by Dan Vining
“This is wack,” Drew said, his eyes on the house.
“It’s just the way it is,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t design this. I don’t know who did.”
Now Drew was crying.
“You’re here for as long as you’re here, until whatever unfinished business you have is finished. You can try to do some good—or you can be one of those people we saw on the street back there, on Sunset, here to do wrong.”
He didn’t tell the boy that there was a third thing you could be. A Walker. Dead to the world, this world and the other.
“You have a new family now,” Jimmy said, flat and unsentimental, looking straight ahead at the grayed-out trees in the next block.
He heard the door open as Drew bolted from the car.
Jimmy went after him, as once somebody had gone after him.
He caught up to him on the lawn, on the black grass.
“Leave me alone!”
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing you can do,” Jimmy said, loud enough to wake the neighbors. “I know.”
Drew had stopped.
“Come on,” Jimmy said.
The door opened. The man, Terry, had heard the noise, the voices. He came out onto the front step. He tried to make sense of two strangers standing there ten feet away.
“Don’t say his name,” Jimmy said.
Drew turned toward the man. With the door open, there was light on the boy’s face.
“Don’t,” Jimmy said.
“What are you doing?” Terry said.
A woman stepped into view behind him in the doorway.
“Who is it?” she said with the saddest kind of hope.
As the sky turned pink, Jimmy yanked close the blackout drapes in the bedroom at the end of the hallway in his house. Behind him Drew was on his back on the black covering on the bed, eyes open.
TEN
In the morning paper there was an article about last night’s accident, a picture of the overturned Honda, a headline:
TWO DEAD, ONE CRITICAL
IN CANYON CRASH
There was a school picture of Drew, probably from two or three grades ago, a straight-faced, trying-to-look-older pose. His last name was Hastings. The other dead boy had been a runner, had held some state record so he got more ink. And a smiling picture, taken from the sports pages of the Notre Dame High School paper.
An adjacent article showed the same photo they were using of the young Latino boy lost in the brown hills out in what they called the Inland Empire and, now, a picture of a man in handcuffs, a Mexican man who looked as if he’d never smiled.
“The news is always the same,” Jimmy said. “It just happens to different people.”
Angel came into the dining room from the kitchen with a cup of coffee.
“I almost drove him down to The Pipe last night,” Jimmy said. “Maybe he should see that first.”
“He’ll know about it soon enough,” Angel said.
Jimmy picked up a phone and dialed the number for Jean’s office. She wasn’t expected in all day. Jimmy called her apartment. After three rings, the machine picked up. Jimmy hung up.
“She was with you?” Angel said.
Jimmy nodded.
“What’s her name?”
“Jean.”
“What’s her last name?”
“I told you, Kantke.”
“What did she see?”
“A car wreck,” Jimmy said.
Angel took a sip of his coffee, waited for Jimmy to remember who he was talking to.
“I don’t know what she thought,” Jimmy said. “She didn’t say anything. I took her back to her office to get her car and then followed her home.”
Jimmy went into the study. Angel followed him.
“So she’s the Long Beach thing. The murders.”
“Yeah.”
“So it’s more than the case. With her. For you.”
“I guess it was getting to be. I don’t know what it’s going to be now.”
Jimmy sat behind the desk and pulled the keyboard closer and rewound the digital machines that recorded output from the security cameras that ringed his property. Between midnight and one, the pale men and the big men from the other night on the hotel roof had made an appearance at the back gate, testing the iron bars, hanging out for twenty minutes.
Jimmy put the picture onto a flat screen monitor on the wall.
“You know these guys?”
Angel looked at the screen and shook his head. Jimmy froze the image and clicked a few keys and the printer printed out a hard copy.
“Maybe they were selling magazines,” Angel said.
“I played a little road tag with the two on the left the other day. They were in an Escort.”
Angel got the joke.
“Lon and Vince,” Jimmy said, looking at their pale faces. “And then the other night I met the other two and a leader, a guy close to seven foot. They showed me the view from the Roosevelt.”
“And that has to do with this?” Angel said.
Jimmy didn’t know. Or wasn’t ready to say. He shrugged.
Drew was in the game room playing pinball, a bottle of Dos Equis sitting on top of the glass. A TV was on, big screen, street luge skaters ripping down a too steep canyon road somewhere, crisscrossing, losing it, spinning out, crashing into hay bales. Drew apparently didn’t get the connection or he would have turned it off.
Jimmy stepped into the doorway.
“I have to go somewhere. You want to go with me?”
“Go where?”
“I’m an investigator. I’m working on something.”
“A what?”
“An investigator.”
“What’s the point?”
“You’ll feel better if you do something, if you go out there and try to find some answers to the questions that there are answers for. Like I said, there are two ways to go.”
“Yeah, I know,” Drew said. “Everybody’s gotta believe in something. I believe I’ll have another beer . . .”
Jimmy turned to go.
“Let me ask you something,” Drew said to stop him, not looking up from his game. “Can I die? I mean, again?” Maybe he did get the connection between the crashing luge skaters and what had happened to him on the canyon road.
“You can get hurt,” Jimmy said, “bad, but you won’t die.” Here was another chance to tell the kid about the third thing that could happen, about how your spirit could die and you’d be left with even less, how they could take your spirit away, the thing they’d hauled him up to the roof for, just so he’d remember it. “You’re here until it’s time for you to go—”
“Yeah, I know . . .”
“But you can’t bring it on yourself and nobody else can bring it on you.”
Drew threw his weight against the machine to force the steel ball uphill.
“Even if like a bullet went through my head, I wouldn’t die.”
“No.”
“If I was shredding down a mountain and pulled a full-on Sonny Bono, I wouldn’t die.”
“No. You could get messed up, but you wouldn’t die.”
The pinball machine clattered wildly. Something had happened.
“The pathetic thing is I don’t know if that’s good news or bad,” Drew said.
Jimmy said, “That’s why there are—”
“Yeah, ‘two ways to go . . .’ ” Drew said. “ ‘Use The Force, Luke.’ ”
Jimmy knew most of the story and a phone call to a friend in politics brought the rest. Harry Turner was a “kingmaker,” one of the men—or, depending on whom you talked to, the man—you went to if you wanted to be governor or a federal judge. Or, if you believed everything you heard, the anchorman on the local news in Santa Barbara where one of Harry Turner’s five big houses was. It was one of those stories that over the years got better and better. To run things in California, you had to wait in line. The man at the head of the line, hand on the gate, for the last twenty years anyway, was Harry Turner. He’d been the real law
yer who ran Jack Kantke’s defense, behind the scenes, behind Upland or Overland or Upchurch or whatever his name was, the Long Beach lawyer whose name nobody could remember but who had to sit at the table next to defendant Kantke and take the loss when it came. When Harry Turner stopped practicing law himself, “retired” in the nineties, he still kept his firm open with a half dozen lawyers angling to be his favorite, his heir, the son he never had. He went even further behind the curtain. He was on a dozen boards of directors. He owned car dealerships. He owned a chain of smog inspection stations. He owned billboard companies. He held patents for devices he couldn’t point to on a table, for “processes” he couldn’t begin to explain. He owned a restaurant. He owned airports. He made money while he slept.
And twenty years ago, with a new dogleg in the aqueduct to bring in water from the Colorado, he became one of the “visionaries” turning green the Coachella Valley out past Palm Springs and Indian Wells. Desert into farmland. He had a thousand acres of winter lettuce and another five hundred in table grapes.
He was eleven feet tall, on the back of his horse.
He rode, not that fast but steady, out of a block of date palms planted in rows and then along the edge of a fie ld of something so green it clashed with the sky. He rode without changing his pace right straight at the black pickup with the ranch logo on the door, came up fast enough to make them all turn their heads aside. He wore chinos and short brown Wellington boots and a long-sleeve white shirt. He stayed in the saddle, all eleven feet of him.
Jimmy had been hand-delivered by a pair of robust cowboys who made the Sailors on the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel look anorexic. These men were Basque, real cowboys. They’d stopped Jimmy even before he made it to the gates of the ranch, sixty seconds after a black helicopter had overflown him in the Mustang on the mile-long road in off of the highway. They’d shown him where to leave his car in front of one of the very clean outbuildings. One of them nodded toward the front seat of the black truck and then got behind the wheel and the other man climbed in back and sat against the tailgate and rode that way all the way out into the fields.
They were strong and their suspiciousness was industrial-strength, but they weren’t smart. Jimmy had told them he was the mayor of Rancho Cucamonga.
Harry Turner looked him over, looked at his sissy shoes, his Prada suit, and smiled a little sourly.
“Mr. Mayor,” he said. He had a walkie-talkie hanging off his wide brown belt. They’d called ahead.
Turner climbed down out of the saddle and took off his hat, a flat-brim Stetson that made him look like a mounted cop. His hand came out and Jimmy thought it might be the start of a handshake but Turner was just reaching for a kerchief he kept tucked up his left sleeve. He wiped off his forehead, even though he wasn’t sweating.
Jimmy still hadn’t said a word. It was the right thing not to say.
“You had lunch?” Turner said.
He didn’t wait for an answer, just walked past Jimmy toward a black flagship Mercedes S600 that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago. Another Basque man now stood beside the pickup. Mexican men in jobs like these always looked at the ground when you weren’t talking to them. These men looked at you. One of them retrieved an automatic rifle from the trunk of the Mercedes before Turner got behind the wheel and they left.
They drove for a mile between two fields and then turned right and drove another mile. All the roads were paved. They had them to themselves. There were tumbleweeds and burger wrappers blown against the chain-link fences. They came out onto the access road and then onto the highway, Interstate 10, headed east through the brown and the green, all of it as flat as the top of a stove. They drove and drove. The Chocolate Mountains on the other side of the valley were getting bigger in front of them.
Maybe they were going to Phoenix.
The green glass in the window beside Jimmy’s head was an inch thick. He tipped his head over to where he could see the side mirror. The black pickup was a half mile back, three of the Basques shoulder to shoulder in the front seat.
Turner didn’t say much of anything, beyond naming the crops in the fields alongside the interstate as they passed, three kinds of summer lettuce, “baby’s breath”—which he sure enough made sound like a product—jojoba and sod. The sod farm was out the window for a long minute at eighty miles an hour, an expanse of lawn with no big house behind it, unsettling, wrong.
They passed a section of planted date trees, Medjool dates, Turner said.
“Dates are too sweet.” Which meant they were somebody else’s dates.
Jimmy didn’t disagree.
Just as he was settling into his seat, thinking they were going to Phoenix, or at least Blythe, they came up on a big new gaudy Morongo Indian casino with a hundred-foot sign out front and a name that didn’t say anything about Indians. Turner looked over at it with a long look that made Jimmy figure he owned that, too, or a piece of it. And he took the brand-new exit just past it.
But they weren’t going to the casino. They took another road, another paved road straight south for five or six miles and then there was a big white box of an aluminum building, nothing else for miles, with three Lincoln Town Cars and a pickup and a new Cadillac in the lot in front. It didn’t have a sign.
There was just one long wooden table inside but it was covered with white linen and the tableware was silver, though a plain pattern. There weren’t any flowers. There weren’t any windows either. It was about sixty degrees, a hundred and nine outside.
A single waiter in a plain-front white shirt and black pants stood next to the kitchen door. There wasn’t any music, just six or seven men talking. They were all dressed like fie ld hands. In four-h undred-dollar boots. None of them were young.
“We waited, Harry,” one of them said. The plate in front of him had a pile of bloody bones and a last smear of what looked liked creamed spinach.
Turner slapped the man on the back.
“Don’t get up,” he said, since the man wasn’t moving.
He shook the hands of two of the other men. One of them introduced the man beside him he’d brought as a guest. Turner knew the rest of them. He didn’t introduce Jimmy and the other men didn’t ask.
“Looks like it’s lamb,” Turner said as he and Jimmy sat down across the table from each other at one end, away from the others.
Jimmy nodded.
“It’ll be good,” Turner said. “Americans don’t know how to slaughter lambs.” The way he said Americans made Jimmy wonder if maybe Turner wasn’t his real name. A lot of the farmers and ranchers out here were Armenian. “Most Americans think they’ve eaten lamb and most of them think they don’t like the taste. You butcher it wrong, you let any part of the meat touch the layer of fat just under the wool and the lanolin turns the meat, gives it that lamb taste.”
The waiter came with two plates, put them in front of the men, and filled their glasses with red wine.
“But maybe you already know all about lamb,” Turner said.
“I didn’t know that,” Jimmy said. “I even thought I liked it.” He picked up a lamb chop and chewed off a bite.
It was the best lamb in the world, the lamb of kings.
Or kingmakers.
“Guess I see what you mean,” Jimmy said.
“You know how to eat it,” Turner said. He picked up a chop with his fingers, too, out of the puddle of blood.
Turner said what Jimmy had already figured out, that a group of them in the Valley had gotten together to make this place, a private dining hall, built it, built the road out to it, hired a chef away from some hotel.
“French,” Turner said. “But he’s all right.”
Jimmy ate his spinach. From that first Mr. Mayor out in the fields under the nonstop sun, he knew Turner was onto him. He also knew that was the way to get in to see someone like Harry Turner. You lied to him in the right way, in this case the smart-ass way.
You sure didn’t come in trying to flatter him. A man like Harry Turner had s
tood before a line of flatterers stretching away to the horizon. You didn’t bow and scrape. Even the waiter knew that.
So Turner was onto him. The question was how much.
The waiter stepped in to top off Turner’s wineglass. Turner looked at him.
“We’ll do that.”
The waiter left the bottle and backed away. The wine was a Jordan Beaujolais.
“I understand you want to know about my brilliant defense of Florence Gilroy in the poisoning death of her third husband,” Turner said.
So they’d radioed out to the fie lds that the mayor of Rancho Cucamonga was there to see him. And Turner had said bullshit and told them to call in the plate on the Mustang. Then who knows what other calls he’d made, even before he started riding in from the date palm oasis. Whomever he’d called, Harry Turner knew everything he needed to know. Or thought he did.
“I do want to know. Sometime,” Jimmy said.
Turner wasn’t in a hurry to eat. It made Jimmy know that this was more important to him than it could have been, maybe even than it should have been.
“Did you look up Barry Upchurch?”
Jimmy shook his head. “Is he still alive?”
Turner said, “You know, I don’t know.” It was a lie.
The last three men left together. One of them, the one who’d introduced his man to Turner, put a hand on Turner’s back as he passed and leaned in close and said something, three or four sentences, into his ear.
Turner nodded. And then shook his head no.
“That’s what I said,” the man said, loud enough to hear.
Then they were alone. The waiter even disappeared.
Turner said, “Where were we?”
“You were saying Jack Kantke couldn’t possibly have done it because he was talking about the Dodgers with the gas station guy in Barstow at eight-fifteen and the time of the murders was determined to be between eight and midnight.”
“Six and midnight,” Turner said. “They couldn’t peg it any closer, not then. 1977. Maybe today.”
“Six and midnight,” Jimmy corrected. “Still . . .”
“He drove fast,” Turner said.