Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  An arica palm next to the house had a full head of brown fronds ready to crack off with the next real wind, but the hedges and a bird-of-paradise were hacked back and the little patch of grass out front was green so the house wasn’t abandoned exactly. Someone was dealing with it.

  Jimmy stood before it a long moment and then sat on the seawall. Spanish-style houses always had a nice balance. There was a big picture window to the left, an archway, a little portico, a heavy door behind it, a door with black iron strap hinges and black iron nailheads and a “speak-easy grill” to look out at the Fuller Brush Man through, iron, too, heavy and lacy at the same time. That was Spanish. The walkway and steps were painted red to look like tile or clay.

  Jimmy looked up at the second-floor window, another picture window curved at the top to match the arcs below. That was the front bedroom, where it happened. One of the pictures in the paper had a uniformed cop standing at the window, looking out, looking up for some reason, as if the murderer had somehow flown out across the canal.

  Jimmy walked to the picture window and looked in. Dark drapes faded to green/gray stood open a foot. It was the living room. There were a few pieces of old furniture, what they used to call a divan, Look and Life magazines on the coffee table, a couple of Klee prints on the walls. It was like a museum of the mid-1970s. Untouched. The table lamps were tall and bulbous, glassy gold dripping over aquamarine. The carpet was white shag. The rotary phone was pink. Over the fake fireplace with its dead and dusty electric log “fire” was a pen and ink sketch of the Left Bank.

  Off a dark hallway, a staircase stepped up through deep angular shadows to the second flo or. If there were any kids in the neighborhood, maybe grandkids, they were sure to swap stories about ghosts. You wouldn’t think so, but there were houses like this all over L.A., left-behind houses, dead houses. Sometimes it was about uncollected taxes. Sometimes it was about crazy. Usually it was about bad blood running through the constricted veins of bitter heirs. If I can’t have it, you can’t have it.

  A spider stepped across the sill. Time meant nothing to it.

  Jimmy stepped back. There was music from somewhere close, Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” more of the past pushing into the present. It was coming from the house two doors down, out an open upstairs window. The song ended and another Abba song started. It was an album. Who listens to Abba albums?

  There was a sound from across the canal, a sound Jimmy was meant to hear, the sailboat man slapping the hose into coils on the dock. Jimmy looked over. The neighborhood watchman tested the valve again to make sure the water was off and then walked up the short walk into the house, stepped out of his Topsiders outside the door and went in. After a few seconds the white shutters in the upstairs window tipped open a crack.

  Jimmy suppressed the urge to wave.

  He walked down alongside the canal to the Abba house. A low stucco wall surrounded a small porch, a patio with Adirondack chairs and a little table for the drinks. He knocked on the door. He waited but nobody came. After a minute, the side ended. It was a record player. The needle lifted—you could hear it—and then a click.

  “She was there a minute ago.”

  A young workman with his shirt off was sanding the dock in front of the next house down. He had KROQ on the box, the Chili Peppers.

  “Try again.”

  “That’s all right,” Jimmy said.

  “She was there a minute ago. She likes the sun,” the workman said. He made it sound a little nasty.

  “Is there still a Yacht Club around here?” Jimmy said.

  The workman pointed down the walk.

  Jimmy walked away from 110 Rivo Alto Canal but it stayed with him. He couldn’t shake it. Instead of the sweet little walk under the trees beside the canal, he might just as well have been walking down that upstairs hallway toward that front room where it had happened, where the lightning had flashed.

  He was already inside.

  FOUR

  Through the tinted glass of the tall windows of the bar Jimmy watched the Hunters and Catalinas and Ericsons motoring out toward the bight. He drank his beer and swiped a few olives from the tray.

  The bartender was on a cell phone to his girlfriend.

  “I know,” he said every once in a while.

  He was too young to know anything about the Kantkes. Star Wars was 1977. Hotel California. Elvis dying in August. Car Wash. Saturday Night Fever. Roots. Laverne & Shirley. Foreigner’s “Feels Like the First Time” and K.C. & the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man.”

  And Abba.

  Jimmy got up, took his beer with him, and looked at the pictures along one wall, the Long Beach Yacht Club over the years. In the old days, what you had was Old Money enjoying itself. The men wore yachting caps with a straight face, only nobody had a straight face. Then New Money started elbowing in. There went the dress code. The fifties were very black and white and the sixties were . . .

  What were they?

  The seventies and eighties looked even more confused and even drunker. The nineties saw a bit of a return to the old order, at least a stab at it, more contained hair, better clothes, straighter lines, a serious, unblinking White look, particularly on the two or three Black members who’d made their way in.

  The current crowd in the latest pictures made no sense at all, like the rest of L.A. now, the only center being a lack of center. There were South Americans with ponytails like movie coke dealers shoulder to shoulder, drinks in hand, with USC frat boys and their old men, next to real life hippies in tie-dye next to leathery world-cruisers next to a lesbian couple all in white, she a little taller than she. Old salts, new salts, Russians, Armenians, Redondo car dealers, Indian ophthalmologists. And a dignified-looking Mexican man in a blue double-breasted jacket with gold buttons.

  And Ernest Borgnine.

  There was a picture labeled “Offic ers 1975-1976” but no Jack or Elaine Kantke.

  A white-haired man and his wife came through the bar, dressed up. Jimmy smiled. They smiled back. A second couple followed the first. The second man wore a pink sports coat, the woman a dress the color of poppies with shoes to match and a pair of sunglasses that remembered the arched-eyebrow tail of a 1959 Chevrolet.

  They said hello, too, and seemed to mean it.

  “Something going on?” Jimmy said.

  “Crabby Lewis,” the white-haired man said.

  Jimmy followed them into the banquet room.

  Up front was a three-foot-tall picture of a tanned ancient mariner in blazer and turtleneck and yacht cap. Jimmy hung around in back. There were only ten or twelve of them, with four waiters.

  When they’d finished their salmon and salads, the pink coat man got up and stood next to the picture.

  “I remember when my boy Spence went sailing with Crabby the first time,” the pink coat man began, his eyes on the big picture. “Spence was twelve or thirteen.”

  Everyone started nodding their heads. They knew the story. They weren’t unhappy. They were too old. Too much had happened. Too many sailors had sailed off to Happy Harbor.

  “When they were coming in, Crabby gave Spence a loose ten-foot coiled line, told him to stand in the bow, told him to get ready.” Here it was. “Twenty feet out from the dock, Crabby said, ‘OK . . . Jump!’ Spence jumped in, still holding the loose line.”

  It got its laugh.

  “That was Crabby. If you jumped when he said to, you were all right.”

  The people nodded. That was Crabby.

  “Spence wouldn’t ever do what I said,” the pink coat man said. “Still won’t.”

  One of the women daubed at the corner of her eye, but she might have been crying about Spence. Or her own Spence.

  When it was over, Jimmy bought a round in the bar.

  “Everybody liked Jack and Elaine,” the pink coat man said.

  Everyone nodded.

  “His lawyer proved he was in Las Vegas,” the white-haired man said. “At the Rotary convention.” He and his wife wer
e drinking tall club sodas. He’d sent the first ones back when they came without limes. “The prosecution had to admit there wasn’t enough time to drive there from Long Beach after the murders were committed.” He sounded like he was still mad about it. Or mad about something.

  “The desk clerk testifie d,” another man said. This one looked as if he’d literally stepped off the deck of a boat to be there, sawdust in his eyebrows and in the hair on the back of his hands. Teak. You could smell it on him. “There wasn’t enough time.”

  The pink coat man shook his head. They all shook their heads. Everybody knew all the same things.

  “Even with the time change,” the sawdust man added.

  “We’re in the same time zone as Vegas, Ted,” the white-h aired man said. He was still mad.

  “I don’t believe so,” the sawdust man said.

  “Yes. Same. All of Nevada,” the white-haired man said. “Including Las Vegas,” he added.

  “Well, I don’t gamble,” the sawdust man said.

  “You probably shouldn’t, Ted,” the white-haired man said.

  The sawdust man could have said, “Well, at least my boat isn’t made out of plastic,” but he didn’t. He just filed it away. And took a sip of his free beer.

  “And there was the guy in the gas station in Barstow,” a fourth man said, to bring it back around. “The gas station guy also verified the time line. Tell him about that.”

  “I believe you just did, Ev,” the pink coat man said and traded a look with the white-haired man.

  “What was his lawyer like?” Jimmy said.

  “Harry Turner,” the white-haired man said.

  Jimmy waited.

  “You don’t know Harry Turner?”

  “He’s too young,” the pink coat man said.

  “I’ve heard of him,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t think he—”

  “He didn’t.” It was the white-haired man. “Harry Turner was behind the scenes. But everybody who knew anything knew Harry Turner was running Jack’s defense. Well, Jack was running it but he had sense enough to know to go to Harry. But up front was . . . The guy at the table in the courtroom was . . . What was his name?”

  “Upland. Or Overland,” the sawdust man said.

  “Harry Turner never lost a case,” the pink coat man said.

  “Still hasn’t,” the white-haired man said with a harsh little laugh.

  “He’s retired now,” one of them said.

  “Yeah, retired,” the white-haired man said.

  A silence rose up. They all knew something that Jimmy didn’t know. Maybe someone would say it out loud.

  “Upchurch,” one of the women said. None of the wives had said anything until now, just sipped their G&Ts and traded looks while the men talked.

  The men nodded. Upchurch.

  And then things got too quiet again.

  “None of you thought Jack Kantke did it,” Jimmy said.

  “Not then,” the pink coat man said. “Nobody could believe it.”

  “And now?”

  There was a long moment.

  “Well, there’s a system, isn’t there?” the white-haired man said.

  The woman in the poppy-colored dress took her sunglasses off. She smiled at Jimmy, a smile not connected to anything in the scene but which now made it about her. Her hair still had life to it and whoever had done the work around her eyes had The Touch. She knew what he was thinking and enjoyed it.

  “So,” Jimmy said, with a look that included all three women, “any of you in The Jolly Girls?”

  On the microfiche at the newspaper library there was a sidebar on Elaine Kantke and her best friends. More importantly, a picture. Four vivacious, frisky babes at the selfsame Yacht Club bar, four of them on four stools, their hips stuck out.

  That was what they called themselves, “The Jolly Girls.”

  The woman in the poppy dress was quick and apparently spoke for all of them.

  “No.”

  Jimmy stood looking down into the water beside a black-bottom pool in a spectacular backyard in Palos Verdes, a bluff overlooking the battered green Pacific.

  “You’re early,” a voice behind him said.

  Jimmy turned.

  Vivian Goreck approached with a professional smile. She was another striking woman in her fifties. She didn’t offer her hand, was from a time just before that. She wore a print dress, bright, tropical.

  “You’re the same color as the wall behind you,” Jimmy said.

  “All part of the plan,” she said brightly. “Like a spider. Did you look inside?”

  “Nope,” Jimmy said.

  She stepped back slightly and put a new smile on her face and he went where she wanted him to go.

  The house was empty, high ceilings, blond floors, a lot of glass, Moderne. A man had lived here, alone, Jimmy could tell that right away. If a woman had lived here anything more than overnight she would have found something to take away at least some of the edge, to get the willful solitariness out of the air. A woman who cared about you, if you wanted her, alone was enough to do it.

  There was an open kitchen with a pair of chrome sinks sunk in granite. Jimmy turned on the water, cupped his hand, bent and drank.

  Vivian watched him. You see it all. Besides, she could tell he had money.

  “The stove’s a commercial Wolf,” she said. “The fridge is Subzero. There are double Blankenship disposals, double Nero trash compactors.”

  Jimmy turned off the water. “Was there a murder or divorce in the house? I always heard people ask that.”

  She handed him a black dish towel. “They do. No, the house was owned by the builder and—”

  Jimmy stopped the pretense. “My name is Jimmy Miles,” he said. “I’m not your buyer, I just wanted to talk to you. Your office told me where you were.”

  She didn’t even blink. She was solid. Secure. Jimmy wondered what had made her that way. It was something else you didn’t see much anymore.

  “Talk to me about what?” she said.

  “The Jolly Girls.”

  She stood up straighter, almost laughed. “Really. Why?”

  “I’m an investigator.”

  “I’m sure there’s a statute of limitations on public drunkenness . . .” she said. Here was another beauty who still had her looks but kept reminding you of what had been, the way the fire must have flared once and how everybody, or at least the men, had gathered round to watch it. Jimmy liked her, wanted the time back when she was young.

  “Gee, I sure hope so,” he said.

  “So what is it?” she said.

  “The Kantkes.”

  “Really?”

  Jimmy nodded. And waited.

  “Who wants to know about that? Why now?”

  Jimmy didn’t answer.

  She leaned back against the counter and crossed her still pretty legs at the ankle. “I used to always say I don’t talk about those days,” she said. “And now it’s been ten years since anybody asked.”

  “We all used to be jolly,” Jimmy said.

  “You’re a little young to be world-weary, aren’t you?” she said in a voice, a Mrs. Robinson voice he could hear her using in a bar. “I have a daughter your age.”

  Then somehow she guessed it. Her mind had been working though she hadn’t let him see it.

  “Jean,” she said.

  Jimmy didn’t say yes, didn’t say no.

  “I saw her picture in the Times a few years ago. The business section. She’s very pretty.”

  He didn’t deny that either.

  “What does she want to know?” she said.

  “Who. It’s who she wants to know. Her mother,” Jimmy said. “Or maybe her father.” He hadn’t thought of that angle until just that moment, that Jean was doing this to get closer to her father. Or close enough to never come close to him again.

  Jimmy walked away from her and into the living room. It was big enough for jai alai. Except for a planter with a ficus in it, which looked brought in for
the sale, there was no furniture, no coverings on the windows, nothing but a brass telescope on a mahogany tripod in front of floor-to-ceiling glass tinted the merest green.

  The gas fireplace was lit, though it was summer and even here along the coastline there was no chill in the air. Jimmy stared at the stone logs, burning yet not consumed, like something in the Bible. Like me, was what he was thinking. He heard her follow him into the room, heels clicking on the wood floors.

  “So,” Jimmy said without turning from the fire, “did Jack Kantke kill them?”

  “No.”

  Now he turned to look at her. If there was any pain in her memory of those days, of those people, she had found a way not to betray it.

  “How do you know?”

  “I knew him,” she said. “Very well. We all knew each other very well.” She gave the last line room to breathe, opened up a space for speculation. “Jack didn’t care about Elaine and Bill.”

  “So he knew about the affair?”

  “Of course.”

  “And he didn’t care?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Does that shock you? Sometimes I shock my daughter.”

  Jimmy wasn’t shocked.

  “I think Jack thought Bill Danko was rather . . . below all of us,” she said. “But Elaine enjoyed him. And Jack had other fish to fry, as we used to say.”

  “He had a girlfriend, too?”

  She smiled a quick, complicated little smile Jimmy would think about later. “Actually,” she said, “I wasn’t referring to his love life. Jack was very ambitious. Ten years after the fact, he was still out on the New Frontier. I think he would have been governor eventually. Or he thought so.”

  She sat on the corner of the planter with her hip out. Jimmy thought again of the picture of the four of them, posing, full of themselves, at the bar.

  “Was the Yacht Club The Jolly Girls’ clubhouse?”

  “Only in an emergency.”

  “Where then? Where did you hang out?”