by Dan Vining
Lucy was on the bridge, walking away, walking toward the center. She was already a hundred yards gone. Alone. Walking away. She wasn’t in any hurry, but there was a kind of scary purposefulness to her gait, almost as if she was counting the steps.
Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine . . .
She was still fifty yards ahead of Jimmy when Les blew past him with a concussive blast that almost pushed Jimmy into the rail. The boy still had the two drinks in his hands, but he dropped them now, first the Coke and then the bottle of water. The water bottle skittered across the walk and bounced into the air and then under the railing that separated the walk and bike run from the fast traffic.
The water bottle bounced into the air and was struck by a northbound Saab, dead in the windshield, bursting. The driver spooked at the splash, the flood, locked the brakes, and crunched the nose of the car into the rail and took the hit from a tailgating Ford Festiva, all in the time it took Jimmy to realize who’d blown past him.
Les never looked back, even as the line of cars in both hot lanes skidded and smoked and banged into each other.
Lucy kept walking. The inverted arc of the main immense suspension cable was beside her to her right, descending as she crossed the lateral plane toward some inevitable point of intersection, the descending curve and the baseline, as if the whole of the Golden Gate were a graph to illustrate the diminution of something. Hope? Promise? A fall from a great height.
But Les caught up to her.
When Jimmy saw that the boy was going to overtake her, or rather when he saw her reaction, when he saw Lucy let go of the dark thing she was holding on to, he stopped, let them have their moment. He had to remind himself that they didn’t know who he was.
Lucy tried to cover with a line or two, and her brother offered her the grace of something close to a laugh, though he certainly didn’t mean it. His face was flu shed from the run. Now he bent over to catch his breath. It occasioned another line from her. The sidewalk was empty around them, had been empty for almost all of the boy’s run after her. It was odd.
The two consoling beauties were nowhere to be seen. They’d just disappeared, like a magic trick, like a magician’s two lovely assistants.
Now the traffic recovered, rolled past Lucy and Les, except for the cars that had crashed. The drivers were out of them now. From the passing cars, no one looked over.
FIVE
Jimmy sat with his eyes closed in a club chair by the window in his tenth-floor suite at the Mark.
For three hours.
There was a bedroom and a sitting room. He was in the bedroom, with the drapes open. When he’d first come back from the Golden Gate, from following Lucy and Les, from looking her right in the eye as she’d walked right back past him on the bridge, he had sat there for a long time and watched the light change, the clouds moving in across the Bay, their quick shadows crossing Alcatraz. Then he’d closed his eyes. Now it was five thirty. The day, which had begun so beautifully, was ending that way. At least for those looking at the sky.
Jimmy opened his eyes. He stood and took off the coat of his suit and laid it across the bed. He looked at the clock. He put on some music, the jazz the black cabby had been listening to, old jazz from a station that broadcast from down on the wharf and used Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront” under its station IDs. He walked back to the window. The low air conditioner under the tall picture window blew right at his groin. It would have been funny, worth a joke, a line, if he’d had anybody in the room with him. He found the little door to look in on the AC controls, fiddled with the knobs and buttons, but couldn’t shut it off. You didn’t need AC in San Francisco, and the hotel didn’t have it for years, didn’t have it the last time he was here. The windows used to open, even the tall ones. He felt his anger rise, felt it burn out to the surface from whatever tight, dark spot he usually kept it stuffed into.
“Goddamn it!” he said, slamming the little lid closed.
The machine wasn’t a bit offended, responded only by blowing more cold air at his genitals.
Jimmy snatched up the phone and rang the front desk.
“Yes, Mr. Miles,” a man with a young voice said, a beat sooner than you’d get for a regular room in a regular hotel.
“I can’t turn off the air-conditioning,” Jimmy said, barked, like some I’m-paying-a-thousand-dollars-a-day L.A. type. He heard the way he sounded but blew out the rest of it anyway. “I don’t want it; I don’t need it. I want to open the window. I’m not going to jump. I just want some pure air. I want my goddamn window to open the way it used to open.”
“Yessir. Sorry.”
The wall behind the bed was mirrored. Jimmy got a look at himself on the phone, the clench of his jaw.
He took what they call in childbirth pain-management classes “a cleansing breath.”
“Mr. Miles?”
“Yeah, look, I’m sorry,” he said with his normal voice. “Just tell me how to turn this thing off or send someone up.”
“They’re already on the way, Mr. Miles.”
He hung up. There was a trio of water bottles on a smoked green glass tray on the table beside the bed, the Mark Hopkins label. He opened one and drank it down, standing there. He took a second one to the window, cracked the seal on the bottle.
Any time Jimmy cursed in front of his friend Angel, “took the Lord’s name in vain,” Angel rebuked him. Or thought of it. He should call him. He should have called him already. He hadn’t reported in since he’d stood on the brown hillside west of Cholame. Yesterday morning.
What would he report? Lucy had looked all right when he left her a few hours ago. The brother and sister took a cab from the bridge back to the Haight. Jimmy was in a cab right behind them. He blew past them on Masonic, then had the cabby loop around up by the top notch on the park and came back down. He’d waited up the hill that way, like a jealous lover, like a nervous dad, for twenty or thirty minutes before the cabby shifted in his seat one more time, and Jimmy let him roll on. They were home. They were OK. But something had changed that morning. Jimmy had looked into her eyes, really looked. On the bridge, the boy had reached her in time, and she had put a look on her face that tried to laugh it off, to say that this couldn’t possibly be what it appeared to be, a woman purposefully pacing off the last of her life. Jimmy had the details, if Angel wanted them. Les had made his awkward joke about dropping her Diet Coke and water. “I didn’t know what you’d want,” Jimmy saw him say. And then, as the traffic came back to speed, blasting past them headed north, as life had resumed, Lucy had put her arm in her brother’s, very grown-up, and they had turned and started walking back. Jimmy was against the rail. He set out walking, toward them. So they wouldn’t be suspicious of him. (He couldn’t believe they hadn’t yet made him, with all the close surveillance. But they weren’t criminals. Why would they think anyone would be watching them?) And so, walking toward Marin, with the two of them walking back toward the visitor center, he came face-to-face with Lucille. Up close. Close enough to see into her eyes.
Here’s what changed in that moment: Jimmy wasn’t impatient with her anymore. He no longer doubted the genuineness of her melancholy.
He drained the second bottle of water. Now night was falling. He’d have to go back out there to her, back to the Haight, wait there at the apartment building until she came out. Or went to the roof again. He had to do what he could do. He had to go to work. It was what he did.
So why did he have this knot in his gut?
Why was he so full of anger?
There was a knock at the door, a little less subservient sounding than he would have expected. Maybe he hadn’t intimidated the house staff after all.
It was a black man. Tall. Bony. He looked a little like Al Green, standing there, especially when he smiled, with big, perfect teeth.
He was wearing black-and-white suede shoes. With dice on the toes.
“I maybe got something for you,” he said, stepping right on into the room aft
er a quick look down the hallway in one direction. He closed the door behind him. “Little sumpin’ sumpin’.”
Jimmy looked from the shoes back up at his face.
“Machine Shop,” he said.
“How are you, man?”
He looked naked, diminished, out of his silver paint. The face and neck were swollen in places from the beating he’d taken behind Alioto’s, but Shop was dark-skinned, and the bruises would be hard to see. One eye had probably been swollen shut when he awoke that morning. It was still puffy, teary. There was a hematoma in one corner of the white of the eye, like a drop of red ink in a teaspoon of milk.
“I called, but . . .” He stopped. With Machine Shop, it was like there were two people in there, engaged in steady, often heated conversation. The other must have said something. “All right,” Shop said, “I never called. I just came over.”
“How’d you know where to find me?”
“You had matches from the Mark, when you were smoking. You smoke too much, man. The body is a temple.”
“I just quit.”
“Good. You had two packs of matches. You got to the end of one, and you had another pack. So you had to be staying here, not just using a pack of matches somebody gave you. And then I made some calls.”
“Calls.”
“I keep my ear to the anvil,” Shop said.
“Called who?”
“All right,” Machine Shop said, “I didn’t call exactly. I just asked around about you. I have my network. Down on the water. Who you were. I knew where you were from, you told me that. I asked people who knew people. I found out, you know, what you do.”
Jimmy waited.
“You know, that you’re a detective and all. From Down Below.”
“You mean hell?”
“L.A., that’s what I call L.A. It’s one of my trademarks.” He heard another inner rebuke. “All right, that’s what a friend of mine calls it. Los Angeles, Down Below. Or jus’ D.L., short for Down ’Low.”
“D.L. instead of L.A.,” Jimmy said.
“That’s jus’ him,” Machine Shop said. “Look, like I said, I maybe got something for you . . .”
“Tell me what you think you know about me,” Jimmy said, an edge to his voice now.
“That you’re a detective. You look into things for people. But not for the money. You work out of your house. That it has to be something that, you know, touches you in your soul.”
“That it? Is that who I am?”
“That, you know, you’re a Brother. Well, not a brother, but, you know, a . . .”
There was a knock at the door.
“That’s probably him now,” Machine Shop said.
Jimmy reached for the knob, not really hearing the last thing he’d said. “That eye looks bad,” he said. “You know any Sailor doctors?”
“Look, before you—”
Jimmy opened the door.
Two people stood there. One was a very short man, built like a bomb. Brown cuffed trousers, a white short-sleeved shirt, tight over the biceps. Brown wing tips. A full head of straight black hair, oiled, combed back, a once-a-week barbershop haircut.
And a sad, Greek face.
The other guy standing there was a thirty-year-old boy in a Kelly green Mark Hopkins blazer who wondered who the man beside him was.
“Is this him?” the Greek man said to Machine Shop, pointing a finger at Jimmy.
“I said wait,” Machine Shop said. “Downstairs.”
“Mr. Miles?” the hotel boy started.
Jimmy dismissed the boy. “It’s all right,” he said, “I’ll do it myself.”
The green-blazered boy looked at the tiny, strong man and then at the tall black man with the beat-up face.
“You sure?” he said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Jimmy said.
The hotel runner gave Machine Shop and the short Greek man another comprehensive look, as if he might be called upon to testify later, and nodded to Jimmy again and padded away.
So then it was just the three of them.
Jimmy let the Greek man come in, even let him close the door behind him. He didn’t break five feet, but no doubt he could kick both of their asses.
“Have a seat,” Jimmy said to the little guy. The Greek man took a seat.
Jimmy snagged Machine Shop’s eye and tipped his head for him to follow him into the bedroom.
Shop came into the bedroom. Jimmy closed the door. He just looked at Shop, asking the obvious.
“It was his daughters who stepped off last night,” Shop said.
Jimmy didn’t exactly see that coming. People were always showing up with “a friend,” some old grievance they thought Jimmy could fix, something “that should just take a couple hours.” If you were a plumber, after you’d had a burger or hot dog out in the backyard, before the game started, they’d probably ask you if you’d mind taking a quick look under the toilet.
But this came at him from an unexpected angle. Had he forgotten about the beautiful naked girls, the dive off of Pier 35 last night, his first night in town? It’s not the going fast that kills you; it’s the sudden stop. He went over to the window. The city was purple all of a sudden, from one edge to the other. It was like a postcard with the color out of whack.
“The twins,” Machine Shop said.
“Yeah, I know. What’s he doing here?”
“He doesn’t know how to deal with it,” Shop said.
“I’m not a counselor,” Jimmy said.
“He has all these questions. I thought of you.”
“Yeah, I’m the answer man,” Jimmy said, with his back still turned.
“He lives across the Bay, El Cerrito,” Machine said. “They were just out of high school. They were younger than they looked. I thought they were from some other country, but they were just girls just out of school, come into the city for, I don’t know, the nightlife. You see a lot of them down there, more than you’d think.”
When Jimmy didn’t say anything, didn’t even seem to hear him, Machine Shop kept on, “He got the call at one-something in the morning. He came over there to the wharf. He was still there when I came back at dawn, like I always do, after I went home and got out of the paint. He was just walking around, standing there at the place where it happened. I hesitated to talk to him, but it was easy to see who he was.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I tried to comfort him. Just that—”
“What did you tell him about me?”
“Just that you were a friend of mine and that you were a detective, that you looked into things.”
“That’s it?” Jimmy said, turning to look at him, a hard question.
“That’s all I said,” Shop said. This time there didn’t seem to be a second voice in his head calling for a correction. After a second, he said, “They still lived at home.”
“You’re playing me,” Jimmy said, looking back down on the bruised city. “Stop it.”
Shop held up his hands. “He just needs—”
“He needs somebody else,” Jimmy turned and said. “I’m not a shrink. I’m not a minister. How am I going to help him? I don’t know shit. I’m not smart. My instincts are lousy. I hear something wise, and I make a joke about it.”
“I understand,” Shop said. “I fully understand.”
“I have something I’m doing already. For a friend of mine. Tell him—”
But then the door opened, and the father stood there. He looked at Jimmy and then at Machine Shop and then back at Jimmy. Maybe he’d heard them through the door.
“He said you were there, too, that you saw it, too,” the short man said. Only now did he let them hear the hint of an accent, a little Greek in the voice to match the shape of his face and the color of his eyes.
“Yes, I did,” Jimmy said. “I’m sorry.”
The man reached into the pocket of his shirt.
“Don’t show me pictures,” Jimmy said, raising a hand against him.
The man pushed the pict
ure back down into his pocket.
That sad Greek face. It could have been half of the comedy/tragedy emblem. There’s no tragedy like Greek tragedy.
“What’s your name?” Jimmy said.
“George Leonidas.”
Jimmy offered his hand. “Jimmy Miles.”
“It means lion. My family’s name.”
“I know,” Jimmy said.
“Why do you know?”
“I’ve been around.” Jimmy was still standing at the window. He turned, took a step closer to the man, a sympathetic step. But what he said was, “I can’t help you.”
Machine Shop lowered his head and closed his eyes, his hands folded in front of him, like an elder standing before the first pew.
“I have to say,” Jimmy said, with that same impossible mix of hard and tender, “there probably isn’t anyone who can help you. What’s happened is awful and wrong and impossible, but you have to take it. And probably alone. This time, it’s your turn.”
“Goddamn,” George Leonidas said. It meant three or four things. Goddamn you was one of them.
Jimmy just stood there in front of him for a long time. Neither man moved, almost as if Jimmy was ready to take a shot to the mouth if that’s what George the Lion needed to do next. But the small man just stood there, eyes on the floor. Jimmy could hear each breath he exhaled over the feathery whisper of the air conditioner.
It could have ended there, but then Leonidas said something, still staring at the muted green carpet in front of him, said it to himself more than to anybody else, or to God, something that flipped it all toward the other world.
“I saw Christina,” George Leonidas said. “And she saw me.”
“There is a place, a position, something, a state,” Jimmy said, “between being alive and being dead. Not alive, not dead. In between.”
There it was, for those who like their reveals cold and hard.
They were down in the Tenderloin. In the Porsche. Jimmy had the gray light of the dash on his face, the shining wood-rimmed wheel in his hands. He was riding in third gear with low revs, and the engine was purring. The Porsche was glad to be up out of the hotel garage, out breathing the night air. Jimmy was half lost but wouldn’t admit it. It was a bit after nine, early yet, but the alleyways were already spotted with street people. Early yet, but there would still be a mad yell every once in a while, echoing off the emptied buildings. There wasn’t much other traffic, a cab every once in a while or a lost, slightly spooked tourist or a box truck making a night delivery. Not even any cops. They’d roll in later, when the Tenderloin got its full freak on.