TWENTY-FOUR
“I still see them,” Mary said.
She had just said it, blank-faced, sitting there in her white slipcovered armless chair, the light of a cream candle dancing on her face. They were in a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Le Dome.
Back then it was the kind of place Jimmy wouldn’t have sought out on his own. A little rich, a little too hushed. He’d go if someone else suggested it, but it was too snow-white and round for him.
Mary had picked the place. “I want to talk to you about something,” she had said.
He had assumed it was one of those girl talks about commitment, about “moving to the next level.” In a way it was. But he was way ahead of her, ready to relocate to any level she named. He loved her, simple and sure.
But what she had said in Le Dome was, “I still see them.”
“It’s over,” he said. He knew what she meant.
“I know,” she said. “I know it’s supposed to be over. I know everything you know, everything everybody else knows. They arrested two brothers. Russian brothers. There is all the evidence against them. I don’t care. I still see them.”
“Where?”
Jimmy leaned closer. Everybody knew about Le Dome. The arch of the smooth, plastered ceiling meant the sound bounced around in funny ways. Conversations ended up where they weren’t meant to go. Jimmy had been there one night, late, alone, stood up by someone, and heard more than he wanted to about the problems in the marriage of a fading television star and his young wife all the way across the room. He was worried about who else was hearing Mary. The place was almost full.
“I was on Melrose,” Mary said. “Two of them were following me. In the middle of the afternoon.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I told you when I met you I was crazy,” she said.
“What did they look like?” Jimmy said.
“Just like before,” she said. “Black on black. Sneakers. Black jeans. Black T-shirts. One of them was maybe one of the ones who came to your house after me.”
“What did they do?”
“They just followed me. I’d go in one store and when I came out, they were waiting, hanging back two stores up the street.”
“Why did you want to come here to talk about this?”
“I didn’t want to fall apart. I feel like I’ve been doing that lately anyway. I wanted to be out. Among the living.”
Jimmy asked her if she’d been thinking much about the others in the house up in Benedict. Whom she’d survived.
“Yes.”
He reached across the white linen to her. “It’s over,” he said. “They caught the two men. They were the ones. The killings stopped.”
“No, they didn’t,” she said. “They didn’t.”
There’d been a copycat murder two weeks after the Russian brothers had been arrested.
“I have friends who are cops, Mary.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Why is that?”
He didn’t have a quick answer for her.
Wait a second or two and that is your answer.
“Why is that?” she said. “You’re a record producer.”
Remember, they were both young. It was a time, and they were an age, when what you do could be a very roomy jacket. And you could have three or four of them on the rack by the door. Pick one. Nobody checked the label, as long as it looked good on you. He was a “record producer” working on a demo for a band in the Valley anytime they got some money together, and sometimes when they didn’t. She was an “actress.” Or was it “singer”?
“I know people from lots of different . . . areas,” Jimmy said. “It’s an L.A. thing. I’m just saying: The cops are convinced they got the people who did the murders. All of the murders.”
“Why did you go downtown that day?”
“What day?”
He knew exactly the day she meant. In the scene they were playing out in the restaurant that night, Jimmy had been behind Mary from the start. Running to catch up.
She just waited him out.
“Angel had heard about somebody else who could have been responsible, involved in the killings. We were downtown checking it out.”
He should have stopped there.
Instead, he made a joke. “Going to see a man about a dog.”
Mary said, right back at him, “There was a man with a dog, all in black and a black dog. I saw a man with a dog.”
It was like laying down the first card in her hand.
“Twice,” she said. “I saw him twice.”
There was the second card.
“Where?” Jimmy said.
“The first time in daylight, when I went back up to the house in Benedict.”
“When? You went back up to the house? Why?”
“Last week. Sunday.”
The third and fourth cards.
“Why did you go up there?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just thinking about it. Too much. I just wanted to see it again.”
He was shaking his head. “You shouldn’t go up there. Or you should have told me. I would have taken you.”
“Always riding to the rescue,” she said. “That’s my Jim.”
“When was the second time you saw him?” Jimmy said.
“A couple of nights ago,” Mary said. “In the yard.” She meant his yard, their yard. “You were gone somewhere.”
The fifth card.
She had ordered a glass of red wine after they’d cleared away their dinner plates, but she hadn’t touched it until now. “I was feeling . . . desperate,” she said, drawing the wine to her. “I was feeling . . . pushed into a corner. He was just standing there, down the slope from the house, with that black dog, looking up at me in the kitchen window, as if waiting for me to do something.”
She tasted the wine. “I don’t like it that you have a gun,” she said. “And I especially don’t like it that you left it where I could find it.”
He held his question. About her, about the gun, about what she had been considering that day. He held his question. And, he realized later, held his breath, too, the same as if he had walked in on her in that moment, holding the gun, precisely at the time in her life when she didn’t need to find a gun.
“I put it away,” Mary said. “In the hall closet, under all those books, in the back. Tell me you’ll get rid of it. I don’t want to see it again. Not when I’m going through this kind of shit, feeling this.”
Jimmy didn’t have a gun.
076
Two days later there was another copycat killing, another heart ripped out, another body spread-eagle on another road cut, and a secondary wave of panic in the L.A. basin. There wouldn’t be any more, but it was enough.
This time, the killing seemed to trigger suicides, a half-dozen of them. “Panic suicides,” the article in the Times called them. Maybe they’d happened before, in the first wave of killings, the real killings, but it hadn’t been reported.
There was another term they used, official psychologists, to describe what they were afraid of, if reason didn’t prevail.
Suicide contagion.
If reason didn’t prevail. As if reason ever prevails.
077
Jimmy moved the two of them up to a house at the edge of Angeles Forest, high in the rocks and woods above Altadena. A house with a pool. The owner was a Sailor friend of Angel’s; Jimmy didn’t know him. The owner called it a “cabin,” but it had three bedrooms and was behind gates, though the back of the property was open, open to the woods and the rocks behind it. It was all the way at the end of its own road. The view from the window over the kitchen sink was of Mount Baldy.
It helped. Mary felt better. Safer.
She assumed Jimmy didn’t believe her, didn’t believe that the Cut Killers could still be out there, looking in people’s windows. Or tying up loose ends, whatever it was that they were doing. Killing again. Maybe he did believe her. She didn’t know what he was thinking. She got up each morning and made a big breakfast, the kind of breakfast her mother used to make for her father, eggs and bacon and fresh orange juice and pancakes or waffles. She’d found a waffle iron in the cabinets. (There wasn’t a phone, but there was a waffle iron.) She’d eat everything she’d made. Jimmy had trouble keeping up with her. He’d make the runs down to the store. She would make the lists, apparently having decided to cook her way through every one of her mother’s recipes, as best she could remember them.
He came “home” one day, and she’d painted “Good Day Sunshine . . .” with clear red fingernail polish on the kitchen window.
Without ever deciding to, without ever talking about what should happen next, they stayed in “the cabin” like that for two weeks straight, Mary never leaving the house and grounds, and Jimmy only leaving to make the supply runs. And to make a few calls. There was no TV. What they had for entertainment was each other and a few board games, cards, and a beautiful old tube Zenith stereo with three-foot-high stained cherry speakers and a cabinet full of old LPs.
All day Mary played The White Album over and over.
078
She came out from the kitchen, the dinner dishes done.
“Honey, I’m home,” she said.
“That’s supposed be my line, Lucy,” Jimmy said.
“I’m more June, June Cleaver.” She crossed to him. He was in a chair, an old man’s recliner, reading. There was a cabinet of Popular Science magazines. From thirty years back.
“I was just reading about the future,” Jimmy said. “We’re all going to have personal helicopters by nineteen eighty.”
“Nineteen eighty! It sounds so futuristic . . . I was seven in 1980. I was born in 1973. When were you born?”
He had made a pitcher of martinis. He had found the glasses and everything behind a little bar, the kind covered in black pleat-and-tuck leatherette. He’d delivered one to her in the kitchen while she was cleaning up. Now she took a sip of his. First, she kissed him. He could smell the gin on her breath.
When were you born?
“I don’t think June and Ward Cleaver were drinkers,” he said, letting her question evaporate.
She plopped down into his lap. “Sure they were. The Beav drove them to it.”
He kissed her.
After a second, she said, “I love you,” and said it in a way that made him think she wasn’t used to saying it. He thought that, even after the voice in his head ridiculed him for it.
“I love you, too,” he said.
“I feel safe,” she said. “I feel safe.”
“Nobody knows we’re here. In the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s like we’re lost,” she said, against his neck. “Or is it saved? Can you be lost and saved at the same time?”
“I’ll ask Angel.”
She jumped up. “Check this out!”
She was like a girl again, more girlish than before. Than when they met. She went over to the stereo on the bookcase. She turned on the amp. The speakers thumped, then buzzed up to attention.
“I figured this out, how to do it, all by myself this afternoon,” she said.
She took hold of the mechanical control on the side of the turntable and shifted it out of gear. “You put it between forty-five and thirty-three and a third . . .”
She took The White Album off the shelf. She unsheathed one of the disks, checked the label.
“Wait,” she said, to herself.
She reengaged the speed control lever. When it got up to speed, she put the needle down. After a second of click and sputter, it began.
“Revolution No. 9.”
She waited until it came to the refrain, “Number nine . . . number nine . . . number nine . . .”
“OK,” she said. “Got it? Now . . .”
She disengaged the speed lever again, slipped it into neutral. Then she put her finger in the center, on one side of the label, right on the bright green apple, and turned it backward, counterclockwise.
“I didn’t know you could actually do this,” she said over the wobbly, warpy backward noises, music for aliens.
“All right, I hear it, stop,” Jimmy said, with an edge to his voice she didn’t understand. And a sadness she couldn’t understand.
“Not yet,” she said. She was still spinning the record backward with her finger, coaxing the guttural discord out of the vinyl, trying to keep the rhythm, what there was of it.
Jimmy sank into himself.
She reached the place in the “song” where the announcer spoke, said his syllables over and over atop the orchestral noises, atop Beethoven’s Ninth or strings tuning or whatever it was.
“Turn me on, dead man . . . Turn me on, dead man . . . Turn me on, dead man . . .”
She turned her face to him. She looked like a teenager, so happy in the moment. “It’s one of the clues! ‘Paul is dead.’ Remember?”
Turn me on, Deadman.
He went outside, out onto the deck, beside the pool. The bleached-out water was just a step down from a huge rock that jutted out of the side of the hill, looked like a natural pool that way, in that “California perfect” way. A dragonfly skimmed the surface, like something out of a future war.
The windows were open. The music came out after him. Mary had fli pped the record, and now she played the side over and over, Disk 2, Side 1, lifting the needle over “Helter Skelter” each time “Sexy Sadie” ended.