Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  An adolescent voice called out behind me, the tone uncertain of its authority or maybe just afraid of the dog. Two more voices, young and male, screeched a second challenge. The Rott let out a low warning bark. I didn’t turn, brought the palm of my hand toward his head, a hand signal I’d taught him to stay put.

  “You got three behind you,” Frank said.

  I took a step closer to my niece, carefully measuring the distance between us in case I had to do what I had to do, and told her, “You’re in a bad situation here.”

  “You’re the one outnumbered.” She wanted me to go away. She owed her allegiance to the crew she ran with far more than to an aunt she’d never seen before.

  “You remember Luce?”

  She nodded, willing to give me that much.

  “Eric murdered her. On Santa Monica Pier. The people controlling this little gang of yours, they’re killers.”

  I watched the realization flash through her eyes. “You’re lying,” she said.

  “I saw him kill her. Through my camera.”

  The challenge sounded again behind me. I reached down and grabbed the Rott’s collar, aware that he was close to going into attack mode. Two of the boys carried iron bars and the third one a knife. They looked as evenly spaced in age as brothers, none of them over eighteen. “Looks like we have to make some fast decisions,” I said. “Tell your friends to back off. Tell them we’re family. I need to talk to you alone.”

  She shook her head as though the prospect of being alone with me frightened her. “I don’t believe anything you’re telling me. I don’t believe you’re my aunt. You should leave now, before you get hurt.”

  I nodded, as though agreeing that was the most sensible option. I released the Rott’s collar and gave him a single command to protect. He launched from my side, his bark deep and vicious as a chainsaw ripping wood. Cassie’s eyes followed the dog. I hit her with a right hook, the blow striking her flush on the jaw where a smile might normally go. She went down without a word of complaint, no more than a sharp exhale of breath on impact.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Frank said.

  I stepped to the fence and drew the wire snips, working the blades as fast as a pair of scissors. The Rott stopped just beyond the range of the weapons, his bark alone ferocious enough to keep the boys at bay. I told Frank to pretend he was calling the police, try to scare the boys into backing off. The Rott charged the young one on the left, who had tried to slip around the side, and the move exposed the dog’s flanks to the older boy in the middle, who swung and connected against his right haunch. The Rott yelped in pain and snapped at the boy’s forearm.

  I pushed out the gap in the fence and grabbed the collar of my niece’s blouse just as the middle boy shouted that the dog had no teeth. I pulled her through the cut-hole and shouted at the Rott to come. He skittered aside to dodge the next swing and dashed toward the fence. I pried back the jagged ends of the chain-link so the Rott could see the hole and he shot through it without hesitation. The boys charged the gap, thinking they’d squirm through behind the dog. I drew the crowbar from my belt loop and whacked it high against the fence.

  “This is a family affair,” I said. “The first head that comes through that hole gets separated from its shoulders. Cassie is my niece. I’m taking her home.” They were brave boys and I sympathized with their instinct to rescue a fallen friend but I didn’t intend to fight them all the way back to the car. It was better for them to understand the situation clearly. They needed to realize that I’d hurt them. They clustered on the opposite side of the fence, glaring through the chain-link but curious too, as though they lacked people willing to stage a commando raid to rescue them and they wondered what such a relative would be like. I wanted to help them, if I could.

  “Eric murdered Luce,” I said. “He’ll kill you too, soon enough.”

  “Eric wouldn’t do that,” the oldest boy said. “He wouldn’t hurt Luce. They were hooking up together. They were tight.” He glanced at his two companions, whose nods confirmed the opinion.

  “She’s dead all the same,” I said. “And even if you’re not afraid of Eric you should know the cops can arrest you on charges of robbery and murder.”

  “What are you talking about? We didn’t kill anybody!” The middle boy’s voice broke with adolescent outrage.

  “A woman was killed the night you took Valentino.”

  “We weren’t anywhere near her,” the oldest boy said. “We didn’t even know anything happened.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They’ll charge you with murder anyway, just because you were there, the same way they charge the driver of the getaway car in a bank robbery.” I turned away from the fence. If they were smart, they’d put it together and run.

  Cassie tried to sit up, couldn’t quite get there, and rolled onto her side. Frank asked if she knew where she was. She tried to sit up again and this time she made it. “You hit me,” she said, resentful and rightfully so.

  I crouched, slung her arm over my shoulder, and lifted her upright. “I’m not sorry I did,” I said. “Come on, I’m taking you somewhere we can talk.”

  Her legs wobbled when she tried to walk. Frank took her opposite shoulder, the Rott scouting ahead. I glanced back at the fence. The smallest boy, the one who had held the knife and seemed most determined to get around the Rott, slithered through the gap in the fence. I ordered the Rott to sit and asked the boy his business. He dropped the knife and jogged up to us.

  “Give me a ride down the hill with you?” he asked.

  Thirty-Eight

  HE CALLED himself Jason and said he’d lived in Portland before hitchhiking to Southern California six months before. From the way he quickly took the responsibility of supporting Cassie from Frank I guessed he favored her in some special way. He appeared to be her age or a year older and sported a look that mirrored hers, hair worn long and black in front and shaved blond in back. He wasn’t a big kid, except in the face; his neck and shoulders seemed too frail to hold his oversized head, his lips swelling beneath a massive brow as though he hadn’t yet grown into his features. Cassie latched onto his hand in the backseat and didn’t let go during the ride down the mountain. I didn’t know the exact nature of their relationship and didn’t ask. Jason cared enough for her to risk throwing his lot with hers. I couldn’t ask for a more genuine sign of his loyalty than that.

  Frank and I booked two rooms in a chain motel close to the freeway to clean them up, feed them, and get their story. Frank had wanted to take them to Scandal Times and worry about where to put them up later but I didn’t want my niece to feel any more kidnapped than she already had the honest right to feel. We met on the walkway outside our adjoining rooms while the two kids showered, Frank using the break as an opportunity to smoke. “We can’t use their names in the paper,” I said. “Are we clear on that?”

  “They’re minors. We’d have legal issues if we tried.” Frank blew his smoke away from me, a rare show of consideration.

  “Let’s break them up,” I suggested.

  “I’ll talk to Jason,” he said. “I’ve got some pot in my bag. After I loosen him up with a few joints he’ll tell me everything he knows.”

  I stared at him.

  “Just kidding,” he said, showing the palms of his hands in a don’t-hit-me gesture. “But I need to know how far to take this. Are we going to put them up here for a few days or what? Will it offend your sense of morals if I bribe him to tell me about the shrine? If this guy Sven really has a bunch of celebrity bones up there this is front-page stuff.”

  “I need to talk to my niece, figure out what to do, how to get her out of this. If I put her on the bus back to Phoenix, she’ll skip at the next stop, just like Theresa did.”

  “What about her father? Can he help?”

  “Her stepfather? He’s in the joint, serving time on a bank-robbery conviction,” I said, remembering what Dougan and Smalls had told me. “Her blood father is a double murderer, executed last year in Texas.
”

  Frank smoked and thought about that for a moment. “Con-artist mother, bank-robbing stepfather, death-row daddy, and an ex-con paparazza for an aunt.” He whistled in mock admiration. “The girl has lots of role models.”

  Like any other talent crime runs in families. My niece, at thirteen already implicated in theft and murder, was looking like a prodigy. I didn’t know how to alter that course. I wasn’t all that convinced it was my responsibility. I jogged down to the car to pull from the trunk a change of clothing and a few back editions of the Los Angeles Times. My niece was too young to take care of herself but old enough to make taking care of her without her consent impossible. I returned to the room to sit on the corner of the bed and wait for her to emerge from the shower.

  “How’s your jaw?” I asked when the bathroom door opened. She scuttled around the far side of the second bed in the room and wrapped her arms around her thin chest, eyes fearful but curious, like a small predator watching a larger one. Hitting somebody isn’t the most endearing way to introduce yourself to a relative. “I had to get you out of there,” I said. “I’m not sorry I hit you. But I regret the pain it caused.”

  “Where’s my mother?” she demanded. “You told me you’d take me to my mother.”

  “Your mother is dead.”

  I hadn’t planned to say it that way but it needed to be said and that’s how it came out. I laid on the bed the issue of the Times that headlined the robbery from Valentino’s crypt and next to it the two-column follow-up story identifying the murder victim by name. Then I sat back on the bed to give her time to read.

  Cassie wasn’t the fastest reader. I tried not to mark her progress by watching too closely. We looked physically similar, enough to guess at a glance we were related, though she was going through her rebellious stage about ten years before I’d gone through mine. She dyed her blond hair black, just as I did. Our eyes were the same color of brown, so dark they could pass for black in dim light or when shaded by rage. Like me, she didn’t seem much disposed to tears. The shock of seeing her mother’s death in print twitched the corners of her eyes but she did not cry out or weep. Maybe life had already burned the tears from her.

  “I thought she was still in prison,” she said.

  “She was paroled a couple of months ago.”

  “It wasn’t like she came to visit me all that often.” The scratch in her voice cut so deeply the words broke up as she spoke. She sounded thirteen going on forty.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “When I was nine. The day before she was arrested on that bank robbery thing.” She braved a longer glance at me, starting to believe that I wished her no harm.

  “You close to your stepdad?”

  “Which stepdad? The one in prison or the one they fried in Texas?”

  “Texas? I thought he was…” I didn’t finish the sentence.

  “My real father? Define real.” The scratch running through her voice hardened and spiked out like a barb. “You mean someone who holds you in your arms when you’re a baby and helps you do your homework and other shit like that? I don’t know what real fathers do because I never had one. Or do you mean the sperm bag who knocked up my mom and nine months later out pops yours truly?” Her hands flourished, palms up at the shoulders, and she clowned a smile. “Mom lied to you, I’m sure. Mom lies to everybody. She sure as fuck lied to stepdad number one, telling him I was his kid.”

  “Did she tell you who your biological father is?”

  “You mean the sperm bag? A con artist is all I heard. Some guy who took her money and left me as the deposit. You think he cares? Or are you thinking blackmail?” Her eyes flashed at the thought. “Like maybe he’s got a nice little life now, a nice little family, he’ll pay something so I’ll stay away?” She examined my boots, jet-black jeans, and black leather jacket as though seeing possibilities, as though she imagined we might embark together on a life of crime. She asked, “You’ve been to prison?”

  “Does it show?”

  “You look like you’ve done some illegal shit. But maybe you’re smart, didn’t get caught.”

  “I’m smart enough,” I said. “And I still got caught. You’ll be caught too, unless you change the way you look at your life.”

  Her lip curled and her glance turned sullen. “Is this the part where you talk about how I have to adjust my attitude, stop fucking up so much?”

  “I don’t have the right to tell you what to do,” I said. “I have the responsibility to care what happens to you. That’s all. And part of that is letting you know what I think about things, to share a little hard-earned wisdom about the way life can cut the legs from under you. But I can’t tell you what to do.”

  “So if I get up right now and walk out the door, you won’t stop me?”

  “I’m not your guardian. I may be your blood aunt, but that doesn’t give me some moral authority over you, not unless we both agree that’s what we want.”

  Cassie threw down a defiant stare and strode toward the door. I clasped my hands together to hold back the urge to tackle her. It was her choice, not mine. The girl was damaged, maybe irreparably. Thirteen is old enough to run away. Thirteen is old enough to go bad, if the determination is there. She paused when her feet crossed the threshold. “Just one question.” She leaned against the door frame, waiting for me to look at her before she asked it. “What the fuck was my mom thinking? Why was she even at the cemetery that night?”

  I couldn’t judge when my sister had spoken the truth or lied, and if confronted with the need to guess which was which I’d put my money on the lie. My sister may have been desperate and like most criminals blind to the consequences of her actions but she wasn’t stupid. She had to realize the stigma attached to being the daughter of a convicted murderer. And so she had told her daughter a little fiction about the identity of her father, I supposed, inventing a figure just enough of a rogue to render him untraceable. Not all lies are hurtful or self-serving. “Your mom started looking for you the moment she got out of prison.” I didn’t know whether or not that was true but maybe by saying it I could make it true for Cassie. It was a hard thing to have to call your own mother a liar. “She loved you more than anything or anyone else in the world. She was looking for you at the cemetery that night because she thought you were in trouble.”

  My niece hovered at the doorway, trying to construct a psychological defense against the assertion that her mother had loved her despite the lies and absences. A mother’s love is among the most powerful forces in all of life, no less potent withheld than given. Breath shuddered into her like wind through broken glass and her hand, draped insolently against the door frame a moment before, trembled. She dropped to her heels and hugged her chest as though violently ill, short gasps breaking from her body until tears swelled her eyes shut. I don’t know whether kinship sings in the blood or merely speaks to the brain but that thin and trembling body called to something vital in me. My life was no worse than hers. Why hadn’t I been able to cry? What had so jammed my heart that such simple emotion seemed forever blocked? My sister had failed at nearly all the basic requirements of parenting, but still, Cassie cried for her. For all her faults my mother too deserved to be properly grieved.

  After some time Cassie’s trembling ceased and she stared dully out the open doorway, all thought of escape vanished for the moment. “What happened that night?” I asked. When the question did not move her to respond I said, “Did you know someone had been killed?”

  Her brow creased sharply and her face reddened, as though the question wounded her and she might cry again, but she shook her head to will away the pain. “Rumors. Some of the crew, they said something bad happened, but nobody knew anything. Gunny said he saw news of it on TV. He likes to go to Circuit City, watch television on the sets they got displayed there.”

  “Who’s Gunny?”

  “Just a fuckhead.” She shook her head again, a short, disdainful gesture. “One of the crew. Nobody believed h
im. Gunny lies a lot.”

  “Nobody saw anything? Nobody heard anything?”

  “We knew something happened,” she said. “But we didn’t know what.” She grasped her head, palms winging from her eyes like blinders. “Maybe we knew. Maybe we were just too afraid to admit it. I was in the vault with Valentino. I didn’t see anything. But I heard. One of the crew said somebody was out there. I was helping pry away the stone, you know, the marble protecting the coffin. Eric ordered us to stop, to shut up. He told us not to move. And he went outside, outside the vault. We didn’t know if it was the pols or not. We were scared. We thought we were all gonna get busted. So I crawled toward the door. Hands and knees like a dog. Getting ready to jet, you know? In case it was the pols. I was gonna be the first one out, jump the fence, escape. Then I heard a shout.” She nodded to herself, as though confirming something remembered. “It was a woman. A woman shouted. But it wasn’t like a scream or anything. And I did see something. I saw a flash of light.”

  “From a flash camera? Could it have been that kind of light?”

  “Fuck,” she said. “Everything’s fucked.” She pushed off the floor, her legs unsteady as she moved into the bathroom to wash the salt from her face.

  My niece’s language didn’t shock me. I didn’t like it, but it didn’t shock me. She spoke like a lot of women I’d known in prison. I once thought people swore to sound tough, but I’ve since learned that just as often it’s the nearest they can come to articulating despair. “Why was she looking for me?” she cried from the sink. “Three years I didn’t see her, three fucking years. And she shows up there? I mean, what the fuck? Did she have radar or something? Was it some criminal thing, like she wanted part of the action?”

  “You ran away from your foster home.” I met her glance in the mirror above the sink. My sister didn’t deserve much, but she deserved the good truths that could be spoken about her. “Nobody knew where you were. She was worried about you. That night, it was the first solid tip she’d received about how to find you.” I began to doubt my words as I spoke them. She’d ripped me off for nineteen grand and taken my point-and-shoot. Why take my camera if she wasn’t intending to photograph the robbery and sell the snaps to the tabloids? I didn’t intend my sister’s death to turn her into something she wasn’t—angel or demon.