SIXTEEN
“Your girl killed herself.”
In Jimmy’s state of mind, with where he’d just been, what he’d just seen, who he’d seen, Mary and her husband, it took him a second to think which girl.
But he figured it out. And the guilt started.
“Get in,” Jimmy said.
From the circle out in front of the Mark Hopkins the two of them went across the city to the scene of the thing, the place where she’d done it. And then to the morgue. In that order, Jimmy delaying the latter as long as possible. It was Machine Shop who’d said, when Jimmy showed some hesitation, that they had to go see the body, to be sure it was really her, be sure that Shop had gotten it right, though it had happened almost right in front of him down at the waterfront. Plus, Shop had a friend who worked nights in the coroner’s office, a Sailor.
They’d already hauled the crumpled car away, the little baby-blue Skylark. Bad for business. They’d already hosed off the blood. The car hadn’t caught fire—when Lucy had driven it at fifty or sixty into the concrete face of Pier 35, the same blank building where the Leonidas girls had jumped.
“There was nobody with her, right?” Jimmy said to Shop, standing there next to the circles of oil and transmission fluid and the white blanket of the powdery flame-killer SFFD had sprayed down just in case. Atop the engine gunk was pebbly absorbent, what at the old Saugus Speedway they used to call “kitty litter.” They’d be back later that night to sweep that up.
“No, nobody,” Shop said.
“Where were you?”
“Over there,” Shop said and pointed to the corner of a parking lot. “Working. It was all just getting going. Where were you?”
Jimmy didn’t answer that question. He looked from the end of the story in front of him back over his shoulder to the beginning, at least this last chapter of Lucy’s story. She had come on a straight shot down the Embarcadero. There was a curve in the wide boulevard but not enough to make her slow. It wouldn’t be hard to get up to speed. Pedal down, go. It’s the long skinny one on the right. You don’t want to be going too slow, embarrass yourself.
“Was she thrown out?”
Machine Shop just nodded. Jimmy remembered the scene in front of the store down in Paso Robles, how she hadn’t put on her seat belt.
It was rocking Jimmy, standing there. Everybody knows how they’d kill themselves, if it came to that. What sad, sorry method they’d pick from the list. This right here was the way Jimmy had thought of, from the time he was a kid. And just about every time he came up on a freeway overpass abutment. Speed meets an unmovable object.
“It was a sweet little car,” he said. “Too bad.”
Shop didn’t have anything to say to that. He wasn’t into cars, not the way Jimmy was, not the way Los Angelenos were. (Who was?) Now wasn’t the time to bring that up, that old north/south row.
“She didn’t suffer,” Shop said. One of those things you say.
Jimmy scanned the flat face of the pier building. Pour-and-fill concrete. Probably three feet thick, given its age. Barely a scratch.
You could throw any number of little sad girls at it and not make a dent.
“Let’s get to that morgue,” Jimmy said.
Turned out she hit face-first. But there was that baby-blue dress, the one she’d been wearing the first time he saw her, in the café in Saugus, the dress that made him think of Mary. There wasn’t much blue left, stained as it was. He wondered what her purpose was, putting it on again, for her last scene, for the end. Or maybe she hadn’t had a purpose. Maybe he was the only one who saw purpose everywhere. Seeing the dress again made his skin crawl.
“Maybe you can start looking for her brother,” Jimmy said to Machine Shop as the coroner’s assistant drew the sheet back over Lucy, like a magician trying again when the trick didn’t work. “Go by the apartment first, but he hasn’t been there for a couple of days, as far as I could see. Maybe he doesn’t even know what happened to her. I don’t know if he was close by or what. I hope not. I don’t know who was there.”
“What are you going to do?” Machine Shop said.
Jimmy turned away. “Try to get this smell out of my clothes,” he said.
The coroner’s assistant said, “There’s no paperwork yet. You want a prep?” His name was Hugh. A Sailor.
“What do you mean?”
“Any family?”
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.
“Normally, when we get the word from the family, if they’re out of town, we just bag ’em for chilled shipping.”
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said again. It was getting to be the thing he thought and said more than anything else.
“Because I could do a prep,” Hugh said. “On my own. In case there’s any viewing or anything. Here. I mean, this isn’t a funeral home, but—”
“Sure,” Jimmy said. “Why not? Make her look good. Do what you can.”
He was thinking of Angel.
069
They call it nightside. The second shift at the newspaper. The business offices are closed, but the guts of the paper are churning. It’s the time of day when it all looks most like you’d expect a newspaper shop to look. Maybe no chain-smoking, green-shade-wearing editors anymore, shouting “Get me rewrite!” to the copy boy, not even any clattering typewriters these days, but busy, purposeful, noisy, even dramatic. That was nightside at the Chronicle. There was work to do. In the morning there would be San Franciscans waiting to be pulled back into their communal lives by the slap of the paper on the driveway, on the doorstep, on the plush green cut pile carpet of the Mark Hopkins.
Like the coroner’s office, the Chron by night was surprisingly wide open as far as security went. It wasn’t midnight yet. Maybe the bomb-throwers came around later. Jimmy parked the Porsche on the street, on Mission Street, and came in one of the workers’ entrances. The first floor was where the presses were, where the pressmen wore square hats folded out of newsprint, at least the old-timers, what was left of them. Jimmy came in as if he belonged there, and nobody stopped him.
Duncan Groner wasn’t in the city room. They said he was in the library, what they used to call the morgue. (Back at the coroner’s, did they call it the library now?) Once Jimmy had gotten up to editorial, he had run into a few questions. He talked his line, spoke Groner’s name. He got an escort, a kid. Good thing, because the library was in the windowless bowels of the place. He never would have found it on his own. There were big leather couches. Groner was asleep on one, flat on his back, his hands over his sternum, fingers laced. He looked like he was positioned to go down the chute at a water park. Only he was snoring. The kind of snoring that comes with exclamation marks at the end of each declining sentence. One terminating snort was loud enough to wake him. His eyes popped full open.
“How long have you been there?”
“Just walked in,” Jimmy said.
“I’ve been sleeping lately,” Groner said, sitting up. “Odd.”
Jimmy didn’t say anything.
“Have you?” Groner said.
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“And wanting to other times when I’m unable.”
“It must be spring,” Jimmy said.
“That’s it,” Groner said. “Spring.” He extracted his flask from his trouser pocket and popped the cap and took a boy-oh-howdy. “Spring in September.”
“I don’t get any blue from you,” Jimmy said, looking down on him on the couch. “Same with a lot of the Sailors here. Some do, some don’t.”
“I probably extinguished it,” Groner said and raised his bottle to finish the thought.
“A clean-cut kid down on the waterfront working at a crab stand . . . A pair of thug boys I saw beating another Sailor, my first night in town . . .”
“I’ve always heard the azure edge was stronger down your way,” Groner said. “More visible. Readable.”
“I never heard that,” Jimmy said.
“Funny, you don’t look bluish,” Groner said. Before his nap he had taken off his shoes, placed them side by side on the carpet next to the couch. He retrieved them, slipped them on. When he went to tie the laces, his fingers were uncooperative, a little shaky. You couldn’t tell if it was age or alcohol.
He must have noticed being noticed. “ ‘Sure, I’m a old gnawed bone now,’ ” he said in a rangy voice, “ ‘but don’t you boys think the spirit is gone. I’m all set to shoulder a pickax and shovel anytime somebody’s willing to share expenses.’ Now there’s a movie. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Why don’t you make them like that anymore down there in Lost Angeles?”
“I don’t make movies.”
“I meant the collective, editorial you.”
“So why are all these people killing themselves?” Jimmy said. He was still standing over the other.
Groner leaned back on the couch. “If you ask me, a better question is why not?”
Jimmy waited him out.
“I guess the ten of them this morning prompted this,” Groner said.
Ten?
“And then there was another one tonight,” Groner finished. “But the overnight ones were the headline. It’s a helluva story, I have to admit. Dayside got it, unfortunately.”
“The one tonight was the girl I told you about,” Jimmy said.
Groner heard that and knocked off some of the “colorful character” show.
“The girl I was supposed to be watching out for.”
“We didn’t have a name for her.”
“Lucy,” Jimmy said. “Her name was Lucille. I didn’t know her last name.”
“Hers was one of the better ones, actually,” Groner said. “Very public.” In the next breath, he said, “I was considerably less . . . entertaining myself.”
You never asked a Sailor how they’d died. You waited for them to say it, if you cared to know one way or another. Jimmy didn’t usually care. He had found out early that it never really added much to his understanding of another Sailor man or woman, so he never asked. Some people needed to tell you. If they decided to tell you, you listened. Or at least stood there and let them empty the bucket.
“A bullet to the brain, which I thought at the time was the source of my gloom,” Groner said. “Small caliber. A little chrome-plated Colt .25 automatic. I thought I was minimizing the mess. I had no surviving family, so I guess my concern was for the sensibilities of what we now call ‘the first responders.’ I didn’t know then how quickly they become dulled to the offal.”
“What year?” Jimmy said, surprising himself.
“Nineteen twenty-two,” Groner said. “So I didn’t even have the excuse of the crash, Black Friday. It was a Black Tuesday, actually. I was fifty-one.”
“What are the overall suicide numbers now? How many total?”
“Aha, you’re looking for a reason! For your Lucy’s act of negation.”
“Is there anything that ties them together?”
“United only in death . . . Twenty-eight Romeos and nineteen Juliets. Which is unusual, the ratio, the high number of women. Usually the men far outpace the women. As whites do blacks. Hispanics are moving up on the outside rail. Asian women, almost never. Asian men, after the age of sixty. Before sixty, they lag behind almost everyone, hari-kari, seppuku in popular entertainment aside. They’re spread all over the city, which is something of a surprise.”
“What about suicide contagion?” Jimmy asked.
Duncan Groner wasn’t the sort to raise an eyebrow in surprise, but something registered on his face. And it took him a beat before he spoke, as if things had to be aligned in his head. Or realigned.
“You are engaged in the subject,” he said.
“Well?”
“Even as we speak, I’m sure great committees are meeting, with the wringing of Great Hands,” Groner said. And here he paused with intent. “A number of the suicides now appear to be in response to the earlier ones, to the publicity. In response to, as you say, ‘the contagion,’ a wonderfully melodramatic phrase.”
Suicide contagion wasn’t the result of some recent research on Jimmy’s part. He’d run into it before.
“Copycats.”
“Not exactly,” Groner said. “More like, Now I see that life is maybe not so sacrosanct after all. With people hurling it at the fronts of buildings and such.” He stood and put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and said, “Something we in the brotherhood have known for some time.”
Jimmy looked at the bony, skeletal hand on his shoulder.
“I’m off work,” Groner said. “Rested and refreshed. Let’s go pretend it’s happy hour. I know a place where Sailors drink free. And freely.”