Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  “I thought of that,” Jimmy said.

  “You like to drive fast.”

  “I just like to drive. I even like to sit in cars in my driveway.”

  Turner ate a good half of his meal before he said anything else. There were linen napkins. He wiped the blood off of his lips onto one.

  “I never understood why the other side didn’t say that,” he said. “He drove fast.”

  “People hate math,” Jimmy said.

  Turner nodded. He thought he was being likeable.

  Jimmy tried to come at it from another angle, got out a few words of a question, when Turner cut him off.

  “We bought the guy at the gas station in Barstow. Six hundred dollars, as I recall. And I think he asked for a pair of Dodgers tickets, his idea of a joke. He’s dead now.”

  “But not because he had a bad sense of humor,” Jimmy said.

  Turner gave a little hint of that sour smile again.

  The waiter reappeared without being called, put a cup of black coffee beside Turner’s left hand. He was left-handed.

  “So what time did Kantke stop for gas?” Jimmy asked.

  Turner said, “About two hours after he shot and killed his wife and Bill Danko.”

  Just like that.

  There it was.

  In case Jimmy didn’t get it the first time, Turner said again, “He drove fast.”

  “It would have been rush hour,” Jimmy said.

  “It was a Saturday,” Turner said. “But you knew that.”

  Jimmy did know that.

  He put his fork and knife on top of his plate.

  “So,” Jimmy said. “What’s for dessert?”

  “None of us eat dessert,” Turner said, looking straight across the table at him. “Vanity. Young wives.”

  “Did you see him executed?” Jimmy said, right back to his eyes.

  “You make it sound like an obligation.”

  Jimmy didn’t know how he was supposed to take that.

  “You lose the case, you have to watch the man die?” Turner said.

  “I guess it’s a long way up to San Quentin.”

  “Jack Kantke and I weren’t friends,” Turner said. “I was just a lawyer trying to help a fellow member of the California Bar.”

  “ ‘In good standing . . .’ ”

  “All of us,” Turner said.

  When Jimmy came out of the dining hall into the glare of the sun, into what was now the hundred and ten degree heat, his Mustang was sitting there waiting for him.

  And Jimmy had the keys in his pocket.

  He looked up at the utterly clear sky. There wasn’t even a daylight moon. He hadn’t seen Turner come out behind him and hadn’t heard anything, but now the black Mercedes pulled out of the lot and onto the road, followed by the men in the pickup in their black txapela Basque berets.

  And then Jimmy was alone out there.

  ELEVEN

  When Jimmy stepped out of the farmers’ and ranchers’ private dining room in the middle of their made-over desert and looked up at the rich blue of the empty sky, for some reason he remembered something he’d heard a NASA scientist say once on a television program, that space wasn’t all that far away, that if you could drive there in a car, you’d be there in an hour. And he remembered something else from the program, that way way out, a few billion miles past that first edge of space, sometimes they would identify a body by the negative evidence, know something was there because everything pointed away from it, because there was a too clear expanse of nothing.

  What Harry Turner had said—and what he hadn’t—had turned Jimmy’s mind. Turner had stated outright that Jack Kantke had killed his wife and Bill Danko, then driven hard and fast out of L.A. to cobble together an alibi. What Turner had said, had confessed on behalf of his client, was meant to convey the same message to Jimmy as the trip to the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel with the Sailors. Nothing to see here, move right along. . . . Harry Turner had read Jimmy Miles as wrong as the tall bony redheaded Sailor and whoever had sent him. What was meant to drive him away only drew him in closer.

  Maybe it was just the look in Harry Turner’s eye.

  Whatever it was, Jimmy now guessed, just for himself, that Jack Kantke hadn’t killed his wife and her lover. He didn’t know who did, didn’t know why, but, just for himself, he was all but sure it had been somebody else standing with the gun behind the wisp of a curtain in the white front bedroom in the Rivo Alto house and that they’d gassed the wrong man.

  If you still believed in the notion of right and wrong men.

  California 74 was a winding, climbing two-lane road highlighted in the AAA tourist guides as something special, the Palms to Pines Highway, slithering its way up off the desert floor into the San Bernardino Mountains, toward Mount San Jacinto, “from a desert oasis to snow capped mountains.” And, though it was June, almost July and the valley behind him was baking, there would be snow on the sides of the road when he got to the higher elevations, up to the top, into the evergreens, eight thousand feet.

  But he wasn’t there yet and he was enjoying the drive. He came to the first of the tall stick trees and pulled off the road and got out. The air smelled cool and green, like the world wouldn’t mind if you lived another day or so. That was the way it was in the mountains. Back down behind him in the desert, Nature didn’t much care if you were there or not, regarded you the way a tortoise looks at you, Are you another rock?

  Jimmy opened the hatchback and pulled the soft, worn red plaid Pendleton shirt out of the grocery bag. He was alone on the highway, hadn’t seen another soul for twenty minutes. He took off his white silk short-sleeved shirt and then the T-shirt underneath it. It wasn’t cold at all but the air made his skin ripple. He pulled on the stretched-out Sears undershirt from the bag and unbuckled his slacks and dropped them and slipped into a pair of faded, patched-at-the-k nee Levi’s. He folded his suit pants and sat on the rear bumper and changed his socks and put on a pair of black hightop Converse All Stars.

  He’d bought the clothes at the Salvation Army in Palm Springs. Everything came to a couple of bucks less than what he’d paid for the socks he walked in wearing. He wasn’t in any hurry, knew where he was going next, so he spent some time talking with the woman behind the register. She had that look in her eye, that recovered look, a little shaky but she was going to be all right, had managed to get in the present, to just read the page in front of her. Maybe she could tell Jimmy how to do it.

  The shirt felt good. He wondered about the man who’d worn it last. Angel had told him about a preacher who made a thing of only wearing the clothes of men in his congregation who’d died, clothes bundled up and handed over by widows and grown children, after they’d buried their faces in the shirts one last time. Jimmy buttoned up the plaid shirt and closed the hatchback. Clothes with a history, it fit.

  In Idyllwild, he bought ten dollars’ worth of gas and paid cash. The attendant, a high school kid, looked him over good, though he didn’t get up out of his plastic chair to do it. The Mustang was a little too cherry to really match the driver in the knockaround clothes, but the kid and the locals walking by didn’t seem to notice, didn’t seem to be thinking much of anything when they looked at Jimmy. Which was the idea.

  Idyllwild was a collection of log buildings on both sides of the highway on the flat part of the summit. A pair of Alpine A-frame gift shops, almost identical, stood across the road from each other, each with an eight-f oot redwood bear out front, chain-saw carved. There was a restaurant. There was an ice cream parlor. There was a bar. There was a little brown wood church up the highway. And a “creekside” motel with cabins.

  Jimmy drove across the highway from the gas station to the restaurant and parked the Mustang and got out. A slice of a giant sequoia, taller than he was, was leaned against the wall on its edge, like a big coin. It was polished, the rings clear. Events in History were marked with little flags on pins, nine hundred years of history, if they had it right, fires by blackened rings
, droughts by thin rings, Columbus setting sail, Lincoln dead, Kennedy dead, a man on the moon.

  It was late enough in the day that Jimmy decided he’d stay over, go at it in the morning. This was where Barry Upchurch had retired, probably moved into what had been a weekend place before. Jimmy had found the lawyer’s name listed in a “Mountain Areas” city directory in the library down in Palm Springs. Then he’d found an article in the microfiche about an Idyllwild No Growth! committee Upchurch had served on when he first came up the mountain ten years ago. Retired So-Cal lawyers seemed either to go to the mountains or the beach, the size of the house and the acreage determined by just who you kept out of jail or bankruptcy. The lawyers who put people into jail, when they retired probably just stayed in their houses in the Valley or out in Santa Monica, grandfathered in.

  Upchurch wasn’t a government lawyer but from what Jimmy had heard and read he hadn’t had a big client practice either. His house was likely a cabin on one of the roads heading up into the low hills above town, nothing fancy, a couple of bedrooms, or maybe a glass-fronted A-frame, if the seventies had made a bit too much of an impression on him. Jimmy had an address but he wasn’t just going to walk up to the door, at least not yet.

  There was snow on the shady side of the cabin, a short foot of it banked up against the stone foundation. Each cabin had a cute wildflower name. The key to “Star Lily” had a green plastic fob, old style. Jimmy opened the door. There was red carpet, fairly new but an old-fashioned pattern.

  There was no TV, no phone. An empty fireplace, gingham curtains somebody had made by hand, a bedspread picking up the same reds and greens. There was a kitchenette. Jimmy tried the faucet. There were two jelly glasses in the cabinet. The water was cold and sweet, better than anything in a bottle with “mountain” in the name.

  But the cabin was too lonely to stay in, with the light dying and all in among the tall trees, and Jimmy turned around and walked out. Better to be out with people, even strangers, than in with himself.

  He went next door to the Evergreen Club. It was dark, but in a good way. There were antlers on the wall and pictures of “Early Idyllwild” and an oversized electric train running on a track up just under the rafters.

  And Barry Upchurch was at the bar.

  Probably.

  Twenty years, not ten, were added to the face from the picture in the microfiche of the No Growth! Committee. Maybe there had been too many nights here drinking what looked like bourbon in a rocks glass. He had a mad look to him, in his eye, in the way he sat hunched over, protecting the space in front of him. And he smoked, too.

  Everybody Jimmy had been meeting lately looked like they were trying to get over something.

  The barstools didn’t swivel so Upchurch and the three or four regulars beside him were using the mirror over the bar to watch the young woman shooting pool behind them.

  She was traveling, alone. She had a backpack, a real backpack, not an accessory, stowed against the knotty pine-paneled wall, worn hiking shoes, a tan that wasn’t from a UV lamp. She was German or maybe Swiss, tall enough to be a model. Short, dark red hair, cut different lengths, like a Beatle, good for the trail. She was laughing at herself between missed shots and drinking a dark beer. The kid from the gas station was her partner.

  He put his stick back in the rack, shaking his head. “I gotta go,” he said.

  “Sorry,” she said, heavy accent. “I’m terrible! Please not to be giving up on me, I am trying.” She laughed between every other word and touched his arm.

  “No, it’s all right,” the kid said. “I just gotta go. You’re OK. Really. It was nice to meet you . . .”

  He held out his hand.

  “Greta,” she said.

  He shook her hand. “Enjoy.” He left.

  She racked up the balls again while the regulars at the bar poked each other in the ribs. Your turn. But it was too early and they were all too sober, or too old, to make a move.

  Jimmy took a stool. The bartender was a woman past sixty, maybe past seventy. She had a cigarette going, too, lying in an ashtray swiped from a fancier place than this.

  Jimmy ordered a dark beer. A German beer.

  “Good luck,” the barmaid said.

  But Jimmy wasn’t going to make a play for the girl. Now he was there to watch Upchurch, maybe close the distance of the three stools between them, talk to him before he talked to him. He hadn’t meant to get into this tonight but sometimes The Case had other ideas, its own sense of timing.

  It turned out one of the other men was a lawyer, too, and still had a practice going down in Palm Desert. This one was twenty years younger than Upchurch. Upchurch listened to him go on and on about a case, more detail than anybody wanted or needed, another murder but this one more immediate than the Long Beach murders long ago, this one about a meth lab in a double-wide too many miles up an unpaved road.

  Upchurch just nursed his drink and nodded every once in a while. This gang had probably all heard his murder story too many times. Or maybe he wasn’t a talker.

  When the beer clock said seven, Upchurch got up and stepped back, steady, not the least bit drunk. His pants leg was hiked up. He slid it down, over the little Colt Detective Special .38 in an ankle holster stuck in the top of his black socks.

  Upchurch picked up the change that had been sitting there all along and pushed two singles across to the trough. The barmaid palmed them straight into the pocket of her jeans and somehow made the whistle on the chugging electric train toot.

  Jimmy waited a minute and followed him out.

  Upchurch came out of the town store across the highway with what looked liked a thick steak wrapped in pink butcher paper. Jimmy was in the shadows alongside the gas station. It closed at nightfall, lights out. Upchurch walked back across the empty blacktop, not in any hurry at all, apparently not having any idea someone was watching him. He glanced at a Jeep CJ-7, old style, open on the sides, parked in front of the bar, walked past it, started up the easy hill, walking in the middle of the gravel road.

  Jimmy waited, followed him.

  A woman in her fifties came out to poke at a charcoal fire in a steel drum smoker out behind an A-frame all by itself next to a dry creekbed in among a good stand of trees. There was an owl somewhere, hooting. She searched for it with her eyes. Then she went back inside. Jimmy watched.

  And then the barrel of the tidy .38 was behind his ear.

  Upchurch didn’t say anything smart or sarcastic or even nasty, just had Jimmy walk the rest of the way up toward the house, toward the light so he could get a better look at him, his gun now down at his side.

  When they got into the light, Jimmy told him who he was, what he was there for.

  Upchurch dropped the .38 into the pocket of his chinos but didn’t shake Jimmy’s hand or anything.

  The woman, Ellie Upchurch, stepped out onto the deck, surprised to see anybody, her hand going to her breast.

  “He’s here about Barry,” Upchurch said.

  Maybe he was schizophrenic.

  But then they went inside the house and the first thing Jimmy saw was a portrait of the real Barry Upchurch, under a brass-plated tube light. Maybe a client had painted it, “in partial payment for services rendered.” The Upchurch in the painting was older than he would have been at the time of the Kantke trial and he was better looking than his big brother, probably always had been. But the eyes, the face had the same slapped look.

  The other Upchurch, whose name was D. L., stepped past Jimmy without looking at him and took the pistol out of his pants pocket and put it in a drawer in a table with a Tiffany-style lamp on it and a vase of pretty purple mountain wildflowers called nightshade. Ellie Upchurch came over and took D. L.’s hand and kissed him on the cheek, something Jimmy guessed she always did when someone was looking at the portrait of her first husband.

  D. L. grunted something that could have been, I love you, too.

  The A-frame was nicely furnished without a lot of references to the past, hi
s or hers or his, except for the portrait. There was an oval “rag rug,” on top of pine flooring, a Kennedy rocking chair, an over-and-under shotgun on pins on the wall, nothing too fancy, a Browning. There was a big leather chair in front of the stand-alone black Swedish fireplace, a healthy fire, a National Geographic bright yellow on the ottoman. It was all one big room, with a bedroom upstairs, a loft.

  “You can go on,” D. L. Upchurch said and walked toward the open kitchen. He meant that his wife could talk to this stranger about her first husband, his brother. He took the wrapped steaks from the counter and put them in the fridge. He got himself a Bud Light in a can and then dug around in the back of the icebox until he came out with a bottle of beer, dark German beer. He handed the Beck’s to Jimmy after he wrenched off the cap with his bare hand—it may or may not have been a twist-off—and then he went outside, left them alone.

  She sat in the leather chair and Jimmy stood beside the fire and she gave him a version of the intervening years. Barry Upchurch had practiced law in Long Beach another twelve years after the Kantke trial and then he retired and they moved up the mountain and he died two years after that.

  The short version was he’d never gotten over it.

  “Doctors are like that, some of them,” Jimmy said. “They keep it to themselves but it rips them up when they lose one.”

  She sat with her legs crossed, her hands in her lap. “That wasn’t Barry’s problem,” she said. “He had no problem losing a case.”

  She probably didn’t mean the twist of bitterness in the way she said the line.

  “It wasn’t that,” she said.

  And then she went into it in great detail, the days and weeks of that time, of 1977, starting even before the trial began. She never referred directly or even indirectly to Harry Turner setting things up, running things from behind the curtain, but he was as present in the story as if she had named his name or he was standing there in the room with them. They’d disagreed from the start, Barry Upchurch and “the others,” until Upchurch finally got the message and shut up and stopped having ideas, or at least stopped saying them out loud.