by Dan Vining
“It’s embarrassing to say.”
“Where?”
“A place called Big Daddy’s.”
Jimmy remembered it. Marina Del Rey. A good forty-five-minute drive up the coastline, far enough away to see and be seen by a whole new crowd, and not be seen by people who knew your husband.
“That’s where Elaine met Bill actually,” she said.
“How close were you to her, to Elaine?”
“Not the closest of the group, but we were all close.”
Jimmy said, “So who killed them?”
She said, “I have no idea.”
There was a sound from the front of the empty house.
“It came out of nowhere, as so many things do,” she said.
A man and a woman stepped in. The man had a phone to his ear.
It was Jimmy’s cue. He touched Vivian’s arm. “Thanks, the house is perfect,” he said, loud enough for the prospective buyers to hear. “We’ll talk.”
She appreciated the gesture. “I’ll be in the office until six, Dr. Miles,” she said.
Nice touch.
Jimmy nodded to the couple and saw himself to the door.
Out front in the circular driveway was a cream-colored Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible with plates that read: “BUY BUY.”
The potential buyers’ Jag was parked behind it.
FIVE
Jimmy drank a Cel-Ray soda in a booth at the window under a sign that said, “We Never Close.” Canter’s was where John Belushi had spent some of the last hours of his life. There was the deli and then the bar in the other room, The Kibitz Room. There had been a time when Jimmy collected last hours facts, Belushi downing a pastrami at Canter’s then going out to Westwood for a chocolate-dipped doughnut at Dupar’s, Janis Joplin shooting pool at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica before the drive up Highland to the hotel, James Dean stopping for a burger at the diner in Saugus before the run to Paso Robles. But the fun had gone out of it in time, after the list of the famous dead got a little too long, or death a little less of a gag.
The waitress came. She was young and Israeli. He didn’t want anything else but he ordered a bowl of soup and another Cel-Ray. The place was empty for some reason and he liked her and it wasn’t going to be much of a night for her.
He’d picked up a couple of tails, pale men in matching cheap suits, one tall enough to joke about, the other with a shock of bleached hair black at the roots in the style that had passed through the club scene two summers ago. Sailors. They were at a table for two in the middle of the room. They’d been down in Long Beach, on the bridge just as he was leaving Naples to go out to meet Vivian Goreck. After he’d left the house for sale, he’d stayed up on the cliffs at Palos Verdes until the sun dropped and then gone by Ike’s, his hangout. They were parked on the street in a white Escort when he came out.
They weren’t any good at this. Jimmy gave the tall one a look and made him knock over his water.
The second soda came and the soup, a pair of bagel chips speared by the handle of the spoon. The tails decided to pretend they were finished and they got up and left, pretending not to look over at him.
Jimmy slid a Time magazine out of a cellophane wrapper. He’d bought it at a collectibles store down in Long Beach. The cover was black with one little dim light, a candle, a hand cupped around it. It was from the week in July of the New York City blackout. He turned over the pages, stepped in. Here was another time capsule, images of 1977, the worries and frivolities of the day. Watergate hearings were grinding on. Miss America Phyllis George married producer Robert Evans “under a four-hundred-year-old sycamore” in Beverly Hills. War between Ethiopia and Somalia. The Sex Pistols arrived in America, in New York, sneering in their Wild One black leather jackets, looking scary and silly, like something New Yorkers had found when the lights came back on.
The story on the murders was halfway through. This was just the kind of California story the East Coast loved. There were pictures of the house front and back and a smiling Elaine Kantke and a half-smiling Jack Kantke and a potato-faced Bill Danko.
The picture of Danko was a mugshot.
The overline read:
LA DOLCE VITA, RIVO ALTO STYLE
“Did I wake you?”
It was a hot night and Jean Kantke had the lights off. She wore a sports bra and three-stripe Adidas silks. She was in the living room in her apartment, the penthouse of a four-story building on a curving street in the hills above Sunset, above the Strip. She pushed aside the sliding glass doors—the apartment had a fifties feel to it—and walked out onto the deck with the portable phone. It was a killer view, the Strip below, the orange and yellow lights of the city stretching all the way down to Compton.
“I never know when people sleep,” Jimmy continued. “I mean, regular people.”
“Is that what I am?” Jean said into the phone.
“You have a job,” Jimmy said. “An office. Hours.”
She stepped to the south end of the wraparound terrace, went to the railing. It wasn’t that late, a little before midnight. She could hear laughter every once in a while from the open-air cafés on the boulevard with their tables on the sidewalks.
“Are you alone?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I thought I heard something.”
“I’m in the car,” he said.
Jimmy was headed east on Sunset, past restaurants and bars with limos stacked up, even on a Monday. He’d lost the tails. They weren’t around when he came out of Canter’s. Or maybe they’d gotten better. He kind of missed them. The light ahead turned yellow. He gunned the Mustang and it leapt forward.
He turned left onto Miller Drive, up into Sunset Plaza, a neighborhood of houses and apartment buildings built like steps up the hills. Modest entrances, pricey vistas. On a quiet side street he parked in the shadows, turned off the engine.
He got out with his phone, leaned against the fender. There were old-fashioned bulbous streetlights on Corinthian stalks, white light, not the crime-fighter orange that colored most of L.A. Three or four houses up the hill, a dog nosed around a trashcan, looked in his direction, then plopped down in the middle of the street.
Jean looked south toward Long Beach, miles and years away.
“Was it cooler down there?” she said.
“Not much.”
“At least it’s clear.”
She was full of longing, vague, undefined. She wondered if he could hear it in her voice.
“The house is empty,” Jimmy said. “It looks like nobody’s touched it since the murders. Inside, anyway. Is that possible?”
There was a hollow wind down the line a second or two.
“People keep telling me anything is possible,” Jean said.
She had a water somewhere. She went looking for it, into the living room, then on into the kitchen.
“What do you know about The Jolly Girls?” Jimmy said.
“They were just Mother’s friends,” Jean said. “The papers made a lot out of it. They all covered for each other. That’s what the papers said anyway.”
“It’s a funny name,” Jimmy said.
Jean found her water bottle in the kitchen, but poured herself a drink instead. Vodka. She opened the fridge for some juice and some ice, left it open, standing for a moment in the cool wedge of white light.
“What was Bill Danko’s story?” Jimmy said.
“He was teaching her to fly,” she said.
She came back out onto the deck with her vodka and cranberry juice.
“I know, it’s a bad joke.” She watched the line of jumbo jets descending into LAX, the dimmest ones twenty miles out, almost to the desert, it was that clear.
“A couple weeks before the murders, he was arrested for ‘drunken flying. ’ A police helicopter caught them strafing the house, looping around. The cops followed them back to Clover Field. My father kept it out of the papers, but everybody knew.”
That would be Bill Danko’s mugshot.
“I guess it was a wild time,” Jean said. “Nineteen seventy-seven. Things were coming apart, getting a little crazy. Clubs and . . . polyester. And platform shoes. My father drove a Karmen Ghia. The papers called it a ‘Euro pean sports car.’ They all drank a lot, played around, I don’t know what else. Loose but not yet too crazy. Just so it didn’t get in the papers. Jerry Brown was governor. My father was about to be named to a judgeship.”
She swirled her drink, took out an ice cube and touched it to her lips. Jimmy didn’t say anything, let her walk around in her memories.
“I remember the seawall in front of the house,” she said. “Trying to climb up onto it. But afraid.”
“It’s about two feet tall,” Jimmy said.
“Daddy nervous, Mother laughing . . .”
A moment passed. Noise from down on the boulevard floated up again. Her longing had turned, as it does, to tiredness.
“I guess I’ll go to sleep,” she said. “Do you have anything for me?”
Jimmy looked up at the four-story apartment building across the narrow street from where he’d parked, the one with the terrace around two sides of the penthouse.
“You mean like a glass of warm milk?” He opened the door of the Mustang, got behind the wheel.
“I mean, can you tell anything yet?” she said. “I don’t know how you work.”
Jimmy started the engine. “This is pretty much it,” he said. He put it in gear.
“Watch out for the dog,” Jean said, over the phone.
Jimmy looked up at her. She was at the railing of the penthouse, looking down at him.
“That’s Roscoe. He’s blind.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Jimmy said into his phone, looking at her.
She stayed at the railing, watched as he pulled out of the shadows. He waited for the dog to move out of the way, drove up the hill, pulled into a stub of a driveway, turned around, came down past her, pulled onto Sunset, headed west, never looking up at her again.
She wondered how many cars he had.
She hadn’t told him where she lived. She wondered about that, too.
The Mustang was parked in front of a tiki bar on Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach. There wasn’t much traffic. The front door of the bar was propped open with a five-gallon can filled with sand and cigarette butts. The cleanup lights were on. You could smell the beer in the carpet from twenty feet away.
Jimmy opened the hatchback and lifted out the frame of a bike, minus the wheels. He put it together, tightened the hardware, gave the wheels a turn. He was wearing a light-colored zip-up jacket. He took it off, folded it, put it over the rear seat and pulled on a black hooded sweatshirt. The moon was bright in the clear sky but ready to set. He closed the hatchback. He’d kept looking for the tails, the pale men, but they never caught back up with him. He was feeling all alone, so alone even some trouble would have cheered him up a little.
He rode the bike up and over the bridge into the Naples area, rode along the lane, along the backs of the houses, the row of garages, almost silent, almost invisible when he was between the streetlights. The cars in the alley were tucked into their covers. No one was out. A possum crossed the alleyway. There weren’t even any free dogs to give chase.
Jimmy stowed the bike behind a hedge and came down the walkway alongside Rivo Alto Canal. He stood in front of the murder house, letting his eyes dilate all the way, now that he was away from the streetlights. A wind came up, rustling the dry, brown palm. The surrounding neighborhood was dark except for the dancing blue light of a television in one house across the lane of water.
Jimmy went to the backdoor, clicked on a penlight with a red cap lens. He read the lock in the knob. It wasn’t much of a challenge, so old a good twist would probably open it. He shined the light on a ring of keys, the head of each wrapped in black tape to silence it. He made the match, put the key in and the knob turned. He wondered who the last person to touch it had been.
The door stuck, then gave way. He was in.
A few ancient dirt-crusted plates sat in the sink in the kitchen, a broken saucer on top. The faucet dripped into the center of an iron-stain circle. There was a single clouded water glass on the counter.
There was movement, a shape that turned out to be a cat darting away. Jimmy shined his red light on the window over the sink. There was a cracked-out pane, a tear in the screen.
In the living room, he crossed to the front window, looked out where he had looked in that afternoon. The blue light of the TV across the way was gone now. He turned, took in the room. On the wall by the front door was a picture of Jack and Elaine on a sailboat tied up out front. On the coffee table were Reader’s Digests, five or six of them spread out in a semicircle like a hand of cards. There was a Life. A chevron-shaped ceramic ashtray matched the lamps. All of it was covered with dust. The living room was unchanged from the newspaper photo taken the morning after the killings. All that was missing was the black-haired cop who’d stood beside the “fireplace” pointing at something that had nothing to do with the carnage upstairs. The wind drawn down the canal came up again. A bougainvillea scratched against the glass, like something wanting in.
There was a small bedroom downstairs. A boy’s room.
Jimmy went upstairs. On the walls down the hall were pictures of the family, pictures of Jean, a baby propped onto a silk pillow, a very little girl with a balloon, a four-year-old and her mother on the steps out front, Elaine in a light-colored sundress with a full skirt, a cigarette between her fingers. There was one picture of Jean’s brother, a sulking twelve-year-old in a suit that matched his dad’s.
He shined the light into the bathroom: pink and green tile, a pedestal sink, dirty, a dimmed mirror. The plastic shower curtain was hard, cracked, brown. There was water in the toilet, which was iron-stained, too.
The door to the bedroom on the front of the house was closed. Jimmy tried the knob. It was unlocked. He stepped in.
It was full dark, shades pulled down over the windows. He swept the room with his light. There was the round bed, the black lacquered “Oriental” bedside table, the funny, overstyled clock radio. Somebody had cleaned the room and pulled the door closed and walked away. Jimmy knelt where Bill Danko fell. He unclipped the red filter from the penlight, scanned the white carpet for some trace of the bloodstain. Clean. He looked over at the floor-to-ceiling silver curtains where, the theory went, the killer had waited.
Jimmy stepped closer, reached out. The cloth had lost all of its life, turned to powder. His fingers went right through it. He touched the shade on the window. It rolled up, clattering and flapping like a window shade in a cartoon. He pulled it back down into place.
He came out, leaving the bedroom door open behind him.
At the other end of the hallway, a door stood open, a third bedroom. Jimmy hesitated. There was something bad still in the air in the house, riding in the molecules. He knew he was built to deal with the past, to walk though rooms most people couldn’t bear, but this was creeping him out and he didn’t know why.
At the end of the hall he clipped the red filter onto the light again and shined it at his feet, at the frayed carpet, worn in a path in the center. The dim red circle of light crossed the jamb, into the back bedroom. There was clutter just inside the doorway, stacks of magazines, folded grocery bags, a couple of empty flat cans.
Cat food.
He stepped in. There was quick movement somewhere, something the same color as the room.
Where was the wash from the streetlights in the alley?
Jimmy stepped to the bay windows that faced the back. There were heavy drapes, closed together, and lowered shades behind the drapes. He ran his fingers along the edge of the shade, felt something. He shined the red light: the shades were taped tight against the window with duct tape, blocking any light from outside.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
Jimmy was trying to make sense of it when a woman coughed and, in the same moment, a black-and-white
TV flashed on.
He jumped half out of his skin, fell back against the windows.
The woman—she had stringy gray hair cut straight across the bangs and wore a faded dress and a sweater and slippers—had turned on the television manually. She now just stood there before it, blue/gray, dead-looking in its light.
She watched it a moment, stepped back, sat in a worn chair.
Jimmy was caught. There was no place to hide. He stood stock still in the pulsing light of the television.
Was it possible she hadn’t seen him?
No, now she looked right at him, as if he had said that last thought out loud. A cat jumped onto the arm of her chair. Then a second cat and a third and a fourth came out from somewhere to rub against her. She still looked directly at Jimmy where he stood, eight feet away, against the windows, in the wash of TV light.
The red cap to his penlight fell to the floor. He bent to pick it up. She watched him. He looked into her eyes and she looked into his.
He took a step toward the doorway. She followed him with her eyes, her expression unchanged.
And then she looked back at the TV.
SIX
On the office wall was a colored print of Jesus sitting in his robes across the desk from a businessman in a gray suit.
Jimmy was across the desk from Angel.
“You didn’t even see her, man?” Angel said.
“Not until she turned on the TV.”
“And she didn’t see you?”
“She looked right at me,” Jimmy said. “She saw me, but I guess seeing someone standing there wasn’t that out of the ordinary to her.”
“So who was she?”
“I don’t know. Nobody. A street person. Maybe just someone who comes in to feed the stray cats. It was easy enough to get in.”
“Sad,” Angel said.
Angel’s body shop was downtown ten blocks south of the City Center. Through the windows in the walls in the inner office you could see men at work on expensive cars. It was a beautiful old wooden building, once a Packard dealership, with a high arched roof. The floors were slick white. This wasn’t an insurance shop. You had to care about cars the way they cared about cars before they even let you through the door. Clean was about the highest compliment the men working here paid each other’s work.