Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  “So it could be cloners.”

  “Could be Satanists. Could be kids from one of the towns around here, playing a prank. Could even be some unholy combination of the two. About the only thing we know for sure is whoever did this has a taste for cola-flavored soda pop.”

  Frank scratched the back of his head with the eraser of his pencil, glancing through his notes for context. “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Found a thirty-two-ounce cup from McDonald’s buried about halfway down. Back in 1955, when they buried Jimmy, the nearest McDonald’s was in Des Moines, and they sold cola by the bottle, so I suppose whoever took the bones left the cup.”

  “A soft-drink cup,” Frank repeated.

  “Thirty-two ounces.” Tuck craned his neck to the side to see if Frank thought that important enough to write down.

  “This cup, it have any fingerprints?”

  “Oh sure, I pulled a clean set. The dirt in the grave picked up the oils so well I didn’t even have to use powder, could see the prints the moment I picked up the cup. ’Course I used powder and tape anyways. But for the prints to be any good to us I need someone to match ’em against, which at the moment I don’t.”

  “Should be easy enough to interview the employees at the local McDonald’s,” Frank said, “find out if they remember anybody came in that night.”

  “You’re right, should be easy enough, if I could come up with a good definition of local.”

  Frank looked at the marshal as though he suspected he wasn’t just mentally slow but completely stopped. “How about the one in Fairmount? Is that local enough?”

  “Fairmount doesn’t have one. Not big enough.”

  “The next town over, then.”

  “You seem like an educated man.” Tuck stepped back over the crime-scene tape. “How many McDonald’s outlets you think there are within, say, an hour’s drive from here?”

  “Five?” Frank guessed.

  “That’s a good guess,” Tuck said. “Why don’t I just show you?”

  A map of Indiana, punctured by colored pins, covered the far wall of the back room in Tuck’s office, opposite a television set, VCR, and ink jet printer perched on a rickety metal stand. Blurred black-and-white photographs surrounded the map and spread to the adjacent walls on both sides. Tuck ushered Frank around the table in the center of the room, stacked at the moment with videotapes, and asked, “How many pins do you see?”

  Frank nosed up to the map and did a quick count. “Looks like about a hundred.”

  “Over a hundred, and each pin is a McDonald’s outlet.” He pointed to a cluster of pins in the middle of the state. “About fifty are in Indianapolis. I’m saving those for when I’m really desperate. That leaves me fifty or so franchises spread out in all directions, not to mention the time it takes to go through the surveillance tapes.”

  I changed lenses, my hands working blind while my eye wandered to the images taped to the wall. The photographs mostly depicted young men holding what looked like large soft-drink cups, shot in the smudged black and white of a video surveillance camera. I asked, “These photographs on the wall, they’re your suspects?”

  “Not exactly suspects, no. Just the ones I’m trying to keep an eye on.” Tuck pointed to the cassettes on the table. “I’m still collecting tape from most of the franchises.”

  “Suspects or not, how are you identifying them?”

  “Anybody buying a thirty-two-ounce soft drink the night of the crime.”

  “Looks like you’re focusing on teenaged boys,” Frank said.

  “Not focusing, no,” Tuck said. “Just happens that most everybody in McDonald’s between ten and midnight is teenaged and male, at least around here. I haven’t looked specifically for any cloners, but you’ll have a better idea what those look like.” He showed the palm of his hand to the wall. “You want to take a look, tell me if you see any, be my guest.”

  I clicked the shutter on his gesture and when I lowered the camera, thinking I’d taken the shot I’d wanted, I saw a face I recognized. I stepped up to the wall and examined the photograph pinned to the right of Tuck’s shoulder. A young man stood at the counter, accepting change from the cashier, his purchase concealed in a take-out bag. He wore jeans and a denim jacket buttoned against the cold. The quality of the photo was so poor I could barely make out what looked like a scraggly blond goatee. I asked, “Who’s this guy?”

  Tuck glanced at the photograph and pointed to the next one in the series, which began another row down. “Somebody I’m not looking at too hard. He’s with a girl. I’m not interested in couples that look like they’re dating.”

  The second photo snapped from the tape caught the young man as he lifted the bag and turned away from the counter. The woman with him couldn’t resist a brief glance at the surveillance camera before she followed him out. I’d seen the same young man or one just like him loitering by the railing in Pacific Palisades Park, and the girl at his side, glancing up at the camera, looked like Theresa, the girl with the lavender-colored glasses.

  Five

  BEN WAS framing the new deck to his trailer, the Rott camped at his side, when I coasted the Cadillac into the cul-de-sac across the way. The trailer was a new Fleetwood single-wide, perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean from the sliding glass door in the living room and Temescal Canyon from the new deck. He’d lived half his life behind the wheel of a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department patrol car and since retirement prided himself on his developing skills as a handyman and part-time dogsitter. The trailer, at the end of a lane landscaped in palm trees, bougainvillea, and birds-of-paradise, did not stand out among the others; everyone in the neighborhood took good care of their homes, rooting them to the land with decks, car porches, and brick foundations. The Rott galloped forward at the sound of my engine, standing on his hind legs to greet me the moment I stepped out of the car. I let him get in a few good licks before I pushed him down, told him to behave himself.

  “Damn dog’s been moping ever since you left,” Ben said, wiping his palm on the side of his jeans before offering his hand. “Stole one of my shoes this morning. Found him under the trailer, slobbering all over the thing.”

  “Good thing he has no teeth or I’d owe you a new pair.”

  “Got a minute to lend me a hand?”

  He’d framed the deck on the ground and needed me to lift it onto the support posts, then hold the frame in place while he set the T-braces and bolted them down. He’d broken his collarbone some months back, about the same time the Rott had been shot, and still had trouble lifting things. We hoisted one end onto his shoulder, then I circled around to lift the opposite end.

  “Have a good trip?”

  He was just making conversation.

  “Good enough,” I said. “Made some money, at least.”

  “Anytime you make some money, that’s a good thing.” Ben had a blue-collar attitude toward money; its supply was not inexhaustible and so you grabbed what you could without being greedy and tried to hold on to it. He pulled a ratchet from his hip pocket and fit the end over the head of the bolt. “You’re getting kicked out of your place at the end of the month, aren’t you?”

  “That’s what the landlord says.”

  He tightened the bolt, asked, “Found anything yet?”

  “Haven’t found anything, no, not yet.” I didn’t want to tell him that I hadn’t started looking, not beyond a closed-eyed glance at the classifieds.

  He moved to the next post, slid the bolt into the hole, said, “I heard about a cabin up Malibu Canyon. The place isn’t very big, but there’s lots of land around for the dog to run.”

  “Sounds ideal,” I said.

  Ben nodded, tightening the bolt.

  “Probably a lot of people would love to rent a place like that.”

  He nodded again, concentrating on the bolt, said, “Probably.”

  “Then why waste our time?” I said.

  He circled to my side of the frame and set a T-brace o
nto the nearest post, glancing at me from beneath the brim of his baseball cap.

  “I’m a convicted felon,” I said. “My current landlord is throwing me out for violating the lease. Lee Harvey Oswald had better rent references.”

  “Don’t forget the dog.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “Landlords don’t care for them, particularly.”

  I shifted the weight of the frame on my shoulder, trying to get comfortable. “We’ll get a room in a flophouse, somewhere that takes ex-cons and dogs.”

  Ben reached over with his free hand, gave my shoulder a little squeeze. “Let’s give this place a look, just to see what you’re missing.”

  The cabin in Malibu lay near the end of a narrow dirt road that scaled down a hillside grove of oaks, the ground lanced by late-morning sunlight. I caught glimpses of glass and wood as we rolled past in Ben’s old Chevy Blazer, then forest intervened and I lost sight of anything but trees until the main house emerged, a hand-built, ramshackle wood and glass structure perched above a creek. The owner stepped outside before Ben turned off the motor, having heard us drive up, a concept I did not immediately grasp after my time in the city. He looked a few years older than Ben, wore jeans, a red-checkered shirt, and sported an old-fashioned handlebar moustache white as the freshly barbered hair on his head. He greeted Ben with a handshake and shoulder slap. His hand, rough with calluses and boney-strong, didn’t boast when it shook mine, taking into account the strength of my own grip and matching it. “You must be the lady paparazzo,” he said.

  “Got a dog and a criminal record, too,” I said. “But I don’t have leprosy, not yet anyway.”

  His smile had more warmth to it than I had a right to expect. He offered his hand to the Rott, waited for the introductory sniff, then pulled the dog to the side of his leg and stroked him with the authority of a man accustomed to animals. “As long as you don’t have a hard place in your heart for old cowboys, we’ll get along fine. So why don’t we wander up to the cabin, see if it suits you.”

  The walk wasn’t more than a few hundred yards, but he moved slowly, his legs broken, he admitted casually, a half-dozen times over the years. He’d worked most of his adult life as a stunt coordinator for Hollywood, getting his start on the John Wayne cowboy films of the 1960s because he knew how to fall off a horse well enough to get up again for take two. I glanced back at Ben, who heeled the Rott to his side and winked at me as though it had all been a good joke. Again I felt the odd sensation of a simultaneous burning and swelling in my throat, and if I didn’t know myself better, I would have thought I was about to burst into tears. They’d met on a film set, the owner told me, Ben hired to work traffic control. They both liked bourbon and bad jokes and had found a way to test their wide tolerance for both at one bar or another every month for the past ten years.

  The cabin had been built in the shape of a pentagon, windows on all five sides framing views of the surrounding forest. Redwood shingled the exterior walls and a narrow deck circled the entire structure, widening at the back, where a couple of lawn chairs had been set up to enjoy the view of the creek that trickled down canyon. The Rott immediately went on patrol, nosing the base of each oak before marking it as his own. He had a lot of trees to cover, and I imagine he felt some anxiety, wondering if he had enough in his tank to mark them all.

  The owner keyed open the front door and I stepped into a studio-sized room, a small corner walled off with just enough square footage to fit a shower stall and toilet. The cabin wasn’t any bigger than my place in Venice and the rent was higher, but the view of trees on all sides compensated. Had the owner bothered to advertise or list the cabin with an agency, he could have asked for twice the rent and still had his pick of tenants. The cabin never should have been offered to me. I didn’t deserve it and I certainly didn’t deserve having an old stunt cowboy for a landlord. Given my history and place in society, I belonged in a studio apartment with barred windows, leaky plumbing, and views of a freeway on-ramp. But the Rott took to the place like he’d been a country dog before he met me and if I didn’t deserve it he did. I said I’d bring first and last months’ rent plus a security deposit the following Monday, move in by the end of the week if it was okay with him. He didn’t ask for a credit report or a reference from a previous landlord. Ben vouched for me and that was enough. I thanked him as we drove out of the canyon.

  Ben glared at me over his shoulder, as though daring me to make something big out of it, said, “For what?”

  “For standing by me, I guess.”

  “The way I look at it, I’m acting purely out of self-interest. I don’t get you and your dog settled into a place soon, I’m likely to have a couple of permanent houseguests.” He reached out, gave my shoulder a squeeze. “I like the both of you, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to share my bathroom with a girl and a toothless Rottweiler.”

  I didn’t expect to see the girl in lavender glasses when I cruised Palisades Park early that afternoon, nor when I walked the 3rd Street Promenade, the Rott leashed by my side. The drifters, runaways, and just plain lost who gather outside the shops and cinemas to beg spare change from the crowds know me by my dog, and those who are sane enough to remember know that I’m willing to pay cash for information. Most homeless like dogs more than people. Even those who lost their minds long ago relate to animal warmth. I asked everyone I encountered whether they’d seen a couple of teenagers hanging around, one a boy struggling to grow a blond goatee, the other a girl who favored lavender glasses. The paper I worked for wanted to do a story, I said, and was willing to pay. One of the skate punks said he’d seen her, but I think he was just trying to scam some cash out of me. I returned to my apartment no wiser and ten dollars lighter in change.

  The landlord had thoughtfully taped a copy of his eviction notice to the door, reminding me I had until the end of the month to vacate the premises. He’d secured the notice to the door with duct tape and encased it in clear plastic as a safeguard against the elements. It was the tenth such notice he’d taped to my door. The apartment smelled of dog, girl, and unemptied trash when I stepped inside. I left the door open to air out the room. The message light on my answering machine blinked methodically in the corner.

  I dropped my travel bag onto the floor and flicked the play button on my way to the refrigerator. The Rott knocked me against the kitchen counter in his excitement to get to the refrigerator before me, as though he believed he could open the door without my assistance, help himself to dinner. The first several calls hung up in rapid succession, as though someone couldn’t believe she’d dialed a wrong number but would get it right with one more try. I nudged the Rott aside with my knee and pulled the hamburger from the bottom drawer. The voice that followed the hang-ups didn’t sound familiar at first. The voice sounded thin and trembly and when it apologized for all the time we hadn’t spoken, recognition stilled me. My brother was speaking. I hadn’t heard his voice for five years, not since the night I’d been arrested for manslaughter. He preferred to tell me this in person, he said, and was sorry that I’d have to hear this on an answering machine. He cleared his throat and then he told me that my mother was dead.

  Six

  MY MOTHER’S body lay partially enclosed in a cardboard box placed atop the table of a mortuary viewing room. A single, hooded lightbulb cast around her head a soft skirt of light that faded to darkness just beyond the table edge. She suffered a massive stroke, my brother’s recorded voice had said. She died before she reached the hospital. He didn’t know when or where the funeral would be held. I could drop by the funeral home if I wanted to view the body. He gave me the address and viewing hours, again said he was sorry, and hung up. She died the night after she’d called me, sometime before my flight to Chicago. That we might have been moving toward reconciliation will haunt me for the rest of my life.

  I approached the body in a slow, dull dread, eyes cast down to the toes of my boots shuffling on the cut-pile carpet. I did not need to see her
death to heal, to move on, to achieve closure, or to engage in any of the emotional processes the feel-good doctors of our time have told us are necessary for a healthy psyche; when I lifted my head just enough to glimpse her face, the sight of her death burned into my heart and cauterized the hole at one stroke, a wound that would not kill me outright but would never heal, never completely, that would linger and ache with each contraction of tissue and pulse of blood.

  I stood at the edge of the table and forced myself not to turn my head or close my eyes, but to stare, unblinking, into the fact of her death. Looking at her dead face was not like a mirror; facing her death was not like facing my own death. It was far worse. When I was a child, I believed in my mother above all people and all things. She had given me life and had done her best to protect me from the rages of my pop, often taking blows meant for my back. I believed in her far more than I ever believed in the distant God of a non-churchgoing family. The year I committed the criminal acts that would later imprison me I stopped believing in her. She lived with a man prone to unpredictable, violent rages, a man who had beaten not just her but every member of the family. My older sister had run away from home when I was just six years old, unwilling to submit herself any longer to his fists. My brother had taken his beatings as a lesson and though he still cowered before the old man he now beat his family, too. My mother could have left him. She held a job at the local Kmart, worked as a cashier. She could have supported herself. But she was terribly afraid of being alone, more afraid of loneliness than of her husband’s rages and brutality. And so I stopped believing in her. But once you truly believe in something, vestiges of that belief remain, no matter how many and loud the protests to the contrary.

  A violent trembling gripped and shook me by the spine. I grabbed the edge of the table for support and gasped for air. I expected to grieve. I expected tears and sorrow. But I didn’t tremble with grief. I trembled from rage. It wasn’t the cheap cardboard box that my pop had chosen to display the body, a final slap at her dignity, nor was it the thin mortician’s gown that covered her shoulders when a moment of thoughtfulness and decency would have consigned her to the incinerator in a favorite dress. I expected pettiness from my pop. It wasn’t his pettiness that so enraged me. Despite the haphazard attempts of the mortician to conceal it, a dark crescent surfaced from beneath the sheen of makeup above her cheek, hanging by its hooked tip at the inside corner of her left eye and spreading, purple and black, toward her ear. I’d seen her marked like that before, after Pop had hit her. Did her eye bear the mark of his fist when she’d called me? Is that why she had reached out to me after months of silence? Had the blood clot that killed her been unloosed by the blow that blackened her eye? The air rasped from my lungs and throat as I hyperventilated, the sound rough and ragged, like the barking of a dog. Had my father shown his face at that moment, I would have gone for his throat. A hand gently squeezed the slope of my shoulder, and a woman’s voice said, “Mary? It’s okay. It’s okay.”