TWENTY-ONE
Turn the page, things change.
Since the day of the ten suicides, spread all over the city, a dark meanness had rolled into town, a jittery Now what? that everyone felt. Ten plus Lucy. They were back down on the waterfront, Jimmy and Angel, coming around the Embarcadero in the Porsche. If he was home in L.A., Jimmy would know how to describe it, that dark sense hanging over everything. And how to duck it. In Los Angeles it would manifest itself in freeway gunplay, “cutoff shootings,” boys on overpasses blowing out windshields with fist-size nuts stolen from job sites. It’d be the dry winds they called Santa Anas, ushering in “homicide summer,” “earthquake weather,” baseball bat attacks at kids’ games in the parks. It’d be fistfig hts at gas stations, gang dustups at Magic Mountain.
Here it had its own style. You felt it in the waves of nervous energy that came off the knots of men standing around the piers. Each cluster of Sailors, out here almost all of them men, would turn and look at the Porsche as it rolled past. Put a fire in a barrel in the middle of them and it’d look like the old newsreels of the Depression. Waiting for something to happen, for whatever was next, wanting it, even if everybody knew it would probably be worse.
“Man, look at this,” Jimmy said.
“It’s been getting strange back home, too,” Angel said. “Everybody’s got the jitterbugs.”
Jimmy hadn’t thought about L.A. in a while, not the L.A. of the present. And he’d stopped wanting to run there. He wanted to be here now.
“Who was the last one Lucy talked to?” Angel said. They were driving through a corridor of waterfront Sailors now, waiting for them to part like herd animals on a Land Rover safari. The men opened a path. They seemed to be a polite lot, for beasts. Almost intentional. It was after two in the morning. Another hour or two, they’d have the world to themselves.
“Did you try to find out?” Angel pressed when Jimmy didn’t say anything.
“No.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Jimmy felt like he was in the dean of boys’ office. Or a cop station.
Then he remembered. “Down here,” he said. “The night of one of the suicides. A guy stepped in front of a streetcar.”
“Did you ever talk to her, face-to-face?”
“No.”
“Machine Shop said he talked to her, had a cup with her one night.”
“I was across the street,” Jimmy said defensively.
“He said she was a real talker,” Angel said. “Baring her soul.” He was quiet for a minute. “She was never that way with me, just said something when it needed to be said, not even then most of the time. She was real sweet.”
What do you want me to say? Jimmy was thinking.
The Sailors were packed in tight around the car now. And not so fast to move out of the way. Angel saw where they were. Pier 35, where Lucy had died.
“I don’t need to see it,” Angel said.
“Shop called, thought he saw Les Paul down here. With the woman in the white dress.”
“She was with Lucy, the last time you saw her?”
“Yeah. And another woman. Short black hair.”
Les Paul. Sexy Sadie. Polythene Pam. The Leonidas girls. Truth was, Jimmy was looking for everybody.
Anybody except Mary.
074
Turn the page, you got another day. Whether you wanted one or not. Duncan Groner had had his own way of bringing Jimmy back to the case, of pressing his fingers down on the fiery Braille again, of dragging him back across the bridge from Marin to San Francisco.
“Page A-6,” Groner had said, a wake-up call at the hotel, though Jimmy had never turned toward the bed that night. “The Chronicle, All the News That’s Fit for Fools.”
It was a full page of faces. The dead. The suicides.
“Some friends of yours . . .” Groner said.
Jimmy opened the newspaper standing in the doorway to the suite, and there they were, all the suicides, in clean rows with their names underneath, way too much like a high school yearbook. He’d expected something else, the latest edition of the present maybe, not the past.
What he’d expected was something about Mary. Or her husband.
The accompanying copy was bylined. Duncan Groner apparently had become the go-to guy for self-murder. There wasn’t much “story” to the layout, one long graf in which the reporter laid out the terms: San Francisco proper usually had eight to ten suicide deaths a month. (The Golden Gate had its own segregated stats, two a month since the plain-clothes patrollers had been instated, “blending in” with the despairing.) Since the first of September, all told there’d been forty-eight suicides, successful suicides was the term, bringing to mind dozens more with half-slashed wrists, with only a half bottle of pills to be suctioned out in the ER, jumpers off one-story roofs, shooters firing starter’s pistols at their temples. Groner ended the lead-in with a few sentences of behind-the-scenes stuff, the disclosure that the editors “vociferously debated” the “dangers” of “publicizing” the suicides (of telling the truth, in other words), for fear that the “suggestible” in San Francisco might think the unthinkable, and act on it, join the club. Even if the initiation ceremony was a tad severe.
Faces. Hairstyles, forced smiles. The retoucher’s craft. Lives smoothed out, flattened onto cheap pulp paper, tamed in black and white, gussied up. There was the old lady, the ninety-year-old chorus girl. The young man with AIDS. The German tourist. All the pictures shaved off years, decades in some cases. Now the AIDS man from the hospice was outdoors, resurrected into a brighter yesterday, coastal cliffs behind him, his perfect thick hair wild in the wind up off the water, a white smile on his face that made you wish you could see the cutoff person at his shoulder, the man, Jimmy guessed, who’d gone through the drawer of pictures to pick this one. There were the Greek twins. There they all were.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Angel said.
“New,” Jimmy said. It was a vulgar term.
Some of the Sailors, the more dramatic ones, used the word aboard when they were talking about new Sailors: a new Sailor was “aboard.” New meant “new meat.”
“You don’t think Lucy’s down here, do you?” Angel said. For Angel, the whole thing had more than enough drama on its own, he didn’t go seeking more in language.
Lucy could be down here, Lucy as a Sailor. A lot of them were suicides, successful suicides. The murdered were another contingent, especially among the darkest of the Sailors, the ones who liked the shadows. The rest had died in accidents. But a loose definition of the term. More than a few had been the ill “misdiagnosed” into this state. Before their time.
Everybody had their own unfinished business, even if none of them knew exactly what it was.
Jimmy had only glanced at her picture in the Chron, Lucy’s picture. A portrait from a few years after high school. From Sears? Kmart? Old enough and fuzzy enough almost to be someone else. (He wondered where they’d gotten it. From family in Paso Robles?) He didn’t look at it long because in the picture Lucy looked a little like Mary. Not the hair, but . . . Why hadn’t he seen it before? (Or had he? He’d flashed on something in the café down in Saugus.) More likely, it was some trippy side effect brought on by the acid of his guilt. He was supposed to save Lucy, and Lucy wasn’t saved.
“Did you see the pictures of all of them? In the paper?” Jimmy said. “They had a picture of Lucy.”
Angel shook his head. “I got my own pictures of her.”
The Sailors were blocking the way now. Jimmy thought about a tap on the horn. Maybe in San Francisco they wouldn’t kill you for it.
Then he saw the Sailor right in front of him, across the hood. This one was very tall. He was black, but light-skinned. He had spotted skin, looked particularly African.
And he carried a staff, a wooden rod taller than he was.
Jimmy and Angel looked at each other.
“Let my people go,” Angel said.
But this Moses wasn’t there to part anything, not yet anyway. He just stared at Jimmy and Angel. The other Sailors seemed to press in closer, surround the car. Moses stayed where he was, in front of the hood, one of the Porsche’s chrome sissy bar bumpers against his leg. Against his calf. That was how tall he was.
“I guess this is the valet parking,” Jimmy said, and turned off the engine.
They both opened their doors at the same time, pushing back the men on the side, and got out.
There didn’t seem to be any women Sailors down here. It was a rough-looking crowd.
“They’re going to mess with the car,” Angel said.
“Maybe not,” Jimmy said. “Maybe they’ll cut a couple of out-of-towners some slack.”
“It’s not going to be here when we get back,” Angel said.
The man with the staff had started away. Jimmy and Angel set out after him, figuring that was the plan. Somebody’s plan.
There were hundreds of them down there. Something about the gathering, the whole scene, felt ceremonial. The general agitation in the air, in the San Francisco night, seemed to have found a focal point.
But they were all silent. Like obedient spectators for a play.
“Maybe we should do this tomorrow,” Angel said.
“This isn’t something we’re doing,” Jimmy said. Now the San Francisco Sailors were moving the two outsiders along. Jimmy and Angel were just going with the flow. There wasn’t any resisting, no use. It felt inevitable, whatever it was.
Jimmy lost sight of the tall African.
One of the grimmest-looking Sailors got right in Jimmy’s face. “We fell away,” he hissed at Jimmy. Or at least that’s what Jimmy thought he said.
Jimmy tried to get past him. The man said his line again.
This time Jimmy heard it right. “We follow Wayne,” the man was saying.
The others around him joined in. “We follow Wayne . . .”
“Good for you,” Angel said. “I follow Jesus.”
A brutish Sailor shoved him. Angel shoved back. “Step off.”
“We serve the Russian!” one of the few women said defiantly.
“Look,” Jimmy said.
Just in time. The tall black man with the staff was waiting next to a door in the front of one of the waterfront warehouses. Jimmy and Angel and their escorts had crossed two hundred yards of pavement. The Sailors had closed in behind them. Wherever the Porsche was, it was swallowed up.
The door on the front of the warehouse was closed.
Jimmy walked to it. He expected it to open. It didn’t.
“Knock,” Moses said.
Jimmy went along with the gag.
Even before the door opened, Jimmy and Angel heard it. Wailing, spacey guitar. Live. They’d found Les Paul.
He played real good.