Among the Living

Among the Living - Dan Vining


THE QUICK

ONE
A rugged malibu canyon, a clear night. The smooth black road ahead, unstriped, wound through slow turns, the headlights igniting the underbrush. There was a song on the radio over the low rumble of the engine. The windows were down, the air sweet with something that picked that night to bloom. For now, Jimmy Miles was just eyes in the mirror. The half-moon came into the corner of the frame, dancing with the vibration of the motor, full of intent, hung up there like a spotlight over the scene. Jimmy watched it until it slid away again.
A few more turns and there was an iron gate flanked by a pair of fifty-foot-tall jacarandas, like purple fireworks against the night sky. On up the canyon there was a dome of glow and noise, but the house wasn’t even visible from here.
A guard stood next to a fat white plain-wrap Chevy.
Jimmy was ready for him. “What’s the square root of eighty-eight?” he said.
The guard didn’t have an answer, just waited, keeping whatever he thought off his face.
Jimmy held up his engraved invitation.
“Thank you, sir,” the rented cop said and stepped back, and the Porsche—it was a ’64 Cabriolet, a ragtop, black—passed through the gates, nice and slow, behaving itself, and up the drive. The guard watched until it went around the next bend then leaned back against the door of the Chevy. The moon flushed, the shadows changed. The guard looked up at the half-round light high out over the water, but didn’t think a thing about it. After a minute, a raggedy coyote crept out of the manzanita. There was a plate of chicken sate, or what was left of it, on the dash of the Chevy. The dog lifted his nose at it from twenty yards out. The guard squatted, picked through the gravel until he found just the right-sized rock and sent it back into the night.
The big house was all glass and steel and hard edges, like a cruise ship rammed into the back of the canyon, the bridge facing the Pacific, all the lights burning as if there was some enormous emergency. Tall black doors stood open. Music and laughter. Jimmy got out of the car, said something in Spanish to one of the valet car parkers that got an honest laugh and went aboard.
In the foyer, he tossed the invitation onto a side table and walked toward the noise. The card read:
Mensa: A Night of Mystery
Joel Kinser’s
June 13th
8 p.m.
12122 Corpo Grosso Road, Malibu
The party was two hours in. Here was a crowd of fairly ordinary people wearing the best clothes they owned, except maybe for the guy in Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, and a Cuban guayabera. They all had drinks in their hands, trying to hold them the right way, and they were a little loud, as if they felt out of place in the big rich house, which inside looked more like a Beverly Hills bank than a ship. Money trumped smarts, at least when you were in the middle of it, even smart people knew that.
Everyone turned as Jimmy stepped down into the main room. There was an Oscar on the piano so there was always the chance a movie star would show. Jimmy was a bit of a clotheshorse. Tonight it was a charcoal suit, a white shirt, a black tie—and pastel suede shoes he somehow made work. There was something about him that was pre-acid sixties, a little Peter Gunn, smoky jazz, cool. He was nice to look at but he wasn’t a movie star so the party people went back to their smart conversations.
The host, Joel Kinser, who produced movies, sat on the arm of a white couch, his finger to his chin as he listened to a woman a foot taller than he was.
Jimmy caught his eye. Kinser winked at him.
A waiter came past with a silver tray of martinis, an actor playing a waiter actually, in black and white, more waiter than any real waiter. It was the way with movie people, they rewrote their lives to look like movies, cast them like movies, spoke dialogue, saw their houses as sets, their clothes wardrobe, their bodies things to be reworked perpetually by backstage craftsmen. Jimmy went along with the gag, took a martini, let the waiter bow at the waist, didn’t giggle. He waded into the crowd. He walked past the guayabera guy just as he was delivering the punch line to his story.
“And it had already been calibrated!”
It got a big laugh.
A woman stood at the bar along the far wall under a Ruscha, her face turned away, quarter profile, talking with someone, maybe watching herself in the plateglass window beyond the man. There was something Old School about her look, too, black hair over the eyes, a silk dress that caught the light, shoes taller than they needed to be. In another time, or at least another movie, she would have had a cigarette smoldering and a little chrome .25 automatic in her clutch bag. And a hurt in her heart.
Jimmy was watching her when Joel Kinser came up.
“Maybe I could see some I.D.,” the host said.
Kinser was just over five feet. He wore a suit the color of raw clay, a black silken V-neck tee underneath, thin-soled slip-ons, no socks, a belt that picked up the hardware on the tops of the shoes. He had his hands in his pants pockets, pockets which were always empty. He hated bulges.
“Look who’s talking,” Jimmy said. “It takes an I.Q. of one-twenty to get into Mensa. What’d you do, have one of your story editors take the test for you?”
Joel Kinser loved talking about how very intelligent he was. It was almost his favorite subject. He smiled in an oddly feminine way.
“Don’t hate me because I’m perspicacious,” he said.
Jimmy couldn’t look away from the beauty.
“Who’s she?”
“Jean Kantke. Go talk to her. We don’t bite.”
“Oh, I could never talk to one of you.”
“Funny.”
“What would I say?”
“Right.”
A television star, a comic, came in from the foyer, even later to the do than Jimmy. He stopped on the steps, looking for Kinser, or making an entrance, letting them all get a good look at him. He had a face that made you smile or at least think of smiling. He had a can of beer in his hand and wore a black Hugo Boss suit over a Day-Glo Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt.
“He’s not Mensa is he?” Jimmy said.
“Just a friend. Like you, Jimmy.” Kinser turned up the wattage in his smile and started toward the comic.
“Have fun,” he looked back and said. “And, by the way, it’s one thirty-two.”
Jimmy went over to the bar, stepped behind it, poured out the martini and started making a shaker of something of his own. The black-haired beauty, Jean Kantke, was still there, alone now, her back to him.
Jimmy said, “Just as I pulled up, this great song started on the radio. I was going to hang a U-ey, keep on going. You ever do that?”
She turned. From across the room, she was pretty. From here, she was stunning. She brushed her hair away from her face. Up close, her black hair had a blue shine to it. She had green eyes, a bit sad. Her lipstick was some shade of fifties red, edged in black in a way you couldn’t exactly see when you looked for it. Her arms were bare. And long. She laid a hand on the bar, struck a pose, but with her it looked natural. A line of little pink pearls followed each other around her pretty wrist.
As he took her in, in that long second, Jimmy had a thought he’d never say aloud, how a beautiful woman was like a classic car, the bold lines, the unexpected color, the speed of it, standing still. And the sense that its time was gone already, even as you stood there in front of it.
“I guess not,” he said.
“I might,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not the radio type.”
“What was the song?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
She was drinking a martini, too. Jimmy took her glass, dumped it, poured her one from whatever he’d made in the pitcher and one for himself. It was pink. He dropped a thin green curve of lime peel onto the surface, like a professional, or an actor playing a bartender.
She started to taste it.
“Wait,” he said. The lime twist was still turning in a circle on the surface.
She waited.
“OK.”
She tasted her drink. “Wow,” she said.
“Yep.”
“What is it?”
“Manna.”
“Manna.”
“That’s what manna means,” he said. “In Hebrew. Mannah. What is it.”
He heard himself. I’m trying to impress her, he thought. It had been a while for that.
He came around the bar. “So, how smart are you?” he said.
“Pretty smart,” she said.
She tilted her head to one side a few degrees, a look that was meant to be friendly, open the door a little further, better than a smile. Her skin was perfect, her face full of light. He wondered why he’d thought she looked sad before.
“I’m just here on a day pass,” Jimmy said. “I know Joel.”
They both took sips of their drinks. She was about to say something when he said, “So, how many languages do you speak?”
“Three or four,” she said.
“English, French, Spanish, German . . .”
“English, French, Italian, German, a little Japanese. And I read Russian.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, “but do you know what you call that little thing on the tip of a shoelace, where it’s wrapped?”
“In English?” she said.
She was at least as good at this as he was. He smiled, waited.
“Yeah, English.”
“Aglet,” she said.
He touched his finger to the indentation below his nose, over the lip.
“OK, what’s this called, the little dent?”
“The philtrum.”
“And the little thing that hangs down at the back of your throat?”
“The uvula.”
“This is kind of exciting,” Jimmy said. “I had no idea.”
She touched the lower part of the opening into her ear, above the lobe. It was as pretty and as perfect, at least tonight, in this light, as the rest of her.
“The intertragic notch,” he answered. And then, “Why do they call it that?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
He offered his hand. “I’m Jimmy Miles.”
“I know,” she said.
But then, before the next line, before he found out how she knew who he was, there were two gunshots. There was a beat and then a third shot, all from an adjacent room, too loud for the house, wrong for the scene. Everyone jumped, a few people screamed, but unconvincingly. Others laughed.
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.
002
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.
003
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.