Free Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan

waits for night to arrive. “Who lives here?”
    “Right now, probably nobody. Until recently, it was occupied by a guy who wears a pinkie ring and the daughter of the woman who owns the motel I’m living in this month.”
    “That sentence opens up so many questions I can’t even figure out which one to ask.”
    “All will be revealed,” I said, climbing the three cement steps to the front door.
    “When?” She was behind me, but hanging back, and I didn’t blame her. The bungalow practically rippled with unhappiness.
    “At lunch.” I keyed the door and pushed it open, and was greeted by the stale, old-paper odor of an uninhabited house. “Coming in?”
    Marge was right: The place had been cleaned with a suspicious amount of energy. I could even see the tracks left by a handheld vacuum on the couch cushions. The house had been rented furnished and the furniture was still on hand, so if it ever came down to hairs and fibers, traces probably lingered here and there, but not for want of trying to remove them.
    “I need the bathroom,” Ronnie said. “I always need the bathroom when I’m someplace weird.”
    “I’m sure it’s sparkling clean,” I said. “Probably down the hall.”
    “Spooky houses,” she said, going down the hallway, “are spookier in the daytime.”
    The living room walls had been painted a bad-mayonnaise yellow, and most of the light in the room was absorbed by a floor of dark-chocolate linoleum with a pumpkin swirl in it, probably laid down over the original oak floors back in the fifties, when the first thing people did when they bought an old house was to wreck it. In the dining-room, the toxic yellow walls gave way to pink-patterned wallpaper in a vaguely Aubrey Beardsley nouveau-decadent pattern, printed on what looked like aluminum foil. A dusty, cobwebbed chandelier in wrought iron hung over the round Formica table. Three chairs were pulled up to the table while a fourth, missing a rear leg, loitered drunkenly against the wall. The effect was depressing beyond measure.
    “Hey,” Ronnie called. “Come look at this.”
    I went down the hall and found her standing at the doorway of a bathroom that had a quarter of an inch of water on the floor. “You went in
there
?” I asked.
    “It was dry when I went in. This happened when I washed my hands. I turned on the water, and all of this came out of the cabinet under the sink.”
    The day got even dimmer. I said, “Oh, no.”
    “Oh, no what?”
    “Let me look at the kitchen,” I said. I didn’t want to, but I had to. Ronnie followed me back down the narrow hallway and grunted at the sight of the dining room wallpaper as though someone had punched her in the stomach. In the kitchen, I went down on one knee in front of the sink and opened the door to the cabinet beneath it. Then I said, “Shit. Shit, shit
shit
.”
    “What? What is it?”
    “Same reason the bathroom got wet.” I pulled the door all the way open and showed her the drainage pipe that ran down from the center of the sink. It ended abruptly about eight inches above the bottom of the cabinet. “The traps have been taken.”
    “The traps?”
    “You know. That elbow-bend in the pipe that’s always under a drain. It’s there to catch anything valuable, rings or anything, that might fall down there.”
    “But why would anyone want those?”
    “He didn’t want the traps. He wanted whatever might have been in them. Hair, for example. Anything that might have had DNA on it.”
    Ronnie took a couple of steps back, looking around the room as though transparent forms were writhing in the air. The house chose that moment to creak. She said, “Can we leave now?”

“Trenton, New Jersey,” Ronnie said, and then swallowed. “A great place to be from and a terrible place to go back to.” A few scraps of steak clung to the bone in front of her, a steak that had disappeared while I was still buttering bread. I’d never seen a woman eat that fast. My former wife, Kathy,