Among the Living (18 page)

“Dancing Queen” was painted on the engine cowling.

Jimmy took that one, too.

And he found the picture of Estella Danko to take. It was from an open-air bar somewhere, sand on the floor and the beach in the background, probably down in Baja. Three blond girls, probably college kids, more
pretty people,
were grouped behind Bill Danko who sat on a silver beer keg, his legs open, wearing shorts and
hurraches,
his elbows on his knees, aviator glasses, a big grin on his face, a bottle of beer in his hand. Estella was off to one side, away from the others, not happy, as if the girls had waved her into the shot.

It was hard to imagine a .45 in the empty little hand at her side but not so hard to picture a murderous look in her eye.

There was a sound from the kitchen.

Rosemary stood in front of the microwave.

“Three zero zero,” she said, more than once.

It dinged. She opened the door and took out a package of macaroni and cheese. She pulled back the covering and set it on a plate to cool. She held her fork in her hand and waited, like she was counting seconds in her head.

She did all right with numbers. She just didn’t know what day it was. She had a broken sense of time and she didn’t know who was dead and who wasn’t anymore.

Jimmy felt a certain kinship.

It was a rough night on the strip, odd and ugly and edgy for some reason. Young men who’d all stripped off their shirts ganged in front of The Roxy, spilled out onto the sidewalks between a pair of shows for some metal band come round again. They were like natives on the banks of a river. Some of them were trying to get a fire going in a trash barrel to complete the picture. Ninety degrees at eleven o’clock and they’re starting fires.

Jimmy rolled past, Streisand’s “People” still looping in his head from the weird afternoon, making the scene all the stranger.

He slid in the CD his musician friend had made for him, the collection of disco music Chris thought he should be listening to. The first song was lush, symphonic, with a sexy chorus, women singing the same three words over and over. It was romantic, dramatic. It was soundtrack music, for the movie playing in the heads of twenty-somethings on the dance floor, overriding, at least for part of a Saturday night, their ordinary lives.

One of the Roxy natives jumped out from the others, slowly and deliberately flipped him off as he cruised past. Maybe the kid could hear the disco music.

Or maybe he just didn’t like Fords. Jimmy was in the Mustang. After spending the early part of the night with Rosemary in the house in Garden Grove, he’d taken a cab back to Naples where he’d left the car and then driven up from Long Beach on Pacific Coast Highway, the slow way, trying to sort it out. Estella Danko was dead but that didn’t make much difference to him, to the case. Now he’d
met
her. He even had her picture in his pocket. Dead now or not, there was a good chance she was the one who’d done the killing. Jealous, left-out wives pulled triggers in bedrooms all the time. D. L. Upchurch thought she had done it and he had brooded over all this more than Jimmy had or ever would.

She was five-foot-one
.

And she wasn’t her husband’s Dancing Queen anymore.

So Jimmy thought he was getting closer to certainty, to an end to it, closing in on something he could take to Jean.

He’d gone by Jean’s apartment. There was no answer downstairs, no lights in the penthouse. He still hadn’t seen her or talked to her since the night they’d come upon Drew. He wondered how
gone
she was.

Jimmy thought he was closing in on certainty, but what he
didn’t
understand was what this particula piece of old history had to do with Sailors. His tails were back, Lon and Vince, still in the subcompact Escort, almost bumping into him when he slowed.

And now there was another one.

At least this one had better taste in cars. He was in a black 745 iL BMW, smart because it blended in in most parts of L.A. better than a basic Ford. And this driver knew what he was doing, stayed two blocks back and turned off onto side streets just a half second before you really noticed he was there, making you think maybe you’d imagined it.

But Jimmy knew how to do this, too, and had caught a good look at the car twice, once on PCH and once when he was coming back down onto Sunset from Jean’s.

It was then that he got a look at his face. When the driver knew he’d been seen, he’d turned into the space in front of a restaurant, had even gotten out to meet the valet, very cool. He was tall, skinny, in an expensive black suit, slicked-back hair. He was too far away, but maybe it was Boney M, the tall one with the long fingers from the rooftop of the Roosevelt.

Jimmy figured he’d never see the man again, though that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be there.

It was their mistake. If they’d stopped following him a week ago, he probably would have ended it by now, told Jean it was over, that there was nothing worth knowing that he could tell her. After the night in the canyon when they’d come upon the overturned Honda, everything in him had wanted to wrap up the case, tell her whatever he could tell her, and then see if there was any way to salvage things with her.

But they hadn’t quit. They were back, following him, nosing around, keeping it alive, accomplishing the opposite of what they wanted, making
the black clear space where the answer was
a thing he could never turn away from now.

He looped around and cruised by Jean’s a third time.

The lights were still out and this time he didn’t go to the door. The song on the CD lasted all the way there and halfway back to his house down Sunset, the singer telling him she loved the nightlife but sounding a little sad, like she was trying to convince herself.

It was an old line producer’s office, bad art, big furniture, a slab of chalk for a coffee table. Jean was alone, on the pink couch. She picked up a book, smiled when she read the spine. Behind the couch was a wall of photographs, the
Everybody-Knows-Me-Wall
, pictures spanning twenty years, marked by the changing hairstyles of Joel Kinser, who was in every one, his head an inch too close to the head of each famous actor or politician, Gerald and Betty Ford among them. So Kinser had spent a little time at the Betty Ford Center out in Rancho Mirage. It was a big club.

Jimmy was in one group shot, three or four nobodies, Joel and a star. It was recent. They all looked like themselves. But a few rows over was a picture from the past, Jimmy and Joel and an actress. Joel had a blown-out eighties look, from another time, but Jimmy didn’t look much younger than now, much changed, unless you noticed a brightness in his eye then that now was gone, or at least dimmed.

Joel came in. He kissed Jean on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said. A movie star out of the limelight lately was a step behind him.

“Do you know ?”

“No.” Jean extended her hand.

“This is Jean Kantke,” Joel said. “We’re in Mensa together.”

Jean still had the book in her hand.

“Where did you find that?” Joel said. “I’ve been looking for it.”

Jean handed it to him.

“Catullus,” Joel said.

The fading star waited a moment, nodding, and then said, “I gotta roll outta here, Joel.” He told Jean it was nice to meet her and left.

“Are you doing something with him?” Jean said when he had cleared the frame.

Joel leafed through his phone messages.

“Hollywood has two speeds,” he said. “ ‘Screw you’ and ‘Yes, Master!’ Is the commissary all right?”

There were only ten tables in the Executive Dining Room, blond chairs, skylights, a Hockney on the wall, waiters who
didn’t
want to direct.

Joel nodded to a man taking a table alone across the dining room. The man gave back less.

Their food had just come.

“What did Jimmy do for you?” Jean said.

“Found an actress who didn’t want to be found,” Joel said. He was staring at his fish.

“Where did he find her?”

“Mexico.”

“You aren’t going to tell me who it was?” Jean said.

“ . We were in the middle of shooting and suddenly she’s gone. Tuesday, she’s there. Wednesday, she’s not. I put three other guys on it, regular guys on it. Nothing. Then Jimmy found her in like a day. How, I don’t know. It took another day for him to go down there and talk her in. Following Monday, we’re back rolling.”

He stared at his fish.

“The picture never worked. We could never get the third act right. It did all right foreign. I always assumed Jimmy had a thing with her, but he said no.”

“Look at this piece of salmon,” he said in the same breath. (He pronounced the
L
.) “A little
parsimonious,
isn’t it?”

“Try putting some salt on it,” Jean said. “What else do you know about him?”

He poked at the piece of fish, as if it could change. “Fairly bright. Locked in a Peter Gunn kind of thing with his clothes, but he has taste.”

“Has he ever been married?”

“Don’t know. Is he gay? I don’t know. So, I assume he’s working for you. He took the job.”

Jean nodded.

“And you want it to be something else.”

“No . . .”

He waved the waiter over. “I’d like a bigger fish,” he said and handed him his plate.

He looked at Jean. “That salt thing. Funny.”

She waited for him to answer her questions.

“Everybody loves Jimmy,” he said. “He works that Little Boy Lost thing. I could never pull that off.”

“He’s not lost,” she said. “He knows exactly where he is. He just isn’t telling.”

“And this for you is a turn-on?”

Jean didn’t answer.

“You know who his mother was, don’t you?” Joel said.

Darren Price drove up Jimmy’s long gravel driveway in a fifteen-year-old Mercedes convertible with a vandal’s cut in the top patched with duct tape.

Jimmy was waiting for him on the steps that led up to the tall dark front door. It was the afternoon but he got the idea that the DJ hadn’t been to sleep since his overnight shift. He got out of the Mercedes wearing the same velveteen exercise suit and white Capezio dance shoes from the other night.

Lloyd-the-Void stood with his mouth open, looking at the house. He looked back down the long driveway to the iron gates and then back at the house and the motor court and the four-bay garage. All four garage doors were open. In separate stalls were the black Porsche convertible, the Mustang, the yellow Dodge Challenger, and in the last garage, covered by a tarp, something with high poking fins and bright wide whitewalls.

“Holy shit,” Price said. “Your house has a
name
? I’m in the wrong business.”

Jimmy took him inside, through the house, past the living room, into the office, the room with the chromed racks of security gear and electronic equipment.

“Holy shit,” Price said again.

Jimmy sat behind the desk and put his feet up. He was barefoot. He was waiting for Price to get over the money around him and to say why he was here, why he’d called.

“You want anything?” Jimmy said.

“I want a house like this,” Price said. “And four cars.” He sat in the leather and chrome chair in front of the desk. He put his feet up, too, like Jimmy, like they were new best friends. “What’s the one under the tarp?”

“I’m afraid to look,” Jimmy said.

Since Price apparently wasn’t going to start, Jimmy decided maybe
he’d
go first. “Did you ever see Bill Danko’s wife at Big Daddy’s?”

“He was married?”

“Yeah.”

Price shook his head.

“Five-foot-one. Spanish.”

The Xeroxes, the newspaper articles of the case were spread out on the desk. Jimmy slid a few papers around and found the picture of Estella Danko.