Among the Living (52 page)

Left to stand in his parents’ bedroom, “house-sitting” in his own life.

Jimmy ended the night, or at least the night ended around him, standing outside another house, standing at the foot of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset, his eyes on the penthouse and the railing.

“Where’s your little doggy?”

It took Jimmy a second to hear the spite in her voice. She was in her sixties, maybe seventies, and stood an arm’s length away from him with her feet apart and her hands on her hips, as if braced against a wind or on the pitching deck of a ship. She wore all black, a dress, a sweater, a shawl over that. Old Country. He was on the sidewalk across the street from a pricey condo building in Brentwood, a four-story taupe job with black trim, black wrought iron around the windows.

The seventh of the dead. A twenty-year-old woman.

“I don’t have a dog.”

“Today you don’t,” the woman said. “The other nights you did.”

“Must have been somebody else,” Jimmy said. What he didn’t say was that, generally speaking, dogs don’t like Sailors.

“I
saw
you,” the woman said. She pointed her finger at him.

Jimmy just let her go on to her next line.

“I think it’s revolting, you coming around here, over and over,” she said. “Let the dead bury the dead.”

Jimmy decided to take a shot with her. Maybe there was something here. “I don’t even like dogs,” he said.

She tilted her head.

Jimmy pressed on. “I think they’re a menace, fouling people’s yards with their feces. Snarling, snapping. Urinating willy-nilly.”

She liked the sound of this. “It wasn’t you?” she said.

“Not if the person had a dog,” Jimmy said.

“I don’t like dogs,” she said.

“I’m like you, then,” he said. “You live in the neighborhood?” Jimmy asked.

“Right behind you,” she said. Right behind him was a cute little Spanish-style bungalow. Covered with tile. From top to bottom, side to side. Ceramic tile, blue and white and green and yellow, every inch of the face of the house, every surface, and out into the yard, up and over fountains and benches and from the front steps to the street on a curving sidewalk. Tile. If it had had a pattern, it would have been a mosaic, but there was no pattern to it. It was a crazy-quilt house.

Jimmy hadn’t really looked at it when he’d parked the car and gotten out, his eyes on the condo, checking the number.

“Damn,” he said now, scanning the tile house. He tried to add a flip to it, to make it sound like he meant it admiringly.

“You’re as bad as him,” she said.

“How so?”

“Coming out here, drooling over this. The death of that poor girl.”

“I was just going for a walk . . .”

“No, you weren’t. You were rubbernecking. Or worse. Let the dead bury—”

“I
am
the dead,” Jimmy said.

She took a step back.

He let her wonder for a minute.

“I write television scripts,” he said. He named a show with a creepy attitude, then tried to look as much like Rod Serling as possible. He tossed his head in the direction of the condo. “I thought this might make a good episode.”

“But you’d change the names,” she said. There was something plaintive about the way she said it.

“So you knew her?”

The woman shook her head. She pointed toward an arched-top picture window on the front of her house, a table, a chair, a Tiffany lamp there. “I sit there. I would see her come and go, out of the underground parking. She never walked anywhere.”

“What did he look like?”

“Who?”

“The one you thought was me.”

“Like you. But with motorcycle boots.”

He knew he wasn’t going to get much else out of her. The “colorful” have their limits as information sources.

“How many times did you see him?”

“Three nights. Just standing there, where you are.”

“When?”

“The night after it happened. And then the next night. And then a week later.”

“Did you ever talk to him?”

“Are you going to use him in your story, too?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not with that dog, I wouldn’t talk to him. That was the idea. The idea of the dog. To keep you back. To scare you.”

“What kind of dog was it?”

“Some black kind, the kind you don’t even see until it shows its teeth.”

There was steady west-side traffic up and down Barrington the whole time they stood there talking. Brentwood had its gentle hills, curving streets, all very easy. If you had the money. The tile house was one of the last of the single homes left on this stretch of Barrington. The rest were condominiums. She probably didn’t even know that the developers called her a holdout.

A car stopped in the middle of the street right in front of them. A Bentley, a ten-year-old Bentley. Black. Waiting for oncoming traffic to clear before it turned left. It made the turn. The window came down as the driver stopped in the driveway beside a keypad switch on a post. A hand came out and tapped a code onto the keys. A hand with a Rolex. The iron gate of the car park rose in recognition.

“That’s him,” the neighbor lady said. “Her father.”

The Bentley went down the sloping drive. The gate closed.

The woman turned to go. “You can stand out here and embarrass yourself all you want,” she said, hard-ass again. “Don’t think I don’t know who you are. Boots or no boots, dog or no dog.” She walked away up her tiled walk, which looked from this distance like walking on broken glass.

Twenty minutes later, the Bentley came back up out of the building. The window was coming up.

You didn’t have to see any more of the man at the wheel behind the black-tinted glass to know who he was. He was everywhere, or his face was. Looking down from billboards, on the sides and backs of buses. And always with a single word across his chest, over his heart:
trust.
The dead girl’s father was Mike Roberts. Of Channel 8. Now he’d gone white-haired and slipped from the network wholly owned and operated down to an independent station, but he’d brought half of his viewers with him, and whatever the ratings were or weren’t, he was still
The Anchorman
in Los Angeles for anyone who’d been here longer than five years. For the new arrivals, he must have seemed like
El Presidente
or
El Jefe
or
The Pakhan
, staring down at his people from every rentable, printable surface.

He was no pretty boy. He had a face like a marine, or a movie star playing a marine. And they
did
trust him. He was the one who went out and stood in the rain for the rest of them, hillsides sliding in the b.g., the one who raced in a panel van on the crest line in Angeles Forest with the flames “leaping across the highway, Trish!” for the sake of the safe at home in their living rooms. Even if all that was years ago.

When his little girl was still a little girl.

But her name wasn’t Roberts. It was Weinstein. Rachel. And as far as Jimmy knew nobody had ever connected the daughter to the father. At least there wasn’t anything in any of the newspaper clips Dill had given him. It wasn’t public knowledge. Another card facedown. She’d been seventh in line.

Jimmy thought back. The coverage had ramped up about then. Maybe that was why: one of their own had been taken.
If it can happen to us
. . .

Along about then was when the people of the city really started feeling threatened. He/they were out there.

Who was next?

Jimmy was following him, following the Bentley. Roberts took Sunset all the way in from Brentwood into Hollywood. The Action Eight studios were in a block-long, solid white Greek Revival curiosity on Sunset, the old Warner studio, where Warner Brothers had started, where
The Jazz Singer
had been shot a thousand years ago.
Mammy!
The Bentley slowed at the gate, and the window came down so the anchorman could chat up the guard, who obviously knew the car, who already had the crossing arm up. The biggest billboard of all was over the studios.

Rachel Weinstein had been dead two months. Jimmy wondered who or what Mike Roberts trusted now.

He had pulled to the curb across the street. Jimmy didn’t know why he’d followed him. He stayed there an hour, waiting for an answer. All he got for his trouble was a glimpse of the Bentley behind the gates in the parking lot. A young man came out, opened the unlocked trunk, removed a white cardboard box, something not too heavy. The kid, the intern, was trying to balance it on one leg so he could reach up and close the trunk when the guard from the gatehouse came running over to assist.

Maybe the anchorman had given his girl his Emmys and now was getting them back. Prick a famous man, and does he not bleed?

Jimmy ended the day back in Encino, Encino by daylight this time. He parked the Cadillac across from the television writer’s long, low house. He didn’t know what he was looking for here, either. He was still new to this.

On the For Sale sign out front there was a radio frequency, a lightning bolt logo that explained it. The Realtors had a new trick. Jimmy tuned it in on the car radio. It was a two-minute commercial for “the property.” Which, it turned out, was spectacularly more valuable even than it appeared. Or at least priced that way. It was a woman’s voice, warm as the smell of fresh-baked cookies, probably another actor doing this to pay the bills, waiting for that big break. Music played in the background, George Winston, if Jimmy knew his New Age tone poems. He shut it off just as she was getting to the square footage of the “bonus room” and got out.

He stood there on the sidewalk across the street for five minutes, just stood there. He could almost hear the screams from out here, through the tinted, double-glazed glass. Is that what he wanted? Is that what he was looking for? Is that why he’d come back? Is that what he was waiting for? For it to get
real
?

He heard a sharp sound behind him, metal scraping on something, and turned. It was a gardener with a grass rake raking the lawn next to a concrete driveway, hitting it every third or fourth stroke, his eyes down. He was a South American, hard to say what country. A few years back, they were all “Mexi cans”; people thought that, but they weren’t, many of them. There were Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Costa Ricans. It also was hard to say how old the man was. He wore clean khakis and had a red kerchief knotted around his neck. Put him in a suit on a telenovela, and you’d realize how handsome he was.

“Amigo,” Jimmy said.

The tile house lady in Brentwood may have stepped back from Jimmy when he spoke, but this man
jumped
back. Five feet. With a scared-to-death look, an I-know-you look. He backed over a rosebush, lifted his rake, and turned the handle sideways, as if he was going to make the sign of the cross with it. From the reaction, Jimmy might as well been a monster, out in broad daylight.

A monster the gardener had seen standing there before.

The man kept looking around, as if looking for the black dog . . .

Angel picked up Jimmy in front of his house. In a primer-red Porsche Cabriolet with no top, just the metal birdcage frame folded back without any cloth over it. It was a ’64. A 356C. It had already been lowered a bit, lost all the chrome, the radio antenna frenched in, but in a way that didn’t look wrong. The seats were bare-bones, but they’d already been rebuilt, too, had a Tijuana border-crossing five-dollar blanket thrown over them.

The engine had a perfect sound to it. It had gotten the first dollars.

“Whose car is this?”

“Nobody’s,” Angel said. “Mine. Yours. I’m just doing it for myself, for the glory of God.”

“Jesus is gonna love it,” Jimmy said.

For now, they were headed nowhere. On Western Avenue, south. It was what they did instead of talking on the phone. It was ten thirty or so. A weeknight. There wasn’t much traffic.

Angel took Jimmy’s Jesus line with a smile. He always did. He was content in his belief and easygoing about others’ disbelief. It worried him, made some part of him sad, but he repeated the same line ten times a day, usually out loud: “It’s in God’s hands.” There was so much doom around him, he had to pick his battles.
Let go, let God
was another one, another line he repeated.

“Let me ask you something,” Jimmy said. “ ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ What’s that about?”

“It’s in Matthew.”

“Yeah, I know. I looked it up. I thought it was Shakespeare.”

“What do you think it’s about?”

“I think it’s
harsh
, is what I think. You read the story. Jesus is heading out, some guy wants to follow him but says first he has to go take care of his father’s funeral. And Jesus says, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ ”

“I used to think it was about
us
,” Angel said. “Back about a hundred New Years ago . . .” That was what they called the increments of time since they’d become Sailors, since it’d happened to them, since they’d crossed over to death’s other kingdom: New Days, New Weeks, New Years . . . Angel Figueroa had been a Sailor almost seventy years. But looked mid-thirties, in his white T-shirt and baggy starched jeans, and long, hipster-straight-back black hair.