Among the Living (62 page)

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” the cop said. “
I’ve
never seen it like this. People I trust say they haven’t seen anything like this for a lot of years.”

“Since when? When was the last time?”

“When the man stepped up, the Passing. Fifty years ago.”

Jimmy dug in his pocket for the loose key to the Porsche.

“I know your man in black with the dog,” Dill said.

It stopped Jimmy.

“They call him Kingman. For Kingman, Arizona. Bad town for a Sailor.”

“He’s a Sailor?”

“
Old
salt. Made his way out here twenty years ago.”

“But he has a dog.”

“I don’t get it, either,” Dill said. “Maybe it’s the one dog in the world that likes us. Maybe it’s a
Sailor
dog, something new. I hate new.”

“What time is it?” Mary said when she felt him move in against her in bed.

“After midnight,” Jimmy said.

“It was after midnight when I went to bed.”

“That was the last song on the radio, coming up the road. ‘After Midnight. ’ ”

She made a sound like a laugh. “Don’t wake me up,” she said, dreamy.

There was a place called the Pipe in Long Beach. Jimmy waited until late afternoon before he rode down out of Angeles Forest. There wasn’t much use in going in earlier.

He figured he’d start at the sea, out on the edge, and work his way inland, looking for Kingman.

Just because. Because the son of a bitch had stood in his yard, looking up at his troubled girl in the kitchen window.

Because maybe he’d planted a gun in Jimmy’s house, where Mary could find it.

Just because.

There was still a little light left in the sky. It was pretty, the last light of the day, the light of surrender, as night moved in. The light was pretty, but nothing else was. The Pipe was wetlands, soggy marsh littered with what floats, whatever is cast aside and floats. Sailors, a certain kind of them, lived down here in the hulls of beached boats, boats on their sides, demasted sailboats and the rusting iron skin of a trawler. The “leaders” would be there, the dominant ones. There was a chance Kingman would be among them.

There were different kinds of Sailors, different levels.
Ranks
wouldn’t be the right term, because it would imply they were linked in service to some mission. In the end, Sailors were all just dealing with themselves, in it for themselves, trying to make sense of it. Even Jimmy Miles. Even Angel Figueroa.

But there was a kind of Sailor easy to spot: Walkers. Everybody said there were more of them in Los Angeles than almost any other city. Go figure, the one place where
nobody
walked. They’d lost all hope, given up, gone slack, checked out of the whole world of Good or Bad, and were a real danger because of it. The Pipe was always thick with them. Down here they tended to stand around fires, hard as it was to keep them going with everything wet, staring into the flames as if waiting for the fiery face of a god to appear, to tell them at last what to do.

“I’m looking for Kingman,” he said, to anybody who would let their eyes meet his.

Jimmy didn’t like doing this alone, but he hadn’t been able to find Angel. He called him. He kept calling him. Angel’s phone rang and rang. And he wasn’t in his usual haunts. His men didn’t know where he was, just that someone had come for him at noon.

There were a lot of ragged-looking Sailors down at the Pipe, shaking their heads
no
. But no Kingman, no black dog.

Jimmy cruised through Hollywood, down a back alleyway in the shadow of the Hotel Roosevelt, another gathering place for Sailors. The alleyway, not the hotel, which had gotten almost toney again. He was driving the Porsche. Angel had thrown a race-tuned exhaust on it. In the canyon of buildings, it provided a rolling thunder effect that made the men and the few women who were down here turn and look. He parked and got out.

Up close, the men looked like they were all on speed. Full-on jittery. Dilated pupils. Moving hands. It was what Angel had been talking about, the
jitterbugs
in the Sailor world.

“Who are you, Brother? What do you hear?” one of the men said before Jimmy could even get out of the car.

Two other men gathered closer, in anticipation of an answer.

No Kingman.

Jimmy drove by his house, stopped out on the street but didn’t turn off the motor. One of Angel’s men was staying there, in case anybody showed up who wasn’t on the guest list. After a moment, some fingers came around the corner of the heavy drapes in the window in the front room, moved them a half inch.

“Water the plants out front, bud,” he said, letting out the clutch to pull away. “They’re looking a little brown.”

The Sailors downtown that night were the worst off.

Same as it ever was.

Jimmy didn’t come down here unless he had to. The downtown Sailor scene had a certain drama to it that he tried to avoid. And so far he had avoided it, except for the couple of times they had dragged him into it, into the arch ceremonial bullshit they reveled in. Their headquarters was an “abandoned” courtroom with its high soiled marble walls on the top floor of the old Hall of Justice building. On Spring Street.

Jimmy kept going right on past it. Even sped up a little.

He went in on foot. His hands were sweaty. It was a funky neighborhood. Sixth Street. He’d done what he could, put the Porsche right across from Cole’s, a street-level, five-steps-down antique saloon with a bloodred mahogany bar and booths carved with the initials of traveling salesmen and USC frat boys from the thirties. But it was a Wednesday night and early yet, not even ten, and Cole’s was still dead. The Porsche looked wide-eyed as he walked away from it.

He came east two blocks. He’d been down here enough to know it wasn’t as dangerous as it looked. Most of the people whose eyes met yours weren’t thinking what you thought they were, didn’t want your watch, weren’t trying to guess which pocket you kept your cash in, weren’t drawing lots for your garments. The dangerous ones you probably never saw coming. Street people were mostly just people on a street.

He stopped in front of the hollow, dead building where he and Angel had climbed the stairs and found what they thought was the “home” of the man with the black dog, and the body of the North Hollywood street person who’d directed Jimmy there.

The House of Kingman.

The homemade video Dill had shown to Jimmy to close the deal with him had had the opposite effect. It had blown the deal apart, and just when Jimmy had the pen in hand, too, hovering over the long sideways line with his name under it. It didn’t happen right away, not even on the ride home. It came later that night, or maybe came the same hour dawn came to the house in Angeles Forest, while Mary still slept beside him.

Jimmy knew something about movies. His mother was a star. His father was a director. There was a screening room in the house Jimmy was born into. A studio nanny pushed him around the Fox lot in a French perambulator. All of his parents’ friends, and all of their enemies, were in the business: actors, directors, shooters, composers, editors.

Editors.
What was missing were the two-shots. There were no shots of either one of the brothers and a victim in the same frame. The shot list: A brother alone. A victim alone, usually in close. A wide shot, pulling out, a brother looking down at the floor. An extreme close-up of an incision. Sometimes the brother would be looking at the camera, sometimes waving it off. Sometimes there’d be a smile, a kind of sour smile that gave off a sex vibe. Naughty. There was one shot of blood on hands, in close. Holding a gutting knife.
Someone’s
hands.

There were no two-shots.

Jimmy was circling the base of the building, outside. The House of Kingman. You could walk all the way around it, alleys on the sides and on the back, Sixth Street out front. He and Angel had come in from the back. Jimmy headed that way. He didn’t think Kingman would still be there, but maybe there’d be somebody else inside who knew something. Or maybe there was some value to standing again over the spot where they’d found the body.

Where Jimmy had had to look at the face of someone who’d died because of him.

It was dark ahead. The light on the corner of the building was out. A black, dead bulb. (Shouldn’t that be the ultimate version of a
stop
light?) But Jimmy had a light in his hand, his own light, a foot-and-a-half-long Maglite he’d thrown onto the other seat of the Porsche when he left the cabin to drive down into whatever was supposed to happen next. Half light, half club, a cop flashlight.

He came around the corner with the light. Somebody scurried away at the other corner of the back of the building.

There was a flash of blue.

“Brother!” Jimmy called out.

The door was closed. A metal fire door. Jimmy watched his hand reach out toward it.

A shoe crunching glass. A sound effect.

Behind him. He spun around.

The shape had already stopped. It spoke.

“Knock knock,” Dill said.

Jimmy felt the way a Rhodesian Ridgeback looks, bowed up.

“Come on,” the cop said, stepping forward out into a little more light. “There’s nobody in there. Certainly not Kingman.”

He turned and walked back up the alley toward Sixth. “Come on, let’s get in out of the rain,” Dill said. It hadn’t rained in three months. Jimmy fell in behind him.

A black-on-black LAPD detective’s Crown Vic was on the street.

“Get in,” Dill said and got behind the wheel. Jimmy got in up front. He left his door open out onto the sidewalk. Cop cars don’t have automatic dome lights. Nothing dings or talks.

“You been busy tonight,” Dill said. “Forget about Kingman. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Jimmy thought a second before he did it, but he began to spit out his doubts about the videotape. He only got two sentences in when Dill leaned forward and started the engine.

Jimmy closed his door, and they pulled away.

“I have the Porsche up here on the street,” he said.

“It’ll be taken care of,” Dill said.

It was about the last thing Dill said as they drove across downtown to the 101 north. Traffic was light. Dill slid straight over to the inside lane and stayed there, rolled up to seventy, seventy-five.

All the way to Universal City. Maybe he was going to take Jimmy on the
Psycho
ride, take him in through the midnight VIP gate, buy him a churro.

They drove east on North Glenoaks Boulevard. And pulled into a motel, an old-style, single-story, U-shaped motor court.

A dark motel. With the sign off. Not even a No Vacancy.

A man dressed in LAPD blues but without a badge on his chest, stripped of anything that shined or named, stepped out of the office. On Dill’s side of the car. Jimmy looked to his right and saw another cop next to the ice machine with a pistol in his hand, down at his side. They both wore body armor vests.

Jimmy liked drama as much as the next guy, but . . .

“What’s this?”

“The Federovs.”

“Here?”

“Live and in color.”

“So who’s in the special cells they built down at Terminal Island?”

“Russians all look alike,” Dill said. “Actually, the Federov brothers aren’t Russians. They’re Ukrainians. That’s one of the things that honks them off. So I make sure and call them Russians.”

By then, they were out of the car and walking toward the back of the U. Another guard stood in front of the door to a unit.

They’d ripped out the partitions between three or four units across the back of the motel, taken them down to the studs, and pulled out the ceiling up to the rafters. They’d sprayed what was left of the framing flat black. The cage that held the two brothers was dead center in the space, built out of gate and handrail iron and metal mesh. And painted black. They’d left the motel carpet on the floor, the bathroom in the corner. The carpet was dirty green. Another guard was fussing over a coffeemaker in the corner, in what remained of a kitchenette.

The brothers were playing chess at a Formica table. They didn’t look up until the door opened again, and the guard stepped outside for a second, on some signal from Dill.

“I brought a friend of yours to visit,” Dill said. “He thinks you’re being framed.”

“Yah,” one of the brothers said, the younger one, the bigger one. Everybody knew all about them.

“He
loves
Russians,” Dill said.

“He’s right,” the other brother said. “Innocent. Not guilty.”

“Leave us alone!” the first bellowed.

“Go ahead,” Dill said to Jimmy. “Look them in the eye. You tell me.”

“Yah!” the first brother said. “Innocent!”

And then he laughed.

When Jimmy came out, there was the Porsche, waiting for him. It was such a Sailor thing to do.