Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  Price was going to make Jimmy wait for it.

  Jimmy waited for it.

  “ ‘We’re in the loneliness business.’ Not loneliest, loneliness . . .”

  Jimmy got it. He nodded his head.

  “Buying or selling?” he said.

  Darren Price didn’t get it.

  “What was the second thing you learned?” Jimmy said.

  “Hats start fights.”

  They talked another half hour. Lloyd-the-Void looked disappointed when Jimmy stood up to go.

  It was almost four. The Kinko’s that occupied the space where Big Daddy’s used to be was open all night. They’d ripped off the two-story front and put in glass all the way up. It was a box of light in front of the empty parking lot. There were six or eight people in there under the ghastly bright lights, two guys behind the counter and one running the big machine that wasn’t self-serve. They probably kept the reams of paper down below in what had been the serious room, Tone Espinosa’s room.

  They’d left the entrance the same, six steps up to what had been the main room of the club. Elaine Kantke and Bill Danko had climbed those steps, looking to do something about their loneliness, if you believed Big Daddy.

  Jimmy sat on the front fender of the Porsche, the car he’d picked that morning from the line in the garage.

  “Why do people need to make copies in the middle of the night?” he said, out loud, to no one. “What are they copying?”

  A coughing VW bug came in, fast. A man with a belly and a colorless T-shirt the size that maybe fit him when he was twenty got out and charged in, taking two steps at a time, his fist clutching a thick sheaf of papers. There was one answer: it was open for the people up all night grinding their teeth at some grievance, consumer or governmental, assembling their cases, ready to by God fire off some papers in the morning.

  It had been a long day. The days got longer when Jimmy was working, felt that way anyway. This story was at that early stage where everything was incomplete, sketchy, self-contradictory—and he had done this enough to know that a big part of what he was “learning” was just simply wrong.

  A seagull landed on a light stanchion. Jimmy turned around and looked toward Marina Del Rey, the immense condominiums which stood over the wide channels and the hundreds of slips. The tops of the tallest masts were visible between the towers.

  The light was odd, noncommittal. He wished the sun would come up, right now.

  An LAPD sergeant’s cruiser pulled in beside him. The cop was alone. The window was down.

  “Saint Thomas,” Jimmy said.

  The patrol cars all had computer monitors hung on the dash now and a full-size keyboard where you used to put your coffee. The radio spoke, the voice female and not very friendly. You could tell the cop was a sergeant by the extra antennas on the roof.

  Saint Thomas’s last name was Connor. He got out. He looked to be in his fifties, handsome in that cops and firemen way, self-assured good looks, clear eyes, skin wrinkled not from worry but from being on the boat on the lake on days off, or on the sidelines coaching kids.

  “You called?”

  Jimmy nodded toward the Kinko’s and asked if Connor had known the DJ who’d turned into a cop. And then a dead cop. It wasn’t that Jimmy thought it had anything to do with the case, he was just curious. It was a good story, in that Movie of the Week way. Or maybe as a pilot for a cop show. Connor didn’t know much about Tone Espinosa except that he’d been killed. Cops all knew who’d been killed, almost all the way back to the beginnings of LAPD.

  “Perversito,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Little Evil,” the cop said. “That’s who killed him, a gangbanger. He went away for it.”

  Jimmy told him what he was working on, a version that left out almost everything but the murders and the execution and kids orphaned. Connor nodded.

  They both looked at the nightclub-turned-Kinko’s.

  “Disco sucks,” Jimmy said, but he was just quoting.

  “I just remember getting laid a lot less for a year or so there,” Connor said.

  “You couldn’t dance?”

  “I guess not. Whatever it was, what I was didn’t work for a while there.”

  Sergeant Connor gave Jimmy a name or two, people who knew about the club scene back then, the drugs, the money. The bar business was a cash business and tended to have bad people around its borders, but Big Daddy’s had been a safer, tamer, brighter version of the seventies club scene than some of the others.

  Jimmy told him about the woman in the Rivo Alto house, asked the cop if he’d run a check on her, see if she had a history in the Naples neighborhood, in Long Beach. Maybe somebody had spotted her coming and going.

  “You want her chased out?”

  “No,” Jimmy said, and then wondered why he’d said it.

  And that was it. A ground fog started to come in around them. It wasn’t cold but it looked cold.

  Connor asked Jimmy how he was doing. Jimmy answered the question for real and asked the cop the same and listened to what he said. They both knew each other’s story. When the radio called the sergeant off to something somewhere out there in what was left of the night, the two men stood up and embraced and held the embrace for a long moment.

  Where was that sun?

  SEVEN

  A Cessna landed. Badly. The right wheel touched first, the plane bucked, then the left wheel hit hard. On the grass between the runway and the taxiway, four old men sat in white plastic lawn chairs. They took a minute then held up handmade cardboard squares with numbers, grading the landing as if this was the Olympics. They had all been fliers or had built planes. It was all very unofficial but the understanding was that the old guys had earned the right to rag on the youngsters. Every pilot who landed tried not to look over but all of them did.

  This time the scoring fell somewhere between a four and a five.

  Jimmy walked up.

  “You look like an undertaker,” one of the old men, Kirk, said. Jimmy wore a black suit.

  He stuck out his hand.

  “How are you?”

  Angel had called Jimmy from his shop downtown at noon. He had come up with a name for him, somebody who might know about Bill Danko and what had been called Clover Field.

  Kirk pumped the hand once. “I told Angel I’d come in to your office.”

  “Don’t have one,” Jimmy said.

  “Well, let’s do it,” Kirk said, and then looked at his friends as he made a joke, “I don’t have all day.”

  They walked down the taxiway. They were on the B-side of the airport, businesses in old wooden buildings and World War II Quonset huts, every third or fourth one vacant, airplane maintenance, radio repair, aerial photography, a skywriting company with one plane. Vines covered half the buildings. Most had peeling paint, gloriously neglected. Somehow, here in the middle of L.A. was a sizable section of the unimproved. There was probably an old person somewhere who’d so long ignored the men in suits with their Big Plans for the property that they’d stopped coming, now just waiting her out—it was usually a woman—waiting for her to die and get out of the way.

  “Angel wouldn’t tell me what this was about,” Kirk said. “He said you were a private investigator. I guess one of my girlfriends’ husbands is onto us.”

  They weren’t headed anywhere in particula but the old man walked at a good steady pace as if getting from here to there was something he’d be judged on.

  “I told Angel, I got a photograph of your mother somewhere,” Kirk said. “Autographed. I didn’t understand those pictures she made over in Europe, but I sure liked her.”

  It made Jimmy smile.

  “Where do you know Angel from?”

  “Big Brothers,” Kirk said. “I ran a unit until I got too old to stand up to all the bullshit.” He held up his hand as if testifying. “I mean, I’m not gay, but I can’t prove it.”

  A sleek corporate jet took off behind them, screaming. The 10 freeway was
less than a mile away to the north and the 405 almost as close to the east. The roars merged.

  When it quieted, Jimmy said, “Angel said you were the guy to ask about the old days here.”

  Kirk said, “He said it was about the seventies. You call that the old days?”

  “It’s all relative, I guess.”

  “I was on the line for Steadman twenty-eight years,” Kirk said. “I put Pitot tubes in ST-10s. Before the war, it was ST-3s. The 10s were built right over there”—he pointed to a massive hump-roof hangar, the biggest building at the airport—“and the 3s built in Hangar Nine that got torn down in September of ’73.”

  Jimmy stopped to admire one falling-down building. They had walked almost to the end of the taxiway.

  “So what’s this about?” Kirk said.

  “You remember the Kantke murders?” Jimmy said.

  “Sure.”

  “Bill Danko.”

  Kirk nodded.

  “You knew him?”

  “I saw him around,” Kirk said. “His outfit was up here behind what used to be the old Clipper Hangar. Everybody said he was an all right guy. That’s what you’re looking into?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “I saw her once, the woman,” Kirk said. “She showed up, waiting for Danko to come back from a photo job, a flyover. He had a Cessna 152. Red over white, mortgaged up. She had an old-fashioned hat on her head, tied under her chin with a ribbon, like as if they were going to fly off together in an open-cockpit Waco. She looked like a barrel of laughs.”

  The old man set out walking again and Jimmy followed him. Kirk talked fast and asked the usual questions, what they all wanted to know: what other cases Jimmy had investigated, the stories behind the stories, the moments when the flashbulbs flashed. Jimmy didn’t offer much. He never did. He’d long ago figured out that nobody wanted to hear the truth. Death and sex, that’s what most of it was about, sometimes money, but he didn’t take those cases. A case was never what it looked like from the outside and when it was over, what was important was never the big plot points, the flashbulb moments. It was what was going on unnoticed in the corner of the frame, the ambulance guys rolling out a woman on a gurney, the cops talking to the people in the next bungalow—and a boy steps up across the street into a clot of strangers, just coming home from school. Maybe it was why he did it, to notice the unnoticed, to find meaning there. Or try.

  They’d reached the last of the buildings off on a side taxiway. “There,” the old man said.

  It was a decrepit building, vacant, standing alone, barely standing, a faded Plexiglas sign on the end of it announcing Sunshine Air, a charter company. The sign hung half off. What was left of a painted sign was underneath: Danko “Flying School”—just like that, quotation marks and all, like it was a pretend flying school.

  “He never could make a go of it, as far as anybody could tell,” Kirk said, as if the look of the building didn’t get that idea across. “And then Steadman Industries bought him out. For a good price, some said.” The old man shrugged. He had lived long enough to see a thousand things he didn’t get. “And then Danko was dead, before he could enjoy the money. Well, he bought himself a new plane right off, I guess he enjoyed that. And her.”

  Everybody seemed to understand how you could enjoy Elaine Kantke.

  “You want to look around, go ahead,” Kirk said. “Nobody’ll hassle you. There’s nothing back here now. Now in the old days, on the other side of Hangar Six was—” Another jet roared into the sky, drowning out the last of it.

  Jimmy stood there thinking of her, Elaine Kantke in her hat, maybe standing right where he was standing now. He thought again about the detail he’d learned, how the bullet that had killed her, went through her, had creased Bill Danko’s cheek. It had probably carried some of her to him, a last kiss.

  Maybe Jimmy did this for the poetry.

  Kirk walked away, leaving Jimmy there to knock around in the past. The front door was locked. He looked in through the dirty windows. The room was bare, cleared of everything but the old newspapers on the floor, a bed for somebody from the way they were shaped, and faded posters of Cabo and La Paz on the walls. On the back wall was an open rectangle where an air conditioner had been. Jimmy went around to the weedy lot behind the building and crawled in through the hole.

  There was a small room off the main room. In it, a desk and a pair of chairs and a water cooler with a dusty glass bottle were stacked at odd angles up to the ceiling. There was a file cabinet. Jimmy opened it. It was empty except for rat droppings and a book of matches from a cocktail lounge.

  The desk was on its end against the wall. It was as old as the building. He pulled it down, set it back on its feet, rolled over the wheeled office chair. The drawers were empty. There was a phone number written in pencil on the bottom of one, a number with a two letter prefix, from some business in the forties or fifties. Geologists had the right idea about history: it was just layers of sediment, one on top of the other. And, given enough time, any sad piece of shit becomes precious.

  Jimmy ran his hands along the underside of the wide center drawer and found a manila envelope wedged into a hiding place. He opened it. It was a bodybuilder magazine from the sixties, big-chested men preening on So Cal beaches.

  In the ceiling was an access hatch. Jimmy arranged the desk and the chair, climbed up and pushed the square door up and over and stuck his head through to the crawl space. Screened vents at the two ends of the roof let in enough light to see. There were two cardboard boxes. He took off his suit jacket, folded it and put it over the chair back, climbed through the hatch and crawled toward them.

  Both boxes were empty, but scattered among the ceiling joists were a few dozen pale green cancelled checks. With his head against the roof, Jimmy went through them. Ten or twelve were made out to “Beachside Market,” each for five dollars, spending money, Danko’s allowance. One paid the phone bill. There were rent checks. Steadman Industries owned the building. There were four to an aviation fuel company, three of them with notations about “Late Penalty ($10) Included.”

  And two to “Chip’s Fashion House” for those Nik-Niks.

  The museum of flight was across the main runway in a cavernous metal building, a new building. A yellow biplane hung from wires from the ceiling, suspended over three open decks of displays, models and full-sized airplanes. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass on the backside of it you could watch takeoffs and landings, listen in on the radio traffic on a bank of headphones. It was the modern opposite of the old men in their lawn chairs on the other side of the runway.

  Jimmy was in a sea of Cub Scouts surrounding a restored ST-10, the bomber in the picture on Angel’s office wall. The boys jumped up and down below the wings, swatting at the undercarriage, trying to touch the teardrop tanks that hung down.

  He went up to the top level.

  Clover Field forty years ago. There was a wall of photos: the hangars, the workmen like Angel, the bombers coming off the assembly line.

  It was also a history of Steadman Industries. As you walked along, the company moved into the fifties and sixties and then the seventies, props disappearing, wings angling back, nothing ahead but a bright, high-flying future. Or so said the PR.

  There was a commotion behind Jimmy as half of the Cubs arrived. They pressed their faces against the glass of a display, the re-created Steadman boardroom of the sixties. Jimmy crossed the hallway and looked over their shoulders. It was complete: the original furniture—a great oblong mahogany table and leather chairs—Coke bottles, coffee cups, pads and pens, pictures on the walls, an ST-10 taking off outside a “window”—and ten wax figures seated around the table, their glass eyes fixed on the big man standing before them.

  The plaque read:

  WALTER E. C. “RED” STEADMAN

  FOUNDER

  1911-1973

  He looked like the kind of man who could get his name painted in fifty-foot letters across the top of a hangar.

  Jimmy thoug
ht he saw the old guy blink.

  When he came back down to the first floor, his tails were back, the pale men who’d been at Canter’s. Today, the short one even had on a peacoat and watch cap. It was easy to make fun of them, but there wasn’t any fun in it today for Jimmy. Maybe it was all the scouts, all the innocents. He tried to make it through to the front door without them spotting him, but the tall one saw him and shot a look up at the second man on the higher flo or. The two-tone blonde came down the staircase fast and joined the other, the two of them “hiding” behind a stacked rack of bombs, a pyramid of dummies.

  Jimmy went after them. Why were Sailors interested in this? Maybe he could shake it out of one of them. The two of them tried to get lost in the crowd. They looked bewildered. When you were tailing someone, he wasn’t supposed to come after you. They ducked behind planes, pretended to look at the shiny models of 747s and then at the mannequins of stews in pastel seventies uniforms. The Cubs had all descended from the top floor and made the two stand out all the more. Even the short one stood tall over them.

  Jimmy kept coming. There was a flight simulator in one corner on the ground floor, a twenty-seater big as a bus mounted on hydraulic lifters. The two pale men cut in line, just making it through the simulator doors before they whooshed closed.

  He got close enough to see the name of the ride: “Turbulence Over Tucson.” The hydraulics sighed and then went to work.

  Jimmy’s ’70 Dodge Challenger, painted school bus yellow, eight coats, hand-rubbed, was parked all by itself in the last row in the lot. He got in, buckled himself in, lit it up. It had a Hemi 454 V-8 under the bulge in the hood. At idle it made a sound a little like a tiger at the zoo in the middle of the afternoon, sleepy, not all that happy. There was a four speed on the flo or. Jimmy backed around, pulled out. He eased up and over three speed bumps and moved onto the street, never spinning the tires once.