Among the Living (15 page)

They drove for a mile between two fields and then turned right and drove another mile. All the roads were paved. They had them to themselves. There were tumbleweeds and burger wrappers blown against the chain-link fences. They came out onto the access road and then onto the highway, Interstate 10, headed east through the brown and the green, all of it as flat as the top of a stove. They drove and drove. The Chocolate Mountains on the other side of the valley were getting bigger in front of them.

Maybe they were going to Phoenix.

The green glass in the window beside Jimmy’s head was an inch thick. He tipped his head over to where he could see the side mirror. The black pickup was a half mile back, three of the Basques shoulder to shoulder in the front seat.

Turner didn’t say much of anything, beyond naming the crops in the fields alongside the interstate as they passed, three kinds of
summer
lettuce, “baby’s breath”—which he sure enough made sound like a
product
—jojoba and sod. The sod farm was out the window for a long minute at eighty miles an hour, an expanse of lawn with no big house behind it, unsettling,
wrong.

They passed a section of planted date trees,
Medjool
dates, Turner said.

“Dates are too sweet.” Which meant they were somebody else’s dates.

Jimmy didn’t disagree.

Just as he was settling into his seat, thinking they
were
going to Phoenix, or at least Blythe, they came up on a big new gaudy Morongo Indian casino with a hundred-foot sign out front and a name that didn’t say anything about Indians. Turner looked over at it with a long look that made Jimmy figure he owned that, too, or a piece of it. And he took the brand-new exit just past it.

But they weren’t going to the casino. They took another road, another
paved
road straight south for five or six miles and then there was a big white box of an aluminum building, nothing else for miles, with three Lincoln Town Cars and a pickup and a new Cadillac in the lot in front. It didn’t have a sign.

There was just one long wooden table inside but it was covered with white linen and the tableware was silver, though a plain pattern. There weren’t any flowers. There weren’t any windows either. It was about sixty degrees, a hundred and nine outside.

A single waiter in a plain-front white shirt and black pants stood next to the kitchen door. There wasn’t any music, just six or seven men talking. They were all dressed like fie ld hands. In four-h undred-dollar boots. None of them were young.

“We waited, Harry,” one of them said. The plate in front of him had a pile of bloody bones and a last smear of what looked liked creamed spinach.

Turner slapped the man on the back.

“Don’t get up,” he said, since the man wasn’t moving.

He shook the hands of two of the other men. One of them introduced the man beside him he’d brought as a guest. Turner knew the rest of them. He didn’t introduce Jimmy and the other men didn’t ask.

“Looks like it’s lamb,” Turner said as he and Jimmy sat down across the table from each other at one end, away from the others.

Jimmy nodded.

“It’ll be good,” Turner said. “Americans don’t know how to slaughter lambs.” The way he said
Americans
made Jimmy wonder if maybe Turner wasn’t his real name. A lot of the farmers and ranchers out here were Armenian. “Most Americans
think
they’ve eaten lamb and most of them think they don’t like the taste. You butcher it wrong, you let any part of the meat touch the layer of fat just under the wool and the lanolin turns the meat, gives it that
lamb
taste.”

The waiter came with two plates, put them in front of the men, and filled their glasses with red wine.

“But maybe you already know all about lamb,” Turner said.

“I didn’t know that,” Jimmy said. “I even thought I liked it.” He picked up a lamb chop and chewed off a bite.

It was the best lamb in the world, the lamb of kings.

Or king
makers.

“Guess I see what you mean,” Jimmy said.

“You know how to eat it,” Turner said. He picked up a chop with his fingers, too, out of the puddle of blood.

Turner said what Jimmy had already figured out, that a group of them in the Valley had gotten together to make this place, a private dining hall, built it, built the road out to it, hired a chef away from some hotel.

“French,” Turner said. “But he’s all right.”

Jimmy ate his spinach. From that first
Mr. Mayor
out in the fields under the nonstop sun, he knew Turner was onto him. He also knew that was the way to get in to see someone like Harry Turner. You lied to
him
in the right way, in this case the smart-ass way.

You sure didn’t come in trying to flatter him. A man like Harry Turner had stood before a line of flatterers stretching away to the horizon. You didn’t bow and scrape. Even the waiter knew that.

So Turner was onto him. The question was how much.

The waiter stepped in to top off Turner’s wineglass. Turner looked at him.

“We’ll do that.”

The waiter left the bottle and backed away. The wine was a Jordan Beaujolais.

“I understand you want to know about my brilliant defense of Florence Gilroy in the poisoning death of her third husband,” Turner said.

So they’d radioed out to the fie lds that the mayor of Rancho Cucamonga was there to see him. And Turner had said
bullshit
and told them to call in the plate on the Mustang. Then who knows what other calls he’d made, even before he started riding in from the date palm oasis. Whomever he’d called, Harry Turner knew everything he needed to know. Or thought he did.

“I
do
want to know. Sometime,” Jimmy said.

Turner wasn’t in a hurry to eat. It made Jimmy know that this was more important to him than it could have been, maybe even than it
should
have been.

“Did you look up Barry Upchurch?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Is he still alive?”

Turner said, “You know, I don’t know.” It was a lie.

The last three men left together. One of them, the one who’d introduced his man to Turner, put a hand on Turner’s back as he passed and leaned in close and said something, three or four sentences, into his ear.

Turner nodded. And then shook his head no.

“That’s what I said,” the man said, loud enough to hear.

Then they were alone. The waiter even disappeared.

Turner said, “Where were we?”

“You were saying Jack Kantke couldn’t possibly have done it because he was talking about the Dodgers with the gas station guy in Barstow at eight-fifteen and the time of the murders was determined to be between eight and midnight.”

“
Six
and midnight,” Turner said. “They couldn’t peg it any closer, not then. 1977. Maybe today.”

“Six and midnight,” Jimmy corrected. “Still . . .”

“He drove fast,” Turner said.

“I thought of that,” Jimmy said.

“You like to drive fast.”

“I just like to drive. I even like to sit in cars in my driveway.”

Turner ate a good half of his meal before he said anything else. There were linen napkins. He wiped the blood off of his lips onto one.

“I never understood why the other side didn’t say that,” he said.
“He drove fast.”

“People hate math,” Jimmy said.

Turner nodded. He thought he was being likeable.

Jimmy tried to come at it from another angle, got out a few words of a question, when Turner cut him off.

“We
bought
the guy at the gas station in Barstow. Six hundred dollars, as I recall. And I think he asked for a pair of Dodgers tickets, his idea of a joke. He’s dead now.”

“But not because he had a bad sense of humor,” Jimmy said.

Turner gave a little hint of that sour smile again.

The waiter reappeared without being called, put a cup of black coffee beside Turner’s left hand. He was left-handed.

“So what time
did
Kantke stop for gas?” Jimmy asked.

Turner said, “About two hours after he shot and killed his wife and Bill Danko.”

Just like that.

There it was.

In case Jimmy didn’t get it the first time, Turner said again, “He drove fast.”

“It would have been rush hour,” Jimmy said.

“It was a Saturday,” Turner said. “But you knew that.”

Jimmy did know that.

He put his fork and knife on top of his plate.

“So,” Jimmy said. “What’s for dessert?”

“None of us eat dessert,” Turner said, looking straight across the table at him. “Vanity. Young wives.”

“Did you see him executed?” Jimmy said, right back to his eyes.

“You make it sound like an obligation.”

Jimmy didn’t know how he was supposed to take that.

“You lose the case, you have to watch the man die?” Turner said.

“I guess it’s a long way up to San Quentin.”

“Jack Kantke and I weren’t friends,” Turner said. “I was just a lawyer trying to help a fellow member of the California Bar.”

“ ‘In good standing . . .’ ”

“All of us,” Turner said.

When Jimmy came out of the dining hall into the glare of the sun, into what was now the hundred and
ten
degree heat, his Mustang was sitting there waiting for him.

And Jimmy had the keys in his pocket.

He looked up at the utterly clear sky. There wasn’t even a daylight moon. He hadn’t seen Turner come out behind him and hadn’t heard anything, but now the black Mercedes pulled out of the lot and onto the road, followed by the men in the pickup in their black
txapela
Basque berets.

And then Jimmy was alone out there.

When Jimmy stepped out of the farmers’ and ranchers’ private dining room in the middle of their made-over desert and looked up at the rich blue of the empty sky, for some reason he remembered something he’d heard a NASA scientist say once on a television program, that space wasn’t all that far away,
that if you could drive there in a car, you’d be there in an hour.
And he remembered something else from the program, that way way out, a few billion miles past that first edge of space, sometimes they would identify a body by the
negative
evidence, know something was there because everything pointed away from it, because there was a too clear expanse of nothing.

What Harry Turner had said—and what he hadn’t—had turned Jimmy’s mind. Turner had stated outright that Jack Kantke had killed his wife and Bill Danko, then driven hard and fast out of L.A. to cobble together an alibi. What Turner had said, had
confessed
on behalf of his client, was meant to convey the same message to Jimmy as the trip to the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel with the Sailors.
Nothing to see here, move right along
. . . . Harry Turner had read Jimmy Miles as wrong as the tall bony redheaded Sailor and whoever had sent him. What was meant to drive him away only drew him in closer.

Maybe it was just the look in Harry Turner’s eye.

Whatever it was, Jimmy now guessed, just for himself, that Jack Kantke
hadn’t
killed his wife and her lover. He didn’t know who did, didn’t know
why,
but, just for himself, he was all but sure it had been somebody else standing with the gun behind the wisp of a curtain in the white front bedroom in the Rivo Alto house and that they’d gassed the wrong man.

If you still believed in the notion of right and wrong men.

California 74 was a winding, climbing two-lane road highlighted in the AAA tourist guides as something special,
the Palms to Pines Highway
, slithering its way up off the desert floor into the San Bernardino Mountains, toward Mount San Jacinto, “from a desert oasis to snow capped mountains.” And, though it was June, almost July and the valley behind him was baking, there
would
be snow on the sides of the road when he got to the higher elevations, up to the top, into the evergreens, eight thousand feet.