Free Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan Page A

would still have been salting it.
    I cut the second piece out of my veal chop. “And you left Trenton because?”
    “Because I could.” She looked around the restaurant, Musso & Frank, one of the oldest restaurants in LA, and practically the only place I ever eat in Hollywood. “Do you think anybody would notice if I picked up the bone and just sort of chewed on it?”
    “Most of these waiters have been here since the King of Spain owned the state. They’ve seen it before.”
    “Good.” She grabbed it in both hands.
    “Okay, so Trenton wasn’t hard to say goodbye to. What was the cue to kiss it off, though?”
    “Another bad boy,” she said. The light from the window that opened onto Hollywood Boulevard fell across her face, deepening the blue of her eyes and revealing a dusty little constellation of freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. “I’ve got thisproblem with men. I only like the dangerous ones. If I had a pet, it’d be a coral snake.”
    “And the guy who got you out of Trenton—”
    “Was Donald. Donald had green eyes and he liked other people’s cars. We left Trenton in a Porsche at about 3 A.M . By the time we got to Chicago, we’d also been in a Corvette, in that sweet little Lexus sports coupe, and a Jaguar. Oh, and an Audi. The Audi was for comic relief. As things turned out, so was Donald.”
    My phone rang. “Audi,” I said. “Donald. Hold the thought and gnaw on your bone.”
    “Yeah?” It was Paulie DiGaudio, from the cop branch of the family, returning my call.
    “Your uncle’s putative victim,” I said. “He was doing some blackmailing.”
    Ronnie looked across the table at me, but she didn’t stop picking at the bone.
    “That’s interesting,” DiGaudio said. “Kinda opens it up, doesn’t it? Gives us some more suspects, besides Uncle Vinnie, I mean.”
    “I thought you’d like it. Do you happen to know whether Bigelow was blackmailing your uncle?”
    “Let’s pretend you didn’t ask that.”
    “Fine. I don’t suppose you’ve got a cop I could borrow.”
    A sound that might have been a chortle, if I’d ever heard a chortle to compare it to. “You gotta be kidding me.”
    “Hey, he’s
your
uncle.”
    “You’re it, Bender. Maybe you want a license plate run or something, I could handle that. Check a reverse-directory, something like that, no problem. But if you think I’m calling attention in the department to my uncle the crook, you’re nuts.”
    “Okay,” I said, getting to the actual reason for the call. “Ineed to know whether there’s a current driver’s license issued to someone living at an address in Hollywood. Or any license listing that address in the past five years.”
    “This have anything to do with Vinnie?”
    “It’s what I’m working on,” I said.
    “Okay. Address.”
    “One-four-six-seven Florence. Zip is probably 90068.”
    “Got it. Couple of hours.”
    “And listen. Don’t put any cops on this, no matter what name turns up. The blackmailing thing, well, there could be dangerous people involved, and I don’t want to be walking around with my fly open, not knowing that some cop has already been knocking on doors and asking questions.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” He hung up.
    “That was
extremely
interesting,” Ronnie said. She had the bone in her right hand and a small piece of meat between the thumb and forefinger of her left. “That was a cop, right? First you asked him for something he wouldn’t give you, just to let him say no, and then you got what you really wanted. And everything you told him was true, but it was also a total lie. The address, which is where we just were, has nothing to do with Derek because it was about your landlady’s daughter. So this cop is out getting a name and he doesn’t have any idea why.”
    I nodded. “And?”
    “And he feels like he won the conversation.”
    “I’d shrug modestly, but I need practice.”
    She looked at the piece of meat between her fingers, popped it into