Among the Living (53 page)

“I mean, I thought, here we are, we were the dead, walking around, here was a job for us.”

“What does it mean?” Jimmy pressed.

“Jesus was a rebel leader.” Angel always said Jesus like the gringos, not
Hay-soos
, at least when talking to white men. “It was the beginning of things. He was starting the revolution. Jesus
was
the revolution. ‘Follow me and become fis hers of men,’ he said when he was talking to fishermen. He meets you where you are.”

“So what did he mean by it?”

“You sound like you’re mad at him.”

“What did he mean?” Jimmy said, harder. He was looking away, looking at the whores on opposite corners of an intersection they blew past. If you didn’t slow down, they didn’t even look like
people
. They just looked like sex. Sex and money.

Bad sex and dirty money.

Angel was nothing if not patient. “ ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ All that matters is what happens now. Next. There’s no purpose in the past.”

Jimmy let a block go by. “But
you’re
the guy who restores old cars,” he said.

“I don’t restore anything,” the other said quickly. “I make something new out of the old.
Too
new for some.”

Angel shifted gears, literally and fig uratively. “Are we looking for something? Somebody?”

“Yeah, somebody who looks like me,” Jimmy said. He told Angel the story of the tile-house woman in Brentwood and then the yard man in Encino.

“He got a name?”

“Three or four or five. I just call him Handsome.”

They drove around the rest of the night, looking where they knew to look, looking for trouble, but they didn’t find him, the man who maybe looked like Jimmy, the man in black with the black dog.

They didn’t find him the next night, either.

Or the next day. Or the day after that.

But they found him.

Or at least they found his den.

It was six o’clock. They came walking down the alleyway between two brick buildings in a “neighborhood” of shit-hole apartments and rooms by the week in the shadow of downtown. And not one of those
romantic
shadows of downtown where painters rent lofts and documentarians make movies of each other and the beautiful poor. Angel’s body shop was five blocks away, so he’d met Jimmy here. Six o’clock. Anywhere else in L.A. that would have meant the light was pretty, but down here the shadows had won the battle between light and dark a half hour ago. Here the Golden Hour only meant you couldn’t quite see.

What Jimmy had was an address, a location, a home base for the man with the black dog, the man who’d shown up at eight of the murder sites, from what Jimmy had learned. Who’d just stood there across the street, whichever street it was, the day after. And sometimes the next. Reliving it? Funny word for it. In the end, after a few days, Jimmy found somebody who knew somebody who knew something. So a few words, an idea, maybe even a lie, had led Jimmy to this alleyway. Maybe to the man.

But what did he know about detective work? He’d heard a line once, about art, about sculpture. About a sculptor known for his enormous, very realistic sculptures of horses. He had been asked how he could do it, his technique. “It’s simple,” the sculptor had said, “I just chip away everything that doesn’t look like a horse.” What did Jimmy know about detective work? Nothing, except to go everywhere he could go, cut away everything it wasn’t, until a shape emerged. What did he know, except that almost everything was a mystery and that what was most true about a thing you usually didn’t see until it was too late.

“Which floor?” Angel said. He was stopped, looking up at the side of the brick building at the end of the alley. It was six floors, old arched windows bricked in years ago, covered by a picture of something, signage. If it was one of those romantic alleyways in a documentary about the poor, the old sign would have been a fading picture of an orange tree with a lush, fading, green Promised Land behind it. What it was instead was a man in a bowler hat wearing a truss.

“My guy didn’t say,” Jimmy said. “Just that this was his squat, that he slept in the daytime. Or at least people only seemed to see him at night.”

So they went inside. The first floor of the brick building was open from side to side, with posts, with high windows with arched tops, with unfinished, worn wood on the deck. It had been a factory. Jimmy and Angel crossed to a pile of rubble in the middle of things. Angel picked through it and found a length of hardwood, like a table leg. Maybe it had been a furniture factory. Or a coffin factory. He gripped it by the skinny end.

“You look like a caveman,” Jimmy said.

To tell the truth, both of them were spooked. They’d bought into the hysteria. They’d been carrying it around, a gnawing unease, both of them, for six days. Since the killings up in Benedict. There hadn’t been any more murders since the director and the two women, but that had only increased the apprehension somehow. The whole town’s apprehension.

They went upstairs. The staircase was wooden but strong.

There wasn’t any dust in the center of the treads. Somebody had been coming and going.

“You should have called that cop Dill,” Angel said.

“He was gone,” Jimmy said. “Out.”

“I got his cell somewhere.”

“We’re here, we might as well go on up.”

“I wasn’t saying don’t go up,” Angel said defensively.

The second floor and the third floor were open side to side like the ground floor. Open and empty. The light was all but gone. Now they had to put their hands on the railing to feel their way up.

But there was light above. Golden light.

They came out of the stairwell onto the fourth floor. It was wide and empty, too, but across it there was a single tall window bringing in a sharp-edged quadrilateral of gold light.

They moved toward it. There was a heap of clothes, a bedroll.

And a body.

He was on his side, the upper quarter of his head smashed in from a blow that could have been inflicted by a club like the one still in Angel’s hand. Angel looked down at it, as if he was thinking the same thing.

Angel said, “He doesn’t look anything like you.”

“It’s not him,” Jimmy said. A moment passed that wasn’t as long as it seemed. “It’s the guy who sent me down here, from out in Van Nuys.”

There was dog shit everywhere.

On the drive home, Jimmy and Angel saw people standing outside an electronics store, looking in at the bank of TVs. Same thing at another store down the street.

The radios in all the cars around them weren’t playing music. It was just talking. All talk.

It was like the end of the world. Or the beginning. The people they passed on the sidewalks and the people in the cars around them seemed to be, if not happy, lightened. The Porsche had a hole in the dash where the radio used to be or Jimmy and Angel would have tuned in the news themselves.

Jimmy went straight to the television when he walked in the door of his house.

Mary was there, startling him, coming out of the bedroom.

She let the TV tell him. They’d caught the killers, black Converse high-tops, bone saws, leather gloves, in an apartment in North Hollywood.

Two Russian brothers.

Neither one of whom looked anything at all like Jimmy.

“Your girl killed herself.”

In Jimmy’s state of mind, with where he’d just been, what he’d just seen,
who
he’d seen, Mary and her husband, it took him a second to think which girl.

But he figured it out. And the guilt started.

“Get in,” Jimmy said.

From the circle out in front of the Mark Hopkins the two of them went across the city to the scene of the thing, the place where she’d done it. And then to the morgue. In that order, Jimmy delaying the latter as long as possible. It was Machine Shop who’d said, when Jimmy showed some hesitation, that they
had
to go see the body, to be sure it was really her, be sure that Shop had gotten it right, though it had happened almost right in front of him down at the waterfront. Plus, Shop had a friend who worked nights in the coroner’s office, a Sailor.

They’d already hauled the crumpled car away, the little baby-blue Skylark. Bad for business. They’d already hosed off the blood. The car hadn’t caught fire—when Lucy had driven it at fifty or sixty into the concrete face of Pier 35, the same blank building where the Leonidas girls had jumped.

“There was nobody with her, right?” Jimmy said to Shop, standing there next to the circles of oil and transmission fluid and the white blanket of the powdery flame-killer SFFD had sprayed down just in case. Atop the engine gunk was pebbly absorbent, what at the old Saugus Speedway they used to call “kitty litter.” They’d be back later that night to sweep that up.

“No, nobody,” Shop said.

“Where were you?”

“Over there,” Shop said and pointed to the corner of a parking lot. “Working. It was all just getting going. Where were you?”

Jimmy didn’t answer that question. He looked from the end of the story in front of him back over his shoulder to the beginning, at least this last chapter of Lucy’s story. She had come on a straight shot down the Embarcadero. There was a curve in the wide boulevard but not enough to make her slow. It wouldn’t be hard to get up to speed. Pedal down, go. It’s the long skinny one on the right. You don’t want to be going too slow, embarrass yourself.

“Was she thrown out?”

Machine Shop just nodded. Jimmy remembered the scene in front of the store down in Paso Robles, how she hadn’t put on her seat belt.

It was rocking Jimmy, standing there. Everybody knows how they’d kill themselves, if it came to that. What sad, sorry method they’d pick from the list. This right here was the way Jimmy had thought of, from the time he was a kid. And just about every time he came up on a freeway overpass abutment. Speed meets an unmovable object.

“It was a sweet little car,” he said. “Too bad.”

Shop didn’t have anything to say to that. He wasn’t into cars, not the way Jimmy was, not the way Los Angelenos were. (Who was?) Now wasn’t the time to bring that up, that old north/south row.

“She didn’t suffer,” Shop said. One of those things you say.

Jimmy scanned the flat face of the pier building. Pour-and-fill concrete. Probably three feet thick, given its age. Barely a scratch.

You could throw any number of little sad girls at it and not make a dent.

“Let’s get to that morgue,” Jimmy said.

Turned out she hit face-first. But there was that baby-blue dress, the one she’d been wearing the first time he saw her, in the café in Saugus, the dress that made him think of Mary. There wasn’t much blue left, stained as it was. He wondered what her purpose was, putting it on again, for her last scene, for the end. Or maybe she hadn’t had a purpose. Maybe he was the only one who saw purpose everywhere. Seeing the dress again made his skin crawl.

“Maybe you can start looking for her brother,” Jimmy said to Machine Shop as the coroner’s assistant drew the sheet back over Lucy, like a magician trying again when the trick didn’t work. “Go by the apartment first, but he hasn’t been there for a couple of days, as far as I could see. Maybe he doesn’t even know what happened to her. I don’t know if he was close by or what. I hope not. I don’t know
who
was there.”

“What are you going to do?” Machine Shop said.

Jimmy turned away. “Try to get this smell out of my clothes,” he said.

The coroner’s assistant said, “There’s no paperwork yet. You want a prep?” His name was Hugh. A Sailor.

“What do you mean?”

“Any family?”

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

“Normally, when we get the word from the family, if they’re out of town, we just bag ’em for chilled shipping.”

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said again. It was getting to be the thing he thought and said more than anything else.

“Because I could do a prep,” Hugh said. “On my own. In case there’s any viewing or anything. Here. I mean, this isn’t a funeral home, but—”

“Sure,” Jimmy said. “Why not? Make her look good. Do what you can.”

He was thinking of Angel.