Among the Living

FIFTEEN
“Where’s your little doggy?”
It took Jimmy a second to hear the spite in her voice. She was in her sixties, maybe seventies, and stood an arm’s length away from him with her feet apart and her hands on her hips, as if braced against a wind or on the pitching deck of a ship. She wore all black, a dress, a sweater, a shawl over that. Old Country. He was on the sidewalk across the street from a pricey condo building in Brentwood, a four-story taupe job with black trim, black wrought iron around the windows.
The seventh of the dead. A twenty-year-old woman.
“I don’t have a dog.”
“Today you don’t,” the woman said. “The other nights you did.”
“Must have been somebody else,” Jimmy said. What he didn’t say was that, generally speaking, dogs don’t like Sailors.
“I saw you,” the woman said. She pointed her finger at him.
Jimmy just let her go on to her next line.
“I think it’s revolting, you coming around here, over and over,” she said. “Let the dead bury the dead.”
Jimmy decided to take a shot with her. Maybe there was something here. “I don’t even like dogs,” he said.
She tilted her head.
Jimmy pressed on. “I think they’re a menace, fouling people’s yards with their feces. Snarling, snapping. Urinating willy-nilly.”
She liked the sound of this. “It wasn’t you?” she said.
“Not if the person had a dog,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t like dogs,” she said.
“I’m like you, then,” he said. “You live in the neighborhood?” Jimmy asked.
“Right behind you,” she said. Right behind him was a cute little Spanish-style bungalow. Covered with tile. From top to bottom, side to side. Ceramic tile, blue and white and green and yellow, every inch of the face of the house, every surface, and out into the yard, up and over fountains and benches and from the front steps to the street on a curving sidewalk. Tile. If it had had a pattern, it would have been a mosaic, but there was no pattern to it. It was a crazy-quilt house.
Jimmy hadn’t really looked at it when he’d parked the car and gotten out, his eyes on the condo, checking the number.
“Damn,” he said now, scanning the tile house. He tried to add a flip to it, to make it sound like he meant it admiringly.
“You’re as bad as him,” she said.
“How so?”
“Coming out here, drooling over this. The death of that poor girl.”
“I was just going for a walk . . .”
“No, you weren’t. You were rubbernecking. Or worse. Let the dead bury—”
“I am the dead,” Jimmy said.
She took a step back.
He let her wonder for a minute.
“I write television scripts,” he said. He named a show with a creepy attitude, then tried to look as much like Rod Serling as possible. He tossed his head in the direction of the condo. “I thought this might make a good episode.”
“But you’d change the names,” she said. There was something plaintive about the way she said it.
“So you knew her?”
The woman shook her head. She pointed toward an arched-top picture window on the front of her house, a table, a chair, a Tiffany lamp there. “I sit there. I would see her come and go, out of the underground parking. She never walked anywhere.”
“What did he look like?”
“Who?”
“The one you thought was me.”
“Like you. But with motorcycle boots.”
He knew he wasn’t going to get much else out of her. The “colorful” have their limits as information sources.
“How many times did you see him?”
“Three nights. Just standing there, where you are.”
“When?”
“The night after it happened. And then the next night. And then a week later.”
“Did you ever talk to him?”
“Are you going to use him in your story, too?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not with that dog, I wouldn’t talk to him. That was the idea. The idea of the dog. To keep you back. To scare you.”
“What kind of dog was it?”
“Some black kind, the kind you don’t even see until it shows its teeth.”
There was steady west-side traffic up and down Barrington the whole time they stood there talking. Brentwood had its gentle hills, curving streets, all very easy. If you had the money. The tile house was one of the last of the single homes left on this stretch of Barrington. The rest were condominiums. She probably didn’t even know that the developers called her a holdout.
A car stopped in the middle of the street right in front of them. A Bentley, a ten-year-old Bentley. Black. Waiting for oncoming traffic to clear before it turned left. It made the turn. The window came down as the driver stopped in the driveway beside a keypad switch on a post. A hand came out and tapped a code onto the keys. A hand with a Rolex. The iron gate of the car park rose in recognition.
“That’s him,” the neighbor lady said. “Her father.”
The Bentley went down the sloping drive. The gate closed.
The woman turned to go. “You can stand out here and embarrass yourself all you want,” she said, hard-ass again. “Don’t think I don’t know who you are. Boots or no boots, dog or no dog.” She walked away up her tiled walk, which looked from this distance like walking on broken glass.
Twenty minutes later, the Bentley came back up out of the building. The window was coming up.
You didn’t have to see any more of the man at the wheel behind the black-tinted glass to know who he was. He was everywhere, or his face was. Looking down from billboards, on the sides and backs of buses. And always with a single word across his chest, over his heart: trust. The dead girl’s father was Mike Roberts. Of Channel 8. Now he’d gone white-haired and slipped from the network wholly owned and operated down to an independent station, but he’d brought half of his viewers with him, and whatever the ratings were or weren’t, he was still The Anchorman in Los Angeles for anyone who’d been here longer than five years. For the new arrivals, he must have seemed like El Presidente or El Jefe or The Pakhan, staring down at his people from every rentable, printable surface.
He was no pretty boy. He had a face like a marine, or a movie star playing a marine. And they did trust him. He was the one who went out and stood in the rain for the rest of them, hillsides sliding in the b.g., the one who raced in a panel van on the crest line in Angeles Forest with the flames “leaping across the highway, Trish!” for the sake of the safe at home in their living rooms. Even if all that was years ago.
When his little girl was still a little girl.
But her name wasn’t Roberts. It was Weinstein. Rachel. And as far as Jimmy knew nobody had ever connected the daughter to the father. At least there wasn’t anything in any of the newspaper clips Dill had given him. It wasn’t public knowledge. Another card facedown. She’d been seventh in line.
Jimmy thought back. The coverage had ramped up about then. Maybe that was why: one of their own had been taken. If it can happen to us . . .
Along about then was when the people of the city really started feeling threatened. He/they were out there.
Who was next?
Jimmy was following him, following the Bentley. Roberts took Sunset all the way in from Brentwood into Hollywood. The Action Eight studios were in a block-long, solid white Greek Revival curiosity on Sunset, the old Warner studio, where Warner Brothers had started, where The Jazz Singer had been shot a thousand years ago. Mammy! The Bentley slowed at the gate, and the window came down so the anchorman could chat up the guard, who obviously knew the car, who already had the crossing arm up. The biggest billboard of all was over the studios.
Trust.
Rachel Weinstein had been dead two months. Jimmy wondered who or what Mike Roberts trusted now.
He had pulled to the curb across the street. Jimmy didn’t know why he’d followed him. He stayed there an hour, waiting for an answer. All he got for his trouble was a glimpse of the Bentley behind the gates in the parking lot. A young man came out, opened the unlocked trunk, removed a white cardboard box, something not too heavy. The kid, the intern, was trying to balance it on one leg so he could reach up and close the trunk when the guard from the gatehouse came running over to assist.
Maybe the anchorman had given his girl his Emmys and now was getting them back. Prick a famous man, and does he not bleed?
Jimmy ended the day back in Encino, Encino by daylight this time. He parked the Cadillac across from the television writer’s long, low house. He didn’t know what he was looking for here, either. He was still new to this.
On the For Sale sign out front there was a radio frequency, a lightning bolt logo that explained it. The Realtors had a new trick. Jimmy tuned it in on the car radio. It was a two-minute commercial for “the property.” Which, it turned out, was spectacularly more valuable even than it appeared. Or at least priced that way. It was a woman’s voice, warm as the smell of fresh-baked cookies, probably another actor doing this to pay the bills, waiting for that big break. Music played in the background, George Winston, if Jimmy knew his New Age tone poems. He shut it off just as she was getting to the square footage of the “bonus room” and got out.
He stood there on the sidewalk across the street for five minutes, just stood there. He could almost hear the screams from out here, through the tinted, double-glazed glass. Is that what he wanted? Is that what he was looking for? Is that why he’d come back? Is that what he was waiting for? For it to get real?
He heard a sharp sound behind him, metal scraping on something, and turned. It was a gardener with a grass rake raking the lawn next to a concrete driveway, hitting it every third or fourth stroke, his eyes down. He was a South American, hard to say what country. A few years back, they were all “Mexi cans”; people thought that, but they weren’t, many of them. There were Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Costa Ricans. It also was hard to say how old the man was. He wore clean khakis and had a red kerchief knotted around his neck. Put him in a suit on a telenovela, and you’d realize how handsome he was.
“Amigo,” Jimmy said.
The tile house lady in Brentwood may have stepped back from Jimmy when he spoke, but this man jumped back. Five feet. With a scared-to-death look, an I-know-you look. He backed over a rosebush, lifted his rake, and turned the handle sideways, as if he was going to make the sign of the cross with it. From the reaction, Jimmy might as well been a monster, out in broad daylight.
A monster the gardener had seen standing there before.
The man kept looking around, as if looking for the black dog . . .
067
Angel picked up Jimmy in front of his house. In a primer-red Porsche Cabriolet with no top, just the metal birdcage frame folded back without any cloth over it. It was a ’64. A 356C. It had already been lowered a bit, lost all the chrome, the radio antenna frenched in, but in a way that didn’t look wrong. The seats were bare-bones, but they’d already been rebuilt, too, had a Tijuana border-crossing five-dollar blanket thrown over them.
The engine had a perfect sound to it. It had gotten the first dollars.
“Whose car is this?”
“Nobody’s,” Angel said. “Mine. Yours. I’m just doing it for myself, for the glory of God.”
“Jesus is gonna love it,” Jimmy said.
For now, they were headed nowhere. On Western Avenue, south. It was what they did instead of talking on the phone. It was ten thirty or so. A weeknight. There wasn’t much traffic.
Angel took Jimmy’s Jesus line with a smile. He always did. He was content in his belief and easygoing about others’ disbelief. It worried him, made some part of him sad, but he repeated the same line ten times a day, usually out loud: “It’s in God’s hands.” There was so much doom around him, he had to pick his battles. Let go, let God was another one, another line he repeated.
“Let me ask you something,” Jimmy said. “ ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ What’s that about?”
“It’s in Matthew.”
“Yeah, I know. I looked it up. I thought it was Shakespeare.”
“What do you think it’s about?”
“I think it’s harsh, is what I think. You read the story. Jesus is heading out, some guy wants to follow him but says first he has to go take care of his father’s funeral. And Jesus says, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ ”
“I used to think it was about us,” Angel said. “Back about a hundred New Years ago . . .” That was what they called the increments of time since they’d become Sailors, since it’d happened to them, since they’d crossed over to death’s other kingdom: New Days, New Weeks, New Years . . . Angel Figueroa had been a Sailor almost seventy years. But looked mid-thirties, in his white T-shirt and baggy starched jeans, and long, hipster-straight-back black hair.
“I mean, I thought, here we are, we were the dead, walking around, here was a job for us.”
“What does it mean?” Jimmy pressed.
“Jesus was a rebel leader.” Angel always said Jesus like the gringos, not Hay-soos, at least when talking to white men. “It was the beginning of things. He was starting the revolution. Jesus was the revolution. ‘Follow me and become fis hers of men,’ he said when he was talking to fishermen. He meets you where you are.”
“So what did he mean by it?”
“You sound like you’re mad at him.”
“What did he mean?” Jimmy said, harder. He was looking away, looking at the whores on opposite corners of an intersection they blew past. If you didn’t slow down, they didn’t even look like people. They just looked like sex. Sex and money.
Bad sex and dirty money.
Angel was nothing if not patient. “ ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ All that matters is what happens now. Next. There’s no purpose in the past.”
Jimmy let a block go by. “But you’re the guy who restores old cars,” he said.
“I don’t restore anything,” the other said quickly. “I make something new out of the old. Too new for some.”
Angel shifted gears, literally and fig uratively. “Are we looking for something? Somebody?”
“Yeah, somebody who looks like me,” Jimmy said. He told Angel the story of the tile-house woman in Brentwood and then the yard man in Encino.
“He got a name?”
“Three or four or five. I just call him Handsome.”
They drove around the rest of the night, looking where they knew to look, looking for trouble, but they didn’t find him, the man who maybe looked like Jimmy, the man in black with the black dog.
They didn’t find him the next night, either.
Or the next day. Or the day after that.
But they found him.
Or at least they found his den.
It was six o’clock. They came walking down the alleyway between two brick buildings in a “neighborhood” of shit-hole apartments and rooms by the week in the shadow of downtown. And not one of those romantic shadows of downtown where painters rent lofts and documentarians make movies of each other and the beautiful poor. Angel’s body shop was five blocks away, so he’d met Jimmy here. Six o’clock. Anywhere else in L.A. that would have meant the light was pretty, but down here the shadows had won the battle between light and dark a half hour ago. Here the Golden Hour only meant you couldn’t quite see.
What Jimmy had was an address, a location, a home base for the man with the black dog, the man who’d shown up at eight of the murder sites, from what Jimmy had learned. Who’d just stood there across the street, whichever street it was, the day after. And sometimes the next. Reliving it? Funny word for it. In the end, after a few days, Jimmy found somebody who knew somebody who knew something. So a few words, an idea, maybe even a lie, had led Jimmy to this alleyway. Maybe to the man.
But what did he know about detective work? He’d heard a line once, about art, about sculpture. About a sculptor known for his enormous, very realistic sculptures of horses. He had been asked how he could do it, his technique. “It’s simple,” the sculptor had said, “I just chip away everything that doesn’t look like a horse.” What did Jimmy know about detective work? Nothing, except to go everywhere he could go, cut away everything it wasn’t, until a shape emerged. What did he know, except that almost everything was a mystery and that what was most true about a thing you usually didn’t see until it was too late.
“Which floor?” Angel said. He was stopped, looking up at the side of the brick building at the end of the alley. It was six floors, old arched windows bricked in years ago, covered by a picture of something, signage. If it was one of those romantic alleyways in a documentary about the poor, the old sign would have been a fading picture of an orange tree with a lush, fading, green Promised Land behind it. What it was instead was a man in a bowler hat wearing a truss.
“My guy didn’t say,” Jimmy said. “Just that this was his squat, that he slept in the daytime. Or at least people only seemed to see him at night.”
So they went inside. The first floor of the brick building was open from side to side, with posts, with high windows with arched tops, with unfinished, worn wood on the deck. It had been a factory. Jimmy and Angel crossed to a pile of rubble in the middle of things. Angel picked through it and found a length of hardwood, like a table leg. Maybe it had been a furniture factory. Or a coffin factory. He gripped it by the skinny end.
“You look like a caveman,” Jimmy said.
To tell the truth, both of them were spooked. They’d bought into the hysteria. They’d been carrying it around, a gnawing unease, both of them, for six days. Since the killings up in Benedict. There hadn’t been any more murders since the director and the two women, but that had only increased the apprehension somehow. The whole town’s apprehension.
They went upstairs. The staircase was wooden but strong.
There wasn’t any dust in the center of the treads. Somebody had been coming and going.
“You should have called that cop Dill,” Angel said.
“He was gone,” Jimmy said. “Out.”
“I got his cell somewhere.”
“We’re here, we might as well go on up.”
“I wasn’t saying don’t go up,” Angel said defensively.
The second floor and the third floor were open side to side like the ground floor. Open and empty. The light was all but gone. Now they had to put their hands on the railing to feel their way up.
But there was light above. Golden light.
They came out of the stairwell onto the fourth floor. It was wide and empty, too, but across it there was a single tall window bringing in a sharp-edged quadrilateral of gold light.
They moved toward it. There was a heap of clothes, a bedroll.
And a body.
He was on his side, the upper quarter of his head smashed in from a blow that could have been inflicted by a club like the one still in Angel’s hand. Angel looked down at it, as if he was thinking the same thing.
Angel said, “He doesn’t look anything like you.”
“It’s not him,” Jimmy said. A moment passed that wasn’t as long as it seemed. “It’s the guy who sent me down here, from out in Van Nuys.”
There was dog shit everywhere.
068
On the drive home, Jimmy and Angel saw people standing outside an electronics store, looking in at the bank of TVs. Same thing at another store down the street.
The radios in all the cars around them weren’t playing music. It was just talking. All talk.
It was like the end of the world. Or the beginning. The people they passed on the sidewalks and the people in the cars around them seemed to be, if not happy, lightened. The Porsche had a hole in the dash where the radio used to be or Jimmy and Angel would have tuned in the news themselves.
Jimmy went straight to the television when he walked in the door of his house.
Mary was there, startling him, coming out of the bedroom.
She let the TV tell him. They’d caught the killers, black Converse high-tops, bone saws, leather gloves, in an apartment in North Hollywood.
Two Russian brothers.
Neither one of whom looked anything at all like Jimmy.