Looking for Przybylski

by K. C. Frederick

  Ted nods, obviously preoccupied about something, and Ziggy can sense bad news coming. When they’ve returned to the place in Venice, Ted says with a sigh, “Look, Ziggy, I have to go out tonight. There’s something Linda and I have to work out. There’s plenty of food, so if you don’t mind . . .”

  “No, no,” Ziggy says, figuring that his days here are numbered. “Look,” he tells Ted, “I don’t want to be in your way.”

  “No, no,” Ted protests. “It’s just . . .”

  “I know the two of you want to get back together here.”

  “Well, that’s certainly true,” Ted says, “but Linda still has to stay with Sarah a bit longer. She won’t be coming back tonight, but I have to tell you it could be as early as tomorrow night. It depends on a few things. But she’ll be back here in a couple of days at most.”

  “I understand,” Ziggy says. “You don’t know if she’s managed to find out anything about Przybylski?” he can’t keep from asking.

  Ted’s face wrinkles into a frown. “Don’t worry about that. If anyone can find him, she will.”

  Here Ziggy is at the Santa Monica pier again. Ted dropped him off on the way to see Linda and gave him all the information he needs about the bus that will take him back to Venice. Ziggy was the one who suggested the pier rather than a quiet night at home, and he’s pleased to be walking here amid the larger evening crowds, the air filled with calliope music and the smell of popcorn. In the murmur of voices around him he senses an undercurrent of excitement, the kind that comes with the recognition that the day is soon going to give way to night. The carousel turns, the big-eyed horses bob, there’s a laugh somewhere behind him, a teenaged voice: “No, Bobby, don’t.” A giggle. “Not here.”

  As Ziggy leaves the amusement section and walks to the end of the pier with a cup of coffee in his hand, he can feel the coolness in the air. The colors out here have changed since the afternoon: the blue Pacific is becoming silver; on the shore, pinpricks of light have appeared around the curve of the coast and the mountains are dark purple now, they look like cardboard cutouts. The sky behind them, for a time a soft peach, is suddenly a chilly blue and all at once the mountains go black. Under the distant sound of the calliope music, Ziggy hears the insistent whisper of the surf beneath his feet, and he feels a shiver.

  What is it, this sudden wash of sadness that’s come over him? Whatever it is, it’s something familiar, it has nothing to do with the scene he’s looking at. As unseen waves boom under the pier, it doesn’t take him long to identify the source of this melancholy. It’s his older sister Terry, long dead—he remembers thinking about her this morning when he was talking to Ted about what he believed. Yes, he knows his sister isn’t alive, but he’s never been able to accept the fact that she’s really gone.

  Terry was the one who always made the world clear to the young Ziggy when he was ambushed by childish terrors brought on by the nuns at school, or his mother’s highly charged brand of religion. Terry grew up to be a rebel and Ziggy always remembers her with a cigarette in her mouth, making wisecracks about things others took seriously. “Oh, those sisters,” she’d say when he’d tell her about some dire prophecy one of the nuns at school had made. “Their problem is that they don’t get out very much, they stay in the convent and pray all the time. They don’t ever go to the movies, I’ll bet they don’t even listen to the radio. They need something to make their world a little exciting, that’s all. That’s why they make up those scary stories.”

  When Terry left for Chicago to live with a man named Lyle (nobody ever knew if they got married), their mother went into mourning and declared that her daughter could never set foot in her house again. She kept to her word when Terry moved back to Detroit without a mention of Lyle, and got an apartment near Seven Mile Road. In the numbers now, Ziggy would visit her there from time to time and talk to her about his rapid rise. Whenever he had a chance to move up in the business, he went to Terry for advice, knowing what she’d tell him. She was thin and wiry with short blonde hair, so nervous in her movements that she never seemed to be still, nodding her head as she listened, grabbing herself by the elbows and rocking back and forth as if she were remembering dance music from some place she’d been to that was a lot more exciting than it was here.

  “So, what do you think?” he’d ask her. “Think I should accept J.J.’s offer?”

  “Listen,” she’d say with a tight little smile, “nobody gives you anything free in this life. Take whatever they give you, and what they don’t give you, just grab.” She looked at him hard. “Not doing something you want to do, Ziggy, and then spending the rest of your life wondering whether or not you should have done it, that’s the worst thing that can happen to you.”

  He got the call in the middle of the night: his sister had been killed in a one-car crash. Somebody had to identify the body. The cops said she was going at least eighty when she hit the tree near New Baltimore on Lake St. Clair. One thing they found odd: the car’s headlights were turned off. The cop who said that was obviously trying to imply she might have committed suicide, but Ziggy wasn’t buying that. Wasn’t it possible she might have been thrown against the light switch? The cops had to concede that was a possibility.

  The next night he couldn’t sleep, he had to look at the place where she’d crashed. It was the time of year when the fish flies suddenly appeared like snow in places like New Baltimore that were near the water, covering whole stretches of the highway in a slush of bugs so that cars sometimes skidded on their soft bodies. Ziggy wondered about that, but the cops said that particular stretch of road was clear.

  When he went out there that night the marks of the impact were still on the tree, there were fragments of glass all around. He got out of his car and felt the cool night air on his face. He moved his hand over the shredded bark of the tree, he knelt to the pavement, picked up a piece of glass and ran it harshly between his fingers. He stood at the site of the crash a moment and began walking without any plan or destination. There was a little grocery store at the edge of town. For all he knew, it was one of the last things his sister had seen before she crashed. The place was closed but the streetlight beside it made it an island in the darkness, and before he realized it he was walking toward the light. How strange to be here, after everything that had happened. He was on his way up in the numbers, he already knew he was going to be a big success, but now Terry wasn’t going to see that. Here he was at the edge of this little town, in a place that was alive with bugs. Fish flies kept striking the glass of the streetlight above him, they jittered and zigged through the night air, they brushed his face. Beneath him a brown carpet of insects covered the sidewalk as well as the grass, their bodies crackling under his feet.

  He stopped before the store. In the darkened window were signs advertising Silvercup bread and Red Man tobacco. Nobody was in sight. Everyone else was asleep, it seemed, and the only living things in the Michigan night were himself and these creatures. What was he doing here? Where was he going? What did any of it mean? He crouched to get a closer look at the wriggling, pulsing things below him; on an impulse he dipped his fingers into the mass and scooped up a handful of fish flies—they were like penny candy, but lighter. They crawled and buzzed in his hands, a soft, damp weight. He held them for a while, then tossed them into the air; they fell with a faint beating of wings. All around him bugs flew and flitted, their long V-shaped tails moved in slow swimming motions, translucent wings glistened palely in the glow of the streetlight. The fishy smell was suddenly overpowering, and all at once, for all that he could see his success taking shape, Ziggy realized he didn’t understand where anything was going. The bugs wriggled and buzzed all around him as he crouched there, somewhere near where his sister had died.

  He feels that same scalding mass in his throat here, on the edge of the continent. Jesus, some things never end, do they?

  “Terry,” he says quietly, as if confessing a secret to the heaving ocean. What happens to people after they die,
though? As Ted said, it’s an important question. He knows that Terry is still alive for him as long as he can keep remembering her.

  But what about me? Who’s going to remember me after I’m gone? Who’s going to know I stood here at the edge of the Pacific remembering my sister? Who’s going to know I came all the way here on the bus looking for Przybylski, that just this morning I lost my way and drove into a canyon where I saw places I hadn’t seen since I was a kid, soft hills with long grass and dark, twisted trees where masked men on horseback waited for a stagecoach?

  He had no idea there was so much sadness in the briny smell of this ocean.

  The next day Ziggy awakens under a cloud, feeling the full weight of his years. It ought to be damp and gloomy outside but, this being California, the sun is reliably shining. He knows it’s just a matter of time before he’s going to be booted out of Ted’s place, and it looks as if he’s going to be no closer to finding Przybylski. What the hell, he thinks, I should just go to Charlie’s for a couple of days and get that over with, then go home. He has the use of Ted’s car again but he isn’t tempted to drive it today. Even the Santa Monica pier, which is close by, isn’t an attraction after his spell of melancholy there last night.

  He’s smoking on the outdoor sofa when he hears the phone. It’s Ted. “Linda says she has some news for you,” Ted informs him. “She’ll tell you tonight. She’s coming over.”

  “About Przybylski?” Ziggy asks.

  “Who else?”

  That evening Linda is eager to share her news. “Artie came through for us,” she says. “He solved the puzzle.”

  “I’m all ears,” Ziggy says.

  “OK,” Linda tells him, “Art figured if we couldn’t find the guy, maybe it was because he’d changed his name. Most people when they change their names keep the initial. That was a start. Then too, Art assumed your undertaker wouldn’t have changed his profession. So he looked around in his usual way and what he found is that the answer was here all along, right under our noses.”

  “What do you mean?” Ziggy asks.

  “There’s a chain of undertakers in Southern California called Prince Funeral Homes. Art did a little digging around and found out that they’ve been here about as long as your Mr. P. has. He checked it out and, sure enough, Prince used to be . . . well, you know who. It makes sense, doesn’t it, to change the name out here?”

  Ziggy snorts. “He wouldn’t be the first Polack that changed his name.” He runs his hand through his hair. “But, OK, he was doing fine in Detroit. Well, fine for a neighborhood undertaker. A chain out here? How could he get so big so quick?”

  Linda beams. “You could work for Art. He asked the same question and he got an interesting answer. It seems that a couple of years ago one of the alternative newspapers ran a story about Mr. Prince’s funeral business. It was written by someone named Sal Russo who unfortunately drank himself to death not long after that. But he wrote a hell of an article. He called it ‘The Prince of Darkness.’ ”

  “It sounds like he wasn’t exactly recommending the guy,” Ziggy ventures.

  Linda nods. “I’ll say. This Russo guy said Prince started out with just one funeral home, but that there was a big expansion a few years ago. The guy seems to be making tons of money. Russo implies that there’s something shady behind it, but he can’t exactly put his finger on what. There’s a history of charges of various kinds of abuses in the Prince chain, like the selling of body parts of the deceased. A lot of it is speculation, including the possibility that the business has been funded by money from organized crime.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Ziggy says, remembering the image of the prissy undertaker trying to keep his distance from the numbers in the parish. Was he a wolf in sheep’s clothing all the while?

  “Russo apparently confronted him about those allegations and Prince just brushed him off. Those were only stories, he said, started by jealous competitors. Russo said this guy was very slick, flashy but elusive.”

  Ziggy shakes his head. “Flashy is the last word I’d use to describe Przybylski.”

  “Haughty is another word he used. He said ‘Edward Prince sometimes acts as if he thinks his name is Prince Edward.’ ”

  “Wait a second,” Ziggy says. “Did you say Edward Prince?”

  “Yeah,” Linda assures him.

  Ziggy has to collect himself a moment before he can assimilate what he’s just heard. “The guy I’m looking for is named Cyril Przybylski. Edward is his son, little Eddie.”

  “I remember Eddie,” Ted says.

  “I guess little Eddie’s grown up now,” Linda says. “But he’d certainly know where you could find his father.”

  Little Eddie, Ziggy thinks. He has a hard time reconciling the glamorous figure described by that Russo guy with the Eddie Przybylski he remembers from Detroit. Eddie was more sociable than his father, but he showed no signs of being anything more than the dutiful son, waiting his turn to inherit his father’s business. What happened, how did this drab caterpillar turn into the splashy butterfly of the article? And, interesting as all this is, how did he get control of the company? What happened to the old man? Did he die out here? The fact is, Ziggy has just had one mystery solved, only to be confronted with another. But at least he has a lead, he has a name and it should be easy enough to get an address. He knows what his next step is, but he suspects he’s going to have to launch it from somewhere else, since Linda’s moving back soon and Ted’s going to be in no mood to play detective.

  Time is running out on Ziggy, at least his time here in Venice, where he’s got only one more night. While Ted and Linda are out shopping, he tries to take stock of things. First, he’s going to have to call Charlie and move his base of operations to Burbank, unappealing as that prospect may be. He’s actually got used to being here in Venice, knows his way around a little, and is comfortable in the neighborhood, but he has little choice in the matter. Burbank it’s going to have to be. But then there’s the business of the apparent conflict in Charlie’s marriage, which is likely to poison the atmosphere there all the more. Ziggy isn’t looking forward to this.

  Still, after what he’s recently learned about little Eddie, he’s more determined than ever to fulfill his original intentions and get in touch with old man Przybylski, or at least to find out what happened to him. But he’s going to need wheels to do what he has to, especially here in LA. He has to play the cards he’s got, and one of them has the phone number of Lennie’s agent on it.

  Sam Bluestone is wary. “Who did you say you were?”

  “I was on the bus with Lennie,” Ziggy tells him. “From Chicago.”

  “And you want . . . ?”

  “Well, I wanted to see how he was doing, for one thing.”

  “Hey,” Sam’s voice is raspy and Ziggy imagines a bobbing cigar in his mouth, “like I keep telling Lennie, these things take time.”

  “He said he was going to be at some motel in Hollywood.”

  Sam snorts. “The Tropicana. That place is a zoo. How anyone can get an hour’s sleep there with all those rock musicians I don’t know. But I got Lennie a nice deal. I got him a sublet, really a house-sit for an actor who’s in rehab.”

  “Is Lennie working?” Ziggy says. “I mean, I know he probably isn’t doing his comedy stuff, but he said he’d be working at something else like maybe waiting on tables at a restaurant.”

  “Waiting tables is shit,” Sam declares. “No, Lennie’s driving people around. People who might be helpful to him some day.”

  “Do you have a number where I can reach him?” Ziggy asks.

  There’s a silence on the other end of the phone. “How do I know you’re not a bill collector?” the agent asks at last.

  “I know one of Lennie’s jokes,” Ziggy says. “He told it to me.” He then repeats the line about the roaches with flea collars.

  Another sigh. “He’s going to have to do better than that, but that sounds like Lennie, all right.” He gives Ziggy a phone number,
which he immediately calls.

  “I talked to your agent,” Ziggy says.

  “Sam Blood-Out-of-a-Stone?” Lennie answers.

  “That’s the guy. He says you’re doing OK.”

  “He does, huh?” He doesn’t sound convinced.

  “He says it takes a while to make it.”

  “Don’t I know that,” Lennie says.

  “Hey, buck up,” Ziggy tells him. “You told me that yourself.”

  “I guess.” After a while, Lennie says, “Did you find your undertaker?”

  “Not yet,” Ziggy says. “But I’m getting close. The problem is, I had the use of a car but now I’m not going to. I wondered if you could help.”

  “Well, I do have a certain amount of free time,” Lennie says.

  “I’ve got your number,” Ziggy says. “Take this one down. This is where I’m going to be staying for a while. Maybe I’ll call you from there. I’m not going to be out here for long.”

  When that call is over, he dials Charlie’s number. Gloria answers.

  “Hi, Gloria,” he says. “I’ve been staying with a friend but now I’m ready to come to your place for a couple of days.”

  “Do you have transportation?” she asks. Ziggy listens for traces of guilt or betrayal in her voice, but it’s just Gloria.

  “I’ll find my way there,” he says. He’d thought about taking a bus but Ted has volunteered to drive him to Burbank tomorrow.

  Linda, who’s in the process of moving back into the house, gives him a big hug as she leaves for the night. “Keep us posted on your quest for Mr. P.”

  “I will,” he assures her.

  “Sorry about the suddenness of the last couple of days,” Ted says when they’re together in the car the next day. “The business between Linda and Sarah is complicated.”

  “Sure,” Ziggy says.

  “You see,” Ted goes on, “Sarah is an ex-lover of Linda’s from her days of sexual experimentation. They still had a lot of things they had to work out between them.”

  Ziggy’s uncomfortable listening to this and nods without saying anything.