EIGHT
He heard the newspaper land on the carpet in the hallway, against the door.
Some call it morning.
He was in the club chair with the drapes open. There was a little blue on the right side of the sky, but it was still dark. He had a glass of vodka in his hand, the glass from the bathroom, but he wasn’t drunk. It hadn’t done anything for him. He never read the paper anymore. The news always seemed to be something he’d already gotten some other way. But he got up anyway and went to the door.
It was fat. A fat paper. He let the door close against his back standing there and then held the lever and let it close quietly, with just a click. No use waking anybody.
He went back to sit in the chair by the window. He put the paper on the ledge. He’d gone to get it not for the news but in the hope it could renew the sense that the world was still out there, remind him that maybe the world wasn’t as small and as empty as it felt right now to him. The cold air from the AC ruffled the edges, made it flutter.
He turned the paper over to the front page.
It was below the fold, but there it was:
STREETCAR SUICIDE
With a picture. The body covered.
Things tend to be a little dead at a newspaper on a Saturday night. They’d given the assignment to a reporter, probably somebody young, maybe even an intern, and let him or her do a feature treatment rather than just the hard news. So the first graf wasn’t the five W’s, but more along the lines of . . .
The weekend revelers and visiting conventioneers in their matching T-shirts who congregated at the edge of the Bay on a Chamber of Commerce brochure-perfect Saturday night never expected . . .
The dead man was thirty-six years old. It said so, right there in the seventh paragraph. Jimmy made a point of not letting his eyes linger over the name.
He snatched up his cell phone and called the first number on the scroll. His “client.”
“A voice from the past,” Angel answered.
“And I haven’t even said anything yet,” Jimmy said.
“You caught me. I was just getting ready for services, just getting in the shower.”
“I forgot it was Sunday.”
“It’s raining here. Maybe I’ll just go stand outside.”
“Rain . . .” Jimmy said, thinking about it.
“So what’s up?”
“People killing themselves left and right,” Jimmy said. “Three since I got here. And I was right there each time.”
“But you didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Not so far as I know. If you had been here, maybe you could have talked them out of it.”
“It’s never me,” Angel said. “God through me. I’m just the . . . whatcha call it. Relay man.”
“Lucy’s all right,” Jimmy said. “As far as I can tell.”
“What is she doing up there?”
“I don’t know. She’s just been acting the tourist. With her brother.”
“Her brother?”
“A kid maybe fourteen, fifteen. Plays guitar. Has a kind of retro look, a porkpie hat. I like him better than her.”
“When did he come into the picture?”
“She stopped in Paso Robles for him.”
“But she’s all right. That’s good,” Angel said.
“She’s dragging me around to see the sights. So far we’ve been to Sausalito and the Golden Gate, past Alcatraz, over to Tiburon, down to Fisherman’s Wharf. All around the Haight.”
“What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?”
“She’s made a couple of friends. Girlfriends. They seem to . . . brighten her spirits.”
There wasn’t any use in talking about slow-motion murder. It would sound stupid if he said it out loud.
“People like her,” Angel said.
“Who is she?” Jimmy asked. “Who is she to you?”
“I like her, too,” was the answer, for all it didn’t say.
“So what do you want me to do? Kidnap her, bring her home?”
“I don’t know,” Angel said. “Now I’m worried about you. Before, you sounded good, glad to be out of L.A. Now you sound like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“Maybe,” Jimmy said. “I’ll watch her. I’ll call you.”
“God bless you,” Angel said.
“That’s what the panhandler said to me the other day up in Sausal ito, when I blew him off,” Jimmy said. “I’m not sure he really meant it.”
He took a shower, a long shower with the water as hot as it would go. In L.A. you always heard the voices of the water conservation nags when you were in the shower, even when you were reaching for the handle on the toilet. Here, it rained, really rained, and San Francisco was that much closer to the mountains and the snowmelt to start with. They had water. So the shower flowed freely, almost washed away the heaviness in him.
The phone was ringing when he got out. The room phone.
It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet.
He let it ring long enough for a wrong number to go away, give up. It kept ringing.
“Hello.”
“This is Duncan Groner. The Chronicle.” It was a cracking voice, an old man’s voice, a voice with some coot to it. Jimmy assumed the man meant the newspaper, not that he was an oracle. Even before he added, “I’m a reporter.”
Something clicked about the odd name. Jimmy walked with the phone over to the window where the thick Sunday paper was. The byline on the Chron’s suicide puff piece was Dana Gruber.
“You don’t write under the name Dana Gruber, do you?” Jimmy said.
“Holy Mother of God, no,” the voice on the phone said.
“The initials are the same.”
“That’s all. She’s a journalist . . .” Then, without a breath between the words, he said, “So you were down there last night, too. I understand you were there for all three.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah, I was there.”
“I’m doing a follow-up on the Leonidas girls, tying it in. I talked to George Leonidas. He said talk to you, that you had something to say about it. A different angel.”
“Did you say angel?”
“I meant angle. Sometimes I’m a little dyslexic early in the morning.”
“Mr. Leonidas got it wrong. I wouldn’t be any help to you.”
There was a little pause. “I know you, Brother,” the man on the other end of the line said. He didn’t say it like the secret Sailor code that it was, more like they were old friends. They weren’t. They weren’t even new friends. He waited. He expected the silence.
Jimmy said, “I guess I could use some fresh air. Where do you want to meet?”
“How do you feel about church?” the reporter said.
060
Fresh air? It was like being in an auditorium-sized pool hall. It was a ballroom in a hotel on Cathedral Hill. The cigarette smoke burned Jimmy’s eyes and constricted his throat from the second he came in. It was like walking into a house afire.
But it was church. A pastor, a skinny man with a big, booming voice, was at a pulpit up front on the elevated platform with its white tacked-on pleated skirt. His voice was not just big but had a kind of authority, a kind of weight, a been there/done that intensity. He was talking about Peter, Saint Peter, and overcoming the past.
Jimmy squinted, looking for his date in the haze.
Duncan Groner was alone in the last row of hotel ballroom armless stackable chairs, against the wall, under an eight-foot-long mural of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the driving of the golden spike. He had a fat, round, red eraserless pencil stuck over his ear and a long reporter’s notebook on the empty seat beside him. And, Jimmy would learn in a second, a buzz on.
The banner strung up behind the preacher said: Western States Roundup Alcoholics Anonymous. Yee-haw.
Groner gave him a wave over, moved his reporter’s notebook for him to sit.
“I thought San Francisco had a smoking ban.”
“They do,” Duncan Groner said. “They cut ’em a little slack. For the conventions. Especially this one.” He had a cigarette of his own in his hand, a Player, a thick, unfiltered, English fag, smoked down to the nub. In his other hand, he had a tall coffee in a paper cup. He swirled it around a couple times and took a sip.
“Thanks for coming, Brother. God loves a cheerful giver.” Groner’s face matched the gravelly voice, ears a little gnomish, flappable, a bulbous nose, a weak chin, droopy dog eyes. Here was another old Sailor. He looked to be in his sixties, wiry, lanky. He wore loud checked wool pants and a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a press on it. And tan-and-white saddle shoes. He looked like he should be at the horse track with a stingy brim hat pushed back on his head. Or the dog track. “God says the past doesn’t matter,” he said. He snatched up his notebook and flipped back a page. “Or rather that ‘the slate is wiped clean.’ ” He swirled his coffee again and took another hit. “God doesn’t even care if you’ve inadvertently polluted your shorts at one time or another.”
“Even advertently,” Jimmy cracked.
“Oh, Mother of God, a free-willer!” Duncan Groner said, loud enough for a woman six rows forward to turn. “Sorry,” he said. And lifted his coffee cup to her.
With a surreptitious slip of the fingers, he extracted a brass flask shaped like a kidney from his pants pocket. He kept it at his side, popped open the cap with his thumbnail, tipped it, and poured a dollop into the coffee cup kept down at his side and clipped the cap down again. And then he made the bottle disappear. For this, at least, he had the dexterity of a surgeon. He swirled the coffee again. Jimmy could smell the bourbon. A man twenty rows up turned and looked. Maybe he could he smell it, too.
Groner continued, “You have to accept that there is a Superior Being, a Higher Power, something greater than you.” He flipped closed his notebook. “What they don’t say is how can you not drink once you know that little piece of information.”
“I believe the answer to that is, God loves you,” Jimmy said.
“He doesn’t know me,” Groner said.
The reporter had what he needed for whatever he was writing, so they slipped out, retired to the hotel bar across the lobby. It wasn’t even ten yet. The bartender and a busboy went to restocking the bar after the two lone customers had been served, an old-fashioned for Groner and a Virgin Mary for Jimmy.
There wasn’t much restocking to do.
“I bet you love this convention crowd,” Groner said.
The bartender smiled hatefully.
Groner stirred his drink with his finger. “By the way,” he began, “George Leonidas isn’t buying any of it. No sale.” He lifted the drink to toast Jimmy and then all but drained the old-fashioned in the first “sip.”
“He thinks you’re insane,” Groner finished.
“That’s usually the intention,” Jimmy said. “With third parties.”
“Up here, we tend not to even try to explain things to third parties.”
“That works, too.”
“It never helps.”
“No, it never does,” Jimmy said.
Jimmy liked him. All Sailors were good liars, if they made it through the first weeks, months, without falling apart. You had to learn fast how to read each other and then trust what your instinct was telling you.
“So who’s next?” Jimmy said and bit his stalk of celery in half.
Groner let a half minute go by. “Maybe it’s you,” he said.
“Or you,” Jimmy said.
Groner laughed. “Is it that obvious?”
“What are you going to say about the Leonidas girls?”
“Mother of God, I saw their room,” Groner said and shook his head. “It was like an explosion in a Dubble Bubble factory. They slept in matching canopy beds. One liked Justin, one liked Clay.”
“That was probably last year,” Jimmy said.
“They change so fast.” The way Groner said the cliché, sour and sincere at the same time, made Jimmy wonder if the grizzled old cynic had been, of all things, a daddy once. “George had just bought them both a Kia. Two Kias. They came into the City in Melina’s. It was in the covered parking lot across from Pier 41. It had a hundred and eleven miles on it.”
“Did you find out why they wanted to die?” Jimmy said.
“You were there,” Groner said. “I wasn’t. What did you see?”
“In the moment, it was hard to get past the nakedness.”
“The assumption was they were loaded, but they weren’t. What they had in their stomachs was essentially a Jamba Juice mango smoothie. They’d each had one. One had some Midol in her blood. She was menstruating. Funny, you’d think the two girls would be in sync, but they weren’t. There’s always a detail like that. Maybe it’s why I do this.”
Jimmy said, “There hadn’t been any signs of depression? High drama?”
“Happy and healthy.”
“You said you were ‘tying this in.’ To what?”
The bartender came past. He pointed at Groner. Groner shook his head, though his glass was empty.
“In the last five days, there have been twenty-six suicides in the City. Usually, there are one or two a day. And more than half of them have been, as you say, the ‘high drama’ kind. Two off the Golden Gate last night, five minutes apart. Three last week. They usually get one jumper every two or three weeks. People are killing themselves spectacularly all over the city. Not the head-in-the-oven kind, alone in the garage with the Nova.” He sucked the bitters-dashed sugar off the cubes at the bottom of his rocks glass.
“That’s not what you meant when you said, ‘Who’s next?’ is it?” he said, and looked at Jimmy.
Jimmy didn’t answer.
“Why would a Sailor be up there with them, whispering in their ear just before they jumped?” he said instead.
“First I heard of it,” the reporter said and almost made it sound like the truth.
Groner changed his mind about that second drink and, while he waited for it, asked Jimmy what had brought him to San Francisco.
Jimmy surprised himself with how much he said. About Lucy and Les. About Angel back home. About the boat ride over to Sausalito. About what he had thought had almost happened on the Golden Gate. About the park on Tiburon. About the two women who always seemed to be hovering.
It’s getting to me, that’s what he was thinking as he heard himself summarize the last days. There was too much death here, and it didn’t have anything to do with him, however much they tried to make it be about him, however much he seemed to be right there when the bodies dropped. Sailors had their own kind of agoraphobia and for their own special reasons. They never liked to be too far from the home port. They started getting antsy. Maybe it was time to go home.
“Go to her, this Lucy, talk to her, tell her people are worried about her, take her home,” he heard Groner say.
061
The Haight. Lucy wasn’t there. And the Skylark was gone. Maybe she’d figured it out on her own. Maybe she’d packed up and was headed south.
But he knew that wasn’t true.
He drove across the Golden Gate, blew past the spot where the dropped drinks had splashed into the oncoming traffic, where Lucy had stopped almost in the middle of the bridge, where Les had caught up to her. A couple was handing off their camera to another tourist for a shot of the two of them with the backdrop of the city, their backs against the low rail.
He took the first exit, dropped down into Sausalito. The baby-blue Skylark would be easy to spot, wherever they were, if he got lucky.
He didn’t get lucky.
He kept on, stayed on the road that swung around the pinched curve of top of the Bay. It gave him time to practice his speech.
Tiburon. He found them. The Skylark was right there in the parking lot of the picnic place next to the playing fields, in the row of spaces closest to the highway. He couldn’t have missed it if he wanted. It was sitting there all alone, like a big sign that said: Here!
So he had gotten lucky.
He pulled in and parked, found a place.
He watched them through the windshield of the Porsche. This time Lucy had brought Les with her. There was no sign of the others, the women, the helpmates. It was a sweet little scene. The sky was blue. The water was beautiful.
A little soccer player came running his way, right toward Jimmy. A boy six or seven with his shin guards over his socks, out of uniform, silky baggy pants and mismatched top. He had a set of keys jangling in his hand. Jimmy looked across the field. There weren’t any games on. (It was Sunday. They probably didn’t have games on Sunday.) But there were two or three boys at some distance and a few parents. (Lucy and Les were close by, but not right next to the parents and kids.) There was a chirp as the Tahoe two spaces away from the Porsche unlocked its doors.
The boy was impatient to get back to the field, to his friends. He yanked opened the passenger-side door and climbed in. Jimmy looked over, saw him rummaging between the Tahoe’s front seats.
He came out with a white squeeze bottle of sunblock, slammed the door, was already running back across the fie ld when he aimed the remote behind him and locked the Tahoe. California kids. Or maybe they were like this everywhere now.
As the boy closed in, a woman, who’d had her back turned away, standing, turned. Maybe she’d heard his voice. Maybe the boy had said something, maybe protested about the errand she’d sent him on, interrupting his play. “Here . . .” maybe he’d said, with an impatient edge to his voice. The boy was holding up the sunblock.
She took a few steps toward him, to meet him. She kneeled down.
It was all it took. She was far away, a hundred yards at least. She was across any number of gulfs, of chasms, of distances. Of time and space and reason. On the other side of possibility, across a wide field of coincidence and improbability. But it was all it took, the shape of her. The outline of her.
Her hair in the light.
The flash of white in the luster of her face, the teeth in her smile, the smile in her eyes . . .
As she knelt and finger-painted sunblock under the boy’s eyes, across his forehead, and down the line of his nose.
Mary.