Among the Living Read online

  And they all moved off to investigate.

  Jimmy stayed at the bar. Jean followed the others.

  She looked back at him. There was a moment and then he followed her.

  In the blond-paneled study there were floor to ceiling books—leather-bound, color-coded, looted from some Old Money family or bankrupt junior college—club chairs and ottomans, green shade lights and ashtrays big as hubcaps, for the cigars. Joel Kinser liked to tell people it was his favorite room in the house. The body on the floor had an effective bloody chest wound, still spreading. She was a woman in her twenties, brown hair, tight low jeans, black Gap shoes, one of those skimpy, navel-baring tees the kids called “a wife beater.” If she was breathing it was very shallow. Here was another actor thinking this would do her some good. Her eyes were closed. She was cute dead.

  Jimmy and Jean stepped in at the back of the crowd.

  The man in the guayabera plopped down in the wingback chair directly over the body. He was an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

  “Don’t touch anything, Ben,” a woman said.

  “I wouldn’t think of it, Deborah,” JPL Ben said.

  Joel was up front playing host. He stepped up onto the first rung of the library ladder.

  “Well? Anyone?”

  “She looks dead,” the TV comic said. They all laughed like it was the funniest thing.

  “I talked to her,” a young man said. He was tall, red-haired, still in his teens. He wore corduroy shorts down over his knees, Birkenstocks with white socks, a T-shirt with a word on it that made no sense. He had a squat brown bottle of Bohemia by the throat, propped against his leg.

  “What did she say?” the woman asked.

  The young man hesitated.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” someone else said.

  “What happened to the third shot?” Deborah said. “Give us something to start with, Joel.”

  Kinser was enjoying himself more than he should have been. “I will tell you this,” he said. “She’s a screenwriter.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Rosie Scenario,” the red-headed teenager said, very dry.

  Ben bounded up out of the wingback chair. He had already made a discovery behind the couch, was just waiting to reveal it.

  “So this would be her agent . . .”

  The amateur sleuths gathered around the half-hidden second body, a young Latino in khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt, new running shoes on his feet, stage blood on his temple.

  The gore was threatening to drip onto the off-white carpet. Joel lifted the lifeless head and put an Architectural Digest under it.

  “What’s in his hand?” one of the women said.

  Someone opened the dead fingers. A computer disk.

  “Datum! ” Ben said.

  The air was mock electric.

  Joel stepped up another rung. “OK, listen, everyone, tonight we have with us a professional investigator, my friend, Jimmy Miles.”

  Everyone turned to look, but Jimmy was gone.

  The cue ball struck the five ball, which clipped the eight, sending it into the side pocket.

  “I meant to do that,” Jimmy said.

  Jean had stepped in. It was the game room. They were alone. He retrieved the eight ball and lined up another shot.

  She waited, expecting him to speak. He didn’t.

  “We were hoping you might give us a fresh perspective,” she said. “Some original ideas.”

  “The butler did it.”

  “Joel said—”

  Jimmy took his shot, sank the ball. “I used to have original ideas,” he said. “Then time and the world conspired to beat them out of me. Now I think the same thing as everybody else, only a little later.”

  He was still trying to impress her. He sank the three. It made a nice click.

  “Kantke,” Jimmy said. “Is that German?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nice to meet you.” He gave her a smile and offered her the cue.

  She didn’t take it.

  “I asked Joel to invite you,” she said.

  In a beat, he changed, went cold, pulled inside. A familiar sadness overtook him, the way a cloud slides over the moon.

  He went back to his game.

  “I knew you and Joel were friends,” she said, as he closed down. “I’d like for you to look into something for me. Joel said—”

  Jimmy sank a shot and cut her off. “I helped Joel with something a while back and he’s had the wrong idea about me ever since,” he said. “I gotta talk to him about that.”

  “Please,” she said. “I know all about you.”

  Now he gave her a challenging look.

  “You only take cases every once in a while,” she said.

  He waited. He wasn’t going to make it any easier for her.

  “Nobody seems to know why you take the cases you take,” she said, putting one word after another. “Money doesn’t seem to be a factor—but I have money.”

  He already knew that. And he knew that she was used to people listening to her, doing what she said.

  He put the cue in the rack.

  “Are you in business?” he said.

  “I own a company.”

  “I’m sure you know some investigators, security companies. There are some good ones.”

  “This isn’t about my business,” she said. “It’s about something that happened a long time ago.”

  Each one of the words of that second sentence came hard for her. But he still just looked at her and smiled and left her standing there.

  A Mexican maid was watching a little TV on the counter in the kitchen. On screen was a school picture of a Latino boy ten or eleven, an image that has come to mean “missing child” or “dead boy.” The story was being told in Spanish. The picture of the boy gave way to a family crying in front of a little house, then an angle on a relative arriving, caught in the first moment he stepped from the car and got the news. On the L.A. Spanish stations the crime coverage was always more explicit, more theatrical, more frightening: Monsters walk among us! was the theme.

  Jimmy came in. The maid tensed, but smiled. He opened a couple of cabinets until he found a glass. She watched as he filled it at the sink and drank it down.

  She had a Band-Aid on her finger. He asked her about it. “Te cortaste el dedo? Penso que era un hot dog?”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  Then Jean came in.

  She stopped under a bright recessed ceiling light, stood under its glare like a defendant in a sci-fi scene.

  “In 1977,” she said, “my father, Jack Kantke, was convicted of killing my mother and a friend of hers. In Long Beach. I was five.”

  There.

  Jean looked at the maid. The maid looked at the TV.

  Jimmy drew another glass of water and looked out at the backyard. A fog was filling the back of the canyon, rolling down from on high like a very slow waterfall. It was always sad when you heard what it was.

  “My father was Assistant D.A.,” Jean continued. “Mother was a dress designer. It was in all the papers, even Time magazine. There were appeals. He was executed in 1992. The gas chamber.”

  It was so matter-of-fact. So repeated.

  “I know people say you shouldn’t go back into the past,” she said.

  “I never say that,” Jimmy turned and said.

  “I just—”

  “Were you there? When it happened?”

  “No. I was at my grandmother’s.”

  She’d lost some of her force from before. He liked her this way. This was the big hurt in her life. Most people, you’d have to know them for months or years to find out what it was. Maybe it was why he did this, looked into things. He liked knowing, even when in the end sometimes it tore him up.

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “If he really killed her,” Jean said. “Killed them. He swore he didn’t.”

  Jimmy said, “You know, innocent people don’t
get executed.” He watched for some reaction to the word innocent. She didn’t have one. “You would think it would happen and people like to talk about it all the time, but it really doesn’t happen.”

  He looked at her until she nodded.

  “It would be an enormous surprise if he didn’t kill them,” he said.

  There was a long moment. She nodded again.

  “So you just want to know how much to hate him?” Jimmy said.

  “No.”

  “What then? What difference would it make? Everybody’s dead.”

  He waited for some reaction to that word, too. To dead.

  “I just think it would be better to know,” she said.

  Jimmy put his glass in the sink. “We could have a long conversation about that sometime,” he said. “Sorry.”

  And he left her again.

  Jean looked over at the maid, who was still pretending she didn’t speak much English. Now on the TV there was a picture of the missing boy in a Cub Scout uniform. And then they were on to some other story.

  At the end of the night, Jimmy waited out front surrounded by his new best friends, a circle that included Ben the JPL engineer and both murder victims, still in their bloodstained clothes. The fog had them all wrapped up. The TV comic was just hauling himself up into a caution-sign-yellow Hummer.

  After Joel and the comic told each other they’d call, the Hummer pulled out and rumbled off to war down the drive. Joel came over to Jimmy’s circle. He put his arm around the murder girl and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Wasn’t she good?” Joel said to everyone.

  The actress smiled.

  “You broke my heart,” Joel said.

  “I’m going to go get cleaned up,” the girl said and started away. Joel looked hurt. She came back and kissed him on the forehead.

  “She’s going to be big,” Joel said, once she was gone.

  “You mean when she grows up?” Jimmy said.

  “Funny.”

  “Don’t hate me because I’m promiscuous,” Jimmy said.

  “She loves me.”

  The valet brought up the Porsche, left the driver’s door open. The engine growled low, warm and friendly, like a dog waiting for its master.

  “Thanks for inviting me, Joel,” Jimmy said.

  “I never know when you’re screwing with me,” Joel said.

  “I just said thanks.”

  “See?”

  Jimmy got into the Porsche, closed the door, punched the gas a couple of times because he liked the sound. “You ever think maybe you were too smart?”

  “Now I know you’re screwing with me,” Joel said.

  Jimmy sped away. The radio came up, loud.

  Jean Kantke stepped out of the house just in time to see the taillights disappear down the smooth curving drive.

  TWO

  In the belfry of the Hollywood United Methodist Church above Highland and Franklin, an owl with luminous eyes scanned the scene below: the river of taillights coming down from the Bowl, cop cars and an ambulance, their red lights slicing up the night, a body under a sheet, a cop drawing chalk rings around spent shells. In the hills to the right was the Magic Castle. Down from that, the façade of the Chinese Theater, seen from behind. This was inland and there was none of the Malibu fog. The night was especially clear. The lights of the city south seemed to crackle.

  The owl took off. Hung on the side of the church’s tower was a fifty-foot AIDS ribbon. All the way down below, a signboard announced this week’s sermon:

  “THE LAST MINUTE OF ETERNITY”

  Jimmy drove the Strip with the radio loud, the top down, past famous haunts, rolling eastbound. It was a Friday night so things were happening but everyone seemed to be headed in the opposite direction, headed west. From the looks on their faces they were happy.

  He stopped on a yellow at Sunset and Crescent Heights. In the side mirror, the red neon sign for the Chateau Marmont shimmered. Jimmy looked back over his shoulder at the hotel on the rise above the Strip, its turrets and towers, the awnings on the penthouse patio, the roofs of the bungalows behind for the long-termers and New York actors and French directors. They’d just hauled down the tall Marlboro Man billboard who’d stood over the hotel for years, replaced him with a state-sponsored rant about secondhand smoke, a dolled up couple close enough to kiss.

  “Mind if I smoke?” the guy was saying.

  “Care if I die?” says the girl.

  Then Jimmy saw him, a man in a Navy peacoat and watch cap. And this a warm night, too. He leaned against a wall next to a turquoise nightclub. This one was young, in his twenties. He drank from a bottle of water, his eyes on Jimmy, a sour expression on his face, a sour smile, as though remembering a sick joke.

  They were called Sailors.

  A trio of Valley teenagers walked past him, stopped to read the names of the bands on the club marquee. The man in the peacoat ignored them, took another drink of water, kept his eyes on Jimmy.

  There was an edge of blue light around him, at least to Jimmy’s eyes.

  “I know you, Brother,” he looked at Jimmy and mouthed.

  Suddenly the passenger door opened and a girl plopped into the seat beside him, a very young girl in a very short skirt. She yanked the door closed, as if that settled something, closed the deal.

  “Hi, what’s your name?” she said, like she was thirteen.

  Jimmy looked over at the turquoise nightclub. The man in the peacoat and watch cap raised his bottle of water in salute.

  The light turned green.

  “You’d better get out,” Jimmy said to the girl.

  “Let’s just ride around,” she said. “Just until it stops raining.”

  “It’s not going to rain for four months,” Jimmy said.

  “It rained earlier.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You’re not very friendly,” she said with a pout someone must have told her was sexy. The car behind the Porsche flicked its lights. Jimmy pulled out.

  “I’ll take you to the All American Burger,” he said.

  “Cool.” She tugged at the hem of the skirt under her and changed the station on the radio.

  “I hate this song,” she said.

  “I mean, I’ll drop you off there,” Jimmy said.

  She ignored him, fumbled in her bag, found her cigarettes.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Please.”

  She pouted another half second then closed her bag and turned in the seat to face him, to let him see her legs, if he wanted to look.

  Jimmy looked up at the crossroads behind him in the mirror. The Sailor had turned away to walk back up Sunset. On the prowl.

  “So. What do you do, Mr. No Names Please?” she said.

  “Just drive around.”

  “Looking for trouble.”

  “No, I know where that is,” Jimmy said.

  She bit her lip and said, “I bet.”

  “You’ve been watching too much TV,” Jimmy said.

  He drove two more blocks, looking ahead. It was after midnight now and the night was coming into its own, shaking itself awake like a dog, the whores and their men, the hyper teens, pierced runaways on bus benches, their legs jumping, laughing and hitting each other, all of it looking like fun, for about the first ten seconds. The All American Burger was ahead, red, white, and blue and way too bright.

  “This car is cool but it’s like older than you are, right?”

  “It’s a ’64.”

  “And that’s like older than you are, right?”

  He laughed. “Yeah.”

  “I have a ’99 Corvette back home in Ohio up on blocks with only a hundred miles on it. I was a Gerber baby.” She said it all in one breath.

  “A what?”

  “A Corvette.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “A Gerber baby. In ads. In Good Housekeeping.”

  There was something sweet about her lies, something that made him want to try to pretend he was her brother, take her along wit
h him for a few hours and try to beat back the night.

  But before they made it to the All American Burger they came up on a tricked-out pickup on the other side of the wide street. Another girl like this girl leaned in the window, talking to three teenagers wedged into the front seat shoulder to shoulder, El Camino High linebackers.

  “Stop!” she said. “I know those guys.”

  Jimmy pulled to the curb.

  She jumped out.

  She threw the door closed and leaned all the way in. “You’re sweet,” she said in that way that doesn’t mean anything.

  Then she kissed him on the cheek.

  She pulled back, spooked. She stepped away from the car. She stood on the sidewalk. She touched her lips.

  Jimmy drove away, up Sunset.

  When he looked up in the mirror, she still stood on the side of the street where he left her, watching him go, holding herself as if from a sudden chill.

  Angel’s house was halfway down an impossibly steep hill in Silver Lake in a neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows, some restored and almost too neat, the rest of them peeling under all the sun the hill took. Jimmy parked the Porsche, wheels canted to the curb. You could hear the music from here. The moon was still up. A couple made out against the fender of a cherry Camaro. They ignored him.

  The partiers spilled out of the house onto the terraced backyard. Angel’s place was never closed, his friends and wards mostly Latinos with a few Cal Arts types. Three people danced to ska under a string of chili pepper lights hung in a grapefruit tree, its trunk painted white. Somebody on the steps recognized Jimmy as he came down around the side of the house and threw him a beer.

  Angel Figueroa huddled at a picnic table with a skinny kid. Angel was in his forties, muscular, “cut,” clear-eyed, un-tattooed. He wore starched wide-leg jeans, stiff as cardboard, and a white T-shirt, a look they called California Penal. He spoke Spanish to the kid, fervent. The kid looked at the ground, nodding. In Angel’s lap was an open Bible with a homemade leather cover.

  Angel looked up.

  “Ask Jimmy,” Angel said. “Jimmy knows all about Jesus but he won’t accept the grace either.”

  Jimmy nodded hello to the kid, who looked embarrassed.