FOURTEEN
Jimmy rang the bell downstairs at Jean’s and waited.
Nothing.
Just as he turned to go, it buzzed open.
He rode the elevator up. It was unlocked right into the penthouse, opening onto a foyer, the living room beyond. Jean wasn’t there, wasn’t in the living room anyway. The sun was just going down and the light looked like tea, made the room look like something out of an old magazine. The elevator doors closed behind him. It was quiet enough to hear the gears and pulleys as it took itself all the way down to the first floor.
“Where are you?” Jimmy said.
She didn’t answer.
On the desk were a dozen books about Hollywood, new books, open. He got the idea they were meant to be seen. He clicked on a light. There was his mother’s face under his fingers, black-and-white, high-glam portrait more shadow than light. The other books were opened to other pictures of Teresa Miles, with a famous French actor, with a famous American director, slant-back wooden chairs on a round rock beach somewhere in the South of France. She had close-cut blond hair, eyes that looked away in every shot, that very commercial, very exploitable look that said Save me and I’m too much for you in the same moment.
There was a Xerox of a fan magazine article from the late sixties with the headline:
TERESA MILES’ TRAGIC BREAKDOWN
And a paparazzo’s photo of the actress coming out of one of the bungalows at the Chateau Marmont, shaken, eyes on the ground.
In the background was a teenager in bellbottoms.
There was a reprint of the newspaper obituary:
MILES’ DEATH REVEALED
Fifties “New Wave” film star Teresa Miles died two weeks ago in Twenty-Nine Palms, Calif., it was revealed Saturday. She was thirty-eight. Cause of death was listed as “emphysema.”
Miss Miles’ former manager Len Schine confirmed that the actress, star of such films as Marina and Morning at the Window (Le Matin a la Fenetre), was buried at an undisclosed location following a private service.
She had no survivors.
Miss Miles, twice nominated for an Academy Award, two years ago suffered a nervous breakdown and retired from . . .
Jimmy tossed the obit into the desk. It was covered with papers and books. It was like his desk only he was the subject under investigation.
He heard something above him.
He stepped out onto the patio. Jean was up on the sloped roof overlooking the deck, sitting with her knees drawn up to her, with a glass of wine, looking out at the pastel haze.
The way up was to step onto the low wall around the patio and then walk along it to where you could step up onto the roof.
Jimmy joined her, silent for a long time.
“I came by a couple times. Called.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I mean, if I hurt you.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
She kept her eyes on the streaked sky. It looked like it had been painted by a child.
“I don’t know. I’m only inside me,” Jimmy said.
She looked at him, for the first time since he sat beside her. And she smiled.
“What happened to that kid?”
“He’s staying at my house.”
She waited for him to say more.
“He’s all right,” Jimmy said.
That was all he was going to say about it. An ambulance screamed up Sunset. They listened until it faded.
“Why the books? In the living room.”
“Just trying to understand,” Jean said.
“Understand what?”
“You. This.”
He wondered what all she meant by this.
“It isn’t supposed to happen, is it?” she said. “Getting involved this way.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It happened. I’m happy.”
“You don’t look happy.”
“It’s my facial structure,” Jimmy said.
She stood. She offered him her glass of wine.
“You look like her,” Jean said.
He took the glass of wine, took a sip. It was as warm as the air.
“I remember what you told me in my office,” she began, “that first day, that maybe it wasn’t always better to know everything.”
“You can’t know everything so it doesn’t really matter.”
“I don’t care about the murders anymore,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know.”
“The woman in the house is Bill Danko’s daughter,” Jimmy said. “Her name is Rosemary.”
“I don’t care.”
“She was nine or ten when he was killed. Her mother died a year or so ago. Maybe that pushed her over the edge, sent her looking for the house in Naples.”
“I want this to end,” Jean said. “This is my choice. I don’t need to know any more.”
“I don’t think your father did it. Your mother was probably just in the wrong place with the wrong guy. There’s a woman who may have done it, one of her friends. Actually, there were two women who may have done it. Bill Danko had a wife.”
“Stop.”
“There’s some link to now, to today.”
“Stop it.”
“To the people who run things. But I don’t know why.”
“Stop!” Her fists were clenched.
But he wasn’t finished. He wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know all of it.
But he stopped himself.
028
She wanted to get out, to cool off, to ride somewhere, so they were on the streets of Hollywood in the yellow Challenger. It was after nine and still hot. They rode out Sunset, east, into East L.A. Jimmy pulled up into the corner lot where there was a Tommy’s burger stand, the original Tommy’s. A paletero, a Mexican ice cream man with his triciclo, a cart on rubber wheels, was supplying dessert for the crowd sharing the white-painted picnic tables. Jimmy bought Jean a cup of shaved ice doused in bloodred watermelon syrup so sweet it made your teeth hurt.
They doubled back on Sunset Boulevard in East L.A. The traffic was heavy but easy going. A real-life lowrider came past them in the other lane, bass notes thumping, echoing off the faces of the storefronts and second-story apartments that made the street a canyon. Maybe everyone was just trying to cool off, nowhere to go, to forget about what they would have to remember tomorrow.
Jean looked out the side window, a girl on her front steps, reading a book by streetlight. They were on Franklin now, one edge of Hollywood, in a neighborhood of single houses with no yards, sidewalks right up to the windows, rental houses, Russian families in this block, and a few busted actors.
“Who was it?” Jean said, still looking out the window. “Which friend of Mother’s?”
Jimmy thought, No one can look away. Everyone has to know.
“Michelle. Michelle Simmonds. She became Michelle Espinosa.”
“One of The Jolly Girls.”
“Yes.”
He told her about the five-foot-one angle.
“Have you talked to her?”
“She’s dead a long time.”
Jean nodded, still not looking at him. She thought that was all there was. She felt strong for asking.
“I think someone killed her,” Jimmy said. “But it wasn’t down as a murder. She drowned. In the Marina.”
Jean turned and he saw the sudden hurt on her face, the world-pain. Jimmy kept forgetting that most people didn’t see the world the way he did, the way he had for most of his years, full of treachery and death and dark motives. Most people thought almost everyone was good.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “I have to watch myself.”
“What do you mean?” She didn’t feel so strong anymore.
“Always thinking the worst,” he said. “People die all the time. Natural causes.”
They had passed into Los Feliz, a richer neighborhood of thirties and forties apartment buildings on streets sloping up toward the low hills, the backside of the Hollywood Hills below Griffith Park.
After a ways, Jean said, “You said this was somehow connected to other people. Who?”
Like an answer, there were headlights in the mirror.
They were back. They’d been behind them all the way from before Tommy’s, through four or five rights and lefts, a white Taurus, two heads haloed by the lights behind them.
Lon and Vince had traded in the Escort for a Taurus.
Now they were closing. Fast.
Jean looked over at him, saw him with his eyes on the mirror.
“Put on your seatbelt,” Jimmy said.
She turned around to look. “What?”
On the next side street, a second car, the black BMW 745 iL, waited at a stop sign—with a man in a peacoat and watch cap standing beside it.
“What’s the matter?” Jean said. “Who are they?”
Jimmy gunned it and the Challenger streaked away, blowing past the BMW on the side street, leaving the Taurus to try to catch up.
She put her seatbelt on.
The man in the peacoat next to the BMW stepped back and the driver pulled it into gear and spun into a U-turn and roared up the hill.
Jimmy was already two blocks away. He’d taken a hard left off of Franklin, onto Vermont, rolling up the rising straight street with the Taurus closing on him.
“Who is it?” Jean said.
“They’ve been following us.”
“What do they want?”
He was very cool. “We’ll lose them up here,” he said, as if it was an answer.
The speedometer popped up to seventy. Jimmy went through a red light at a cross street called Ambrose and the Taurus stayed with him.
But didn’t make it.
A Jeep coming fast through the intersection tagged the left rear panel of Lon and Vince’s Taurus and sent it spinning, a pair of quick 360s in the middle of the X.
Jimmy watched it in the mirror, the hit and the spinout. He was already at the next corner. This time the light was green.
But then the black BMW came at him from the intersecting street, Los Feliz Boulevard, trying to T-bone him, or at least be there when somebody else did.
Jimmy stood on it and cranked the wheel, sliding sideways to avoid him, then sped up the hill as the BMW skidded to a stop inches away from the nose of a fat beige Lexus.
The two Sailors in the Taurus recovered and went after Jimmy, front wheels smoking.
The BMW had stalled out. The driver lit it up again, backed it into a hard J and went after them, fishtailing for a second before the big powerful car got into the groove.
The three cars—Challenger, Taurus, BMW—blew into Griffith Park on a straightaway on a boulevard through a canopy of trees, blew one, two, three past a sign nobody had time to read:
OBSERVATORY GOLFCOURSE ZOO MERRY-GO -ROUND
The Taurus was falling back, outgunned. Jimmy was at eighty, leading the thing. Jean sat with her hands on the dash in front of her, like it was a roller coaster.
The first climbing left into the higher parklands was coming up fast. Just as they went into the hard curve, the BMW came up on their right, door to door. Jimmy dropped down a gear and the Challenger and the BMW took it together, mirror to mirror.
Jimmy looked over to see the driver. The BMW eased off and fell back in behind him, then rolled over onto Jimmy’s left, moving up. They went like that through a pair of esses, a chicane. Jimmy would surge ahead for a moment, but the BMW would gain in the corners.
“I might have brought the wrong car,” he said.
Jean was wide-eyed.
“Stop, please,” she said.
The two cars banged fenders as the BMW driver tried to shove them into the outside rail. Jimmy got his first good look at him, but didn’t have time to process it.
The Taurus was back.
The three cars came around a corner, three wide, and there was the Griffith Observatory, lit up, green-domed, as sudden as an explosion. The turn was a hairpin and the screeching tires made people look, tourists and teenagers crossing over from the parking lot.
The BMW sideswiped a van and spun into the parking lot and the Taurus rear-ended it. They were stopped.
Jimmy pulled away.
It was all downhill now, a straightaway down the backside of the low mountains. He wasn’t slowing.
Jean looked back.
“Stop,” she said. “They’re gone.”
But as soon as she’d said it, she saw the two pairs of headlights coming after them. She looked at him, at the look in his eyes. He was all the way into it, given over to it. It was frightening.
They roared past two men standing close by a tree. Ahead was a cluster of cars, lights out, pairs of men leaning against the fenders, others sitting atop picnic tables, eyes bright dots in the Challenger’s headlights.
Jimmy braked hard and stopped. Stopped dead.
“What are you doing?” Jean said.
“Get out. I’ll come back for you.”
She didn’t want to get out.
“Get out.”
Jean opened her door.
“It’s all right,” Jimmy said, but he was still that same man, changed and frightening and too full of purpose.
She got out and he sped away, the power slamming the passenger door closed.
Jimmy looked up in the mirror at the paired men and Jean, a couple of them stepping toward her.
Ahead he had a clean straight run through a corridor of tall, dusted eucalyptus, a bridle path on one side. The speedometer, dim and green, touched a hundred. The Challenger was made for this.
He smiled.
In the moment he thought he was made for this, too. He shifted up a gear. The engine sucked in boost. Ahead, the mouth of a gentle curve. Jimmy barely slowed as he steered into it.
Horses. Horses.
Suddenly there were horses alongside the road, six horses, empty saddles, tied together and led by a mounted cowboy. All in the same second, the cowboy turned two silver reflecting eyes toward the car howling down the straightaway at him and the last animal in the line reared and leapt sideways into the road, and then the next in front of it followed.
Jimmy yanked the wheel. The Challenger skidded and smoked and screeched and then slammed against the stout trunk of a eucalyptus.
He was thrown against the window, knocked out.
The first minute passed.
The Hemi engine raced, roaring, then died.
The horses whinnied wildly, all of them rearing now, shredding the air with their front hooves in the wash of the Challenger’s headlights still burning through the stirred up dust.
The BMW was first to arrive. The driver got out.
The cowboy fought to gather and control the six horses and himself.
“He was—”
“Yeah,” the BMW driver said, cool and calm. “Go to the phone. Get some help.” She had an accent.
The cowboy did as he was told and let go of the spooked horses and pulled himself into the saddle of his own horse and rode away down the path. The trail horses tried to scatter but were still lashed together and pulled in different directions so that none of them escaped.
The wrecked, smoking Taurus arrived. Lon and Vince. They got out, pumped up, ready to hurt someone but Jimmy was bloodied and looked dead.
Another minute passed.
A black Lincoln Town Car pulled up. Lon and Vince straightened, almost came to attention.
The backdoor opened.
Jimmy had started to come around. He was bleeding from a cut on the side of his face. He tried to focus, the headlights, the images through the shattered glass, through his own blood which streaked the window: the cars, one white, two black, figures moving.
He saw the red-haired man with the long fingers, Boney M, get out of the back of the Lincoln Town Car. And, with the door open, another man in the backseat, under the spot of the reading light, a big man, familiar.
Then someone was walking toward him.
It was the BMW driver, the man in the expensive suit, slicked-back hair.
But it was a woman in a dark expensive suit.
It was the German girl from the Evergreen Club, from the dark beer, from the kisses in his cabin. He even heard her voice, her accent, as she said something to Lon and Vince.
But then things got darker and faded out.