TWENTY-TWO
There was one last set of checks.
In the study, standing at his desk, Jimmy shuffled the deck until he came to one made out to somebody named Roy Pool with the notation “Payroll.” He turned it over. On the back was an endorsement by Mr. Pool, notably florid, and a deposit stamp that said, “Ringside Liquor.”
It was still there. It was in Hawaiian Gardens, south and inland, straight in from Long Beach. Everyone said there was no heritage in L.A., but some things survived the perpetual reinvention, like red sauce Italian restaurants and old-style Mexican places with dusty sombreros on the walls. And corner liquor stores. Most of them had come right after the war with names that meant more then than now, names like Full House, Victory Liquor, and Ringside.
The clerk was in his sixties. He came out the front door with Jimmy and squinted in the sun on the sidewalk and pointed down the block and then over.
Jimmy set out walking, drinking the bottle of water he’d felt obliged to buy. The heat wave had broken, but it was still hot. Hawaiian Gardens didn’t have much to do with either Hawaii or gardens, block after block of apartment buildings and strip malls, a few dead cars on every block painted with dirt and plastered with Day-Glo Notice to Remove stickers. A bus smoked past, covered top to bottom and front to back with an ad for a movie, a grinning black man with a .9 millimeter that stretched ten feet.
The clerk at Ringside Liquors had given Jimmy a number from his files, three-by-five cards in a green shoebox, but Roy Pool’s house was gone. Now a big ugly apartment building covered the space of four numbers.
But there was a neighbor, a sole survivor in a Spanish bungalow—they liked to call it Mediterranean—with peeling pink paint and a few yard-birds in even greater need of a touch-up. Jimmy knocked on the steel security door that ruined the look of the little house.
It took a long time, then an old lady answered. She never opened the steel mesh door, even after she saw that he was a nice young man, but she told him where to find Roy Pool, that he was “still kicking” as she said, though his house was long gone.
Capri Retirement Villa wasn’t as grim as it could have been. The sidewalk out front was clean, the paint was fresh, and a pair of fluffy Boston ferns hung from hooks in the overhang out front. Somebody cared. Jimmy stopped by the desk, then came down the corridor and found the room.
At least he was awake. Everyone else was sleeping.
Roy Pool, who looked to be in his sixties but was probably older, sat in a wheelchair looking out the sliding glass door at the concrete “garden” in the middle of the four-sided nursing home. He wore silk pajamas with a scarf at the neck. The vintage bodybuilder magazine hidden under the desk at the Danko flight school was his.
“Hi.”
He turned. “Hello.”
“I’m Jimmy Miles. You’re Mr. Pool?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’m an investigator. Can I ask you about Bill Danko?”
“What kind of investigator?”
“Private.”
“My,” Pool said.
He wheeled around to face his guest and looked him over, his eyes lingering on Jimmy’s shoes, black suede loafers with silver diamond shapes across the top.
“This isn’t for one of those television shows, is it? I detest television.”
“I’ll watch a ballgame every once in awhile,” Jimmy said. “That’s about it.”
There were three or four old movie star pictures on the walls and a one-sheet for Now, Voyager. A magnolia blossom floated in fresh water in a globe that used to be a fishbowl. On the desk in a plain black frame was an eight-by-ten of a much younger Roy Pool, a dramatic, side-lit pose.
Pool saw Jimmy looking at it. “The older I get, the better-looking I was,” he said.
At Pool’s feet was a small oxygen bottle. He lifted the pale green mask to his mouth and inhaled, held it delicately with two fingers like the cigarettes he once smoked, which made this necessary now.
He took the mask away and exhaled. “So, who’s your patron?”
“Elaine Kantke’s daughter.”
“Who apparently has never been told that The Past doesn’t care what we think about it.”
“What about the future?” Jimmy said.
“Cares even less,” Pool said.
Jimmy straightened the photo on the desk. “You were Bill Danko’s—”
“Secretary. There’s nothing wrong with the word.”
“I want to know if there was some connection to Rath-Steadman.”
Roy Pool looked at Jimmy levelly for a long moment, then got out of the wheelchair and stepped over and closed the door.
“Not that anyone in this place can hear . . .”
He moved gracefully. Jimmy thought the word queen wasn’t really such a pejorative. Pool dropped into the chair by the desk and crossed his legs at the knees and then lifted his face into the light angling in from the patio, as if he wanted Jimmy to remember exactly how he had looked when he told him what he was about to tell him.
“So, there was a connection between—”
Pool held up his hand.
Jimmy gave him his moment.
“One week before he was murdered, Mr. Danko—I always called him that although he would repeatedly ask me to call him ‘Bill’—Mr. Danko took several important persons up one night to fly over the proposed site for an industrial park in the Inland Empire.”
“At night?”
“There was a full moon.” He gave Jimmy a look meant to squelch any further interruptions. “Among those passengers was Vasek Rath of Rath Aircraft and . . .”
He allowed a ridiculously long pause.
“Red Steadman of Steadman Industries . . .”
Pool let his wild revelation hang in the air a moment. He’d waited years to give this speech.
“Though, of course, Red Steadman had died some four years previous to that time, so how could that be?”
He looked Jimmy in the eye, ready for a challenge.
He wasn’t going to get it.
“Mr. Steadman was wearing a disguise, but not a very good disguise,” Pool concluded. “My point being that Mr. Danko that night saw something or realized something that he was not meant to, namely that the two companies were about to merge—and that Mr. Red Steadman had apparently faked his own death some years earlier.”
He took another drag of bottled oxygen.
“Did you actually see them?” Jimmy asked.
“They left at midnight. Mr. Danko told me about it in great detail the next morning.” Pool picked at something on the knee of his pajamas. “I should have bought some stock.”
“Who else do you think he told?”
“The events that followed would suggest Mrs. Kantke.” There was another theatrical pause. “And perhaps Michelle.”
Pool waited to see if Jimmy knew the name.
“Espinosa,” Jimmy said.
“Yes, eventually that would be her last name.”
“They were still in touch? Michelle and Danko. Or was there something more?”
“Mr. Danko had a weakness for her.”
“There was some evidence the actual killer was short,” Jimmy said, just to see what would happen.
“Michelle was short.”
“And so was Estella Danko.”
Pool went a bit sad and sentimental. “And neither of them wanted anything other than Bill alive and loving them.”
He corrected himself. “Mr. Danko.”
“You never testified?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“No one asked. And, for a long time, I was quite peeved at that.”
Here was another soul who wanted Jimmy to stay a little longer. Pool took a thick manila envelope from his bedside table, unwound the string closure and handed it over. Jimmy knew everything he needed to know, enough to pull him down further, make him feel that weight, that compression again, but he took the folder.
It was a file of clippings and pictures, like Jean’s, which now had become his. There was a two-inch article about the drowning at Mothers’ Beach in Marina del Ray. There was no clip about Tone Espinosa shot dead. The newspaper picture of Red Steadman in his prime was almost brown but time hadn’t taken the hardness out of the boss’s eye, that look the old man on the pier had remembered. That same look, softened only a little, had been in the eyes in the wax fig ure presiding over the boardroom at the Museum of Flight. Red Steadman.
And somewhere else. In the now.
045
Jean was out past the shore break. It was afternoon. She pulled hard on a concluding stroke and rolled onto her back with the last of the energy, gliding like a seal.
She watched her hands describing figure eights as she treaded water. The waves, from this far out, seen from behind, looked like hands pushing something away.
She looked skyward. There was a daylight moon, just risen.
White.
A perfect circle.
A communion wafer.
Where did that come from? She hadn’t taken communion in ten years. She thought of the little church in Carmel, that afternoon, the way the candles weighted the air. The Quick and The Dead. That memory led her to another from long ago, a little girl—four?—with her mother in an Episcopal church in Long Beach in a straight wool coat, pink with pink buttons in a style like the one John John Kennedy had worn in the famous picture, and the hat, too, which she held in her hands because her mother was kneeling beside her. Suddenly there was a bird, a brown wren probably, something small and common, flying around the airy vault above the altar. There were a few other children and they began to laugh and Jean began to laugh with them until the adults got up from their knees.
Jean didn’t remember what happened next. How odd that she wouldn’t remember the ending.
A swell lifted her and she saw Jimmy on the beach.
She washed the salt out of her hair over the kitchen sink with a round striped pitcher.
“Have you been all right up here?” Jimmy said.
“I’m fine,” she said.
She squeezed the water out of her hair with a kitchen towel and stepped closer to him.
She kissed him.
He wondered if she could feel the change in him.
He found a blue bottle of vodka in the freezer and poured an inch of it into a green glass and walked with it to the windows that tried to frame the ocean. He stood with his back to her. Far away, almost at the horizon, a sloop was passing, so far out it was flying a spinnaker. He waited. He felt himself going back to his life, back to before, back into himself, from wherever he had been with her. It felt like falling backwards. It felt like a plug being pulled. It hurt and was sad. If he wasn’t a man, he would have howled like a dog.
There was a TV on the countertop, the first of the afternoon news shows, a brushfir e somewhere, tanker helos dropping showers of red water. Jean watched it. The sound was low.
Jimmy still was looking out at the sea.
“One of The Jolly Girls, Vivian Goreck, still lives two doors down from your house,” he said. “With her daughter, Lynne.”
Jean remembered the picture, the four of them at the Yacht Club bar, starched white blouses and round pearlesque earrings the size of quarters.
“I remember her.”
Something had changed in Jean, too, and he felt it. She had decided something. He didn’t know what it was.
“She was pretty.”
“Vivian Goreck bought ten thousand dollars’ worth of Steadman stock in July of 1977, three weeks before the merger of Rath and Steadman. It was worth a hundred grand six months later. Today, it’s two or three million.”
“She’s the one who ties this to the past?”
“One of the ones. Also her daughter. She’s seeing your brother.”
Jean nodded. She accepted it.
He was surprised that she wasn’t surprised.
“My mother was killed because of stock?”
Jimmy told her about Roy Pool and the midnight flight of Vasek Rath and Red Steadman. He told it just the way Pool had told it, Bill Danko and some big shots, a man thought to be dead wearing a disguise, a famous man who’d apparently faked his own death for some reason.
“They needed a pilot too dumb to know what it meant. But Danko wasn’t that dumb, or your mother wasn’t. Danko probably told your mother. I don’t know who she told. After the drunk flying thing, I guess Rath and Steadman knew Danko was a problem.”
“Maybe Vivian and my father were having a thing.”
“Maybe.” It was something he’d thought of, too, something cued by one of Vivian Goreck’s smiles. “Maybe she’s the one who put that half smile on his face,” Jimmy said.
“So who killed my mother and Bill Danko?” Jean said, too coolly.
“Nobody. Somebody in the shadows. Somebody who’s probably dead now, too. Somebody short.”
He kept his eyes on the water.
“So there it is. It’s over. That’s everything there is to know.”
She nodded, whether she believed that lie or not.
“My father had a stroke, a small one,” Jean said. “Half of his face was slightly paralyzed. Carey told me that, when I was at Stanford. I never knew. The jury thought he was smirking at them, too.”
There was always something else to learn.
He still wasn’t looking at her.
“Where is Carey’s house?” she said. “You said he had a house and an apartment.”
“Out on the point. Crown Road. It looks like a ship.”
She went to him. She put her head against his back as he stood at the window.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Why? Where are you going? Stay here.”
Jimmy turned to face her. “I can’t. But you should still stay here,” he said.
She remembered his line, this could all be over soon.
“When are you coming back?” she said.
He told her he’d call her in the morning. She pulled him to her but he was somewhere else already.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
As he walked away, she looked at the television. A shimmering live shot of the daylight moon filled the frame, icy. The newscaster was saying, “Ton ight Southlanders will witness a rare conjunction of folklore and science, a real live ‘blue moon.’ ”
She heard Jimmy’s voice out front, speaking to the guards, Angel’s men.
“A blue moon—I’ll bet you didn’t know this Trish—a blue moon is two full moons in one month,” the voice-over said. “It only happens once every eight or ten years. It looks like any other moon but this one seems to be bringing with it unusually high tides along our coastline.”
She heard the Mustang start.
“Once in a blue moon . . .” the newscaster said.