TWENTY
The back of the house at one-ten Rivo Alto Canal was blackened but not burned out. A fireman kneeled just inside the backdoor, beside the water heater.
“What was it?” Jimmy said.
The fireman looked the two of them over.
“I own the house,” Jean said.
“Oily rags under the water heater,” the fireman said.
“Was anybody—”
Jimmy pushed past him and headed upstairs.
“No. They got out,” the fireman told Jean.
Jean followed Jimmy. She slowed as she moved through the living room. It hadn’t been burned but the smoke had crawled across the ceiling and stained it. Her eyes went over the pictures on the walls, the coffee table, the divan. She’d never been back.
Jimmy was already at the door of the back bedroom upstairs. The door-frame was blackened and some of the dirty carpet had been burned over to the doorway.
Jean came up behind him.
“They said she got out.”
They stepped into the room together. The fire had burned the shades off the windows so there was light. The TV was melted, the recliner singed and blackened and its plastic melted, too.
A voice startled them. “You the owners?”
A fir e marshal, a handsome man in a perfectly white shirt with a badge on the pocket, stepped out of the second bathroom. He wore rubber gloves.
“I am,” Jean said.
“Who was she?”
Jean said, “No one. No one was supposed to be living here.”
“It was a woman. I guess a transient,” the fire marshal said. “Living here.” He looked around the room. “And six or seven cats. So far.”
Jean turned and walked out.
“It burned itself out up here,” the fire marshal said to Jimmy. “There’s not much structural damage. It came straight up from the water heater below, rode up the stack.”
“Was the backdoor locked when you got here?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah, it was. Pulled tight.”
Jimmy looked into the bathroom. It was smoke-damaged but not burned. A yellowed shower curtain with flamingos on it still hung on its rings. The mirror above the sink over the years had lost most of its silvering. There was a splotchy black hole in its center where your face would be.
The fire marshal squatted next to the carcasses of two cats at the base of the bay window, trying to decide what to do with them.
“Her name was Rosemary Danko,” Jimmy said.
The fire marshal stood.
“You knew her?”
“I talked to her once.”
“You want to tell me why?”
Jimmy told him. Some of it.
Jean was in the car when he came down. He got in without saying anything, started the engine and pulled away.
He looked in the mirror. Vivian Goreck was standing with the other neighbors in the middle of the lane.
“Where are we going?” Jean said.
“She had another place,” Jimmy said.
043
And another fire.
A red L.A.F.D. Suburban was parked in front of the apartment building in Garden Grove Jimmy had followed her to, crossing town on a hot bus.
Jean stayed in the car.
Jimmy walked around the side of the building. On the service porch of the corner ground-floor unit another fire marshal stood beside another water heater.
“Who are you?”
“I knew the woman who lived here.”
“Where is she? We thought it was vacant.”
Every time Jimmy heard that word vacant, he thought of the look in Rosemary’s eyes.
He came in off of the service porch through the kitchen and into the living room. It was gutted, burned to the studs, and the cabinet that had been full of pictures was now a collapsed, empty box.
It would have been neater if there was a body in one of the two places—If I just could be sure—but whatever threat in her madness Rosemary Danko had been to them, it was gone, as gone as she was. They’d cut her out of the story. And the traces of her mother with her.
Five-foot-one.
Jimmy stood in the warm sun out front for a moment. It was good to breathe the open air.
He got in the Mustang. Jean looked at him and he shook his head, though it wasn’t clear what he meant by that.
It just meant no.
044
Nine o’clock at night and the traffic on the 405 north was still clogged. It should have opened up hours ago. They were stopped cold in the fast lane at the top of Sepulveda Pass, up where Mulholland crossed overhead with a high bridge. The line of cars ahead of them stretched for two miles down across the San Fernando Valley, the spaces between the sets of red taillights never expanding beyond a car length.
Jean had a beach house north of Malibu at Point Dume. Jimmy was taking her there the back way over Kanan Dume Road, the fast way he had thought, until a half hour ago. This time she hadn’t said no when he told her what to do, when he told her she had to leave town because they’d kill her, too, if they thought she knew something, if they thought she was in their way, cut her out of the story, too. He had said she should go to San Francisco, had said something that made no sense to her—They won’t follow you out of the city—but she told him about her house at the beach.
Both of them could still smell the smoke on their clothes.
“That was my room,” Jean said.
There was nothing to say to that.
“How old was she?” Jean asked.
“In her forties.”
“What was she like?”
“Crazy.”
It wasn’t enough for Jean. She looked at him.
“Lost,” he said. “Haunted.”
He had plenty more words where those came from. His life had been filled with Rosemary Dankos.
“What was the other place?”
“It was her mother’s.”
“I’d like to think she lived there most of the time. At her mother’s.”
“She probably did,” Jimmy said.
“Are you sure she’s dead?”
“No. Not sure. But I don’t know where she’d be if she wasn’t, where they would have taken her, why.”
“So she’s dead.”
“I would guess she is.”
“What do you think caused her to come to my house?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was when her mother died. She had nowhere else to go for family. Her father had ‘lived’ there in a way, had history there. She sat around thinking about it. Sometimes you have an idea in your head about something like that—and then it just starts growing, like a potato under the sink.”
A car edged up beside them. The man looked over at them, at Jean, liked her looks, kept his eyes on her as if they were in a bar.
“So you think they killed her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is my brother involved in this?”
“Rath-Steadman is,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Tell me.”
They had inched up over the crest of the mountain to where they could look down on the scene ahead, the shimmering valley lights and the traffic stilled in both directions, red taillights down, white headlights up in the opposite lane.
Now they could see what it was. A mile down the steep run of the freeway where the 405 met the 101 there were clustered spinning lights, red and blue, an accident.
Her hand was on the seat beside her. He took it.
“You’ll be all right at the beach,” he said. That was all he would tell her. For now.
“This could all be over in a few days,” he said.
She wondered what difference a day or two made now but she didn’t ask and the two of them said nothing for a long time, watching the dead traffic in front of them, the accident far below, the TV news helicopters that flo ated, turning, high above the scene, red lights blinking, like sparks above a fire.