Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  And then came the verdict. And then the appeals. And then the execution.

  “His practice picked up after the Kantke case,” she said, this time intending every bit of the bitterness she laid onto the words. “It was quite remarkable. Some of the finest criminals in Long Beach were suddenly Barry’s.”

  Jimmy asked her the question he already knew the answer to.

  “No,” she said. “Jack Kantke was innocent. Completely. And Barry knew it. And knew how to prove it.”

  She laid it all out. It had to do with the killer behind the wispy curtains in that front bedroom, waiting, and the angle of the barrel of the .45 in that hand, the trajectory of the two bullets, the height of the shooter.

  And the fact that Jack Kantke was an inch over six feet.

  “They wouldn’t use it,” she said. “Barry went to the mat but they wouldn’t use it. And it killed him.”

  She heard what she had just said.

  “Killed both of them I guess.”

  “You never knew why,” Jimmy said. “Why they wouldn’t use it.”

  She shook her head and then looked at him as if maybe, now, he was going to tell her. When he didn’t, she said, “So I guess losing did take its toll. Or maybe it was seeing the ways things really are.”

  Jimmy would remember that last line.

  She invited him to stay for the steaks but he just shook her hand again and looked again at the portrait and went out the way he’d come in.

  D. L. Upchurch was watching the fading charcoal fire.

  “You can stay,” he said. “Eat.”

  Jimmy looked at that face in the red and orange light. What would come to him in a minute was starting to come now.

  “No, that’s all right,” he said.

  “Up to you.”

  Jimmy said, “Sorry about the creeping around. I really meant to come out here in the morning.”

  “Old habits,” D. L. said. Maybe it was an apology, too.

  Then Jimmy got it.

  He stayed put in front of the man.

  “She tell you about the trajectory?” D. L. said.

  “Yeah.”

  “The angle. The shooter behind the curtain.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bill Danko’s wife killed them,” D. L. said, straight ahead, eyes down. “She was five-f oot-one.”

  D. L. Upchurch was a cop. One brother’s a lawyer and his big brother’s a cop, like something out of an old Warner Bros. movie.

  And not just any cop, a Long Beach cop, the Long Beach uniformed cop in the newspaper picture looking out of the murder bedroom. Looking up.

  Jimmy went back to the Evergreen and drank dark beer until they closed and then he was in his cabin with the tall German girl. They kissed and that’s all they did and only that because the day and the work with its tricks and surprises and reversals had gotten to him.

  And because they were both so far from home.

  TWELVE

  A cat rubbed against his leg as Jimmy stood in the middle of the back bedroom in the murder house. It was late afternoon. Needles of light shot through pinholes in the shades taped against the windows. There was a second bathroom off the bedroom. He hadn’t noticed it the first time. She was in there. The water was running.

  She came out, saw him. She was startled, but again accepted the apparition before her, even as she tried to ignore it. He did see her hands shaking a little this time.

  She walked past him and sat in her chair, looking at the TV, which wasn’t on, not looking at him.

  “My name is Jimmy Miles.”

  “Not funny,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you. I knocked. On the backdoor.”

  “OK, I’m not going to talk to you,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you because then it’ll be you and the others.”

  She was only in her forties, maybe even her thirties. The other night, Jimmy thought she was older. She wore the same worn dress, faded roses, a sweater over it, slippers on her feet. He made a harsh judgment: she’d never been pretty, except maybe to her daddy.

  “I know you see people,” Jimmy said gently, “but I’m really here. I’m real.”

  “The beat goes on,” she said to the blank TV.

  “I just want to ask you about this house.”

  She still wouldn’t look at him. Jimmy took an apple from his pocket. He took a noisy bite. She didn’t look at him but the smell of it suddenly filled the room.

  “Any of them ever eat an apple before?” he said.

  She glanced at him. He took another bite. From his pocket he produced another apple. He put it on the TV tray beside her chair, the way you put down food for a dog you just rescued and then step back.

  She watched the action, then tried to shake it off.

  “The beat goes on,” she said, staring ahead again.

  Jimmy sang a line of “The Beat Goes On.”

  “Any of them ever sing before?”

  She gave him a quick look, a flash of impatience.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Take a bite,” Jimmy said.

  She hesitated, then reached for the apple on the TV tray. She took a bite.

  “It’s one of those new Fuji apples,” he said. “How do you think they did it? How do you get a brand-new apple?”

  She took another bite. “You didn’t knock,” she said. “You said you did.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t answer. What’s your name?”

  “I can be here,” she said. “I’ve got a right.”

  “I have nothing to do with that. What’s your name?”

  She looked at him. “Rosemary. Rosemary Danko.”

  Jimmy already knew it, before she said it.

  “You look like your dad,” he said.

  “I’ve got a right to be here. This is where they killed him. I’m not leaving.”

  He stepped back, leaned against the wall.

  “Where do you get your food?”

  She straightened herself in her chair. “Two a.m., I go to the Ralph’s. It used to be a Hughes. They cash my checks and they take my stamps.”

  “Are you on medication?”

  “They think I live at the other place, over in Garden Grove,” she said. “Sometimes I have to go over there on the Six Bus, to keep them thinking that.”

  A cat jumped into her lap. She looked at it a moment, as if she wasn’t sure what it was. Then she relaxed.

  “They won’t kill me here,” she said, as much to the cat as to Jimmy.

  “Who wants to kill you?”

  She said something that he couldn’t understand, something mumbled, swallowed up.

  “Say it again,” he said.

  She suddenly looked at his feet. “I like your shoes. Most people don’t wear those.”

  “Who wants to kill you?” he said again.

  She looked at him hard, suddenly angry. “Who are you? What does this have to do with apples?”

  “Who killed your father?”

  “I know what I know. That’s why I don’t live over in Garden Grove.”

  Jimmy nodded as if he understood.

  “They knew his weakness,” she said. “They were waiting in the closet.”

  Maybe it was the pretty people—maybe that was what she had said.

  Jimmy asked her again who they were but she just ate her apple. Every bit of it, stem and seed.

  “I’ve never seen a picture of your mother,” Jimmy said.

  “She comes on Sundays.”

  Jimmy waited.

  “And I go there Mondays. When she comes here, I know the next day is Monday.”

  “What does she say about you being here?”

  “We don’t talk,” Rosemary said.

  “What does she say about you being here where they killed him?”

  “That’s what she doesn’t talk about.”

  “What day is today?” Jimmy asked.

  She got up out of her chair.

  “Did you ever hear the record they were playing?�
�� she asked, her face opening up a little, “Daddy and that woman?” She didn’t wait for an answer, opened the front of a nightstand, an old humidor cabinet, and took out a 45 record in its original sleeve. She stepped over and put it on a turntable with a fat center post, a teenager’s record player. It clicked, the arm moved over, it began.

  It was Streisand’s “People (Who Need People).”

  “It was still playing, again and again, when the police looked in the window. They left it here. They had no idea how it fit in . . .”

  They both listened to it. When it ended, it started again and Jimmy left her there.

  After dark, about nine, when the neighbors would all be inside with their prime-time TV or their murder books and their third or fourth drinks, she came out. The streetlight over the alleyway behind the house was out. She pulled the door closed behind her and started away, nothing in her hands. One of the cats came out of the broken kitchen window and watched her go from the sill.

  The Number Six bus was crowded with domestics headed home from the beach neighborhoods, a funny name for the cleaning women since most of them were illegals. They carried plastic bags of the supplies they preferred, pungent disinfectants, Day-Glo green. Since it was the end of the day, they didn’t talk to each other.

  Rosemary Danko was in the sideways seat behind the driver. Jimmy sat in the last row, against the window. When she’d sat down, one of the cleaning women moved away. Rosemary knew Jimmy was there, had turned to see him at a stop where a man with no shirt had gotten off the bus. She had looked right at him. He thought for a second she was going to lift her hand to wave.

  The bus took her all the way into Garden Grove, a twenty-minute trip straight east on Westminster. Away from the water, it got hotter by the mile. Jimmy could feel it coming through the glass of the closed window. Inland, it hadn’t gotten any cooler when the sun went down. It was another reason the women didn’t talk.

  She got off at a big cross street and walked north two blocks and then over a block. When she passed through a section with the streetlight shot out or burned out, she quickened her pace.

  It was a ground-flo or unit in a building of ten apartments. She knocked at the door and waited for almost a minute before she knocked again. Then, impatient, sighing, she took the key from the black mailbox beside the door. She wiped her feet on the mat.

  Estella Danko had died fourteen months ago.

  Jimmy stood in the dining room at the round white Formica table and went through the mostly unopened mail. She had died somewhere out of the house. She had died suddenly. There were quarterly dunning letters from a nursing home but Estella Danko hadn’t died there. She had worked as a nurse and had left without turning in her uniforms. Died inconsider ately, without giving them notice.

  There were government letters referring to Rosemary. She was on disability. Her utilities for the apartment were being paid direct by some agency. With the death of her mother, she’d gotten a bigger check. She had been an L.A. Unified School District teacher, ninth and tenth grade math, a school in Diamond Bar. Her middle name was Marialinda. Rosemary Marialinda Danko.

  Jimmy looked in on her. She had gone straight into one of the bedrooms, her mother’s bedroom. She was watching television, sitting on the end of the stripped mattress. It was one of those dating shows. She looked over at Jimmy, waved him away.

  In the living room he found a cabinet full of old pictures, the next best thing to living witnesses. He turned on a floor lamp and pulled it closer and sat on the end of the coffee table. There were boxes of photos, loose and in leather albums. The Dankos liked cameras.

  There had just been the three of them. They’d had a house somewhere for most of the time, had lived in other apartments in the early years after a wedding in what looked like Rosarito Beach, down over the border on the way to Ensenada. Estella was Mexican. She had been a beauty but she was the size of a child.

  Every picture except the wedding had the baby in it. And then the baby grew. There was one of Rosemary at four or five on a pony at the rides in Griffith Park, her smiling father sitting on the rail as she passed behind him staring straight ahead, a scared look on her little face.

  Jimmy slipped it into the pocket of his shirt.

  Almost every other picture of Danko had him beside one plane or another. There was a framed photo in fading colors of a four-place Cessna, red over white, Danko standing with his hand on the tip of the wing, the world headquarters of the Danko “Flying School” in half-focus in the background.

  “Dancing Queen” was painted on the engine cowling.

  Jimmy took that one, too.

  And he found the picture of Estella Danko to take. It was from an open-air bar somewhere, sand on the floor and the beach in the background, probably down in Baja. Three blond girls, probably college kids, more pretty people, were grouped behind Bill Danko who sat on a silver beer keg, his legs open, wearing shorts and hurraches, his elbows on his knees, aviator glasses, a big grin on his face, a bottle of beer in his hand. Estella was off to one side, away from the others, not happy, as if the girls had waved her into the shot.

  It was hard to imagine a .45 in the empty little hand at her side but not so hard to picture a murderous look in her eye.

  There was a sound from the kitchen.

  Rosemary stood in front of the microwave.

  “Three zero zero,” she said, more than once.

  It dinged. She opened the door and took out a package of macaroni and cheese. She pulled back the covering and set it on a plate to cool. She held her fork in her hand and waited, like she was counting seconds in her head.

  She did all right with numbers. She just didn’t know what day it was. She had a broken sense of time and she didn’t know who was dead and who wasn’t anymore.

  Jimmy felt a certain kinship.

  It was a rough night on the strip, odd and ugly and edgy for some reason. Young men who’d all stripped off their shirts ganged in front of The Roxy, spilled out onto the sidewalks between a pair of shows for some metal band come round again. They were like natives on the banks of a river. Some of them were trying to get a fire going in a trash barrel to complete the picture. Ninety degrees at eleven o’clock and they’re starting fires.

  Jimmy rolled past, Streisand’s “People” still looping in his head from the weird afternoon, making the scene all the stranger.

  He slid in the CD his musician friend had made for him, the collection of disco music Chris thought he should be listening to. The first song was lush, symphonic, with a sexy chorus, women singing the same three words over and over. It was romantic, dramatic. It was soundtrack music, for the movie playing in the heads of twenty-somethings on the dance floor, overriding, at least for part of a Saturday night, their ordinary lives.

  One of the Roxy natives jumped out from the others, slowly and deliberately flipped him off as he cruised past. Maybe the kid could hear the disco music.

  Or maybe he just didn’t like Fords. Jimmy was in the Mustang. After spending the early part of the night with Rosemary in the house in Garden Grove, he’d taken a cab back to Naples where he’d left the car and then driven up from Long Beach on Pacific Coast Highway, the slow way, trying to sort it out. Estella Danko was dead but that didn’t make much difference to him, to the case. Now he’d met her. He even had her picture in his pocket. Dead now or not, there was a good chance she was the one who’d done the killing. Jealous, left-out wives pulled triggers in bedrooms all the time. D. L. Upchurch thought she had done it and he had brooded over all this more than Jimmy had or ever would.

  She was five-foot-one.

  And she wasn’t her husband’s Dancing Queen anymore.

  So Jimmy thought he was getting closer to certainty, to an end to it, closing in on something he could take to Jean.

  Your father didn’t kill anybody. She did.

  He’d gone by Jean’s apartment. There was no answer downstairs, no lights in the penthouse. He still hadn’t seen her or talked to her since t
he night they’d come upon Drew. He wondered how gone she was.

  Jimmy thought he was closing in on certainty, but what he didn’t understand was what this particula piece of old history had to do with Sailors. His tails were back, Lon and Vince, still in the subcompact Escort, almost bumping into him when he slowed.

  And now there was another one.

  At least this one had better taste in cars. He was in a black 745 iL BMW, smart because it blended in in most parts of L.A. better than a basic Ford. And this driver knew what he was doing, stayed two blocks back and turned off onto side streets just a half second before you really noticed he was there, making you think maybe you’d imagined it.

  But Jimmy knew how to do this, too, and had caught a good look at the car twice, once on PCH and once when he was coming back down onto Sunset from Jean’s.

  It was then that he got a look at his face. When the driver knew he’d been seen, he’d turned into the space in front of a restaurant, had even gotten out to meet the valet, very cool. He was tall, skinny, in an expensive black suit, slicked-back hair. He was too far away, but maybe it was Boney M, the tall one with the long fingers from the rooftop of the Roosevelt.

  Jimmy figured he’d never see the man again, though that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be there.

  It was their mistake. If they’d stopped following him a week ago, he probably would have ended it by now, told Jean it was over, that there was nothing worth knowing that he could tell her. After the night in the canyon when they’d come upon the overturned Honda, everything in him had wanted to wrap up the case, tell her whatever he could tell her, and then see if there was any way to salvage things with her.

  But they hadn’t quit. They were back, following him, nosing around, keeping it alive, accomplishing the opposite of what they wanted, making the black clear space where the answer was a thing he could never turn away from now.

  He looped around and cruised by Jean’s a third time.

  The lights were still out and this time he didn’t go to the door. The song on the CD lasted all the way there and halfway back to his house down Sunset, the singer telling him she loved the nightlife but sounding a little sad, like she was trying to convince herself.