TWENTY-NINE
Think dark. Darker.
Who did this? What exactly happened?
When a big question was thrown in Jimmy’s face, his usual first response was to look for the answer in Coincidence. Shit happens, wasn’t that the bumper sticker? You find out something wasn’t at all the way you thought it was, and you’re scrambling to make sense of it. And you think, Coincidence. You think that if you pull back a little bit, go over all the pieces, see this leading to that leading to this and this, you’ll see that it was coincidence, chance, the roll of the bones that made it happen. That made this particular shit happen.
So some other Lucy-looking girl with a 1978 baby-blue Buick Skylark convertible just happened to plow into the flat face of Pier 35 right around the time the real Lucy, Lucille Estella Maria Valdez of Paso Robles, was getting suicidal?
What’s next?
Think dark. When Coincidence isn’t the answer, look next for a human explanation. Skullduggery. Conspiracy. Men in shadows pulling strings for dark purposes. Jimmy Miles probably had a lower opinion of the human animal than most people, men in or out of shadows, pulling strings or dancing on the ends of them, but it didn’t wash. Why? How? Who? For what purpose? If this wasn’t Lucy, the Lucy he’d followed here all the way from her house in L.A., who was it? Why wasn’t it Lucy? Who would it profit? How would they do it?
Coincidence. Conspiracy.
Too many questions, you went to Cosmic. Some cosmic Somebody is working out His (or Her) will, moving chess pieces on a whole other plane. You only thought that was Lucy you were seeing on the slab in the morgue in the baby-blue dress, her face smashed in. It was just a trick of the gods, a bit in a skit that amuses them ever so slightly. Part of the plan. What they wanted you to see and think about and act upon, for some reason. There was a time when Jimmy’s mother went religious, Angelus Temple religious. Jimmy was ten or eleven. She dragged him down there with her to Echo Park for three-hour Sunday services for the half year it lasted. He remembered some of the songs, the old rawboned hillbilly hymns. One of them said,
Farther along we’ll know all about it,
Farther along we’ll understand why.
But Jimmy didn’t have the luxury of waiting for it all to make sense later. This was way too here and now. And human. On this plane.
Think darker. Darker than dark.
Who set this up? Why? Who would it profit? What would he gain?
“Look, you’re sure?” Jimmy said. “I mean—”
“She looks a little like her,” Angel said. “But not enough.” He pointed at her face, with two fin gers together, almost touching her forehead and then her cheek. It was a gesture that looked like he was blessing the girl. “Her eyes, her nose. It’s not her. This one’s older, for one thing. Ten years, maybe. She’s also more mestizo. She’s also probably Salvadoran. Lucy was Mexican.”
Jimmy hadn’t really looked at the girl on the table until now. And now when he looked at her . . . But how could you know? What do you go by? She’d gone into the wall face-first. Her skull had been smashed. Who knew what mortician skills Hugh had. Maybe he just wasn’t any good at this. It didn’t look like Lucy. But what did Jimmy know? How close had he ever really been to her? Ten feet away in the café in Saugus?
“This is somebody else,” Angel said. “Lucy is still alive out there somewhere. I know it . . .”
Jimmy covered the body. The face.
“So who’s this Hugh?” Angel said. “The one who sent us down here.”
Jimmy knew what Angel meant. Start at what’s right in front of you and backtrack. Go from man to man to man until it started making sense. New sense.
“He’s a Sailor,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, I know. I got that. That can mean a couple of things.”
“Friend of Machine Shop’s. He works nights here.”
Angel said, “So lay it out for me.”
“Machine Shop was right there, Pier 35,” Jimmy said. “He didn’t see it happen, but he was on the scene right after, saw them load the body. She was wearing the blue dress.”
“Did anybody actually see it happen?”
“I don’t know. I guess. It must have been crowded down there.”
“Then what?”
“They brought her here. Shop and me came here, after we’d gone back down to the waterfront together.”
“And this girl is the one you saw that night? That same night. Here.”
“Her face was crushed in,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know.”
Angel said, “I never knew Lucy was dead. You know what I mean? I never felt it.”
The intensity was still there, but his anger was gone. And Jimmy knew why.
“She’s alive out there somewhere,” Angel said. “Her and her brother.”
085
Angel wasn’t even three feet from the car when he put a Sailor on his back in the parking lot with a single shot to the face. Angel wasn’t that big, so a good part of what knocked the man down was just surprise.
“Sorry,” Angel said. “Don’t come at me like that.”
They were on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was three in the morning. The tourists were long gone, but there were two or three hundred Sailors between the Porsche and the warehouse building. And no Black Moses to part the Red Sea this time.
Whatever tension, noise that had been in the air before, it had been cranked up a few notches. The waterfront Sailors saw Jimmy and Angel for what they were, two guys looking for trouble, or for something on the other side of trouble, and most of them backed out of the way.
But not the guard at the door. It was Red Boots, the blond, pouty Billy Idol in the peacoat and navy watch cap who’d tailed Jimmy his first night in town.
“Hold up there, mate,” he said, putting a hand on Jimmy’s chest.
Jimmy slammed his face into the metal door, something of an overreaction.
But effective. It knocked the door ajar.
Jimmy and Angel came down the same corridor as before, but this time it opened out onto a dock, inside the huge, unlit warehouse space.
They got their first look at the exterior of the ship.
It was painted black, or some dark color that looked black in this gloom. It was big, a refitted oceangoing trawler. With its three-deck-high square windowless cabin, it came off looking like a missile cruiser.
“What’s the difference between a boat and a ship?” Angel said.
“This is a ship,” Jimmy said.
There was a gangway that was level with the dock, a double-wide hatch at the end of it on the other side. It was probably where they’d been led in the other night for their audience with Wayne Whitehead. Jimmy snatched up a three-foot wrench propped against a mooring winch and went aboard, Angel behind him.
Nobody home.
And no bent guitar notes sustaining in the air.
The oil lamps on the walls burned. Just enough light to illumine the oval, black marble-topped table in the center of the room and the white rose in the vase of milk.
Jimmy gripped the wrench a little tighter.
He yelled. “Hey!”
They waited.
“We should have took him that night, instead of playing whatever game that was,” Angel said. He meant Les Paul.
When they came out through the hatch again, they weren’t alone. Twenty or thirty of the Sailors from outside had come into the warehouse. They were still not saying a word, quiet enough to make it creepy.
Just staring at the two out-of-towners.
Jimmy shifted the wrench to the other hand, but they weren’t any threat.
“We follow Wayne,” one of them said without much behind it. A few of the others gave him a look.
They were staring at Jimmy as if he was somebody. As if his reputation had preceded him. As far as Jimmy knew, he didn’t have a reputation. Not here.
“Go,” he said.
Surprisingly, they went.
Maybe it was the wrench.
“Come on,” he said to Angel. “We’ll go south, to the shipyards where we were before. It was where all the women were.”
“She’s not dead,” Angel said. He said it in an odd way, different from before.
“Maybe he’s there,” Jimmy answered. “Maybe he’s looking for her there.”
Angel was looking into the shadows.
“What?” Jimmy said.
Angel waited a second, still looking into the shadows, then said, “We know she’s not dead, son. Where is she?”
There was a rope locker on the dock. “Come on out, it’s all right,” Angel said. “We’re the good guys. We just want to find her, too, get you guys home.”
There was a scurrying rat sound, and the kid exploded up out of the plywood bin. Angel charged in, crossed twenty feet in two seconds, but it was only fast enough to catch an ankle.
“I’m Angel, man, Lucy’s friend!”
But the ankle was slick, wet from sweat. The boy escaped Angel’s grip but fell hard, on his face, onto the dock. He didn’t stop moving. He jumped to his feet and made it another ten yards before Angel was even sure he wasn’t still holding him.
“Stop! Come on, man!” Angel said. “You gotta stay with us! We know she’s still alive!”
The kid turned with a look of hurt and confusion and anger and suspicion all at once, but only slowed for a second.
And then he was out, through an open door at the far end of the long room, lost into the night again.
When Jimmy and Angel came out of the warehouse building, things had changed yet again. The numbers had swelled. It looked and felt and even smelled like the exercise yard at a prison.
Familiar faces. Some of the L.A. Sailors had come calling, had come over from Fort Point. Some of the roughest ones. Angel knew most of their names. Jimmy knew to stay away from them. The ranks of the San Francisco Sailors had grown. There was a face-off going on, maybe just starting. Some of them, on both sides, had weapons in hand, clubs, lengths of chain, or heavy marine rope. There was an ugly sound in the air, ugly anticipation, like the sound in the auditorium before a heavyweight fight.
But then it stopped. When they saw Jimmy and Angel.
They followed them with their eyes.
Or was it just Jimmy?
They split open a path before him. Yea, though I walk through the parking lot of the shadow of death . . .
A woman they’d seen earlier stepped in front of Jimmy again and said her line again. “We serve the Russian . . .”
“I don’t know what that means,” Jimmy said.
To answer, she pointed. Across the skyline, the winking cityscape behind them, like a backdrop in a play.
“I don’t understand,” Jimmy said again. She was right in his face.
She kept pointing. Now he saw it. Maybe. Was that what she wanted him to see?
A violet light atop one of the hills, brighter than anything around it, brighter than there was an immediate explanation for. It burned with the intensity of an airport runway light.
Violet.
The Porsche had been left unmolested.
Jimmy got in the car, but Angel didn’t.
“I’m going to stay down here,” he said after a second. “In case Lucy’s here. In case the kid pops out again. Maybe he’ll lead me to her.”
“We should stay together,” Jimmy said. “Until we understand more of this, what this is about.”
Angel shook his head. “I don’t care what it’s about,” he said. He set out back toward the waterfront and all the Sailors.
086
Jimmy crossed the empty foyer of the Mark.
There it was again. Hope. It was all over Angel. He was walking with it like it was his new best friend. Jimmy hadn’t run after Les Paul because he wouldn’t have known what to say to him if he caught him. He saw the look on the boy’s face when Angel had said his sister was alive.
The kid knew she was dead. He knew. He was her brother. He knew.
And now Jimmy was back to knowing it, too. Lucy was dead. Angel had talked himself into something.
Angel had hope. Sometimes it gives you perfect vision, sometimes it blinds you.
It all made Jimmy’s head hurt. It made him want to lie down. Sleep. He looked over at the first-floor sitting room as he went past, the big pink divans. He had tried all night, through all the death and death talk, through the gathering storm, not to think about Mary, to keep it in some safe spot, the way when something is really good you don’t want to connect it to the world, you don’t want to dirty it, you want to leave it where it is, perfect. He wanted to let a day or two go by, to think on all of it. To think of her. Of them. He wanted it to be waiting for him, whenever he got through with this, whatever this was.
The last thing he wanted was to see her again now.
But there she was.
Mary stood in the corner of the sitting room. The far corner. She had changed her clothes from what she wore on the dock, the last time he saw her. She was wearing black pants and a long coat, a coat that seemed too heavy for the night, for the season. She looked severe.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
She took his hand but then let it go a second later, self-conscious. Even if there was no one there to see anything.
“Can I stay with you?” she said. It was a line she’d never said to him.
But if she wanted rescue, she came to the right guy.
He didn’t ask any questions. He took her hand and led her away, across the lobby, toward the elevator.
They got in. He didn’t want her to say anything else. He didn’t want to know what it was. At least not out here, not now.
But she said it anyway. “He knows about you,” she said, as the elevator doors closed.
Jimmy just pushed the button for the fifteenth floor.
“When I came home—”
Before anything happened, the doors opened again, as if he’d pushed the wrong button.
Four men. In dark suits.
The biggest one was Red Steadman. Walter E. C. “Red” Steadman. He flashed blue, strong blue. It made Jimmy take a step back and take Mary with him, though he knew she wouldn’t have seen what he saw. The blue.
Steadman. From the deck behind the house in Angeles Forest that night. From other nights.
At Steadman’s side was a portly man with a briefcase in hand, a short man as far around as he was tall. (Who had also been on the deck that night.) On the other side was an average man of average size. He wore a hat, or carried it in his hand, a gentleman, if one out of another time. He nodded to Jimmy, all polite, familiar. As if they were all just fellow guests of the Mark. The fourth was a thug of some kind, but a well-dressed one.
They stepped forward into the elevator. The thug made it one too many. The average man flicked his hand, and the thug stepped out again. The doors closed.
It was Steadman who reached across and pushed the button for the sixteenth floor.
“We’re just above you,” he said.
Jimmy had let go of Mary’s hand, but he could feel her trembling beside him. Staring straight ahead.
Steadman seemed to catch the scent of her perfume but never looked at her directly.
“Did you get your flo wers?” Steadman said. He slowly turned to look at Jimmy. “Did we all get them?”
Jimmy shrugged.
“Interesting gesture,” Steadman said, looking forward again. “What do we think of it?”
“I don’t think anything.”
“Must be . . . new management,” Steadman said.
It was a long few silent seconds before the doors opened again. At fifteen. The men moved aside to let Jimmy and Mary out.
Steadman was standing next to the polished brass wall of the elevator, so Jimmy had two views of the last look he gave them before the doors closed.
Mary was still trembling, standing at the door to Jimmy’s suite while he found the key. He wasn’t sure she’d recognized Steadman. Them. She’d never actually seen Steadman’s face on the deck that night. That night, he was wrapped in a scarf and wearing a hat, his face covered. Even his hands. Maybe she had gotten it just from his shape, from his vibe, from the dark richness of his suit. Maybe she remembered the fat man. And the other, the nondescript man with his hat in his hand, the mouthpiece. He’d been there that night, too.
All she really needed to get from seeing them was that Jimmy was the same thing now that he had been then, the same impossible thing. Whatever name they called themselves. She didn’t have to see a flash of blue to know that.
He opened the door, and she went in ahead of him, not looking back.
She never said a word about the men. Or of the coded, elliptical talk of flowers, of “gestures” and “new management.”
Or of her husband.
She went to bed. They went to bed together but didn’t make love again. They didn’t talk about the future or about the past. Jimmy just put his arm around her until she went to sleep. He stared at the ceiling, not ever realizing that she wasn’t asleep at all.