Little Elvises Read Online Free PDF Page B

many people about it as possible. Buy an ad if you got the budget. Maybe a skywriter.”
    He started looking around the room, his ponytail bobbing. Louie was short, wide, and darkly Mediterranean, and if his face had been a house, his forehead would have been the living room, since it occupied about half of the front of his head. For a while he’d worn bangs, but he had a natural curl in his hair, and the bangs flipped up at the ends with a twee effect that made him look like a hitman for the Campfire Girls. Recently he’d grown his hair out and pulled it back with a rubber band in the ever-popular dude-tail so beloved of tiny music executives in pressed jeans. He gave up on searching the motel room, probably because he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore, patted his shirt pocket again, and said, “Got a match?”
    “Here.”
    “You know, my wife, Alice, she’s been working with this broad who teaches people how to get things done,” he said, and took a deep drag, looking cross-eyed at the coal. “Alice, she’s got problems with what she calls
completions
, meaning everything gets kind of half-done and then it lies around the house until I straighten things up and then Alice gets all crazy because she can’t find stuff. Like she’ll open all the bills and organize themalphabetically or by color or size or how she feels about the store they come from or some other fucking thing, and then she’ll tear a bunch of checks out of our check book and then she’ll go on a cruise. And a week later, we’re getting late notices and she’s yelling about how I can’t leave stuff alone, and I’m messing up all her
systems
.”
    By now Louie’s head was so wreathed in smoke I could hardly see him. “So she hires this broad, and for a hundred fifty bucks an hour, the broad tells her—good thing you’re sitting down—to make lists. I coulda done that for free, but it wouldn’t have meant nothing. But, see the problem with lists is that you gotta organize shit in order of
importance
. Otherwise, you keep adding stuff to the top of the list, and before you know it, your list says stuff like
Go to K-Mart for Michael Bolton CD
and
Don’t forget kibble
, and you find yourself sitting in your car, listening to Michael Bolton with a trunk full of kibble, and you learn that you can cross off number three on your list, because
bang
, somebody just capped your journalist.”
    I said, “Michael Bolton?”
    He took the cigar out of his mouth and regarded the cylinder of ash on the end with the kind of satisfaction God probably felt on the Seventh Day. “For Alice. See, the thing is, this kind of lets you off the hook about your rules, don’t it? Because you say no murders, but this guy DiGaudio, the reason he’s pissed off is because he
didn’t
commit a murder.”
    I said, “He gave me money.”
    “Yeah?” Louie waved the smoke away. “You in the giving vein?”
    “You’ve been going to your extension course.
Richard III
, right?” Crooks have more time than most people for self-improvement, but Louie was one of the few I knew who took advantage of it. This year it was a seminar on Shakespeare.
    “Yeah. Wouldn’t miss it. Good old Richard, nothing stopped him. We’re in the third week on the histories.”
    “Aren’t the histories tough?”
    “Naaahhh. They’re a snap. Kings are just crooks with better hats.”
    “I always had trouble keeping them straight,” I said. “All those Richards and Henrys.”
    “No problem. But tell me something, how the hell do you multiply and divide with Roman numerals?” He sucked long and happily on the cigar and then used the little tool he poked the cigar tip with to scratch the surface of the table. “Let’s say Richard III and Henry VIII and two dukes stick up a place, some minor palace, okay? They get, I don’t know, CCCMMXXXVIII shillings or so. Then they gotta divide that by IV.” He scratched the problem, division sign and all, on the table, and regarded it. “I