Among the Living (29 page)

She looked skyward. There was a daylight moon, just risen.

White.

A perfect circle.

A communion wafer.

Where did that come from?
She hadn’t taken communion in ten years. She thought of the little church in Carmel, that afternoon, the way the candles weighted the air.
The Quick and The Dead
. That memory led her to another from long ago, a little girl—
four?
—with her mother in an Episcopal church in Long Beach in a straight wool coat, pink with pink buttons in a style like the one John John Kennedy had worn in the famous picture, and the hat, too, which she held in her hands because her mother was kneeling beside her. Suddenly there was a bird, a brown wren probably, something small and common, flying around the airy vault above the altar. There were a few other children and they began to laugh and Jean began to laugh with them until the adults got up from their knees.

Jean didn’t remember what happened next. How odd that she wouldn’t remember the ending.

A swell lifted her and she saw Jimmy on the beach.

She washed the salt out of her hair over the kitchen sink with a round striped pitcher.

“Have you been all right up here?” Jimmy said.

“I’m fine,” she said.

She squeezed the water out of her hair with a kitchen towel and stepped closer to him.

She kissed him.

He wondered if she could feel the change in him.

He found a blue bottle of vodka in the freezer and poured an inch of it into a green glass and walked with it to the windows that tried to frame the ocean. He stood with his back to her. Far away, almost at the horizon, a sloop was passing, so far out it was flying a spinnaker. He waited. He felt himself going back to his life, back to
before,
back into himself, from wherever he had been with her. It felt like falling backwards. It felt like a plug being pulled. It hurt and was sad. If he wasn’t a man, he would have howled like a dog.

There was a TV on the countertop, the first of the afternoon news shows, a brushfir e somewhere, tanker helos dropping showers of red water. Jean watched it. The sound was low.

Jimmy still was looking out at the sea.

“One of The Jolly Girls, Vivian Goreck, still lives two doors down from your house,” he said. “With her daughter, Lynne.”

Jean remembered the picture, the four of them at the Yacht Club bar, starched white blouses and round pearlesque earrings the size of quarters.

“I remember her.”

Something had changed in Jean, too, and he felt it. She had decided something. He didn’t know what it was.

“She was pretty.”

“Vivian Goreck bought ten thousand dollars’ worth of Steadman stock in July of 1977, three weeks before the merger of Rath and Steadman. It was worth a hundred grand six months later. Today, it’s two or three million.”

“She’s the one who ties this to the past?”

“One of the ones. Also her daughter. She’s seeing your brother.”

Jean nodded. She accepted it.

He was surprised that she
wasn’t
surprised.

“My mother was killed because of stock?”

Jimmy told her about Roy Pool and the midnight flight of Vasek Rath and Red Steadman. He told it just the way Pool had told it, Bill Danko and some big shots, a man thought to be dead wearing a disguise, a famous man who’d apparently faked his own death for some reason.

“They needed a pilot too dumb to know what it meant. But Danko wasn’t
that
dumb, or your mother wasn’t. Danko probably told your mother. I don’t know who she told. After the drunk flying thing, I guess Rath and Steadman knew Danko was a problem.”

“Maybe Vivian and my father were having a thing.”

“Maybe.” It was something he’d thought of, too, something cued by one of Vivian Goreck’s smiles. “Maybe
she’s
the one who put that half smile on his face,” Jimmy said.

“So who killed my mother and Bill Danko?” Jean said, too coolly.

“Nobody. Somebody in the shadows. Somebody who’s probably dead now, too. Somebody short.”

He kept his eyes on the water.

“So there it is. It’s over. That’s everything there is to know.”

She nodded, whether she believed that lie or not.

“My father had a stroke, a small one,” Jean said. “Half of his face was slightly paralyzed. Carey told me that, when I was at Stanford. I never knew. The jury thought he was smirking at them, too.”

He still wasn’t looking at her.

“Where is Carey’s house?” she said. “You said he had a house and an apartment.”

“Out on the point. Crown Road. It looks like a ship.”

She went to him. She put her head against his back as he stood at the window.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Why? Where are you going? Stay here.”

Jimmy turned to face her. “I can’t. But you should still stay here,” he said.

She remembered his line,
this could all be over soon.

“When are you coming back?” she said.

He told her he’d call her in the morning. She pulled him to her but he was somewhere else already.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

As he walked away, she looked at the television. A shimmering live shot of the daylight moon filled the frame, icy. The newscaster was saying, “Ton ight Southlanders will witness a rare conjunction of folklore and science, a real live ‘blue moon.’ ”

She heard Jimmy’s voice out front, speaking to the guards, Angel’s men.

“A blue moon—I’ll bet you didn’t know this Trish—a blue moon is two full moons in one month,” the voice-over said. “It only happens once every eight or ten years. It looks like any other moon but this one seems to be bringing with it unusually high tides along our coastline.”

She heard the Mustang start.

“Once in a blue moon . . .” the newscaster said.

Angel was standing in the driveway in front of the garages when Jimmy came back from Malibu. It was dark already, the moon through the trees.

“Your Porsche is downtown,” he said before Jimmy got out.

They both knew what all it meant.

Jimmy went in and took a long shower, changed clothes. He sat in the dining room and drank a glass of water. He’d looked at the blue revolver in the desk drawer in the office but closed it without taking it.
Who was he going to shoot?

They drove out Sunset in Angel’s pickup. It was a Thursday night but there was traffic, a rattle and hum in the air, people either driving fast or way too slow, sudden screeching U-turns in front of you, cars double-parked, as if everyone was off on his own trip.

Angel went south on Highland.

“Where’d you spend last night?”

Jimmy just shook his head.

“I called, came by,” Angel said.

“I just rode around.”

“Rode around.”

“I ended up out at the beach.”

“A sailor watching the sea.”

“I’m all right,” Jimmy said.

“Good,” Angel said. “We’ll see about
tomorrow.
”

They came south six more blocks.

The wave was breaking.

Returning
. . .

Jimmy looked over as they passed the recording studio.
Clover.
The past was knocking him on his ass, had been for days now, since Big Sur. Old music kept going through his head. On every other street corner he saw a memory in bright relief, a piece of a scene, in daylight or dark, played at double speed, or half.

There was the razor wire around the roof. They used to go up there, on the roof, smoke and look out over low Hollywood.

He was on the roof with one night at the end of a session and the singer said he’d give Jimmy a ride back to the Chateau Marmont. Jimmy didn’t have a car but in those days you didn’t need one if you looked right, if you were in on the joke, in on the big idea they’d all just that summer discovered. 1969. You stood by the side of the road looking the way you looked and someone would stop and you’d get where you wanted to go, particularly if you didn’t much care where you went.

This night it was .

But they hadn’t gone back to the Chateau Marmont but to three or four houses instead, up in Laurel Canyon and, even though it was four in the morning by then, all the way out to Topanga. There was downstairs cocaine for everybody who came by and upstairs coke for the famous people and their friends, even their new friends. His mother was gone, off on location again. No one was waiting up for him.

The singer came through the room, said some of them were leaving for the desert, to ride horses. And peyote.

Jimmy told him he’d see him tomorrow night at Clover.

He had talked for hours with a girl who’d been to Morocco but he was alone on the deck when the new sun broke over the ridgeline and lit up the head of a royal palm across the canyon, as suddenly as if fire was involved.

Angel drove, low in the seat, his arm on the armrest between them. Now they were down in South Central. Angel wasn’t afraid of any part of L.A. so they were on surface streets. Black men sat on the fenders of cars parked in front of houses with barred windows but nice little yards, one of those TV news neighborhoods where the mothers put their children to bed in the bathtubs some nights in fear of gunfire.

Jimmy dropped his window. Angel reached over and turned off the A.C.

“I used to live down here, block west of Normandie,” Angel said.

There was vague music from multiple sources. Angel drove slowly, out of respect for the people who lived there. The streets were concrete with a bead of black tar in the expansion joints. The truck’s tires thumped rhythmically, like a heartbeat, another kind of music. They slipped past one bungalow, all blue-lit inside, just as the front door came open, letting out an explosion of television laughter. A woman stepped onto the porch and called out something to the men. Two of them had a pit bull spread-legged on the hood of a Buick Regal, slapping it in the face every time it thought to move.

“Her father is a Sailor,” Jimmy said.

He hadn’t said anything since Highland, since Angel had asked him where he spent the night.

“I thought maybe it was headed that way,” Angel said. “How did you find out?”

“I saw him. Palos Verdes. A house his son owns. I saw him kiss a young woman, the daughter of one of The Jolly Girls. She looks just like the mother did then.”

Angel nodded.

It was a Sailor thing, you drove the car you drove then or would like to have driven. You lived in the house you lived in then, if you could. And you tried to find a new version of the girl you loved then.

“How much are you going to tell her?” Angel said.

“Not much. There’s not much I can tell her without telling her everything.”

“Maybe she already knows.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“I don’t think so.”

“He was living here all along, ten miles away? And you think she didn’t know? She just happened to find an investigator who was a Sailor, too?”

Jimmy didn’t answer it. He’d asked himself the question enough. None of it was important to him anymore. None of it would make any difference.

He would just let the wave break.

“How much longer did you think you could wait before you told her what was up with you?”

“Longer,” Jimmy said.

They rode another block. An ice truck came past.
Hollywood Ice.
Angel turned left on Exposition to head downtown. His rough leather-bound Bible on the dash started to slide sideways.

Angel put a hand on it to stop it.

“I wish I had what you have,” Jimmy said.

“What’s that?”

“Believing that everything is part of the plan.”

“Me or you believing it isn’t what makes it true,” Angel said.

They drove under the Harbor Freeway toward downtown and something else came to Jimmy, something else he should have seen before. That he was the same age as the kid Drew that daybreak in Topanga Canyon, the morning of the last day of his life.

The alley was a dead end. Jimmy’s black Porsche sat, top down, dead center in the circle of light an old-fashioned incandescent streetlight threw.

It looked like what it was, bait in a trap.

They got out of the truck. The key was in the ignition. The Porsche was clean. There weren’t even any fingerprints on the glass. It was as if someone had wiped it down just minutes before they arrived.

It was almost eleven o’clock. There were a few homeless people but no Sailors. And this wasn’t where the Walkers lived. Downtown was
real
Sailor territory, too hardcore for anybody but the strong ones.

Drew had come right down into the middle of the darkest version of the Sailor world.

Or been
brought
to it.