can see. The horses here know the trail so well, all we’d have to do is hang on to the pommel and offer a little encouragement.”

  It was about the most romantic idea I’d ever heard. At some point in the ride we’d dismount and look up at the quarter moon and the stars and let biology take its course with the same surefootedness of our mounts on the trail.

  I was angry at Billy b but not that angry. I told Jerry he was a good guy, I liked him but I had a boyfriend. Said what a great painter Billy b was, how interesting the people he knew. Really talked up the scene. Jerry listened quietly, nodded every now and then, drank his Miller.

  When I stopped talking, he said, “I was hoping you came up here tonight to talk about something a little different than your boyfriend.”


  “Actually, I was hoping to borrow a crowbar, maybe a flashlight if you got one.”

  “What do you need a crowbar for?”

  “I need to break into a house.”

  “What’s the matter, we’re not paying you enough, you need to supplement your income with a little breaking and entering?” Jerry opened the side door to his van, dug out a tool box.

  I said, “It’s not what you think. It’s a friend’s house.”

  “Sure, and your friend forgot to pay the electric bill, so that’s why you need the flashlight.”

  I asked, “You know anything about alarms?”

  He handed me the crowbar and flashlight, said, “Sure. If you’re where you shouldn’t be and one goes off, you should probably leave.”

  Good advice. I walked back to the truck.

  Jerry walked with me, said, “You don’t know much, do you?”

  “Just enough to get arrested, probably.”

  “Go in through a window where nobody can see you. Look for contacts, those are little things by the window corners, if somebody opens the window, they go off. If you see one, break out the glass, crawl through without opening the frame. If you see something looks like tape around the edge of the window, that means you can’t break the glass without setting off the alarm. If you see both tape and contacts, you need a glass cutter. If they have a motion detector, forget it, you won’t see it until you’re caught. But this is Southern California, every little earthquake sets those things off, so you probably won’t have to worry. Once inside, go to the closet nearest the front door, that’s where they usually put the controls. If you don’t see any, you’re fine. Also, listen for the phone ringing, security companies usually call first to see if it’s a false alarm. Got all that?”

  “Sure. Why you know all this, anyway?”

  “There’s a whole hell of a lot about me you don’t know.”

  I liked that and I didn’t, and I liked it for reasons I shouldn’t have. Just before I started the engine he leaned into the open window, said, “If you ever wanna go on that midnight ride, let me know.”