Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  Jean put her knife and fork across her plate. She ran her fingers through her hair, fluffed it out, like his mother had in his memory, and leaned back, her legs crossed at the ankles under the table. She smiled at him, the way you have to the day after you make love in a motel, if you haven’t split already. She had bought clothes at a shop a few doors down from the restaurant, had changed in the dressing room, a silk dress the color of the tarnish on a bell, or the lace lichen they’d just left on Point Lobos. Whether it was the dress or the light filtered through the oaks on the patio, her green eyes looked blue. Blue and sad.

  Or maybe she was just hungover.

  “Was that where you and your mother were, the memory you told me about when we were talking about perfume?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old were you?”

  Of course he couldn’t tell her.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Fifteen or sixteen. Sixteen. It was early in the summer, 1967. The Doors’ first album had just come out.

  “I looked at City of Light the other night,” she said.

  City of Light was the movie Teresa Miles went off to shoot the week after the day on Point Lobos.

  Jimmy wondered again what she knew, how much she knew.

  “How many of her movies have you seen?” he said.

  “I think they were called films.”

  Jean smiled. Her eyes had gone back to green again.

  “All of them,” Jean said. “I’m a fan. Now.”

  A waiter came, asked if they wanted coffee. They didn’t. Jimmy ordered a crème brulee.

  “We’ll share it.”

  It was another thing you did the day after the night in the motel.

  “Most of the books said she had no children,” Jean said.

  “She tried to keep me out of it,” Jimmy said. He was telling her more than he should again.

  “One said there was a son. Another that there were two boys, one who came along much later in her life. I guess that was—”

  “Lies.”

  “Who was your father?”

  “He was a director. Married to someone else.”

  A bird snapped down onto their table, a finch. It eyed a crust of bread, looked at Jimmy as if waiting for permission. Jimmy kept still. It pecked at the crumb then flew away as quickly as it had come when someone coughed at a table across the way.

  “One of the books,” Jean began, “one of them said there was a rumor that your mother didn’t die, that she was still alive somewhere.”

  Jimmy looked at her.

  “No.”

  When they finished, Jimmy gave the waiter cash and Jean crossed the patio into the restaurant to go to the ladies’ room. A man paused in his attention to his wife’s lines of dialogue to follow Jean with his eyes.

  Jimmy stared at him, wanted to yank him out of his chair, shove him until he backed up with his hands in front of him.

  He wondered where that came from.

  They started up the sidewalk. The collectors’ car show was on in Monterey. A convoy of restored Corvairs came past in the tunnel of trees, eight or ten of them nose to tail, half of them turquoise. Coming along behind was an enormous old Packard with the spare on the running board and a Klaxon horn that the locals—were they called Carmelites?—probably didn’t appreciate.

  Jean went into a hat store. Jimmy ducked into another shop to buy something for her. When he came out, she was across the street and down in the next short block. She waved happily and called out to him.

  She was in front of a tiny redwood chapel, an Episcopal church wedged between the shops and restaurants. Once she knew that he had seen her, she went inside.

  Jimmy crossed the street.

  He stepped into the dark cave of the chapel. Candles burned in red cups, dozens of them, a decorating touch more California Mission Catholic than Episcopal. Or maybe Jimmy was just in a sour mood. It was warm and pleasant in the tiny sanctuary, smaller than a candle store, and they were alone.

  Jean was in the second pew, kneeling on the drop down pads. She straightened, crossed herself and sat back with her hands in her lap. There was a “good little girl” rigidity to her posture. It was sweet.

  Jimmy sat beside her.

  She was reading from the Book of Common Prayer.

  “It’s the old book of prayer,” she said. “Before the revision. Look. You can tell.”

  She passed him the book, her finger on a line in what was called The Apostles’ Creed. As his eyes crossed the page, she said the line aloud in a soft voice.

  “And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead—”

  “Now it says, ‘the living and the dead’,” Jean said.

  The Quick and The Dead.

  Jimmy looked at the altar. All the wood was red. The light of the votives was red, warm, pulsing. It was like being inside a beating heart. He brushed his hair back. He could smell her on his hands. Last night, after they’d made love, when everything was still quiet, before anyone broke the charm, she’d touched his face.

  “Tell me your secret,” she had said.

  SEVENTEEN

  “The kid is gone,” Angel said.

  Jimmy stripped off his shirt, took a clean shirt from the stack in the closet. Angel had come over to be with Drew at Jimmy’s house while he was gone with Jean. When they’d come back, Jimmy had tried to talk her into staying with him for a few days but she’d said no. Angel had sent two of his friends to go home with her, to stand watch over her, to stand between her and Them.

  “First night you left.” Angel waited a beat to deliver the rest of the bad news. “He took the Porsche.”

  Jimmy buttoned the shirt.

  He went into the office, stood over the desk, looking at all the papers and the pictures. The dead, the living. The case. He found the canceled checks from the rafters of the Danko flying school.

  Angel came in after him.

  “Did you tell him about the moon?”

  “I told him the rest,” Jimmy said, “but not that.”

  “Somebody should tell him.”

  “Somebody probably has.”

  “What are you going to do about him?”

  “Nothing, for as long as I can,” Jimmy said.

  There was a silvery path across the water to the fat moon. Jimmy found Kirk, the old Clover Field expert, at the end of the Malibu Pier, a pole over the side, his fishing license in a vellum envelope pinned to his funky hat. Something flapped in a white lard bucket next to the old man’s beat-up tacklebox.

  Jimmy leaned over for a look in the bucket.

  “You don’t want to see that,” Kirk said. “I don’t even know what it is. I’m going to take it back to this science teacher I know.”

  Jimmy leaned against the rail, turned his back on the moon.

  “What do you need?” Kirk said. “You aren’t dressed to fish.”

  He was fishing. The checks were for overdue aviation fuel bill payments and rent checks made out to Steadman Industries. They had made him rethink the thing Rosemary Danko had said that he didn’t quite hear, when he’d thought she’d said her father’s killers were the pretty people.

  Maybe it was the airplane people.

  “I found rent checks Bill Danko paid to Steadman Industries.”

  Kirk nodded. “The old man owned everything at Clover. The airport was the city’s but all the buildings belonged to Steadman.”

  “You ever hear of any run-ins between Danko and him or his people?” Jimmy said.

  Kirk shook his head. “Red Steadman wouldn’t have anything to do with a small fry like Danko.”

  “Did you ever meet him, Steadman?”

  “Sure, he was there all the time in the war days. He’d pick up a rivet gun, come in over your shoulder, put one in to show you how it was done. He was all right, but he’d definitely tear you a new one if you looked at him wrong.”

  Jimmy had also come back to the year-en
d wrap-up:

  1977 . . .

  A MERGER A MURDERER A MONARCH

  “When was the merger with Rath Aircraft?”

  “I guess seventy-six or -seven. Steadman died Christmas Day, 1973. Three, four years after that. It never could have happened when Red was alive.”

  “You were still there? After the merger?”

  “A year. I finished out my time. It wasn’t the same.”

  “Why?”

  “I was out of the old days, when it was ‘Steadman and his boys.’ The companies may have ended up merging but Red Steadman and Vasek Rath sure as hell never did, never would have. They hated each other. Since we worked for Red we hated Rath, too, even with Red dead and gone. Who’d want to work for that bastard Rath?”

  Kirk filled a cup from a thermos. He’d not touched the pole over the side and apparently nothing had touched his bait either.

  “I make it sound like I liked Red Steadman,” he said. “Once he was dead, he got larger than life. You know what I mean?”

  Kirk shook his head, shook off the past.

  He looked at the moon, startling each time it caught your eye.

  “Look at that,” he said, “best moon for Pacific seawater fish, fat, almost full.”

  Jimmy thanked him and started back up the pier. A little boy and his mother came toward him carrying their tackle, a couple of old poles and a battered box. The woman wore a crisp shirt tucked into a long white skirt that caught the light, low heels. Jimmy wondered what their story was. She was too young, too together-looking to have a boy that age, but she did. And it was too late for them to be out here like this, too, but they were.

  The boy looked at him the way boys without fathers look at young men, hard and soft at the same time, trying to connect.

  Jimmy knew it too well. He pointed a finger at the boy.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  The headquarters for Rath-Steadman was three identical mirrored boxes with greenbelt all around, standing alone in an industrial park, inland and south almost to Orange County. Jimmy looped the perimeter of the empty parking lot and parked the Mustang in the front row, just as if he belonged there, and settled in to wait out the rest of the night. Dawn came in an hour or two, the orange parking lot lights overcome by a sky flushed an embarrassed pink.

  They unlocked the doors at nine. The receptionist was dressed like a pilot, all the way up to her angular cap. Jimmy paused over a glass-tombed model of a passenger jet labeled, “RS-20,” Rath-Steadman’s latest, and came up to her desk, which was tall and which she stood behind.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  On the wall behind her were portraits of the founders, Vasek Rath and Red Steadman. For two men who hated each other, they looked a lot alike, big-chested, clear-eyed.

  “I’d just like an annual report,” Jimmy said.

  She seemed a little disappointed for some reason.

  “Public Relations, Tenth Floor. Your name?”

  He told her. Harry Turner.

  She tapped on a keyboard and a pass popped up out of a slot in the stainless steel.

  He was alone in the elevator until it stopped at the third floor and three men in suits got in. Matching suits. As they rode up, the three men traded looks and nodded at each other, wordlessly continuing whatever they’d been in the middle of before. Then, at about the sixth floor, one of them said, darkly, “Tim,” and the other two nodded. Nobody said anything else and they got out on nine. They never looked directly at Jimmy.

  He had punched the button for the top floor, eighteen.

  When the doors parted it was the boardroom and it was empty. The drapes were open. There was a view almost to the ocean, over the planted greenery and then the San Diego freeway and, beyond that, the spires of a refinery with its flaring burn-off stacks. The table was forty feet long, oblong, perfectly smooth, any claw marks buffed out.

  There were pictures of the directors in a row across one wall, meat-eaters one and all, including the two women. It was the usual mix of yesterday’s politicians and sports statesmen. None of them looked as if they could have stood up to Red Steadman or Vasek Rath in the old days.

  Maybe one man.

  Jimmy was going through a trashcan when a side door opened and a fruit tray as tall and comic as a Carmen Miranda headpiece came through the door. It was on a cart, wheeled in by a young assistant something or other.

  Jimmy excused himself and stepped back into the waiting elevator.

  “No problem,” the kid said.

  Jimmy stopped at Public Relations on the way down.

  In the lobby he nodded and smiled at the receptionist on his way to the door and waved his annual report.

  She looked disappointed again.

  He looked back at her.

  “What’d it close at yesterday?”

  “Seventy-seven and an eighth,” she said. “Up a quarter today, Mr. Turner.”

  He half expected her to salute.

  “Outstanding!” Jimmy said.

  He took the corporate report out to the parking lot, sat on the hood of the Mustang and opened it. There were the same pictures of the founders and the directors. Kurt Rath, Vasek Rath’s son, had a page of his own as CEO. He was in his thirties, looked like a Luftwaffe pilot. Jimmy ran the math. Rath the-Younger was just a few years old when Bill Danko and Elaine Kantke died. Vasek Rath had died twenty years ago, five years after the merger, leaving his son enough stock to take control when he came of age.

  In the picture, Kurt Rath was trying to manage a bit of a smile but knew not to give away much.

  A look that made Jimmy want to buy a hundred shares.

  Alone on the putting green at the most exclusive country club on the Westside, Jimmy sank a twenty-footer, clean, straight, no suspense.

  “I meant to do that,” he said.

  He dropped another ball and lined up his shot. Behind him, Kurt Rath, CEO, strode toward him followed by a nervous younger man, the club’s starter.

  “Is this him?” Rath said.

  The starter nodded.

  Jimmy turned. Who me?

  “This idiot jammed us both up,” Rath said.

  Jimmy still stood over his putt.

  “Yeah? How’d he do that?”

  “I have a standing twelve noon tee-time Thursdays. I’ve had it for six years. Everybody knows it. And this moke says someone in my office blanked it this morning, which is impossible, and now you’ve got it.”

  Rath’s partner stepped up. He looked like a nice guy, nice smile, good build, nice tan. He looked like the kind of guy you could beat every Thursday.

  “Hey, how’s it goin’?” Jimmy said to the beatable man.

  The man nodded back. He was already embarrassed by what he knew was coming next from Rath.

  “Look,” the CEO began again.

  “Take it,” Jimmy said.

  Rath had expected a fight. It took a moment for him to regroup.

  “I own a little R-S stock,” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you having a bad day.”

  Rath nodded four or five times, started away.

  Jimmy dropped his head to concentrate on the long putt.

  He sank it. Rath looked back about the time the ball snapped into the cup.

  “You want to join us?” Rath said.

  Who me?

  Jimmy walked after them and caught up and shook Rath’s partner’s hand.

  “Sonny Ball,” Rath said.

  Jimmy shook Sonny Ball’s hand. Rath never offered his.

  After the round, they had a drink.

  Rath was going back to work so for him it was just a grapefruit juice with a splash of cranberry juice on top, like a dash of blood.

  He wasn’t talking. And Jimmy hadn’t learned anything from Rath on the greens, except that he lifted his head and he was better at long putts than short. Jimmy didn’t really know what he was looking for. He’d long ago stopped being restrained by that, by what somebody else would see as a lack of purp
ose. He just went where it seemed he should go, heard what he heard, saw what he saw.

  And thought about it at night instead of sleeping.

  Rath drained his drink and spit a cube of ice back into the glass and stood up.

  “Enjoyed it,” he said. “People never kick my ass, even when they can.” Sonny Ball looked into the Scotch he was having.

  “It was only a couple of strokes,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah, I remember,” Rath said.

  Rath patted Ball on the back as he left. When he was ten feet away, he half turned.

  “Call my office. We’ll get you over for lunch.”

  He meant Jimmy.

  “Outstanding,” Jimmy said.

  For a while, he chatted with Ball, a retired United pilot with a good long story about Bangkok, but he didn’t learn anything about Rath-Steadman there either, the old days or the new. Then the rich old men started filling the place, bright clothes, bright colors on men you knew had terrorized and ball-busted “their people” yet had survived it, the company life, the dictator’s life, the acid in the mouth and the unsatisfied knot in the gut that usually killed off these guys long before now.

  Jimmy finished his martini, stood to go, leaving the two fat olives on the spear.

  A pair of moons hung in a jet black sky.

  Below, a tracked rover the size of a suitcase hustled over the surface of Mars.

  Or at least that’s the way it looked.

  Behind the glass, Ben, the Jet Propulsion Lab engineer from the Mensa murder mystery night at Joel Kinser’s, wiggled the rover’s controls, spun it around in a circle.

  The name “Rath-Steadman” was stenciled on the side.

  Ben offered the controls to Jimmy. Jimmy declined.

  “When we were ready to put out the first pictures from the surface of Mars,” Ben said, “I downloaded a fuzzy image of Elvis and superimposed it over an up-slope, very dimly, perfect. But somebody caught it before it went out.”