Dating Dead Men

by Harley Jane Kozak

  For the first time all night, P.B. spoke.

  “I know them.”

  He stood and looked over my shoulder. Before I could react, he shouted, “I know you, I know who you are!” and stepped in front of me, out into the open, the object he carried held aloft like a talisman.

  Doc and I came to our senses at the same moment, jumped up, and knocked into each other. I pushed my way around him, frantic to grab my brother.

  “Assassins!” P.B. yelled, as I caught his shoulder. “I saw you shoot him—I saw!”

  The Swede under the hood had straightened up. He called out a single word. The driver's door opened.

  P.B.'s arms were raised like an avenging angel. I got him around the waist and did my best to pull him backward, when a bullet whizzed by my ear.

  Doc grabbed me and I lost my hold on my brother. I saw the bigger Swede in front of the car, and the glint of his gun in the overhead light. There was a flash and a popping sound and P.B. fell to the ground. I heard yelling—it might have been me—as I threw myself onto my brother's body.

  Doc pushed me aside and took P.B.'s shoulders. I got his lower body, and we hauled him to shelter around the front of the Jeep. Another pop was followed by a clink and then the slow shattering of glass from the Jeep's side window.

  P.B. moved.

  He shook his head, sat up, and reached behind him for a piece of aluminum foil, fallen from his ear.

  Another pop hit the Jeep's front tire, and I knew we weren't going to make it, not all of us, maybe none of us, when from behind us came a shout, lovely as a poem.

  “Police. Freeze!”

  I froze.

  Doc did not. He pulled me around to face him and said, “Get out of here, right now. You and P.B. Over the wall. Go.”

  I glanced at the wall, three feet behind us. We could do it. The Jeep would block us from view of the cops for thirty seconds, maybe more, depending on how fast they moved across the parking lot. If the Swedes didn't shoot us first, we could make it. But I couldn't move.

  “Go.” Doc gave me a shove. P.B., fully alert now, took my hand and with surprising strength pulled me toward the wall.

  We tumbled over it, back into the cemetery, and hit the grass hard.

  “Drop your weapon!” we heard from the parking lot. There was a long, dreadful silence, then a barrage of gunfire so endless it could only mean one thing. I curled into a ball, eyes squeezed shut, held on to my brother, and prayed for it to stop.

  It stopped.

  From above came blinding lights and the chop-chop sound of a helicopter. P.B. pulled me farther into the shadows, and we heard a megaphoned voice say, “You behind the Jeep. Come out with your hands up.”

  Oh God, Doc, I thought. Sirens sounded from another direction, came close, and cut off. Car doors slammed and more footsteps crunched across the gravel, accompanied by the static of radios. Red lights flashed, strobe-style, and voices barked out orders. “Fall to the ground!” and “Down on your knees!” and then “Cross your legs behind you.”

  Finally, through the cacophony of sounds I heard Doc. His words were muffled, and I pictured him on his stomach with someone's heavy shoe on his back. “Okay, okay,” he called out. “Lemme just ask—is one of you guys Dambronski?”

  Out of the chaos came a voice. “Yeah, I'm Dambronski.”

  “Thank God,” Doc said. I could almost see him smile.

  chapter thirty-one

  I glanced out the back window of Joey's Saab every few minutes, until I was sure no one tailed us, not cops, not Carmine, not the Weasel. Finally I noticed Margaret, on the backseat with P.B. She was gnawing matter-of-factly on a clump of wires. I looked at Joey, driving fast, as usual, and asked what they were.

  “Spark plug wires,” she said. “From the Alfa Romeo. I figured I'd just—”

  My brother screamed.

  “What?” I gasped. “What is it, P.B?”

  He couldn't speak. He stared at the metal container he'd carried with him all night, then pressed it to him as if to stanch a wound. He rocked side to side, as he'd done earlier, moaning.

  I unbuckled my seat belt and climbed into the back. “What's the problem—this urn? Can I look at it?”

  Gently I pried it from him; he put up little resistance. The vessel was made of tin, useful yet artsy, a sort of pre-Columbian kitchen canister. It seemed a likely place to store human ashes, but was so lightweight it couldn't contain much of anything. Then I saw why.

  Halfway up the base, nearly obscured by the design, was a hole the size of a bullet. A second hole went out the other side. Whoever had inhabited the canister—whether Stevie or some anonymous soul—was now pretty much gone with the wind.

  Pretty much, but not entirely. When I shook it, I heard residue inside. “He's still here, P.B.,” I said. “Maybe not all of him, but part of him. Maybe the best part. And wherever the rest of him landed, at least you did what he asked when he spoke to you through the sand. You liberated Stevie from . . . where he was. What's left in here, we'll scatter on the beach.” How close the bullet had come to hitting P.B., I couldn't even think about. I touched his hair and dislodged a clump of dirt. “You did well,” I said. “You were a good friend to him.”

  I handed him the canister. He clutched it to his chest, covering the holes. The rocking stopped, but his shoulders, pressing through his thin shirt, moved convulsively.

  All the way to Zuma Beach, I watched him cry.

  WHATEVER ROMANTIC IMAGE I might've had of scattering someone's ashes over the sea was soon squelched. There just wasn't enough of Stevie, and the wind blew the wrong way. We stopped some distance from the roaring surf. P.B. closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sky. He stayed that way long enough for me to realize how profoundly cold I was, then he knelt, uncorked the canister, and overturned it. A small amount of gray ash poured out and scuttled over the rocks and sand. I said a silent apology to Stevie's family, who might object to his relocation.

  P.B. handed me the canister and got down on his stomach, ear pressed to the ground. His blond hair rippled in the wind, but his aluminum foil held firm. Finally he nodded, stood, and wiped his hands on his shirt.

  He removed the aluminum foil first from one ear, then the other, then pried pieces out of his teeth. When that was done, he turned away and began walking back toward the highway. I followed. At the first trash can, he tossed the foil. He took the canister from me and threw it in too, as though it were no more interesting than an already-read L.A. Times.

  Then he turned to me and stared, as though he just now figured out who I was. When he'd looked me over, head to foot, he sat down next to the trash can and pulled off his running shoes.

  “Jeez, Wollie, you are so crazy.” He handed me the shoes. “You can't go around barefoot. It's not safe.”

  DOC WAS SITTING on the front steps of my apartment building when Joey dropped me off. I stopped on the sidewalk and we looked at each other without speaking. I held Margaret's crate in my arms. The night air had a strange quality, calm, almost warm.

  “The Swedes?” I asked, breaking the silence.

  “Tor's headed for arraignment. The other one's dead. Olof. Cops shot him in the parking lot.”

  I nodded. It wasn't pleasant, to think of all those bullets I'd heard, landing in someone's body. But it was a relief.

  “P.B.?” Doc asked.

  “He wanted to go home. To the hospital, I mean. When I told him it was too early, he decided to visit Uncle Theo. Who was perfectly happy to be awakened at three A.M. He'll find P.B. a ride back to Rio Pescado tomorrow. Today,” I amended.

  “And you came here. The last place you should be. Tempting fate, aren't you?”

  By “fate” I figured he meant Carmine or the Weasel, but I was too weary to get into it with him. At 9 A.M., one way or another, I was opening my shop, but I said only, “There is no fate worse than spending another hour in this dress.”

  “Speaking of which, your shoes are still at the cemetery. That's a problem.”r />
  “Actually,” I said, “it's a tragedy. They're Miu Miu. Seventy-five percent off, which will never happen again in this lifetime. But I think I left them in front of Marilyn Monroe, so maybe the police will think they're an offering.”

  The mention of crime scenes reminded me what shape my apartment was in. “You know what?” I said. “Since I've got you here to disarm the alarm, I'd rather go to the shop. There's a bathtub in the back room I want to soak in.”

  “Can't stay away from that place, can you?” he said, but he came down the steps and started toward the alley. “And you kept the date with Carmine, after swearing—”

  “I didn't swear anything, and it's lucky for you I did keep that date, because that's how I found out that Olof and Tor were following you. And what about you, telling me you were taking my brother to the movies, and taking him grave robbing instead?”

  “I said we were going to the Avco. You knew it was a theater; you assumed the movie part.”

  “Pure rationalization,” I said.

  I expected some response, but we continued in silence, to the front door of the shop. There was something different between us, something missing, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Doc punched numbers into a keypad. The keypad flashed and beeped. “Give me a four-digit number,” he said, and unlocked the front door.

  “Nineteen sixty-eight,” I said automatically. “One-nine-six-eight.”

  “Not your birthday, is it?”

  “Nope,” I said, and realized what was missing: the infatuation I'd felt for the last six days. The night's events had knocked it all out of me. I was crush-free. Liberated. “Hey, Doc,” I said, “you know what I'd like? I'd like us to start over, with complete honesty. Straightforwardness. No lies of omission, no ambiguity, no—”

  “Hold on.” He handed me Margaret's cage, took out his Swiss Army knife, and tightened the keypad. “Punch in the code, one-nine-six-eight. Then hit this key to arm the system, or this one to disarm. If you press these two simultaneously, it's a panic button, and they'll sound an immediate alarm. Got it?”

  “Yeah, I got it. Did you hear what I just said?”

  He took back Margaret's cage. “Set the alarm and lock up. I want to see you do it.”

  I complied. When I finished, he set the cage on the counter and turned to me. “Yes. I heard what you said. You want honesty.” He stepped in closer, put his hands on my waist, and pulled me to him. Then he kissed me.

  It was straightforward and unambiguous. It was neither brief nor gentle, nothing like any previous kiss. I kissed him back like I'd been doing it my whole life.

  A minute later, maybe two, we stopped. We drew apart a little, stared at each other without blinking, then went back to kissing.

  Another minute passed, then Doc took me by the hand and led me to the back room. Once inside, he turned and pressed me against the wall, and kissed me again. I heard the sound of a dead bolt and turned my head to see him lock us in. “Where did that come from?” I asked, wondering how many other security measures he'd installed in my life that afternoon. By way of response, he led me across the room to the red velvet sofa. He lay down on it, looked up at me, and drew me toward him.

  I got one knee on the sofa cushion, then stopped. This was it. This was what I'd wanted since the moment I saw him in the elevator at Rio Pescado. Several dozen thoughts zigzagged through my head, from What about safe sex? to When did I last shower? but what came out of my mouth was “You're married.”

  His expression changed. The moment was lost. I bit my lip and wished for some rewind button to hit that would put the words back in my mouth.

  “It's over,” he said.

  My heart thumped. What was over, his marriage? Or us? His marriage, surely. I wanted clarification but I couldn't seem to formulate the words just at the moment.

  It seemed he could read my thoughts, because a smile started at the corner of his mouth and worked its way to the corners of his eyes. I smiled back.

  “God, I love looking at you,” he said. His hand reached up and snaked around my neck and drew me down. My heart beat faster. I slid lower.

  Some vague thought of herpes entered my consciousness and wafted away again. That's what that drug, valacyclovir, was for. Dr. Cookie had said so herself, and if I couldn't trust Dr. Cookie, what was the world coming to?

  I got both elbows on the sofa before I stopped again.

  “In the interest of honesty,” I said, “I think I should explain something. I'm not a call girl.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because I wasn't planning to pay you.”

  I CAN'T SAY what woke me. It was an hour later, maybe two.

  Across the room, on my drafting table, the high-intensity lamp burned like a candle.

  I glanced at Doc next to me. The sofa was unfolded now into a sofa bed and we shared the blanket. He breathed steadily, undisturbed by whatever woke me, his dark growth of beard in stark contrast to his sleep expression, conferring on him a ravaged innocence. Reluctantly, I extricated my leg from under his. I picked up an afghan from the floor, wrapped it around myself, and tiptoed out to the front of the shop.

  Margaret was gone.

  In her place, on the front counter, was my computer screen, turned to face me.

  I approached the screen slowly. It hit me that if Doc hadn't dead-bolted the door to the back room, we'd have been as vulnerable as the shop floor had apparently been. But why hadn't the alarm worked?

  On the screen was a message. “Wanna see what I do to rats, look in the alley. You know what I want. I'll be back for it tonight. Cute hamster.”

  Oh, Margaret, Margaret, I thought, and my heart constricted with fear for the little ferret. It occurred to me I was still asleep, actually sleepwalking, because I had no desire to see any rats, in any condition, yet here were my feet propelling me to the front door of their own volition.

  The door was unlocked, and just the slightest bit ajar.

  I pulled it open and looked around. Nothing.

  I wrapped the afghan tightly around me and went through the walkway into the alley. Then I stopped.

  Carmine lay on the ground, his face unnaturally white. Something dark lay across his neck. The sky was just beginning to lighten, and I stayed focused on his neck in strange fascination until my eyes adjusted and I saw exactly what it was.

  Blood. His throat was cut.

  chapter thirty-two

  I did not scream, but sound may have come out of me, because at some point, there was Doc. He moved me aside and took a long look at the body in the alley. Then he led me back into the shop, and folded his arms around me.

  “It's Carmine,” I said. “The door was open, and there was a note and Margaret's gone and it was supposed to be a rat, but it was Carmine, with blood all—”

  “Okay, it's okay,” Doc said. “It'll be all right. We'll call 911 in a minute. You need to put on clothes.”

  I nodded, and started for the back room, still feeling like a sleepwalker. I stared, unseeing, into one of the metal lockers against the far wall, my afghan clutched around me. Doc joined me, pulled some sweats out of the locker, and led me to the sofa bed.

  “Get dressed,” he said, then picked up his wallet from the floor and extracted a business card. He was practically naked himself. He pulled the cell phone out of his unzipped jeans, then sat down next to me as I worked myself into a pair of gray sweatpants. “Did you touch anything out there? The doorknob, anything—?”

  I shook my head. “I don't know. Maybe. The door was open, I—”

  “It doesn't matter. Just tell the cops—”

  “Cops?” I snapped to attention. “I can't talk to cops!”

  “You have to. There's a dead body on your doorstep.”

  “But I can't—”

  “Listen to me. Just tell them the truth. We slept in the shop because of the break-in at your apartment. Before that, while I was at the precinct answering questions, you were out with your best friend Joey. Leave P.B. out of it. And don't m
ention the graveyard. You with me?” He waited for my nod, then went on. “You went to the Beverly Wilshire for dinner with Whatsisname and then afterward—shit, did anyone see you meet Carmine last night, anyone who might remember?”

  I pulled a sweatshirt over my head. “The entire night shift at Jerry's Deli.”

  “All right, you'll have to tell them about that. Tell it all, just leave out P.B., and don't volunteer that you were at Rio Pescado on Friday. Can you remember that?”

  “What about the Weasel and the burglary and the diamond—”

  “Everything; it'll match what I told them. You've got nothing to hide—you're mixed up with these guys because they're after me and I'm living here with you.”

  “What happens to Margaret?” I cringed to think of the ferret, left in her cage on the counter while we'd dead-bolted ourselves in the back room.

  He tightened his lips. “I don't know. Put this away somewhere.” He handed me my dirt-encrusted dress and scanned the room. Then he punched numbers into his phone and asked for a Lieutenant Fondo. What happened to Dambronski? I wondered dully, then realized that this had all grown bigger than the murder of a mental patient in Ventura County. Fondo must be LAPD. Another of Doc's new best friends.

  I stowed the red dress in the locker. Doc left a message on Fondo's voice mail, then dialed 911. He explained the situation calmly, his eyes on me. As I moved toward him, he zeroed in on my neck. “Is that dried blood?” he asked when he hung up.

  We headed for the mirror in the bathroom. I wiped dirt from my forehead as Doc applied rubbing alcohol to a cut under my ear. It was not my best morning. Still, when I considered the cemetery, the fence I'd thrown myself over, gravel I'd hurled myself onto, splinters I'd impaled myself with, I wasn't doing so badly.

  “Ouch.” I glanced at him in the mirror. “It's worse under my clothes. I hope they don't strip-search me.”

  He lifted my sweatshirt up to my rib cage, revealing bruises and scrapes on my abdomen. His eyes met mine in the mirror. “I didn't notice this last night.”