SIX
On the office wall was a colored print of Jesus sitting in his robes across the desk from a businessman in a gray suit.
Jimmy was across the desk from Angel.
“You didn’t even see her, man?” Angel said.
“Not until she turned on the TV.”
“And she didn’t see you?”
“She looked right at me,” Jimmy said. “She saw me, but I guess seeing someone standing there wasn’t that out of the ordinary to her.”
“So who was she?”
“I don’t know. Nobody. A street person. Maybe just someone who comes in to feed the stray cats. It was easy enough to get in.”
“Sad,” Angel said.
Angel’s body shop was downtown ten blocks south of the City Center. Through the windows in the walls in the inner office you could see men at work on expensive cars. It was a beautiful old wooden building, once a Packard dealership, with a high arched roof. The floors were slick white. This wasn’t an insurance shop. You had to care about cars the way they cared about cars before they even let you through the door. Clean was about the highest compliment the men working here paid each other’s work.
Luis, the skinny kid from Angel’s backyard, worked alone in one corner of the shop, airbrushing a scene onto the tailgate of a chopped and lowered, scooped and stretched Ford F-150 pickup, an artful expressionistic rendering of the L.A. skyline, a pair of woman’s eyes emerging from the night clouds, and a blue moon.
Jimmy got up from the chair. There was a picture on one wall in a black wood frame, a World War II-era bomber rolled out in front of a hangar. Huge block letters white across the roof said: STEADMAN. There were palm trees behind it in the picture, Santa Monica behind the palms and an ocean beyond that, suitably gray, since it was wartime.
“You know anybody at Clover Field anymore?”
Angel shook his head. “Nah, it’s nothing but general aviation now, Wayne Newton flying in in his Gulfstar.”
“I like Wayne Newton,” Jimmy said.
“I think we all do,” Angel said. “It’s not Clover Field anymore.”
“Yeah, I know. Everything changes.”
Jimmy kept his eyes on the picture.
“So, you gonna tell me?” Angel said.
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me what you’re working on.”
“A couple of the dead,” Jimmy said.
“Lucky stiffs.”
Jimmy looked at another picture on the wall, next to the first, as he gave him the short version. “Double murder, 1977, guy killed his wife and her boyfriend down in Long Beach. He was convicted, executed.”
“Kantke. I remember it.”
“I’m working for the daughter. She wants to know if he really did it.”
“What’s the point?”
“I believe I asked her that.”
“What’s the connection to Clover Field?”
“The dead guy worked out of there. A pilot.”
In the other picture, Angel Figueroa stood alone next to one of the bomber’s fat wheels. The lettering said: “No. 2000 July 16, 1944.” He had shorter hair now, a buzz cut, but Angel didn’t look much different in the picture than he did here, sitting behind his desk.
“Good-looking guy,” Jimmy said.
“I tell people it’s Uncle Eduardo,” Angel said.
010
“Disco got a bad rap.”
Jimmy was buying lunch at Vern’s, a red Formica lunch spot out in The Valley on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, a half-gentrified art and artists’ neighborhood they were trying to talk people into calling NoHo.
Chris Post drew musical notes on a three-by-five card while they talked. They were at a table in the window with a view to the street. He’d look out the window and then say something else to Jimmy and then draw another note on the card. He had a stack of three-by-five cards with a rubber band around them jammed in the pocket of his pocket tee. He was in his forties. He had bad eyes and long hair thinning on top pulled back into a ponytail. He wore orange jeans. He was skinny and tall, no ass at all. That was a line a lyricist friend had put to one of Chris’s melody lines once, presumptuously trying to turn it into a song.
Chris never spoke to him again.
He was a musician, a real musician, the kind of shack-out-back artist who had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of computers and synthesizers and keyboards—and a safety pin holding his glasses together. To pay the rent, he played song demo dates and commercial jingles and the occasional session for a Touched by an Angel, but what he really wanted to do was . . . write atonal symphonies and then not play them for anyone. A few years back, Jimmy and Angel had encouraged him to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and he did, scrawling, Go Screw Yourself! across the application.
Surprisingly, he was turned down.
“Disco got a total bad rap. Repetitive. You want repetitive? You ever listen to Vivaldi, or, better yet, Ravel?”
Chris picked up a fork.
“What is this?” he said.
“A fork,” Jimmy said.
Chris picked up a spoon. “What is this?”
“A spoon.”
Chris started nodding his head. “Which is better?” he said.
“I hear you.”
“You got a steak, I’ll tell you whether a fork is better than a spoon.”
“I get what you’re saying,” Jimmy said.
“Most people don’t,” the musician said. “Sadly.”
Their food came. Chris got a bowl of soup the size of a hubcap, bean soup. Jimmy had just ordered a plate of steamed carrots. Chris picked up his spoon, wiped it off with a napkin.
Jimmy said, “I drove by there. Big Daddy’s.”
Chris slurped up the first too-h ot spoonful of soup. He kept shoveling it in. He ate like a musician, like a musician who hadn’t eaten in a week.
“How’s the soup?” Jimmy said.
“It’s all right.”
Ten years ago when Chris’s mother died, Jimmy had gotten him into an apartment and the first day he’d had to show him how to make canned soup. A week later, he introduced him to SpaghettiOs.
“So, I drove by there, Big Daddy’s,” Jimmy said. “Where it used to be.”
“And it’s a Starbucks now,” Chris said.
“A Kinko’s.”
“But you get what I mean . . .”
Jimmy got what he meant.
“I don’t get down there to the Marina anymore,” Chris said. “It takes four buses.” He took out a new three-by-five card and wrote a note to himself. “I’ll burn you a CD. The stuff you should be listening to. You ever hear Cerrone?”
“Love in C Minor.”
Chris was impressed. “How old are you, man?” he said. “I’ve never been able to tell.”
Jimmy let the question go unanswered. “Here’s what I need,” he said. “You know anybody who spun at Big Daddy’s?”
Chris was to the bottom of his bean soup. “Could I get another bowl?”
“Sure.”
Chris motioned to the waitress for another bowl, pointed to it like it was a Scotch and soda.
“I knew Slip Tony,” he said. “But he spelled it with an E instead of a Y, like tone. Tone Espinosa. He was the best. He wouldn’t say a word all night. He had all these imports. He was the first guy I knew of to use three tables. He’d throw something over something with something else underneath and you couldn’t believe what you were hearing. Spoken word. He’d lay in a guy saying a poem or narration for a training film for air-conditioning repair. There wasn’t anybody in L.A. who was a better DJ—except for maybe about a dozen gay guys in little clubs you never heard of playing tea dances on Sunday afternoons.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Dead. It’s funny,” Chris said, then caught himself. “Well, I don’t mean being dead . . . He became a cop. He was on a gang unit, right down in there, Venice south. Shot dead. Two years after Big Daddy’s, maybe by some slick who two years earlier was out on the floor, thinking how cool Slip was there in the booth, his head over sideways, half a headphone on his shoulder.”
“You know anybody else from Big Daddy’s? Anybody who’s still alive?”
The second bowl of soup came. “I’d also like another one to go,” Chris said to the waitress. He looked at Jimmy for approval. Jimmy nodded.
“Lloyd Hart. Lloyd-the-Void. He called himself Popper or Rocker or something but everybody called him Lloyd-the-Void. He was the DJ in the main room upstairs with the lights in the floor and the Is-Everybody-Having-A-Good-Time? jive. Slip Tone was in the serious room downstairs.” He wrote something else on another three-by-five card and handed it to Jimmy. “I guess you could say he’s alive.”
Chris dug his way down to the bottom of the second bowl of soup and put his spoon aside. He looked out the window again and then drew one last musical note.
He handed the three-by-five card to Jimmy.
“I don’t read music,” Jimmy said when he looked at it.
Chris whistled an odd little twelve-n ote tune.
“You just wrote that?”
Chris shook his head, nodded out at the street.
“What?” Jimmy said.
“The palm trees. Other side of the street. Up and down, different heights. If they were notes on a scale, it’d sound like that.”
Jimmy held up the card. “Can I keep this?”
“No,” Chris said and took it back.
011
The Love Storm was the name of the overnight program at KLVV, fifth in the ratings for its time slot. The show had a cosmopolitan L.A. feel to it, slanting noir shadows and cigarette smoke curling out of your radio, but the studios were actually in a squat three-story box of a building on Van Nuys Boulevard in Van Nuys, the transmitter ten miles farther out in the Valley, almost to the mountains in a field of sunflowers. This time of night, the flowers would be closed up tight.
Lloyd Hart was now Darren Price.
He was working alone. There wasn’t even a janitor around. Jimmy talked his way in, past the squawk box down at street level. Price had said hello, had said something quick and sharp and funny actually, hope in his voice that it was some young girls out cruising around. When Jimmy said what he wanted to talk about, Price buzzed him up, another case of “Now it’s been years since anyone asked . . .”
He was still good-looking, in a game show host way, and he had a good, deep, round voice and a way of putting the sound of a warm smile in every word he said. Jimmy thought he recognized the voice from a TV commercial for headache relief, the kind where you got the idea somebody really cared about you and your pain. He wore a velveteen running suit, almost purple, and perfect white shoes, Capezio dance shoes. He rocked back and forth in a chair that didn’t squeak. His hand kept reaching for cigarettes he didn’t smoke anymore, hadn’t smoked for ten years.
“Hold on a sec,” he said and lifted the cans off of his neck and up over his ears. He leaned to the mic. The song was ending.
Half of the show’s audience were love-struck kids dedicating sappy songs to each other, to break up or to get back together or just to say to each other, and to the world and to ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, that this love was real and would stand the test of time. The other half was people at work, at 7-Elevens with a portable on the counter they weren’t supposed to have, people at bakeries and tortillarias, in emergency rooms, in factories where they chromed wheels or assembled meals for airlines, people cleaning offices, driving cabs, writing screenplays—and cops and suicide hotline answerers and dope-dealers and whores all waiting around for something to go down. There was a KISS station in town. Listeners were encouraged to call and repeat the money phrase, that they were “Kissing at Work . . .” At an hour like this, one other midweek night like this, Jimmy had heard a listener call in a request to The Love Storm saying he was “Storming at Work . . .”
A jingle played. A saxophone. A woman’s voice. The sound of soft, rolling, distant thunder.
It made Jimmy wish it would rain, really rain.
“Andrea is up studying, studying for her nursing finals,” Darren Price said, so close to the mic you could hear the breath going over his teeth. Jimmy felt like he wasn’t there now, that it was just Price and Andrea and . . .
“Carmen, she just wants you to know that she’s sorry she said what she said, sorry that it hurt you, and that she didn’t mean it. And that the whole future is ahead for you two and she doesn’t want to jeopardize that because she loves you more than anything. And she wanted to send this song out to you. She knows you’re listening, too.”
The song began, a song that didn’t seem to connect to words said that shouldn’t have been said or to “the whole future,” but the song was good and the singer sounded as if he really had been hurt somewhere along the line, had that in his voice the way Darren Price had a smile in his.
“I’m union. AFTRA,” Price said as he pulled off the headphones and killed the music in the monitors. “We’re all union.” It was a way of saying he made good money, more money than he made when he was under brighter lights, when people knew who he was, when he was right there in front of them at Big Daddy’s when Big Daddy’s was the place to be.
There are all kinds of deaths, Jimmy thought.
“What was Tone Espinosa like?” he said.
Price squinted as if somebody had turned on the overhead lights. “This is about Tone?” he said.
“No,” Jimmy said. “It’s not.”
“We got along all right,” Price said. “He didn’t ever really get it.”
“Get what?”
“He hated it when Saturday Night Fever came along. That’s just an example. When it got big, he said it was over.”
Jimmy didn’t say anything.
“Does that make sense to you?” Price said, real perplexity in his voice.
“I guess I know what he meant.”
Price shook his head. “Well, I never did. He was about to get fired when he finally quit. They just ran cables downstairs and I played both rooms. I mean, I’m not glad the guy got killed or anything . . .”
The phone never stopped ringing. It was silent, just blinking lights. Price punched one button.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Hey.” It was a soft little voice, up past her bedtime. “It’s Andrea.”
“Hey.” Price looked at Jimmy.
“I just wanted to thank you for playing the song,” she said.
“Shouldn’t you be keeping the line open for . . .” Price looked at a Post-it note stuck on the mic stand. “Carmen?”
“I have call waiting,” she said, sexy.
Price was still looking at Jimmy when he said, “I hope things work out for you guys.”
“You’re so sweet,” she said.
“Not really,” he said, as a sexy threat.
“Yeah-h uh,” she said.
“I want you to call me, whatever happens,” he said. “On this line, OK?”
She said yes and he said he had to go and cut her off.
“I’m like a priest,” Price said as her light went out.
“Yeah, I was just thinking that.”
Jimmy told him who he was, what this was, a version that left out murders and executions and little girls orphaned, that almost made it sound like Elaine Kantke had lost her purse or one of her shoes like Cinderella and had hired Jimmy to get it back, all the way back from Disco ’77.
“The Jolly Girls,” Price said. He used a slanted intonation, like a comic. The Jolly Girls . . .
“So you remember them.”
“There were three of them, four of them. They were babes. They were all older than I was. I was, I don’t know, twenty-four. They were maybe thirty. It seemed like a real difference at the time, but they were still babes.”
“And they always came to the club with their husbands,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, right, I remember that distinctly.”
“Who was the leader?”
“Elaine, I guess. I don’t know. It’s all kind of a blur, if you know what I mean.”
Jimmy knew. “Did they do coke?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Jimmy had said they in a way that meant, “Did they do coke, too?” The DJ wasn’t insulted. Lloyd-the-Void had tried to fill the void with one of the things you try to fill the void with. Step One was to accept that you were powerless . . .
“I wouldn’t say they were the biggest Hoovers among the regulars,” Darren said. “But then again, that bar would have been pretty high at Big Daddy’s at that particular time.”
“Did you talk to her much?”
“I talked to all of the regulars. It was part of the job. But I liked doing it. I was kind of a star. I got that kind of response from people, the regulars.”
And he began to talk about the nights there. I love the nightlife, I love to boogie. He described each one of the lighting effects suspended above the dance floor, how they had been brought in from New York, how there weren’t any lights anywhere else in L.A. like those lights. Turn the beat around, turn it upside down. He remembered the wattage of the sound system, the size of the big black bass cabinets that sat on the four corners of the dance floor so it came up out of the earth at you, too, how the floor was covered in fog, like a graveyard in a cheap movie. Talking about the past, he had a different kind of energy. He woke up. He had more words at his disposal and they were better words, words that put you there.
He interrupted himself when he needed to change a record or speak some words of encouragement to the heartbroken. An hour passed while he talked and the lovesick went to bed and the requests changed. Now it was more the people at work trying to stay awake, wanting something with a little more heat and a little less hurt.
He remembered what Elaine Kantke drank because he’d buy her and the other Jolly Girls drinks to make them feel special. Long Island iced teas. He remembered that she wasn’t the best dancer of the four young women. That would be Michelle. Michelle would also be the biggest Hoover. Elaine would dance every once in a while, but what she really liked was being at the bar, on a stool, facing the dance floor and laughing at her friends.
He remembered Vivian Goreck, a redhead. Viv.
He remembered Bill Danko but not by name, just remembered that for a while there was someone Elaine seemed to meet, a blocky guy with his thick torso wedged into the requisite Nik-Nik pointy-collared polyester shirts and beltless, high-waisted flared pants. He remembered his name as Wayne or Dwayne, which is what you’d think, looking at Bill Danko.
He didn’t know that Elaine Kantke was dead. DJs read Billboard, not the Times. He’d just assumed The Jolly Girls had found a new club or their husbands had finally gotten around to seeing Saturday Night Fever and had shortened their leashes.
“I learned two things about the bar business—and about life—when I was at Big Daddy’s,” Darren Price said.
Jimmy wondered how many times he’d said that line.
“The first thing, Big Daddy Joe Flannigan himself said to me personally. One night after we closed and we were all drinking kamikazes at the bar, he said to all of us, ‘What business are we in?’ Somebody of course said, the booze business, thinking that was what he wanted to hear. He had a white beard, looked kind of like Hemingway and wore these white shorts and a Kelly green shirt and he was big. Joe shook his head. Not the booze business. There were a couple more wrong guesses. He looked at me. I said, ‘The entertainment business.’ Big Daddy shook his head.”
Price was going to make Jimmy wait for it.
Jimmy waited for it.
“ ‘We’re in the loneliness business.’ Not loneliest, loneliness . . .”
Jimmy got it. He nodded his head.
“Buying or selling?” he said.
Darren Price didn’t get it.
“What was the second thing you learned?” Jimmy said.
“Hats start fights.”
They talked another half hour. Lloyd-the-Void looked disappointed when Jimmy stood up to go.
012
It was almost four. The Kinko’s that occupied the space where Big Daddy’s used to be was open all night. They’d ripped off the two-story front and put in glass all the way up. It was a box of light in front of the empty parking lot. There were six or eight people in there under the ghastly bright lights, two guys behind the counter and one running the big machine that wasn’t self-serve. They probably kept the reams of paper down below in what had been the serious room, Tone Espinosa’s room.
They’d left the entrance the same, six steps up to what had been the main room of the club. Elaine Kantke and Bill Danko had climbed those steps, looking to do something about their loneliness, if you believed Big Daddy.
Jimmy sat on the front fender of the Porsche, the car he’d picked that morning from the line in the garage.
“Why do people need to make copies in the middle of the night?” he said, out loud, to no one. “What are they copying?”
A coughing VW bug came in, fast. A man with a belly and a colorless T-shirt the size that maybe fit him when he was twenty got out and charged in, taking two steps at a time, his fist clutching a thick sheaf of papers. There was one answer: it was open for the people up all night grinding their teeth at some grievance, consumer or governmental, assembling their cases, ready to by God fire off some papers in the morning.
It had been a long day. The days got longer when Jimmy was working, felt that way anyway. This story was at that early stage where everything was incomplete, sketchy, self-contradictory—and he had done this enough to know that a big part of what he was “learning” was just simply wrong.
A seagull landed on a light stanchion. Jimmy turned around and looked toward Marina Del Rey, the immense condominiums which stood over the wide channels and the hundreds of slips. The tops of the tallest masts were visible between the towers.
The light was odd, noncommittal. He wished the sun would come up, right now.
An LAPD sergeant’s cruiser pulled in beside him. The cop was alone. The window was down.
“Saint Thomas,” Jimmy said.
The patrol cars all had computer monitors hung on the dash now and a full-size keyboard where you used to put your coffee. The radio spoke, the voice female and not very friendly. You could tell the cop was a sergeant by the extra antennas on the roof.
Saint Thomas’s last name was Connor. He got out. He looked to be in his fifties, handsome in that cops and firemen way, self-assured good looks, clear eyes, skin wrinkled not from worry but from being on the boat on the lake on days off, or on the sidelines coaching kids.
“You called?”
Jimmy nodded toward the Kinko’s and asked if Connor had known the DJ who’d turned into a cop. And then a dead cop. It wasn’t that Jimmy thought it had anything to do with the case, he was just curious. It was a good story, in that Movie of the Week way. Or maybe as a pilot for a cop show. Connor didn’t know much about Tone Espinosa except that he’d been killed. Cops all knew who’d been killed, almost all the way back to the beginnings of LAPD.
“Perversito,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Little Evil,” the cop said. “That’s who killed him, a gangbanger. He went away for it.”
Jimmy told him what he was working on, a version that left out almost everything but the murders and the execution and kids orphaned. Connor nodded.
They both looked at the nightclub-turned-Kinko’s.
“Disco sucks,” Jimmy said, but he was just quoting.
“I just remember getting laid a lot less for a year or so there,” Connor said.
“You couldn’t dance?”
“I guess not. Whatever it was, what I was didn’t work for a while there.”
Sergeant Connor gave Jimmy a name or two, people who knew about the club scene back then, the drugs, the money. The bar business was a cash business and tended to have bad people around its borders, but Big Daddy’s had been a safer, tamer, brighter version of the seventies club scene than some of the others.
Jimmy told him about the woman in the Rivo Alto house, asked the cop if he’d run a check on her, see if she had a history in the Naples neighborhood, in Long Beach. Maybe somebody had spotted her coming and going.
“You want her chased out?”
“No,” Jimmy said, and then wondered why he’d said it.
And that was it. A ground fog started to come in around them. It wasn’t cold but it looked cold.
Connor asked Jimmy how he was doing. Jimmy answered the question for real and asked the cop the same and listened to what he said. They both knew each other’s story. When the radio called the sergeant off to something somewhere out there in what was left of the night, the two men stood up and embraced and held the embrace for a long moment.
Where was that sun?