As most of you know I am the founder of the Hardboiled Collective, a group of crime writers helping each other out getting noticed by readers. This week every member of our group spotlights another member on his / her blog by publishing an excerpt from a member's latest work.
It is an honor for me to feature the following (second) chapter of Timothy Hallinan's wonderful novel Little Elvises.
Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of three series, featuring overeducated Los Angeles private eye Simeon Grist, Bangkok travel writer Poke Rafferty and San Fernando Valley burglar (and private eye for crooks) Junior Bender. His newest book, LITTLE ELVISES, begins when Junior Bender is forced by a corrupt cop to solve a murder for which it's likely the cop's uncle will be arrested. The uncle, Vinnie DiGaudio, made a fortune in the sixties discovering and promoting “little Elvises” – kids off the streets of Philadelphia with a vague resemblance to Elvis Presley.
This is the second chapter of LITTLE ELVISES. The book got a starred review from Booklist, which called it “hugely, splendidly entertaining,” and a rave from Associated Press (“compelling and heart-pounding”), and was just chosen Mystery Pick of the Month by BookPage. The series has been bought for film by Lionsgate.
2
An Original Void
The month’s motel was Marge ’n Ed’s North
Pole at the north end of North Hollywood. The advantage of staying at the North
Pole was that even the small number of people who knew I’d lived in motels
since my divorce from Kathy would never figure I’d stoop that low. The
disadvantage of staying at the North Pole was everything else.
Generally speaking, motels have little to
recommend them, and the North Pole had less than most. But they made me a
moving target, and I could more or less control the extent to which anyone knew
where I was at any given time. I’d been divorced almost three years, and the
North Pole was my 34th motel, and far and away the worst of the bunch.
I’d been put into Blitzen. In an explosion
of creativity, Marge ’n Ed had decided not to number the rooms. Since Clement
Moore only named so many reindeer in “The Night Before Christmas,” Marge ’n Ed
had pressed Rudolph into service and then come up with some names on their own.
Thus, in addition to the reindeer we all know and love, we had rooms named
Dydie, Witzel, Tinkie, and Doris.
Doris wasn’t actually being passed off as a
reindeer. She was Marge ’n Ed’s daughter. Marge, who grew confidential as the
evenings wore on and the level in the vodka bottle dropped, told me one night
that Doris had fled the North Pole with someone Marge referred to as Mr. Pinkie Ring, a pinkie ring being, in Marge’s
cosmology, the surest sign of a cad. And sure enough, the cad had broken
Doris’s heart, but would she come home?
Not Doris. Stubborn as her father, by whom
I assumed Marge meant Ed, whom I always thought of as ’n Ed. Ed was no longer with us, having departed
this vale of sorrows six years earlier. It
was probably either that or somehow orchestrate a global ban on vodka,
and death undoubtedly looked easier.
The string of Christmas lights that
outlined the perimeter of Blitzen’s front window blinked at me in no
discernible sequence, and I’d been trying to discern one for days. They sprang
to life whenever anyone turned on the ceiling light, which was the only light
in the room. I’d tried to pull the cord from the outlet, but Marge ’n Ed had
glued it in place.
“YouTube-dot-com,” Rina said on the phone.
“Y-O-U-Tube, spelled like tube. Aren’t
you there yet?”
Something unpleasant happens even to the
most agreeable of adolescents when they talk to adults about technology. A
certain kind of grit comes into their voices, as though they’re expecting to
meet an impenetrable wall of stupidity and might have to sand their way through
it. Rina, who still, so far as I knew, admired at least one or two aspects of
my character, was no exception. She sounded like her teeth had been wired
together.
“Yes,” I said, hearing myself echo her
tone. “I’ve managed somehow to enter the wonderland of video detritus and I
await only the magical search term that will let me sift the chaff.”
“Dad. Do you
want help, or not?”
“I do,” I said, “but not in a tone of voice
that says I’d
better talk really slowly or he’ll get his thumb stuck in his nostril again.”
“Do I sound like that?”
“A little.”
“Sorry. Okay, the interview is called
‘Vincent DiGaudio Interview.’ Have you got that?”
“Slow down,” I said. “Did you just ask me
whether I can follow the idea that the Vincent DiGaudio Interview is called
‘Vincent DiGaudio Interview’?”
“Oh.” She made a clucking noise I’ve never
been able to duplicate. “Sorry again.”
“Maybe I’m being touchy,” I said. “Thanks.
Anything else?”
“Not on video. I’ll email you the links to
the other stuff, the written stuff. There’s not much of it. He doesn’t seem to
have wanted much publicity.”
“Wonder why,” I said. I figured there was
no point in telling her I was going to be getting involved with a mob guy. She
might worry.
She said, “But the FBI files are kind of
interesting.”
“Excuse me?”
“Somebody used the Freedom of Information
Act,” said my thirteen-year-old daughter, “to file for release of a stack of
FBI files on the outfit’s influence in the Philadelphia music scene. Since
DiGaudio’s still alive and since he never got charged, his name is blacked out,
but it’s easy to tell it’s him because a lot of the memos are about Giorgio.
The files are on the FBI’s site, but I’ll send you the link so you don’t have
to waste time poking around.”
“The FBI site?” I said. “Giorgio?”
“Wake up, Dad. Everything’s online.”
Was I, a career criminal, going to log onto
the FBI site? “Who’s Giorgio?”
“The most pathetic of DiGaudio’s little
Elvises. Really pretty, I mean fruit-salad pretty, but he couldn’t do anything. Tone deaf. He stood on the stage like his
feet were nailed to the floor. But really, really pretty.”
“I don’t remember him in the paper you
wrote.” I was taking a chance here, because I hadn’t actually read all of it.
“I didn’t talk about him much. He was so
awful that he kind of stood alone. He wasn’t an imitation anything, really. He
was an original void.”
“But pretty.”
“Yum yum yum.”
“Thanks, sweetie. I’ll check it out.”
“You can look at Giorgio on YouTube, too,”
she said. “Although you might want to turn the volume way, way down.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s under
‘Giorgio.’”
“Try ‘Giorgio Lucky Star.’ That was the
name of his first hit. ‘Lucky Star,’ I mean. Little irony there, huh? If there
was ever a lucky star, it was Giorgio. If it hadn’t been for Elvis, he’d have been
delivering mail. Not that it did him much good in the long run, poor kid.
Anyway, search for ‘Giorgio Lucky Star.’ Otherwise you’re going to spend the
whole evening looking at Giorgio Armani.”
“Is your mom around?”
A pause I’d have probably missed if I
weren’t her father.
“Um, out with Bill.”
“Remember what I told you,” I said.
“Whatever you do, don’t laugh at Bill’s nose.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Bill’s nose.”
“Just, whatever happens, next time you see
Bill’s nose, don’t laugh at it.”
“Daddy,” she said. “You’re terrible.” She
made a kiss noise and hung up.
It was okay that I was terrible. She only
called me Daddy when she liked me.
I’ve had more opportunity than most people
to do things I’d regret later, and I’ve taken advantage of a great many of
those opportunities. But there was nothing I regretted more than not being able
to live in the same house as my daughter.
I’d wanted to stay in Donder, but it was taken.
“Donder” is a convincing name for a
reindeer. “Blitzen” sounds to me like the name of some Danish Nazi
collaborator, someone who committed high treason in deep snow. But Donder was
occupied, so I was stuck with either Blitzen or Dydie. I chose Blitzen because
it was on the second floor, which I prefer, and it had a connecting door with
Prancer, which was unoccupied, so I could rent them both but leave the light
off in one of them, giving me a second room to duck into in an emergency, a
configuration I insist on. This little escape hatch that has probably saved me
from a couple of broken legs, broken legs being a standard method of getting
someone’s attention in the world of low-IQ crime. And as much as I didn’t like
the name “Blitzen,”there was no way I was going to stay in Prancer. It would
affect the way I thought about myself.
Blitzen was a small, airless rectangle with
dusty tinsel fringing the tops of the doors, cut-outs of snowflakes dangling
from the ceiling, and fluffs of cotton glued to the top of the medicine
cabinet. A pyramid of glass Christmas-tree ornaments had been glued together,
and then the whole assemblage
had been glued to a red-and-green platter,
which in turn had been glued to the top of the dresser. Marge ’n Ed went
through a lot of glue. The carpet had been a snowy white fifteen or twenty
years ago, but was now the precise color of guilt, a brownish gray like a dusty
spiderweb, interrupted here and there by horrific blotches of darkness, as
though aliens with pitch in their veins had bled out on it. The first
time I saw it, it struck me as a perfect
picture of a guilty conscience at 3 a.m.: you’re
floating along in a sort of pasteurized colorlessness, and wham, here comes a black spot that has you bolt
upright and sweating in the dark.
I have a nodding acquaintance with guilty
consciences.
When Andy Warhol predicted that everyone in
the future would be famous for fifteen minutes, he was probably thinking about
something like YouTube. What a concept: hundreds of thousands of deservedly
anonymous people made shaky, blurry videotapes of their pets and their feet and
each other lip-synching to horrible music, and somebody bought it for a
trillion dollars. But then all this idea-free content developed a kind of mass
that attracted a million or so clips that actually had some interest
value, especially to those of us who
occasionally like to lift a corner of the social fabric and peer beneath it.
Vincent DiGaudio Interview popped onto my screen in the oddly
saturated color, heavy toward the carrot end of the spectrum, that identifies
TV film from the seventies. Since I was going to meet DiGaudio in about forty
minutes, I took a good look at him. In 1975, he’d been a beefy, ethnic-looking
guy with a couple of chins and a third on the way, and a plump little mouth
that he kept pursing as though he had Tourette’s Syndrome and was fighting an
outbreak of profanity. His eyes were the most interesting things in his face.
They were long, with heavy, almost immobile lids that sloped down toward the
outer corners at about a thirtydegree angle, the angle of a roof. His gaze bounced
nervously
between the interviewer and the camera
lens.
Vincent DiGaudio had a liar’s eyes.
As the clip began, the camera was on the
interviewer, a famished woman with a tangerine-colored face, blond hair bobbed
so brutally it looked like it had been cut with a broken bottle, and so much
gold hanging around her neck she wouldn’t have floated in the Great Salt Lake.
“. . . define your talent?” she was saying when the editor cut in.
“I don’t know if it was a talent,” DiGaudio
said, and then smiled in a way that suggested that it was, indeed, a talent,
and he was a deeply modest man. “I seen a vacuum, that’s all. I always think
that’s the main thing, seeing in between the stuff that’s already there, like
it’s a dotted line, and figuring out what
could fill in the blanks, you know?” He
held his hands up, about two feet apart, presumably indicating a blank. “So you
had Elvis and the other one, uh, Jerry Lee Lewis, and then you had Little
Richard, and they were all like on one end, you know? Too raw, too downtown for
nice kids. And then you had over on the other end, you had Pat Boone, and he
was like Mr. Good Tooth, you know, like in a kids’ dental hygiene movie,
there’s always this tooth that’s so white you gotta squint at it. So he was way
over
there. And in the middle, I seen a lot of
room for kids who were handsome like Elvis but not so, you know, so . . .”
“Talented?” the interviewer asked.
“That’s funny,” DiGaudio said solemnly.
“Not so dangerous. Good-looking kids, but kids the girls could take home to
meet Mom. Kids who look like they went to church.”
“Elvis went to church,” the interviewer
said.
DiGaudio’s smile this time made the
interviewer sit back a couple of inches. “My kids went to a white church. Probably Catholic, since they were
all Italian, but, you know, might have been some Episcopalians in there. And
they didn’t sing about a man on a fuzzy tree or all that shorthand about
getting—can I say getting laid?”
“You just did.”
“Yeah, well that. My kids sang about first
kisses and lucky stars, and if they sang about a sweater it was a sweater with
a high school letter on it, not a sweater stretched over a big pair
of—of—inappropriate body parts.” He sat back and let his right knee jiggle up
and down, body language that suggested he’d
rather be anywhere else in the world. “It’s
all in the book,” he said. “My book. Remember my book?”
“Of course.” The interviewer held it up for
the camera. “The
Philly Miracle,” she
said.
“And the rest of it?” Di Gaudio demanded.
“Sorry. The Philly Miracle: How Vincent DiGaudio
Reinvented Rock and Roll.”
“Bet your ass,” DiGaudio said. “Whoops.”
“So your—your discoveries—were sort of Elvis with mayo?”
“We’re not getting along much, are we? My
kids weren’t animals. I mean lookit what Elvis was doing on the stage. All that
stuff with his, you know, his—getting the little girls all crazy.”
The interviewer shook her head. “They
screamed for your boys, too.”
He made her wait a second while he stared
at her. “And? I mean, what’s your point? Girls been screaming and fainting at
singers since forever. But you knew if a girl fainted around one of my kids he
wouldn’t take advantage of it. He’d just keep singing, or maybe get first aid
or something.”
She rapped her knuckles on the book’s
cover. “There were a lot of them, weren’t there?”
DiGaudio’s face darkened. “Lot of what?”
“Your kids, your singers. Some people
called it the production line.”
“Yeah, well, some people can bite me.
People who talk like that, they don’t know, they don’t know kids. These were crushes, not love affairs. The girls weren’t going
to marry my guys, they were going to buy magazines with their pictures on the
front and write the guys’ names all over everything, and fifteen minutes later
they were going to get a crush on the next one. So there had to be a next one.
Like junior high, but with better looking boys. Girl that age, she’s a crush
machine, or at least they were back then. These days, who knows? Not much
innocence around now, but that’s what my kids were. They were innocence. They
were, like, dreams. They were never gonna knock the girls up, or marry them and
drink too much and kick them around, or turn out to be as gay as a lamb chop,
or anything like guys do in real life. They were dreams, you know? They came
out, they looked great, they sang for two and a half minutes, and then they
went away.”
“And they did go away. Most of them
vanished without a trace. Are you still in touch with any of them?”
It didn’t seem like a rough question, but
DiGaudio’s eyes bounced all over the room. He filled his cheeks with air and
blew it out in an exasperated puff. “That ain’t true. Some of them, they’re
still working. Frankie does lounges in Vegas. Eddie and Fabio, they tour all
over the place with a pickup band, call themselves Faces of the Fifties or
something like that. They’re around, some of them.”
“And Bobby? Bobby Angel?”
“Nobody knows what happened to Bobby.
Somebody must of told you that, even if you didn’t bother to read the book.
Bobby disappeared.”
“Do you ever think about Giorgio?”
The fat little mouth pulled in until it was
as round as a carnation. “Giorgio,” he finally said. He sounded like he wanted
to spit. “Giorgio was different. He didn’t like it, you know? Even when he was
a big star. Didn’t think he belonged up there.”
“A lot of people agreed with him.”
DiGaudio leaned forward. “What is this, the
Cheap Shot Hour? Even somebody like you, after what happened to that poor kid,
even someone like you ought to think a couple times before piling on. Who are
you, anyway? Some local talent on a TV station in some two-gas-station market.
I mean, look at this set, looks like a bunch of second graders colored it—”
“This is obviously a sore topic for—”
“You know, I came on this show to talk
about a book, to tell a story about music and Philadelphia, about when your
audience was young, about a different kind of time, and what do I get? Miss
Snide of 1927, with your bleeping
jack-o’-lantern makeup and that lawn-mower hair—”
“So, if I can get an answer, what are your
thoughts about Giorgio?”
DiGaudio reached out and covered the camera
lens with his hand. There were a couple of heavily bleeped remarks, and then
the screen went to black.
“My, my,” I said. “Touchy guy.” I glanced
at my watch.
DiGaudio lived in Studio City, way south of
Ventura Boulevard, in the richest, whitest part of the Valley. I had another
thirty-five minutes, and the trip would only take fifteen. I typed in Giorgio Lucky Star.
And found myself looking at fifties
black-and-white, the fuzzy kinescope that’s all we have of so much early
television, just a movie camera aimed at a TV screen, the crude archival
footage that the cameraman’s union insisted on. Without that clause in their
contract, almost all the live television of the fifties would be radiating out
into space, the laugh tracks of the long dead, provoking slack-jawed amazement
among aliens sixty light years away, but completely lost here on earth.
Even viewed through pixels the size of
thumbtacks, Giorgio was a beautiful kid. And Rina was right: he couldn’t
do anything.He stood there as though he’d been told he’d be shot if he moved,
and mouthed his way through two minutes of prerecorded early sixties crap-rock.
Since the face was everything and he wasn’t doing anything with the rest of
himself anyway, the cameras pretty much stayed in closeups, just fading from
one shot to another. No matter where they put the camera, he looked good. He
had the same classical beauty as Presley. Like Presley, if you’d covered his
face in white greasepaint and taken a still closeup, you’d have had a classical
statue, a cousin of Michelangelo’s David.
But unlike the sculpted David, staring into
his future with the calm certainty of someone who knows that God is holding his
team’s pom-poms on the sidelines, Giorgio had the look you see in a crooked
politician who’s just been asked the one question he’d been promised he
wouldn’t be asked, in the athlete who’s been told he has to take the drug test
he knows he’s going to fail.
Giorgio
was terrified.
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