SEVENTEEN
“The kid is gone,” Angel said.
Jimmy stripped off his shirt, took a clean shirt from the stack in the closet. Angel had come over to be with Drew at Jimmy’s house while he was gone with Jean. When they’d come back, Jimmy had tried to talk her into staying with him for a few days but she’d said no. Angel had sent two of his friends to go home with her, to stand watch over her, to stand between her and Them.
“First night you left.” Angel waited a beat to deliver the rest of the bad news. “He took the Porsche.”
Jimmy buttoned the shirt.
He went into the office, stood over the desk, looking at all the papers and the pictures. The dead, the living. The case. He found the canceled checks from the rafters of the Danko flying school.
Angel came in after him.
“Did you tell him about the moon?”
“I told him the rest,” Jimmy said, “but not that.”
“Somebody should tell him.”
“Somebody probably has.”
“What are you going to do about him?”
“Nothing, for as long as I can,” Jimmy said.
034
There was a silvery path across the water to the fat moon. Jimmy found Kirk, the old Clover Field expert, at the end of the Malibu Pier, a pole over the side, his fishing license in a vellum envelope pinned to his funky hat. Something flapped in a white lard bucket next to the old man’s beat-up tacklebox.
Jimmy leaned over for a look in the bucket.
“You don’t want to see that,” Kirk said. “I don’t even know what it is. I’m going to take it back to this science teacher I know.”
Jimmy leaned against the rail, turned his back on the moon.
“What do you need?” Kirk said. “You aren’t dressed to fish.”
He was fishing. The checks were for overdue aviation fuel bill payments and rent checks made out to Steadman Industries. They had made him rethink the thing Rosemary Danko had said that he didn’t quite hear, when he’d thought she’d said her father’s killers were the pretty people.
Maybe it was the airplane people.
“I found rent checks Bill Danko paid to Steadman Industries.”
Kirk nodded. “The old man owned everything at Clover. The airport was the city’s but all the buildings belonged to Steadman.”
“You ever hear of any run-ins between Danko and him or his people?” Jimmy said.
Kirk shook his head. “Red Steadman wouldn’t have anything to do with a small fry like Danko.”
“Did you ever meet him, Steadman?”
“Sure, he was there all the time in the war days. He’d pick up a rivet gun, come in over your shoulder, put one in to show you how it was done. He was all right, but he’d definitely tear you a new one if you looked at him wrong.”
Jimmy had also come back to the year-end wrap-up:
1977 . . .
A MERGER A MURDERER A MONARCH
“When was the merger with Rath Aircraft?”
“I guess seventy-six or -seven. Steadman died Christmas Day, 1973. Three, four years after that. It never could have happened when Red was alive.”
“You were still there? After the merger?”
“A year. I finished out my time. It wasn’t the same.”
“Why?”
“I was out of the old days, when it was ‘Steadman and his boys.’ The companies may have ended up merging but Red Steadman and Vasek Rath sure as hell never did, never would have. They hated each other. Since we worked for Red we hated Rath, too, even with Red dead and gone. Who’d want to work for that bastard Rath?”
Kirk filled a cup from a thermos. He’d not touched the pole over the side and apparently nothing had touched his bait either.
“I make it sound like I liked Red Steadman,” he said. “Once he was dead, he got larger than life. You know what I mean?”
Kirk shook his head, shook off the past.
He looked at the moon, startling each time it caught your eye.
“Look at that,” he said, “best moon for Pacific seawater fish, fat, almost full.”
Jimmy thanked him and started back up the pier. A little boy and his mother came toward him carrying their tackle, a couple of old poles and a battered box. The woman wore a crisp shirt tucked into a long white skirt that caught the light, low heels. Jimmy wondered what their story was. She was too young, too together-looking to have a boy that age, but she did. And it was too late for them to be out here like this, too, but they were.
The boy looked at him the way boys without fathers look at young men, hard and soft at the same time, trying to connect.
Jimmy knew it too well. He pointed a finger at the boy.
“Good luck,” he said.
035
The headquarters for Rath-Steadman was three identical mirrored boxes with greenbelt all around, standing alone in an industrial park, inland and south almost to Orange County. Jimmy looped the perimeter of the empty parking lot and parked the Mustang in the front row, just as if he belonged there, and settled in to wait out the rest of the night. Dawn came in an hour or two, the orange parking lot lights overcome by a sky flushed an embarrassed pink.
They unlocked the doors at nine. The receptionist was dressed like a pilot, all the way up to her angular cap. Jimmy paused over a glass-tombed model of a passenger jet labeled, “RS-20,” Rath-Steadman’s latest, and came up to her desk, which was tall and which she stood behind.
“Good morning,” she said.
On the wall behind her were portraits of the founders, Vasek Rath and Red Steadman. For two men who hated each other, they looked a lot alike, big-chested, clear-eyed.
“I’d just like an annual report,” Jimmy said.
She seemed a little disappointed for some reason.
“Public Relations, Tenth Floor. Your name?”
He told her. Harry Turner.
She tapped on a keyboard and a pass popped up out of a slot in the stainless steel.
He was alone in the elevator until it stopped at the third floor and three men in suits got in. Matching suits. As they rode up, the three men traded looks and nodded at each other, wordlessly continuing whatever they’d been in the middle of before. Then, at about the sixth floor, one of them said, darkly, “Tim,” and the other two nodded. Nobody said anything else and they got out on nine. They never looked directly at Jimmy.
He had punched the button for the top floor, eighteen.
When the doors parted it was the boardroom and it was empty. The drapes were open. There was a view almost to the ocean, over the planted greenery and then the San Diego freeway and, beyond that, the spires of a refinery with its flaring burn-off stacks. The table was forty feet long, oblong, perfectly smooth, any claw marks buffed out.
There were pictures of the directors in a row across one wall, meat-eaters one and all, including the two women. It was the usual mix of yesterday’s politicians and sports statesmen. None of them looked as if they could have stood up to Red Steadman or Vasek Rath in the old days.
Maybe one man.
Jimmy was going through a trashcan when a side door opened and a fruit tray as tall and comic as a Carmen Miranda headpiece came through the door. It was on a cart, wheeled in by a young assistant something or other.
Jimmy excused himself and stepped back into the waiting elevator.
“No problem,” the kid said.
Jimmy stopped at Public Relations on the way down.
In the lobby he nodded and smiled at the receptionist on his way to the door and waved his annual report.
She looked disappointed again.
He looked back at her.
“What’d it close at yesterday?”
“Seventy-seven and an eighth,” she said. “Up a quarter today, Mr. Turner.”
He half expected her to salute.
“Outstanding!” Jimmy said.
He took the corporate report out to the parking lot, sat on the hood of the Mustang and opened it. There were the same pictures of the founders and the directors. Kurt Rath, Vasek Rath’s son, had a page of his own as CEO. He was in his thirties, looked like a Luftwaffe pilot. Jimmy ran the math. Rath the-Younger was just a few years old when Bill Danko and Elaine Kantke died. Vasek Rath had died twenty years ago, five years after the merger, leaving his son enough stock to take control when he came of age.
In the picture, Kurt Rath was trying to manage a bit of a smile but knew not to give away much.
A look that made Jimmy want to buy a hundred shares.
036
Alone on the putting green at the most exclusive country club on the Westside, Jimmy sank a twenty-footer, clean, straight, no suspense.
“I meant to do that,” he said.
He dropped another ball and lined up his shot. Behind him, Kurt Rath, CEO, strode toward him followed by a nervous younger man, the club’s starter.
“Is this him?” Rath said.
The starter nodded.
Jimmy turned. Who me?
“This idiot jammed us both up,” Rath said.
Jimmy still stood over his putt.
“Yeah? How’d he do that?”
“I have a standing twelve noon tee-time Thursdays. I’ve had it for six years. Everybody knows it. And this moke says someone in my office blanked it this morning, which is impossible, and now you’ve got it.”
Rath’s partner stepped up. He looked like a nice guy, nice smile, good build, nice tan. He looked like the kind of guy you could beat every Thursday.
“Hey, how’s it goin’?” Jimmy said to the beatable man.
The man nodded back. He was already embarrassed by what he knew was coming next from Rath.
“Look,” the CEO began again.
“Take it,” Jimmy said.
Rath had expected a fight. It took a moment for him to regroup.
“I own a little R-S stock,” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you having a bad day.”
Rath nodded four or five times, started away.
Jimmy dropped his head to concentrate on the long putt.
He sank it. Rath looked back about the time the ball snapped into the cup.
“You want to join us?” Rath said.
Who me?
Jimmy walked after them and caught up and shook Rath’s partner’s hand.
“Sonny Ball,” Rath said.
Jimmy shook Sonny Ball’s hand. Rath never offered his.
After the round, they had a drink.
Rath was going back to work so for him it was just a grapefruit juice with a splash of cranberry juice on top, like a dash of blood.
He wasn’t talking. And Jimmy hadn’t learned anything from Rath on the greens, except that he lifted his head and he was better at long putts than short. Jimmy didn’t really know what he was looking for. He’d long ago stopped being restrained by that, by what somebody else would see as a lack of purpose. He just went where it seemed he should go, heard what he heard, saw what he saw.
And thought about it at night instead of sleeping.
Rath drained his drink and spit a cube of ice back into the glass and stood up.
“Enjoyed it,” he said. “People never kick my ass, even when they can.” Sonny Ball looked into the Scotch he was having.
“It was only a couple of strokes,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, I remember,” Rath said.
Rath patted Ball on the back as he left. When he was ten feet away, he half turned.
“Call my office. We’ll get you over for lunch.”
He meant Jimmy.
“Outstanding,” Jimmy said.
For a while, he chatted with Ball, a retired United pilot with a good long story about Bangkok, but he didn’t learn anything about Rath-Steadman there either, the old days or the new. Then the rich old men started filling the place, bright clothes, bright colors on men you knew had terrorized and ball-busted “their people” yet had survived it, the company life, the dictator’s life, the acid in the mouth and the unsatisfied knot in the gut that usually killed off these guys long before now.
Jimmy finished his martini, stood to go, leaving the two fat olives on the spear.
037
A pair of moons hung in a jet black sky.
Below, a tracked rover the size of a suitcase hustled over the surface of Mars.
Or at least that’s the way it looked.
Behind the glass, Ben, the Jet Propulsion Lab engineer from the Mensa murder mystery night at Joel Kinser’s, wiggled the rover’s controls, spun it around in a circle.
The name “Rath-Steadman” was stenciled on the side.
Ben offered the controls to Jimmy. Jimmy declined.
“When we were ready to put out the first pictures from the surface of Mars,” Ben said, “I downloaded a fuzzy image of Elvis and superimposed it over an up-slope, very dimly, perfect. But somebody caught it before it went out.”
Ben flicked the stick.
“Watch this.”
The multimillion dollar toy popped a wheelie.
In the JPL employee’s dining room, Jimmy drank a bottle of water and watched as Ben attacked his five o’clock “lunch,” a can of sardines with a pull-top lid and two slices of dark rye wrapped in wax paper.
“I’m not going to eat that pear,” he said.
Jimmy took the pear.
“Rath-Steadman. Past, present, or future?” Ben said.
“Whatever you know.”
“I know everything,” Ben said, a simple statement of fact.
“Start with the past.”
“When Rath and Steadman merged in 1977, two rather interesting companies were lost and one rather uninteresting company was born, producing a particularly undistinguished series of spectacularly successful airplanes.”
Jimmy took the first bite of the pear. Ben eyed him, as if he now regretted giving it up.
“Presently,” Ben said, “R-S is in a becalmed patch of sea, captained by Kurt Rath, who is a real son of a bitch, to use the technical term. As for the future, all eyes are on the sky . . .”
It was a joke. Jimmy didn’t get it.
“The war with the birds . . .”
Jimmy still didn’t get it.
They took Ben’s car, a dust-white twenty-year-old Honda Civic. Ben cut across Pasadena and then up through La Canada/Flintridge. He was a shortcut kind of guy, a surface street guy. He made fifty right and left turns in the twenty-m ile trip, maximizing the torque in each gear, sometimes violently downshifting as he yanked the car around a turn, all while Persian music squeaked out of the Honda’s cheap speakers, snake charmer’s music to the untuned ear, and too loud to talk over.
Jimmy held on, his head under the lowered cloud of the torn headliner. They came down Sepulveda from the north, faster than the cars on the adjacent freeway, right and left and right and left down into Van Nuys to an industrial park.
One last turn and they were on the tarmac of Van Nuys Airport.
“You have a plane?” Jimmy said.
Ben threw open the doors of a hangar. There was an experimental plane hardly longer than the Civic with an odd wing configuration, two place, prop aft.
“I built it. In my garage,” Ben said as he yanked away the blocks and shoved it toward the doorway.
The light plane had power. There was some chatter on the radio as they came up the runway, fast.
“It’s the same model as John Denver’s,” Ben yelled to Jimmy as he pulled back on the stick and the plane leapt into the sky. “That seems to impress some people.”
They crossed the city. What would have taken an hour and a half down below took ten minutes. They fle w over the Rath-Steadman headquarters, the parking lot where Jimmy had burned up the last hours of last night. It was late afternoon and the light and the distance and the angle made everything look good, the shining buildings and rolling, green manmade hills around them, even the refinery, Oz in this light.
Ben banked right, a steep turn, and they were facing the dropping sun. As they approached the coastline, Ben looked down, shouting over the noise.
“See any B-One-R D’s?”
“What?”
“B-1-RDs.”
“What?”
“Birds.”
Jimmy looked over the side.
Below was a grim expanse of what once were wetlands, a broad section that fed, in a few flashing waterways, into the Pacific. It was a landscape dotted with abandoned tuna boats and decaying pleasure craft and a few figures too far off to read.
Jimmy’s eyes darkened.
“Last wetlands in the South Bay,” Ben yelled. “Rath-Steadman wants to build RS-20s here. Buddy of mine has been doing a little stealth air-mapping for them. Immense plant, no more wetlands. Look for the PR campaign to start soon. ‘Birds for Jobs! ’ ”
Ben pushed the plane into a wild, diving turn.
“I like birds,” he shouted, “but I’d bet on Rath-Steadman . . .”
The little aircraft spiraled down over the cluttered wetlands for an up-close view.
A man in a peacoat and watch cap looked up, a gasoline rainbow at his feet.