Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  A minute passed. Jimmy heard an engine start. The white Porsche curled around the circle drive and sped away up to the coast road, Carey behind the wheel, alone now.

  Jimmy looked back at the living room. The room was empty.

  But then they were back, the man and Lynne Goreck.

  The phone in Jimmy’s pocket rang.

  It was Jean.

  He listened for a long time.

  “I’ll meet you there,” he said.

  TWENTY

  The back of the house at one-ten Rivo Alto Canal was blackened but not burned out. A fireman kneeled just inside the backdoor, beside the water heater.

  “What was it?” Jimmy said.

  The fireman looked the two of them over.

  “I own the house,” Jean said.

  “Oily rags under the water heater,” the fireman said.

  “Was anybody—”

  Jimmy pushed past him and headed upstairs.

  “No. They got out,” the fireman told Jean.

  Jean followed Jimmy. She slowed as she moved through the living room. It hadn’t been burned but the smoke had crawled across the ceiling and stained it. Her eyes went over the pictures on the walls, the coffee table, the divan. She’d never been back.

  Jimmy was already at the door of the back bedroom upstairs. The door-frame was blackened and some of the dirty carpet had been burned over to the doorway.

  Jean came up behind him.

  “They said she got out.”

  They stepped into the room together. The fire had burned the shades off the windows so there was light. The TV was melted, the recliner singed and blackened and its plastic melted, too.

  A voice startled them. “You the owners?”

  A fir e marshal, a handsome man in a perfectly white shirt with a badge on the pocket, stepped out of the second bathroom. He wore rubber gloves.

  “I am,” Jean said.

  “Who was she?”

  Jean said, “No one. No one was supposed to be living here.”

  “It was a woman. I guess a transient,” the fire marshal said. “Living here.” He looked around the room. “And six or seven cats. So far.”

  Jean turned and walked out.

  “It burned itself out up here,” the fire marshal said to Jimmy. “There’s not much structural damage. It came straight up from the water heater below, rode up the stack.”

  “Was the backdoor locked when you got here?” Jimmy asked.

  “Yeah, it was. Pulled tight.”

  Jimmy looked into the bathroom. It was smoke-damaged but not burned. A yellowed shower curtain with flamingos on it still hung on its rings. The mirror above the sink over the years had lost most of its silvering. There was a splotchy black hole in its center where your face would be.

  The fire marshal squatted next to the carcasses of two cats at the base of the bay window, trying to decide what to do with them.

  “Her name was Rosemary Danko,” Jimmy said.

  The fire marshal stood.

  “You knew her?”

  “I talked to her once.”

  “You want to tell me why?”

  Jimmy told him. Some of it.

  Jean was in the car when he came down. He got in without saying anything, started the engine and pulled away.

  He looked in the mirror. Vivian Goreck was standing with the other neighbors in the middle of the lane.

  “Where are we going?” Jean said.

  “She had another place,” Jimmy said.

  And another fire.

  A red L.A.F.D. Suburban was parked in front of the apartment building in Garden Grove Jimmy had followed her to, crossing town on a hot bus.

  Jean stayed in the car.

  Jimmy walked around the side of the building. On the service porch of the corner ground-floor unit another fire marshal stood beside another water heater.

  “Who are you?”

  “I knew the woman who lived here.”

  “Where is she? We thought it was vacant.”

  Every time Jimmy heard that word vacant, he thought of the look in Rosemary’s eyes.

  He came in off of the service porch through the kitchen and into the living room. It was gutted, burned to the studs, and the cabinet that had been full of pictures was now a collapsed, empty box.

  It would have been neater if there was a body in one of the two places—If I just could be sure—but whatever threat in her madness Rosemary Danko had been to them, it was gone, as gone as she was. They’d cut her out of the story. And the traces of her mother with her.

  Five-foot-one.

  Jimmy stood in the warm sun out front for a moment. It was good to breathe the open air.

  He got in the Mustang. Jean looked at him and he shook his head, though it wasn’t clear what he meant by that.

  It just meant no.

  Nine o’clock at night and the traffic on the 405 north was still clogged. It should have opened up hours ago. They were stopped cold in the fast lane at the top of Sepulveda Pass, up where Mulholland crossed overhead with a high bridge. The line of cars ahead of them stretched for two miles down across the San Fernando Valley, the spaces between the sets of red taillights never expanding beyond a car length.

  Jean had a beach house north of Malibu at Point Dume. Jimmy was taking her there the back way over Kanan Dume Road, the fast way he had thought, until a half hour ago. This time she hadn’t said no when he told her what to do, when he told her she had to leave town because they’d kill her, too, if they thought she knew something, if they thought she was in their way, cut her out of the story, too. He had said she should go to San Francisco, had said something that made no sense to her—They won’t follow you out of the city—but she told him about her house at the beach.

  Both of them could still smell the smoke on their clothes.

  “That was my room,” Jean said.

  There was nothing to say to that.

  “How old was she?” Jean asked.

  “In her forties.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Crazy.”

  It wasn’t enough for Jean. She looked at him.

  “Lost,” he said. “Haunted.”

  He had plenty more words where those came from. His life had been filled with Rosemary Dankos.

  “What was the other place?”

  “It was her mother’s.”

  “I’d like to think she lived there most of the time. At her mother’s.”

  “She probably did,” Jimmy said.

  “Are you sure she’s dead?”

  “No. Not sure. But I don’t know where she’d be if she wasn’t, where they would have taken her, why.”

  “So she’s dead.”

  “I would guess she is.”

  “What do you think caused her to come to my house?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was when her mother died. She had nowhere else to go for family. Her father had ‘lived’ there in a way, had history there. She sat around thinking about it. Sometimes you have an idea in your head about something like that—and then it just starts growing, like a potato under the sink.”

  A car edged up beside them. The man looked over at them, at Jean, liked her looks, kept his eyes on her as if they were in a bar.

  “So you think they killed her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is my brother involved in this?”

  “Rath-Steadman is,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Tell me.”

  They had inched up over the crest of the mountain to where they could look down on the scene ahead, the shimmering valley lights and the traffic stilled in both directions, red taillights down, white headlights up in the opposite lane.

  Now they could see what it was. A mile down the steep run of the freeway where the 405 met the 101 there were clustered spinning lights, red and blue, an accident.

  Her hand was on the seat beside her. He took it.

  “You’ll be all right at the beach,” he said. T
hat was all he would tell her. For now.

  “This could all be over in a few days,” he said.

  She wondered what difference a day or two made now but she didn’t ask and the two of them said nothing for a long time, watching the dead traffic in front of them, the accident far below, the TV news helicopters that flo ated, turning, high above the scene, red lights blinking, like sparks above a fire.

  TWENTY-ONE

  He felt like running, as if this was something he could outrun. After he left Jean at her Malibu house, Jimmy drove north, not south, up California 1, then back inland through the mountains to Thousand Oaks and the 101 East, a great loop onto the 210 to cross the base of the Angeles Forest and the mountains above Glendale.

  Now it was way after midnight.

  When he turned back down into it, when he was riding down out of the foothills, it was like L.A. was on the bottom of a dark ocean, the spikes of downtown still a half mile below the surface, the green copper dome of Griffith Observatory a decorative toy on the floor of a midnight aquarium. And the air was bad, even in the middle of the night. The air was heavy. He felt compressed. The feeling was so real it was hard to breathe. He had to fight the panic, the urge to jump from the car and swim frantically for the surface.

  He tried to drive it out. He cruised the streets of Hollywood until the whores were gone, down through the canyon of billboards on the Strip, past the all night newsstand.

  He didn’t go home.

  He drove all the way out through the winding turns of Sunset Boulevard, all the way back out to Malibu, to the beach at Point Dume, almost where he’d started. He parked on the access road. He found at the edge of the dial a drifting Mexican pirate rock station with old music. When morning came, an offshore wind came with it and stood the waves up straight and tall. Jimmy watched at the water’s edge. The wind came up stronger until there was a wave that rose and rose and rose and wouldn’t break.

  TWENTY-TWO

  There was one last set of checks.

  In the study, standing at his desk, Jimmy shuffled the deck until he came to one made out to somebody named Roy Pool with the notation “Payroll.” He turned it over. On the back was an endorsement by Mr. Pool, notably florid, and a deposit stamp that said, “Ringside Liquor.”

  It was still there. It was in Hawaiian Gardens, south and inland, straight in from Long Beach. Everyone said there was no heritage in L.A., but some things survived the perpetual reinvention, like red sauce Italian restaurants and old-style Mexican places with dusty sombreros on the walls. And corner liquor stores. Most of them had come right after the war with names that meant more then than now, names like Full House, Victory Liquor, and Ringside.

  The clerk was in his sixties. He came out the front door with Jimmy and squinted in the sun on the sidewalk and pointed down the block and then over.

  Jimmy set out walking, drinking the bottle of water he’d felt obliged to buy. The heat wave had broken, but it was still hot. Hawaiian Gardens didn’t have much to do with either Hawaii or gardens, block after block of apartment buildings and strip malls, a few dead cars on every block painted with dirt and plastered with Day-Glo Notice to Remove stickers. A bus smoked past, covered top to bottom and front to back with an ad for a movie, a grinning black man with a .9 millimeter that stretched ten feet.

  The clerk at Ringside Liquors had given Jimmy a number from his files, three-by-five cards in a green shoebox, but Roy Pool’s house was gone. Now a big ugly apartment building covered the space of four numbers.

  But there was a neighbor, a sole survivor in a Spanish bungalow—they liked to call it Mediterranean—with peeling pink paint and a few yard-birds in even greater need of a touch-up. Jimmy knocked on the steel security door that ruined the look of the little house.

  It took a long time, then an old lady answered. She never opened the steel mesh door, even after she saw that he was a nice young man, but she told him where to find Roy Pool, that he was “still kicking” as she said, though his house was long gone.

  Capri Retirement Villa wasn’t as grim as it could have been. The sidewalk out front was clean, the paint was fresh, and a pair of fluffy Boston ferns hung from hooks in the overhang out front. Somebody cared. Jimmy stopped by the desk, then came down the corridor and found the room.

  At least he was awake. Everyone else was sleeping.

  Roy Pool, who looked to be in his sixties but was probably older, sat in a wheelchair looking out the sliding glass door at the concrete “garden” in the middle of the four-sided nursing home. He wore silk pajamas with a scarf at the neck. The vintage bodybuilder magazine hidden under the desk at the Danko flight school was his.

  “Hi.”

  He turned. “Hello.”

  “I’m Jimmy Miles. You’re Mr. Pool?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m an investigator. Can I ask you about Bill Danko?”

  “What kind of investigator?”

  “Private.”

  “My,” Pool said.

  He wheeled around to face his guest and looked him over, his eyes lingering on Jimmy’s shoes, black suede loafers with silver diamond shapes across the top.

  “This isn’t for one of those television shows, is it? I detest television.”

  “I’ll watch a ballgame every once in awhile,” Jimmy said. “That’s about it.”

  There were three or four old movie star pictures on the walls and a one-sheet for Now, Voyager. A magnolia blossom floated in fresh water in a globe that used to be a fishbowl. On the desk in a plain black frame was an eight-by-ten of a much younger Roy Pool, a dramatic, side-lit pose.

  Pool saw Jimmy looking at it. “The older I get, the better-looking I was,” he said.

  At Pool’s feet was a small oxygen bottle. He lifted the pale green mask to his mouth and inhaled, held it delicately with two fingers like the cigarettes he once smoked, which made this necessary now.

  He took the mask away and exhaled. “So, who’s your patron?”

  “Elaine Kantke’s daughter.”

  “Who apparently has never been told that The Past doesn’t care what we think about it.”

  “What about the future?” Jimmy said.

  “Cares even less,” Pool said.

  Jimmy straightened the photo on the desk. “You were Bill Danko’s—”

  “Secretary. There’s nothing wrong with the word.”

  “I want to know if there was some connection to Rath-Steadman.”

  Roy Pool looked at Jimmy levelly for a long moment, then got out of the wheelchair and stepped over and closed the door.

  “Not that anyone in this place can hear . . .”

  He moved gracefully. Jimmy thought the word queen wasn’t really such a pejorative. Pool dropped into the chair by the desk and crossed his legs at the knees and then lifted his face into the light angling in from the patio, as if he wanted Jimmy to remember exactly how he had looked when he told him what he was about to tell him.

  “So, there was a connection between—”

  Pool held up his hand.

  Jimmy gave him his moment.

  “One week before he was murdered, Mr. Danko—I always called him that although he would repeatedly ask me to call him ‘Bill’—Mr. Danko took several important persons up one night to fly over the proposed site for an industrial park in the Inland Empire.”

  “At night?”

  “There was a full moon.” He gave Jimmy a look meant to squelch any further interruptions. “Among those passengers was Vasek Rath of Rath Aircraft and . . .”

  He allowed a ridiculously long pause.

  “Red Steadman of Steadman Industries . . .”

  Pool let his wild revelation hang in the air a moment. He’d waited years to give this speech.

  “Though, of course, Red Steadman had died some four years previous to that time, so how could that be?”

  He looked Jimmy in the eye, ready for a challenge.

  He wasn’t going to get it.

  “Mr. Steadman wa
s wearing a disguise, but not a very good disguise,” Pool concluded. “My point being that Mr. Danko that night saw something or realized something that he was not meant to, namely that the two companies were about to merge—and that Mr. Red Steadman had apparently faked his own death some years earlier.”

  He took another drag of bottled oxygen.

  “Did you actually see them?” Jimmy asked.

  “They left at midnight. Mr. Danko told me about it in great detail the next morning.” Pool picked at something on the knee of his pajamas. “I should have bought some stock.”

  “Who else do you think he told?”

  “The events that followed would suggest Mrs. Kantke.” There was another theatrical pause. “And perhaps Michelle.”

  Pool waited to see if Jimmy knew the name.

  “Espinosa,” Jimmy said.

  “Yes, eventually that would be her last name.”

  “They were still in touch? Michelle and Danko. Or was there something more?”

  “Mr. Danko had a weakness for her.”

  “There was some evidence the actual killer was short,” Jimmy said, just to see what would happen.

  “Michelle was short.”

  “And so was Estella Danko.”

  Pool went a bit sad and sentimental. “And neither of them wanted anything other than Bill alive and loving them.”

  He corrected himself. “Mr. Danko.”

  “You never testified?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “No one asked. And, for a long time, I was quite peeved at that.”

  Here was another soul who wanted Jimmy to stay a little longer. Pool took a thick manila envelope from his bedside table, unwound the string closure and handed it over. Jimmy knew everything he needed to know, enough to pull him down further, make him feel that weight, that compression again, but he took the folder.

  It was a file of clippings and pictures, like Jean’s, which now had become his. There was a two-inch article about the drowning at Mothers’ Beach in Marina del Ray. There was no clip about Tone Espinosa shot dead. The newspaper picture of Red Steadman in his prime was almost brown but time hadn’t taken the hardness out of the boss’s eye, that look the old man on the pier had remembered. That same look, softened only a little, had been in the eyes in the wax fig ure presiding over the boardroom at the Museum of Flight. Red Steadman.