SEVEN
A Cessna landed. Badly. The right wheel touched first, the plane bucked, then the left wheel hit hard. On the grass between the runway and the taxiway, four old men sat in white plastic lawn chairs. They took a minute then held up handmade cardboard squares with numbers, grading the landing as if this was the Olympics. They had all been fliers or had built planes. It was all very unofficial but the understanding was that the old guys had earned the right to rag on the youngsters. Every pilot who landed tried not to look over but all of them did.
This time the scoring fell somewhere between a four and a five.
Jimmy walked up.
“You look like an undertaker,” one of the old men, Kirk, said. Jimmy wore a black suit.
He stuck out his hand.
“How are you?”
Angel had called Jimmy from his shop downtown at noon. He had come up with a name for him, somebody who might know about Bill Danko and what had been called Clover Field.
Kirk pumped the hand once. “I told Angel I’d come in to your office.”
“Don’t have one,” Jimmy said.
“Well, let’s do it,” Kirk said, and then looked at his friends as he made a joke, “I don’t have all day.”
They walked down the taxiway. They were on the B-side of the airport, businesses in old wooden buildings and World War II Quonset huts, every third or fourth one vacant, airplane maintenance, radio repair, aerial photography, a skywriting company with one plane. Vines covered half the buildings. Most had peeling paint, gloriously neglected. Somehow, here in the middle of L.A. was a sizable section of the unimproved. There was probably an old person somewhere who’d so long ignored the men in suits with their Big Plans for the property that they’d stopped coming, now just waiting her out—it was usually a woman—waiting for her to die and get out of the way.
“Angel wouldn’t tell me what this was about,” Kirk said. “He said you were a private investigator. I guess one of my girlfriends’ husbands is onto us.”
They weren’t headed anywhere in particula but the old man walked at a good steady pace as if getting from here to there was something he’d be judged on.
“I told Angel, I got a photograph of your mother somewhere,” Kirk said. “Autographed. I didn’t understand those pictures she made over in Europe, but I sure liked her.”
It made Jimmy smile.
“Where do you know Angel from?”
“Big Brothers,” Kirk said. “I ran a unit until I got too old to stand up to all the bullshit.” He held up his hand as if testifying. “I mean, I’m not gay, but I can’t prove it.”
A sleek corporate jet took off behind them, screaming. The 10 freeway was less than a mile away to the north and the 405 almost as close to the east. The roars merged.
When it quieted, Jimmy said, “Angel said you were the guy to ask about the old days here.”
Kirk said, “He said it was about the seventies. You call that the old days?”
“It’s all relative, I guess.”
“I was on the line for Steadman twenty-eight years,” Kirk said. “I put Pitot tubes in ST-10s. Before the war, it was ST-3s. The 10s were built right over there”—he pointed to a massive hump-roof hangar, the biggest building at the airport—“and the 3s built in Hangar Nine that got torn down in September of ’73.”
Jimmy stopped to admire one falling-down building. They had walked almost to the end of the taxiway.
“So what’s this about?” Kirk said.
“You remember the Kantke murders?” Jimmy said.
“Sure.”
“Bill Danko.”
Kirk nodded.
“You knew him?”
“I saw him around,” Kirk said. “His outfit was up here behind what used to be the old Clipper Hangar. Everybody said he was an all right guy. That’s what you’re looking into?”
Jimmy nodded.
“I saw her once, the woman,” Kirk said. “She showed up, waiting for Danko to come back from a photo job, a flyover. He had a Cessna 152. Red over white, mortgaged up. She had an old-fashioned hat on her head, tied under her chin with a ribbon, like as if they were going to fly off together in an open-cockpit Waco. She looked like a barrel of laughs.”
The old man set out walking again and Jimmy followed him. Kirk talked fast and asked the usual questions, what they all wanted to know: what other cases Jimmy had investigated, the stories behind the stories, the moments when the flashbulbs flashed. Jimmy didn’t offer much. He never did. He’d long ago figured out that nobody wanted to hear the truth. Death and sex, that’s what most of it was about, sometimes money, but he didn’t take those cases. A case was never what it looked like from the outside and when it was over, what was important was never the big plot points, the flashbulb moments. It was what was going on unnoticed in the corner of the frame, the ambulance guys rolling out a woman on a gurney, the cops talking to the people in the next bungalow—and a boy steps up across the street into a clot of strangers, just coming home from school. Maybe it was why he did it, to notice the unnoticed, to find meaning there. Or try.
They’d reached the last of the buildings off on a side taxiway. “There,” the old man said.
It was a decrepit building, vacant, standing alone, barely standing, a faded Plexiglas sign on the end of it announcing Sunshine Air, a charter company. The sign hung half off. What was left of a painted sign was underneath: Danko “Flying School”—just like that, quotation marks and all, like it was a pretend flying school.
“He never could make a go of it, as far as anybody could tell,” Kirk said, as if the look of the building didn’t get that idea across. “And then Steadman Industries bought him out. For a good price, some said.” The old man shrugged. He had lived long enough to see a thousand things he didn’t get. “And then Danko was dead, before he could enjoy the money. Well, he bought himself a new plane right off, I guess he enjoyed that. And her.”
Everybody seemed to understand how you could enjoy Elaine Kantke.
“You want to look around, go ahead,” Kirk said. “Nobody’ll hassle you. There’s nothing back here now. Now in the old days, on the other side of Hangar Six was—” Another jet roared into the sky, drowning out the last of it.
Jimmy stood there thinking of her, Elaine Kantke in her hat, maybe standing right where he was standing now. He thought again about the detail he’d learned, how the bullet that had killed her, went through her, had creased Bill Danko’s cheek. It had probably carried some of her to him, a last kiss.
Maybe Jimmy did this for the poetry.
Kirk walked away, leaving Jimmy there to knock around in the past. The front door was locked. He looked in through the dirty windows. The room was bare, cleared of everything but the old newspapers on the floor, a bed for somebody from the way they were shaped, and faded posters of Cabo and La Paz on the walls. On the back wall was an open rectangle where an air conditioner had been. Jimmy went around to the weedy lot behind the building and crawled in through the hole.
There was a small room off the main room. In it, a desk and a pair of chairs and a water cooler with a dusty glass bottle were stacked at odd angles up to the ceiling. There was a file cabinet. Jimmy opened it. It was empty except for rat droppings and a book of matches from a cocktail lounge.
The desk was on its end against the wall. It was as old as the building. He pulled it down, set it back on its feet, rolled over the wheeled office chair. The drawers were empty. There was a phone number written in pencil on the bottom of one, a number with a two letter prefix, from some business in the forties or fifties. Geologists had the right idea about history: it was just layers of sediment, one on top of the other. And, given enough time, any sad piece of shit becomes precious.
Jimmy ran his hands along the underside of the wide center drawer and found a manila envelope wedged into a hiding place. He opened it. It was a bodybuilder magazine from the sixties, big-chested men preening on So Cal beaches.
In the ceiling was an access hatch. Jimmy arranged the desk and the chair, climbed up and pushed the square door up and over and stuck his head through to the crawl space. Screened vents at the two ends of the roof let in enough light to see. There were two cardboard boxes. He took off his suit jacket, folded it and put it over the chair back, climbed through the hatch and crawled toward them.
Both boxes were empty, but scattered among the ceiling joists were a few dozen pale green cancelled checks. With his head against the roof, Jimmy went through them. Ten or twelve were made out to “Beachside Market,” each for five dollars, spending money, Danko’s allowance. One paid the phone bill. There were rent checks. Steadman Industries owned the building. There were four to an aviation fuel company, three of them with notations about “Late Penalty ($10) Included.”
And two to “Chip’s Fashion House” for those Nik-Niks.
013
The museum of flight was across the main runway in a cavernous metal building, a new building. A yellow biplane hung from wires from the ceiling, suspended over three open decks of displays, models and full-sized airplanes. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass on the backside of it you could watch takeoffs and landings, listen in on the radio traffic on a bank of headphones. It was the modern opposite of the old men in their lawn chairs on the other side of the runway.
Jimmy was in a sea of Cub Scouts surrounding a restored ST-10, the bomber in the picture on Angel’s office wall. The boys jumped up and down below the wings, swatting at the undercarriage, trying to touch the teardrop tanks that hung down.
He went up to the top level.
Clover Field forty years ago. There was a wall of photos: the hangars, the workmen like Angel, the bombers coming off the assembly line.
It was also a history of Steadman Industries. As you walked along, the company moved into the fifties and sixties and then the seventies, props disappearing, wings angling back, nothing ahead but a bright, high-flying future. Or so said the PR.
There was a commotion behind Jimmy as half of the Cubs arrived. They pressed their faces against the glass of a display, the re-created Steadman boardroom of the sixties. Jimmy crossed the hallway and looked over their shoulders. It was complete: the original furniture—a great oblong mahogany table and leather chairs—Coke bottles, coffee cups, pads and pens, pictures on the walls, an ST-10 taking off outside a “window”—and ten wax figures seated around the table, their glass eyes fixed on the big man standing before them.
The plaque read:
WALTER E. C. “RED” STEADMAN
FOUNDER
1911-1973
He looked like the kind of man who could get his name painted in fifty-foot letters across the top of a hangar.
Jimmy thought he saw the old guy blink.
When he came back down to the first floor, his tails were back, the pale men who’d been at Canter’s. Today, the short one even had on a peacoat and watch cap. It was easy to make fun of them, but there wasn’t any fun in it today for Jimmy. Maybe it was all the scouts, all the innocents. He tried to make it through to the front door without them spotting him, but the tall one saw him and shot a look up at the second man on the higher flo or. The two-tone blonde came down the staircase fast and joined the other, the two of them “hiding” behind a stacked rack of bombs, a pyramid of dummies.
Jimmy went after them. Why were Sailors interested in this? Maybe he could shake it out of one of them. The two of them tried to get lost in the crowd. They looked bewildered. When you were tailing someone, he wasn’t supposed to come after you. They ducked behind planes, pretended to look at the shiny models of 747s and then at the mannequins of stews in pastel seventies uniforms. The Cubs had all descended from the top floor and made the two stand out all the more. Even the short one stood tall over them.
Jimmy kept coming. There was a flight simulator in one corner on the ground floor, a twenty-seater big as a bus mounted on hydraulic lifters. The two pale men cut in line, just making it through the simulator doors before they whooshed closed.
He got close enough to see the name of the ride: “Turbulence Over Tucson.” The hydraulics sighed and then went to work.
Jimmy’s ’70 Dodge Challenger, painted school bus yellow, eight coats, hand-rubbed, was parked all by itself in the last row in the lot. He got in, buckled himself in, lit it up. It had a Hemi 454 V-8 under the bulge in the hood. At idle it made a sound a little like a tiger at the zoo in the middle of the afternoon, sleepy, not all that happy. There was a four speed on the flo or. Jimmy backed around, pulled out. He eased up and over three speed bumps and moved onto the street, never spinning the tires once.
Westbound on Pico, he looked up in the mirror. Here they were, two heads in a white Ford Escort a quarter mile back. He slowed, let them close the gap. As they drew near, he pulled it down into second, punched it and hung a right.
They tried to keep up. Three blocks into a neighborhood of pastel Mediterranean houses with tender little yards, they stopped in the middle of the street. They’d lost him. The short one slapped the dash.
The tall one, who was driving, looked in the mirror.
The yellow Challenger was right behind them.
Jimmy pulled around the dinky Escort, looked over as he came alongside, then gunned it, leaving a perfect pair of wide black streaks.
014
But they came back and they caught him that night.
It started on Hollywood Boulevard. They were still in the Escort so for a minute it was still a joke. The traffic was light and Jimmy was a little down and almost glad for the company. He wasn’t going anywhere, he was just out, knocking around in the present, or trying to.
He let them stay close behind him for a mile or so and then took a quick right.
Where, it turned out, they wanted him to take a right.
When he came around the corner, the side street was blocked by a pair of black Chevys, nose to nose.
And four more Sailors. All of them had the blue edge of light around them, what you’d call halos if they were angels, which they decidedly weren’t. The Escort came in behind Jimmy and closed the backdoor.
The new men got out of the Chevys and started toward him at the same moment the tall pale man and the one with the bad blond hair got out of the Escort.
Jimmy turned off the engine. He opened the door, but before he could get out, they pulled him from the Dodge, rough, even though he wasn’t resisting and they knew it.
Now he resisted. He tried to break away from them but there were too many of them and they were too sure of what they were supposed to do. When Sailors were involved in anything in L.A., it wasn’t personal. They didn’t act alone. A stray single one might throw a foot out to trip you going down the sidewalk of a night, say something sour behind your back, but when three or four came after you, got in your face, it was because they meant something by it. It was because they’d been told to. It was because you were in violation, busted in the part of dark things they ran. Jimmy assumed that it was about the Kantke murders, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was about the last one. The last case. Or the one before. Unfinished business. He upset people all the time.
But not ever Sailors, until now. They dragged him the half block down to the Roosevelt Hotel, nobody saying anything, right into the underground parking. There was an elevator there, and nobody to stop them from going where they wanted to go.
And then they were all on the roof. Sailors had a thing about roofs. High places, lookouts.
One of the four new ones was a foot taller than the tall pale man Jimmy had made fun of and weighed twenty pounds less. This one was like a tall stick in a suit, though his suit was a better suit than what the Escort boys wore. He had red hair. He had long, long fingers. He pointed one at Jimmy. And said nothing.
“I get it,” Jimmy said. “You want me to stop.”
Two of the other new ones, big ones who wore peacoats and watch caps, took turns pushing Jimmy backwards. There was an ugly rhythm to it, almost like the three of them were dancing across the roof. They slammed him backwards into the base of an iron radio tower left over from what now seemed like a whole other age.
“You’re the Disco Antidefamation League.”
One of the big ones hit him in the face.
Long-F ingers came a few steps closer. On his cue, the two big men yanked Jimmy up off his feet and carried him over to the parapet and stood him up there and turned him around and then leaned him out over the drop, holding him by the back of his black undertaker’s suitcoat like a puppet. A wind blew up the side of the hotel, almost strong enough to hold him up if they let go. Almost.
Jimmy looked down, way down on the street, the people walking, the tour buses parked in front of the Chinese, a few cruisers out on the wrong night in their perfect lowriders, the lights. He thought of the line, from the Bible, Cast yourself down. But this wasn’t the pinnacle of the temple and he sure wasn’t Christ and Long-Fingers wasn’t exactly Satan.
“Look down there,” Long-Fingers said. “Can you see them?”
He didn’t mean the tourists or the cruisers. He meant what was in the shadows, in the alleyways, behind the buildings. Who.
“Can you see them?”
“Yeah, I see them,” Jimmy said.
“You want to walk around forever?” He said it again, the same words, as if he’d been told to say them, this time so loud the people down on the boulevard could have heard him. “You want to walk around forever?”
There was another kind of Sailor. Walkers. You’ve seen them on your streets, or at least in parts of your town. You’ve thought it was drugs or alcohol and maybe it began there. You’ve wondered why they keep moving, shuffling, how they went dead in the eye, where they could be going, where they sleep, where they go in the daytime. You wonder that, until the light changes, until your husband says something and you go back to your life, or you think of your wife and what’s for dinner in the regular world, leaving them behind, like on the street below the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.
“What do you want me not to do?” Jimmy said. “Give me a clue . . .”
The two big men received another silent signal from the tall bony one and they shoved their charge out over the abyss and then yanked him back, like this was a school bully’s prank.
Jimmy didn’t let them see the fear they wanted to see. But they saw something and the very tall one turned his back and started away, which meant they were finished, that it was finished. The two lifted him down. They didn’t look at Jimmy again, just fell in behind the red-haired one with the long, long fingers.