Try Dying

by James Scott Bell

  “Fine,” I said.

  At just that moment a cloud rolled between sun and earth. I swear it was like a Halloween moment. The cemetery fell under heavy shadow. I half expected somebody to rise from one of the graves.

  “Let’s see.” Ratso, bolder now, moved closer.

  I opened my wallet and took out another twenty. That left me with about four more.

  “Talk,” I said.

  “Under . . . freeway,” he said, making a motion. I assumed he meant the overpass. “I seen the body. Boom.” He clapped his hands.

  My heart jumped. And I was there, at the scene, in my mind.

  “Dude’s body, on the car. Car stop, man, sounds eeeeee.”

  I imagined tires squealing. Jacqueline inside the car.

  “Nobody do nothing. Other cars getting around. No stop. People no want to get out. Guys honking. Seen her in car. Trapped in there, cause of dude’s body.”

  “Alive?”

  “Moving.”

  I couldn’t say a word.

  “Then I seen somebody off the hill. Coming right down. Hill under the pass. I’m up in the corner, watching.”

  I was trying to get all this to make sense. It was weird, something out of a David Lynch movie. Dark, like my insides.

  “He goes to the car and he attacks the dude.”

  “What? Attacks?”

  “I don’t know, it looks like. He grabs something, I don’t know. It’s loco, man. Then he goes to the door and opens it. He has to pull it hard.”

  “What about Jacqueline?”

  “She turns her head.”

  Alive.

  “The dude he . . .” Ratso stopped.

  “You better tell me fast what—”

  Ratso shook his head hard. “Man, it’s no good!”

  Now I didn’t care about the guy’s shirt. I didn’t care about anything but having him finish this bizarre story. I dropped my wallet and the twenties and grabbed his shirt with both hands.

  “Tell me!” I shook him.

  He pushed away and almost snarled. “This worth more, man. You got to come up with more.”

  “Money? You’re asking for more—” I grabbed my head. It was going to burst. The picture I’d formed of beautiful Jacqueline being killed—

  “You sick. . . . Get out of here, now! Or I call the cops.”

  At least I remembered to bend down and get my wallet and money.

  Stupid. What I think was the guy’s foot slammed into the side of my head.

  9

  IT WAS DARK and cold when I came to.

  My face felt two sizes bigger. I couldn’t breathe through my nose.

  “Don’t worry, son,” a gentle voice said. “Ambulance on the way.”

  In the distance I heard a siren. Things started coming back to me. I felt my pocket. “Wallet,” I said.

  “Just lie here,” the voice said. I blinked a couple of times and saw the outline of a man. He was kneeling beside me.

  “But the—”

  “Shh. You took a nasty fall.”

  “No—”

  “Ambulance coming.”

  The siren got louder, and I took the guy’s advice. I just lay there. The world was spinning, and I didn’t have anything inside me to stop it.

  I spent half the night in emergency at Northridge Hospital. They contacted Fran Dwyer for me, and she showed up to get me out of there.

  “You’re coming home with me,” she said.

  And I did.

  Fran lived in the same little stucco job where Jacqueline had grown up. On Hemmingway Street (two m’s) in Reseda. Not more than a thousand square feet, it was built in the fifties when the San Fernando Valley was exploding into the biggest suburb in the world.

  She set me up in Jacqueline’s old bedroom, making sure I was as comfortable as possible. Which, under the circumstances, was not very. She sat on the side of the bed.

  “Who would do such a thing?” she said.

  I decided not to give her the whole story. She’d been through the grinder. I wasn’t going to give her some whacked out account when I didn’t know what to think about it myself.

  “Some guy wanting money,” I said. “Can you believe it? At a cemetery?”

  “You should call the police.”

  “I’ve got to run around and get all my stuff together—license, credit cards, all that. Can you help me?”

  “You need to rest.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “My legs are fine.”

  “I don’t just mean your face. It was a hard day for all of us.”

  “I bet I ruined the reception when I didn’t show. Would you do me a favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Call Rachel and tell her I’m fine, and have her call people. Explain. I’m just not up to it.”

  “I will.”

  She patted my hand. “Ty?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a box of Jacqueline’s things, from school. I wonder if you’d like to have it.”

  She left the room for a moment, returned with a simple brown box that might have held anything—old clothes, oranges, records of the dead. It had a thin veneer of dust on the flaps.

  “I think she’d want you to have this,” Fran said. “Promise you’ll take care of it.” She put it on the floor next to the bed.

  I looked at the box, afraid to open it. Afraid it would gnaw the wound of loss. But, at the same time, needing to see what it held.

  “I’ll take good care of it, Fran, I promise.”

  She left me there again. A box of Jacqueline’s things. What would I find in there? What did I want to find? Jacqueline alive, her voice in my ear.

  But her voice was silent. Instead, I heard something else. Another voice. Over and over.

  They kill her, it said.

  10

  NEXT MORNING, FRAN drove me to the Department of Motor Vehicles so I could get a temporary license, then back to the cemetery to get my car. I gave her a hug and told her I’d call her later.

  She looked worried about me.

  She should have been.

  I did not go home. Instead I found myself driving, heading for the Harbor Freeway. I was going back to the scene of Jacqueline’s death.

  Did I expect to see him? Sitting in a corner under the overpass? The rational part of me said no. But something beyond, or below reason, argued. It wasn’t the money or the credit cards or anything else I wanted. I wanted to know if the story was true.

  As I got closer to the place where Jacqueline died —down the 110 Freeway past the Sports Arena and Exposition Park and just after Imperial Highway —my nerves started to hum. All of a sudden it was like I was taken over by some alien light beam controlling my body.

  I almost rear-ended a semi carrying office furniture.

  Closer now. I could see it, could see the connector freeway where Ernesto Bonilla had stood, gun in his mouth.

  Traffic was light, but I was only going 40. Cars were honking behind me. I didn’t care. I had something to see.

  Almost there. I started looking under the concrete bridge. For him.

  Nothing. It was shadowy, but clearly no one was on either side. Ratso was not at home.

  What I did see was the hillside. The place Ratso said the guy had scurried, down to where he would break Jacqueline’s neck. It was mostly dirt, with a couple of oleander bushes struggling to be fertile.

  And I swore I saw, in the middle of one of the bushes, a trampling down.

  I got off at the next ramp and doubled back on Figueroa to Imperial. I parked my car and walked to the freeway overpass. On the chain-link fence hung a sign that said Complete Funeral Service—$2,170.50. Direct Cremation—$695. It gave a phone number. I wondered why they picked this particular spot to post a bill. Maybe they knew things.

  From the fence I could see where a guy like Ratso could sit himself in the shade. And I could see quite clearly, in the shadow of the connector freeway, the stretch of Harbor Freeway where Jacqueline died.
/>   Murdered?

  Could it possibly be true? The whole bizarre story?

  I had to tell somebody.

  11

  I DROVE DOWNTOWN, parked in one of those lots that require a second mortgage, and walked across Los Angeles Street to Parker Center, headquarters of the LAPD. It’s a big, aged white block of a building with windows and three skinny, tired-looking palm trees in front. The new headquarters was being built then, making the old place seem all the more weary. Still, it was the nerve center of the whole department, and I figured why not start at the top.

  I walked into the cavernous lobby. A big tile mosaic depicting images of the city dominated the left-hand side. At the reception desk sat two uniformed police officers, a man and a woman. The woman gave me a skeptical eye as I approached. Maybe it was the marks on my face that did it. The nameplate on her uniform read Stevens.

  “Is this where I report something?”

  “What is it you want to report,” Stevens said.

  “A possible murder.”

  The other officer gave me a look.

  Stevens said nothing. Skeptical face, waiting for me to continue.

  “There was a guy last week,” I explained. “Shot his wife, then shot himself on the overpass, where the Century goes over the Harbor.”

  “I read about that,” the other officer said. “Fell on a car, right? Killed somebody?”

  “The woman who died was my fiancée,” I said.

  The officers now looked at least a little interested. I said, “There was a witness, and he said he saw somebody go down to the car and kill her.”

  “He saw this?” Stevens said.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “He needs Southeast,” the other officer said.

  “Isn’t Robbery-Homicide down here?” I said.

  “That’s a separate unit,” Stevens said. “This is administration. Jurisdiction starts with division, and that would be Southeast.” She took a yellow Post-It note from a pad and wrote an address on it. “It’s on One Hundredth and Eighth. Need directions?”

  “I’ve got GPS. She’ll tell me where to go.”

  Stevens smiled. “I been told where to go lots of times.”

  Southeast Division was in a two-story brick building just east of the Harbor Freeway. I parked in front. Inside, windowless, it gave off the sterile feel of the local government’s idea of renovation.

  The front desk had three computer monitors and a couple of uniforms standing behind. To the right, a woman was fiddling with a QuickDraw ATM machine. Getting bail money no doubt. To the left, on a bench, sat a fat guy in shorts holding a wadded-up T-shirt to a bloody face.

  “Help you?” one of the uniforms asked. At least the LAPD had that phrase down. The officer was slim, mid-twenties. The other, stockier and a little older, kept his eyes on his computer monitor.

  “I want to report a homicide,” I said.

  The slim uniform squinted. “Homicide?”

  “There was a shooting last week, a guy named Bonilla shot his wife, then himself, on the Century Freeway.”

  Stocky, without looking up, said, “Yeah. Murder-suicide.”

  Slim said, “Already in the pipe.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m talking about the woman who was in the car he fell on. Remember that?”

  “Terrible,” Stocky said.

  “She was murdered,” I said. “Maybe.”

  That got Stocky’s attention. He looked at me. “That’s not murder. Guy shot himself—”

  “She was murdered after that, after the body fell on her car.”

  Stocky and Slim looked at each other.

  The fat guy on the bench moaned and shouted, “Where is she?”

  “She’s coming,” Stocky told him. “Just hold on.”

  “I been holding for an hour! This place is a freakin’ prison!”

  Stocky turned his attention to the fat guy. Slim said to me, “If you’ll leave your name, I’ll pass it along to the detective in charge—”

  “Is he here?” I said.

  “Just give me your—”

  “Can I talk to him, please? He’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

  “Sir—”

  “Five minutes.”

  Slim must have seen something in my discolored face. He picked up a phone and punched an extension and mumbled something. I couldn’t hear what he said because the fat guy was screaming now, and Stocky was shouting Sir! Sir! Sir! at him.

  Slim put down the phone and pointed at a pea green door behind me. “Through there,” he said, and went to assist his partner.

  I walked past the screaming guy and through the green door. That took me to another reception area with pale yellow walls with nothing on them, except a clock. A bald black man with an earpiece sat at a desk. He wasn’t a uniform; he was dressed in civilian clothes. He said, “Just wait there.”

  A minute later a guy who looked like a Golden Gloves contender came out, gave me a handshake, introduced himself as Detective Ramón Fernández, and had me follow him past a large copy machine and a few filing cabinets into a room of waist-high cubicles.

  He led me around a corner and motioned for me to enter an interview room. Spare white walls. A table and two chairs.

  “Get you some coffee?” Fernández said. He was maybe thirty-four, thirty-five. Short black hair and photogenic face, marred only by the little white scar under his left eye. He wore a tan shirt with a plain brown tie.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “Okay, take a chair, I’ll be right with you.”

  I sat and listened to the sounds of the detective room through the open door. It was a low-level hum of voices and keyboards and shoes on floor. For a second I thought of myself as the suspect. Jacqueline was dead. I had to be guilty of something.

  Fernández came back in with a yellow pad and file folder. He closed the door, plopped the pad and file on the table. “Okay,” he said, taking a chair, “why don’t you tell me what this is about?”

  I made like Greg Louganis and dove right in. “My fiancée was the one who died in that Bonilla incident.”

  “Shot his wife, then himself. Fell off the overpass and killed a woman. She was your fiancée?”

  “Yeah.”

  Fernández leaned forward. “I’m very sorry. That was a freak thing to happen.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Not an accident?”

  “Something else happened, I didn’t find out until the funeral.” As I spoke I could tell I was moving into odd territory, stuff that wasn’t going to sound too plausible. But I had to make it known.

  “A guy came up to me in the parking lot, told me he’d come looking for me. Said he witnessed the accident. Someone had gone down to the car and Jacqueline was still alive . . .” The words stopped cold in my throat.

  “Go ahead,” Fernández said. He removed a pen from his shirt pocket.

  I took a deep breath, “He said they killed her.”

  “They?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This guy, says he saw this?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “How far away was he?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “This guy was in a position to see?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have the man’s name?”

  I knew where this train was headed. “I’ll tell you, I really thought the guy was telling me the truth, but then I ticked him off and he attacked me.”

  Fernández’s eyebrows went up in the universal sign of skepticism. He didn’t write anything. He tapped his pen on the pad. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”

  “I gave him a couple of twenties for his information. I got mad and dropped my wallet and bent over to get it and next thing I know I’m out. I wake up on the ground, and my head feels like it’s been kicked.”

  “I can see that.”

  We fell into an uncomfortable silence.

  “Anything el
se you want to add?” Detective Fernández said.

  “What else you need?”

  “Any witnesses to this guy beating you up?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “This guy who attacked you, what did he look like?”

  I gave him the best description I could.

  “Well, I have to tell you off the bat that the chances of finding this guy are pretty slim. I can have a patrol take a look. But even if we do, to prove the attack from your word alone isn’t going to—”

  “I don’t care about the attack.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m here because of the murder.”

  Fernández opened the file folder and looked over some papers. “Mr. Buchanan, Ernesto Bonilla popped his wife and then got on the freeway, stopped on the overpass, and ate a bullet. His body fell onto the Harbor Freeway. That’s about a hundred foot drop. So how does a guy get to the car and find your fiancée and kill her? More to the point, why?”

  “I’ve been trying to think. Somebody follows Bonilla for some reason? Maybe it’s Bonilla he’s after.”

  “Then he has to stop on the freeway and get down to the Harbor. I mean, I think it could be done, but it would be a real stuntman thing to do. Problem is, we got three witness statements from the scene. It was pretty confusing down there. A lot of rain. But nothing about anybody doing anything to the occupant of the car. Did this guy give you a description?”

  I shook my head.

  “Same problem. We’d have to find this guy to talk to him. Unless we do . . .” Fernández shook his head.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Do you believe it?”

  My hands curled around the arms of the chair.

  “Easy,” he said.

  “Maybe I have to believe it,” I said.

  He cocked his head. “Come again?”

  I didn’t say anything. Didn’t feel like telling him my dad was a cop in Miami who got murdered when I was ten. That he’d been working on a major drug case, went out one night on his own, and they found him the next morning behind a motel with two holes in the back of his head. That the cops turned the town upside down for a month and no one was ever arrested.

  The detective took a cardholder from his pocket, fished out a card, handed it to me. “Look, you find anything else, and I mean anything, feel free to call. You have a number I can reach you?”