Free Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan Page B

her mouth, and said around it, “And then there’s the fact that you’re a crook but you seem to be working for cops. I know there are cops who work for crooks, but I didn’t think it worked the other way around. And while I’m on this topic, I probably shouldask you why you’re interested in Derek in the first place. I would have asked back at my apartment, but you distracted me.”
    “Well, you distracted me, too.”
    “See what I mean? It may be true, but it’s not an answer.” She eyed the veal chop on my plate. “You going to finish that?”
    “I’ve barely started it.”
    “That’s not an answer, either. Yes or no?”
    “Every last ounce. And then I’m going to take the bone home and have it bronzed.”
    “Jiminy. So what’s the deal? What are you, a crook or a cop?”
    “I’m a burglar. That’s where my heart is, as people say these days. But once in a while, I help out other crooks who have a problem, who got ripped off or something and for obvious reasons can’t go to the cops. It’s a sideline, sort of. And now I’ve got a cop pressuring me to do a favor for him, or he’ll put me in jail for something I didn’t do, and the favor involves the fascinating question of who killed Derek. And the woman who owns the motel I’m living in at the moment thinks something has happened to her daughter and asked me to check it out. And my waist is thirty-two and my inseam is thirty-four. How’d you get from Chicago to LA?”
    She pulled the bread basket over and rifled through it. Before we left the apartment, she’d replaced the fork through her hair with a chopstick, which she deemed dressier. The way she ate, it was surprising she didn’t have a whole table setting in her hair. “You’re more interesting than I am,” she said.
    “To you, maybe. Chicago is what, about seventeen hundred miles from LA?”
    “That’s one way to look at it. Are you hoarding the butter?” I pushed it over to her. “Another way to look at it is that Chicago is three guys away from LA. After I chased Donald off, in Chicago, I got kind of hooked up with DeWayne, and you
know
he had to be hot to overcome a name like that. Do you think some names are hot and some names aren’t?”
    “Definitely.”
    “Yeah? How do you feel about Ronnie?”
    “I like Veronica better.”
    “You and everybody else, except me. And, I’ve got to tell you, you’ve got more to overcome in the name department than DeWayne did. I mean,
Junior?
What’s the least hot name for a woman?”
    “Tillie. So, DeWayne. What did he do, run numbers?”
    “DeWayne was a dealer. The straightest, most organized dealer ever. Never touched anything more stimulating than chocolate. Had a six-state route and ran it regularly. Like a milkman, but with dope. And he was gorgeous. If there’d been a dope dealer’s calendar, he’d have been Mr. January to get everybody’s year off to a good start.”
    “But the relationship didn’t last,” I said, cutting into the veal chop and watching her eyes follow my hands. “Did his beauty fade tragically, or what?”
    “Actually, I developed a weensy substance abuse problem. I got to the point where I needed four lines to tie my shoes. And it finally hit me that DeWayne, with his infinite stash, probably wasn’t the ideal companion, so I split. We were out on his route, in Taos, New Mexico. He had artist clients there. Artists do a lot of dope, did you know that? So when this guy Leon wanted to paint me, I took my suitcase out of DeWayne’s car and started posing.”
    “Leon, he do dope?”
    “Leon didn’t do anything except downers, and I hate downers. That was his appeal, that I didn’t want his dope. How can you just sit there and talk with all that nice food in front of you? Some poor little calf lived and died in a tiny wooden pen so youcould have that chop, and you’re not paying any attention at all to it. Do you think if I told you all about how they raise veal, you’d lose your appetite and