TWENTY-SIX
There was a place called the Pipe in Long Beach. Jimmy waited until late afternoon before he rode down out of Angeles Forest. There wasn’t much use in going in earlier.
He figured he’d start at the sea, out on the edge, and work his way inland, looking for Kingman.
Just because. Because the son of a bitch had stood in his yard, looking up at his troubled girl in the kitchen window.
Because maybe he’d planted a gun in Jimmy’s house, where Mary could find it.
Just because.
There was still a little light left in the sky. It was pretty, the last light of the day, the light of surrender, as night moved in. The light was pretty, but nothing else was. The Pipe was wetlands, soggy marsh littered with what floats, whatever is cast aside and floats. Sailors, a certain kind of them, lived down here in the hulls of beached boats, boats on their sides, demasted sailboats and the rusting iron skin of a trawler. The “leaders” would be there, the dominant ones. There was a chance Kingman would be among them.
There were different kinds of Sailors, different levels. Ranks wouldn’t be the right term, because it would imply they were linked in service to some mission. In the end, Sailors were all just dealing with themselves, in it for themselves, trying to make sense of it. Even Jimmy Miles. Even Angel Figueroa.
But there was a kind of Sailor easy to spot: Walkers. Everybody said there were more of them in Los Angeles than almost any other city. Go figure, the one place where nobody walked. They’d lost all hope, given up, gone slack, checked out of the whole world of Good or Bad, and were a real danger because of it. The Pipe was always thick with them. Down here they tended to stand around fires, hard as it was to keep them going with everything wet, staring into the flames as if waiting for the fiery face of a god to appear, to tell them at last what to do.
“I’m looking for Kingman,” he said, to anybody who would let their eyes meet his.
Jimmy didn’t like doing this alone, but he hadn’t been able to find Angel. He called him. He kept calling him. Angel’s phone rang and rang. And he wasn’t in his usual haunts. His men didn’t know where he was, just that someone had come for him at noon.
There were a lot of ragged-looking Sailors down at the Pipe, shaking their heads no. But no Kingman, no black dog.
Jimmy cruised through Hollywood, down a back alleyway in the shadow of the Hotel Roosevelt, another gathering place for Sailors. The alleyway, not the hotel, which had gotten almost toney again. He was driving the Porsche. Angel had thrown a race-tuned exhaust on it. In the canyon of buildings, it provided a rolling thunder effect that made the men and the few women who were down here turn and look. He parked and got out.
Up close, the men looked like they were all on speed. Full-on jittery. Dilated pupils. Moving hands. It was what Angel had been talking about, the jitterbugs in the Sailor world.
“Who are you, Brother? What do you hear?” one of the men said before Jimmy could even get out of the car.
Two other men gathered closer, in anticipation of an answer.
No Kingman.
Jimmy drove by his house, stopped out on the street but didn’t turn off the motor. One of Angel’s men was staying there, in case anybody showed up who wasn’t on the guest list. After a moment, some fingers came around the corner of the heavy drapes in the window in the front room, moved them a half inch.
“Water the plants out front, bud,” he said, letting out the clutch to pull away. “They’re looking a little brown.”
The Sailors downtown that night were the worst off.
Same as it ever was.
Jimmy didn’t come down here unless he had to. The downtown Sailor scene had a certain drama to it that he tried to avoid. And so far he had avoided it, except for the couple of times they had dragged him into it, into the arch ceremonial bullshit they reveled in. Their headquarters was an “abandoned” courtroom with its high soiled marble walls on the top floor of the old Hall of Justice building. On Spring Street.
Jimmy kept going right on past it. Even sped up a little.
He went in on foot. His hands were sweaty. It was a funky neighborhood. Sixth Street. He’d done what he could, put the Porsche right across from Cole’s, a street-level, five-steps-down antique saloon with a bloodred mahogany bar and booths carved with the initials of traveling salesmen and USC frat boys from the thirties. But it was a Wednesday night and early yet, not even ten, and Cole’s was still dead. The Porsche looked wide-eyed as he walked away from it.
He came east two blocks. He’d been down here enough to know it wasn’t as dangerous as it looked. Most of the people whose eyes met yours weren’t thinking what you thought they were, didn’t want your watch, weren’t trying to guess which pocket you kept your cash in, weren’t drawing lots for your garments. The dangerous ones you probably never saw coming. Street people were mostly just people on a street.
He stopped in front of the hollow, dead building where he and Angel had climbed the stairs and found what they thought was the “home” of the man with the black dog, and the body of the North Hollywood street person who’d directed Jimmy there.
The House of Kingman.
The homemade video Dill had shown to Jimmy to close the deal with him had had the opposite effect. It had blown the deal apart, and just when Jimmy had the pen in hand, too, hovering over the long sideways line with his name under it. It didn’t happen right away, not even on the ride home. It came later that night, or maybe came the same hour dawn came to the house in Angeles Forest, while Mary still slept beside him.
Jimmy knew something about movies. His mother was a star. His father was a director. There was a screening room in the house Jimmy was born into. A studio nanny pushed him around the Fox lot in a French perambulator. All of his parents’ friends, and all of their enemies, were in the business: actors, directors, shooters, composers, editors.
Editors. What was missing were the two-shots. There were no shots of either one of the brothers and a victim in the same frame. The shot list: A brother alone. A victim alone, usually in close. A wide shot, pulling out, a brother looking down at the floor. An extreme close-up of an incision. Sometimes the brother would be looking at the camera, sometimes waving it off. Sometimes there’d be a smile, a kind of sour smile that gave off a sex vibe. Naughty. There was one shot of blood on hands, in close. Holding a gutting knife. Someone’s hands.
There were no two-shots.
Jimmy was circling the base of the building, outside. The House of Kingman. You could walk all the way around it, alleys on the sides and on the back, Sixth Street out front. He and Angel had come in from the back. Jimmy headed that way. He didn’t think Kingman would still be there, but maybe there’d be somebody else inside who knew something. Or maybe there was some value to standing again over the spot where they’d found the body.
Where Jimmy had had to look at the face of someone who’d died because of him.
It was dark ahead. The light on the corner of the building was out. A black, dead bulb. (Shouldn’t that be the ultimate version of a stoplight?) But Jimmy had a light in his hand, his own light, a foot-and-a-half-long Maglite he’d thrown onto the other seat of the Porsche when he left the cabin to drive down into whatever was supposed to happen next. Half light, half club, a cop flashlight.
He came around the corner with the light. Somebody scurried away at the other corner of the back of the building.
There was a flash of blue.
“Brother!” Jimmy called out.
The door was closed. A metal fire door. Jimmy watched his hand reach out toward it.
A shoe crunching glass. A sound effect.
Behind him. He spun around.
The shape had already stopped. It spoke.
“Knock knock,” Dill said.
Jimmy felt the way a Rhodesian Ridgeback looks, bowed up.
“Come on,” the cop said, stepping forward out into a little more light. “There’s nobody in there. Certainly not Kingman.”
He turned and walked back up the alley toward Sixth. “Come on, let’s get in out of the rain,” Dill said. It hadn’t rained in three months. Jimmy fell in behind him.
A black-on-black LAPD detective’s Crown Vic was on the street.
“Get in,” Dill said and got behind the wheel. Jimmy got in up front. He left his door open out onto the sidewalk. Cop cars don’t have automatic dome lights. Nothing dings or talks.
“You been busy tonight,” Dill said. “Forget about Kingman. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Jimmy thought a second before he did it, but he began to spit out his doubts about the videotape. He only got two sentences in when Dill leaned forward and started the engine.
Jimmy closed his door, and they pulled away.
“I have the Porsche up here on the street,” he said.
“It’ll be taken care of,” Dill said.
It was about the last thing Dill said as they drove across downtown to the 101 north. Traffic was light. Dill slid straight over to the inside lane and stayed there, rolled up to seventy, seventy-five.
All the way to Universal City. Maybe he was going to take Jimmy on the Psycho ride, take him in through the midnight VIP gate, buy him a churro.
They drove east on North Glenoaks Boulevard. And pulled into a motel, an old-style, single-story, U-shaped motor court.
A dark motel. With the sign off. Not even a No Vacancy.
A man dressed in LAPD blues but without a badge on his chest, stripped of anything that shined or named, stepped out of the office. On Dill’s side of the car. Jimmy looked to his right and saw another cop next to the ice machine with a pistol in his hand, down at his side. They both wore body armor vests.
Jimmy liked drama as much as the next guy, but . . .
“What’s this?”
“The Federovs.”
“Here?”
“Live and in color.”
“So who’s in the special cells they built down at Terminal Island?”
“Russians all look alike,” Dill said. “Actually, the Federov brothers aren’t Russians. They’re Ukrainians. That’s one of the things that honks them off. So I make sure and call them Russians.”
By then, they were out of the car and walking toward the back of the U. Another guard stood in front of the door to a unit.
They’d ripped out the partitions between three or four units across the back of the motel, taken them down to the studs, and pulled out the ceiling up to the rafters. They’d sprayed what was left of the framing flat black. The cage that held the two brothers was dead center in the space, built out of gate and handrail iron and metal mesh. And painted black. They’d left the motel carpet on the floor, the bathroom in the corner. The carpet was dirty green. Another guard was fussing over a coffeemaker in the corner, in what remained of a kitchenette.
The brothers were playing chess at a Formica table. They didn’t look up until the door opened again, and the guard stepped outside for a second, on some signal from Dill.
“I brought a friend of yours to visit,” Dill said. “He thinks you’re being framed.”
“Yah,” one of the brothers said, the younger one, the bigger one. Everybody knew all about them.
“He loves Russians,” Dill said.
“He’s right,” the other brother said. “Innocent. Not guilty.”
“Leave us alone!” the first bellowed.
“Go ahead,” Dill said to Jimmy. “Look them in the eye. You tell me.”
“Yah!” the first brother said. “Innocent!”
And then he laughed.
When Jimmy came out, there was the Porsche, waiting for him. It was such a Sailor thing to do.
Jimmy opened the door.
“So. You all right, Brother?” Dill said, right behind him. “Did you see what you needed to see?
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. And he almost meant it.
What did he know about cracking a case?
Or even about guilt or innocence?
081
When Jimmy made it to the gate at the end of the long private road up in Angeles Forest, he yanked up the parking brake and killed the headlights but left the motor running. He got out. The gate wasn’t automatic. There wasn’t a remote control. In fact, he’d locked the gate when he left, a length of chain and a padlock. He unlocked it, shoved it open. He stood there a moment in the open gateway. After being in the city and then in the traffic, it all looked really dark. He thought he heard something out in the trees. The woods were thick all around him. He listened for the sound, but it didn’t repeat.
He’d had enough of noises, enough of suspicions.
Mary was in a deep sleep, but a gentle one. In the bedroom. With just a low light on beside the chair. She’d felt safe enough to turn out all the lights in the rest of the house and go to sleep in the bedroom. He pulled the wool Pendleton Indian striped blanket up over her shoulder, to send her even deeper into that peace.
He was about to sit in the chair at the end of the bed, to read away what was left of the night, when he heard their footsteps on the deck.
Loud. There was no intention to be quiet. Loud enough to make Mary stir.
He leaned over her, awakened her the rest of the way.
“Get in the closet,” he said when her eyes came open.
There was a sliding door from the living room out to the deck, to the pool. He could see them out there as he crossed the room.
Six of them.
He opened the door and stepped out.
He had already recognized one of the shapes: Angel. Detective Dill was next to Angel. Even in the dim light, Jimmy could see that Dill had an embarrassed look on his face. It was harder to say what the look on Angel’s face meant.
The blue edge around them was vibrant, all of them. This was official business.
Angel waited for Jimmy to look at him directly. When Jimmy did, Angel’s face said, It’s all right.
Whether it was or not.
The other men were less . . . conflicted.
There was a round man, cartoonishly large, Orson Welles-size. And in a suit with a vest, like some Daddy Warbucks. They were in a semicircle, facing him, like a tribunal. Next to the fat man was a man who had cop written all over him, but ranking officer. Next to him was a man, not small, not big, who didn’t give off much.
And then there was the biggest man.
Who wore a hat. Whose face, save the eyes, was covered by a wool scarf, like this was London. Who even wore gloves, gray doeskin, lest his hands somehow give him away.
It was Walter E. C. “Red” Steadman, who in a way was their king. It was the first time Jimmy had ever been face-to-face with him.
It turned out Steadman was just there for the visual effect. And the scent of almost ultimate power he gave off. Steadman nodded to the nondescript man, who delivered the word.
“You are not incorrect in your conclusions,” the mouthpiece said, “but this matter suits our larger purposes at this particular point in time.”
A hoot owl picked now to hoot. “Who?”
“And now it’s over,” the nondescript man finished. “Your part in it, at any rate. It is over. Do you understand?”
He said the last with a surprising kindness.
“What about the threats?” Jimmy said.
“There were no threats,” the high-rank cop said.
Red Steadman looked at the ranking cop to silence him. Jimmy noticed that Steadman didn’t move his neck, as if he’d been injured somewhere along the line. Or as if he was very old. The “chief” wouldn’t speak again.
“Who?” the owl said again.
“It’s over,” the mouthpiece said. “Anything that happens now will not happen to you.”
Jimmy looked like he was about to jump in with something.
“Or to yours,” the man added.
“Why are the two Russians going along with it?” Jimmy said. “Just curious.”
No one thought it was necessary to answer.
“You should, in the morning, go back to your house,” the mouthpiece finished. “Stop trying to see the bigger picture. Just live for yourself, for as long as you are here.”
It was a line Sailors told each other, the last phrase anyway.
The nondescript man turned to Angel. “And you, too. Bless you, Brother.”
Jimmy wouldn’t let it go. “Why do Sailors want people murdered, and other people, Norms, panicked, killing themselves? Why do you want all these people to die?”
Jimmy was looking Steadman in the eye when he said it.
This time, there wasn’t any thought any of them would answer. Their eyes had moved to the house behind him.
Mary stood in the open doorway.
She ran out of the house and past them.
Jimmy came after her. “Mary!”
It was steep, it was downhill, it was dangerous. And the woods had gotten even darker.