Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  I bought a take-out pizza from a stand on the boardwalk and took it down to the sea to eat and watch the sun descend toward sunset. The conversation would involve some yelling and crying, I figured. We needed privacy to work through the problems that confronted us, first and foremost her return to Los Angeles. The Rott sat at attention on the sand beside me, big brown eyes mournful at the sight of any bite of food heading to a mouth not his own. I tore small chunks from my slice and fed them to him. “How far did you get before you turned back?” I tried not to sound sarcastic or ironic. I was curious.

  “Denver.” Her cheeks bulged with the bite of pizza she’d just taken. The bite was so big she looked like a snake trying to swallow a hedgehog. She managed to get it down without choking and smiled. “I should have checked my messages in Las Vegas when we stopped, but I guess I was kind of tired and didn’t wake up in time to get off the bus.”

  “Checked what messages?”

  “Sean and I, we got voice mail at one of those places rents mail boxes, you know, so we’d have a callback number to leave at auditions.” The setting sun lit a black smudge near the top of her forehead and the breeze blowing off the ocean tossed her ash-blond hair into tangles behind her back. Dirty, hungry, broke, and a runaway, she seemed completely content to be where she sat. “And I got called back. I was lucky to make it here in time. They want to see me tomorrow. Can you believe that? I’m going to be in a movie!”

  “How did you get back? I’m only asking because I put you on the bus with my last dollar and I don’t remember you having any money to help pay the fare.”

  “I hitched a ride.” She shrugged as though it was that simple.

  “You’re a sweet young girl, Theresa. Do you have any idea how many people out there would rape you given a closed door and nobody watching? Do you know how many sweet, attractive young girls are killed and buried by the side of the road they hitched on?”

  She took another bite of pizza and shook her head, unable or unwilling to conceal a smile, a smile that said I just didn’t get it, she was different, those things didn’t happen to her. “I was careful. I didn’t just stick my thumb out and take what pulled over. I went to a truck stop, found a nice trucker going all the way to Long Beach, you know the big harbor there?”

  “You’re fifteen years old,” I said. I wanted to make it clear to her. “You don’t know the evil people are capable of. I’m thirty, and it still catches me by surprise.”

  “I know it’s dangerous. That’s why I decided I should come straight to see you when I got into town, not try to stay on the streets by myself again.”

  “They killed Luce,” I said. I hadn’t planned to tell her so quickly. I wanted to give her time to eat, time for the food to settle. But more than that I wanted to impress upon her the dark consequences of running wild in the world.

  She swung her head toward me, another bite of pizza bulging her cheek, disbelief sheening her eyes. She remembered to swallow but the food went down hard, and in the golden light of the low sun, her face crimsoned.

  “It happened two nights ago,” I said. “One of the guys who took you out to the desert did it, the one called Eric. He stabbed her to death.”

  “No.” She shook her head, stubborn in her disbelief.

  “I’m sorry. It happened on Santa Monica Pier. I saw her die.”

  The swell rose to six feet that afternoon and the waves crashing to shore muffled Theresa’s sobs. I watched the surf, something I can do for hours without pause, my arms around the Rott’s neck, and waited for her to stop. I didn’t offer to hold or hug her. I didn’t want to soften the blow. I wanted her to hurt. Pain helps us understand how closely our lives hew to tragedy, that whatever we have can be ripped from us, our friends, our relatives, our lives, and our dignity taken without notice or apology. She began to eat again while the tears still streamed down her cheeks, chewing slowly and swallowing with effort. I knew by that one gesture that she possessed an unconscious strength of will. Nobody’s will is indomitable. We can all be damaged and broken. But Theresa seemed more determined than others to survive intact. She asked, “Did the police catch him?”

  “No. He’s still out there.” I picked up a slice of pizza, thought about eating it. “Did you remember the shoes he wore, you know, when he took you out to the desert?”

  She finished the slice and licked her fingers, her expression perplexed, as though she couldn’t understand why I asked but trying nonetheless to answer. “Hiking boots, I think. Why?”

  “Because Luce said the word Nike just before she died and I can’t figure why. Nike doesn’t make hiking boots. Not like the ones I remember seeing.”

  “Nike? She said Nike?” Theresa eyed the pizza box, measuring the remaining slices against her hunger. “Isn’t that Japanese or something? I mean originally. Before it became a running shoe. Like Seiko probably meant something in Japanese before it became a watch.”

  “It’s not Japanese.” I stared out to sea, trying to remember. “Nike is Roman or Greek. It means winged victory.”

  “You’re kidding. You mean it’s one of the gods they had? Like Zeus? Why would she be thinking about that? Gotta be a running shoe.”

  “Maybe the police will figure it out.” I had my doubts but didn’t want Theresa to know. “You’ll have to talk to them, now that you’re back.”

  “The police? Why?”

  “Because you’re at the center of two murder investigations.” I heard parole officer Terry Graves in my voice and shuddered. I was beginning to understand how Graves felt having me as her charge. I wasn’t sure I liked that. “At a certain point, you have to obey the law. You can skirt it sometimes, if you’re quiet and lucky, but you can’t run headlong against the law and expect to be the one to survive the collision. Let’s say you get this part you’re talking about. Would the film crew come do your scenes in a juvenile detention center, you think? Because that’s where you’re headed if you don’t correct your course. Once you start to get work, particularly in a high-profile job like acting, you won’t be able to hide anymore. People looking for you, you’ll be easy to find. That means you have to make it right with everybody. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  Theresa puffed her cheeks in glum exasperation, asked, “Can we talk to the police after the audition?”

  I didn’t want to negotiate with her but I wasn’t her mother or a cop. It wasn’t my responsibility to make her decisions. “That’s up to you.” I offered her my cell phone. “But if you want to stay with me tonight you have to call your mother.”

  “I called her from Denver.” She dug her hands into the sand and looked away. Her face was like stone. Either the conversation hadn’t gone well or she was lying. I suspected she was lying.

  “Call her again.”

  She made no move to take the phone.

  “If you want to stay with me, you have to trust me a little bit,” I said. “Otherwise, it’s not going to work.”

  “I don’t have a mother.” She spoke so softly I barely distinguished the words from the wind and waves. “I was lying to you. She ran away when I was two. Sends me a card on my birthday and on Christmas, no return address.”

  I didn’t put away the phone. I said, “I’m sorry for that. But you must have somebody taking care of you. Call your father.”

  “I doubt he even knows I’m gone.” The tears that sprang to her eyes came from anger more than self-pity. “I live in a trailer park, all right? I’m trailer trash. My dad is drunk most of the time he’s not at work and ’cause he never lasts more than six months in any job he’s not at work all that often, you know? It was fine, I was living with it, but he’s got a new girlfriend who drinks as much as he does and we don’t like each other. If he realizes I’m gone, which is extremely doubtful, he’s probably pretty fucking happy about it.”

  I took her hand and held it. We watched the ocean, each thinking our own thoughts. Then I replaced my hand with the cell phone, said, “Call your father.”


  She nodded, not resentful about it now that I knew the truth, and dialed an eleven-digit number. She said a sullen hello into the mouthpiece and asked for her dad, then stood and walked a few yards down the beach to talk in private. I tore the last slice of pizza into bite-sized chunks and fed them to the Rott. Theresa wandered back, nodding and saying, “Yes, dad…yes, dad.” She handed the phone down to me. “He wants to talk to you.”

  I pressed the phone to my ear.

  “You taking good care of my little girl there?”

  Even through the tin-can acoustics of the cell phone I could hear the booze. He wasn’t just drunk, he was twenty-years drunk, his voice a cheerful rasp. “I don’t think you understand the relationship,” I said, phrasing each word carefully. “I’m your daughter’s friend and I’m happy to help her but I’m not taking care of her, not in the way you seem to think.”

  “I’m happy you’re happy,” he said. “And don’t think your help is going unappreciated. She’s told me all about you and your work out there in Hollywood.”

  I looked up at Theresa. Hope and fear worked her face into an expression of anxiety, as though her fate hung in the balance at that very moment. I wondered what she had told him about me. I said, “Theresa is fifteen years old. She needs to go to school.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. Lemme think a second.” I heard a long, liquid swallow lubricate his thinking. “By God, when she gets that part she’s talking about, we’ll hire her a tutor. And then maybe I’ll come out there. That’s what parents do when their kid hits it big, isn’t that right?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “I’m not proud. I won’t stand in my little girl’s way.” The man sounded precariously close to tears. “I’ll do everything in my power to support her.”

  A sudden screeching sounded in the room where the man spoke, loud as a car locking tires and skidding through the room. Several distinct words emerged from the shrieks. Bastard, I’m not gonna, you don’t, fuck you, then…

  “Don’t you yell at me like that when I’m talking long-distance!” The shout was muffled, as though he’d cupped the phone against his chest. His voice returned, low and ragged, to the mouthpiece. “Gotta go now.”

  “I’ll give you back to Theresa to say good-bye.”

  I held the phone up. Theresa snatched it, held the receiver against her ear, said, “Hello?” Then again, “Hello?”

  Her eyes misted.

  He’d hung up.

  We did our best to clean the dirt and stains from Theresa’s clothes in a 1950s-era courtyard motel a few miles inland. I didn’t mind sleeping in the back of the Cadillac and the Rott wasn’t all that particular either, but I couldn’t sleep rough while supervising a fifteen-year-old girl, not in good conscience. The motel’s swaybacked roof looked one Southland trembler away from collapse and rust pitted every metallic surface, from the sign advertising rooms to rent to the bathroom fixtures. The room didn’t have cable, a telephone, or air-conditioning and the furnishings had the wounded look of life in the company of transients, but they allowed dogs, the sheets were clean and the water hot. I didn’t ask for more than that, not at the price.

  Theresa sat on the edge of the bed, working on her calfskin jacket with a toothbrush and bottle of stain remover. She wore a sun-yellow T-shirt with the words Venice Beach emblazoned on the front, each letter a different color, and looked up from her work every now and then with a dizzy smile, her greatest worry whether or not her clothes would dry in time for her audition the following morning. I’d bought a hair dryer at the drugstore, along with the hand wash and stain remover. The clothes would dry, I assured her, even if we had to run the hair dryer over the fabric half the night.

  When Theresa closed herself into the bathroom to shower I worked the cell phone. Detective Dougan wasn’t at his desk. I hadn’t expected him to be. I left a voice-mail message that I’d tracked down someone who knew Lucille Ryan and hoped to bring her by the station tomorrow afternoon. I figured Dougan would take her statement and call her father. When he could establish the girl wasn’t a runaway he’d cut her loose. I left another message with my parole officer and thought about calling Marshal Tuckman. With the three-hour time difference it was past midnight in Fairmount. I didn’t think he’d appreciate a call to his cell phone at that hour telling him his witness wasn’t showing up.

  I lifted from my camera bag the sheaf of mail I’d collected before meeting Theresa and tossed it onto the covers beside me, thinking about what I was going to tell Tuck, then made a call to his office line. Most of the mail was junk. I sorted through it while the answering machine picked up, announcing that I’d reached the Fairmount marshal’s office. One envelope had been personally addressed to me. The postmark read Phoenix. I slit open the envelope and shook out a letter and photograph. The photograph fell facedown onto the bed. On the blank back someone had penned Cassie, 9th grade. The letter was from my niece’s foster mother. I flipped the photograph to look at the face on the opposite side.

  Sometime later a long beep signaled that I’d reached the end of the time allotted to leave my message and the line disconnected. The bathroom door opened to a plume of steam and Theresa stepped out, wrapped in a towel. She glanced down at the photograph in my hand, said, “I never figured that girl out. She wants to be an actress? As though she thinks anybody’s gonna cast her with a look like that. Maybe if they’re casting for a TV movie about Columbine.”

  I closed the cell phone. I hadn’t left a message. The girl in the photograph was one of the kids I’d seen in the warehouse owned by Stonewell’s brother, part of the gang I’d followed that night to the mountain behind Forest Lawn cemetery. The barely teenaged girl with multiple piercings and hair as black as my own. “Did you meet her?” I asked.

  “Not really, not like we got to know each other. She was just around, with the others. Sean did most of the talking anyway.”

  “What did she seem like?”

  “Angry. Really angry.”

  That made sense. Anger ran in the family.

  “What are you doing with that anyway?” She plucked the photograph from my fingertips and examined it beneath the light of the bedside lamp. “You didn’t shoot it, did you? It looks like a class picture.”

  “Did my sister ask about this girl?”

  “Her? No, not specifically.” She looked again at the photograph, then returned it to me. “But like I said before, she wanted to know who ran in the gang—ages, personality types, looks, that sort of thing. That’s why I thought she was a journalist. And yeah, when I mentioned the Goth girl, she wanted to know more about her. But I thought it was just because, you know, Goths make good villains and she needed one for her story.”

  I slid the photograph back into the envelope, tucked the envelope into my camera bag, and stuffed the rest of the mail, all junk, into the trash can beside the door. “I’m going to take the dog for a walk,” I said. The Rott bounded to the door, his eyes riveted on the knob like a bird dog. “Don’t open to anybody except me. I won’t go far and I won’t be gone long.”

  “What’s wrong?” Theresa clutched the towel more tightly around her, took a small step forward. She knew I was upset and it panicked her, because she didn’t know how I’d react. She had to fear that I’d abandon her, because in her experience that’s what people did to each other.

  “I can’t tell you yet,” I said. “I need to think about it some. But it has nothing to do with you, not really, don’t worry about that.” When I glanced back to close the door behind the Rott, Theresa looked like she didn’t believe I’d be coming back.

  I walked the Rott from the motel into borderline gang turf near Oakwood, blankets hanging as curtains in apartment windows and random tufts of crabgrass sprouting from dirt lawns. As I walked I thought about how my sister may have been a liar and thief but she had also been a mother searching for redemption. Greed hadn’t been her sole motivation. Desperation played its role, too. She had been broke in a strange city, looking for a da
ughter whose deeply troubled life mirrored her own, a daughter taken from her because she had lived her life so badly the system had declared her an unfit mother. Had I been broke she probably would have confided in me rather than conned me. My money made me a better target than confidante. The thought made me want to cry. I rarely had more than a month’s rent in my bank account. My sister reappeared in my life during one of the few times I had money.

  Not that I could cry for my sister. Not that I was capable of crying for anyone. Not that I’d even think about crying in that neighborhood. Too many men lounging near street corners, too many cars cruising the streets, the long arms of multiple occupants hanging below rolled-down windows. I turned toward the next commercial avenue, the size and seeming ferociousness of the Rott my pass through the neighborhood. Perhaps my sister had maintained some kind of contact with her daughter. When I considered how deeply my sister seemed to care for her daughter, I thought it likely that they weren’t completely estranged. She might have known that Cassie had run away to Los Angeles. Cassie would have called to tell her that much. Cassie might have bragged about her criminal life, trying to impress her criminal mother. My sister easily could have known that her daughter was in Los Angeles, involved in an enterprise that involved robbing graves.

  That knowledge would have led her straight to me. I had always assumed that my sister hadn’t known who I was or what I did for a living when we met in the room that held our mother’s body. She may have known far more about me than I ever suspected. The day she showed up at my apartment with a copy of Scandal Times she had pretended not to know that I had changed my name and asked what had seemed at the time casual questions about the story I had been working on. I hadn’t realized until then that she had been pumping me for information. She’d certainly learned her craft well during the years she’d spent kiting checks, robbing banks, and conning the foolish out of their life savings. We’re all good at something. My sister had been good at conning people. She’d conned me out of more than just money. She claimed kinship not out of any deep feelings of rediscovered sister-hood but to use me to help find her daughter. Her skills had failed her at the end. She hadn’t found her daughter and lost her life.