Read Online Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan - Free Book Online Page B

“But we have to make a stop first.”
    ° ° °
    “Hollywood,” she said , looking out the window. “If this is glamour, you can keep it.” Louie had gone back to pulling on wires, and Ronnie and I were stuck in traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, not too far from the stretch of sidewalk where Derek Bigelow had washed up, extravagantly fractured, on Giorgio’s star. “I was so horrified when I first got here. Hard to imagine it was ever anything but awful.”
    “In the thirties,” I said. “It was really something in the thirties.”
    “Hmmm,” she said, glancing at my left hand on the steering wheel. “What’s your wife like?”
    I said, “She’s recently divorced.”
    “Oh, my. I’m sorry. Well, no, I guess I’m really not.”
    “You’re forward,” I said. “Has anybody ever told you that?”
    “If I were a man,” she said, “you’d describe me as
decisive. Goal-oriented
. Something like that. And no one has used the word
forward
in years and years. Would it be out of line for me to ask what happened? With your marriage, I mean.”
    “According to the laws of polite discourse in the twenty-first century,” I said, “women are allowed to ask any man any question that comes to them at any time, and a man who doesn’t answer it is marked for life as emotionally unresponsive.”
    “I wish someone had told me that years ago. What happened?”
    “We were too different, I guess. And we got more different as time went by.”
    She put her feet up on the dashboard. “I’ve always thought differences make for more interesting relationships. What’s the fun in being with somebody who thinks all the same things you do? It’d be like watching a TV channel that doesn’t show anything except your own home movies.”
    “There’s different, and then there’s different. If we’d had any less in common, it would have been an interspecies marriage.”
    “But that’s vague, isn’t it? There’s always a main issue, a specific issue. With Derek and me it was that he was a shit and I wasn’t. What was it with you?”
    “I suppose it was mainly my job.”
    The light changed eight or nine cars ahead of us and we went through the inevitable urban pause while several drivers tried to remember how to get their foot from the brake to the accelerator. When we were finally moving, she said, “Which is what?”
    “I steal things.”
    “What
is
it with me?” she asked. “I go from a blackmailer with a terrible prose style to a thief.”
    “I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
    “Oh, pshaw,” she said, actually pronouncing it. “Don’t pretend. You know what’s going on.”
    “Yeah, I suppose I do.”
    Ronnie leaned forward and fiddled with one of the sandals decorating my dashboard. She had painted only the smallest toenail on each perfect foot, just a tiny dot of color at the border between foot and not-foot. “Tell me at least that you only steal from the rich.”
    “Okay.”
    She put an elbow out the open window. “That’s a little better.”
    “They’re the only ones with anything worth taking. What are you going to steal from the poor? Aspirations?”
    “It’s not going to make any difference,” she said. “Whatever you tell me, however awful, it’s not going to make any difference. We’re still going to get into trouble.”
    I said, “Glad to hear it.”
    “Exactly what are we doing here?” Ronnie asked. We were picking our way up a concrete walkway to a peeling clapboardbungalow on a street folded in between Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset. The neighborhood hadn’t been fashionable seventy years ago and still wasn’t. The lawn looked like it hadn’t been watered since the Hoover administration.
    “We’d be breaking in,” I said, “except that I’ve got a key. Although we could still break in, if you’d like to get a feel for it.”
    She slowed down, looking dubiously at the bungalow, which was rapidly approaching shack status and looked like the place where dark