Among the Living (68 page)

“I’m not thinking anything,” Jimmy said.

“Here’s another scenario,” Groner said. “The car was operated by remote control. The girl, Miss Nobody, was already dead. A body. Yet full of blood, like a ripe pomegranate, ready to burst.”

“I guess sarcasm is something you use every day in your line of work,” Jimmy said.

“Yes, it is. And on the weekends. Even sitting alone in my little backyard.”

“How about this?” Jimmy said. “Somebody talked another girl into killing herself, put the idea in her head and put her behind the wheel?”

There was a several-second delay before Groner laughed, a lag Jimmy would think about later, would try to calibrate.

“Yeah, crazy,” Jimmy said. “What’s next?”

“How about this?” Groner said. “Dr. Hesse is a Sailor.”

Jimmy had to remember to breathe.

“You said he wasn’t when I asked you.”

“I believe I said I wouldn’t think so,” Groner said. “I’m afraid I made the mistake of assuming something didn’t exist because I hadn’t heard of it.”

“Where is he on the local organizational chart?”

“Not on it, as far as I can tell. Though he may have pretensions. Just lives the good life. Wink wink.”

“How long has he been a Sailor?”

“Years. Thirty?”

Groner studied Jimmy’s face. Jimmy was chewing on the inside of his cheek.

“So I guess the boy, who looks just like Hesse, is adopted,” Groner continued. “Or he was hers from some previous dead end. I don’t know, maybe Hesse put the kid under a knife to make him look more like ‘Daddy.’ ”

“How did you find out?”

“People were asking about you,” Groner said. “I in turn asked about those people. You go back up the line.”

“When? When did my name come up?”

“For me, the first question about you came a few days ago, just when the girl died. Your Lucy.”

Jimmy waited for the rest.

“But the Jimmy Miles File had already been pulled. He’d made inquiries of others before it got around to me. Or I surely would have alerted you.”

“He.”

“Hesse.”

“When? When did Hesse start asking about me?”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Groner said. “A month ago. Before you came north. Great gears turn.”

He put a little drama in his voice. “So maybe
he’s
the mind reader, the prognosticator.”

A minute earlier, a pair of men had walked by the restaurant, and one of them had looked in, looked only at Groner. Jimmy wasn’t sure Groner had noticed.

But Groner noticed now, when the two men came in the front door, shoulder to shoulder, wide enough to block the exit of the businessman.

“I believe
you’ll
be getting the check,” Groner said, with a little shake in his voice.

Jimmy got up defensively.

“It’s all right,” Groner said, getting to his feet, too. “It’s nice to be noticed.”

“Who do they work for?” Jimmy said.

“Oh, could be any number of people,” Groner said. “These days.”

The men took a step closer, like starting a sentence.

Groner raised his open hands in surrender. He had spotted two more of the same subspecies on the sidewalk out front. And a car.

Jimmy just watched it go down. They hustled Groner out and into the back of the car.

At least it wasn’t Hesse’s big wine-red Mercedes.

Then it became visible
. . .

Jimmy stopped the car, driving westbound on Haight. The nouveaux hippies were bopping down the street. He’d just passed them. It was minutes after sunset. Haight at Ashbury.

They were flashing red auras, faint to Jimmy’s eye, but unmistakable.

“Are you seeing that?”

Machine Shop looked back over his shoulder at the hippies. “Uh-huh,
red
,” he said.

“I never saw it before,” Jimmy said.

“It’s the moon. Or all this
meshugas
. All this
activity
.”

“What about the moon?” Jimmy said.

“We’re goin’ into a new moon. Man, you don’t know much, for being a emissary from the south and all. Everybody’s different—San Francisco is different from L.A. You’re blue, we’re red. Blue sometimes but red sometimes, too, when the moon goes into a certain phase. You and me together will make purple. The world’s a rainbow, man.”

“Let’s walk,” Jimmy said.

“You’re the one driving . . .” Shop said.

The two of them had been cruising for hours in fairly aimless loops. Not that Machine Shop was complaining. Jimmy had gone by Shop’s Tenderloin hotel around noon, talked him out of going to work down on the waterfront. Jimmy needed the company, needed someone around him, beside him, someone from the time before everything started doubling back onto itself. A week ago seemed like a long time now.

Angel had never come back to the Mark.

“Maybe I need a night off. Sometimes I wonder if that silver paint is bad for you,” Shop had said as they were getting into the Porsche.

They made the run up across the Golden Gate to Marin. Past the house on Alcatraz Lane out on Tiburon. It was buttoned up, the black shutters closed. Jimmy drove around the circle in the village, then past the marina. The Swan,
Queen Mary
, was at the dock, a cover over the cockpit now, the mainsail sheathed. The cruise-down-the-coast guys in the Hunter 38 were long gone. Jimmy was beginning to wish he had made friends with them and gone along. Nothing was much simpler than a boat on the ocean, out of sight of land.

He took the 280 south out of the city to Hillsborough, a community of gated homes big enough to look Euro rich. He’d tried to reach Groner all day on the phone, at work and on his cell, but he never answered. He needed another address for Hesse. He pulled into a little branch library and dug into a city directory. There was nothing listed. But there Hesse was, in an old number of the local weekly, a picture in a backyard in a black short-sleeved shirt and tan linen shorts, a fund-raiser for a preschool, though there wasn’t any mention of Little Marc and no pictures of his smiling, supportive wife.

And no mention at all of the undead.

The article didn’t let slip a street address but referred three times to “Butternut Drive” and even “. . . at the end of Butternut Drive . . .” As they cruised by the numbers, single- and double-digit and nothing more, Jimmy asked Machine Shop what he knew about Hesse.

Nothing, it turned out.

“I move around at the
bottom
,” was the way Shop put it.

They found the house. The circular driveway was clean and clear, right up to the four-car garage. It didn’t look lived in, but that seemed to be the idea with all the homes on Butternut Drive. Show houses.

Machine Shop didn’t ask any questions, not a one all day, seemed content to just be along for the ride. They stopped for lunch at a sawdust-floor burger joint next to Stanford, a bit on down the peninsula, and then came back up on the 101 into the City. With the working stiffs.

They made one last stop, the building downtown where Hesse’s office was. Jimmy stayed in the car at the curb in a loading zone, let Shop ride the elevator up.

“It’s closed, locked,” Shop said when he came back down.

Which didn’t seem exactly right.

Night fell. Jimmy found a place to park on Haight, and he and Shop set out. They walked up one side of Haight Street eight or ten blocks and then crossed and came down the other. It was a midweek night but the tourists were out anyway. Jimmy and Shop came past the nouveaux hippies again, face-on this time. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry to get anywhere. More laid-back than the sixties, actually. The leader, with his Vandyke beard, who had seemed a little hostile to Jimmy before, this time put his hands together and bowed.

“I know you, Brother,” he said self-consciously, stiffly, the way you greet a foreigner with a phrase not your own.

“Right,” Jimmy said. “Hola.”

There was a flash of red from Shakespeare.

The young sisters were in the back of the group.

“Can I talk to him?” the one with the imploring eyes pressed forward and said. Her sister tried to hold her back.

“Of course,” the leader said. “If he is willing.”

“Hi,” Jimmy said to the girl. She looked about fourteen.

There was a stiff moment, and then the hippie leader said, “We’ll dig you later, Babygirl. We’ll be at The ’Choke.”

And he led his merry band away up Haight. Babygirl’s sister looked back at her, not happy.

“I’m going to get a tea,” Machine Shop said, when he picked up that Babygirl was still hanging back, with him there.

“Got any idea what The ’Choke is?” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, down the street. That’s where I’ll be.”

When Shop was gone, the girl leaned against the wall, took refuge beside a rainspout pipe. She said, “He calls me that, Babygirl, or Cry Baby Cry,” she said.

Jimmy was about to say something.

“But my name is Christina,” she said. “Christina Leonidas?”

Everything’s a question. Maybe everybody’s name is a question.

“Are you doing OK?” Jimmy said.

“My dad calls me Selene,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. He told me.”

He heard a breath, or an unformed word, catch in her throat. The perfect word, that explained everything.

“He’ll be all right,” Jimmy said. “I’m watching him.”

“I thought I saw him the other night.”

Jimmy nodded.

“No, I mean . . . again. Out at the Yards.”

“You mean the Point, Fort Point,” Jimmy corrected.

“No, the Yards. Where we saw you. Down south. I mean, I thought I saw him, but—”

“That’s your sister, right?” Jimmy interrupted. “That’s Melina?”

Christina nodded. Cry Baby Cry nodded.

“She’s . . . different from me,” she said. “She has all these ‘friends.’ I just feel like going home.” She looked at him directly. “I know I can’t, so don’t even.”

“I wasn’t going to say it,” Jimmy said.

“I mean, I know how it is. Sorta.”

“Where are you staying?”

“We were in this apartment place, down in North Beach, with these really nice people, you know . . . Sailors. But then Melina said things were changing, that something big was going to happen now, that we had to move, to be with the right people.”

“So where are you now?”

“With these people, the hippies. But we go back down to the Yards a lot, too. Where the women are, where The Lady is. Sometimes. That’s how I knew about you.”

“The Lady.”

“That’s what she told us to call her. She is so nice. She even let us go to her house.”

Jimmy decided to break the rule.

“Why did you jump off the roof? What was going on that night?”

She flushed red, so bright and so sudden it was as if she’d expelled vaporized blood into the air around her head and shoulders.

“It’s so stupid, I don’t know,” she said. “We were just hanging out with this guy Jeremy. We were just having fun. He knew all about everything. It was fun. I guess we were drinking, but it wasn’t that. Suddenly, we were both so
sad
. We were like crying and everything. And Jeremy was crying with us.”

“Stay away from him,” Jimmy said.

“Well I know that now,” she said, with a little fight in her voice that made Jimmy want to hold her.

“The Lady knows who I am?” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “I told you . . .”

“You mean from the other night. At the Yards.”

He was remembering that moment when he first saw her, the woman with the short-cropped hair, when he thought she looked like a version of his mother.

“From before that.”

“What did she say about me?”

“Just that you were a good person. Someone who understood stuff. Someone to follow. And that was why you had been brought here.”

“To the Yards?”

“I guess.”

Click. A fragment of light appeared in the angled space between the tops of two buildings across the street, a lamp, a flame, a mirror behind the trees, that hadn’t been there a second ago. And a rustling sound at the same time, though there couldn’t be any real connection. Jimmy followed her eyes to it. It was the moon. What there was of it.

“Do you know what Selene means?” she said. “In Greek?” She didn’t wait for him. “It means
moon
. When I tell people that now, they think it is so cool.”

He walked her down the street to The ’Choke, a coffeehouse. A coffeehouse for real, not like the Starbucks wannabe. Yesterday’s coffeehouse, not today’s. Jimmy didn’t tarry. Once he saw the hippies, saw Christina’s hard-eyed sister, once he had delivered her back to them safe and sound, he bought a pack of American Spirit smokes and then came back out the front.

And into the shadows across the street.

Machine Shop was already there.