by Dan Vining
Whitehead stayed in his chair. He made a little church out of his hands, looked at them over his nine fingertips.
They weren’t back at the waterfront, or at least not Fisherman’s Wharf. When they went through the last door, they were somewhere else, stepping out of another warehouse building with its back against another pier. There were ships all around, but it was dark, past dark. The ships looked to be old navy ships being stripped for salvage and old freighters, some of them navy gray, too, some black, some rust red, all dead-seeming, under a blurred navy gray half moon.
“Where are we?” Angel said.
“Go ask Alice,” Jimmy said.
Then they started to emerge. Forms, shadows coalescing into human forms. People. There were scores of them, coming in from all quarters. A show of strength. Or need, because they all had looks of expectation on their faces. Anticipation, hope, fear. Waiting.
Who’s next?
Jimmy and Angel had left Whitehead and Jeremy behind them in the hold of the ship, had just followed the nobody out.
But now Whitehead was standing right behind Jimmy, seeing what he saw.
“They know who you are,” he said, just loudly enough for Jimmy to hear. “You have a reputation.”
There began a reverberation coming up from the gathered, a vibration like the engine on the boat, low and indistinct. They were saying something over and again. It was like the noise they call for from a crowd of extras in a movie, vague mumbling that sounds like a hundred conversations but is really only a few words repeated. The same words. With the crowd of them, it was oddly melodious.
It got clearer as they synced up. “We follow Wayne . . .”
Whitehead stepped around Jimmy and waded into their midst.
Jeremy had come out from the ship, too, with his long cape draped over his arm. Now he came forward and, hoping at least some in the crowd were watching him, unfurled it and let it fall over his shoulders. These San Franciscans liked their Romanticism, if that’s what it was. Jeremy stood with his hands on his hips but still looked like what he was, a sidekick, a right-hand man.
Jimmy was watching Whitehead and his congregation. “Funny, I wouldn’t take him for a people person,” he said to Jeremy, who seemed to like the line.
“Thought maybe you’d want to know: The Greek girls, what’s left of them, are down here,” Jeremy said.
“They’re both Sailors?”
“Double down, I say,” Jeremy said. “Whenever you can.”
Now it was Jimmy who went into the crowd, into the wake closing behind Whitehead.
“Where are you going?” Angel called after him.
Jimmy kept going and didn’t answer his friend.
Jeremy turned and grinned at Angel, a look Angel didn’t get at all.
TWENTY-THREE
Two girls were holding hands. It was a start.
Jimmy found them down by the piers, walking apart from the others. One of them kept looking over her shoulder at him. She smiled, in fact. The girls wore matching clothes, long blue dresses out of some cheap goods. It looked rough to the skin and the color uneven, as if hand-dyed. It made Jimmy think of cult clothes, pretty hippie girls on a commune, flowers in their hair but a dreary, frightened servitude in their hearts, following the master. (The trick was to not want to be the master.)
“Wait,” Jimmy said when the one turned to look at him again.
She waited, held back her sister.
When he got closer, he saw how young they were. With Sailors the new form matched the old, at least in age and usually in size. From a distance, or in a photograph, one might pass for his or her former self, except to the eyes of a close loved one, to whom the new person always looked like a stranger.
It wasn’t a logical thing. The Sailor way was a ball of mystery, surrounded by a hundred miles of fog. There was a famous fog in the Central Valley, starting south of Bakersfield on Old 99 when you came up from L.A., Thule fog, so thick it looked like dishwater. Whenever Jimmy drove through it, or up to it (you couldn’t drive through it at its worst), he thought, This is what it’s like to be a Sailor. A sailor at the wheel of his boat.
“Hi,” the girls said together. They weren’t twins in this domain, but they looked alike.
“Hi,” Jimmy said.
They seemed so trusting, so open. Unafraid, now that they had each other. They also seemed to know who he was. He wondered why, what they’d been told about him.
They were New. It was all over them. Jimmy had already decided they probably weren’t the Greek girls, the reborn Leonidas twins. He just had a feeling about them. The fog. He was about to ask them, gently, about themselves, when they just smiled again, or at least the one of them did, and they walked away.
Down the rabbit hole again . . .
Jimmy followed them into a room in an old military building, World War II-era, wooden, with brown linoleum floors. One of those buildings built fast, when the world was coming apart on two fronts. It had a ten-foot ceiling, exposed rafters, all very intentional. There were windows along both sides, but they were covered with blackout cloths, just like in the war. It was an officers’ mess, with a long table.
An odd one, because the table was set with candelabra and a tablecloth. And a meal on silver serving plates.
The chairs were filled with women. The two sisters were seated on either side of a woman who looked a little French, with short-cropped hair. They stopped talking and eating when he stepped in, then went back to it. They were different ages, but there was something in their faces, all of the women, something about their pale skin, that made Jimmy think of the Procol Harum line about the sixteen vestal virgins leaving for the coast. (And, although his eyes were open, they might just as well have been closed.) It was a little like a scene from a dream, like a memory of an event that never took place.
A couple of the women looked familiar. It took him a second to realize that some voice in his head was telling him that two or three of them resembled women out of his past. That dream. At his right, closest to him, was a dark-haired beauty who reminded him of a woman from a year or so ago in his life, a “client” who’d become much more before it was over. And next to her was a girl who instantly made him think of a girl he’d fallen hard for when he was just a kid, maybe the last real love before he’d become a Sailor. (Maybe they’d slipped him something on the boat.) Right in front of him was a punky-looking girl with silver hair. Eighties Girl. She stuck out her tongue at him. Jimmy almost laughed. He’d accepted the trippiness of the scene, was going with it.
Then he realized the short-haired woman at the other end of the table looked a little like his mother. He didn’t exactly want to dwell on that.
There was an open place at the table. Was it meant for him? There was a glass of wine there. He decided now would be a good time to drink half of it.
It wasn’t all women. Machine Shop was there. Shop had dressed for the occasion, whatever the occasion was, a maroon suit that could have been sewn from the remnants of the velvet hanging on Whitehead’s vessel. Put him in a plush red Al Green suit and the seventies really came out. Shop hadn’t even noticed Jimmy. He was totally into the women around him, full shuck and jive, a bit of the old “And how are you fine ladies this evening?” When his eyes met Jimmy’s, he looked embarrassed, guilty, caught. He was supposed to meet Jimmy at the Wharf.
“Sorry, man,” Shop said.
“Yeah, I was looking for you up there.”
“And now you’re here.”
“How’d you get here?” Jimmy said.
“They brought me in a limousine,” Shop said.
Jimmy guessed that all this was part of Whitehead’s master plan, whatever it was.
Then he saw Mary. Or rather “Mary.”
At the far end of the table. If the lights were up, she probably wouldn’t have looked a thing like Mary. Not the twenty-two-year-old Mary Jimmy had met on Sunset Strip in 1995, not the woman now, out in Tiburon. But the hair was close, the face the same
shape. She was wearing a dress that made Jimmy remember the one Lucy had been wearing there at the start. But that was all right, too; all of them were getting tangled up in each other’s stories in his head.
He took his wine over to her. Nobody paid him much mind. He stood over her.
She looked up at him, stopped whatever conversation she was having. This close, she didn’t look like Mary at all.
“Come sit by me,” Jimmy said to her. “There’s a seat down there by me.” He sounded drunker than he was.
“You’re always trying to relocate me,” the Mary almost lookalike said. Or Jimmy thought she did.
TWENTY-FOUR
“I still see them,” Mary said.
She had just said it, blank-faced, sitting there in her white slipcovered armless chair, the light of a cream candle dancing on her face. They were in a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Le Dome.
Back then it was the kind of place Jimmy wouldn’t have sought out on his own. A little rich, a little too hushed. He’d go if someone else suggested it, but it was too snow-white and round for him.
Mary had picked the place. “I want to talk to you about something,” she had said.
He had assumed it was one of those girl talks about commitment, about “moving to the next level.” In a way it was. But he was way ahead of her, ready to relocate to any level she named. He loved her, simple and sure.
But what she had said in Le Dome was, “I still see them.”
“It’s over,” he said. He knew what she meant.
“I know,” she said. “I know it’s supposed to be over. I know everything you know, everything everybody else knows. They arrested two brothers. Russian brothers. There is all the evidence against them. I don’t care. I still see them.”
“Where?”
Jimmy leaned closer. Everybody knew about Le Dome. The arch of the smooth, plastered ceiling meant the sound bounced around in funny ways. Conversations ended up where they weren’t meant to go. Jimmy had been there one night, late, alone, stood up by someone, and heard more than he wanted to about the problems in the marriage of a fading television star and his young wife all the way across the room. He was worried about who else was hearing Mary. The place was almost full.
“I was on Melrose,” Mary said. “Two of them were following me. In the middle of the afternoon.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I told you when I met you I was crazy,” she said.
“What did they look like?” Jimmy said.
“Just like before,” she said. “Black on black. Sneakers. Black jeans. Black T-shirts. One of them was maybe one of the ones who came to your house after me.”
“What did they do?”
“They just followed me. I’d go in one store and when I came out, they were waiting, hanging back two stores up the street.”
“Why did you want to come here to talk about this?”
“I didn’t want to fall apart. I feel like I’ve been doing that lately anyway. I wanted to be out. Among the living.”
Jimmy asked her if she’d been thinking much about the others in the house up in Benedict. Whom she’d survived.
“Yes.”
He reached across the white linen to her. “It’s over,” he said. “They caught the two men. They were the ones. The killings stopped.”
“No, they didn’t,” she said. “They didn’t.”
There’d been a copycat murder two weeks after the Russian brothers had been arrested.
“I have friends who are cops, Mary.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Why is that?”
He didn’t have a quick answer for her.
Wait a second or two and that is your answer.
“Why is that?” she said. “You’re a record producer.”
Remember, they were both young. It was a time, and they were an age, when what you do could be a very roomy jacket. And you could have three or four of them on the rack by the door. Pick one. Nobody checked the label, as long as it looked good on you. He was a “record producer” working on a demo for a band in the Valley anytime they got some money together, and sometimes when they didn’t. She was an “actress.” Or was it “singer”?
“I know people from lots of different . . . areas,” Jimmy said. “It’s an L.A. thing. I’m just saying: The cops are convinced they got the people who did the murders. All of the murders.”
“Why did you go downtown that day?”
“What day?”
He knew exactly the day she meant. In the scene they were playing out in the restaurant that night, Jimmy had been behind Mary from the start. Running to catch up.
She just waited him out.
“Angel had heard about somebody else who could have been responsible, involved in the killings. We were downtown checking it out.”
He should have stopped there.
Instead, he made a joke. “Going to see a man about a dog.”
Mary said, right back at him, “There was a man with a dog, all in black and a black dog. I saw a man with a dog.”
It was like laying down the first card in her hand.
“Twice,” she said. “I saw him twice.”
There was the second card.
“Where?” Jimmy said.
“The first time in daylight, when I went back up to the house in Benedict.”
“When? You went back up to the house? Why?”
“Last week. Sunday.”
The third and fourth cards.
“Why did you go up there?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just thinking about it. Too much. I just wanted to see it again.”
He was shaking his head. “You shouldn’t go up there. Or you should have told me. I would have taken you.”
“Always riding to the rescue,” she said. “That’s my Jim.”
“When was the second time you saw him?” Jimmy said.
“A couple of nights ago,” Mary said. “In the yard.” She meant his yard, their yard. “You were gone somewhere.”
The fifth card.
She had ordered a glass of red wine after they’d cleared away their dinner plates, but she hadn’t touched it until now. “I was feeling . . . desperate,” she said, drawing the wine to her. “I was feeling . . . pushed into a corner. He was just standing there, down the slope from the house, with that black dog, looking up at me in the kitchen window, as if waiting for me to do something.”
She tasted the wine. “I don’t like it that you have a gun,” she said. “And I especially don’t like it that you left it where I could find it.”
He held his question. About her, about the gun, about what she had been considering that day. He held his question. And, he realized later, held his breath, too, the same as if he had walked in on her in that moment, holding the gun, precisely at the time in her life when she didn’t need to find a gun.
“I put it away,” Mary said. “In the hall closet, under all those books, in the back. Tell me you’ll get rid of it. I don’t want to see it again. Not when I’m going through this kind of shit, feeling this.”
Jimmy didn’t have a gun.
Two days later there was another copycat killing, another heart ripped out, another body spread-eagle on another road cut, and a secondary wave of panic in the L.A. basin. There wouldn’t be any more, but it was enough.
This time, the killing seemed to trigger suicides, a half-dozen of them. “Panic suicides,” the article in the Times called them. Maybe they’d happened before, in the first wave of killings, the real killings, but it hadn’t been reported.
There was another term they used, official psychologists, to describe what they were afraid of, if reason didn’t prevail.
Suicide contagion.
If reason didn’t prevail. As if reason ever prevails.
Jimmy moved the two of them up to a house at the edge of Angeles Forest, high in the rocks and woods above Altadena. A house with a pool. The owner was a Sailor friend of Angel’s; Jimmy didn’t know him. The own
er called it a “cabin,” but it had three bedrooms and was behind gates, though the back of the property was open, open to the woods and the rocks behind it. It was all the way at the end of its own road. The view from the window over the kitchen sink was of Mount Baldy.
It helped. Mary felt better. Safer.
She assumed Jimmy didn’t believe her, didn’t believe that the Cut Killers could still be out there, looking in people’s windows. Or tying up loose ends, whatever it was that they were doing. Killing again. Maybe he did believe her. She didn’t know what he was thinking. She got up each morning and made a big breakfast, the kind of breakfast her mother used to make for her father, eggs and bacon and fresh orange juice and pancakes or waffles. She’d found a waffle iron in the cabinets. (There wasn’t a phone, but there was a waffle iron.) She’d eat everything she’d made. Jimmy had trouble keeping up with her. He’d make the runs down to the store. She would make the lists, apparently having decided to cook her way through every one of her mother’s recipes, as best she could remember them.
He came “home” one day, and she’d painted “Good Day Sunshine . . .” with clear red fingernail polish on the kitchen window.
Without ever deciding to, without ever talking about what should happen next, they stayed in “the cabin” like that for two weeks straight, Mary never leaving the house and grounds, and Jimmy only leaving to make the supply runs. And to make a few calls. There was no TV. What they had for entertainment was each other and a few board games, cards, and a beautiful old tube Zenith stereo with three-foot-high stained cherry speakers and a cabinet full of old LPs.
All day Mary played The White Album over and over.
She came out from the kitchen, the dinner dishes done.
“Honey, I’m home,” she said.
“That’s supposed be my line, Lucy,” Jimmy said.
“I’m more June, June Cleaver.” She crossed to him. He was in a chair, an old man’s recliner, reading. There was a cabinet of Popular Science magazines. From thirty years back.
