Among the Living (24 page)

He half expected her to salute.

“Outstanding!” Jimmy said.

He took the corporate report out to the parking lot, sat on the hood of the Mustang and opened it. There were the same pictures of the founders and the directors. Kurt Rath, Vasek Rath’s son, had a page of his own as CEO. He was in his thirties, looked like a Luftwaffe pilot. Jimmy ran the math. Rath the-Younger was just a few years old when Bill Danko and Elaine Kantke died. Vasek Rath had died twenty years ago, five years after the merger, leaving his son enough stock to take control when he came of age.

In the picture, Kurt Rath was trying to manage a bit of a smile but knew not to give away much.

A look that made Jimmy want to buy a hundred shares.

Alone on the putting green at the most exclusive country club on the Westside, Jimmy sank a twenty-footer, clean, straight, no suspense.

“I meant to do that,” he said.

He dropped another ball and lined up his shot. Behind him, Kurt Rath, CEO, strode toward him followed by a nervous younger man, the club’s starter.

“Is this him?” Rath said.

The starter nodded.

Jimmy turned.
Who me?

“This idiot jammed us
both
up,” Rath said.

Jimmy still stood over his putt.

“Yeah? How’d he do that?”

“I have a standing twelve noon tee-time Thursdays. I’ve had it for six years. Everybody knows it. And this moke says someone in my office blanked it this morning, which is impossible, and now you’ve got it.”

Rath’s partner stepped up. He looked like a nice guy, nice smile, good build, nice tan. He looked like the kind of guy you could beat every Thursday.

“Hey, how’s it goin’?” Jimmy said to the beatable man.

The man nodded back. He was already embarrassed by what he knew was coming next from Rath.

“Look,” the CEO began again.

“Take it,” Jimmy said.

Rath had expected a fight. It took a moment for him to regroup.

“I own a little R-S stock,” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you having a bad day.”

Rath nodded four or five times, started away.

Jimmy dropped his head to concentrate on the long putt.

He sank it. Rath looked back about the time the ball snapped into the cup.

“You want to join us?” Rath said.

Jimmy walked after them and caught up and shook Rath’s partner’s hand.

“Sonny Ball,” Rath said.

Jimmy shook Sonny Ball’s hand. Rath never offered his.

After the round, they had a drink.

Rath was going back to work so for him it was just a grapefruit juice with a splash of cranberry juice on top, like a dash of blood.

He wasn’t talking. And Jimmy hadn’t learned anything from Rath on the greens, except that he lifted his head and he was better at long putts than short. Jimmy didn’t really know what he was looking for. He’d long ago stopped being restrained by that, by what somebody else would see as a lack of purpose. He just went where it seemed he should go, heard what he heard, saw what he saw.

And thought about it at night instead of sleeping.

Rath drained his drink and spit a cube of ice back into the glass and stood up.

“Enjoyed it,” he said. “People never kick my ass, even when they can.” Sonny Ball looked into the Scotch he was having.

“It was only a couple of strokes,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I remember,” Rath said.

Rath patted Ball on the back as he left. When he was ten feet away, he half turned.

“Call my office. We’ll get you over for lunch.”

He meant Jimmy.

“Outstanding,” Jimmy said.

For a while, he chatted with Ball, a retired United pilot with a good long story about Bangkok, but he didn’t learn anything about Rath-Steadman there either, the old days or the new. Then the rich old men started filling the place, bright clothes, bright colors on men you knew had terrorized and ball-busted “their people” yet had survived it, the company life, the dictator’s life, the acid in the mouth and the unsatisfied knot in the gut that usually killed off these guys long before now.

Jimmy finished his martini, stood to go, leaving the two fat olives on the spear.

A pair of moons hung in a jet black sky.

Below, a tracked rover the size of a suitcase hustled over the surface of Mars.

Or at least that’s the way it looked.

Behind the glass, Ben, the Jet Propulsion Lab engineer from the Mensa murder mystery night at Joel Kinser’s, wiggled the rover’s controls, spun it around in a circle.

The name “Rath-Steadman” was stenciled on the side.

Ben offered the controls to Jimmy. Jimmy declined.

“When we were ready to put out the first pictures from the surface of Mars,” Ben said, “I downloaded a fuzzy image of Elvis and superimposed it over an up-slope, very dimly,
perfect.
But somebody caught it before it went out.”

Ben flicked the stick.

“Watch this.”

The multimillion dollar toy popped a wheelie.

In the JPL employee’s dining room, Jimmy drank a bottle of water and watched as Ben attacked his five o’clock “lunch,” a can of sardines with a pull-top lid and two slices of dark rye wrapped in wax paper.

“I’m not going to eat that pear,” he said.

Jimmy took the pear.

“Rath-Steadman. Past, present, or future?” Ben said.

“Whatever you know.”

“I know everything,” Ben said, a simple statement of fact.

“Start with the past.”

“When Rath and Steadman merged in 1977, two rather interesting companies were lost and one rather uninteresting company was born, producing a particularly undistinguished series of spectacularly successful airplanes.”

Jimmy took the first bite of the pear. Ben eyed him, as if he now regretted giving it up.

“Presently,” Ben said, “R-S is in a becalmed patch of sea, captained by Kurt Rath, who is a real son of a bitch, to use the technical term. As for the future, all eyes are on the sky . . .”

It was a joke. Jimmy didn’t get it.

“The war with the birds . . .”

Jimmy still didn’t get it.

They took Ben’s car, a dust-white twenty-year-old Honda Civic. Ben cut across Pasadena and then up through La Canada/Flintridge. He was a shortcut kind of guy, a surface street guy. He made fifty right and left turns in the twenty-m ile trip, maximizing the torque in each gear, sometimes violently downshifting as he yanked the car around a turn, all while
Persian
music squeaked out of the Honda’s cheap speakers, snake charmer’s music to the untuned ear, and too loud to talk over.

Jimmy held on, his head under the lowered cloud of the torn headliner. They came down Sepulveda from the north, faster than the cars on the adjacent freeway, right and left and right and left down into Van Nuys to an industrial park.

One last turn and they were on the tarmac of Van Nuys Airport.

“You have a plane?” Jimmy said.

Ben threw open the doors of a hangar. There was an experimental plane hardly longer than the Civic with an odd wing configuration, two place, prop aft.

“I built it. In my garage,” Ben said as he yanked away the blocks and shoved it toward the doorway.

The light plane had power. There was some chatter on the radio as they came up the runway, fast.

“It’s the same model as John Denver’s,” Ben yelled to Jimmy as he pulled back on the stick and the plane leapt into the sky. “That seems to impress some people.”

They crossed the city. What would have taken an hour and a half down below took ten minutes. They fle w over the Rath-Steadman headquarters, the parking lot where Jimmy had burned up the last hours of last night. It was late afternoon and the light and the distance and the angle made everything look good, the shining buildings and rolling, green manmade hills around them, even the refinery, Oz in this light.

Ben banked right, a steep turn, and they were facing the dropping sun. As they approached the coastline, Ben looked down, shouting over the noise.

“See any B-One-R D’s?”

“What?”

“B-1-RDs.”

“What?”

“Birds.”

Jimmy looked over the side.

Below was a grim expanse of what once were wetlands, a broad section that fed, in a few flashing waterways, into the Pacific. It was a landscape dotted with abandoned tuna boats and decaying pleasure craft and a few figures too far off to read.

Jimmy’s eyes darkened.

“Last wetlands in the South Bay,” Ben yelled. “Rath-Steadman wants to build RS-20s here. Buddy of mine has been doing a little stealth air-mapping for them. Immense plant, no more wetlands. Look for the PR campaign to start soon. ‘
Birds for Jobs!
’ ”

Ben pushed the plane into a wild, diving turn.

“I like birds,” he shouted, “but I’d bet on Rath-Steadman . . .”

The little aircraft spiraled down over the cluttered wetlands for an up-close view.

A man in a peacoat and watch cap looked up, a gasoline rainbow at his feet.

It was on Western the block above Third, a storefront church with services in Spanish and Korean depending on the night, formerly an adult bookstore, next to a new adult bookstore. Through the open doorway, twenty folding metal chairs, a low stage, a plywood pulpit. A Fender Stratocaster leaned against an amp. It was the end of the day and hot and the Wednesday night services wouldn’t begin for another hour but a few people were already in place. A seven-year-old girl in a dress the color of cotton candy played scales on the upright piano.

Jimmy and Angel were out front on the sidewalk.

Jimmy started by telling him about
The Airplane People.

“Red Steadman owned the building the murdered boyfriend’s business was in, a flight school. I think somehow Danko got mixed up in some Steadman business and they killed him and Elaine Kantke for it.”

“I thought it was about disco,” Angel said. “What? Mixed up in what?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s all a long time ago,” Angel said. “I don’t see how any of it matters now.”

Jimmy had an answer for that.

“Rath-Steadman wants to build a new plant down in South Bay,” he said. “On some wetlands. That’s the link to today.”

He waited before he said the next.

“It’s down at The Pipe.”

Jimmy let it sink in. Angel’s eyes darkened the same way his had when he’d looked over the side of the little plane.

A skinny preacher got off a bus and walked toward them up the sidewalk carrying a white-cover Bible the size of a cake box. He rolled his hand across Angel’s back as he passed, not wanting to interrupt what might be a witnessing.

“So that’s the link with Sailors,” Angel said.

“I guess.”

“They want it to happen or
don’t
want it to?”

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

Angel shook his head. “Are you still seeing them?”

“Not since the chase in the park.”

“What about the German woman?”

Jimmy shook his head.

Inside the church, someone played a brash chord on the guitar. “What about Jean?” Angel said as it blew on down the sidewalk.

“I still haven’t seen her.”

“Why is that?”

“I stopped calling her, stopped going by.”

“Why?”

There was a billboard down the street behind Angel for some movie that had opened and closed a month ago. Now it was peeling in the weather. The stars, man and woman, beamed toothy grins out at Jimmy, in their confidence just about the most pathetic faces on the street.

“I knew your guys were watching out for her.”

“Go to her,” Angel said. “Tell her her daddy didn’t do it and whoever did is probably long since dead. Whoever did it and for whatever reason.”