Among the Living (56 page)

“Let’s go,” Jimmy said when the song was done.

He had told Angel about Les Paul and about The Wind Cries Mary, but she was the only Mary Jimmy told Angel about that night.

The night Lucy had died and Jimmy had ended up in the library at the
Chron
with Duncan Groner, they’d talked Sailors, suicides, and San Francisco.

But Jimmy hadn’t left it at that. At the end, as they were walking out to go get that drink, Jimmy spoke her name, almost as if it was just an afterthought.

Mary Hesse.

Or rather, he spoke
his
name, Dr. Marc Hesse.

There was a beat. “Don’t personally know him,” Groner said.

He plopped down into an armless roll-around chair and rolled over to one of the terminals. His two index fingers went to work, typing hunt-and-peck at a furious speed, more peck than hunt. He hit
Enter
with his elbow, to be funny.

“There used to be black steel file cabinets in here, wall to wall, floor to ceiling,” he said. “Mother of God, I miss them. Now you put in a name and you end up with pictures of some gentleman servicing his wife in Quito, Ecuador.”

The screen filled up in front of him. Text and pictures. But fully clothed.

“Cardiologist,” Groner said first. “Who is he to you?”

Now it was Jimmy’s turn to hesitate, to shove aside all the words that were gathering around the truth. To come up with the right lie.

“Something I’m working on,” was the one he settled on. It was true in its own way. He’d been working on the idea of Mary over all the years since they’d been together, trying to tame it in his head. Trying to get over it.

“I thought what you were working on was a sad little Mexican girl who came up here and killed herself,” Groner said.

“It goes where it goes,” Jimmy said. He was looking past Groner to the image of Hesse on the screen, a color shot of the doctor in another tuxedo at another charity event. Or maybe the same tuxedo. Jimmy couldn’t help but see a cold, unpleasant look in the other’s eye, in the shape of his face, in the reluctance of the muscles around his mouth to gentle into anything remotely like a real smile. That face said,
I can do anything I want to you.
To Jimmy, anyway.

“Cardiologists are cold bastards,” Groner said, like he was inside Jimmy’s head. Maybe the San Francisco Sailors had come up with some powers their brothers to the south had missed out on, like mind reading.

Another screen full of information replaced the first.

“Not much about his years back East,” Groner said, reading. “Sketchy. A liberal arts college in central Florida, then Duke for med school. He’s thirty-eight, one kid.”

Jimmy held himself back from asking what he really wanted to know. About Mary.
Her
past. What she had been doing since their time together in L.A.

“He’s on boards, professional and philanthropic,
loves
stray animals apparently, believes in neutering, plays tennis.” The bony index fingers went to work again. “Oh, this is rich. He’s a Mormon. So that means he has a year’s worth of food and water in the basement of the nine-bedroom house in Hillsborough.”

Jimmy waited.

“He has a house on Tiburon, too,” Groner said, reading. “And probably a cabin up in Sebastopol, where he dances naked in a fern-ringed redwood glen with a secret assemblage of men at solstice.”

Groner spun in the chair to look at Jimmy. “His wife is beautiful,” he said after a long beat. Then he looked back at the screen.

“Mary,” Groner said. “He doesn’t deserve her. Maybe none of us do.”

Jimmy took the reporter’s obvious, immediate dislike of Marc Hesse as an act of friendship, though Groner couldn’t know why Jimmy hated him.

“Any chance he’s a Sailor?”

Groner shook his head and said, “I’d know.”

And then they’d gone off into the night for that drink.

Hesse had offic es downtown, in a building across from the TransAmerica Pyramid.

Midmorning, Jimmy was standing out front. Groner had called him at the Mark with the address. Hesse had just moved from previous digs. This new place wasn’t even listed yet.

Jimmy knew enough about movies to know it was the building with the “florist’s shop” on the ground floor where Dirty Harry had faced down somebody, said something sharp while the punk was left to stare into the holey end of the .44 magnum. It wasn’t
Dirty Harry
itself or even
Magnum Force
. It wasn’t “You have to ask yourself, do I feel lucky?” or “Go ahead, make my day.” The movie was probably
Sudden Impact
, and the line wasn’t good enough to get remembered, the way it was with sequels.

He should have been off with Angel, looking for Les Paul. He hadn’t even knocked on Angel’s door when he left the Mark.

Jimmy rode up in the elevator. He felt lucky.

He didn’t know what his intentions were, what the plan was. What was he going to do, slap Hesse in the face with a glove? Challenge him to a duel?
Go ahead, make my midmorning.

It never came to that. The doctor was in surgery.

The waiting room was empty. Everything was perfect. The magazines were unmussed, in neat stacks. Unread. Even the sports magazines. Even the swimsuit issue. Everything had a new smell to it. The receptionist was cute, didn’t have a drop of blood on her. She was a little flirty, maybe bored with a long, slow morning. Or it could have been that everybody who came in was old and pale and short of breath. Jimmy’s breath was just fine.

The art on the walls was original. Oils. One canvas pulled Jimmy closer. It was of a boat entering a harbor, a black-and-white sloop, a storm behind it like a giant with a puffed-out chest. The painting even had a name:
In Time.
It wasn’t pretty, as pictures went. It went right up to the edge of pretty, stopped just short;
art
that way, not decoration or entertainment. Jimmy wondered why a doctor, a cardiologist, would choose it for the eyes of those waiting.
We found the blockage just in time
?
You’re safe here
?

It made Jimmy want to eat a steak, drink a martini,
Celebrate Life!
with the new hippies in the Haight. What he remembered of it.

It made him want to hold Mary.

“Bye,” the flirty receptionist said to his back.

A call to Groner on the run got him the name of the hospital where Hesse was. Under the hood of some poor bastard. Valve job.

Groner kept the info coming, a second call. He told Jimmy to look for a deep dark red, big-dog Mercedes, a CLS500.

“A color called Bordeaux Metallic.”

“Sounds delicious,” Jimmy said. “Fruity, but not casky, I hope. But how am I going to find out what row he’s parked in?”

Jimmy was already at the hospital, in the corner of the lot. He was making a joke.

“Where are you?” Groner said.

Jimmy told him.

“Look straight ahead, on the right,” Groner said. “Under the carport.”

“Now you’re starting to creep me out,” Jimmy said.

“I can see through walls, across town, but only if the conditions are exactly right,” Groner said. “A friend works there, in the ER. I just called her. Hesse’s name is on a parking place.”

“Your friend a Sailor?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re sure Hesse isn’t a Sailor.”

“I would say no,” Groner said.

“Would you say any more?”

“I’ve never heard of him, never heard anybody speak of him,” Groner said. “Remember, I’ve been here a very long time. And then there’s the boy.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said.

Sailors were sterile. Some cosmic safeguard. Or joke.

“Of course, the boy is six. Hesse could have fathered him Before.”

“Yeah.”

“But then why would they so resemble each other? You haven’t seen the boy. I’m sitting here looking at a picture of him.”

Of course Jimmy had seen him. The boy didn’t look anything like Mary, but Jimmy wondered if he’d just thought that because he liked that idea, because it made the reality of the situation a little less painful for him. So the boy looked like his father.

“I have work to do,” Groner said. “People to bury, mysteries to demystify. Good luck. With whatever it is you’re doing.” And he was gone.

Hesse didn’t appear for two hours, two hours before he got into the bulbous new Mercedes and backed out of a reserved parking place. (His name wasn’t on it.) The hospital was the medical center at UCSF. On Divisadero.

He came back toward downtown. He disappeared into the Sequoia Club on Hyde, the private club, pulled up in front, left the Mercedes with a valet. He stayed inside for a half hour and came out into the afternoon looking fresh, clean shirt, pressed suit. Came out under the SC’s arched doorway, under the letters cut into the stone . . .

 

GREAT GEARS TURN

 

Hesse then drove west on Geary, through the Richmond District, out to Fourteenth Avenue, where he turned right, headed north. He stayed with it as Fourteenth turned into California 1 in a tunnel of tall old trees, a corridor of mystic greens and almost black browns that kept closing in tighter until it burst open into the Presidio, then onto the Golden Gate. Dr. Hesse was headed home.

Jimmy stayed right behind the Mercedes on the bridge until he realized how close he was following. It was borderline road rage. He eased off, let a BMW motorcycle and an Accord pulling a U-Haul trailer pass him and then tuck back in, so he had a wall between him and the Mercedes. A cool-down zone was another way to look at it.

Jimmy had a
What am I doing?
moment. He hadn’t learned anything so far, nothing except that Marc Hesse was fairly young, fairly good-looking. Rich, clean. A member of society in good standing. Belonging to all the right clubs. Paying rent, fixing heart valves. Buying good art. Friendly when it came to the little people. He’d waved to a pair of nurses coming in as he was leaving the hospital. So what if they only tentatively lifted their hands, as if they didn’t exactly recognize him? It was the thought that counted.

A wearer of Italian suits.

A brand-name shopper when it came to cars.

A neuterer of strays.

A
giver
. What else?

Oh yeah, not sterile.

Alive, not dead. Living a life with the one woman who had shown Jimmy what love could look like, when it finally came round to you.

Jimmy yanked the wheel right, took the exit for Sausalito. It was just about the last self-protective instinct he’d have for a good, long time.

You know you’ve got it bad when you start lying to your friends. About her. About you. About
it
. Or just leaving it unsaid, which is another way to lie. Jimmy was on the same bench as before in the little pocket park on the north end of Sausalito, when he had been tailing Lucy and Les Paul four or five days ago. But he wasn’t thinking about them. He was looking, through the trees, past the red-and-white ferry boats, one coming in/one going out, past the sailboats in the marina, across the water to the knob of Tiburon. The tip of it was shaped like a turtle. Maybe that’s what
tiburon
meant. There was a light chop on the water, a little wind. Sitting there, he was wondering why he hadn’t told Angel straight out about seeing Mary. About the hole seeing her again had pulled him into. Angel knew more of the story of Jimmy and Mary than anybody, knew it from all angles. Start to finish, beginning to end.

Maybe he’d tell him now. Because Angel was walking across the grass toward him.

“He’s here somewhere,” Angel said from ten feet out. “We lost him. He came in on the boat.”

Les Paul.

“What are
you
doing here?” Angel said.

“Just out riding around,” Jimmy said.

“Come on, let’s go find him.”

Jimmy didn’t move off the bench. Angel looked at him.

“Maria, mi Maria, esta aqui,”
Jimmy said.
Mary, my Mary, is here.
He’d gone to Spanish without thinking about it, but it made sense. The Spanish Jimmy knew he learned from Angel, back in those L.A. days.

“Where?” Angel said.

“There. Tiburon.” He lifted a finger to point at the arched back of land across the way.

“That’s bad,” Angel said.

“She’s married. Has a little boy.”

“You talked to her?”

Jimmy shook his head.

Now Machine Shop was walking toward them across the grass.

“That’s bad,” Angel said again. “Bad for you, bad for us.”

“He’s down here,” Shop said. “I found him.”

Jimmy got up.

Les was in a bar. And he had a beer in front of him.

“Doesn’t anybody check IDs in this town?” Jimmy said. They were in the doorway. The bar was open in the front with French doors that slid aside, and open on the back to the water. Heavy, dark, carved curving wood, a stained glass skylight. It was about as Sausalito a bar as there could be. The boy was alone at a round table with his back to them, across the half-filled room. With his beer.