Among the Living (8 page)

At the end of the hall he clipped the red filter onto the light again and shined it at his feet, at the frayed carpet, worn in a path in the center. The dim red circle of light crossed the jamb, into the back bedroom. There was clutter just inside the doorway, stacks of magazines, folded grocery bags, a couple of empty flat cans.

He stepped in. There was quick movement somewhere, something the same color as the room.

Jimmy stepped to the bay windows that faced the back. There were heavy drapes, closed together, and lowered shades behind the drapes. He ran his fingers along the edge of the shade, felt something. He shined the red light: the shades were taped tight against the window with duct tape, blocking any light from outside.

Jimmy was trying to make sense of it when a woman coughed and, in the same moment, a black-and-white TV flashed on.

He jumped half out of his skin, fell back against the windows.

The woman—she had stringy gray hair cut straight across the bangs and wore a faded dress and a sweater and slippers—had turned on the television manually. She now just stood there before it, blue/gray, dead-looking in its light.

She watched it a moment, stepped back, sat in a worn chair.

Jimmy was caught. There was no place to hide. He stood stock still in the pulsing light of the television.

No, now she looked right at him, as if he had said that last thought out loud. A cat jumped onto the arm of her chair. Then a second cat and a third and a fourth came out from somewhere to rub against her. She still looked directly at Jimmy where he stood, eight feet away, against the windows, in the wash of TV light.

The red cap to his penlight fell to the floor. He bent to pick it up. She watched him. He looked into her eyes and she looked into his.

He took a step toward the doorway. She followed him with her eyes, her expression unchanged.

And then she looked back at the TV.

On the office wall was a colored print of Jesus sitting in his robes across the desk from a businessman in a gray suit.

Jimmy was across the desk from Angel.

“You didn’t even see her, man?” Angel said.

“Not until she turned on the TV.”

“And she didn’t see you?”

“She looked right at me,” Jimmy said. “She saw me, but I guess seeing someone standing there wasn’t that out of the ordinary to her.”

“So who was she?”

“I don’t know. Nobody. A street person. Maybe just someone who comes in to feed the stray cats. It was easy enough to get in.”

“Sad,” Angel said.

Angel’s body shop was downtown ten blocks south of the City Center. Through the windows in the walls in the inner office you could see men at work on expensive cars. It was a beautiful old wooden building, once a Packard dealership, with a high arched roof. The floors were slick white. This wasn’t an insurance shop. You had to care about cars the way they cared about cars before they even let you through the door.
Clean
was about the highest compliment the men working here paid each other’s work.

Luis, the skinny kid from Angel’s backyard, worked alone in one corner of the shop, airbrushing a scene onto the tailgate of a chopped and lowered, scooped and stretched Ford F-150 pickup, an artful expressionistic rendering of the L.A. skyline, a pair of woman’s eyes emerging from the night clouds, and a blue moon.

Jimmy got up from the chair. There was a picture on one wall in a black wood frame, a World War II-era bomber rolled out in front of a hangar. Huge block letters white across the roof said: STEADMAN. There were palm trees behind it in the picture, Santa Monica behind the palms and an ocean beyond that, suitably gray, since it was wartime.

“You know anybody at Clover Field anymore?”

Angel shook his head. “Nah, it’s nothing but general aviation now, Wayne Newton flying in in his Gulfstar.”

“I like Wayne Newton,” Jimmy said.

“I think we all do,” Angel said. “It’s not Clover Field anymore.”

“Yeah, I know. Everything changes.”

Jimmy kept his eyes on the picture.

“So, you gonna tell me?” Angel said.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what you’re working on.”

“A couple of the dead,” Jimmy said.

“Lucky stiffs.”

Jimmy looked at another picture on the wall, next to the first, as he gave him the short version. “Double murder, 1977, guy killed his wife and her boyfriend down in Long Beach. He was convicted, executed.”

“Kantke. I remember it.”

“I’m working for the daughter. She wants to know if he really did it.”

“What’s the point?”

“I believe I asked her that.”

“What’s the connection to Clover Field?”

“The dead guy worked out of there. A pilot.”

In the other picture, Angel Figueroa stood alone next to one of the bomber’s fat wheels. The lettering said: “No. 2000 July 16, 1944.” He had shorter hair now, a buzz cut, but Angel didn’t look much different in the picture than he did here, sitting behind his desk.

“Good-looking guy,” Jimmy said.

“I tell people it’s Uncle Eduardo,” Angel said.

“Disco got a bad rap.”

Jimmy was buying lunch at Vern’s, a red Formica lunch spot out in The Valley on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, a half-gentrified art and artists’ neighborhood they were trying to talk people into calling
NoHo.

Chris Post drew musical notes on a three-by-five card while they talked. They were at a table in the window with a view to the street. He’d look out the window and then say something else to Jimmy and then draw another note on the card. He had a stack of three-by-five cards with a rubber band around them jammed in the pocket of his pocket tee. He was in his forties. He had bad eyes and long hair thinning on top pulled back into a ponytail. He wore orange jeans.
He was skinny and tall, no ass at all.
That was a line a lyricist friend had put to one of Chris’s melody lines once, presumptuously trying to turn it into a
song.

Chris never spoke to him again.

He was a musician, a real musician, the kind of shack-out-back artist who had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of computers and synthesizers and keyboards—and a safety pin holding his glasses together. To pay the rent, he played song demo dates and commercial jingles and the occasional session for a
Touched by an Angel,
but what he really wanted to do was . . . write atonal symphonies and then not play them for anyone. A few years back, Jimmy and Angel had encouraged him to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and he did, scrawling,
Go Screw Yourself!
across the application.

Surprisingly, he was turned down.

“Disco got a total bad rap.
Repetitive.
You want repetitive? You ever listen to Vivaldi, or, better yet, Ravel?”

Chris picked up a fork.

“What is this?” he said.

“A fork,” Jimmy said.

Chris picked up a spoon. “What is this?”

“A spoon.”

Chris started nodding his head. “Which is
better?
” he said.

“I hear you.”

“You got a steak, I’ll tell you whether a fork is better than a spoon.”

“I get what you’re saying,” Jimmy said.

“Most people don’t,” the musician said. “Sadly.”

Their food came. Chris got a bowl of soup the size of a hubcap, bean soup. Jimmy had just ordered a plate of steamed carrots. Chris picked up his spoon, wiped it off with a napkin.

Jimmy said, “I drove by there. Big Daddy’s.”

Chris slurped up the first too-h ot spoonful of soup. He kept shoveling it in. He
ate
like a musician, like a musician who hadn’t eaten in a week.

“How’s the soup?” Jimmy said.

“It’s all right.”

Ten years ago when Chris’s mother died, Jimmy had gotten him into an apartment and the first day he’d had to show him how to make canned soup. A week later, he introduced him to SpaghettiOs.

“So, I drove by there, Big Daddy’s,” Jimmy said. “Where it used to be.”

“And it’s a Starbucks now,” Chris said.

“A Kinko’s.”

“But you get what I mean . . .”

Jimmy got what he meant.

“I don’t get down there to the Marina anymore,” Chris said. “It takes four buses.” He took out a new three-by-five card and wrote a note to himself. “I’ll burn you a CD. The stuff you should be listening to. You ever hear Cerrone?”

“
Love in C Minor.
”

Chris was impressed. “How
old
are you, man?” he said. “I’ve never been able to tell.”

Jimmy let the question go unanswered. “Here’s what I need,” he said. “You know anybody who spun at Big Daddy’s?”

Chris was to the bottom of his bean soup. “Could I get another bowl?”

“Sure.”

Chris motioned to the waitress for another bowl, pointed to it like it was a Scotch and soda.

“I knew Slip Tony,” he said. “But he spelled it with an
E
instead of a
Y,
like
tone.
Tone Espinosa. He was the best. He wouldn’t say a word all night. He had all these imports. He was the first guy I knew of to use three tables. He’d throw something over something with something else underneath and you couldn’t believe what you were hearing. Spoken word. He’d lay in a guy saying a poem or narration for a training film for air-conditioning repair. There wasn’t anybody in L.A. who was a better DJ—except for maybe about a dozen gay guys in little clubs you never heard of playing tea dances on Sunday afternoons.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Dead. It’s funny,” Chris said, then caught himself. “Well, I don’t mean being dead . . . He became a cop. He was on a gang unit, right down in there, Venice south. Shot dead. Two years after Big Daddy’s, maybe by some slick who two years earlier was out on the floor, thinking how cool Slip was there in the booth, his head over sideways, half a headphone on his shoulder.”

“You know anybody else from Big Daddy’s? Anybody who’s still alive?”

The second bowl of soup came. “I’d also like another one to go,” Chris said to the waitress. He looked at Jimmy for approval. Jimmy nodded.

“Lloyd Hart. Lloyd-the-Void. He called himself
Popper
or
Rocker
or something but everybody called him Lloyd-the-Void. He was the DJ in the main room upstairs with the lights in the floor and the
Is-Everybody-Having-A-Good-Time?
jive. Slip Tone was in the
serious
room downstairs.” He wrote something else on another three-by-five card and handed it to Jimmy. “I
guess
you could say he’s alive.”

Chris dug his way down to the bottom of the second bowl of soup and put his spoon aside. He looked out the window again and then drew one last musical note.

He handed the three-by-five card to Jimmy.

“I don’t read music,” Jimmy said when he looked at it.

Chris whistled an odd little twelve-n ote tune.

“You just wrote that?”

Chris shook his head, nodded out at the street.

“What?” Jimmy said.

“The palm trees. Other side of the street. Up and down, different heights. If they were notes on a scale, it’d sound like that.”

Jimmy held up the card. “Can I keep this?”

“No,” Chris said and took it back.

The Love Storm
was the name of the overnight program at KLVV, fifth in the ratings for its time slot. The show had a cosmopolitan L.A. feel to it, slanting noir shadows and cigarette smoke curling out of your radio, but the studios were actually in a squat three-story box of a building on Van Nuys Boulevard in Van Nuys, the transmitter ten miles farther out in the Valley, almost to the mountains in a field of sunflowers. This time of night, the flowers would be closed up tight.