Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  NINETEEN

  It was morning and raining. Jean brought a cup of coffee into the living room in Jimmy’s house. She looked out the tall window. Two more of the weight lifters from Angel’s backyard stood guard under the dripping overhang of the four-bay garage. The garage doors were up. There was the Mustang and empty spaces for the wrecked Dodge Challenger and the Porsche Drew had taken. In the last bay was the tarp-covered car with the high fins. Jean watched as one of the iron men lifted the corner of the cover for a look.

  The rain helped, made her feel safer. She’d lived years in Northern California and so she liked the rain. Here, when it rained everything fell apart. The weathermen apologized, the freeways clogged with spun-out cars, mudslides slopped across the curvy foothill roads. Everybody either drove too fast or too slow and everyone bitched. People walking their dogs looked out from under their umbrellas and rolled their eyes instead of saying Good morning, if they looked at you at all.

  Jean cranked open a window an inch or two so she could hear it and smell it. It reminded her of San Francisco, of Tiberon, of Atherton, of the hills above Stanford, brown today and green tomorrow, as the drops ticked into the gravel under the eaves. In California, the rain was usually like this, flat, steady, without drama.

  Maybe that was what the locals hated about it.

  It was a huge room. A child could stand in the fireplace. Everyone knew the history of the house. It had been built by one of Los Angeles’s first oil barons in the twenties. A movie star had owned it in the forties, put in the pool in back, the motor court and the garage. The star had sold off a half acre in the fifties but there were four and a half acres left. It became a museum in the sixties, restored more or less to the look of the oil baron’s home, paid for by the family out of their great wealth. Out of vanity. No one ever toured it except elementary school kids coming in buses for field trips. The grounds were good for picnics.

  Then Jimmy had bought it.

  But his name wasn’t on the deed. Jean had checked. It was owned by a trust. Blue Moon. She wondered what the name meant.

  There was a grand piano, the wood as black as the black keys and so shiny you didn’t want to touch it. Next to it was a tall glass case with a beautiful white dress in it. And a picture of Teresa Miles, in her prime, in the fifties, wearing the same dress in a scene from a movie. Morning at the Window. Jean opened the case and felt the fabric. She lifted her fingertips to her nose and breathed in the scent on the cloth.

  They’d made love again last night. After that first night in Big Sur, they’d slept in the same bed two more nights in a small hotel in Pacific Grove with a view across Monterey Bay, but had not made love again. It was a comfortable avoidance. Neither of them thought it meant anything worrisome, only that what had happened the first night could stand on its own.

  And she had not asked again what his secret was.

  He wasn’t in bed when she awoke at seven that morning. He’d stayed beside her all night, curled against her. She awoke several times, pulled out of sleep by the strangeness of the bed and the room, needing a moment to realize where she was. Then she would close her eyes again as she felt him against her. She knew he was awake. (She’d not yet seen him asleep.) She thought of him as a restless man, an unsettled man, but he wasn’t restless in the middle in the night, with her. He was the kind of man who held you while you slept.

  Jean closed the glass cabinet.

  She went into Jimmy’s study. The bank of security monitors was lit, color images, cameras panning automatically across a half dozen sections of the brick and iron wall that surrounded the property. Another of Angel’s men stood in the rain just inside the gate below the house down a slow hill. And another patrolled a back gate.

  Was this really now that dangerous? What had changed?

  On the desk, spread out, was the case. Jean stood before it, picked up the old Time magazine. She looked at the pictures, at a photocopy of a one-inch story about Bill Danko’s arrest for “drunken flying” she’d never seen before. It mentioned “a female companion.” She’d thought her father had managed to keep all of it out of the papers. She looked through the cancelled checks.

  There was a clip from the business section of The Times:

  The aviation industry was stunned in early June when directors of Steadman Aircraft and The Rath Corp., former bitter rivals, announced the two companies had agreed to merge.

  And there was the year-end wrap-up.

  1977 . . .

  A MERGER A MURDERER A MONARCH

  Cut into the copy was a picture of her father being led into the court-house in handcuffs, Jack Kantke in a gray suit, three-button, buttoned up, a narrow black tie. Jean had seen the picture before but this time she noticed what a bright day it had been, everything almost washed out, and the pathetic smile on her father’s face.

  She looked into his eyes and felt embarrassed for him.

  What had changed?

  She’d never felt embarrassed for him before. She wondered what of him was carried on in her. It was every child’s question if you waited long enough or if circumstances exploded in your face.

  At least the picture of the Queen Mary was simple enough. The Monarch. Nineteen seventy-seven had seen the “gala” tenth anniversary of the arrival of the ship to Long Beach Harbor as a tourist attraction.

  Scott stepped into the doorway.

  “Sorry,” he said when she jumped.

  They considered each other a moment.

  “I was looking for Jimmy,” he said.

  It was awkward. Jean had the thought that it was as if the bartender and Jimmy were lovers, which wasn’t true and made no sense, like they were both Jimmy’s lover.

  It’s just that they share such a secret, she thought.

  “I don’t know where he is,” Jean said.

  “He just went for a walk in the rain,” Scott said. “We spoke. I thought maybe he had come back.”

  It stayed awkward. He looked at the bank of monitors, points of view like eyes moving from side to side, like heads saying no very slowly. He looked at her again and then looked away. He felt ashamed about what she’d seen on the roof the night before.

  “I made some coffee,” Jean said. She held up her coffee mug. “In the kitchen.”

  She sat down behind the desk to make it seem as if she belonged there, that she wasn’t snooping, that she had permission. Or, maybe that she knew.

  Scott looked at the clippings, upside down.

  “This is about you?”

  She nodded. “My father. And mother. It started out simpler.”

  “Yeah, things get complicated.”

  There was another silence.

  “How long have you known Jimmy?” she said.

  “Years.”

  Jean realized she couldn’t tell how old he was. A week ago, behind the bar, he looked liked he was in his twenties. Now, here, before her, he looked fifty.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She saw him flinch slightly. He waited to hear what it was.

  “Why does he order a second drink when he comes in Ike’s and then just leaves it on the bar?” she said.

  “A manhattan.”

  She waited.

  “It was what his mother drank.”

  “What do you do with it when he leaves?”

  Scott smiled. “Give it to someone who looks like they need it. Tell them it’s from a secret admirer.”

  Jimmy came in, drying his hair with a towel. He’d heard the last of what Scott said.

  “Do they believe it?” Jimmy said.

  Scott turned. “Every time.” He left them alone. Jimmy patted his back as he went past.

  Jean was still behind the desk, the case in front of her.

  Jimmy tried to read what was on her face.

  “Now you know everything,” he said.

  Jean stood. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, stay there.”

  Jimmy smiled. “You put everything in piles.”


  Jean looked down at the neatened desk. She’d hadn’t remembered doing it.

  “That’s a little embarrassing,” she said.

  He put a different look on his face. “What do you want to know?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “My turn to talk you into it,” he said.

  “No.”

  He stood in the same place, across the desk from her, with all of It between them. She knew he was going to wait for her to say something.

  “Who’s this?” She took a photo from the desk, Harry Turner.

  He told her his name. “A lawyer. Or at least he started out as one. He was behind the scenes in your father’s defense. He runs things. That’s what he does. Who he is.”

  She dropped the picture, careful not to put it atop one of her piles.

  Jimmy wasn’t finished.

  “And he’s on the board of directors of Rath-Steadman.”

  Harry Turner’s was the face Jimmy had recognized from the wall in the boardroom on the top floor of Rath-Steadman as maybe the one man who could have stood up to the old men, to Vasek Rath and Red Steadman.

  “The merger in 1977 is connected to the murders?”

  He nodded. “Rath-Steadman is ready to build a new assembly plant down in Long Beach. Somehow that’s connected to this.”

  Jean came around the desk to him. She thought she was going to go into his arms but he didn’t want that. Without pushing her away, he pushed her away. Maybe he’d decided something. There was an anger in him this morning she didn’t understand.

  “Are you going to stop now?”

  “No.”

  “I told you I don’t care about this anymore,” she said.

  “It’s taken on its own life.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she said. “Pushing my face into it?”

  “I want you to know everything I know.”

  “I don’t care about Rath-Steadman. I’m at peace with the idea of my father, what he did or didn’t do. I don’t want to know everything. Not anymore. I want . . .”

  And she waited before she said it.

  “You.”

  “Your brother Carey is on the board, too,” Jimmy said.

  Something broke inside her, like a support, something that held up part of the façade. He saw her crumble.

  He heard himself, the way he’d said it, wondered if some part of him meant to break her. Or even drive her away.

  “He doesn’t have any hand in the day-to-day operation of the company,” Jimmy said. “He’s just on the board.”

  She sat in the chair.

  He waited. “And he has three million dollars’ worth of R-S stock.”

  “Where does he live?” she said, suddenly smaller.

  “He has a house in Palos Verdes. And a penthouse in a high-rise on the harbor in Long Beach.”

  He could see her pulling herself together again.

  “Have you talked to him?” she said.

  “No. Have you?”

  She didn’t understand the accusation in it. She said, “Carey called me on some anniversary of the execution. I was at Stanford. That was the last time I talked to him. I heard seven or eight years ago that he was a lawyer, that he was living in Arizona.”

  “He practiced four years,” Jimmy said, “private practice, then filed for bankruptcy. He’s had inactive status with the Arizona Bar ever since.”

  She wanted out of there.

  “Was there bad blood between the two of you?”

  “No,” Jean said. “There wasn’t anything. There isn’t anything.”

  “Where did he go to live after the murders?”

  “He was eight. A boarding school in Scottsdale.”

  “Why didn’t he live with you and your grandmother?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She got out of the chair.

  “You never asked?”

  “Why are you being this way?” she said.

  He didn’t tell her, he didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She knew he’d hold her now but now she didn’t want it.

  There was a full daylight moon over the high-rise Deco apartment building on Long Beach Harbor. It was a pretty building, twenty stories high with ornate bas-relief detail over the black frames of the windows. It was from the twenties, recently refurbished, reconfigured into condominiums for young professionals and widows with a sense of style. The rain had ended at noon and left behind the brightest kind of sky, a few round white clouds and a view all the way to Catalina.

  The gate on the subterranean parking lifted. After a moment, a white Porsche Cabriolet came out. It stopped. The top folded back.

  It was Carey Kantke.

  He looked like his father, wore his hair in the same crew cut though there was probably a different name for it now. He was in his late thirties, the same age as his father at the time of the murders, the trial. He ran his hand through his short hair, checked it in the mirror and pulled out of the parking garage and onto West Shoreline Drive, turning right.

  Jimmy waited and then fell in behind.

  Jean had gone in to her office after they’d talked in the study. Jimmy had told her to stay there at the house behind its high walls, that things were getting weird, but she’d had other ideas. Angel’s men went with her. Jimmy thought that if they could get through these next days, with all they would hold, he and Jean might be together for a while, might have a chance. But he didn’t tell her that.

  There was a stop for lunch, a sidewalk café on East Second Street, a street of gentrified shops and galleries with only a few taco stands and tiki bars left over from the old days. Carey Kantke ate alone, got up once to collapse the green umbrella that shaded his table. Jimmy watched from across the street on a stool at a sidewalk Mexican juice bar splashed with orange and yellow paint. Carey had a coffee and a refill and then paid for his lunch with cash, standing beside the table, talking with the young waitress, all the time in the world.

  The valet pulled up with the white Porsche. Jimmy drank the rest of his milky, too sweet horchada, left two bucks for the man behind the counter. Carey never saw him, never looked around as he dropped behind the wheel. This wasn’t a wary man.

  The white Porsche humped up and over the concrete bridge on East Street, into Naples, then right onto the perimeter loop called The Toledo.

  And then right again, onto Rivo Alto Canal.

  Maybe Carey Kantke had his own version of returning.

  Jimmy dropped back and parked the Mustang and jumped out and followed the Porsche on foot. The lanes behind the houses were narrow and the pace was slow, slower even than the three-mile-per-hour speed limit posted on funny hand-painted signs.

  Carey drove past the house at One-Ten, the murder house, and parked behind the garage of the two-story house two doors down. He got out and went up the walkway between the houses leading to the front, to the canal and the waterfront sidewalk.

  It was the house where Jimmy had heard Abba’s “Dancing Queen” drifting out of the upstairs window.

  Jimmy watched the house from a rental boat, cruising in the canal. Carey Kantke had been inside forty-five minutes. Jimmy cut the engine and let it coast until it thunked into an empty dock. He took the housing off the little outboard and pretended to adjust the carb while he kept his eyes on the house.

  In time, Carey came out onto the porch with a Coke. He unbuttoned his shirt and dropped into a pink Adirondack chair, lifting his face into the sun.

  Right at home. Why? What was Carey Kantke doing there, two doors down from the house where his young life and his sister’s had been blown apart with a pair of gunshots in the middle of a summer night?

  Then the answer, at least part of it, came out the front door. A young woman. She was in her early twenties but with this kind of good looks it was hard to tell. She could have been sixteen. Or thirty. She wore white shorts and a short top that tied up high enough to show her stomach. She handed Carey a portable phone with someone on the lin
e. Carey said hello, listened, said a few words and handed it back to her. She sat in a second matching Adirondack chair, a long tan leg over the armrest. There was something very familiar about her.

  Then the next part of the answer came out.

  Vivian Goreck.

  The real estate lady Jimmy had talked with at the empty Palos Verdes house. Former Jolly Girl.

  She was the young woman’s mother. It was obvious when they were next to each other. Vivian stood over her daughter and brushed her fingers through her blond hair until the young woman pushed her mother’s hand away.

  Jimmy would learn that her name was Lynne.

  Vivian sat on the low wall that edged the porch and joined in the conversation between the young people. No one was in much of a hurry. A seagull landed on the neighbor’s fountain, atop a cement seagull, balancing on the other gull’s back. They all watched it, enjoying the joke. It drank. It flew.

  After a few more minutes the young woman and Carey got up. He kissed Vivian Goreck on her cheek and they left. The Jolly Girl stayed seated on the low wall. She looked down, pulled out a dandelion growing from a crack in the concrete.

  Jimmy got the boat to a dock and then ran between the two closest houses.

  He came out onto the alleyway just as Lynne and Carey got into the white Porsche and drove off.

  The garage was open. There was Vivian’s Rolls, with its BUY BUY license plates.

  On a bluff above the ocean at Palos Verdes was a glass and steel house with an angular face like the prow of a ship. Jimmy was above it on the adjacent point, an empty lot muddied from the overnight rain. He scanned the scene with binoculars. The white Porsche was in the driveway.

  This was Carey’s other address.

  He stepped into view in the glass living room. He went to the tall window, looked out at the expanse of ocean with his hands behind his back like a captain of a ship.

  But wait.

  Was it Carey?

  Lynne Goreck came into the room. She went to him at the window, went into his arms. They kissed. She stepped away. He turned again to look out at the Pacific, then followed her, moving out of view.