by Dan Vining
When his little girl was still a little girl.
But her name wasn’t Roberts. It was Weinstein. Rachel. And as far as Jimmy knew nobody had ever connected the daughter to the father. At least there wasn’t anything in any of the newspaper clips Dill had given him. It wasn’t public knowledge. Another card facedown. She’d been seventh in line.
Jimmy thought back. The coverage had ramped up about then. Maybe that was why: one of their own had been taken. If it can happen to us . . .
Along about then was when the people of the city really started feeling threatened. He/they were out there.
Who was next?
Jimmy was following him, following the Bentley. Roberts took Sunset all the way in from Brentwood into Hollywood. The Action Eight studios were in a block-long, solid white Greek Revival curiosity on Sunset, the old Warner studio, where Warner Brothers had started, where The Jazz Singer had been shot a thousand years ago. Mammy! The Bentley slowed at the gate, and the window came down so the anchorman could chat up the guard, who obviously knew the car, who already had the crossing arm up. The biggest billboard of all was over the studios.
Trust.
Rachel Weinstein had been dead two months. Jimmy wondered who or what Mike Roberts trusted now.
He had pulled to the curb across the street. Jimmy didn’t know why he’d followed him. He stayed there an hour, waiting for an answer. All he got for his trouble was a glimpse of the Bentley behind the gates in the parking lot. A young man came out, opened the unlocked trunk, removed a white cardboard box, something not too heavy. The kid, the intern, was trying to balance it on one leg so he could reach up and close the trunk when the guard from the gatehouse came running over to assist.
Maybe the anchorman had given his girl his Emmys and now was getting them back. Prick a famous man, and does he not bleed?
Jimmy ended the day back in Encino, Encino by daylight this time. He parked the Cadillac across from the television writer’s long, low house. He didn’t know what he was looking for here, either. He was still new to this.
On the For Sale sign out front there was a radio frequency, a lightning bolt logo that explained it. The Realtors had a new trick. Jimmy tuned it in on the car radio. It was a two-minute commercial for “the property.” Which, it turned out, was spectacularly more valuable even than it appeared. Or at least priced that way. It was a woman’s voice, warm as the smell of fresh-baked cookies, probably another actor doing this to pay the bills, waiting for that big break. Music played in the background, George Winston, if Jimmy knew his New Age tone poems. He shut it off just as she was getting to the square footage of the “bonus room” and got out.
He stood there on the sidewalk across the street for five minutes, just stood there. He could almost hear the screams from out here, through the tinted, double-glazed glass. Is that what he wanted? Is that what he was looking for? Is that why he’d come back? Is that what he was waiting for? For it to get real?
He heard a sharp sound behind him, metal scraping on something, and turned. It was a gardener with a grass rake raking the lawn next to a concrete driveway, hitting it every third or fourth stroke, his eyes down. He was a South American, hard to say what country. A few years back, they were all “Mexi cans”; people thought that, but they weren’t, many of them. There were Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Costa Ricans. It also was hard to say how old the man was. He wore clean khakis and had a red kerchief knotted around his neck. Put him in a suit on a telenovela, and you’d realize how handsome he was.
“Amigo,” Jimmy said.
The tile house lady in Brentwood may have stepped back from Jimmy when he spoke, but this man jumped back. Five feet. With a scared-to-death look, an I-know-you look. He backed over a rosebush, lifted his rake, and turned the handle sideways, as if he was going to make the sign of the cross with it. From the reaction, Jimmy might as well been a monster, out in broad daylight.
A monster the gardener had seen standing there before.
The man kept looking around, as if looking for the black dog . . .
Angel picked up Jimmy in front of his house. In a primer-red Porsche Cabriolet with no top, just the metal birdcage frame folded back without any cloth over it. It was a ’64. A 356C. It had already been lowered a bit, lost all the chrome, the radio antenna frenched in, but in a way that didn’t look wrong. The seats were bare-bones, but they’d already been rebuilt, too, had a Tijuana border-crossing five-dollar blanket thrown over them.
The engine had a perfect sound to it. It had gotten the first dollars.
“Whose car is this?”
“Nobody’s,” Angel said. “Mine. Yours. I’m just doing it for myself, for the glory of God.”
“Jesus is gonna love it,” Jimmy said.
For now, they were headed nowhere. On Western Avenue, south. It was what they did instead of talking on the phone. It was ten thirty or so. A weeknight. There wasn’t much traffic.
Angel took Jimmy’s Jesus line with a smile. He always did. He was content in his belief and easygoing about others’ disbelief. It worried him, made some part of him sad, but he repeated the same line ten times a day, usually out loud: “It’s in God’s hands.” There was so much doom around him, he had to pick his battles. Let go, let God was another one, another line he repeated.
“Let me ask you something,” Jimmy said. “ ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ What’s that about?”
“It’s in Matthew.”
“Yeah, I know. I looked it up. I thought it was Shakespeare.”
“What do you think it’s about?”
“I think it’s harsh, is what I think. You read the story. Jesus is heading out, some guy wants to follow him but says first he has to go take care of his father’s funeral. And Jesus says, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ ”
“I used to think it was about us,” Angel said. “Back about a hundred New Years ago . . .” That was what they called the increments of time since they’d become Sailors, since it’d happened to them, since they’d crossed over to death’s other kingdom: New Days, New Weeks, New Years . . . Angel Figueroa had been a Sailor almost seventy years. But looked mid-thirties, in his white T-shirt and baggy starched jeans, and long, hipster-straight-back black hair.
“I mean, I thought, here we are, we were the dead, walking around, here was a job for us.”
“What does it mean?” Jimmy pressed.
“Jesus was a rebel leader.” Angel always said Jesus like the gringos, not Hay-soos, at least when talking to white men. “It was the beginning of things. He was starting the revolution. Jesus was the revolution. ‘Follow me and become fis hers of men,’ he said when he was talking to fishermen. He meets you where you are.”
“So what did he mean by it?”
“You sound like you’re mad at him.”
“What did he mean?” Jimmy said, harder. He was looking away, looking at the whores on opposite corners of an intersection they blew past. If you didn’t slow down, they didn’t even look like people. They just looked like sex. Sex and money.
Bad sex and dirty money.
Angel was nothing if not patient. “ ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ All that matters is what happens now. Next. There’s no purpose in the past.”
Jimmy let a block go by. “But you’re the guy who restores old cars,” he said.
“I don’t restore anything,” the other said quickly. “I make something new out of the old. Too new for some.”
Angel shifted gears, literally and fig uratively. “Are we looking for something? Somebody?”
“Yeah, somebody who looks like me,” Jimmy said. He told Angel the story of the tile-house woman in Brentwood and then the yard man in Encino.
“He got a name?”
“Three or four or five. I just call him Handsome.”
They drove around the rest of the night, looking where they knew to look, looking for trouble, but they didn’t find him, the man who maybe looked like Jimmy, the man in black with the black dog.
The
y didn’t find him the next night, either.
Or the next day. Or the day after that.
But they found him.
Or at least they found his den.
It was six o’clock. They came walking down the alleyway between two brick buildings in a “neighborhood” of shit-hole apartments and rooms by the week in the shadow of downtown. And not one of those romantic shadows of downtown where painters rent lofts and documentarians make movies of each other and the beautiful poor. Angel’s body shop was five blocks away, so he’d met Jimmy here. Six o’clock. Anywhere else in L.A. that would have meant the light was pretty, but down here the shadows had won the battle between light and dark a half hour ago. Here the Golden Hour only meant you couldn’t quite see.
What Jimmy had was an address, a location, a home base for the man with the black dog, the man who’d shown up at eight of the murder sites, from what Jimmy had learned. Who’d just stood there across the street, whichever street it was, the day after. And sometimes the next. Reliving it? Funny word for it. In the end, after a few days, Jimmy found somebody who knew somebody who knew something. So a few words, an idea, maybe even a lie, had led Jimmy to this alleyway. Maybe to the man.
But what did he know about detective work? He’d heard a line once, about art, about sculpture. About a sculptor known for his enormous, very realistic sculptures of horses. He had been asked how he could do it, his technique. “It’s simple,” the sculptor had said, “I just chip away everything that doesn’t look like a horse.” What did Jimmy know about detective work? Nothing, except to go everywhere he could go, cut away everything it wasn’t, until a shape emerged. What did he know, except that almost everything was a mystery and that what was most true about a thing you usually didn’t see until it was too late.
“Which floor?” Angel said. He was stopped, looking up at the side of the brick building at the end of the alley. It was six floors, old arched windows bricked in years ago, covered by a picture of something, signage. If it was one of those romantic alleyways in a documentary about the poor, the old sign would have been a fading picture of an orange tree with a lush, fading, green Promised Land behind it. What it was instead was a man in a bowler hat wearing a truss.
“My guy didn’t say,” Jimmy said. “Just that this was his squat, that he slept in the daytime. Or at least people only seemed to see him at night.”
So they went inside. The first floor of the brick building was open from side to side, with posts, with high windows with arched tops, with unfinished, worn wood on the deck. It had been a factory. Jimmy and Angel crossed to a pile of rubble in the middle of things. Angel picked through it and found a length of hardwood, like a table leg. Maybe it had been a furniture factory. Or a coffin factory. He gripped it by the skinny end.
“You look like a caveman,” Jimmy said.
To tell the truth, both of them were spooked. They’d bought into the hysteria. They’d been carrying it around, a gnawing unease, both of them, for six days. Since the killings up in Benedict. There hadn’t been any more murders since the director and the two women, but that had only increased the apprehension somehow. The whole town’s apprehension.
They went upstairs. The staircase was wooden but strong.
There wasn’t any dust in the center of the treads. Somebody had been coming and going.
“You should have called that cop Dill,” Angel said.
“He was gone,” Jimmy said. “Out.”
“I got his cell somewhere.”
“We’re here, we might as well go on up.”
“I wasn’t saying don’t go up,” Angel said defensively.
The second floor and the third floor were open side to side like the ground floor. Open and empty. The light was all but gone. Now they had to put their hands on the railing to feel their way up.
But there was light above. Golden light.
They came out of the stairwell onto the fourth floor. It was wide and empty, too, but across it there was a single tall window bringing in a sharp-edged quadrilateral of gold light.
They moved toward it. There was a heap of clothes, a bedroll.
And a body.
He was on his side, the upper quarter of his head smashed in from a blow that could have been inflicted by a club like the one still in Angel’s hand. Angel looked down at it, as if he was thinking the same thing.
Angel said, “He doesn’t look anything like you.”
“It’s not him,” Jimmy said. A moment passed that wasn’t as long as it seemed. “It’s the guy who sent me down here, from out in Van Nuys.”
There was dog shit everywhere.
On the drive home, Jimmy and Angel saw people standing outside an electronics store, looking in at the bank of TVs. Same thing at another store down the street.
The radios in all the cars around them weren’t playing music. It was just talking. All talk.
It was like the end of the world. Or the beginning. The people they passed on the sidewalks and the people in the cars around them seemed to be, if not happy, lightened. The Porsche had a hole in the dash where the radio used to be or Jimmy and Angel would have tuned in the news themselves.
Jimmy went straight to the television when he walked in the door of his house.
Mary was there, startling him, coming out of the bedroom.
She let the TV tell him. They’d caught the killers, black Converse high-tops, bone saws, leather gloves, in an apartment in North Hollywood.
Two Russian brothers.
Neither one of whom looked anything at all like Jimmy.
SIXTEEN
“Your girl killed herself.”
In Jimmy’s state of mind, with where he’d just been, what he’d just seen, who he’d seen, Mary and her husband, it took him a second to think which girl.
But he figured it out. And the guilt started.
“Get in,” Jimmy said.
From the circle out in front of the Mark Hopkins the two of them went across the city to the scene of the thing, the place where she’d done it. And then to the morgue. In that order, Jimmy delaying the latter as long as possible. It was Machine Shop who’d said, when Jimmy showed some hesitation, that they had to go see the body, to be sure it was really her, be sure that Shop had gotten it right, though it had happened almost right in front of him down at the waterfront. Plus, Shop had a friend who worked nights in the coroner’s office, a Sailor.
They’d already hauled the crumpled car away, the little baby-blue Skylark. Bad for business. They’d already hosed off the blood. The car hadn’t caught fire—when Lucy had driven it at fifty or sixty into the concrete face of Pier 35, the same blank building where the Leonidas girls had jumped.
“There was nobody with her, right?” Jimmy said to Shop, standing there next to the circles of oil and transmission fluid and the white blanket of the powdery flame-killer SFFD had sprayed down just in case. Atop the engine gunk was pebbly absorbent, what at the old Saugus Speedway they used to call “kitty litter.” They’d be back later that night to sweep that up.
“No, nobody,” Shop said.
“Where were you?”
“Over there,” Shop said and pointed to the corner of a parking lot. “Working. It was all just getting going. Where were you?”
Jimmy didn’t answer that question. He looked from the end of the story in front of him back over his shoulder to the beginning, at least this last chapter of Lucy’s story. She had come on a straight shot down the Embarcadero. There was a curve in the wide boulevard but not enough to make her slow. It wouldn’t be hard to get up to speed. Pedal down, go. It’s the long skinny one on the right. You don’t want to be going too slow, embarrass yourself.
“Was she thrown out?”
Machine Shop just nodded. Jimmy remembered the scene in front of the store down in Paso Robles, how she hadn’t put on her seat belt.
It was rocking Jimmy, standing there. Everybody knows how they’d kill themselves, if it came to that. What sad, sorry method they’d pick fro
m the list. This right here was the way Jimmy had thought of, from the time he was a kid. And just about every time he came up on a freeway overpass abutment. Speed meets an unmovable object.
“It was a sweet little car,” he said. “Too bad.”
Shop didn’t have anything to say to that. He wasn’t into cars, not the way Jimmy was, not the way Los Angelenos were. (Who was?) Now wasn’t the time to bring that up, that old north/south row.
“She didn’t suffer,” Shop said. One of those things you say.
Jimmy scanned the flat face of the pier building. Pour-and-fill concrete. Probably three feet thick, given its age. Barely a scratch.
You could throw any number of little sad girls at it and not make a dent.
“Let’s get to that morgue,” Jimmy said.
Turned out she hit face-first. But there was that baby-blue dress, the one she’d been wearing the first time he saw her, in the café in Saugus, the dress that made him think of Mary. There wasn’t much blue left, stained as it was. He wondered what her purpose was, putting it on again, for her last scene, for the end. Or maybe she hadn’t had a purpose. Maybe he was the only one who saw purpose everywhere. Seeing the dress again made his skin crawl.
“Maybe you can start looking for her brother,” Jimmy said to Machine Shop as the coroner’s assistant drew the sheet back over Lucy, like a magician trying again when the trick didn’t work. “Go by the apartment first, but he hasn’t been there for a couple of days, as far as I could see. Maybe he doesn’t even know what happened to her. I don’t know if he was close by or what. I hope not. I don’t know who was there.”
“What are you going to do?” Machine Shop said.
Jimmy turned away. “Try to get this smell out of my clothes,” he said.
The coroner’s assistant said, “There’s no paperwork yet. You want a prep?” His name was Hugh. A Sailor.
“What do you mean?”
“Any family?”
