Read Online Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan - Free Book Online

your tall, silent, nicely muscled friend?” She lifted eyes the color of lapis lazuli up to my face. “Haven’t
you
ever—”
    I said, “Suggest something.”
    She looked up at me, wrapping me in that lapis blue, for the span of a couple of accelerated heartbeats and then one eyebrow went up a sixteenth of an inch, and she stepped back and held the door open. “Come on in,” she said. “I’ll make some coffee.”
    “He was mean when he was drunk,” she said, plonking three blue-and-white Chinese-willow cups onto their saucers, “and boring when he was sober. He had the personal hygiene of a truffle. There was no woman he ever met,
ever
, that he didn’t make a pass at. He had terrible taste in clothes. He had British teeth. Sugar?”
    Louie and I took our coffee black and unsweetened, and it was pretty good. The apartment was basic but neat and bright, with blond wood Ikea furniture and rugs of a slightly overstimulated robin’s-egg blue. The long wall in the living room was floor-to-ceiling books, always a good sign. The titles were eclectic with a slight tilt toward biography, and not all of women, which I tookas another good sign. No matter how militantly we may be either male or female, it’s no stretch to admit that the world has seen interesting specimens of both sexes.
    “I don’t mean to be personal—” I said.
    “Why not?” she said. She looked down at her bare feet as though she’d just bought them and hadn’t made up her mind about them yet. “I was insanely drunk, and I thought his accent was cute. We were in Las Vegas. He told me he was a novelist, working on a book written from a woman’s perspective, and he was being devoured by insecurity about whether he was capable of carrying it off.
Devoured
was the word he used, and I was drunk enough to think that sounded sensitive. I’m a fool for sensitive.” She regarded her feet for another moment and then gave them a resigned-looking nod of acceptance. She said to me, “Are you sensitive?”
    “I sand my fingertips.”
    She gave it a moment’s thought, which was more than it deserved, and said, “Why?”
    “Certain kinds of locks,” I said. “Certain kinds of locks require an elevated sense of touch.”
    Louie waved a hand to interrupt the confession. “So, your former, um, this guy you—”
    “My deceased better half?” Ronnie Bigelow asked.
    “Yeah. Him. Derek.”
    “Is there a question there somewhere?” She turned to me. “And why are you interested in locks?”
    This time, Louie literally leaned in between us. “Derek, he made his money writing for those little rags you read in line at the market, right?”
    “Ah, well, that’s an interesting question.” She sipped her coffee. “Here’s what he would do. This is how Derek Bigelow eked out a living. He would scuttle along the bottom of the seaof life, down where all the shit eventually winds up, looking for something that would cause pain to some people and give a cheap thrill to some other people. The people he would cause pain to were generally rich and famous, and the people to whom he would give a cheap thrill couldn’t afford an expensive one. They’re almost all women, and nothing lifts their poverty-stricken little hearts like learning that some rich, glamorous movie star has gained three hundred pounds and is living on an intravenous supply of coconut milk, or that
this
female sitcom star is gay and secretly married to a transsexual NFL tackle, or
that
country music star has three children of, ahem, mixed race, chained to the wall of some tar-paper shack in North Carolina. Cancer, mastectomies, secret sex-change operations, plastic surgery gone horribly awry. In other words, stuff that demonstrates that misery, despite all the evidence to the contrary, actually
does
get its claws into the people who have everything.”
    “Pay much?” I asked.
    The question almost brought a smile. “Aren’t you quick. No, it doesn’t. And Derek had an expensive nose,