Among the Living (47 page)

Coroners’ offices have less security than you’d think. Jimmy walked in a back door, off the loading dock. He came down one corridor and then another, threaded his way into the interior, following his nose.

He was alone in a roomful of the dead for a good two minutes before anyone came in.

And
she
didn’t work there.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She was in her late fifties. She was dressed like a businesswoman but in particularly muted colors. Rich, but muted.
Dignified.

Jimmy just smiled, the it’s-all-right smile.

The coroner came in, a deputy coroner. He’d probably heard voices in the room. He was in his thirties and fleshy with heavy glasses that could have been military-issue. He looked like he should be working in a comic-book store somewhere.

He looked at Jimmy first. He seemed to know the woman.

“Can I . . . ?” he asked.

“She was first,” Jimmy said. Maybe it would give him time to figure out what he’d come here for.

The man let his eyes linger on Jimmy for another beat, then crossed the room to a steel desk, curved corners, a gray “marble” linoleum top, like an old schoolteacher’s desk, or a cop’s desk. There were clear plastic bags on top. He found the one he was looking for. It had a number on a tag. He lifted his glasses to read it—so he was nearsighted!—and then went to the wall of body drawers. He pulled one out, pulled away the polythene over the face, put it back, and checked the number on the end of the drawer.

He left it open and looked at the woman. She came over. He nodded at her. The woman pulled down the plastic and looked at the body.

Jimmy slipped out, left them alone. There was something that convinced him she wasn’t a family member, but Jimmy couldn’t decide who she was. Clergy? She looked too uncertain, too off balance for that. But she also didn’t look like she was any stranger to morgues. He was at the water fountain, taking a good long drink, when she came out of the body room. She didn’t stop to lean against the wall or anything, didn’t twist a hankie in her hand. She wasn’t distraught, but she had a tear in her eye. And, with this one, you got the idea those eyes hadn’t cried in a while, that her eyes were just a bit too old to tear up easily. Or had seen too much.

Jimmy came out into the parking lot in time to see what she drove, a pearlescent white Infiniti FX45 SUV that was probably almost pink in the right light. She pointed the remote at the door. There was a double click, and she went first to the hatchback and opened it and put the plastic bag there, on the carpet.

He didn’t know why exactly, but Jimmy tailed her across town to Russian Hill.

The Infiniti was parked in the stubby driveway of a six-story apartment building, a vintage place,
some
vintage. It had character. He found a place down in the next block and hiked back up the incline. No wonder San Francisco women had such good-looking legs. He was about to go into the first floor—the door was propped open—when he saw something on the door of the Infiniti, letters impossible to read from any real distance. He came closer. They were silver on white. Dignified. Rich. Muted.

What they said was:

In the lobby was an old-fashioned elevator, with a brass arrow to point to the number of the floor. It was pointing at six. The top. As good a bet as any for where the woman had gone. Jimmy pushed the button to bring it down and stepped back. It was slow. It took twenty seconds just to creak down to five.

He leaned against the opposite wall. He’d been smoking all day, since he’d gotten in the Porsche in the basement garage of the Mark, since he’d dropped the metal door of the glove box, looking for his sunglasses, and had seen the pack of cigarettes he’d bought at the little store back down in Paso Robles.

Luckies.

He was snubbing out the cigarette in the sand in the canister ashtray across from the elevator when the Infiniti woman stepped out of a door at the end of the lobby, a door that had been left standing open but that he hadn’t noticed.

“Hello,” she said. “Again.”

“Hi.”

“Do you need a minute?”

Jimmy took one, to think what to say. He had been intending to work on his opening lines on the ride up in the elevator, have something worked out before he got to the top floor.

“I know it’s difficult,” the woman said.

“Unprecedented,” Jimmy said.

She smiled and nodded. She’d been misting up again, just like she had in the coroner’s office. He could see the teary sparkle in her eye. She turned around and left him there, went back through the door at the end of the lobby, left it open.

When he looked in, it was a small apartment. The door opened into a four-foot-square foyer and then a twelve-foot living room. It was tiny, but it was a deluxe apartment. The building was on the top of the hill, so even on the first flo or there was a view, a blue and white pane of color, clear and bright, like a stained glass rendering of a slice of the skyline and the Bay beyond. The woman saw him looking out the window and for some reason got a bit flustered, apologetic.

“I opened the drapes,” she said. “She kept it so dark in here.”

“It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

She crossed to him, a card already in her hand. “Someone said you weren’t coming in until this afternoon,” she said. “Patricia Hatch.”

Jimmy took the card. He convinced himself that he was working, working for some greater good, and just let the lie tell itself.

“Were you her only child?” she said. “No,” she immediately corrected, “I’m sorry. A neighbor said she had a daughter here in the City who came to see her often. Who had just moved here?”

Jimmy kept quiet, took in the place. Every inch of wall, every flat surface, was covered with photographs, framed. On the coffee table was an ashtray from The Coconut Grove.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she corrected again. “You would be
grand
children. I forgot how old she—she was
ninety
.”

There was picture after picture of a beautiful, sassy girl, maybe twenty-two. In gowns. In a bathing suit, what they used to call a bather.

“Why were you crying?” Jimmy said, still scanning the pictures. “At the coroner’s. And here, before I came in. I mean, in your business you must see the same thing, over and over. Was something different with her?”

The woman stepped closer, with a kind of familiarity, the same familiarity she’d been apologizing for ever since he came in.

“Can I show you my favorite picture?” she said.

“Please,” Jimmy said.

“It’s this one.” It was a publicity shot, the young woman as a chorus girl. She handed it to him. “You see, I was a dancer, too,” she said. “A million years ago.”

“But not seventy,” Jimmy said.

“No.”

Jimmy put the picture back on the table.

“The world has changed so much,” the woman said.

Jimmy couldn’t argue with her there. “I don’t have a sister,” he said. “You said a woman had been coming by?” He tried to amend his tone, to keep from sounding like he was pushing. “Someone young?”

“That’s what they said. A new friend. Maybe she’s just someone in the neighborhood,” the other said. “Someone like me. Who cared very much for your grandmother. It was good that she had a friend.”

She went to her purse and started unpacking. A pad. A gold pen. A phone with a keyboard. A handheld tape recorder. A digital camera. “Timothy from our office will be here in a few minutes. Of course, you can have your own Trusted Witness for the inventory.” He heard her capitalize the
T
and the
W
. He thought,
That’s what I’d like to be: a Trusted Witness.
Angel was a Trusted Witness. Jimmy knew a few others. “Of course, you can take anything today, before the walk-through,” she said.

“I think I’ll walk around the block,” Jimmy said.

“Of course.”

He made another scan of the room. There weren’t any pictures anywhere of anyone who looked like a son or a daughter or a grandson or a granddaughter. Or a man friend. Or even the “new friend” she’d made. No friends, neighbors. Nobody. But don’t you get used to being alone, being lonely, in ninety years? Don’t you get used to outliving everyone, even get used to outliving yourself, at least what you used to be? Your perk? Your spark? The tone of young skin? The beauty, the sex that drew people to you? If she had been sixty, it would have made sense. Or seventy.

At least now he knew how she got her leg up and over the rail on the bridge. She had been a dancer.

“I wonder why I thought I should do this today,” Jimmy looked at Patricia Hatch and said.

“Everyone is different,” she said.

And he made his exit, graceful or otherwise.

The world wasn’t neat. The world didn’t make sense, at least not moment by moment. Nobody knew that like Jimmy knew it, but still, he tried to neaten it up where he could, even if only in his own head. He made lists. He checked things off.

So, after Russian Hill, he looked into the other two suicides off the Golden Gate, the latest ones.

The German woman apparently was traveling alone, had checked in, alone, to a fairly expensive room at a blue-and-white nautical-themed hotel down on Fisherman’s Wharf, a new hotel in an old, old brick building, a former cannery. You could look out every window and see the Buena Vista bar and the cable car turnaround and the water beyond. It didn’t look like the kind of place a last-stage depressive would pick for herself. She’d been there three days, had made the rounds of all the sights, had asked the concierge for maps and restaurant picks. She was signed up for a wine country bus tour tomorrow, prepaid. (A
pair
of tickets. Why?) From here, it was on to L.A. for the woman. Alone.

Jimmy talked to a half-dozen guests and hotel staff. It didn’t make sense to anybody, but everybody admitted they didn’t know much about her, about how she was spending her days and nights. The concierge seemed particularly to feel the loss. The woman was German. Europeans understand that you tip the help at the end of your stay.

So that was two out of the three.

What about Mr. Wrong Side?

He had AIDS. That was the first thing Jimmy learned about him: he was dying of AIDS. It was right there in the paper, a sidebar bylined by Duncan Groner, who apparently owned the suicide beat. Jimmy had stopped for an Irish coffee at a place in North Beach. By night North Beach would be packed with tourists and locals, one of the neighborhoods that satisfied both of them, with good-as-Rome Italian restaurants and bars and hipster bookstores and strip joints. It was three in the afternoon, and the coffee and Irish whisky was good. Up and down in the same cup.

The young man was living in a hospice. Too weak to move out of his bed, they had thought. So he’d had some help. Jimmy didn’t really want to follow up on it. He had the address for the hospice. It wasn’t far away, four or five streets over. He didn’t want to follow it up because the answer to the question of why the young man was dead was too clear. In spite of what he told himself all the time, he didn’t like simple, obvious answers. A young man killed himself because he was dying in a slow, bad way. Jimmy wanted it to be something else. He wanted a little mystery. Not a lot, a small mystery, easily blown out, like a candle, by a professional with a modicum of sense, even if he was from out of town and wrapped in the cloak of his own mysteries, dragging around his own chains.

Then again, there was that detail . . .

The man dying of AIDS had to have had some help.

And something else . . .

Most of the day, Red Boots and another had been tailing Jimmy, neither one of them looking all that happy to be up in daylight.

He stayed away for as long as he could, which turned out to be a day and a half. It was five thirty. Mary waited behind the wheel of her husband’s black BMW X-5, in front of a dance studio on a side street in San Raphael. The light was what they call in the movie world the Golden Hour. Everything looked good at five thirty. She wasn’t on the phone. Maybe she was listening to the radio. She had the window down. Jimmy was across the street, in the Porsche. He hadn’t been this close to her before. Her hair was a little darker, at least in this light, than it had been back then when it was so blond it was almost white, when sometimes it looked like there were lights inside it, or at least electricity. He remembered the first time he saw her in daylight, walking toward him, away from the director’s house up in the canyon, early enough in the morning that no one else was awake.

She put her head back against the headrest. She had one knee up against the door of the car, sitting like a man. She seemed happy, glad to be exactly where she was.

There was a reason Jimmy didn’t like the simple, obvious answers. They hurt more.