Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  Twenty-Four

  IRAN along the Venice Beach Boardwalk that night, the pump of muscle and blood a centrifugal force driving the toxins from my mind and body. I didn’t believe in the devil but that didn’t mean those who did weren’t capable of great harm. The Rott patrolled ahead, fell behind while investigating one irresistible scent or another, then raced ahead again. I tried to let my mind go blank as I ran, meditating on the breath pumping through my lungs. If I didn’t believe in the devil I did believe in the existence of evil and that was frightening enough. Evil done in the devil’s name makes the devil’s existence a moot point. A single idea flared in imposed calm of the run: I needed to do something decent to counteract the evil interjected into my life. No need to get carried away with thoughts of goodness—I wasn’t about to volunteer at a soup kitchen to feed the poor, being close enough to poverty to join those in line—something small would suffice if it felt genuine. Handing out a few quarters to the homeless, always a cheap feel-good gesture, wasn’t going to be enough. Then I realized what I needed to do, should have done the day I learned of my sister’s murder.

  I made the call after getting the number for the only Micklin family in Phoenix from directory assistance. A woman answered—a tired woman in her fifties by the strained sound of her voice. It was just past ten PM but still I heard the clatter of children in the background. I asked if Cassie was in.

  “Who’s calling?” A sharpness carried over the line, as though the woman suspected me of something just by the sound of my voice.

  “Her aunt, I guess.”

  “You guess? What the hell do you mean? You are or you aren’t.”

  “I didn’t know Cassie existed until three days ago.” I resisted adding an epithet to the end of the sentence. Swearing at the woman wouldn’t help. “I’m her mother’s sister. That makes me her blood aunt. But I’ve never even met the child so I can’t claim more than that.”

  “You the mother’s sister?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you know the girl don’t have a mother no more, not that her mother was worth a damn to begin with.” Her end of the line rapped sharply, as though she struck the receiver onto the tabletop, and she shouted a warning to a wayward child before her voice came back to me. “None of the kids I care for have parents worth a damn. That’s why they’re with me. Course it’s a shame what happened to the girl’s mother, does no good to talk ill of the dead.”

  “The police asked me to identify the body,” I said. “That’s how I learned I have a niece. My sister disappeared from my life when I was six. I don’t want to interfere with the care you’re giving. But it might do my niece and me some good to talk to each other, to get to know each other a little bit.”

  “What’s your address,” she said. “I’ll send you a picture.”

  “I’d rather talk to her.”

  The woman said nothing.

  “She knows about her mother? About what happened?”

  “Cassie ran away from us two months ago.”

  Like mother, like daughter, I thought.

  “I’ll take that picture, then,” I said.

  The previous night had been sleepless and the run on Venice Beach Boardwalk had taken the last of my energy. I didn’t have to worry about insomnia. Exhaustion silences the brain. Moments after hitting the futon I plummeted below the surface of dreamlike images to the dark and barren depths of sleep. Some sleeps you earn. When the Rott began to bark from his nest at my feet I kicked blindly from beneath the covers. It was like kicking a baby bull. The Rott leapt from the bed and charged the door, his bark harsh and percussive, no longer a warning bark but a signal of attack.

  I bolted upright, my body quick but my mind still clawing through the smothering density of sleep. The door shuddered under a clanking blow that sounded like metal on metal. The wood splintered between the door and jamb near the base. I leapt forward to put my eye to the peephole. A figure cloaked in black swung a mallet toward the door, his back grotesquely bent in the parabolic lens. One step below on the exterior stairway another figure hurled his arm forward and something flickered for a moment before winging from view. The security-barred window to the right of the landing shattered a split second later and a breaking glass jar splattered liquid against the wall. The smell of gasoline invaded the room the moment before the air flashed with the ignition of flame on petrol.

  The door whomped again, this time higher up the jamb. The Rott glanced at the flames over his shoulder and flung himself forward as though he could run through wood. I snatched open the closet door and wrapped my palm around a baseball bat. The Rott responded to my voice and heeled to my leg, trust stronger for the moment than fear. I stepped to the side, planning to fling open the door and follow the Rott’s charge with the bat. The Rott skittered back, understanding what I was about to do when I flicked back the top bolt. I turned the bottom knob and pulled. The Rott charged forward on the movement of my arm. The knob didn’t give and my shoulder pitched into the wood. The Rott thumped into the side of my leg and bounced back, his look recriminatory. I was human. It was my job to open doors. I thought one of the assailants held the door closed and put my eye to the peephole again to see both figures running down the stairs. The wood at the jamb above my head had splintered. I realized then the trap.

  They’d spiked the door shut.

  Smoke scudded across the ceiling in the kitchen and rolled down the walls. The Rott whirled to face the fire curling toward the kitchen, howled, and careened into the wall, the bookcase collapsing in a spray of books. I ran to the window and shoved at the security bars, and when they didn’t budge I lifted a chair and threw it. The chair broke out the rest of the glass and bounced back to the floor. The bars had rusted shut long before I moved in. I didn’t even have a key. The only other window, in the bathroom, looked onto a three-story drop into the alley. Within minutes we’d suffocate and fry.

  Sweat from my palms slickened the smooth grip of the bat. I stepped up to the door, tapped the lower-left quarter panel, marked by decorative grooves in the wood, and swung. The shock of wood on wood nearly wrenched the bat from my hands. I cocked the bat and swung again, the solid crack of wood grain sounding my progress. I golfed the third swing. The head of the bat punched through the panel. I swung again and again, each blow splintering out chunks of wood, until the entire panel gave at the grooves.

  The Rott cowered in the closet, howling. I pressed the neck of my T-shirt across my mouth to filter the smoke and hauled him out by his collar. The moment he saw the gap he dashed forward and bulled through it. I canvassed the room quickly and collected the things I’d need to stay on the job. I tossed jeans, leather jacket, and boots out the door, held my camera bag over my head, and squirmed through the hole.

  Dr. James Whitehead labored up the stairs, his gray hair swirling like a storm above his head and a home fire extinguisher bundled under his left arm. The Rott barked from the sidewalk, bounded up the first set of steps, then hurried back down, torn between his fear of fire and coming to get me. I jumped into my jeans and boots. Dr. Whitehead yelled something at me. A firebomb, I said. Somebody threw a firebomb. He tried to yank open the door, his expression befuddled when the door didn’t give.

  Sirens wailed, blocks away.

  I pointed out the spikes and we shouted back and forth about what to do. I wrapped my hands around the fire extinguisher. Dr. Whitehead gave it up willingly. I sucked a lungful of air, bellied down, and crawled through the hole. Flames ripped through the apartment from floor to ceiling. I pointed the hose at the center of the inferno and shot out the canister.

  My neighbors lined the streets to watch the circus act of whirling lights, howling sirens, and ax-wielding firemen, but by five in the morning most decided the show was over and those who had beds—half my neighbors were homeless—returned to them. Dr. Whitehead’s home fire extinguisher had slowed the fire, allowing the fire crew to contain the flames to my top-floor apartment. The apartment below mine suff
ered some water damage that I didn’t regret; its tenant was a young executive with a preference for yellow ties and an aversion to dogs. His complaints about the Rott had led to my eviction. I thought of his ruined stereo equipment as a farewell present from the both of us.

  I sat on the curb across the street from the building while the fire crew mopped up, the Rott’s head in my lap, and drank an infusion of mint tea. Dr. Whitehead had given it to me, his own spirit-healing concoction, he said. I told him I was sorry to bring so much commotion into his life. He waved off the apology, said, “I saw trouble coming the day we talked. I’m just glad no one was hurt. If it’s any consolation, your aura is looking much better.” His eyes tracked up and over my shoulder and I knew by the movement that someone stood behind me.

  “Are you the tenant of the top-floor apartment?”

  I looked over my shoulder to the source of the voice, a tired-eyed man in his early forties, thin as a coat hanger, clad in a blue Los Angeles Fire Department windbreaker. He looked too pensive to be a fireman, his eyes distant, yet focused so intensely on the details of the moment I felt as though he could accurately describe my face and clothing after one glance.

  “You’re with the fire department?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I’d just won the dumb-question-of-the-month award, then showed me his investigator’s badge. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Are we allowed up yet?” I stood and nodded toward the stairs. “I can explain things better if I show you what happened.”

  The arson investigator thought about that for a moment, opened the trunk of a sedan double-parked in front of the fire truck, and handed me a fire helmet. “Regulations,” he said.

  I put on the helmet and followed him up. Ash-blackened water trickled down the steps. The firemen had hacked their way through the front door with an ax, and what remained of it hung in shards from the hinges. Inside the apartment the fire had burned into the ceiling and blackened the walls. Another investigator squatted near the kitchen, his shoes wrapped in plastic. The lead investigator blocked the doorway, said, “I can’t let you get any closer than this. It’s a mess in there anyhow.”

  I knelt to examine the inch-wide head of the spike that pinned a chunk of the door to the frame. The spike, about six inches long, had gone through the frame and into the wall.

  “I was wondering if you could tell me about that,” the investigator said, squatting next to me.

  “My Rott went into a barking fit about three this morning,” I said. “Two guys wearing ski masks spiked the door shut and threw a Molotov cocktail through the window.”

  The investigator stood and edged across the landing to inspect the security bars. While climbing the stairs he’d slipped plastic gloves over his hands, and he spotted the lock with a penlight before probing it with gloved fingers. He glanced around the bars’ edges, then brought the circle of light onto a rust-stained finger. “These don’t look like they’ve opened in years.” He spotlit the bolts securing the bars to the wall. “You didn’t come out this way, did you?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  He clicked off the penlight and turned away from the window to look again at the door, glancing once at my face as though trying to read in my features the answer to a riddle. “Security bars rusted shut, door spiked—how did you get out?”

  “I punched through a panel in the door with a baseball bat.”

  He leaned to look around the apartment without stepping inside and saw the bat, blackened with soot and leaning against the wall away from the door. “You’re one lucky lady. You realize you could have fried to death in there?”

  “It didn’t escape my notice, no.”

  He pointed toward the window, his gesture short and sharp. “Those security bars are a violation of city safety codes.”

  “I just rent the place. You’ll have to talk to the landlord.”

  “I’ll do more than talk to him, I’ll cite him. And you have grounds for a civil suit, if you’re so inclined. Every year someone dies in a situation like this.” He took a couple of steps down the stairs and turned to face the hole where the door once hung, then glanced toward the window. “The assailants wore their masks at all times?”

  “I know who they are, masked or not.”

  He raised a dubious eyebrow, asked, “Did they speak to you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “If you didn’t see them and they didn’t speak to you, you don’t know who they are. That brings up a different question. Who do you think might have done this?”

  “The same people who killed my sister.”

  He’d expected to hear the usual sordid tale of petty squabbles involving drugs or sex and stared at me with unflickering eyes as though waiting for me to admit a joke. Only when I began to tell him what I did for a living and how my sister died, complete with the details of how the detectives were handling the case, did he open a binder-style notebook and take notes. “I don’t know this newspaper you say you work for.” He glanced at his notes. “What is it, Scandal Times?”

  “It’s a gossip tabloid.”

  “And you do investigative reporting? I thought you guys made all that shit up.” He asked where I could be reached over the next few days in case he had additional questions, which seemed a sure thing considering this didn’t look like an ordinary kitchen fire. I gave him the number at the newspaper, said, “One other thing you should know about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m currently on parole.”

  He stepped away from me as though I’d announced I carried an infectious disease, and the way he looked at me shifted from curious to clinical. “What was the conviction, arson?” His voice curled hopefully at the end.

  “Manslaughter.”

  He grabbed my arm above the elbow and gestured toward the bottom of the stairs. “I’m sure I’m going to have some more questions to ask you once I’ve talked to these detectives you mentioned,” he said. “Would you mind waiting for me in the car?”

  Twenty-Five

  LIKE THE marked and unmarked police cars I’d been invited inside before, the rear seat of the arson investigator’s sedan was screened from the front by Plexiglas and the doors could not be unlocked from the inside. Had I been a regular citizen I could have complained about illegal detention—either arrest me or let me go—but I wasn’t a regular citizen. The arson investigator hadn’t read my rights before guiding me into the car because I wasn’t yet under arrest and as a parolee I didn’t have the same rights as anyone else, except maybe bail jumpers. I did the only sensible thing possible, guided by my vast experience in similar situations; I carefully folded my leather jacket, lay back on the seat, and fell asleep.

  A few hours later a knock on the window wakened me to bleached blue skies and the familiar smell of confinement—the sweat of past prisoners mixed with my own in a closed, airless box. The door at my feet cracked open and the long, thin face of the arson investigator poked into the compartment, the skin under his eyes purpled with fatigue. “You want to step outside?” He left the door open and stepped back onto the sidewalk to wait for me to comply. “Detective Dougan wants to talk to you.” He flashed a yellow slip of paper scribbled in ink. “I promised him you’d drive over to the Hollywood station this morning.”

  He’d written Dougan’s name, telephone number, and address on the slip of paper, just in case I’d forgotten. I struggled to find the inside sleeves of my jacket, told him I’d visit Dougan after the end of rush hour.

  “I haven’t managed to contact your parole officer yet, but I will,” he said. “If I remember the terms of the standard parole agreement, you need a place of residence.” He looked up the steps at my apartment, yellow police tape crisscrossing the plywood sheeting nailed over the doorway. “And it looks like you just lost yours.”

  As though I needed the reminder.

  I collected the Rott from Dr. Whitehead’s apartment and walked him to the public showers to wash the soot and smoke
from our hair. If I was going to be homeless I’d have to learn how to soap up and hose down wearing a bathing suit in the open air. We dried off in the Cadillac, the heater blasting on high as we drove east on a line that would take us to Hollywood, though I had no intention of stopping at the Hollywood station to visit Dougan, not just then. I sipped a cup of take-out coffee and brushed my hair as I crawled forward with the rest of the traffic, calling numbers on my cell phone and steering most of the time with my knees. Rush hour in Los Angeles is an oxymoron squared: nobody rushes anywhere and it lasts not one but four hours. My parole officer wasn’t answering her office phone yet, no surprise considering the hour. I didn’t intend to talk to her anyway and left what I hoped would be the first message in a long game of telephone tag. Frank’s voice mail picked up at Scandal Times. I tried his home and mobile phone numbers, left messages everywhere. Every now and then I glanced at my neighbors one lane over and most of them were no less busy than I, involved in everything from putting on makeup to shaving.

  I reached Los Feliz by eight in the morning and parked the Cadillac down the block from the Palms, the apartment building Theresa had been taken to the night before last. Unless the driver of the van had warned everybody about the make of my car, Luce—the girl Theresa had met—wouldn’t know the Cadillac by sight. I stepped onto the sidewalk and strolled past the underground parking gates, spotting the blue fender of her Tercel parked in its assigned spot. I needed information. Luce had an apartment, a car, and, according to Theresa, a blossoming career as a young actress; she’d be easy to pressure. I slipped back into the Cadillac, eyed warily by the Rott, laid out in the backseat. After his busy night he was even more exhausted than I, and the three donuts I’d fed him for breakfast finished him off.

  The Tercel sputtered out of the parking garage and onto the street fifteen minutes into the stakeout, Luce bobbing her head behind the wheel as though listening to music. I waited for the car to clip by and then started the Cadillac. She kept to surface streets through Hollywood, turned south and then west onto the Miracle Mile section of Wilshire Boulevard. The indicators blinked conscientiously at every turn, the last one into a parking garage below a white-concrete and black-glass high-rise just across from Museum Square. The side pocket of my leather jacket chirped. I slowed to follow the Tercel, slipping the mobile phone from my pocket to check the caller. Terry Graves, my parole officer. I let it ring and ramped toward visitors’ parking. The ringing stopped. Two lanes over, Luce reached a fringed and beaded arm out the window to insert a parking card into the monthly parking slot.