Try Dying

by James Scott Bell

  Father Bob shook his head slowly. “Poor kid.”

  “Poor kid? He lied about you. He got you booted.”

  “He’s in the grip.”

  “Grip?”

  “We’re all in the grip, Ty. The world, the flesh, and the devil. Until we let God loosen the fingers. Davey is still in the grip of his lie, and that’s not a good place to be.”

  “I would have thought you’d like to work on his face yourself, after what he did to you.”

  “That’s not my calling, son.”

  94

  I WOKE UP the next day to a familiar sound.

  A basketball drumming asphalt, short silence, then the sound of iron rim. Repeat. Repeat.

  I twisted out of bed and looked through one of the porthole windows of the trailer. There was a basketball court about fifty yards away. Somebody in gray sweats was shooting hoops. Alone.

  Sister Mary Veritas.

  Making some very good moves. And she could shoot.

  I threw on some shorts and shoes and a T-shirt, which amounted to about half my wardrobe at the moment, and went out to the court.

  Sister Mary hit one from the foul line.

  “Very nice shot,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You played some ball.”

  “In high school.” She dribbled in place. Her hair was nut color, short.

  “Shouldn’t you be praying or something?”

  “The body is the temple of our Lord. It’s our duty to take care of it. So I pray, play, pray, and eat. That’s my morning. Do you play?”

  “Some. Almost got my nose broken the last time.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t throw elbows. Unless you come into my house.”

  I almost laughed at the thought of this little nun, who came about to my chin, trying to body me out of the post. “Is that a challenge?”

  “Anytime,” she said.

  “I may take you up on it. I actually have a favor to ask.”

  She took a shot from the side of the key, banked it in. “Sure.”

  “Your car. I wonder if I can borrow it.”

  “You want to borrow the Abbey car?”

  “If I may.”

  She looked over at my Cabriolet, parked behind Father Bob’s trailer. “You have a nice ride.”

  “That’s the thing. I need to be a little less noticeable.”

  “You figure to help yourself out?” she asked.

  “You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Of course. I googled the whole thing last night.”

  “Nuns google?”

  “Remember our computers?”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s a little dangerous, what you’re doing.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.

  “Maybe you should just stick here.”

  She shot again. I moved under the basket and caught the ball when it came through the net. I twirled it on my finger. “Thanks for the advice. May I borrow the car? I’ll let you drive the Cab. You’ll be the envy of all the other nuns.”

  “Envy’s a sin, Mr. Buchanan.”

  “So is denying a man a favor, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head, smiled. “I’ll play you Around the World for it.”

  “What?”

  “Around the World. You win and the car is yours.”

  “Isn’t that gambling? Isn’t that a sin?”

  “It’s not gambling at all.”

  “How so?”

  “Because I know I’ll win.”

  Getting smack talked by a nun on a basketball court was surreal. Also irresistible. “You can go first,” I said.

  “You’ll be sorry.”

  I was.

  She didn’t miss. Went all the way around and hit the final two. It was one of the most amazing displays I’d ever seen, and I saw Magic, Jordan, and Bird.

  “All you have to do is make ’em all,” she said, “and you’ll tie. I’ll give you the car on a tie.”

  She was like a little gremlin now, and I was hacked off. She needed to be taken to school, but I wasn’t going to be the one. My first shot clanked off the rim.

  Humbled by a nun. Not my best guy moment.

  “You can use the car,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Mercy is a virtue, Mr. Buchanan. And anytime you want a rematch . . .”

  “Count on it,” I said.

  She bounced the ball triumphantly. “May I offer a suggestion?”

  “Now that you’ve thoroughly shamed me, go ahead.”

  “Follow the sin.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ll find the answer there.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “Do you know the seven deadly sins?”

  “Let’s see. Lust?”

  “Check,” she said.

  “Daytime television?”

  “Close. Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Somewhere in there is the motive for every crime.”

  “Gluttony? The crime of overeating?”

  Sister Mary smiled at my apparent ignorance. “The classical view of gluttony is overindulgence or excess in something you put into the body. Drugs and alcohol would fall into that category. There are drug crimes, are there not? And crimes done under the influence?”

  “You have a point.”

  “Follow the sin, Mr. Buchanan. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d look to lust, avarice, or wrath. These seem to be the biggies these days.”

  “Thanks for the tip. Now can I ask you a favor?”

  “Shoot.”

  “You’re the computer maven at this operation, am I right?”

  “I like the way you put that. It sounds cool.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “I suppose I am.”

  “I need to track down a man named Frank Trudeau.”

  “Is he a friend?”

  “Hardly, he—”

  “Wait a second,” she said. “That name has something to do with your case. It came up in one of the stories.”

  “He’s married to a woman formerly named Dyan Blumberg. She’s the mother of Claudia Blumberg who is suing Dr. Lea Edwards.”

  “Uh-huh. So why do you want to see this Frank?”

  “Are you a cop all of a sudden?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Mind if I keep it to myself?”

  “Play you Around the World for it.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Mr. Buchanan, I want to help you. If you’re not guilty of this charge, I’d like to do what I can—”

  “Suppose I am guilty?”

  She looked at me, holding the ball in her hands now. “Then I will pray for you.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “But I’d still like to know why you need to talk to this man.”

  “Give me the ball.”

  I took it to the top of the key. “This is for the info,” I said, and shot. This time I hit nothing but net.

  Sister Mary gathered the ball and dribbled to where I was standing. As she took her position to shoot I said, “No pressure.”

  She ignored me, took the shot. It rimmed out.

  “I believe in mercy, too,” I said. “I think Trudeau may have helped set me up. I want to have a word with him.”

  “Give me an hour,” she said.

  I waited in the trailer. And thought how being a monk might drive a guy crazy. Or closer to God, if that was the only other alternative.

  Maybe that was the whole point. You sit in silence and God’s the only alternative to hearing the voices in your head.

  Like the ones telling me I would never get out of this, never. Somebody this determined to get you had his mallards all in a row. So why not stay here? Claim sanctuary?

  Monks had their sacred text, and I had mine—Jacqueline’s journals. I got the box from the trunk of my car and brought it into the trailer.

  It surprised me to realize I’d been avoiding t
he journals. I guess I was thinking that once I’d been through them all, that would be it. There would be no new discoveries about her. She’d be gone then, truly.

  But now it was like I needed her more than ever. This was the end of the world and I had no companion.

  I took up a journal with a green cover. The date put her a year out of high school, the summer after her first year of college at Cal State Northridge.

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

  Little we see in Nature that is ours—

  —Wordsworth

  He got it right, did Wordsworth! I can’t believe the beehive of pointless activity going on around me. Everyone seems to be moving, head down, toward some goal that involves real estate and BMWs, and they never look up except to watch—

  —the sordid unfolding story of a President who couldn’t keep it zipped and some tramp stamp intern who kept a dress stained with his seed and didn’t send it out to be cleaned. THAT is what we are fixated on!

  I just sat in the backyard tonight and looked at the moon. For an hour, just the moon and the stars. The occasional plane flew overhead, blinking toward Burbank or LAX. I wondered about the people on the planes. Did they even bother to look out and see the moon? Or were they, too, thinking about real estate and Presidents who lie?

  We’ll keep missing what’s most important as long as we don’t look up.

  A knock on the door. Sister Mary, in her habit.

  “He works at a PR firm in West Hollywood,” she said. “I have the address.”

  “You are good,” I said.

  “I’d agree with you,” she said. “But pride is the great sin.”

  95

  THE TAURUS HAD seen its best days when Clinton was in the White House. Probably purchased around Monicagate, and that just gave everything I was about to do a harmonic resonance.

  Maybe things were lining up for me for a change.

  Sister Mary kept the car neat. The interior was vintage nineties, and I could smell the ArmorAll. The only stuff in the car was a box in the backseat and a black cloth. The box was for fruitcake, the pride of St. Monica’s. The cloth, I guessed, was for a nun’s head. But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure about nuns anymore. I’d seen a nun in sweats shooting baskets, and a mother superior who didn’t wear a habit, but slacks and a blouse that might have come from Wal-Mart.

  It wasn’t a world I was familiar with.

  The car drove pretty nice, especially for having 112,852 miles on it. Where did these nuns drive, anyway? Road trips? That must be a hoot.

  I took the 118 to the Hollywood Freeway and caught the 101. Trudeau worked out of West Hollywood. It was early yet, so I decided to start my day by taking a look at Triunfo headquarters for a while.

  I found a spot on Vine across from the location, sat back, and played surveillance.

  The same woman who’d greeted me the last time was doing PR on the street. The book rack was visible in the alcove. At this hour it was still a little early for a lot of pedestrians. But a few regulars happened by.

  The woman ignored a black man who staggered by and waved both hands at her. Nothing in Triunfo for winos I guess. She scanned the street, answered a call on her cell phone, and then went back to trolling for dollars.

  What was I expecting to find here? I didn’t know, but it was better than sitting in a hermitage waiting for something to break. And I figured my luck had to change. Something had to swing my way. If there was any hope of a God being in the universe, if Jacqueline had been onto something, there had to be some sort of yin to the yang I’d been dished.

  An hour later, no yang had come my way, but my bladder was inflated. I got out and pushed a quarter in the meter and went looking for a head.

  There was a Starbucks on Hollywood. I ordered a drip and was about to leave when a voice said, “Hey.”

  I turned around. A guy in his late forties or so was smiling at me from a table. He wore a camouflage jacket with a faded blue T-shirt underneath. He had a salt-and-pepper ponytail and L.A. eyes—trying to look cool and detached and hungry for money.

  “You’re the guy,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Dude, you are the man. Hey, sit down a second.”

  “Thanks anyway.” I turned. I heard his chair scrape across the floor. When I got to the door, I knew he was behind me.

  Outside, I said, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Wait, man, you got me wrong.” He still had that plastic smile on his face. It made me want to keep a hand on my wallet. “I’m on your side.”

  “I don’t need anyone on my side, but thanks for the thought.”

  Again I tried to walk away. He stayed with me.

  “Dude, wait, I just want an autograph.”

  I stopped. “What?”

  “That’s all. I sit in there and see a few minor leaguers. Bruce Jenner comes in now and then. Kathie Lee Gifford once. But never Phil Spector or O. J. Simpson.”

  “You want an autograph because I’m a defendant?”

  “You’re the defendant right now. Man, I can’t believe this. This is so cool talking to you.”

  “I don’t give autographs or interviews or have my picture taken with tourists, all right? You can go down to the Kodak and have fat Elvis sign for you.”

  He followed me to the corner. “Come on, you need friends. I might even land on your jury. How cool would that be? I’ll guarantee you an acquittal or a hung. But I need that auto—”

  “Look pal, the answer is no, and if you keep following me I’m going to get mad.”

  His smile finally faded. “That’s no way to talk.”

  “You hearing me?”

  He took a step back and reached in his jacket pocket.

  Gun, I thought. Guy’s gonna kill me.

  For the half second it took for that thought to flash, I froze.

  Then I saw a cell phone in his hand.

  He flicked it open. Held it up.

  And took my picture.

  I unfroze. I dropped my Starbucks cup and lunged at him, caught his wrist, and grabbed the cell phone out of his hand.

  I opened it and snapped it in two.

  He turned around and whined, “Hey!” He sounded like Alfalfa from the old Little Rascals movies.

  A couple of people, street people I guessed, had stopped to watch. But this being the big city they did nothing else.

  “You’re crazy!” Ponytail screeched.

  He was right. “Boogah boogah,” I said, then dropped the cell phone pieces on the sidewalk and gave them two big stamps with my heel. I kicked them down the sidewalk, past a few stars on the Walk of Fame.

  He went one way and I went the other. But he managed to foul the morning air with some choice words, leaving off with, “I hope they find you guilty! I hope you fry in hell!”

  96

  I FRIED IN the Taurus.

  I was a celeb now. There were no more anonymous defendants. With 24/7 news and Net, with picture and videophones and worldwide distribution, everybody could know everything about anybody. Just about. No more anonymity. Maybe that was as good a definition of hell as there was.

  Sunglasses alone weren’t doing it for me. If I was going to go out on the street, I’d need at least a modest getup. If Pitt and Cruise went out with fedoras and fake moustaches, maybe I could, too.

  The only thing in the car was that black cloth.

  I looked about as inconspicuous as Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. But I kept reminding myself this was L.A., home of freaks and geeks and everything in between. A place where individuality was advertised as a shortcut to significance. Be different, get discovered. And if you don’t get discovered, you can always pay for a billboard and put yourself on it, like that Angeline chick did years ago. She got famous for trying to be famous. It was the ultimate.

  So walking around like Depp could be a new look for me, normal in Hollywood terms.

  A guy
in a leather jacket came by and put something under a windshield wiper of Sister Mary’s car. He had a stack of papers in his hand. He didn’t see me, or didn’t bother to look.

  I fished the thing off the window. It was a pamphlet, a tri-folded piece of paper with tight, single-spaced writing. The top of the page said that the Messiah was alive and living in Arizona. He was about to announce the beginning of the true Millennium—the last one was apparently a huge, Satanic lie —and it would only include followers of the Messiah and his prophet, the Divine Earl. Apparently the Divine Earl had been given a vision by the Messiah, and it included a description of the New Earth. The Divine Earl said the New Earth would be made up of those who had not taken the Mark of the Beast, which was some sort of stamp that related to one’s social security number.

  Illegal aliens would probably be in good shape, I thought.

  I didn’t read the rest. Thought Sister Mary or Father Bob would be interested, and tossed it on the seat. Went back to watching Triunfo.

  The girl was gone, replaced by a young man with a big smile for all the people. He tried to talk to a lady walking a poodle, but she wanted nothing to do with him. The poodle yipped at his ankle. He smiled at the poodle.

  I stayed another forty-five minutes. Nothing much happened. It was getting on toward eleven and I thought about driving through Burger King for a Whopper, then trying to see what I could dredge up at Frank Trudeau’s office. See if he was meeting anyone for lunch, maybe follow him.

  But just before I started the car I saw someone come out of Triunfo and start bopping up the street like he’d just won free Lakers tickets.

  Then I recognized him. It was my good friend Ratso.

  97

  I GOT OUT of the car and followed him from a distance of half a block. He went to the Vine Street Metro Station, past the replica of the Brown Derby, and down the escalator.

  He was going to take the train.

  I was going to take him.

  A few others separated Ratso and me. He was still dancing to some inner tune. He didn’t have ear buds, so I could only assume he was happy about something.

  Something I wanted to find out about.

  He passed the ticket machine. Maybe he had a pass. I quickly bought a ticket just in case. The Metro rail ran on fear. If they did a ticket check and you didn’t have one, it was a couple hundred bucks.